Do we really need flamboyant visionaries to run our companies?

Photo by Hamed Saber

The Economist decided to wage an all front attack against humility in leadership and management. One of Its recent columns discusses what kinds of leaders make the best CEOs. The argument?

In general, the corporate world needs its flamboyant visionaries and raging egomaniacs rather more than its humble leaders and corporate civil servants. Think of the people who have shaped the modern business landscape, and “faceless” and “humble” are not the first words that come to mind.

It looks like this claim comes just out of the best management books of the beginning of the last century. As Bill Taylor from Harvard Business Review Blog points out, most of the claims in the column are not only wrong, but plainly misleading:

The crux of The Economist’s argument relies on what’s known as the Great Man Theory of History. After trumpeting the virtues of business geniuses such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lou Gerstner, and Jack Welch, it then generalizes from this handful of larger-than-life moguls: “The best ambassadors for business are the outsize figures who have changed the world and who feel no need to apologise for themselves or their calling.” It’s an intriguing essay and a good read. It’s also a false choice — and a bad reading of history. For one thing, when it comes to larger-than-life CEOs, I can name as many scoundrels and failures as I can geniuses and world-changers.

My view? Three things are wrong with The Economist’s view.

First, the assumption that there is only one way. Maybe, for some companies and in certain situations, the flamboyant visionaries are the best fit as CEO’s. But not in every situation. Some companies need the quiet leadership behind the scene, the steady hand that improves and creates processes that lead to growth and innovation. Taylor’s choice of the historic Great Man Theory seems appropriate. It too claimed that only certain people are fit for leadership roles. We know today that this attitude was plain wrong.

Second, the assumption that the flamboyant visionaries must be in the top of the pyramid. You can be in a leadership role and create change in your company, without being the CEO, especially if the CEO in that company needs to deal more with management issues, where the “raging egomaniacs” are just not cut out to do the job. Management and leadership are different things that require different talents. The column refers to Bill Gates. We need to remember what Bill Gates is doing today: As Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton: write in their book Now, Discover Your Strength:

“…[Y]ou will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. This is not the same as saying ‘ignore your weakness’. The people we described did not ignore their weakness. Instead, they did something much more effective. They found ways to manage around their weakness, thereby freeing them up to hone their strengths to a sharper point. Each of them did this a little differently. Pam liberated herself by hiring an outside consultant to write the strategic plan. Bill Gates did something similar. He selected a partner, Steve Ballmer, to run the company, allowing him to return to software development and rediscover his strengths’ path…

Third, when you read the column you feel almost like there have never been hugely successful leaders that changed the world while acting humbly. Has humble leaders never brought change and created value to society? Michael Dell comes to mind as someone who succeeded doing both. The research and consulting advice that The Economist is complaining about did not come out of thin air and it is based both on empirical evidence and experience. But what does that have to do with anything. The Economist wants a good story. A flamboyant leader, even if he will be less effective.

I am amazed how even a respected journal like The Economist falls prey to the conventional wisdoms and continues to harbor management principles that are almost a hundred years old, although we have so much research and experience suggesting otherwise.

Elad

Shorts: The Freak Factory on Teamwork

We so often forget where the real power of teamwork can be found. David Rendall, in his Changethis manifesto The Freak Factory: Making Employees Better by Helping Them Get Worse, reminds us:

Teamwork doesn’t mean that everybody does the same thing. It means that everyone contributes what they do best

Reminded me of what I wrote in my E-book:

There is the known proverb saying: “there is no ‘I’ in the word ‘Team’”. If you ask me, it is a silly notion because it takes to edge of the most important factor of the team – The teammates themselves. I think that a team is composed of a lot of “I”s. That is what makes it a strong team… A team is made powerful by using the comparative advantage of each team member and making it the team’s advantage.

Elad

Shorts: Customer Experience Matters on leadership

I read so many things each day that are relevant to the subjects I write about in my blog . However, I don’t always have the time or the ability to write a full blog post about them. Usually, there is one quote I like, which it too long to tweet about. Therefore, I decided to start a new series of posts called: Shorts. Each of these posts will have the word: “Shorts” in the title, with the name of the source I am referring to and the subject. These posts will only include a short introduction by me, and then a quote.

Today, I am going to start with a post from Customer Experience Matters. Bruce Timken Quotes a few people interviewed for U.S. News & World’s America’s Best Leaders 2009 list. Here is the quote I like in particular, as talks about the balance between team and individuals in management:

Roy Williams, head coach of North Carolina, listed his three guiding leadership principles:

“(1) Everyone on the team must focus on the same goal. It’s my job to effectively communicate those goals to the team; (2) Emphasize those goals every day; and (3) Understand that although everyone has a common goal, individuals also have goals, needs, and dreams that must be cared for.”

Elad

It’s not about you

Photo by David Boyle

On B-net Australia, Steve Tobak, writes about The Ten Rules of Great Teams:

Great groups and great leaders create each other

Every great group has a strong leader

The leaders of great groups love talent and know where to find it

Great groups think they are on a mission from God

Great groups see themselves as winning underdogs

Great groups always have an enemy

People in great groups have blinders on

Great groups are optimistic not realistic

In great groups, the right person has the right job

The leaders of great groups give them what they need and free them from the rest

I was going through this list and noticed something. The list mentions the idea of leadership a number of times (even though I think mostly management is a better term in this case), but it does not differentiate the concept from the group. The leader and the group are both part of one concept. And that reminded of something I wrote a few weeks back:

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.

As things happen these days online, connections are created . Just a few minutes after reading the B-net article, I read Marshall Goldsmith’s post on the Harvard Business Review blog “Leadership isn’t about you“:

Charlie thought about my question. “As a coach,” he said, “you should realize that success with your clients isn’t all about you. It’s about the people who choose to work with you.” He chuckled; then he continued: “In a way, I am the same. The success of my organization isn’t about me. It’s all about the great people who are working with me.”

Maybe it is time to stop worrying about ourselves. It is time to realize that nobody cares about us. Being a great manager or leader is not about us. It is about connecting people to something bigger. It is about creating a shared story. It is about creating great people and great teams.

Elad

Learned Helplessness and Managerial Uncertainty

Photo by Abulic Monkey

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

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

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

Bad parents, bad bosses, and the role of managers

Photo by Yodel Anecdotal

What do you think of this claim?

I also think people should understand that they will learn more from bad parents than a good parent. They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good parent things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine.

When you have a bad parent you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?”

Sounds ridiculous, right? We would not want bad parents just because it might be more educational for the kids. Replace the word “Parent” with the word “Manager”. Does it still sound ridiculous?

Well, it does to me. But not Carol Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo, who actually said this in an interview with Adam Bryant on The New York Times. While I do agree, like Bob Sutton does, that you should make the most even out of a bad situation, this line of thought makes me angry. I think it is not only a rationalisation for bad managers, it also a misconception of what good managers actually do.

First, I am worried that managers will take this as an excuse to say – “hey, I am a bad manager, but it is better for you. You will learn from it. What does not kill you, makes you stronger. Why should I invest in being a good manager if you can learn more from me being a bad manager?” And of course, that employee will think the same when he becomes a manager. So, because of this rationalisation, we will only end up with bad managers. Is that something we want?

Second, do you really think that if an employee does not even know why things are going well, his manager is doing a good job? A manager is not a supervisor that just needs to make sure the work is done. A manager is a good manager when he makes people think; when he helps employees improve their abilities and capitalize on their strengths; when he supports their own self development, self-efficacy and sense of achievement; and when he helps them prepare for their next role.

Because if a manager is only about making sure that things are as usual, then he is not a good manager. He is a bad manager. And form those; I agree you can learn something. Learning from mistakes is a good way to learn. But just as children to bad parents sometimes become bad parents themselves, employees of bad managers become bad managers themselves. And that is not something I want to see. As Carol Bartz accurately says, being a manager is hard enough as it is:

Managing is a tough job. When you’re young, you just think it’s a natural progression — I’m good at this so I’m going to be good at that, and it’s not that way at all.

Elad