Work Matters

Tag: management

  • Check-out J. Keith Murnighan’s “Do Nothing” for Strange and Fact-Based Advice

    Do-nothing-cover3d_400px

    Kellogg professor J. Keith Murnighan, my colleague and charming friend, has just published a lovely  book called "Do Nothing." I first read the manuscript some months back (and thus could provide the praise you see on the cover) and I just spent a couple hours revisiting this gem.

    This crazy book will bombard you with ideas that challenge your assumptions.  His argument for doing nothing, for example, kicks-off the book. I was ready to argue with him because, even though I believe the best management is sometimes no management at all, I thought he was being too extreme. But as I read the pros and cons (Keith makes extreme statements, but his arguments are always balanced and evidenced-based), I became convinced that if more managers took this advice their organizations would more smoothly, their people would perform better (and learn more), and they would enjoy better work-life balance.

    He convinced me that it this is such a useful half-truth (or perhaps three-quarters-truth) that every boss ought to try his litmus test:  Go on vacation, leave your smart phone at home, and don't check or send any messages. Frankly, many bosses I know can't accomplish this for three hours (and I mean even during the hours they are supposed to be asleep), let alone for the three weeks he suggests.  As Keith says, an interesting question is what is a scarier outcome from this experiment for most bosses: Discovering how MUCH or how LITTLE their people actually need them.

    You will argue with and then have a tough time resisting Keith's logic, evidence, and delightful stories when it comes to his other bits of strange advice as well.  I was especially taken with "start at the end," "trust more,"  "ignore performance goals," and "de-emphasize profits."  Keith shows how the usual managerial approach of starting out relationships by mistrusting people and then slowly letting trust develop is not usually as beneficial as starting by assuming that others can be fully trusted until they prove otherwise.  He will also show you how to make more money by thinking about money less!

    As these bits suggest, Keith didn't write this book with the aim of telling most bosses what they wanted to hear.  Rather his goal was to make readers think, to challenge their assumptions, and to show the way to becoming better managers by thinking and acting differently.  In a world where we have thousands of business books published every year that all seem to say the same thing, I found Do Nothing delightful and refreshing — not just because it is quirky and fun, but because Keith also shows managers how to try these crazy ideas in low-risk and sensible ways.

     

  • Hollow Visions, Bullshit, Lies and Leadership Vs. Management

    Fast Company has been reprinting excerpts from the new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  The fifth  and current piece 'Why "Big Picture Only" Bosses Are The Worst' deals with a theme I have raised both here and at HBR before: My argument is that, although the distinction between "management" and  "leadership" is probably accurate, the implicit or explicit status differences attached to these terms are destructive. 

    One of the worst effects is that too many "leaders" fancy themselves as grand strategists and visionaries and who are above the "little people" that are charged with refining and implementing those big and bold ideas.  These exalted captains of industry develop the grand vision for the product, the film, the merger, or whatever — and leave the implementation to others.  This was one of Carly Fiorina's fatal flaws at HP: she loved speeches and grand gestures like the Compaq merger, but didn't have much patience for doing what was required for making things work.  By contrast, this is the strength of Pixar leaders like Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, and Brad Bird.  Yes, they have grand visions about the story and market for every film, but they sweat every detail of every frame and worry constantly about linking their big ideas to every little detail of their films.

    As Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer show in their masterpiece The Progress Principle, the best creative work depends on getting the little things right.  James March, perhaps the most prestigious living organizational theorist, frames all this in an interesting way, arguing that the effectiveness of organizations depends at least as much on the competent performance of ordinary bureaucrats and technicians who do their jobs well (or badly) day in and day out as on the bold moves and grand rhetoric of people at the top of the pecking order.  To paraphrase March, organizations need both poets and plumbers, and the plumbing is always crucial to organizational performance.  (See this long interview for a nice summary of March's views).

    To be clear, I am not rejecting the value of leadership, grand visions, and superstars.  But just as our country and the rest of the world is suffering from the huge gaps between the haves and have nots, too many organizations are doing damage by giving excessive credit, stature, and dollars to people with the big ideas and giving insufficient kudos, prestige, and pay to people who put their heads down and make sure that all the little things get done right.

    Our exaggerated faith in heroes and the instant cures they so often promise has done a lot of damage to our society too — not just to organizations.  In this vein, I wrote a piece in BusinessWeek a few years back after re-reading The Peter Principle.  I argued that the emphasis on dramatic and bold moves and superstars, and our loss of respect for the crucial role of ordinary competence, was likely an underlying cause of the 2008-2009 financial meltdown:

    If Dr. Peter were alive today, he'd find that a new lust for superhuman accomplishments has helped create an almost unprecedented level of incompetence. The message has been this: Perform extraordinary feats, or consider yourself a loser.

    We are now struggling to stay afloat in a river of snake oil created by this way of thinking. Many of us didn't want to see the lies, exaggerations, and arrogance that pumped up our portfolios. Instead we showered huge rewards on the false financial heroes who fed our delusions. This is the Bernie Madoff story, too. People may have suspected that something wasn't quite right about the huge returns on their investments with Madoff. But few wanted to look closely enough to see the Ponzi scheme.

    I am not saying that we don't need heroes and visionaries.  Rather, we need leaders who help us link big ideas to the little day to day accomplishments that turn dreams into realities.   To paraphrase my friend Peter Sims, author of Little Bets, we need leaders who can weave together the "birds eye view," the big picture, with "the worm's eye view," the nuances and tiny little actions required to make bold ideas come to life.

  • 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.  

     

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

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

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

    OK, here is the uncut version:

    Title:

    The Virtues of Evidence-Based Management

    Reading lines:

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

    Text:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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! 

  • Jeff Pfeffer on “Perverse Norms” About Good Management

    I was reading through an old but still spot-on book by my friend and co-author Jeff Pfeffer,  The Human Equation, which provides an evidence-based case about why companies that put people first enjoy superior financial performance over the long-run.   Jeff makes an argument that is a variation of something one of my college friends used to say, "eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong."  But he adds prestige and status as an added twist in a section he labels "Perverse Norms about What Constitutes Good Management," and how such norms often emerge even though they conflict with the evidence.   He uses the example of layoffs — which are no doubt sometimes necessary.  But executives often seem to act in ways that clash with evidence showing that companies that do layoffs last and least tend to perform best over time:

    " If the world believes that laying-off employees by the carload is good management and confers status on those that do it with the most vigor, it will be difficult for executives to resist the temptation to conform to the normative definition of "good management" and thereby achieve approval."

    As usual, Jeff is smart and blunt.