Work Matters

Tag: bosses

  • Wall Street Journal Selects Good Boss, Bad Boss as a Business Book “To Read at the Beach.”

    I was pleased to hear that Kyle Stock from the Wall Street Journal selected Good Boss, Bad Boss as one of "Six
    Business Books to Read at the Beach.    "  I was also a little
    surprised because it won't be available officially until September 7,
    although they way the book business works, copies will likely begin to be
    available by August 20th or so.   In any case, I appreciate the vote of
    confidence, and here is the rest of is list.  All sound interesting,
    but the one I just ordered was "The Upside of Irrationality" as Dan
    Ariely is brilliant and that sounds like a great topic:

    Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hiseh

    Multipliers, by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown

    Employees First, Customers Second, by Vineet Nay

    The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor

    The Upside of Irrationality, by Dan
    Ariely

     I would also add Chip and Dan Heath's Switch and the deeply insightful and most troubling The Invisible Gorilla.  And, if you never read it, the astounding Orbiting the Giant Hairball — still the best creativity book ever written. 

    What would you add?  What would you subtract?

  • The Delicate Art of Being Perfectly Assertive: The 4th Belief of Good Bosses

    I put-up a new post over at HBR this morning, which is the 4th in what will ultimately be 12 Things the Good Bosses Believe.  This fourth belief builds on research showing that the best bosses strike the middle ground between being too assertive and not assertive enough — the press their people hard enough to motivate and guide them, but stop short of being overbearing or micromanaging to the point of pissing-off followers or undermining their confidence or work.  As I say in the post, this requires much flexibility, and is one reason that perhaps the central idea in Good Boss, Bad Boss is that the best bosses are in tune with what it feels like to work for them — which means in this case to understand just how hard to push your people on average  and to be able to "read" when it is time to interject, perhaps lean on them or instruct them, versus when to back-off, is a crucial and difficult craft to develop.  As I say at HBR, my favorite quote about this fine art comes from Tommy Lasorda:

    When I heard about this research, I couldn't help but think of a quote
    from Tommy Lasorda, who has worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers for
    almost 50 years, including a 20-year stint as the team's manager. The
    first day he took charge of the team, Tommy said to the press: "I
    believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too
    tightly you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it."

    I love that.  Also, Julia Kirby, who edits my posts at HBR, dug up the fabulous picture below.  It is in the final link in the article, but I couldn't resist inserting it here:

    081019_p03_tp

    The reason I love this picture so much is, as I have discussed on Work Matters before, and explain in the new HBR post:

    [w]hen I had finished writing much of my
    new book    , I had a conversation with the very talented Marc Hershon about
    what to call it. Marc is unusually good at naming things. He's the
    branding expert who named the Blackberry and the Swiffer, for example,
    and has helped authors like Tom
    Kelley     and Dr.
    Phil     come up with titles for books that turned into bestsellers.
    (Marc also co-authored his own book called I Hate People and
    produces all manner of other creative output, including screenplays, TV
    scripts, jokes for the likes of Jay Leno and Dana Carvey, and weekly
    political cartoons for San Francisco-area newspapers.) Based on the
    chapters he read, and thinking about the bosses he knew, he suggested
    the title "Top Dog on a Tightrope." What struck him, in other words,
    was the constant balancing act required. He also thought it was
    important to emphasize that, while everyone misjudges a step now and
    then, the best ones fall less often, because they have the skill to make
    constant and correct adjustments to stay out of trouble.

    Being a "perfectly assertive" boss is a lot easier to talk about then to do. I would love to hear your ideas about how you –or bosses you know — have accomplished this feat.  Please comment here or over at the HBR post

  • The Wise Boss: More Evidence For Expressing Confidence, But Harboring Private Doubts

    One of the challenges that I write about in Good Boss, Bad Boss and that Jeff Pfeffer and I discuss in Hard Facts is that leaders walk a fine line between exuding confidence while simultaneously making decisions and updating their actions based on the best possible information.  The best bosses, we argue, have what psychologist's call the attitude of wisdom: They act with confidence, while doubting what they know.  I have written about this here before, and perhaps the best example is in this long post about the wisdom of former Intel CEO Andy Grove.  There is a long quote from Andy in this post, and he demonstrates that attitude of wisdom with this great line, advising bosses:

    Act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction, and when your realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

    But perhaps Grove's most intriguing argument is that when you've made a decision you are not quite sure about, you as a boss are still smart to act confident, "to keep up your own spirits even though you well understand that you don't know what you are doing."

    I talk about this balancing act a lot in Good Boss, Bad Boss and in the workshops I do with managers and executives and they usually immediately get it and tell me that this is their lot in life.   But I have received push back over the years from some readers and some managers too who argue I am telling bosses to be less transparent.  I agree with the sentiment, and their arguments make me squirm, but have argued back that, if you as a boss talk about uncertainty too much, the problem is it undermines both your legitimacy as well as the self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, since you will be seen as less competent if you come across as wishy-washy, to keep your job and sustain your follower's faith, you need to act confident, probably more confident than you really feel.

    On a related point, the lovely new book, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla (you really should read it, it is scary and wonderful), describes a study done of two hypothetical weather forecasters, Anna and Betty.  Anna predicted a 90% chance of rain for 4 days in a row.  Betty predicted a 75% chance of rain 4 days in a row. The experimental subjects were told that it ended-up raining three of the four days, so Betty was an objectively perfect forecaster — her probabilistic estimates were exactly on target .  Yet still, nearly half of the subjects said that Anna was a better forecaster, because she was more confident in her predictions (even though Better was more accurate).  Chabris and Simons also report related research on confidence; for example, doctors who consult articles and books before making a decision are seen as less competent than those who do not, which the authors take as another sign that we human-beings tend to reward and believe people who act confident, independently of whether that confidence is justified or not.

    When I take all this into account, the best advice I can give bosses is to develop wisdom, to express confidence in their decisions (to sustain legitimacy and inspire people to action) and yet to keep doubting what they know and are doing in private and in backstage discussions with their trusted advisers.  But my advice makes my own stomach turn a bit as, although it explains why our leaders are smart to bullshit us, and that it might even be for own good at times, it is still an argument for deception or at least exaggeration and less transparency.

    I am thinking about this because, in a few days, I am going to be writing point 6 of my list over at HBR of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe: "I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge,
    but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong."

    In light of the complex forces here — the weird pressures to act confident but to avoid falling prey to evils of overconfidence and the apparent tension between being completely honest and being seen as a competent boss — I would be extremely interested to hear your advice, reactions, and examples of how a good boss navigates through these complex forces. 

  • Enough With The Big Hairy Goals — Also Any Ideas About Assertive AND Effective Bosses?

    I am continuing to dig into the details on my list at HBR of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe.  My post on point 3 appeared today, Having
    ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to
    think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable
    my people to make a little progress every day. 

    Or, as HBR editor Julia Kirby called the new post, "Hey Boss, Enough With The Big Hairy Goals." Nice title, the main idea is that yes, big goals matter, but the best bosses devote most of their time and energy to the small wins, the little steps required to achieve them as that is only path to doing so, breaking them down into bite size pieces stops people from freaking-out and freezing-up, and it enables people to experience more pleasure in the process. 

    My next post at HBR will be on "One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to
    strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not
    assertive enough."  If you have any nominations of bosses who are especially good — or especially bad — at striking this balance, I would love to hear who they are and what they do. 

  • Why Does Having Multiple Siblings Make You A More Effective Boss?

    I just did a post about a new study that shows, among other things, that the best bosses are more self-aware than the worst.  The press release had one tantalizing finding that intrigued me.

    Here it is:

    People with multiple siblings tend to be better
    leaders.         Executives with more siblings were rated highly
    in their ability to manage people and drive result    s.     "No one says it
    better than the Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who's quoted in USA Today
    saying, 'Having seven siblings [gave me]… a unique background in
    understanding what competition is.'    "

    This finding is interesting but the example from the Bank of America guy bugs me because it places so much emphasis on competition — having multiple siblings also had other advantages as it forces you to learn to cooperate and learn that the world does not swirl around you — plus to return to the strongest finding form this study, siblings usually give each other unvarnished feedback, making it tough for any of us to live in a fool's paradise.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts about siblings, as I found this to be a cool finding, but I bet I missed a lot of reasons why having them may help bosses be more effective.

  • My job is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn’t hit you. Your job is to keep me from having to use it.

    This quote comes from a boss named "gschaadt " who wrote a comment in response to my post (with the great picture) on A Shitty View of the Pecking Order.  The complete comment is

    I always
    tell the people who work for me the same thing:

    My job
    is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn't hit you.

    Your job is to keep me from having to use it.

    I think this is  brilliant because there is so much wisdom on so many levels.  First, it is really funny, especially when paired with the picture in the post.  Second, there is deep wisdom there about the relationship between a good boss and good followers — these are mutually supportive relationships, not one way. Even the best boss can't do everything.  This boss —"gschaadt "– is more than willing to go to bat for his people.   But the implication for him or any other boss is, if people keep creating conditions where he or she constantly has to protect them, say, from superiors that they piss-off because they do shoddy work or break too many rules or anything else– a point comes where the difficult employee ends-up undermining the boss's reputation, the reputation of his or her team, and ultimately hurting everyone involved. 

    This especially struck me because, as I said in my last post, I am working on an HBR article on how good bosses serve as a human shield, protecting their people in all sorts of ways, but there comes a point where a follower has messed-up so much that smart bosses don't open the umbrella to protect that one troublesome person because, otherwise, he or she –and the rest of the team — will all get in such deep shit that they will never be able to dig out.  At the same time, walking this line isn't easy because some of the most creative and productive people are also sometimes the most difficult, weird, or annoying. 

    This is yet another example of why the best bosses realize they are always doing a balancing act.  It reminds me of Marc Hershon (co-author of I Hate People and also the guy who named the Blackberry and the Swiffer) and what he said after reading some early chapters of Good Boss, Bad Boss. Marc suggeste another name for the book could be "Top Dog on a Tightrope."



  • Boss Posts Ranked First, Second, and Tenth on HBR’s Most Read List

    As I wrote here a couple weeks back, I started blogging (again) over at Harvard Business Review a couple weeks ago and I kicked things off with a list of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe, and will spend the next few weeks digging into each of the 12 things in a separate post there — as I love lists (and apparently so do a lot of people), when these dozen are done, I will add them to this blog on the side.  So far, I have added a post on how good bosses know that they are at risk of living in fool's paradise and on what every new generation of bosses has to learn –which are linked to the first and second beliefs. Quite a few of these ideas are themes from Good Boss, Bad Boss, but many touch on other topics.  In fact, the point about what every generation needs to learn is inspired more by Hard Facts and a great book called Beyond the Hype than by Good Boss, Bad Boss. I especially had fun writing this paragraph:

    Cries for the reinvention
    of management     and claims that we have to discard
    old models     are made by every generation of gurus. But really, the
    ideas that work aren't that complicated, and most of what is called new
    is really the same old wine in relabeled bottles. If you want to read a
    great book on this point, check out Robert
    Eccles'     and Nitin
    Nohria's     Beyond
    The Hype    . When I read it for the first time, I realized that a
    big reason every generation thinks that its solutions are new is
    because it thinks its challenges are brand new. People can't
    quite bring themselves to believe that managers of the past faced
    remarkably similar problems, found frustration and satisfaction in
    similar sources, and came up with similar solutions. Just as teenagers
    discover sex and can't imagine that the fundamentals were the same for
    their parents, managers are convinced they are encountering forces and
    feelings that haven't been seen before. And management theorists do
    little to disabuse them of that notion

    So far, I have been delighted and quite surprised by how many people are reading this stuff given all the people who blog on HBR.  The 12 Things post was number one on the most read list (the list is on the landing page to the right), and and right now, the fool's paradise post is ranked first, the 12 things post is second, and the every new generation post is ranked 10th.  I appreciate all the readers of Work Matters who will be checking things out and, as I hope you can tell, this remains the blog that is dearest to my heart. Also, as I have 10 more posts to write over at HBR on items 3 to 12 of the list of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe, I would love to hear your suggestions about what I should write on any of those points.

  • Is GM’s Culture Really Changing, Or Is It Just More Hot Air?

    The BP fiasco has made many of us even more cynical about the difference between what executives and their spin doctors say about their management styles and organizational cultures versus what is actually happening.  With that caveat in mind, I was still heartened by a story in the Financial Times a couple days back about the cultural changes that CEO Ed Whitacre is apparently implementing at General Motors (note you can read it for free but have to register).  I was sent this article by Alison Beard, an editor I am working with at Harvard Business Review on article for the September issue, which presents and develops some of the ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss about how the best bosses serve as "human shields" and take steps to protect their people from intrusions, misguided procedures, and idiots and idiocy of any stripe that undermines their performance and dignity.

    I have been extremely critical of GM here as both the public record and my own more haphazard but extended experience with the company convinced me that they had — at least before they went bankrupt — some of the most dysfunctional and inefficient programs, group dynamics, and leadership styles I have ever seen.  I am not surprised they went bankrupt, I am only surprised that it took so long.  You can see my rant about their "No we can't" mindset where I argued that their core competence was justifying why they couldn't do the right things and Mat May's amazing story about the dysfunctional power dynamics at GM and how he confronted GM executives with them.

    At least on the surface, a lot seems to be changing at GM.  The story in the Financial Times listed numerous encouraging things that new CEO Ed Whitacre is doing that strike me as reasonable antidotes to the old GM diseases.  Whether or not these are enough to change what the thousands of other people at GM for the better is another matter.  But there are encouraging signs other than the 1.2 billion dollars that GM made last quarter. A few quotes from the article are intriguing:

    1. The new CEO has little appetite for the PowerPoint presentations that
    have long been a staple of internal GM meetings. He has delegated many
    decisions and honed in on aspects of the old GM’s bureaucratic way of
    doing things that he sees as ripe for the cull. At one meeting in April,
    he questioned the number of websites GM ran – nearly 3,000, two-thirds
    of which were internal and many of which were not updated regularly.
    “Why on earth do we need this many?” a colleague recalls him asking.
    Many have since been closed.

    2. Mr Girsky has chopped the number of regular reports compiled by GM’s
    research group from 94 to four. He may dispense with some of these too,
    after deliberately not e-mailing them to the usual 150 recipients and
    finding that only a handful missed them. If executives give forecasts or
    dates of something they plan to do, Mr Whitacre makes clear they will
    be held accountable. “Everything is a bit more immediate,” says one
    executive.

    3. He regularly lunches in the RenCen’s food court, clearing his tray
    afterwards    .

    Comment: GM top brass have traditionally been treated like royalty — this is not trivial.   The best book on GM culture is very old  — One a Clear Day You Can See General Motors — and is about a guy who got busted a giant drug deal he got involved in to save his new company, John DoLorean –who in some ways was the Elon Musk of is era.

    4. At all levels, Mr Whitacre asks managers to take more risks. When
    subordinates request money for a new initiative, his response is
    typically to ask whether the amount is within their existing budgets. If
    so, they are told that the decision whether to spend it is theirs. “You
    don’t have to wait for that monthly meeting,” says Ed Welburn, GM’s
    design chief, citing a recent decision to change the rear-seat design of
    a new Cadillac model.      (But there is also bad news here.  The article says that "He has also made it clear that the flip side of extra responsibility is
    accountability, with few second chances."     When people are terrified of losing their jobs, they avoid risky behavior… if he is creating… or perhaps revising… a culture of fear, he needs to accept that there will be failures… see Diego's great post on this point).

    5. Mr Welburn, one of the handful of executives still in the same job they
    held two years ago, recalls that prior to the new regime, “half of our
    people were spending all of their time preparing presentations, instead
    of designing great cars”.

    This last quote — which is very consistent with my experience at the old GM — suggests that indeed some heads needed to roll. Perhaps Mr. Whitacre can now introduce some stability and psychological safety– Jack Welch, for example, was known as "Neutron Jack' early in his career because he did so many layoffs and got GE out of so many businesses, but after that phase, he developed a series of programs to engage employees and to make them feel safer, while still improving performance, notably Work-out. 

    So, what do you think?  Is there real hope for GM?   Is this just PR?  If you were advising Mr. Whitacre, what would you tell him?

    I am rooting for him and GM, as returning this company to greatness would help so many people's lives in so many ways, especially in Midwestern United States.

  • 12 Things Good Bosses Believe is Still #1 at HBR: The Attraction of Lists?

    I am pleased, and a bit surprised that my now 10 day old post at Harvard Business Review on 12 Things The Good Bosses Believe is still the most read. It is nice to see that people resonate with these topics from Good Boss, Bad Boss and my other writings, but I think something else is going on. I was talking to one of the editors from HBR last week, one experienced in the ways of the web and blogs, and she commented on something I guess I knew but had never quite thought of before: People love lists — they attract attention on blogs and just about any other place in life. 

    As I thought back to posts I have written that have generated the strongest responses, many turn out to be lists.  Certainly people had a lot to say about my updated list of 17 Things I Believe and some of my most popular posts over the years include Places That Don't Tolerate Assholes and Tips for Surviving Workplace Assholes. More recently, my list of 10 Suspect Assumptions from HR  and my short list of the Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies generated dozens of additional suggestions from readers.  For example, Wally Bock had some great ones to add to the list of dumb practices:

    We
    ignore the importance of supervision. We "promote" people into
    supervisory jobs without evaluating if they have a good shot at
    succeeding. Then we give them little to no training and even less
    support. Then we wonder why they don't succeed.

    We hope for magical leadership instead of developing good systems.
    When we do develop systems we favor the engineered and the technological
    over the human and common-sensical.

    So, what is it with lists?  This is a trick you see everywhere that people want to attract attention, from David Letterman's nightly top 10 list to Bill Maher's New Rules and on and on. Why do we
    love to read them, generate them, and add to others?

  • Some Bosses Live in Fool’s Paradise: The Mum Effect

    As I wrote earlier in the week, my post over at HBR on 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe generated a lot of interest and 75 comments.  I am now going to dig into each of the 12 points in detail over there.  The first one is "I
    have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to
    work for me.      Or as Julia Kirby retitled it, Some Bosses Live in Fool's Paradise.  I talk about a host of psychological and structural factors that lead to such delusion, including the "Mum Effect"

    Bosses are insulated from reality. As Jeff Pfeffer and I
    reported in Hard Facts, extensive research proves that people
    routinely "shoot the messenger." Bearers of bad news, even when they
    aren't responsible for it in any sense, tend to be blamed and to have
    negative feelings directed toward them. The result is the "Mum Effect":
    subordinates with good survival instincts soften bad news to make it
    sound better, or avoid passing it along to their bosses at all.
    Therefore, in a steep hierarchy it is a happier and happier story that
    reaches the top ranks. Our most disturbing example came courtesy of
    physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman after his
    investigation     of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
    He said he'd asked a group of engineers to estimate the probability
    that the shuttle's main engine would fail, and their estimates ranged
    from 1-in-200 to 1-in-300. But when he asked the head of NASA to make
    the failure-rate estimate, the answer he got was 1-in-100,000. Feynman
    pointed to this as an illustration of managerial isolation from reality,
    a problem he believed to be rampant throughout NASA. 

    I should add, however, that not all followers keep bad news away from their bosses to the same degree.  I wonder, what can a boss do to encourage people to deliver bad news?  Yes, not shooting the messenger is a start. But is seems to me that their must be a lot more. 

    P.S. Also, I got into argument over at HBR with commentor who took me to task for using the terms superior and subordinate.  He suggested team member because I was emphasizing power differences so much.  My response was that I am not talking about the world as we might like it to be, I am talking about the world as it is, and every organization has a system of rank and hierarchy, and the resulting power differences have hue effects on what people think, feel, and do.  Perhaps I was too tough, or perhaps I am a cynic, but while I do believe that leaders that de-emphasize spower differences are more effective than leaders who emphasize and expand them at every turn, I also believe that power differences are a fact of organizational life, and denying them sets people up for failure.