The other day, while standing in front of the mirror, I realized something. My criteria for success has changed. I used to ask myself whether I looked good. Now I ask myself whether I don't look too bad. I'm not sure exactly when this changed but it did. This subtle change is probably more responsible than anything else for the image that I see in the mirror. I changed my focus from "winning" to "not losing". Where I was once driven to work out, eat right, sleep well, etc., now I am satisfied if I just avoid things that are bad for me. Those few extra pounds that prevented me looking good, aren't as troublesome as they once were, since they don't make me look that bad. I've lowered the bar. It's not suprising that my weight continues to increase.
As leaders, we need to create a culture of people who strive to win rather than than just avoiding losing. One of the best leaders in this regard was my high school wrestling coach, Fred Richardi. I remember a match I had my sophomore year. It was only my second year wrestling but I had been put on the varsity team (needless to say, I lost a lot). My opponent was a senior ranked third in the state. With 30 seconds left in the match, we were tied. There was a pause in the match. I went back to my corner and Coach Richardi said something I'll never forget, "You still have time to beat him." Gven the circumstances I'm sure he was one of a very few coaches who would have made that comment. Most would have told me to hold out for the tie.
I tried to pin my opponent. He easily countered and escaped earning one point. He won the match. I sulked back to my corner expecting to get chewed out by my coach. But instead he said, "Good job." I reminded him that I had just lost. He replied, "I didn't expected you to win. I expected you to try to win." For Coach Richardi a loss trying to win was far better than settling for a tie. He wanted aggressive wrestlers who tried to win. As a result, his wrestlers and teams had strong winning records year after year. That moment changed my view. Had he not empowered me to take a risk or had he penalized me for not staying the course and accepting a tie, I would have had a very different, and average, wrestling career (not that mine was all that outstanding but it was certainly better than average).
Looking back on my business career, Coach Richardi's words have even more meaning. The times that I've failed have been when I was trying not to lose - the safe opinion that wouldn't stir controversy, the easy project that I could deliver with my eyes closed, or those times when I tried to stay below the radar. My successes have come when I tried to win -doing those things that other people thought not possible or going after the high visibility projects.
The same thing happens in the business with whom I work. Organizations, teams, and individuals try not to lose rather than strive to win. The result is cautious decision making, risk aversion, and only doing things that have been "tried and true". Over time, these organizations go from being good to not bad to irrelevant. The very actions they take to avoid losing are the ones that, in the end, drive their loss.
Leaders who encourage their people to play it safe (whether implicitly or explicitly) create cultures of people who play not to lose. They hit their targets and meet their deadlines but never create the "killer app" or innovative idea. Their departments don't detract from the business but aren't seen as value creators or essential functions. At best, they generate indifference from the rest of the business.
It's time to start playing to win. Encourage your people to take chances. Allow them to swing for the fence and understand that they might strike out more. In the end, you'll win more games and have more impact.
**In memory of Coach Fred Richardi who taught me about life while trying to turn me in to a wrestler.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Critical thinking is essential during execution
I recently gave a talk on critical thinking. One audience member firmly asserted that critical thinking is fine during planning when you have time. However, he said, it has no place during execution. His case in point, the Army. You can't have soldiers thinking about their mission. They just need to execute their orders. I hear this quite often. There is a strong belief that thinking is for planning, not execution. I couldn't disagree more.
Critical thinking needs to be happening all the time. It matters most during execution. After all, that is the only point at which your actions have consequence. Look at the most critical or devastating execution mistakes in your business. I would bet that many are not due to failed execution of the plan or policy. Often it is because they executed it too well.
The June, 2005 issue of Technology Review had an article by David Talbot titled Preventing Fratricide. Talbot cites a case of a U.S. and a British fighter plane were shot down during the second Gulf War. Planes get shot down during war, that wasn't his issue. The issue was that U.S. Patriot Missiles shot them down. Talbot provides several reasons for the errors including critical thinking. One of the biggest culprits was that the people who deployed the Patriots had a flawed assumption in their strategy. They assumed that Saddam Hussein was going to have a heavy, on-going barrage of missiles. Unfortunately, they didn't plan (or at least communicate a plan) for the alternative. According to Talbot, "The operating protocol was largely automatic, and the operators were trained to trust the system's software...a design that would be needed for heavy missile attacks, the task force wrote." In other words, part of the plan was that the operators shouldn't think but should rely on the system. Unfortunately, the intelligence was wrong and the missiles were few and far between. The systems weren't set up for that. The people deploying the Patriot batteries followed the plan perfectly. As a result, they watched as the missiles shot down their allies.
Sentinel events in hospitals, airline crashes, military errors, or even mundane day to day problems such as poor customer service or shop floor inefficiencies often stem from a lack of critical thinking during execution. Research shows that as stress and time pressures increase, critical thinking tends to decrease, just at the time you need it most. Believing that critical thinking is a luxury that can only be had during planning is itself a major thinking error.
As a leader, your job is to ensure that you create an environment where people think about what they do. The days of command and control decision making are over. This does not mean that people should sit around all day pondering every decision - that's not critical thinking anyway. It does mean that your people should have enough information and empowerment to challenge flawed or no longer relevant assumptions. Everyone in your organization should be thinking critically - especially those who are making the real decisions that ultimately affect your customer, your product, and your future.
A few tips for enabling critical thinking in your organization:
Critical thinking needs to be happening all the time. It matters most during execution. After all, that is the only point at which your actions have consequence. Look at the most critical or devastating execution mistakes in your business. I would bet that many are not due to failed execution of the plan or policy. Often it is because they executed it too well.
The June, 2005 issue of Technology Review had an article by David Talbot titled Preventing Fratricide. Talbot cites a case of a U.S. and a British fighter plane were shot down during the second Gulf War. Planes get shot down during war, that wasn't his issue. The issue was that U.S. Patriot Missiles shot them down. Talbot provides several reasons for the errors including critical thinking. One of the biggest culprits was that the people who deployed the Patriots had a flawed assumption in their strategy. They assumed that Saddam Hussein was going to have a heavy, on-going barrage of missiles. Unfortunately, they didn't plan (or at least communicate a plan) for the alternative. According to Talbot, "The operating protocol was largely automatic, and the operators were trained to trust the system's software...a design that would be needed for heavy missile attacks, the task force wrote." In other words, part of the plan was that the operators shouldn't think but should rely on the system. Unfortunately, the intelligence was wrong and the missiles were few and far between. The systems weren't set up for that. The people deploying the Patriot batteries followed the plan perfectly. As a result, they watched as the missiles shot down their allies.
Sentinel events in hospitals, airline crashes, military errors, or even mundane day to day problems such as poor customer service or shop floor inefficiencies often stem from a lack of critical thinking during execution. Research shows that as stress and time pressures increase, critical thinking tends to decrease, just at the time you need it most. Believing that critical thinking is a luxury that can only be had during planning is itself a major thinking error.
As a leader, your job is to ensure that you create an environment where people think about what they do. The days of command and control decision making are over. This does not mean that people should sit around all day pondering every decision - that's not critical thinking anyway. It does mean that your people should have enough information and empowerment to challenge flawed or no longer relevant assumptions. Everyone in your organization should be thinking critically - especially those who are making the real decisions that ultimately affect your customer, your product, and your future.
A few tips for enabling critical thinking in your organization:
- Reward critical thinking – don’t squelch people who oppose the status quo. Reward those people who can look at a situation differently.
- Assign people the role of thinking critically – One CEO would assign a different person in each meeting to play “devil’s advocate”. The CEO based that person’s performance in the meeting solely on his or her ability to raise tough issues.
- Provide context – Don’t just provide answers and orders. People can’t think critically about what they are doing unless they understand the assumptions and thought process that went into coming up with the answer.
- Communicate both the consensus and the dissention – The Supreme Court publishes both the final ruling of a case as well as the dissenting opinion. This is to support future thinking and decisions.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Forget social media. There's a more powerful way to encourage collaboration.
I was involved in an interesting discussion today. The group was trying to determine how to be more effective at driving collaboration in their organizations. This discussion has been going on for a long time. The emergence of social media has rekindled it by providing a new arsenal of tools from which to draw.
But it struck me that we might be asking the wrong question. In fact, I think we might have fallen into a common trap. Often, when people aren’t performing as expected, our first instinct is to "enable" - create tools, training, or processes for our people.
I'm not opposed to tools, training and processes. Good organizations give their people the resources they need to get things done. But, there is something more fundamental. Instead of asking, "how" people collaborate (and focusing on the tools), perhaps we can find a better answer by asking "who collaborates?"
Your people collaborate all of the time in their personal lives. They do it without all of the fancy tools, infrastructure, and processes that you make available to them. Even at work those people collaborate. They just don't always collaborate on the things that you want. Think of the last time you rolled out a major change initiative. I'd bet that your resistors found incredibly effective ways to collaborate and resist the change. They probably found "experts" who could build the case against the change; they located others with similar points of view. And, they coordinated the message so that there was a focused, unified force resisting the change. Just like at home, they probably didn't rely on your collaboration infrastructure to make this happen.
So, if it's not the infrastructure driving collaboration, what does? Let's go back to the question of "who" collaborates? People who collaborate the most have three things in common: shared goals, passion/engagement, and an opportunity to collaborate. Consider Wikipedia. The shared goal was the building of an open-source encyclopedia. The passion was whatever topic interested the individual making the contribution, and the opportunity was the Wikipedia site. Simple. So, why can't we replicate that?
Many organizations focus their efforts on the "opportunity part". They provide tools and website to allow collaboration. However, without passion or shared goals, people don’t seek opportunities. No one uses Facebook or Twitter just because they are available. They use them to further their goals and interests.
Recent research on workforce engagement sheds some light on the problem. A large percentage of people simply are not engaged in their jobs. They don't have passion for what they do. Their leaders fail to create a compelling vision or story in which they want to participate. They are doing a job. The aren't bursting with excitement over talking about the last customer complaint they handled, the status report that they wrote, or the team meeting in which they just participated. Many are probably trying to do the minimum required to get the job done satisfactorily.
Similarly, few leaders create simple, clear, shared goals for their organizations. At best individuals and departments have disparate goals. At worst, they have competing goals. In either case, people have little incentive to collaborate since, in the absence of shared goals, collaboration generally comes at a cost to one of the participants.
Perhaps it’s time to take a step back to the basics. There is no silver bullet or killer app that is going to solve our collaboration problems. Your people collaborate. They just don't collaborate on the things that you care about. So, instead of giving them a new tool, why not try to get them to care about those things as well?
But it struck me that we might be asking the wrong question. In fact, I think we might have fallen into a common trap. Often, when people aren’t performing as expected, our first instinct is to "enable" - create tools, training, or processes for our people.
I'm not opposed to tools, training and processes. Good organizations give their people the resources they need to get things done. But, there is something more fundamental. Instead of asking, "how" people collaborate (and focusing on the tools), perhaps we can find a better answer by asking "who collaborates?"
Your people collaborate all of the time in their personal lives. They do it without all of the fancy tools, infrastructure, and processes that you make available to them. Even at work those people collaborate. They just don't always collaborate on the things that you want. Think of the last time you rolled out a major change initiative. I'd bet that your resistors found incredibly effective ways to collaborate and resist the change. They probably found "experts" who could build the case against the change; they located others with similar points of view. And, they coordinated the message so that there was a focused, unified force resisting the change. Just like at home, they probably didn't rely on your collaboration infrastructure to make this happen.
So, if it's not the infrastructure driving collaboration, what does? Let's go back to the question of "who" collaborates? People who collaborate the most have three things in common: shared goals, passion/engagement, and an opportunity to collaborate. Consider Wikipedia. The shared goal was the building of an open-source encyclopedia. The passion was whatever topic interested the individual making the contribution, and the opportunity was the Wikipedia site. Simple. So, why can't we replicate that?
Many organizations focus their efforts on the "opportunity part". They provide tools and website to allow collaboration. However, without passion or shared goals, people don’t seek opportunities. No one uses Facebook or Twitter just because they are available. They use them to further their goals and interests.
Recent research on workforce engagement sheds some light on the problem. A large percentage of people simply are not engaged in their jobs. They don't have passion for what they do. Their leaders fail to create a compelling vision or story in which they want to participate. They are doing a job. The aren't bursting with excitement over talking about the last customer complaint they handled, the status report that they wrote, or the team meeting in which they just participated. Many are probably trying to do the minimum required to get the job done satisfactorily.
Similarly, few leaders create simple, clear, shared goals for their organizations. At best individuals and departments have disparate goals. At worst, they have competing goals. In either case, people have little incentive to collaborate since, in the absence of shared goals, collaboration generally comes at a cost to one of the participants.
Perhaps it’s time to take a step back to the basics. There is no silver bullet or killer app that is going to solve our collaboration problems. Your people collaborate. They just don't collaborate on the things that you care about. So, instead of giving them a new tool, why not try to get them to care about those things as well?
Saturday, October 10, 2009
There's a new blog in town - I recommend it to all leaders
As a leader, you've probably been bombarded with six sigma and lean. Should you do it? How do you do it? Does it make sense in a non-manufacturing setting?
Jim Wells, a Master Blackbelt in Six Sigma, is sharing his experience in a great new blog called, "Quality in Practice". This blog isn't about theory. This blog contains real-life, practical applications of Six Sigma and Lean. Jim is going to cut through the hype and help you figure out how to make these principles work for you.
I'd encourage every leader to check it out.
http://qualitypractice.blogspot.com
Jim Wells, a Master Blackbelt in Six Sigma, is sharing his experience in a great new blog called, "Quality in Practice". This blog isn't about theory. This blog contains real-life, practical applications of Six Sigma and Lean. Jim is going to cut through the hype and help you figure out how to make these principles work for you.
I'd encourage every leader to check it out.
http://qualitypractice.blogspot.com
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