Dan Erwin

Even the CEO Needs Feedback, But. . . .

Over the last few months I’ve been conversing with several new managers about their responsibility for giving feedback. Two issues keep coming up. How do you go about really giving effective feedback? And when should you not give feedback? It’s that second issue that I want to talk about. Sometimes it’s more important than the how-to.

 

Giving feedback can be a waste of time. Especially to someone who’s not ready to receive it or incapable of doing anything with it. More significantly, the downside of giving feedback to someone who can’t do anything with it can create a mess of relationship difficulties.

Sometimes the feedback is simply outside the person’s knowledge base. In a previous blog, “If you need a mentor, forget the expert,” I warn that it’s often difficult for an experienced person to put the cookies on the bottom shelf. Rather than enhance the learning experience, it can frustrate it.

On a personal note
My own experience of being coached resonates. Years ago when I first began to get serious about popular writing, I hired a former editor-in-chief from Harper Collins to coach me. “Hire the expert,” I thought. I learned a lot about the publishing business from him, destroying many of my myths. But truthfully, he was too experienced and too much of an expert to put the cookies on the bottom shelf. And it’s tough for an academic like me to leave academic writing behind without a lot of direction.

Five years ago, I bargained for the services of a 22 year-old college grad in English, a Gen-Yer from one of our top schools. His ability to answer my most basic questions has been and remains phenomenal. I’m a “why” person, and he’s always ready to answer my “whys.” Furthermore, unlike the “expert” editor, my young friend is not fearful of being literally ruthless with a red pen. I’ve shown articles he’s edited to some of my cronies and they tell me the hair on their neck stands on edge just reading it. But it’s done in all kindness and care, with lots of suggestions and alternative ways of going at a subject. The “expert” was too far above me to be of more than cursory help, but my young friend was just what I needed. Though there are plenty of times when my writing isn’t the best, I’m certain his feedback has moved me a long way in those few years.

There are other reasons for not giving a person feedback. Some people are too defensive to gain from coaching input. They have to learn from the school of hard knocks. It’s a tough way to learn, and some never do. One of the delights of my coaching business is that when I’m hired, the client is ready for my services. After a couple sessions, there are no holds barred in the giving of feedback. These clients want to know specifically what the feedback means, why it’s important, and what to do about it. But it takes experience a degree of maturity to get to that point.

Still others think they have all the answers. They just want a quick response from you, and then they cut you off. Maybe it’s defensiveness, but maybe it’s just big ego. But one thing is clear. Just a little feedback often fails to go very far. Furthermore, when some say they “get it,” there’s not a chance in hell that they can do anything with such a small amount of feedback. They really need you to take them by the paw and lead them through the steps of development. At the least, based on the feedback, they need to be able to talk you through the next three or four steps they’re going to take with your feedback. And if you can’t get that much time from them, or they can’t respond with the steps, it’s all a waste of time.

How can you tell when someone’s not ready for feedback?
Of course, the easiest way is past experience. You’ve observed that person for months, even years, and you know it’s going to be a waste. Then too, if you pay much attention to the rumor mill, the difficulty of giving feedback to a certain person gets around.

Some people are obviously and openly defensive. If a person always wants to be right or have the last word in a conversation, you’re asking for trouble. And if endless explaining or rationalizing is the norm in his conversations, that too, is a sign of trouble for feedback.

But as a manager, sometimes giving feedback is required. Take the person to a private office. Ask him for permission to give feedback, or, if necessary, tell you’re going to be giving some feedback. Give the feedback in developmental form. Ask what he can do about the information and what steps he's going to be taking to resolve the issue. Offer your support. And just get on with it. Oh yeah, always check back regarding the change. Especially if it’s positive!

Flickr photo: by pamalamadag

Once More: What Do Managers Do All Day?

Austerity. Employee engagement. Social media. Crowd-sourcing. Entrepreneurial. Social networking. Restructuring. Innovative. Internet company.

Words come and go. The verbiage changes, but how has this changed what managers actually do?

In a recent conversation with a Gen-Yer, just 14 months into his first management job, he downloaded most of his day at my request. He uses different language than most of my exec clients. His context, an internet company, is a lot different than theirs: technology, small appliance, agribusiness, etc. Does that mean that the heart of what he does daily is different than what 45 year-old execs at old-line firms do?

For the sake of audience appeal and to desperately offer newness, I need to be able to answer my question with a big, detailed “yes.” There are a lot of new approaches to management: new frameworks, models and buzzwords. But does the heart of managing more traditional companies differ from the heart of managing internet startups today? Or is the new language just new hype?

The context is different
It took only a bit of reflection to realize that at the heart of what managers do, nothing has changed. Oh yeah, the context is quite different, as are the products. But whether you manage at Facebook, GE or General Motors, the heart of management is action.

Most of us know that the orderly reasoning about managing is intriguing, but fairly useless. Even with just a semester of business, you know the business language, describing how managers are supposed to work. A rational approach to management includes the following: planning, organizing, staffing, coordinating, recruiting, etc., etc. When managers step away from the work, most of them still use the terminology of management. But we all know those descriptions have a lot of fiction in them. Managing, like other experiences in life, is messy. Very messy.

The Gen-Y manager
Listening to that Gen-Yer’s talk about chairing a meeting of eight people where an important and controversial issue was to be decided, I thought about his frustrations. He’d gradually come to realize that managing is not what he expected. It’s all action: 10 to 12 hours a day.

Here are six conditions that are completely reflective of what he experienced. Only the conditions were formulated nearly 25 years ago. Not surprisingly, my young friend said that they were completely identical with his 2012 experience. This is a highly descriptive statement about what managers do and can’t do all day:

As a manager, you “cannot avoid acting.” At each moment of the meeting you are acting. Even letting things go constitutes an action—and with effects you may or may not want. So, you are always “thrown into action, independent of your will.

“You cannot step back and reflect on your actions.” You have to rely on your instincts to react and act in real time, even though you may reflect on the meeting later on and realize or wish that you had done things differently.

"The effect of your actions cannot be predicted.” There are too many paths that any action could lead to, so you cannot always depend on rational planning to find steps that will achieve your goals. Instead, you have no choice but to “flow with the situation.

“You do not have a stable representation of the situation.” Things in the meeting evolve continuously. At any moment, you only see fragmentary pieces. The overall pattern of the meeting is only discernible after it is over.

“Every representation is an interpretation.” Even after the meeting is over, your description of what transpired at the meeting will never be the only one. Someone else will read the meeting differently and so the facts will always be elusive—what one must work with is opinions and interpretations.

"Language is action.” Every time you speak, you are not merely stating the facts, you are acting. You are actively shaping and constructing a definition of the situation and trying to persuade others of the facts as you see them and the action s that you believe must be taken. The rhetorical nature of managerial action cannot be escaped and must be constantly attended to.

That new Gen-Y manager breathed a sigh of relief. He expected his job to be something different than what he was experiencing. It was liberating to talk through these actions. They were pragmatic. His practice is not so much about business hype, but what works.

The more you know and understand a situation, the easier it is to work in that situation. I rarely get stressed by a situation I understand. So, like my Gen-Y friend, I find this description liberating. I’m very curious to know what you think about it.

Note: The six points are from Robert G. Eccles and Nitin Nohria, Beyond the Hype: Rediscovering the Essence of Management.
Photo fm Flickr.com: by **Anissa**

Is Leadership Passé?

Not quite, but you’d better start learning how to “do” collaboration. Competency needs grow out of cultural, economic and organizational demands. And today’s world, more and more, needs the skills of collaboration.

Recognize this!
The manufacturing age, which began with Henry Ford in the early 1900’s, focused on manufacturing’s needed competency: managing. Employees weren’t knowledge agents. They pounded widgets and followed orders, and everyone, bosses and ordinary employees, was fairly clueless about leadership. The only related term was “leader.”

A leader was the next rung up the manufacturing ladder from us peasants (I spent my year off from college—summer 1957 to spring 1958—in a Detroit manufacturing plant. And I was one of those peasants. But, since it was Detroit at the height of the manufacturing age, I made a huge pot of money, got my shit together, and went back to college and graduate school. Astute move.) The ascending order of company hierarchy was peasant (or whatever), leader, foreman, supervisor, then white collar executives who drove big Detroit cars. The leader was merely a very low level manager, responsible for five to ten people and their widget production. He usually drove a little Detroit Chevy, Plymouth or Ford. I had a great leader for my manufacturing education. You might find my experience very enlightening, here.) But the leader was totally a very controlling manager. He wasn’t interested in your ideas. He was not what we think of today as a leader.

By the 1970’s there was a fair amount of clarity on managing. When the explosion of technology in the 1980s demanded a different kind of smarts—Drucker’s knowledge worker—leadership was required to manage those people. Unlike my experience in Detroit, organizations began to realize that we humans weren’t merely peasants or robots. So the talk circled around the need for leadership, the definition of leadership, the differences between leading and managing, and questions of whether leaders are born or made. (They’re made!)

But society, economics and business continue their volatile move into the future. And in today's world, the great need for competency is the discipline of collaboration.

What’s collaboration?
Don’t be too quick to say that you know how to collaborate. Few do. It’s a tough skill to navigate. Like leadership, there are no born collaborators. And it’s very easy to go off the rails when you’re attempting to “do” collaboration, wondering what the hell just happened.

The first major shot across the bow on the subject of collaboration is Morton Hansen’s Collaboration: How leaders (there’s that word again) avoid the traps, create unity, and reap big results. It’s exceptionally good for the first pass at a major business subject. (Although not nearly as much fun as the first major shot at leadership by Warren Bennis. But no business writer can match the fun in Bennis and I’ll be very sorry to see his smarts and literary brilliance pass off the scene. God, what a well-rounded, well educated, highly practical, humanistic thinker!)

But back to Hansen. It takes him 14 pages to get around to defining his subject (He needed a better editor). He talks about it as the process by which people from different units work together in cross-unit teams on a common task or provide significant help to each other. Though accurate, his definition is pretty flat, lacking pizzaz. But, as I said above, there ain’t many Bennises.

Where Hansen is especially useful is his in analysis of what is and is not collaboration, when to use it and when not to use it, and what it can do for an organization.

Why collaboration?
In chapter 2, Hansen lays out his case for collaboration. Though his rationale is simple-minded and obvious, it’s exceptionally important and highly reflective of business needs today. Don’t forget, everything is obvious once you know the answer (see Duncan Watts). Hansen sees better innovation, better sales, and better operations providing a huge rationale for the competency. And he supplies a superb set of examples to explain his rationale. Every organization from P&G and Norwest Bank to British Petroleum.

Hansen needs to make much clearer that because of the knowledge explosion, no single person in business today, no single division or group, has the intelligence to create a product or service ready for the consumer to buy. You’re simply going to have to access a lot of smarts, from more than one place, or else you’ll get beat up badly by the companies that do understand and act upon the knowledge explosion. I wish that was obvious, but sadly, it isn’t. That’s one of the reasons many companies go bankrupt and disappear from the stock market.

Why so tough?
Though I have both extensive education and extensive experience in the field of collaboration it's still tough as nails to pull off. For a number of reasons. We have all these business silos still very much in place and their members aren’t interested in cross-silo collaborating, even when needed. Indeed, collaborators often find themselves in hostile territory attempting to pull off collaboration. Hansen’s comparison of Sony and Apple makes the point exceptionally well.

Another related issue, just as important, is that a huge portion of the business population is congenitally incapable of collaboration. It seems not to be in the genes. It's like strategic thinking. Ninety-five percent of business folk are incrementalists and can't think strategically. The training in collaboration, thus far, is also piss-poor. And long term, when organizations get around to recognizing the absolute necessity for the competency, they may have to terminate some of their folk to fulfill their organizational needs and succeed financially.

Collaboration relationships between business people and their clients is just downright terrifying to many. They have no models for collaboration, no personal experiences of the subject, and frankly, don’t really believe it can be pulled off. But as Apple has proved exceptionally well (in spite of their fascist leader, Jobs), great success in the knowledge economy absolutely requires the competency of collaboration.

It’s plainly obvious that long term, collaborative abilities are going to be more important than leadership. Besides, if you can “do” collaboration, you can "do" leadership. Leadership is merely (that’s right, “merely”) a subset of effective collaboration.

Photo fm Flickr: by starheadboy

Forget What You Think You Know About Gen-Yers

Five Millennial Myths
The conventional wisdom that Millennials--all those under the age of 30--are needy and narcissistic is deeply flawed, says Jennifer Deal.

Deal, a research scientist at the Center for Leadership in San Diego, has a book on the subject. Based on extensive survey research, she says that the stereotypes of Millennials are "inconsistent at best and destructive at worst."

Deal's summary in the latest issue of Booz-Allen's Strategy+Business challenges the five millenial myths that have been going the rounds for several years. My own extensive experience with the youngest generation supports her conclusions. Here's a thumbnail sketch of her conclusions:

Myth #1: Millennials don't want to be told what to do.  The unexpected conclusion is that they're exceptionally deferential to authority. More than the other work generations: Baby Boomers--30%, Gen Xers--30%, and Millennials--41%. The obvious implication is that managers can readily shape millennial employees' behavior. That is, if the millennials understand the culture and know the expectations. Her suggestion is almost too funny, but very true: Millennials even appreciate being told what time to arrive at the office. (The flip side will also come up. "If I've worked 12 hours or more, several days in a row, do you think I can go home early?")

Myth #2: Millenials lack organizational loyalty. Deal's research finds that the group has about the same amount of organizational commitment as the other generations. Her explanation of the myth is that Gen-Yers, who are at the lower levels of the organization, are paid less and have less responsible positions. Their elders are likely to be more invested in the organization because of income and responsibility. It's all a matter of the fact that in your 20s is liable to be the best and only time that you can try on new jobs and careers. Loyalty is a characteristic of age, not generation.

Myth #3: Millennials aren't interested in their work. This is new to me, but evidently the mythology is out there. As the research shows, my experience has been that all people at the lower organizational levels are slightly less motivated by the content of their jobs than higher-ups. They're just not that motivated to do grunt work. This is true of all of us, and especially in our early career years. Most understand that grunt work is part of a job, but a reasonable portion of the job should be interesting. If not, why not find a new job?

Myth #4: Millennials are motivated by perks and high pay.  No more, the research says, than Boomers and Gen Xers. And although you think that handing them an iPad will increase their dedication to the job, it won't. As one of my Gen-Yer friends said, "cool," but it didn't increase his overall motivation.

Myth #5: Millennials want more work-life balance. This myth is "marginally accurate." But as Deal points out, society as a whole now believes that life is about more than just work. Policies such as flex schedules, part of a work-life balance, are perceived to be important by both Gen Xers and Yers. 

Ensuring that workers of all generations are "engaged contributors to the workforce" is far more critical in this world than in the last century. Knowledge is the key corporate equity, not bricks and mortar. Deal has given us a highly useful understanding of the Millennial generation.  

Jennifer Deal, Retiring the Generation Gap (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2007)
Photo fm flickr: Ali Goldie

How Leaders Kill the Joy of Work

Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees,” say Harvard’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. Amabile and her associates have successfully studied the inner work life of employees. And often, the picture is not very pretty.

These aren’t union leaders. This is management. The sample isn’t from the factory floor or your local public school. No. These are business professionals. The objective of the research was to better understand the role of upper-level management. To get at that objective, Amabile and Kramer dug back into 12,000 electronic diaries from dozens of professionals working on important innovation projects at seven North American companies. They selected only entries from diarists who mentioned bosses—868 narratives in all.

Progress: Key to meaningful work
As the researchers remind us, understanding the traps should help execs determine whether they risk falling into some of the traps themselves—unknowingly. And dragging their organization into the abyss with them.

In their book, The Progress Principle, Amabile and Kramer argue that managers routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their subordinates through “everyday words and actions.” They found “that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.” So, they wanted to see whether meaningful progress is on the radar screen. In survey research of 669 managers at all level from dozens of companies and industries around the world, they sought to rank five employee motivators: incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and progress in the work.

Their conclusion, reported in the McKinsey Journal, reveals that most managers and execs don’t act as though progress matters to their direct reports. Only 8 percent of senior executives ranked progress as the most important motivator. Had they chosen randomly, 20 percent would have done so. In short, our survey showed that most executives don’t understand the power of progress in meaningful work. And the traps revealed by the diaries suggest that most executives don’t act as though progress matters.

But back to the first research. The study revealed four traps that leaders fall into—often inadvertently.

• Mediocrity signals. The diaries that the researchers studied were full of references to innovation. Yet, those senior managers were so focused on cost savings that they repeatedly negated their teams’ autonomy dictating cost reduction goals that were primary. By the end of the diary reports, employees were “completely disengaged.” Mediocrity was also signaled by top managers’ risk aversion.
• Strategic ‘attention deficit disorder.’ A second trap, far too familiar for those of us who’ve done much consulting, was starting and then abandoning initiatives, making for an attention deficit disorder. What workers call “the fad of the day.” Of course, if execs don’t have their act together on where the organization is heading, the troops will quickly lose the joy of work.
• Corporate Keystone Kops. You remember those Keystone Kops from the silent films—fictional policemen, running around in circles and bashing each other on the head. Some execs contribute to the “comedy” by failing to hold support organizations accountable, overly complex reporting structures and last minute changes. A chronic indecisiveness.
• Misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals.’ It’s important for organizations to give strategic direction, audacious, relevant goals, articulated in a way connects with peoples’ values and emotions. (Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In contrast, the researchers found that goals are stated in ways that seem unattainable and vague, even empty.

What to do?
Although Amabile and Kramer don’t address it head on, this is a masterful study of the creation of strong motivation. Think about that subtext: leaders must create forward momentum in meaningful work. Leaders who can provide meaningful work for their employees are on the road to success.

FYI: As I’ve worked through these recommendations, thought over their implications and seen their immense relevance, four issues kept cropping up in my ever-busy gray matter:

1. The notion of meaningful work has a long history, dating from the Reformation. Martin Luther and John Calvin both spoke to the importance of meaningful work in ways that haven’t been on our 20^th and 21st century radar screen. But some workers are caught in meaningless work. Flipping burgers is little more than a few bucks in the pocket of a teen-ager or poorly-educated adult.
2. Amabile and Kramer’s conclusion are spot-on. They couldn’t be more accurate. On those occasions where they’ve been implemented, the productivity rates skyrocket.
3. Most leaders don’t think in terms of the subjective or of soft power. Yet when they do, success is often inevitable.
4. When someone asks me why, at my age, I haven’t retired, I have one answer. “I’m having too much fun. My contributions have been exceedingly meaningful for me as well as for others. Why would I want to retire?” Duhhhhhh.

Want to motivate your employees? Make sure their work is meaningful.

Photo from Flickr: Intermayer

IBM's Unique, Highly Successful "Ground Rules"

A textbook case in how to drive change, IBM has been so consistently successful that it is almost boring. Even more surprising is the size of its workforce in contrast to other tech firms: IBM has more employees than Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, Apple, Amazon and Google all put together. Furthermore, only HP pulls in more revenue than IBM.

What’s the secret to IBM’s success?

In an interview with Steve Lohr, Sam Palmisano, the retiring CEO, says that the firm’s pursuit of excellence around four dimensions—ground rules—shaped the strategy and focus over the past ten years. Palmisano boils his ground rules down to four questions:

• Why would someone spend their money with you—so what is unique about you?
• Why would somebody work for you?
• Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography—their country?
• Why would somebody invest their money with you?

These questions cut new territory in the business world in a number of differing ways, providing especially relevant insight into the 21^st century orientation to talent management, careers, and socially responsible businesses. The third, why society allows you to operate in their geography, was rarely considered in the past. Today, although many ignore the question and social responsibility, more are beginning to take notice and get involved. Indeed, Rosabeth Kanter points out six strategic reasons for serving, a highly relevant necessity in today’s world. Palmisano not only read speeches and memos from the founder, Thomas Watson, but he had lunch regularly with Watson Jr., once a month. The Watsons, he says, always defined I.B.M. as a company that did more than sell computers; they believed that it had an important role to play in solving societal challenges. It’s old-fashioned, but it’s motivational, he says.

The second, “why would someone work for you,” has become a significant matter in the battle for brainpower in a day in which the so-called talent war has gone global, along with talent shortages. It’s a reminder that although all kinds of employees are out of work, more and more businesses are having a difficult time accessing needed talent, even in states like Michigan. Skills shortages are widespread. Dan Pink’s comment back in 2001 is even more relevant today: “Talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.” Palmisano found that social responsibility resonated with the young people IBM is recruiting.

A couple of times a year, Mr. Palmisano speaks to groups of elite students whom I.B.M. is trying to woo to its research labs. The pitch, he says, is that I.B.M. is a place where you can make a difference and do deep science.

“You can change the world, and you can compete for a Nobel prize,” he says, referring to I.B.M.’s five Nobel winners.

(Eighty-seven percent of the candidates who were offered jobs by I.B.M. Research this year joined the company.)

Mr. Palmisano’s appeal to young technologists is just one example of an answer to one of his four questions.

The first question, why someone would spend their money with you, goes straight to the heart of business strategy. This is an issue that has gotten much attention since Drucker, and continues to be the beneficiary of much thinking, refining and focusing.

Viewed individually, these questions are not especially unique, excepting the talent focus, but together they are a phenomenal set of ground rules. My response when I first read the ground rules was, “my god, this guy is really a thinker, a great thinker. Not just the typical business yeoman who performs in workmanlike fashion to achieve the company’s objectives.” Taken together, his ideas are client focused, but at the same time, they force a scintillating inward focus upon the operations of the firm. They impact the culture, the strategy, the workforce morale, the commitments of its employees, finances and the clients’ expectations. It’s no wonder that Warren Buffett, who normally shuns technology, to accumulate $10 billion of shares, amounting to a stake of 5%.

"The hardest thing is answering those four questions,” Mr. Palmisano says. “You’ve got to answer all four and work at answering all four to really execute with excellence.”

Finally, it should be noted that Mr Palmisano was not bred a techie, but came up through the ranks of IBM sales with a Johns Hopkins history major. His thinking is highly indicative of the strengths of that liberal arts background. History people are weaned on the big picture, and thrive on the intellectual ideas that initiate and maintain change in a sea of competing ideologies. This critical tool is especially useful for analyzing the sequence of events leading up to massive changes and reformations, and adept at forecasting the consequences of ideas for good or ill. History is one of two or three fundamental critical tools of global human thinking and analysis, and Palmisano’s thinking reflects that background. It’s paid off superbly for the firm over his CEO tenure.

Google Wants to Build a Better Boss

In today's NYTimes, Adam Bryant reports on Google's quest to build a better boss.  A high priority for the firm, Google understood that outstanding bosses are key to the future of the organization. 

Actually, there were no surprises except that the Bryant and the Google team made a very big deal out of the fact that technological expertise ranked last in the survey of employee's desires for a better boss.  Why is that such a big deal?  The transition that practically every person who becomes a manager has to make is to learn that technical expertise does not make for effective management.  It's a tough transition for many, but news?  Hardly.  I've worked one-on-one with technology managers for more than 25 years and I have yet to meet a manager at director, VP or CIO level who thinks that technology expertise is a high priority.  Those who think technology expertise is fundamental for managing technology people really don't understand people.

To figure out what a better manager will look like, Google poured over performance reviews, feedback surveys and award nominations, correlating words and phrases "as only a data-driven company can do."

According to the Times writer, here's the list of Google's Rules--in order of importance--as well as a few management pitfalls it found. 

Eight Good Behaviors

1. Be a good coach.
2. Empower your team and don't micromanage.
3. Express interest in team members's success and personal well-being.
4. Don't be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.
6. Help your employees with career development.
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.
8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team.

Three Pitfalls of Managers

1. Have trouble making a transition to teh team.
2. Lack a consistent approach to performance management and career development.
3. Spend too little time managing and communicating.

[Note: Follow above links to NYTimes article and rules.]

Based on my experience, I'd say the Google employees nailed the issues spot-on.  What do you think? 

 

What Really Motivates Mark Zuckerberg?

Good managers, we are told, know how to motivate their people.  The result of this ideology, of course, is that most managers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do just this.  And inevitably, conference planners schedule conferences with so-called great motivational coaches and managers from business and sports.  All these speakers emphasize the manager's role in motivating people.  

I'm very skeptical of much of what goes under this rubric of coaches and managers "motivating people." As a result I was absolutely delighted to see what the omnipresent Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook had to say about motivation.  

Zuckerberg takes issue with the way he's portrayed in The Social Network, especially that he built Facebook to build a pot of gold.  What he said to a Stanford audience about the movie portrayal and his own motivation is especially illuminating.  They frame it (the movie) as if the whole reason I invented Facebook was that I wanted to get girls or to get into some kind of social institution.  They just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.

In what amounts to an expose of The Social Network, Viginia Heffernan writes in a New York Times article, Network Error, contrasting the movie Zuckerberg with the real guy's motivation.  As Heffernan commented, Zuckerberg doesn't mean that he is free from ambition.  It's just that his struggles and goals are not about notoriety, status or romance.  Quoting Virgil Griffith, she reminds her readers that hackerdom rewards spontaneity, curiosity and ingenuity.  Scientific questions like the creativity inherent in Facebook are deeper and the answers so uplifting and transcendently beautiful that contact with them is a genuine spiritual experience. 

In other words, Zuckerberg and his compatriots in the work world are all self-motivated.  My experience has been very similar throughout all my client base.  The managers that really do well and achieve legendary productivity are superb at identifying and hiring self-motivated people.  They don't spend their time motivating people.

Bob Sutton's "Good Boss, Bad Boss"

Bob Sutton’s new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, is a wonderful book for both managers and their people.  It is fact-and research-based, filled with fascinating stories and interactions with managers from all over the planet, and loaded with very, very useful advice.  On top of all that, it’s exceptionally readable. 

Sutton makes it clear that his basic purpose is to describe what a good boss looks like.  His research and anecdotes intentionally compare “better versus worse” behaviors in order to make the nuances of good managing crystal clear. Bob writes so that you can turn knowledge into practice and develop the needed skills that will make becoming a good boss second nature.    

Chapter one sets up the book, emphasizing why bosses matter, providing numerous examples and the research to support the boss’s importance.  Summarizing Gallup research, for example, Sutton reveals that in a survey of over 100,000 employees in more than 2,500 diverse businesses, “managers trump companies.”     Not only is your boss more important than the quality of your company in impacting performance, but a Swedish study even shows that people with the best bosses “suffered fewer heart attacks than those with bad bosses.”  Throughout the chapter, Bob Sutton presents the necessary ideas to get you to think seriously about your taken-for-granted assumptions about the differences between good and bad bosses.  He also provides some simple notions you can use to guide your reading—and digesting--of the book. 

The major portion of the book, Section II, is given over to what the best bosses do, and includes taking control, striving to be wise, recruiting people with “connective talents,” tying the “knowing-doing gap” together, protecting people, implementing tough decisions, demonstrating needed humility and “squelching your inner jerk.”  

Bob Sutton, a Stanford Business School prof, is almost unique in that he has a foot in two camps: academia and the business world and exceptional in both.  Unusual?  Very.  I’ve got nearly 3,000 business books in my library and when I go through them, they either smell of the ivory tower too much, or are filled with advice from an exec’s own successes.  I don’t trust either.  I’ve learned that the bulk of business advice doesn’t travel.  You can’t apply what one great leader says about his company to your company and your organization and your life.  And you can start on that with Jack Welch. (I must confess that I snickered when a few years ago Jack Welch, rather defensively, wrote that he never told anyone his advice would travel.)  On the other side of the matter, a great deal of academic writers, including many of those in business schools around the world, are too conceptual for their advice to be useful.  Often, it’s just not practical--and it won’t travel either.  Peter Senge, the really brilliant MIT academic, admitted the same—openly--in a workshop.  Sutton, in contrast, is both highly practical and fact-based.  As a result, I’ve plagiarized the hell out of some of his advice and my clients love it.  They use it.  They tell me it works.  And they always want more of his stuff.  And he’s a writer, I’ve learned, that a lot of non-reading business types will read.  His stuff really travels.  And that’s the best test for a business writer. 

I’ve also got a very important warning.  As you work through Good Boss, Bad Boss, you’re going to find yourself tempted to think that what Sutton says is obvious and just common sense.  Be very careful when that conclusion crosses your gray matter.  My experience tells me that it’s wrong most of the time.  And it’s not just that common sense is not so common, it’s more than that.   Take, for example, Sutton’s fact-based insight that “people quit bad bosses, not organizations.”  That’s obvious, you might think.  But the fact of the matter is that it’s neither obvious, nor common sense, nor even useful information until Sutton calls your attention to it.  Why do I say that?  I’ve found again and again that that the notion that people quit bad bosses, not organizations is just not on an exec’s radar screen.  As a result, most execs put up with bad bosses that are doing serious damage to their organization for a long, long time.  They can lose five to ten good people before they finally realize that their subordinate, that boss, is doing serious damage, and finally, they dump that bad boss.  So throughout the book when you’re tempted to think Sutton’s conclusions are merely obvious--and skip over them--be very careful. 

Last, each chapter has at least one list of tips, tricks, commandments, or recommendations that are loaded with straightforward, practical steps to becoming a better boss and employee.  Throughout the entire book is the idea that you’re creating your own path to becoming a better boss.  As Bob entitles that last chapter, It’s All About You.  And although he’s given illustration after illustration of people who become better bosses, in his last chapter he pulls together the most important themes from his book, even prioritizes them for you.  He closes with two acid tests for great bosses.  I’ll let you buy Bob’s book and read up on them for yourself. 

Bob Sutton's new "Good Boss, Bad Boss"

I'm nearly halfway through a galley of Bob Sutton's masterful new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss.  This is going to be a blockbuster.  It's a book we'll all want to devour and use.  I'm already thinking about some bosses who'll want this book and planning it as a gift for them.  These are men  and women who are trying to become better bosses and I know they'll find this very helpful.

You could, I suppose, think of this as a sequel to his last blockbuster, The No Asshole Rule.  But here, he sets out to contrast the differences between the best and worst bosses.   

I really like the way Bob's wife set this up for him.  A boss herself, she wants to know what a great boss looks like.

Some of you might be tempted to say that you know what a good boss is and what he/she would look like.  I'm very, very skeptical of those comments.  It's like saying you know what a good marriage or a good relationship looks like.  I've been around the barn enough times to know that what a good marriage or a good relationship looks like to one person is not what it looks like to another.  Instead a good marriage or a good relationship is good for both parties.  Same with a good boss.  She's a good boss for herself and a good boss for her subordinates.

You'll find a good boss spelled out in detail with plenty of evidence backing up the conclusions, and many highly useful recommendations.

Stay tuned.   I'll be writing about this book on several occasions, teasing you with reasons to add it to your bookshelf and start putting its recommendations to work for yourself.

Good Boss, Bad Boss will be available on September 7.