Authenticity

 “I was a rock star in the 80s,” my seatmate told me on a short flight to Baltimore years ago.  He looked the part--tall, English accent, 80’s shag haircut.

He wasn’t bragging--I had asked him how things were going and he told me he played lead guitar for The Outfield. “We were big for a while in the 80s.”

During the 80s I had three little kids and I wasn’t actively tracking emerging rock music, so I confessed that I didn’t know The Outfield, which surprised him.  I asked about their biggest hit, and he said it was a song he wrote called “Your Love” which nearly reached the top of the charts in 1986.  You probably know the song as it has been covered hundreds of times since then and it still gets radio play on classic rock stations, but I didn’t know it by name. So he immediately did what any self-respecting rock star would do—he started singing the song for me. I recognized it (as did most of the people sitting around us) and to this day everytime I hear that song I remember my brief encounter with authentic 80s rock star John Spinks.

The Outfield (John Spinks, Alan Jackman, Tony Lewis)

I was thinking of that incident again recently while watching election coverage and ruminating about personal authenticity, which experts define as: 

…being true and honest with oneself and others, having a credibility in one’s words and behavior, and an absence of pretense.

On one level, Spinks’ serenade on the plane was intended to help me recognize his hit song.  On another level, it was offered to provide support for his rock star story. He was “walking the walk”, i.e., establishing credibility by demonstrating his ability to do something he claimed he could do or had done.  Walking the walk used to be an essential part of developing character and reputation, of becoming authentic.

When I was growing up, if someone in my social circles claimed they could do something, it was a given that they would have to prove they could actually do it, not just talk about it. It really didn’t matter what it was--dribbling left-handed, juggling, doing a cartwheel, throwing a curve ball, naming the presidents—nobody got the benefit of the doubt.  So the accountability model was very clear: if you said you could, and it turned out you couldn’t, you were going to experience social and reputational penalties.

When I entered the corporate workplace, however, I learned that in my industry being willing and able to walk the walk wasn’t quite as culturally significant as it had been in my earlier life. Folks who couldn’t walk very well, but who were accomplished at talking about the mechanics of walking, or at recounting the history of walking, or at criticizing how other people were walking, were recognized and rewarded as if they were the best walkers ever.  That puzzled me, but I figured either the non-walkers had never experienced the accountability model I had grown up with, or they had forgotten about it as they aged. So many folks who were comfortable just talking the walk and being inauthentic--misrepresenting their skill levels and exaggerating their accomplishments—yet they weren’t being called on it.

How does a workplace thrive without authenticity, without accountability, and without an operating culture that values folks who walk the walk more than those who talk the walk? Why do people remain in such a workplace? Well, it’s socially awkward and politically incorrect in most corporate work situations simply to call out exaggerators and demand they demonstrate the proficiency they are claiming, particularly if the exaggerator happens to be a powerful senior leader.   And leadership failure contributes significantly to the problem since tone is set at the top and leaders set the standard for what is tolerated in the work environment. Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker of Indiana State University describe it this way:

The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.

Which means if a leader is unwilling or unable to demand authenticity, to insist that the accountability model be an integral part of the workplace culture, it probably won’t be. How do you deal with a culture like that? Depending on how pervasive, inequitable and offensive the behavior is, and how important it is to you, you generally have three choices: tolerate it, change it, or leave it behind.

Whether it was Aesop or Lou Holtz who told us “After all is said and done, more is said than done,” embellishment is human nature and we all know it is often much easier to talk about doing something than it is to do it.  Call me sentimental, but I remember life being simpler and fairer when authenticity and character were important and accountability meant doing what you said you would (or could) do. But let’s leave the final word on authenticity to Muhammad Ali, who while he didn’t hesitate to talk about what he could do (“I’m not the greatest, I’m the double greatest”) or how he felt about it (“It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am") certainly did see a big difference between talking and doing:

Braggin' is when a person says something and can’t do it. I do what I say.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, is a retired executive who now enjoys his time as an advisor, board member, educator, and watercolor painter.  He can be reached at dean.harring@gmail.com or through LinkedIn or Twitter or Harring Watercolors

Slackers and Social Loafers: "Playing" the Team Players

America loves teams and team players, even outside of sports. What’s not to love? Team players are selfless—they set aside their personal goals and focus their talents on coordinating efforts with their fellow team members to achieve a common goal. Teams personify cooperation and collaboration and synergistic effort. And, of course, we’ve all been taught that teams inevitably generate better outcomes than individuals do.
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So it’s good to be on a team, and teams do good work, which means teams and teamwork are iconic realities of life in America--socially, educationally, and professionally. It really doesn’t matter whether you are a toddler, a college student, a retail clerk, or a corporate executive—today you regularly find yourself slotted onto teams (or onto committees or into small groups) where you are expected to behave like a good team player.

How does a good team player behave? According to leadership coach Joel Garfinkle: “You just need to be an active participant and do more than your job title states. Put the team’s objectives above yours and take the initiative to get things done without waiting to be asked.” He identifies five characteristics that make a team player great:

1. Always reliable
2. Communicates with confidence
3. Does more than asked
4. Adapts quickly and easily
5. Displays genuine commitment

Seems obvious, but think of your most recent team experiences—were your team members behaving that way? Were you? Not likely, and J. Richard Hackman, a former Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University and a leading expert on teams, knows why. When interviewed by Diane Coutou for a 2009 Harvard Business Review article (Why Teams Don’t Work) he said:

Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration. 

Problems with coordination and motivation interfering with team collaboration and performance—doesn’t that sound like a rather modest challenge that could be resolved with more effective team management? Sure, to a certain extent. Teams are often too large, they are thoughtlessly staffed (proximity and position rather than proven talents and ability to produce results) and they are routinely launched with murky objectives, vague group member accountabilities, and no formal support network for team process management. In other words most teams don’t meet the five basic conditions that Hackman, in his book Leading Teams, said that teams require to perform effectively:

1. Teams must be real. People have to know who is on the team and who is not. It’s the leader’s job to make that clear.
2. Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.
3. Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.
4. Teams need a supportive organization. The organizational context—including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system—must facilitate teamwork.
5. Teams need expert coaching. Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes—especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project.

But there’s another challenge, and it is presented by the people who don’t want to be team players. People who, when added to a team, immediately focus their attention and effort not on being a good team player but instead on dodging work, avoiding exposure and manipulating the conscientious team players into doing more than their share of the work. This is known as social loafing (or slacking) and it describes the tendency of some members of a work group to exert less effort than they would when working alone. Kent Faught, Associate Professor of Management at the Frank D. Hickingbotham School of Business, argues in his paper about student work groups in the Journal of Business Administration Online that social loafers can’t be successful, however, unless the other team members permit the loafing and complete the project successfully:

…the social loafer must find at least one group member that CAN and WILL achieve the group's goals and ALLOW themselves to be social loafed on. "Social Loafer Bait" is the term used here to describe the profile of the ideal target for social loafers.

This problem isn’t new. Max Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, conducted one of the earliest social loafing experiments in 1913, asking participants to pull on a “tug of war” rope both individually and in groups. When people were part of a group, they exerted much less effort pulling the rope than they did when pulling alone. According to Joshua Kennon, Ringelmann’s social loafing results were replicated over the years in many other experiments (involving typing, shouting, clapping, pumping water, etc.) leading psychologists to believe that humans tend toward social loafing in virtually all group activities. Kennon shared two other conclusions:

• The more people you put into a group, the less individual effort each person will contribute
• When confronted with proof that they are contributing less, the individuals in the group deny it because they believe they are contributing just as much as they would have if they were working alone

I recently asked a group of friends and colleagues who have been involved in group work at school or in their jobs to respond to a brief, unscientific survey on how they deal with social loafing. Their response pattern is shown in parentheses, and although respondents varied in age from 20 to 50+, answer patterns didn’t seem to vary by age group:

You are working on an important, time-sensitive project with a group of people. One of the group members is slacking off, not contributing to project work. What do you do about it? (choose one)

• Ask/Tell the slacker to commit to the project and start contributing (40%)
• Report the slacker to the project sponsor (3%)
• Complain about the slacker to other team members (10%)
• Work harder to pick up the slack and ensure the project is successful (30%)
• Follow the slacker’s lead and reduce your commitment and effort (0%)
• Other (17%--most respondents who chose this reported they would employ more than one of the listed strategies)

How effective is the response you identified above?

• Solves the problem (27%)
• Partially solves the problem (53%)
• Fails to solve the problem (17%)
• Causes other problems (3%)

Respondents who took some action (talking to the slacker, or reporting the slacker to the project sponsor) were much more likely to report that their actions solved all or part of the problem. Complaining to other team members failed to solve the problem—no surprise there. And even though 30% of respondents elected to address the slacking problem by working harder to pick up the slack (earning themselves a “social loafer bait” ID badge) the effect of doing so was mixed, spread fairly evenly among solving, partially solving, failing to solve and causing other problems.
What’s not clear is why we are so willing to tolerate social loafing on group projects and why we are so reluctant to call slackers out and hold them accountable. According to Kerry Patterson, co-author of the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High:

93% of employees report they have co-workers who don't pull their weight, but only one in 10 confronts lackluster colleagues.

I suppose the reality is that unless work groups are tightly managed, they offer excellent cover for slackers--relative anonymity, little or no pressure from team members, great individual performance camouflage--with only a slight threat of exposure or penalty for not being a good team player. So the solution to the social loafer problem probably involves not only changes in how groups are formed, resourced and supported, but also changes in the group work dynamic to eliminate the cover and camouflage and to illuminate how each individual contributes to the group work effort (this is sometimes accomplished in university student work groups by using a formal peer review process to help group members hold each other accountable.)

As you might expect, Google is serious about team work (all Google employees work on at least one team) and they want their teams to be successful. Their recent study of team effectiveness at Google determined that five team dynamics (Psychological Safety, Dependability, Structure and Clarity, Meaning of Work, and Impact of Work) are more important to successful teams than the talents of the individuals on the teams. To help their teams manage these dynamics, Google developed a tool called the gTeams exercise, described by Julia Rozovsky of Google People Operations as:

…a 10-minute pulse-check on the five dynamics, a report that summarizes how the team is doing, a live in-person conversation to discuss the results, and tailored developmental resources to help teams improve.

According to Rozovsky, Google teams reported that having a framework around team effectiveness and a forcing function (the gTeams exercise) to talk about these dynamics was the most impactful part of the experience. That’s not surprising, since any “forcing function” that puts a public spotlight on ineffective or unacceptable behavior makes it easier to identify and eliminate that behavior.

Given the concentration of talent at Google, I imagine the social loafers there probably boast a more refined slacker “craftiness” pedigree than most of us normally encounter. Still, I am betting the Google slackers aren’t very pleased with the light and heat generated by the gTeams exercise spotlight.


Dean K. Harring, CPCU,  is a retired insurance executive who now enjoys his time as an advisor, board member, educator and watercolor artist.  He can be reached at dean.harring@gmail.com or through LinkedIn or Twitter or Harring Watercolors

What Got You Here Won't Get You There

 
That’s the catchy title of a 2007 book by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, an award winning author, business thought leader, professor and executive coach who heads the Marshall Goldsmith Group of consultants (mission: to help successful leaders get even better) and maintains the free Marshall Goldsmith Library. He has written and/or edited 35 books, mostly about leadership, learning, change and personal improvement. I found a copy of this book at a library sale recently, and I recommend it, but that’s just background.

Some weeks earlier, I had agreed to help kick off a senior management meeting at a company run by some former colleagues of mine who had escaped from an insurance company claims environment nearly 20 years earlier to start up their own specialty claims business. Over the years their business flourished, expanding in scope and size to the point where the founders knew it was time to pull together their management team and discuss what needed to be done to move the company to the next level. They wanted me to help set the proper tone for their meeting by talking about change challenges and reviewing some of the things successful companies do, and don’t do.

Since I was heading off on vacation, I thought I would spend some of my leisure time preparing by re-reading my favorite articles about successful companies, and by reviewing some of the many notebooks I had filled over the years with on-topic material. I also brought along Goldsmith’s book, and read it through one rainy day. If you haven’t read it, I think I can give a quick overview without spoiling it for you. The theme is that most of us have bad habits, and even if those bad habits somehow helped to get us to a certain level, they might just prevent us from moving to or being successful at the next level. When I read through the habits (like delusional thinking, denial, overconfidence, failing to listen, dismissing feedback, failing to plan, blaming failures on external, uncontrollable factors, and allowing distractions to interfere with achieving objectives) I started feeling a bit uneasy, even embarrassed, because at one time or another in my career I knew I was probably guilty of all of them.

But then it hit me—Goldsmith was writing about personal, individual habits, but companies are collections of people so they have their own habits and ways of doing things (their culture.) Entrepreneurs imprint their own habits on their company, so they directly influence their company’s success through their imagination and insights, their willingness to take chances, their resiliency, their commitment, and the unique set of skills, behaviors and attitudes they bring to the effort. Through scrambling, innovating, scraping by, doing without, overextending and even overpromising, the successful ones keep their businesses going, and growing. Of course it’s not a linear path to success--they lurch, they make mistakes, then they recover and learn from them. But one fine day they realize they are actually making it, competing successfully in whatever business niche they selected. At that point one of two things can happen:

• They celebrate, relax, and begin to suffer from the “complacent lethargy” that Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras (Built to Last) called the “We’ve Arrived Syndrome”
• They start to dream about expanding their business, diversifying into other products and services, entering new markets, making acquisitions...you know, taking their business to the next level.

Maybe both things happen. But if they get past the dreaming and start in on the planning, they often realize that the skills and behaviors they used to get their business going and help it survive may not be the ones they need to make it thrive at the next level. So what’s a company to do at that point? Of course that’s what my former colleagues wanted to get into at their meeting.

So at the management meeting I ended up sharing with the group some of the most impactful (to me) things I have learned about successful companies, such as their tendency to operate with three perspectives simultaneously: strategic, governance and control, and execution. Sounds reasonable, but juggling those three can be complicated and counterintuitive at a smaller company, where managers often prefer to stay within their comfort zone and focus on execution. But even with flawless execution, a company still needs both a winning strategy and a capable governance/risk management protocol in place to ensure long term success.

Successful companies tend to share certain characteristics:

• They have strategic clarity
• They have objectives and performance metrics that encourage behavior that supports their strategy
• Their rewards are aligned with achievement of those objectives and performance metrics
• They provide regular, constructive feedback to individuals regarding performance against objectives and metrics

Successful companies share certain capabilities:

• Talent (knowledge, skill and will)
• Speed (capacity for rapid, meaningful change)
• Learning (across silos and boundaries)
• Shared mindset (on the same page)
• Accountability (willingness to accept responsibility for behaviors and results)
• Collaboration (leveraging relationships, sharing work and responsibility)

I had the management team do a quick capability self-assessment from two perspectives, rating themselves as a management team, and then rating their company as a whole on a scale of 1 to 10 in each of those six capability areas (1 means no capability and 10 means industry leading capability) and flip-charted the results. That’s an easy and quick exercise that often produces interesting insights into potential conflicts and barriers to success.

We also unpacked the three performance categories often associated with talent in a knowledge-intensive business: KNOWLEDGE, SKILL and WILL.

• In the claims service business, KNOWLEDGE involves understanding the law, regulations, contracts and policy forms, as well as understanding what customers want and knowing how to deliver it within necessary margins of compliance, speed, service and accuracy.

• SKILL usually refers to doing, not knowing. Employing best practices, interpreting complicated coverage situations, correctly calculating a business income loss or reinsurance penalty, investigating, evaluating, negotiating, resolution, recovery, communicating with stakeholders, etc.

• WILL refers to the commitment, desire, discipline, or motivation to do something and do it well.

Finally, I urged them to accomplish four things in their meeting:

• Create strategic clarity. Agree on what business they are in, and what business they want to be in, and articulate what they need to know and be able to do in order to be successful.
• Complete a stakeholder needs analysis and develop a shared view of who their stakeholders are (potentially anyone with a vested interest in how well they operate their business) and what those stakeholders need in order to be successful and content.
• Take another look at the capability self-assessment summary (the flipchart) and do an honest and critical assessment of their capabilities, particularly their talent. Do they really have the talent and the ability to meet stakeholder needs better, faster and cheaper than their competitors? If not, where are the capability gaps and how will they close them?
• Carefully consider the WILL component of talent within the framework of change and business evolution. Determine what steps to take to influence attitudes and motivation and move their management team, and their company, from compliance to commitment.

I enjoyed seeing my colleagues again, and meeting their management team, and I heard later that their meeting went well. A few days after that meeting I came across this quote I used in an earlier article, attributed to German writer and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (and also, variously, to Leonardo Da Vinci and Bruce Lee):

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

In the talent context, it sounds like whoever said this believed in execution. Knowledge and will alone were not enough—he considered skill, the ability to do the necessary things well, to be the critical component of talent. I see it a bit differently, believing that success in almost any human undertaking requires all three elements of talent (knowledge, skill and will.) To me, skill is derivative, developed through the combination of knowledge (understanding what needs to be done, when and how) and will (practicing and perfecting) but I suppose that’s one of the reasons why people find the talent topic so fascinating.

For a thoughtful look at talent management in the 21^st century, check out this Harvard Business Review article from professor Peter Capelli. And for an interesting overview of how taking a strategic approach to talent management can help power innovation, growth and market advantage, take a look at this Talent To Win whitepaper from PwC.


Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired insurance executive who now enjoys his time as an advisor, board member, educator and watercolor artist.  He can be reached at dean.harring@gmail.com or through LinkedIn or Twitter or Harring Watercolors

Magical Thinking

 
Remember that TV commercial where a wide-eyed guy's favorite football team scores every time he goes into his basement to get more beer, so he concludes he has "cracked the code," leaves his friends and goes down into the scary basement one more time "for the win"? That spot depicted a form of magical thinking, which according to psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones in Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking involves believing "that one's thoughts, words, or actions can achieve specific physical effects in a manner not governed by the principles of ordinary transmission of energy or information."

Magical thinking is a normal dimension of thinking in young children, of course. Toddlers routinely make illogical and unsound decisions--they just don't have enough information about the world yet to form more reasonable conclusions (more on that topic here.) At around age seven or eight most children begin to think logically and are better able to grasp cause and effect relationships, so they move away from magical thinking.

Yet magical thinking lives on in many adults--sports fans, athletes, coaches, gamblers, sailors, politicians and even business executives. Think of all the people you know who regularly engage in superstitious rituals-- following lucky routines, wearing lucky items of clothing, carefully avoiding any behavior or circumstance that might curse or jinx an undertaking or outcome. While such rituals might be irrational, they are not generally harmful and some experts even consider them to be potentially beneficial. Perhaps that's why the tagline for the beer commercial described earlier offered viewers this subtle reassurance:

“It's Only Weird if it Doesn't Work”

O course there is a darker side of magical thinking that can be problematic, particularly in business. It has roots in narcissism and can involve delusional thinking fueled by an unrealistic or underdeveloped understanding of causes and effects. Unfortunately, since experts believe we're "more likely to find a narcissist in the C-Suite than on the street" it follows that we're also more likely to find magical thinking in the C-Suite.

Here's the problem: a business leader with even mild narcissistic tendencies can be a compelling and disruptive leadership force even when he or she hasn't the slightest knowledge or understanding of the dynamics, the causes and effects, that shape a particular situation. Such leaders come across as supremely certain, energetic, decisive, strategic, visionary--even charming and charismatic in the short term. But they have a big blind spot: when they are in unfamiliar territory, they are incapable of recognizing and acknowledging their own ignorance or lack of understanding. They are confident, but not competent. Sadly, when they don't have the requisite information (or understanding, or knowledge) to make logical and sound decisions, they fall back into magical thinking--just like toddlers do. So their decisions are informed and driven by biases, superstitions, fantasies and faulty logic rather than by facts and evidence-based thinking.

I worked with a CEO years ago who was, among other things, a rip-roaring magical thinker. One of his more peculiar blind spots involved strategy. He categorically refused to even discuss the topic (he called it the S-word) and he would behave even more scornfully and abusively than he normally did if someone dared to bring it up. He made his magic belief mindset clear--if people just did their jobs, the company would flourish, so it was foolish to waste time thinking or talking or worrying about something as unimportant as the S-word.

I was reminded of that CEO (let's call him S-word CEO) the other day while listening to an HBR Ideacast featuring Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes, author of Putting Sales at the Center of Strategy. He was describing how companies often have a vision, or a mission, but they don't have a coherent strategy--because they have failed to make "explicit choices" about markets, customers, value propositions and competitive differentiators. Why is that important? Professor Cespedes:

"...it’s obviously difficult, if not impossible, for people to execute a strategy that doesn’t exist or that they don’t understand."

Cespedes went on to say that once a coherent strategy has been developed, it's vital for company leadership to ensure that the tasks and behaviors (plans and activities) performed by different company segments (Cespedes talked about Sales, but I took his comments to apply equally to all segments of a company) are focused on delivering value and helping to implement the strategy effectively. In other words, strategy should define the critical tasks and behaviors, not vice versa. Nothing very magical about that.

Well, that S-word CEO struggled with his biases and his fuzzy logic. He made more than his share of dubious decisions, and he caused some degree of harm and collateral damage in the process, but he was tenacious and persistent and he completed a multi-year run as CEO. As he walked out the door on his last day, I'm sure he was pleased with himself, and proud of how well he had steered the company during his tenure. What about his struggles, his setbacks, his ill-advised decisions, and the collateral damage he had caused? Not his problem. He accepted no accountability for anything that didn't work out well, since in his mind someone else was always to blame.

I've worked with many magical thinkers, but S-word CEO probably provided as vivid a demonstration as any I've ever seen of the power, and the wonder, of magical thinking in business. Maybe the beer commercial was spot on--maybe magical thinking is only weird if it doesn't work--and while it may not have worked for others within S-word CEO's sphere of influence, it sure worked for him!

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired insurance executive who now spends his time as an advisor, board member, educator and watercolor artist.  He can be reached at dean.harring@gmail.com or through LinkedIn or Twitter or Harring Watercolors.