A: Ah, if not for the word “useless”, this would be an entirely different answer! But, there it is, signaling to me that you are head-down, get-it-done go-getter who’s “all business”… and who is primed for a violent crash into the proverbial glass ceiling because you have no idea what it takes to actually run a business.

How do I know that?

Because people with more savvy would have asked a different question… they would have asked, “Why don’t my meetings start on time,” or “Why can’t my team transition from chit-chat to business,” or even, “How do I steer chit-chat away from golf and more to something that I can engage in?” These folks would have had a problem about the way in which the chit-chat occurred, but not with the chit-chat itself… because they know something you don’t know.

What they know, and what you will soon learn, is that chit-chat serves a very real, very important function. To understand that function, imagine—for a moment—a meeting from the perspective of your company’s CEO:

You (CEO) walk into the meeting, surveying the 11 other people in the room. You immediately have questions, such as:

1. Who’s competent, and in what areas?
2. Who sees the bigger picture?
3. For those who don’t see the bigger picture, what are their motivations?
4. Who’s in a bad mood today? Who’s in a good mood? How are those moods influencing decisions and perspectives?
5. What are people’s personal interests… who’s looking for a promotion, who wants to coast, etc.?
6. Is anyone here trying to sandbag someone else? (And are they doing it to protect themselves or hurt the other person?)

You want the answers to these questions because it will help you frame the conversation that follows… it’s hard to talk tactics if you don’t understand your goals, your environment, and your people. It’s like when your girlfriend starts complaining about her friends, but you know from some subtle, intuitive vibe you pick up that she doesn’t actually want help with her friends, what she really wants is reassurance that you’re interested in her life. This knowledge helps you see that her goal has more to do with establishing a bond with you than with solving a problem… which is helpful knowledge because it allows you to avoid the trap of solving the wrong problem. (BTW, the correct response here is, “No kidding, that’s weird, then what happened?” It’s not—repeat, not—“Well, the answer’s obvious, she’s a moron and you need to stop calling her.” Don’t worry about how I know this. Just trust me.) In a business setting, this same dynamic is at work, and you, as CEO, need to find out the answers to these questions so that you can know how to respond the real, underlying issues, and not react to whatever you see on the surface.

What makes life challenging, in business and elsewhere, is that you usually can’t ask these questions directly. Very few people would look you in the eye and say, “Hey, CEO, this morning, I think I’m predisposed to see things through rose colored glasses because I had a really great date last night,” even though that might be precisely what is happening. Likewise, no one with any designs on keeping his or her job would tell you outright, “Ms. CEO, be aware that I am going to show you only information that makes me look good today, while simultaneously painting my peers here in the most negative light possible.”

So since you can’t ask these questions directly, how do you get at the answers?

That’s right, you guessed it: chit-chat.

People are constantly sending out subtle clues about their true feelings, motivations, and intentions. Some of us are trained to concretely identify those clues, but all of us sense them… and we know—in that reptilian, primal part of our brain—that the clues are easiest to spot when people are relaxed and unguarded. In other words, people’s true colors tend to show brightest during casual conversation… during chit-chat. Ffrom the perspective of the CEO, there is no better way to size people up than in the few minutes before a meeting starts, before people have adopted their formal roles and have started going into a more scripted mode.

If you are just starting out in a management position, you don’t need chit-chat for such political reasons. Or do you? Failure to engage can signal that you are, as I stated before, an “all business” go-getter with no interest and no idea about the politics; it sets you up to be the person the CEO looks at and says, “This person is a doer; I’ll wind her up, point her in a direction, and she’ll take off!” Also, if you avoid learning the skill of engaging in casual conversation now, when it is merely a social endeavor, you won’t have that skill when you need it later.

So relax! Engage in a little small talk, it just might make a big difference in your career.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Communications

“Help! I have all this responsibility and no authority to get it done!”

OK, I’ll help: authority is designed to formalize and strengthen your ability to influence others, not to replace it. If there is something you need done and you can’t figure out how to do it by influence, then having authority won’t help. In fact, here’s what’d happen if you had sufficient authority right now to push your agenda through:

You’d call up whoever it is whose help you needed, and you’d ask for help.

They’d say, “No.”

You’d pull rank and tell them they have no choice.

They’d tell you to go stick it.

Or, after you pull rank and tell them they have no choice, they say, “OK, whatever you say.” And fail to deliver, just to spite you.

Now whatcha gonna do? Tell your boss that you got had by an employee? That you didn’t see it coming? That you were perfect and it was your dang employee who dropped the ball? Because now that you have authority, ultimately your failure to deliver is due to one of only two things: your inability to prioritize activities or your inability to manage people.

Yikes.

OK, so suddenly, influence is starting to look better. That means you need a model for influencing others, so you’re in luck: there are lots of them. Here’s one:

Influence can happen through one of three ways:

1. Power: think might, brute strength, political clout. Pros: fast, expedient, and you WIN. Cons: you develop enemies, create animosity and resentment, and because power erodes with use, every time you use your power, you weaken yourself relative to those around you. (Think of military power: once a bomb is dropped, it is gone until it is replaced; once a division is mobilized, it is no longer available to commit elsewhere; similarly, once a political favor is called in, it’s been called in, and needs to be replaced.)
2. Rights: think formal authority, contracts, mediation… basically, anytime a third party or outside, objective standard is used to determine an outcome. Pros: objective (perceived as fair). Cons: slow, not so objective (how impartial do you think you’d feel after losing a court case?), indistinguishable from power under certain circumstances, introduces 3rd parties (with their own interests, interpretations, and perceptions) into the mix.
3. Interests: think influence, trade-offs, win-win negotiations (the real kind, not the coersive, “power dressed up as a fake win-win“ kind). Pros: lasting outcomes, don’t need formal authority, long term relationship is preserved. Cons: can be slow, require both parties to be invested in the relationship, can create future vulnerabilities, not always perceived as fair in the moment

We often hear about influence, power, interests, authority, and win-win or win-lose scenarios, but we don’t often hear about them in context. Hopefully, this context helps bring just a bit of visibility to why formal authority is so alluring and the real costs of using it, vis-a-vis a softer, more influence-based approach.

Posted under Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Gen X & Gen Y

It is an issue we are all too familiar with: too many silos, too many people with authority over various critical resources that make the project as a whole nearly impossible to execute. Solutions include obtaining executive sponsorship, improving one’s organizational savvy (a.k.a. political astuteness), defining cross-functional projects as defined change initiatives, and simply plowing forward in a ask-forgiveness-not-permission approach.

Turns out, this problem can be explained as part of a bigger issue, which is nice because it lets us pull the silo problem out of the complex world of psychology and begin to apply strategic and economic models to it. The bigger issue behind silos has been coined The Tragedy of the Anticommons, a take on the famous “tragedy of the commons,” in which private individuals in a market economy each have a personal incentive to overuse public resources, despite the inevitable wasting of that resource. (OK, maybe it’s only famous to economists and econ students.)

The solution to the tragedy of the commons is private ownership—think farmers who used to overgraze public land and who can now erect fences on their private property. However, private ownership taken too far creates gridlock: if everyone owns a piece of something, it becomes far easier to block progress than to move forward. Think children jointly inheriting a house, who cannot do anything with it unless they all agree, but who can too easily block one another’s plans!

In the tragedy of the commons, the power to act is diffuse, the power to block highly concentrated. In the tragedy of the anticommons, the power to block is diffuse, the power to act highly concentrated. Forward progress seems to flow best when these two powers are in balance; neither extreme is good, as both extremes require an autocrat to generate alignment.

A great introduction to this issue by Michael Heller has been posted on ChangeThis today. It’s quick and it’s worth a read… and it may get you thinking about whether the way in which “ownership” of tasks within your team promotes teamwork or petty squabbles, and whether undesired, autocratic leadership can be eliminated through a different and more somewhat more communal division of labor.

Posted under Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Current Trends

A few of us have been working on a short survey to dive into the issue of cross-generational communication, which it looks like I’ll be releasing into the wild this week, in time for my weekly newsletter.

The survey is designed to answer a few questions that the popular press, and even academia, seem to gloss over, namely:

1. When we talk about “younger generations,” who are we talking about? The academics use a demographic cut-off for Gen Y based on birth rates, but the behavioral studies don’t line up to that point in time. Much of the stuff I’ve seen that uses the 1982 cut-off fails to show a generational trend, instead showing stage-of-life and general economy trends, while one meta-study I saw did find a generational shift… with the cut-off being 1971.
2. Which raises an interesting point: where does Gen X fall… are we closer to Boomers or Millennials?
3. And, what’s really going on inside companies? Two weeks ago, I saw an article about how 24 year-olds need to be careful not to get burned out… and another article lamenting Gen Y’s lack of commitment. And then I look at some the people I work with, who are committed and screaming for more responsibility while sitting bored and underutilized, and I think, in my unfailing eloquence: Huh? This makes no sense!

I know there are a lot of studies out there about what this group wants, and what that group thinks of this group, and what this group would like to do to that group given a 10 minute window of opportunity and enough duct tape, but I think by and large these studies continue to make some reasonably questionable assumptions.

This survey should shed some light on those assumptions.

Look for the survey, and when you see it, please, please, please… take 5-10 minutes and fill it out, plus 30 seconds to spread the word.

Results will be available in the Fall.

Posted under Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Gen X & Gen Y, Current Trends, Communications

A: This is one of those answers that is going to be good for your business and bad for you personal health at the same time, because implementing it will require you to internalize a lot of stress. I just want to be clear about that right up front.

OK, for a moment, let’s fantasize about our ideal world: employees care about what they do and put everything they’ve got into being a success. Getting it right is more important than the clock; everyone works to get the job done. Employees have full trust and confidence in the company’s leadership, and they know, without asking, that the rewards for their hard work will be there, whether in the form of a random day off, a company-bought lunch, or a trip to Las Vegas. This arrangement is unspoken, the result of mutual trust, clear, shared goals, and a team of intrinsically motivated individuals.

Now let’s detour quickly into theory-land. The leader in this utopian workplace described above is what is known in my field as a transformational leader, a term coined by Bernard Bass to describe someone who is able to get people to transcend parochial interests to pursue a common vision. The “opposite” of transformational leadership, or at least what many business owners threaten to use when their employees start taking loose company policies for granted, is transactional leadership. This is where everything done between a boss and subordinate is done on a quid pro quo (or tit-for-tat!) basis. Both styles can work, but they result in very different corporate cultures, and very different boss-subordinate relationships. For the record, there are more laissez-faire styles of leadership, too, in which owners, bosses, and other authority figures basically sit back and don’t engage until a problem comes up, if at all.

At last, it’s time to discuss reality.

If your office is clearing out at 5pm, that’s feedback that the conditions of a “transformed” team have not yet been met. It’s feedback that team members lack either the mutual trust, shared goals, or intrinsic motivation to go beyond their self-interest for the good of the whole. Sounds bad? Hang on, it gets worse: what you want to do–yell at those incomprehensibly lazy slobs and threaten the ingrates with the removal of privileges until they fix their attitudes or do XY&Z–is, by definition, transactional leadership, and doing this pretty much nails the coffin shut on the nirvana of your fantasy world. At least, for a while.

Uh-oh. You yelled at them already, didn’t you. Don’t worry, you didn’t know. Just like they didn’t know that there was anything bigger for them to latch onto beyond their job responsibilities, or that the secret to making their jobs truly enjoyable was simply to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Truly, don’t sweat it. Going from transactional to transformational is not on the level of asking a tiger to change its stripes. The shift is evolutionary. It will take a little time, but you–and your team–can make the shift.

As the team’s leader, your biggest challenge in achieving (and holding) that utopian state of the transformed team is going to be working against instinct. When others seem to abuse your loyalty, you’re going to want to take your ball and go home… especially if you started the business. What you should be doing instead is recognizing that in your success, you gave birth to something separate from you, with character, aspirations, and mass all its own, and that as with living creatures, the formative years come after gestation… they don’t run concurrently. So now that you’ve given birth to it, you’ve got to nurture the organization and teach it everything you know until it can survive by itself.

Frustrating? You bet. You wanted to give birth to a fully mature organization, I know. You saw yourself coasting by now. Believe me, I get it. I told you this wouldn’t necessarily be good for you personally. But right now, it’s not fun for your employees, either. Those 20- and 30-somethings want to be part of something big and important. They want to contribute to a meaningful cause, and they feel lost because when they’re watching the clock, ready to skip out at 4:59, there is something within them that is going unfulfilled. They can’t put their fingers on it, but they feel it. (And if they don’t, fire them. You can light a fire under people’s butts, but you cannot light the fire in their bellies.) You, on the other hand, know exactly what that something is, and even if you can’t articulate it, you know how to scratch that itch. OK, maybe their passions don’t burn as brightly as yours. Or maybe they’re not in a position to take the risks you took to move ahead. So what? Assuming you hired good people, the fact that they haven’t internalized their commitment to your goals yet isn’t a problem; it’s simply a state of being. Everything you do now should be in the spirit of creating an atmosphere of mutual trust, shared vision, and intrinsic motivation… because my guess is that you’re about as disinterested in a command-and-control organization as they are.

Easier said than done, but it’s the only formula that works if you intend to have fun with your work and create something that can outlive you in the long run. Next up: the employees’ responsibilities in this equation.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Team Dynamics, Leadership