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

Which do your prefer – happiness or trust?

Photo by yewenyi

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

The Continuum

I was watching Nancy Etcoff talk on TED about happiness. The subject is, for obvious reasons, of interest to me, and I found it quite entreating. But one part of the talk really spiked my interest.

During the 7^th minute of the talk, Etcoff talks about the fact that contrary to common belief, happiness and unhappiness are not on the endpoints of a single continuum. They are not on the same scale. Happiness is not simply absence of misery. There are actually two different continuums for each of these categories. Or as Etcoff says it, as you get less miserable you don’t become happy, you become less miserable.

This is a simple yet very powerful idea. But then I said to myself, haven’t I heard this idea before? Off course I have.

According to the Two-factor theory (also known as Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory) job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction act independently of each other. Two Factor Theory states that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction (Motivators, e.g. challenging work, recognition, responsibility which give positive satisfaction, arising from intrinsic conditions of the job itself, such as recognition, achievement, or personal growth), while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction (Hygiene factors,e.g. status, job security, salary and fringe benefits, which do not give positive satisfaction, although dissatisfaction results from their absence. These are extrinsic to the work itself, and include aspects such as company policies, supervisory practices, or wages/salary).

In the book “First, Break all the rules“, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman explain what Gallup found about costumer’s satisfaction and dissatisfaction. You guessed it. They are different. Granted, here they are not on a different continuum, but according to the book, costumers have two expectations that determine their level of dissatisfaction: accuracy and availability, and two different expectations that determine their satisfaction: partnership and advice.

The implications of each if these separately are profound in each field by itself. But put together, they produce something even bigger. Our tendency to think about phenomena as a continuum. This tendency might actually be wrong. And I ask you – what other tendencies do we have that our wrong? How many mistakes we do every day, because of our underlining assumptions? When is the last time that you conducted an exercise with the sole purpose of challenging your assumptions?  It is a difficult exercise, but it is worth it.

Elad

Live long and prosper in horse manure

Photo by Rikki_

My friend Jonathan sent me a link to an article writing in the subject of the email: “long, physiologic and fascinating”.  The article, from “The Atlantic Online”, bears the very promising headline: “What makes us happy?“. Although I don’t think it actually answers this question, it sure does give you a very interesting journey of trying to understand it.

In a nut shell, the article describes the writer impressions from spending one month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest running – and probably the most exhaustive – longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. It begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well adjusted Harvard sophomores (all males) and it has followed these subjects for more than 70 years. I will leave the work of reading the article and answering the question “what makes us happy?” to you, but I do want to quote and comment shortly on two quotes I liked in particular.

The first quote is a very short story the manager of the research, Dr. George Vaillant, gives as an answer to one of the questions:

… [T]he story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s do fragile, it could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

We always hear the importance of looking on the part of the glass that is half full, and not the one that is half empty (link in Hebrew). As I mention in my e-book, In Randy Pausch ’s last lecture he said: “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand“. When is the last time you woke up to see horse manure on your table and thought to yourself – this is an opportunity. They say that times of depression are times when people get rich. It is the people who can see the opportunity in the horse manure. The following thought is self evident. When you are assembling your team – are you looking for people who opportunities in horse manure?

This is the second quote:

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs – protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections – but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak

I talk a lot about short-term versus long-term thinking in this blog. And about the fact that short-term thinking is to be blamed for a lot of the problems this world is facing.  Actually, my last post was about this subject. I also mentioned, a couple of times, that I believe the most important challenge of a leader is the dissipate people fear’s about the future. This outlook on the subject, gives another explanation, why long term view is so important and why it is so hard to reach. This also explains why the talent of leadership is so important and why we need to create processes that help us overcome out behavioural tendencies 

Elad