In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard had a remarkable superpower: he had only to say, “Make it so,” and things would get done.
To be fair, this power was not entirely unique to him. Plenty of leaders and managers have said, “Make it so.” Sometimes, “it” even gets done, whatever “it” may be. In fact, it’s really less about whether or not “it” gets done, as how well “it” gets done. That’s the real key: not getting something done, but getting it done well.
Okay, Star Trek is fiction. Are teams really capable of demonstrating the sort of performance that we see from the crew of the Enterprise? The answer to that is, perhaps surprisingly, no. The truth is, real teams can do much better, and real teams don’t need a friendly script writer to make sure it all turns out okay. The secret is to develop the mindset and momentum of success. This can be challenging, particularly when a team is new or if a team has suffered a setback. However, even when things are going well, actually harnessing success and making it build upon itself takes more than just luck and good intentions.
Successful leaders manage it not through chance, but through having a blueprint for success. This leadership blueprint is known as the High Performance Cycle. Despite its name, the High Performance Cycle is not something used by elite riders in the Tour de France. At its most basic level, the High Performance Cycle links goals, feedback, employee engagement, and commitment to the organization, into one virtuous circle. Properly managed, each turn of the cycle increases the competence of the individual team members and of the team as a whole. Furthermore, when implemented properly, even failure becomes a form of feedback: information that lets the team adjust its goals and strategies. As the cycle runs, team members take on ever more challenging goals, leading to increasing levels of productivity for the organization.
The trick for the leader is that the cycle isn’t something that just magically happens. The leader is key to each step of the process: when you are in charge, you are the face of the larger organization. Thus, it is the leader who transforms successful goals into feedback that builds job satisfaction; it is the leader who transforms satisfaction into engagement and commitment; it is the leader who inspires committed and engaged employees to stretch themselves and seek out ever greater challenges.
Initiating the High Performance Cycle does not happen overnight and it rarely does happen by chance. It is the result of knowing what to do and being willing to do it. It can be a particularly useful tool for new managers, particularly during the transition from individual high performer to enabling others to perform at a high level. Indeed, one of the most powerful aspects of having a blueprint for effective leadership is that it enables leaders to engage in their most important task: increasing the performance of everyone else.
What can you do to set your organization on the High Performance Cycle?
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
I hear all the time about stress reduction and the importance of eliminating stress from your life. The problem is, if we eliminated all the stress, we would also eliminate all progress and success. Stress is healthy, in the same way that food is healthy: we need it pretty much every day, but too much can give you a belly ache or cause other health problems. It’s not necessarily the food per se, it’s the quantity or quality that kills you.
Stress, at root, is anything that gets us moving, be that thinking, feeling, or acting. When a stressful event occurs, we experience physical and psychological reactions. It is the combination of the stressful event along with our reactions to it that we need to know how to use to our best advantage. It’s when we don’t use stress to our advantage, or when it gets out of control, that we start experiencing the negative effects of stress: illness, distractibility, reduced team performance and organizational commitment, loss of creativity, and so on. In order to really understand how stress works, though, it will be helpful to look at cavemen and the starship Enterprise.
Let us turn the clock back twenty thousand years or so and consider Thag. Thag is a hunter, a member of a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers. In Thag’s line of work, the biggest risk is being eaten by something that disagrees with you. On a typical day, Thag wakes up in the morning, grabs his trusty spear, and heads into the primeval forest to hunt. He probably does not have a cup of coffee, there being a notable lack of Starbucks in the forest primeval and besides, Thag hasn’t yet invented money.
So far, this has been a fairly low stress day for Thag. There is enough stress, specifically hunger or the needs of his family, to get him up and out hunting, but nothing too extreme. This is about to change. As Thag makes his way through the forest, birds chirping ominously in the background, a tiger suddenly springs out. Now the stress level skyrockets. Thag’s heart starts beating faster, his breathing comes more quickly, and the blood is really flowing in his veins, which, in point of fact, is where he’d like to keep it. Under the surface, as it were, epinephrine and norepinephrine (the chemicals formerly known as adrenaline and noradrenaline) are released into Thag’s blood. Energy is routed from non-essential functions, such as digestion, healing, and the immune system, to Thag’s muscles. In little more than a heartbeat, Thag is ready to fight or run.
But wait! Since when are digestion, healing, and the immune system non-essential? Without them, we’re not going to be particularly happy or healthy. Fundamentally, if you’re looking at a hungry tiger, or, more to the point, if that hungry tiger is looking at you, neither fighting off the flu nor digesting your last meal are particularly high on the priority list. Your goal is to live long enough to worry about the flu otherwise that last meal really will be your last meal.
Why not run or fight and also maintain digestion, healing, and the immune system? Well, to answer that let’s jump from the distant past to a not quite so distant future. Whenever the starship Enterprise is attacked by Romulans, Captain Kirk orders full power to weapons and shields. That makes a certain amount of sense: when someone is trying to blow you out of space, you don’t want to put half power to the shields. Sometimes, though, full power is just not quite enough. When that happens, as it so often does, Kirk orders emergency power to the shields as well. At that point, Mr. Spock usually observes that such an action will mean taking power from life support, which never stops Kirk but does serve to make the scene more exciting (which is also a form of stress, albeit a pleasant one at least when it’s happening to someone else). Basically, the Enterprise may be big, but it’s not infinitely large. It has only so much power. That power can be put in different places, shifted around as necessary, but there’s still a finite limit to how much there is. Most of the time life support, or long-term survival, is a pretty high priority. However, when confronted with hostile Romulans, the short-term need to not be vaporized takes priority.
On Star Trek, this is known as a Dramatic Moment. For Thag, however, it’s more commonly known as the Fight or Flight response. Confronted with danger, the stress triggers Thag’s body to fight or run. Like the Enterprise, Thag’s body is finite. He has only so much energy to go around.
Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.
Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
“Space, the final frontier.”
– Captain James T. Kirk
To be fair, Captain Kirk was talking about a different kind of space than what concerns us here. It may seem a little odd that a book on organizational psychology would be concerned with space; fundamentally, however, we are creatures of our environment. We respond to what is around us and how we perceive the space we are in can affect our moods, our creativity, even our perceptions that our team is worth our time. How people feel about the space they are in can influence whether or not they believe a leader is authentic!
Imagine that you are going to rent an office: you approach the building and see peeling paint and dead trees outside. How does that shape your impression of the building? What will your clients think when they see it? What if you were going to visit a doctor whose office was in that building? Perhaps you’re already beginning to have doubts. Sure, she has great recommendations, but could someone competent really work out of a building like that? Of course, once you step inside you might find a brightly lit, professional office, but first you have to get that far.
Well known psychologist Martin Seligman once observed that as the chair of the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania, he interviewed many people who went on to become quite famous in the field of psychology… somewhere else. Why were none of the candidates accepted? Reviewing the applications, he and the rest of the faculty found something wrong with each candidate and consistently felt that their strengths just weren’t strong enough. Eventually, Seligman noticed that they were holding all their candidate reviews in a gray, windowless, conference room. When he tried holding the meetings in a brightly lit, colorful space, suddenly the candidates’ flaws didn’t seem so bad and their strengths were considerably more obvious.
Our moods and our environment feed off one another. It’s hard to be discouraged on a bright, summer day, and hard to be excited when it’s cold and gray outside. Similarly, when our work environment is gray or boring, we tend to be less trusting, less creative, less open to new ideas, and less cooperative. We spend more of our mental energy just trying to be vaguely cheerful, and less on actually getting the work done. Conversely, when we are in open, brightly lit spaces, we tend to be more willing to trust and cooperate with others, happier, more energetic, more creative, and considerably more open to new ideas and experiences. If successful innovation and brainstorming requires that we suspend disbelief and open ourselves to off-the-wall ideas – and that is exactly what they do require – then we need to construct our environment to encourage that mindset.
“…[Organizational Psychology for Managers] should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.”
– Stephen R Guendert, PhD, CMG Director of Publications
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers
A question I get asked all the time is some variant of, “What is a leader?” The question may be, “How do a I recognize a real leader?” or “What do true leaders look like?” or any of a dozen other versions of the question. I created a stretch of dead air on a radio show one time by responding, “Whatever we think a leader looks like.” The host apparently didn’t expect that!
We are biased toward seeing as a leader someone who fits our cultural image of a leader. Conversely, we build our model of leaders in the image of other leaders. As we discussed in chapter one, James Kirk was John Kennedy in outer space. This bias can get in our way, though, when it prevents us from recognizing the real leader or from giving people the opportunity to lead because they don’t fit the image we’re looking for. We’ll look at some activities to identify real leaders when we discuss training in chapter 8.
Conversely, how the leader sees her role is shaped and reinforced through television, movies, books, and other media. It is also shaped by the cultural assumptions each organization makes about what constitutes appropriate leader behavior. As a result, leaders act according to those assumptions often without ever questioning them. This can trap a leader into taking on a role that they are not comfortable in but feel obligated to play. This becomes a serious problem when it interferes with the ability of the leader to accept feedback or when followers become unwilling to provide feedback. Without feedback, error correction cannot occur: if the leader misses the “bridge out” sign, and no one is willing to speak up, the results can be more than a little embarrassing.
At root, though, being a leader really means only one thing: you have followers. A leader without followers is just some joker taking a walk.
Fortunately, there are many ways to convince people to follow you; unfortunately, there are many ways to convince people to follow you. People will follow the leader because that leader is the standard bearer for a cause they believe in, or for a reward, or because that leader exemplifies particular values or a vision, or because that leader is providing structure and certainty. People will also follow out of fear or greed or as a way of hurting someone else. There is no implied morality in being able to convince people to follow you. Fundamentally, people follow a leader for their own reasons, not the leader’s. The art of leadership is, to a great extent, aligning other people’s goals with the goals of the leader and the organization.
Much of leadership is based on a purely transactional relationship: you follow and support the leader, the leader rewards you. While this is the basis of almost all forms of leadership, if that is all the relationship consists of, it is very limited. The best leaders build on the transactional element to inspire their followers to greater efforts than can be obtained only through rewards. This is commonly known as “transformational leadership,” which certainly sounds impressive. In a very real sense, the information in this book is really about to become that type of leader without getting trapped in definitions.
The other critical point of effective leadership is recognizing that being a leader is not a static enterprise. As the term implies, a leader must lead. Change initiatives fail when organizational leadership isn’t out there in front showing the way. People stop following when the leader stops moving.
Part of how the leader moves forward is by changing and developing their own styles and techniques of leadership. As we discussed in the previous chapter, the needs of the team dictate the approach of the leader. A leader can no more treat a stage 3 group like a stage 1 group than a parent can treat a fifteen year old like a three year old (despite, as many parents observe, certain behavioral similarities).
The key lesson here is that the external trappings of leadership are not leadership. Giving instructions, dividing up work, setting an agenda, taking questions, are all part of leadership, but they are not leadership. Those are tools which a leader might use to get a job done. Good leaders, like any master craftsman, learn to use their tools well.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
Traditional systems engineering argues that we identify the key systems and then decompose them into progressively smaller systems. Thus, a helicopter might be decomposed into a flight subsystem and ground subsystem. The fight system can be further decomposed into a drive system and navigation system, and so forth. Eventually, we get down to the smallest possible subsystems and then start building them up again. Each system communicates with other systems through a predefined interface. This approach is quite common in engineering disciplines, from aeronautic to software. It is also a common approach with human systems.
Unlike mechanical or electronic systems, however, human systems rarely maintain clean interfaces. Human systems are porous. In small organizations, this can work very well, but can become hopelessly chaotic when the organization grows. The lines of communication between different organizational systems start to look like a plate of spaghetti. While it’s great that everyone is talking, the lack of discipline in the process leads to confusion and lost information.
On the flip side, when systems are tightly controlled, they can easily transform into silos. In this case, each group retreats behind its own metaphorical moat and interacts with other silos only through very limited channels. Organization members will typically express great frustration with the “bureaucracy.” The key is to develop loosely coupled interfaces, allowing for flexibility in communications without either chaos or rigidity. Accomplishing that requires understanding a number of different organizational components.
Consider a typical business: Marketing. Sales. Engineering. Human Resources. QA. IT. The litany of departments goes on and on. Every organization, be it a business, a non-profit, a church or synagogue, a school, a sports team, and so on is composed of a variety of moving parts, of departments and teams that themselves can be viewed as smaller organizations. The larger organization comes to life out of the interactions of the smaller organizations.
As anyone who has ever been part of a large organization, be it a corporation or a club, well knows, each subgroup in the organization is constantly struggling for resources, constantly trying to demonstrate its importance to the organization as a whole. Just as the larger organization is a complex system, each subgroup is itself a system, taking in information and resources and, we hope, putting out value to the organization as a whole. These systems all interact with one another, sometimes in very elaborate ways.
Even more important than the obvious and visible departments within the larger organization, though, are the hidden systems: how and why the organization does things, attitudes about success and failure, how the organization hires, fires, and promotes, beliefs about how mistakes should be handled, problem-solving and innovation versus blame, and so forth.
To understand the vortex of interactions between these systems, we first need to understand the organization’s DNA: its culture.
Understanding Organizational Culture
J. J. Abram’s 2009 Star Trek movie featured, as a major plot point, a good deal of back story to explain how the iconic Captain James Kirk became the person he was in the original series. What is interesting, however, is that when Star Trek first went on the air in 1967, the character of James Kirk was immediately recognizable to viewers: he was an exaggerated version of another famous military figure known for his heroic feats, charisma, womanizing, and connection to outer space. That famous figure was, of course, John Kennedy, and Star Trek was a product of the culture of the space race inextricably linked to the assassinated president.
How did James Kirk came to represent John Kennedy? What does that have to do with the vortex in your company or, indeed, organizational psychology?
Culture is an odd beast, most often described as “the way we do things around here.” This description has just enough truth in it to be dangerous. There is truth in the definition since culture is, on the surface, what we do and what we see. These obvious components of culture, what MIT social psychologist and professor of business Ed Schein referred to as artifacts of the culture, are also the most trivial aspects of culture. When we focus on the artifacts, we are missing the depth of the culture’s influence. Furthermore, we foster the dangerous illusion that organizational changes can be accomplished simply by making a few alterations to the way things are done.
Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.
Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media
http://www.ere.net
July 16th,2013
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As published in the CEO Refresher
Imagine for a moment Mr. Scott giving his famous, “Captain, the engines cannae take much more of this,” line and Kirk responding, “No problem, Scotty. You take a break and I’ll fix the engines.” Even for Star Trek this would be ludicrous. Kirk may be pretty smart, but he’s not the master engineer that Scotty is. It makes no sense for him to try to do Scotty’s job; that’s what he has Scotty for. Oddly enough, Star Trek is one of the few places where this scenario never happens.
Where does this scenario play out? In far too many businesses. I am always fascinated when a manager tells me that he would never ask his employees to do something that he couldn’t do. What is the point of having a team? A team that limits itself to the abilities of the leader is not really a team. It’s a group of henchmen who may be good at carrying out instructions, but who are not capable of achieving high levels of creativity or performance. It would be like Kirk refusing to order Scotty to fix the engines because Kirk can’t do it himself.
In an effective team, the abilities of the team are greater than the sum of the individuals. It is the capacity of the team to work as a unit, to be able to put the right person or subset of people in the right place to deal with problems that makes the team strong. Fictional though they are, the crew of the Enterprise is an effective team exactly because they know how to put the right people in the right place at the right time. While it certainly helps to have a cooperative script writer, the fact is that the level of teamwork that they demonstrate is not fictional at all. It is something that all teams can achieve, for all that barely one in five actually do.
To bring this into the real world, or at least as real as the software industry gets, I worked once with a software company that had the idea that every engineer should become expert in every other person’s code. Unfortunately, this was a fairly large project and the different pieces required different areas of highly specialized knowledge. Each of the engineers had spent many years building up that expertise and could not simply transfer it to every other engineer. While having partners working together makes a great deal of sense, trying to have everyone doing everything is self-defeating. It sacrifices the benefits that come from applying specialized knowledge to specific problems.
However, this was not nearly as dysfunctional as the suggestion by one senior manager at a high tech company that part of having everyone in the company better understand one another’s jobs, each person should spend time doing each of the other jobs. When it was pointed out that engineers are not always the most socially adept people, and that perhaps having the engineering team trying to market to customers wasn’t the best choice, his response was, “Then they need to learn.” When it was pointed out that marketing and sales professionals, talented as they are, generally are not trained engineers, he had the same response. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed: while those engineers who wanted to become more involved in customer facing activities were given the opportunity to do so, the engineers did not end up trying to sell the product and the sales force did not end up attempting to build it.
Now, the fact is, this manager did have a point. Helping people to become more knowledgeable about one another’s jobs is important. If you understand just a little about what other people are doing, you have a much better sense of what is a reasonable request and what is not, what you can do that will help them accomplish their jobs, and what you can do to help them to help you do your job.
So how do you develop that level of mutual helping? Different people bring different skills to the project. The more people can get to know one another, to appreciate the perspectives, experiences, and ideas that each one brings, the more they will start to come together as a team. The leader needs to set the example that asking for help is not a sign of weakness and accepting help is not a sign that you can’t do your job. It is exactly because you have multiple perspectives and approaches, multiple skill sets and ideas, that the team becomes strong.
The leader can do this by, well, leading. Not by ordering or threatening or attempting to coerce people, but by demonstrating the behavior that he wants other people to engage in. The leader must be the first one to acknowledge that the reason there is a team in the first place is because the leader can’t do it all himself. If he could, why is anyone else there? Whether it’s Captain Kirk trying to run the Enterprise single-handedly or one man trying to play all nine positions on a baseball team, a leader who can’t accept help is not a leader.
What are you doing to help your team members help you?
