The Business Sensei

What Are You Really Asking For?

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.

Trust Your Feelings, Luke

“Trust your feelings…”

— Obi Wan Kenobi

 

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

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 However, just as Luke discovered, it’s not quite as easy as Obi Wan originally made it seem.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

So, when are feelings useful?

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

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

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

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

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

Mirror, Mirror

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”

 

Magic mirrors have a habit of showing up in fairy tales and legends. The most famous, of course, was the mirror owned by the wicked queen in Snow White. But don’t think that magic mirrors were solely the province of the wicked queen. There were plenty of evil sorcerers, kings, and especially evil grand viziers who had magic mirrors of one sort or another. Given how ubiquitous those mirrors were, one can only imagine that entire fantasy economies must have depended on their manufacture. But that, as they say, is another story.

The interesting thing about magic mirrors is that what they show us is, well, us, with an emphasis on making us feel good about it. That’s the problem with magic mirrors: when we look into them long enough, we might actually start to believe that we really do look that good. If that happens, anything that spoils the illusion becomes a problem to remove rather than feedback that things might not be as they seem.

“Sorry Queen, but it is Snow White who’s better looking by day or night.”

We all know how that worked out.

In a business setting, the magic mirror is the people we work with. When we work as part of a team, we can see everyone on the team: we can see what they do, we react to their work, we hear their words. The one person we cannot see is ourselves. Is our work good or is it poor? Are we behaving intelligently, foolishly, wisely, or carelessly? We can only really tell by how we are reflected in the eyes of our team mates. Without that feedback, we have no point of reference. Sometimes, the mirror doesn’t show us what we want to see.

This mirroring phenomenon is a big part of how a group of people who happen to be wandering in the same direction learn how to come together as a team. We look at others and we see how people act, look, and dress. Because team members always seek some degree of similarity, we try to mimic what we see so that we’ll feel like part of the team. This is especially true when we are new to the team (when everyone on the team is new, each person is doing this. That can make things a bit tricky). Similarity brings the team together, but differences make it effective. The trick is making use of the first without losing the second.

Assuming that each member of the team sees and reflects the appropriate actions, appearances, and behaviors, the team has a much better chance of coalescing and achieving very high levels of performance. On the other hand, if people don’t reflect to one another or, in other words, see too much difference, the team doesn’t come together, members are less loyal, and the team is more likely to dissolve.

Points of similarity can be many things: behavior, clothing, common goals, an outside threat, annoyance at a particular member of the team, skin color, gender, etc. Some of these work better than others. Superficial characteristics such as physical appearance and gender can certainly help bring a team together, although at the risk of creating a more homogenous team. Simply looking at people who look like you might feel good, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to stimulate creative thought; for that, difference helps. As Terry Pratchett observed, we go on vacation so that we can come back to view home through new eyes. Seeing those who don’t look like us helps us consider multiple options and perspectives, an important component of successful products and services.

Bringing a team together against an outside threat has good short-term results, but often only succeeds in suppressing disagreements and preventing the group from learning how to argue effectively and develop consensus. Unifying around annoyance at a particular member of the team creates its own special set of problems. Both of these approaches tend to suppress difference in favor conformity. Common goals, interests, imitating behaviors, and having a common vision work best at building similarity while preserving differences.

How a group unifies then determines who else it lets in. Humans naturally form in- and out-groups, and we are all subject to viewing members of our in-groups more favorably than members of our out-groups. That means that we will tend to favor those who resemble the people around us. Over time, the group will reflect the dominant identifying characteristics: be that skin color, a penchant for puns, gender, style of dress, incisive problem solving capabilities, and so on. The magic mirror is telling us what the group looks like and, by extension, what new members should look like. And, because, we’re human, we are also very good at explaining why our group looks the way it does. In fact, we might decide that there are very good and very serious scientific reasons why it must look that way, and why any other group composition would be wrong. In reality, there may be nothing special about many of the dimensions of group composition other than happenstance.

Indeed, when we recognize the important dimensions of similarity, we can also take advantage of our differences. A key strength of a high performance team is its ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives, to generate diverse ideas, and to explore different and unexpected approaches. Team members must become comfortable along the axes of their similarities and their differences for that strength to manifest.

Just to make things more complicated, not all group members will always recognize which dimensions of similarity are the relevant ones for the group. For example, some people might assume gender or physical appearance is the driver, when, in fact, they are simply coincidental. Part of how a group matures is for members to connect along more significant dimensions than the merely superficial. People who cannot make this adjustment ultimately cannot remain as part of the group. Some will leave after discovering that the group is not what they thought; others will demonstrate their inability to connect along the important dimensions or will demonstrate that they are intolerant of valuable differences and will need to be forced out before they poison the team.

The team is a mirror for each of its members. It’s important to stop and reflect, and then learn to use the feedback correctly. Getting fixated on superficial similarities can break the team and lead to a great deal of bad luck.

 

What a Hissing Cat Teaches Us About Teamwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Performance in a Day?

I was recently asked if it’s possible to get a team from just beginning to work together to high performance in a single afternoon.

There is a way to do it. The technique is very similar to how you train for a marathon in a single day.

The trick is in what you do to prepare for that one day.

If, for example, you’ve spent about six months running 3-4 times a week and doing other physical conditioning, then you’ll be ready for your one day. If, on the other hand, you haven’t been running or doing other physical exercise, that one day of marathon training might not work so well and you might not feel like moving for several days afterward.

Team building in a single day is much the same. It’s all a question of how you’ve prepared.

Most training exercises tell you where your team is at and show you how to move forward. Without the proper Read the rest of this entry »

What are the symptoms telling us?

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

Earlier, we discussed the process of looking at symptoms as the route to finding the problem. The danger here is that we become too focused on the symptoms. Treating the symptoms will often make us feel better in the short term, but only serves to mask the real problem. For example, if your car is making a weird knocking noise from one wheel, you can simply deal with the symptom by closing the windows and turning the music up. As they said on Car Talk, this approach works great until your axle breaks and the wheel comes off.

Of course, knowing that we get focused on symptoms isn’t the real question. The real question at this point is, why do we get focused on symptoms? The answer is because they’re there. Symptoms are easy to see and they seem easy to deal with. Making a symptom go away feels good. For a short time, everything appears to be working.

In one technology company, one of the engineering teams couldn’t make decisions. Now, we’ve looked at decision making from several different angles, and we therefore know that we’re looking at a symptom. There are any number of factors that can cause this symptom to appear:

1. We could be looking at a so-called leaderless team. As we’ve discussed, leaderless teams don’t work. This is one of the reasons why.
2. The team could be using wrong decision making method for the organizational culture or for the team’s stage of development. Stage one teams that attempt to use voting systems often end up stuck. Stage two teams are particularly resistant to directive leadership.
3. Lack of engagement: if the team isn’t committed, it isn’t really taking the decision seriously. As a result, and note that this is an additional symptom, no one is asking questions or pushing back on ideas.
4. Perceived lack of control: if the team doesn’t believe that their actions will matter, they won’t try. Decisions are a ritual they go through even though they “know” it won’t matter.

Indeed, even the basic problem, “can’t make decisions,” can mean different things: are decisions being made but not implemented? Are decisions not being made at all? Are they being made and then revisited and second-guessed? Each of these scenarios present different symptoms and point to different underlying problems.

Why isn’t my company doing better?

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Bloom

President

Manager Mechanics, LLC

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

 

Unity of Crisis

Marvel Comic’s Avengers are a pretty impressive bunch. Thor, Captain America, Ironman, and the Hulk make a fearsome combination: Captain America is practically indestructible, Thor flies around throwing lightning, Ironman, aka Tony Stark, is like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rolled into one, and the Hulk is, well, the Hulk. When it comes to fighting off alien invasions, these guys have power to spare. That’s a good thing, because impressive as they are individually, as a team they aren’t so hot. Their inability to coordinate well would have been a total disaster if they hadn’t had such tremendous power and a friendly script writer in the basement to back them up. In fact, after watching them in action, it’s easy to understand why Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Nick Fury, is bald.

But wait! Sure, the Avengers have their issues, but they do pull together and beat off the invasion. They may have been at each other’s throats earlier in the movie, but aren’t they a team by the end? What’s the problem?

Fundamentally, the problem is that the Avengers are not really ever a team; rather, they are a group of people, more or less, who are able to agree that working together is less awful than the alternative. That, as the poet said, is not exactly a ringing endorsement! Even without Loki’s mind games, they were already barely civil to one another. He merely accentuated what was already happening, pushing them into open conflict.

The Avengers, of course, are fiction. Sadly, this unity of crisis is not. A common problem in business settings are teams whose members barely interact until the pressure of the oncoming deadline forces them to work together at least enough to get something out the door. At one company, this non-interaction took the form of endless debates and decisions that were revisited every week or two. At another company, the team ended up dominated by a couple of loud members, while the rest simply tried not to be noticed. In neither situation was there productive debate, problem solving, or effective decision making; unlike the Avengers, the motions they went through were not particularly dramatic or exciting. On the bright side, again unlike in the movie, no flying aircraft carriers were harmed.

When I’m speaking on organizational development, it’s at about this point that someone interrupts to tell me that they are communicating: they are sending email. Don’t get me wrong; email is a wonderful tool. However, it’s not some sort of magic cure-all. When I actually sit down with groups to look at their communications patterns, we quickly find out that while emails may be sent to everyone in the group, they are really only for the benefit of the team lead. Quite often, the email chain quickly becomes an echo chamber or an electronic trail useful only to prove a point or hurt a competitor when reviews come around.

The challenge every team faces is helping its members learn to communicate. It seems so simple: after all, everyone is speaking the same language. As we see in the Avengers, though, that is not entirely true. While the words all may sound the same, each person is bringing their own perspectives, assumptions, and beliefs to the table. Moreover, each person is bringing their own assumptions about what the goals are and the best way to accomplish them. Also, not unlike the Avengers, there is often a certain amount of friction between different team members. While most business teams do not explode into physical violence, the verbal equivalent does occur. Unlike the Avengers, when that happens many teams simply fall apart. Although the Avengers avoid that fate, it was close. While that experience may be exciting in a movie, I find that most business leaders would rather skip the drama.

So what can be done to create real unity, instead of a unity of crisis? To begin with, it takes time. Sorry, but just like baking a cake, if you simply turn up the temperature of the oven, all you get is a mess. Teams are the same: if you rush, you still spend the same amount of time but with less to show for it.

Assuming that you use your time well, it is particularly important for the team lead to set the tone: invite questions and discussions, but also be willing to end debate and move on. At first, team members will be happy to have the leader end the debate; eventually, though, they’ll start to push back. That’s good news: your team is coming together and starting to really engage. Now you can start really dissecting the goals of the team, and really figure out the best ways of doing things. Start letting the team members make more of the decisions, although you may have to ratify whatever they come up with for the decision to be accepted. Encourage questions and debate, but do your best to keep your own opinions to yourself: the process of learning to argue well isn’t easy and if the team members realize you have a preference, the tendency is for the team to coalesce around that preference. Alternately, the team may simply resist your choice just because it’s coming from you. Better to not go there.

A unity of crisis can be very useful for a one off event, such as saving the world from an alien invasion. But for more mundane, ongoing, projects, real unity is a far better outcome.

 

 

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 McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” and “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” He is also 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.

Undermining control

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

 

The powerful thing about providing people control is that it builds their sense of competence and autonomy. They become more likely to tackle difficult projects and are less willing to give up. However, if we approach control in the wrong way, we can easily reverse those effects. It’s easy to order people to do something and then tell them exactly how to do it: that’s not giving them control. That’s micromanaging.

The more serious problem, though, is when you routinely second-guess people’s decisions: a form of the hindsight trap we discussed in the previous chapter. Remember that your goal is not to have people make the decisions you would make, but to make the decisions you can work with. As we discussed in the section on feedback, focus on what people did right. When you do have to correct something, make sure you clearly explain why the decision the incorrect and how they can fix it in the future. Avoid doing this unless it really is necessary: frequent correction only undermines confidence and destroys the sense of control. I’m not in control if I’m always wrong! If you are finding that you have to frequently correct people, either you haven’t adequately conveyed the goals to them, you have the wrong people, you haven’t provided them proper training, or you are too sensitive.

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

Killing the Princess: The Dangers of Goal Lockdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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