Confident Managers

Imagine the question is "Where is the stapler?"

Someone says "It might be on John's desk"

Someone else says "It is in the coffee room, I'm positive."

Who do you believe?

This works fine for staplers but confident managers are one of the most dangerous seductions of the business world.

When it comes to business strategy or tactics no well-informed person ever feels "I'm positive." They know there are many uncertainties. We ought to reach the common understanding that great confidence is a red flag.

There are many subtleties to this. You want your coach saying "I know you guys can win" even when the evidence is clearly against that prediction. However, the notion of a red flag remains valid. If someone is confident they know the truth on complex matters, you should begin to doubt them.

Doug passes on the quote:

"The view that truth is found and that ignorance and error are at an
end is one of the most potent seductions there is. Supposing it is
believed, then the will to examination, investigation, caution,
experiment is paralyzed: it can even count as criminal, namely as
doubt concerning truth--Truth is therefore more fateful than error and
ignorance, because it cuts off the forces that work toward
enlightenment and knowledge."(1888)

Can you identify the author?

Adolescents

I recently looked at two books on raising teenagers. To oversimplify:

-one said that we make the mistake of encouraging teenager independence, treating them like adults when they are actually still kids who need our guidance.

- the other said we make the mistake of discouraging teenage independence, treating them like kids when they are actually adults who need their freedom.

This sort of contradictory advice is common in management and that's what I've been exploring in a number of these blog entries. The natural reaction is to argue for one side or the other (or just to, like Hollywood, decide no one knows anything).

But Dave Crisp's reaction was right "Ah, they've identified the issue!"

If we look at it as an issue to be explored not a choice to be decided we will be much better off. As always we can start by asking "What are the dynamics?"

My intent is not to discuss parenting but to explore how to approach this sort of paradox/polarity that we run into so often. In this case, having identified the issue we might think:
- what aspects of life ought to be independent and which ought to be dependent?
- how does this evolve over time?
- how does one assess if the balance is correct for any given aspect at any given time?
- what tactics/approaches will make a teenager more dependent, less dependent -- what are the levers?

This may all seem self-evident, but the truth is we often get into unhelpful debates where we chose a side rather than diving into an exploration that does not presume either polarity is correct. (for more see Johnson's book on Polarity Mgmt)

The Sift for Talent

Consultants love talking about the war for talent because it implies that companies should hire them to help. However, I don't think companies experience the world that way. It's not so common that a company interviews people for a job and then finds their top choices turn them down because someone else made a better offer (university recruiting may be an exception). More commonly, they sift through mounds of applications and try to find someone suitable, usually ending up with an ok new hire but not a star.

The problem is not battling against a competitor but sifting through a piles of sand to find the gold nugget. The war metaphor doesn't work.

So consultants might want to give the war metaphor a rest. Talent is important, but it doesn't feel like a war, it just feels like a long slog.

McKinsey Changes their Mind

In the McKinsey Quarterly 2008 #1, there is an article by Matthew Guthridge et al. called Making Talent a Strategic Priority.

They note that the original war for talent work "made a strong case for emphasizing recruitment and retention of a company's A players" then go on to say "what's much clearer today... is that organizations can't afford to neglect the contributions of other employees."

They go on to note criticism of the original recommendation to focus on A players. The criticism boils down to the fact that if you lavish attention on the top 20% you piss off the other 80%.

So McKinsey appears to have changed their mind on A players. Does this mean HR should now go to management and say, 'forget the A players, we're now being inclusive'?

There are good arguments for that but then someone will trot out the old arguments in favour of A players and those can still sound convincing. So what do we do?

The problem is that we are treating the problem as a simple choice (focus on A players or not) when the situation is more complex. When this issue comes up, rather than get into an argument over the pros and cons of each talent strategy HR should take the discussion to a different level by saying, "Let's look at the dynamics of this."

In fact, for HR, "Let's look at the dynamics of this" is always a pretty good opening line, even if you have no idea what you are going to say next.

One of the key dynamics here is that every time you focus on A players you piss off the B players so you need to judge every action in terms of the balance. You don' t want to give up on the concept of A players, but you do want to weigh every action and tune it so that the overall dynamic is optimal.

Helen Handfield-Jones, one of the original authors of the War for Talent, has since explained that the dynamic plays out differently in different sorts of job. She says her original focus was on the top 50-100 players in a large corporation. For this group you can and should push the A player focus harder than you would lower down in the ranks. It's a bit like professional hockey players in the NHL knowing they will be held to ruthlessly high standards whereas in the junior leagues you just want to give everyone a chance to play their best.

The key point is to lift the debate to a higher level of analysis and not get trapped in a nasty argument. If HR routinely shows they are able to bring the discussion to a higher, more systematic level they will have more impact on the organization.

Emergent Strategy, Systems Thinking

In my previous entry I noted how an appreciative inquiry approach allowed one to benefit from complex systems without necessarily understanding how they worked. Emergent strategy is similar. (If you are interested in strategy in all its forms see Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg.)

Most approaches to strategy presume one can figure out what is going on in the complex system of your organization and the marketplace and then plan accordingly. Emergent strategy is more a matter of learning by doing and seeing what works. You may not understand the complex system enough to know why an emergent strategy is working, but that may not matter so much since you do know that it is working.


David
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Problems, Systems Thinking, Appreciative Inquiry

We should be suspect whenever someone points out a problem with some organizational system. For example, someone noting that the centralized recruiting team is not in close touch with the business units--with the implication that we should decentralize.

The "problem-centric" approach generally pays too little attention that any organizational system (program/policy/process/design) has many pros and cons. If you change the system to fix the problem you are just migrating to a different system with its own pros and cons.

Senge of course is famous for encouraging systems thinking but it can be hard in daily mgmt life to use his ideas. A simplified approach is found in Barry Johnson's "Managing Polarities". The basic idea is that if we simply recognize that what we are dealing with in organizational systems are polarities to be managed, not problems to be solved then we are less likely to get into passionate but pointless arguments or worse, swing wildly between different systems forever focusing on the problems each one produces.

(I remember Farouk in Hay Malaysia telling me "In HR you can't solve problems, you can only move them around.")

However, my thought of the day is just to note how Appreciate Inquiry (AI) is inherently more systems friendly. You might think it just inverses the narrow "look for problem" view with an equally narrow "look for success" view. However, what's different is that the problem-centric view encourages often uninformed tampering with a system, whereas AI seeks to extend existing systems.

AI may not consciously understand systems any better than those who are problem-centric but they don't have to, they just try to nurture the thing that works even if they may not understand why it works.

Part timer employees

I was struck by a line in a paper by James E. Martin and Robert R. Sinclair

"These findings fit the proposition that [part time] workers have better attitudes than do [full time] workers because of their limited exposure to the organization."

It rings true, but feels rather sad. Does it imply we should limit the exposure of full timers to the organization?


REF: A typology of the part-time workforce: Differences on job attitudes and turnover James E. Martin and Robert R. Sinclair Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2007), 80, 301–319