I suppose it makes sense that people are the most challenging aspect of running an innovation services firm like Atomic Object. Even when you take away the obviously critical people we call clients, my greatest struggles, the peaks of my happiness, and the valleys of my despair, can mostly be attributed to the amazing people we employ. Operations, finances, strategy, sales, facilities, technical practices — these challenges are as nothing compared to leading and managing people.
My personal management style is consultative, collaborative, and participative. Talking through problems and opportunities with other people is a natural part of my decision making process. I feel like we make better decisions together than I would alone. Even when it comes down to a decision I alone make, I seek other’s perspectives and ideas beforehand. This style requires my employees to engage in complex issues, question me, take time to understand, and sometimes disagree with me. I want to make it clear, the upsides of working with people willing to seriously engage like this far outweigh the downsides, but at times I experience frustration along the way.
So you need independent thinkers to get to the best decisions. But what if you’re king? Tom Petty has it that being king is a pretty sweet gig:
It’s good to be king and have your own way
Get a feeling of peace at the end of the day
I actually find more peace at the end of the day from collaborating rather than dictating. Being king makes my style of decision making more complicated sometimes.
By king I mean, of course, being in charge. Owner. Boss. Manager. Supervisor. When you’re king, the talk-it-through, collaborative approach to decision making demands a high degree of trust. If your employees don’t trust you, they won’t tell you what they really think, and you’ll probably hear an awful lot of “yes”. Trust is built slowly, through actions, not rhetoric, and can be destroyed much more easily than it can be built. One way I’ve built trust with my employees is by encouraging a culture of questioning and independent thought as we embrace our work.
There have been times when I wonder if I’ve been too successful building this culture.
A culture of questioning and independent thought is valuable to the extent the thoughts are valuable. With respect to the quality of the decision, there is nothing inherently good about having your own opinion and expressing it. If your ideas are novel or contribute a new perspective to a decision, that’s valuable. But what if they aren’t relevant, and you choose to live in a world that admires personal perspective and beliefs, strongly held and openly expressed? A risk, it seems, in these circumstances, is that you hold to your opinions and ideas past the point where you should be getting on board with the consensus or deferring to those with more experience, broader perspective, or authority. If deferring to other people’s ideas and working to implement them can be seen as a weakness, then sticking to your own ideas must be a strength, right? Unfortunately not. What you risk is inadvertently closing your mind to and showing a lack of respect for the direction of your team or your team’s leader. I resist thinking this is a lack of respect, but that’s definitely how it can feel.
After contextualizing a problem, collaboratively brainstorming, listening and answering questions, explaining what I want — investing the time, in short, to get one of my employees on board with an assignment or course of action — I expect ownership, responsibility and action. When later I hear questioning, lack of ownership, preference for other work, or disbelief in the value of the work, I have to wonder. There’s a time for their push back, for questioning, and for confusion. But having gone through that, and having been given the context and rationale for the decision or task, then it’s time for ownership and action, not resistance or disengagement. Should I interpret resistance as a lack of respect for my experience and leadership? Shouldn’t it be ok, particularly for very young or inexperienced employees, to just say “got it, boss”, and set about solving the problem at hand? I think the answer to this question is obviously “yes”, but when I continue to have to work on motivating and explaining, I wonder if I’m observing a misplaced worship of the culture of independent thought.
It’s hard in these circumstances to not just abandon delegation and do the work myself. When I experience this disengagement, I wonder, is it because people aren’t paying attention? Do they not care? Is it a lack of respect? Are they slower on the uptake than I’m assuming? Do they have ulterior motives? Is it a pressure to challenge for challenge’s sake? Is it a generational difference? Or is it a bad employment match? The answer to the question, no doubt varies with each situation. I definitely don’t have this one figured out. At any rate, it’s a keen reminder that it’s not always good to be king.
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karlinfox
September 17, 2011“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
Anonymous
September 18, 2011Beautifully put. Is that from The Prince?
It seems to represent the ideal for “big picture” stuff. A little harder to apply for some of the more pragmatic and mundane activities of work, perhaps, but a good ideal nonetheless. I suppose you might also extend this analogy in business by noting that not everyone cares for the sea, and some people may not make the boat.
Steve Frazee
September 18, 2011Excellent post. Very tricky stuff.
I hold the opinion that advances in the information distribution have
Anonymous
September 23, 2011Really well put, Steve. I think your observation about the profusion of information is insightful. There are in fact many, many things that I don’t know, and I rely on others to be the master of those details so I can do other stuff. That’s a smart way to work together, it seems.
But maybe this confuses some people about the value of facts vs the wisdom of experience.
Patrick Foley
September 19, 2011“With respect to the quality of the decision, there is nothing inherently good about having your own opinion and expressing it”
Yes, but with respect to the quality of the PROCESS, there is much inherently good about having your own opinion and expressing it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect it is the SENIOR people who can more easily suck it up and say “OK, I got it” to a decision they may not agree with. The more senior (and emotionally mature) people are able to recognize the tradeoffs and complexities of decisions, so they can take the sometimes uncomfortable step of supporting a decision without 100% agreement.
By contrast, more junior people are still learning about things like
ownership – and it’s much easier to own a decision you are 100% in agreement with. Any one decision is “better served” by working with a team full of mature people. But the organization is “necessarily served” and sustained by dealing with the overhead of more junior people and helping them mature. And even brilliant, senior developers can struggle with nagging emotional immaturity (and I presume that it’s quite worth helping them continue to mature).
One of my formative experiences of pair programming happened in your wonderful office and taught me something about this very issue. The first day, I spent 59 minutes of every hour trying to explain to the junior developer why we should do it my way (the right way, of course). He was so stubborn! The second day, I spent 59 minutes of every hour listening to him figure it out and gently nudging him in the direction I wanted to go. He was so much smarter and more creative than I realized! We got WAY more done and had a much more enjoyable day the second day. As the more senior developer, it was MY responsibility to keep my ego in check and let him run with his ideas so that HE could learn (turns out that I learned more too). Does this relate to your issue at hand, or am I missing the point, GNB?
Anonymous
September 23, 2011My experience generally agrees with your junior vs senior suspicion, Patrick. Not exclusively, but definitely more commonly, it’s younger people with less experience in work and life that are the most challenging in this regard.
And yes, it’s certainly worth investing time and energy in them. On a simple tactical level, you can’t do everything yourself, so you need to figure out how to delegate and effectively leverage the help of others.
And I share your point-of-view about the quality of the process and corresponding outcomes being better when everyone can express an opinion. Maybe I have erred too much on the side of encouraging and enabling that, but even with the occasional painful interaction and hassle, it doesn’t shake my overall faith in the approach.
John Rusk
September 23, 2011Carl, you’ve probably seen the book “Crucial Conversations”. They studied people with a knack for dialog and wrote up the results. One finding was the benefit of everyone knowing “How we will decide”. Sometimes its by Command (the boss decides without discussion), sometimes it’s by Consultation (lots of healthy discussion, but in the end the boss makes the final call), or Consensus.
For instance, if you think you are consulting with an employee, but they think you are seeking consensus, then afterwards they may be resistant to the decision because they think you didn’t keep your end of the deal in achieving true consensus.
The authors suggest mitigating this risk by making sure that, for each decision, everyone knows how that particular decision will be made.
Anonymous
September 23, 2011Seen, but not read, John. Thanks very much. I just ordered a copy.
The disconnect between boss and employee on how a decision will be made seems valuably insightful.
John Rusk
September 23, 2011Chapter 9, “Move to Action”, is the one to look at. (The earlier chapters are excellent too, but I suspect Atomic Object is already doing much of what they recommend.)