Shorts: Jim Hart in HBR Blog on communicating with your team

This is a quote from Jim Hart’s post in Harvard Business Review Blog titled In Tough Times, Help Your Team Remember Their Purpose:

In his book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, Roy M. Spence Jr. writes something we have been coaching CEOs and executive leaders on for 30 years: “A real purpose can’t just be words on paper. It has to get under the skin of every member of your organization….If you get it right, people will feel great about what they’re doing, clear about their goals, and excited to get to work every morning.” This is especially important in turbulent times…

Very strong statement. Reminds of the idea of Vital Signs I write about a lot. And this:

And I think, this can also teach us a lesson as managers and leaders. There is no doubt that one of the most important things we need to do as managers and leaders is to communicate. But we have so many channels. Just using one of them for all our communications is not enough. We need to create the right mix and to send the right messages using the right tools. We need to remember that some people are listeners and some are readers. We need to remember that some people like to get all the information online (on a computer and all the time) and some prefer to do it offline (not on a computer and postponed to a different time).

Elad

Taking the hurdles of employees out of the way

Photo by clearlyambiguous

I was going over some of Tom Peters presentations on his website (yes, I had some free time today, and a good friend reminded me of this amazing source of great ideas about management – Thanks Tommer). These presentations are not always easy to understand  without the commentary, but some of the content is really mind-blowing! I was going through this presentation where I encountered this sentence:

Peter Drucker once famously said, “Ninety-percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.”  There is more than a grain of truth to that. On the other side, and there can be an “other side,” I see the manager’s principal role as identifying things that get in people’s way (by asking them!) and meticulously getting those things out of their way. Thence, you could call the boss the CIRO, or Chief Impedance Reduction Officer, or my choice, CHR, Chief Hurdle Remover. In any event the idea is that this is a/the primary task the boss performs—and that it is a systematic, pro-active affair (e.g., on the daily agenda).

Wow!

Managers’ job is to find ways to help people excel. They do that by understanding them, what they do and what troubles them. By helping them find and use their strengths. By helping them reach a state of flow.

Doing that is not easy. But a good place to start is to try talking to people. What about?  Telling them once a week, how they made a difference this week and actively helping them create that difference.  Making sure you have an answer to these three questions. And one of the simplest ways is just asking them a simple question:

What do I need to do in order for you to excel at your job?

This quote by Peters deals just with that. You would be surprised by the answers you would hear to that question and by how easy it is to solve some of the problems they have. And you would be even more surprise of the level of engagement these people will reach when you actually solve these problems and give your employees the feeling that you are putting them first.

Elad

Is money equals motivation a conventional wisdom we have to break?

The last few days I have been reading the book Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. It describes many experiments done over the years that illustrate how people behave in irrational ways when we – and when I say we I mean traditional economics – expect them to act like rational people. While I don’t agree with some of the conclusions Ariely makes in his book, I find the questions fascinating. Thus, I am going to dedicate my next few posts to relevant lessons for managing people the book.

Chapter 4 of the book is called: “the cost of social norms – why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them”. In it, Ariely describes a number of experiments that show how when people are paid to do things, they do them with less enthusiasm and effectiveness. It reminded me of the above fascinating TED talk by Dan Pink that talks about similar experiments that led to similar (but a little different) conclusions. Both Ariely and Pink conclude that we need to rethink the effectiveness of money as a motivator for work.

So, is money being the best motivator another conventional wisdom that needs breaking.  Well, I will let my past as lawyer get the better of me and say – yes and no.

Yes, because we need to realize that the world is changing. That some things that we thought were true are not true anymore. There is a growing tendency of people to seek out work that not only gives them money, but also gives them joy, a sense of impact and work life balance. People look to use their strengths more and attempt to reach a state of flow. And we need to understand that money creates problems, because it is easy to compare (link in Hebrew). I would direct you to Ariely’s first chapter in the book about relativity.

But the answer is also no. in some situations, monetary rewards work. And when we think about these experiments we need to remember a few things. First, the experiments described in Ariley’s book and in Pink’s lecture are experiments, done in a lab, on students and not in a real work environment. Real life is different and we need to be careful in applying the lessons learned in the lab without thinking about the differences between students in the lab and real life work environment. Second, these experiments are social science experiments. They don’t have one result. They check for averages. And averages are sometimes dangerous. The experiments show trends. They show tendencies. But they don’t show how all people behave in all situations. And we know that monetary rewards do work in certain circumstances. As Paul Hebert from I2I explains, although there are some accurate things in Dan Pinks’s lecture, we must be careful when taking it as saying all monetary rewards are bad. Below is his presentation on how to look at incentive reward strategies within the context of how business operates:

From all the theories of motivation I encountered to date, the one I like the most is Vroom’s expectancy theory.  The reason I like it so much is that it talks about personalization. About understanding each employee specific motivation and about customizing the right rewards, invectives, and recognition, in order to motivate him. And I think this is the most important lesson from the science and experiments. We should be careful from applying one approach. We should doubt and check if what we are doing actually works. And the most important thing of all, we should not assume what motivates people, we should find out.

Elad

Lessons from conductors – musings about modern managers

Modern managers deal with a challenge. Mangers have to manage people who know more than they do. In the past, the manager was someone who did the job and was promoted to the management role. That meant that he usually had superior professional knowledge and could teach his employees how to practice the profession.

In many of today’s jobs, that is not the case anymore. Specialization and specific knowledge are commonplace and even if a manager knows about a specific profession, the speed in which profession change and evolve do not allow managers to keep this advantage for long. That is why managers need to learn how to manage people who are more proficient in doing their job then they are. And there are many professions from which mangers can learn how to do that. The profession of a conductor is one of them.

A conductor manages an orchestra to do a task. Create music. He knows and understands music. Perhaps he can play a few instruments. But he cannot do what the musicians in his orchestra are doing. I doubt that every conductor can play every instrument in the orchestra. And like a modern manager, even if he did, he could not do complete the task, the music, alone. He has to rely on his team. He has to facilitate the creation of music.

That is why I think the above TED talk by Itay Talgam is so insightful to modern mangers. By giving examples from famous conductors, Talgam exposes us to different method of management for modern team. As usual, I don’t want to ruin the entire talk for you, as it is a magnificent talk. I just want to point out a few messages I especially liked:

If you are a manger and you wake up every day depressed to go to work you should know something is wrong. If you don’t find joy in working with people, in trying to help them excel, then you are probably in the wrong role. The joy in management is found in enabling others to feel the joy of work all the time. How can you enable them to feel joy? Help them find flow; help them use their strengths a higher percentage of the day. Help them develop personally.  

A manger leads his team, not by control or authority, but by being there a 100% of the time, full in awareness and with a passion to help and enable learning and development. It does not mean that authority is not useful. When it is needed authority is there and should be used, but it is not enough to make the members of your team into partners.

And making your employees your partners is what modern management is all about. The task could not be completed alone. It is a shared journey. Many people today are not satisfied with getting their wages and doing what they are told. People spend a high percentage of their day at work and they want to enjoy it. They want to feel that it is about them. That they are part of the story. And a manager has to remember that. It is not about the manager’s story; it is about the team’s story. The part of the manager is facilitating the building of a shared story for the team.

They way to create a shared story is not using your employees as instruments, but treating them as partners. And if you treat them as partners, the results will follow. It is more than making sure the job gets done. In order to get the job done, you can put processes in place. But a manager needs to think beyond getting the job done and beyond the process. A manager, as a facilitator, needs to create the conditions in which these processes take place. Conditions that lead to flow, joy and happiness.

Authority is not about telling people what to do either. The worst damage you can do is giving clear instructions because it prevents the communication inside the team and prevents the development of people. It means that there is a big chance the team will fail when you would not be there. And it is not about you, it is about your team. It is about completing the task together.

Elad

More on managing meetings

A week and a half ago I wrote here about my most important concepts for managing meetings. I got many comments on this post, many of them offering other important concepts and some disagreeing with some of the concepts I mentioned. One of the disagreements that kept coming up dealt with my concept about coming prepared.

This is what I wrote:

Everybody must come prepared. And when I say prepared I mean totally and utterly prepared. When you get to the meeting you already: read everything; made the preparations; calculated the numbers; came up with your own ideas. I spent so many meetings where people come unprepared and as a consequence half of the meeting is spent on just understanding the issue or on doing things that should have been done earlier without wasting everybody else’s time. Too many people believe that they perform the best under pressure and rationalize their way into procrastination. This trend extends itself into the meetings and people say to themselves – “hey, I learn the subject while the meeting takes place”.

Here are some of the comments about this point:

Everyone needs to be prepared. However, avoid over preparation if you want to be innovative. If you want to build ideas as a group, you don’t want to have people come with their ideas nailed down.

Too much preparation can be a downside, leading to people coming in with pre-conceived ideas and already solved problems. Basic preparation is a must though, to understand the key facts etc. but I’ve found too much preparation can hold back a discussion.

While I respect the people who commented on this point, I have to strongly disagree with them.

First, I think the comments confuse between communication skills and preparation. One can come totally unprepared, but still be closed to other people’s opinions. On the other hand, somebody can come with his own ideas and solutions, but be open, receptive and listen to other people. The fact that some people come prepared and are not willing to listen does not mean that coming prepared is the problem (causality). It means that their lack of communication skills and ability to listen is probably the problem. I think one of comments actually described it quite well:

… but I think there is a thin line between coming prepared for a meeting and coming with THE solution. I think it’s very important to be open to new ideas and avoid selling your solution. The attitude that you have when you go to a meeting is crucial.

The issue is the attitude and not the preparation which is positive.

And this brings on the second point. Part of the problem occurs when only one person comes to the meeting prepared. The others, who are not prepared are not able to contradict that person so he seems like he is not listening to them and they are also not able to point mistakes or to create a positive influence on his idea. Everybody loses.

Third, most of the comments also talked about wasting time in meetings and the fact that we have to many meetings. If people come unprepared, everybody’s time is wasted because people have different abilities and speed of understanding. I honestly don’t see the negative connection between preparation and being innovative. On the contrary, the fact that everybody has come prepared only allows spending more of the time on the actual innovation and allows avoiding things like groupthink.  

Fourth, preparation is disregarded in many aspects of our lives, and while I don’t support excessive over perpetration I feel that it should be given its due place. Just recently Jon Gordon wrote a post exactly on this subject:

So often we fail because we fail to prepare. We focus on hitting the ball but we forget to take the time to tie our shoes tight before the game starts

I am going to come prepared to my next meeting. What about you?

Elad

Two of the most important concepts of feedback

Two days ago I wrote about an interview with Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s CEO, focusing on one of the quotes in the interview that got me really angry. But, as mad as I was, I must admit that most of interview made a lot of sense and there were two quotes that I found really interesting. I want to discuss one of them today. Here it is:

Q. And how do you give feedback?

A. I have the puppy theory. When the puppy pees on the carpet, you say something right then because you don’t say six months later, “Remember that day, January 12th, when you peed on the carpet?” That doesn’t make any sense. “This is what’s on my mind. This is quick feedback.” And then I’m on to the next thing.

If I had my way I wouldn’t do annual reviews, if I felt that everybody would be more honest about positive and negative feedback along the way. I think the annual review process is so antiquated. I almost would rather ask each employee to tell us if they’ve had a meaningful conversation with their manager this quarter. Yes or no. And if they say no, they ought to have one. I don’t even need to know what it is. But if you viewed it as meaningful, then that’s all that counts.

Two important concepts of giving feedback are revealed in this quote.

Promptness – the closer the feedback to the event the more effective it is for both parties (the giver and the receiver). We see so many things during a day that we want to communicate to our peers, but we hold them back. While I do agree that you should not always say everything immediately, the longer you wait the less effective the feedback will be. It looks something like this:

  

When you look at this graph you immediately understand what the problem with quarterly evaluations is. The feedback on the beginning of the quarter is just not effective and might actually be a waste of time for both sides.

Consistency – feedback should be given all the time. Not at a predetermined time once a quarter. But all along the year. This is where I disagree with Bratz. The question is not whether you had one meaningful conversation with your manager once a quarter. The question is how often during the quarter did you have meaningful conversations with your manager. Conversations that create value for you and are not done just to fill some kind of form or requirement from HR. If constructive feedback is given consistently, the answer will be all the time. And if it is done all the time, there is a high probability that we are dealing with a good boss.

 Elad

What did you learn today?

Photo by Rick

I urge you to read this blog post by Naomi Simson describing the main points from Joe John Duran’s lecture at the Entrepreneur Organization event in Barcelona. Most of the points reminded me of the things I constantly write about in this blog. I actually felt it is a good summary of what I believe in. The fact that similar lessons come from a serial entrepreneur who talks about personal life balance makes me proud and happy.

Two of my favourite quotes:

If you have to tell people how to do something you have got the wrong people. Tell them what is wanted and let them figure it out for themselves. Decision makers are more expensive but you cannot grow without them

I call this outcome management. We need to remember that the added bonus of this is that people grow up to be capable and creative. Then, the manager’s job is about communicating the right values to take into account in the decision making.

The best ideas come from those that listen the hardest… and have time to be creative. It is important to create an environment of listening. Joe says in his experience women are the best listeners

I think that listening is one of the most important skills to master. Again and again it comes up in stories of success. Successful companies that listen to their customers. Successful managers who listen to their employees. Successful communicators who listen to their audiences. The good thing is you don’t really need to do a lot in order to master it. Talk less. Ask more. That’s it. Everyday ask yourself – what is the one thing I learned today from/about my employees? If you can come up with one good answer every day, the effects will start to appear soon enough.

Elad

More on the art of giving praise

Photo by annthrop

I love this blog post, “The art of giving praise”, by Steven DeMaio on the Harvard Business Review blog. As someone who has been teaching the art of feedback and is a firm believer in the importance of positive recognition, I still face some hurdles when I give positive feedback and I think DeMaio’s post confronted some of these hurdles.

People sometimes find it harder to give positive feedback then negative feedback. Especially to people who are humble and are eager to learn, because they feel a little bit shy while listening to how good they performed. And the person giving the feedback feels a little, well, stupid, saying to the other guy how good he was. It’s awkward and it seems like a waste of time. After all, they guy did it well. I know. I have been there.

That is why I think the first tip given by DeMaio is really important:

Be truly specific. General compliments like “Great job!” or “Excellent presentation!” surely have their place, especially as you hurry to your next meeting. But precise feedback does much more, both for the ego of the recipient and for the quality of her future work. And guess what? “You were so inspiring” or “I loved your final pitch” isn’t specific enough. Tell Carmen that her well-organized tables in part 2 helped you realize that the team’s new project is actually an extension of the previous one (contrary to how others have framed the new venture) and that key components can be imported to save time. She might be able to build on the point at the next team meeting. At the very least, you’ve helped her identify a takeaway message that she delivered successfully.

If you concentrate your feedback not only on what was done well, but also on the ramifications of it, both tangible and intangible, your allow the listener to get a better insight of the implications of his positive behaviour. Sometimes, this person is aware that he is good at something, but does not understand all the effects his positive performance had. Feedback is about providing information that the performer cannot see or hear by himself. It is an attempt to put a real-time mirror that will enable the listener to see himself fully. We need to remember that that feedback giver sees things that the receiver doesn’t and we should be careful from assuming otherwise. Thus, the more information we give, the more valuable it will be for the listener.

But, focusing on positive feedback is even more important. I have seen many people who are truly eager to learn and improve and their enthusiasm leads them to ignore the positive feedback and focus only on the negative feedback. “OK”, they say, “just tell me what I need to improve”.

While learning from your mistakes and improving aspects of your performance is important, an enormous untapped potential lies in recognizing ones strengths and leveraging them to future better performance.  That is why I think DeMaio’s tip #3: “Praise with action, not just words” is an important one. It holds an understanding about the importance of a person’s strengths and the fact that leveraging your strength might produce superior results to improving your weakness.

Like DeMaio, I don’t think we should give positive feedback just because it is the polite thing to do or in order to mitigate the negative feedback. This actually can hinder the effectiveness of the feedback process. But as soon as we recognize the importance of positive feedback and spend time making it count, the recipients of our feedback will not only appreciate it, but will learn to use it in order to advance their next performance and overcome their weakness.

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 you 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

 

Standpoints, interests and zero-sum game

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I was reading a very interesting post by Shmuel Merhav about t “impotent explanation of the manager’s ego problem” (link in Hebrew). In short, Merhav claims that many times, problems in organizations are said to be a result of some individual’s ego. The trouble is that talking about someone’s ego does nothing to solve the problem. It blames it on an external force (and off course, it is never our ego, always others). Hence, it is an impotent way to deal with problems. Defining the problem as an ego problem suggests that there is nothing to do about it.

Merhav then goes to describe how in many of his consultation services, he came to an organization and heard that the problem was due to some manager’s ego, but when he actually looked into the problem he discovered it is not an issue of ego at all. For example, he describes a situation where a manager used to keep all essential information to himself. The other managers saw it as an ego problem. It turned out that that manager did it because of a legitimate concern that classified information will leak to competitors as this has happened a few years earlier. A little work allowed to better identify which information is really classified, and release most of the information the other managers needed without any fears of a leakage. Not an ego issue at all.

Another example was of a manager that did not delegate. A short investigation revealed that she did not really know how to. She was sent to a workshop that not only made her team members happy, but also made her very happy, as she was swamped and wanted to delegate. Again. No ego issues.

This reminded me of a lesson I wrote about in my e-book about understanding the difference between standpoints and interests. An interest is what we really want. A standpoint is how we communicate to the world what we want. Many times, there is a misalignment between the two due to our fear to admit our own fears or problems or just due to poor communication. Then, the discussion revolves around the standpoint, instead of around the interest.

Think about the manager with the classified information. His interest was that no sensitive information would leak outside of the organization. His standpoint was: I am not releasing any information. Only after his interest was laid out on the table, there was a possibility to really solve the problem by meeting the interest of both sides. Instead of asking a zero-sum question – “should the information be released or not?” a discussion of the interests allows to ask a win-win question: “how can we release the information the managers need, while making sure there are no leaks of important information outside the organization?”.

I think the important lesson we can learn from all these examples is that sometimes we assume that the other side has a standpoint, without him even stating it. The ego explanation is just our own standpoint of the situation. But, as Merhav puts it, it is not a very productive standpoint.

So, do you talk about your and the other side standpoints or about your and the other side interests?

Elad