The Business Sensei

Mayan Apocalypse? Oh My!

There have been a lot of questions about where this Mayan apocalypse thing comes from. According to recent research conducted by Mayan scholar Perry Mede, the current legend actually stems from a combination of two Mayan legends.

Although fearless in battle, the Mayans had a deep fear of being kissed by an Alpaca. This is not an unreasonable fear, at least according to those who have been kissed by an Alpaca. Mayans worried a great deal about the “Alpaca lips.”

The other big fear held by the Mayans was that their lips would get stuck together. This rare condition was known amongst Mayans as the “Epoxy lips.”

These fears came together into the Mayan legend of the end of time as being kissed by an Alpaca whose lips got stuck to you: sort of a “alpaca-poxy-lips.” Evidence of this is found in the last words of the chief of the Mayans, Mayan Bissa-son, who said, “Mmmph, mmph, mmmpphhh!” Historians believe this to mean, “Get this **** alpaca off me!”

The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

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.

Twinkie, twinkie, little star…

The news that Hostess Brands (aka Interstate Bakeries), maker of the legendary Twinkie, is closing its doors after 80 some years is all the rage these days.

Along with that news is the argument about why they are closing their doors. There are so many claims and counter-claims running around that it’s starting to sound like the beginning of a bad detective movie. Hostess is dead! Whodunit?

Some people are claiming that union demands killed Hostess, others that tripling the CEO’s pay did the job. More than likely, what really did the job was the death of a thousand knives: a series of cascading errors that put them in the position where their demise was inevitable; it was just a question of what specific event finished them off.

Of course, to really understand what happened, we then have to ask the question, “How did the cascade get started? What happened, or didn’t happen, what changed or didn’t change, to make the vulnerable in the first place?”

Here we can see the power of organizational culture at work. Specifically, we can see what happens when two cultures that were tightly aligned drift apart from one other.

When Hostess was founded in 1930, it was a product of the culture of the time: created by people living and working in that time period. The foods it sold were the foods of the day, the things people wanted. Over the years, Hostess became very successful selling twinkies, Wonder Bread, and the like. They weren’t just the best thing since sliced bread, they were the sliced bread!

Culture, of course, is the residue of success: the accumulated lessons an organization learns over time about how to successfully navigate the world. Those lessons can be hard to unlearn. Sometimes bankruptcy will do it, but not always. In the case of Hostess, they went bankrupt in 2004 and spent the next five years in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. When they emerged from Chapter 11 in 2009, however, they had apparently failed to learn some lessons, specifically:

1. Sliced bread was no longer quite the rage it had been in 1930.Indeed, today artisan breads, local breads, and the like are extremely popular. Wonder bread is no longer the first choice of many parents.

2. The dessert market changed. Twinkies are not so cool or fun anymore. They are the object of jokes and experiments to see how long before the go bad, or how much oil can one absorb, and so forth. They are not a school lunch staple as they were even 30 or 40 years ago. Same for Hostess cupcakes, ding-dongs, and the rest.

Are there additional factors? Sure. Supposedly Hostess never really modernized its distribution system and it’s not at all clear how much their internal management ever adopted modern goal-setting and motivational techniques. Fundamentally, though, what killed Hostess is the same thing that almost killed IBM in 1992: their market changed; their culture did not. Unlike IBM, Hostess didn’t have the same willingness to confront unpleasant realities and make necessary changes soon enough.

The rest is merely detail.

QWERTY Culture

Remember the last time the keys on your computer jammed because you were typing too fast? Neither do I.

The fact is, our QWERTY keyboards are an artifact of history, a solution to a problem that hasn’t existed for at least half a century: typewriter keys jamming when you type too fast. The solution was to design a keyboard which reduced the speed at which someone could type. Even though that problem hasn’t existed at least since the 1960’s IBM Selectric Typewriter, with its “letter ball,” we still use QWERTY keyboards. Better keyboard layouts do exist, but that hasn’t changed the fact that QWERTY still owns approximately 98% of the keyboard market. QWERTY is so accepted that even my spell-checker recognizes QWERTY as a word.

Now, one can make all manner of arguments about how QWERTY persists because there is a significant investment in QWERTY keyboard manufacturing in place, or because most people are comfortable with QWERTY keyboards and don’t want to learn something new, or that learning the more efficient Dvorak keyboard isn’t a transferable skill, and so forth. All of these arguments are even sort of true, albeit of questionable relevance. Fundamentally, they call boil down to tradition. We’ve always done it this way, so let’s keep doing it this way. Everything else arises in response to that.

Maybe this isn’t such a big deal in the world of keyboards. After all, most people are pretty happy with their QWERTY keyboards, and it’s not that hard to use a Dvorak if you really want to. The QWERTY phenomenon can be more of a problem, though, in large organizations where continually solving a problem that no longer exists wastes time, energy, and resources.

The “way we’ve always done it” is very attractive. It’s familiar, safe, something we often don’t think much about. Doing things the way we’ve always done them feels good, like putting on a favorite coat. Sure, it may not be as nice or as warm as a new one, but it’s comfortable. We’ve grown used to it. Quite frequently, we’ve built up structures or procedures to help us do whatever it is we’ve always done. Those structures and procedures, like QWERTY keyboard factories, give us a convenient excuse to not make changes.

Founded over a century ago, General Motors learned many lessons about how to sell cars. Those lessons were the results of hard won victories over competitors and economic disasters including the Great Depression. Those lessons made GM the most successful auto maker in the world for many years. Those same lessons, unfortunately, also eventually led to a GM executive pointing to a GM parking lot and declaring there was no need to worry about competition because there were no foreign cars in the lot. The world, and the competitive landscape, had changed and GM hadn’t kept up. They were, metaphorically, still happily using their QWERTY keyboards in a world where everyone else had moved on to something far more effective. It took an economic disaster and the near destruction of the company to force them to start facing modern problems instead of hiding comfortably behind old ones.

By comparison, IBM badly misjudged the computer market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were so accustomed to being on top that they simply couldn’t imagine any need to do things differently. Thus, the techniques they’d learned selling giant multi-million dollar computer systems to large corporations were the same techniques they applied to selling little tiny PCs to individuals. The results were underwhelming. It took the first loss in the company’s history to shake them out of their complacency. For the first time in IBM history an outsider, Lou Gerstner, was brought in to run the company. He successfully refocused IBM on the market in front of them, not the market they were used to being in.

Giant companies are not the only ones vulnerable to this “QWERTY trap.” It’s a game everyone can play. One Silicon Valley company I worked with asked me to convince all their employees to work twelve hour days. When I pushed them on what they were trying to accomplish, they first spoke about deadlines, fixing bugs, and customer commitments. When I kept pushing, it eventually turned out that they wanted their employees to work twelve hour days because, “This is Silicon Valley and that’s what we do here!” Once I convinced them that a more sane work schedule would make more sense, we saw productivity go up and both the quantity and the severity of software bugs go down. The company actually started hitting its deadlines.

It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that the way to do things today is the way we’ve always done them. It’s also easy to use existing procedures and policies to justify our desire not to change. Doing things the familiar way feels good. However, just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s actually doing what we think it’s doing. It pays to stop periodically and check to see that we’re doing is actually solving the problems in front of us, not problems that disappeared fifty years ago.

Trust the Force, Luke

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

The (now) classic movie, “Star Wars: A New Hope,” features a scene aboard the spaceship Millennium Falcon in which a blindfolded Luke Skywalker attempts to use a lightsaber to deflect energy bolts from a floating drone. This scene is presented to the viewer as a Jedi training exercise. As the old Jedi Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, calmly instructs Luke to “trust the Force,” Luke attempts to feel the energy bolts before they arrive. Luke gets zapped frequently, to the vast amusement of Han Solo.

As Obi-Wan repeatedly exhorts Luke Skywalker to “trust the Force,” Luke eventually manages to successfully deflect a few of the energy blasts. This is an important step for Luke: In order for a Jedi to exercise their powers, they must be able to feel the Force and trust it. If they can’t trust the Force, all their tricks collapse like a cheap special effect.

Trust, the speed of trust, the importance of trust, and almost anything else that has anything to do with trust, gets a great deal of press in business books and articles. There is a good reason for this: For a team to function at its maximum capacity, the leader must be able to trust the members. Trust, however, cannot be one way — the members must also be able to trust the leader and to trust one another. Unfortunately, trust is not something we can just turn on or off at will. Just because we are told to trust someone, or told how important it is to trust someone, doesn’t mean that we can immediately do it. As with Luke Skywalker learning to trust the Force, it takes time and practice for trust to develop.

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 their 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 his or her 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 him or her 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.

So how do you learn to trust someone’s process?

Start by recognizing 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.

The best approach is to start small. Your employees are feeling you out just as you are feeling them out. Don’t launch into something so large that you won’t be able to resist jumping in all the time to tell people what they should do. Rather, give people some degree of autonomy and safe space to experiment with their process for getting work done.  Help them develop their process and be there for them when they make a mistake. In the practice of jujitsu, for students to develop expertise, they need the freedom to practice and screw up, and the freedom to then ask for help. If you punish people for making mistakes, you are demonstrating that they can’t ask for help and you are demonstrating that you don’t really trust their process.

To be a Jedi, Luke Skywalker had to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust the Force. To be an effective leader, you will need to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust your employees’ processes. No, it’s not easy and you won’t experience the immediate feedback of being able to block blaster bolts while blindfolded. Far too many leaders give up, dooming their teams to under performance. If you can succeed, though, the performance of your team will increase dramatically.

This article is drawn from Stephen Balzac’s upcoming book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” 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.  For more information, visit www.7stepsahead.com, or contact Balzac at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Vote!

Nov 6, 2012. Election Day.

Vote!

If you’re not willing to be part of the process, don’t whine about the results.

Are You Speaking to Me?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Are you speaking to me?”

–          Fearless Leader

The manager of a team I was working with looked at me quizzically and said, “Of course we all speak to each other. Who do you think we speak to?”

That was, in part, the question I was there to answer. The problem wasn’t that they never spoke to one another; indeed, they’d taken all sorts of courses on communications. Unfortunately, none of those courses seemed to make any difference: decisions were still not being made in a timely fashion, brainstorming sessions had about as much storm as a sunny day at the beach, and there was almost no discussion or elaboration of ideas. As one of the more painful results of the situation, the team was spending a great deal of time attempting to fix problems that should have been identified ahead of time, and even more time blaming one another for said failure to identify the problems.

The easy answer was that they weren’t communicating. So they took the aforementioned courses in communications. The problems didn’t go away, although they did learn to blame one another much more articulately.

Easy answers are not necessarily correct answers.

In fact, they were communicating, just not with one another. If you’re talking to the wrong person, it doesn’t really matter how many good communications tricks you learn. Effective communications require a sender and a receiver. When you only have one of the two, it doesn’t work so well.

From the perspective of the manager, they were all talking to one another. After all, they sent emails to the entire team, they held meetings where they all conversed, and so forth. Thus he was quite confused at the idea that they weren’t all communicating with one another.

His confusion is excusable though, because from his perspective communication was occurring: the team members were all talking to him. Although it superficially appeared that they were talking to one another, in truth each team member would really speak for the benefit of the manager, and other team members were cueing off of his response in formulating their own responses. Even in emails, there was a strong tendency to wait for the manager to respond, and then each person would respond to him, not to the original poster… or the original idea.

The net result was that decision making became a series of “me too’s” instead of productive debate and incisive questioning, leading to poor decisions and lack of commitment. Complicating the problem was that the manager didn’t fully recognize that his team of experts was depending on him to be the brain in the room. He thought he’d hired each of them for their brains! Similarly, brainstorming was all about convincing the manager to buy into the idea, rather than engage in serious conversation with one another. When something didn’t work out, failure was seen as disloyalty to the team rather than as the result of poor process and incorrect communications.

Now, to be fair, being the center of communications on your team is a normal thing and it happens quite often. Indeed, had the manager not taken on that role, the team would not have been even as productive as it was. However, as the team became more sophisticated and the problems they were working on became more difficult, their habits of communication needed to change as well. Instead of operating as what amounted to a wheel, with the manager in the center acting as the clearing house, they needed to become more of a star, with each person talking directly to each other person.

Making the change wasn’t easy: it involved changing some long ingrained habits, and that never happens quickly. How did we make it happen? There is no fixed formula, but here are a few ideas you can use if you find yourself in a similar fashion:

–          When someone sends an email to the group, resist the urge to respond right away. If no one responds in a reasonable amount of time, assign someone to write the initial response. You may have to force feed the discussion in this way in order to get people talking.

–          Conversely, if email discussions devolve into pointless running about in circles until you step in, resist the urge to hand down a solution. Instead, direct and focus the discussion, making a point of asking specific team members to voice an opinion.

–          Instead of running brainstorming meetings, appoint someone else to run it, give the team some preliminary goals, and leave the room. Later, you can have the team set the goals.

–          Instead of making a decision for the team, guide them through your process for making a decision. In subsequent meetings, instruct someone else to lead the decision making process.

–          Appoint someone to act as Devil’s Advocate in meetings: their job is to raise questions and push back on issues. Encourage your team to respond to the points the Devil’s Advocate raises, don’t do it yourself. In some cases, you may have to say, “I’m not the person you have to convince. It’s her.”

Through a combination of different techniques, we were able to significantly shift the team’s communication style, dramatically increasing productivity. Now that’s a worthwhile conversation to be having!

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.

Who Needs Strategy?

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

“Our goal is to succeed!”

“Our goal is simple: we will build a winning product.”

“Joe’s goal is to get his work done on schedule 75% of the time.”

“Billy’s goal? He should cross the street safely 75% of the time.”

I’ve heard each of these so-called goals presented with a straight face. They sound good; well, at least the first three sound good. The fourth? Well, isn’t it just like the third?

Goals are an interesting beast. We talk about them all the time, put them down on paper, hang banners with goals written on them, and exhort people to stay focused on the goal. Despite all that effort, a great many of these goals never come to pass. Most of them are little more than wishful thinking or downright fantasy.

The goal problem is two-fold.

First, setting a goal does not make it happen. You can set a goal of finding a pony under your Christmas tree, but that doesn’t magically cause a pony to appear. For a goal to succeed, there needs to be a plan to accomplish it. That planning process, sometimes known as the strategy, is critical. It doesn’t matter how much you want to succeed if you aren’t willing to plan you aren’t going to get there.

Now, I frequently hear that planning is pointless since no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That may be true, but seeing the plan not survive is at least giving you feedback that you’ve encountered the enemy. Seeing how your plan is failing can give you vital information on how to shift focus, allocate resources, and generally adjust your strategy.

More broadly, though, the difficulty is often a misunderstanding of what it means to plan. I’ve worked for companies that tried to plan projects out 2-3 years. While this is possible in a very broad sense, details matter, and you can’t plan details that far in advance. Instead, you have to plan the steps in front of you. Part of the plan is to pause periodically and review the plan. What worked? What didn’t work? What are the next steps? Developing an effective strategy is not something you do once and then execute blindly; you have to constantly adjust as circumstances change. The beginning chess player tries to play out a sequence of moves and is paralyzed when the opponent doesn’t respond as expected; the chess master has a plan and constantly adjusts his strategy in response to his opponent.

Interestingly enough, the beginner usually can’t explain his plan, while the master can. The beginner’s plan sounds like, “I have a plan: I’ll do this, and this, and this, and that’s how I’ll win.” The chess master, on the other hand, is likely to treat you to a detailed discussion of his thinking processes and chess strategy. The first is easy to say and easy to listen to, but is fundamentally useless. The second is hard to articulate and takes a lot of effort to follow, but actually does have a chance of working.

I said earlier that there are two big problems with goals. The second is failing to fail correctly.

Sometimes failure is a form of feedback. In fact, this is exactly what you want failure to be: a means of testing out different strategies and figuring out which ones work best. It is Edison’s proverbial, “I learned a thousand ways to not make a light bulb.” Used this way, failure can be very helpful. Indeed, without such productive failures learning and strategy development is impossible.

However, sometimes the cost of failure can be somewhat higher. If Billy’s goal is to cross the street safely 75% of the time, what about the other 25%? Even if we raise the expectation to 99%, that one failure can negate all the successes: getting hit by a car can ruin your whole day.

It’s all too easy to confuse the two types of failures and businesses do it all the time. They are afraid to fail when that failure would give them valuable information and they take risks that sound good but where one slip causes you to lose everything.

How do you tell the two apart?

Check out the strategy around the goal. If there is a strategy and the possibilities of failure are being considered and managed, then odds are good that if you fail, you’re failing successfully. If there is no strategy or failure is not being considered as a possibility, turn and run away. All you’re doing is rolling the dice, and if that’s your game, Vegas is a better bet.

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.

Voices in the Corridor: A Halloween Tale

Even the janitors don’t go down that corridor. Not any more, not for a very long time. The spiders moved in long since, creating a very different sort of website. The old-timers in neighboring buildings claimed that long ago, on a moonless Halloween night, a business had died there.

The last company to use that building tried to have the corridor blocked off. Each day the wall would be put up. Each morning, it was found broken and scattered, a trail of debris leading from the conference room at the end of the corridor all the way to the Keurig coffee maker in the kitchen.

Those who ventured into the corridor reported voices coming from the conference room, sometimes faint, sometimes loud, always indistinct. Always arguing, always debating, though none could say of what they spoke. Only one phrase would, from time to time, rise above the murmur, a phrase that struck fear into the hearts of all who heard it. Then, for a brief time, other phrases would emerge, before fading once more into inchoate argument.

Those who returned from the corridor were always quiet, subdued, as though some darkness had settled upon their spirits, a strange, mysterious darkness not easily dispelled. Either that or they suddenly realized that they had a lot of work to do and needed another cup of coffee. Yet, no force would convince them to walk down that corridor again, to listen to the voices coming from behind the closed doors at the end, heavy wooden portals locked from the inside.

What words had they heard? What phrase filled with horror those who heard it spoken in that cobweb filled corridor?

It was only this: “I call the vote.”

Four simple words. Four words that might seem innocent, harmless, a way to make a decision and move forward. Four words which left those who spoke them trapped forever in argument and debate.

The vote: there are those who claim it is the way all debates should be settled, all arguments brought to a close.

“It is how we do things,” they say. “It is the American way.”

When the vote is called, the tally counted, the argument does not end. It continues, on and on, through vote after vote.

“I didn’t understand the issues.”

“I thought a yes vote meant we weren’t going to do it.”

“We can’t vote on this yet, we haven’t considered all the issues.”

“I don’t care what we voted, that just won’t work.”

“We can’t vote on this. It wasn’t announced ahead of time.”

The vote settled nothing. No agreement was reached, no consensus created. People took sides, the arguments became more vocal, more strident. The debate less about the issues, more about convincing others or forcing agreement. Without consensus, each vote only convinced those who lost that their error lay in not yelling more loudly, in failing to persuade others. The value of the ideas, the goal of the meeting fell away, the vision of the business lost in the struggle. Winning the vote became the new goal, the new vision. To lose the vote was to lose face. Perhaps the vote was called without warning. Who knows?

Had there been a leader who could make a decision, perhaps that would have ended it. Or perhaps not. Sometimes decisions refuse to stay decided. More precisely, some teams are unable to make a decision and stay with it. They vote, over and over they vote, yet those votes settle nothing. Rather than end the debate, the losers join together to win the next vote. The issue refuses to die until, like a zombie, the debate itself has eaten their brains.

For a vote to work, first there must be consensus. For there to be consensus, there must be productive discussion, effective debate, meaningful argument. This takes time: not just time to argue, but time to learn how to argue. Most votes occur too soon, before the team is ready. Even a strong leader can’t always change that. Strong leaders draw out their teams, involve them in the decision even when the leader will have the final word. When the best leaders make a decision, in truth they are ratifying the consensus of the team. Their strength lies in their ability to bring about that consensus, to argue without being drawn into argument.

“I don’t care what the vote was, I’m in charge here.”

So the debate continues, on an on. Eventually, everyone else went home. Down that corridor, in that room, they call the vote, over and over, and nothing ever gets done.

Happy Halloween!

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 Paradox of Perfection

This article was originally published in American Business Magazine.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”– Michael Jordan

Ask practically any hiring manager if they’d hire someone who never considers alternatives, who refuses to take decisive action, who has never challenged themselves, and the answer will be, “No.”

The odd thing is, however, that those same managers are hiring exactly those people they said they’d never hire. Of course, they say they’re hiring people with strong track records, who don’t have a history of failure, who have never been responsible for something going wrong; the people, in short, with the perfect job histories.

But what they don’t do is take the time to understand just why that person looks so perfect. After all, isn’t it always better to hire someone who has never failed than to hire someone whose background includes unsuccessful projects?

Imagine if Michael Jordan’s coach had said, back when he first missed a game winning shot, “Hey Mikey, you missed that shot! You’re done.”

Far too often, the people who look so perfect are only perfect because they’ve never allowed themselves to attempt anything that would damage their image of perfection. They carefully choose their projects to make sure they’ll be successful, and they never challenge themselves or expose themselves to risk. Unfortunately, when something does go wrong, they also have no ability to cope.

Twelve years ago, I worked with someone who was telling me how he failed his black belt test in the martial art he studied. “It was the first test I’d ever failed,” he told me. “It was devastating.”

“How long ago did that happen?” I asked him.

“Two years.”

“So I assume you passed the second time.”

“What second time?” he asked.

After two years, his failure was still so overwhelming that he hadn’t gotten back on that metaphorical horse. As an engineer, he was not easy to work with because he had to be right all the time.

I was once called in to work with a manager who had a stellar track record, until something went wrong. He couldn’t cope. He kept telling me, “I’m not the sort of manager who allows something like that to happen.”

The resulting disconnect between his (mis)perception of himself and reality was overwhelming. The fellow was so stressed out that he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and couldn’t think straight. The fact that he had never failed meant that he had no resilience. The mere possibility of failure was enough to send him into panic and make the odds of failure more likely. Yes, we did turn things around, and he’s a much more capable manager now than he ever was before.

When you want someone to embark on a risky project or take bold, decisive action, don’t look to the person with the perfect record who has never failed. If they haven’t taken risks or been bold before, why would they change just for you? Clearly what they’ve been doing worked for them—it got them praise, promotions and financial rewards.

Paradoxically, perhaps that person with the checkered past is exactly who you’re looking for. The person who misses that game-winning shot one day, improves their skills, and nails it the next time is the real winner. Success is about trying over and over and accepting the bobbles along the way. Unfortunately, the tendency on the part of many people is to view a mistake as total failure. This deprives them, and their managers, of the chance to improve and seek greater challenges.

Who would you rather trust when the stakes are high? The person with the perfect record, or the one who is the equivalent of Michael Jordan?