The Business Sensei

Yahoo’s Pfizer Problem

What is Yahoo’s Pfizer problem? That may seem a bit of an odd question: Yahoo is, after all, a fallen titan of the Internet age. As companies go, Yahoo is barely old enough to drink. Pfizer, on the other hand, is, well, Pfizer: a 150 year old pharmaceutical giant quite possibly best known for giving the world Viagra. What is a “Pfizer problem” and what does it mean for Yahoo to have one? No, it has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals. Rather, it has everything to do with Hank McKinnell.

Hank McKinnell was the CEO of Pfizer from 2001-2006. This was, in retrospect, perhaps not Pfizer’s finest period: after five extremely disappointing years, Pfizer’s board forced McKinnell into retirement. This was quite the change from 2001 when they couldn’t stop shouting his praises. McKinnell, it seems, looked like a great leader in 2001. While looking like a leader may, in fact, be enough to make someone a leader, it isn’t enough to make them a good leader. That’s a bit more difficult.

Thus we come to Yahoo. From its lofty perch at the pinnacle of the Internet hierarchy in the late 1990s, Yahoo is now something of a has-been. Its search business eaten by Google, its marketplaces by eBay and Amazon.com, Yahoo is struggling. According to the NY Times article, “What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to be Steve Jobs,” Mayer, the current CEO, has so far failed to actually do more than make cosmetic changes. That’s not to say that she hasn’t managed to generate a great deal of sound and fury, but her actions have done little to actually turn the company around.

Like Hank McKinnell, Marissa Mayer looks like a great leader. To be clear, she’s brilliant and she was a fantastic engineer at Google. But being a CEO is not an engineering problem; it’s a people problem. A great leader does more than give lip-service to the concept that people are the company’s biggest asset; they live that ideal. Leaders build relationships, they form connections, and they act in ways that cause that web of relationships to spread throughout the company. Marissa Mayer, to much fanfare, eliminated Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, a decision which generated a great deal of smoke but only actually affected maybe 1% of the company. It was a distraction. However, since she also built her infant son a private nursery next to her office, it was a distraction that also served to sever, not build, relationships.

Exemplary leaders create commitment by enabling people to trust one another. Unfortunately, Yahoo adopted an employee rating process similar to Microsoft’s late and unlamented employee stacking method: team members who received high ratings got huge rewards, people at the bottom were fired. As the NY Times reported, top people at Yahoo did their best to never work together: it’s much easier to get a top rating when you surround yourself with weak players. The same thing happened at Microsoft. Furthermore, when the goal is to make sure someone else takes the fall, trust is hard to come by: at Microsoft, engineers sabotaged one another in a variety of subtle ways. Sometimes a leader gets lucky and manages to make an employee stacking system work for a time; that’s unfortunate, because then they often think it really is a good system, even after their luck runs out.

The leader is, rather obviously, the person at the top of the company hierarchy. That’s more than just a figure of speech: the CEO is in the position to see the furthest. The biggest difference between leaders and managers is scope: how far ahead can you look? Well, the CEO is the person whose job it is to look the furthest. Marissa Mayer likes to dive down into the depths of the code base: this may be a great activity for an engineer, but for the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company employing thousands of people? Details matter, and if you spend too much time on them, it’s easy to lose track of the big picture. However, a characteristic of human nature is that we like to do what we’re best at and when we aren’t sure what to do, we do the things we know how to do. In Marissa Mayer’s case, that appears to be focusing on code and data in the areas where she is most comfortable. She’s doing what she’s trained to do.

Hank McKinnell got booted out of the leadership role at Pfizer because he was doing immense damage and the reasons why he only looked like a leader were not particularly amenable to change. Marissa Mayer has a chance to actually become a great leader and make a difference… but only if she takes the time to learn the right skills to actually become a leader instead of merely looking like one.

It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Hike up a Mountain!

Last summer, I had the opportunity to hike Algonquin. For those who are not familiar with Algonquin, which included me up until about two days before I climbed it, Algonquin is the second highest mountain in New York state. This translates to roughly 5100 feet, which may not be much by Sierra Nevada standards, but when actually doing the hike such subtleties swiftly become irrelevant. The trail up Algonquin starts at 2000 feet and climbs 3000 feet in 4 miles. There are a number of words for a trail like that; one of the less emotionally expressive ones is “steep.” The estimated time for the hike was 8 hours.

I have long believed the old adage that building a software project is a marathon, not a sprint. I was wrong. It’s a hike up a mountain. Consider that a marathon may be long, but it is basically predictable. You know how far you are going and exactly what the conditions will be along the way. When you get to the end, you’re done. Maybe it’s a big circle or there are busses waiting to take you home; either way, the finish line is the finish line.

Climbing a peak like Algonquin, however, is a different experience. At the base camp, the weather was sunny and warm, a typical August day. My wife directed my attention to the sign that said that the temperature at the peak was 40 degrees Fahrenheit, just a tad cooler. I hadn’t noticed that as my attention was on the sign that explained that no matter how beautiful the weather, sudden snow storms were still possible. Yes, even in August there are occasionally snow storms at and around the peak.

The trail itself started off very smooth and easy. My brother-in-law set a good pace, since we wanted to be up and down before dark. Assume one mile per hour, was what he told us. I was thinking that the trail wasn’t that hard, so why such a low estimate? Then we reached the steep part. Well, at least the part that seemed steep until we got to the really steep part. Then it got steeper from there. Suddenly, a mile an hour seemed optimistic.

See the connection to a software project yet?

Even a difficult project seems pretty manageable at the start. Sure, everyone talks about the inevitable rough patches, but no one really expects them to seriously derail the schedule. But then it gets steep; or, in other words, something turns out to be much harder or more complex than expected. Lack of planning? Not really; planning is important, but it can only take you so far. Sometimes you have to plan to not know something until you get there. Your plan needs to include how you’ll deal with that discovery.

I didn’t realize how steep the hike up Algonquin would be. But, I had a hiking stick and my wife was using poles. My stick was very useful; on one particularly wet and slippery section of rock, it nobly sacrificed itself to save my ankle. The, now much shorter, hiking stick was still useful in various creative ways on some other impressively inclined sections of the trail.

Preparation can seem pointless until you need it. If you haven’t prepared properly, your will to win won’t matter. That said, sometimes you also have to improvise and be willing to back up and try something different if your first idea doesn’t work.

Algonquin peak was beautiful. Despite the weather reports, it wasn’t nearly as cold up there as expected. No sudden snowstorms came rolling in. Of course, it was also only the halfway mark; we still had to hike back down. That didn’t stop us from having a picnic and enjoying the view; it’s important to celebrate successes along the way, even if you still have more to do. If you never stop and recharge, you’ll never maintain the focus necessary to reach the end. Hiking a wet, steep, trail, that can mean a blown knee or busted ankle; with software, it can mean endless delays, poor design decisions, and a buggy release.

In the end, our 8 hour hike took us closer to 10 hours. Fortunately, we’d started early in the day so we didn’t run out of light; if night had fallen, that would have been a serious problem. Although I did have a flashlight, I had neither a headlamp nor any desire to spend the night on the mountain. Leaving a little more time than you think you need is always a good idea; projects inevitably take longer than expected. Getting stuck on a mountain means a very long, unpleasant, and potentially serious delay; being too aggressive with your schedule can likewise trigger unexpected problems. Putting in some slush time prevents the unexpected from becoming the catastrophic.

As we finished the hike and emerged from the woods into the sunset, we were both exhausted and exhilarated. Algonquin is a tough hike; we celebrated with dinner at a very good restaurant. At the end of your projects, what are you doing to celebrate? No matter how dedicated people are and how much they enjoy the activity, there are sections that are just exhausting. Taking the time to relax and have some fun after the slog helps us appreciate our accomplishments and prepares us to tackle the next big challenge.

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,” sold out at Amazon.com two days after it was released. 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 Cardinal and the Sparrow: Effective Organizational Change

You can’t make an omelet without breaking some legs. One of those legs is Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Cardinal Raymond Burke of the Roman Catholic Church was in the news recently, although perhaps not entirely in a way that he would have liked. The good Cardinal recently suffered a significant and dramatic change in status, sort of the equivalent of an admiral being demoted to swimming pool monitor: from Cardinal and head of the ecclesiastic church, he is now the patron of the Knights of Malta. This is not, to put it mildly, an upward career move. Indeed, one might well imagine that the Cardinal and the Bluebird of Happiness are not exactly on speaking terms right now.

The question, of course, is why did this happen? The ostensible cause is that the Cardinal did not agree with Pope Francis. While that may, in fact, be the proximate reason, the real reason is a bit more subtle. It has to do with the often messy and awkward process of organizational change. The world is constantly changing, whether we are looking at the religious landscape of the Church or the business landscape. Businesses rise up and achieve success within the environment in which they are founded. Many of them then go out of business or fade into the background: still important, but no longer dominant. Think Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, to name three, with Google possibly preparing to become a fourth.

Organizational change is never an easy thing. The larger the organization and the more deeply entrenched its culture and behavior, the more difficult it is to change. Few organizations are larger and have a more deeply entrenched culture than the Roman Catholic Church. Change can be a lot like trying to turn the QE II: it’s not something that happens easily or quickly. But Francis is making it happen. How?

To begin with, he is moving slowly. He is not trying to change the church all at once, but rather in small steps. He raises issues and then builds on them; he first suggests different ideas and gets people thinking about them. He then starts to act on those ideas and concepts.

Part of what makes change difficult is that an organization became successful by doing things a certain way. They have learned how to succeed, and everyone knows that nothing succeeds like success… except, of course, when it doesn’t. But trying to change those comforting habits is challenging: like throwing away that old coat that fits just right, the change simply feels wrong.

The first step, therefore, is painting a picture of the future: tell people what change will look like. This can be done through vibrant and dramatic speeches or through quiet questions. What matters is that it happens. Once people know where you are going, they are much more comfortable following you. It’s when they don’t know, or don’t want to know, that people dig in their heels. You have to make it easy for people to follow.

However, no leader can change a large organization on their own. There are simply too many people, too much psychological inertia. It is critical to get other organizational leaders on board. Show them the future and help them become comfortable with it, so that they will then share that vision with their followers. The more people who come on board, the more people will come on board: once change gets large enough, it starts to snowball.

But what about those who hear and refuse to follow? Often, they need to be removed from power: politely, calmly, and firmly. There can be no doubt, no question that the snowball will run over anyone who is refusing to move. Provided that people know which way to start moving, this approach can be remarkably effective at convincing those who have doubts that they should jump on the bandwagon. The catch, of course, is that you can’t get rid of too many or move too fast: scare people too much and they freeze or panic. If people are scared by the change process, they will swiftly become scared of the change itself.

By demoting Cardinal Burke in such a public fashion, Pope Francis is sending a very clear message. By finding a place for him, albeit a minor one, Francis is also recognizing his years of service. It is not always necessary to get rid of those who won’t change; rather, leading change involves moving them to places where they can still help the organization but can no longer impede the change process. Instead of being a focus of attention, they become boring and unimportant.

If you want to lead change effectively, you need to show people the future. Paint the picture that will get them thinking about how the world, or at least the company, can be a better place. Ask the questions that will get people to become unhappy with the status quo and start thinking about how change could be a good thing. Show them the way, recruit followers to spread the message, and strategically replace those who won’t move. Don’t be afraid to turn a few brightly colored cardinals into boring sparrows.

The Leadership Blueprint can help you with organizational change. Find out how.

Make It So

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard had a remarkable superpower: he had only to say, “Make it so,” and things would get done.

To be fair, this power was not entirely unique to him. Plenty of leaders and managers have said, “Make it so.” Sometimes, “it” even gets done, whatever “it” may be. In fact, it’s really less about whether or not “it” gets done, as how well “it” gets done. That’s the real key: not getting something done, but getting it done well.

Okay, Star Trek is fiction. Are teams really capable of demonstrating the sort of performance that we see from the crew of the Enterprise? The answer to that is, perhaps surprisingly, no. The truth is, real teams can do much better, and real teams don’t need a friendly script writer to make sure it all turns out okay. The secret is to develop the mindset and momentum of success. This can be challenging, particularly when a team is new or if a team has suffered a setback. However, even when things are going well, actually harnessing success and making it build upon itself takes more than just luck and good intentions.

Successful leaders manage it not through chance, but through having a blueprint for success. This leadership blueprint is known as the High Performance Cycle. Despite its name, the High Performance Cycle is not something used by elite riders in the Tour de France. At its most basic level, the High Performance Cycle links goals, feedback, employee engagement, and commitment to the organization, into one virtuous circle. Properly managed, each turn of the cycle increases the competence of the individual team members and of the team as a whole. Furthermore, when implemented properly, even failure becomes a form of feedback: information that lets the team adjust its goals and strategies. As the cycle runs, team members take on ever more challenging goals, leading to increasing levels of productivity for the organization.

The trick for the leader is that the cycle isn’t something that just magically happens. The leader is key to each step of the process: when you are in charge, you are the face of the larger organization. Thus, it is the leader who transforms successful goals into feedback that builds job satisfaction; it is the leader who transforms satisfaction into engagement and commitment; it is the leader who inspires committed and engaged employees to stretch themselves and seek out ever greater challenges.

Initiating the High Performance Cycle does not happen overnight and it rarely does happen by chance. It is the result of knowing what to do and being willing to do it. It can be a particularly useful tool for new managers, particularly during the transition from individual high performer to enabling others to perform at a high level. Indeed, one of the most powerful aspects of having a blueprint for effective leadership is that it enables leaders to engage in their most important task: increasing the performance of everyone else.

What can you do to set your organization on the High Performance Cycle?

Is Congress Running Your Business?

It’s been pretty impressive listening to the news lately. Will Congress deign to return from vacation to debate whether to grant military authorization to attack ISIL? It seems sort of odd to even be debating whether or not they should be doing their jobs! Now, I could at this point draw some trivial parallel to around how many people get to just blow off their jobs and not really worry about it, but that would be pointless. I doubt anyone is having any trouble seeing that issue!

What I find much more interesting is why they are so eager to avoid debate, and what that can teach us about similar problems in a business.

Politics is an interesting game: in a very real sense, it’s not so much about doing a good job as it is about looking good. Debate military authorization before elections? No matter what you decide, events might prove you wrong. In this case, prove really means that a completely arbitrary and unforeseeable event makes whatever decision you just made appear to be wrong in hindsight. Of course, once this happens, then it becomes an opportunity for your political opponents to swoop in and declare that they would have magically foreseen the future and made a different decision.

In the immortal words of Monty Python, there are three lessons we can take from this and the number of the lessons shall be three.

First, hindsight is very comforting, but is fundamentally an illusion. Hindsight only appears to be 20-20. In reality, what appears obvious in hindsight is frequently only obvious because we know the answer. Go read a good mystery, be it a Sherlock Holmes story or something by Agatha Christie, and try to figure out the clues. It can be done; Conan Doyle, for instance, played fair. You don’t need to know that Holmes picked up a particular brand of cigar ash from the floor; it’s sufficient to just know that he found something interesting. The problem is that it doesn’t help: even with the clues in front of us, it’s still extremely difficult to solve the mystery. Once Holmes explains it, however, then it’s obvious; in fact, it’s hard to imagine that it could have gone any other way. That’s the problem with hindsight: once we know how events turned out, clearly it was obvious all along. That’s why everyone bought Google stock the day it went public and held on to it ever since. While hindsight, used properly, can certainly teach us some useful lessons about our decisions, the hindsight trap teaches us to avoid taking action.

Second, how do we react when someone makes a mistake? In any business operation, mistakes will happen. Are those mistakes feedback or are they the kiss of death? Does a wrong decision become an opportunity to bring out the knives and get rid of a rival or find an excuse to not give someone a promotion or a raise? Or does a wrong decision become an opportunity to revisit the process of making the decision and learn how to make better decisions? In other words, are you fixing the problems or are you simply fixing blame? Fixing blame may feel good, but doesn’t actually solve anything: the same problems just keep reappearing in different guises.

Third, are you evaluating your employees based on results, strategy, or both? Even the best strategy sometimes fails, but when you focus on strategy your odds of successful results are much higher. If you only focus on results, you are telling people to not take risks, not accept challenges, but rather to play it safe. If you only focus on strategy, you lose the opportunity to reality check your plans: if a strategy fails, it’s important to understand what happened. Did the market change? Did something unexpected and unpredictable occur? What are the things that can derail your strategy and what can you do to make your strategies more resilient? What can you control and what is outside your control? Athletes who focus on strategy, process, and winning, win far more often than those who only focus on winning.

When you get caught in the hindsight trap, fix blame, and ignore strategy what you are really doing is telling people that inaction is better than action, pointing fingers is better than improving the business, and playing it safe is better than pushing the envelope and seeking excellence. Is that really the business you want? If it’s not, what are you going to do?

The Illusion of Control

While attending a 4H fair with my family, I had the opportunity to watch an owl show. Harry Potter aside, owls are not exactly the best of pets. Owls, even small ones, are birds of prey. The trainer commented at one point that the owl he was holding was biting his thumb with around 200 pounds of pressure, quite painful even through the thick leather gloves he was wearing!

What was particularly interesting was watching just how little the trainer actually did. It often seemed as though the less he did, the greater his control over the birds. Speaking with him afterward, I found that this was, indeed, the case. If he tries to force the bird to do anything, the bird expresses its opinion in an unmistakable fashion, generally involving three inch long razor sharp talons. Listening to his explanation, I was reminded of jujitsu training: beginners seek to control their partners through brute force and the application of painful techniques. The more force the beginner applies, the more their partner instinctively resists. When the beginner manages a successful throw, both partners are left sweaty and gasping for breath.

By comparison, when the master executes the same technique, she often seems to barely touch her partner. The partner punches, and almost magically flies through the air. Where the beginner struggles for control, the master effortlessly leads their partner around and around until directing them into the floor, the wall, or another attacker. The only benefit the beginner gets is that they don’t need to go out running or lifting weights in order to get a good workout!

Like the trainer and the owls, the more force the beginner applies, the less control they actually have. Conversely, the less force the master applies, the more control they actually have. Much of jujitsu training is learning to overcome that almost instinctive response to use increasing amounts of force to overcome opposition and learn to apply technique instead.

What is particularly interesting in considering these examples is that owls and people react the same way to attempts to compel them to act in a certain way. Even in a friendly training environment, the use of force causes someone who wants to cooperate to fight instead.

The same thing happens in business: far too often, I’ve seen people transformed from enthusiastic and motivated to oppositional and unmotivated by managers who felt a need to focus on the consequences of “not measuring up,” instead of building on the excitement and then getting out of the way.

At one large computer hardware company, a certain VP of Engineering kept complaining that his department refused to step up. The less they did, the more draconian he became; the more draconian he became, the less they did. This could have ended very badly, with people quitting or being fired, neither of which would have been good for the company’s product cycle. Both the VP and the department needed help learning to stop fighting with one another. Helping them rebuild trust wasn’t easy, and it required the VP to have faith that his department would perform if he just gave them the chance. Instead of threats and sanctions, he had to learn to think, and communicate, strategically: instead of focusing on the consequences of failure, he enabled the department to see how their contributions fit into the long-term strategic goals of the company.

The department, on the other hand, needed to be brought to the point where they were willing to give the VP another chance. This, too, was not easy, as the habits of conflict had started to set in and several senior employees were already starting to hunt for new jobs. Fortunately, it was possible to reframe the conflict to the point where the department was willing to listen to what the VP had to say, and have faith that he really meant it.

The more the VP was able to stop trying to control his department, the more productive they became. The more the members of the department were able to accept that his attempts a over-control were mistakes, the more they were able to give him feedback in ways that didn’t threaten his authority. The net result was that performance increased sharply, product quality improved, and customers took notice. This led to a substantial revenue increase for the company.

Letting go of control is not easy: all too often it feels unnatural or premature. When our own reputation or job is on the line, it is even harder to not attempt to control every detail and every person. The more control we attempt, the less effective it is; paradoxically, though, this only convinces us to attempt to impose ever greater levels of control. When dealing with owls, you get very rapid feedback when you’re attempting too much control. It’s a bit less obvious in jujitsu, and hence harder to break the cycle. The most skilled jujitsu masters can throw an opponent often without touching him, but it takes a leap of faith to abandon the use of force and develop that level of skill. The business environment is, fundamentally, no different.

What’s stopping you?

Want High Performance? Have the Village Idiot Run Your Team!

I often hear that building a high performance team is really pretty simple. All you need to do is get the best person, for example the best engineer, and put him in charge of a team of strong engineers. Once you do that, that’s enough, right? The fact is, when you can build a team like that, it doesn’t take all that long to move from a team that’s operating at, let’s say, a “1” to one that’s operating at a “10.” Don’t get me wrong; moving from a 1 to a 10 is pretty good.

The problem is, they could be at 100. That’s a pretty sizable difference; it’s certainly a lot better than Spinal Tap’s famous “but it goes to 11.”

Unfortunately, scarcely one team in five will ever reach 100. Most teams barely make it much past that 10. Why? Because they aren’t putting the village idiot in charge of the team.

Village idiot? That’s an error, right? Well, not really. It may be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.

One of the most interesting, and powerful, aspects of high performance teams is the degree to which members argue with one another. The fact is, members of high performance teams are really good at arguing; it’s one of the things that they do best. Part of why they’re so good at it is that while members of high performance teams like to be right, they don’t need to be right. Thus, team members are able to argue, evaluate, make a decision, and then all get behind that decision. Learning to do this is why you need the village idiot.

When the best engineer is running the team, particularly if she is also doing engineering at the same time, there’s a problem. It’s very hard to turn against your own solution. The stories I hear from different people are all oddly similar: at first, it’s great being on a team run by the expert engineer. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to being on that team run by the person who was always yelling about milestones and who didn’t understand anything about engineering. And there’s a real element of truth here: being on a team run by a bookkeeper isn’t necessarily much fun. But sooner or later, and it’s usually sooner, the people on that team run by the expert engineer find themselves increasingly frustrated: he always knows the “right” way, and it’s always his way; She’s doing the most interesting work because it’s “her” idea; No matter how much we discuss it, he always finds a way to prove that his solution is best; I never know when she’s going to jump in to “save the day,” whether or not the day actually needs saving.

The issue here is that an engineer succeeds by being an excellent individual contributor. A manager, however, succeeds by making the people who report to him excellent. It’s hard to be an excellent individual contributor and also make everyone else excellent as well. It’s hard to let someone else be right when that means you might be wrong. Are there people who can do it? Yes, of course. How many? A small fraction of those who believe they can do it. But when companies insist that’s the best way to run a team, what they are really doing is saying they’re happy with a 10 when they could be at 100.

The role of the leader is to build up others and to think strategically. Even if you’re running a team and not the whole company, building your team, making them excellent individually and collectively, and considering the ramifications of your work and different ways it can help company strategy is a non-trivial job. Being a really good team leader is not easy. It only looks that way, in the same sense that experts often manage to make the impossible look easy… until you try it. So what are some steps toward becoming the sort of leader who can get from 10 to 100?

1. No matter how well you know the subject matter, invite ideas and suggestions from others. When you lead off with your expert opinion, you immediately anchor the team. Keep your opinion to yourself as long as possible. Help others come up with the brilliant ideas.
2. Don’t make decisions based on your expertise. Help your team make decisions based on their expertise.
3. Admit when you don’t know something. In fact, make a habit of being curious: “I’m not sure I understand. Could you explain it to me?” Be the village idiot.
4. Lead the discussion, but don’t own the discussion. Bring others in. Help people learn to argue and don’t worry about being right. As the team gets better at arguing, rotate the job of running meetings or brainstorming sessions. Participate when someone else is running the session.
5. Be predictable. As Google found when they crunched their data, boring, predictable, leaders are better than heroic leaders. Team members need to work with your strengths and your weaknesses. The more predictable your behavior, the easier it is for your team to configure itself to maximize everyone’s strengths and minimize everyone’s weaknesses.
6. Find ways to build people up. Great leaders know that performance increases when you build people up, not when you tear them down. Encourage team members to do the same.
7. Do steps 1-6 all the time, not just when the pressure is on. How well your team performs, particularly under pressure, depends on how effectively you built the relationships ahead of time.

Okay, so maybe the leader isn’t really the village idiot. Or perhaps they’re the sort of village idiot who knows the right questions to ask, helps their team argue effectively, somehow encourages people without threatening them or competing with them, and who manages to make everyone around them excellent. That’s not such a bad village idiot to be.

Bring Me The Head Of Shinseki The General

When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of old WWII movies and B-grade science fiction on TV. There wasn’t a whole lot of difference between them. The WWII movies involved airplanes or submarines, while the science fiction involved space ships. Beyond that, the plot lines were remarkably similar. The bad guys always appeared absolutely overwhelming and were led by a seriously tough, supremely competent general who terrified everyone. He, and it was almost always he, would usually be introduced in scene that involved him killing off one of his subordinates for failing at something or another. The good guys always were slightly disorganized and Our Hero started the show in deep trouble: he was either being dressed down for some major screwup or the major screwup occurred early in the show. But, because these were the Good Guys, he would be given another chance. Naturally, because this was the nature of that type of movie, Our Hero would then turn out to be the one person who could save the day. It was very clear, even then, that if the good guys killed people off for failing, they would have been defeated. Indeed, this was the major difference between the good guys and the bad guys in a lot of those movies, a point emphasized in some movies where it would also be revealed that Our Hero’s earlier screwup was due to attempts by the bad guys to discredit him. Meanwhile, assuming he survived to this point, the bad guy general would kill himself or be killed for his failure.

The fact is, when a team fails it’s not uncommon to kill off the leader, albeit these days the death is more likely to be symbolic. As news of the problems at the Veteran’s Administration surfaced, General Eric Shinseki ended up resigning his post as head of the VA. Now that he’s gone, naturally all the problems at the VA will immediately disappear.

Well, maybe not.

Killing off the leader can be a very satisfying move, and certainly has a sense of poetic justice to it. Certainly, when the screwup is large enough, it’s more satisfying than killing off some junior flunky. However, as a means of producing effective organizational change it is not necessarily going to be all that effective; indeed, you just may be getting rid of someone you’ve spent a long time training. Instead, it helps to stop and look at the organizational system and understand the forces at play and what is actually taking place. Organizational systems can be very complex and unexpected interactions or badly constructed goals can have serious unintended consequences independent of any particular leader.

For example, at one time Sears Automotive famously gave all of its car mechanics a goal of generating some $200 dollars an hour of billable revenue. The problem, of course, is that they had no control over how many people came to them for auto service nor did they have any control over the particular problems those drivers were having. But the goal focused only on the result: a specific number. Failing to make that number meant failing to remain employed. As a result, the goal became all-consuming: mechanics focused on it to the exclusion of all else. Not surprisingly, they found a way to make their numbers: they invented problems out of thin air. This worked very well until Sears was caught. The wrong short-term goal can blind people to longer term consequences. Changing leaders only helps if the goals are changed as well.

In another situation, IBM in the early 1990s decided that it needed to do a better job of getting technology out of its scientific centers and to the market. They decided that the engineers in the scientific centers needed a stronger incentive. The incentive some senior VP came up with was to tie the performance evaluations of the engineers to how well their products did in the market. This produced a couple of significant problems:

First, the engineers had no control over the sales force. Salesmen had their own numbers to make, and tended to push only those products that they were most comfortable with. They had no particular desire to risk their bonuses! The net result was that it was pretty random which products were being actively marketed and which were not. This, as one might imagine, did not exactly thrill the engineers. The problem was further aggravated by the fact that the sales people were often in a different geographic location from the engineers.

Second, instead of collaborating and cooperating, engineers on different projects now had an incentive to compete with one another. Since they really had no idea how to make one product or another more attractive to the sales team, competition was, at least, mild. Mostly it served to waste energy and distract people. Each new leader who came in was caught up in “the way things were done,” and a lot of good people quit. Replacing the VPs didn’t change anything; it wasn’t until Lou Gerstner came in that anything actually changed. Changing leaders can help, but only if the new leader can also change the culture. Otherwise, you’re just replacing an experienced leader with a less experienced one, and telling the new one that he’d better not make any mistakes. That is not a recipe for success!

In a third situation, a manager was fired because customers were complaining that products were being released too slowly. The manager had been told several times to speed up the process. After the manager was fired, shipment speed dramatically increased. Unfortunately, so did two other things: customer complaints about defective products and, to the surprise of no one except senior management, product returns. I suppose one could argue that they fired the wrong manager in this case. The real culprit, though, was problems with team coordination across the company. Killing the various leaders was not the solution; training them properly was. When that happened, and the various managers were allowed to learn from their mistakes, things began to improve.

Particularly in high profile situations, killing the leader can feel very satisfying. It has a feeling of justice being served. However, quite often it does not actually solve the problem. It’s only when we stop to look at the system and understand what is really happening that we can take the actions that will actually make changes that we want.

Fatal Deadlines

“It ships on Monday!”

“We have a deadline to meet!”

“Why did you even set a deadline if you’re going to change it?”

Deadlines. They matter until they don’t. They are far away until suddenly they are right on top of us. Sometimes a deadline is sacrosanct, unchangeable no matter the situation or the quality of the product: one technology CEO I knew released his products on the day he promised them and nothing would change his mind. It was a point of pride for him to always release on schedule. His customers, however, were equally adamant that they wished it would be a point of pride for him to release products that worked. Yes, this particular CEO would release a non-functional product on the chosen date and then deal with fixing it in the field rather than slip the date and deal with the problems. Eventually, the customers won: they went to a competitor.

Other times, deadlines seem to be almost mystical talismans: setting a deadline will magically cause a product to be ready by that date. In one rather dramatic example from early in my career in high tech, the CEO turned to the head of engineering and asked him when the product would be ready.

“September 1^st, best case scenario,” was the curt reply.

The CEO nodded, picked up the phone, and said, “We’ll have it ready by July 15^th.”

The head of engineering did a very credible job of not exploding.

When July 15^th rolled around, the product was not ready. The CEO was shocked. His reaction was, “I set a deadline!”

Sometimes a deadline can spur people to dramatic action. Sometimes it can’t. It’s important to know which situation is which. When I was managing a team, I was once asked why I even bothered to set deadlines if I would then change them. The short answer was that it was because the only deadline that actually mattered was the one at the end, and that one we consistently managed to hit. How?

At the most basic level, deadlines are merely tools. They are powerful tools, but tools nonetheless. As will all power tools, it’s important to know how to use them properly, lest your deadline prove fatal to your success.

At the beginning of any non-routine, non-trivial project, deadlines are basically little more than wishful thinking. Early deadlines exist to give you feedback: how well is your team working? How difficult is this project turning out to be? Will we be able to marshal the resources we need at the times we need them? Are we being aggressive enough? Are we being too aggressive? That feedback provides your roadmap moving forward. Therefore, start with small deadlines: don’t rush forward in giant leaps which give you little information.

Whether you make those initial deadlines or miss them, the key is to be strategic: why did you make them? Why did you miss them? What are you learning about your team and your project? Early stage deadlines can be easily shifted and adjusted as needed, provided you don’t lose sight of the feedback they are generating. Done right, the more flexible your early deadlines, the easier it is to hit your later ones. When you do miss a deadline, recalibrate! Don’t just pile the extra work onto the next deadline; that only triggers a series of failed deadlines, which reduces productivity. Success is not how fast you can move, it’s how smoothly you can accelerate.

As the project continues, you’ll find that your ability to set useful, doable, aggressive deadlines will increase. You want your deadlines aggressive enough to excite and challenge your team, not so aggressive that people look and tell themselves that there’s no point in trying. The secret to maintaining that excitement is simple: strive for deadlines that can be beaten with serious, but not unsustainable, effort. Beating deadlines increases excitement and builds a sense of success. Failing to meet deadlines has just the opposite effect. Quite simply, when people are ahead of schedule, they work harder, are more creative and innovative, and are better at problem solving.

Many a race ends with a final sprint across the finish line. How well you’ve managed the deadlines to that point will determine how hard the sprint is, and how much fuel your team has in its tank when you get there. If the team is exhausted and burned out, your deadline will likely prove fatal to your plans. On the other hand, if the team is excited and energized, they’ll blast through that final deadline.

To Succeed, Plan to Fail

I’m getting tired of hearing people say, “Oh I get it. We didn’t plan to fail, we failed to plan.”

When I’m working with a business to help them understand why their process is failing or their projects are off course, sooner or later someone comes out with this little gem. At that point, everyone nods sagely as though they’ve actually solved something. They are missing the point. If that was all that was wrong, they wouldn’t need help.

Sure, it’s certainly true that if you fail to plan, you’re far more likely to fail, but knowing that doesn’t actually address the real problem: they are taking the “failure is not an option” mindset. This is a fantastic line in a movie, but has some problems in reality.

When we take the mindset that failure is something that cannot be accepted, we are implicitly stating that failure is a terrible thing, something so terrible that we cannot even consider it. It’s an attitude similar to that taken by many martial artists, who teach their students that they must never allow themselves to be taken off balance. All their training is then based on the idea of never being off balance. As a result, when they are off balance, they freeze.

A youthful student once watched Morehei Uyeshiba, the founder of Aikido, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. After Uyeshiba defeated the guy, the young student said to him, “Master, that was amazing. You never lose your balance!”

Uyeshiba’s reply: “You are mistaken. I frequently lose my balance. My secret is that I know how to regain it quickly.”

Uyeshiba recognized that loss of balance is a normal part of any fight. By training to rapidly regain his balance, he stripped the experience of its emotional content. It was merely something that happened, and something which he well knew how to recover from. As a result, not only were his opponents unable to capitalize on taking him off balance, when he took their balance, they didn’t know what to do.

Failure is the same. When failure becomes something we fear, it can cause us to freeze. At one company, the first hiccup in a string of successes led to panic by the CEO. He wasn’t used to failing, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

The problem is that fear of failure causes us to avoid risk and not experiment with new ideas. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, we figuratively lose our balance and become momentarily stuck. If we think that failure means something terrible will happen, we opt for the safe course. Unfortunately, the safe course is often not the best course or the wisest course. It’s merely the one that minimizes the short-term risk to us, potentially at the cost of long-term risk to the team. That, of course, is just fine: if the entire team fails, no one is to blame.

Conversely, when we accept that along the route to success there will be many failures along the way, and when we practice viewing failures as a form of feedback, the negative emotional component of failure is eliminated. Instead, we simply have information: something we attempted did not work the way we expected. What does that mean? What is that telling us about our plan? About our process? About the competitive landscape?

Failure is a way of calibrating our efforts and focusing our energy. Particularly early in a project, small failures are, or should be, common. The less defined the project, the more exploration needs to occur in order to adequately and accurately define the milestones. Indeed, early milestones are best thought of as little more than wishful thinking: opportunities to put stakes in the ground and see what happens when we get there. It’s the chance to see how well the team members are working together, how effective the leader is being, how effectively the team can make decisions and implement a course of action.

When we fear failure, the fear itself is often more damaging than the failure! The key to succeeding at large, important projects is to recognize that failures will happen along the way. By accepting the information that failure gives us and cultivating the mindset that failures are recoverable and useful, failure truly does make us more, not less, likely to succeed.