Work Matters

  • Creativity: Another Reason that Having a Drink — or Two — at Work Isn’t All Bad

    Last April, I had fun writing a guest column for Cnn.Com arguing that having an occasional drink with your colleagues while you are at work isn't all bad:

    In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed — at least to a degree — to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others — because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

    Now there is a new study that adds to the symbolic (and I suppose objective) power of alcohol to bring about positive effects. The folks over at BPS Research Digest offer a lovely summary of an experiment called "Uncorking the Muse"  that shows "mild intoxication aids creative problem solving."   The researchers had male subjects between the ages of 21 and 30 consume enough vodka to get their blood alcohol concentration to .07, which is about equal to consuming two pints of beer for an average sized man.  Then they gave them a standard creativity task 'the "Remote Associates Test", a popular test of insightful thinking in which three words are presented on each round (e.g. coin, quick, spoon) and the aim is to identify the one word that best fits these three (e.g. silver).'

    The tipsy respondents performed better on the test than subjects in a sober control group:

    1. "they solved 58 per cent of 15 items on average vs. 42 per cent average success achieved by controls"

    2. "they tended to solve the items more quickly (11.54 seconds per item vs. 15.24 seconds)"

    The reasons they did better and moved faster appear to be lack of inhibition ("intoxicated participants tended to rate their experience of problem solving as more insightful, like an Aha! moment, and less analytic") and, following past research, people with superior memories tend to do worse on this task — because drinking dulls memory, it may help on the Remote Associates Test.  The researchers also speculate that "being mildly drunk facilitates a divergent, diffuse mode of thought, which is useful for such tasks where the answer requires thinking on a tangent."

    I am not arguing that people who do creative work ought to drink all day — there are two many dangers.  As I warned in the CNN piece, booze is best consumed in small doses and with proper precautions.  And of course people who don't or should not drink for health, religious, or other reasons ought not to be pressured to join in the drinking.

    Yet,  this study, when combined when with other work suggesting that drinking can serve as a useful social lubricant, suggest that having a drink or two with your colleagues at the end of the day now and then, and kicking around a few crazy ideas, might both enhance social bonds and generate some great new ideas.  The payoff might include innovative products, services, experiences and the like — if you can remember those sparkling insights after you sober up!

    P.S. The citation is Jarosz, A., Colflesh, G., and Wiley, J. (2012). Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 21 (1), 487-493

  • Social Media Explained With Donuts: From Geek.Com

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    It helped me!  I found it here.

     

     

  • Diego Rodriguez: This is What Leadership Should Look Like at IDEO

    As long-time readers of this blog know, I am a big admirer (and long time friend) of Diego Rodriguez.  Diego is a partner at IDEO and runs the flagship Palo Alto office, and he writes the always provocative blog Metacool.   Diego's IDEO colleague, Tatyana Mamut, stopped by Stanford last week to serve as judge for the final project in our course on scaling-up excellence (they were wonderful, but that is another story). 

    Somehow, we got to talking about leadership and she told me about a video that Diego had shown people and told them "This is what leadership should look like at IDEO."  Watch it here.  You have to see it, I won't tell you anything else.

    I will offer an opinion, however, after years of hanging around IDEO: This is how leadership usually looks there and has since the earliest days when founder David Kelley started a company (with Dean Hovey) in 1978 so he could have a place to hang out with his friends.  But it is always good to remind people of what is sacred (and profane) in any culture, and this little video does it well.

    P.S. As a bonus, if you click on the link for Tatyana, you get a great short talk on how tools, rules, and norms and how they explain the spread of deodorant use in Russia.  It reminds of when my dissertation adviser — Bob Kahn, half jokingly — defined organizations as "rules, tools, and fools." 

  • The Hallmarks of Great Leaders — and the Needs of Younger Workers — are Timeless

    Fast Company has another excerpt from the new chapter in Good Boss, Bad Boss out today — one that goes against things that many so-called management gurus often say. My main point i those who argue management needs to be re-invented are misguided — they massively overstate the case and have incentives for doing so, but it doesn't stand up to the evidence.  Here is opening of the piece and you can read the rest here:

    A lot of people write business books: about eleven thousand are published each year. There are armies of consultants, gurus, and wannabe thought leaders, and thousands of management magazines, radio and TV shows, websites, and blogs. 

    These purveyors of management knowledge have incentives for claiming their ideas are “new and improved” rather than the same old thing. One twist, which I’ve seen a lot lately, is the claim that management or leadership needs to be reinvented. Many reasons given for this need seem sensible: Gen X and Gen Y require different management techniques; outsourcing, globalization, and information technology means working with people we rarely if ever meet in person; the pressure to think and move ever faster is unprecedented; so many employees are disengaged that they need to be managed so they feel appreciated.

    Yet, no matter how hard I look at studies by academics and consulting firms, or at contrasts between successful and unsuccessful leaders, I can’t find persuasive evidence of substantial change in the kinds of bosses people want to become or work for, or that enable human groups and organizations to thrive. Changes such as the computer revolution, globalization, and distributed teams mean that if you are a boss, staying in tune with followers is more challenging than ever. And, certainly, bosses need to be more culturally aware because many workplaces are composed of more diverse people.

    But every new generation of bosses faces hurdles that seem to make the job tougher than it ever was. The introduction of the telephone and air travel created many of the same challenges as the computer revolution–as did the introduction of the telegraph and trains. Just as every new generation of teenagers believes they have discovered sex and their parents can’t possibly understand what it feels like to be them, believing that that no prior generation of bosses ever faced anything like this and these crazy times require entirely new ways of thinking and acting are likely soothing to modern managers. These beliefs also help so called experts like me sell our wares. Yet there is little evidence to support the claim that organizations—let alone the humans in them—have changed so drastically that we need to invent a whole new kind of boss.

    I'd love your reactions!

    P.S. Note that Gen Y and Gen X really aren't much different than any other new generation of employees in terms of what they want — even though there is a small industry around dealing with these so-called new kinds of workers.  Certainly, younger workers want different things than older workers — but this has always been the case and what they want has always been pretty similar — be they baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, or whatever.  See this piece by Wharton's Peter Cappelli, perhaps the most prestigious talent researcher in academia, where he discusses the evidence, which show a few differences, but nothing dramatic.  

     

  • Are Incompetent and Nice Bosses Even Worse The Competent Assholes? An Excerpt from My New Chapter

    Tomorrow is the official publication day for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  It contains a new chapter called "What Great Bosses Do," which digs into some of the lessons I learned about leadership since publishing the hardback in September 2010.  I have already published excerpts from the new chapter  on power poisoning,  bad apples, and embracing the mess at Fast Company.

    As I am teaching all day tomorrow, I am publishing another here today excerpt here to mark the occasion.  It considers one of the most personally troubling lessons I've learned (or at least am on the verge of believing).  I am starting to wonder, as the headline says, if nice but incompetent bosses are even worse (at least in some ways and at certain times) than competent assholes. 

    Now, to be clear, they both suck and having to choose between the two is sort of like deciding whether to be kicked in the stomach or kicked in the head.  And I have even suggested here that there might be certain advantages to having a lousy boss (and readers came up with numerous other great reasons).  But I have seen so much damage done by lousy bosses who are really nice people in recent years that I am starting to wonder…

    Here is the excerpt from the new chapter (the 4th of 9 lessons):

    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” is 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 e-mails 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.

    Thoughts?

  • The Power of the People Around You

    I spent the morning trying to organize and make sense of various materials that Huggy Rao and I have been gathering about scaling.  I came across a most interesting post on "Learnings from 2011" that was apparently written by Xenios Thrasyvoulou, CEO of European-based start-up called Peopleperhour.com, which enables you to hire people "remotely, for small projects or a few hours a week." 

    The post was quite interesting, well-crafted and introspective.  But the advice at the end stopped me in my tracks:

    “Life is too short to waste it with people who don’t get it, whatever “it” may be for you, so make sure you surround yourself with people who do”

    This is such good advice because human attitudes and behaviors are so infectious.  If you are surrounded with a bunch of smart, graceful, caring, and action-oriented people, all that goodness will rub-off on you; and if you are surrounded with a bunch of people with the opposite attributes, that will infect you too.  This is why who you choose to hang out with, hire, fire, spend time with, and avoid has so much influence on everything from acting like an asshole, to building a creative organization, to scaling-ip excellence, to living a happy life. 

    Yet, implementing this philosophy in real life isn't easy.  I would love to hear some ideas about how people make it happen.

  • Great Piece on Narcissistic CEOs in The New York Times

    Steve Davidoff has a well-researched piece on the antics and impact of narcissistic CEOs in The New York Times.  The allegations of deeply selfish and unlawful actions by chief executive of Delphi Financial, Robert Rosenkranz, appear to have motivated the piece. Here is just one of the vile acts listed by Davidoff:

    Despite restrictions in Delphi Financial’s charter, Mr. Rosenkranz demanded in negotiations that he be paid over $110 million more than other shareholders, a number that a special committee of Delphi Financial’s board negotiated down by about $50 million.

    To me, the piece really gets interesting when Mr. Davidof digs into the research, including:

    1. Henrik Cronqvis and his colleagues found that the more deeply a company was in debt, the more its chief executive was willing to borrow to buy a house!

    2. In another study: "Flying small planes is viewed as thrill-seeking behavior. Professors Cain and McKeon found that chief executives with pilot licenses were more prone to engage in acquisitions, with the theory that takeovers are risky, yet exciting ventures."

    This second study reminds me of a hypothesis that Huggy Rao (my co-author of the scaling project) has proposed:  Male CEOs who have "trophy wives" are more likely to lead companies that make risky investments, as having a trophy wife is indicative that the boss had been fooling around at some point (also a risky behavior).

    The question that always nags at me when it comes to narcissism and related bad behavior displayed by powerful people is how much of it is provoked in a once decent person who is infected with power poisoning (there is plenty of evidence that this happens, much of which I review in my bossholes chapter in Good Boss, Bad Boss) versus the explanation that giving a selfish and narcissistic jerk a powerful position gives them greater opportunity to reveal their greed and self-absorption. In real life, it is probably some of both.  And the way the organization is structured makes a difference too — this is one reason why people who study corporate governance often advocate having "checks" on CEO power.

    In any case, I thought it was a nice article and it raises all osrts of issues about CEO selection and the structure of executive roles.

  • FUBAR, SNAFU, Fast Company, and Good Bosses

    My late father, Lewis Sutton, was a World II veteran.  Like many of his generation, the things he learned and experiences he had — from the terrors of the Battle of the Bulge to the joys of chasing French women — profoundly shaped the course of his life.  Part of what he learned was the language, funny and accurate expressions that — although now falling out of use — still provide lovely compact summaries of life's complexities. 

    I was reminded of two of my favorite sayings today by this excerpt from the  new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback posted today at Fast Company: "When There Is No Simple Solution at Work, Learn to Embrace the Mess."

    Here is part of the piece:

    Good Boss, Bad Boss shows the value of checklists, of instilling predictability during scary times, and offers A.G. Lafley’s philosophy that the best managers make things “Sesame Street simple.” These and other examples demonstrate that simplicity, clarity, and repeatable steps can reduce the burdens on people, promote performance, and save money. We human beings especially love simple stories that communicate clear solutions and actions; when Conrad Hilton was on the Johnny Carson show, he pleaded with millions of Americans, “Please remember to put the shower curtain inside the tub.”

    Yet there is there is a hazard to this quest: People start believing that every challenge has a clear and simple solution. Stories about past triumphs fuel this predilection. They can make life sound orderly and predictable, even though when the events unfolded, people were probably bewildered and overwhelmed much of the time. As singer Jimmy Buffett put it in his song Migration: “Some things are still a mystery to me/While others are much too clear.”

    Bosses have to be prepared to deal with both circumstances. They need to search for clear solutions and simplify things when possible. But it is impossible to be a leader without facing stretches where you and your followers are overwhelmed with the complexity and uncertainty of it all. When this happens, to maintain everyone’s spirits keep them moving forward, and to sustain collective stamina, sometimes it is best to embrace the mess–at least for a while.

    This challenge reminded me of two of the most famous and fun World War II expressions:

    Snafu — situation normal, all fucked-up

    fubar — fucked-up beyond all recognition

    One CEO I know, also the son of a World War II veteran, uses the distinction between the two to help decide whether a "mess" requires intervention, or it is best to leave people alone for awhile to let them work through it. 

    He asks his team, or the group  muddling through mess: "Is it a snafu or fubar situation? " He finds this to be a useful diagnostic question because, if it is just usual normal level confusion, error, and angst that is endemic to uncertain and creative work, then it is best to leave people alone and let hem muddle forward.  But if it is fubar, so fucked-up that real incompetence is doing real damage, the group is completely frozen by fear, good people are leaving or suffering deeply, customers are fleeing, or enduring damage is being done to a company or brand — then it is time to intervene. 

    Its not a bad diagnostic, and dovetails well with another theme from Good Boss, Bad Boss — that the best bosses are "perfectly assertive," they know how to diagnose situations to determine when to watch, evaluate, coach or criticize their followers — versus when it is best to just get out of the way.  

    I would love to hear other ideas about how a boss knows when it is time to intervene versus time to "manage by getting out of the way."

  • The Power of Habit: Quick Review

    Book The Power of Habit 280

    The Power of Habit has been sitting on my desk for a couple months, as the publisher sent me an advance copy.  I didn't start reading it until today — although I was most impressed by this recent piece in The New York Times based on the book.  What a compelling read!  It is evidence-based and great reading — if you want to learn how companies track our habits, try to weave their products into our lives, and how we can understand and change our own habits for the better, it is all there. 

    I confess that I didn't pick it up because I am not wild about the cover design, It is hard to grasp on quick glance and, well, I do not find it especially attractive — but once I started reading the book, I realized it is the rare cover that actually provides a great compact summary of a book's core ideas.  And having struggled with the cover design process myself quite a few times now, I can tell you that it isn't easy getting something as emotionally compelling as Made to Stick or as beautiful as Enchantment.   In any event, The Power of Habit reminded me that the old saw "you can't judge a book by it's cover" is true! 

  • The Rise of a Culture of Contempt and the Demise of UCLA Men’s Basketball

    Work Matters reader and fellow blogger, Chris Yeh, sent me a link to a Sport's Illustrated story about the discouraging downfall of the UCLA basketball program.  And I don't mean the drop off in performance at UCLA in the past few years, I mean the loss of its soul and the rise of a culture of contempt — with rampant lousy leadership, bad role models, asshole poisoning.  Chris summed it all up well:

    It’s terrible.  Thank goodness John Wooden isn’t alive, or this would have killed him.  To trample on his legacy like this is atrocious.

    UCLA's John Wooden, the "Wizard of Westwood" not only won more national championships than any coach of a male college basketball team, he fostered a culture of mutual respect and individual development that turned his players — whether they were superstars like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton or bench-warmers — into more confident, cooperative, and compassionate human beings.

    It appears coach Ben Howland has had the opposite effect.  As you can see in this excerpt from the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback over at Fast Company on the power of subtraction, there is plenty of evidence that when leaders and peers display bad behavior and don't act swiftly and firmly to stop, the vile actions and attitudes spread like wildfire — and the result isn't just bad performance, it is a culture of contempt that damages everyone involved.

    Here is the upshot of the SI story about what happened the last few years under coach Ben Howland:

    "Over the last two months SI spoke with more than a dozen players and staff members from the past four Bruins teams. They portrayed the program as having drifted from the UCLA way as Howland allowed an influx of talented but immature recruits to undermine team discipline and morale. Fistfights broke out among teammates. Several players routinely used alcohol and drugs, sometimes before practice. One player intentionally injured teammates but received no punishment."

    The story offers many twists and turns, it is long and well-researched.  It provides many old but true lessons about how a bad boss can ruin a good team. If you are a leader of a group or organization of any size, it is worth studying and then taking a long hard look in the mirror and asking yourself — am I doing that too?  Here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

    1.  Are you focusing on strategy, but ignoring your team?

    Strategy matters, but it is not enough.  According to the story this was Howland's general management style. He acted as if the human part of his job was a nuisance. As the article explains:

    Other than during practices and games, he had little contact with his athletes, according to players. He showed up moments before a workout began and was gone before players paired off to shoot free throws at the end. Several team members say that his approach was how they imagined an NBA coach would run a team.

    2. What behavior do you model? 

    The SI story reports numerous examples of abusive and disrespectful behavior on his part:

    Each of the players who spoke to SI said they found Howland socially awkward and disapproved of the verbal abuse they say he directed at his staff, the student managers and the weakest players. One player said if he saw Howland waiting for the elevator he would take the stairs.

    3. Are you so focused on your own needs and wants that you insist that others indulge your little quirks? 

    The inner focus that comes with power poisoning can cause leaders to indulge and bizarre and petty behavior that — even if they are not aware of it — conveys that they are focused on their own self importance and don't give a hoot about others.  For example, SI reports:
    The players were puzzled by some of their coach's idiosyncrasies. Howland seemed obsessed with the temperature in the film room. If it was not exactly 76º a student manager was certain to feel Howland's wrath. The water bottles handed to him had to be just cold enough and not too large.
    4. Do you apply different rules to "stars" than to other team members even when they take reprehensible actions? 

    The story describes how star freshman Reeves Nelson was repeatedly physically abusive to fellow players in practice. Here is one of a string of such incidents:

    Walk-on Tyler Trapani was another Nelson victim. After Trapani took a charge that negated a Nelson dunk, Nelson went out of his way to step on Trapani's chest as he lay on the ground. Trapani is John Wooden's great-grandson.

    There are many other examples, but this one is symbolic as Nelson was literally trampling on a body that contained some of Wooden's DNA.  Here is how Howland was reported to have responded to such bad behavior:

    After each of the incidents, Howland looked the other way. One team member says he asked Howland after a practice why he wasn't punishing Nelson, to which he said Howland responded, "He's producing."

    5. Are you succeeding because the peer culture among your followers is hiding or offsetting your deep flaws? 

    This is one of the interesting parts of the story, and something every leader should think about.  In many cases, teams and organizations succeed DESPITE rather than BECAUSE of their leaders flaws.  In Howland's early years at UCLA, when the team was winning and morale among the players was good despite Howland's quirks and flaws, it was apparently due in large part to the tight bonds among the team members, an unusually mature and low ego group (which began unraveling in about 2008):

     It was a team of prefects, the protectors of the UCLA dynamic, who looked out for each other, making sure that no one got into trouble, that no one threatened what they were trying to accomplish or what UCLA has always been about. They were a tight group. If they went out, to the movies or a party, they were 15 strong. That kind of camaraderie is not unusual on good teams, but Howland's former players say he had very little to do with instilling it.

    6. Is your boss letting YOU get away with toxic and incompetent leadership?

    I was pretty stunned to read this:

    UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who through a spokesperson declined SI's interview request, told ESPN.com in January, "I need Ben Howland. Why would I even think about looking at someone else?" He added, "By his own admission, [Howland] made some mistakes. But I'm going to work with him. I'm not going to crucify him for those mistakes. Because Ben Howland is a hell of a coach, and anyone who understands basketball, anyone that's been around him, that knows the game, has the utmost respect for what he does as a coach. … We need to turn it around, and we all get that. But we will."

    The above quote is quite discouraging as it suggests that, well, so long as he goes back to winning, all is forgiven. As far as I am concerned, if the SI story is accurate, Howland suffers too deeply from power poisoning, committed too many selfish sins, and has demonstrated so much incompetence in dealing with people he is hired to look after and motivate to be allowed to continue in any leadership position. 
    The problems I've listed only begin to scratch the surface of the damage done under Howland's apparently flawed leadership. I haven't even got into the partying, the players who came to practice still stoned from the night before, and the bench-warmer who couldn't enter a game during "garbage time" because he didn't bother wearing his jersey under his warm-up jacket (the same player now says he can't believe, in retrospect, that he did it — but bad leadership and bad team dynamics cause people to do weird and dysfunctional things).
    Apparently, there are signs that Howland is doing a bit better this year and is taking steps to deal with bad behavior.  Last year, Howland finally stopped putting up with Reeves Nelson's awful behavior — for example, last season, he finally showed the courage to call fouls on Nelson in practice (in the past, "[Howland] always gave Reeves the benefit of the doubt on foul calls in practice so Reeves wouldn't lose it and be even more disruptive").  Nelson finally was kicked-off the team last November.   And now even Nelson and mother believe Howland should have been nipped the bad behavior in the bud.  As Nelson told SI:
    "I'm not trying to make excuses for what I did, but I got into some weird behavior patterns, and I think my mom was saying that if instead of one big punishment at the end, what if there had been smaller punishments along the way."
    Perhaps Howland will change his ways.  People do get better and perhaps he will learn to be less of a jerk, be in tune with the people he leads, to avoid letting superstar run roughshod over others, and to do the little bits dirty work when necessary.  I am not especially optimistic, especially after smelling the "winning is the only thing" attitude from Howland's boss.  Regardless, I believe this is a useful cautionary tale for any boss, and in particular, I  think of this guideline in Chapter 1 of The No Asshole Rule:
    The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. 
    P.S. Note that Reeves Nelson did an interview where he disputes many of the bad things said about him in the article and his law firm is demanding that SI retract the article.