The Business Sensei

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.

Following Prince Charming

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a solution to that.”

I was sitting across a table from Joe. We had just finished dinner and he was trying to convince me to join his new company. I had some doubts about the feasibility of what he was proposing.

“I really know this area,” he continued. “And I’ve already worked out several possible solutions. It won’t bottleneck the project.”

You couldn’t fault his confidence. He was calm, focused, and intent. He spoke with a definite air of authority. He knew how to start companies and he knew he knew it. A lack of self-esteem was not one of his problems.

Over the next two years, some odd events took place.

Although we had regular code reviews, somehow Joe’s code was never looked at. It’s not that he refused or said, “I’m the CEO, no one looks at my code.” Rather, he confidently reminded us of his expertise, and was always very willing to help others, or at least have the code review time be focused on more junior engineers.

Joe finally decided that writing code was taking away from his ability to do other CEO-like things. When we eventually got a look at his code, it was rather like a software house of horrors. He did things to software that should never be done. We now knew why we were seeing those weird bugs and mysterious problems.

As we came closer and closer to our ship date, we realized that one of the earliest problems had never been solved. Joe was working on that. He was always so calm, so confident, he projected such authority, that we never doubted that he’d deliver.

He didn’t.

Why hadn’t we pushed sooner for a solution? In hindsight, it seems like the obvious thing to have done. Yet, it never happened. Joe didn’t share information, especially information that he thought was valuable to him. He simply didn’t share so smoothly and with such charm that no one ever noticed.

The company folded. Joe, however, did extremely well for himself.

Joe looked like a leader. He acted the way leaders are supposed to act: calm, confident, authoritative. He was not, however, a particularly good leader. But he was very good at keeping anyone from realizing that until it was much too late.

Lest you think that this is a phenomenon reserved to small tech startups, let us consider a certain giant pharmaceutical company. In 2001, Pfizer’s board appointed Hank McKinnell CEO. McKinnell was widely perceived to be strong, confident, and charming, if sometimes abrasive. Rather than the last being seen as a negative, it was seen as strength: He was someone who could get things done. McKinnell had no lack of self-esteem. Karen Katen, the other candidate for CEO, was seen as quiet, but effective. However, she lacked, at least in the board’s estimation, the necessary authority and toughness to get things done.

Five years later, McKinnell’s confident, strong, charming, occasionally abrasive, style of leadership led Pfizer into serious financial trouble. The board forced McKinnell into retirement. However, don’t be too quick to offer Hank a hanky. He did quite well for himself. He did so well for himself, in fact, that Pfizer was hit with several shareholder lawsuits over the size of McKinnell’s compensation package.

A New Jersey woman once learned that her next door neighbor had been arrested as a spy. She famously commented that, “She couldn’t be a spy. Just look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

The pretty colors of the hydrangeas are a superb way of distracting people if you’re a spy. The moral equivalent of those colors can be a great distraction when you’re not exactly the best leader around. If you can look enough like a leader, you can often win the rewards that go with leadership and dodge the consequences of failure. Sometimes, you can dodge the consequences all the way to the top. The company, however, doesn’t get to dodge the consequences of that poor leadership: just ask Pfizer. Following Prince Charming can be extremely expensive for the organization.

So how do you tell the difference between a real leader and Prince Charming? It’s not enough to just look at results. Joe and Hank had a history of results. It’s just that when it really counted, their companies suffered while they profited. So, you really have to ask yourself some important questions:

Are Prince Charming’s methods sustainable? What is the burnout or turnover rate in his team, division, or department? The higher they are, the more likely you’re dealing with Charming.

What happens to his team, department, or division after he’s promoted or moves somewhere else? Does productivity increase? If it does, you should be asking why it wasn’t higher when Charming was in charge.

How does information move through Charming’s department? Is there a great deal of open discussion, a sharing of information, perspectives, and knowledge? Does the leader seek out input and invite people to challenge his ideas? If so, you have a real leader. If not, Prince Charming is in charge and odds are he’s so full of himself that he’s not going to listen to anything he doesn’t want to hear. Quite simply, a good leader facilitates discussion by asking questions and periodically summarizing the discussion. Prince Charming is too full of himself to do that. He’s only interested in what he has to say.

When you follow a real leader, the entire company benefits. When you follow Prince Charming only one person lives happily ever after. What steps do you have in place to make sure you have the real leaders in your company?

The Team Driver Paradox

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Imagine for a moment that you’re taking a ride on the subway, or, as we say here in Boston, the “T.” Somewhere up in that front car is a driver. That person sits in a little chamber and drives the train along the tracks. Someone not familiar with the T might assume that the driver isn’t doing much at all: after all, the trains are traveling through tunnels most of the time and along tracks all of the time. Yet, when an accident occurs due to a driver texting, it becomes painfully clear that the driver is doing a great deal. It just may not be obvious.

Driving a car is oddly similar to the train: When my children were very young, they didn’t understand just how much I was doing as the driver. They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t pick up a dropped toy or why I was tired after a long drive. Adults who don’t drive have more of an appreciation of the concentration involved than do children, but still tend to grossly under- or overestimate it. Indeed, if you were driving along a large, empty Midwestern highway, someone unfamiliar with driving might well assume that you were doing nothing at all, just sitting there as the car effortlessly zoomed down that long, straight road. The actions and almost constant adjustments you make are so small, so apparently insignificant, as to easily escape notice, unless, of course, you didn’t do them. Then everyone would notice!

In a very odd way, a successful team is much like that car, and the leader of the team much like the driver. In the best performing teams, it often appears that the leader isn’t doing much of anything. In fact, it often seems that the leader could be removed and the team would go on without a problem. That’s true, in the same way that the car would continue down the highway if you removed the driver and simply put a brick on the accelerator. If you decide to try that, please let me know so that I can be somewhere far away!

I have had CEOs, vice presidents, directors, and other executives and senior managers tell me that their company has leaderless teams. They even insist that their teams are performing at a very high level. Despite that, earnings are not where they could be, products are shipping late, and there is a very high degree of failure work. The teams, when looked at more closely by an outsider, turn out to be more along the lines of disorganized hordes. There is little sense of team spirit or community, rather each person is out for him or herself. Goals are vague, often to the point of uselessness. That’s OK, though, because everyone is operating on the basis that “there’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.” In one particularly egregious example, the following conversation occurred at product review meeting I attended:

Manager: “Is the feature complete?”

Engineer: “Yes.”

Manager: “Does it work?”

Engineer: “There are some bugs.”

Manager: “What’s wrong with it?”

Engineer: “The code’s not written.”

Luckily, I had already swallowed my coffee!

The most amazing part of the whole meeting is that no one seemed to find this particularly odd. It was simply seen as a normal part of how business was conducted. If that guy got fired, oh well, someone else would take his place. Without someone to lead, the team really never figured out which way to go and no one really cared.

That said, there are certainly times when it appears that a team is functioning just fine without a leader. You may even have been lucky enough to have seen such a team in action. Like the driver of the car, there’s a leader there. He or she just may not be obvious, until you take them away. That team and that leader did not start out working at that level. Rather, like any new driver, there were undoubtedly some bumps and wrong turns along the way. Even for experienced drivers, it can take a while to get used to a new car, to learn all of its idiosyncrasies and quirks. The apparently leaderless team is the product of a lot of hard work. It’s also not really leadless; it just appears that way.

Like the driver of the car, the apparently insignificant, or even invisible, adjustments made by that leader are working to keep the team from going too fast and burning out, from going off the road, or even from smashing into an unexpected obstacle. The results are only obvious when the leader is removed. By then, of course, it’s often too late.

If you truly think you have a leaderless team, look again. The leader may not be obvious, but he or she is there. And if you want to have a leaderless team, be patient. You can’t start that way and you won’t get there without some bumps along the road!

That’s An Amazing Serve!

One of those little tricks known to certain expert tennis players is saying to an opponent, “That’s an amazing serve! However do you do it?”

They’ll typically do this as they switch sides of the net, and suddenly the opponent’s amazing serve fizzles. By making the other player think about what he’s doing and focus on his body, instead of on the ball, that one question can completely change the course of a game.

Many practitioners of jujitsu and aikido learn the unbendable arm: they are told to extend their arm and imagine water jetting out at high pressure. Their arm becomes incredibly hard to bend. If they try to focus on the muscles, the arm is relatively easy to bend.

A similar trick is used by proponents of medical magnets and various other magic therapies: they’ll ask you hold your thumb and forefinger together on your right hand, and really focus on keeping those fingers together. They’ll then grab your fingers and pull them apart. Next, they have you hold the magnet or the magic herb packet in your other hand, and imagine the strength it’s giving you. Suddenly, your fingers can’t be pulled apart.

It’s a cool trick. I do it regularly by claiming my MIT class ring is magnetic and having the other person hold it in their off hand. Even though people know there’s obviously a trick, it works virtually every time.

So what’s going on? It turns out that when you focus someone on the mechanics of how their body moves, it scrambles their ability to do it. On the other hand, when you focus someone on a particular effect, be that a good serve, an unbendable arm, or keeping your fingers together, the body figures out the best way to achieve the desired result.

To put this another way, we become less capable when we attempt to micromanage ourselves. We become more capable when we learn to trust ourselves to exercise our skills in the ways that make the most sense for us. We do best when we have the freedom to focus on what we want to accomplish and discover the best way of accomplishing it, instead of being locked into one way of doing it.

What is even more interesting is that the behavior of teams mimics the behavior of individuals. The more a manager attempts to control the details of how the team is doing its job, the less capable the team becomes. The expert leader knows how to trust his team and gets out of their way.

The beginning jujitsu player attempts to make every piece of the move perfect: they try to turn their arm at just the right angle, step to just the right spot, and so forth. They are stiff and awkward. The master knows the result she wants and produces it, confident that her body will do the right thing. What is the difference between the novice and the master? Correct practice. Obvious though this point may be, if you practice the wrong things, you’ll do the wrong things.

The team is no different:  a leader learns to trust his team and the members learn to trust the team and the leader through constant practice. Like jujitsu, however, it must be correct practice. The novice who practices incorrectly improves slowly, if at all. He may do more advanced techniques, but he does them with the same awkwardness and wasted energy of a beginner. The team which focuses on the wrong skills may be given more difficult projects, but it does them with the same lack of coordination and poor use of resources as it did when it first got together.

When teams come together and attempt to leap straight into project definition and problem solving, they are focusing on the wrong skills. They haven’t yet learned how to be a team. Before they can define the project or solve problems they have to learn how to make decisions that they can all support. That doesn’t mean they all have to agree with the decision, but every team member must be able to enthusiastically implement whatever the team decides. That won’t happen if the team doesn’t know how to settle disputes and achieve consensus without splitting itself into factions.

Unfortunately, when teams focus on the wrong skills, leaders are unable to trust those teams to make good decisions. The leader, therefore, takes it upon herself to make all the decisions. While this may be a great way to get started, it starts to break down as the problems become more complex. This causes the leader to attempt ever tighter control of the team, with increasingly poor results.

At one major manufacturing firm I worked with, a certain engineering director was the go-to guy. He could solve every problem, and the team knew it. The director often complained that if he was stuck in a meeting, work came to a screeching halt, assuming it ever got moving fast enough to screech as it halted! The idea of taking a vacation wasn’t even in the cards.

The solution was to help him back off and let go of his control. Instead of solving their problems, he started walking the team through his problem solving process. Instead of answering questions, he showed them how he found the answers to those questions. Instead of making the decisions, he helped them develop effective decision making skills. It was pretty uncomfortable at first: the team got it wrong a lot, and he kept imagining what his boss was going to say to him if things didn’t work out. After a while, though, the team started to get the idea. Their problem-solving and decision making skills improved.

One of the very difficult transitions for jujitsu practitioners is discovering that doing very little yields the biggest response. Focusing on what should happen to their partner allows the technique to become effortless. This director had the equivalent experience:  although he felt like he was doing less and less, his team was accomplishing more and more. The less he focused them on the details of getting things done, the more they were able to do. Eventually, he was able to focus his time and energy on long-term strategic thinking, instead of day-to-day minutia.

Trusting yourself, or your team, to do the right thing isn’t magic. It’s the result of hard work and correct practice. The more you control the details, the harder the task becomes. The more you enable your team to deal with the details, the easier it is for everyone, and the higher the quality of the results.

Sometimes less really is more.

North Korean Rocket Change

I was listening to a news report this morning about North Korea’s latest rocket launch. It was quite the show, with hordes of journalists invited to watch and report on North Korea’s military might. According to one report, North Korea was also showing off for potential buyers of its military equipment.

As anyone who has ever given a software demo might suspect, North Korea’s rocket demo had similar results: it crashed. Unlike software, you don’t get to reboot the rocket and try again.

Although the news report wasn’t entirely clear on what happened, it appears that just before the first stage of the rocket finished its burn and dropped away, stages two and three both tried to ignite.

This did not go well.

Although perhaps less visually spectacular, the results are much the same when a business attempts to implement a “North Korean Rocket” approach to organizational change.

Organizational change is never easy, and on top of that, most companies make it considerably harder than it needs to be.

Change is a process: like launching a rocket, each stage needs to fire in turn. Attempting to fire the stages all at once or out of order only leads to a spectacular boom.

At least with a rocket, you might get some visually stunning fireworks.

The first stage of organizational change is getting your employees comfortable with the idea of making a change in the first place! This is one situation where focusing on what’s wrong is the right thing to do. You want your employees talking about why the status quo isn’t so hot, and how things really could and should be better. After all, if they’re all happy with the status quo, why would they want to change? As many a manager has learned, the more force you apply to make people change, the slower they go and the more likely your change initiate will fail.

Once people are in the mood for change, it’s time for the second stage: building some excitement. Rather than grumbling about how bad things are, it’s time to ask how things could be better. What would the company be like if we did make a change? How would that feel? What would working at that changed company be like? Look at both benefits to the company and benefits to the individual: no one wants a change that will leave them worse off.

In stage three, it’s time to focus on creating the confidence to change successfully. No matter how excited people may be at the idea of change, if they don’t believe they can do it, they won’t really try. It’s time to get them talking about previous successes, especially successful changes they’ve made in the past.

Finally, in stage four, it’s time to get people contributing ideas for change. Getting everyone involved dramatically increases the odds of success. The more confident and excited people are, the better the ideas they’ll come up with. The more involved they are in the idea generation process, the harder they’ll work to make the changes happen.

I worked with one client who would say to me, “Okay, I get it. I should do this, and then this, and then this.”

About then, I’d stop him, and say, “No, just do this one thing.”

He didn’t like that: it was too slow.

Every week, he’d complain that the project wasn’t moving forward. Every week, I’d ask him what he’d done, and he’d list off “this, and this, and this.”

Eventually, he decided to try going through the stages in order and one at a time. Suddenly, he saw progress.

Like the rocket, ignite the stages in the right order, and you make very rapid progress. Try to ignite them all at once or in the wrong order and you have a North Korean rocket launch: straight up in the air and then straight down into the ocean.

If they’re lucky, they might still be able to sell arms to Pottsylvania.

It’s Annual Review Time!

I was recently quoted in the NY Times on the subject of preparing for annual performance reviews.

The fact is, performance reviews are extremely stressful. Some business professors argue that we should drop them completely. Far too often, rather than providing benefit to the organization and useful feedback and a promotion to the employee, they only promote the Peter Principle.

Performance reviews can benefit both the employee and the organization, but they have to be done correctly. That means starting by establishing and agreeing upon goals. Of course, even that is tricky, as goals require actual thought to do well. The key point here is to identify desired outcomes and then focus on the behaviors and learning opportunities that will lead to those outcomes. Taking the time to focus on and identify productive and effective behaviors produces the most effective goals. It also means the performance review is now focused on providing the employee useful feedback and opportunities to build their strengths instead of arguing over failures and getting wrapped up trying to remediate weaknesses.

On that point, it helps considerably to recognize that people have both strengths and weaknesses. Yes, I know, this is a great shock to some people, particularly many managers. Tailoring goals to fit people’s strengths produces far more motivated, enthusiastic, and productive employees than goals that are focused around “fixing” their weaknesses. Don’t get me wrong: weaknesses that are based in a lack of knowledge are eminently fixable; but those that are based in a lack of fundamental talent or ability are simply frustrating to everyone when you try to fix them. If you give people some room to experiment and, gasp, fail, you and they will quickly figure out which is which and how to best focus their time and energy. Build people’s strengths enough and their weaknesses matter less and less.

The other key point on performance reviews is to provide specific feedback: it doesn’t help to tell someone they are “too aggressive” or “too passive.” That is your perception. Tell them exactly what they did that you saw as aggressive or passive. Good or bad, the details matter if you want someone to repeat a positive behavior or end a negative one.

Performance reviews can be a waste of time and energy or a powerful tool to improve performance in your organization. Like all power tools, you need to use them correctly.

Make A Decision!

“Daddy, can I have that?”

As the holidays approach, a familiar refrain is heard. More common than Jingle Bells or other traditional Christmas music are the unending requests from children for various toys. Even for those who do not have young children, there is the pressure of deciding what gifts to get for family and friends. Indeed, in one sense, the parents of young children have it easy: their kids are at least telling them what they want. Of course, if all the kids got all the toys they asked for, we’d be able to pay off the national debt about fifty times over. Since very few people have that sort of money, a certain level of decision making still needs to take place.

Although web-based retailers have certainly removed a great deal of the terror normally associated with holiday shopping, nonetheless it remains an oddly exhausting activity. An hour of shopping on Amazon.com may not leave us battered, bruised, or pepper-sprayed by over-eager shoppers, but it can still leave us feeling like our brains have turned to jelly and are dripping out our ears. Not only does this lead to some very odd looking stains on our shoulders, it can also be very hard to focus on much of anything else. Attempting to put off the e-shopping is even worse. In many cases, the effort of not shopping can be more exhausting than the shopping itself! When it finally happens, the shopping experience is all the more, let us say, poignant.

So what is going on here anyway? How can a few mouse clicks be so draining?

As psychologist Roy Baumeister and John Tierney explain in their book, “Willpower,” the act of decision making is oddly tiring. The more important the decision feels the more exhausting it is. When it comes to buying gifts for family and friends, well, the level of import often feels insanely high. Even worse, the more decisions we make, the harder the next one becomes. Eventually, we hit the point where we start making really bad decisions, such as deciding to go to the store at the last minute: even for those of us who are comfortable and familiar with the Internet, going to a bricks-and-mortar store often remains a natural and reflexive action no matter how utterly crazy the experience actually is. Worst of all: we don’t even realize how bad our decisions are becoming; all we know is that everyone around us is simply getting more and more unreasonable and the information we’re looking at more and more poorly written. Well, at least it appears that way and will only get worse when you’re experiencing decision fatigue. When our brains get tired, they start taking shortcuts, such as reverting to non-decisions such as “I’ll deal with it later,” or reckless ones such as buying our kids that “Build a killer robot” kit, complete with working death ray and nuclear reactor.

When it comes to buying presents, this once a year experience, nightmarish though it may be, is ultimately not all that big a deal. Sure, it may feel that way at the time, but ultimately it generally works out, albeit with the occasional bizarrely ugly sweater or killer robot along the way. In a business environment, however, this sort of decision fatigue can be both subtle and costly.

It turns out that there are two types of decisions that are particularly difficult. Coincidentally, they are also the types of decisions that arise quite frequently in businesses, at least those that involve more than one person. These two types of decisions are those involving compromise or negotiation and those involving innovation and trying out new ideas or ways of doing things.

The fact is, compromise and negotiation are relatively rare skills in the animal world. Outside of Tom and Jerry, I’ve never seen a cat negotiate with a mouse. When dogs and cats compromise, it usually involves one of them running up a tree (lest there be any confusion, it’s usually the cat). Even for people, compromise is surprisingly difficult at the best of times, not just when the old Christmas spirit is sapping our self-control.

Now, I am often told that compromise and negotiation is something that certainly managers and salesmen need to do, but what about everyone else? How much compromise and negotiation really takes place in an office? Quite a lot. Brainstorming, problem solving, group discussions all involve compromise and negotiation. So does simply dealing with life in the world of cubicles. When everyone is suffering from decision fatigue, it becomes much harder to work with other people. Little things become major irritants simply because it’s that much harder to shut them out.

Innovation and trying out new ideas run into trouble for much the same reasons. There is a much greater tendency to let problems fester or to accept those natural and reflexive solutions, the solutions that we don’t really like but which are familiar and oddly comfortable despite the actual unpleasantness they bring. In other words, the functional equivalent of going to a large department store, tired and grumpy children in tow, on December 23^rd. At least in that case you get to join all the other people who are doing the same thing.

Fundamentally, new ideas are particularly difficult to accept when we’re suffering from decision fatigue. Meetings to address what should be simple problems can drag on for hours and, at the end, no one can actually make a decision. This only increases the frustration level.

So what can be done to avoid these problems?

As many an endurance athlete has told me, “Eat before you’re hungry, drink before you’re thirsty.” In other words, don’t wait until you’re feeling grouchy and out-of-sorts to get a healthy snack (or even an unhealthy snack, though the benefit doesn’t last nearly as long). If you wait, you’re already making bad decisions and it can take a long time to get your brain back on track. Athletes who wait too long to eat or drink suffer from rapid performance collapse, and getting hit with decision fatigue is very similar. The major difference is that an endurance athlete whose performance collapses knows it. With decision fatigue, we don’t always realize just how drained we are until the next day when we ask ourselves, “How could I have been so stupid?”

Next, take breaks. They don’t have to be long, but getting out of the office for a few minutes to take a walk or get a snack can do wonders to replenish our mental energy before we start making bad decisions.

As the old adage goes, make haste slowly. If you do have to make a major decision, sleep on it. Make it first thing in the morning when you’re fresh, not at the end of the day. If you’re running a meeting, separate any decision making from the rest of the meeting. Take a long break before making any decisions or, again, if possible wait until the next day. Finally, recognize that everyone is always a little distracted at this time of year. Take that into account in your planning. It’s a lot more productive to build a little extra time into the schedule than to have to go back and fix bad decisions.

Making good decisions and getting along with our coworkers can be hard enough at the best of times. Don’t let the holiday spirit make it harder.

What Are You Really Asking For?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

The names have been changed to protect the silly…

History teacher Norman Conquest had a very difficult student, Sasha Pandiaz. Sasha was constantly disruptive in class, driving Norman up the wall. Finally, Norman decided on a simple solution: when Sasha misbehaved, he would be sent out into the hall for five minutes. If he misbehaved three times, he spent the entire class sitting in the hall.

Inside of a week, Sasha was spending the entirety of each class in the hall. Sasha, it turns out, didn’t like the class. Although Norman thought he was punishing Sasha, apparently no one bothered to inform Sasha of that. As a result, Sasha was quite happy to miss each class; the long-term negative of a bad grade in the class was simply too far off and abstract to change Sasha’s behavior.

Fred was the VP of Engineering at Root-2 Systems. Fred had the habit of indicating his displeasure with engineers in his department by assigning them projects that were not particularly fun or interesting. At least, Fred didn’t find them particularly fun or interesting. Unfortunately, the engineers did. Rather than feeling punished, they thought they were being rewarded! As one engineer put it, “I thought Fred was ready to kill me, but then he gave me this really cool project.”

Thus, for example, instead of realizing that Fred was punishing them for blowing off a meeting, engineers believed he was rewarding them for skipping a meeting that they thought would be a waste of time. As a result, they kept repeating the behaviors that were infuriating Fred. By the time he figured out what was going on, Fred was bald.

At Mandragora Systems, Joe took over a key product team. He regularly exhorted his employees to work together: “We’re a team!” Joe cried loudly and often. But when it came time to evaluate performance, the song was a bit different:

“What were you doing with your time?”

“I was helping Bob.”

“If you’d finished your work, why didn’t you come to me for more?”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“Then why were you helping Bob?”

“It was something I could do quickly and would have taken him all night.”

“If Bob can’t do his job, that’s his problem. Worry about your own work.”

Astute employees soon realized that the key to a good review was to focus on their own work and devil take the hindmost. While Joe won points with his boss for his aggressive, no-nonsense style, and for his success in identifying weak players and eliminating them, something rather unexpected occurred: team performance declined on his watch. Instead of a team working together and combining their strengths, he ended up with a group of individuals out for themselves and exploiting one another’s weaknesses. The fact that this was damaging to the company in the long-run didn’t really matter as it was very definitely beneficial to the employees in the short-run.

There are several lessons to be drawn from these experiences.

First, it doesn’t matter whether you think you’re rewarding or punishing someone. What matters is what they think. If they think they’re being rewarded, they will naturally attempt to continue to get those rewards. If that means you lose your hair, so be it. If, on the other hand, they think they’re being punished, or at least not rewarded for their efforts, they will change their behavior no matter what you might say. Your actions really do speak louder than your words.

Second, no matter how much we might tell employees to think about the long-term rewards and delayed gratification, short-term rewards offer an almost irresistible lure. If you create a contradiction between the short-term and the long-term, most people will go for the short-term.

Third, if you want a strong team, you must reward team-oriented behaviors. If you only reward individualism, you’ll get a collection of individuals. For some jobs, that really is all you need. For many other jobs, though, it’s virtually impossible to succeed without a team.

In the end, people will do whatever they hear you telling them to do. It pays to make sure that what they are hearing is what you think you are saying.

Yankee Swap Rorschach

This article was originally written a couple years ago, but always seems rather appropriate for the holiday season…

The holidays are the season for Yankee Swaps. Now, a Yankee Swap would seem to be a fairly simple and straightforward activity: each person either chooses a wrapped gift or steals an opened gift from someone else. This latter activity can, of course, trigger a chain reaction, but that’s part of the fun. At the end, everyone feels like they had at least some measure of control over the outcome. One would think it difficult, if not impossible, to mess up a Yankee Swap.

However, all things are possible. In this case, one company held a Yankee Swap with incredibly detailed and complicated rules which had as its most salient feature that no gifts were opened until the very end. In other words, the experience was transformed into the equivalent of a very slow grab bag: a long, frustrating, totally random process at the end of which people felt that they had no control over the outcome. Ironically, the most common complaint from employees at this company is that many of the rules are complex, time consuming, and leave them feeling like they have very little control over how they get their work done.

Now, a Yankee Swap is a pretty insignificant event, little more than an amusing party game. However, how a business goes about designing a small process says a lot about how it goes about designing larger, more significant processes: process design is strongly influenced by institutional habits and beliefs. With a small process, it’s easy to see the results of that belief in action because the entire event can be seen at one time; with larger processes, cause and effect may be separated by weeks or months, and the process is often so big that no one ever views it as a whole. The company ends up wondering why their results are poor, but can’t figure out the reasons. Those small processes can provide valuable insights into the company’s methodology and assumptions; recognizing consistent causes of small problems can enable you to avoid large ones. Ultimately, more important than improving one process is improving how the company designs all its processes.

In designing a process, it helps to clearly understand what you are trying to accomplish. Why did this particular company choose to redesign the Yankee Swap? Was there an actual problem that someone was trying to solve? Clearly, someone felt a need to come up with something, although their motives are impossible to fathom. As a result, they got a process that rather missed the point, but did end up reflective of the organization as a whole. However, it’s generally more successful to focus on results:

• Clearly define the objective. If the objective is to solve a problem, take the time to look at the symptoms and consider what they mean. When do they come up? Under what circumstances? Remember, the symptoms are not the problem, they’re just the symptoms. Generate a list of hypotheses and then test them to see if they lead to the observed symptoms. Solving the wrong problem will generally make things worse, not better.
• Describe what a successful outcome will look like. What will have changed? What behaviors will be different? Make this concrete. If success is, “people will have more fun,” how will you know? If the picture isn’t clear, identify the questions you need to answer to bring clarity. This may be an iterative process.
• Identify what you can change and what you can’t. You probably can’t change the economy, but you can change how you deal with it. Tom Watson Sr., founder of IBM, used the Great Depression as an opportunity to build up a highly trained, extremely loyal workforce and a stockpile of equipment. When WWII started, IBM was in an excellent position to capitalize on the reawakening economy. If everything falls into the “can’t change” category, you need to revisit your goal or problem formulation.
• Brainstorm possible solutions or approaches. Record ideas and do not evaluate any of them until you have a significant number of possibilities. Don’t worry if some ideas are silly or off-the-wall: innovative solutions come from the most unlikely sources.
• Will your solutions really get you where you want to go? Do research. Don’t rely on opinion and conjecture.
• Define your action steps.
• Execute and evaluate. Did it work? If not, check your problem formulation and try again.

If you’re not getting the results you want, what steps are you missing?

Force of Nature Change

“What are the odds of a snow day in October?”

This was my response to my kids telling me how wonderful it would be if school were to close on Halloween. Not only would they have more time to finish their costumes, but they were imagining the fun of an extended afternoon and evening of trick-or-treating.

While it may not be nice to fool Mother Nature, the converse is apparently not true. Here in the northeast, 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.

Now, the fact is, if someone had proposed moving Halloween in our town, the uproar would have been fast and furious. But when Mother Nature makes a change, it can be best described as, well, a force of nature.

When you are Mother Nature, that approach works extremely well. Unfortunately, attempting to be a force of nature as a way of creating change tends to work somewhat less well. Mother Nature, it turns out, holds the exclusive rights on being a force of nature.

Which brings us to a company known as Mandragora. Mandragora had long been very successful in its markets, and was facing a number of new competitors. They were also finding it extremely difficult to compete against some of the newer, smaller, and more nimble companies they were facing.

Change was necessary! And change was instituted. Like a force of nature, Mandragora’s management team announced sweeping changes to how the company was organized and how it did business. There was the usual grumbling and complaining, which was, of course, ignored. Forces of nature do not listen to grumbling and complaining.

Indeed, the force of nature approach initially appeared to work. Changes did occur in how people worked and how they approached customers. But over the next few months, behavior drifted back to what it was before the change.

A new change was announced. It too had short-term success before people returned to their old ways of working. So it went, with each change initiative lasting for less and less time before returning to the status quo.

Mother Nature never gets tired and never runs out of resources. The same could not be said for the management team at Mandragora. Eventually, having exhausted all other options, they decided to ask for help.

Solving their problem wasn’t terribly difficult, but it did require respecting Mother Nature’s patent on the force of nature approach. Rather than simply announce a new change initiative, the first step was to enable the employees to convince themselves that the status quo wasn’t working and that a lasting change would be a good idea.

Once that was accomplished, the employees were further drawn into the change process by being asked for ideas and suggestions on what should change and how to make the changes work. Where the force of nature approach had yielded unenthusiastic compliance, employees were now taking the lead. As an unexpected benefit, employees also identified several change opportunities that management had missed. The management team incorporated that information into the evolving vision of how Mandragora would look after the changes were complete and fed it back to employees, increasing their enthusiasm and eliminating many of their concerns about the process.

Still, though, when it came time to begin implementing changes, there was a certain amount of reluctance. The solution was to provide opportunities for employees and managers to practice the new ways of working.

Naturally, the initial response to that step was, “It’ll take much too long!”

In fact, it took less than a fifth of the time that had already been spent in failed change attempts and a similar fraction of the cost. Providing practice opportunities meant that employees had time to become comfortable with the new paradigms and see how the changes would improve their lives. Practicing with management reinforced the message that “we’re all in this together.”

Throughout the process, employee concerns were addressed promptly and effectively. Mistakes were handled by identifying and fixing causes as opposed to fixing responsibility. Fixing responsibility, it turns out, does not fix problems. Fixing causes, however, does.

This time around, the changes stuck.

Now, if you happen to be Mother Nature, the force of nature approach can be a natural way of doing things. Mother Nature is also rather unconcerned about outcomes or how much havoc she inflicts along the way. For the rest of us, however, taking things slowly is a much faster way of accomplishing our goals.

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.” 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.