Be Careful What You Expect

James K. Harter, Ph.D., the chief scientist of workplace management at Gallup has been investigating the manager-employee relationship and the role stress plays for some years now. His team has found that the quality of our relationships with our managers, and our perception of our workplace as a positive or negative environment can predict, and contribute to, up to 30% of the heart disease that we actually develop. That’s how powerful these relationships are, such that they affect our own health.

A related Yale School of Management study revealed that simply by changing very small things about how managers interact with their teams, and the expectations they have, they can create immense performance differences. For example, in one phase of the study managers were asked to deliver a script read in a negative, neutral, or stressful tone. A second group of managers was asked to deliver the same message in a cheerful or positive tone of voice. As you might expect, the first group not only participated in a more negative and less productive discussion following, but they also understood and comprehended less. The other teams not only were more productive, but they reported enjoying their work more. Imagine that. And remember, both groups were told the exact same information.

Shawn Achor and his team at Harvard conducted another related study in which they identified individual managers in a large group as having either a “theory x” disposition or a ‘theory y” disposition. Theory X managers believed that employees essentially found work to be toiling, only performed for the money, and had to be constantly watched or they wouldn’t perform. Theory Y managers believed that people were intrinsically motivated, creative, and could best decide how to get their work done with little supervision. What they found was that Theory X managers had Theory X employees, and Theory Y managers had Theory Y employees. Interestingly, as they followed these managers over time as they moved into leading different teams, the researchers found that the managers had the ability to change the orientation of the people on their team. That is, a Theory X manager could inherit a Theory Y team and turn them into Theory X employees.

This is the Pygmalion effect in which you get what you expect. Some of the more classic experiments by Robert Rosenthal involved telling teachers that particular students (selected randomly) were exceptional and very intelligent. The teachers then changed their attitudes toward those children, expected them to perform better, and they did. It turns out, the teacher’s biased expectations had real-life actual effects.

Expect the best.

Beware the Innovation Killers

“All too often the act of the innovator, that stroke of genius, is in spite of the company system, not because of the company system.”

– Craig Wynett, Chief Innovation Officer, Procter & Gamble

Alan Murray blogged today in the Wall Street Journal that management is dead. Within hours Tom Peters tweeted: “Guarantee: Hierarchy will NEVER disappear. Period. Take it to the bank.”

I think they’re both right.   Of course, people have been talking about the power of creative destruction and blowing up hierarchies to foster engagement, collaboration, and innovation for years. Whether unintentional or flat-out malicious, the enemies of innovation include:

  • The Bureaucrat: builds consistency, and sets limits to ensure rule adherence. Favorite quotes: “Fill out this form.” and “That’s not in this budget cycle.”
  • The Totem-poler: resource-blocker and creativity killer. Favorite quotes: “Has this been approved?” or “We tried that before without success.”
  • Deadbeat sponsor: project champion lacking attention, interest, or clout. Favorite quotes: “Can you rework the business plan on this?” “Let’s study this some more”
  • Power-monger: power and resources are more important than results. Favorite quotes: “I’ve already thought of that” “We’re already building that in our group”
  • Chicken-little: paranoid scarcity-mindset. Favorite quotes: “We can’t afford that.” “Hope you can do that with your own people”

True innovation supporters and collaborators are generous, encouraging, and inspiring. Stay close to the real McCoy.

Bring back quiet time and your ideas will benefit

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. – Einstein

Theresa Amabile, of Harvard, and her colleagues conducted a study in which they tried to capture creativity in the wilds of teams and companies by asking participants to reveal their activities in Daily Questionnaires. These surveys were aimed at monitoring what participants were doing on a daily basis in their teams and projects to distill how creativity really happens – thus trapping the elusive critter Creativity in action.

Entering the study, the conventional thinking was that imminent deadlines and crisis thinking would lead to more innovative and novel solutions. The power of urgency right? As Theresa’s colleague Leslie Perlow demonstrated in a 1999 study, the vicious time-work cycle of crisis mentality, rewarding individual heroics, and constant interruption, is considerably less conducive to fostering real creativity and innovation, than good old-fashioned focus and uninterrupted attention.

In Amabile’s study she introduced a mandatory quiet time, followed by collaborative interaction, then another quiet period of work and implementation. Overwhelmingly, the engineers reported a higher level of both productivity and creativity when the strict quiet time was imposed. Sadly, six months after the study concluded quiet time had vanished, and within a year the old habits of constant interruption were back in force. I might get an email from the Getting Things Done guru David Allen on this next point, but Therese Hoff Macan showed in a 1994 study that although time management training and tools could bring greater satisfaction, contrary to popular claims, time management training was not found to be effective in job performance.

Bring back quiet time, and uninterrupted work. How we spend our day is how we spend our life. We are the sum of what we pay attention to. What we focus our attention on determines our skill, experience, knowledge, amusement, fulfillment, joy.

The Next Level – Become a Change Artist

My last post argued for recognizing and adopting the innovative practices of positive deviance. Now I’m suggesting you can become one. Identifying and adopting the strategies of positive deviants can be a powerful accelerant in your work, your play. I’m talking about being a Change Artist – creating new, unique change in positive and pro-social ways.

First, what’s positive deviance:

Positive deviance focuses on those extreme cases of excellence when organizations and their members break free from the constraints of norms to conduct honorable behaviors. – Gretchen Spreitzer, University of Michigan

Change artists do at least these four key things constantly, always:

  1. Replace fear with curiosity: First get out of your comfort zone. Often fear motivates stagnation, and the fear of failing can drive people to not try new or challenging things outside their competence, and thus finally fulfill The Peter Principle and arrive at their own level of incompetence.
  2. Experiment: Familiar with the story of WD-40? Some engineers were trying to make a rust-preventative by displacing water on metal surfaces, thus “water displacement #40” because it took them 40 recipes to get it right. Try things and don’t give up.
  3. Reach out for ideas: Even poets, writers and sculptors in their private studios are collaborators – always building on open-sourced collaborations. Whether you reach out personally to colleagues, or scour the web for ideas, when you reach beyond your own expertise with an open mind, the resulting collaborative effort will yield more powerful results
  4. Count things: Become a scientist about it. Anything directly or indirectly related to your goals are worth keeping track of, because the numbers will lead to questions, and the questions will lead to change. If you run a restaurant, count the number of kids who order Shirley Temples, or how long your typical wait list is on a Friday night. What you count becomes what you think about, and what you ultimately choose to change.

Positive deviance can also happen on an organizational level.  Previously I posted about Merck during the dark Vioxx days, but Merck has deviated from the norm in positive pro-social ways too.  In 1978 Merck inadvertently created a potential cure for river blindness – a painful and debilitating disease that affects millions in developing nations around the world.

They had a choice to think like a capitalist and mine the bottom of the pyramid market with this new drug, drop the project due to daunting manufacturing and distribution costs, or… be true to their founder’s words:  “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people.  It is not for profits.  The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they never fail to appear.” – George Merck II

In spite of the fact that the manufacturing and distribution was greater than what the 3rd world market could bear, in spite of the fact that Merck lacked the infrastructure to effectively distribute the medication, in spite of the fact that the drug wasn’t mass market-tested and they were unsure what the medication’s effect would be at scale, and in spite of the fact that they risked Wall-street confidence by investing against earnings because there was no foreseeable profit and a 250 million dollar price tag – despite all this, since 1987 Merck has donated more than 2.5 billion tablets of MECTIZAN in more than 30 countries worldwide and protected over 100 million people from this debilitating disease.

Learn from Positive Deviants

On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, at age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. In her own words, she was “tired of giving in.”

As a popular Zen Buddhist story goes:
Two monks were returning to the monastery in the evening. It had rained and there were puddles of water on the road sides. At one place a beautiful young woman was standing unable to walk accross because of a puddle of water. The elder of the two monks went up to a her lifted her in his alms and left her on the other side of the road, and continued his way to the monastery.

In the evening the younger monk came to the elder monk and said, “Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman.”
The elder monk answered “yes, brother”.
Then the younger monk asks again, “But then Sir, how is that you lifted that woman on the roadside?”
The elder monk smiled at him and told him ” I left her on the other side of the road, but you are still carrying her.”

What common dogmas are you abiding by? In our world, our work, our life, we commonly see others, and ourselves, abiding by principles and ideas we take for granted, for truth. Yet some of these ideas we intuit naturally that they don’t seem quite right. Some of these ideas may be unchallenged, but our conscious knows. Choose carefully, but if you have a better idea contrary to collective beliefs and ideals, act on them and see who follows. If you persevere with resolve and conviction, the truth with out.

Positive deviance is a bottom-up, not top-down, approach to innovation that systemically recognizes people doing innovative behaviors and adopting them for universal use. Consider the story of Jasper Palmer, a transport medical worker at Albert Einstein Medical Center, who noticed that the gowns and gloves he and other staff wore while moving patients infected with a virulent Staphylococcus virus were overwhelming the hospital’s trash cans. The piles of discarded attire spilled out of disposal bins onto the floor, contaminating surrounding surfaces. So Mr. Palmer devised his own method: He took off his gown, rolled it up into the size of a baseball, and pulled his gloves over it to contain it in a tight package. This simple innovative behavior then became taught and part of the common behavior of all medical technicians.

“Positive deviance uses a process of interviews to highlight these people’s solutions and spread them throughout the community. Rather than imposing externally defined best practices, as is common in many quality-improvement initiatives, it generates solutions from within.” – Curt Lindberg, Chief Learning and Science Officer at the Plexus Institute

Let New Ideas Past the Watchman

Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Issac Newton, Albert Einstein all included long walks as part of their daily routine.  Charles Darwin had a favorite “Sand Walk” that has since become famous and popular for tourists to walk.  Teddy Roosevelt, who greatly expanded our National Parks, was such an avid outdoor enthusiast that after his Presidency, he spent almost a year on safari in Africa.  Isaac Newton was known for his odd tendency of drifting off into silent trance of thought for several minutes even during his lectures.

Freud used the analogy of a large banquet hall to represent our unconscious, and an adjoining small drawing room to represent our conscious mind.  At the door of the drawing room is a Watchman.  Within the subconscious mind of the banquet hall, there are all varieties of guest ideas, while within the smaller drawing room are ideas the conscious mind is actively working with.  The Watchman’s job is to allow entry to the drawing room for only those ideas which comply with our belief and logic system.  So while we consciously work with only a small subset of ideas, skills, behaviors and attitudes in our active, conscious mind, William James, the father of modern psychology, believed we have a wealth of thoughts and ideas at our disposal now – we just don’t allow them into our conscious thought patterns.  The Watchman evaluates bizarre, foreign, strange ideas in our subconscious and decides whether or not they can be permitted into the active thinking process.  William James believed the healthiest mental relationship with our thoughts is to treat them as simply thoughts, without any bearing on reality.  At the other end of the spectrum is psychosis, in which thoughts are treated as reality.  In this mental state, if you have the thought that there are ants on your arms, you believe this is reality.  That’s psychosis.

But if you can treat your thoughts as simply thoughts, without danger to reality, the Watchman will permit more into your active, conscious mind.  The results is that you will have a much greater arsenal of ideas to work with.  More tools for your creative problem solving.

After you start feeding your mind positive, constructive ideas, you need a pause in your efforts.  These pauses open up the drawing room of your conscious mind allow new ideas from the subconscious to enter.  And a physical or emotional provocation is a great way to start.  By removing yourself from your desk, engaging in physical activity, attending an art exhibit, having lunch with someone who works in a different field, etc…, you allow the puzzles that are active in your work to incubate.

This incubation period is crucial to getting to synthesis – pulling together mentally the ideas into an innovation.  Because new ideas and creativity aren’t enough.  You must put them into action.  Innovation = creativity X execution.

You must find the time to partition your active thinking and turn off the white noise in our lives.  Yet our conscious thought is incredibly difficult to turn off.  Just try it while lying awake at 2:00 am while your mind churns.  Consciously persisting in repetitious mind games on ideas isn’t usually the best way to solve a problem because you aren’t allowing new ideas to enter your mind to contribute.  You need to allow new ideas past the Watchman.  Start by getting outside of your usual domain and getting comfortable with new ideas and experiences.  You can teach the Watchman to allow more ideas into your active thinking process.

What We Think Reinforces What We Think

Everyone has an internal running dialogue in their head – that mental input that feeds our thinking, and ultimately our own output, our behaviors and decisions.  Our internal narrative might be opinionated, “I can’t believe how slow these people are to respond!” or life commentary, “Wow, what a beautiful piece of music,” or perhaps our own personal tormentor, “There’s no way I’m going to get this done.”  What we tell ourselves can become habitual.  And what we think consistently, and then say out loud, infects our conversations and others around us.  The mental cycle becomes reinforcing.

The constant stream of internal dialogue may feel beyond your control.  You may say to yourself, “They’re just my thoughts – I can’t control what I think!”  But you can, simply by considering what you allow in.  Faced with any moment, any interaction, any experience, you can control your mental reaction and choose a positive or constructive tone with yourself, instead of a negative or derogatory thought.  Simply by choosing the initial reaction, you will begin to alter the shape of what happens next – the unconscious mental gestation period.  When wrestling with any puzzle, professional or personal, there is typically a period of mental churning before the A-ha! moment.  That’s the ‘sleep on it’ period of time.

And as researchers have shown, what we think creates pathways in our brains that are reinforcing.  Basically what we think becomes what we think, which is why it’s so important to choose your attitude carefully.

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why

“Play that is directed by the child, not the parent, is the key to cultivating curiosity.” – Todd Kashdan

This evening I was treated to my 7 year old son playing the piano – not the pounding childish make-noise kind, but nor the rote practice kind assigned by music teachers.  And I take nothing from either version of playing the piano – both quite valid in figuring out this instrument. But he worked the piano in a moment of utter focus finding melodies he invented.  It was nothing Mozart-like of a young prodigy, he was simply exploring the piano in a very present and exploring way – finding rhythm and notes on his own.  He’s never had piano lessons beyond watching and listening to my own piano tunes I learned long ago.  It was just simple curiosity about what the piano sounds like.

When we are in a curious state, we ask probing questions, read deeply with intent, manipulate and examine objects, and persist in activities and tasks which we find both challenging and stimulating.  Todd Kashdan has conducted studies with his colleagues which demonstrate that curious people tend to become more curious over time (curiosity breeds curiosity) and ultimately find greater enjoyment and even live longer too.

Study after study reveal that true and lasting competitive advantage comes from having talented and engaged people.  The surest way to wither your sense of engagement is to curb your curiosity.  Curious people are more competent, knowledgeable and expert.  Not only that, curious people have stronger relationships, more physical and mental resilience, and even cultivate a stronger sense of meaning in their lives.

So when we are trying to find more “engagement” in our work, or as a leader cultivate that high level of engagement, there are three clear variables.  First, the right people; then those people in the right seats; and doing what they are good at and love. Those three components to engagement look like this:

  1. Recognition of Role: Everyone must have a clear understanding of what role they play in the larger context of the organization. Demographic studies suggest this demand started in earnest with Gen X, and now Gen Y pretty much refuses to be part of a work environment that isn’t entirely transparent.
  2. Executable Talent: Show up with the skills yo. This is part talent selection, and part talent development. Every organization and leader must create an environment where curiosity and intellectual growth is expected.
  3. Passionate Commitment: Parts 1 and 2 are important but for full engagement, a passionate belief about what the team, the function, and the organization as a whole is trying to do remains paramount.

Two out of three of the above is nice but insufficient. Someone with skills who lacks belief in the mission is a flight risk. The most intolerable might be the prima donna who refuses collaborative efforts. As John Tucci, CEO of EMC says, “I have taken very talented smart people who did not play on a team and shown them the door.”

Understanding context, building skills, and being passionate aren’t easy to have on a consistent and thriving basis but maybe the key is simply to remain curious.

Here’s a tip that really works.  When trying to build new knowledge, or figure out how to connect with someone who might be on the opposite side of your viewpoint, ask a simple open question that mines what they know about.  This works on almost any topic – vegetarianism, the Iraq War, whether we should renew our catering contract, whatever…  Ask something open and probing, for example, “Help me understand why being a vegetarian (buying from a particular vendor….whatever) is the best choice for our community (our company, again whatever the topic).”  If asked in an honest inquiring voice, you are more likely statistically to be viewed as empathetic and even intelligent in your curiosity. Stay open, be curious, enrich your life.

Five Expectations of Great Managers

“The culture defines the outcome.” – Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

I recently had an interview with Nick Kugenthiran, CEO of Fuji Xerox Australia who poses five expectations of his managers. But before the big five, everyone needs to be on the same page. Nick first creates a sense of shared vision with a short collaborative exercise: with your team write the headlines, the press release you want to see in five years.  Each should start independently and then compare notes. In his experience, once you reconvene, the team will immediately see intersections of vision once each person shares their personal perspective of the future. Next build on these points of intersection until the intended outcome becomes crystallized, shared and sincere. In such an exercise, with gentle non-intrusive guidance from senior leadership, the vision quickly becomes once of shared construction. Everyone had a part in the vision creation.

It’s at this point that a senior leader can build upon a shared vision to deliver the five great actionable expectations of managers:

  1. Lead Change: Take the lead.  Leading the change toward the shared vision will entail taking chances, and that needs to be expected. Make it clear that you expect both risk and tolerable failure – above the waterline failure. Above the waterline means the scope of the risk, and potential downside, remains above the waterline and unable to sink the ship.
  2. Act on Principle: The second expectation is that the initiatives and correlating risk and behavior is founded in the values and integrity of the team and organization. It should be abundantly clear that risk and initiative is expected and always safe if executed in full faith of the team’s articulated values. In Nick’s case at Fuji Xerox, their mandate is that business initiatives should be servant to What is Good for People (to be an employer of choice), Good for Planet, and Good for Profit (their target is 80% recurrent business)
  3. Build Capability: On the path to innovation and value development, the best managers continue to build company capability. Be it new solution options for customers, new tweaks to the delivery code… In Nick’s case, as the General Manager of a global Fortune 500 company, his vision includes gestating new leading capability which can be tested on a regional basis and then elevated to a global community of solutions.
  4. Be Clear About What Is Not Changing: People need to understand there are solid underpinnings upon which we base our change initiatives – the rock-solid things we can count on. It’s fine to emphasize bold decision-making on the frontiers of growth but people need to understand they are indeed supported by sound business integrity, and team values.
  5. Reward Execution: Make it clear we reward execution and results. Period. After the values talk, the engagement and collaboration emphasis, it must be clear that since we are the owners of our destiny, execution becomes the highest expectation and reward of valued managers, business owners, and contributors.

Nick reminds us that these expectations require continual renewal – it’s not a one-shot exercise and conversation.  Nick is one of the best EchoLeaders around – one who has found his own voice, recognizes his strengths, and builds powerful echoes within his team.  Echoes only sustain when reinforced.

Make your work your play and never work again

When you do what you love, you never work again. 
– Confucius

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls it being in Flow. Ken Robinson calls it being in your Element. It’s a wonderful state to be “in the pocket” (musicians) or “in the zone” (athletes).  The historical model of business competitive advantage dictates that a few wield the insight, and the many provide the mental brawn of execution.  And so this model squanders the potential collective insights of people who make up the bulk of the executing talent we employ.  Yet research shows those enabled to find their voice, skill and passion, are the most likely to build stronger collaboration with customers to build successes.

Recently I posed the term Echoleaders to mean those who find their voice and begin to build resonant ideas around them.  Resonance is when the energy applied is in sync with the intended outcome. I mean to say we should be vocal in what we believe, and by giving voice to our passions – in work, play, whatever – we’ll naturally find those in our field of vision who can echo back their own experiences and then collectively we find new paths of creating constant value and innovation.

Just watch the Facebook or Twitter scroll you participate in and the ‘like’ affirmations and comment participation demonstrate your resonant posse on any given idea or moment in your life.  Each point of participation is a building block of collaborative effort. All contributions are cumulative. The point is this: if you focus on your skill and passion, you’ll find an interested like-minded group to participate in the journey.

Make your work your play. Wherever you are on the Org chart, reach beyond your task and team, and give voice to what you believe. If your heart and intent is authentic, a growing party of fellowship will happily join your venture.