... they're everywhere, aren't they?
You're on your way to work and you find that there are transport problems: the train is late again. Once at work, because you are late for your meeting - your boss is angry. Worse still, you are not given the pay increase you were promised.
All this, and more, are typical of the every day issues that come up for employees and which managers sometimes have to 'manage'. The emotional twists and turns can be unhealthy for your morale and the energy you need to be successful.
A few years ago I came across a course, "The Power to Choose", by chartered psychologist Graham Price. Research that Price had done with colleagues at Birkbeck (University of London) found that there are three main ways in which people accomplish substantial goals. The first is the well known method of goal-setting: this made up around 40% of participants in the research. The second method was some kind of spiritual enlightenment, making up close to 10%. In the region of another 40% was a third method: people somehow accepting things as they are and their goals materializing.
Price's course explained the working of this third way of reaching goals and dealing with life. The most powerful concept of the course is that you have the power to choose. When you come across a situation that is unpleasant, such as a late train, you can choose not only your reaction to the situation, but also how you feel about it. Too often people let themselves get into auto-pilot chains of thought that lead to anxiety, depression, anger or a range of other unhealthy emotions. If you can get out of auto-pilot, you can put yourself into modes of thought and then action that are more productive.
Recently Price has released an e-mail based version of the course he normally delivers in-person to audiences around the UK. Because email is a more limited form than real life, Price is currently offering this version of the course free. Available at www.helpwithyourproblem.com, I recommend taking a look at this e-mail for anyone interested in taking greater control of their life.
How do you grow a team that is so tightly jelled, that it becomes self-motivated, unstoppable and hugely successful? The technical term for this kind of team chemistry might be 'associability', a concept referenced in Viral Change from an academic paper [1]. The term 'associability' is described as the "willingness and ability of individuals to subordinate personal goals and associated actions to collective goals and actions". This is in contrast to 'sociability', which is related to the ability to socialise. While 'sociability' is useful, it is 'associability' that motivates people and the team to achieve more together than the sum of the parts that make up the team.
One well known self-motivated, unstoppable and hugely successful team is the 'The Black Team' from the book Peopleware[2]. The story is an interesting case study in how people with certain behaviours are selected, then combined together and nurtured through these behaviours - producing the net result of high associability. Some of the key drivers in this story are:
- That people recognised across the company as having behaviours related to being good testers were gathered together in a single team
- This team developed a philosophy, and associated behaviours, of (1) expecting and wanting to find bugs and (2) getting delight from the ordeal they put programmers through in finding bugs.
- The team's growing identity that they are destroyers of software further reinforced the behaviours necessary for the team to succeed.
- Leana, C.R., Van Buren, H.J. III (1999), "Organisational social capital and employment practices", Academy of Management Review, Vol. 24 No.3, pp.538-5
- Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Second Edition, ISBN 0-932633-43-9
- http://a.mongers.org/clueful/20020402-peopleware-blackteam
An interesting excerpt:
Warren Buffett said something similar (from Thoughts of Chairman Buffett), "Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you."
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In his book titled Winning, Jack Welch dedicates a chapter to Change, subtitling it Mountains Do Move. Welch distills his wisdom for bringing about change into four practises:
1. Attach every change to a clear purpose or goal. Change for change's sake is stupid and enervating. People need to understand in their heads and hearts the need for change. This is easiest when the reason for change is obvious, for example bad media headlines. When it is not obvious, it becomes necessary to collect data and relentlessly communicate the rationale for change.
2. Hire and promote only true believers and get-on-with-it types. To find these change agents, Welch points out to look for their characteristics: being brash, high-energy and more than a little paranoid about the future. They tend to be curious and forward looking, asking questions that start with the phrase "Why don't we...". They often invent their own change initiatives or ask to lead them.
3. Ferret out and get rid of resisters, even if their performance is satisfactory. Welch believes it is necessary to get the right people by your side and to get rid of those resisting change. These resistors usually lower the morale of those who support change and foster an underground resistance. They waste their own time in a company where they don't share in the vision - they should be encouraged to find one where they do. Even if they have a specific skill-set, they should not be held on to: they only get more die hard and their followers more entrenched over time.
4. Look at car wrecks.
Make the most of opportunities, even capitalising on other people's unpredictable disasters. It is possible to acquire resources cheaply from bankruptcies, for example.
These practises, though they may seem simplistic, do make sense. As well as point 1, behavioural change in the team should be the priority. From point 2, the person in my team who is embracing change the most is of the type Jack describes - always asking questions about improvements. Point 3 confirms a suspicion I have that if the person who is the biggest resister to change stays on my team, I am not likely to accomplish the change I need. Point 4 is definitely something that I will bear in mind.
A reoccurring theme in the new jobs that I take on seems to be hiring new people to accomplish significant goals. Seth Godwin asks, "Would you marry someone based on a one hour interview in a singles bar?", and then explains that far too often people are hired because they interviewed well - not necessarily because they can do the job well. A bad hire can be a significant cost in terms of resource and investment spent on them that proves to be fruitless. Instead of interviews, Godwin recommends actually trialing potential new hires on the job:
There are no one-on-one-sit-in-my-office-and-let’s-talk interviews. Boom, you just saved 7 hours per interview. Instead, spend those seven hours actually doing the work. Put the person on a team and have a brainstorming session, or design a widget or make some espressos together. If you want to hire a copywriter, do some copywriting. Send back some edits and see how they’re received.
If the person is really great, hire them. For a weekend. Pay them to spend another 20 hours pushing their way through something. Get them involved with the people they’ll actually be working with and find out how it goes. Not just the outcomes, but the process. Does their behavior and insight change the game for the better? If they want to be in sales, go on a sales call with them. Not a trial run, but a real one. If they want to be a rabbi, have them give a sermon or visit a hospital.
Yes, people change after you hire them. They always do. But do they change more after an unrealistic office interview or after you’ve actually watched them get in the cage and tame a lion?
Read More >>In a previous post I discussed the need for cultural change as the necessary underpinning of any implementation of "best practise" and how I have tried thus far to overcome the resistance to change. Without some level of cultural change, the team or organisation becomes stuck in "current practise", not "best practise" and the implementation will not succeed.
In researching this area, I've come across Dr Leandro Herrero's Chalfont Project. Dr Herrero's perspectives on the area of cultural change are a contrast to other thinking, for example challenging the view that cultural change has to be slow and painful.
Dr Herrero's site has a video and a number of articles, but the highlights are:
- Cultural change programmes concentrate on creating new mindsets and attitudes. A lot of time and effort is spent in rolling out new processes and tools. There is also a lot of communication and training, rationalising the logical need for change. In all this, an assumption is made that the new behaviours will follow to support these changes.
- In reality, behavioural changes have to come before "cultural change". People need to be performing behaviours that are specifically "collaborating", for example, and this behaviour encouraged and spread. Once the behaviour becomes widespread, it can be considered that cultural change has taken place.
- In this form of change programme, it is necessary to identify the key behaviours that will produce the required change. These behaviours must be reinforced and encouraged.
- To make cultural change happen across an organisation, it is necessary to take advantage of the few people in the organisation who are connected to many people. These people need to be demonstrating and spreading the behavioural change. Dr Herrero compares this to the spread of an infectious disease, virally through a network.
- The best thing that can happen in this kind of programme is dropping the terms "culture" and "change". People have preconceptions about these labels. Instead, people's natural tendencies to copy well regarded behaviours is used.
It is one thing to talk about "best practises". It is quite another to have them implemented and working effectively within a team or organisation. Since the end of June, when I took a team on to shape and mould into an Operations team, perhaps the most striking problem has been some members' shear resistance to adopting new working practises. This has to be a problem in any organisation attempting to improve.
In particular, I want the team to make notes on their incident investigations. There are a multitude of reasons for this, such as allowing other engineers to review and continue the work if necessary and allowing the notes to be reviewed retrospectively if similar incidents occur in future.
My first and default method for getting the engineers to follow this practise was to tell the team quite simply what my expectations were and that we should be doing with respect to taking notes. This was enough for one of the team of 5 to take it all on board and start working as expected.
I then worked through some problems and showed how this could be of benefit. No further engineers were swayed to this new way of working.
The next step was to organise a "training". In this, I invited the users of the Operations teams - project manager, developers and others who would be using the services of the Operations team. I asked them to tell me what they thought would make a great Operations team. They came up with suggestions like "knowledge sharing in the team", "clear idea of where an investigation is and the process". I then went through how I would investigate a problem using this note taking working practise and how this satisfied their requirements. Almost all the users liked what they saw and approved.
The training had an interesting affect - one of the engineers requested to change teams soon afterwards, leaving a team of 4. The others became more convinced of the usefulness, but after an initial stab at trying the new method, soon reverted to their old ways.
After a major incident, a retrospective was held and some of the same themes re-emerged: the need to knowledge share, the need for more logging/notes on the investigation. These themes came from the team members themselves, yet still behaviours have not changed and the working practises have not been adopted.
During and after other incidents, users have sent emails relating to these same points and themes. The team members have seen these mails, yet still continue to work in the same way.
Changing working practises and creating a working environment where this is possible has now become the major and most fundamental issue. Everything else, such as what kind of things are "best practise" or IT Service processes, is a secondary issue.
I have spent over 6 months in Bangalore looking at how we could get our operation over there significantly more productive than it had been in the the 9 months to then. Before I arrived in Bangalore, everything seemed to be black and white. Now everything seems like shades of grey.
A key ingredient that we lacked 6 month ago was an experienced and talented team in India. I inherited a team of graduates, termed freshers in India. We now had some of the experience and talent that is crucial, but today I realised that this is still not enough.
The developers in India had created a specification and design document for a test harness they intended to build. When the document came to the UK for review, a few emails were exchanged and all seemed happy on the surface. A little further digging when I saw the UK reviewers face to face showed that they felt the entire approach was wrong - this much was not clear from the email discussions. Even with the brightest people working for us in India, it was still possible for misunderstandings to creep through between people and what is intended for the work. When the different people involved do not know each other, people can find it easier not to communicate than to make the effort to do so.
Going forward, the managers in India and UK need to encourage more interactive communication between the teams - particularly through phone and video conferencing. Greater mutual involvement and inclusion of senses, like sight and sound, can only increase familiarity between the two parties involved. If we can get both sides feeling like they are on the same team, they will be more willing to support each other through each other's mistakes.
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