The business leader must ask the question that springboards change. And that's the question that Grove posed to Moore: "What if?"
The question "what if?" will help you open a variety of doors to different versions of the future. When Moore answered Grove's "what if?" question, for instance, Intel marched into an entirely different destiny. "What if?" is your essential tool for reinventing your organization, reassessing your current circumstances using a more forward-looking set of variables, opening your mind to alternative interpretations of current circumstances, realigning your employees to a new vision, and rededicating everyone's passion to a new mission.
The business leader must ask the question that springboards change.
Here are some "what if" questions to try when you're ready to slough off the same old set of problems and take on an entirely new challenge:
What if there's a better answer?
"What if?" is your essential tool for reinventing your organization.
What if there's a simpler approach?
What if there's an entirely different way to interpret the meaning behind this problem?
What if this failure is actually a great solution to a different problem?
What if there is more than one solution?
What if my team was given the chance to rehire me tomorrow?
What if they could fire me instead?
What if all my employees had to reapply for their jobs tomorrow?
What if my employees met our customers face to face?
"What if" questions can be decidedly uncomfortable, especially for leaders who are most at home in realms that they can measure, schedule, and evaluate. The ambiguous landscapes of hypothetical thinking might cause you to worry—hypothetically, of course—"What if I'm asking the wrong question?" or the dreaded "What if I'm wrong?"
The beauty of the open-ended "what if" question is that there is no right or wrong answer. It's an invitation to be wise, to experiment, to see things a different way. To maybe, even, chuck the old business model and take on a new enterprise that will carry you farther into a more prosperous future.
What if your "what if" turned out to be a good thing?
Truth 38
Serving your employees means managing your boss
Before you became a manager yourself, your line of responsibility was pretty straightforward—it was up. If you were lucky, you only had one boss. If things got complicated, you had multiple bosses. But they were still above you on the organization chart. And, ideally, if they had competing demands for your time and focus, they could work it out among themselves before coming to you with it.
Now that you're a manager yourself, you've got bosses all around you. Your philosophy of engagement requires you to take the position that you work for your employees—always making sure they have what they need to do their best work and caring about them personally.
There could be times when your boss gets in the way of your people doing their best work. If so, you've got an unruly boss. And it's up to you to fix that. So here's the paradox. In the service of working for your employees, as their manager, you sometimes have to boss your boss—preferably without getting fired.
Even without meaning to, unruly bosses can make your team's life miserable in so many ways.
They impose a pile of conflicting priorities on your group, frustrating their efforts to make any progress on even a few of them.
They withhold the necessary resources to get essential work done.
They are unreliable with commitments.
They alienate your team from you by making you look ineffectual.
They make them feel undervalued and disrespected by giving them inappropriate projects.
They make them feel that they are serving him rather than working for the company's big picture purpose.
You sometimes have to boss your boss—preferably without getting fired.
There is no simple solution to dissolving the effects of unruly bosses, especially if you work in an organization that's not completely committed to cultivating an engaged workplace. It can, in fact, ultimately prove to be impossible. But bosses are just as obligated to take care of their people (you, for instance) as you are obligated to take care of yours. So it's reasonable to assume that they at least see the benefit of exploring ways you can work together to make the most of your team's passions, energies, and talents.
Your job is to help your boss find a way to help you serve your team.
There's no getting around this. A meeting with your boss is in your immediate future. Call it yourself. That way you have some chance to control the agenda.
Check your own assumptions before going in. Are some of your own issues triggered by some personal, emotional conflicts with authority figures? Are you assuming your boss is just a jerk who doesn't care about your team? Or a spineless person who can't say no to his own boss? Is your problem a perceived lack of respect? Or a fear of conflict that your boss will stop listening to you the minute you bring up this touchy subject? You could be right on all those counts. But it's not your job to judge or psychoanalyze your boss. Your job is to help your boss find a way to help you serve your team, even if it means changing certain disruptive behaviors.
Assume only one thing: a collaborative stance. If you're working for a company committed to engagement, you can count on the fact that your boss is under pressure from above to help you do your job well. If your team's performance is measured by numbers and those numbers are slipping, you both know it—as does the leadership up the organizational ladder. So you're both responsible for improving performance. Now you have the basis for a discussion about partnering for performance improvement. Speak to this mutual need to reframe the rest of your conversation as one between collaborators rather than between master and servant.
You're both responsible for improving performance.
Be specific about what your team needs to do its job well. More time for each project? Assignments that are more appropriate to employees' skills, interests, and talents? A clear, unshifting set of priorities?
In return, find out what your boss needs from you. Maybe a weekly report will provide reassurance that everything is on track. A phone call might be all that's necessary. Or a spreadsheet would show at a glance that your department is already working at capacity on very important projects. That spreadsheet, by the way, could help your boss make a case to the leadership up the ranks that your department deserves more resources and fewer assignments—at least for the immediate time being.
You could be doing your boss a favor with this meeting. It's possible that he's been worrying about how to tell his boss to back off and let him do his job. And you've just modeled a way for him to do it.
Truth 39
Bad news is good news
We might have gone a little overboard in our efforts to create workplace cultures of empowered employees expected to solve all their problems by themselves. True—a dependent employee is not very productive to have around. Leaders don't like to have their concentration fractured all day long by little shards of complaints and petty roadblocks that their employees can easily dissolve on their own. It's one of the manager's responsibilities to encourage employees to take on challenges independently. You grow your organization by growing your people. And that means often making them do more than they think they can.
But you also have to know what's going on in your department. Making your employees solve all their problems independently can do serious damage to the company. You don't find out what's wrong before the problem gets too big to fix (or before it goes public). The solutions are limited only to those your employee can think of all by herself—that self-same employee who might have been the one to cause the bad news in the first place. You miss the chance to put the whole team behind a potential emergency.
The problem is that, as the manager, you're the best one to distinguish between what's essential and what's insignificant. But you can't make that judgment unless you know it al
l. So you must be willing to hear it all. And to that end, oddly enough, the more bad news you hear, the happier you should be about it. Management's full of ironies, isn't it?
Your behavior should never make people afraid to bring you bad news. Bad news is fearsome enough without your people shouldering the added burden of worrying about how you're going to react to it. Are you inclined to yell? Make things bigger and more dreadful than they really are? Do you immediately look for someone to blame? Do you make a big, guilt-trippy show of blaming yourself? Do you punish the messenger? If you do, don't expect to hear anything but the happy stuff.
Making your employees solve all their problems independently can do serious damage to the company.
So, your team has shared the dreaded news with you. And now you have it. Knowledge is power; now go do something with it. It doesn't mean you have to own it all by yourself. You can still make the solution a learning experience—for your entire group, if not just for an individual employee. The experience of arriving at a solution as a team effort can be a bonding project in and of itself. No single employee may have the entire brilliant answer to the problem—particularly if it's an especially complex one. But a group focus can bring up group brilliance without necessarily blaming and shaming the individual who has brought it to the table.
The more bad news you hear, the happier you should be about it.
The solution isn't the only learning here. The even-tempered way in which you handle the bad news is a teachable moment in and of itself. It's easy for your employees to trust their boss when everything is going swimmingly. But when someone has made a terrible mistake, all eyes will be on you to see how you react. This is your chance to teach your people that their trust is well placed with you, and that the way you are treating them is precisely the way you expect them to treat each other (and their own direct reports) should they be on the receiving end of bad news one of these days.
If you receive bad news on a regular basis (not a frequent basis, hopefully, but a relatively regular one), you can be quite sure you're getting the whole story—or one that's close to it. This is your chance to demonstrate to your people that they can trust you with the trouble as much as they can with the celebrations. Keep your temper, resist the urge to blame (at least in front of the entire team), focus on the solutions, and walk your employees through the problem-solving experience.
Assuming that your company isn't involved in a colossal, cross-functional, systemic scheme of fraud and malfeasance, there's a solution to almost any problem that your team can bring you on an average daily basis. You don't actually have to say "thanks" to them when they bring you breaking news that will throw your department into a momentary tailspin. But in the privacy of your own thoughts, you can say to yourself, "Today was a good day."
Truth 40
Trivial conversations are essential
There are those who will complain that cubicles are counterproductive because they give employees little privacy. They need the chance to lose themselves in thought. To process the ideas that came up in the morning's meeting. To practice the new software uninterrupted. To call their mortgage broker. To check their bank account online. They don't need to be overheard or snuck up on. (You know those little mirrors stuck to the frame of monitors throughout your company? Those aren't vanity mirrors; they're rearview mirrors. Who would have ever predicted that one day we'd be driving our desktops with the help of rearview mirrors?)
There are still others, though, who will tell you that there's still too much isolation at work. Every single cubicle in the rabbit-warren of workspaces represents a lost opportunity to share ideas and spontaneous strokes of genius that will propel a project forward. We were trained as schoolchildren that there will be no talking. (Some children were better trained than others, of course.) And, since the classroom was basically our first workplace, we took our behaviors with us as we graduated from the world of laminated beech desk-and-chair combos all in a row and moved into the world of upholstered walls all in a row. The workday has begun; we must all be good children and be quiet now.
Sure, you may have formal meetings during which everyone is expected to deliver updates, reports, and analyses. But much of the real work gets done on the fly—in the hallways, by the elevators, in the lunchroom, by the photocopier while waiting for the guy to please come and unjam the blasted thing.
As the manager, you hear all this undisciplined yakking from outside your own workspace and get this maddening feeling that maybe your department is out of control. But you should welcome that happy chatter—even if it's about such trivia as who won last night's reality show sensation. More work is being done through sharing inconsequential chitchat than you might realize.
Much of the real work gets done on the fly.
Essential data is being exchanged during these seeming wasted idle moments.
Who can be trusted?
More work is being done through sharing inconsequential chitchat than you might realize.
Who can open doors and facilitate otherwise hard-to-get meetings?
Who can evangelize your project to the right people?
Who will lend a consoling ear in moments of panic or crisis?
Who has the to-die-for PDA filled with personal phone numbers of essential people?
Who can influence the leadership decisions?
Who happily pitches in on last-minute crunch deadlines?
Who sees the bright side of just about any kind of problem?
Who will suck the light right out of the sky with negativism?
Who is an electrifying brainstormer?
Who do you need to hide your wallet from?
Who can fix that damned copier?
If you were to actually listen in on those conversations, you may not actually hear the words copier, project, PDA, leadership. You may instead hear the words Emeril, can you believe?, sale, CNBC, Larry King, marinade, monster truck, immunity challenge. But don't let that upset you or drive you to enforce a restriction on talking in the halls.
What you're really listening to is a conversation about trust, creativity, teamwork, process, and progress.
Truth 41
The way you listen speaks volumes
The trouble with running an engaged workplace is that people actually care about their work and what happens to the company. And when they care like that, they're going to get mad sometimes. The other trouble with running an engaged workplace is that you probably have some sort of open-door philosophy. Which means, by gum, when these people get mad, they're going to march right through that open door, plunk themselves down in a chair, and unburden themselves.
A meeting with an angry employee is your chance to demonstrate your commitment to your people.
This is actually an opportunity for you. A meeting with an angry employee is your chance to demonstrate your commitment to your people.
Silently congratulate yourself that your employees are venting to you—You may not necessarily like what you're hearing. But at least you're hearing it. It takes a lot of nerve (and trust) to unload on someone who has the power to say, "Well, then, perhaps you might be more happily employed elsewhere." The fact that they have muscled up the gumption to come to you with their problems demonstrates that they still hold the expectation that you at least care and are maybe able to do something about their issues. (Actively disengaged employees have long ago given up venting. Now they just tell their friends and maybe indulge in a little office thievery or vandalism. So if you're not getting visits from peeved employees now and then, that's the time to really worry.)
If you're not getting visits from peeved employees now and then, that's the time to really worry.
Don't expect them to be reasonable, rationale, or logical—They might have rehearsed their speech before friends before coming to you. They might have made a list of grievances and points they hoped would keep them focused and unemotional. But all that could go right out the window if they're especially wound up. Assuming this
is a rare incident and they are otherwise calm, cool-headed professionals, let it go. Unless they threaten you with bodily harm (in which case, call security), let them let'er rip.
Let them let'er rip.
Listen hard—Don't speak until they have had their complete say. Listen to what they are really trying to tell you inside the torrent of words and frustration. Look them in the eye while they're trying to express their resistance or fury. No matter how confused and confusing they may be, there's something buried in what they're saying that you need to know. If you focus on just hearing them, rather than talking back, you'll be able to keep your own calm and reason through this potentially stormy moment.
Make sure you get it right—When they're done, try to rephrase what you think you heard in your own words, and ask them if you understand them correctly. Give them a chance to refine their thoughts or revise your words to more accurately reflect their points. If they get wound up again and start repeating themselves, calmly say, "I think I've got it, thanks."
Calmly ask additional questions for clarity—Ask them if they have any solutions to the problem in mind. Do they see a better way of approaching the problem? Or a better, more appropriate person to assign the troublesome project to? Is there anyone else they want you to talk to for confirmation or additional data?
Promise them only one thing—That you'll get back to them and when. Don't be surprised if they try to push you for more definitive action. If they have worked for untrustworthy managers before, they might take "I'll get back to you," as manager-speak for: "You've had your say. Now get out." Reassure them that you will get back to them, reminding them that a matter this important deserves some time to think through.
The Truth About Getting the Best From People Page 10