Work Matters

Tag: leadership

  • Luis Urzua and the Trapped Miners: A Good Boss, Performance, and Humanity

    I first wrote this post on September 6th.  I am highlighting it today to celebrate the rescue and to show some of the nuances of Luis Urzua's impressive leadership.

    When people ask me for one sentence summary of a great boss, I answer "He or she promotes both performance and humanity, and strikes a healthy balance between the two when trade-offs are necessary."   In Good Boss, Bad Boss, I quote a cool 2008 American Psychologist article by Mark Van Vugt, Robert Hogan, and Robert Kaiser who, after examining descriptions of admired and effective leaders in settings ranging from ancient human tribes to modern corporations and sports teams, conclude the best leaders are both "competent and benevolent."

    In light of this perspective, I am intrigued with reports (see here and here, for example) about 54 year-old foreman Luis Urzua and the impressive steps he is taking to oversee, organize, protect, and tend to the emotional needs of the 33 men trapped in the mine in Chile — a group that faces months trapped underground.  Urzua kept the men alive by immediately rationing food (two spoonfuls of tuna and a glass of milk every 48 hours for each man), which enabled them to survive and to avoid dysfunctional conflict until food started arriving through a small hole drilled be rescuers — a crucial move because none the miners had run out of food 48 hours before despite the rationing.  Uruza has organized the underground space (he is a skilled topographer) into a work area, sleeping facility, and so on, and is keeping the men on 12 hour shifts by using the headlights of trucks in the mine to simulate daylight.  He not only needs to keep the group healthy and focused to survive the ordeal, he  needs to stay in control because, under some rescue scenarios, the men will need to remove many tons of rocks to help with their own rescue operations.

    I was also taken with reports about the "leadership team" that has emerged.  The New York Times tells us that the oldest miner, 62 year-old Mario Gomez has "become the spiritual guide to his men, government officials said. He has organized a small subterranean chapel and is serving as unofficial aide to the psychologists working on the surface to cope with the miners' sadness and fear."  In addition, another miner, "Yonny Barrios, 50, the group's impromptu medical monitor. He is drawing on a six-month nursing course he took about 15 years ago to administer medicines and wellness tests that health officials are sending down through the 4-inch borehole and then analyzing in a laboratory on the surface."

    This case is so striking to me because Urzua and his team have taken such impressive action to tend to both the performance and human needs of the group — the blend of their competence and compassion is striking.  Moreover, if I go through the mindset of the best bosses discussed in the opening chapter of Good Boss, Bad Boss, the key elements are all there:

    1. The men are being pushed by their leaders (especially Urzua) hard enough to maintain their discipline and order, but not so hard as to be overwhelmed (consistent with the notion that the best bosses strive to be perfectly assertive).

    2. Uruza is showing extreme grit; in particular, a hallmark of gritty leaders is they treat life as marathon rather than a sprint,

    3.  In related fashion, Uruza and his team — and their advisers above — are treating this ordeal as a small wins situation, where the final goal of escape (and not getting overwhelmed by this big hairy goal) depends on one tiny victory after another.

    4. Uruza is clearly not suffering from detachment or power poisoning, as he is hyper-aware of how the large and small things he does affect the miners' moods, actions, and ability to survive; and he is not taking more goodies for himself than others.

    5. There is no doubt that he "has his people's backs," that he will do whatever is possible to protect them.  One way that good leaders protect their people is by limiting outside intrusion, and you could see this mindset when he urged experts to keep the medical conference call short because "We have lots of work to do."

    This is clearly an extreme situation, and you could argue that parts of it don't transfer well to the mundane organizational settings where most us work.  But I do think that extreme situations sometimes bring into focus what human groups need to thrive in terms of both performance and well-being, and what the best leaders do to help make that happen.  Indeed, I gleaned the five elements of the mindset of great bosses — being just assertive enough, grit, small wins, avoiding power poisoning (and being aware that followers are watching the boss very closely), having people's backs largely from research and cases in ordinary and mundane settings.

    P.S. For a take on how the miners can best survive this ordeal, check out this New York Times piece by psychiatrist Nick Kanas. 

     

  • Managing Leadership: An Unappreciated Gem

    Jim Stroup's Managing Leadership took me by surprise.  I got in the mail last week and was intending to glance at it for a few minutes, but I am now hooked.  I also felt compelled to write an Amazon review because this is a book that needs more attention.  Too many leadership books are either unrealistic, full of nonsense, or
    downright boring or useless. Jim Stroup has somehow managed to
    transcend these hazards to provide us with one of rare compelling,
    inspiring, and relentlessly useful book on the topic. I was especially
    struck with his contrasts and deep exploration of leadership from the
    rear, leadership from the rear, and leadership from within. This book has been around since 2004 and and is an
    unappreciated gem. I wish I had read it earlier, especially when I was writing Good Boss, Bad Boss,but I am glad that I did
    now. I just added it to my list of favorite boss books.

  • HBR Article on The Boss as a Human Shield: 100 Free Downloads

    Sutton_penultimate

    As I wrote yesterday, I just had an HBR article on "The Boss as Human Shield" appear, which presents some of the main points from Chapter 6 of Good Boss, Bad Boss.   HBR online posts the text of the article for free for a few weeks, so you can go here and read it now if you want.  But they also give authors 100 free PDF's.  If you would like one, please go here to get it.   Please just take one so that others can have a copy.  And if you try to get a copy and they are gone, please email me so I can let people know.

    P.S. The above picture is the opening graphic for the article; it was inspired by an executive I quote in the article who talked about how, when people mistakes, sometimes her job is to let them "hide behind my skirt."

  • Management, Leadership, and Mark Hurd: Why Top Teams are More Important than Individual CEOs

    My last posts here and at Harvard Business Review were about the unintended dangers of the distinction between leadership and management.  I argued that leadership is too often over-glorified and management is too often under-appreciated, which results in management being treated as a second class activity.  The discussion these posts provoked, a total of about 30 comments in total, yielded great examples and details.  I especially liked Rick's statement that "there is
    an ebb and flow in what is required, the mix of leadership (inspiration)
    and management (perspiration) which best matches the in-the-moment need
    of the entity which is being managed and led." Good stuff. This very consistent with the notion that the best bosses are in tune with others, and skilled at making the right adjustments in response. 

    I was thinking about all this when I read a fascinating editorial by Joe Nocera in The New York Times about the Mark Hurd story,  where he makes the argument that perhaps HP wanted to get rid of Hurd for other reasons, and used sex/misuse of funds scandal as an excuse. The editorial contained a lot of quotes from ex-HP executive Chuck House (an amazing guy, once given an award by David Packard for "Exceptional Defiance and Contempt Beyond the Usual Call of Engineering").   It ended with this assertion:

    What H.P. needs in its next leader, Mr. House told me, is “someone with
    Carly’s strategic sense, Mark’s operational skills, and Lew’s emotional
    intelligence.” (Lewis E. Platt preceded Ms. Fiorina as C.E.O.)

    Nocera described this as a tall order but not an impossible one.  My first reaction was, well, it is impossible, no one boss can do that.  My second reaction OH it is possible — so long as we make some different assumptions.  In Chuck's quote, and in some of the ways I was talking about connecting management to leadership, there was an implicit and I think inaccurate assumption that there are single magical leaders who can do everything.  This is called the romance of leadership, something researchers have studied a lot and I write about in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The best bosses –and the best companies, including the best boards — don't fall prey to this cognitive error and look for an all powerful and flawless CEO who can do everything. Rather they look for a boss who can build and properly lead a team with the right range and balance of skills.  Note that Carly's inability to delegate operations to others and try to do too much of it herself is one reason she lost her job.  And if Nocera is right, HP's emerging troubles with innovation and morale are things that were not being handled well enough by his team.

    The upshot of all this is that the best bosses aren't all powerful and all knowing, but by understanding their own limits and developing the wisdom to rely on others who can compensate for them, they can have a team that applies the right blend of management and leadership skills to achieve greatness.  This is one of the reasons that I emphasize wisdom so much in Good Boss, Bad Boss, which includes the ability to recognize one's weaknesses and blind spots and find ways to dampen or reverse the negative effects.  You can see this quality in some of the greatest companies of our time, at Pixar under Ed Catmull, P&G under AG Lafley, and it appears, at Apple with the blend of Steve Jobs visionary brilliance and Tim Cook's operational excellence.  Indeed, I think Job's deserves more credit than he gets for building a team that compensates for his weaknesses.

    In the case of HP, I don't think it is possible to find the one superwoman or superman that Nocera and Chuck House hope might exist.  But I do believe it is possible to find a CEO with skill and wisdom to build a team with Carly's strategic ability, Hurd's operational skill, and Lew's EQ.  As a final note, when you take this perspective on leadership as team sport — which is especially crucial in a big company — you can see why academics have become increasingly convinced that the dynamics of top teams have such strong effects on performance, probably stronger than the characteristics and actions of the CEO alone.

  • Why Leadership Can Be a Dangerous Idea

    Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a longstanding ambivalence about the distinction between leadership and management  I blogged about it today over at HBR.org, under the title ""True leaders are also managers." Here is a taste and then I will talk about what motivated me to think more about why this difference is both valid and dangerous:

    The brilliant and charming Warren Bennis has likely done more to popularize this distinction than anyone else. He wrote in Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader that
    "There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and
    both are important. To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to
    have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is
    influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The
    distinction is crucial." And in one of his most famous lines, he added,
    "Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing."

    Although this distinction is more or less correct, and is useful to a degree (see this recent interview with Randy Komisar for
    a great discussion of the distinction), it has unintended negative
    effects on how some leaders view and do their work. Some leaders now see
    their job as just coming up with big and vague ideas, and they treat
    implementing them, or even engaging in conversation and planning about
    the details of them, as mere "management" work.     Worse still, this distinction seems to be used as a reason for
    leaders to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they
    lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they
    serve. I remember hearing of a cell phone company CEO, for example, who
    never visited the stores where his phones were sold — because that was a
    management task that was beneath him — and kept pushing strategies that
    reflected a complete misunderstanding of customer experiences. (Perhaps
    he hadn't heard of how often Steve Jobs drops in at Apple stores.)

    That story is typical. "Big picture only" leaders often make
    decisions without considering the constraints that affect the cost and
    time required to implement them, and even when evidence begins mounting
    that it is impossible or unwise to implement their grand ideas, they
    often choose to push forward anyway .

    You can read the rest at HBR.org.  Here, I want to dig into some of my motivations for revisiting this topic.

    The first came a couple months back when I did a workshop for a small group of Local CEOs on Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The organizers of the workshop did advance interviews with the CEOs, and this difference came-up a lot in these conversations.  One thrust was that they were interested in how to spot managers with leadership skills and how to help good managers develop leadership skills.   My reaction, as you might expect from the above comments was that, yes, leadership skills are different, but doing and understanding management is such a crucial part of being a good leader, that they really needed to be careful not to over-glorify leadership or to treat management aS a less important skill.  A couple of the CEO's of the biggest firms really latched onto this point, lamenting that young managers often seemed to want to get straight to being leaders without learning how to manage well first, and it resulted in naive and misguided decisions — and, often, to be seen as bullshitters, or as one put it, "all hat and no cattle." 

    The second is sort of a working hypotheses that I have had at Stanford for a few years now about the difference between "Good MBAs" and "Bad MBAs."  Although my primary appointment (and tenure) at Stanford is in the engineering school,we teach a lot of MBA's at the Stanford d.school, but because we are a unit of the Stanford Engineering School (see this rant on engineering and design thinking), individual faculty have pretty much complete authority over which students get into d.school classes and which do not.  And thus far, we get a lot more applicants than we can serve from throughout Stanford. 

    Over the years, I have noticed that there is remarkable variance among MBAs, or more precisely, most seem to fall into one of two groups.  There are the "good MBAs," who have wonderful leadership qualities, great presence and great big ideas, and jump in enthusiastically when it comes to less exciting and harder chores like planning and implementing the details of user research and prototyping.  Then, there are the bad MBAs, the one's who love big ideas and always want to present the group's ideas, but avoid the hard work of planning, organizing, and implementing things — and seem especially adept at avoiding anything that entails shit work.

      I now talk pretty openly about this with MBAs, especially if they are lobbying to get into class — and a few times, after describing this difference to an MBA who was arguing to get in a class, and asking him or her to self-select, they have mysteriously disappeared.  I think this is very similar to the "all hat and no cattle problem," and bad MBAs may become those bad leaders that the group of CEOs was talking about.  (As I am an engineering professor, I don't want to let my students off too easily — yes, fewer of them are slackers and and bullshitters, but there are a larger percentage who lack interpersonal and leadership skills, but despite the stereotypes, there are plenty of engineering students who have great skills there as well.)

    The third motivation was a comment that a Silicon Valley insider made to me about Mark Hurd versus Carly Fiorina — and this was before Hurd was fired and there was any hint it was coming.  She commented that, personal style issues aside, if you put the two together, you had a complete leader because Carly was good at the big picture stuff and Hurd was good at the management stuff, that in essence, Carly was a leader without being a manager and that Hurd was a manager without being a leader.  Whether this is completely true or not (no doubt others have different opinions) it reminded me that looking for one boss who can do it all might be a fool's errand; rather, what you are looking for is a boss who can assemble a LEADERSHIP TEAM that can do leadership and management.    

    The upshot, in my view, is that asking if leadership or management is more important is like asking "what is more important, your heart or your brain?"  Both are equally essential and if there isn't a connection between the two, you are in big trouble! 

  • Leading a Good Fight: Stories and Rules

    If you read Work Matters, or my books or articles, you know that I believe that one of hallmarks of constructive team dynamics are healthy and respectful arguments over ideas.  And I believe it is a hallmark of skilled bosses, especially when it comes to sparking creativity.  For example, I have written about the importance of having strong opinions that are weakly held and fast fights at the  d.school. I continue to dig into this issue in Good Boss, Bad Boss, which has a section in the chapter on what wise leaders do called "Fight Right."  It discusses Karl Weick's lovely advice to "fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong," and offers ten guidelines for "How to Lead a Good Fight."

    As a preview, and as point 7 on the list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe that I am rolling out at HBR, I have new post at HBR called "It's Up to You to Start a Good Fight," which includes some guidelines for leading a good fight.  It also includes this section about one of the heroes of the computer revolution, Bob Taylor:

    I suspect that a lot more of you have heard of Brad Bird than Bob Taylor —
    but Taylor probably has had a bigger influence on your life. The
    researchers he funded and guided in the 1960s developed, among other
    things, ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet. In Dealers of Lightning,
    author Michael Hiltzik depicts how Taylor conducted meetings among the
    super-smart people whose research his group at the U.S. Defense
    Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded:

    "The daily discussions unfolded in a pattern that remained
    peculiar to Taylor's management style throughout his career. Each
    participant got an hour or so to describe his work. Then he would be
    thrown to the mercy of the assembled court like a flank steak to pack of
    ravenous wolves. "I got them to argue with each other," Taylor recalled
    with unashamed glee….. "These were people who cared about their
    work…. If there were technical weak spots, they would almost always
    surface under these conditions. It was very, very healthy."

    Taylor continued the same pattern later as assistant lab manager at
    Xerox PARC, where during a rather magical and now mythical period of the
    computer revolution, researchers developed many of the technologies we
    use everyday including WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word
    processing, hypertext, laser printing, Ethernet and TCP/IP, to name just
    a few. At PARC, Taylor organized a weekly meeting where a different
    speaker each week (called "the dealer") would propose an idea and try to
    defend against questions and criticisms raised by some of the most
    critical, motivated, and brilliant engineers and researchers on the
    planet at the time. As Hiltzik explained:

    "[I]t was not to be personal. Impugning a man's thinking was
    acceptable, but never his character. Taylor strived to create a
    democracy where everyone's ideas were impartially subject to the group's
    learned demolition, regardless of the proponent's credentials or rank."

    I love that phrase, " Impugning a man's thinking was
    acceptable, but never his character."  I also believe that one of the most important things we can do when teaching people to do creative work is to teach them to participate and lead good fights.  

    I wonder, have you had — or do you know about — other bosses who are especially skilled at leading a good fight?  What else do they — or you — do to make this happen? 

  • Why BP’s New CEO Is Lucky — and the BP Board Is Shrewd

    Earlier in the week, I was interviewed by Michael Krasny at KQED (our local public radio station) about BP's new CEO Robert Dudley and the more general question of CEO accountability.  You can listen to the interview here if you like.  To get ready for the interview, I took a bit of time to read up on the infamous outgoing CEO Tony Hayward — who even as he was departing, continued to stick his foot deep down his throat.  As The New York Times reports, Hayward admitted that it was time for new leadership at BP, but then emphasized how hard he had worked to improve safety standards at BP, but “sometimes you step off the pavement and get hit by a bus.”  I was surprised that this comment did not get more play, as one of the worst things that a leader can do is to convey that they have no control and no responsibility when things go wrong.   As is well-documented, this is just one of many misguided comments by Mr. Hayward, his most infamous being his comment that he wanted his life back.

    As I was reading such reports, and thinking about research on the romance of leadership, executive succession, and the illusion and reality of CEO influence, I realized three things.

    The first, as my headline says, is that the new CEO Bob Dudley is mighty lucky to follow someone like Mr. Hayward.  Indeed, because of the power of psychological contrast, the more that Mr. Hayward comes across as an insensitive buffoon, the better a scapegoat that Mr. Hayward becomes — and the better that Mr. Dudley looks in contrast.  If I were Bob Dudley, I would be delighted with Mr. Hayward's final gift — the comment about the bus — as it makes it appear that BP's leadership has been repaired by his promotion to the position. The fact that Dudley is from the U.S. (Louisiana in fact), has been focused on managing the fiasco and thus spent a lot of time in the Gulf, and has made no major gaffs so far, all look even better when contrasted with Mr. Hayward's English accent (because confidence in the U.S. market is so important), the relatively little time that he his spent in Gulf and of course his many gaffs.( As an example, look this  attack on Hayward by Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter)

    There is an interesting lesson here, a broader one, for every boss who is offered a new job.  If you are lucky, or perhaps strategic, following damaged goods like Mr. Hayward will make things a lot easier (at least at first) than if you follow a widely admired boss.  This is also a pattern that I commented on in The No Asshole Rule — where quite a few bosses explained to me that it was great to take a job where the last boss was a certified asshole because, in comparison, they seemed to civilized. 

    The second thing I realized was that, although calls for Hayward's resignation have been ringing for months, the BP board was very shrewd to leave Mr. Hayward in the position and to let him take all the slings and arrows on behalf of the company and his colleagues.  He was beat-up by Obama, the U.S. Congress, and many many others until the leak was (apparently) stopped.  By doing so, Mr. Hayward served as an excellent scapegoat.  If Mr. Dudley had stepped in before the leak was stopped, he would have taken heat that would have undermined his honeymoon period and, by association, BP's credibility.   But since Dudley was in charge in Gulf operations, the "symbolic repair" appears credible even if it is left unsaid:  "It was Hayward's fault, so he is gone, and the guy who fixed it is now in charge."  So I have to give the board credit for playing a lousy hand pretty well. (I would also note that if you look at the level of responsibility that the board is still giving Mr. Hayward, it appears they have faith in his technical skill, if not necessarily his ability to deal with press and public — which further suggests that this is necessary scapegoating rather than a complete loss of confidence in his abilities).

    The third thing I realized is that all these theatrics are an interesting sideshow that may distract BP insiders and outsiders from fixing the real problems.  As is well-documented, especially when a company is large, old, and complex, leaders almost always get far more credit and blame than they deserve.  As such, although it appears that BP's board has been wise in terms of handling CEO succession, the real question is if BP can ever change from what is a culture that has had ethical and safety problems for a long time — apparently worse than other major oil companies.   That will be the real test of Bob Dudley's leadership and the board's skill.

    Although should add, as I emphasize in Good Boss, Bad Boss, that if a leader can create the illusion that he or she is charge and has the power to make positive organizational changes, the confidence and effort that it inspires can help bring about such changes. A great example is George Washington — check-out David McCullough's 1776.  In other words, sometimes such theatrics are pure bullshit (like BP's "Beyond Petroleum" campaign), but if a leader is persistent and authentic, a symbolic change can be a powerful step toward real change.  There are lot more oil wells in our oceans, so for everyone's sake, I hope that the symbolic change at BP leads to real changes.

    As a final comment, although I have vented plenty of anger at BP, at the same time, I have some sympathy for BP's board, Mr. Dudley, and most people who work for BP, as they are in a very difficult spot because of both the the stigma and the difficulty of what they are trying to accomplish.  I would not want to be in their position right now, and finding a way out of this mess isn't going to be easy.

    P.S.  Tom Davenport — a brilliant knowledge management  guy — just put a great post over at HBR called "If Only BP Knew Now What BP Knew Then."  Tom makes a compelling case that BP's narrow focus on speed and profit helped destroy an emerging safety culture.  I was especially intrigued by this link to a Financial Times post on BP's narrow focus, which ends by reporting BP's motto ion recent years "every dollar counts, every seat counts."  A seat is an employee at BP.  Surely, that is true in every company, but if you are just hyper-focused on every penny, it turns attention away from other things, like safety.

  • Strategy Is For Amateurs, Logistics Are For Professionals

    I first heard this saying a few years back from Joe McCannon of the Institute for Health Improvement, who was campaign manager for an amazing effort by this non-profit to reduce the number of preventable deaths in U.S. Hospitals. It was called the 100,000 Lives Campaign, which according to most experts who have looked at the data, probably did reduce 100,000 preventable deaths as a result of implementing simple evidence-based practices like hand-washing and keeping the bed elevated about 45 degrees for patients on respirators.  Huggy Rao and I have written about the campaign in the McKinsey Quarterly if you want to read more.

    I was quite taken with Joe's use of that expression and emphasis on logistics and the campaign he led did have a grand strategy and a big hairy goal.  But big hairy goals don't mean much without thousands of small wins.   My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I have argued for years that implementation, not strategy, is what usually separates winners from losers in most industries, and generally explains the difference between success and failure in most organizational change efforts, sales campaigns and so on.  I also believe (and wrote here) that one of the dangers of talking about leadership versus management is that the implication is that leadership is this important high status activity and management is the shit work done by the little people.  My view (and there is plenty of evidence to support it) is that effective management — the work done by the collection of bosses and their followers in an organization, if you will — is probably most crucial to success. After all, they are the people who turn dreams into reality.

    P.S.  There is also another possibility.  It could be that strategy is very important to the success of firms, but it does not explain differences among firms in an industry because following the right strategy is required to stay alive and that executing strategy explains the differences in performance among living firms.  In other words, all the firms that followed the wrong strategy are dead — which I think is a reasonable and quite plausible explanation and is supported by some research in a subfield of organizational studies called population ecology.

  • 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. 

  • BP Improves Their Rhetoric

    I wrote a post last week taking BP to task for the heartless CYA language in the giant ads they were taking out in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.  I lamented that there wasn't even a hint of human compassion, that they were taking responsibility in the most mealy mouth way possible, and that the dull march through the facts conveyed that will they were taking steps to stop the leak and clean-up the mess, their cold corporate heart wasn't in it.  I made a comment that it seemed to be written by lawyers, not caring people. On second thought, that is unfair to lawyers as many have far for common-sense and humanity than the narrowly focused and emotionally tone deaf people who wrote those ads.

    I was taken to task on this blog and at Psychology Today where I reposted my BP comments for,among other things, being naive to expect anything else.  One reader chastised me here:

    "Of course
    BP's language is legalistic, with every public word chosen carefully.
    There will be lawsuits, and lawyers will scrutinize their every
    utterance over the last century for ammo. Would you really expect any
    public admission of culpability from them as the vultures are gathering?"

    Comments like above one are, in my view, correct in that we would expect them to be careful about what they say because of all the lawsuits.  But to me — and this is a difference between a good lawyer and a bad one, by the way –a  good lawyer and the leaders they advise balance litigation concerns with other business issues, such as the hits in the press and stock market the firm is taking and (to be crass) what will enable the current management survive the firestorm of blame.  As I said in my last post, there are plenty of examples of leaders and firms that have effectively struck this balance and I reject the argument that purely legalistic language or even the absolute best language to protect the company during future litigation is always the business decision.  Indeed, I believe that BP's numerous indications of arrogance and coldness have attracted and motivated more vultures and the legalistic language, finger-pointing, and dull language have made things worse. 

    While I will refrain from commenting on the reality of what they are doing (it is hard to know, and frankly, I remain unimpressed based on the disputed and twisted facts I do encounter about BP).  But I do give them credit for finally getting the compassion thing right and other elements required to come across as actual caring human beings in their big ad today in The New York Times. 

    The new headline is "We Will Make This Right"   Compare it to the old headline in the ad last week, which sounded like a dull corporate memo from a cold-hearted creep: "Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Response" — it did not even say whose response.  In the new ad, while I bet their more narrow-minded lawyers are squirming at the language, there are statements that suggest compassion, accepting responsibility for fixing things in less mealy-mouthed language, and a commitment to pay for it (well, they may sue others to get the others, but saying that taxpayers won't pay for the clean-up is smart if it is true).  Examples include "Stopping the leak will be a major step, but only start.  We know our responsibility goes much further."   And although they stop short of quite admitting blame, we finally see some compassion here;  "The spill and hardship endured by Gulf families and businesses should never have happened."   And they end well:  "You expect us to make this right. We will." 

    Note that I am being very careful to withhold judgment about the reality here, and the fact that it has taken BP many weeks to use language that suggests a hint of humanity suggests to me that this is not their first instinct.  But better late than never, at least from a PR standpoint.

    Also, there is another message beyond the humanity that comes through in this ad that is quite consistent with research on effective leadership when the shit hits the fan: They are talking about things they have done and will do to take control of the situation — one of the topics I discuss in chapter 2 of Good Boss, Bad Boss, which is on how the best bosses persuade others they are in charge. If you are in a leadership position, a big part of your job is convincing people that you are wrestling to get control over even difficult events and are making progress — that there is a link between what you and your people are doing and good things that are happening and that will happen.  BP started-out pointing so many fingers at others that they didn't seem to quite grasp this point, but seem to be slowly getting it as well. Of course, if they never stop the leak, their credibility will evaporate, but it does seem like their sustained period of failure to do so may have finally taught them to express some compassion and wisdom — or to be more cynical, perhaps they are so desperate that they are pretending to be caring and compassionate as a last resort!

    There is a lesson here for every leader who ever gets into a PR mess.  If your lawyers are only thinking of future litigation and don't grasp its importance relative to other business risks, beware of their advice. Specialists of any stripe can be dangerous when they see events only from the perspective of their narrow expertise, be they engineers, HR people, PR people, or lawyers.  But I believe lawyers are especially prone to causing such problems because they are often especially adept at arguing their point of view and trashing others.  This can be a great quality, but only when used with proper precautions and in the context of the larger business decision.

    If you are convinced by your persuasive lawyers to use legalistic and vague language, and talk like heartless people who don't care about anyone but yourselves and who are bent on pointing fingers at everyone else, it may help with the litigation down the road.  But in the intervening years, you may be fired, your organization may decline or die, and in fact, by the time those lawsuits are contested, you or your company may have ran out of money to pay your lawyers — and pay the claims against your company.   Again, a great lawyer is crucial under such conditions, but the great ones see beyond their narrow area of expertise.