The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

Performance and the Inescapable Logic

One of the most reliable of ancient wisdoms is this: Don't challenge the inevitable. If there is an infrastructure logic to something, go with it. Don't go up against it.

Organizations may succeed for many different reasons. But many organizations fail for one reason - they did not adapt to the logic of the situations in which they found themselves. The logic of situations, from the interpersonal to larger economy, is always implicit - hidden, tacit. You have to figure it out without having the code book in your hand. If one of your lieutenants is gung-ho for your mission, and another expresses overt hostility to it, the logics of the two situations are quite different. If you play them the same, you may lose both ways.

Consider poker or bridge. Each game has a certain logic to it. If you can read it better than your opponents, you might win. It is the same for every competitor in every marketplace. The logic of the situation will always win. It pays to be on the side of the forces that are going to win.

Three concepts to ponder:

1. How good you are at what you do is revealed solely by how well you perform under adversity. Make the logic of adversity your ally.
2. What doesn't make you the best at what you do, makes you ordinary. What makes you ordinary can never make you the best. You can't beat that logic. People have been trying to do that for years.
3. There is no necessary correlation between what people say and what people do. That's the logic. You can play it the other way - but, if you do - you will lose.

Accountability and the High-Performance Organization

Talk is not an accomplishment. It is typically what people do in lieu of an accomplishment. The more accomplishment-minded people in an organization are, the less they have to talk about. Consider these thoughts.

• The less people achieve, the more need they feel to talk about it.
• Communication fills the void left by having no clear purpose, or by failing to accomplish what needed to be accomplished.
• Much if not most communication in organizations is in lieu of accomplishment. Or it may simply be as irrelevant as are the people who engage in it as a substitute for purposeful performance.

Accountability means owning the outcome - not the talk. Accountability requires the competencies required to accomplish what needs accomplishing, and for avoiding those consequences that ought not to occur. To develop a high-performance organization, accountability is the tool that you, as the leader, must wield. You are, and the people in your organization must be:

• accountable for statements made.
• accountable for the promises that were made to anyone inside or outside the organization.
• accountable for an implicit promise.
• accountable for every accomplishment you and they sign on to, explicitly or implicitly, and for the ramifications of whatever occurs as a result of your or their failure to perform.
• accountable for developing all of the competencies required to accomplish what you have signed on to accomplish.

There is no accountability where there are no consequences for failing to accomplish what was agreed to. An excuse is the opposite of accountability. Every hour of every day there are "Moments of Truth" in every organization, as Jan Carlzon (then head of SAS) wrote some years back. In the outcomes of those moments of truth, there is either accountability or there is not. Making it necessary for people to be accountable is simply indispensable to making a high-performance organization.

Six Obstacles to Extraordinary Performance - Do You Know What They Are?

If you don't want to be tripped-up or blindsided by the most common obstacles to extraordinary performance, it helps to know what they are. Consider these:

1. One of the most basic of these obstacles is our compulsion for short-term thinking. We are a quick-fix society. However, becoming really good at anything requires a commitment to whatever it takes - and that includes the investment of time and effort required.
2. A similar obstacle that bars anyone's entry to world-class performance is recipe/panacea thinking. This kind of thinking culminates in your belief that somehow, there is a magical solution to your problems that merely has to be applied - the less effort, the better. Call it modern magic.
3. Closely related is the belief that words can be used to change people. That is, if you use just the right magic words, you can "motivate" people from being merely adequate to being truly masterful at what they do. This is a widely-held myth.
4. If you believe that the answer to your prayers is some how-to-recipe, then you must necessarily assume that people are interchangeable with respect to that recipe. They are not.
5. If you "go with the flow" - the conventional mindset - you will see the world as far more linear than it is. And you will see human behavior as far more controllable by you than it is.
6. Across the range of people we look to for leadership, such as the managers of our organizations, there is a significant shortfall of courage, of vision, of passion, of commitment, and of competence. All these are required for those who would either lead themselves or others. Such shortfalls function as obstacles.

As you consider these obstacles, ponder also these relevant thoughts:

• Most people are okay with the notion of change - as long as it does not involve them personally.
• Most people are satisfied with their mediocrity. In fact most people will work harder at preserving their mediocrity than at anything else. What do you think motivates them to do this?
• And finally, people and their byproducts are perverse. What sort of logic, therefore, is required to provide leadership to them?

Remember, realizing obstacles that can block extraordinary performance is the first step on the path to acheiving it. Would anyone like to add to the list?

On Getting "a Job"

People used to have work to do that they could parlay into a career. Now, it seems, most young people are looking for "a job," not primarily to become proficient at it, but to earn enough money to support their lifestyles outside of work.

This is not something to be condemned. We're not going to change it. It's just the way things are. Nor is this about "the good old days." They really were not all that good.

This is about what's missing in a person's life by whoring this way, and what it is costing our civilization. It has become a lose-lose situation. A person is looking for "a job," a place to put in his or her time with the least possible effort and the biggest paycheck. At the same time, the typical company may be looking for someone to fill some job or another, at the lowest cost and with the greatest hope of ongoing return. We buy and sell everything else - why not ourselves?

The quality of a person' life is roughly equivalent to the quality of what he or she contributes to the life of the community and beyond. Seeing and performing one's work as merely "a job" is demeaning. It is dehumanizing. Children do not gain relevance merely by being "kids" or doing what kids do. They gain relevance by gaining in competencies, by learning - which is where growth of mind and character occur. If a person's "job" does not require continuous learning, both the employee and the organization lose.

We have put so many options before our young people that it may be impossible for them to choose. So they just opt out by getting "a job" or by dabbling first in one thing then another like lifetime diletantes. And it becomes obvious that the quality of their bosses is also diminishing - simply because so many bosses started out by getting "a job" and then being pushed up the ladder by default. How many burger-flippers take that "job" on in order to learn how to own or manage a restaurant?

By permitting this to happen, we have not only spoiled our children, but sentenced them to a life of decreasing relevance and thus decreasing quality of life. The Quakers may have had it right. How well you do your work is a measure of your life.

Maybe I am in the minority here. But I believe there is more to life than just getting "a job."

If life consists of what we are thinking about all day long, then there's not much life in having "a job" which does not engage heart and mind.

Reader, Beware!

Not a new caution, for sure. But the gimmickry changes with the fashions. Recently [and reaching epidemic proportions] writers on subjects such as leadership and organizational excellence have been playing a special trick on us readers. They identify some less-used exemplars of (usually) temporary business success, and write a book explaining that those successful companies are successful because they used the writers’ proprietary recipes for how to do it. Since no one could know for sure whether they did or not, it seems a safe enough explanation. The trick gets somewhat exposed when different writers use the same companies, but different theories.

Or when the writers change their theories and disavow any responsibility for the failure of those once-successful companies. Most of this is by innuendo or implication, of course.

To try to gain visibility or status in the guru pecking order by doing this seems a bit sleazy to me. Since most successful corporate leaders can’t really tell you how it was they became successful, it suggests at least overwrought opportunism to me. I was knew a professor who wrote about business “ethics” who get dismissed for being “unethical.” Duplicity abounds in this market.

Any book that does not attribute a good measure of any executive’s success to luck is misleading.

Any comment?

Performance Evaluations

If I had not seen so much human perversity in my many years, I would be astonished by the fact that lots of people are still doing routine and regular “performance reviews.” As it is, such silliness seems little more than what might be expected.

When I was a child, growing up with my duties on my grandparents’ self-sufficient farm in southeastern  Kansas, we didn’t have “performance evaluations.” I was only about 5 years old at the time, but I knew what had to be accomplished, and I was painfully aware of whether or not I had “performed” as required. My grandparents did not “own” the problem of my performance. I did.

It seems today that we treat our children increasingly as if they were adults, asking their opinions about meals and vacations, and providing them with plenty of money for cosmetics and “spring breaks.” At the same time, we treat our employees as if they were children. We don’t talk to them about what has to be accomplished – that’s the manager’s job. We hire them to carry out a list of activities. Then we spend a couple of hours or so once a year haranguing them about what they didn’t accomplish. Strikes me as being more than a trifle insane.

If an employee cannot assess his or her own performance, we either have an employee without a conscience, or we are playing a stupid game to justify the “manager’s” existence. Managers should not own their employees’ performance. The employee should. It should be crystal clear what needs to be accomplished – both in the short-term and the long-term.

The manager, if needed at all, is there to help and to mentor. But when the manager plays the role of the bad cop, the employees will never grow up. And we could use a great deal more maturity than we’ve got in our organizations and institutions.

The Conditions of Learning: Life on the Farm

When I was but a tad, growing up on my grandparents’ small farm in southeast Kansas, I learned some lessons which have served me well over a long life.

So I got to thinking: where are our young people today going to learn those lessons? Not in school, unlikely at home, not from peers, not from the media or the popular electronic games (although they could learn some things there that I couldn’t have learned). Then I thought – is this just nostalgia for the “good old days.” I don’t think so. For one reason, they weren’t all that good.

But here’s an example of what I mean: Because I was clearly the youngest of the three of us, I had daily chores, usually beginning around 4 or 5 am. One was to draw water out of the well by bucket and put in a trough for the horses, which I had to harness and bring to the trough. I had seen my grandfather (a wiry old Irishman) do it. One flowing motion from dropping the bucket to emptying its contents.

I tried. I could fill the bucket in the well, but I wasn’t strong enough to bring it up. There wasn’t anyone I could ask to do it for me. They were busy with their own chores. So, I knew I had to accomplish the larger task of watering the horses, and that I wasn’t going to grow that much in the next 15 minutes. What to do? I tried filling the bucket half-full. Wow! I could haul that half-full bucket up and empty it. But wait a minute. That meant I had to make twice as many trips into the well with the bucket.

So be it. When it is necessary for you to accomplish something, you had to figure out a way. That’s the way my grandparents lived, always on the edge and up against their own wits. We lived in the real world.

That was the lesson. Most people I meet in present-day organizations haven’t really learned that – including their CEOs. An invaluable lesson. And free.

What we call “learning” today has little or no necessity in it – and it is often not about the real world. What does that predict to?

The Chief Cause of Problems in Organizations Is Solutions

This now-banal homily has a nice beat. But, beyond that, it offers a couple of provocative bones to chew on.

One is that no matter how careful you try to be, solutions to existing problems will invariably unearth or create other problems. Sort of like the collateral damage that accrues from pin-point bombing. You can always guess at the most obvious monsters, just lying in wait for you to solve a problem so they can spring free, jack-in-the-box- style, and scare hell out of you (unless you prefer being stressed out by them). But, one way or the other...

The other bone that may deserve thoughtful chewing is that people tend to identify those problems for  which they have, or can imagine, a solution. This means, in effect, that solutions precede problems in organizations. We have this-or-that problem because someone can imagine that she has the solution to it. It’s a little perverse (but, welcome to the real world).

How do you deal with such paradoxical dilemmas? By thinking and acting counter-perversely. For example, in the first instance you can take the stance that you want to create certain kinds of problems so you can get to where you’re trying to go by dealing with them. Plan the side-effects or end-effects you want, or need.

In the second instance, your counter-perversity means hiring people who have the kinds of solutions that will produce the problems that you want. In other words, be pro-active. Don’t wait for a problem to bite you in the seat of your jeans. Create the ones you want by hiring the people who will produce them. Then, in retrospect, it will be the story of “How you stopped fretting about problems by loving the ones you created.” That could be the vignette that is the center piece of your autobiography.

It’s worth thinking about.

Problem-Solving, Once More

It wouldn’t be worth paying so much attention to problem-solving (a) if it were not clearly the heart of the matter, and (b) if most people hadn’t gotten it so wrong. Not that this will illuminate the rightful path from here on. But who knows? It might help.

The point of this added reconsideration is simple enough: It is that people identify problems according to the solutions they imagine they have available for solving those particular problems.

In other words, and as a very practical matter, solutions precede problems in the scheme of things. People start with their favorite solutions to their favorite problems and work backwards. It is solutions that define problems. Not the other way around. That’s why the actual problems so rarely get solved. With a hammer in your hand, all the world appears to be nails. We wander around the organization like a bundle of solutions, looking for a problem to claim as our own. In any contest about what the problem “is,” bet on the solution that is most likely to win the day.

If a problem doesn’t have champions who have solutions in their holsters, it won’t even be seen. So we  spend inordinate amounts of time and effort solving the same problems over and over again, Meanwhile, the real problems hang around, virus-like, waiting for another opportunity to be mistaken for the one we solved last week. It’s clearly perverse. But what isn’t, when people are involved?

We solve the problems for which we have workable solutions. That’s one reason why people don’t really change much. And why change is so difficult to bring off. If we needed to change we would already have done it, wouldn’t we? That makes a non-problem out of a perennial one.

There’s a lot more to this. But you’ve got to crack an egg if you want to make an omelet. If we think we’ve got a problem, we will put the person having the most experience with that kind of problem on the case. This makes problem-solving a little bit like a Wild West show. There you’ll see in action people who amaze us with their ability to solve a problem they’ve concocted because they can amaze us with the solution. Can you even imagine it doesn’t work that way?

Problem-Solving, Revisited

There is something truly remarkable about the avalanche of blather anent problem-solving, etc. When it first occurred to me, I thought I was missing something. Most of the stuff we’re confronted with about problem-solving etc. is remarkable because it starts near the end of the process. The problem to be solved is offered up as a given. Such as: Here’s the problem. Now here are the seven steps for solving this – or any other – problem.

The problem with this (pun intended) is that the most important step lies in naming the problem. Given that the problem that gets named is the problem that gets addressed, all of this talk about problem-solving etc. misses what is most important – problem-naming. I thought I was missing something. It turns out that there is something missing in most of the recipes about how to do problem-solving.

[Now I could refer to this as problem identification. But that would put the focus on the validity of how it is identified. And that’s largely beside the point. It is whether you are identifying the problem in a way that will get you where you want to go. Problem-naming is not a truth test. It is a test of how well people see the world in terms of their purposes or aims in life.]

Let’s say you’re the CEO. Let’s also say that you ARE the problem. How much time and effort is going to be invested in finding a scapegoat on which all can agree? It seems unlikely that the COO is going to be candid in public about this. I have never seen a CEO arise and announce to all assembled that he is the problem. So you will misname the problem for political reasons.

Otherwise it is sometimes a matter of who is the most persuasive (or most powerful), for those who are the best rhetoricians get to put the tail on the donkey.

But the most remarkable fact of all is this: Most organizational problems get produced or helped along by incompetence. If you took all of the incompetence out of an organization, the number of problems would drop by about 98%. But those who live in glass houses know better than to start throwing stones.

Who, then, given our own shortfalls, is going to bell the cat?