Category Archives: management

I found this post by Stanford evidence-based management professor Robert Sutton and tweeted about it earlier today.  But since it’s so good, I decided to do a post about it along with some commentary.  First, here are the twelve things:

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do.
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

And here are some thoughts on them:

1. While 360 degree feedback studies can help managers understand themselves better, I agree that, by definition, managers will always have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it’s like to work for them.  By the way, in general, I think managers always need to assume they are missing information, regardless of the topic.
2. I agree strongly with this one; I think the media puts too much emphasis on the big, breakthrough idea and virtually none on the mundane business of clarifying operational goals, getting people to agree them, and then holding people accountable for delivering them.
3. I semi-agree with this one.  I think quarterly operational goals are critical, annual goals are important, and some general sense of “where we’re headed” is important as well.  But I do agree that a big part of a manager’s job is getting those small, everyday wins that my colleague Martin Cooke refers to as “1% changes.”
4. I totally agree with this one and struggle with it every day.  On one hand you have experience and opinions and want to show leadership.  On the other you don’t want to run over your people.
5. I’ve seen myself in this way only when it came to certain constituencies (e.g., the board, bankers, analysts) and not in general.  Perhaps I should.  I’ll mull on this one.
6. Yes.  See 4.
7. I am a big believer in understanding both sides of an argument before deciding.
8. I think this is a very important point and every manager, including me, surely believes:  “it’s OK to make a mistake, just don’t make the same one twice.”  The question is does our behavior actually reinforce that view?  People listen to words, they watch behavior, and they weigh the behavior about 10x relative to the words.
9. I agree that innovation is important, and not only in large things.  I think the business media tends to equate innovation with “the next big thing.”  To me, innovation matters in all things, both large and small.  And if you agree with Sutton’s point 3, it matters perhaps more in small matters than in large ones.
10. While I’d never consciously thought about this issue that way, I do have an innate tendency to worry more about driving out the negative than collecting the positive.  Some of my philosophies (e.g., mediocrity intolerance) reflect that.
11. Yes, and it’s easy to miss this one.  As a CEO you can get so results oriented that you can forget the how whilst focusing on the what.
12. Indeed.

The ability to see both sides of an issue is a critical executive skill.  Yet, in typical corporate America culture, that skill is all too often lost.  Why?

• Things get partisan:  sales wants X, marketing wants Y, finance wants Z.
• Discussions turn blame-oriented.  Instead of working to solve problems, people work to avoid blame.
• Managers lose interest in understanding the alternative positions.
• People don’t listen to each other, often because they’re too busy thinking of what they’re going to say next.  (Resulting in what one friend calls “parallel independent conversations.”)

The solution is to force managers to articulate both sides of important issues.  If a person is advocating thing X instead of thing Y, I want them to be able to clearly and convincing explain the advantages of both.  The best decisions come, in my opinion, when you hold two opposing ideas in your mind at once, and then choose.

When done correctly, you will see:

• A focus on solutions, not blame.  Example:  “help me understand how you want to solve the problem.”
• Managers looking forward, not back.  This flows naturally from the prior point.
• Managers practicing active listening, a great technique for trying to understand the other person’s point of view.  Example:  “so, Ted, you’re telling me that you think we’re doing too many tradeshows that result in poor quality leads — is that correct?”

But seeing both sides of an issue only gets you halfway to your goal.   In many big companies, the unintended dysfunctional consequence of doing so is passivity and fence sitting:

• Well,we could do A or we could do B.  Frankly, I’m open.
• The consensus in the meeting was that both A and B were good options.  (This hits my “launch” button!)
• Well, there are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both options.
• We should pick the option that keeps the most other options option.  (Also known as The MBA Credo).

Somewhere along the way in corporate America, managers forgot that they are paid to make decisions.  The point of seeing both sides isn’t to avoid decision making.  The point is to make better decisions.

To ensure a focus on decisions, I usually run a line of questioning that starts with the decision and backs up from there.

• What do you think we should do?  (And push for a single answer)
• Why do you think we should do it?
• Why should we do the alternative?

If you’re already performing these techniques, great.  If you’re not, give them a try and let me know how it works.

The older, grumpier, and less patient I get, the more I realize that keeping up with the conversation is probably the key skill for career success and executive development. I wonder why it’s taken me so long to realize this because, like the discovery of the non-existence of Santa Claus, once seen, it appears obvious. But it sure as heck wasn’t obvious to me during the last 20 years of my management career.

Let’s make this concrete. To assess whether someone keeps up, I increasingly ask myself one question: do I want to talk to person X about problem Y?

There are three primary reasons why I wouldn’t want to talk to person X about problem Y:

• Person X doesn’t understand problem Y. It’s not interesting to talk to him/her* because all I do is educate him on the problem. It is not a stimulating two-way exchange of ideas.

• Person X doesn’t say anything interesting about problem Y. Person X understands the problem, but doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say about solving it. Boring.

• Person X doesn’t follow through. Person X says interesting things about problem Y, but never follows through on agreements made during the discussion. Big talker. Or, to use the Texas equivalent: big hat, no cattle.

I reflect on the now-immortal words of a Business Objects board member who I (and several other execs) watched argue with a United flight attendant many years ago on a flight from Paris: “I don’t want to talk to you any more.” At which point the pilot came out not in an escalation of authority, but more to provide an appropriate-level contact with whom to resume the conversation.

(This became a running joke as we subsequently imagined ourselves being fired in a similar dialog. “What went wrong with the marketing campaign?” “Well, we had some trouble with the mailing lists.” “The mailing lists?” “Yes, you know sometimes it’s hard to find good –” “I don’t want to talk to you any more.” “But, but, but …”)

I like the want part of the equation because it provides an emotional element in the decision process. Yes, I’m supposed to talk to person X about problem Y because it’s in his domain as defined by the current organization. Yes, I know that. But do I want to talk to him?

Wherever I find a supposed-to/want-to gap, there’s a potential need for an organization change.

It might be that person X is wrong for the company. Or it might be that person X is a bad fit with his role or certain parts of it. But when things are working well, I should not only want — but be eager – to talk to person X about problem Y.

Now I’m sure I’ve condemned myself to weeks of “Hi Dave, do you like talking to me about X” questioning from Mark Logic staff. But I think it’s probably worth it to have shared this reductionist nugget.

According to this theory, the secret to career success is then: getting your bosses to want to talk to you about the organization’s top problems. That means two things: you need to figure out the top problems and you need to figure out how to make them want to talk with you about them.

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* Henceforth, take all him references as him/her and his references as his/her.