Of Mice and Turkeys

Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting down to your Thanksgiving dinner when suddenly the roof of your house swings back and you find yourself looking up into something huge and incomprehensible: the eye of a hurricane perhaps, which I suspect is a lot less comprehensible close up than it is on TV.

I was unexpectedly encouraged to think about this today when I went out this morning to start smoking the Thanksgiving turkey. I flipped open the top of my grill and what should I find inside but a mouse nest. Needless to say, the mice were not at all thrilled at having the roof of their house flipped up, but I’m guessing that these mice thought they were getting a pretty good deal on the place and didn’t imagine that their house came with a detachable roof. Let’s not even talk about the central heating…

To make a long story very short, the mice booked out of there and we cleaned out the grill. Half an hour at 500+ degrees did the rest. I figure that any bacteria that can survive that treatment is going to take over the world anyway so I’m not going to worry about it.

Meanwhile, back to the mice. Much to the annoyance of our cats, who sat at the window watching, we let the mice scurry off. Their odds of survival are pretty good, even if their next home is likely to be a real hole in the ground.

Someone recently told me that he was former biology teacher and thus believed strongly in the survival of the fittest. The mice got me thinking: what does that mean? Drop a human in the forest at the end of November and their odds of survival aren’t all that good. The mice, though, will do just fine. Who is more fit to survive, the mouse or the human? Granted, the mice aren’t likely to find any other mice that will take them in or help them, but mice are individualists. They won’t even remember being a family before too long. They’ll survive, or they won’t, on their own.

One untrained person alone in the forest is in trouble. Put several people together, though, and their odds suddenly get much better assuming they can cooperate. Granted, that can be a big assumption sometimes, but it’s vital if you want to survive in the forest or in business.

I once read the statement that, “Teamwork was invented by the weak in order to beat the strong.” I’ve also heard some form of  that argument put forth many times, usually by the person who is trying to make sure that no one can compete with him. Let’s face it, the biggest, strongest person has a vested interest in convincing everyone else not to form a team. The fastest, most skillful programmer might well see a real short-term benefit in a fractious and divisive team. In the short-term, there is a real benefit for some in keeping people divided: remember, it’s “divide, then conquer.” The results for the business, though, of such a dynamic may not be quite so good.

Over the long term, being able to work as part of a team confers a distinct advantage on the entire group. Members of the group can support one another, assist one another, and watch out for one another. New members can be taught the skills and accumulated knowledge of the group, so that they don’t spend their time reinventing the wheel. Over time, a cohesive group can outperform any individual or collection of individuals.

Mice don’t form teams. They don’t even have the concept. When disaster strikes, they’re on their own. They don’t help one another. They think only about themselves.

People are capable of forming teams, forming what Ed Schein calls “networks of mutual helping.” We don’t always manage it, but we’re stronger when we do. Whether we’re talking about business challenges or about responding to the next Katrina, our ability to form teams is our greatest advantage if we choose to use it, if we choose to reach out and help others and let others help us.

So here’s my Thanksgiving question: are you a man or a mouse?

November 26th,2009 Thoughts on business | tags: , , , , | Comments Off on Of Mice and Turkeys

The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

Here’s one that was just published by the CEO Refresher.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, routinely features tales of bumbling managers. The popularity of Dilbert, and the degree to which it resonates with people, are a testament to his accuracy; indeed, Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss has become an iconic figure. Dilbert aside, however, I have observed that very few leaders intentionally act like the pointy-haired boss depicted in the comic strip. Rather, they engage in pointy-haired behaviors without realizing the effect they are having on the organization as whole. Let’s explore some examples of such behaviors and their unintended consequences.

1. Pointy-haired bosses break their own rules and figure either no one will notice or no one will mind because they are in charge. In one company, the CEO called everyone together to talk about the importance of really working hard and putting personal needs to one side in order to ship a product. At the end of the talk, he announced he was leaving for a two week vacation in Hawaii and wished everyone good luck. This did not go over well. One vice-president, who had apparently not been warned, almost choked on his coffee. When the CEO came back, two people had quit and the rest were up in arms.

2. The pointy-haired boss believes that he is separate from the group he leads. In fact, leaders are also group members, with a very important and well-defined role. Through their actions, leaders set the norms for their group. For example, the manager of a team at a large software company imposed a $.25 penalty for being late to meetings. When he was subsequently late himself, the team gleefully demanded he pay up. After a brief stunned moment, he tossed a quarter into the pot. No one complained about the fine after that. What the leader does is directly mirrored in the organization. When leaders find that employees are not living up to the standards of the organization, they often need to look in a mirror and see what example they are setting.

3. Pointy-haired bosses fail to recognize the culture they are creating. To be fair, it’s hard to see your own culture from the inside, and despite what many managers and CEOs believe, culture is formed not from what you say but from what you do. As MIT’s Ed Schein observes, “Culture is the residue of success: success in dealing with external challenges and success in internal advancement.” What behaviors are successful in the organization? What behaviors are rewarded? The very behaviors that people tell me they want to change are frequently the ones they are encouraging.

4. Pointy-haired bosses lack an understanding of group/team dynamics. They like to say that their organization is “different,” and the research on group dynamics doesn’t apply. That’s like the people in early 2000 who said about the stock market that “This time, it’s different.” If you’re dealing with people, patterns repeat. It pays to recognize the patterns and understand how they are manifesting in your specific situation.

5. Pointy-haired bosses are often unable or unwilling to create a clear, compelling vision for their organization that gets everyone involved and excited. The best way to attract and retain top talent is to make people care about what the company is doing. That’s best done through painting a vivid picture of the outcome and creating clear goals.

6. Pointy-haired bosses motivate through short-term rewards and/or intimidation. They assume they know what their employees want, rather than taking the time to ask or to observe how people are responding. Short-term rewards and intimidation generate short-term spikes in performance, but build neither loyalty nor the desire to go the extra mile. Unfortunately, far too many people are willing to sacrifice the longer-term performance of their team for a short-term gain. In one company, the head of engineering “motivated” employees by inviting them to join him for happy hour in a bar on Friday nights. Had he asked, he would have realized that what the team wanted on Friday nights was to go home and have dinner with their families. Instead of motivating the team, he made them feel imposed upon.

Finally,

7. Pointy-haired bosses do not believe in asking for or accepting help. It’s not about asking for help, it’s about investing time and money to enable the company to accomplish its goals. The boss’s time is a resource; skilled leaders invest their time and the time and money of their business where that will produce the best return. Sometimes the best return is obtained by investing in an employee, sometimes by investing in a contractor.

Very few leaders deliberately engage in these Pointy-haired boss behaviors. Rather, their behaviors are the result of their own corporate success story. Therefore, for all that even one or two Pointy-haired boss behaviors can derail an organization, behaviors acknowledged to be counter-productive are very difficult to eradicate. Nevertheless, the ability of a manager or CEO to recognize these failings and invest in changing themselves is the true test of great leadership.

September 20th,2009 Published Articles | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

Growing Wheat in Siberia

This one was just published in the CEO Refresher. The link is only good for month, so the text is below:

Once upon a time, the late and unlamented Soviet Union decided to grow wheat in Siberia. Their logic was simple: by growing wheat in the inhospitable conditions of Siberia, the wheat would become stronger. The wheat, however, was indifferent to Soviet philosophy. Despite speeches, threats, and promises from the government, the wheat stubbornly refused to grow.

In 1990s, a group of Nobel Prize winning economists developed some very interesting theories about how the financial markets should work. Their theories were brilliant and attracted billions in investment dollars into the hedge fund they created. Long-term Capital Management almost took down the entire US economy when it collapsed in the summer of 1998.

In both cases, a belief about how the world should work was trumped by the way the world does work.

To bring this a little closer to home, I worked with one high technology company that decided to create a set of coding standards for its software development team. While not an unusual occurrence in software companies, in this case, the manager in charge wrote up a fifty (that’s right, 50) page standards document. Naturally, everyone was overjoyed and memorized everything; at least, that’s what the manager thought. In fact, no one read more than a page or two and most of the engineers ignored even that.

Another company was trying to manage information: design decisions, notes from discussions, and so forth. They had the very good idea that they could manage all their accumulated wisdom as a Wiki. Unfortunately, the Wiki swiftly ballooned into an unmanageable morass of data in which no one could actually find anything useful. The problem wasn’t so much getting people to remember to update the Wiki; it was organizing the information in a manner useful to everyone who needed to use it, and in convincing people to take the time to keep it organized. Indeed, even agreeing on how it should be organized generated controversy and bad feeling.

In both of these cases, beliefs about how people should do their work were trumped by the way people actually do work. Like Soviet wheat, it can be remarkably difficult to motivate or threaten people into doing something that they really do not want to do. Unlike wheat, people can be forced. It’s merely a question of how much time and energy you want to spend: pushing people takes a great deal of effort and tends to result in significant amounts of anger and frustration for all parties involved. Not, in other words, a conducive atmosphere for creating a strong, collaborative team.

Of course, sometimes it is necessary to have people do things they don’t want to do. Code does need to be commented, information needs to be documented, and so forth. Fortunately, unlike wheat, people can be convinced. Instead of pushing them, the key is to get them to pull: the best teams are the ones that know where they should go and will trample anyone who gets in their way. How do you create such a team? Here are some tips:

  • Involve those who will be affected by the outcome in the process of solving the problem. Nothing gets buy-in like giving people the opportunity to develop the solution.
  • Identify the actual problem. Spend some time brainstorming; make sure you know what you’re trying to accomplish. The company with the 50 page style guide needed code that could be maintained over time and easily read by someone other than the writer, and they needed the process to not interfere with actually getting work done. That can be accomplished with a one page style guide. Instead, they were trying to win the World’s Most Beautiful Code Contest. That may be prestigious in certain obscure circles, but it doesn’t sell product. The customers only care that the software works.
  • Ask yourself how you’ll know when you have a workable solution. This may seem counter-intuitive since you don’t have a solution yet, but it helps to figure out what success looks like. That way, you’ll know it when you get there and you’ll be better able to recognize if you’re going off course.
  • Brainstorm possible solutions. Don’t be afraid to come up with wacky ideas.
  • Do not evaluate any solution until the end of the brainstorming process. Off-the-wall ideas frequently trigger creative solutions.
  • For each solution, ask yourself if it will actually get you to the outcome you want. Focus on the idea, not the person who came up with it. Even Nobel Prize winning economists can make mistakes.
    • Take the time to honestly assess what might go wrong.
    • Recognize that “oh, we’ll figure that out later,” is often a warning of trouble ahead. Make sure there is either a way past potential roadblocks or that you have identified the work you’ll need to do to determine how you’ll know if there’s a way.
  • Test your solution before you commit to it, or at least look for examples of similar solutions being successfully implemented. Why learn from your own mistakes when you have the opportunity to learn from someone else’s mistakes? The latter is a lot cheaper.
  • If more than one solution has survived to this point, pick one and implement it. Be willing to abandon it and pick another if it becomes obvious that it won’t work. You can’t foresee everything that can go wrong. Solutions that looked good from a distance sometimes turn out to be unworkable or too expensive when you get closer.
  • Be willing to reformulate the problem if the solution doesn’t work.
  • Give people as much autonomy as possible in implementing the solution. When possible, allow them to develop their own implementations. The company with the Wiki could have used email and encouraged each person to maintain their own records in whatever form was most individually useful. Instead of trying to figure out how to maintain a central repository, perhaps what they should have done was to present different ways of organizing the information and allow each person to pick the one most useful to them.

This may seem like a lot of steps, and there certainly is effort involved. The Soviet Union decided it was easier to yell at the wheat. Given the amount of wheat they imported, it’s clear which method is cheaper in the long run.

Good luck!

August 6th,2009 Published Articles | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Growing Wheat in Siberia

Leadership and team formation

Ever wondered why some teams are a pleasure to work for and others are a royal pain? You can find out on my live radio interview on Leadership and Team Formation.

You can also read a discussion of the show here.

July 31st,2009 Announcements | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Leadership and team formation

The value of screwing up

I was interviewed recently on Motivational Minds radio on the value of making mistakes in creating an innovative organization. Check it out!

July 27th,2009 Announcements | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The value of screwing up

Yankee Swap Rorschach

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

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

Read the rest at Affluent Magazine

July 20th,2009 Published Articles, Thoughts on business | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yankee Swap Rorschach

Slip Slidin’ Away

Here’s one just published in the CEO Refresher:

“You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away”

— Paul Simon

Some twenty years ago, I had a rather odd experience while working for a Silicon Valley software company. As we came closer and closer to shipping the product, more and more problems would crop up. Not problems with the software, as one might expect, but interpersonal problems. There was an increase in argument, bad feeling, and ineffective conflict at exactly the point where it would seem the most likely and logical that people would be feeling the greatest sense of unity and triumph. I experienced the same phenomenon at other companies, both in and out of high tech. In more than one instance, the team would successfully snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.

In each of these situations the problem was simple; unfortunately, the solution was not. The team in each circumstance had never truly learned to work together, to handle disagreement, or to tolerate variations in working style. The only thing the team had ever agreed upon was the necessity of getting the product out by a certain time. The strength of that agreement was enough to forge sufficient common ground for the team to work together. Unfortunately, as the project drew nearer and nearer to completion, the glue holding the team together became weaker and weaker. Would the team hold together? Would everyone start fighting again? Would people leave the company? After all, working with people you don’t always agree with is often easier than working with complete strangers: as the old saying goes, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Ironically, then, people would engage in the very behaviors they were most afraid of in order to delay the completion of the project and keep the team intact.

Sounds ridiculous, does it not? Why would trained professionals make such a mistake? Managers and CEOs tell me over and over that this would never happen in their teams. In a couple of cases, they’ve said this even as it was happening around them. Wishful thinking is not a good strategy.

The great benefit of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. The great weakness of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. In order to reap the benefits of having a team, the members of the team need to learn to work together. This involves more than just agreeing on a set of goals, especially since agreement on goals is difficult to get when team members cannot even agree on how to work together.

The solution is to recognize the importance of the early days of the team’s existence. How many professional sports teams go into competition with a team that’s just been assembled? Very few. Of those few, how many win? Even fewer. Basketball fans might well remember the Olympic Dream Team of a few years ago: some of the best basketball players in the United States all playing on the same team. While they were certainly competent, they did not demonstrate the level of brilliant basketball everyone expected: despite their individual excellence, they never really came together as a team.

In business, the only difference from the sports world is the belief that a team can be assembled and instantly jump to performing at a high level. It simply does not work, no matter how much we may want it to. A team in this situation is particularly vulnerable to cracking under stress at exactly the moment when it most needs to be working together.

So what can the manager or the leader do to build a strong team?

Start by fostering common ground and appreciation of one another amongst the team members. What’s the vision of the company? What are you trying to accomplish? Get everyone excited by the outcome you’re after and help each person understand how they and their colleagues fit into bringing that outcome to fruition. If you can’t figure out how each person fits in, then perhaps your project is insufficiently well defined or your team is too big.

Create as much freedom for people to work according to their own styles. Think in terms of mechanisms that permit maximum autonomy while still enabling the team to communicate and be aware of one another’s progress and needs. Allow for autonomy to increase as the team gets better at working together. Encourage the use of email as much as possible, minimize meetings, and have clear checkpoints where you can easily monitor progress.

Approach problems with the attitude of “evaluate and adjust” not “judge and punish.” There will be false starts and mistakes made, especially in an early version of the product. If people are afraid to be wrong or make mistakes, they will also be less willing to advance different ideas or experiment with novel solutions. Set aside time for brainstorming.

What roles do the members of the team take on? Are those roles truly taking advantage of each person’s skills? As the project advances, are you prepared for roles to change or for team members to take on different roles in the project? Frequently, the roles people start with are not the best ones for them; being able to change as the project develops helps build team cohesion and increases productivity.

How do you recognize status? Everyone on the team is good at something; otherwise, why did you hire them? It pays to find ways of building up the status of your team members and developing the strengths each person brings to the table. The more each person can demonstrate their competence and apply their expertise, the more motivated they will be and the stronger your team will become.

What’s happening when you get nearer your destination?

July 1st,2009 Published Articles | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Slip Slidin’ Away

Strengthen your business by knowing your competition

Imagine for a moment that you are going skiing. You put on your equipment. You make sure you’re prepared for the weather conditions. You get up there at the top of that black diamond slope and before you race down the slope you carefully put on your blindfold.

Well, maybe not. Even James Bond, whose movies routinely feature some pretty outrageous ski stunts, never tried skiing blindfolded. When you’re trying to dodge obstacles and avoid being shot by enemy agents, the last thing you want to do is not be able to see where you are going.

Despite that, many businesses choose the blindfold.

Read the rest at Mass High Tech

June 19th,2009 Published Articles | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Strengthen your business by knowing your competition

The Bi-Lingual Advantage in IT

Imagine a typical software solutions problem. The company needs to improve its bottom line revenue, the customers are complaining and want their problem solved yesterday. At best, the engineer sees a technical challenge involving algorithms and code. At worst, he sees an annoying interruption to solving interesting technical challenges. The engineer’s goal is to build a robust, elegant solution to a problem. The manager, on the other hand, sees something very different. His focus is not on the technology but the process of assembling and coordinating a team. Who has the right skills? What skills are needed? What will this cost? How quickly can it be done? The manager’s goal is to give the customer what they really want, even if that is not the most elegant solution.

Dilbert highlights, to great effect, the gap between management and engineering. Frequently, the two groups seem to live in different worlds. More significantly, they often appear to work for completely separate companies with totally contradictory agendas. Sadly, there is some truth to this. Ed Schein, professor emeritus of business psychology at MIT Sloan, points out, managers and engineers form two distinct, separate organizational subcultures. Each group has very specific goals, which may not always be in alignment. Unfortunately, since both groups are working for the same company, and apparently speaking the same language, they tend to assume that they have the same image in mind. As many managers and engineers have discovered, this can lead to more than a little friction.

Read the rest at Enterprise Management Quarterly

June 3rd,2009 Published Articles | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Bi-Lingual Advantage in IT

Right To Midnight

“Left or right?”

“Right to Midnight.”

I had this conversation recently with my 3.5 year old son. We were in the car, and he had just dropped his favorite stuffed animal, a black cat named Midnight. He couldn’t reach it, and I was feeling around trying to find it for him, while he kept telling me I was near Midnight. When I finally tried asking him if I should move my hand left or right, his response was that I should move my hand, “right to Midnight.”

Now the fact is, a 3.5 year old doesn’t really understand that I don’t know what he knows: after all, he can see my hand and the cat, therefore I should know which way to move. This sort of thing is not at all unusual with young children. For the most part, it’s generally pretty funny.

It’s much less funny when senior management is in the role of the 3.5 year old, and the employees or customers are trying to figure out what is going on. Young children haven’t yet learned to consider other perspectives; management, on the other hand, doesn’t have that excuse.

Many people are familiar with companies that put out products with incomprehensible interfaces or unreadable documentation, and then become highly irate when the customers complain that they can’t figure out how to use the product. I worked with one high tech company where the CEO and engineering team routinely described their customers, primarily research scientists, as a bunch of incompetent idiots. They simply could not understand why their customers could not understand how to use the product. After all, the CEO and the engineers understood it.

Fortunately, very few people are going to argue that a company needs to get input from its customers and involve them in the design process. After all, that’s the best way to make sure you’re giving them something that they’ll be happy to spend money on. The real problem arises when the company’s internal communications are lacking. It is, sadly, not at all unusual for management and engineering, or engineering and sales, or any other combination of departments to be talking past each other. The groups are nominally all working for the same company, but none are capable of recognizing that the others don’t know what they know or cannot imagine that different groups within the company have different, equally valid, priorities.

Engineers, for example, are most concerned with building elegant, effective solutions to problems. Salesmen want to sell product. Documentation wants to describe what the product does. Customer support wants to help the customer actually use the product. Managers are trying to meet deadlines and generate revenue for the company. It would seem that everyone is on the same page. The reality, though, is far different. The engineer’s elegant solution may be brilliant, but impractical: for example the engineer who suggested driving bolts into the side of my house to hold up a sunshade for an afternoon. While that would have solved the immediate problem, it was just a bit of overkill and could easily have caused other problems down the road. Salesmen may promise features that engineering can’t implement or management, in an effort to close a deal, might set overly aggressive deadlines. A case in point occurred in one company I dealt with, when the CEO turned to the VP of Engineering and asked when the product would be ready to ship.

“September 1st,” said the VP.

The CEO turned back to the phone and said, “We’ll have it for you on July 15th.”

The CEO simply could not understand why engineering couldn’t have the product done by July 15th, and the VP of Engineering simply could not understand why the CEO couldn’t accept September 1st. The net result was that the product ended up shipping on October 1st, delayed by a constant series of unmeetable deadlines.

When I’m telling this story, someone always says to me that the two people simply needed to communicate better. True, but not very useful. If it were simple, they would have done it. Under the pressure to get a product out the door, each one forgot to stop and get the full picture. Their frames of reference narrowed to the point where they could not imagine any other answer than the one they had locked onto. Whether two people or ten people are involved, it’s important to stop and ask four critical questions:

1.      What do I know that they do not know?

2.      What do they know that I do not know?

3.      Do I actually have enough information to make a decision?

4.      Are we really all on the same page?

Taking the other person’s perspective can pay off in a big way. What’s stopping you?

May 12th,2009 Newsletters | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Right To Midnight