It’s easy to put together a group of knowledgeable and skilled individuals, but a team of high performers is not the same as a high-performance team. Just think about the Olympic Basketball Dream Team of 1992, made up of top American players. While they certainly played great basketball, the team never performed at the level people expected, given the skills of the individual players. Transforming your group from a set of people who happen to be going in roughly the same direction into a high-performance team isn’t always easy, but the results are always worthwhile:
Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting down to your Thanksgiving dinner when suddenly the roof of your house swings back and you find yourself looking up into something huge and incomprehensible: the eye of a hurricane perhaps, which I suspect is a lot less comprehensible close up than it is on TV.
I was unexpectedly encouraged to think about this today when I went out this morning to start smoking the Thanksgiving turkey. I flipped open the top of my grill and what should I find inside but a mouse nest. Needless to say, the mice were not at all thrilled at having the roof of their house flipped up, but I’m guessing that these mice thought they were getting a pretty good deal on the place and didn’t imagine that their house came with a detachable roof. Let’s not even talk about the central heating…
To make a long story very short, the mice booked out of there and we cleaned out the grill. Half an hour at 500+ degrees did the rest. I figure that any bacteria that can survive that treatment is going to take over the world anyway so I’m not going to worry about it.
Meanwhile, back to the mice. Much to the annoyance of our cats, who sat at the window watching, we let the mice scurry off. Their odds of survival are pretty good, even if their next home is likely to be a real hole in the ground.
Someone recently told me that he was former biology teacher and thus believed strongly in the survival of the fittest. The mice got me thinking: what does that mean? Drop a human in the forest at the end of November and their odds of survival aren’t all that good. The mice, though, will do just fine. Who is more fit to survive, the mouse or the human? Granted, the mice aren’t likely to find any other mice that will take them in or help them, but mice are individualists. They won’t even remember being a family before too long. They’ll survive, or they won’t, on their own.
One untrained person alone in the forest is in trouble. Put several people together, though, and their odds suddenly get much better assuming they can cooperate. Granted, that can be a big assumption sometimes, but it’s vital if you want to survive in the forest or in business.
I once read the statement that, “Teamwork was invented by the weak in order to beat the strong.” I’ve also heard some form of that argument put forth many times, usually by the person who is trying to make sure that no one can compete with him. Let’s face it, the biggest, strongest person has a vested interest in convincing everyone else not to form a team. The fastest, most skillful programmer might well see a real short-term benefit in a fractious and divisive team. In the short-term, there is a real benefit for some in keeping people divided: remember, it’s “divide, then conquer.” The results for the business, though, of such a dynamic may not be quite so good.
Over the long term, being able to work as part of a team confers a distinct advantage on the entire group. Members of the group can support one another, assist one another, and watch out for one another. New members can be taught the skills and accumulated knowledge of the group, so that they don’t spend their time reinventing the wheel. Over time, a cohesive group can outperform any individual or collection of individuals.
Mice don’t form teams. They don’t even have the concept. When disaster strikes, they’re on their own. They don’t help one another. They think only about themselves.
People are capable of forming teams, forming what Ed Schein calls “networks of mutual helping.” We don’t always manage it, but we’re stronger when we do. Whether we’re talking about business challenges or about responding to the next Katrina, our ability to form teams is our greatest advantage if we choose to use it, if we choose to reach out and help others and let others help us.
So here’s my Thanksgiving question: are you a man or a mouse?
I was interviewed recently on Youth Sport Psychology Radio on how to succeed by imagining success. You can listen to it here:
“We need to take our time and carefully evaluate the situation.”
“We don’t have a lot of time and we need to move forward.”
Both of these statements were made about the same project by different sets of people. The first was made by a representative of a large company, the second by a representative of a much smaller company with which the larger company was working. The folks from the large company wanted to plan everything out to the last detail, avoid any possible errors, guarantee a perfect product, and not move forward until success was assured. The members of the smaller company, not having the financial resources of the larger company and being more personally invested, wanted to get the project started.
In any project, it’s important to evaluate the situation and determine the best way to move forward. However, in any non-trivial project, it’s impossible at the beginning to foresee every eventuality. When leaving on a trip, one attempts to plan for various contingencies such as traffic, weather, flight delays, and so forth; however, some things cannot be predicted either because they are too far off to see clearly or because changing conditions make long-term prediction unreliable. On the other hand, it’s foolish to set forth on a journey without making some effort to predict the possible pitfalls and plan for how to deal with them.
There’s an old saying that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” While true, how, and when, the battle plan fails can provide valuable information about what is going wrong and how to fix it. That’s assuming, of course, that the plan is designed correctly in the first place.
When planning a project, be it a battle, software development, a sales campaign, or just about anything else, the first step is always to understand how you’ll know when you’re at your destination. If you don’t know what success looks like in terms of the results you expect to achieve, it’s all too easy to take the wrong turn. Once you know what success is, only then can you identify what failure looks like.
Of course, success or failure is still a long way off. That means that your descriptions will, of necessity, be more or less vague. In order to sharpen your focus, you need to identify several stopping points between where you are now and where you want to end up. When doing this exercise, it often helps to work backward from the end point. Those stopping points become your initial milestones and should be sharper the closer they are to your starting point. A secondary goal of your milestones is to identify resources and dependencies and make sure they will be available or met at appropriate times.
For each milestone you must once again repeat the process of understanding where you are and how you’ll know if you didn’t get there. Your goal is not to avoid all possible errors, but to make sure you can identify errors as quickly as possible and be willing to cut your losses before you’ve invested too many resources down a non-functional path. When you’re uncertain which way to go, it often helps to explore several possibilities simultaneously. Some will be wrong, but if you cut your losses well, then you can save a great deal of time and may develop some novel or unexpected solutions. Walt Disney liked to have a dozen movies in production at once: he knew that half of them would flop, just not which half.
Once you have your milestones, you can get started. At each milestone, you need to evaluate your progress and adjust as necessary. What worked and what did not? Have unexpected problems cropped up? Are their external dependencies that may become a problem? It’s not about fixing blame but about understanding how to best allocate your resources and move forward. Mistakes are part of the game and initial guesses about how difficult tasks are or how long they might take are often wrong.
Once you’ve done all that, you’re still not ready to move forward to the next milestone. It’s important to take a little time and see what you’ve learned about your upcoming milestones. Have they come into sharper focus? Do they need to change? Have you discovered new dependencies that need to be taken into account or are there old dependencies that are no longer relevant?
While this may seem like a lot of work, with a little practice it becomes surprisingly easy. Once you understand your route and know how you’ll adjust it as necessary, cutting loose the anchors and moving forward is remarkably simple and even relaxing. You’ll reach your destination faster than if you rush forward without considering or planning for potential obstacles and much faster than if you never start.
We like to think of ourselves as highly rational beings, but the fact is we’re just not that good at being rational.The recent Star Trek movie demonstrated the normally imperturbable Mr. Spock making foolish decisions based on emotional reactions. Later in the movie, Spock’s reasoned, logical approach is less than sufficient to rally the crew. Certainly they follow him, because he is the legitimate commander at that moment — but they are not excited. When Kirk takes command, however, it is another story. Kirk engages them on an emotional level, a level deeper and considerably more powerful than logic.
I hear all the time about how there is no room for emotions in the workplace.Yet, the companies where I’ve seen this implemented are about as unemotional as Mr. Spock: in other words, they put on a good front. Under pressure, though, they are as emotional as anyone else. I still remember, from early in my consulting career, the manager of a team screaming at me that he did not allow emotions to influence his behavior. For some odd reason, the irony of the moment was lost on him.
There is an old and hoary claim that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will sit there until it cooks. In fact, this happens only if the frog is equipped with little frog cement galoshes rendering it unable to jump: frogs are too smart to be boiled alive. They leave long before the water gets hot enough to cook them. Why, then, does this story have such longevity?
“Over there,” says the man, pointing into the inky darkness
down the street.
“Then why aren’t you looking there?” responds the passerby
in amazement.
“The light’s better here.”
Although ludicrous, like many jokes its humor comes, as it were,
from the light it sheds on an important aspect of human behavior.
Given the choice between poking around blindly in the dark or
looking in the light, most people will choose the latter.
I can already hear the cries of, “But wait a second! That’s
nonsense. Why would anyone in their right mind deliberately look
where they know the keys are not?”
Why indeed? The fact is, we already have our answer: “the light’s
better.” The real question is what does that actually mean?
When working with businesses, I frequently encounter teams
There’s an old joke about a man searching in the gutter under a streetlight. A passerby asks him what he’s doing.
“Looking for my car keys,” replies the man.
“Where did you drop them?” asks the passerby.
“Over there,” says the man, pointing into the inky darkness down the street.
“Then why aren’t you looking there?” responds the passerby in amazement.
“The light’s better here.”
Although ludicrous, like many jokes its humor comes, as it were, from the light it sheds on an important aspect of human behavior. Given the choice between poking around blindly in the dark or looking in the light, most people will choose the latter.
I can already hear the cries of, “But wait a second! That’s nonsense. Why would anyone in their right mind deliberately look where they know the keys are not?”
Why indeed? The fact is, we already have our answer: “the light’s better.” The real question is what does that actually mean?
I recently had the CEO of a certain business very proudly tell me that she was so busy looking for clients and helping her staff deal with the economic crisis that she didn’t even have time to sleep. Was she serious? Yes, she was. Were things actually working out for the business? That was less clear, however it didn’t matter. They were Taking Action, and that’s what really counted.
When we’re feeling stressed, the instinctive response is to take action. Taking action feels good; it provides an outlet for our energy and a feeling of accomplishment. It just may not actually be useful. Sometimes it really is better to follow the advice of the old joke, “don’t just do something, stand there!” After all, if you take the wrong action too frequently, you may well find yourself without the time, money, or energy to take the right actions.
Now, it’s certainly true that sometimes the toughest problem is just to get started. It’s sometimes the case that taking some action is better than taking no action at all. However, it does help if the actions being taken are those that have at least some chance of moving the business forward. It helps even more if the CEO can clearly evaluate the success or failure of each action and adjust course as necessary. That’s hard to do when you aren’t sleeping.
A lack of sleep leads to more than just a desire for an extra cup, or ten, of coffee. There is a reason why athletes want a good night’s sleep before a big game and why legendary investor Jesse Livermore stated that one his secrets of success on the stock market was being well rested. Lack of sleep interferes with motivation, judgment, and planning. It makes one more reactive, less able to stop and look before leaping. Worst of all, lack of sleep very quickly degrades a CEO’s ability to recognize a losing strategy and replace it with one that might work.
As anyone who has taken a first aid class recently will recall, the first thing you need to do in an emergency is evaluate the situation. That’s difficult to do when sleepy. Part of that evaluation involves determining how quickly you need to act. Even if there’s a wall of flame rushing toward you, a few seconds of thought can still make the difference between life and death: caught in a massive forest fire, firefighter Wagner Dodge stopped and thought. He survived the fire while those around him were engulfed. Wagner Dodge had only seconds to come up with an innovative solution to his problem. The good news: he did. The bad news: he had never developed strong bonds of trust and loyalty with his team. Under pressure, they ignored him and perished in the flames.
Today, many businesses are still facing the financial equivalent of that wall of flames. Instead of stopping and thinking, they are leaping into action. In many cases, those actions are not working out so well. The CEO who isn’t sleeping isn’t helping her company or herself. She is, however, giving herself the opportunity to undermine her own credibility with her staff. The longer that goes on, the more likely they’ll give up on her at just the wrong moment.
So what should a CEO do?
Build up a reservoir of trust and reinforce it daily. Help employees understand your decisions. Invite employee feedback, ideas, and suggestions.
Build and maintain loyalty: this is the worst time to cut employee benefits or have an opaque layoff policy. As demonstrated by IBM’s Tom Watson or HP’s Hewlett and Packard, building employee loyalty makes a tremendous difference in tough times. Without it, they won’t follow you when you most need them.
Don’t just react to the crisis. Stop and think. Brainstorm solutions with others. Find someone who will give you unbiased feedback. Take full advantage of the eyes, ears, and brains around you.
Take care of yourself. Exercise and sleep are critical to maintaining perspective and functioning effectively under pressure. Despite the failing equipment around them, even the Apollo 13 astronauts took the time to sleep before attempting their return to Earth.
Anticipate success. Never pass uncertainty down to your team members.
Many companies will survive the current economic tsunami. Fewer will prosper as the economy turns around. It will be those who know when to stand there before they act who will be in the second group.
Yesterday, I wrote a post and also posted on Facebook a link to the NYT article about a six year old cub scout being suspended for 45 days because he brought a “weapon” to school: a combination spoon, fork, and knife. The presence of this obviously deadly weapon triggered the school’s Zero Tolerance policy. One of the responses to my post was rather interesting:
“Steve, this issue isn’t really about what’s ethically/morally correct when you’re in the school “trenches”.”
The poster explained that these policies exist to protect the school against lawsuits for discrimination, and added, “sometimes pragmatism gets the nod over the idealism we’d prefer.”
First of all, this is a textbook example of the process of moral disengagement: in other words, people justify unreasonable or unethical behavior by saying that it’s necessary to protect themselves or others. In this case, the argument is that, “We have to do this to protect ourselves from lawsuits.”
But I also have to wonder just how seriously a district takes ethical and moral behavior when the attitude is that ethics can be disposed of if they’re not convenient. In what other areas will they cut corners?
On a deeper level, what I see here is an organization that has forgotten what its mission is. Schools need to educate in a safe, supportive environment. Zero Tolerance doesn’t do that on several levels.
The American Psychological Association, the Department of Education, and the US Secret Service (!) have all found that ZT policies do not improve student safety. ZT is nothing more than a CYA for administrators who want to look like they’re doing something. While they are focusing on imaginary threats, they are not dealing with the real threats, the ones that the Secret Service (for example) found actually do turn into real violence. They are also creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear.
Indeed, the very idea that a well-behaved six year old can be sent to reform school for 45 days for an innocent, childish mistake is profoundly unsettling. How can one possibly feel safe in an environment when having a pocket knife dropped in your lap is grounds for expulsion? No, I’m not exaggerating. That’s happened too: ZT says that if it’s in your lap, it’s yours. How can parents trust a school district when they know that the school is perfectly willing to do serious psychological damage to their children in the name of Zero Tolerance? Let’s face it, sending a well-behaved child to reform school for a quarter of the school year is going to be psychologically and probably physically traumatic.
For a business to work well, it needs to build a sense of autonomy and competence amongst its employees. ZT destroys that. It turns administrators and teachers into robots and creates an atmosphere of fear. When you create an atmosphere of fear, people look for threats and they look for people to strike out against in order to reduce their fear. The schools are striking out against the students, and the parents naturally look for ways to strike back against the schools.
In a for-profit business, you’d see increasing amounts of fighting between teams and within teams. A for-profit business would be in serious danger of going under just from the deterioration of its products and services. Something to think about.
And, by the way, the last thing we need children learning is that ethics should be disposed of whenever they are “not pragmatic.”
I believe it was Dilbert (or more likely Dogbert) who commented that “stupidity is like radiation. You don’t want to get it on your clothes.”
When writing games, we used to joke about the cosmic stupid ray problem: the tendency of inexperienced writers to create a story in which people acted in ways that simply could not be explained by any other means. Unfortunately, it seems that cosmic stupid rays are not a product of the imagination, as I can’t really find any other explanation for this article from the NY Times:
The article tells the story of a six year old who was suspended and sent to reform school for 45 days because he brought a Spork to school. A spork is one of those all-in-one utensils. The kid received it at that bastion of violence, the Cub Scouts. As we all know, Cub Scouts are trained to use sporks as deadly weapons in order to take down entire armies equipped with modern weaponry. However, a Cub Scout with a spork (or lightspork, as they are known to cognoscenti, due to the fact that they are almost always made from plastic) can bat bullets from the air with the tines, and catch missiles in the spoon bowl and fling them back. As for the knife edge, best not to think about that, but let me just say that if you happen to be made of soft butter, you’re in trouble.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made the point.
What is even more amazing in the article is the argument by school officials that they must have ZT because otherwise they might make unfair or discriminatory decisions. Instead, they will guarantee that they will make unfair and stupid decisions.
If you’re worried that your employees will not make good decisions, the answer is not to take away all decision making power, and hence all requirement to actually *think*, but to train people in sensible decision making.
In typical bad management fashion that is fully worthy of Dilbert, the response from the president of school board was this: “There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife,” said George Evans, the president of the Christina district’s school board.
This is known as a straw man argument and is being used only to scare people. Rather than attempt to lead, the incompetent manager seeks to coerce obedience through fear: “You can’t question us because something terrible will happen.”
They are right: something terrible might happen if ZT goes away. School officials might have to learn to think, to do their jobs competently instead of copping out, and the ones who can’t might just get the boot.
Here’s one that was just published by the CEO Refresher.
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, routinely features tales of bumbling managers. The popularity of Dilbert, and the degree to which it resonates with people, are a testament to his accuracy; indeed, Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss has become an iconic figure. Dilbert aside, however, I have observed that very few leaders intentionally act like the pointy-haired boss depicted in the comic strip. Rather, they engage in pointy-haired behaviors without realizing the effect they are having on the organization as whole. Let’s explore some examples of such behaviors and their unintended consequences.
1. Pointy-haired bosses break their own rules and figure either no one will notice or no one will mind because they are in charge. In one company, the CEO called everyone together to talk about the importance of really working hard and putting personal needs to one side in order to ship a product. At the end of the talk, he announced he was leaving for a two week vacation in Hawaii and wished everyone good luck. This did not go over well. One vice-president, who had apparently not been warned, almost choked on his coffee. When the CEO came back, two people had quit and the rest were up in arms.
2. The pointy-haired boss believes that he is separate from the group he leads. In fact, leaders are also group members, with a very important and well-defined role. Through their actions, leaders set the norms for their group. For example, the manager of a team at a large software company imposed a $.25 penalty for being late to meetings. When he was subsequently late himself, the team gleefully demanded he pay up. After a brief stunned moment, he tossed a quarter into the pot. No one complained about the fine after that. What the leader does is directly mirrored in the organization. When leaders find that employees are not living up to the standards of the organization, they often need to look in a mirror and see what example they are setting.
3. Pointy-haired bosses fail to recognize the culture they are creating. To be fair, it’s hard to see your own culture from the inside, and despite what many managers and CEOs believe, culture is formed not from what you say but from what you do. As MIT’s Ed Schein observes, “Culture is the residue of success: success in dealing with external challenges and success in internal advancement.” What behaviors are successful in the organization? What behaviors are rewarded? The very behaviors that people tell me they want to change are frequently the ones they are encouraging.
4. Pointy-haired bosses lack an understanding of group/team dynamics. They like to say that their organization is “different,” and the research on group dynamics doesn’t apply. That’s like the people in early 2000 who said about the stock market that “This time, it’s different.” If you’re dealing with people, patterns repeat. It pays to recognize the patterns and understand how they are manifesting in your specific situation.
5. Pointy-haired bosses are often unable or unwilling to create a clear, compelling vision for their organization that gets everyone involved and excited. The best way to attract and retain top talent is to make people care about what the company is doing. That’s best done through painting a vivid picture of the outcome and creating clear goals.
6. Pointy-haired bosses motivate through short-term rewards and/or intimidation. They assume they know what their employees want, rather than taking the time to ask or to observe how people are responding. Short-term rewards and intimidation generate short-term spikes in performance, but build neither loyalty nor the desire to go the extra mile. Unfortunately, far too many people are willing to sacrifice the longer-term performance of their team for a short-term gain. In one company, the head of engineering “motivated” employees by inviting them to join him for happy hour in a bar on Friday nights. Had he asked, he would have realized that what the team wanted on Friday nights was to go home and have dinner with their families. Instead of motivating the team, he made them feel imposed upon.
Finally,
7. Pointy-haired bosses do not believe in asking for or accepting help. It’s not about asking for help, it’s about investing time and money to enable the company to accomplish its goals. The boss’s time is a resource; skilled leaders invest their time and the time and money of their business where that will produce the best return. Sometimes the best return is obtained by investing in an employee, sometimes by investing in a contractor.
Very few leaders deliberately engage in these Pointy-haired boss behaviors. Rather, their behaviors are the result of their own corporate success story. Therefore, for all that even one or two Pointy-haired boss behaviors can derail an organization, behaviors acknowledged to be counter-productive are very difficult to eradicate. Nevertheless, the ability of a manager or CEO to recognize these failings and invest in changing themselves is the true test of great leadership.
Stephen R. Balzac, "The Business Sensei," is a consultant and professional speaker. He is the president of 7 Steps Ahead, LLC, a consulting firm helping businesses get unstuck and transform problems into opportunities.
