Learned Helplessness and Managerial Uncertainty

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This post is the fifth (and last) post in a series of posts I am writing on lessons about managing people from the book Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely (for more post in the series, see 1, 2, 3, 4).

In the additions to the 2nd edition Ariely added a chapter called Thoughts about the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and Its Consequences. In it he writes this:

All creatures (including humans) respond negatively in situations where things don’t seem to make sense. When the world gives us unpredictable punishments without rhyme or reason, and when we don’t have any explanation for what is happening, we become prone to something psychologists call “learned helplessness.”

Let’s think about a business environment. In your office or in your team, how much uncertainty is present? And no, I am not talking about general uncertainty which is a part of every business. I am talking about managerial uncertainty. It is a kind of uncertainty that revolves around what behaviors are expected and what will be the rewards or punishments to them. It is uncertainty about how decisions that affect people are being made.

Just think about all the times that your manager waited until the last moment to give his team the news. The last time there were rumors in the office about what is going to happen. The last time you knew something is going on, but did not understand what is going on. The last time you got a decision dictated to you without understanding why.

I wrote here a number of times that I think a leader’s job is to take care of the future. To try and dissipate the natural fear that is part of the uncertainty the future holds. But managers have to deal with uncertainty as well.

In investment theory there is a term called systematic risk. This term defines the risks of the entire market. This is differentiated from the unsystematic risk which is specific for a company or industry. What is the difference between them? You can take care of the unsystematic risk with diversification, while you cannot care of the systematic risk.

A manager cannot take care of the systematic risk. The future. It is a leader’s job. It is the leadership uncertainty. A manager is in charge with the present. And he needs to take care of the risks associated with it. Take care of managerial uncertainty.

So, how do you take care of managerial uncertainty of the present? One word. Transparency.

As managers we need to make sure that our employees do not get to a state of learned helplessness. That they understand the connection between cause and effect in the workplace. That they understand how decisions are being made. That they understand the process of management. In the legal field there is term called Procedural Justice:

The notion that fair procedures are the best guarantee for fair outcomes is a popular one. Procedural justice is concerned with making and implementing decisions according to fair processes. People feel affirmed if the procedures that are adopted treat them with respect and dignity, making it easier to accept even outcomes they do not like.

When people understand the system and the system works “the way it is supposed to”, they don’t have to live in a state of uncertainty, even if the result itself is uncertain. They don’t have negative reactions and they don’t go into a state of learned helplessness. It is time we put some transparency to work in order to deal with the managerial uncertainty.

Elad

Confusing leadership

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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”

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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. They 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 Professor once said: “there is no one person who is as smart as two people”. Trying to tell your teammates what to do, not only disrespect 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

Re-thinking tradeoffs

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During the last few weeks, as part of our AGSM MBA integrative experience, we participated in a simulation with a software called Markstrat. The simulation allowed us to run companies in teams as part of a competitive environment, making decisions about operations, marketing, strategy and more. In the end of the two weeks experience we each had to write a short essay about what we learned from the experience.  Here is a short part of what I handed in:

As future managers we should be aware of that and think carefully about the implications each decision has on our cognitive resources. Attention and time are the scarcest resources a manager can allocate, even more then money. Thus, they should be considered in a decision like any other scarce resource.

This relates to an idea I have been writing and thinking about a lot lately. Tradeoffs. I think as human beings we have the immediate tendency to want everything. To try and be everything. To try and be the best at everything. Maybe instead we should focus our attention on being the best at something. Just one thing that will make us stand out. Not because being good at everything is bad. It is because it is so hard to achieve all at once. Because success is so many times the result of tradeoffs. Of actively deciding not to be good at something, because we put all our resources on something else.

Maybe, in our multi-tasking world, we need to re-learn what our forefathers, the hunters, knew how to do so good – focus on one thing. Become your prey. Follow it enough and you will understand it, start to think like it and finally hunt it.

I was reminded of this concept yesterday while I was reading Seth Godin’s post: “Spare no expense!“. Godin, makes the same point about tradeoffs in a different setting. The resources companies put into making one customer happy. A short excerpt:

The reason we get trapped by (c) is that, “I’m doing the best I can” is always much easier than, “we need to be disciplined and help more people, even if that means that some special cases will fall through the cracks. The internet makes this even more difficult because people who fall through the cracks are able to amplify their complaints ever louder.

The way around it, I think, is to set expectations early and often. If you’re going to give me your phone number, you better answer it. If you’re going to offer a warranty, you better honor it. If you position yourself as a company with real people eager to make every single person happy–you better deliver.

No matter what, you should decide. In advance. How much do you want to spend on ad hoc emergencies, how much do you want to reserve on design and helping the masses improve their experience?

The hard part is making the decision and sticking to it. We see many companies saying things like – “we put our people first” – but when it comes to making the actual choice, the actual tradeoffs, they don’t. It is not only about not fulfilling your promises; it is about not making the right tradeoffs even though you decided to make them.

So, what are your actively chosen tradeoffs? And what do you to keep them?

Elad

The fallacy of the all knowing General-Leader

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I think it is already a commonplace knowledge that leadership is about managing change. It is about the future and people’s fear of the uncertainties the future holds. It is about painting a clear picture of what the future would look like and articulating what it would feel and why it is a worthwhile journey to take.

This process is difficult. Difficult for the followers as people, generally, prefer the devil they know on the devil they don’t. Change also means work. It sometimes means, like president Obama said a while back, that things will get worse before they get better. People don’t want things to get worse for an unknown future of better. It is to flimsy of a concept. These difficulties lead to a reluctance to change. Leads to push-backs. And sometimes leads to total opposition.

This week, as part of our adaptive leadership workshop one of our instructors pointed us to the fact that many of the names that pop to mind when we think about leadership like Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi and even Jesus (and my own Israeli Example, Yitzhak Rabin) are people who were killed when they tried to bring on change.

Probably these people are extreme examples and the next change initiative you will lead in your company will not result in your murder, but still it is a valuable example to the difficulties we face when we bring a message of change. We need to consider the feelings of the people standing in front of us when we try to lead a change initiative and understand their actions in light of these feelings.

That is why the ability to articulate a vision and communicate it clearly is so important. The less uncertainly people will feel about the future, the clearer it will seem to them, the less afraid they will be and the less they will be prone to actions of resistance.

But an important thing leaders tend to forget it that having a clear vision of the future and painting the picture of the future does not make it a reality. It does not make something unbreakable. The future, like the future, will always remain uncertain and unknown. The only thing we can be sure about is that it will come. Even the best leaders make mistakes when they try to predict it. So, the process of communicating should a two way street. Not only is the leader’s job to articulate it, it is his job to dive into the uncertainties of the people. To try and understand them. And if needed, accommodated them into his vision.

When you think, learn or read about leadership and especially when you discuss it, there is always a tendency to resort to military examples. So many leadership quotes are taken from generals. Many analogies have been made between leadership the work of a general. I think it is about time we abandon this leader as a commander type of thinking. In the battle field, the general is the final word. In real life, and especially in business, it is not a sustainable practice. There is too much wisdom to gain from people who “oppose” you. The days of leading a group of “yes men” or of a leader that knows more than the rest are over. Today, the chances you will know more or better than your employees are slim. You might blame the Gen Y; you might blame the internet; I think it is just commonsense and it should have always been like that.

The fallacy of the all knowing General-Leader could lead to disastrous results. We are probably living an example of that these days. Change is not only hard for the followers. It is also hard for the leader. It is time to incorporate transparency and vulnerability into our leadership instead of complete obedience and self-confidence.

Elad

Getting down from the ladder

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Our integrative experience in the AGSM MBA this week included a big chapter on adaptive leadership. One of the concepts that were mentioned time and time again was that of rank. How we perceive our and other people’s rank and what effect it has on our assumptions and behaviours.

One sentence that one of our facilitators mentioned (he actually quoted someone else, whose name I don’t remember) struck me as especially interesting. He was talking about rank in organizations and about people “going up the ladder”, being promoted. Then he said:

“When we go up the ladder, we look down and see a lot of shiny happy faces. When they look up, they see…”

Well, he did not finish, so I don’t feel I need to. But that reminded me of the “Toxic Tandem“. People in positions of power tend to be oblivious to the needs and actions of the people who have less power than them. Or in other words, as we described it in class: “managers are usually blind to their rank”. As a manager, it is easy to forget that you are there on the ladder. That means that the focus of all eyes is on you. And it also means that you are in a different position than everybody else is. Which means it is harder for you to understand them.

Too many managers get to a management position and continue to do what they always did. Their work. Which is good, but not great. The problem is that now their work is being a manager. And that is a totally different job. A job you cannot do without leaving your desk. With our being active about it. without a little, MBWA.

So, the fact that you went up the ladder does not mean you have to stay there all the time. From time to time, you can climb down from the ladder and let the people see your happy shiny face, instead of your…

Elad

Resisting the temptation to give answers

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There are lessons you learn and that you need to be constantly reminded of. A few months ago, I wrote this:

The conventional wisdom that a manager needs to say to its employees how to do their work is already intertwined into people’s expectations. Just the same way people think that there is one best way to write a speech, give a presentation, use notes or get the audience attention, while there isn’t, people expect their manager to tell them how to do their work.

Today, in class, as a part of a workshop dealing with adaptive leadership, we read an article by Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie, which had this sentence in it:

We all – superiors and subordinates alike – have to change our expectations for dispensing and receiving definitive answers.

As someone who used to spend a lot of time teaching, I know how big the temptation is. Someone asks a question. You know the answer. Actually, you know three times what is needed to give the answer. And you are tempted to immediately give that answer. The problem is, if you want a good process of teaching, you should (in many cases) divert the question back to asker or to the entire class and creates a process of self learning.

Management (or as many people call it, leadership, but I won’t go there in this post) is exactly the same. Your employee comes to you with a problem. He expects you to solve it for him, to tell him what to do. That is the conventional wisdom. But, that is exactly what you should not do in most cases. The famous creed: “don’t give a hungry man a fish, teach him how to fish” is right and not implemented enough. We need to resist the temptation and try to give solution and answers and move to letting people find their own ways. So they will be able to do the job when you are not there. Tell him what the desired outcome is and let him find the solution. Give him the support and help, but not the solution. Resist the temptation.

So, are you able to resist the temptation?

Elad

Which do your prefer – happiness or trust?

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Today in our marketing class we talked about customer’s happiness and trust. If you create a simple 2 by 2 matrix you can allocate your customers to 4 groups. Then you need to think about how you treat each group and what the reasons for the existence and size of each group are.

And that got me thinking about transferring the same kind of measurement and thinking process to other arenas. Let’s think about politics. If you are a president or a prime minster, what is more important – that the citizens trust you or that they are happy with what you are doing? Or think about being a manager – do you want your employees to trust you or do you want them to be happy?

I know that trust and happiness are interrelated. I also know that the definitions are not completely clear. But life (and leadership and management) is about making decisions in a scarce and uncertain environment. And when your resources are limited you are faced with the choice of what to concertante on.

If I was a marketer, I think I will concentrate mainly on happiness. But as a leader and a manager of people, I would go with trust every time. In the marketplace of the consumers – happiness will generally lead to trust. In the leadership sense, happiness is important – but doing the right things and making the right decisions is a way that will lead to trust, is even more important. The trust will lead to happiness.

Leaders and managers need to make tough choices even though their followers will not always like it. In a book I am currently reading called: “The last argument of kings” one of the characters uses the phrase: “One cannot be a great leader without a certain … Ruthlessness”. I believe this is true. First create trust in your vision, in your cause, in your decision making. First create respect. Happiness will come.

What do you think is more important? Happiness or trust?

Elad

Who is to blame?

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The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem. Theodore Rubin

Yesterday I was reading an excerpt from the book “What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen”, published at Knowledge@Wharton. In it, the writer Michael A. Roberto advocates that a big part of leadership is about preventing problems before they occur.  The book starts with an example from the engineering world. This is how it is recapped:

These two stories provide a stark contrast in the handling of information suggesting that a potential problem exists. The managers in the Kansas City hotel case dismissed the concerns of others and reaffirmed their belief in prior judgments by experts. Who were these construction workers to suggest that engineering experts might have made an error? William LeMessurier approached his situation with far more intellectual curiosity. Intrigued by the questions posed by a young engineering student far less knowledgeable than he, LeMessurier chose to perform additional analysis. In time, he began to question his earlier assumptions and judgments. He chose to pursue his concerns and obtain the perspective of unbiased experts. LeMessurier represents the quintessential problem-finder. He did not simply assume that his expert judgments were correct. When he detected trouble, he dug deeper. He wanted to understand the nature of the potential problem. He did not seek to assign blame to others, nor did he let the possibility of a disturbing answer suppress his investigation. LeMessurier clearly approached his situation with a very different mindset than the people involved in the Kansas City hotel tragedy.

This passage immediately reminded me of what I wrote about in this blog yesterday – the “Toxic Tandem“. People in positions of power tend to be oblivious to the needs and actions of the people who have less power than them. Look at the bolded sentence in the quoted paragraph. “These construction workers” are the people who actually do the job. They are the people who walk the walk every day. They might be wrong, but ignoring them is not only dangerous, it is just bad management. But more importantly, you need to go out and seek them out. To hear them. To listen to what they are saying. Because they don’t always come to you. In yesterdays post I emphasized this from managers’ perspective. Because people are the managers’ job. This excerpt actually gives a different reasoning: “You do not discover problems by sitting in your office waiting for the bad news to arrive at your door”.

The second paragraph that appealed to me was dealt with assigning blame:

Successful problem-finders not only exhibit a curious mindset, but they also embrace systemic thinking. They recognize that small problems often do not occur due to the negligence or misconduct of an individual. Instead, small errors frequently serve as indicators of broader systemic issues in the organization. Effective problem-­finders do not rush to find fault and assign blame when they spot a mistake being made. They step back and question why that error occurred. They ask whether more fundamental organizational problems have created the conditions that make that small error more likely to occur.

In Hebrew we have a term called “תחקיר” (Thachkir). The official translation into English is the word “debrief”, but this word means other things as well. In Hebrew it only stands for a discussion of an event after it occurred. The Israeli Air-force is known around the world for its implementation of after the event debriefing. I actually used to teach about it while I was serving in the Air-force. The main idea is that the recipient of this debriefing is the system and that blame is not part of the process. The blame is part of a different process. This is done in order to eliminate the fear of the consequences. You try to understand what happened, why, and how to prevent it, without asking who is responsible for what happened on a personal or organizational level (“the marketing department”). In the Israeli Air-force this is done regularly after every event, accident, exercise, etc. This is something I think should be, in some senses, better implemented in the business world. Stoping and thinking about why things happened without questioning the specifics of this case and who is to blame but by thinking about the process and the future. About the bigger fundamental organizational problems. This is hard to do in the day to day mess we are handling. But doing so, helps prevent problems instead of solving problems.

Elad

How does a Judo Fighter act at home?

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 This week’s strategy class dealt with competition and the question of how to approach it. We discussed different methods, most prominent of them being Judo Strategy. This theory takes the ideas of Judo (momentum, balance, leverage) and applies them to the strategic business world. The analogy is very intuitive and I think it really helps in understanding how companies should approach competition (from both directions).

But as I was sitting in class thinking about this, it occurred to me, that this theory creates a frame of competition. If you are a manager, and you spend most of your day thinking about your competition in terms of battles, Judo and so forth, what happens to you when you start thinking about your employees? What is the frame of mind you approach when you try to think about internal procedures? How hard it must be for a manager to change the frame of mind he uses to think when he starts thinking about his employees? And off course, treating our employees as strategic enemies is not a good idea.

This got me thinking on a subject I touched upon a number of times in this blog. The difference between managers and leaders, the expectation that all managers will do both and the problems that this approach creates.

I don’t think there is simple solution to the fact that this framing exists. But, the solution will be closer when we realize that leaders and managers are different, both in the talents needed for their success and in what they need to concentrate on. Off course, I do realize that some roles, especially those on high levels of organizations require people who should be able to do both. These people have to make sure that they are actively making a difference in their thinking about each of these roles. Even the Judo fighter steps out of the ring in the end of the fight, takes his gear off and goes home to his family. The Judo fighter actively changes his state of mind before going home. We need to make sure we do that.

Elad