Eureka!

by Walker Royce

  Precise. I dislike this word because I rarely see it used precisely. Most people use precise when they mean accurate, and too many disciplines use precise representations for things that are rough estimates. This misusage drives me nuts. I shouldn’t blame the word, but I do.

  IMHO. Okay, this is not a real word. It is an acronym or on-line shorthand for In My Humble Opinion. The people who use this acronym are rarely humble. Truly humble people feel no need to emphasize that they are humble.

  Qi and Za. When these two-letter words were added to the The Official Scrabble® Players Dictionary it changed the strategy of the game in significant ways. In my opinion, this is comparable to shortening the distance between the bases in baseball by 10 feet, thereby exploding the offensive scoring statistics and changing some of the beautiful balance in the game.

  Like. This is another overused word, especially in, like, California where I, like, lived for most of my life. It’s, like, such a misused word that I don’t like it. If you are, like, okay with this usage, then you should, like, move to California and work with, like, airheads.

  Bad. Used as in “my bad,” this is a cheap, abstract way to avoid saying, “Sorry, my fault.” Where did this usage come from? It sure sounds lame. Saying “That’s bad” when you mean “That’s good” is another silly usage that seems to come from people who don’t understand the difference between bad and good.

  Analyzing your favorite and least favorite words is an exercise in observation. After you have done it, you will likely want to update it every now and then. I wanted to conclude with this simple exercise because it reinforces the main theme of this book: Observe the way you and others use our language to communicate. View it as an educational pastime and enjoy it.

  I leave you with a final poem as my last puzzle in observation. Poetic license was needed for my final attempt at enjoying English. This poem has a few special attributes that should be easy to detect now that you’ve read this book and this paragraph. Eureka!

  English shining linens in eggshell sheen.

  “Negligees, leggings, high heels,” he sings.

  Giggling, she senses illness in his singleness.

  Lessening his lies is senile.

  Is she seeing his sinning signs?

  She sighs. He is selling silliness.

  His highness is senseless in English!

  APPENDIX A.

  A Team Dynamics Workshop

  In 2002, when I worked at a large software company, we were merging four different groups of highly experienced software consultants into a worldwide team. After reading Personal Styles and Effective Performance by David Merrill and Roger Reid, and First Among Equals by Patrick McKenna and David Maister, I developed a professional workshop to apply what I had learned to the challenge of integrating our team. This appendix provides the framework and results of that workshop as a detailed case study.

  Our four groups of software consultants were managed separately in different regions of the United States and Europe. They generally knew each other, and many had worked with each other on occasion. Although the teams had somewhat different cultures, they shared the common mission of providing high-leverage consulting and selling services to large, industrial-strength software organizations.

  This collection of some of our best and brightest employees included a mixture of high IQ and high emotional quotient (EQ) people. They had diverse styles—the usual mix of prima donnas, workhorses, and competing professionals—and, in some cases, dysfunctional relationships. We knew we had to establish at the outset a strong foundation of teamwork, open and honest communications, and participatory management culture, or this talent pool could run onto the rocks.

  First Among Equals and Personal Styles and Effective Performance provided plenty of material to build a workshop for our management team. Our goal was to accelerate our transition from four separate teams into one team with shared objectives and a common culture. Our approach was to get everyone together, face to face, for 2 to 3 days to accomplish three things:

  Build stronger interpersonal relationships and an appreciation for the strength inherent in the diversity of the team

  Explore techniques for communicating better

  Build the rules of membership for our team in dealing with our clients, our employees, one another, and ourselves. We, the management team, would own these rules and demand adherence to these standards as a community of peers.

  If we were even mildly successful in meeting these goals, the impact, although hard to measure, would be well worth the time invested.

  This workshop was the seed of our group’s management culture, creating a team dynamic that stood the test of time and even survived an acquisition. Our team of managers worked together for more than a decade with low attrition while growing nearly fivefold. We maintained consistent performance measures, steady business results, and an esprit de corps that stood out in a company known for esprit de corps. As we grew, the workshop was repeated three times with different subsets of managers. Each time, the participants saw it as a watershed accelerator in teamwork and improved communications.

  Although it would be difficult to quantify the value of such workshops objectively or in financial terms, here are some observed benefits.

  The workshops provide a great starting point for any newly formed team, organization, or re-organization.

  Their relatively small cost is easy to measure, although their immense return on investment is difficult to measure.

  People always appreciate a concrete investment in improved teamwork, communications, coaching, openness, and trust, even if they are skeptical at the outset.

  As the team leader, you will accelerate your knowledge of the team and your ability to communicate with them by preparing the prerequisite work, analyzing the inputs, tailoring the presentations, and facilitating the workshop.

  PREPARATION

  Each participant was asked to do homework to prepare for the workshop. This work involved two simple assignments. The first was to provide a few observations about themselves.

  The proudest result (personal or professional) they had achieved

  A significant shortcoming they wanted to work to overcome, to increase their contribution to the team

  An embarrassing moment in their professional life

  Participants provided this information to the facilitator. They were told that the information would be presented at the workshop to see how much group members already knew about each other. They were told to provide meaningful responses about themselves that were not well known by all the participants so that they could learn more about each another.

  The second assignment was for each participant to review a two-page introduction on social styles, and then to assess their own social style and those of the other participants. If they did not know another participant well enough to have an opinion on their style, they were to leave that assessment blank.

  Participants were told that we would compare everyone’s views of themselves and others during the workshop, to see how well they aligned. There were no right or wrong answers. The purpose of the exercise was to learn and reflect on how they saw their own style and how others saw it. Assessing and discussing the diversity of styles and the perceptions of others helped us build stronger interpersonal relationships and therefore a stronger team.

  It was surprising how many of the participants were uncomfortable with assessing themselves and others. Engineers are notoriously apprehensive about their soft skills, and this workshop had a touchy-feely quality that made many of them skeptical and defensive. It took a fair amount of discussion and cajoling to convince everyone that this would be a productive exercise.

  This preparatory work was well worth the time it took. Many of the discussions prompted by the skeptics ended up being great coaching sessions, with honest self-reflection. Figure A-1 synthesizes the preparatory work and illustrates the range of social styles across the participants.

  FIGURE A-1. Results of So
cial Style Survey of Workshop Participants

  Because this workshop was for software engineering leaders and managers, it was not surprising that the team was composed of more driver styles and analytical styles. The data prompted some eye-opening discussions. Here are a few observations.

  • Four of the 16 people were judged to be a different style than they judged themselves to be. These were pretty senior people, who should have been mature enough to self-assess accurately. They struggled with their identities in the team, and three of them were the most difficult people to manage and coach.

  • On average, most people assessed about half of the individuals the same as the team consensus.

  • The most capable managers assessed people more accurately.

  WORKSHOP AGENDA, MATERIAL, AND RESULTS

  The workshop was scheduled for a day and a half, with time to interact during breaks, lunch, and dinner. The agenda was roughly as follows.

  The sessions were light on presentations and rich with topics for discussions. An exercise where the teams would interact and construct material for discussion and team consensus was built into each morning and afternoon session.

  Introductions and Goals

  It was important for the introduction to set the right tone of openness and trust. Although many participants knew each other well, some knew each other only by reputation. The introduction emphasized that the workshop was experimental and would succeed or flop based on our ability to open up and establish trust as a team with a common purpose. Everyone knew that a big state change was in process—namely, a formal reorganization—so the stakes were high for everyone.

  Practicing what you preach is a powerful motivator, especially for the leader and facilitator, so I began by demonstrating my own openness. I posed a question, and then answered it.

  “Why am I subjecting us to this fiasco? It came from you.”

  We had recently completed a 360-degree performance assessment where 10 of my colleagues, subordinate managers, and technical leaders (all of them workshop participants) were asked to assess my skills and attributes. The most glaring need for improvement that the survey results highlighted was my mentoring of others; my own perception was similar. This is a common weakness of managers in high-tech fields. I told the team that I had read a couple of books on coaching and teamwork, and had built this workshop as a means of pushing myself into the “coaching pool.” Not only did I need to become a better trusted advisor, I needed each of them to become one too.

  I presented the following hypotheses as the needs for the workshop. The general consensus was that these rang true for all the participants.

  High-performance individuals have many characteristics that are barriers to being even more successful as a team.

  Our team dynamics and growth profile demanded a high level of trust to succeed.

  We all had high IQs, but not many of us had a high EQ, especially as a team.

  I presented the outcomes I expected from the workshop:

  A better understanding of each other and our diverse strengths and weaknesses

  Increased teamwork and trust among team members and shared leadership

  Consensus on the “rules of membership” for our management team.

  After this introduction, everyone was more comfortable. The air was only half as thick as when we started.

  Exercise: Who are We?

  As the facilitator, I had edited everyone’s responses to their proudest moment, their significant shortcoming, and their most embarrassing moment into a handout. The exercise I used to start off the workshop was simple, and I posed it as a puzzle (of course!). Each participant tried to determine which row in the table corresponded to each of the participants. We gave everyone 20 minutes to make their speculative assessments. To provide some incentive for giving it their best effort and to stoke the competitive natures of the workshop participants, $50 was offered to the person (or people) who got the most right answers. The 20 minutes of intense thought was broken up by occasional snickers and sly comments by a few wise guys looking for some hint of who was who. A few good shushes kept the room focused.

  We then began exposing identities. Each person was asked to identify their row in the table and to describe a little more of the context around their accomplishment, weakness, and embarrassing moment. Even the most introverted engineers in the room enjoyed sharing personal insights, and a few verbal jabs opened up the atmosphere surprisingly well. Two people tied for getting the most right (10) and shared the $50. This exercise proved to be a great ice breaker for the workshop because the participants learned a little more about each another.

  In the discussion afterwards, we answered two questions:

  Did we learn a little more about each other?

  Did we take some personal risk?

  Everyone felt they had gained some insight, although most thought it was trivial and of marginal value. Someone noted that they would have preferred performing this exercise before being assigned to assess social styles because they saw some things in people that they hadn’t seen outside of work. This was a breakthrough insight, and a few people were anxious to change their assessments.

  On the second question, about taking personal risk, there was a broad spectrum of responses. Most participants felt that they had responded to the questionnaire with substantial caution because they didn’t know some of the other participants well enough. This led to a great discussion about trust. We observed that if you trust other people, you are much more willing to risk being more open with them. And if someone is open with you, you tend to trust them more.

  We came to the conclusion that communicating openly builds trust, empathy, and intimacy.

  • Trust: reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of other people

  • Empathy: understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives

  • Intimacy: the quality of feeling comfortable, close, or familiar with another person

  This discussion led to a need for everyone to understand better each other’s strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, and diverse motivations and styles.

  The last discussion topic of this exercise was about establishing a “setbacks are OK” attitude that reduces individual vulnerability. Our high-technology world requires a tremendous amount of pioneering and trial-and-error discovery. (Although this is true of many endeavors, it is particularly true for software development.) If we are all going to feel safe with each other, we must know that mistakes are going to be made and the team must learn, forgive, and move on.

  Styles and Coaching

  Everyone was anxious for the next discussion topic: social styles. Having studied the social styles quite a bit, I could just imagine the four different questions that were going through everyone’s mind:

  The Drivers wanted to know: What were the results of the exercise?

  The Analytics were pondering: Is there enough scientific data to support this model?

  The Amiables wondered: Why can’t we just accept people as they are, without labels?

  The Expressives asked themselves: Who will see these results?

  We discussed each style and unfolded the team’s results (shown in Figure A-1) in front of everyone. It was incredible how much more comfortable the audience became. A few people genuinely could not believe the styles that others had judged them to be. But as they saw their own assessments and the team consensus, most moved to a perspective of, “Wow! There is something here that I could use.”

  The discussions resulted in some interesting outcomes and observations.

  The main point was well understood: People have diverse styles, and when two people interact, they can be more comfortable (and less tense) if both people recognize and adjust to each other’s style.

  Although there are no prescriptions, there are many patterns for simple adjustments in style that can make a difference.

  Everyone had a few anecdotes on why some past conversation or relationship was ver
y tense or very comfortable.

  People who judged their style differently than the team consensus had their eyes opened in a meaningful way. Each expressed and demonstrated a noticeable change in attitude and behavior in the days and weeks that followed.

  Although the discussions bordered on being uncomfortable—everyone dislikes being pigeonholed—the participants had empathy for one another’s discomfort. They were all experiencing roughly the same feelings. Consequently, it was easy for them to open up and discuss honestly how they felt.

  As the leader of this team, I was overwhelmed by the positive results I saw. These capable individuals had opened up their communications channels and let trust grow. They already had competence and integrity going for them; their communications skills had been the weakest link.

  As anecdotal evidence of the value of this workshop, two of the participants chose to run similar workshops a few years later as they inherited new, growing organizations. The outcomes were similar, and our three organizations have strong reputations for esprit de corps, trust, effective business results, and low attrition.

  Leadership, Trust, and Teamwork

  Our next discussion topics focused on establishing a common understanding of what we were all looking for in leaders and highly effective teams. These integrated topics provoked a lively discussion. The results follow.

  What does a leader need to do?

  • Motivate

  Create energy and excitement

  Encourage creativity as well as routine high performance