Provide Context, Not Control

photo by pattyequalsawesome

photo by pattyequalsawesome

Sometimes you run across derivatives of the same idea from multiple sources and it gets you to stop and listen.

Two recent examples have come from Netflix and Miles Davis.

Ultimately, it’s about how best to maintain a leadership position by enabling those around you to explore new boundaries.  Leading and corralling rather than managing.

Netflix has posted a rather lengthy, but worthwhile slide show about their culture and how they work.  They put it best by asking their managers to provide ‘context, not control’ (slides 76 - 84).  In essence, describe where you want to go, not how you want to get there.

And The Miles Davis Story (as relayed by a friend) explored Miles’ proclivity to assemble talented musicians, set the mood for the evening and then walk around the stage as they do their thing.  His job was to capture each individual’s wandering explorations and create something cohesive out of it.  Sometimes it worked brilliantly.  Often it didn’t.  But his purpose was to create something that hadn’t been felt before.  To do that you have to be willing to try things that don’t pan out.

It takes a unique type of person to be able to lead in this manner.

  • You must be able to inspire.  Start by focusing on the destination and challenge people to find creative ways to get there.  Ask questions rather than provide answers (except for additional context).
  • You have to be able to communicate.  You can’t over-communicate.  Make sure everyone knows where you’re going and what’s on the landscape ahead.  Everything is need to know.  Everything.  Find your preferred method, but most importantly…
  • …You must be consistent.  While you may start getting self-conscious about saying the same thing twenty times - it will sink in.  Also recognize that one action counter to what you say completely undermines the foundation you’re trying to build.
  • You have to be confident enough in your abilities to be able to let go.  More cattle herder less prison guard.  Your job is to recognize good ideas not to necessarily to create them.   Trust in yourself to be able to find the pearls of wisdom in disparate ideas.

It’s no wonder that people who are at the top of their game are attracted by this environment.  If you’re looking to set the direction for your industry then it’s a leadership style worth considering.

Deposit: Emotional Capital

photo by mrpattersonsir

photo by mrpattersonsir

Work is draining.  For many, rare are the days when we leave the office feeling energized.

  • It drains us to work with people who communicate differently
  • It drains us to combat the petty political games
  • It drains us to try and adopt the company’s and our manager’s values in order to ‘get ahead’
  • It drains us to figure out what is meant rather than what is said
  • It drains us to just be told what to do
  • It drains us to continually give ourselves pep talks in order to get our heads back in the game
  • It drains us to repeatedly convince ourselves that what we’re working on is really important

As a manager you have to recognize that people are going through this.  Chances are you are too.  But change has to start somewhere.

Sure, technically your job is to make sure the ball is being advanced down the field.  But if your team is too exhausted (or detached) to run the plays how far is the ball going to move?

Your real job is to make deposits into the emotional bank so that when the inevitable time comes when the team needs to hunker down and everything has gone sideways that people are present, engaged and have the persistence to get through the rough patches.

From the employees perspective, they have gone out of their way to make the relationship work.  They started in their role excited and ready to roll up their sleeves and make a real difference.  But every slight along the way has made a withdrawal on their emotional involvement with you, the team and with the company.

  • Seemingly innocuous statements may have reinforced how little you know them.
  • Decisions may have been made that seemingly flew in the face of the stated company values.  That inconsistency gets noticed.
  • Ideas may have been squashed prematurely.
  • A teammate may have been rewarded ‘unfairly’

It all adds up and you may be responsible for making many of those emotional withdrawals.  If you expect them to dig in then you need to exert the energy to refill that account.

Focus on your people.  Feed them the projects that keep them energized.  Recognize they’re all different and build those relationships accordingly.  People do want to be treated differently.  They’re not all the same and not universally motivated by the same things.

Start today.  Hold one on ones that don’t focus on tasks but rather the individual.  The work will still get done.

Motivate Intrinsically

photo by becominggreenblog

photo by becominggreenblog

Dan Pink’s recently posted TED talk makes a convincing argument for why extrinsic, if-then rewards are detrimental to our businesses.  If you need an 18-minute break then you could spend your time in far worse ways.

If you don’t have 18-minutes then the gist is:

Extrinsic rewards / contingent motivators limit thinking and block creativity.  Extrinsic rewards do work to narrow focus and work well when solution is known.  But right brain, conceptual abilities are what are needed in our knowledge-based workplaces today and these are stunted by if-then rewards.

His evidence is partly a study in which people were given a box of tacks, matches and a candle and were asked to attach the candle to the wall so it did not drip on the table.  The solution requires some literal ‘out of the box’ thinking.  Two groups were given the challenge.  One was told their time would help establish group norms and the other was given a monetary incentive to complete it in the fastest time possible.

The result?  Those who were given the if-then incentive completed the problem three and a half minutes…slower.

The incentive narrowed their focus and limited their creativity.

Chances are the team you’re leading isn’t building widgets and being asked to push buttons and pull levers faster.  Your team operates within a changing marketplace where the solutions to success are not always obvious.

If you want to look good yourself then you need the mental horsepower of your entire team to find the solution.  Providing a bigger carrot isn’t going to help.  Rather you need to figure out if your team members even like vegetables.

Intrinsic motivation, according to Pink, comes from three things.  He only defines the first in his talk so I’ll go out on a limb and color between his lines on the latter two.  Those three are:

  1. Autonomy - giving people the chance to work on the things they believe to be important
  2. Mastery - allowing people to play to their strengths and having a coach (not a manager) in their corner who is interested in helping to make them better
  3. Purpose - ensuring people are working on things that are important.  Tying their ‘to do’ list to the team and company goals

I’d also like to throw in a fourth which may be a derivative of ‘purpose.’  I’ll call it ‘potential.’

  1. Potential (should be #4, but c’est la vie) - Find out how the team member views herself.  Where she sees herself going.  What she wants to accomplish.  Help her get there by leaping over the hurdles the team or company faces

Far too often we succumb to the ‘inherent truths’ that turn out to be just not true.  Social science has a lot to offer us in the business world if we’re willing to challenge our beliefs and listen.  Let us start here.

Turn your people loose with what matters to them, work hard to align company and individual goals, give them the support they need to fulfill the goals and help them reach their potential.

How to Hire Great People

photo by jason lippa

photo by jason lippa

RoundPegg held a roundtable on hiring this morning with some of Boulder’s most forward-thinking CEOs.  Needless to say, it’s a topic where everyone has learned a lot from their failures and the conversation was a lively one.

While it was universally acknowledged that how one fits with the company’s culture is directly linked to success, how everyone got to the point of whether a candidate ‘fit’ or not was interesting.

Here are a few of the more intriguing approaches:

  1. Know what you’re looking for. Focus on those who are successful within the organization and find the commonalities between them all.  What are the shared values, communication styles, personality traits etc.  Once you know what makes one successful it’s much easier to identify that in others
  2. Lean on your high performers. Ask those same high performers to interview the candidates.  We all naturally gravitate toward those who are ‘like us.’  If the high performers think highly of the candidate then the odds are better that the candidate will work out
  3. Listen between the lines. You’re asking questions about the person.  But you learn more when they talk about others.  Do their greatest successes involve anyone other than themselves?  How do they reference others who contributed to that success?
  4. Watch them live. Get the candidate out of the conference room and observe how they handle various non-work situations.  Travel with them (a stretch) or go out to a meal.  See how they treat the waitresses, gate agents etc.  People often let their guard down when doing the mundane.  If you’re particularly sneaky you can set up a situation - e.g. ask the waitress to overcharge the table or give too little change.  True colors will often come out.
  5. Role play. Put them through a scenario that your company is facing.  Ask a product manager to spec out a new feature and lead a couple folks (e.g. engineers and marketers) to hone the concept and scope the work.  With so little time to work on it, look beyond the thought that went into the specifications and pay attention to how they work with others to improve the concept and get buy-in.
  6. Interesting questions. A couple interesting questions arose.  One was to define leadership.  How they answer that illustrates the type of individual behind whom they would most likely throw their energy.  Another was to identify their favorite literary character and to describe the values that character held.  Again, you get a lot of insight into the types of values the candidate admires.  Finally, asking about their greatest successes and failures has proved helpful when you listened to the amplitude of their feat/failure, how they described their role, the role of others and what they took away from it.

It was a fantastic hour of discussion that wandered down other paths on culture, managing people and the like.  So I’m sure we missed a ton of great ideas.  What specifically works for you?

What Employees Want From Jobs

photo by jspace3

photo by jspace3

Thanks to Lijit I can see what folks are searching for when they arrive.  “What Employees Want From Their Jobs” has been hitting the top of the charts frequently lately so here goes:

It depends.

Horrible answer, but people are all working for different reasons.  The best employers try to get to the bottom of what indviduals want rather than looking at their workforce as a single entity.  I’d recommend you start by asking them.  Ask them repeatedly and don’t accept their first few answers.  Most people haven’t actually thought much about this.  Press them.  Then ask again.

So contrary to what I just said, I’m going to try drawing some broad generalities as a starting point.

  • Control of their destiny. One needs to know what constitutes excellent performance and what it will take to get a raise, promotion or more responsibility.  Further they must have the leeway to perform excellently.  When politics, bureaucracy and subjectivity take the control out of their hands rewards are perceived as arbitrary.  Randomness isn’t exactly inspirational.
  • Trust.  Be an ‘insider.’ Trust in your people to hold sensitive information close to the vest.  Bring them into the fold.  Being on the ‘inside’ and breaking down the ‘us vs. them’ barriers is a great way to establish allegiance.  In particular, give them the information that impacts how they do their job or could fundamentally change their world.  Poor communication begets poor action.  It fosters resentment and ultimately makes you look bad anyway.
  • Compensation fairness. It’s usually not about how much one is making as it is about the perceived fairness of what they earn relative to others.  Often salaries are a function of what gets negotiated initially.  And new employees are often ‘valued’ more than existing ones (3% annual raises don’t add up as quickly as job-hopping).  Assume the information will leak.  Admins and communal printers are quite efficient at identifying inequity.
  • A challenge. More often than not, people want a chance to grow.  They want to stretch themselves, learn and try new things.  Find ways to give them the chance to fail but give them the support to maximize the chance they won’t.
  • Important work and a chance to shine. Not everyone likes the spotlight, but everyone likes to feel like they’ve done a great job on something that really matters.  Ensure people understand how what they’re working on helps the company accomplish the big goals and then find ways to get them the credit they deserve in a way that suits their personality.

A job is a lot more than a paycheck, a bowl of M&Ms and health insurance.  Intrinsic rewards are far more meaningful and lasting.  If you see your team as more than cogs in the wheel and want to build a sustainable business then focus on what those intrinsic rewards are for each individual.