Culture, by Netflix

Just run across some very interesting presentation which has been a hit for a while, to date it gathered over 15,000 views from techcrunch alone, not exactly “viral” though.  It’s quite lengthy and doesn’t have universal appeal of a singing sensation so I’d say it pretty impressive, especially for the words coming from an HR department…

Confusion Amplified

Finding one’s style of management is not an easy task. Who do you trust, where do you get the guidance, which theory to believe? Some of us try to find our own way, some dive into books and manuscripts, some seek help of mentors. As we try to connect the dots we are distracted by The Myths of Management and if that is not enough the confusion is amplified by urban legends and conventional wisdom. What legends you might ask – let me mention just a couple –

The Legends of Complete Turnaround

I do not know how many times I heard that one. Joe Smith was one of the worst performing employees, always late to work, unproductive, rude… Linda Black took him under her wing and before we knew Joe became a high powered executive, a mover and a shaker. In meanwhile Linda moved on and now she’s turning around teams, entire organizations, planets… Well that might be a bit of simplification / exaggeration but I am sure you recognize the pattern.

I do not dismiss a possibility of a turn around. Things happen, like we see on the Biggest Loser TV shows where fat depressed slobs become extraverted health freaks with shining teeth. What an inspiration! No wonder some managers see their mission to make sure that every loser on their team turns into a winner. I call that a God Syndrome… Who are you Mr. Manager? Do you think you can change people? What a joke! People do not change unless they want to do it themselves. And not just want it… They must have a burning unstoppable desire to change and even then it’s exceptionally difficult, painful, and liable to relapse and reversal.

Five Myths of Management

Management is not a fact based science / technique / process. While many of best practices come from long-term observations of facts related to human and organizational behavior the sad reality is that there is nothing certain about management. We do not know for sure what works and what doesn’t. And “Where facts are few, experts are many.” [Donald R. Gannon] There is enormous number of management theories, techniques, trends, ideas… Picking the right path among those theories is not easy by all means. And to make it even more complex the waters are muddied by common wisdom, dubious rules, misleading tails and legends, sci-fi entertainment, and myths of management… Let me start with just a few of those, the Five Myths of Managment –

The Myth of an Instant Manager

Promoting individual contributors to management positions is a common practice. Most senior member of the team, most organized or most vocal can become manager in one wave of an executive wand. Despite of a well-known phenomena (promote a good engineer to a manager and you lose a good engineer and gain bad manager) many companies continue doing that again and again. Why is that?

The reason is quite simple – a common belief that a title change would make an impact strong enough to make an instant transformation. Most common justification is “Good people step up to the challenge”. You would not hand a scalpel to a software engineer and ask him to perform a simple surgery, would you? You would not ask a business analyst to lend a 747. You would not ask me to coach NFL team… Of course all those tasks require knowledge, experience, skills… Same with managing even at a very small scale. I have to admit that managements is not necessarily a brain surgery, it’s so much simpler, maybe just as old, common and easy as a c-section. So where is that scalpel?

Management: From Dusk to Dawn

As dusk falls the dangerous creatures of the night step outside from their hidings. Moving silently from one street corner to another, dropping no shadows, practically indistinguishable from common crowd the prey on innocent victims leaving impaled bodies behind… Well, even if I could write well I would not dare compete with Anne Rice on her territory, plus I do not know much about vampires anyway, I do know quite a lot about another sort of treacherous creatures – bad managers.

I see bad managers… Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re bad.

Well, some of them know that they are bad and they chose to remain bad anyway. There is an important distinction here, many of these bad managers can become unbad, some pretty darn fabulous, and as far as I am concerned this blog could be the only medicine they need to take…

There are many types of bad managers, let me mention a few most frequent ones starting with most obvious three –

• Non-managers, or as Peter Drucker put it “There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.” Those guys often are easy to recognize: they may have titles, responsibilities, and authority and even though even they are very good at creating appearance of work and looking busy they typically do / produce nothing. They offer no value to the organization and often have zero respect from their subordinates. If they are good at any aspect of managing – that is at managing upward – keeping their bosses informed, happy and whatever it take to stay where they are…

• Incompetent Managers. You may recall the Peter Principle – in a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their “level of incompetence”. There are many reasons for the incompetence; in many cases it’s a misfit, lack of interest, or lack of drive to achieve the competence. In most of the cases the incompetence can be eliminated with one mandatory condition – the manager him/herself should recognize the lack of competence and have the desire to change it.

• Managers with some serious personal issues, or what would be another way to say it? Liars, credit-takers, self-centered morons, and all other creatures… No reason even to discuss: there are some managers who you are much better without.

Now let me mention a few categories of bad managers that nevertheless are often regarded as good ones –

• The DIY Sorcerer or do-it-yourselfer. That is very common situation for individual contributors who has been promoted to management role. As they say “Promote a good engineer to a manger and you will lose a good engineer and gain a bad manager”. DIYers typically jump on implementing tasks themselves instead of using their teams, frequently they can not deliver. They get the team involved late in a game and get frustrated with team “not meeting the expectations”, “not understanding some obvious requirements”, etc.

• Invisible Man…Reminds me of Cake’s song – Never there – “You tell me that you love me so, you tell me that you care | But when I need you baby, you’re never there” Those are the managers who are so busy that their team gets pretty much zero attention. They spent their days in executive meetings and email processing barely ever connecting with the team members…

• The Big Brother and other incarnations of The Micro-Manager. Do you enjoy working when someone stays looking over your shoulder? How do you feel about sending all your email communications to your boss for review and approval before it goes to its true recipients? I can come up with hundreds other examples and I bet you can too.

• Ivan the Terrible wannabes. Have you ever heard about MBO? Managing by Objective? Or MBWA (managing by walking around)? Those are interesting techniques well worth considering. How about MBE? It’s a less common term that stands for Managing By Explosion.

• Policy Enforcer. That is one of the most common management species, especially popular in corporate world whether there is a policy and SOP for everything. The Policy Enforcer elects not to seek the spirit of the document or try to interpret it, instead he or she relies on the policy verbatim and operates in rather mechanical way. Policies usually make a great shield for mediocrity to hide behind…

The list may go on for a while, I’ll stop with it for now. Feel free to suggest other ideas – together we can create a comprehensive reference of bad management…

Laws of Nature and the Need for Management

Have you ever heard about management being nothing but an unjustified overhead? I can’t count how many times I heard it, how many different counter-management viewpoints, ideas, approaches, how much justification and reasoning – developers can self-organize, agile mentality is a replacement for project managers, adult engineers need no supervision, etc. At best management is given a credit or more like a benefit of a doubt for taking care of admin tasks and HR benefits. Most of these arguments I find childish and plain silly. And still once in a while I have to defend the need for management that I believe is not much more than just stating the obvious.

One of the ways to illustrate the need for management is by juxtaposing management to the basic laws of nature.

Let’s just apply Newton’s law of Inertia to the traditional management. If you organize a team, set it on the right path and give it a little push it should go with a constant speed just by the shier force of inertia, according to Newton that journey will never end, the team will go on and on, that is if it operates in the vacuum. Otherwise, the inevitable friction will bring the team journey to the end and likely sway the team in some direction, and here we are back to need for the managers to adjust the course and push the team forward ;)

Well, application of the Newton’s law might be an overly simplistic metaphor. Let’s take it a notch up in complexity and look at the laws of thermodynamics. Without overly complicating the issue the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be formulated as “entropy always increases” or that there is always an increase in disorder.

As you know that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to all aspects of the world we live in. Organizational dynamics are no exception and the laws of entropy for the organization are absolutely identical, quoting Murphy – “Left to themselves things always go from bad to worse.”

Peter F. Drucker formulated it in his rather concise statement “The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance.”

Or one more way to put comes from Dwight David Eisenhower – “The uninspected deteriorates.”

The uninspected deteriorates. Is there a better way to put it? And do you need any more reasoning for introducing managers in an organization? Of course there are more reasons to do so, but that one alone justifies a plenty of overhead…

BTW, the third law of thermodynamics states that you can’t get out of the game – absolute zero is unachievable… That spells like a job security for me :)

CSM Origins

Common Sense Management is the approach to management I’ve been developing since mid 80s. I started with a typical approach based on bytes of knowledge I picked up in college, from my mentors, and classical books such as One Minute Manager by Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, The Practice of Management and other books of Peter Drucker, The 7 Habits by Stephen R. Covey, Coaching and Mentoring for Dummies by Marty Brounstein and a great deal of other classical books, manuscripts, articles and work of many masters. Inevitably my style at some point was very much like everyone else’s…

At the same time most of my skills and experiences came not from the books but from daily exercises in the School of Hard Knocks. Frankly, many lessons from that school did not blend well with my academic knowledge. More and more often I was finding myself in conflict between knowledge and experience, between what I preached and what I really did… And then I run across First, Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Break All the Rules was not an epiphany or sudden change, it was a long awaited confirmation of what I have always thought made sense, something I was doing but was afraid to admit.

Another paradigm shift in my style and approach was induced by The Art of Speed Reading People: How to Size People Up and Speak Their Language by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. The book which I picked by accident while running for one of my business flights opened my eyes to the whole new world of personality profiling with very pragmatic and useful applications. I invested a great deal of my time of learning MBTI® and going through books by many psychologists and HR professionals who subscribe to that and other similar methodologies. I found that application of many techniques derived from those books and studies was exceptionally helpful in managing people and teams.

One more dimension of influence which I have to note has been the work of motivation masters and professional speakers such as Anthony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Herb Cohen, Dale Carnegie and many others.

I started to teach my mangers CSM a few years ago, the full set of classes ended up to be rather significant, probably about 10 full days, and it still doesn’t cover full scope of CSM, plus I continue learn and improve it every day. I hope this blog will help me capture, share and improve CSM overtime.

10 Golden Rules of Bargaining

I covered golden rules of bargaining / haggling in a pragmatic outsourcing post Offshore Negotiations and Rules of Haggling. The post got some traction and later on I decided to use the topic for a discussion with my team in the office. At the same time I wanted to illustrate an approach to building higher impact presentations. The approach know as Presentations 2.0 is becoming increasingly popular and is widely promoted by SlideShare. From my standpoint 2.0 approach has its limitations an as any approach has its sweet spot and its areas on mismatch. Many presentations should never be done / delivered in that way, some can benefit from it immensely. That’s a longer discussion though.

For now let me just share with you the presentation that I build out of a single slide in a deck I used for negotiations training. I have to tell you considering that I knew the topic, had it’s all written up 8.5 hrs of labor it took me to put together the slides sounds quite excessive. I hope that you like the slides though and thus it was the time well spent.