Dave Rendall from The Freak Factor is so spot on:
The same thing that causes some people to like you, will cause other people to dislike you. The same thing that makes some people happy, will make other people unhappy.
I said it before – life, business, relationships. It is all about tradeoffs. The more we accept that, the happier and more successful we will get.
Elad
Photo by Cambodia4kidsorgI am reading Guy Kawasaki’s book Reality Check these days. It is like reading many important checklists about how to do just about anything in business. Strange, but interesting. Anyway, in one of the first chapters he talks about why is it better to invest in young inexperienced entrepreneurs than in serial entrepreneurs. One paragraph in that chapter caught my eyes:
Serial entrepreneurs fill new roles in their next companies. For example, in the first company the person was an engineer who became the vice president of engineering. In the next company, she is the CEO and founder. Just because you are good at designing chips doesn’t mean you’re CEO material. You may end up not doing what you’re good at and doing what you’re not good at
I am constantly surprised how people have misguided self-perceptions. They are so good at something and they usually even enjoy and love doing it. Sometimes they feel a state of flow when they are doing it. But something, society, greed, conventional wisdom or something else I cannot fathom, tells them – hey – you should try being a manager. You should try doing something else. You are better than this.
I wrote about this in my E-book:
It is not uncommon to see someone who was very good at his job and is promoted to be a manager. When he was part of a team or even a solo player, he excelled at his job. But when you put him in a managerial position, which is not his comparative advantage, he just can’t handle it. This is interesting. Usually this man actually wanted the promotion even though he was happy with what he was doing and even though he does not like to manage people. We are so used to the Hierarchy Thinking Model and not the Comparative Advantage Thinking Model, that we actually want positions that our abilities are not compatible with. The reason being this is just the way we know the system works. Well, the system sucks! The problem is that not only this man can’t handle the job of a manager, he also can’t handle the truth … He does not have what it takes to be a manager. And I am not just talking about an application of the Peter Principle. This man is actually unhappy being a manager! It is not his comparative advantage. Bill Gates got it when he put Steve Ballmer to manage while he did software development, so why can’t it work for all of us?
I admit this is a natural phenomenon. You know what, it happened to me not a while back. I found myself looking for a career, I am not 100% share was for me. I am actually struggling these days to find a career path that will allow me a better use of my strengths.
It is not always a bad idea to try new things. If we don’t try, we will never know. And sometimes, the only way to discover your strengths is to do something again and again and fail at it. As long as you enjoy failing at it (not being cynical here, seriously, read the post in the link).
However, if we can’t be true with ourselves we will never be able to reach our full potential. If we become managers and our most important job is to help our employees find what they are good at and help them excel at it, there is no way we can do that before we go through the same process with ourselves. And it does not matter of you are a serial entrepreneur that made millions of dollars or if you are just a novice trying to find your place in the world. You can do better, for yourselves and others, by finding and using your strengths.
Elad
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
