Counter-Intuitive Management

Visionary Or Crazy?

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:21:00 +0000

The key to management is to get rid of the managers.

The key to getting work done on time is to stop wearing a watch.

The best way to invest corporate profits is to give them to the employees.

The purpose of work is not to make money. The purpose of work is to make the workers,
whether working stiffs or top executives, feel good about life.

Ricardo Semler (CEO Semco, author of "The Seven Day Weekend")

A New Thread: Fear, Organizations & Potential

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:40:00 +0000

As much as better processes, such as sales processes, can help an organization improve short-term results, the best strategy for systemic long-term growth depends entirely upon your people and management philosophies. For example - do you reward risks and failure, or punish them? (You might say you reward risks, but what have your actions communicated to your organization? What did you do to the last person who tried something new and failed?)

In addition to simple sales improvement ideas, I believe cultural and organizational ideas can set the stage for even more fundamental, long-term success of a team or company. However, from my personal experience, I know people (like yourself) will fall into one of three categories:

a) Believer. "Yes!" You get it and connect with these new ideas. You see how they can benefit your organization and are willing to try some out,
b) Skeptic. "No way Jose." You think these ideas are impractical because "this isn't how things work in the real world," or you're
c) Agnostic. "Where's the proof?" You aren't sure about all this yet, but it's intriguing enough to keep reading about it, perhaps even try something at some point if it really seems relevant to a particular situation you're facing and there is some proof of success.

Classic corporate culture is, at its root, based on fear and insecurity (I'm speaking in generalizations here, so yes I realize there are exceptions). This fear shows up symptomatically in ways such as:
*Insecurity (I'm afraid of what people or my boss will think of the truth, so I have to massage it)
*Secrecy (I'm afraid that if this something is known, either to coworkers or other companies, it might hurt me)
*Parent-child relationships (I'm afraid to let you do something different than what I want. I say "no" a lot)
*Control (I'm uncomfortable without control)
*Denial (Failure cannot happen; failure is unacceptable)

Just as someone who's individual personality is fearful, paranoid and in denial can't live up to their full potential, these same values in a corporation holds back the entire organization's potential and growth.

More to come, but if this first post strikes a chord, send me a note (you can do that through the email link in my Blogger profile)

Do You Believe In Theory X or Theory Y?

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:43:00 +0000

Douglas McGregor developed a philosophical view of humankind with his Theory X and Theory Y in 1960. These are two opposing perceptions about how people view human behavior at work and organizational life.

THEORY X
With Theory X assumptions, management's role is to coerce and control employees.
* People have an inherent dislike for work and will avoid it whenever possible.
* People must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened with punishment in order to get them to achieve the organizational objectives.
* People prefer to be directed, do not want responsibility, and have little or no ambition.
* People seek security above all else.

THEORY Y
With Theory Y assumptions, management's role is to develop the potential in employees and help them to release that potential towards common goals.
* Work is as natural as play and rest.
* People will exercise self-direction if they are committed to the objectives (they are NOT lazy).
* Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement.
* People learn to accept and seek responsibility.
* Creativity, ingenuity, and imagination are widely distributed among the population. People are capable of using these abilities to solve an organizational problem.
* People have potential.

Which theory do you subscribe to?

His book, "The Human Side of Enterprise"
http://www.codysbooks.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=0071462228

(Thanks Kary!)

Don't Delegate: Just Do It

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:22:00 +0000

As a manager, do you feel entitled to delegate tasks to "less-important" people? How does it feel when your own manager asks you to do something that you feel is a waste of time? Or when your manager asks you to do something that you know would take them 10 minutes but will take you an hour?

The point is not that delegation is bad, but that delegation is like any tool: it can be used efficiently or inefficiently. If it becomes a way for a manager (whether you or your own manager) to just shift pain to someone more vulnerable than they, like a report, it becomes destructive. There is a difference between delegating work to the right person who should own it, and delegating work to someone else because you don't want to do it or think that you're too busy (who isn't busy?) Delegation gone wrong wastes your and your people's time and sends a message to them that you don't respect their time.

As a manager, by just getting stuff done that you might have delegated for the wrong reasons in the past, you:
1) Save you the time of explaining, clarifying and following up,
2) Saves your team's time and increase their productivity, and
3) Boosts their morale by communicating to them through your actions that you respect their time

Be authentic about your delegation - who really is the best, not most convenient or most junior, person to handle it?

Control without Controlling

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:12:00 +0000

Executives and big companies love the idea of control - through in reality they never have real control, only the illusion of control. And the bigger a company gets and the higher the rank of an executive, the less control they have! (Though they have much more influence)

People hate to be controlled, whether through arbitrary rules and regulations or management that is afraid of any kind of risk. Who needs a new parent? Not only is control frustrating to people, it kills the kind of new ideas and energy that creates new kinds of businesses through innovation! Managers can choose to exert another kind of control: control of quality and results through vision, learning and development of judgment, rather than through rules and regulations.

Control through vision and alignment
If people have a clear vision of what is important to their team and company, have aligned goals, and are encouraged to learn through experience in making appropriate decisions and judgments, the need to 'control' in the first place will naturally go away. It's much more effective to spend time on developing and communicating compelling vision, values and goals than it is on creating and enforcing rules and regulations.

Work for Their Success, Not Your Success

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 18:52:00 +0000

Mindset flip
As a manager, does your team work for you, or do you work for them?
Do they work to make you successful, or do you work to make them successful?
Do you ask people "what are you doing for me?" Or do you ask them "what can I do for you?"

Traditional management and leadership models promote a manager stereotype of a powerful, strong and decisive authority figure. "We're climbing the mountain, follow me!" Yet the most powerful kind of manager can let go of their ego and themselves, and is able to completely focus on making their people successful. After all, they're usually the ones doing the work and interacting with customers!

Making a bigger impact
As one person I am constrained in what I can do. I don't scale. But my impact on the organization is much bigger if I can make my 3, 10, 20 or 200 people more effective. The more people that I can make more successful...makes me more effective and successful!

Motivation
Most people aren't used to feeling that managers are truly there to support them and work for them. The true tests occur when the manager chooses between their own self-interests and their team's...such as giving or taking credit. Or in being happy for someone who's leaving the company for a better job, instead of trying to find ways to get them to stay in a job that isn't as a good a fit for that person.

It's amazingly motivating to your people once they understand you're there to support them, whatever they need.

Each person defines success differently
Your definition of success will vary from what success means to each person on the team. What does success mean for each individual? The #1 motivation for the best people is not money. What is it to them? Do they even know? This isn't a question you can answer at a team level, as it'll vary wildly by each person.

Walking the walk
As an example, pay attention to youself the next person that finds a job outside your team or company, one that really is a better fit for their personal goals. Will you celebrate their new opportunity wholeheartedly? Or will you feel resentful that they've created work for you to replace them, or perhaps rejected that they didn't want to stay with you?

Avoid Making Decisions

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:25:00 +0000

If you're a "Missing In Action" manager that needs to make more, not fewer, decisions, ignore this section!

Decision making skills, just like muscles, get better as you use them more often. As a manager, think about how much you've learned by exercising these muscles, and how you've been able to move the team forward with your confident (or at least confident-sounding) decisions.

That makes sense, right? Now flip it around to look at it from the team's side: the more decisions you make for your people, the fewer they make for themselves. For every decision you choose to make for the team or for someone, you've deprived the team or that person of an opportunity to exercise their decision muscles. Even bad decisions can be valuable, when the person learns from them.

By making decisions for them, you're teaching them to become dependent on you and less self-reliant. This is true even if that person wants the decision to come from you - you can still decline to accept. An obvious example: "Should I stay in my position and earn another promotion, or try to move to another group where I might find my job more fulfilling but will earn less?"

Yes, there will be decisions that ultimately HAVE to be made by you, but many fewer than you think, such as significant organizational changes, [examples] I bet most of the decisions you current make are ones you don't have to make but that you choose to make.

As a manager, it's your decision to make as many, or as few, decisions as you want with the team. You can choose to encourage your people to get approval on everything new they try, on every discount, on every kind of new marketing message, of every change in seating arrangements...or you can choose to let them take responsibility for their own decisions. Decision-making as a whole will improve and they will truly appreciate it.

Are you (or your company's processes) depriving your people of the opportunity to make decisions?

Are You Paying Them for Achieving the Wrong Results?

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 18:13:00 +0000

It doesn't matter how fast or well you solve the wrong problem. It is always challenging in setting individual and team goals and compensation, especially when the results of the team aren't as easily measured as sales (business development, marketing, product management, internal audit...). Are your goals aligned with what matters to the company, or are they your goals because they're the easiest to track and measure?

For example, let's take a mature company who's board is focused on three things: growing cashflow, ROI and net profit. What should marketing be measured on? Oftentimes it's the total number of leads generated, without any quality criteria. Measuring marketing on quantity of leads can actually be harmful if it encourages marketing to generate leads that are a waste of sales' time. What about:
* The number of leads, but only from 'high quality' sources (referrals, 'contact me'...), and excluding low-quality sources (webinars, tradeshows...).
- These are just examples - what are your own hgh and low quality sources?
* The number of leads that get positively qualified by sales
* The revenue generated from the leads
* The cashflow, ROI and profit from the leads

Companies often don't measure marketing on these better metrics because, for example, they would need to update their reporting to track these metrics, or marketing resists measurement, or "that's not how we have ever done it here".

Another example is in customer service. How many companies measure, as key metrics, time per call, first call resolution and cost per call? Are those more important to your executives or less important than customer satisfaction and net recommender metrics? Is customer service viewed as a cost center, or an investment in making customers happy?

The closer you can align people and teams to the company's strategic goals (whatever they are), the more aligned and productive they will be, and you can stop paying them for the wrong results.

Work Less, Think More

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:20:00 +0000

Thinking before you act can save you a tremendous amount of time. Whenever we get a new project, we're tempted to jump right in and start, without considering "what are we trying to accomplish, and why does it matter to the organization?" Studies suggest that workers are only adding true value to the business during about 5% of the time they are at work.

Of course workers are busy 95% of the time they're on the job, so what's the problem? The problem is how much of the activity is a waste of time. Consider a software developer that writes code non-stop for two weeks. If it turns out that the code was sloppy, and it needs a week of QA and fixing to correct it, that's three weeks of activity for a beta. What if the product manager that spent two weeks designing it in the first place didn't use customer feedback in his design, and realizes in beta testing that they need another two weeks of changes to fix it? And what if the CEO realizes that the market he decided the company should get into, widgets, actually doesn't have the right margins and we're shifting to thingamajiggies and cancels the project? All that busy activity added no value to the business, unless the people in the process learned, as a group, how to think more about what they really want to accomplish BEFORE acting.

Motivate Through Aspiration, Not Fear

aaron@pebblestorm.com (Aaron Ross) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:59:00 +0000

There is still a stereotype of the "kickass manager" who blows in, lays down the law (ever seen Glengarry Glenross?) and blows out, leaving his troops scared yet highly motivated through this fear of God...and they rise to the occassion to save the day by blowing their numbers away!

That might work once. Or twice. Or even longer, if your people aren't skilled or self-confident enough to find jobs elsewhere. But it's not the best way to build a great team that can make a business sustainably successful over the course of years.

People are motivated by 1) fear and 2) aspiration. Which one do you use more? What idea gives meaning or vision to each individual to create long-term, sustainable motivation?

Fear can work wonders in the short-term, but isn't a sustainable a motivator - it takes too much energy and burns you and your people out. Great managers first motivate through aspiration, and then secondly only occassional rally the team with adrenaline-producing anxiety around achieving major goals, deadlines and projects.