Work Matters

Category: Bosses

  • Why Bosses Who are Civilized and Caring, But Incompetent, can be Really Horrible

    GoodBoss_pb3

    I haven't been blogging much the last couple weeks because, in addition to the usual madness that goes with the holiday and start of the term, I have been wrapping up a new chapter for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback, which will appears March 15th (but I suspect will be shipping before that, Amazon usually does).  Above is the new cover, which I quite like because it stands out and is now more distinct from The No Asshole Rule. 

    I had planned to write just a few pages for the Epilogue, but once I took the time to think about what I had learned since Good Boss, Bad Boss was published, I became rather obsessed and wrote a lot of text.  As my editor Rick Wolff wisely advised, I trimmed back the original draft quite a bit, but it still runs about 8,000 words. The opening looks back on the experience and devotes special attention to Luiz Uruza, the boss of the trapped Chilean miners (who I first wrote about at Psychology Today.)  and was interviewed about on CNN International.  I then present new nine lessons I've learned or come to believe in more strongly about what it takes to be a great boss. 

    To give you a taste, I thought you might like to see the fourth lesson (warning, this will be copy-edited, so it may read slightly different when it is published, but the point will remain the same):

    4.  Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

    Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people – journalists, employees, project managers, even a few CEOs – who picked a fight with me: They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human-beings; they make sure the job gets done.  I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely.   Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point – and thought about some lousy bosses – I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.” 

    As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels.  I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip-up, you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. 

    In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “nice guys finish last” sometimes right is that, when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.  People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires.  He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important emails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront — let alone fire — destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

    There are two lessons here.  The first is for bosses.  If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide protective armor when things go wrong.  Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well as second and third chances – sometimes even if you are incompetent.  I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss – but care as much for others as they do for you — stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers.   Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed — or things are falling apart too fast to risk it — the time has come to hit the delete button.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree? What did I leave out?  How do you deal with one?  And, following my recent post, are the advantages to working for one of these lovable losers?

  • On Saving the American Health System: Dr. Donald Berwick’s Farewell Speech

    Don Berwick is an American hero and also a victim of the obscene stalemate in Washington; the one being heaped on us by our Congress that has a 9% approval rating.  Most people that I know with a score that low would have the self-respect to quit rather than to point fingers at others.  Well, as part of this mess, Congress wouldn't approve the appointment of Dr. Don Berwick, who is a true American hero because he is among one of the real leaders of the movement to save American health care.  Before coming to Washington, the organization he led, a small non-profit called the Institute for Health Improvement, organized and guided an effort in American hospitals that — by doing simple, evidence things like hand washing, raising the bed when people are on a respirator, and other small but effective things — saved more than 100,000 lives by some estimates.  This little non-profit recruited over 3000 hospitals that had over 70% of the beds in the U.S. to participate in this effort to reduce preventable deaths.

    Obama, recognizing his greatness, appointed him as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Or he tried to. Our do nothing — or actually do nothing but screw the other side — Congress opposed his appointment, so Obama did one of those sneaky interim appointments that Berwick to keep the position for 17 months before being forced out.  The New York Times Joe Nocera did a great piece on him, check it out. 

    The thing I would especially emphasize is that Berwick is not and has never been about ideology, he is about effectiveness and cost-cutting is central to everything he does and advocates.  Perhaps he wasn't mean and tough and selfish enough for our broken system; it is a shame that a guy who does everything possible to put patients first would be fired by people who do everything they can to put themselves first.

     I urge you to read his amazing farewell address. Get it here: Download Ihi forum don berwick 12-15.dat.Consider a few key parts. Here are his five principles — and unlike people in Congress who TALK about doing things — Berwick's organization has already led efforts to DO such things and continues to do so every day. He gets fired and they keep their jobs?  I quote:

    This is our task… our unwelcome task – if we are to help save health care from the cliff. To reduce costs, by reducing waste, at scale, everywhere, now.

    I recommend five principles to guide that investment:

    1. Put the patient first. Every single deed – every single change – should protect, preserve, and enhance the well being
    of the people who need us. That way – and only that way – we will know waste when we see it.

    2. Among patients, put the poor and disadvantaged first –those in the beginning, the end, and the shadows of life. Let us meet the moral test.

    3. Start at scale. There is no more time left for timidity. Pilots will not suffice. The time has come, to use Göran Henrik’s
    scary phase, to do everything. In basketball, they call it “flooding the zone.” It’s time to flood the Triple Aim zone.

    4. Return the money. This is the hardest principle of them all. Success will not be in our hands unless and until the parties
    burdened by health care costs feel that burden to be lighter. It is crucial that the employers and wage-earners and unions and states and taxpayers – those who actually pay the health care bill – see that bill fall.

    5. Act locally. The moment has arrived for every state,community, organization, and profession to act. We need mobilization – nothing less.

    To show these aren't just theories or pipe dreams, look at these examples from Dr. Berwick's speech:

    It is not possible to claim that we do not know what to do. We have the templates.

    If you doubt it, visit the brilliant Nuka care system at Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage, which just won the Baldrige Award. I visited in October. Thoroughly integrated teams of caregivers –physicians, advanced practice nurses, behavioral health specialists, nutritionists, and more – occupying open physical pods in line-of-sight contact with each other all day long, weaving a net of help and partnership with Alaska Native patients and families. The results: 60% fewer Emergency and Urgent CareVisits, 50% fewer hospitalizations, and 40% less use of specialists, along with staff turnover 1/5th as frequent as before the new care.

    If you doubt that we know what to do, visit Denver Health or ThedaCare or Virginia Mason, and see the Toyota principles of lean production learned, mastered, adapted, and deployed through entire systems and into the skills and psyches of entire workforces. The result, over $100 million in savings at Denver Health while vastly improving the experience and outcomes of patients.

    If you doubt that we know what to do, contact George Halvorson at Kaiser Permanente and ask him how they have reduced sepsismortality – sepsis is the cause of death in 24% of seniors who die in California hospitals. Kaiser-Permanente has driven down sepsis mortality by nearly half – to 11% in less than three years.

    Then, Berwick said to the colleagues he was leaving at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

    Let me put it simply: in this room, with the successes already in hand among you here, you collectively have enough knowledge to rescue American health care – hands down. Better care, better health, and lower cost through improvement right here. In this room.

    The only question left is: Will you do it?

    Shame on us as a country for allowing this man to be fired and for bickering and backstabbing while the solutions appear to be at hand.  Can't we join together to do the right things?

  • What Are Good Things About Having A Lousy Boss?

    I have a weird question for Work Matters readers, one I've been fretting over for a couple weeks. 

    What are some GOOD things about working for a BAD boss?

    I would love to hear your thoughts on this odd question.  Here is the story of how it came about.

    About two weeks back, I enjoyed a long dinner with a couple good friends of mine — whose names must be kept anonymous given the facts that follow.  I generally like to name names, but in this case, I will not out them and will also omit identifying information (and change a couple key descriptions) to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

    To get back to our dinner, we were among the first people at the place and the last to leave because we were having so much fun talking many different topics — why incremental innovation is sometimes under appreciated (well, not in China… and look how they are doing) and why breakthrough innovations are overqualified, how the best way to influence your spouse is through your kids rather than directly, and why the 130 proof bourbon that the bartender gave us to try was a cool idea — especially because the ice cubes sink in it — but too much like drinking lighter fluid for our tastes. 

    But this blog post is about the topic we kept coming back to, the idea that, well, bad bosses aren't all bad.  Of course, we all had suffered through bad bosses, and had seen them do all kinds of damage.  BUT — and this the thread I thought I would raise here — during the course of the conversation, we all started realizing that a bad boss — especially the kind who doesn't really have the power to hurt you very much — can be a great thing in some ways.  The notion that you can learn a lot about what NOT to do from a bad boss has been around for decades . A charming version of this argument is in Robert Towsend's classic Up The Organization, where he asserts that much of what he learned about being a good boss came from working for such awful bosses at American Express early in his career.

    The focus of our conversation about bad bosses, however, turned a different direction that I am still fretting over.  One of my friends had just ended a long stint working for a lousy boss, one who could be a selfish asshole at times and was a legendary backstabber and narcissist.  He talked about how great it was that this selfish jerk had been removed from his management job and was now working a line job again, and how his new boss was thus far amazing — selfless, open, always thinking about was good for his group rather than himself, listening all the time, practicing constant empathy. This guy could be the poster child for Good Boss, Bad Boss.

    Then, my other friend chimed in and talked about how he wished he had such a boss because his current boss was so lame.  She was inept in many ways, especially committing sins of omission: not going to meetings she should, not answering emails no matter how important, not following through on commitments, not jumping into help his team when she said she would, not having the guts to deal with performance problems, not reaching outside of the organization to develop a stronger network, and perhaps worst of all, constantly spending time planning and talking and brainstorming — but pretty much being unable or unwilling to actually get anything done.  This boss could be the poster child for The Knowing-Doing Gap.

    Then, however, the conversation took an interesting turn that still gnaws at my mind. The guy with the good boss said to the one with the bad boss "Be careful what you wish for, I got the great boss I want, and it has disadvantages."

    He went on to explain that, when he had that inept boss, he felt obligated to take only minimal steps to help his organization.  He did everything he could to avoid contact with his boss — and would never lift a finger to help that asshole succeed.  He wasn't the only one in his group who reacted that way: Alienation was high and the commitment was low throughout.  But he didn't just mess around at work. He devoted his energy to developing a big book of business and for developing a great reputation among clients.  In other words, and this is the key point, he was treated sufficiently badly by his boss (as were others), that he felt free to act largely in his self-interest.

    BUT with this new and nearly model boss, he and many of his colleagues are spending much more time working to help the organization in all sorts of ways — to recruit new people, to repair broken procedures, to attend every group meeting, to develop business that helps the organization and not necessarily themselves.  As a result, he is spending far less time doing things that benefited only him, and as a result, not only is making a bit less money, he is having less fun too. He now feels compelled to do things that he doesn't like to benefit his group and organization — because he respects and admires his boss so much, and didn't want to let him down.

    Then, we started quizzing my friend who still had the bad boss.  Our friend has become a total star in recent years.  The work his team does is bringing in a third of the group's revenue, he has freedom to do what he wants, his boss is rather afraid of him so almost never tells what to do, he is making a lot of money, and — while he is still doing many things to help his group succeed — he is far more respected both inside and outside the organization than his boss.  As my friend with the new good boss warned him, if you got your dream boss — or worse yet they gave you your bosses job — you might feel great in some ways.  But your life would change for the worse in other ways.  You would start doing more things that benefited your organization that were not in your pure self-interest, you would spend more time doing things to help others that you would rather not do, you would go to more meetings with people who are of no interest to you –and even dislike — because doing so was for the greater good.

    The conversation went back and forth in this vein for awhile, and although all three of us still believe that bad bosses suck on the whole, we started wondering if a more general, elaborate, and evidence-absed argument might be made about the upsides of working for a loser.  In this post, there are some hints:

    1. You can learn what NOT to do.

    2. If you just have ordinary competence, you look like a genius compared to your boss.

    3.  You don't feel compelled to waste time doing extra things that help your group and organization.  After all,  if they aren't doing much for you or are treating you badly (via your boss), why should you do anything to help them?

    3. Your boss is so inept at implementation that it isn't worthwhile going to meetings, generating ideas, or suggesting now paths the organization might take. None of it will happen in anyway, so why waste your time?

    4.  A lousy boss probably needs you more than a good boss — and thus you may have power — because you keep bailing him or her out, bringing in money or clients that he or she is too inept to do, and performing other competent acts that protect the boss and make the boss look better than he or she really deserves.

    5. If the boss leaves (perhaps is fired — but in too many organizations lousy bosses get promoted), and you get the job, people will think you are brilliant because of the power of psychological contrast. (I am cheating here, as this is really about an advantage of taking a position last held by a horrible boss).

    I am partly having fun here and partly serious.  Yet as we talked about the good and bad bosses my friends had, and other bosses we had known and worked for, we realized that there are some perhaps under appreciated advantages to having a bad boss.  I am not sure how far to take this, but for now, perhaps we could have some fun. Let's try a little thought exercise and look at the same thing as everyone else, but to try to see it differently.

    So, once more, I want to hear from you:

    What do you think? What are some other advantages of working for lousy boss?

  • Wisdom from Stanford’s Jim March on the Numbing Effect of Business Schools

    There is a great interview on leadership with Jim March (probably the most prestigious living organizational theorist) by Joel Podolny (current head of HR at Apple, but also a very accomplished academic researcher) in the current edition of the Academy of Management Learning and Eduction journal (Vol. 10, No. 3, 502–506.)  The link is here, but someone will likely make you buy it. 

    March, as always, looks at things differently than the rest of us.  For example, he does a lovely job of arguing — using historical figures like Aristotle and Alexander the Great — that the time frames used in most leadership research are often too short to be useful.  But what really caught my eye was a line that reminded me of that old Pink Floyd song :

            We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.

    March laments on page 503 :

    My experience with business school students is that those who possess an instinct for joy, passion, and beauty often learn to suppress their expression by virtue of a sense that such instincts are unwelcome both in business schools and in business, thereby making the sense self-confirming.

    I found this depressingly accurate for too many students, who often seem to lose their spark.  It doesn't just happen in business schools, to be clear, it is a danger in any school or institution that has strong norms, where people are in close physical proximity, and they have a lot of contact with each other (Indeed, Apple especially needs to guard against this now).  I do believe that the d.school — at least at its best — sometimes serves as a countervailing force, as the best teachers and classes there do encourage joy and self-expression.  But as much as I love being a professor, I do think that Jim raises an implicit question that every educator needs to keep asking him or herself:

    "What am I teaching my students? Am I teaching them to think for themselves and to be themselves? Or am I teaching them to a perfect imitation of each other, or of some other idealized and emotionally cold model of humanity?" 

    I am not saying that conformity is all bad, but too often we teach it unwittingly. I am curious about your reactions to March's point.  Is he (and I guess me) too hard on the educational process?  What can be done to educate people without turning them into emotionally repressed and joyless clones?

    P.S. BY the way, after I posted it, I realized that March's comment actually is another example of the issue I raised in my last post about how roles can change what do and believe so much.

  • Bad is Stronger than Good: Why Eliminating the Negative is More Important than Accentuating the Positive

    I  had a piece appear today in the Wall Street Journal called "How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything," a topic I have written on before and her, especially, in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A fun discussion of bad apples can also be found on This American Life; check out the opening interview of this episode with Will Felps, who has done some cool research on how bad apples have a disproportionately negative effect on group performance. 

    The underlying theory and evidence for my argument that bad apples do so much damage, and more broadly destructive emotions and incompetence undermine performance and well-being so much, that the first order of business for any boss is to eliminate the negative rather than accentuate the positive (I am not discouraging goodness and excellence… but getting rid of the bad is importance for achieving greatness).  This perspective is inspired by a masterpiece of an academic article called "Bad is Stronger Than Good," which was published in 2001 by Roy F. Baumeister and three other colleagues. If you want to really dig in, I invite you to download Bad is Stronger Than Good.. it is very detailed but readable.

    Essentially, the authors meticulously go through topic after topic — personal relationships, learning, memory, self-image, and numerous others — and show that bad packs a much stronger impact than good. They review a couple hundred diverse studies to make this point, and as they say at the end, the consistency of their findings about the disproportionate impact of bad things (compared to the power of good things)– like negative emotions, hostility, abuse, dysfunctional acts, destructive relationships, serious injuries and accidents, incompetence, and on and on — is depressingly consistent across study after after study. 

    One implication for managers and numerous other influencers in organizations is that, while bringing and breeding great people, and encouraging civility, competence, effort, and other kinds of goodness is an important part of the job, such efforts will be undermined if you aren't constantly vigilant about eliminating the negative, which includes dealing with people who are bad apples.  Baumeister and his colleagues also do suggest that another implication is sheer volume — overwhelming strong bad stuff with lots of weak good stuff.  I will discuss that approach at the end of this post.

    By coincidence, my doctoral course on leadership is reading and discussing this article today, so I re-read it closely this weekend, and it just knocks my socks off.  Here are just a few quotes from the article that got my attention:

    This one explains why bad could be so much stronger — we are selected to focus on it:

    From our perspective, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased probability of passing along their genes. (p. 325)

    On bad versus events:

    A diary study by David, Green, Martin, and Suls (1997) examined the effects of everyday good and bad events, as well as personality traits. Undesirable (bad) events had more pervasive effects on subsequent mood than desirable (good) ones. Although each type of event influenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad events influenced bad mood, and good events predicted good mood) to similar degrees, bad events had an additional effect on the opposite-valence mood that was lacking for good events. In other words, bad events influenced both good and bad moods, whereas good events influenced only good moods. (p. 327)

    How long the impact of everyday events lasts was studied by Sheldon, Ryan, and Reis (1996). Bad events had longer lasting effects. In their data, having a good day did not have any noticeable effect on a person's well-being the following day, whereas having a bad day did carry over and influence the next day. (p.327)

    On close relationships.  Note the implication is that if you do something bad in a close relationship, you've got to do at least five good things (on average) to make up for it:

    On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994) has proposed a revealing diagnostic index for evaluating relationships: He proposed that in order for a relationship to succeed, positive and good interactions must outnumber the negative and bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratio falls below that, the relationship is likely to fail and breakup. This index converges well with the thrust of our argument: Bad events are so much stronger than good ones that the good must outnumber the bad in order to prevail. Gottman's index suggests that bad events are on average five times as powerful as good ones, at least with regard to close relationships. (p. 329)

    The article goes on and on in this vein, digging into seemingly every possible nuance, and constantly concluding that "bad is stronger than good.:  Here are a some excerpts from the wrap-up toward the end:

    Let us briefly summarize the evidence. In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events. Close relationships are more deeply and conclusively affected by destructive actions than by constructive ones, by negative communications than positive ones, and by conflict than harmony. Additionally, these effects extend to marital satisfaction and even to the relationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce). Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger and have bigger effects than friendly,harmonious ones. Bad moods and negative emotions have stronger effects than good ones on cognitive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good moods). That suggests that people's desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their desire to get into a good one. (p. 362)

    Bad parenting can be stronger than genetic influences; good parenting is not. Research on social support has repeatedly found that negative, conflictual behaviors in one's social network have stronger effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad things receive more attention and more thorough cognitive processing than good things. When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact on the total impression than any comparable good information. (p.362)

    Bad stereotypes and reputations are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger effects than good feedback. Bad health has a greater impact on happiness than good health, and health itself is more affected by pessimism (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) than optimism (the presence or absence of a positive outlook). (p.362)

    Their closing paragraph, implies — albeit weakly– to one solution to overcoming the power of bad.

    Although it may seem pessimistic to conclude that bad is stronger than good, we do not think that such pessimism is warranted. As we have suggested, there are several reasons to think that it may be highly adaptive for human beings to respond more strongly to bad than good. In the final analysis, then, the greater power of bad may itself be a good thing. Moreover, good can still triumph in the end by force of numbers. Even though a bad event may have a stronger impact than a comparable good event, many lives can be happy by virtue of having far more good than bad events.

    I think this implied solution of working extra hard to crank up the good to drown out the bad is certainly part of the answer.  But, to me, another and probably more effective solution for managers is to work doggedly to screen out and stop bad people and bad behavior at every stage.  This means dealing with it via big things like recruiting, selection, training, rewards and punishments, and removing people; and, just as important, paying attention to the little things like  giving people feedback when they are destructive.   Another implication I emphasize is that self-awareness is important so that we realize when we are being bad and damaging others — and damn well better work on changing our attitudes and actions.

    I know this is a long and detailed post.  My view is that you can read the lighter and more bouncy piece in the Wall Street Journal, so I thought I would use this post to geek out a bit and dig into the underlying research. 

  • Is It Sometimes Rational to Select Leaders Randomly? A Cool Old Study

    This term at Stanford, I am teaching a doctoral seminar on leadership.  Of course, this one of the broadest and most confusing topics on earth.  I am not qualified to teach a seminar on love or religion; so, for me, this is the most vexing topic I can teach.  The topic for the first meeting was "cynicism."  I started out by assigning academic papers that brought evidence and perspectives that undermined conventional assumptions about leadership and that even questioned why scholars bothered to study the topic at all (my friend and co-author Jeff Pfeffer raised this question in a 1977 paper called "The Ambiguity of Leadership").

    The most entertaining paper we read was by S. Alexander Haslam and a long list of coauthors, called  "Inspecting the emperor's clothes: evidence that random selection of leaders can enhance group performance" (Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1998, pp. 168-184).  The two key studies in the paper entailed assigning student groups to play various versions of the "survival exercise" (see some of the variations here), where the group imagines that they have experienced some kind of disaster and are stranded (a plane crash, a broken car in the desert, and a nuclear war were used in these studies).  The group's task is to rank order the importance of a dozen or so items that might help them survive the ordeal (e.g., a compass, map,  loaded pistol, newspapers, cigarette lighter).  The performance of the group is determined by comparing their rank-ordering to those produced by experts.  This is, of course, just a simulation of reality.  But I've participated and led these exercises and they are quite engaging — I suspect many of you have had similar experiences. 

    Overall, the researchers compared the performance of these student groups under four conditions:

    1.  A leader selected via a formal selection process (self-ratings by group members)

    2. A leader selected by an informal process (group members had a discussion and picked a leader)

    3. A leader who was randomly selected.

    4. No leader selected. 

    The consistent finding was that groups with RANDOMLY selected members performed significantly better than groups in all other conditions, and there weren't significant differences found between the other conditions.  The researchers also did some follow-up surveys, and revealed some mildly interesting findings; notably, groups with randomly selected leaders rated their leaders as LESS effective even though their performance was BETTER.

    The authors assert that this rather surprising finding — which was fairly strong and replicated across two (albeit modest) studies — occurs because performance on this task requires cooperation, input, and effort from all group members.  They suggest that the very act of selecting one individual, of singling him or her out as better than the rest or simply focusing attention on that person, undermines the group's sense of unity and shared identity. They suggest that doing so may lead to social loafing.   As they put it, in describing the impact of a contest for the "best" leader:

      'In effect, their thoughts about the leader may have been of the form "if you're so wonderful, you can get on with it.' 

    I am still not entirely sure that these arguments are right, but I guess they make some sense (although they do not quite explain why groups that did not select leaders at all did equally badly — the researchers suggest this is because the leadership role is necessary).  Yet the study, imperfections aside, is provocative.  I like it because it challenges so many deeply held assumptions about groups and organizational life.  I especially like how it implies that just THE PROCESS of selecting the leader can provoke group dynamics that undermine the performance of the group as a whole.  That is worth considerable attention as this is something that selection committees and such often forget — and consistent with findings from many corners of the behavioral sciences that show "what you do is as important as how you do it."  Also, while the survival games probably do not generalize well to most tasks in organizational life, another possible implication is that, if you are doing a task where no one has any special expertise or experience, you might try randomly selecting your leader.

    What do you think? Does this have any implication in real life, or is it just one of those crazy studies that is irrelevant to real people and organizations?

    P.S. As veteran readers of this blog may remember, I have written about the virtues of randomness before; check out this post about Karl Weick's cool ideas about randomness and wisdom.

    P.P.S. Do not miss the link to the study from Arie below.  More evidence that randomly promoting people might work! Thanks Arie, fantastically weird.

     

  • Adopting The No Asshole Rule: Don’t Bother If The Words Are Hollow

    I just got off the phone with executives from an unnamed large company who are thinking about implementing a "no jerk rule." I am, of course, a big fan of this idea. And there are organizations that have such rules and the implement them effectively, such as Baird, the financial services firm.

    But I think they were a bit taken aback by how vehement I was about the dangers of just plastering the words everywhere, and not following it with the real work of implementing The No Asshole Rule (and, of course, this applies to any other norm in the organization… we wrote a lot about this in The Knowing-Doing Gap).  I wanted to know if the reward and prestige systems already supported the rule, and if not, how they were going to change things.  I wanted to know if the senior executives already modeled the right behavior, and if not, was something being done to make sure they changed their behavior.  I wanted to know if there were known assholes in visible positions, and if there were, was something going to be done to change their behavior or send them packing –to signal that the words were not hollow. 

    As with all norms, the espoused beliefs don't mean much unless they are backed by what people do — especially during the little moments.  Google is an interesting case in point.  Although they are imperfect like every human organization, it remains a civilized place because, as one senior executive explained to me years ago, "it isn't efficient to be an asshole here."  That is a sign to me that the norm is working, and all the strategy and product stuff aside, it is impressive they seem to have sustained this norm despite their size and the relentless performance pressures.  

    To return to the dangers of hollow rhetoric: It is especially destructive when it comes to the no jerk or or no asshole rule.  When organizations say it, but don't do it, when it does not constrain and describe how people act — and no serious efforts are being made to begin implementing the norm — the result is that double-whammy:  Leaders are seen as both assholes and hypocrites.  

  • Our New York Times Piece on Evidence-Based Management: The Uncut Version

    Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

    In addition, one point that we didn't emphasize even in the "uncut version" is that we are NOT arguing financial incentives are generally useless, dangerous, or unwise to use.  They do motivate human-beings, and seem to be especially effective (as Dan Pink shows us) for tasks that do not require high levels of imagination.  But a condition for any incentive system to work is that people need to have enough control over their work.  A big problem with many teacher incentive programs is that, all too often, individual teachers just don't have enough resources, enough influence over the preparation kids had before they enter their classroom, enough influence over what happens to their students outside the classroom, and enough support from the administration.  So no matter how motivated the teachers might be, they can't have a big impact on student's scores, at least through honest means. Although it isn't pretty or ethical, teachers and administration sometimes turn to something they can control: They give the kids answers, erase wrong answers and change them to right answers, or in some cases, find ways to get the weakest performing kids out of their classes and schools, even when those students need the most help.  Unfortunately, in too many schools, this means the weakest students are moved to special education classes, which raises mean test scores in regular classes, but hurts both the kids who don't belong in special education classes as well those who do.

    OK, here is the uncut version:

    Title:

    The Virtues of Evidence-Based Management

    Reading lines:

    We know a lot now about what it takes to build humane and effective workplaces.   Leaders and managers can avert a lot of unnecessary harm –and do much good – by learning and heeding the best evidence.

    Text:

    Consider this scenario.  You have a serious illness. Your doctor prescribes an intrusive, painful, and expensive treatment— and you have to pay for it.  What she doesn’t tell you—because she has not consulted the research – is that most studies show the treatment is ineffective and fraught with negative side-effects.  You go through the procedure, suffer severe pain, and spend a lot of money.  Unfortunately, as with most patients, the procedure proves ineffective. You later uncover the research your doctor failed to consult.  When you ask why she didn’t use this evidence, she answers, “Who pays attention to studies?  I have years of clinical experience.  Besides, the protocol seemed like it ought to work.”  

    Does that sound like malpractice?  It does to us.  Fortunately, pressures to practice evidence-based medicine are reducing preventable errors.  Not so in most of our workplaces, where failure to consider sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well-being and organizational performance.   But it doesn’t have to be this way.

    No workplace practice is as important—and apparently vexing—as pay.  Many people believe that pay for-performance will work in virtually any organization, so it is implemented again and again to solve performance problems — even in settings where evidence shows it is ineffective.  Consider the recent decision to end New York City’s teacher bonus program after wasting three years and 56 million dollars.  As this newspaper reported in July, a Rand Corporation study found this effort to link incentive pay to student performance “had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.”  This bad news could have been predicted before squandering all that time and money.  The failure of such programs to boost student performance has been documented for decades.  A careful review of pay for performance in schools in the 1980s showed these programs rarely lasted more than five years and consistently failed to improve student performance.   The 300 page Rand report emphasizes that (although exceptions exist) evidence against the efficacy of teacher incentive pay in U.S. schools continues to grow stronger and is especially evident in the most rigorous studies. 

    This practice doesn’t just waste money.  As Chicago economist Steve Levitt and others show, strong incentive programs can entice – or scare — teachers and administrators to “cheat” on the tests, either by providing students with questions and answers in advance or changing student’s answer sheets to increase apparent performance.  Recent well-publicized cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and elsewhere could have been foreseen by anyone who read and heeded this research.  Building a culture of cheating in schools corrupts both students and teachers for no good purpose.

    Evidence about numerous other practices is ignored too.  Harvard University’s J. Richard Hackman finds that stable membership is a hallmark of effective work teams.  People with more experience working together typically communicate and coordinate more effectively.  Although this effect is seen in studies of everything from product development teams to airplane cockpit crews, managers often can’t resist the temptation to rotate people in and out to minimize staffing costs and make scheduling easier.  This happens even though, for instance, the National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the safety incidents reported on commercial aircraft occur on the first day a new crew flies together. 

    Hiring the right people is another key decision in every workplace.  Many studies show that unstructured face-to-face interviews are biased; for example, interviewers prefer candidates who are likeable, similar to them, and physically attractive (even when these qualities are irrelevant to performance).  Numerous selection methods are superior – among the best is to simply see if the candidate can perform the work.  Yet interviews remain the primary selection method used by organizations.  And we’ve often been astounded by the refusal of seasoned managers and executives to even consider evidence that interviews are a flawed selection tool.

    Strongly-held but weakly supported beliefs about workplace practices reflect what psychologists call “confirmation bias.”  When people hold firm beliefs about something, they tend to ignore, reject, and forget facts that clash with their beliefs; and remember, accept, and more readily accept facts that support their beliefs.   A related impediment is the excessive self-confidence that plagues many people, especially those who wield power over others.  Decision-makers may acknowledge they use a practice that is ineffective for most other people and organizations — but believe they are so talented that the usual findings don’t apply to them.  

    To illustrate, numerous studies show that mergers typically inflict economic damage on the acquiring company.  Yet when one of us served on the board of a software company that was contemplating an acquisition — a “target” company in a different city and of comparable size (conditions that predict merger failure) — the CEO argued it would succeed despite the evidence because he wasn’t like most CEOs.  He was wrong.  It failed, just as most acquisitions do under these conditions.

    Despite such impediments, there is an evidence-based movement afoot in some organizations.  When Gary Loveman became COO of Harrah’s in the late 1990s, he decided that improving the service provided to the best customers—“the people who made the cash register ring”—was a priority.  Loveman had taught service management at Harvard Business School, so was well-versed in research on customer loyalty — and how employee turnover undermined it. Loveman’s team implemented numerous evidence-based tactics including realistic job previews. After candidates were offered a job, they were informed about the good and bad elements so they could decide if the work was right for them.  Turnover plummeted, service improved, and coupled with Harrah’s innovative marketing, the company went on a decade-long run of outstanding performance. 

    A recent study at Google demonstrates the power of accepting and acting on evidence, even when it clashes with ingrained beliefs.  For most of its history, Google’s leaders believed that deep technical expertise was the most important quality for a manager. They believed the best bosses pretty much left their people alone, and their main role was to help with technical problems when people got stuck.  Yet when Google examined what employees valued most in a manager, technical expertise ranked last of the eight attributes examined.  Attributes like being even-keeled, asking good questions, taking time to meet with people, and caring about employees’ careers and lives were most crucial.  Google found that managers who did these things led top performing teams, had the happiest employees, and suffered the least turnover. In response, Google is making many changes in how it selects and coaches managers, and is devoting particular effort to improving its worst managers.  We applaud Google’s leaders for overcoming their biases. But note the attributes of great managers Google “discovered” were evident in hundreds of prior studies. Perhaps if Google’s leaders hadn’t believed they were so “special” and “different,” they might have launched such efforts to improve their managers years earlier.

    The evidence-based medicine movement arose in response to thousands of unnecessary deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by implementing proven practices.  Similarly, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, bad group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes, and other preventable damage suggests the need for an evidence-based management movement.  Some organizations are leading the way.  It’s time for many more to do the same.

    P.S. Speaking of evidence-based management, Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle, had a great editorial The Times today called "Do Happier People Work Harder?"

  • 5 Warning Signs to Watch for at Apple

    I declined several media inquiries to comment on Steve Jobs and the impact his departure will have on Apple.  I did so because predicting the future of any company is always hard, but especially so for Apple where the secrecy is so severe.  For example, although Tim Cook has stepped in and out of the CEO role multiple times, the assumption seems to be that Jobs has retained influence on daily operations throughout the past three or four years. Clearly, Steve is quite sick and has been for a long time, which leads me to wonder to what extent Steve Jobs himself versus the IDEA of Steve Jobs has held stronger sway in Apple.  In any case, it is clear the Cook has been running a big proportion of day to day operations for years now.  But perhaps Jobs has had little more than symbolic influence for years.  If that is true — and I have no idea if it is — the odds that Apple will continue its impressive run might be a bit higher than pundits predict.  Regardless, in the short-term, my hunch is the capital markets have the right take on Apple (the stock is holding rock steady) as it has such great products, pizazz, stores, and operations that sudden trouble seems unlikely.

    When I finally did a media interview for FT Germany yesterday, I got to thinking about Apple from an organizational and cultural perspective.  I was especially influenced by Adam Lashinsky's magnificent Fortune piece called Inside Apple.  The story that emerges from Adam's piece and other bits of information is that Apple's structure, work practices, and beliefs about how to get done are woven together to support a highly centralized model of decision-making, where very talented individuals and small teams are given specific tasks, individuals are held highly accountable for implementation, and extremely strong cultural, interpersonal, and performance pressures are present. 

    Although I won't dig into the debate about trade-offs between centralization and decentralization, centralization works best when leaders face a relatively small number of important decisions, when they find ways to reduce the emotional and cognitive load on the relatively small number of people making major decisions, and tight personal, organizational, and cultural controls mean that decisions from on high are implemented quickly and without much question.  At its best, in a centralized system, there is much confidence in leaders, fast communication up and down, and relatively little time spent on dysfunctional politics (as there is no power vacuum, little second guessing, and severe penalties for ignoring or undermining orders from on high).   Although it is mighty hard to know exactly what is going on in Apple, this description seems to fit most stories and other information about the place under the shared leadership of Jobs and Cook. 

    Assuming this is more or less accurate, I started wondering, what would be some signs that such a system was heading for trouble? Consider five:

    1. The size of the board of directors starts to grow.  Apple has been criticized for having a board that is too small, only 7 people.  Smaller teams not only make better and faster decisions, and have better dynamics, a small board helps a senior management team move faster as there are fewer masters to serve and, on average, the speed and quality of their advice should be better.  If more members are added to Apple's board (especially if they get to 10 or more) it would suggest the board and top team are putting too many things on their plate, trying to please too many masters, and creating more complex group dynamics that will slow and complicate decision-making and implementation in both groups. 

    2. The number of products expands dramatically.  When Jobs first returned to Apple, they had a huge pile of products — he killed all of them within the year.  For example, as Jobs said ten months after his return, they had so many different kinds of Macs and other hardware that Apple employees couldn't even tell their friends which ones to buy (See this old 1998 video, especially minute 5:20 to 7:30 or so).  In contrast, look at the product line now, they only make one iPhone at a time, one iPad, and have a pretty narrow set of Macs too.  If you are going to run a highly centralized organization (as one friend of mine calls it "genius driven"), a smaller product line is especially important because, that way, the senior team need only track a relatively small number, which averts placing excessive cognitive load on them.  As I wrote here earlier, Jobs has argued that a hallmark of great companies is that they not only kill all the bad ideas, they kill most of the good ones too so they can focus on doing a few things well and not design inelegant products or experiences that reflect an effort to jam every seemingly good idea in someplace.

    If Apple's product line gets bigger, especially a lot bigger, it gets harder to run the organization without delegating more major decisions.  In addition, and perhaps most crucially, when an organization has an irrationally large product line, when consumers and even insiders can't understand the logic, the real explanation often is that there are many medium power groups that have enough resources and influence to build their own hardware, software, or whatever BUT not enough power to stop others.  As a result, many medium size fiefdoms emerge, attention turns inwards to gaining political advantage over competitors, and away from what is best for the company and customers.  I saw this at GM before the bankruptcy.  This was also exactly the situation that Jobs faced when he returned to run Apple in the mid 1990s. My conversations with Apple insiders suggest that dysfunctional politics explained the big product line, not the strategy.  So a big increase in products — and one that doesn't seem to make much sense — would signal the team is putting too much cognitive load  on itself, moving to a more decentralized model that does not fit with other elements of Apple, and that people are spending more time battling to get THEIR product out and to kill others developed by colleagues instead of making a few INSANELY GREAT products.

    3. Departures of senior executives.  One of the most consistent strengths of Apple that observers emphasize is the quality of their top team.  The same goes for their board too, with perhaps the star being the amazing Bill Campbell, one of the most renowned coaches and mentors on the planet and THE most desirable board member in Silicon Valley. Presumably, Tim Cook has had years to work with them, and the dynamics are healthy; I suspect one reason Apple is so effective partly is because of this stability.  When people start leaving any group, there is good evidence that the resulting disruption undermines group performance as it takes time for groups to absorb and learn how to work with new people.  I would be especially concerned if people who left are replaced by outsiders, as Apple clearly has distinct ways of thinking and acting that would take time for even the most able outsider to learn.  Moreover, when people start leaving a top management team at unexpectedly high rates, it often signals trouble: They are unhappy with their CEO and fellow executives, they are being forced out, or both. Note that there have been some key departures of senior executives  in recent months, so this is something to keep an eye on.  In particular, if head designer Jonathan Ive left, that would signal that something is terribly wrong.

    4. Leaks to the press.  As an outsider who would like to know more about Apple, and who often talks to journalists that cover Apple, the difficulty of learning anything about the company just amazes me.  It took me a good four months to confirm that my former Stanford colleague Joel Podolny had become head of HR after hearing the first rumor it had occurred — and of course Joel was too smart and well-socialized to answer the email I sent him asking him if the rumor was true.  While information does sometimes get out (consider Adam Lashinsky's great Fortune piece) a hallmark of Apple's culture is that people in the company take secrecy so seriously — especially when it comes to forthcoming products and release dates (the current secrecy around the iPhone 5 being a case in point).  I have friends who work at Apple, not just Joel.  It is amazing to see what happens to them when they go to work there.. they stop talking, they won't return emails, and you learn — if you do run into them — not to ask them about anything sensitive.  After all, should they slip and tell you, they are putting their own jobs at risk.  Now, such paranoia, although unattractive in some ways, does have advantages in that competitors are kept in the dark and consumers don't really know when an Apple product they buy will be outdated.  Apple has been able to do an especially brilliant job of tweaking production levels (thanks to Tim Cook's amazing supply chain) and pricing so they can squeeze the most out of existing but soon to be outdated hardware and software.  Perhaps even more important, Apple's infamously effective secrecy is a sign of fantastic cultural control and individual commitment to the company. If we start seeing more leaks than in the past, it signals the strength of the bonds among people are weakening and their fear of breaking this most sacred of Apple commandments in waning — that Apple's carrots and sticks aren't working as well as in the past.

    5. Acquisitions, especially big ones.  Just this morning, I was reading some stories quoting management professors who predicted that Apple is sitting on so much money that they would probably go on a shopping spree and buy a bunch of companies.  If this happens, I would really start to worry.  Yes, small strategic acquisitions to bring specific people or specific technologies that Apple needs to move ahead are probably necessary and wise.  But if you look at research on acquisitions, especially big acquisitions, not only do they tend to fail, they do a bunch of things to organizations (especially senior teams) that would be especially deadly for Apple.  They distract leaders from the day to day operations of their firms, increase the overall cognitive and emotional load, bring in different and change resistant subcultures that are usually harder to transform than senior executives predict, they result in additions (and subtractions) to the top management team and board of directors (and thus create the group dynamics problems outlined earlier), and often broaden the product line (The Compaq/HP merger being a case in point).  As such, it seems to me that doing a big acquisition — or worse yet, a stream of them — would be an especially efficient way to undermine Apple's seemingly magnificent structure and culture.  Apple got big by doing a fairly small number of things very well and by doing them for themselves.

    As I said at the outset, it is impossible to predict Apple's fate.  I would speculate, however, that regardless of whether all or none of the things above happen, the best bet is that Apple will slip a bit in the next decade.   One reason is simply regression to the mean, that things even out over time, so extreme outliers in any distribution tend to drift toward the average.   There are some forces that helps this process along in very successful companies.  As my colleague Jeff Pfeffer likes to say, whether it comes to a great restaurant or a great technology company, the inevitable distractions, overload, outside scrutiny,  arrogance, confusion, and fear of screwing things up (rather than focusing on making things better and better) mean, all too often, that "success ruins everything."   Regardless, regression to the mean seems to happen in most or all systems where large variance in performance is seen.  Certainly every high flying technology company that ever existed has eventually drifted toward the middle or bottom, at least for awhile.   Even the most enduring, such as IBM, have gone through some hard times and, of course, Apple had some mighty tough times in the mid 1990s. 

    Meanwhile, I confess that I hope Apple continues to be great and become greater.  If the iPhone 5 is as cool as I hope, I will get one.   My old 3GS is still running strong, but I don't think I will be able to resist.  About a year ago, I had dinner with design guru Don Norman , who was once a senior executive running advanced development at Apple,  Don was quickly fired when Jobs returned.   Don, who is smart, charming, and has a sharp tongue, noted that Jobs' decision was understandable, he just wished that Steve had been a little nicer about it.  Don — who owns both a Droid and iPhone — made an interesting comment.  That you could argue all day about the technical pros and cons of each phone, but he pretty much always grabs the iPhone because it is just more fun and that "fun thing"  is a reflection of Steve Jobs' and Jonathan Ive's combined genius: Something no other technology company seems to ever figure out quite so well or so consistently.   If Apple can protect and keep spreading that human magic across its products, and keep running that amazing supply chain, nothing that any of us say will matter.  Their greatness will persist.

  • New Study: Helpful and Friendly Co-Workers Can Keep You Alive

    Tiffany West from the World Economic Forum just alerted me to an intriguing new study that suggests having the right co-workers can help us live longer, while having the wrong ones might kill us.  The article was published by Arie Shirom and four of his colleagues and is based on a diverse sample of approximately 800 Israeli employees, who were tracked by the researchers for 20 years.  The main finding is that those who had unsupportive co-workers died at a much higher rate (2.4 times lower).  You can read a good summary here, along with some other bells and whistles. 

    Here are the two questions they used to measure "peer social support, as described on  page 270 of the original article:

    Peer social support was scored high for participants who reported (a) that their immediate coworkers were helpful to them in solving problems, and (b) were friendly to them.

    I was most intrigued by these two items because they remind me of the two hallmarks of a good boss that I saw over and over again as I read research when writing Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A good boss is one who is both competent at the work at hand and who treats his or her charges with dignity and respect.  One of the most fun variations of this theme is David Kelley's "love and money" balancing act. 

    But it is instructive that, when you step back and look at all this evidence about what we, as humans, want and need from the people for lead us and who work with us, much of it boils down to two simple things. We want people who are skilled at the work and using to use those skills to help us perform our jobs when we have too much work to do or don't know how to solve the problem at hand.  And we want people who treat us with warmth, respect, and who inject a bit of fun in life (at least that is what I want from from a friendly co-worker).  Academics have found many nuances and will find many more, but these two simple categories jump out again — and they make sense.

    These findings also reinforce that advice I have given again and again about the kind of workplaces it is best to seek versus avoid, and my related advice on surviving an asshole infested workplace.  As I have always said, if you are surrounded by a bunch of assholes — and people who won't help you solve work problems and who are unfriendly would qualify — get out as fast as you can.  This study suggests that, they longer you stay around such people, the more your health will suffer, and eventually, your risk of an early death will rise.

    This is not a perfect study, the sample is not representative, a larger one would have enabled the researcher to do more fine-grained analyses, and while the two item measure of co-worker support was suggestive, it is rather coarse.  But all studies are imperfect, and this one is impressive because the authors followed this group for so long and took considerable care to rule out competing explanations, such as the health of the worker when the first measurements were taken in 1988.

    P.S. There was an interesting twist in the findings, the mortality effects seen in 2008 were driven mostly by the impact of support on workers who were 38 to 43 when the measurements were first taken in 1988. As the authors suggest, the younger workers may have still been healthy enough to avoid the mortality effects of bad co-workers, but the lack of effects on older workers seem harder to explain.

    The citation is: Work-based predictors of mortality: A 20-year follow-up of healthy employees. Shirom, Arie; Toker, Sharon; Alkaly, Yasmin; Jacobson, Orit; Balicer, Ran. Health Psychology, Vol 30(3), May 2011, 268-275.