Mike Lehr's Blog

Linda Hill and Kent Lineback write in their April 5, 2011 HBR Blog Network post, “Why Does Criticism Seem More Effective than Praise?”:

A lot of evidence suggests that positive reinforcement — identifying and building on strengths — will produce better results than a relentless focus on faults.

However, as post’s title suggests, this isn’t always apparent. They do briefly talk about focus on the long term. Related to this perspective, the challenge I find in strategically using compliments is primarily our expectations; we expect a compliment to work immediately. Criticisms and other negative reinforcements do much better here but over the long run they don’t do much to develop a strong working relationship.

Thus, in order to make complimenting work, here are six expectations I find very important to effect change:

1. Focus on the long-term
2. Apply regularly
3. Appreciate the importance of personalizing compliments
4. Be patient
5. Reward positive change with additional complimenting
6. Employ other relationship building techniques

Yes, this means complimenting is a long-term proposition, but we can integrate compliments into our daily work routines. The difficult part is disciplining us to follow through and adhere to a complimentary regimen.

Once we achieve this part, we can take complimenting to a more strategic level in which we consciously plan the employment of compliments. This comes about by knowing what we want to:

• Achieve with every person we manage
• Say to the person if we have a moment to interact

Thus, in our minds we visualize the interactions we might have with our people and determine how to position the right compliments to effect the desired change. The process is no different than that used in thinking about the numbers we reviewed, the plans we will right or the resources we need to maximize.

Many companies are finalizing their 2012 strategies by planning their roll out to their employees. To this effort, Nilofer Merchant’s March 22, 2011 post on the HBR Blog Network, “Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time,” is very apropos and relates to my “Best Decision as Myth” post: we often spend more time trying to make the best decision than we do trying to ensure we can implement it. A vital aspect of that implementation is a healthy company culture.

Taking Merchant’s themes further, an important part of a healthy company culture is the relationship between management and employees. That is more than just having a great vision, definable roles and enforcing accountability. It’s about doing the sublime relational techniques that mean so much even though they don’t seem to serve a direct business purpose. For instance, it’s important for managers to spell their people’s names correctly. Yes, unfortunately, this isn’t an automatic.

I’ve called this placebo management. If there is scientific evidence supporting the positive effect of placebos in medicine, they can work in business too. While managers are taught around the world in business schools about the more concrete aspects of visions, goals, compensation, information and credentials in developing relationships, they rarely learn the more intuitive aspects of relationships. Consequently, they never learn how to change the message without changing anything about it. Conversely, they don’t learn that even the best message can be ruined by a lousy messenger.

The holiday season is approaching and many companies and teams get together in celebration and camaraderie. It’s often a time to develop business relationships on a more human level. Good interpersonal relationships we develop with employees ensure a company culture that can implement strategy. Let’s make every month the holiday season in this regard.

Intrinsic rewards are important aspects of creating a cooperative work culture. However, such rewards are difficult to understand and teach. Moreover, many, many people just don’t believe they are that powerful. Yochai Benkler in his article “The Unselfish Gene” of the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review endorses the importance of intrinsic rewards in cooperative cultures.

Essentially, as we saw in the second post of this series, most people enjoy being cooperative, enjoy helping others; but, this enjoyment will dissipate if we ignore, discount or unreinforce it. Using effective, intrinsic, morale building techniques and compliments while working to minimize selfish extrinsic motivations such as money will ensure this won’t happen.

Since intrinsic rewards by nature are less tangible, it’s often difficult for managers and leaders to understand and appreciate the internal motivations of others, especially if they by nature don’t receive tremendous enjoyment from helping others. Nevertheless, here are a few tips for encouraging a cooperative workforce:

• Thank employees when they help others (letting them know it’s important to you)
• Demonstrate how they have helped you or others (it’s not always apparent to them)
• Recognize that they naturally enjoy helping others (reinforcing their internal motivation for helping others)
• Show how their job helps others to do theirs when performed well (creating a personal connection between their job and others)
• Hire and promote people who enjoy helping others (the desire to help others is a function of personality)
• Believe that people enjoy helping people (we cannot promote cooperation if we don’t believe it’s a motivation)

These tips will be uncomfortable at first but regularly applied they will produce positive effects over the long run. Thus, they require relentlessness, discipline and almost a fanatical belief in the power of cooperation.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy

One of the paradoxes of best practices is that they promote unimaginativeness because if everyone followed best practices the differentiation among competing firms would drastically narrow.

In its raw form, BP is copying. Companies do not transform markets or shoot ahead of the competition by copying. If they do, they need to enhance the original. A better practice than the best practice will achieve this especially if every other company in that space is following the best practice. As a result, BP’s encourage “inside the box thinking” resulting in a workforce based upon complying with the BP rather than thinking about making the best better.

This occurs because to find a “best practice” people only need to dredge the internet or current research material. If they don’t want to do this, they only need to find an unimaginative expert who has already done this for them. However, bettering a best practice requires much thought and inspiration. That’s why in many law firms there are research assistants assigned with this task so attorneys have more time to think about the uniqueness of their cases.

Of course, many unimaginative people offer this defense: “Let’s not reinvent the wheel.” What they don’t realize is that since 1790 the United States Patent Office has approved over 30,000 patents for wheels. This number doesn’t include many specialty wheels in toys and machines such as the wheels on toy cars or the pulleys in machines like transmissions. It also doesn’t include the Ferris Wheel.

BP’s encourage employees to do exactly that: not reinvent the wheel. They don’t encourage them to think about improvements to make the wheel better or for other purposes. BP’s say, “Someone else has already solved the problem.” Thus, the best practice of inside-the-box thinking is to adopt a best practice.

Additional recommended reading: the post “The Downside of Best Practices” by Mike Wyatt

In the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic, I ran across Richard Florida’s article, “Where the Skills Are” and found myself rethinking the idea of a diverse workforce. The idea has two paradoxical forces playing on it:

1. Diversity improves a company’s adaptability, creativity and innovation
2. Employers tend to hire employees who are like them

For the moment, let’s imagine that employers can hire a diverse workforce. The next challenge is managing it. It’s difficult because personality conflicts are side-effects of diversity. Since everyone’s a people person until people are the problem, managers are more apt to “get rid of the problem” rather than incorporate it. Consequently, employers will not only tend to hire those “who fit in” but also dispose of those “who don’t.” This moves them ever faster toward a homogenous workforce lacking adaptability and innovation.

Even though Richard’s article focused on talented individuals adept at connecting with diverse people, there are applications from a managerial perspective. It will take a very talented person to manage diversity. That’s because personality conflicts manifest themselves in many ways as differences in approaches, organization, ideas, behaviors and others. A manager will need to be able to see through this, account for his own biases, creatively solve it, and have the discipline to pursue the solution. We do not solve personality conflicts overnight.

Moreover, the need for such managerial talent is only going to increase as technology continues to take over the more routine and predictable tasks of various jobs and as the marketplace becomes more dynamic. The need for diversity not only in demographics but also in personality is only going to increase too.

Many people agonize over decisions. A primary reason is belief in a “best” decision. Consequently, people run endlessly through their options when often there isn’t much qualitative difference among them.

I first became aware of this when discussing start-up businesses with an accountant. He made this observation: eighty percent of his clients ended up in businesses quite different from their initial plans. For example, one client began a retail operation in a specialty food product. One day, a grocer asked to carry the product. Soon, others did the same. Thus, the client was “forced” to shift from retailing a food product to manufacturing it.

However, the consistent quality in these start-ups was the ability to adapt quickly. So many times, organizations strive to research and plan their decisions then build consensuses around them. As a result, they turn decision making into a torturous process thus fulfilling the myth of the best decision: if it takes that long to make a decision then an outstanding is necessary. Thus, it’s hard to imagine an adaptive organization with an elongated decision-making process.

Yet, in our early school years, teachers grade us on right and wrong answers. Thus, our educational systems condition us to look for the best decision. Ironically, this conditioning is so strong that even a good decision is not satisfactory if it’s perceived as not being the best one.

Accelerating our decision-making allows us the luxury of correcting bad decisions more quickly. Thus, the fear of making bad decisions wanes if we have confidence in our groups’ abilities to learn, to correct its mistakes and to adapt a new direction. This is true for individuals too.

Even in hindsight, the best decision is not clear. We assume so because we make the false assumption that nothing else would have changed.

Classical business literature emphasizes focus: set goals, plan, and then focus on execution. However, it’s relatively void of focus’ downside: obliviousness to peripheral threats and opportunities.

In the mid-1900’s, when conditions didn’t change as dynamically as today’s, extensive research, planning and focus worked. Today, most research is outdated upon completion. Consequently, situational awareness (SA) becomes more important as part of an adaptive business strategy.

SA is the degree to which a person or company can be aware of surrounding conditions while focused on a task or plan. Ironically, SA came of age with aerial combat; you need to know where you are in the sky while focused on engaging enemy aircraft. If not, you could crash your plane from flying too low or from enemy fire simply because you were oblivious to those factors.

Context strongly influences our planning; however, if conditions forming that context are dynamically changing, that means our plan – the object of our focus – might become invalid by new threats and opportunities, and our focus and poor SA might cause us to overlook them. Psychological influences such as anchoring and optimistic planning will create additional pressures to keep us focused and ignorant.

These will also influence our assessment of talent by tending to make it too static and historical. Rather than basing it on people’s potential within new conditions, we will tend to base it on performances under old conditions. We will tend to believe that successes and failures transfer rather than assess actual skills and actual aptitudes within a new set of actual conditions. More simply, this is pigeonholing.

Technology and the internet strongly influence today’s dynamic conditions. Our focus shouldn’t blind us. SA will help us see the many threats, opportunities and talents that will influence our success.

Sensitive people (SP) can increase team intelligence in very much the same way mortar makes brick and stone walls stronger. Since diverse teams tend to be more creative and intelligent than homogeneous ones, SP will often provide the relational glue keeping diverse groups from fracturing under the stress of diverse views.

In “What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women,” an article in the June 2011 of the Harvard Business Review, Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone found SP:

• Listen well
• Share criticism constructively
• Possess open minds
• Aren’t autocratic

Since “Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do,” Woolley and Malone found that adding more women to groups would make them more intelligent. They “saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent.”

SP’s concerns for the well being of others will help ensure that diverse views receive a hearing even from more dominant and autocratic members of the team. In effect, we don’t increase the intelligence of the group by necessarily adding more intelligent people. We do so by adding more SP who give deference to others so stronger more effective bonds are formed. Through these bonds flow the life-blood of ideation, more simply called communication. Under the influence of dominant, head-strong members, these arteries become constricted by fear and tension thus preventing the free, open flow of ideas necessary for increasing team intelligence.

As we saw, nurturing positive feelings in others dramatically improves performance. SP are perfect additions to improving the intelligence and performance of teams. Their talent for being more aware of the emotions running through others will help ensure team members will feel good about the team and their contributions.

Other links in this series:

• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

Several folks on Twitter inspired this post: Ted Coine, Kevin Vonduuglasittu, Tim Steigert, Peggy Fitzpatrick and Michele Price. Their discussion centered around the merits of Twitter relative to Facebook and other social media sites.

While every social media site has its advantages and disadvantages, the challenge is not deciding where to spend your time but rather how to use them integratively. A military analogy can serve well here.

For instance, Twitter is the Air Force. It’s quick, fast and covers a lot of ground. You can meet more people per hour than on other social media sites. However, they are shallow meetings.

Blogs or blog-like sites that change frequently are Armor. It’s the first solid dose people can get of you. More importantly, its content adapts quickly to attract people repeatedly.

Facebook is the Infantry, the human side. Yes, networking can be frustratingly slow because it’s a friendly domain; many types are there for many different reasons.

LinkedIn is the Heavy Artillery, the business side. Networking is less personal and more business. It allows the display of the full, unvarnished impact of your business efforts in a social setting.

Websites are home; they link all the above forces and allow people to engage for the effort’s central mission.

The Air Force makes initial, quick contact. The Armor advances to exploring expanding that contact more thoroughly. Infantry arrive to solidify the relationship, and the Heavy Artillery follows later to show that this is business. Finally, if all of it works, people accept an invitation home to engage.

Every situation is different, and it will likely require different sequencing and coordinating. No military can succeed using only one branch of its force; therefore, no outreach effort can succeed using only one avenue. Integration is a natural force; look at nature.

The article, “Think Yourself Better,” in the May 21, 2011 edition of The Economist discussed the placebo effect: belief in a medical treatment increases its effectiveness. Research is also showing that this effect continues even if patients know a placebo was used. So, if belief helps doctors treat patients, why can’t it help managers manage employees?

The connection becomes more pragmatic when we consider that placebos work better when the drama around administering them is intensified. For example, the more enthusiastic the doctor is in administering it, the more likely it will have a greater effect. Additionally, giving an injection works better than a pill and a sham surgery works better yet.

The application to management is this: you can improve employees’ performances by telling them you believe they will become better. By connecting this belief to various new tools, initiatives and training, you will make the tools, initiative and training work better.

Presentation is a large part of what makes placebos work. A previous post talked about two identical bonus plans that were presented differently to employees. One motivated them more than the other did. This held true even when employees learned later that they earned the same bonus under both plans.

In pragmatic terms, this means that the more enthusiastic you are, the more attention you pay to employees and the more important you believe they are, the better they will do. This will occur even if you don’t show them one single technique to do their jobs better.

To make employees better, help them believe they can become better by showing sincerely and enthusiastically that you believe they can become better. If you want good employees, treat them like good employees.