The Business Sensei

That’s An Amazing Serve!

One of those little tricks known to certain expert tennis players is saying to an opponent, “That’s an amazing serve! However do you do it?”

They’ll typically do this as they switch sides of the net, and suddenly the opponent’s amazing serve fizzles. By making the other player think about what he’s doing and focus on his body, instead of on the ball, that one question can completely change the course of a game.

Many practitioners of jujitsu and aikido learn the unbendable arm: they are told to extend their arm and imagine water jetting out at high pressure. Their arm becomes incredibly hard to bend. If they try to focus on the muscles, the arm is relatively easy to bend.

A similar trick is used by proponents of medical magnets and various other magic therapies: they’ll ask you hold your thumb and forefinger together on your right hand, and really focus on keeping those fingers together. They’ll then grab your fingers and pull them apart. Next, they have you hold the magnet or the magic herb packet in your other hand, and imagine the strength it’s giving you. Suddenly, your fingers can’t be pulled apart.

It’s a cool trick. I do it regularly by claiming my MIT class ring is magnetic and having the other person hold it in their off hand. Even though people know there’s obviously a trick, it works virtually every time.

So what’s going on? It turns out that when you focus someone on the mechanics of how their body moves, it scrambles their ability to do it. On the other hand, when you focus someone on a particular effect, be that a good serve, an unbendable arm, or keeping your fingers together, the body figures out the best way to achieve the desired result.

To put this another way, we become less capable when we attempt to micromanage ourselves. We become more capable when we learn to trust ourselves to exercise our skills in the ways that make the most sense for us. We do best when we have the freedom to focus on what we want to accomplish and discover the best way of accomplishing it, instead of being locked into one way of doing it.

What is even more interesting is that the behavior of teams mimics the behavior of individuals. The more a manager attempts to control the details of how the team is doing its job, the less capable the team becomes. The expert leader knows how to trust his team and gets out of their way.

The beginning jujitsu player attempts to make every piece of the move perfect: they try to turn their arm at just the right angle, step to just the right spot, and so forth. They are stiff and awkward. The master knows the result she wants and produces it, confident that her body will do the right thing. What is the difference between the novice and the master? Correct practice. Obvious though this point may be, if you practice the wrong things, you’ll do the wrong things.

The team is no different:  a leader learns to trust his team and the members learn to trust the team and the leader through constant practice. Like jujitsu, however, it must be correct practice. The novice who practices incorrectly improves slowly, if at all. He may do more advanced techniques, but he does them with the same awkwardness and wasted energy of a beginner. The team which focuses on the wrong skills may be given more difficult projects, but it does them with the same lack of coordination and poor use of resources as it did when it first got together.

When teams come together and attempt to leap straight into project definition and problem solving, they are focusing on the wrong skills. They haven’t yet learned how to be a team. Before they can define the project or solve problems they have to learn how to make decisions that they can all support. That doesn’t mean they all have to agree with the decision, but every team member must be able to enthusiastically implement whatever the team decides. That won’t happen if the team doesn’t know how to settle disputes and achieve consensus without splitting itself into factions.

Unfortunately, when teams focus on the wrong skills, leaders are unable to trust those teams to make good decisions. The leader, therefore, takes it upon herself to make all the decisions. While this may be a great way to get started, it starts to break down as the problems become more complex. This causes the leader to attempt ever tighter control of the team, with increasingly poor results.

At one major manufacturing firm I worked with, a certain engineering director was the go-to guy. He could solve every problem, and the team knew it. The director often complained that if he was stuck in a meeting, work came to a screeching halt, assuming it ever got moving fast enough to screech as it halted! The idea of taking a vacation wasn’t even in the cards.

The solution was to help him back off and let go of his control. Instead of solving their problems, he started walking the team through his problem solving process. Instead of answering questions, he showed them how he found the answers to those questions. Instead of making the decisions, he helped them develop effective decision making skills. It was pretty uncomfortable at first: the team got it wrong a lot, and he kept imagining what his boss was going to say to him if things didn’t work out. After a while, though, the team started to get the idea. Their problem-solving and decision making skills improved.

One of the very difficult transitions for jujitsu practitioners is discovering that doing very little yields the biggest response. Focusing on what should happen to their partner allows the technique to become effortless. This director had the equivalent experience:  although he felt like he was doing less and less, his team was accomplishing more and more. The less he focused them on the details of getting things done, the more they were able to do. Eventually, he was able to focus his time and energy on long-term strategic thinking, instead of day-to-day minutia.

Trusting yourself, or your team, to do the right thing isn’t magic. It’s the result of hard work and correct practice. The more you control the details, the harder the task becomes. The more you enable your team to deal with the details, the easier it is for everyone, and the higher the quality of the results.

Sometimes less really is more.

Don’t Let Dracula Decisions Roam Your Business

As published in Corp! Magazine.

As a kid, I liked watching the old Bela Lugosi Dracula movies. The movies were more than a little formulaic, but still fun. Each one would begin roughly the same way: after a series of mysterious murders, disappearances, and other strange happenings, Our Hero would figure out that Count Dracula had somehow returned from the grave. Naturally, everyone else would laugh at him because as they, and the audience, knew perfectly well, Dracula had been thoroughly killed off at the end of the previous movie. Someone might also make the token objection that vampires don’t exist, but no one ever took that objection seriously. Our Hero would persevere, though, and after much debate and argument, eventually convince everyone that the Count was, indeed, once again walking the Earth. Finally, in the very nick of time, Our Hero would successfully drive a stake through Dracula’s heart, or expose him to sunlight, or the Wolfman would tackle him and they would fall together out a window into the raging surf hundreds of feet below, or some other equally melodramatic ending. Afterward, everyone would relax, confident in the knowledge that this time Count Dracula really was dead once and for all. This time, for sure… at least until the next movie.

I frequently hear a variant of this story from my clients. No, they’re not talking about Count Dracula per se; rather, they are talking about making decisions at their companies. No matter how thoroughly a topic is debated to death, and no matter how often teams make decisions on which way to go, the topic reappears in the next meeting. There’s always some purported reason: “We didn’t follow proper procedure,” or “I forgot to include this really important piece of information,” or “It’s not fair that Bob wasn’t here,” or “I didn’t understand what I was voting for,” or, “How about another Dracula flick?”

OK, maybe the last one doesn’t come up all that often. The actual reasons don’t really matter anyway: they’re all about as hokey as the reason why Dracula didn’t really die in the previous movie. Dracula returns because the audiences and the producers want him back; similarly, the decision returns from the grave because people want to bring it back. In this way, even apparently simple decisions can return again and again, sucking up time and energy like Dracula sucking blood. It isn’t long before a mundane meeting turns into an event to be anticipated with mounting horror, or at least a strong sense of dread.

Make decisions that stop returning from the grave
While this problem is particularly prevalent with leaderless, or self-managed, teams, it is hardly unique to them. The real question, of course, is what to do about it. How do you make decisions stop returning to roam the hallways like Dracula returning from the grave?

First off, if the team doesn’t have a leader, it needs one. When you see a team unable to make decisions, that’s a team rushing towards being dysfunctional. Changing course requires putting someone in charge, or at least having someone who can facilitate meetings and hold both individuals and the team accountable.

Next is communications: if no one is asking questions or pushing back on a decision, that’s a bad sign. That’s telling you that the team isn’t engaged in the process, and if they aren’t engaged, they’re also not seriously thinking about the decision. Inviting speculation or asking open-ended questions can get conversation started. If no one is willing to question, then you are also missing out on a valuable opportunity to debug the decision before you make it.

Conversely, once you have debate going, you also need a way to bring it to a halt. Just as it’s important to not end debate too quickly, it’s also important to not let it continue on until people are ready to chew their own legs off. Periodically polling the room to see if everyone can accept any of the alternatives being considered, and, if not, finding out what else they want to say or what else they need to know, can be very effective at helping everyone recognize when debate is ready to end. Once everyone in the room feels that they can support any of the alternatives being considered, you can make your decision. This approach has the added benefit that if there’s someone in the room who is determined to keep arguing until they get their way, that too will become obvious. Should that situation occur, the person in charge can then deal with it appropriately.

Finally, you need to have something substantive to discuss. It’s not enough to just make a decision: you also have to map out how the decision will be implemented, what steps need to be taken, who is responsible for reporting back, and when. In any non-trivial decision, the early steps are always error-prone: those charged with implementing the decisions must feel certain that the feedback they gain on those early steps will not be held against them. If people are afraid of being punished for inevitable learning mistakes, you can count on that decision returning like Dracula until responsibility is sufficiently diffused that no one can be blamed for failure. At that point, you can also be certain that no one will care about the outcome.

As much as the process of effective decision-making may seem to take a long time, it’s far quicker to make a decision once and put it to rest than to have it returning, time and again, like Dracula from the grave.

What You See is Why You Do

I’m frequently asked for help motivating employees. The fact is, motivation is not that hard… provided you’ve built the right foundation!

When someone tells me that his department has a motivation problem, my first question is, “What’s your vision?”

The most common response is a blank look. Vision? Isn’t that some silly psychobabble or convenient buzzword?

Unfortunately, the concept of vision is often treated that way. Your vision, however, and your enthusiasm for it, are what make the difference between people who just show up and do their jobs and people who are excited and determined to excel.

People are motivated by their hopes and dreams, by causes, by being part of something that matters beyond the next paycheck. If you are the CEO, your enthusiasm is what brings the vision to life. If you are a manager, VP, department head, etc, then your enthusiasm in how you communicate the vision is what brings it to life for your team. If they see that you don’t care, why should they care?

I was recently listening to an Old Time Radio Science Fiction podcast of the classic Fritz Lieber sotry, “A Pail of Air.” At the end of the story, they played John F. Kennedy’s famous speech in which he vowed that the United States would land a man on the moon and bring him back again. Even now, 50 years later, it is still a powerful speech. Listening to him, it’s easy to see how his vision galvanized a nation.

The good news is that you don’t need to be John Kennedy to galvanize a company.  People devote hours to charities and hobbies because they have a vision of making a difference or achieving something significant. The key is to craft an exciting vision and then let your enthusiasm show.

I’ve often observed that the apparently unmotivated person at the office is the same person whom you’d find outside each evening training for a marathon or a hundred-mile bike ride (aka a “century”): it’s all a question of where they find meaning. I figured the concept was pretty clear, even though I’ve never run a marathon or ridden a century. I could never convince myself that it was worth the time and the pain involved in training for one of those endurance events.

Last summer, my father-in-law, Ira Yermish, died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was 64 and a serious endurance athlete, with seven Iron Man competitions and innumerable marathons and bike centuries under his belt.

This coming August, my wife, daughter, and I will be riding the Philly Livestrong Challenge in his memory. Livestrong raises money to help improve the lives of people with cancer, making this event even more significant: my mother died of cancer 13 years ago. Suddenly I have a cause, so training for a bike century just doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming.

Whom do you know who has died of cancer, or is living with it today? Please help make people’s lives better by donating to the Livestrong Foundation.

That vision thing? Yeah, it works.

For Want of a Rubber Band

The other day, my DVD player stopped working. Naturally, this happened the night I was sitting down to watch a movie I’d been looking forward to. Quite simply, the tray wouldn’t open (presumably, it wouldn’t close either, but there was no way to test that). As we all know, a feature of modern electronics is that there are “No user serviceable parts inside.”

Nonetheless, I decided to open it up anyway. If nothing else, I figured I could at least recover the trapped DVD one of my kids had left in the machine.

Opening it up was an interesting experience. Inside was mostly empty space with a tray and a circuit board. Apparently the major difference between a portable player and a non-portable one is the amount of wasted space.

There was also one user serviceable part: the rubber band.

Yes, in the midst of the electronics there was a broken rubber band. That rubber band acted as the “drive train” to open and close the DVD tray. Just think about that: all this high tech electronics rendered completely useless by the failure of a sixty cent rubber band. How much is that rubber band really worth? Sometimes the value is not the cost of the item but what it makes possible. Sometimes the critical problem that is blocking us from moving forward turns out to be something small and simple, but only if we know where to look and what to look for. While I could have replaced the DVD player, that would have been a much more expensive solution than replacing the rubber band. Knowing the real problem enabled me to pick the best possible solution.

I was asked recently about my opinion on attendance point systems.

“Why?” I replied.

The person explained her company was having problems with absenteeism and people changing shifts without notifying anyone in authority. Based on this, she wanted my opinion of attendance point systems, presumably on the logic that implementing one would solve her problem. Unfortunately, without knowing exactly why people are not showing up for work on time and without knowing why they’re constantly switching shifts, implementing an attendance point system is as likely as not a solution in search of a problem. Sure it might work; on the other hand, it might not work. It’s basically a roll of the dice.

So why jump to that solution? Simple. It’s easy. Faced with a problem without an obvious solution, the natural response is to impose a solution that fits the symptoms. Symptoms, unfortunately, are not the problem; they’re just the symptoms. Like taking an antibiotic for the flu, it doesn’t help and may make you feel worse.

Instead, we need to work backward from the symptoms to understand the underlying problem. With my DVD player, the symptom was that the tray wouldn’t slide out. Had I assumed the problem was that the electronics were fried, I would have tossed it and bought a new one. By investigating the problem, I had a working DVD player in less than fifteen minutes.

Investigating the problem, however, requires a certain amount of effort and frequently appears overwhelming and expensive. The lure of an obvious, easy, and, above all, cheap solution is very strong. The fact is, there are a lot of obvious, inexpensive solutions to many problems. In a business, it’s particularly easy to find an easy solution particularly if you don’t care if it actually works. If you want a working solution, though, the choices become somewhat more limited.

Investigating a problem is rarely as overwhelming as it first appears. With the DVD player, it was easy to open it up and see what was going on inside. With human systems, on the other hand, taking them apart in that way can be a bit problematic. Putting them back together again is even more tricky. The real key is to see how often the symptoms appear and under what conditions. What other symptoms are there? What do people say when you ask them about their experiences and their observations? As you put together a picture of the symptoms and when they appear, you can start brainstorming about possible causes. Does your organization have a cold? The flu? Is it suffering from growing pains?

At one company, everything was going great until they went public, had a huge influx of cash, and began a rapid expansion. Suddenly, all sorts of symptoms appeared: increased conflict, passive-aggressive behavior, confusion, inability to follow through on decisions, and so forth. Fixing the problem required first identifying what was really going on, and then crafting a solution appropriate to that organization. None of the problems were that big, but, like that rubber band, they were in critical places.

In a sense, it’s not how big the problem is that matters most. What matters most is what that problem is preventing you from doing.

How much was that rubber band worth again?

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Is the product done?” a certain manager asked during a product review meeting.

“It is done,” replied the engineer building the product.

“Are there any problems?”

“There are problems.”

“What is the problem?”

“It does not work.”

“Why doesn’t it work?”

“It is not done.”

I will spare you the transcription of the subsequent half hour of this not particularly funny comedy routine. The manager and the engineer managed to perform this little dance of talking past one another without ever seeming to realize just how ludicrous it sounded to everyone else in the room. It was rather like Monty Python’s classic Hungarian-English phrasebook sketch, in which translations in either direction are random. In other words, the Hungarian phrase, “I would like to buy a ticket,” might be translated to the English phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

It was extremely funny when Monty Python performed it. As for the manager and the engineer, well, perhaps they just didn’t have the comedic timing of Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

[SYSTEM-AD-LEFT]As it happens, “my hovercraft is full of eels” moments come about far too often. What was unusual in this situation is that it involved only two people. Usually, considerably more people take part. Thus, instead of a not particularly amusing exchange between two people, there is an extremely frustrating exchange involving several people. The most common failure to communicate is the game of telephone: as the message passes along the line, it becomes increasingly distorted.

What I hear from teams over and over is, “We are communicating! We send email to everyone.” This is where the hovercraft starts to fill with eels. Broadcasting is not really communicating: effective business communications require a certain amount of back and forth, questioning and explaining, before everyone is on the same page.

Who talks to whom? When you send out an email, do questions come back to you? Or do people on the team quietly ask one another to explain what you meant? While it’s comforting to believe that every missive we send out is so carefully crafted as to be completely unambiguous, very few of us write that well. Of that select few, even fewer can do it all the time. Particularly in the early stages of a project, if there are no questions, then there are certainly problems.

When someone else asks a question, either via email or in a meeting, does everyone wait for you to respond? Even worse, does Bob only jump into a thread if Fred jumps in first? Who is Bob responding to at that point, you or Fred? Are you still addressing the main topic or is the hovercraft starting to become eel infested?

It can be extremely frustrating to ask, “Are there any questions?” and receive either dead silence or questions about something trivial. It can easily become tempting to assume that there are no questions and just race full speed ahead. However, until employees figure out how much each person understands about the project and how you will respond to apparently dumb questions, they will be cautious about what they ask. Their curiosity is as much about one another and about you as it is about the project. How that curiosity gets satisfied determines whether you have productive conversations or a hovercraft that is full of eels. In the former case, you get strong employee engagement; in the latter case, you don’t.

If you’ve been working with a team for some months, or longer, and people are still not asking questions then there are really only two possibilities: either your team is composed of professional mind-readers or you are about to find a room full of those pesky eels. No project is ever perfectly defined from the beginning. Questions and debate should be ongoing throughout the development or production cycle. A lack of questions tells you that there is a lack of trust between the team members and between the team members and you. When trust is lacking, so is engagement.

Now some good news: remedying that lack of trust isn’t all that complicated. It does, however, require a certain amount of persistence and patience.

Start by highlighting each person’s role and contribution to the project. Why are they there? What makes them uniquely qualified to fill the role they are in? Be specific and detailed. If you can’t clearly define their roles, you can rest assured that they can’t either.  Questions come when people are clear about their roles. Disengagement comes when people are not clear about their roles.

Prime the pump with questions. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and that you need the help of the team to find them. Give each person a chance to play the expert while you ask the dumb questions. When you set the tone, the others will follow. Communications start with the person in charge.

Separate producing answers from evaluating answers. Collect up the possibilities and take a break before you start examining them and making decisions about them. Brainstorming without evaluating allows ideas to build upon one another and apparently unworkable ideas to spark other ideas. Pausing to examine each potential answer as it comes up kills that process.

Encourage different forms of brainstorming: some people are very analytical, some are intuitive, some generate ideas by cracking jokes, others pace, and so on. Choose a venue where people are comfortable and only step in if the creative juices start to run dry or tempers start to get short. In either case, that means you need to take a break.  Intense discussions are fine, heated discussions not so much.

Initially, you will have to make all the decisions. That’s fine, but don’t get too comfortable with it. As trust and engagement build, the team will want to become more involved in the decision making process. Invite them in: that demonstration of trust will further build engagement and foster effective communications. Effective communications, in turn, builds trust and engagement.

Having a hovercraft full of eels isn’t the real problem. The real problem is what a hovercraft full of eels tells you about the trust, engagement, and communications in your company.

Make Believe Can Really Help Business

I was very pleased to see that Lizzie Stark’s new book, “Leaving Mundania: Inside the World of Grownup Make-Believe” is now available. Lizzie’s book is an excellent explanation of live-action roleplaying (larping) and how it works.

But  wait? Isn’t larping just a game? How can it help my business? I’m glad you asked.

All businesses need to provide leadership to their members, motivate employees, and negotiate with individuals and organizations. The problem is practicing those skills in an environment that doesn’t feel artificial. A well-designed, serious larp provides an engrossing, entertaining training experience. Players are able to get into the game and as a result deal with the problems that come up much as they would in real life. Whether a player gives up in frustration after encountering an obstacle or comes up with a creative out of the box solution, that tells you they’ll likely do the same thing on the job. Conversely, when someone shines in the game, but is a mediocre performer on the job, that alerts employers to untapped potential.

In sports, teams practice their skills over and over to deal with every conceivable scenario. Businesses rarely have that luxury. When I design a serious larp for a business, the experience of playing in the scenario enables employees to practice and hone skills before the critical situation in which they are needed. Employees also have the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes in an environment in which there are no financial consequences to the business. Finally employees who need additional skill training can be identified before they fail on the job.

If you want an academic treatment of larping, click here. Otherwise, I encourage you take a look at “Leaving Mundania,” and think about how you can use the games she describes to help your business (and have a good time!).

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Becoming a Loyalty Magnet

Originally published in American Business Magazine.

“I’m looking forward to seeing the results of our work when I return from my two week vacation in Hawaii.”

The coughing and sputtering sounds that broke the silence came from one of the vice presidents who had just choked on his coffee. He had apparently not been briefed on the content of the talk that Fred, the CEO, was giving.

The team was pushing hard to hit an aggressive product launch deadline. The CEO decided they needed a shot of inspiration, a few words of encouragement. He called a meeting in which he exhorted the team to work long hours, work weekends and give up time with their families in order to hit the deadline. Had it not been for his rather dramatic final sentence, his little speech would have been utterly unmemorable. As it was, however, it became the stuff of legend. By the time he returned from Hawaii, two people had quit. Within six months, half the company was gone. After a year, only the CEO’s footsteps echoed hollowly in the empty corridors and offices of what had once been a thriving company.

This, it may be argued, was not the way to build loyalty.

To be fair, it was not this isolated incident that led to the exodus. The Hawaiian vacation was merely the final straw, which, under other circumstances, might have been taken as a joke. While it’s certainly possible, albeit difficult, to lose employee loyalty in a heartbeat, building employee loyalty is a process. Depending on how well you’ve managed that process, your Hawaiian vacation might be the source of some good-natured grumbling or it might be the death knell for your company. Context is everything. As for your customers, well, if you haven’t managed to gain employee loyalty, you can forget about customer loyalty.

So what is this process? In today’s environment of tight budgets and limited raises, what can be done to keep your employees coming back? It’s not as hard as you may think.

To begin with, though, let’s debunk that popular myth that employees had better be loyal because there’s nowhere else for them to go in this economy. If your business is in a profitable niche, then you can bet that other businesses will join you there. Nothing attracts competition like the scent of money. During the last recession, I had a senior manager boast to me that he’d just scoffed at an employee who asked for a raise. “I laughed at him and told him he should be grateful that he has a job!”

A short time later, that employee had a new job with a significantly higher rate of pay. If he’d received a raise, he wouldn’t even have been looking. That manager’s department, meanwhile, was set back six months by the loss of that employee.

Sure, it’s a lousy economy, and sure, it’s hard to find a job. However, those companies that are hiring like nothing better than to lure employees away from their competitors. Indeed, foolish though it may be (see the article, Who Betrays One Master ), a great many companies will only hire those who are already employed somewhere else. Never assume that your employees have nowhere to go.

The first step to building employee loyalty is to give them something to be loyal to. If that’s their paycheck, then all you’ve done is hire a bunch of mercenaries. That’s fine, until someone offers them more money. If you don’t want mercenaries, though, start by getting people excited. What is your company doing? Why does anyone care? Why should they care? Why should your customers care? It doesn’t matter whether you’re a high-tech startup, an accounting firm or a landscaper. If you can’t clearly and succinctly state the value that you are bringing and get people excited about providing that value, you’re in trouble. Recognize that your message doesn’t have to appeal to everyone. Rather, it only needs to appeal to the people you want to hire and, eventually, to those whom you’d like to turn into your clients.

Crafting an exciting message isn’t always easy, but the benefits are worth it. Most of us want to take pride in our work. The more vividly we can see ourselves providing value, the more motivated and loyal we are. Similarly, when clients receive value from a company that isn’t afraid to stand up and say, “This is who we are!” they also become more loyal. People like to support causes they believe in, so make sure your company is the company people want to spend money to support. This is something our friend Fred did well. His product was one his employees were initially extremely excited by and his customers couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Unfortunately, that’s as far as Fred went.

Now that you’ve established the frame, if you will, the next step is to start filling in the details. Having an exciting message is only the beginning. You have to help your employees see how they fit into your corporate story. Remember, when it comes to stories, no one wants to be the bit part. Maybe everyone doesn’t want to be the hero, but virtually everyone does want to feel competent, important, valuable and useful. Exactly how you make this happen will vary somewhat from person to person, but here are some elements to focus on.

How many hats do employees wear? Some people thrive when given the opportunity to wear multiple hats on the job. Other people like to wear just one hat, but they wear it very, very well. Whether you need employees to do a variety of different things or one thing well, recognize that those alternatives often appeal to different people. When you get a match, you also get increased loyalty. When you give people the opportunity to experiment and potentially expand what they’re doing, you get even more loyalty— provided they don’t think they’ll be fired for failing. But not all experiments are successful. The best way to get employees to do more is to let them develop an area of strength and then try new things. If they succeed, great! If not, they can retreat to their area of strength and try again. Over time, you’ll end up with steadily more competent employees.

The more competent your employees feel, the more loyal they will be. By extension, the more competent and loyal your employees, the more satisfied, and hence more loyal, your customers. Fred got this one wrong on two counts: First, he rarely let anyone experiment to see if they could expand their duties. When he did, he focused on weakness instead of strength and had no tolerance for failure. The net result was that everyone swiftly became afraid to try anything new or volunteer to help out beyond the limits of their job lest it not go well.

Employees also want to feel as though they matter to the company. Can your employees see how their work contributes to the company? When I worked for IBM in the 1980s, I was a very small cog in a very large machine. Even my most successful project was a rounding error on Big Blue’s balance sheet. Fred’s company was considerably smaller and each person could see how their work fit in and mattered. Fred’s biggest mistake was that he didn’t take the time to recognize the work his employees were doing and remind them how much it mattered. Even so, the employees quit in inverse order to the importance of their contribution. Make sure everyone can see their contribution to the company and periodically thank them for it. The more visible and important their work, the more loyal your employees will be.

Part of feeling competent and important is being able to make your own decisions. While any given employee may only be able to make decisions in limited areas, nonetheless, it’s important to provide employees with the opportunity to make as many decisions as possible. Fred needed to be part of every decision, even the most trivial. Not only did this slow down progress, it also left the experts in the company mightily offended. If you’re going to go to the trouble and expense of hiring highly skilled people, make sure you let them make decisions on the best ways to exercise those skills. Create a framework, provide guidelines and structure, but give them some freedom. For example, you might give your customer support people the authority to provide refunds to any customer up to $100 (or $1,000 or $10,000 depending on the nature of your company and product/service). They’ll feel good because they’re getting to exercise their own judgment and help the customers. Then, the customers will be happy because their problem was resolved quickly. Once again, you’ve increased loyalty.

Finally, how will your employees know they’re doing the right thing? Let’s face it, no one wants to have to ask how well they’re doing and you really don’t want people bugging you all the time. That means they need to be able to see the fruits of their labors as part of the job. Developing feedback systems that keep you mostly out of the way is not an easy task, but it is a very worthwhile one. The easier it is for employees to get feedback on their progress, the more they’ll enjoy their work and the greater their loyalty. In addition, taking the time to talk to your employees one-on-one and let them know you see their efforts and appreciate them is very powerful. Back when IBM was a tiny, struggling company, a big part of Tom Watson’s secret to building loyalty was taking the time to meet everyone. Tom Watson, Jr., presiding over a significantly larger IBM, maintained the tradition.

If you take the time to get to know your employees, you also reap an additional benefit: When you know your employees as individuals, you can reward them as individuals. Rewarding someone at random because “I’ve seen your work and I just wanted to say thank you,” is a great way of increasing loyalty. Making that reward something the individual employee really values is even better. Fred could never bring himself to reward people. Instead, he always complained that their work wasn’t good enough and would find excuses not to give rewards he’d promised.

Loyalty is not something that just happens. It’s something that you build over time and put in the bank for the times when you need it. If it’s not there, a single wrong word can cost you your employees or your largest customer. If it’s there, well, you can accomplish almost anything. The choice is yours.

Eye of the Hurricane

I was lying on my back. Standing around me were four people who, only two weeks before, had been teaching a class on appropriate emergency response in jujitsu.

The fact that I was flat on my back on the ground was not, in one sense, unusual. A friend of mine was taking his black belt exam and I had volunteered to let him demonstrate his throws on me. Things went slightly off the rails when he threw me, lost his balance, and ended up kicking me in the head.

The “thwock!” echoed through the gym.

One of the instructors was supposed to take charge. They stared down at me. I stared up at them. Eventually, I said, “Someone get me an ice pack.”

One of the men jumped slightly, turned, and ran out of the room. A moment later, he ran back in with one of those first aid kid chemical cold packs in his right hand.

“It’s not cold,” he yelled.

“You have to squeeze it,” came a voice from somewhere in the room.

In case you were ever curious, yes, it is possible to squeeze one of those cold packs too hard.

For such a small cold pack, the contents covered a remarkably large area.

I looked at my now soaking gi. I got to my feet.

“I’m fine now. Please don’t help me any more.”

Fortunately, in this situation, there was no permanent harm done and the fact that several people froze at the moment of crisis was merely embarrassing. My gi wasn’t even stained.

Unfortunately, many businesses are not so lucky. Even more unfortunately, it’s not the actual disasters that freeze them: handling the rare fire or power failure is barely a blip in the proverbial routine. Rather, the “disasters” that throw everything off balance and freeze decision making in its tracks are those that could have been anticipated or for which management thought that they had prepared.

Despite all their training, when the accident occurred, the four jujitsu instructors metaphorically lost their balance by focusing on the image of how bad it could be. That prevented them from acting immediately to determine how bad it actually was.

At Lacunae Software, the ship date was two days off when QA found a major bug in the software. Rather than stop, investigate the severity, and determine an appropriate course of action, the CEO announced that delaying the ship would clearly doom the company. He castigated QA for disloyalty and ordered the product to ship on schedule. Customers were not happy, costing the company more than the delay would have. Acting out of fear of how bad it could have been made the situation worse.

When things are going well and something suddenly goes wrong, it can be very easy to focus on all the potential negatives. That doesn’t help. Successful companies have the habit of focusing on what can go right. Developing that mindset takes practice:

Take a deep breathe and recognize that you have more time than you think. This is quite probably the hardest step.

• Remind yourself of the vision for your product and company (you do have a vision, right?).
• Review the steps necessary to manifest that vision. It can help to write them down as you go through them.
• List the things that can go right to move you forward from where you are. Be realistic, and also optimistic.
• Any time you find yourself focusing on what can go wrong, stop and shift back to what can go right. Evaluate the problems later.

Far too many companies never define their vision nor do they map out the path to success. The secret to success is staying on balance. The secret to not losing balance is knowing where you’re going, reminding yourself how you’ll get there, and focusing on the positive.

Good leadership traits? Not so fast…

I frequently hear about someone exhibiting good “leadership traits.” Someone who exhibits leadership traits, the argument goes, is more likely to become a successful leader, or at least a leader.

The whole concept of identifying traits and then attempting to identify those traits in other people as a way of meaning, well, anything has a long and venerable history.

In the field of Sport Psychology, a great deal of effort was put into identifying the traits of top athletes and then using those traits to identify potential top athletes from amongst young athletes.

It failed. Miserably. Despite this fact, it’s still popular. In one of my graduate sport psych classes, we were presented with the data on using traits to identify potential top athletes (worse than chance, as I recall). Despite this, about a third of the class insisted that they would still use that method of selecting new athletes for the Olympic Team because, “It just has to work!”

In the field of leadership, a great deal of effort was spent on identifying the traits of top leaders and then using that information to identify potential leaders. It failed as well.

While it seems like a very attractive concept, that if we could just identify the traits of top <X>, then future top <X> would share those traits, it just doesn’t work. Amongst other things that came out of the various studies is that many of these top athletes and leaders did not even exhibit those traits or characteristics when they were young (were they traits that simply hadn’t manifested or learned behaviors? Not clear), and many of those who did never developed into top <X> despite all the attempts to make them so.

A good current example of this flawed reasoning is something someone recently brought to my attention: the concept of Edison Traits. It feels good, but based on the results of similar efforts in other areas, is likely to be meaningless. It appears to be based on the argument that if someone exhibits traits similar to those the history books tell us that Edison exhibited, they’ll grow up to be like Edison or something. It also appears to argue that Edison himself must have had ADHD (I’m not sure why), and that this is beneficial in becoming a brilliant inventor like Edison.

The idea that Thomas Edison had ADHD is, itself, questionable. Intensely inquisitive, challenge seeking, high intelligence does not equal ADHD (so if you think that everyone in your office has ADHD, odds are pretty good you need to take another look…).

At the risk of going off on a tangent, the general concept of trying to argue that ADHD is “Hunter’s Mind” or anything else other than a difficulty in executive functioning is also flawed. That’s not to say that ADHD can’t be used to your advantage: consider Robin Williams.

However, the argument that ADHD is an advantage to a hunter (for example) ignores the reality of survival hunting: long periods of boredom, hours spent practicing skills, etc. To the extent that I’ve read up on this topic, in present day Hunter/Gatherer societies (e.g. in Papua New Guinea), people who cannot regulate attention do not make good hunters.

To some extent, at least some of these beliefs stem from the observation that kids with ADHD do better in martial arts and similar activities. The key is “do better than what?” They do better than they would in more sedentary activities and better than they do in activities with less immediate feedback. Do they do better than kids without ADHD? Once we correct for athleticism, intelligence, etc, the answer is no. Everything that is seen as an advantage for kids with ADHD (e.g. rapid field shifting) is quite easily learnable with sufficient practice by people without ADHD, and those people without ADHD are also much more able to spend the time in routine, boring practice (granted, highly intelligent children and adults often have trouble with routine practice, but that’s not ADHD — that’s normal boredom with routine activities with distant payoffs. The best fix is to make the activity more interesting if at all possible).

Moving back to the question of leadership traits, your odds are better if you train people in effective leadership skills. If you really want to see how someone will be as a leader, put them in scenarios in which they can demonstrate leadership (if you don’t want to risk the farm, predictive scenario serious games are a good tool for leadership identification and development).

In the end, performance, not some mysterious set of traits, is your best method for identifying leaders.