Mike Lehr's Blog

As people’s careers progress, they tend to become more risk adverse, less willing to accept challenges. Much is because they feel they have too much to lose if wrong. Enough of these people in a company can retard its growth and our own too. Awareness of their existence will help to protect us.

In “The Paradox of Excellence,” an article in the June 2011 of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas DeLong and Sara DeLong write “high performers often let anxiety about their performance compromise their progress” even to the point that they “would rather do the wrong thing well than do the right thing poorly.” As a result, they tend to prefer options that worked well in the past to those that are best.

Early in their careers, things might have come more easily to them. As they progress and tackle more difficult assignments, they begin to function more and more on the outskirts of their attributes and skills. Rather than expand those limits they consolidate their gains, preferring consensus over what is right. As the Delongs attest, their careers flatten.

However, enough of this excellence in the right positions will flatten the company’s growth too. This conservatism will affect budget decisions, product development and talent acquisition. Expense control supersedes investing; existing products supersede new ones; the proven candidate supersedes the game changer. It helps to explain how the best and the brightest can bring about demise.

If we work for such people, the expansion of our limits could slow too. The challenges we seek will be thwarted by the conventional. It’s important to realize their existence and to avoid being blinded by their excellence and allowing our talents to rot under their light.

In “Before You Make That Big Decision,” which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* suggest that one way to overcome unconscious biases in decision making is that we ask the question: Is the base case [for the decision] overly optimistic? They make the point that:

• “Most recommendations contain forecasts, which are notoriously prone to excessive optimism.”
• “Groups with a successful track record are more prone to this bias than others . . . [especially if the] . . . team has been on a winning streak.”

However, in daily business life we often view those who try to rein in or express contrarian views as downers. As a result, in the desire to show who is less negative, a race to the top of optimism’s ladder begins and at some point becomes Pollyannaism.

Moreover, as we saw in the benefits of viewing a glass half-empty rather than half-full, the fear of being in an adverse situation can be a powerful motivator for taking action. Thus, a Pollyanna state could reduce a group to complacency. That means a team in the midst of success is less likely to change than one in the midst of crisis.

While clearly defining the demarcation zone between optimism and Pollyannaism is difficult, it once again highlights the failure of success and casts doubts on “nothing breeds success like success.” In fact, as the writers suggest, the best indicator that Pollyannaism might have infected a business culture is the degree of success it has been having.

After all, it’s kind of hard to reach a Pollyanna State if you’re not even in the State of Optimism.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

The article, Now You Know, in the May 28, 2011 edition of The Economist discussed a study published in Cognition by Elizabeth Bonawitz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Shafto of the University of Louisville regarding the directing of children in their play. The conclusion is that prior explanation of how to play inhibits exploration and discovery.

Developmentally, businesses, through their everyday managerial practices, tend to instill a resistance to change in their people. They do this by excessively directing their people what to do. This direction not only comes via communications from managers but also procedures managers established. Consequently, employees don’t need to think; they just do as told.

As with any task, practice reduces anxiety of doing it. Uncertainty is no different. To become more accepting and adapting of change, employees need exposure to uncertainty. They need to explore and discover. Reiterated more pragmatically, they need to try and err. However, this requires time and money which is intolerable in most business cultures.

Therefore, managers need to look for tasks and projects that require thinking, exploring and discovering by their employees.  For example, assigning tasks requiring unique customer solutions would help. This could mean simply writing a letter to address a unique customer inquiry. Tasks involving working with people of different personality types work too. Creating a new process or set of procedures is good. Any task where the method or solution isn’t pre-defined or one of several works will help.

If you want to encourage your employees to have a change mentality, you need to give them experience in dealing with uncertainty. It means giving them time to explore and discover, to try and err. It means encouraging them to think for themselves rather than telling them what to do.

When leaders try to change organizations, they often overlook that resistance to change serves a very positive, natural role: it protects the group from bad ideas. Just because we want to institute a change doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

Therefore, rather than look at resistance as a byproduct of negative thinkers, we should view it as natural as the ocean tide. People who “resist” organizational change ensure stability and continuity of the group’s culture.

For instance, imagine that any organization could change overnight at any leader’s whim. Now, you as a consumer enter your favorite eatery only to find it radically different. This might be good if the change is good, but what if it isn’t? Moreover, imagine that this company gets a new CEO in another year who changes things again! So now, your favorite eatery is again dramatically transformed.

A good example of where change resistors often serve a positive role is in quality preservation. When they are used to delivering products and services of a certain quality, they will tend to view cost-cutting changes to enhance profitability or to increase volume through price reductions as endangering quality.

What this means for us who are trying to change things is really a change of perspective. It’s not about overcoming resistant to change but rather about promoting change. Focusing on resistance is like focusing on trying to prevent the tide from going out. Singling these folks out as resistors, or worse yet as negative thinkers, only makes our change initiatives more difficult. We need to appreciate that these employees serve a very valuable purpose in preserving the stability of our companies’ brands.

Many leadership models give the leader almost divine characteristics or minimally the best humanity can offer within a business context. These models often position the leader as the vanguard of change, the influencer who can move an enterprise from its current state to its future one.

Tunisia’s first lesson is just how conditional leadership really is. Rather than a visionary triggering and influencing events, the leader is often just trying to avoid being overrun. Tunisia’s uprising was not “ordered” by any leader. Tunisia’s second lesson is emotion’s power in galvanizing collective action around a particular point. Demanding free elections is that point in Tunisia. Finally, the third lesson is how small, simple, singular events can trigger these emotions. In Tunisia, the trigger was a college-educated street vendor who set himself on fire.

What do these lessons mean for business leaders?

First, a leader who fits one particular set of circumstances might not fit another. A large, mature enterprise defending its turf from competitors is going to require a different leader than a small, virgin one trying to tap an undeveloped market. Second, emotions are more powerful at galvanizing employees than any reasoned list of benefits. That means connecting initiatives to the particular emotions dominating the workforce such as greatness, safety, happiness and competitiveness. Third, the trigger doesn’t have to be grandiose. Small events that symbolize something greater about the enterprise can do it. This means small, almost invisible success stories can create a powerful narrative about the enterprise and its mission.

Overall, Tunisia reminds us that the number one resistor to change is often the leader of the enterprise. New conditions might necessitate a new leader.

I came across a book review in the October 11, 2010 issue of The New Yorker about The Thief of Time, edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White. It’s a collection of essays on procrastination. Under an illustration there was this caption: Procrastination interests philosophers because of its underlying irrationality.

I never knew that procrastination received such puzzling attention. No one can really explain why we do it. Yet, it’s very common across all personalities. What makes it even more puzzling is that “indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.” In fact, according to Professor Piers Steel of the University of Calgary, “people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002.” He defines it as “willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.”

Why is this important to intuition? Well, in order to appreciate intuition’s impact, we need to appreciate the degree to which our emotions influence our decisions and actions. Since procrastination is a frequent, everyday occurrence, it can serve as a tangible reminder to go beyond simple, rational analysis.

While many of us would acknowledge this, we often don’t practice it. Rather, we attempt to analyze problems in rational, logical and objective terms employing the best scientific analysis we can muster. We try to quantify then weigh benefits and costs without even considering the emotional weights of each. Then, we try to communicate our findings in the same way.

This can lead us astray because in reality emotions play a dominant role in people’s decisions and actions. Thus, when we try to be objective, we often aren’t realistic. Imagine not accounting for procrastination in planning because it’s irrational.