Solving People Puzzles

Ever assembled a team that looked world-beating on paper and then had them underperform beyond belief?

Or appointed someone with all the credentials and who interviewed - repeatedly - like a star, only to find within two months of appointment that they are clearly in the wrong job?

There are a hundred variations on this theme, and everyone has these "people puzzle" moments. Where do they come from?

The central issue is that very (very) few of us are able to accurately present who we are - really. So, to take just one of a hundred examples, when someone describes themselves as outward-going or as "a team-player", they really believe that to be true. What can come as a surprise to the individual (let alone their poor manager) is that what they have expressed is their understanding of what is socially desirable - not "how I really am". How they really are may be quite different; so keeping on with our example, some individuals who describe themselves as team-players are actually happiest when they have the opportunity to work on individual assignments.

What makes the issue more subtle is that we will generally try to live up to our view of what is best, so to begin with the "team-player" may appear to be just that. Here's the crux: our ability to deliver behaviour that matches our view of what is socially desirable depends upon our underlying orientation being satisfied over time.

So here's our self-described "outgoing team player" with an underlying need for assignments they can work on by themselves. If we happen to structure their job so that they do get to spend at least some time on individual assignments - 20%-30% even - we will probably never know there was a potential problem, because the rest of the time they will be the life and soul of the project or committee. If on the other hand, we happen to design their role so that every part of their job is collaborative, we will probably get a good start, then declining contributions followed by disruptive behaviour within the group (seen that before?).

So what do we do - make sure everyone gets a mix of team and individual work? No good - our example is just one dimension of many; further more there are people who are the opposite of the case we have used; people who describe themselves as rugged individualists but who need the support of the group much more than they realise. And of course there are those who are more true to label - team-players who largely are that sociable, and individualists who really would prefer to be left to get on with it.

So what do you do? Here's two options.

1. Talk - in depth - to people who have worked for or around the person or people in question BEFORE you appoint them to a position or your team. In particular, run the person's own descriptions of who they are and how they work past these informants, and see whether and to what extent they want to qualify these descriptions. Where you uncover evidence of something else going on beneath the surface you may want to reconsider making the appointment at all. Alternatively you may feel justified to go back to the individual and test out variations on them. "We need you to work on these two project teams, but I was wondering if you could also take on a piece of solo research..." (or whatever the issue appears to be.) Look for the light in the eyes. You may have just saved yourself another horrid people puzzle.

2. Get accurate measurement of your people and take the guesswork and supposition out of the equation. A good deal of my professional practice involves exactly this - deploying diagnostic tools that give an accurate reading of individuals and teams as they really are. Word of advice - avoid tools that only involve self-description of behaviour; after all, that is the whole problem: we aren't very good at describing ourselves.

Mr Incredible

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has remarked on several occasions that he has never managed to draw a strip where someone hasn't emailed him the next day and told him that something even more extreme actually happened in their company. I have had a similar experience working with author and speaker Rob Parsons on The Heart of Success (2002) and The Money Secret (2005) - stories went into the book which could only be used after they had been toned down; reality was just too unbelievable.

A rather frightening proportion of these true stories seem to relate to the personal credibility, or lack thereof, of Chief Execs and other senior managers and the programmes they promote and the statements they make.

If you are the CEO of any sizeable organisation you will likely know from experience that the 20% of what you do that delivers 80% of your contribution to the enterprise is actually - to onlookers - very simple. The decision to go with Black. Or white. Yes. Or no. Up. Or down. Mentoring three direct reports in an organisation of 30,000 employees. Decisions and input that look simple but which are profound enough to still be influencing the fate of the organisation as much as 25 years on.

Here's the rub, and you may well find the way I am expressing it offensive, but here goes:

    for CEOs there are no intermediate points between
    "woman or man of integrity"; and "devious little weasel".

Harsh! But it is precisely because of the impact of those simple and profound acts that are the territory of the Chief Executive, that they enjoy none of the leeway which might be granted to lesser mortals (and don't get me wrong - I am a very long way from condoning moral equivocation for anyone). You either are, or aren't, a person people can and should trust.

There is no such thing as a CEO who is "a bit of a chancer" but such a nice guy that people forgive him or her their pecadilloes. No need for me to name names - you can list 20 names of fallen leaders yourself, people who enjoyed wide acclaim one minute and then brought themselves and often their organisation down when the true nature of their dealings came to light.

It never starts with accounting fraud or insider dealing or clever structures. You either prove or destroy your credibility every time you give and then have to keep your word. Time and time again I go into organisations and hear of senior leaders giving to their people with one hand on a good news day, and then cynically taking more back with the other on a day suitable for burying bad news - and the incredible thing is that these leaders clearly think they have got away with it. Trust me - they are fooling no one.

So what is your reputation among the employees of your organisation? When did you last commission someone to find out for you?

You can be as tough or demanding as you like, or warm and empathetic, but what matters to the people at the coal face is - can they trust you? Men and woman of integrity make mistakes. Some of them will even make mistakes that cost others their jobs. But they will walk away with their integrity intact.

(And not have to spend the next two decades telling fairy tales to the press!)

Building a Better Board

Started writing this as a magazine article, but just in case I never get around to finishing it, here's a summary...

Driving Blind

When my father was in his early 80's and still mentally and physically active, his sight started to go. We discovered afterwards that he had developed small holes in both his retinas.

What was interesting is that for a long time he had no idea anything was wrong. I knew before he did - after riding with him in the car and seeing how many parked cars we nearly hit. He only accepted there was a problem when he couldn't find a pine tree when he was standing right in front of it, even though he had seen it clearly from a distance.

Turns out that that wonderful piece of adaptive super-connective tissue called the human brain copes with sensor failure (in this case, of Dad's retinas) by providing ghost data to fill the gaps. So instead of a figure-eight black spot in the middle of his field of vision, Dad saw a bland extrapolation of whatever was being received by the neighbouring still-functional cones and rods. Amputees often experience something similar - they can even tell you how the missing limb feels.

The question is, was Dad better off because of this compensation? He was spared a disconcerting visible gap - but at the risk of killing himself driving into a parked truck.

Driving the Enterprise

So what is the connection with your Board? It is unlikely, I agree, that any of your board members are as old as my father was or that they could all simultaneously be suffering the same physical degenerative condition he had.

But what then if I told you that when it comes to navigating your Enterprise through the crowded market-place, the average Board is in fact very likely hampered by small but critical gaps in its ability to see? What if every scan by the Board of your business and its environment has small areas where what is seen bears little or no relation to reality? Just how keen are you to drive your organisation at speed into an immovable reality?

Let me give you 3 scenarios to illustrate what I mean, and do so using a simply but powerful analysis of perception, color-coded as follows:

Reds are production, action oriented people. The job needs doing by yesterday.
Yellows are systems, data oriented people. The results already in predict whether or not the next plan will succeed.
Blues are creative, planning oriented people. How things are today is less important than where we could be in 12 or 48 months time.
Greens are persuasive, sales oriented people. Carpe diem - it's a world of opportunity out there!

A 50+ year research project collecting data from around the world and whose results we have used powerefully in a whole range of corporate interventions, has suggested that we all combine all of these perspectives in some ratio or other; however, some of us are most strongly oriented to just one of these, some two or three. A few of us can switch between all four (which - perhaps surprisingly - doesn't make for an easy ride); others are only faintly influenced by any of the four.

1. The one-eyed Board. Strong founders can impress their strength of character so forcibly upon the enterprise that only like-minded individuals can ever make it onto the Board of Directors. "A man (or woman) after my own heart" is a dangerous criterion for selecting Board Members. So for example, the Board of a local power utility in the US whose profile I was shown; nine people who were "Red" almost to the exclusion of any other perspective. My questions were "where did they find nine such Red people?" - and "when do they hit the wall?"

"Six months ago," was the reply. "I warned them that they desperately needed some other perspectives, especially some Blue people who could see the big strategic picture or they would fall off the curve. 18 months later they went on the block in a fire sale."

An extreme case, but a common complaint. Remember, these people - just like my Dad - don't know what they can't see. What they could see was that they were the best team any of them had ever worked on; the knottiest problems were subjected to the laser-like gaze of their combined operational expertise and gave way in a trice. What they had absolutely no way of knowing(at least until my colleague tried to help them) was that they didn't know what they couldn't see, namely that their industry was changing rapidly and that operational effectiveness by itself couldn't save them. They hit the parked truck doing 90. What you can't see most certainly can hurt you.

2. The Different = Complementary Myth. Unfortunately this issue of perspective and perception runs a lot deeper than skill or ability or experience. The implication of this is that you can assemble a group of very different people - an Accounting Partner, a Corporate Lawyer, an HR Specialist, a successful serial Entrepreneur, a Trades Union leader and the Pastor of the 1000-member Church in your community and, while you may indeed have a broad spectrum of experience represented, there is no guarantee that that experience is being moderated to you via the full spectrum of complementary viewpoints. In fact, your apparently diverse Board may have been attracted to your organisation by what is a strongly shared perspective, for example that they all share a Blue concern for the future well-being of your community or a Green delight in the possibilities opened up by your innovations.

Even if - as is more likely - you have more than one strong perspective at work, that is not the same as saying you have complementary perspectives. So for example, your Board might comprise people who are either predominantly Blue or preedominantly Green in their outlook. Doesn't the Blue long view counterbalance the Green focus on immediate opportunity?

Answer - not really. What distinguishes Blues and Greens is a difference in their communication preferences. Greens are direct communicators, while Blues tend to be much more reflective in their approach. So far, so good. But what they share is a focus on people and process rather than on task. So who is bringing a more task-oriented viewpoint to your Boardroom table? The missing Reds and Yellows would supply that deficit; in their absence the most wonderful innovations may be introduced and "sold" to other stakeholders, but who is going to ensure that execution and follow-through matches all the talk?

3. Problem-Framing. Good news, now I am going to tell you that even if you have the most complementary perspectives assembled since the Flood, it still may not do you any good - at least not unless you can help them to understand one another's perspectives. One of the reasons that the "One-Eyed Board" above can be so comforting to have around is that there are rarely any fundamental differences of opinion.

But what happens when you really do have the full complement of viewpoints around the table? Such a Board can easily fall into an established pattern where the same people carry every argument and others rarely speak up. Why?

Problem-solving is not the fundamental activity of any team; problem-framing is. In other words, solving a problem is relatively easy once you have correctly framed it. However, it is in the process of framing problems that our perspectives come most strongly into play.

So you and I can both be looking out the Boardroom window at the pot-holes in the road outside, but you may be framing the problem as a lack of action (a Red viewpoint - "why has noone got on and fixed that") whereas I know(!) that the real issue is a failure to think about why the holes keep appearing - perhaps the road has been built in the wrong place (that's my Blue viewpoint). We turn back to the rest of the Board and simultaneously shout "Get on with it!" and "Stop and think!" - and then turn and look at each other in disbelief. Maybe that happens a few more times, but sooner or later, both of us write the other off as stupid - and one of us, probably me with my less direct Blue approach, stops speaking up. So in a short time we have a Board where you can always be trusted to kick things into action, and I can be trusted to fume silently. Or perhaps you get fed up with my constant "prevarication" and sit in silent frustration while I attempt to paint my picture of where we should be going. Either way, for all practical purposes we might as well be the One-Eyed Board.

Unless, that is, we can learn to appreciate the view point each of us can't see; and that is the mark of any genuinely complementary team. If someone attacks your point of view, I can explain it to them to your satisfaction - and vice versa. That is when a Board can drive down the street with some hope of avoiding parked cars and jay-walkers alike.

No Management without Measurement

In the same way that the only way to establish my father's condition was to subject him to diagnostic eyesight tests, the only way to establish perspective is to measure it. The fact my father had made it safely down the road one more time did not give him a clean bill of health!

The tools for accurate measurement of perspective exist (just ask - jonmason@elaura.com) but what are you going to do with them? How do you build a better Board?

Short answer: recruiting to fill the gaps (using of course the same basis of measurement as a guide to recruitment, rather than individual CVs alone) is the second step, not the first. The first step is to help your existing Board to understand who they already are and identify for themselves the gaps in their field of view. One of the best ways of doing this, after introducing them to the concepts and the actual measured data for themselves and the Board as a whole, is to use this as an opportunity to review recent important decisions taken - not necessarily with a view to changing the decisions unless that is strongly indicated, but as a source of illumination.

"So when I said x, you heard y and that's why you suggested z? That's a big relief - I was worried you'd lost your marbles, old man..."