How do you say: “No!”

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Miguel Barbosa conducted an interview with Dan Ariely about his new book and posted it to his blog. Ariely gave a small excerpt out of that interview on his blog where he posted as an answer to one of the questions. This answer gives an example of dealing with the issue of internal motivation (or meaning) at work. Here is the example:

Three weeks ago I was in Seattle where an ex-student of mine who works for a big software company. She contacted me six weeks prior and I agreed to meet with her team. Something happened at that company in the weeks before I gave the talk.  The background being that my student and a small team of people had discovered an idea which they thought was the best innovation in the “computer world.” They worked very hard on this idea for two years and the CEO of the company looked at it and said I’m canceling the project.

Ariely then goes on to describe how that affected the team:

So here I was sitting with a group of highly creative people, who were completely deflated- In my life I’ve never seen anyone (in the high-tech industry) with a lower level of motivation. So I asked them, “How many of you show up to work on time since the project has been shut down?” Nobody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you go home early?” Everyone raised their hand. Lastly, I asked them, “How many of you feel that you should have taken the opportunity to fudge on your expense reports?” In this case, no one answered the question — rather everyone sat laughing to themselves—in a way that makes me think that they would have fudged their expense reports. So here you have a case of people who worked incredibly hard on a project and basically got rejected. Which leads me to ask how could the CEO have behaved differently if he was also trying to create a more positive feelings for the team members.

While I agree with Ariley’s suggestions on how the CEO could have behaved differently (read the rest of the post and the entire interview) I am interested in a different question. From the way the situation is presented, the CEO has no idea of the effects his decision had on his employees. Just read what the people describe as their feelings. It is freighting to think about the CEO’s ignorance! (also see – Toxic Tandem).

Now, beside Ariely’s ideas that are all, in one way or another, ways not to actually say “no” to the team, I am thinking about how the CEO could reach the same result, without taking the wind out the team’s sails and without creating all of these negative feelings in the team.

To be honest, I am not sure, I don’t know enough about the situation. I am, however, sure about one thing. A lot of it is found in the way the decision was communicated. Most people understand “no”. But they want to hear the “no” in an emphatic way and feel like they were listened to and that the process of reaching the no was fair. Thus, how the message is communicated matters. It is clear, from the way the team reacted and the solutions they offered (later in Ariely’s example) that what really mattered to them is not that they have been denied, but the way they have been denied. This might seem like semantics, but when dealing with internal communication between people, semantics matter (see my E-book for more examples)!

I think that if you ask each and every one of those employees whether it occurred to him that their project could be shut down, they would probably say – yes. And if you would have asked them, should, some projects be shut down while other should get the green light – they would have said yes. They don’t have a problem with the decision itself, although the justifications for it could be debated. It is, from what we can understand, a reasonable decision that CEO’s make. It is how the decision was communicated to them.

It is an important lesson. It is not enough to say “no”. Managers and leaders should be aware of the consequences of their “no” and communicate it clearly. Yes, it will require some more of the CEO’s time. Yes, it will mean that the decision will not be as fast. But it will ensure that the team will continue to the next project, pumped with energy and ready to risk themselves again.

Elad

The difference between downstream and upstream feedback

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I wrote in the past about the difficulties of giving positive feedback and praise . I do believe that positive feedback and noticing employees are very important concepts that are not practiced enough. There a tendency to deal only with the negative (hopefully, constructive) feedback, neglecting the discussion of what went well and how can we improve and leverage from our strengths.

However, this is especially true for downstream feedback. That is to say, as a manager or team member giving feedback to your employees or peers. When we talk about the upstream feedback, feedback coming from the employees up to the manager, the tendency is to focus on the good things, while many of the bad things disappear. I came across this paragraph in Guy Kawasaki’s book, Reality Check:

Good news. The competition, customers, governments and schmexperts (shmucks + experts) constantly assault a company. Because of this barrage, good news is attractive – like an addictive, illegal, and dangerous drug. It makes you crave more good news, and you refuse to communicate bad news up the chain of command. Ultimately, it may even make you refuse to hear bad news at all. How many commanders-in-chief of armies has this phenomenon brought down over the course of history?

Now, while Kawasaki’s quote focuses on bad news in general, it is just as valid for negative (constructive) feedback coming up from employees. How many employees do you know will conscientiously, wholeheartedly, criticize their manager? Or even tell him when he is wrong or mistreating someone or missing a crucial fact? Not enough. Not because they don’t think about it or talk about it behind the managers back or feel frustrated about it. Because of culture and the action of the manager when somebody does it and of course, conventional wisdom.

As managers we need to be aware of that fact. The problem is that the minute we become managers, we fall prey to the toxic tandem. We actually know and understand less about our employees the higher we are. So while dealing with downstream feedback, we need to focus on the emphasizing the positive sides and focusing on strengths, when dealing with the upstream side, we need to demand employees to come up and tell us we are wrong, what we are missing and how we can improve. And it is important to encourage, notice, and recognize it when it happens as well as to take in with humility.

The employees could be wrong. They might not see the entire picture or understand what you as a manger understand. They might get the facts wrong. However, I can guarantee one thing. You will understand their feelings better and while we can argue with facts, we cannot argue with individual feelings. And we cannot deal with feelings, until they are out there and we recognized them.

What do you get out of the upstream of information coming from your employees? Is it only praises and good news?

Elad

http://comparativeadvantage.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/more-on-the-art-of-giving-praise/

Getting down from the ladder

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Our integrative experience in the AGSM MBA this week included a big chapter on adaptive leadership. One of the concepts that were mentioned time and time again was that of rank. How we perceive our and other people’s rank and what effect it has on our assumptions and behaviours.

One sentence that one of our facilitators mentioned (he actually quoted someone else, whose name I don’t remember) struck me as especially interesting. He was talking about rank in organizations and about people “going up the ladder”, being promoted. Then he said:

“When we go up the ladder, we look down and see a lot of shiny happy faces. When they look up, they see…”

Well, he did not finish, so I don’t feel I need to. But that reminded me of the “Toxic Tandem“. People in positions of power tend to be oblivious to the needs and actions of the people who have less power than them. Or in other words, as we described it in class: “managers are usually blind to their rank”. As a manager, it is easy to forget that you are up there on the ladder. That means that the focus of all eyes is on you. And it also means that you are in a different position than everybody else is. Which means it is harder for you to understand them.

Too many managers get to a management position and continue to do what they always did. Their work. Which is good, but not great. The problem is that now their work is being a manager. And that is a totally different job. A job you cannot do without leaving your desk. With out being active about it. without a little, MBWA.

So, the fact that you went up the ladder does not mean you have to stay there all the time. From time to time, you can climb down from the ladder and let the people see your happy shiny face, instead of your…

Elad

Who is to blame?

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The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem. Theodore Rubin

Yesterday I was reading an excerpt from the book “What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen”, published at Knowledge@Wharton. In it, the writer Michael A. Roberto advocates that a big part of leadership is about preventing problems before they occur.  The book starts with an example from the engineering world. This is how it is recapped:

These two stories provide a stark contrast in the handling of information suggesting that a potential problem exists. The managers in the Kansas City hotel case dismissed the concerns of others and reaffirmed their belief in prior judgments by experts. Who were these construction workers to suggest that engineering experts might have made an error? William LeMessurier approached his situation with far more intellectual curiosity. Intrigued by the questions posed by a young engineering student far less knowledgeable than he, LeMessurier chose to perform additional analysis. In time, he began to question his earlier assumptions and judgments. He chose to pursue his concerns and obtain the perspective of unbiased experts. LeMessurier represents the quintessential problem-finder. He did not simply assume that his expert judgments were correct. When he detected trouble, he dug deeper. He wanted to understand the nature of the potential problem. He did not seek to assign blame to others, nor did he let the possibility of a disturbing answer suppress his investigation. LeMessurier clearly approached his situation with a very different mindset than the people involved in the Kansas City hotel tragedy.

This passage immediately reminded me of what I wrote about in this blog yesterday – the “Toxic Tandem“. People in positions of power tend to be oblivious to the needs and actions of the people who have less power than them. Look at the bolded sentence in the quoted paragraph. “These construction workers” are the people who actually do the job. They are the people who walk the walk every day. They might be wrong, but ignoring them is not only dangerous, it is just bad management. But more importantly, you need to go out and seek them out. To hear them. To listen to what they are saying. Because they don’t always come to you. In yesterday’s post I emphasized this from managers’ perspective. Because people are the managers’ job. This excerpt actually gives a different reasoning: “You do not discover problems by sitting in your office waiting for the bad news to arrive at your door”.

The second paragraph that appealed to me was dealt with assigning blame:

Successful problem-finders not only exhibit a curious mindset, but they also embrace systemic thinking. They recognize that small problems often do not occur due to the negligence or misconduct of an individual. Instead, small errors frequently serve as indicators of broader systemic issues in the organization. Effective problem-­finders do not rush to find fault and assign blame when they spot a mistake being made. They step back and question why that error occurred. They ask whether more fundamental organizational problems have created the conditions that make that small error more likely to occur.

In Hebrew we have a term called “תחקיר” (Thachkir). The official translation into English is the word “debrief”, but this word means other things as well. In Hebrew it only stands for a discussion of an event after it occurred. The Israeli Air-force is known around the world for its implementation of after the event debriefing. I actually used to teach about it while I was serving in the Air-force. The main idea is that the recipient of this debriefing is the system and that blame is not part of the process. The blame is part of a different process. This is done in order to eliminate the fear of the consequences. You try to understand what happened, why, and how to prevent it, without asking who is responsible for what happened on a personal or organizational level (“the marketing department”). In the Israeli Air-force this is done regularly after every event, accident, exercise, etc. This is something I think should be, in some senses, better implemented in the business world. Stopping and thinking about why things happened without questioning the specifics of this case and who is to blame but by thinking about the process and the future. About the bigger fundamental organizational problems. This is hard to do in the day to day mess we are handling. But doing so, helps prevent problems instead of solving problems.

Elad

Manager’s Toxic Tandem Dilemma

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Yesterday I was listening to a podcast from the Mckinsey Quarterly titled: “Good boss, bad times“. It is basically a very interesting interview with Bob Sutton from the Stanford Graduate School of Engineering about an article he wrote for Harvard Business Review.

One of the concepts he mentions is the “Toxic Tandem”. Here is the explanation:

…it’s a combination of two things about power that are very well documented. One is that when people are in positions of power, for better or worse, they often become sort of oblivious to the needs and actions of the people who have less power than them… And the other part of the toxic tandem is sometimes called hyper vigilance…  The spotlight raises on you. They’re looking at you really closely. So if you think about the toxic tandem, you’ve got the boss, oblivious, and then the subordinates, even more and more worried. People tend to devote a lot more energy to their boss—or to their board, even, if they’re CEOs—to figure out what is going on. And they don’t engage as much with the people who are under threat.

I think this is a particularly interesting concept because at least the first part of it is so opposite to what a good manager should do – engage with his employees and become more aware of their needs. Being oblivious to your people is a real danger as a manager.

You hear a lot of managers saying that they feel they don’t have time to do their work since they became managers, because they have to spend so much time with their employees. Then they start disappearing, employing closed door polices and so on. This is because people are promoted on the merit of their old job, without regard to whether they are compatible to being a manager. To whether they have the inherit talent for it. So, they try to do what they did before, but just better. But when you are a manager, it does not work. Because being a manager is about more than being a great professional, no matter what your profession is. Because you cannot afford to be oblivious to your people as a manager. Your job is your people. Their feelings, their thoughts, their success, their excellence.

I believe that one of the most important aspects managers should adapt to their management style is MBWA (management by walking around). I find the importance of this concept not only in managing people, but also in other fields likes marketing (the best companies spend a lot of time with their customers) and operations (actually walking to the production level and seeing things with your own eyes). But when we talk about managing people, it is a must. It is the key to understanding your employees and to making sure you are not oblivious about them.

So, how have you been fighting the Toxic Tandem Dilemma?

Elad