The Business Sensei

Taken For Granted

Which animal runs faster, the coyote or the roadrunner?

What I find when I ask this question is that I get some funny looks, and then most people tell me that it’s the roadrunner. The reasons always vary, and I’ve heard some very interesting technical explanations for why roadrunners run faster, which, I was assured, have nothing to with the famous Warner Brothers cartoon. Nonetheless, they conclude that the roadrunner is faster.

In fact, despite what many of us learned as children watching the Bugs Bunny Show, a roadrunner actually runs at only 20 mile per hour, compared to around 40 for a coyote. Unlike the Roadrunner, real roadrunners escape being eaten by flying, not running. However, real coyotes are slightly more skilled in the use of rockets and other high tech gadgets than the fictional Wile E. Coyote.

The problem with things we “just hear” or other information that we’re exposed to so often that we come to take it for granted is that we may never really stop to think about the data. While I doubt very many people believe that real coyotes carry around an Acme catalog and are capable of running on thin air until they look down, the canonical image of a roadrunner for many people is a flightless bird that goes, “Beep, beep!”

Now, the fact is that unless you are being chased by a coyote on a large red rocket (in which case the strategy is to step to one side and let the rocket fly out of control), knowing that a coyote can outrun a roadrunner is probably unimportant. However, in the business world such unquestioned, hidden, assumptions can cause us to miss opportunities or fail to see potential innovations that are right in front of us.

Part of the problem is that creating an unquestioned assumption does not require showing generations of children cartoons for fifty years. A hidden assumption can be created in a matter of minutes by how we describe a problem or present a scenario, and what we automatically take for granted can become as hard to change as granite. On one occasion, I ran a management training exercise in which I handed participants large envelopes containing various items. The participants had to trade and negotiate to get the things they actually wanted. They were unable to complete the exercise because each person became convinced that at least one of the others was holding out on him: no one would admit to having two of the items, apples and leaves, which led to the assumption that those who did have them were sitting on them to force concessions from the rest of the participants. The hidden assumption that everyone made was that the items they wanted must have been handed out in the envelopes. Thus, no one thought to walk down the hall to the cafeteria to get an apple or thought to pull a leaf off the tree outside the window, even though both those solutions were staring them in the face – one person even walked down the hall for a cup of coffee, passing by the fruit bowls!

Identifying the hidden assumptions can be a tricky business since they are, by definition, hidden. Getting at those assumptions is not always all that simple. It requires taking the time to list everything you think you know about the situation, especially since you may not realize you “know” it: the belief that all the items were in bags, for example, was a very difficult assumption for the group to identify. Sometimes, the listing exercise does the job: once everyone puts their assumptions on the whiteboard, you realize that one or more of them just don’t make sense. Frequently, though, that’s not sufficient. In that case, we must do something surprisingly difficult: asking not what would prove our assumptions right, but what would prove them wrong?

Asking the questions that would prove our assumptions wrong turns out to be an unexpectedly challenging task. We want to be right, so we tend to look for the evidence that will support our positions or beliefs: “Of course all the items must have been in bags, I saw the bags handed out,” or “Of course roadrunners are fast, they can run 20 miles per hour! Why do you think they’re called roadrunners?” What we don’t automatically do is ask the questions, “Must items start in bags?” or “How fast are coyotes?”

Organizational cultures are filled with these hidden assumptions, taken for granted and passed from one employee to another. The breakthrough products come when people look past them and ask the questions that disprove what everyone knows to be true. Of course, if Wile E. Coyote had ever thought to question the hidden assumption that he can’t run as fast as the Roadrunner, the ACME corporation would probably be out of business; given their products, perhaps that’s not so bad a thought.

Trust Your Feelings, Luke

“Trust your feelings…”

— Obi Wan Kenobi

Star Wars made it seem so simple: all a Jedi had to do was trust his or her feelings and they would do the right thing. It certainly worked out pretty well for Luke in the original movie (Episode IV), blowing up the Death Star and all. But then came The Empire Strikes Back and it turned out that learning to trust your feelings involved running around in a swamp with a grouchy Muppet on your back.

Feelings are certainly useful, and they can help us make better decisions. However, just as Luke discovered, it’s not quite as easy as Obi Wan originally made it seem. In fact, trusting our feelings in the heat of the moment can often lead to very bad decisions: in a training exercise I was running, one participant was completely convinced that another participant was lying to her. She based this on her infallible instincts, aka feelings. When we debriefed at the end, it turned out he wasn’t lying. He was telling her the complete truth and would have helped her if she’d let him. In general, letting our feelings rule the day works out badly when we’re tired, hungry, frustrated, confused, angry, or even overly happy.  In each of these cases, strong feelings can overshadow judgment.

So, when are feelings useful?

It helps a great deal to train your feelings. The point of Luke running around the swamp may have been primarily to make Jedi training look mysterious, however for serious athletes, constant drills and training serve to develop their skills and hone their instincts. The master fencer picks up on subtle cues of posture and blade position that reveal what their opponent is likely to do next. It is because of their training that they can trust and act on their feelings.

Feelings can be very useful when planning future strategy. When you feel strongly, good or bad, about a particular course of action, that’s often a good clue that it’s worth exploring that action more thoroughly. Why do you feel that way? What about that course of action appeals to you or does not appeal to you? Just to make things more complicated, feeling good about a course of action doesn’t mean that the action will succeed just as feeling bad about a course of action doesn’t mean it is a bad choice. You might feel good only because the action feels safe or you might feel bad because the action involves something new and different. In that case, the correct choice might be to go against your instincts.

When engaged in a long and complex project, be that designing software or producing marketing materials, it can help to pause periodically and admire your work. If you don’t like it while it’s in progress, that’s a bad sign. Pay attention to your feelings: they’re likely telling you something is wrong.

Training feelings can be tough. Athletes do it through many days and weeks of practice. Jedi do it by running around a swamp. In a business setting, sufficiently complex and elaborate training games can serve the same purpose, only with better food and without the humidity. Such games, in addition to their other benefits, are fun and can help build organizational cohesion.

Like Obi Wan said, “Trust your feelings.” But take the time to make your feelings trustable.

What’s a Vote?

“Lord Nelson has a vote.”

“No Baldrick, Lord Nelson has a boat.”

                                               — Blackadder

In Blackadder’s London, some people may have a boat, but it seems that virtually no one has the vote. Today, of course, voting is a considerably more common occurrence than it was in Britain in the late 1700s, even if the results are not always quite as comic as they are when Rowan Atkinson gets his hands on the process. What, though, is a vote? We’ve determined that it’s not something in which one can sail, even if the process may sometimes leave people feeling a little seasick.

At root, voting is merely one of the six methods that a group can use to make a decision and move forward. Voting, or majority rule, is popular in large part because voting to make decisions is an obvious and central part of the larger culture of United States and other democracies.  In other words, it’s a culturally normative behavior.

Voting systems rely on several tacit assumptions: members of the group understand the issues; members are able to argue with one another effectively and resolve questions around the issues; members have developed a solid communications and social structure; members of the group will support the final decision reached by the group.

In small groups, these assumptions are often, though not always, valid provided that the group membership has developed fairly strong, trusting relationships with one another. As groups get larger, member connections become thinner and even the boundaries of group membership may become somewhat diffuse: it’s easy to see the boundaries of a specific department in a company, while it’s much harder to define the exact boundaries of a group such as “Red Sox fans.”

When the assumptions that underlie voting are violated, the voting system starts to break down in various ways. The most common, and obvious, breakdown is that the debate moves from a battle over ideas to a battle over votes: I don’t have to come up with good ideas so long as I can sell my ideas better than you can sell your ideas. Alternately, perhaps I can call the vote by surprise so your side won’t have enough people there, lock your allies in the restroom while the vote is being held, or otherwise take away your ability to influence the outcome of the vote. There’s a reason why many organizations have explicit rules requiring quorums and prior announcements of when a vote is going to be held, as well as rules specifying who gets to vote.

Claiming that the vote was rigged in some way is often a variant on the voter suppression approach: it’s a way of not facing the unpleasant reality that maybe most of the people didn’t like my ideas. In a large group, it’s particularly easy to perceive a vote as rigged if you happen to be surrounded by people who are voting as you are. This creates a false sense of unanimity as the local echo chamber reinforces the idea that “everyone” supports your view. This makes the actual result all the more shocking. The fact that sometimes a vote can be rigged does complicate this issue; fortunately, the larger the scale of the voting process, the harder that is to do.

Losers of a vote may also try to protect their ideas by consciously or unconsciously sabotaging the majority result: if the decision turns out to be “wrong,” even if because some members of the group kept it from working, then the losing party in the vote can claim that the group should have chosen their option instead. This behavior manifests in small groups fairly often, and can sometimes force the group to reconsider its decisions. Sometimes, though, the behavior is purely a means of saying, “see I was right all along!” even as the entire group fails. I worked for a startup or two many years ago that failed in part because of this type of behavior. For some people, being right was more important than being successful.

Depending on how the voting rules are set up, a majority rules system can degenerate into a minority rules system. Minority rule is another group decision making method, although frequently a dysfunctional one. In minority rule, the group adopts a decision supported by, as the name would imply, a minority of the group. Sometimes this is due to railroading the vote and not giving anyone a chance to object, sometimes minority rule is the result of each person assuming that they are the only ones who have doubts about a course of action, and so not speaking up. Sometimes, minority rule can result from a plurality voting system in which only a single vote will be held and multiple choices leave one option with more votes than any single one of the others, although less than half of the total. Some systems allow for subsequent rounds of voting with only the top finishers or have some form of preferential balloting in order to avoid this problem. Minority rule can also result from voter suppression or indifference.

Voting systems can also break down as individual people try to deal with the choices in front of them. Groups may move through a series of votes in order to reduce a large set of options down to a smaller number: in a sense, the group is sorting out its priorities and feelings about the different choices, making a series of decisions on potentially superficial criteria in order to reduce the decision space to something more manageable. At any point in this process, not all members of the group will always like the set of options that the group is considering. Sometimes this is because the group has already eliminated their favorite option; sometimes, it’s because members may not want to accept that other options are infeasible, impractical, or otherwise unavailable: members of a jury get to vote on each individual charge, but not on anything that wasn’t part of the court case, regardless of their feelings on the matter. Sometimes the group as a whole simply didn’t know about or care to investigate particular options that some members feel strongly about. In all of these cases, and others that you can probably imagine, individuals are left with a menu of choices that they might not like.

Group members may drop out of the process as their favorite options are eliminated, particularly if their only interest in the vote is a particular decision or outcome; depending on circumstances, this could represent a form of tunnel vision, as those members forget about the larger goals of the group and become stuck on one specific outcome. This can also be a form of trying to prove the majority wrong, as discussed above.  In some cases, other group members may become more invested later in the process, either because they didn’t care much which option was selected so long as they have a voice near the end, or because they realize that the vote isn’t going the way they expected.

The problem at this point is that, all too often, everyone involved in the voting process is totally focused on the choices and the process, not on the point of voting: it’s to make a decision that lets the group select a course of action that will, at least in the opinions of enough members, advance its goals. Which goals get prioritized is, in a very real sense, a consequence of the voting process: each decision, that is, vote, that the group makes is implicitly or explicitly prioritizing some goals over others. That’s it. A vote is nothing more than a decision making tool. That decision will have consequences of course, but so does not making any decision. Some voting systems allow for a non-decision, or “none of the above,” choice, which can force the group to go back and reevaluate the options. That can work well in situations where the decision is low urgency and the cost of redoing the process is low. Other systems, such as US Presidential elections, are designed to force a decision within a specific time frame. The implicit assumption is that it’s better to make some decision than no decision: no matter what the outcome, someone will become president.

In a small group, members might refuse to support any of the available options. If enough members make clear their unwillingness to support any option, this can force the group to reevaluate its decision space. However, this really does depend on how many group members feel this way: if it’s a small enough minority, the group will go ahead anyway. Holdouts who then refuse to support the outcome will often leave the group if they disagree deeply enough, or may be forced out by the rest of the group.

In a large group, it’s much easier to avoid supporting any of the available choices. This is particularly true with a secret ballot voting system: secret ballots make it easier for people to vote as they wish, but also make it easier to disengage from the moral consequences of a bad group decision. The larger the group, the less any individual feels responsible for the overall outcome. Thus, a group member can vote for an unlikely outcome, write in an outcome not on the presented list, or not vote at all, and simultaneously feel like their action is disconnected from the final result. This disconnect makes it easier to not feel guilt over a group decision that hurts other people and also not feel guilt over profiting from a group decision that they might have refused to support. This is particularly true in the plurality/minority rule systems discussed earlier. Arguably, though, all members of the group share in the responsibility for the decision and subsequent actions that result from it, particularly if they are in a position to benefit from those decisions.

Ultimately, voting is a tool that enables a group to make a decision, sometimes whether or not members of the group want to make a decision at that time or whether or not they like the (available) options. Sometimes what counts is that the decision be made and the group move on. Voting is thus a very powerful tool. As with all power tools, improper use may result in injury to the social structure of the group or potentially some members thereof.

What a Hissing Cat Teaches Us About Teamwork

One of our cats recently needed a course of antibiotics. Now, this particular cat is quite large, but also very sweet and has a purr that would put a motorboat to shame. Giving her pills is really a very simple task: pop the pill in her mouth, give her a treat, and we’re done. She never runs away, never puts up a fight, just gives me a dirty look and then gobbles up the treat. Thus it was that when we realized that we’d be out of town for a few days during the cat’s course of antibiotics, we didn’t think it would be all that big of a deal to have a friend come in and give the cat her pill.

As it turned out, the cat had a different opinion about this. The first night we were gone, we were treated to a series of text messages detailing the ongoing adventures of the friend who had come by to pill the cat. Apparently our sweet lump of a cat had transformed into Demon Kitty. She was loudly expressing her opinion, while ducking under pieces of furniture and also demonstrating her willingness to remove any human limb that happened to come in after her. At the first opportunity, she dodged past our friend and disappeared.

She did not get her pill that night. On the other hand, our friend was intact.

The next morning went somewhat better. Eventually, the cat did agree to eat the pill. The basic problem was that the cat didn’t really know the friend who came over, but once she came by the house a couple of times, the cat began to accept her. At that point, there was a relationship and the cat was willing to submit to being pilled. Cats don’t like people they don’t know sticking things down their throats or doing other unpleasant things to them. They don’t necessarily like it when someone they do know is doing it, but at least they are more likely to tolerate it.

Cats are suspicious of people they don’t know. They approach carefully, if at all. They want to take their time getting to know the person before they will tolerate much, if any, contact. Although we are less likely to hide under chairs hissing and spitting, people are surprisingly similar to cats. We are also suspicious of people we don’t know, although we do a better job of hiding it than a cat might. I’m not sure whether this says something profound about people or cats!

Like cats, we have a variety of social rituals and behaviors that we use when we meet someone new. These behaviors are the moral equivalent of cats sniffing at each other and checking each other out. These behaviors become increasingly important when a team is coming together, when a new leader is assigned to a team, or when a new person joins an existing team. In each of these cases, different members of the group need to build relationships with each other.

At first, those relationships are professional: distant, polite, and, above all, superficial. No one is quite sure of where they stand or what behavior is appropriate. What will offend someone else? What will embarrass us or another person? Which behaviors will help us gain status and acceptance, and which behaviors might get us thrown out of the group? Push people too hard at that point and the reaction can be quite strong. Think about groups you’ve been in: how often did you find yourself agreeing with an idea or a suggestion because you assumed that other people knew better or because you didn’t want to upset anyone? How often did what seemed like a simple suggestion or off-hand comment provoke an unexpectedly angry or intense response? Conversely, think about who has the right to criticize you: people whom you know well, or people whom you don’t? Superficial relationships produce lower quality work.

It takes time for those relationships to move from keeping people at a safe distance to actually engaging with the other person at a deeper, more productive level. It’s easy to say that in the office we need to focus on the issues, not the person, but it’s hard to do. The less we feel we have good relationships with our colleagues, the more we’re likely to feel that they are trying to shove something down our throat. It’s only after we’ve been working with them for a few months that we might really start to develop a sense of trust and comfort. That’s assuming, of course, that the process is handled correctly. Try to rush it, and it only takes longer. That sense of trust and comfort is vital, though, for actually doing high quality work.

As with cats, we have to take it slowly. Everyone involved has to recognize that mistakes will happen. So long as you don’t take anyone’s head off, it is the process of making mistakes and recovering from them that actually builds the relationship. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the cat runs and hides. Sometimes the relationship gets destroyed and people flee the team or the company. But the only way to achieve high quality relationships, and do high quality work as a team, is to take the risk of being scratched.

Why isn’t my company doing better?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

As we’ve discussed previously, when we set goals we need to know not just if we’re on track, but if we’re off track as well. We can’t really trust a system that doesn’t give us tools to recognize and correct problems. Just as this is true at the individual and the team level, it is true at the organizational level. It’s not enough to know what you should do; you also need to know what to do when things don’t work out as expected.

Fundamentally, Murphy’s Law holds true in organizational development just as it does in engineering. Things will go wrong. Mistakes will happen. People will misunderstand, miscommunicate, misconstrue. Go back to our discussion of team development in chapter 3: people have to learn how to talk to one another. This process takes time. While we certainly hope that problems will be small, localized, and easily dealt with, we need to be prepared to handle the situations where that’s not the case. Remember, most teams get stuck somewhere along the way to high performance.

The goal of organizational diagnosis is to apply our skills at problem solving to understand what is going on in our organization and then apply the information we’ve discussed throughout this book to moving the organization forward. Organizational “problems” can take many forms, from obvious failures or outright disasters; to feeling stuck, meaning that you’re expending a great deal of energy on something, but not seeing results; to strong performance that can’t quite make the jump to extraordinary performance. This last can be particularly pernicious as management becomes complacent and becomes unwilling to take the risk of improvement. In any and all of these situations, the key is to be able to identify what is happening, propose possible courses of action, evaluate those proposals, form an action plan, execute it, and be able to evaluate the results. For something ostensibly so simple, why is it so difficult?

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom

President

Manager Mechanics, LLC

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Killing the Princess: The Dangers of Goal Lockdown

Remember the Ford Pinto? If you don’t, you are not alone. The Pinto’s history was a troubled one, complete with explosions, fires, and lawsuits. In a nutshell, in the 1970s, Ford committed to building a small, light, inexpensive car. It turned out that while they were so committed to that goal, that they also made a car that was prone to exploding in an accident. Why did that happen? According to management professors Lisa Ordonez, Maurice Schweitzer, Adam Galinsky, and Max Bazerman, it was because the management at Ford set goals.

Wait a minute! Aren’t goals are supposed to be a good thing? Normally, yes. However, Ford’s management was supposedly so committed to their goals that they developed metaphorical tunnel vision. In other words, although they knew there were design problems with the Pinto, they ignored those problems in favor of the more powerful outcome goal they were committed to accomplishing. Interesting concept, but are there other examples?

In fact, yes. According to the same four professors, setting specific, high outcome goals led to dishonest behavior at Sears Auto Repair: by requiring mechanics to generate $147/hour of revenue, the mechanics were effectively incentivized to cheat customers. They also implicate goals in the Enron fiasco of the late 1990s. So, if goals are supposedly such wonderful things to have, how can we explain what happened? While it would be easy and comforting to simply say these four professors are ivory tower academics, that would be unjust and incorrect. In fact, they have a point: the best thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them; and the worst thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them.

To put it another way, goals are powerful tools. Like all power tools, it’s important to know how to use them correctly lest you cut yourself off at the knees. In a very real sense, the rules for goal setting and rules for chess have a great deal in common: both sets of rules are relatively simple, but the strategies for success within those rules are complex. Failing to understand the proper strategies leads to defeat. In the case of goals, it can lead to a phenomenon that I refer to as, “Goal Lockdown.” In Goal Lockdown, people become so fixated on their goals that they ignore all feedback or other information that they might be heading into trouble. Indeed, in extreme cases, they will take any feedback as confirmation that they are on track, even when the feedback is someone yelling, “Hey, didn’t that sign we just passed read ‘Bridge Out?’”

The dangers of improper goals are not limited to giant firms like Ford or Enron. I ran an organizational development serious game for a certain high tech company. This particular serious game takes participants outside of the normal business world, instead presenting them with a fantasy scenario with very real business problems. Instead of playing their normal roles of managers, engineers, salesmen, and so forth, the participants are kings, dukes, knights, wizards, and the like. Participants still must recruit allies, motivate others, negotiate over resources, and solve difficult problems. Changing the scenery, however, makes it fun and increases both learning and retention of the material.

In keeping with the fantasy nature of the scenario, a number of plots involve the princess. Unfortunately, for all those people who had plots, and goals, that included the princess, she was eliminated from the exercise; in other words, figuratively killed. What was particularly interesting, however, was that the people whose goals involved the princess found it extremely difficult to change those goals, even though they had just become impossible! This was Goal Lockdown in action. Fortunately, by experiencing it during the exercise, we were able to discuss it during the debriefing and the people at that company are now on guard against it.

Ultimately, if you don’t want to bother with serious games and if you do want to avoid Goal Lockdown, there are some steps you can take. The simplest is to identify your outcome but then focus on your strategy. How will you accomplish the goals? What are the steps you will take? How will you know you are succeeding and how will you know if you’re failing? A system that doesn’t tell us what failure looks like is a system that we won’t trust under pressure. In the long run, the more we focus on process and how that process will move us towards our objectives, the more likely we are to be successful: we are focusing on the things we can most easily change. It’s when we focus on the result and let the strategy take care of itself that we become most likely to fail, sometimes in very dramatic ways!

How does the organization shape learning?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Organizations develop attitudes around learning: when is it necessary? Who gets trained? Why are people trained? How are mistakes viewed? etc. These attitudes shape how learning is viewed and, to a very great extent, how successful learning is.

Many years ago, I was participating in a training exercise. As part of that exercise, I was assigned to play a manager who had been recommended for coaching. Having been a serious competitive fencer for many years, I knew that the only people who were recommended for coaching were the best athletes. One of the other participants in the exercise was stunned at my happy response to the role and said, “How can you be so happy? You’re playing someone who was recommended for coaching!” Her experience with coaching was that it was the last step before you were fired.

Similarly, it matters how the organization views training: is this something done to build people up or “fix those who are broken?” Is it developing strengths or remediating weakness? Is training something fun or something to be endured and forgotten? Will you have the opportunity to exercise your new skills or not? How the culture views training is critical to the success of training. If the organizational narrative is one that teaches us that training is for losers or that Real Experts don’t need training, it’s going to be very hard to make training work. That, in turn, will reduce engagement with the material and, hence, make it difficult for organizational members to grow in their roles. On the other hand, if training is viewed as an opportunity to increase competencies and status in the organization, and those who engage in training are given opportunities to exercise their new skills, training can have dramatically outsized benefits compared to the investment.

All too often, training is viewed as an afterthought, something to do when nothing important is going on. There is frequently a strong attitude of, “Sure, take classes, but don’t let it interfere with the real work.”

If you want training to be effective, it needs to be taken as seriously as any other part of the job. The products you build today are built with the skills you learned yesterday. The products you build tomorrow will be built with the skills you learn today. View training as an afterthought and it will be treated as one. Demand that people already working long hours add more time for training and it will be resented. Either of these factors will dramatically reduce the benefits of even the best classes or training exercises. This may not matter for classes which are done for legal protection more than anything else; it will matter for training that it intended to achieve that goal of a permanent change in behavior.

When training is intended to alter the way people in an organization do their jobs, such as learning new technology or systems, deadlines must be adjusted for that learning to occur. If people are expected to maintain the same levels of productivity during the learning and adoption period as before they started to learn something new, the new technology or systems will not be learned: people will naturally and reasonably opt to meet their deadlines by doing things the old way, rather than invest the time in learning something new. There is almost always a dip in performance in the early stages of adopting new systems and technology: people need time to get used to the new ways of working. This is perhaps the most difficult part of learning as no one likes feeling incompetent. Performance improvements only come once people have become sufficiently comfortable with those new ways of working that they can work faster than they can in the old way: remember, even if the old way is less effective or less efficient, it is very well practiced. That practice enables a great deal of speed and efficiency, which will not initially be present in the new system.
Recall our recent discussion of automatized skills and cueing: the old skills are automatized; the new ones still need to be.

“Author Stephen Balzac has written a terrific book that gets into the realpolitik of organizational psychology – the underlying patterns of behavior that create the all important company culture. He doesn’t stop at the surface level, explaining things we already know like ‘culture beats strategy’ – he gets into the deeper drivers and ties everything back to specific, actionable stories. For example he describes different approaches to apparent “insubordination” by a manager; rather then judging them, he shows how each management response is interpreted, and how it then drives response. Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

The Difference Between Leaders and Managers? Less Than You Think!

This article originally appeared in Corp! Magazine.

The world is full of classic face-offs:

Red Sox vs. Yankees

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Kirk vs. Picard

They’re all pikers! Nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the big one: Leaders vs. Managers. As important as any of these other matchups might be in some circles, none of them have ever generated the sheer volume, passion, and press as the eternal debate over the difference between leaders and managers. Classic arguments in the leader vs. manager debate include such pearls of wisdom as, “Managers take you safely along the map, leaders take you off the map;” Peter Drucker’s classic, “Managers do what’s right, leader’s do the right thing;” and so on.

If there is a fairly consistent theme in the leader vs. manager debate it’s that leaders are somehow innately superior to the poor manager. Managers are relegated to the role of also-ran or minor functionary. While I hate to disagree with Drucker, not only is this unfair to managers, it’s also inaccurate.

The fact is no one can single-handedly lead a large organization. A skilled, charismatic leader might be able to individually lead 10 or twenty people, although even that is probably pushing it. By the time your organization is up to 100, 1000, or 10,000 members, it’s too big for one person. There are too many moving parts, too many specialized groups. Each of those groups needs to know how they fit into the overall mission and strategy of the organization; how does the corporate mission apply to them and why are they important? Let’s face it, groups and individuals who are seen as not important to the success of the organization don’t stick around. Either they get fired because they aren’t producing or they leave because they don’t feel connected and involved.

That overall leader needs lieutenants, essentially “sub leaders,” whose job it is to communicate the leader’s vision to their individual groups. Those lieutenants, better known as managers, are the conduits through which the overall vision and strategy is brought home to individuals and small groups. It is up to them to provide the underlying support that enables the CEO to lead. The CEO of a company can speak in terms of broad and exciting visions, but the managers need to make it specific to each individual team member, and then enable each team member to contribute to the vision.

By individualizing the vision, managers enable individuals to contribute to the vision and help bring it to life. The best managers recognize that one of the most important things they can do is bring out the best in each person, hone their strengths so that they can become enthusiastic contributors to the organization; they don’t try to put in what isn’t there. The CEO is too far removed from the individual team members to see each person’s strengths and weaknesses and figure out how to make the best use of them. The individual managers, on the other hand, are perfectly positioned to do that. Just as the overall leader of an organization must identify and build the strengths of the business, so the leader of each team must help each individual develop his or her own individual strengths. Just as the CEO must weave together the differing strengths of each part of the organization into a cohesive whole, the manager must weave together the differing strengths of each individual team member to produce a high performance team. Mediocre managers focus on “fixing” weaknesses; great managers focus on building strengths. It’s not an easy task, however, which is why so many managers, and CEOs, fail to do it.

So what then is the real difference between leaders and managers? It comes down to scope: While the leader may set the overall vision and direction for the organization, the managers then bring it to life within their particular areas. People who cannot do that should not be managers… or leaders. In the end, managers and leaders really are not all that different!

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

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 late 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.

Trust

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

Effective communications comes from building trust, and trust comes from taking the time to build connections with employees and from, yes, communicating. The problem is that many people don’t typically drop by to chat with the boss. If you only talk to the ones who do drop by, you end up with limited information and communications structure that’s more like a game of telephone. There is also a very good chance that you’ll split your team into an in group and an out group. If you really want to get people talking to you, you need to seek them out. IBM’s founder, Tom Watson, was legendary for showing up unannounced at different IBM locations and just dropping in to chat with different people. He was trusted as few CEOs have ever been: employees believed that he cared about them personally. The stories about him reflect that to this day.

Trust is not just about keeping your word. It’s also about living up to the image of leadership in your organization and honoring the implicit promises in the organizational story and culture. If the story your organization tells is one of people being recognized for their work, you need to make sure that happens.

If something happens to cause a breech of trust, you need to acknowledge it, apologize, and explain what happened. Economic conditions or other surprises sometimes mean that promises can’t be honored, be that a raise or sending someone to a conference they were looking forward to attending. When that happens, you need to be honest about the situation. Trying to deny it or fool people only compounds the problem whereas repairing trust makes it stronger.

In a very real sense, trust and safety go hand in hand: when we don’t trust someone, we don’t feel safe around them and, conversely, when we don’t feel safe around someone we also don’t trust them. We tend to be more on our guard and less willing to engage. Commitment, innovation, feedback, and intelligent risk taking are sharply reduced. Careless risk taking, on the other hand, tends to increase.

Trust, it must be remembered, is a two way street. As your employees learn to trust you, you also learn to trust them. That means developing an accurate picture of their strengths and weaknesses. If you force people to operate in their areas of weakness, they will be more likely to fail. This reduces your trust in them and causes them to view you as setting them up for failure. That, in turn, reduces trust in you.

Part of building trust is recognizing process. Every person in an organization tries to work in the ways they work best. Each person seeks to develop their own process. That process is, in a very real sense, a manifestation of who that person is in the organizational community. If you cannot trust someone’s process, you will not be able to trust them; conversely, if you do not trust someone’s process, they will not trust you: you are essentially telling them they cannot be who they are. When you trust someone’s process, however, you build trust in them and enable them to trust you. This increases productivity, motivation, and loyalty. Fundamentally, as psychologist Tony Putman observed, a person becomes what he is treated as being. How you treat the process is how you treat the person.

Recognize that trusting the process is not just about trusting that the results will be what you expect. That is important, but it’s a surprisingly small piece of the puzzle. There is no such thing as a perfect process and no process will always execute without something going wrong. True trust comes when you know that people can be trusted to handle mistakes and unpredictable events. Trust in our own skills comes from learning that we can make a mistake and recover; without that, trust is brittle. Trust in a process comes from recognizing that the process may sometimes give us the wrong answer, but it also gives us the ability to recognize that fact and recover.

Finally, how you act in a crisis can make or break people’s trust in you. A leader who panics in a crisis can undo months or years of team building and trust. On the flip side, being able to remain calm and focused in a crisis can increase trust as you become seen as someone who can be counted on when the chips are down. However, some trust must already exist for your behavior in a crisis to matter: in the Mann Gulch disaster, Wagner Dodge never built enough trust with his team for them to trust him when he figured out an innovative way to save their lives; as a result, most of them died. Conversely, after hurricane Sandy hit the east coast in October of 2012, President Obama won praise from some of his harshest critics for his calm, disciplined, organized response to the disaster.

Your response in a crisis is the model for how others will respond. If you remain calm and build safety, people will respond to that and trust you more than ever. If you panic, you will reduce perceptions of safety and trust will decline.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications

Change Narratives

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

I live in a small town west of Boston. Halloween is a big deal here. It doesn’t matter which night of the week Halloween falls, that’s the night the kids are out trick or treating. Naturally, the kids prefer it when Halloween falls on a Friday or Saturday night so that they don’t have to worry about going to school the next day, but the idea of celebrating Halloween on the nearest Friday or Saturday night is anathema. Witches have more flight capability than the idea of moving Halloween. It just doesn’t happen.

My son, though, came up with a different approach: he asked me what would happen if there was a snow day on Halloween. Would that mean a full day of trick or treating?

“What are the odds of a snow day in October?” was my response.

I’ve always heard that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The converse is apparently not true. In 2011, we got a Halloween snowstorm. Not only did schools close on Halloween, they closed for the next two days as well. So much for the odds.

But Mother Nature’s little treat quickly revealed itself as a trick: due to downed trees and power lines, Halloween was postponed, and ended up being the evening of a school day after all. Halloween moved and no one objected: when Mother Nature makes a change, it can be best described as, well, a force of nature.

A year later, we had Hurricane Sandy. Some towns kept Halloween on schedule, some moved it. The force of the story is very strong: Halloween is supposed to be on October 31st. Even though there was still storm damage, the cultural habits produced different results in neighboring town. The kids, of course, made out like bandits: they got to go trick-or-treating twice!

This is the problem most organizations face when it comes to implementing effective and lasting organizational change. So long as enough force is applied, the change will happen. As soon as the force is removed, people revert to their old behaviors. They might not even wait for the force to stop. Sometimes a crisis can force permanent change, as happened at IBM when Lou Gerstner took over. A crisis can also force the sort of permanent change that happened at DEC: they were acquired by Compaq. Waiting for a crisis to force a change to occur is a very risky way to approach organizational change.

In chapter one, we discussed the process of unfreezing a culture in order to make change possible. What we are going to look at now is how change affects the narrative of the organization and how to frame the changes in the context of the existing narrative. Not only does change reactivate all the issues we’ve already discussed, it introduces a whole new set of cocnerns that need to be addressed if you want people to become active agents of change instead of opponents of it. While these new questions can manifest in a variety of ways, the seven canonical versions are:

• What will this do to the organization?
• How will my place in the organization change?
• How will this affect my job?
• Will I still enjoy working here?
• Will this hurt our product quality?
• Will I still measure up?
• Would I be able to get a job in this new organization?

Let’s look at each of these questions individually.

What will this do to the organization?

In other words, “I have an image of the organization, based on the vision and the stories and my experiences here. What is going to happen to that organization? Will I still be proud to work for the new organization?”

Fundamentally, people base their perceptions of the organization on their experiences. The organization is as they have found it to be. The longer they’ve been there, the more deeply immersed they are in the culture of the organization. It’s become something solid, something predictable. Now that is all changing! Like living in California during the Loma Prieta earthquake, it’s very disconcerting to have the solid ground under your feet suddenly not feel quite so solid. For several weeks after the quake, whenever the cat jumped on the bed, I would awaken bolt upright. Don’t make change in your organization feel like that!

In constructing the story for why change needs to occur, we have to connect the existing values of the organization to the new values. It’s a sequel, not a completely new story. People need to be able to see that at the end the values of the organization and the underlying culture they are part of will still be there. They may be different, but they’ll be there. By connecting the dots, by telling the story of how the current values and vision are transforming into the new values and vision, people can feel comfortable with the change, rather than worried or anxious. Anxious people resist; comfortable people join in the process. Resistance is a sign that you’re going too fast.

If there are organizational values or processes that are going to disappear, again, connect that to the story. You’ll recall that in chapter one, we discussed the process for getting employees to convince themselves that change in necessary. In inviting people to talk about why the current situation isn’t working, include those things that are changing: “How is this process getting in the way?” “What are two or three better ways of getting this done?” Your goal is to have people telling you why the values or processes need to change or disappear, rather than you fighting to convince them.

In conducting serious organizational change, sometimes a few sacred cows need to become hamburger. The less sacred they are when that happens, the easier it is for everyone to swallow.