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

Am I just like you?

Photo by Lanuiop

A few days ago, Bob Sutton wrote a post called “I am just like you“. In it, he describes some of his thoughts after reading David Dunning’s book: Self-Insight. While I haven’t read the book (Yet! Just added it to my ever-growing Amazon wish-list), I am not sure I agree with Sutton’s thoughts. Here is what I perceive to be the gist of his post:

Dunning points out that a host of studies show that one major impediment to self-awareness is that people see themselves as unique — usually as superior to others –  when that actually are  not: as more ethical, emotionally complex, skilled, and so on…

The implication, however, that if we assume “I am just like you” rather than “I am special and different,” or even that “we are all the same,” we might make better decisions and learn at others’ expense rather than our own strikes me as a lesson that could be quite valuable.  For example, I’ve been rather obsessed about the virtues and drawback of learning from others mistakes rather than your own (see this post on Randy Komisar and Eleanor Roosevelt), as this question has huge implications about how to teach people new skills and the best way to develop competent and caring human-beings.

While I agree with the basic assumption that we should get to know ourselves better and that we should develop a better understanding of our abilities and strengths, I am not sure the solution could be found in “I am just like you” thinking. Actually, I don’t see the difference between that kind of thinking and “we are all the same” thinking. I wrote something similar in my e-book:

Equality is an important concept in many aspects of life, especially in the legal field, as I know so well. But in real life, because equality is intertwined into our thinking DNA it is used in ways that many times hinders excellence. Earlier I mentioned Ken Robinson’s inspiring speech regarding creativity and education. In it he says that standard and equal education for everyone is not necessarily good because it “misses” people’s strengths. All men are not born equal. Whoever tells you that is lying. All man should deserve an equal opportunity to excel, to be happy and to use their comparative advantage. That is the truth. And there is a big difference between the two. Nobody can be good at everything. People who truly excel do it by recognizing their comparative advantage, maximizing it and letting other people do what they are better at than them.

I do not disagree that people have a tendency to be over optimistic about their abilities. There is ample research to support that. I am just not sure that the way to deal with that problem (if we assume it is a problem) is to reinforce the wrong assumption that we are in fact just like each other. I think this is a dangerous line of thinking for individuals and managers. The real value is found in realizing the actual differences and respecting them. By realizing who we are and embracing it, we could reach much more than by deluding ourselves about our equality or superiority.

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 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

The unconventional wisdoms: helping people succussed and long-term teams

Photo by John Spooner

One of my favourite subjects here in this blog has been conventional wisdoms. Those things that mangers usually believe in, but that have been proven wrong and ineffective. Over the life of this blog I have mentioned some of them, mostly relating to the management of people and teams. That is why it made me so happy to read Bob Sutton’s post: “What are the Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies?“. It’s nice to have smarter and more experienced people reinforce your ideas from time to time.

I recommend reading the post and the comments which offer many mistaken conventional wisdoms. With so many of them out there, I sometimes wonder how the business world works at all. But I wanted to focus my attention to two of these practices that are mentioned in the original post, and add a few thoughts of my own. This is the first one:

2. Dysfunctional Internal Competition.  This is a big theme in The Knowing-Doing Gap and Morten’s Hansen’s masterpiece Collaboration.  If you dig into the problems in the banks and a lot of other companies, they actually punish people who help others succeed, both via the reward systems and who gets the most prestige.  This seems to persist even though the evidence against such assumptions and systems are so clear.

I must admit that I have never seen this problem described like this. But it makes a lot of sense. As I advocate in this blog, following Markus Buckingham preaching, is that the most important thing a manger could do is help other people succussed. And if organizations are built in a way that hinders the ability of managers to do this, that actually incentivizes them not to do what there are supposed to do, there is no wonder why so many people feel out of place in their workplace and why so many people do not reach their full potential and quote “a bad manager” as their number one reason for leaving their jobs. It is about time to not only make sure that we as managers engage in helping other people excel, but also to ensure that there are systems in the places we work for are set to support that function.

This is the second practice Sutton complains about:

3. Breaking-up Teams Constantly.  American companies often seem to love moving people around constantly, breaking-up teams, giving people new experiences, and so on.  Certainly, there is a time for fresh blood, but if you read J. Richard Hackman’s Leading Teams you will see that the weight of the evidence is that breaking up teams less often rather than more often is linked to all sorts of effectiveness indicators.  Also, see this post about the Miracle on the Hudson where I discuss this literature.

Again, I never thought of this problem in the way described here but it makes perfect sense when you think about it from a strengths perspective. An effective team, among other things, is a team where every member is attuned with his strengths; where synergies are created from the diverse opinions and talents. And it takes time to create this synergy, because people are so different. But it is their differences that creates strength and allows them to perform excellently. I think everyone who has worked in a team felt it. The difference between the beginning of the life of the team and the end of it, when each team member has learned his teammates’ traits and knows how to work in tune with them. So, maybe we need to think about long-term teams and about ways in which we sustain them.

Two challenges laid down for managers of organizations… will you take them upon yourself?

Elad

The process of effectiveness

photo by grahambones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad

Obliquity and management

Photo by Olibac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad

The gift that keeps on giving

Photo by Saquan Stimpson/monstersh aq2000’s

A few weeks ago I realized that a very good friend of mine’s birthday is coming up. I am really bad at buying presents, especially for women. So, I decided to enlist two other friends to help me with buying the gift. After I approached them, without me doing anything else, one came up with the idea, the other implemented it. Before I knew it, without really needing to do anything else, a great present was bought and given (including a card, which I signed a minute before we gave the present(. My friend was really excited with the present and it was a big success.

Now, this sounds a little like laziness on my side. I had to do some work that I was not good at (buying a present) and instead of doing it, I just made other people do it. But, when you think about it, what I did was actually to put into practice two very important concepts for managers:

The first one, is Use your strengths and manage around your weakness. In my e-book I quoted a paragraph from, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton 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…”.

I had a weakness in buying presents. I do not know how to do it and it is highly unlikely that I will ever learn. I do know how to manage, find the right people and bring them together. Sometimes, doing the work is not actually about doing the work.

The second one is “Get the right people on the bus” – this is a term I borrowed from Jon Gordon. Check out this quote:

“This principle of identifying the right people was echoed by the Director of Learning at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. He told me how the Ritz has saved millions of dollars by identifying the key characteristics, strengths and traits of each job/position at the hotel and then creating a benchmark that every potential employee is measured against. Utilizing a company called Talent Plus they interview each potential employee and then identify how they measure up to the benchmark of the position they are applying for. As a result they are better able to identify who the right people are for each job at the hotel”.

Sometimes, doing the work is not about doing the work, but about choosing the right people. Check out this inspiring example for how to implement this idea.  

So, as a manger, how do you choose the people you work with? How does their strength compare to yours?

Elad

Making a difference

Photo by tawalker

A few days ago I was reading a very interesting post titled: “The One Thing Every Manager Must Learn” by the “Incentive Intelligence” blog.  This is the main idea:

But the bottom line is that you only need to train your Managers to do one thing…

Ready?

Train Managers to say this to every employee at least once a week (if it is true of course)…

You made a difference by ____________ .

I like it. It really crystallizes what a manager should do. Focus on making his employees excel at what they do. And treat each and everyone differently because everybody is different. One of the most important ways to do that is by recognition and validation of their actions. But in order to excel, they need more than just recognition, they need to find their strength, or what they can excel at.

Last week we had an exam in operations management. One of the questions in the exam asked us to compare the Japanese principal of Poke Yoke with the idea of control charts that are used monitor quality. The main idea of the answer (or at least I hope it is…) is that there is a difference between preventing the problem before it occurs and with monitoring it after it occurs. Albert Einstein said: “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them”.

A manager’s job is to help each individual find the right way for him to make a difference. To find his strength. And then help push him to use it. The “you made a difference sentence” is like the control chart. It is the way we check the results each week. But we cannot allow ourselves as managers to be passive. A manager’s job is an active one.

So yes, I agree that this is the most important thing you need to know as a manager. But, we need to understand that this weekly saying must have substance behind it all through the week. Then, you will be able to complete the sentence not only for you employees, but for yourself as well.

So, how did you make a difference this week?

Elad

The real you

Photo by Elven*Nicky

I was reading Marshall Goldsmith post on the Harvard Business review blog titled: “Do You Have an Excessive Need to Be Yourself?“. He talks about the fact that people use the excuse “That’s just the way I am!” to avoid tackling hard challenges and important tasks. He uses an example of a manager who avoided giving recognition to his employees because he felt like a phony and excused it by saying: “it’s just not me”. This is how Goldsmith ends the post:

Keep this in mind the next time you find yourself resisting change because you are clinging to a false — and probably pointless — notion of “me”

While I agree that many times the “That’s just the way I am!” thinking is used as an excuse, there is a difference between a “false — and probably pointless — notion of ‘me’” and an actual weakness. There are differences between inherent talents and skills or behaviours. While I agree that we should try and see if we can do things, we should be careful from falling prey to the notion that everybody can be good at anything. There is a difference between just recognizing employees and doing it all heartedly and with empathy.  The technical part, almost everybody can do. Excelling at it is reserved to those who have the inherent talent. And if you don’t have it, you might be able to get to the technical level of mastering it, but you will never excel at it.

Off course, that does not mean that you should give up. Because usually, if you are weak in one thing, your strength lies somewhere else and that strength can help you circumvent your weakness. Or you can use a process to make sure that something is done properly. Or you can partner with someone who has the opposite strengths to help complete you.

This is why I am not fond of the title of goldsmith’s post. You should try to be as much yourself as you can. You just need to make sure you understand who you really are before you go about doing that. Thus, I do agree with the main message that comes out of Goldsmith’s post: you have to try. You have to discover yourself and realize what your true strengths and weakness are and what are just “false — and probably pointless — notion[s] of ‘me’”.

So, when is the last time you tried finding out who the “real you” is?

 Elad