The biggest challenge of modern managers – managing smart people

photo by GIHE

The last few weeks I have been interviewing for a job. I went to different firms and met different interviewers. As I am interviewing for a position in the middle of an organization, one that will demand the handling of a team, the discussion included questions around teamwork, leadership and management. Those are all things that I love talking about, as those of you who have been following this blog know very well. However, the interviews themselves, and my mental preparation for them, made me think about some of my beliefs, in an attempt to articulate them better.

I wrote here many times that I believe that a manager’s main challenge is helping his team excel, each person in a different way. I talked about the fact that I believe that the best way to manage is by outcome management and by resisting the temptation to give answers. I also talked about the humility that must be part of a manager’s attitude, and off course about MBWA.

But the more I think about it, the biggest challenge managers in modern organizations face today, one that encompasses most of the above challenges is that of managing smart people. Because in today’s environment a manager is not necessarily the best professional. These days are over. He no longer has the ultimate knowledge and the ability to understand all issues of the business, department , division or sometimes, even the team. The people he works with, most of the times know more about specific things then he does and have skills that he doesn’t.  And they are smart. Not only smart in terms of pure intelligence (IQ)  but smart in terms of emotional intelligence (EQ) and social intelligence (SQ).

Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite authors gave an amazing speech at the New Yorker conference labeled: “Genius: 2012″. In it, he  compares Michael Ventris, the decipherer of Linear B, with Andrew Wiles, the solver of Fermat’s Last Theorem and concludes:

“Modern problems require persistence more than they require genius and we ought to value quantity over quality when it comes to intelligence”.

One of his main claims in the speech is that 13 smart guys are better than one genius in dealing with modern problems. And this is the essence of what a manager needs to do. He needs to coordinate 13 smart guys to solve modern day problems. And those of you who worked with smart people, know how big a challenge it is.

The more our society advances the smarter people will get. They will get more specialized. Most problems today can’t be covered by one individual so each team members must know only part of the problem very well. And the manager needs to coordinate all of that. He needs to make sure that each team member has the ability to excel with his specific knowledge and skills; has to ability to use his strength for the good of the team; to create a synergy from the separate members of the team.

What do you think the biggest challenge of modern managers is?

Elad

The process of effectiveness

photo by grahambones

One the bloggers I follow regularly is the cartoonist Hugh MacLeod in his blog gapingvoid.  This week he wrote a post titled: “artists are entrepreneurs and marketers, too“. The subject of the connection between art and business is a subject he writes a lot about and I think this a worthy cause, as the two are not as different as we usually think. But what this post made me think about is something bigger, due to a comment on one of his other posts that he quoted in this post, which goes like this:

The thing about working as an artist is that you never realize how much of the work is on top of making the actual art. I was remembering how when I started out, I would visit the studios of more established artists and couldn’t begin to grasp how they ran the show. It’s taken years to slowly put each piece in place. Every day there’s new problems to solve, but if you can solve them in a way that sticks— so that from now on that issue is covered, eventually you come up with an efficient system for supporting the most important work you do, which is the art.

An artist is like every professional. He is very good at something. He has his strengths. But the problem is that he has to do so much work around that doesn’t use those strengths. It may be administrative. It may be marketing. Or it could be anything else. And every second he is not doing what he is good at is a waste of time, effort and a moment where we all miss on his art.

I am sure you felt it before. I know I have. Working as a law intern is all about wasting your time and doing things that are under your potential. Work that can be easily done by someone who did not study law for 4 years. And when somebody complains about it, the answer is usually something like: “this the way it has always been, it’s part of the territory”.

Well, it is not. Because great managers know that this is a conventional wisdom that must be ignored. Managers need to help each employee excel at his job. This means that they should do everything they can to make sure the employees use their strengths as much as they can. So a great manager will create a process that allows his professionals to concentrate as much of their time on what they do best. It just like the second phase according to theory of constraints:

“Decide how to exploit the constraint (make sure the constraint’s time is not wasted doing things that it should not do)”.

Employees being the constraints in the good sense of the word, of course. But the idea is still the same.

I believe it is all about the process. The way your business or team operates, should support the people in it and their strengths. You need to decide which employees are your priorities, your valuable assets, your constraints, and build the business around making sure they have the ability to employ their strength if not all the time, most of the time. The process should not only be effective by itself, it should support and make sure that the right people are effective.

Elad

Obliquity and management

Photo by Olibac

As part of a “Business Ethics” course I am taking at my AGSM MBA I came across this fascinating article by John Kay titled:  ”The role of business in society”. It deals with the long lasting debate surrounding the role of business – to make profits or to be a good corporate citizen. It is an interesting look at the debate and I think it makes some valid points, even though I think in its essence it does not contribute something very new to the discussion. However, one concept in the article made me reach a revelation, the principle of obliquity:

I call this paradox the principle of obliquity. It says that some objectives are best pursued indirectly… We are all familiar with one application of the principle of obliquity. While Americans, characteristically, talk of the pursuit of happiness, happiness is rarely best achieved when it is pursued. Research in social psychology confirms our intuition and experience. Happy people are not, in the main, those who selfishly promote their own interests: in fact happy people are most often characterized by a kind of uncalculating and outgoing generosity

In a later article, titled: “The oblique approach”, Kay writes the following things:

With maturity – personal or corporate – comes the principle of obliquity. Goals are often best achieved indirectly. Many people have noted the paradox that the most profitable companies are not necessarily the most profit oriented

It is so inspiring to read something that actually makes you feel: “wow”. And that is the way I felt when I was reading about this concept. So many times during my life I was told that the first thing we should do is concentrate on the goals and try to align ourselves with them. Why, I taught it myself a number of times. And it is true. And useful. And effective.

But not always. Because sometimes the best way to reach a goal is to reach it indirectly. We all know that sometime we are so obsessed with something that we hurt our chances of actually gaining it. When we let go, it somehow comes naturally. And I know it sounds very Hollywood-Movie like. But it actually happens.  

Think about it. When do you learn the most? When you are sitting in class actually trying to learn or when you are doing something and the learning comes as a side effect? Most people say that the most they learned it from the indirect learning – from other people, from doing, from watching – and not in formal courses. Or from failing. Could you imagine that? Those of us who learned how to drive know that the best teacher of driving is the road. Once you start driving, it actually teaches you about how to drive.

And this concept is so true in so many business settings. And it explains why many of the conventional wisdoms are just wrong! Would the manager help his flowers more by solving their problems or by letting them reach the answers by themselves? If you want to improve the performance of your team do you focus your managerial attention on your strongest people or on your weakest people? The answer to both of these questions is the indirect answer. Don’t give answers and the strongest people. or just think about Judo Strategy, and its claim that sometimes we don’t need to attack by pushing, but by pulling. Or by substituting effort for ability.

I am not saying that the answer to each and every problem is the indirect approach. But when we realize that the direct approach is not working, why not try to attack the challenges we face indirectly. It could be a powerful tool. After all, as Abraham Maslow said: “When your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail“.

Elad

Confusing leadership

Photo by db*photography

Earlier this week I had a job interview and one of the first questions I was asked was: “what do you think leadership is?”. Those of you who have been following my blog must be smiling, as you know this is a subject I write about a lot and feel comfortable talking about. So, although I did not get the job, I do feel that my answer to that question was very good: “leadership is about dealing with the future”.

I mentioned a number of times in this blog that I get frustrated by the fact that people confuse leadership with management. Though some people need to do both jobs, they are in fact very different jobs. Management is about the now. It is about helping the people around you excel. It is about support and making sure things happen. With leadership, the main thing is about dissipating fear of uncertainty and fear of change.  

Today I was reading this interesting post in Harvard Business Review Blog called “Decoding Leaders“. In it, the author Norm Smallwood, starts well by describing the inflation of leadership theories, books and names:

On Amazon, there are 480,881 books today that have to do with leaders as the topic. If you ask 30 leadership development experts to define leadership, you get 31 different answers. No wonder we’re confused.

So, how did they go and try to solve the confusion. By interviewing:

“…recognized experts in the field who had already spent years sifting through the evidence and asked two simple but elusive questions:

1. What percentage of effective leadership traits are basically the same?

2. If there are common rules that all leaders must master, what are they?”.

After all that, They came up with five rules to decode leadership.

I have a lot of respect for all of these experts that spend their lives dealing with leadership. But I don’t understand how a solution to the problem can be achieved by averaging the thoughts of many people, be their expertise as they may be. Can we really have an average of ideas? Could it be that the answer to what leadership lies in some kind of popularity contest? I find that hard to believe.

I think that first we need to decide what the big goal is. Then, we can start dispensing rules.

Why, just a few posts before, on the same blog, a post named “Humility as a leadership trait” can be found. This is off course a trait that could not be found on the five rules list. Not that I think humility is not important or should not be advocated. On the contrary. A little more humility could do great things for the world. But I am not sure this is a required trait for leadership. Actually, I think it is important for managers, whose main work is working with others and resisting the temptation of giving answers. And how do the authors think humility should be achieved. Here is one example:

Look to promote others. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman note in their seminal text, First, Break All the Rules, that a characteristic of successful managers is their ability to promote others, sometimes to positions higher than their own. Such managers are talent groomers, they are ones upon whose leadership success of the enterprise rests.

Is it only me? Wait – leaders? Managers? Future leaders? Grooming talent?

Are you confused? I know I am.

In the atmosphere of humility I must admit that I might be wrong. Maybe leadership is not about the future. But trying to solve the confusion by making an average of ideas will not help solve the confusion. Albert Einstein famously said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Let’s try to find a simpler definition for leadership.

Elad

Lessons on teamwork from “Mistborn”

Photo by Wikipedia

I mentioned in the past that I am a keen Epic Fantasy reader. I am constantly amazed by how accurately the authors of some of these books describe the complex concepts of leadership and management. I was reading the fascinating “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson and came across these few lines:

“All right, let’s talk. We’ve got something of a task ahead of ourselves, and the sooner we begin outlining a plan, the better”.

“I thought you had a plan,” Yeden said uncomfortably.

“I have a framework,” Kelsier said. “I know what needs to happen, and I have a few ideas on how to do it. But, you don’t gather a group like this and just tell them what to do. We need to work this out together, beginning with the list of problems we need to deal with if we want the plan to work”.

What are the lessons I see in these lines?

• Outcome management – this is a concept I wrote about a few times before. Good managers give a framework and desired outcomes and don’t tell their team how to do the work. The teammates usually know better.
• Respect your team – no matter who you are working with, they are people, they have abilities, ideas and personality. And they are unique. As one of my Professors once said: “there is no one person who is as smart as two people”. Trying to tell your teammates what to do, not only is disrespectful to them, it also kills good ideas.
• Transparency leads to cooperation – if people are a part of the process, they understand the big picture, their role in it and how it relates to the roles of others. It not only creates physiological buy in, but it also improves the efficiency of the process.

Elad

Widespread transparency

Photo by Arenamontanus

Everybody who ever worked in any kind of an organization has felt the same way. “What the hell are the guys up there thinking?”; “I do all the work down here and I am not sure how what I do relates to what the company does?”; “How do I make a difference?”.

Here is how Anthony Tjan from the Harvard business review blog describes it:

Here’s a test. Ask five to 20 of your employees to explain what your company’s customer value proposition is. How many different answers do you guess you’ll get? Answer: somewhere between five and 20. This is, of course, in addition to the response, “What the heck do you mean by a value proposition?”

When is the last time you thought about how much your team understands about what is your business and about what the team actually does? When I was in the Israeli Air-Force I headed training for new soldiers. I had a couple of new instructors working with me and before the course started we sat down to have a chat about what the new course is going to be like. I planned to have a short discussion of what we were generally trying to accomplish and then move on to the urgent administrative staff. But when we started the discussion I realized, after a few short questions, that was what obvious to me regarding the training, the way it is built and handled and its objectives, was not that clear to them. We ended up spending more than two hours just talking about the big pictures. After a few weeks on the job, one of my teammates came up to me and said: “you know, if we haven’t had that discussion, I would have handled a lot of my daily interactions totally differently. Thanks for that”.

I remember thinking after that about how things that are obvious to me as a manager of that team were not at all obvious to my teammates. Years later I was reminded of this story when I read about the “curse of knowledge” in the great book “made to stick”. The curse of knowledge basically means that we have problems explaining things because we already know them, which makes it hard for us to imagine how someone who does know what we know see it. This means we need to actively seek where our assumptions about the knowledge of other people are wrong.

However, I think that if we look at it from a broader managerial perceptive, it is about creating a culture of widespread transparency. It could be, as Anthony Tjan claims, that it will be about transparency in what is our value proposition It could be financial transparency that helps low level managers and employees make decision. And it could be leadership transparency. But all of these are part of the same mechanism of creating a widespread transparency. A way to engage our teammates, employees and followers and a way that allows them to make the right judgment calls and decisions. To implement strategy below the c-level strategy. In this complex but highly fast paced and fast communicated world, this kind of culture will have to be the norm.

So, what have you been doing to create a widespread transparent environment?

Elad

Intuitive Vs. Analytical

I was watching Mae Jemison’s TED talk today about the connection between science and art. In this interesting talk she explains why she thinks the perception of many people that science is analytical while art is intuitive is wrong. Actually, she claims, they are both a manifestation of the same idea. You can find analytical thinking in art and you can find intuitiveness in science.

That made me think. This debate is relevant to business as well. How should businesses be run? According to intuition or analysis? The answer, of course, is both.

In the last few weeks I have been preparing for interviews with management consulting firms. One thing you understand when you practice solving business cases and reading about how these firms operate, is that there is a tremendous importance to analysis. You are expected to be structured in the way you approach each problem, you are expected to think about all the problems while at the same time paying attention to the little details. But at the same time you see how important intuition in their work and thinking process is. You are also expected to hypothesize and prioritize. Go with your basic logic, gut feeling and intuition.

I heard many people in the past say: “I am a numbers guy” or “I am a big picture – go with my gut – kind of guy”. Hell, I said it myself a few times. And I think knowing what you are is an important part of success. At the same time, it is also important to understand that the fact that you have a certain point of view, a bias if you will, does not make the other way wrong. It means that we should actively try to seek out the other way.

It seems to me that success, in art, science or business, comes from integrating intuition and analysis. That is one of the reasons diverse teams have trouble working in the short term (they speak different languages – one of intuition while the other analysis) but in the long term, they tend to outperform homogeneous teams (which do not take the full picture).

Thus, if we are unable to use both (and most people will struggle doing it consistently) we need to complete our own biased point of view, with the opposite point of view. Or just remind ourselves to re-check the other point of view every once in a while.

So, how do you integrate both intuition and analysis in your everyday work?

Elad

A segment of one

Photo by Son Of Groucho

During the last week I heard the expression “a segment of one” a number of times. The idea is that with the tools of computerized customization many companies can actually understand the needs of each and every customer. For example, a company can send thousands of different emails to its customers, so each customer will get a personalized e-mail message. Sounds promising? It is. New technology creates an abundance of possibilities to do things that were once very hard to do. And I am sure that as time goes by, the ability to use it more effectively will enhance.

But, just because we can, does not immediately mean that we should!

Technology allows us to do many things today. It makes things that were once very hard, a lot easier. However that does not mean that we should do them. If it was not smart to do when it was hard, the fact that it is easy should not matter.

The “segment of one” example is a simple one. Segmentation is about going after the right customers. It takes into account the fact that there are some inherent tradeoffs because a company cannot be everything to everybody. The fact that we can understand all of our customers, does not mean we should try to satisfy all of them. Not all customers are born equal. Some are more important. Some are a liability more than an asset. Don’t invest time and money, even if it is a small amount of time and money, on these customers.

Don’t let the fact that there is a simple answer to the question: “how?” blind you from asking the question “why?”

Elad