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Team Conflict – Part 1

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Our December article in GigaOm had a brief nod to the myth that conflict in teams is bad.   In fact, practitioner experience and scholarly research agree that there are good forms of conflict and bad forms of conflict.  The good conflict, often referred to as cognitive conflict, is the healthy debate that teams get into regarding what should be or why something should be done and involves a wide range of perspectives and experiences.   Bad conflict, often referred to as affective conflict, is role based and often involves how to do something or who should be doing something.  This of course isn’t to say that all discussions over roles are “bad”, but rather that lingering role based discussions that are perceived as political or territorial can be unhealthy for an organization if not handled properly.

Good, or cognitive conflict, helps teams open up the range of possibilities for action.  Diverse perspectives and experiences work together to attack a problem or an opportunity from multiple angles.  Brainstorming sessions and properly run post mortems are all examples of controlled cognitive conflict with the intent of generating a superior set of alternatives and actions.  Team norms have been shown to have a positive effect on developing cognitive conflict; a culture of acceptance and respect for diverse opinions is more likely to generate more alternatives.   Emotionally and socially intelligent leaders also may help create positive cognitive conflict within teams.  But research shows us that cognitive conflict if left unresolved can escalate to affective (bad) conflict.

Bad (or affective) conflict results in physical and organizational trauma.  Physically, it can leave us drained as the sympathetic nervous system (the same system partially involved in the fight or flight syndrome kicked off by the hypothalamus) releases the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine.   Our blood pressure and heart rate increase, and the adrenal cortex releases 30 different hormones to deal with threats.  Over time, constant affective conflict leaves us drained.  Organizationally, teams fight over ownership and approaches.  Organizations become fractured, and scholarly research shows that the result is a limiting of our options from a tactical and strategic perspective.  The fighting closes our minds to options, meaning we sub-optimize our potential results.

Why is all of this important?  By understanding the sources and results of conflict, we as leaders can drive our teams to have healthy debates and we can quickly end value destroying affective conflict.  Our job is to create a healthy environment suitable to the maximization of shareholder value.  By creating an open, caring and respectful culture we can both maximize cognitive conflict and minimize affective conflict.  By setting clear roles and responsibilities we can limit the sources of affective conflict.  And by hiring a diverse group of people with complementary skills and perspectives we can minimize group think, maximize strategic options and grow quickly!

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Speak in Terms of Objectives – Not Actions

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Have you ever been in a position where a project you were managing was late or over budget? Have you ever supported an application that had a customer impacting service outage? How did your boss respond to these issues? Did she say something like “I want a review of our quality strategy” or “I’d like to see our application rollout strategy”? Maybe they asked for something even more nebulous and less connected to the issue at hand like “Show me our site and product integration strategy”. Huh? What does that mean?

It’s easy for managers to react to incidents and problems by requesting that certain actions be taken by a person or team. The problem with such an approach is that it feels like a punitive action to the people from whom the action is being requested. Maybe the group or person needs to receive performance feedback, but by asking them to take an action you are not really giving them feedback. If your goal is to both provide feedback and ensure the underlying issue is corrected then provide candid performance feedback and explain the desired goal of the corrective action.

Great leaders understand intuitively that they should speak in terms of desired end states and then ask for plans to achieve those end goals or states. Another approach is to use the Socratic Method and ask your team what an appropriate end goal should be, whether they’ve achieved it and how they should correct their approach to achieve that goal. The first is probably the best approach when the team is overwhelmed or you are in the middle of a crisis. The latter approach is best for higher performing teams who have simply hit a “bump in the road”.

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Lower Your Standards and Build a Better Team

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

In the 2008 essay “Most Likely to Succeed” that appeared in The New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell looks at NFL quarterbacks, high school teachers and personal financial advisors in the top firms.  College quarterbacks experience rather high failure rates in the NFL.  School teachers see rather high retention even with varied results; the worst teachers cover ½ of a year’s material in an academic year while the best cover 1 ½ years material in the same amount of time.  Compare both of these with North Star Resource Group, a personal financial advisory firm, which has had over 56% of its advisors recognized by the industry as top advisors.

Gladwell paints a picture of recruiting with NFL quarterbacks on one end and teachers on another.  NFL recruiting is entirely experiential, with performance being personally observed by scouts.  The problem in this arena is that the game is different – the NFL has better, stronger and faster players and the play of a quarterback can’t be determined by simply watching what is fundamentally a different game (college).   Teachers, on the other hand, almost entirely without observation and based almost solely on their academic resume.  It turns out that the complexities of teaching is such that academic prowess is only one skill and others like personal interaction, emotional intelligence, and “withitness”, the ability to control the classroom, are just as important.

North Star Resource Group does their recruiting a little differently.  They interviewed 1,000 candidates, hired 49, put them through a four month training camp where only 23 graduated and then over the next three to four years expects to keep only at most 9 individuals from the original group. While this may seem harsh as we mentioned above the North Star Resource Group consistently gets great performers.

One implication for us as hiring managers is that perhaps the standards for hiring shouldn’t be raised but rather lowered.  Learning from both the NFL and teachers, perhaps we should lower our “offer” standards and evaluate more people on the job with the foreknowledge that we will cut them quickly.  We are clearly unable to predict future success based on past performance in a different environment (different employer, different culture, etc) and academic prowess alone isn’t likely to be a good indicator of job performance.  Clearly a couple hour interview will not net a better result.  Perhaps we should approach hiring, especially in “right to work environments” such as we have in the US more akin to the way we purchase cars:  take the employee for a test drive.

Said more simply, we should hire more people but make the cuts way faster. If you have read and implemented our model of seed, feed, and weed then you’re actually on the right track.  If you’ve allocated 33% to each phase, Gladwell’s hypothesis is that you might get better results with a ratio more like 10% seed, 45% feed, 45% weed. Continuing with the gardening analogy it would be like spreading a wildflower mixture of seeds, providing them with plenty of fertilizer and water, and removing the ones that don’t thrive in your garden.

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Complacency Kills Scalability

Monday, October 12th, 2009

We recently read John Kotter’s “A Sense of Urgency”.  Professor Kotter, of the Harvard Business School, is often thought of as one of the premier authorities on change and has written books such as Leading Change and The Heart of Change.

The book is an easy read and we highly recommend it.  In it Kotter argues that all companies need to have a sense of urgency to succeed in today’s world of continuous change.  Without urgency, companies are doomed and unfortunately most companies do not act urgently.   Instead, they act with the equally insidious enemies of urgency: complacency and false urgency.

Complacency has its roots in past success and is very pervasive.   People feel confident and content that they know what they need to do. Change comes seldom, even while the business needs change rapidly.   False urgency is equally pervasive and is mistakenly taken for a true sense of urgency.   False Urgency springs from recent failures and problems, focusing on short-term results even in the light of long term declines.   Anxiousness, anger and frustration coupled with frenetic activity netting little benefit are all characteristics of False urgency.  False urgency is often mistaken for urgency.

Urgency is rare and critically important.  It springs from great leadership and the recognition that opportunities and hazards abound.  The focus is on winning and in purging the company of all unnecessary activities.   Whereas false urgency is deflating, urgency can be rejuvenating.

In our experience, there are few places where complacency is more to blame than in the failure to scale your product.  You are successful and growing.   Things are going well and you are profitable or well on your path.   The press says great things about you and investors are flocking to your door.   Complacency abounds.   Why would you do anything other than you were doing yesterday? Get ready for failure!

Then when you fail, you look to just fix the current issues.   False urgency sets in and people rush about creating spreadsheets, presentations and meetings occur hourly.  But where is the simultaneous focus on long term needs?   Who is focusing on making the crisis a future success?   How are you ensuring that the processes you need are in place to keep you from having future failures?   Whom do you have looking at all the other limitations within your architecture?   Without the right focus, you will return to complacency and start a cycle of scale related failures that will bring your company to its knees.

Your only answer is to set a real sense of urgency.   The strategy, as Kotter recommends it, is to win over the minds and the hearts of your team and company to the scalability initiatives.   Explain why scale is important in a way that speaks to their hearts; make it about the customer!

Tactically, Kotter recommends four steps:

1) Bring the outside in: Focus externally.  What are other companies doing to solve their scale problems?   Get expert help where you need it.

2) Behave with urgency.  We take this to mean “set the example”.  Discuss scale every day and ask scale related questions.

3) Find opportunity in crises.   As we discuss in our soon to be released, a crisis is a chance for you to make your company better!

4) Deal with No-Nos.  These are the people who say “we’ve tried that before” or “that won’t work here”.   See our article entitled “Seed, Feed and Weed to Succeed”.   You can’t afford to have folks diluting your culture and sowing the seeds of complacency.

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Resonant or Competent?

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

What type of boss or employee would you rather have, one who is in tune with the team or a competent one? While we usually don’t have to make that extreme of a choice it is often the case that we are faced the decision of keeping or letting go a manager or employee who is technically excellent but difficult to work with. Sometimes this is our boss and we have to decide as an employee whether to stay or not. Two theories on leadership that I’ve come across recently have me debating this question. The first is Extremis Leadership from Colonel Thomas Kolditz who is a professor at West Point. The second is Resonant Leadership by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee. Dr. Boyatzis is a professor at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Annie McKee is the founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute, and both are co-authors with Daniel Goleman of the bestselling book Primal Leadership.

A simple blog post cannot fully explain either one of these leadership theories and while they do offer generally different perspectives on leadership there is also a great amount for which they complement each other. I encourage you do investigate and read each book but I will provide a quick positional overview that can spark our discussion. Extremis Leadership essentially states that in crisis situations three characteristics of leaders stand out, competence, trust, and loyalty, in that order. And that competency is by far the most important when people feel their lives are on the line. This is to such an extreme that competency can supersede the individual’s rank, which as you can imagine in the military is pretty strong words. There is a promotional video on his site that shows some of the principles that he espouses put into action as Col. Kolditz takes someone through their first parachute jump. The term Resonant Leader, was first introduced in Primal Leadership and refers to a person who is in tune with him or herself, and the people they work with. They create a sense of resonance in the workplace, so great work can be accomplished. Resonant Leadership explains that mindfulness, compassion, and hope are the key elements to enabling renewal and sustaining resonance in leaders that produce quantifiably better results. Additionally they prevent the leader from burning up and becoming dissonant.

An easy way to compare these theories is using our 2×2 matrix that we usually use to explain our “Seed, Feed, and Weed” approach to leadership. In case you haven’t gotten a chance to checkout the rough cuts version of the book we have an expanded section on this concept of identifying the right team members to reward, coach, or encourage to pursue other job opportunities. Below you see how we have overlayed the theories on the axis that they most strongly relate to. Obviously both strive for the upper left quadrant as their goal but each has a dominant axis in which they utilize to get to the upper left.

2x2

Having been a part of many crisis situations, including some where people’s lives were on the line I can see how competency can momentarily trump all other characteristics. However, a leader who has produced dissonance in the organization over many weeks, months, or years before the crisis can and probably will be ignored exactly when they are the most useful in spite of perhaps having the best plan.

I would put up with a boss or employee who was extremely competent but difficult to work with for a short period of time to get through a crisis. But having to work with someone for any extended period of time would cause me to discount the value of their competency and remove them from the organization. To me there is an inflated impact rate over time. For every day I have to put up with a person, rather than enjoy their resonance within the team, the value of their competency gets diminished.

As much as I’ve pointed out the differences between the two theories there are many overlaps. For instance, the Resonant Leader is required to display competency but additionally must be able to foster resonance with themselves and their teams. The Extremis Leader displays trust and loyalty among their team in addition to their unflagging competency. I think the answer for all leaders is yes to both. From what used to be the Army’s eleven Leadership Principles, notice the first two:

  • Be tactically and technically proficient
  • Know yourself and seek self-improvement
  • Know your soldiers and look out for their welfare
  • Keep your soldiers informed
  • Set the example
  • Ensure the task is understood, supervised and accomplished
  • Train your soldiers as a team
  • Make sound and timely decisions
  • Develop a sense of responsibility in your subordinates
  • Employ your unit in accordance with its capabilities
  • Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions

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