One life or two?

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

Another area of destructive stress is everyone’s favorite problem: conflict between work life and family life. The problem here lies in the basic premise that we have two lives: a work life and a family life and that these are somehow two separate existences. Perhaps if you are James Bond you get to live twice; the rest of us don’t have that luxury.

One of the biggest sources of frustration for employees is this illusion that these lives are separate. When we ask people to sacrifice family for the sake of the organization, we are putting them into a very stressful situation. In part, we are forcing them into a form of role ambiguity: they are being forced to play two roles at once or choose between two very important roles. We are also forcing them into a mental state where they are doing one thing but thinking about the other: a form of multi-tasking. This is a very bad place to be. Not only does it reduce performance, it also interferes with job satisfaction. As you’ll recall from our discussion of the High Performance Cycle, reducing job satisfaction reduces commitment to the organization, which interferes with goal accomplishment, better known as productivity.

Taking the time to respect people’s lives outside the organization is a powerful tool for building loyalty and commitment. Indeed, as we’ve discussed, time is a powerful gift. Sending people home a little early if you’re running ahead of schedule or accepting that quarterly report a little late so that Fred can attend his kid’s soccer game are extremely effective methods of reducing that work/family conflict. Flexible work from home policies are another good approach. When you make it easy for people to manage the demands of work and family, you build loyalty and increase satisfaction with the organization. That, in turn, feeds the High Performance Cycle.

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

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

The stress of 20-20 hindsight

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

The hindsight trap can be best described by Dr. Watson saying to Sherlock Holmes at the end of the mystery, “It’s so obvious once you explain it!” Holmes famously does not reply by saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” though one might imagine that he is at least thinking it. The fact is, though, that what Holmes is doing is not elementary or obvious, as evidenced by how few readers can actually figure it out. In fact, being able to look at an apparently random collection of clues and figure out how they fit together is incredibly difficult. However, because after the fact it seems so clear, we are vulnerable to the hindsight trap: we assume that because hindsight is 20-20, foresight must have been 20-20 as well.

In rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories recently, I realized that Arthur Conan Doyle does play fair most of the time: he reveals the clues to the reader, or at least he reveals the fact that there was a clue in such a fashion as to provide the reader the information he needs to figure out what is going on. For example, there are times when Holmes is taking advantage of knowledge not readily accessible to the reader, such as Holmes’ enyclopedic knowledge of mud or cigar ash, but that’s not the point: it is a sufficient clue that Holmes is interested in the mud or the cigar ash. Despite this, it’s extremely hard to figure out the solution to the mystery before Holmes reveals it. Once revealed, though, it’s equally difficult to imagine the pieces fitting together any other way.

Now, if this phenomenon was limited to Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it would be rather thoroughly insignificant. Unfortunately, it happens all the time:

“I can’t believe she didn’t see that coming!”

“How could he have not noticed the problem ahead of time?”

“Were they even paying attention?!”

When something goes wrong, be that in a marketing campaign, a client engagement, developing an app, or launching a new online service, the reasons are almost always obvious… in hindsight. Like a Sherlock Holmes story, once the ending is clear, we can’t imagine any other arrangement of the pieces. Thus, we assume that not only is someone responsible, that person or that team must have been incompetent, indifferent, or careless, because they didn’t recognize what we now know to be completely obvious. Ironically, what I’ve observed over and over is that when someone does point out the potential problem, they are first laughed at for being too nervous and then when the problem is clear to everyone, castigated for not pushing their point more aggressively!

On the flip side, when someone does successfully anticipate and forestall a problem, their efforts are not taken seriously. After all, the problem was obvious, so why did it take them so long to figure it out and prevent it? Clearly, they weren’t working all that hard!

The net result of both of these manifestations of the hindsight trap is that self-confidence and the feeling of being in control are both eroded. This is a very bad combination, because eroding self-confidence makes us less likely to take actions that might demonstrate control, and reducing control also reduces our self-confidence. As we can see, getting caught in the hindsight trap is a very destructive form of stress.  In particularly severe situations, the hindsight trap can produce such a strong focus on the past that it leads to organizational stasis or passivity. No one is willing to make a decision because they are too afraid of being second-guessed for it later. The decision to do nothing is viewed as the safest course.

Taking this a little further, we can now understand why fear based motivation sooner or later causes trouble. Fear activates our fight/flight response: just ask Thag! Fear focuses our attention on the source of the fear; if we can’t easily find the source, then our attention is very likely going to be grabbed by anything which we think might be the cause. In the first case, when people are afraid of the boss, they are not focusing on the goals of the organization. Rather, they are focusing on pleasing the boss, or at least avoiding his wrath. While this can be a tremendous boost to the boss’s ego and self-esteem, it doesn’t do much for the employees. Their sense of control is now based not on their actual ability to address problems and accomplish goals, but on the far more nebulous ability to manipulate the boss. Cooperation, creativity, problem-solving, and the high-performance cycle all suffer in this scenario. In the second case, where attention is grabbed by whatever seems to be causing the fear, we again see a loss of control. In this case, the organization or the team spends its time and energy focused on the wrong things, and hence fails to adequately address the actual challenges in front of them. Constantly seeking to change something that doesn’t matter will sometimes briefly create an illusion of control, similar to constantly pressing a “Walk” signal that doesn’t actually work. More likely, though, is that the wrong focus leads to repeated failures to change the situation, and a steady erosion of both individual and team confidence.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

Are You Helping Your Business Team to Warm Up?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Not so long ago, a friend of mine walked into a meeting moving with all the fluidity and grace of the Tin Woodsman after a rainstorm. He was doing a credible job of moving forward while doing his best to not actually move his legs. As a form of locomotion, I would not have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen it.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was practicing layups last night, and this morning I couldn’t move.”

A serious amateur basketball player, he had done some serious practice the night before. Unfortunately, he had neglected to warm up: he was in a hurry and felt that he didn’t have time to do a slow warm-up. Instead, he had “warmed up” by doing a number of fast, sharp moves, which ended up straining his lower back and legs. It was no wonder he was having trouble walking. The time he “saved” by not warming up, he paid back with interest over the next several days.

At this point, I suspect many readers are nodding sagely and thinking that only an idiot forgets to warm up before an activity. Unfortunately, they’d be wrong. Very smart people, very knowledgeable people forget to warm up. Furthermore, it’s not just individual athletes who forget to warm up; teams do as well. Moreover, it’s not just athletic teams that occasionally forget. Work teams routinely forget to perform the functional equivalent of warming up; even worse, most of them believe that it’s not necessary. In sports, many an athlete has learned the hard way that no matter how often you can get away without warming up, it only takes one time when you didn’t get away with it to drive home the error of your ways.

Unfortunately, businesses tend to be slower learners, perhaps because the pain is not so obviously connected to the actions taken or not taken. What does it mean for a team to warm up? In sports, the answer is pretty easy. They run, they stretch, they practice the skills of their sport. They might eventually play practice games.

In business, however, it’s less obvious. However, just as athletic warm-ups are based in understanding the activities that the athlete needs to perform, the equivalent behaviors can be deduced for a business team. In sports, an athletic team needs to be able to function as a seamless unit, each member automatically moving to where they need to be. Top basketball players often seem to have an almost uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time to assist one another.

In a business, it’s critical that a team be able to bring the right person or right combination of people to bear on any given problem. That can only happen if the members of the team are fully knowledgeable about one another’s strengths and weaknesses, are comfortable asking each other for help, and feel safe in admitting that they might need help. The last point is critical: far too often members of a team are seen as less competent or less capable if they ask for help. I’ve been in many companies where the stated attitude was that you were hired to do a job, and if you need help, you don’t belong here. That’s rather like Michael Jordan trying to sink the basket without any help from the rest of his team. If the rest of the team wasn’t backing him up, he wouldn’t be so successful.

Therefore, for a business team to “warm up,” they need to focus on preparing their teamwork skills so that those skills will be there under pressure. That means spending time getting to know one another and developing an appreciation of one another’s skills, interests, accomplishments, perspectives, and working styles. That includes, by the way, skills, interests, and accomplishments that are not obviously work related. Knowing that a coworker is a chess master, for example, tells you something about their ability to concentrate, plan tactics, execute strategy, anticipate problems, and deal with distractions. Knowing that someone is a marathon runner might tell you a great deal about their tenacity and ability to focus. Team members can only truly become comfortable with one another when they know each other as individuals, not as someone hired to do a job.

As paradoxical as it might seem, the secret of a successful team is strong individual connection! Just as top athletes look for ways to assist their teammates, so too must members of business teams practice helping one another. That means getting past the “I can do it myself!” attitude: it may be endearing in a 4 year old, but it’s extremely frustrating in a coworker. No matter how much you can do on your own, you can do more when backed by a strong team. We would have no patience with a basketball player who lost the game because they turned down an assist. Indeed, someone who took an “I can do it all myself” attitude would probably be cut from the team.

Finally, management needs to think about how it’s evaluating the team and its members. Are they being evaluated on individual contribution only? It’s extremely hard to help someone else score if only the scorer gets the credit. It’s hard to accept help if that’s seen as reducing one’s own status on the team. Part of enabling a team to “warm up” its helping skills is removing any obstacles that may be in the way of using those skills. What if the team doesn’t bother to warm up? Will disaster necessarily ensue? Of course not. You might not have any problem at all, nine times out ten. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing in advance which time is the tenth time.

How are you helping your team warm up?

The Final Frontier

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

What is learning?

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

It is very easy to find long and detailed discussions of what learning is and what it means to learn. Most of these definitions, while interesting, are of little practical use. Of considerably more practical use, however, is this:

Learning is the (hopefully!) permanent change in behavior resulting from practice and experience.

Sounds simple. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy. We have only to look at the number of failed learning initiatives and the frustration so many people feel around learning to see just how often learning is not handled well. Part of the problem is that learning is treated too often as an event, not as a process: a single class rather than an ongoing practice of skill development. To understand how this works, consider the process of learning a skill.

As I often tell students in my jujitsu class, learning a move is easy. Performing the move when you want to is what’s difficult. For example, it takes only a few seconds to demonstrate how to block a punch. Most people, upon seeing that demonstration, are then capable of moving their hand in the correct manner. They are not, however, blocking the punch yet; they are only moving their hand. In other words, they are repeating an action but they have not yet internalized the action. Under carefully controlled conditions, they can block the punch: it’s slow, it’s clearly telegraphed, their partner doesn’t really want to hit them. If their partner does something unexpected, the student freezes, panics, gets hit, or all of the above. Similarly, a sales trainee might learn a script to use or a set of phrases and actions designed to make the prospect sign on the dotted line. So long as the prospect behaves exactly according to the script, the trainee is fine. Should that prospect deviate in any way, the trainee is lost: their brain is full of the script and there is no room for anything else, such as improvisation.

Eventually, after enough practice, the block improves, right up until there is some pressure: a belt test, a more aggressive partner, or anything else which suddenly raises the stakes of getting it right. At that point, many students instead of blocking with their hands, block with their nose. It takes a great deal more practice before the skill works reliably under pressure. Similarly, a trainee might do well on practice exercises, but fold when tested or put in front of a real client.

This process of continual practice is known as automatizing the skill. Because we are not actually that good at thinking about multiple things at once, if we have to think about how to use the skill, we can’t pay attention to what’s actually going on. We have to learn something so well that we no longer need to think about it. At that point, the skill is becoming reflexive and we only need to recognize the need to use it for it to happen. This frees a tremendous amount of brain power, enabling us to take in more information and respond more effectively to our environment: the beginning basketball player is so busy concentrating on dribbling the ball that an experienced player can walk right up and take the ball away. The beginner will often report that, “I didn’t even see him coming!” As dribbling becomes automatic, the basketball player becomes more able to pay attention to the other players and evade the person trying to steal the ball. The beginning salesman is so focused on her script that she misses the warning signs that the sales call is about to go off the rails. The experienced salesman notices the subtle shifts in the prospect’s behavior, and is able to adjust his strategy accordingly. The rote action is transformed into a framework for activity.

Of course, there is a catch. As I alluded to a moment ago, we have to recognize the need to use a skill in order to use it. It doesn’t matter how much we’ve automatized the skill if we don’t realize that we need it. Thus, part of skill learning is situational: like an actor, we need to know our cues. The more time spent looking for our cues, the slower our response will be. Just like a scene in a movie seems artificial and unbelievable when actors don’t realize it’s time for their lines, so too do behaviors ranging from leadership to engineering to sales seem artificial, and hence unbelievable or not trustable, when we don’t recognize our cues in those settings. The leader who is not aware of the signs, or cues, that indicate a group is entering Storming is thus more likely to respond inappropriately or too slowly to the changing team dynamic. In the worst case, like the jujitsu student who misses the warning signs that it’s time to block, he may be gob smacked.

As a result, proper training includes coupling the behavior and the appropriate cues for the behavior. This pairing must also be automatized, although not necessarily at the same level of reflexivity as the base behavior. Sometimes we want to be able to choose between several trained choices. The important thing is that the appropriate cues bring the appropriate options to mind, and that we have the cognitive resources available to evaluate the situation and choose. Training conducted in an artificial environment which divorces situation from action reduces the value of the training; similarly, management training that does not include the rest of the team lacks appropriate cues from the team, and often teaches the manager behaviors that the team doesn’t know how to respond to. As we discussed in earlier chapters, training the leader and the team separately is not all that effective: this is one of the big reasons why.

Another important point of how learning works is that people have to be able to get it wrong. Learning is not just absorbing, memorizing, and rehearsing behaviors. It is also experimentation and exploration. Making mistakes is a critical part of skill mastery: being able to execute a skill reflexively is great, but you still need to be able to adjust when something unexpected happens. When people learn without the opportunity to make mistakes, the skill is brittle. Failure becomes a catastrophe, and fear of making a mistake can paralyze performance under pressure. That jujitsu student learning to block will get hit many times along the road to mastery: under training conditions, the student might end up with a bloody nose or black eye, but otherwise will be unharmed. Along the way, they learn how to make their own movements more effective. More to the point, they learn that getting hit isn’t the end of the world: it isn’t fun, but you can keep going. This enables them to relax under pressure. Paradoxically, the less afraid you are of getting hit, the less likely you will get hit. The less afraid the salesman is of screwing up, the less likely she is to screw up. The leader who is confident that he and his team can recover from mistakes is more open to trying new and innovative ideas. That confidence and that lack of fear come from making mistakes. Note that there are limits to this: I have been told that the best way to avoid being stung by a bee is to be unafraid of the bee. I can state from personal experience that the bee does not know this.

Unfortunately, too many learning situations are focused around fear of failure, a lesson we all learned in school, when failure meant bad grades and quite possibly Not Getting Into The College of Your Choice. These learned habits often interfere with ongoing learning in organizational settings. Typically, when we learn something new in a class or training exercise, we will only have time to get down the rote memorization piece of it: the process of then mastering the skill, that exploration and experimentation piece, needs to happen on the job. If you can’t handle making mistakes, you just wasted roughly 90% of the training.

Is this all there is to learning? Of course not! If it were, we’d have a lot more experts out there! A key part of making learning successful is understanding what your goals really mean and understanding the context in which learning is occurring.

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

Feedback Systems

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

Feedback takes many forms. Equity, blame versus problem solving, and dealing with jerks provide feedback that tell people how the organization works and handles difficulties. In addition, there are the explicit feedback systems:

There is the feedback that people get that tells them how, and whether, the organization views them as people. This is feedback about the nature of the relationship between members and the organization as a whole.

There is feedback that goes up the organizational hierarchy, informing those higher up about conditions, the market, problems in the organization, and successes. This system often fails.

There is feedback in the form of performance reviews. Done properly, which rarely happens, performance reviews are very powerful and valuable to the organization: they provide a route by which members of the organization can grow, develop their skills, and build their status. They provide an important connection to the organizational narrative.

Relational Feedback

Psychologist Robert Cialdini observes that every culture has a social rule around favors: when someone does something for you, helps you, or gives you a gift of some sort, you are expected to reciprocate in some way. People who do not reciprocate, that is, those who take but do not give, are viewed as greedy moochers, and are often shunned by the rest of the society. Similarly, as Schein observes, those who give help but never accept it, are often viewed with suspicion or resentment.

In an organizational setting, people want to understand what sort of relationship they have with their coworkers, their boss, and with the more nebulous construct that is the “organization.” Reciprocity is one of the ways people explore that relationship. How the team and the organization handle reciprocity thus becomes a proxy for the relationship.

In early stage teams, people might refuse to accept help in order to avoid a feeling of indebtedness or incompetence, or might attempt to help another in the hopes of receiving help later or building status. In fact, for the team to be considered just and fair, there needs to be that mutual exchange of helping behavior in the early stages. Eventually, as the team develops, the mutual exchange of favors turns into a more abstract helping network in which team members automatically give and receive help as necessary to the accomplishment of the task at hand. It’s no longer about the individual ledger; rather, it’s the confidence that we will all engage in helping behaviors for the good of all of us. The trust that enables that to happen comes from demonstrating reciprocity in the early stages of team development.

Similarly, when members of an organization put forth an extra effort or engage in pro-organizational behavior outside the normal expectations, they expect that the organization will, in some way, acknowledge and repay their contribution. When the organization refuses to do that, or, even worse, treats the exceptional effort as “just part of the job,” this creates the image of someone who takes and takes but gives only grudgingly, if at all. For example, when employees work long hours or weekends in order to meet a deadline, they are sacrificing their personal time for the good of the organization. This is not, or at least should not be, a routine event. If it is, you have some serious problems!

How the organization responds to that sacrifice provides feedback on the relationship: reciprocity of some sort says that you are a valuable person; failure to provide reciprocity says that you are a tool or a slave, that the boss is selfish, that the organization does not value its members, or all of the above.

I’ve met many people who tell me that long hours are part of the job, and ask why they should thank or reward people for doing their jobs. The reason is simple: reciprocity is a proxy for the relationship, and the relationship determines trust. Without trust, motivation, team development, and leadership all start to break down.

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

Outrunning the Ballmer

There’s an old story about two people walking through the woods. One of them, Pete Ahtear, is a track star. The other, that famous dessert maker Eaton Flanagan, may be an expert in the kitchen, but is not otherwise known for his speedy movement. As the two men are walking, they hear behind them the unmistakable sounds of a very hungry bear.

“That doesn’t sound good,” says Flanagan.

“That sounds like a hungry bear!” replies Ahtear. “Don’t you have a pot of honey or something you could toss at it to distract it?”

“Sorry, fresh out of honey.”

At that point, Pete Ahtear sits down, pulls his track shoes out of his backpack, and quickly puts them on.

“Even you can’t outrun a bear!” exclaims Flanagan.

“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” replies Ahtear with, it must be admitted, a somewhat smug tone to his voice. “I only need to outrun you.”

Indeed, were we to look at these two men, the truth of Ahtear’s statement could hardly be more obvious: one, a slender athlete in prime physical condition; the other, well, let us just say that Eaton Flanagan is a man whose skill at making desserts is exceeded only by his enjoyment of eating those desserts. Losing weight, given the time available, is not an option. Although quite possibly as large as that pursuing bear, regrettably Flanagan is sadly lacking in the sharp teeth and long claws department. On the scale of bears, Flanagan may be more closely likened to “Teddy” than “Grizzly.”

Speaking of bears, it’s getting closer.

Thinking quickly, Flanagan knocks Pete Ahtear to the ground, kicks him, and then uses the window of opportunity thereby created to tie Pete’s shoelaces together. Flanagan then lumbers off. He may not be able to outrun a bear, but he can now outrun Pete Ahtear. What follows is best left to the imagination.

As a further exercise of the imagination, consider how this philosophy might play out in a large corporation. What would outrunning the bear look like? What would such a competitive atmosphere do to employee cooperation and collaboration? How about problem solving and innovation?

Unfortunately, according to a number of articles about Microsoft, we don’t need to use our imaginations. Microsoft is one of a number of businesses that practice the fine art of “employee stacking.” In other words, employees are rated on a performance scale. The top performers are highly rewarded, while the bottom performers are… not. Sounds good, right? After all, won’t this push people to constantly push themselves to excel, and won’t it weed out the weakest performers?

Sadly, that’s not what’s happening at Microsoft. Excelling and taking on a risky project or trying something new are often mutually exclusive. Furthermore, what constitutes “excelling” can vary with comparison to others. In fact, as more than one Microsoft employee observed, they quickly learned to look like they were cooperating with their teammates, while actually withholding critical information or otherwise sabotaging their progress. In other words, when the performance review bear is approaching, all I really need to do is outrun you. That can happen in a great many ways: as Eaton Flanagan so ably demonstrated, not all of them involve actually being a better runner.

The side-effects of the Microsoft Way are far-reaching and not always immediately obvious. It goes well beyond employees sabotaging one another in order to make themselves look good. Hiring is effected: will you really hire someone more skilled than you are if that might push you down the rankings? Or will you prefer to hire people less skilled so that someone else will take the fall? What will that do to the overall level of employee skill? What about problem solving? When the goal is to make sure someone else trips and falls, are we going to fix the problem or merely fix blame? How about team work? Are you really going to ask to be on a team with other high performers?  It’s much safer to be surrounded by bear food than it is to work with someone who might be able to run faster than you. How badly will that reduce collaboration, creativity, innovation, and product quality?

Now, one might make the argument that Microsoft’s approach can’t be that bad. After all, they became the world’s largest software company and still dominate the PC market. Indeed, outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted in one article swearing by employee stacking. He thinks it’s wonderful.

It is possible that during the 1980s and 1990s, when Microsoft was surfing the great PC technology wave, that Microsoft’s review process really did produce high performance. Possible, but unlikely. Far more likely is that having a hot product in a rapidly growing market protects you from a lot of errors. When Microsoft’s stock was doubling practically every year, it was easy for them to constantly hire the best people. Most of those people were motivated to achieve not primarily because of the employee stacking system but because they were excited by their work, the company’s vision, and, yes, the stock options. So what if some of them become bear food? There are always more where they came from! Even if your teams are performing at only a fraction of what they are capable of, being in the right place with the right product can be enough for a long time.

Microsoft today is in an interesting position. As I’ve written about in several articles and books, they lost their way in 2000. While some people have argued that employee stacking is the reason for Microsoft’s malaise, it’s really only one factor. Granted, it is a very serious factor: at a time when Microsoft most needs to regain the innovative vision and energy of its early days, that pursuing bear means that few people indeed are going to be taking any chances.

But wait! Shouldn’t the creative vision come from the top? If that were to happen, wouldn’t that solve the problem? While vision may come from the top, leaders are more creative when they are surrounded by creative people. People staring at the ground, looking for an opportunity to trip up their colleagues, are not looking ahead and imagining the future. That’s an awful lot of psychological inertia for a leader to overcome.

In the end, when employees are forced to compete with one another, your productivity gains are brief and inevitably cost you far more than they are worth. It’s always easier to outrun your buddy than the bear, particularly when tripping your buddy is all it really takes.

At least the bear eats well.

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.

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

This article originally appeared in Corp! Magazine.

The world is full of classic face-offs:

Red Sox vs. Yankees

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Kirk vs. Picard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

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

Focus on experiences, not things

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

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the perils of rewards, and now I’m going to talk about using rewards. Bear with me. As we discussed earlier, rewards can be very useful when they are a form of feedback. It’s when they become the goal that they become problematic. The nature of the reward also matters: some rewards force us into the motivation trap, while others are easily amenable to becoming something we do with people.

It turns out that the most common form of reward, cash bonuses or items, easily slip us into the motivation trap. Cash or items, be they t-shirts, fleeces, laptop bags, tech toys, all produce much the same results: a short-term blip followed by, at best, nothing, at worst long-term dissatisfaction. While some people use cash to buy something they’d like, most of the time the extra cash goes to paying bills or toward a rainy day fund. Cash also creates an expectation of an even larger cash reward the next time around.

Giving people tech toys or other things seems like a nice idea, but actually doesn’t work. First, the reward feels impersonal: look, everyone in the department got a new phone. Of course, that can get tricky, since some people like Android and others iOS. A more serious problem, particularly with technology, is that the gift loses its appeal very quickly. All it takes is a newer, fancier tech toy to hit the market and suddenly that old gadget is no longer cool: Now it makes you look behind the times. In early 2012, Apple announced the iPad HD, popularly referred to as the iPad 3. It was definitely an amazing gadget. In October, they announced the iPad Retina, an even more amazing gadget. As several newspapers reported at the time, Apple fans were furious. Suddenly their new iPad HDs were obsolete. One analyst commented that he didn’t understand the fuss: if the HD was a good device on Monday, before the iPad Retina was announced, why wasn’t it a good device on Wednesday? He was, of course, missing the point: the excitement wasn’t in having just any gadget, it was in having the newest gadget. In the end, things lose their motivational power very quickly: getting a new iPhone is fun for a week or two, but after that it’s just another item that I stick in my pocket along with my wallet and keys.

Rather than things, lasting happiness and motivation are produced through experiences. It is the opportunity to go off and do something that we enjoy that really builds long-lasting motivation. There are several reasons why this works.

First, in order to give someone an experience, you have to have taken the time to get to know them and know a little bit about what they’d like. If you have an employee who loves watching the Olympics, giving her tickets to attend the games would be extremely effective. However, if you gave her tickets to the opera, maybe not so much. As we learned as kids, it’s the thought that counts. While that is not an absolute truth, as anyone who has ever received a particularly ugly sweater can attest, knowing that someone cared enough about you as a person to arrange for you to do something you deeply care about is a very powerful motivating force. Again, treating someone as a person as opposed to a generic tool on the team is extremely important.

The other thing about experiences, though, is that they never lose their value. Our memories of the fun times we’ve had remain positive memories. They don’t stop being positive just because we might do something else. Graduating from high school can still evoke memories of pride and accomplishment even in someone who went on to gather advanced degrees from a top college. If you enjoyed learning to wind surf while on a vacation, the memory of that enjoyment will always be with you even if you never wind surf again.

The things we do become part of who we are; they shape us as people in a way that gadgets cannot. Sure, it might be nice to receive a new camera right before a major vacation, but the camera isn’t what makes the vacation fun. It may help us remember our trip and it may enable us to share some of our enjoyment with others, but rarely is it the point of the trip.

Experiences do not have to mean vacations, although that is important. We’ll discuss that further later in this chapter. Experiences can be work related. For example, continuous learning is a form of experience provided by the organization to those who desire it.

Providing people with the opportunities to do things they value builds their relationship to the organization: by providing the opportunity, you become their virtual partner or supporter.

Experiences can be used on a group level as well. While having organized, group activities is certainly a good thing, it should not be the only thing. Low level teams try to do everything together to build team unity. This is silly and counter-productive. In one case, a certain organization sent members of a group to a state fair. The manager insisted that everyone stay together and attend the same events, whether everyone was interested or not. Rather than building unity, it only created division.

Physical objects are ephemeral. Experiences never grow old, never get stale, and don’t become obsolete when someone announces a new model.

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

Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications