It’s a soapbox day….

You can’t raise a responsible person by not giving them any responsibility. You can’t build a team capable of making intelligent, quality, fiscally responsible decisions if only a small subset of people make decisions for them. Instead of a small subset of a company making the ‘important’ decisions, leaders must ask intelligent questions of their people.

Lead people with questions, not answers. Have faith in them and be willing to accept decisions and answers that differ from your own. It’s far more valuable to the long-term development of an organization to have a company filled with individuals confident in making decisions. The alternative is a group too scared to do anything but sit and wait for their next chance to ask the guy who makes the decisions.

Get excited about wrong decisions and bad news. Encourage individuals to take action, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes quickly and take more action.

View team members who trumpet only good news as red flags. They’re either misrepresenting situations or aren’t comfortable conveying the bad news. This is partly symptomatic of reward systems based on managers having to evaluate their own teams. People hesitate to bring forward the bad news, or they happy-filter it, as it directly impacts their compensation. Bad news exists, even if hidden, and we are in a far better position if we know about it as early as possible.

If leaders punish, frown, whince, or discipline people for making incorrect decisions then you’ll quickly have a group of people taking no meaningful action. Their actions will be the absolute safest, most innocuous path they can think of as they continue in ‘just don’t screw up’ mode. The team will stagnate and innovation won’t exist. Leaders must view mistakes as exciting learning opportunities and drag them out into the daylight.

Even college basketball’s Final Four used this approach.

Seth touches on a similar topic to my recent IT battles post. The key difference being that Seth‘s example deals with company policies on how employees interface with their clients. While it’s the same issue, my post used the example of company policies for how employees interface with each other across teams and departments.

Of course I love his idea but the issue is never the idea. In truth, 99% of retail companies out there today would require a major culture shift to even consider this idea. Even that isn’t the real issue though, ideas are cheap, coming up with them is the easy part. What I’m interested in is how do you actually pull this off across a large retail organization?

This is about formalizing the process of questioning standard operating procedures. Shifting your organization from simply doing “what’s in the book” to doing what’s right for the business today. In the real world that has to be balanced with getting things done and not creating a culture where every employee shows up to work with a different idea of how things will run today. The key is building a communications network between those people and getting them comfortable with this topic. Ultimately it’s about asking them the right questions and giving them a forum to discuss it amongst themselves.

Some Links:

• A great article on questioning SOP in the military.
• While I haven’t experienced it first hand, Great Harvest appears to have done an outstanding job of focussing on, and creating, that communication network. They demand that each of their stores are run uniquely and then work on sharing the experiences to allow other owners to learn quickly. They view each of their stores as individually run R&D labs. Quite different from the typical franchise approach where the only decision you get to make is….actually I’m not sure there is one.
• Book: Bread and Butter, What a Bunch of Bakers Taught Me About Business and Happiness

While I no longer have the luxury of an available IT staff, in the past I’ve had a recurring beef with them. An example was a previous attempt to acquire a particular email address. My name’s challenging to spell at best, and having to explain over the phone how to spell ‘brydon’ is frustrating enough. Having to convey how to correctly spell ‘brydon.gilliss’ or ‘bgilliss’ is just a pain in the ass.

“ahh, two s’s.”

“two s’s?”

“Yes, two.”

“At the end?”

“Yes.”

In an attempt to make this process simpler in dealing with clients and cut down on potential missed emails, I requested the email address ‘brydon@’. That request sat for almost a year before the IT guy finally cancelled it with the explanation:

“Firstname@company.com emails are an artifact from the past and violate the current firstname.lastname or FirstInitialLastname standard used by ABC Inc. and the world for email. The only exceptions are made for name combinations that would be rude (Stanley Hitter) or names that are regionally impossible to spell”

If you work in an internal IT department then who are your clients? The people that work within your company. Should they not be working to get their clients what they need? Or am I missing the point? Is it their job to make up standards that must be adhered to regardless of what their clients require and request?

I understand the idea of standards. They create consistency, making it easy for someone to guess my email if they know my name. As well they benefit the IT guy. They’re required to have a workstation in place and operational the day a new person starts. This standard allows for that.

Fine, keep my existing email addresses in place. Just add another line item that directs emails from the additional ‘brydon@’ to my existing inbox as well. Why would I be taken to task on an issue like this?

“This is a classic struggle between the IT manager who wants to be the totally dominant person making all the IT decisions [and the business manager],” he says. “There is a struggle going on out there – I witnessed it just this week – between a business manager and an IT guy. The IT guy was saying, ‘I make the decisions’ and the business guy replied, ‘I want this’.”

Walking the walk with SAS CEO Jim Goodnight

Paul Graham does a great job of breaking down why people spend time doing this blogging crap. When this topic comes up with people out of this loop, ie someone who has no clue what RSS stands for, they are typically surprised by what’s happening. Their first comments usually relate to the blogger’s ego.

“Do they think everyone cares what they think?”

I completely agree that the majority of blogs out there do fall into this category. The medium(blogging), however, isn’t the flaw in those cases. Those people would be ranting about their insular world regardless of the technology at hand.

As always, Paul Graham takes it all to another level, all of which hits home for me. This process of blogging is about discovery, discarding information, looking in your blind spot, and learning. While few people, bloggers or not, are opposed to testing out their 15 minutes of fame, anyone who writes solely for that purpose will only produce boredom among readers.

On one hand I can look at some of my posts like Feeling Business and think someone’s going to view that as being self-centred, here’s what we do, why aren’t you doing it? While I can’t keep anyone from seeing that, what I hope at least a few see is insecurity and curiousity. Here’s what we’re doing, we have no clue if it makes sense, what do you think?

ClearSpace is intended to be a self-managing, self-organizing group of individuals. The goal being to treat everyone like a grown-up along with expecting everyone to act like one. A few specific examples:

• Control over your work environment. We collaborate and come together when needed, however, we all have home offices that allow us to work in a place we designed.
• Paid when the client pays. We have no traditional payroll where our company would front people money until the client pays their invoice.
• Choose your work. Ultimately our people decide whether they want to work on any particular project. No one is assigned to work on projects.

We do our best not to hide or shelter our people. If a client pays late, or doesn’t pay, we all know about it, and feel it. If an individual, or team, drops the ball on a project we all feel it.

Some people will read this and think I’m describing the ultimate workplace while others will run in the opposite direction. It takes a certain individual to want, and succeed in, this model. You will feel the business everyday. Why do this? It stems from a respect for the people, however, it’s even more self-serving than that. It’s a good business decision. Having everyone, not a select few at the ‘top’, in tune with our business puts us in a better position for success. When an opportunity or crisis presents itself we’re in the best possible situation to face it.

Years ago, I assumed everyone would want to work in a model like this and it’s those big, bad companies that prevent us from having access to all this learning. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved in a few other experiments like this over the years. I’ve come to understand that a lot of people do NOT want this. Quite the opposite. Looking at it from the other direction, you could say those people are paying their company NOT to tell them about all this. That’s part of the value their company offers them. If a client pays late and it means finances may be stretched next month, fine but don’t tell me, that’s what I’m paying you for.

For me, while it’s stressful and freaks you out somedays, I’d much rather feel the business than not.

Something I hope I’m getting better at over time is how I respond. How we respond can be more important than the content of our actual response. Women understand this far better than men as they have more ‘tact’.

“Sandy told me I look different today, what do you think she meant?”

If you’re this tuned in to these meta-messages, it’s a blessing and a curse. Some people spend their days interpreting messages that don’t even exist.

How do you respond when a team member brings you less than exciting news? Getting specific, let’s say they forgot to include a key file in your software for a customer deliverable. A stereotypical manager response to this could be to treat it as a ‘fire’, get worked up, possibly even angry. The intent being to convey the severity of the situation at hand. In some cases there may be formal punishment on the spot. Or it may take a passive aggressive form by showing up on that person’s next review or your next performance grade. Seems reasonable right?

What’s really important here? The most important part of this exchange is the information brought forward. It’s now available and in the open for the team to address, learn from it, and move forward.

How does that traditional response impact this goal? It may, if you’re lucky, prevent that person from making the same mistake again out of fear of reprisal. They’ll fear being yelled at, humiliated, or having money taken from them due to their resulting low performance or review grade.

What’s guaranteed is you’re less likely to know if they do make the same mistake again. You may have driven that information underground. If you’re lucky that person won’t make that mistake again. They will, however, make new ones. Are your chances of hearing about them more or less likely now? As well, have your chances of hearing about other team members mistakes increased or decreased?

How we respond is very important and often overlooked in relation to our real goals. It reminds me of my kids. When my son drinks alcohol or smokes for the first time, will I want to know about it? Of course I do. If I freak out, ground him, and give him a lecture, will that keep him from drinking again? Maybe, but probably not. Will it make him think twice about ever telling me about a similar event in his life again? Oh ya.

About 5 years ago I returned to playing ice hockey after an almost 15 year hiatus. It was a struggle in the beginning but I’ve been able to improve enough to hold my own and contribute, I think. In learning old skills again and new ones, it quickly became apparent that the important skills are the ones you can’t see, the ones you’re rarely aware of. It’s the subtle minute shift in the angle of your blade, the slight twist of your wrist as you shoot. The overt skills on display are an amalgamation of all the tiny ones you don’t realize you’re doing.

Thinking about this had me reflecting back to consulting. Often times the first objection to change or suggestions of change is that “we already do that” or “we basically do that”. I’m often left feeling like a nitpicker in attempting to explain the subtle differences between what a company’s doing today and what they could be doing tomorrow.

Maybe our work environments are more analogous to sports than even I first thought. It isn’t enough to be able to skate, make a saucer pass, or shoot. At a certain level, every player has those ‘on display’ skills. The differentiators are the subtle things we barely see, hardly think about, and can rarely articulate.

In the March issue of FastCompany, they ask 10 of their favourite brains what’s next for business and how to get ready for it. I’m most likely breaking a bunch of rules by posting the quotes here but I never had a black leather jacket as a kid so these are my rebel years. Here are a few quotes I picked out:

“I was told again and again that the basis of hiring is not your skills or experience, but how likable you are. The rationale is that you have to conform, in great detail, down to the shape of your lapel pin. In what kind of team does everyone have to be the same?”, Barbara Ehrenreich.

“Fewer and fewer people will want to be employees of corporations, because corporations don’t have anything to offer. Corporations don’t provide security and provide fewer and fewer benefits….This isn’t globalization, because globalization to me feels big. I think it’s the opposite, it’s villagization – making everything smaller and in some sense more intimate.” , Avram Miller.

“To pull this off, the corporate organization is going to change. No longer will there be a few people at the top, millions in middle management, and very few at the bottom. It’s going to become a lot of people at the top thinking strategy, and a lot of people at the bottom executing it against all these different segments. Sod all in the middle – it’s the end of management.” , Kevin Roberts.

These and many other quotes in this article excite me as we’ve somewhat bet the farm on this at ClearSpace and CreationStep. It isn’t what we do but how we do it and how we chose to build and organize ourselves around the work we do.

Some old rewards related quotes to make you love your paycheque…

“Not only are financial rewards not the most important thing to most people, but a substantial body of research has demonstrated, both in experimental and field settings, that large rewards can actually undermine intrinsic motivation. This process involves self-perception and retrospective sense-making: If someone works for a large reward, when called upon to account for his of her behaviour, the reward is a salient explanation – I did it for the money. When working hard for less money or for money that is less salient a rationale, people will come to see intrinsic interest in the work or the organization itself as their motivation.
An emphasis on financial incentives is controlling, and this control can set up psychological reactance in which people rebel against attempts to control their behaviour. ‘By making that bonus contingent on certain behaviours, managers manipulate their subordinates, and that experience of being controlled is likely to assume a punitive quality over time.’”

“The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, with his characteristic gift for understatement, has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded ‘the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world.’ He adds that it ‘nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and …leaves people bitter.’ To this we can add that it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control.”

“All this is not to say that pay is unimportant to people. If individuals are not treated fairly, pay becomes a symbol of the unfairness and a source of discontent. If the job, or the organization, or both, are basically unpleasant, boring, or unchallenging, then pay may be the only source of satisfaction or motivation in the work environment. But, creating a fun, challenging, and empowered work environment in which individuals are able to use their abilities to do meaningful jobs for which they are shown appreciation is likely to be a more certain way to enhance motivation and performance – even though creating such an environment may be more difficult and take more time than merely turning the reward lever.”

“As Bill Strusz, Director of Compensation at Xerox’s US Customer’s Operations division, is fond of saying, if you focus solely on compensation and change compensation only, you will get two results: nothing will happen, and you will spend a lot of money getting there.”

“To this point, I have argued that money’s role in the context of work is less prominent than we have assumed. When we widen our inquiry to look at the significance of money relative to life itself, the results are even more striking. As the sociologist Philip Slater once remarked, ‘The idea that everybody wants money is propaganda circulated by wealth addicts to make themselves feel better about their addiction.’”

“Organizational incentive systems send important messages about how and what the organization thinks of its members. A system that is reasonably complicated and comprehensive, rewarding myriad micro behaviours, sends the message that management believes people won’t do what is necessary unless they are rewarded for every little thing. A system of micro-level behavioral or outcome incentives also tends to convey an absence of trust, implying that people must be measured and rewarded for everything or they won’t do what is expected of them.”

“Individual incentive schemes erode teamwork and trust and set people against one another in a competition for rewards. Such systems do not promote sharing knowledge. Why should I teach you if we are competing for a fixed pool of salary raises? Such systems also don’t do much to promote concern about organizational well-being. Climbing the corporate rank or salary ladder becomes a more important objective than ensuring the organization’s overall success, particularly if job security is limited and the real goal is to get ready for a move to the next job, building a track record through a salary history and not by actual accomplishments.”

“By emphasizing financial rewards above all else, organizations signal that money is basically all they provide to those who work in them – not fun or meaningful work, only pay. Intrinsic motivation diminishes.”

These are some old notes from my time spent in more “traditional” organizations, reworked for the year of the dog….

One of the more intriguing parts of introducing a new review process in which people are asked to review their managers, is how those managers respond. Not how they respond to the actual reviews but how they respond to concept of being reviewed.

I’ve witnessed this several times and it universally involves a lot of tedious arguments. The managers throw their arms up and resolve “fine, go ahead but it’s a mistake”. They demand a line in the sand that frees them from being held accountable to the content of the reviews. The reviews must not be kept on their files, “it’s just a waste of paper”. They request that reviews only be used by the manager under review in order to improve their behaviour as they see fit, and that’s all.

In making these arguments the managers produce all kinds of excuses and justifications. The people who work for them don’t understand what their jobs really entail. They don’t see all the behind the scenes work they have to do. They don’t understand how difficult their jobs really are.

What you will rarely, if ever, see is a manager in the midst of a group of other managers having one of these earthshaking discussions reach a moment of true clarity. “Wait a minute, maybe that’s the point? Maybe this whole review thing just doesn’t make sense…for anyone? How could it be such a great tool for us to use on our people yet such a wrong tool for our people to use on us? Maybe the point of this exercise is for us to realize and understand that there are flaws in this concept?”

Oh to dream.