Leadership and Learning

Posts Tagged ‘autonomy’

Ed Frauenheim has written a tremendous blog on workforce.com that everyone who feels busy should read.

http://www.workforce.com/article/20120113/BLOGS05/120119976/when-agility-adopts-the-symptoms-of-a-d-d#

To be fair, he is actually summarizing work done by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, who wrote in the January issue of the McKinsey Quarterly. But he does a nice job, and here is what he (and they) are saying:

Organizational life, work, pace and culture have stumbled into a condition that they call Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder (yes, SADD). It is characterized by leaders careening from one priority to another, always jumping to the next thing. In the process, they demoralize the workforce and “kill meaning” at work.

This only matters if you care about motivation and people feeling that what they do makes sense. If you don’t mind low morale and employee perceptions that work is meaningless, then you can disregard the piece.

Here’s the kicker: What seems to be driving at least some of this is one of the latest, recycled buzzwords of “agility.”
Who can argue with being agile? We all have to be this way – at times.

The problem is that it has become code for constantly shifting priorities that confuse employees, and who learn to see the pattern of “here today, gone tomorrow,” as the organization grasps for the next new thing. Maybe it will be operational excellence. Or customer-centricity. Or core competency.

Seriously, we can go back in the literature and pull these things out at any time – although it is best to wait until most of the organizational memory is erased around the initiative. (The one that still has not been dead long enough to remove the memories is TQM, and its key word: “empowerment.” When you use those terms with a government group, there is usually a groan, and this dates back to the 1980s.)

The desire for the silver bullet – that one, key linking piece that will forever resolve all the problems, anxieties, confusion and pain – will never go away, I suspect. It’s why a bazillion books have been written on leadership and organizations. Everyone is looking for The Answer.

It also speaks to how our brains work. We are hard-wired to notice what is bright and shiny, something exciting and new. We want to be sure we don’t miss the boat, or incur a threat. So we give a lot of air time to whatever is new, even while not really following through on what is already in place. So agile becomes fragile.

My friend Katherine McGraw calls the age in which we live “global speed-up.” I believe a symptom of the age is SADD, and wise leaders will recognize the problem and perhaps slow the ever-accelerating merry-go-round to ask some new questions.

One of those might be how to get the workforce really behind and supporting whatever the new initiative is. The answer? Engage them in the process. This creates a commitment that makes change efforts more likely to succeed.

Who are you?

Are you an individual, who has made choices around career, relationships and where to live?

Or are you your job, relationships and location?

It sounds like a silly or trick question, but let me share with you a line I heard delivering a leadership development program at one government agency.

We had shown a video that highlighted leaders’ ability to evoke possibility and outstanding performance from those they are leading. Much of the video stressed the emotional connections and deeper communication with people that helps unlock possibility.

I suppose the person who delivered the line I am about to share had not really thought about that way of leading, or felt unable to lead in that way. (Hey, that’s the work.) In any case, here is what he said.

“But we’re a bunch of lawyers! We’re not like that!”

I believe what he meant was that in his role, these kinds of leadership behaviors were not mainstream, or conventional. Never mind that they work better. It was just hard to see the change, given the context, especially culturally, in which he worked.

I submit this is really over-identifying with a role, career or job.

What works for you? What individuality do you bring to where you work?

Are you your job? Or are you you?

The November, 2010 issue of Vanity Fair offers a fascinating and in-depth, if depressing, insight into the world of Merrill Lynch’s leadership before and during the financial crisis, when Stanley O’Neal was at the helm.

The piece, “The Man Who Blew Merrill Lynch’s Billions,” by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera truly reads like an archetypal fairy tale, or myth. Perhaps Greek drama is a better characterization. It’s all here in the story — all the elements of leadership that run an organization into the ground. (See the summary at the end of this blog.)

O’Neal joined Merrill in 1986 as a junk bond trader. He quickly worked his way up, impressing his superiors in each position as a top performer – and one who could be ruthless in chasing the performance imperative. The authors write that he was
“proud, prickly, intolerant of dissent and quick to take offense at perceived slights.”
Within 16 years, he was CEO.

Once he got the top job, he immediately pushed aside those he had competed with to get there. But he went further. The article authors write, “O’Neal had been insular before; he was the kind of man who liked to play golf by himself. Now he became isolated. He had been wary; now he became suspicious of everyone around him. Patrick and Zakaria (two officials) had been extremely competent executives; he replaced them with more pliable lieutenants.”

Other executive mirrored this; they were vindictive, surrounding themselves with a small group of those who would only say “yes” — a process that ultimately had catastrophic results. He once said, “You don’t understand. Dysfunction is good on Wall Street.”

During this time, O’Neal developed a fixation with Goldman Sachs, the money printing press that quarter after quarter was churning out enormous profits. O’Neal’s jealousy was such that one executive commented that you did not want to be in O’Neal’s office the day Goldman released its financial results.

Beyond the differences in financial performance, there were others. The authors write, “O’Neal insisted that the company’s executives speak only to him about their businesses and not with one another. The Goldman brass insisted on knowing bad news; Merrill executives trembled at the thought of giving O’Neal bad news. O’Neal rarely asked for input when making a decision. And under no circumstances did he want to be challenged once he had made up his mind.”

Some basic economics: One hugely important strategic decision O’Neal made was to not only sell, but also own, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). CDOs are one example of those derivatives that precipitated the U.S. financial crisis. They are essentially your mortgage, mine, others’ car loans and other forms of debt all bundled together and resold to investors who like the stream of income as debt is repaid.

The only problem is that when individuals cannot make the debt payments, the system comes unhinged. Since the credit rating agencies gave top marks to any CDOs with a pulse – even when they were shaky – they were freely bought and sold with Triple A confidence, until the music stopped. In reality, many of the debts in these CDOs were perilous, and O’Neal kept pushing for Merrill to embrace higher coupons – Wall Street parlance for increasingly risky debt instruments. Merrill had grown up as a nice, stable stockbroker, selling shares to middle America, but as it embraced CDOs to increase profits, it was in a new game, with all new risks.

This rush to CDOs was propelled by O’Neal’s envy of Goldman profits, and woe to the man or woman who warned of the risks as Merrill’s profits, too, rose. In fact, O’Neal’s force of temper meant that no one would tell the truth, even as the first explosions in the debt market began happening. Executives downplayed the risk Merrill faced (remember, it now owned, not just sold, the debt), saying the earliest market tremors would blow over, and the little “rough patch” would end. One internal estimate from the O’Neal clones of Merrill’s exposure at $83 million came to be known within the firm as “The Fantastic Lie.”

But as you know, the facts have an inconvenient way of not going away. As it became increasingly clear that the financial system was encountering systemic disruption, firms’ positions were flushed out. The $83 million lie ballooned to $6 billion. Just like that.

At this point, it is an entirely fair question to ask why, when you keep track of a few dollars error in your checking account, a company can mistake nearly $6 billion.

You actually already know the answer. The authors write. “Always a loner, he had become isolated from his own firm. He had no idea that key risk managers had been pushed aside or that people he had put in important positions were out of their depth. Amazing as it sounds, the CEO of Merrill Lynch really didn’t have a clue.” They also write that as Goldman executives were cancelling vacations, O’Neal played golf by himself.

The rest is history. The reality became undeniable, and O’Neal – almost overnight – went from the arrogant, resentful, irritated defender of Merrill to a shell-shocked shadow of his former self. There was no way out. Except out, with $161 million in retirement benefits as Bank of America bought Merrill.

When he was later hauled up before Congress, mostly to defend his retirement package, the authors write that he spent his time “dwelling on the mistakes of the men he had surrounded himself with, mostly blaming others for his downfall.”

So what’s the message? Here is the O’Neal Leadership Playbook, for your consideration:

 Don’t let people communicate freely with each other

 Keep an enemies list, and get rid of them

 Make sure people know you can’t stand to hear contrary information

 Operate out of competitive jealousy

 Tear up the strategy

 Be emotionally volatile

 Isolate yourself

 Blame everyone else

Sometimes, just a few words can nail a concept so important to life and work that they border on poetry.

That’s the case with the following quotation – the best I’ve ever heard in the business of leadership and management.

It comes from the ancient philosopher from the West – not the East – (Santa Monica, to be specific) whose name is George Carlin (RIP).

George Carlin once said, “Have you ever noticed that everyone driving faster than you is a maniac, and everyone driving slower than you is a moron?”

Think about it.

Whenever I share with a class this piece of wisdom wrapped in the veil of comedy, there is an immediate reaction (laughter), to which I respond with the question, “Why is this so funny?”

Invariably, someone says, “Because it’s true!” At which point there is even more laughter.

This affirmation reinforces the central irony of the statement, which we should unpack here.

• Do you know a workaholic? How about someone lazy?

• Do you know someone who is obsessive about details? How about someone too blue sky?

• Do you know someone who spends too much time making things “perfect?” How about someone sloppy with work?

• Do you know someone who takes too long to make a decision? How about someone who jumps the gun and is too hasty?

• Do you know a micro-manager? How about someone too hands-off?

Guess who is present, but usually invisible, in all these stories?

That’s right – you. The ultimate arbiter of the correct balance point in life. The only person driving the right speed, working the right number of hours, with the right amount of attention to detail and quality, and so on.

You must be right. After all, if you thought you weren’t, you’d think or do something different.

Sometimes, there actually is an objective standard to which we can refer to figure out how much or little of anything we should do. For example, there is a speed limit (although few people pay any attention to it).

But much of the time in knowledge work, there is not some higher standard to reference to make a clean, defensible decision. Instead, our approaches often come straight out of our own values. And guess what? Not everyone shares your values – the subject of another post.

The next time you hear some difference and judge it as too fast or slow, or too anything, stop and think. How did you come to your own decision on what’s right? How do you know that’s right? And perhaps most importantly, why is something different creating potential discomfort in you?

If given a choice, research in the field of neuroscience shows that people are willing to bet on risky outcomes over ambiguous ones. The lack of uncertainty prevents people from stepping into situations that hold unclear outcomes; therefore, people demonstrate ‘away’ behavior such as retreat or withdrawal to move to a place of safety and security. The ‘knowing’ or awareness of some details in a risky situation is enough of a factor to influence ‘toward’ behavior. Given that leaders are responsible for leading change or working on a myriad of projects that don’t always have a clear-cut path to a desired outcome; leaders create situations fraught with risk and ambiguity.
Simply by giving people choice in situations that are risky will increase the likelihood of action in the direction of accomplishing the change or meeting the requirements of the project. Choice, offers a sense of autonomy which leads to a feeling of reward…a feeling of control in their destiny enables people to feel more at ease in the accomplishment of tasks in their organizations and therefore stimulate the reward center of their brain’s to initiate ‘toward’ or welcoming behavior.
Every organization is faced with developing strategies to effectively deal with a changing economy. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that talked about research that had been conducted over an 18-year period on organizations that laid people off and organizations that selectively cut costs, but did not make drastic lay-offs during a prior recession. The long-term effects of organizations that over reacted to the down turn in the economy by drastically cutting staff with lay-offs suffered for the next ten years. They experienced minimal profits and growth as they could not rebound from the loss of talent and they struggled with efforts to hire replacement staff to make up for the loss of talent. Former workers, potential talent who had experienced the imposed changes of being streamlined with a pink slip, weren’t as eager to rejoin an organization that left them out in the cold…a bitter pill of uncertainty and very real threat to their survival! They voted with their feet and joined other organizations that provided some sense of certainty for their futures.
The organizations that demonstrated a level headed approach to keep their talent and avoid drastic moves, tended to reap greater rewards during the same period after the down turn. These organizations experienced abundant growth in profits, as they were able to keep up with the trends of economical growth without missing a beat while putting in play their long-term strategies. They had retained their talent and were able to adjust quickly and seamlessly to the increased customer demands and product development requirements.
The lack of certainty among staff within organizations demonstrated by the leadership in these organizations that made drastic moves in staff adjustments, created chaos and threatened the very people who made up their organizations; it put people in a heightened state of fear and discomfort. There was no autonomy and most certainly gross uncertainty. The sense of certainty offered in the other organizations, gave them a feeling of autonomy through the challenging times and helped them to effectively handle the challenges associated with the recession.
Leadership has a responsibility to reduce or eliminate the ambiguity within their organizations by providing tactical and strategic plans, goals, and vision for how they will continue to stay in business. Communicating that there is ‘risk’ in how the organizational leadership will deal with a downturn still provides a sense of hope for people. A realistic portrayal of the business status communicated to the staff will generate greater buy in and ownership for the transition and outcomes, not forced compliance in darkness of not knowing and a perceived sinking of the ship. Leadership has a responsibility to communicate truth, often and consistently. Being transparent provides needed certainty, even if the news is less than ideal. How informed are your people and what will you do to lessen the burden of uncertainty and increase autonomy in your organization?