The Business Sensei

There Can Be Only One

The other morning, I noticed one of my cats running around with her catnip mouse. Now, this isn’t such an unusual occurrence. However, the difference this time was that the other two cats also wanted to play with the mouse. This is unusual: normally, when one cat gets the toy, the others ignore it.

It wasn’t until the cat dropped the mouse that I realized that either it wasn’t a catnip toy or the cat had been playing with a Pinocchio mouse that had picked a very unfortunate moment to become a Real Mouse.

As soon as the mouse was on the ground, it immediately tried to run from the cat. The only thing that saved the mouse was when another cat got in the way. It was a bit hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure that the cats were more interested in competing with one another over which one would get the mouse than in working together. It reminded me of an old Tweety and Sylvester cartoon.

What was particularly interesting, though, was how the mouse behaved whenever a cat did catch up to it: it would open its little tiny mouth, raise its front paws, and try to look fierce. It was pretty funny watching a mouse trying to intimidate a cat that outweighs it one hundredfold. Oddly enough, though, every time the mouse did this, the cat would hesitate, which usually gave enough time for another cat to get in the way. At that point, the mouse would run and the third cat would quickly chase and catch it, causing the whole process to repeat. Eventually, I managed to trap the mouse in a container and release it outside.

To be fair, one can hardly blame the cats for taking an “every cat for herself” attitude. After all, in this situation, we’re talking about a very fixed pie, or mouse. Only one cat will get the prize. Whether that prize is then eaten or proudly left as a gift on a bedroom pillow, there can be only one winner, and it’s not the owner of the pillow. For cats, this is quite normal. Unfortunately, it is also quite normal on far too many so-called teams. Indeed, it is quite disturbing how often teams work together almost as well as did the cats.

Like the cats, though, in a very real sense you can’t blame the team members either. When there is only one mouse, or pie, suddenly the priority becomes getting it. Put another way, whenever team members are in a position of “I win, you lose,” you don’t really have a team; you have a mob or a horde of cats out for themselves.

It doesn’t matter whether there’s a fixed amount of money being given out to the “best” members of the team, or bottom ten percent are being fired. Quite simply, when members of a “horde” are competing with one another for the rewards, performance is drastically and dramatically reduced compared to a strong team. How bad can this be, you ask? A team outperforms a horde by at least tenfold, and can sometimes outperform by a factor of a hundred or more. What is that level of performance worth to you?

Like the cats being “intimidated” by the mouse, members of a horde are also more likely to be flummoxed by relatively simple problems. By behaving in an unexpected fashion, the mouse could startle the cats, in large part because each cat was devoting the bulk of its efforts to competing with the other cats. Thus, they were less able to focus on the mouse. Similarly, when team members are devoting the bulk of their efforts to competing with their supposed colleagues, they spend less effort solving problems. After all, the reward is not for finding the best ideas, but to finding an idea that looks better than the ideas that other team members came up with. In some cases, just being good at making someone else’s ideas look bad is enough to win. Well, at least the individual wins; the team, and the company, end up with a dead mouse on their pillow.

Competition on the team also means that you, the manager, have to spend most of your time keeping your cats walking in the same direction and focused on your goals. This can be exhausting, as anyone who has ever taken their cats for a drag can attest. Team members will only care about the goals of the team when no other way of getting ahead is available. As for taking risks, forget it. Why take a risk when that means someone else gets the mouse? It’s smarter to play it safe and let another person make the mistake.

Far better to eliminate competition within the team and focus team members on competing against other teams, preferably teams at other companies. Use the competition to bring them together instead of driving them apart. If someone on the team isn’t carrying his weight, it’ll become obvious and can be dealt with simply and directly at that point. Building a strong team takes effort, but it sure beats herding cats.

The Perils of Perception

I was flying through the air. Unlike the common experiences of flying, this did not involve an airplane. Rather, I was practicing jujitsu and my partner had just executed a very well-timed throw. As I went over, I suddenly realized that my partner had turned the wrong way and was throwing me off the mat and onto the concrete floor.

Needless to say, the landing was painful. I started to say something to my partner when I suddenly realized that I was still on the mat. While I thought my partner was throwing me onto concrete, he was, in fact, throwing me exactly where he was supposed to: onto a nice, soft mat. Believing that I was about to land on concrete, however, was enough to cause me to take a hard fall.

Perception, in other words, is reality.

Now, it is easy to argue that maybe the expectation of falling on concrete was enough to make me tense up and hence take a bad fall. On a separate occasion, I really was thrown off the mat and onto the concrete floor. I didn’t realize it was happening and fully expected to land on a soft mat. Far from being a painful shock, the landing was completely comfortable, exactly how I’m used to feeling when I hit the mat. It wasn’t until I stood up that I realized that I wasn’t where I expected to be.

Perception is, once again, reality.

A certain company was experiencing explosive growth. Their hot new product enabled them to dominate the niche they had created. As their product became more and more successful, the senior management team became more and more concerned about the future. They focused on the consequences of failure and the decisions they made were based on protecting their turf, not continuing to innovate and expand. Despite their successes, they viewed themselves as fighting a doomed battle against encroaching competitors. Over time, just as they envisioned, their competitors chipped away at their market share and they saw their revenue decline.

Perception can become reality.

The company was seriously stuck. They knew they had a good product, but they couldn’t get any traction. Engineering teams were spending all their time arguing over minute details; everyone was so afraid of making a mistake that making a commitment to any course of action was seen as high risk behavior. Even when they did make a commitment they made almost no progress: every decision had to be reevaluated and rejustified at every meeting.

Rather than focusing on what could go wrong, the management team had to learn to focus on what could go right. Rather than viewing every decision in terms of avoiding failure, they had to plan for success. The only way to never fall off a bicycle is to never get on one in the first place. If you want to ride, though, you have to risk falling over. This company needed to stop being afraid of falling off the bike and simply start pedaling. They needed to perceive success around the corner.

As management started to change their attitudes, the rest of the company followed. We always assume that the person highest up the ladder can see the furthest. In this case, once the people at the top started perceiving success, everyone else could perceive it too.

The company regained its dominant position. Were their mistakes along the way? Of course there were. At one time, those mistakes would have led to heads rolling and projects being canceled. Even worse, the mistakes would have led to interminable meetings arguing over the causes and making elaborate plans to avoid any possibility of failure in the future. However, with the new mindset that success was inevitable, mistakes were merely feedback, opportunities to collect information and adjust strategies.

Change perception and you change reality.

What you perceive determines how you act. This isn’t some sort of magic, it is simple psychology. Teach people to perceive success at the end of the journey and they perceive the opportunities to get them there. Teach people to perceive failure and they avoid anything that might be risky, including the opportunities to succeed.

Hard landing or soft landing, it’s up to you. What are you doing to make sure your team perceives success?

What Are You Avoiding?

The amazing thing about train wrecks is that they are obvious in hindsight. However, while they are happening, everyone involved is gripped by some horrid fascination that, if not forcibly interrupted, leads to the inevitable conclusion.

By the end of this particular train wreck, a member of the senior management team had resigned and the CEO had lost the trust of many of his formerly extremely loyal employees.

The newly hired VP of Sales was given responsibility for supervising a particular product manager, someone who had been with the company for years. They did not hit it off and the relationship went downhill from there.

The PM was charged by the CEO with getting a particular release of the software out the door. The VP of Sales wanted the project manager to be working on something else. The CEO kept promising to straighten things out with the VP of Sales, but never quite got around to it.

The VP of Sales became ever more frustrated with the constant “insubordination” of the PM; the PM, meanwhile, was increasingly frustrated with getting one set of instructions from the VP and one from the CEO.

The VP of Sales eventually went to the CEO and told him that he was planning to fire an employee. The CEO shrugged and didn’t think much about it. “It’s your department,” was his only response.

The VP told the project manager to leave, that she was suspended without pay pending completion of the paperwork to fire her.

At this point, the CEO noticed that the PM wasn’t in the office, found out what was going on, and “unfired” her. While she was happy to be unfired, she was also furious that he’d let it get to that point. The VP of Sales, meanwhile, was just a tad miffed. He felt he’d received carte blanche and ended up feeling much like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football as Lucy jerks it away.

The CEO’s attitude was that, “these things just happen.” He was, of course, wrong.

Teams are not a group of people operating in their own silos, independent of one another. Rather, they are an interacting system and sometimes parts of that system don’t work quite the way they should. When something goes wrong, it’s important understand the system and how different players contributed to the problem.

The Project Manager was nobly perhaps, but foolishly, focused on the assignment she’d received from the CEO. Her attempts to explain to the VP of Sales just why she wasn’t focusing on his objectives were either insufficient or simply missing. She may have assumed that the CEO would explain things to him, but didn’t force the issue when it became obvious that he hadn’t.

The VP of Sales walked into the company and made a number of assumptions about how work was done and how authority was implemented. Rather than take the time to find out how people worked in the company, how rigid or flexible the lines of control were, and what other projects might be going on, he assumed that an employee put into his department could be assigned to his projects. He didn’t listen to the PM and he never made the effort to go to the CEO and found out what was going on. He assumed the CEO was paying attention to issues in his department that were, quite simply, not where the CEO’s mind was. Even when he went to the CEO to explain that he wanted to fire someone, he didn’t bother to explain the situation.

The CEO, for his part, also contributed in a major way to the final, unsatisfying outcome. He knew he was giving an employee instructions that might contradict what her manager was telling her. He also knew the project manager was extremely frustrated with her new manager. He didn’t act on that knowledge. He was busy, and explaining things to the VP of Sales was not a high priority for him. Even once the situation had reached its climax and the project manager had been fired, the CEO didn’t really address the problem. He simply pulled the rug out from under the VP of Sales and did not consider how that might make the VP look to his other subordinates.

At every stage of the game, the CEO, the PM, and the VP of Sales each had opportunities to address issues that each of them wanted to avoid: the CEO didn’t really want to deal with the disappointment of the PM at having her project cancelled, nor did he want to upset his new VP of Sales. The PM did not want her project cancelled and really wasn’t all that interested in the project the VP of Sales wanted her to take on. The VP of Sales had his own views about power and authority and didn’t really want to find out that the company did things differently than he believed they should be done. He was angry, blamed the PM, and wanted to punish her.

Right up to the end, stopping to address the unpleasant issues and recognizing how each person was contributing to the impending train wreck could have changed the results. Instead, each person operated in a vacuum, and managed to achieve one of the worst of all possible results.

What difficult situations or awkward conversations are people in your office avoiding?

Being Fred Flintstone

Remember the classic kid’s TV show, the Flintstones? Fred and Wilma Flintstone are a stone age couple who live in something that looks oddly like the 1950s with rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Despite this, the show had nothing to do with either rock music or getting stoned. It did, however, have an episode which predicted that the Beatles were a passing fad. So much for prognostication! Fortunately, that episode is not the point of this article.

In one episode, Fred complains to Wilma that he can’t understand what she does all day. How hard can it be to take care of a house? Of course, as Fred swiftly learns, after he and Wilma make a bet, the answer is very hard. Fred, of course, makes a total mess of the whole thing. Now, obviously, the cartoon was playing off of social issues of the time and was intended to make people laugh. The obvious lesson, that a “non-working mother” is a contradiction in terms, is hopefully one that most people have figured out by now. The less obvious lesson is the much more interesting one: it is often impossible to gauge from the results, or from watching someone work, just how difficult a job actually is or even how hard they are working! Conversely, how people feel about the results has little bearing on how hard you worked to get them.

At one company, a manager told an employee that he wasn’t going to get a raise because he made the work “look too easy.” Of course, one might argue that most people who develop their skill in a field eventually become good enough that they manage to make the job look easy. It’s not until we try to imitate them that we realize just how hard it is to do what they are doing.

In another situation, the Principle Investigator in a biology lab had an employee who wasn’t producing results. He first told the employee that she wasn’t working hard enough and quickly moved to haranguing her to work harder. She quit and was replaced by another scientist. He also failed to get results and the process repeated until he quit. So it went through another two employees before the PI, quite by accident, discovered that there was an error in a protocol the scientists were required to follow. Each one had tried to discuss the possibility with him, but he consistently refused to listen, taking the attitude that any problems were purely a result of their lack of dedication. They simply weren’t working hard enough and if they just buckled down and took the job seriously, they would get results! This attitude cost the lab four excellent employees and set them back over a year on one of their projects.

On several occasions, when I’ve stood in front of audiences ranging from management students to senior executives, I’ve presented the following scenario: “Someone at your company isn’t completing their work on time. Why not?”

Invariably, the responses I get back are: “He’s not dedicated,” “he doesn’t work hard enough,” “he’s goofing off,” and so forth. Eventually, I point out that they really have no information from which to draw a conclusion. Occasionally, someone beats me to the punch, but it always takes several minutes before that happens. After the point is made, the number of dumbfounded looks is amazing.

Fundamentally, when we see something not working or something not getting done as fast as we’d like, we tend to blame the person doing the work. The tendency is to assume that they aren’t working hard or that they don’t care or some other fault in the person. We often assume that the difficulty of the task is proportional to how hard someone appears to be working, not what they are actually accomplishing. We tend to ignore the situation, often to the detriment of our companies. In that bio lab, if the PI had been willing to consider other possibilities than blaming the scientists, he could have saved a year of effort and not potentially damaged people’s careers.

By extension, there is also a tendency to assume that when the result looks small or insignificant, that the effort involved in producing it must have been lacking. Large and clunky is thus appreciated more than small and elegant, particularly in software. Unfortunately, this runs afoul of the Mark Twain principle: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Transforming something clunky into something well-built and efficient is not easy! Most corporate vision statements are wordy, vague, and meaningless. It actually takes a great deal of effort to create a short vision that works and that can inspire people for years.

Now, let’s look briefly at the converse: that how people feel about the results has nothing to do with how hard you worked to attain them. At one startup company, the VP of Marketing told me that she expected everyone to work long hours because “our customers will want to know that we worked hard to produce this product!” Actually, with apologies to Charlie Tuna, what your customers want is a product that will work hard for them. They really don’t care how hard you worked to make it. They only care that it meets their needs. If it does, they’ll buy it. If it doesn’t, you’re out of luck.

The fact is, it’s very easy to underestimate both how hard the work actually is, and how much work went into producing something. In both of these situations, the key is to figure out what feedback is really important. Results are a form of feedback. However, as long as you’re on track to accomplish those results, then it doesn’t much matter how hard or how easy it looks; as Fred Flintstone discovered, you probably can’t accurately gauge that anyway. When something doesn’t work, then you need to know the process so you can figure out why.

In other words, you need to clearly define your expected results and also clearly define meaningful and useful interim steps that should yield those results. The advantage of having those interim steps is that you can recognize fairly quickly when something is going wrong and you can figure out the real cause. A failure to achieve results is not necessarily the problem: it’s the symptom. Perhaps it’s because the person didn’t work hard enough. Perhaps it’s because the situation was untenable. Treat the symptom and not the problem and before too long you’ll be right back where you started from.

Who Needs Strategy?

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers.”

“Our goal is to succeed!”

“Our goal is simple: we will build a winning product.”

“Joe’s goal is to get his work done on schedule 75% of the time.”

“Billy’s goal? He should cross the street safely 75% of the time.”

I’ve heard each of these so-called goals presented with a straight face. They sound good; well, at least the first three sound good. The fourth? Well, isn’t it just like the third?

Goals are an interesting beast. We talk about them all the time, put them down on paper, hang banners with goals written on them, and exhort people to stay focused on the goal. Despite all that effort, a great many of these goals never come to pass. Most of them are little more than wishful thinking or downright fantasy.

The goal problem is two-fold.

First, setting a goal does not make it happen. You can set a goal of finding a pony under your Christmas tree, but that doesn’t magically cause a pony to appear. For a goal to succeed, there needs to be a plan to accomplish it. That planning process, sometimes known as the strategy, is critical. It doesn’t matter how much you want to succeed if you aren’t willing to plan you aren’t going to get there.

Now, I frequently hear that planning is pointless since no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That may be true, but seeing the plan not survive is at least giving you feedback that you’ve encountered the enemy. Seeing how your plan is failing can give you vital information on how to shift focus, allocate resources, and generally adjust your strategy.

More broadly, though, the difficulty is often a misunderstanding of what it means to plan. I’ve worked for companies that tried to plan projects out 2-3 years. While this is possible in a very broad sense, details matter, and you can’t plan details that far in advance. Instead, you have to plan the steps in front of you. Part of the plan is to pause periodically and review the plan. What worked? What didn’t work? What are the next steps? Developing an effective strategy is not something you do once and then execute blindly; you have to constantly adjust as circumstances change. The beginning chess player tries to play out a sequence of moves and is paralyzed when the opponent doesn’t respond as expected; the chess master has a plan and constantly adjusts his strategy in response to his opponent.

Interestingly enough, the beginner usually can’t explain his plan, while the master can. The beginner’s plan sounds like, “I have a plan: I’ll do this, and this, and this, and that’s how I’ll win.” The chess master, on the other hand, is likely to treat you to a detailed discussion of his thinking processes and chess strategy. The first is easy to say and easy to listen to, but is fundamentally useless. The second is hard to articulate and takes a lot of effort to follow, but actually does have a chance of working.

I said earlier that there are two big problems with goals. The second is failing to fail correctly.

Sometimes failure is a form of feedback. In fact, this is exactly what you want failure to be: a means of testing out different strategies and figuring out which ones work best. It is Edison’s proverbial, “I learned a thousand ways to not make a light bulb.” Used this way, failure can be very helpful. Indeed, without such productive failures learning and strategy development is impossible.

However, sometimes the cost of failure can be somewhat higher. If Billy’s goal is to cross the street safely 75% of the time, what about the other 25%? Even if we raise the expectation to 99%, that one failure can negate all the successes: getting hit by a car can ruin your whole day.

It’s all too easy to confuse the two types of failures and businesses do it all the time. They are afraid to fail when that failure would give them valuable information and they take risks that sound good but where one slip causes you to lose everything.

How do you tell the two apart?

Check out the strategy around the goal. If there is a strategy and the possibilities of failure are being considered and managed, then odds are good that if you fail, you’re failing successfully. If there is no strategy or failure is not being considered as a possibility, turn and run away. All you’re doing is rolling the dice, and if that’s your game, Vegas is a better bet.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Voices in the Corridor: A Halloween Tale

Even the janitors don’t go down that corridor. Not any more, not for a very long time. The spiders moved in long since, creating a very different sort of website. The old-timers in neighboring buildings claimed that long ago, on a moonless Halloween night, a business had died there.

The last company to use that building tried to have the corridor blocked off. Each day the wall would be put up. Each morning, it was found broken and scattered, a trail of debris leading from the conference room at the end of the corridor all the way to the Keurig coffee maker in the kitchen.

Those who ventured into the corridor reported voices coming from the conference room, sometimes faint, sometimes loud, always indistinct. Always arguing, always debating, though none could say of what they spoke. Only one phrase would, from time to time, rise above the murmur, a phrase that struck fear into the hearts of all who heard it. Then, for a brief time, other phrases would emerge, before fading once more into inchoate argument.

Those who returned from the corridor were always quiet, subdued, as though some darkness had settled upon their spirits, a strange, mysterious darkness not easily dispelled. Either that or they suddenly realized that they had a lot of work to do and needed another cup of coffee. Yet, no force would convince them to walk down that corridor again, to listen to the voices coming from behind the closed doors at the end, heavy wooden portals locked from the inside.

What words had they heard? What phrase filled with horror those who heard it spoken in that cobweb filled corridor?

It was only this: “I call the vote.”

Four simple words. Four words that might seem innocent, harmless, a way to make a decision and move forward. Four words which left those who spoke them trapped forever in argument and debate.

The vote: there are those who claim it is the way all debates should be settled, all arguments brought to a close.

“It is how we do things,” they say. “It is the American way.”

When the vote is called, the tally counted, the argument does not end. It continues, on and on, through vote after vote.

“I didn’t understand the issues.”

“I thought a yes vote meant we weren’t going to do it.”

“We can’t vote on this yet, we haven’t considered all the issues.”

“I don’t care what we voted, that just won’t work.”

“We can’t vote on this. It wasn’t announced ahead of time.”

The vote settled nothing. No agreement was reached, no consensus created. People took sides, the arguments became more vocal, more strident. The debate less about the issues, more about convincing others or forcing agreement. Without consensus, each vote only convinced those who lost that their error lay in not yelling more loudly, in failing to persuade others. The value of the ideas, the goal of the meeting fell away, the vision of the business lost in the struggle. Winning the vote became the new goal, the new vision. To lose the vote was to lose face. Perhaps the vote was called without warning. Who knows?

Had there been a leader who could make a decision, perhaps that would have ended it. Or perhaps not. Sometimes decisions refuse to stay decided. More precisely, some teams are unable to make a decision and stay with it. They vote, over and over they vote, yet those votes settle nothing. Rather than end the debate, the losers join together to win the next vote. The issue refuses to die until, like a zombie, the debate itself has eaten their brains.

For a vote to work, first there must be consensus. For there to be consensus, there must be productive discussion, effective debate, meaningful argument. This takes time: not just time to argue, but time to learn how to argue. Most votes occur too soon, before the team is ready. Even a strong leader can’t always change that. Strong leaders draw out their teams, involve them in the decision even when the leader will have the final word. When the best leaders make a decision, in truth they are ratifying the consensus of the team. Their strength lies in their ability to bring about that consensus, to argue without being drawn into argument.

“I don’t care what the vote was, I’m in charge here.”

So the debate continues, on an on. Eventually, everyone else went home. Down that corridor, in that room, they call the vote, over and over, and nothing ever gets done.

Happy Halloween!

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

When The Solution Is The Problem

I am pleased to announce that my next book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, will be published by Springer in 2013.

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“I sit down in a meeting and my phone goes nuts. I can’t even take a vacation!”

This very frustrated comment was made to me by a manager about his team. Whenever he’s in a meeting or away from the office at a client site, no work gets done. His team is constantly calling him to make decisions or help them solve problems.

“I don’t get it. The solution is obvious!”

This was a completely different manager at a completely different company. Same basic problem though: When he wasn’t there, nothing got done. He was frustrated; his team was frustrated. They were all loyal, all eager to please, but they also wouldn’t do anything if he wasn’t there.

Indeed, teams that don’t work when the manager isn’t around are legion. It’s a common problem, and common wisdom suggests that the team members lack motivation or are trying to goof off: when the cat’s away, and all that.

Common wisdom may sound good, but is often wrong. This is no exception.

When apparently enthusiastic teams are unable to get any work done when the boss is away, there are really three common causes:

1. The goals are unclear.
2. The group can’t make decisions without the boss.
3. The group is either unable or unwilling solve the problems that come up.

While the first two are important, the third is critical: If the team doesn’t think it can do the job, or isn’t willing to try, then it doesn’t matter how skillful they are at decision making and it doesn’t matter how clear the goals are. It’ll merely be that much clearer to them that they cannot do it.

In each of the cases mentioned above, and countless others, the situation was the same: a highly skilled, knowledgeable manager, a competent team, working under a tight deadline and the perception that there was no time for mistakes.

Perception can be dangerous: In this case, the perception that mistakes had to be avoided caused more delay than the mistakes would have!

In each situation, when the team ran into a difficult problem, they’d call their manager. He’d run into the room, quickly size up the situation, and tell them what to do. It usually worked; if it didn’t, they’d call him in again and the process would repeat.

Given the tight deadlines and how busy the manager was, this always seemed to be the best thing to do: solve the problem, move on. Unfortunately, it meant that the team never had to learn to solve the problems for themselves. Even worse, they were being given the very unmistakable message that they couldn’t be trusted to make the attempt lest they make a mistake.

In each case, the solution was easy, although the implementation was not: The manager had to slow down and work through the problem solving process with their team. Rather than solving the problems, they had to let the team see their process for problem solving, and understand their criteria for success.

Then, came the really hard part. Each manager had to step back and let the team move forward on their own.  Yes, the manager could help, but they also had to resist the urge to solve the problems. They had to accept that the teams would make mistakes.

This did not always go smoothly. It is not easy to tolerate mistakes, especially when the right answer is obvious to you. However, if the teams were not allowed to make mistakes, and then recover from those mistakes, the team couldn’t develop either the confidence or the ability to solve problems on their own.

Some managers couldn’t accept this. They couldn’t tolerate the inevitable mistakes or they couldn’t stop themselves from solving the problems. Others went the other direction: they were too quick to pull away, refusing to help at all. A couple firmly believed that they were making themselves irrelevant, and refused to move forward.

Most, however, were able to make the transition. Many needed some coaching: An outside perspective is very helpful. For those who were successful, they found that their teams became far more skilled and motivated than they had ever dreamed could happen. Instead of spending their time running around solving problems for the team, those successful managers were able to take a more strategic focus, further increasing team productivity. Several were subsequently promoted into more senior roles in their organizations.

In the end, teams don’t learn to operate when the boss is away by watching the boss solve every problem. It’s learning what to do, practicing, and recovering from the inevitable mistakes along the way that transform a dependent, low-performance team into an independent, high-performance team that gets things done when the boss is away.

Dial M for Manager

I am pleased to announce that my next book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, will be published by Springer in 2013.

James Bond movies always follow some very predictable patterns. The movies always open with Bond involved in an extremely dangerous mission, which he single-handedly accomplishes to the tune of numerous explosions. Bond then shows up in M’s office in London to be briefed on the mission that will be the focus of the current movie. That done, Bond picks up his arsenal of tech toys from R (formerly Q), and is off. M, meanwhile, remains behind trying to keep track of what is going on and presumably coordinating other agents and missions.

James Bond is, of course, the ultimate individual contributor. While various people might help him from time to time, he’s basically on his own. Because Bond has a script writer, he’s never going to become a manager: that would spoil all the fun. Of course, we can imagine what might happen were Bond to end up behind a desk running the operation. SPECTRE would hatch some sort of dastardly plot and the agents sent out to stop them would all be killed, except for the dying guy who escapes to tell Bond what happened. Bond would then have to go back into the field and foil SPECTRE himself.

Unlike James Bond, many individual contributors do end up in management. Perhaps it has something to do with their jobs not being as exciting as Bond’s, or maybe it’s just that that’s the only promotion path in the business. Either way, it’s not unusual to see excellent salesmen becoming sales managers, excellent engineers, engineering managers, excellent marketers, marketing managers, and so forth. Like our hypothetical Bond scenario, however, many of them unsuccessfully fight the urge to do everything themselves.

Being an individual contributor means being in the trenches getting your hands dirty. While it’s very frustrating at times, it can also be very rewarding. Perhaps more important is the fact that you get to be the person taking action. You don’t have to sit around and wonder, you know what’s happening. You’re in the middle of it. You are like James Bond, only without the explosions, deadly tech toys, and, of course, the women. On the other hand, odds are pretty good that no one is trying to kill you.

Now, like Bond’s boss, M, you are a manager. Being a manager means not being in the thick of things. It means not doing the work yourself. It means going against years of training because now you have to work through others. Now you have to give instructions to your team of individual contributors and wait to hear back from them. You no longer know exactly what is going on, because you are not doing it. This can be a very stressful and unpleasant experience, especially if your manager is someone who is always asking for updates because she finds not knowing as unpleasant and stressful as do you.

Truth be told, the transition to management can be a very disorienting experience. Unlike a James Bond movie, if you don’t manage your team well and there’s a problem, your direct reports won’t appreciate you coming in to save the day. In fact, such an act would only make it harder for you to gain respect as a manager instead of an individual contributor who happens to sign time cards.

So what can you do to make the transition easier?

Start by embracing your role as someone whose job it is to build up others. You’re now the coach, not the player. Look for opportunities to improve the skills of your team, build their confidence, and foster a sense of team unity. Remember that there really is an “I” in team, so praise both good teamwork and individual initiative.

As you and your team build out goals, make sure you mark logical checkpoints on the calendar. That way, both you and they will know when you expect an update on what’s going on. Then make sure they know that if someone is having trouble, you’re there to act as a sounding board, help brainstorm, or just bounce ideas around. You may not have the answers, but you can help your experts figure out the answers.

If you do have to solve problems for the team, don’t just give them the answer. Let them see how you work through the problem to arrive at a solution. Then, the next time around, have them solve the problem while you coach from the sidelines. Sometimes you have to teach your players new moves. That’s okay.

If something goes wrong, make sure they know that you’re there to help them fix it, not to yell at them. You want people to feel comfortable bringing problems to your attention early, while they are small, rather than after they’ve had time to get large and unwieldy.

Finally, periodically take the time to see how far you’ve come and celebrate your progress with the team. The positive feedback will build your skills as a manager, and their skills as team members.

Good luck!

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Less Than a Duck

Some years ago, I had the rather dubious pleasure of watching an organization implode. Arguments, recriminations, people leaving, the works. What had happened? Well, it seems that salary information for a certain employee, let’s call him Fred, got out. Now Fred was a decent enough employee but, at least in the opinion of the rest of the department, he didn’t deserve to be paid significantly more than the rest of them. Unfortunately, he was being paid significantly more, for no clear reasons. There was Fred and then there was everyone else. The general feeling by everyone else was that Fred’s work simply didn’t deserve the greater pay despite his having the word “Senior” as part of his title.

This perception of unfairness caused no end of problems. Management’s response didn’t help. While they did make some attempt to deal with the facts of the situation, they failed to address the real problem: a great many employees no longer felt that the system was fair. That lack of fairness, in turn, undermined trust and things went down hill from there.

Now, the fact is, all organizations need to have metrics for determining raises, deciding whom to promote or punish, resolve conflicts, give awards, and on. Sometimes the methodology is crystal clear, sometimes not so much. Either approach can work, provided that the process appears to be fair. At IBM under Tom Watson Jr., while the guy with the PhD might get a higher starting salary than the guy without one, if they did the same quality of work then after a couple of years they’d be getting paid approximately the same amount. Whether or not this is literally true, certainly IBMers at the time believed it to be true. The process was perceived to be fair.

Fairness, of course, is itself a funny thing. What is fair? Well, most Americans consider a trial to be fair provided evidence is presented and the accused has the right to face her accusers. Justice that appears arbitrary or capricious will generally evoke reactions ranging from discomfort to outrage. Of course, sometimes an outcome that doesn’t match our perceptions of justice will also trigger such reactions, as in the OJ Simpson trial. Most often, though, we expect the process to be fair even if it occasionally fails to deliver the results we want: if the process by which raises are given is perceived to be fair, then we know that over time our pay will be commensurate with our work, even if we didn’t get a raise this particular time around.

In the classic comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there is a scene early in the movie where a woman is accused of being a witch. Now, as everyone knows, you determine if someone is really a witch by throwing them in the water: if they drown, they’re innocent and if they float they’re guilty. Sir Bedevere then launches into a bit of brilliant logic in which he determines that since witches float and ducks float, if the woman weighs less than a duck, she must be a witch. When they put her on the scales with a duck, she does, indeed, weigh less than the duck (possibly due to an appropriately placed thumb). This may not be a particularly fair system of justice, but at least the Python version was funny.

Of course, Holy Grail is a movie. It’s not reality. Fortunately, we don’t have to look very hard to find a real life example of a process that many people perceive to be unfair: the recent USADA claim that Lance Armstrong doped and the recommendation that he be stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.

Now, before I go any further, I should make it clear that I’m not a competitive cyclist, I don’t know Lance Armstrong personally, and I have no inside knowledge of whether or not he doped. My concern here is with the process, not the outcome. My analysis is based purely on the information provided in the newspaper articles I’ve been reading about the case.

The system appears unfair exactly because it violates the maxims of how many people are conditioned to think about justice: for one, there is no physical evidence. Lance Armstrong has never failed a drug test. Although USADA claims to have physical evidence, they also won’t let anyone see it. Since they are a private organization, they aren’t bound by legal rules of evidence; however, the fact that they have the right to withhold the evidence doesn’t mean that the perception of such behavior is favorable.

It’s worth noting that the US government recently concluded a two year investigation into the doping allegations leveled against Armstrong and ended up dropping the case due to lack of evidence. This makes USADA’s claim seem even more baseless. Even the argument that Armstrong made so much money riding his bike that he could afford to fool the government is hard to swallow: professional baseball players make just a tiny bit more than professional cyclists and the government was able to find plenty of evidence in those cases.

One of the conversations that, sadly, happens all too frequently in many businesses goes something like this:

Manager: I hear you haven’t been a good team player.

Employee: What are you talking about? I’m constantly helping the team. Who said that?

Manager: That’s what people say.

Employee: Which people?

Manager: I can’t tell you.

Employee: What was the situation?

Manager: It’s not important. What matters is that they say you aren’t a good team player.

This is particularly frustrating for the employee who may have no clue what the claims are about and certainly cannot address the specific issues. In fact, in the situations I’ve dealt with, the most common reason for the complaint is a misunderstanding that could have been easily resolved if the two people had spoken. Less common, but hardly unheard of, is someone making a complaint in order to bring down a high flyer or to advance a personal agenda. At one Massachusetts company, employees figured out that if there was even a hint of disagreement with another employee, file a complaint with management. The first complainer always won.

Going back to the USADA example, one of the points I’ve seen mentioned over and over is that much of their case is based on hearsay evidence from riders whom USADA threatened to ban if they didn’t testify against Armstrong. Exactly who those riders are, however, is unclear since USADA won’t release the names. While they may have perfectly valid reasons for having secret witnesses, the behavior is one that is easily perceived to violate cultural norms of fairness.

In a situation such as a professional sport, the perception of fairness in administering drug claims may not be all that important. It’s not impossible to make a reasonable argument that what matters is getting the cheaters, just as some people might argue that a trial is unnecessary when we know someone is guilty. Of course, this begs the question of what happens when you make a mistake (as an aside, while I’ve met many people who seriously support the maxim of guilty when accused, those who have subsequently been the target of an accusation always seem to feel they should be the exception to that rule). In a business, mistakes of this nature can lead to expensive litigation or to difficulties retaining and hiring top people. When there is a perception that your career can be derailed by a disgruntled coworker passed over for promotion or by a petty bureaucrat whose highest accomplishment is destroying others to advance his own career, it’s hard to be loyal to that organization or to trust your coworkers. Lack of loyalty decreases performance and job satisfaction, which leads to reduced revenue for the business, higher turnover, and a more expensive recruiting process. The perception of organizational justice has far reaching implications for the success of the business.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Help Star Performers Ramp up the Whole Team

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Do basketball players have hot hands? A hot hand in basketball is when a player is shooting better than normal. A star player with a hot hand is, therefore, going to be shooting incredibly well. Many players claim that it happens, and many statisticians point out that it doesn’t. The argument against basically says that when you look at the frequency that a missed shot follows a successful shot, you find that the whole “hot hand” thing is just an illusion. It may feel like something is happening, but the results don’t match.

The statisticians, however, are missing a key point: a basketball player is not on the court by himself. In other words, he’s not playing in isolation. When a player is shooting extremely well, the other team is going to put more effort into guarding him. Of course, if that’s correct, the extra effort expended guarding that star player should leave less available to guard other players on the team. In other words, the increased performance of a star should have the effect of increasing the performance of the entire team.

Once someone actually thought to ask that question and look at star performance in that context, the answer turned out to be that hot hands exist and that true star performers don’t just perform well on their own –they increase the performance of everyone on the team.

Star performers in a business setting are the same, or at least they can be. The trick is to set up your team so that star performers increase everyone’s productivity rather than just their own.

To begin with, what are your incentives? If you’re only rewarding team members for their individual performance, you’ve got a problem. You’ve told your star performer to make herself look as good as possible, even at the cost of other team members: Imagine a basketball team where each player was only concerned about his own personal record and not about whether the team won or lost. The fact is, such a team wouldn’t be all that successful. I’ve seen any number of software development teams, for example, structured in just that way, with exactly the expected results.

Part of what enables a star to be a star is the strength of the team. While it can be comforting to argue that focusing on individual incentives will weed out the weaker performers and leave you with the star players, that’s a bit like arguing that your basketball team only needs Michael Jordan. He’s a fantastic player, but even he can’t be everywhere on the court. Jordan is so good in part because he has a strong team supporting him. Conversely, the team is so good in part because of Jordan.

This brings us to the next point: how do people communicate on the team? This can be tricky: everyone sends emails around, but that doesn’t mean they are communicating. It’s important to look at the patterns of conversation and communication in the group: quite often, one person is the center of the wheel; even when a team member is ostensibly addressing the group, he’s really talking to that one person, and no one responds until that one person weighs in.

Related to communication is the question of how well your teams argue and makes decisions. A team which never argues is also incapable of making good decisions. Sure, they may get lucky once in a while: a blind basketball player might also sink the occasional basket. Effective decision making requires being able to debate issues, ask pointed questions, disagree strongly, and eventually come to a consensus that everyone can work with. Teams that can’t do that tend to not benefit from star power.

What is the boss’s attitude toward giving and receiving help? At one company, the manager who took over a particularly high performing team had the attitude that, “you do your job, and let the other guys take care of themselves.” Although the star performers continued to do relatively better than everyone else, overall productivity dropped off rapidly after that manager took over the team. People stopped helping each other. Conversely, in a different department, the manager who came in with the “we’re all in this together” attitude saw his team performance skyrocket. Although the best performers on his team were not as individually strong as the best performers on the first team, on the second team the stars really brought everyone else up, and everyone else really supported the stars. In basketball, five people working together will beat five people working apart.

Hot hands exist, in basketball and in virtually all other areas of team performance. It’s only a question of whether or not your team is set up to take advantage of them when they occur.