The Business Sensei

Trust the Force, Luke

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

The (now) classic movie, “Star Wars: A New Hope,” features a scene aboard the spaceship Millennium Falcon in which a blindfolded Luke Skywalker attempts to use a lightsaber to deflect energy bolts from a floating drone. This scene is presented to the viewer as a Jedi training exercise. As the old Jedi Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, calmly instructs Luke to “trust the Force,” Luke attempts to feel the energy bolts before they arrive. Luke gets zapped frequently, to the vast amusement of Han Solo.

As Obi-Wan repeatedly exhorts Luke Skywalker to “trust the Force,” Luke eventually manages to successfully deflect a few of the energy blasts. This is an important step for Luke: In order for a Jedi to exercise their powers, they must be able to feel the Force and trust it. If they can’t trust the Force, all their tricks collapse like a cheap special effect.

Trust, the speed of trust, the importance of trust, and almost anything else that has anything to do with trust, gets a great deal of press in business books and articles. There is a good reason for this: For a team to function at its maximum capacity, the leader must be able to trust the members. Trust, however, cannot be one way — the members must also be able to trust the leader and to trust one another. Unfortunately, trust is not something we can just turn on or off at will. Just because we are told to trust someone, or told how important it is to trust someone, doesn’t mean that we can immediately do it. As with Luke Skywalker learning to trust the Force, it takes time and practice for trust to develop.

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 their 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 his or her 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 him or her 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.

So how do you learn to trust someone’s process?

Start by recognizing 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.

The best approach is to start small. Your employees are feeling you out just as you are feeling them out. Don’t launch into something so large that you won’t be able to resist jumping in all the time to tell people what they should do. Rather, give people some degree of autonomy and safe space to experiment with their process for getting work done.  Help them develop their process and be there for them when they make a mistake. In the practice of jujitsu, for students to develop expertise, they need the freedom to practice and screw up, and the freedom to then ask for help. If you punish people for making mistakes, you are demonstrating that they can’t ask for help and you are demonstrating that you don’t really trust their process.

To be a Jedi, Luke Skywalker had to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust the Force. To be an effective leader, you will need to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust your employees’ processes. No, it’s not easy and you won’t experience the immediate feedback of being able to block blaster bolts while blindfolded. Far too many leaders give up, dooming their teams to under performance. If you can succeed, though, the performance of your team will increase dramatically.

This article is drawn from Stephen Balzac’s upcoming book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” 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.  For more information, visit www.7stepsahead.com, or contact Balzac at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Voices in the Corridor: A Halloween Tale

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

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

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

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

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

It was only this: “I call the vote.”

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t understand the issues.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Halloween!

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

Dial M for Manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what can you do to make the transition easier?

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck!

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

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.

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Is the product done?” a certain manager asked during a product review meeting.

“It is done,” replied the engineer building the product.

“Are there any problems?”

“There are problems.”

“What is the problem?”

“It does not work.”

“Why doesn’t it work?”

“It is not done.”

I will spare you the transcription of the subsequent half hour of this not particularly funny comedy routine. The manager and the engineer managed to perform this little dance of talking past one another without ever seeming to realize just how ludicrous it sounded to everyone else in the room. It was rather like Monty Python’s classic Hungarian-English phrasebook sketch, in which translations in either direction are random. In other words, the Hungarian phrase, “I would like to buy a ticket,” might be translated to the English phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

It was extremely funny when Monty Python performed it. As for the manager and the engineer, well, perhaps they just didn’t have the comedic timing of Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

[SYSTEM-AD-LEFT]As it happens, “my hovercraft is full of eels” moments come about far too often. What was unusual in this situation is that it involved only two people. Usually, considerably more people take part. Thus, instead of a not particularly amusing exchange between two people, there is an extremely frustrating exchange involving several people. The most common failure to communicate is the game of telephone: as the message passes along the line, it becomes increasingly distorted.

What I hear from teams over and over is, “We are communicating! We send email to everyone.” This is where the hovercraft starts to fill with eels. Broadcasting is not really communicating: effective business communications require a certain amount of back and forth, questioning and explaining, before everyone is on the same page.

Who talks to whom? When you send out an email, do questions come back to you? Or do people on the team quietly ask one another to explain what you meant? While it’s comforting to believe that every missive we send out is so carefully crafted as to be completely unambiguous, very few of us write that well. Of that select few, even fewer can do it all the time. Particularly in the early stages of a project, if there are no questions, then there are certainly problems.

When someone else asks a question, either via email or in a meeting, does everyone wait for you to respond? Even worse, does Bob only jump into a thread if Fred jumps in first? Who is Bob responding to at that point, you or Fred? Are you still addressing the main topic or is the hovercraft starting to become eel infested?

It can be extremely frustrating to ask, “Are there any questions?” and receive either dead silence or questions about something trivial. It can easily become tempting to assume that there are no questions and just race full speed ahead. However, until employees figure out how much each person understands about the project and how you will respond to apparently dumb questions, they will be cautious about what they ask. Their curiosity is as much about one another and about you as it is about the project. How that curiosity gets satisfied determines whether you have productive conversations or a hovercraft that is full of eels. In the former case, you get strong employee engagement; in the latter case, you don’t.

If you’ve been working with a team for some months, or longer, and people are still not asking questions then there are really only two possibilities: either your team is composed of professional mind-readers or you are about to find a room full of those pesky eels. No project is ever perfectly defined from the beginning. Questions and debate should be ongoing throughout the development or production cycle. A lack of questions tells you that there is a lack of trust between the team members and between the team members and you. When trust is lacking, so is engagement.

Now some good news: remedying that lack of trust isn’t all that complicated. It does, however, require a certain amount of persistence and patience.

Start by highlighting each person’s role and contribution to the project. Why are they there? What makes them uniquely qualified to fill the role they are in? Be specific and detailed. If you can’t clearly define their roles, you can rest assured that they can’t either.  Questions come when people are clear about their roles. Disengagement comes when people are not clear about their roles.

Prime the pump with questions. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and that you need the help of the team to find them. Give each person a chance to play the expert while you ask the dumb questions. When you set the tone, the others will follow. Communications start with the person in charge.

Separate producing answers from evaluating answers. Collect up the possibilities and take a break before you start examining them and making decisions about them. Brainstorming without evaluating allows ideas to build upon one another and apparently unworkable ideas to spark other ideas. Pausing to examine each potential answer as it comes up kills that process.

Encourage different forms of brainstorming: some people are very analytical, some are intuitive, some generate ideas by cracking jokes, others pace, and so on. Choose a venue where people are comfortable and only step in if the creative juices start to run dry or tempers start to get short. In either case, that means you need to take a break.  Intense discussions are fine, heated discussions not so much.

Initially, you will have to make all the decisions. That’s fine, but don’t get too comfortable with it. As trust and engagement build, the team will want to become more involved in the decision making process. Invite them in: that demonstration of trust will further build engagement and foster effective communications. Effective communications, in turn, builds trust and engagement.

Having a hovercraft full of eels isn’t the real problem. The real problem is what a hovercraft full of eels tells you about the trust, engagement, and communications in your company.

The Death of Brainstorming?

An article by Susan Cain appearing in the NY Times a few weeks ago argued that brainstorming is counterproductive, a poor way to stimulate creativity.

While the arguments are persuasive, they are also flawed. They appear to proceed from the assumption that brainstorming is a relatively simple process that can be done by any group at any time. In fact, effective brainstorming is surprisingly difficult, and problems with team cohesion, decision making, and leadership can easily turn it into an unpleasant time-waster. Teams that haven’t developed good conflict management and debate skills are also unlikely to brainstorm effectively. Rather than producing good ideas, they are likely to experience exactly the sorts of groupthink that Cain argues is likely to occur.

Fundamentally, though, Cain’s article confounds several problems and concludes, therefore, that brainstorming doesn’t work. So let’s look at how to make it work:

Don’t take on too much in one day. 3-4 topics are about it, probably less. In general, the more important the topic, the more that should be your focus. Spending several days on one large topic is often seen as a “waste” of time, but, done correctly, is actually the most likely way to get useful results.

Give yourself lots of time and take short breaks every 60-90 minutes. Take a long lunch break and get out of the office. Brainstorming is surprisingly draining, so taking regular breaks gives people a chance to refresh their perspective and keep the creative juices flowing. Once people start getting tired, the quality of ideas and effective debate decline rapidly.

Don’t try to cram more work into the day: after 4-6 hours of serious brainstorming, people are drained. If they know they have to go back to work afterward, they’ll hold back during the brainstorming, or do low quality work because they’re tired. Go out to dinner or something afterward and call it a success.

Separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Evaluating ideas as they are presented only invites argument and defensiveness. Instead, spend half your time collecting ideas, no matter how outrageous. Some people brainstorm very effectively by being silly or cracking jokes. Let it flow. I’ve found that the craziest ideas often provide the spark for the best solutions. After you’ve collected enough ideas, then take a break, or even wait until the next day, and then evaluate them. A little distance gives wonderful perspective.

Assign someone to collect ideas; don’t rely on memory. Use multiple whiteboards, an easel with a giant pad of paper, your favorite technology, etc. It can often help to bring in an outside facilitator who has no emotional connection to any outcome. This also helps prevent the appearance of bias or of having someone emotionally connected to a particular outcome attempting to influence the result.

Work in a large, brightly lit space. Institutional gray only dampens creativity. Yes, physical environment matters. A change of venue, away from the office, can work wonders.

If you find your team slipping into a groupthink mentality or unable to agree on a course of action, that’s not a problem with brainstorming. That’s a problem with your debate and decision making process. Bring in someone who can help you fix it, or your brainstorming efforts are going to be a waste of time (in addition, problems with debate and decision making are likely to be reducing your productivity in other areas as well!).

Brainstorming is a powerful tool, if you use it correctly.

New Year’s Resolutions? Forget it!

It’s barely the start of the new year, and I’ve already received half a dozen identical articles touting the benefits of SMART goals as the solution to all my New Year’s resolutions.

Now, to be fair, they have a point as far as it goes: New Year’s resolutions have a shorter half-life than champagne at a New Year’s party. However, that’s about as useful as these articles get.

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, SMART goals are often touted as the secret to personal and business success. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of these goals will go the way of all New Year’s resolutions. Why? Because none of these articles actually tell you how to make SMART goals work. In fact, most people who try the SMART approach for any but small and relatively easy goals frequently find themselves frustrated and disillusioned.

Well-constructed goals are extremely powerful tools for getting things done, increasing concentration and motivation. Successfully completing a well-constructed goal builds self-confidence. Unfortunately, creating a well-constructed SMART goal is not quite so simple as the average article makes it out to be.

To begin with, a specific goal is only useful if it’s something you can control. Although this may seem obvious, the fact is that far too many people set goals that appear to be under their control, but really are not. For example, consider the athlete who sets the goal of winning an upcoming tournament: it’s specific, it’s measurable, it has a time of completion associated with it, and presumably it’s highly relevant to the athlete. Is it achievable? Depending on the athlete’s level of skill, very possibly. However, the athlete has no control over the difficulty of the competition. He may simply be outplayed by a more skilled opponent.

Furthermore, although the goal is measurable, in that the athlete will know whether or not he accomplishes it, the measurement is not particularly useful. At no time will he know how close he is to accomplishing the goal, where he needs to focus his energies, or what else needs to be accomplished. The athlete is far better served by setting the goal of exercising certain key skills in the competition, skills that have a high probability of leading to a victory. Not only will he gain the self-confidence boost of accomplishing his goal, he may just win the tournament. Whether your goal is winning a competition, selling a product to a particular customer, or getting a specific job, focusing mainly on outcomes only gets you in trouble.

Another problem is that a goal may simply be too big. If a goal takes years to accomplish, it can be extremely difficult to maintain motivation. Big, ambitious goals are wonderful, but they need to be carefully structured. It is vital to break them down into subgoals that can be accomplished in a much shorter period of time. The perception of progress is critical to maintaining motivation, whether for an individual or a team.

Having too many goals is another common problem. Well constructed goals are great, but if you have too many of them at once, they become a distraction. Many people can focus on three to five unrelated goals without a problem, but not ten or twenty. Keeping in mind that each goal might generate numerous subgoals along the way, it’s easy to see how having more than a few key goals can easily balloon out of control.

Is the goal something you really care about? Many people have goals that they don’t really care about. Perhaps they’ve been told it’s something they ought to do or they believe they should do, but they don’t really care about the outcome. If you don’t care whether or not you accomplish a goal, it’s hard to find the motivation to do it.

Used properly, SMART goals can be a very powerful and effective tool. Well-constructed goals can increase motivation, improve focus, and build self-confidence. Used improperly, they can decrease motivation, and destroy self-confidence. If you’re using SMART goals, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do I control the outcome?

Can I measure progress in a meaningful way?

Is my goal too big? How can I break it up?

Do I have too many goals? Is there enough time in the day/week/month to work on each one?

When will I work on each piece of my goal? How will they chain together?

Do I really care about my goal? Is this something I genuinely want to accomplish?

Good luck!

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.