Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • How Can You Help Your Boss Succeed?

    Many of the posts and comments on this blog focus on either how to be an effective boss or how to deal with a lousy boss.  No doubt, all this talk about dealing with lousy bosses is fueled by The No Asshole Rule.  But there is another theme that I believe deserves more attention here and elsewhere:  How can people help their bosses be more successful?  After all, when your boss succeeds, not only does he or she gain a better reputation, so do you, and it also usually means your team is doing better work.  I was reminded of this last week when a I gave a talk to a group of HP managers and executives. Right before my talk, they were doing an ice-breaking exercise, and as the groups reported-out, one suggested a great guideline for everyone

    “The way in which I can earn success is by driving success
    to those around me.    "

    I later found out that this quote came from Geoff Heath, who is a Senior Experience Designer and Information Architect.  He explained in a subsequent email:

    'I like to summarize that to my superiors by telling them
    “It’s my job to make you successful."    '

    I think that is a lovely and very constructive sentiment, but perhaps most useful as a kick-off to a more specific conversation.  So, I'd like to ask: what can you do to make your boss more successful?  I realize this will ultimately be a very long list. But I suggest two things for starters:

    1. We all owe it to our bosses to give them feedback about their performance, especially negative feedback — unless and until they demonstrate they aren't adult enough to hear it.

    2. We all ought to assume the best about our bosses' motivations and intentions, as most bosses really do intend to do their jobs in ways that spark performance and allow their people to work with dignity.  Of course, some bosses ultimately demonstrate this isn't the case, but it is destructive for everyone if you always assume the worst about your boss — indeed, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that renders a competent boss incompetent.

    These are just two quick ideas, I would love to hear more.

  • When is the change going to be over?

    An executive my wife knows reported one of her people recently asked her this question.  The last couple years have been tough on all of of us, and especially tough on people who had assumed that the future would be an imitation of the past.  Of course, the answer is that the change will never be over. More so than ever, a boss's job is to prepare his or her people by developing expectations that there will be constant change, while (as I wrote in HBR), providing as much prediction, understanding, control, and compassion as possible.

    I wonder, what else can a boss do to help people anticipate, cope with, and flourish in the face of change?

  • I Am Just Like You

    A few days back, I wrote about David Dunning's book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we might be at things and our awareness of how others see us.  Dunning points out that a host of studies show that one major impediment to self-awareness is that people see themselves as unique — usually as superior to others –  when that actually are  not: as more ethical, emotionally complex, skilled, and so on.  Dunning proposes on page 166 that:

    "People would hold more accurate self-perceptions if they conceded that their psychology is not different from the the psychology of others, that their actions are molded by the same situational forces that govern the behavior of other people. In doing so, they could more readily learn from the experiences of others, using data about other people's outcomes to forecast their own."

    I find this quite fascinating. I believe that the average person would benefit from this perspective, but some industries would suffer — especially those that have a kind of Ponzi scheme quality where most people fail, a rare successes happens now and then, but no matter what happens, the people who run the system always seem to benefit.  Both casino operators and venture capitalists come to mind.

    The implication, however, that if we assume "I am just like you" rather than "I am special and different," or even that "we are all the same," we might make better decisions and learn at others' expense rather than our own strikes me as a lesson that could be quite valuable.  For example, I've been rather obsessed about the virtues and drawback of learning from others mistakes rather than your own (see this post on Randy Komisar and Eleanor Roosevelt), as this question has huge implications about how to teach people new skills and the best way to develop competent and caring human-beings.

  • Former CEO Richard S. Fuld of Lehman Brothers: A Striking Picture

    Richard-fuld

  • Do You Learn More from Working for a Bad Boss than a Good Boss?

    Bad bosses suck, as I often document here.  Of course, you knew that anyway — many of you know it all too well from first hand experience.  But perhaps they do more good than I have given them credit for in the past. Carol Bartz, the feisty, tough, unusually plain-speaking CEO of Yahoo! (see this earlier post or this story), makes an intriguing point about bad bosses in today's New York Times that is weirdly related to my recent post On Noticing That You Don't Notice. Here is the link to the interview, and the argument I found especially intriguing:

    I also think people should understand that they will learn more from
    a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where
    they’re so frustrated that they aren’t
    paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a
    good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going
    well because it just feels fine.

    When you have a bad manager
    you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that?
    Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do
    this?”

    There are several elements of this comment that made me stop and think. The first follows from my post on not noticing, as the implication is that when things are going great, you don't engage in very deep cognition about them, because little is happening to give you pause or upset you. In fact, this point is consistent with research on cognition and emotion suggesting that people in good moods do not engage in as much mindfulness,deep thought, or self-doubt as people in bad moods. 

    The second thing that intrigues me is as I thought about some of the more interesting bosses I've been reading about and communicating with, I've ran into quite a few who make a related argument.  Perhaps most famous is the late Robert Townsend, author of the still amazing Up the Organization, who argued repeatedly that he learned how to be a good boss at American Express because his bosses were so bad and the company was so badly ran that he learned what not to do — very close to Bartz's point.  Even closer is an amazing comment I posted here a couple years ago from a surgeon, who during his residency at a prestigious hospital, got together with  fellow residents every week to vote on the senior or "attending" surgeon who most deserved the "asshole of the week" award — and wrote in a journal that had been passed down from generation to generation of residents. The great thing about this story is that he his fellow residents all vowed not to be assholes when they became more senior, and all — who now hold prestigious appointments through the country — have all worked to try to keep that vow.

    Now, as much as I love Bartz's thought process, I do disagree with her that when people have a lousy boss and want to escape, she tells them " You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something."

    That bugged me for two reasons.  The first is that, if these complaints are about a lousy boss who reports to Carol, it is her job to do something about it, not to just tell the victims to suck it up and just deal with it.  Indeed, there is so much research showing the damage that lousy bosses do to productivity, commitment, and well-being that Carol or any other boss who learns of a horrible boss below them in the pecking order owes it to their company to deal with it. The "victims" may be learning more, but those lessons come at a high price that hurts both organization's and people.

    The second thing that bugs me is from the victim's perspective, which is that there is so much evidence that bad bosses do damage (recall this Swedish study on heart attacks), that if you care about your physical and mental health — and those of the people you come in contact with, your friends, lovers, children, and so on — that you should escape as soon as you possibly can.

    Clearly, I don't agree with Bartz about everything, but I admire her enormously because she is so thoughtful and so straightforward, a refreshing voice in a world where too many people are afraid to express strong opinions.

    This all raises a great question: What is the most important thing you ever learned NOT TO DO from working for a bad boss?

    P.S. One another thing I agree with Bartz about — in fact a headline of the article — is that perhaps we ought to get rid of annual performance reviews, as there is good reason to believe that they do more harm than good, as I blogged about here and this Wall Street Journal article by Sam Culbert argues. 

    UPDATE: I always appreciate the quality and range of comments that readers make, but in this case, they are even better than usual.  I suggest that you read them carefully.  This post has been up less then a day, so I expect even more good stuff and to change my opinion again over the coming days.  But my initial reaction to the comments is that I (and certainly Bartz) should have emphasized the dangers of bad bosses even more, the damage they do to people and as at least one comment implies, the danger that — just as abusive parents tend to produce abusive children –  the odds are high that bad bosses will teach their followers to be bad bosses like them.  Also, by just talking to people who have survived and learned from bad bosses, and become bosses themselves, we blind ourselves to all the able people who have left companies and occupations because they had the sense to leave, were so damaged that they had to leave, or worse yet, became lousy bosses someplace else applying what they learned — and after doing a lot of damage — got fired and demoted. Yes, there are examples of the opposite effect, of people who have become great bosses by doing the opposite of past lousy bosses, but the psychological forces of imitation, learning, and identification with authority figures all push people in the opposite direction.  Perhaps the best way to learn for bad bosses is to watch and study other people's bad bosses — that way you get the learning without the damage and risk of imitating their incompetent and nasty ways. 

  • You Better Start Treating Your People Right, Or The Best Will Be Leaving Soon

    This week's Economist has a story called Hating What You Do, which presents a rather discouraging but well-documented argument that, since the downturn began, a lot more people are a lot more unhappy with their jobs.  For example, to quote the story, "A survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy,
    found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of
    employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to
    39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%." Ouch.

    Certainly, some of this unhappiness is due to the fear, bad news, pay cuts, loss of benefits, objective loss of job security, job overload (an effect of layoffs on survivors), and other bad experiences provoked by these hard times.  But there is huge variation in how well or badly different organizations have treated their people during the past couple years.  The Economist article refers indirectly to my HBR article on being a Good Boss in a Bad Economy (see the McKinsey interview for free). If you recall from my prior posts, my basic argument was that there is a big difference between what organizations and bosses must do to survive during tough times and how they do it — and the keys to doing dirty work (like pay cuts and layoffs) well include providing people as much prediction, understanding, control, and compassion as possible in the process.

    Well, now that we seem to be seeing early signs that, within a year or perhaps less, many companies will be hiring again (in fact, I notice that Google is back to hiring already, and they did some layoffs earlier in the year), your chickens will be coming home to roost soon. If you are a boss or organization that has treated your people well despite the challenges, the return of the so-called "war for talent" will be great for you because your best people won't run for the door when the job market starts heating-up again and you will have an easy time recruiting great people because, after all, the good word spreads. 

    But if you have treated people like dirt during the tough times (for a horror story, see here), have been inept about how you have implemented tough decisions (see here) or have simply been clueless about your people's perspective during these tough times (see here), you may have been able to keep great people working for you during these tough times and to hire some of the best. You can be sure, however, that they have told their friends about how much your company or you suck.  They are waiting for things to get better, and perhaps encouraged by the signs the labor market is coming back, are probably doing their jobs extra well these days to enhance their reputation for that coming job search.  So you may be fooling yourself into believing all is well when it is not.

    In my view, if you have been nasty, inept, or greedy about how you've treated people during the downturn, you will deserve everything you get when, as things start getting better, your best people start leaving in droves and the best candidates not only turn down your job offers, they don't even bother to apply because your reputation stinks.  Looking at it from your perspective, however, you've might have just enough time to salvage your reputation if you begin reversing your vile ways right now.  And, if you've treated your people well during these tough times, cranking up the respect, attention, and — if you can afford it (I know it is tough) — your pay and benefits right now just a bit could pay huge dividends down the road.

  • Challenging Ingrained Assumptions in HR: My Remarks at the Singapore Human Capital Summit

    As I reported in my post on the "Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies," I was fortunate to be part of the closing panel at the Singapore Human Capital Summit last week.  I had a delightful time in Singapore, as my hosts did a wonderful job of organizing the conference and making sure that those of us involved in the conference never stopped exchanging ideas with others — in talks to large groups, meetings with small groups of business leaders and government employees, and one-on-one meetings of all kinds.  My liaison for the conference, Noelle Yee, somehow scheduled things so I was busy almost every minute but somehow never seemed rushed. 

    I met all kinds of interesting people at the conference, but several stand-out. The first was Yuzaburo Mogi, CEO of the Kikkoman Corporation, which I believe is the leading producer of soy sauce in the world. Mr Mogi's ancestors started the company over 300 years ago and he has worked there for 51 years.  Mr. Mogi was fun and had a great zest for life. I loved hearing his stories. Among other things, he described his firm's ventures into the wine business and how, although it isn't as profitable as soy sauce, the wines made by his company (which are not available in the U.S.) have been winning awards in Europe.

    The second was Dr. Robert Care, CEO of Arup Australasia. I have blogged about Dr. Care before, as Arup is renowned for doing the toughest structural engineering work in the world, from the Sydney Opera House to the stunning "water cube" in 2008 Peking Olympics.  I confess, however, I was especially keen to meet Dr. Care to talk with him about the "no dickhead rule" that he had instituted and that I had blogged about here before.  Dr. Care, a charming and tall man, explained how they were using the rule to encourage civility and cooperation, which was essential to both the kind of work they do and — as it is a firm wholly owned by an employee trust — essential given the kind of culture they have and want to perpetuate.

    Third, and although I have known him for about 30 years, I was especially impressed with an exchange that HR guru Dave Ulrich had with an audience member, who was lamenting about the lack of power that HR had and who wondered if people from HR could ever be CEO's. Dave, quite wisely I thought, gently responded that it wasn't constructive to focus on that question, as if you were in HR the kind of work you do is remarkably valuable to your company and it is your job to do it as well as possible — and it is just isn't very constructive for your colleagues or yourself to obsess over issues like whether HR has enough power.  I am not even sure I entirely agreed with Dave's answer, but he stated it more elegantly than I did here, and — as he told me in private conversation shortly thereafter — people who focus too much on becoming top dog in the future and not enough on the quality of the work they do right now are the wrong people to take leadership positions. 

     I could go on and on about other people and things I learned.  But because so many readers here and at BNET wrote so many great comments (about 75 total at the moment) about "the dumbest practices used by U.S. companies," I thought I had better tell you how those ideas shaped my comments.  I did not directly label my closing remarks as "dumb practices."Rather as I hung out at the conference, and thought of the comments you made and the topics we were discussing at the conference, I decided that — in the short 10 minutes I had (I confess that I ended-up going 12 minutes… my apologies to master of ceremonies Professor Narayan Pant), that I would use the time to question some deeply held and often suspect HR assumptions and practices.  The ultimate aim of the conference, and a host of other other efforts by Singapore's Ministry of Manpower and other agencies is to develop and spread the very best "people management" practices throughout Singapore and the rest of the region.  Although many executives and academics at the conference were mindful of these challenge, it still felt like they (and me too…. it is an automatic response) often mindlessly slipped into doing what had always been because, well, it had always been done that way.

    As such, about four hours before my talk, I slipped away for a couple hours and pounded out the list below of 10 "Flawed, Suspect, and Incomplete Assumptions About Managing People."  The conference organizers, bless their hearts, were nonplussed by my absurd request to produce and pass out 800 copies to audience with a couple hours notice.  I thanked and apologized to Low Peck Kem (who has a great job title "Director of People Matters" at the Ministry of Manpower), and she gave an answer that I've never heard before "Anything is possible" and added "this is easy." 

    The handout is reprinted below, and although it was impossible to include everything in this 12 minute talk (indeed, I only made it to point 8), I think you can see the influence of your comments as well as many other themes I have talked about on this blog.  The point I emphasized to the audience was that I am not even sure that I believe everything on the list:  My goal was to jolt them into thinking about and to challenge their assumptions.  Also, to add some background, I have provided links to past posts and other sources that expand on the points below.  I would love your comments and especially your disagreements because, as I said, this list is meant to provoke rather then persuade. 

    Bob Sutton’s Top 10 List

    Flawed, Suspect, and Incomplete Assumptions
    about Managing People

    1.  HR ought to be all about spotting, hiring,
    and breeding individual talent     (HR could pack a bigger wallop by focusing
    on teams and networks more).

    2.  HR should focus on finding, hiring, and
    developing the very best people     (Bad is stronger than good – about 5 times
    stronger  — so screening-out, reforming,
    expelling the very worst people is more crucial to collective performance).

    3. Find some great
    superstars and pay them whatever is necessary to keep them happy… and certainly
    a lot more than everyone else     (The best organizations pay higher than
    competitors, but have more compressed pay).

    4. Competition
    makes people, teams, and companies stronger      (Unless people and teams are rewarded for
    undermining one another rather than helping each other… dysfunctional internal
    competition     is one of the most pervasive problems in American firms).

    5. Harmony and
    having a shared vision are crucial to success     (Perhaps for routine work;
    but creativity depends on battling over ideas. Part of HR’s job should be to
    teach people how to “fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are
    wrong”    ).

    6.  The key to success is copying practices used
    by the best companies.      (The best
    companies may be succeeding despite rather than because of their HR practices).

    7.  Every company needs a great performance
    review system.      (Are they really
    worth the time and effort? Do they do more harm than good?).

    8. Taking a leadership
    position brings out the best in people.     (This is a dangerous
    half-truth.  Giving people power over
    others turns them into self-centered jerks).

    9.  The most important thing HR can do is to find
    and develop great senior leaders     (Having an organization with a high
    proportion of good bosses     is probably more important).

    10.  The best organizations have the best people,
    “the people make the place.”      (There
    are huge differences in talent, but the best organizations typically have the
    best systems     and not necessarily the best raw talent).

    Robert Sutton, Stanford University (www.bobsutton.net)

    Singapore Human Capital Summit

    30 September 2009

  • Derek Dean on Dealing With Fear and Denial in Senior Teams: A Thoughtful McKinsey Quarterly Article

    Last week, as I was preparing to get ready to go to Singapore (more on that in another post), McKinsey Quarterly editor Allen Webb asked me if I might be interested in writing a comment on Derek Dean's article "A CEOs Guide to Reenergizing the Senior Team."  I said I would take quick look but was busy getting ready…. well, when I did, I extremely impressed with tone, insights, and balancing act between compassion and the need to get stuff done that Dean described and recommended in the article. The article is short and packed with all kinds gems, but I especially liked the detailed description of how Harrah's Gary Loveman (who may win the award from the best CEO who started as management professor — most of us talk about leading but can't do it) guided his team through the recent tough times.  You can read the article and my comment by going to the above link.  The Quarterly does require you to register, but us free.

     In my comment, CEOs, Tough Times, and Emotions, I made several points,  but perhaps the most important was "to underscore a point that’s implicit but unstated in his essay:
    CEOs must work just as doggedly to confront and deal with their own
    demons and foibles as they do to help their charges come to grips with
    theirs."  CEOs, like other human beings, are often not aware of how their emotions are leaking or spilling out (especially when they are under stress) and how strongly the little things they do affect their teams — especially when members are afraid that something bad is going to happen to them.  I also had a lot of fun using the "interesting shoes" example that originally appeared here.

    As a final comment about where life is heading. I am an old guy who has spent much of his career writing stuff and then waiting months and months before it appears.  Indeed, in graduate school, a colleague and I wrote a chapter for an academic book that appeared some seven or eight years later.  Although it is short, the immediate jolt of writing something less than a week ago and then seeing it distributed for all to see is both delightful and disconcerting.  And all for free…. good thing McKinsey charges money for its other work.

    I hope you enjoy Derek Dean's article; I found it it very thoughtful and his advice can help CEOs in these tough times, or anyone else who leads a team. 

  • How to Avoid Being a Nasty, Clueless, and Idiotic Boss During the Downturn

    A few months back, Guy Kawasaki asked me to write something for a blog he is developing over at AMEX's Open Forum. I just got a note from him that my piece, with the above title, just appeared.  If you read this blog regularly, and have seen my HBR article on How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy or the related video over at the McKinsey Quaterly, none of the stuff in his postwill come as a surprise, but it is one of the shortest presentations of some of central beliefs and recommendations.  Here is an excerpt:

    Assume you lack key facts. Research on people in power shows that –
    even when they have no idea what is going on – they assume that they
    know everything that is important because, after all, they are the
    boss. This is called the fallacy of centrality. This gets worse during
    bad times because people are afraid the boss will shoot the messenger.
    Assume your assumptions are wrong and check them out as many ways as
    you can.

    Really listen. Another aspect of this problem is that, even if your
    people tell you what is going on, people in power have tendency to
    listen badly to their underlings. As renowned UCLA basketball coach
    John Wooden put it, “Listen to those under your supervision. Really
    listen. Don’t act is if you’re listening and let it go in one ear and
    out the other. Faking it is worse than not doing it all."

    Frankly, I am not quite sure what this AMEX effort is, but if they have recruited Guy, that is a sign to me that the quality will be high and there could be some fun stuff published, assuming they don't get too paranoid about censoring things, as can sometimes happen at corporate blogs (I don't like it, but understand why it happens as life becomes hellish for management when things get controversial)

  • Bret Simmons Blog: Check it Out

    Bret Simmons is an organizational behavior professor at the University of Nevada at Reno, and appears to have been blogging for awhile.  I read through his many posts (he blogs at a pretty high rate), and was taken with both the quality and the range.  Given my biases, I like how travels among research, personal opinions, and stories, and I like the engaging writing style.  I especially like his posts here and here about great leaders. The story about Captain Kitts was inspiring, here is little sample:

    His true brilliance came when we admitted we were having problems with
    a project.  He would simply ask “Do you need my help?”  We usually did
    not, and     he left it at that.  If we did need help, we told him what we needed, and we knew that he would take care of it and then let us return to working autonomously.

    I also was intrigued with many others, including the post about research on the limits of optimism and about Leadership:My Bias. 

    There is some great stuff on this blog .. at least in my biased opinion. Let me know what you think.