Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Leading Teams

The Bikeshedding Fallacy: Why Trivial Matters Eclipse the Important Ones

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Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also known as the Bikeshedding Effect, is a mental model that underscores the inclination to place undue emphasis on a simple or easily comprehensible matter while ignoring more significant ones.

The term “bikeshedding” originated from a book by C. Northcote Parkinson (who gave us Parkinson’s Law.) To illustrate the idea of bikeshedding, Parkinson evokes a situation where a cross-disciplinary committee discusses the design of a nuclear power plant. Most of the members have a limited understanding of nuclear reactor design. Consequently, they will likely rely on the experts’ opinions on these critical matters.

However, when the discussion turns to a relatively simple topic like a humble bike storage shed for employees, everyone feels the need to contribute. This is attributable to the people’s desire to be recognized as valuable contributors and showcase their competence by providing their thoughts on something everyone can understand. As a result, the committee spends a disproportionate amount of time deliberating on trivial matters like the shed’s building material or paint color while turning its back on critical issues such as how to foolproof the fuel control system.

In essence, Parkinson’s Law of Triviality highlights the human tendency to focus on easy-to-understand matters, even if they are less important, because individuals feel more confident and productive doing them.

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A Tagline for Most Meetings: Much Said, Little Decided

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A one-hour meeting with eight people is an 8-hour meeting.

It’s ludicrous that a $5KK expense budget requires a tiresome justification and sign-off by senior executives, but gathering a bunch of well-paid professionals to dawdle away for a few hours and burn the same money in low-value interactions is totally unchecked. Besides, no one seems satisfied with the quality of the output of these ‘decision meetings,’ let alone committed to following through.

Idea for Impact: Want a better decision? Plan a better meeting! Treat time spent in meetings consciously by emphasizing decision-making over information-sharing.

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  1. How to … Deal with Meetings That Get Derailed
  2. At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It
  3. How to Stop “Standing” Meetings from Clogging Up Your Time
  4. Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting
  5. The Bikeshedding Fallacy: Why Trivial Matters Eclipse the Important Ones

Treat Employees Like Volunteers

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Treat your employees as volunteers—as if they’re free to leave at any time. Volunteers want to connect to a mission. They want to make an impact by investing their time and energy because they want to, not because they need to. Moreover, unlike employees, volunteers aren’t constrained by the command-and-control structure.

You’ll pay greater attention to the non-monetary needs of your employees, and you’ll better align your goals and their goals. You’ll be more intentional, preferring transformational motivation, not transactional motivation.

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  4. Job Crafting: Let Your Employees Shape Their Roles
  5. Teams That Thrive make it Safe to Speak & Safe to Fail

When Implementing Change, You’ll Encounter These Three Types Of People

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'Change is like a Slinky' by Hans Finzel (ISBN 1881273687) To successfully make changes in your workplace, you’ll need to have everyone on board. But don’t try to get them all to accept change at once. Not everyone responds to change similarly; some employees will not react well to it initially.

According to Hans Finzel’s Change is Like a Slinky Paperback (2004,) you must anticipate your allies and adversaries. Determine which of these three groups each of your employees belongs to and adapt.

  1. The Innovators and Early Adopters. Some people love the challenge of change for its excitement and the opportunity to spearhead change. These employees can research the topic, develop prototypes, and act as “change ambassadors” to motivate people further down the hierarchy.
  2. The Careful Majority. Most employees will support change once they’re reasonably confident it’ll succeed. Demonstrate to skeptics what the change will represent and how it will benefit them and the company. Acknowledge concerns—both the spoken and unspoken—and the discomfort of being in unfamiliar territory while focusing on what’s within their control. Eventually, the majority will follow the early adopters’ lead.
  3. The Holdouts. A few employees may resist—and even sabotage—change because they feel uncomfortable about it, don’t believe in it, or can’t see any benefits in it for themselves. If their contentions are worth the time and energy to debate and discuss, make a fair effort to gain alignment on perspective and resolution on position, but be firm with your strategic direction. Get key organizational leaders to give these dissenters reasons and opportunities to get on board, but let them know the price if they don’t accept change.

Idea for Impact: The best managers understand that each employee has different skills, sentiments, wants and needs—and work to put each employee in a position to feel valued and contribute.

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These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions

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Engaged employees are more likely to be effective, stay with your company, and nurture a favorable corporate culture. To gauge employee engagement levels regularly, run a pulse survey and ask these two questions:

  1. To what degree are you proactively engaged in improving the tasks you’re responsible for? Does your workplace actively seek your ideas to make those improvements?
  2. To what degree do the processes that you are working with enable you to be highly successful in your job?

Seek ideas meaningful for improvements from people on the job. Demonstrate commitment to taking significant action and follow through.

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  3. Treat Employees Like Volunteers
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  5. From the Inside Out: How Empowering Your Employees Builds Customer Loyalty

Managerial Lessons from the Show Business: Summary of Leadership from the Director’s Chair

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'Notes on Directing' by Frank Hauser (ISBN 0972425500) Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director’s Chair (2008) explores the parallels between directing the stage and managing projects. The shared themes include ad hoc teams, one-off goals, tight time frames, limited budgets, nebulous chains of command, shared objectives, etc.

Compiled by writer Russell Reich from the notes of British stage director Frank Hauser, this tome contains 130 meditations on casting actors, rehearsing, stage-setting, supervising the production units, and handling critics.

Organized temporally from a director’s initial encounter with the play’s script to its final production, this slim volume is so much more—it’s not just for stage directors.

  • #7: “Learn to love a play you don’t particularly like. You may be asked—or may choose—to direct a play that, for any number of reasons, you don’t think is very good. In such cases it is better to focus and build on the play’s virtues than attempt to repair its inherent problems.” Idea for Impact: Focus on virtues and strengths, not weaknesses. Spend more of their time reinforcing the good performers than dealing with untrainable performers—i.e., you can never remediate grievous weaknesses. Position the person somewhere else where her talents are a better match.
  • #33: “Every scene is a chase scene. Character A wants something from Character B who doesn’t want to give it.” Idea for Impact: Productive relationships with balance and joy call for continuous concession and managing one another’s expectations. Work hard to ensure that all sides feel contented with a negotiated compromise.
  • #73: “Know your actors. Some like a lot of attention; others want to be left alone. Some like written notes; some spoken. Get to know them. It doesn’t have to take long. It’s a good investment that will pay enormous benefits later.” Idea for Impact: Embrace individualized management. No two employees are alike—their temperaments, qualifications, experiences, and backgrounds shape them into thoroughly unique people who’re persuaded, challenged, and inspired in different ways. So why treat them all the same way?

Recommendation: Read Notes on Directing. It’s a worthwhile meditation in managing people, projects, and yourself. Anyone who must get things done through people will find insightful meditations on getting to the core of the narrative, handling people with diplomacy and nuance, and navigating conflict.

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  5. Making the Nuances Count in Decisions

You Can’t Serve Two Masters

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Learning to “serve two masters” and managing multiple supervisors is a vital skill in today’s work world. Organizations have increasingly embraced matrix structures, with “dashed line” reporting (you work under a supervisor who doesn’t do your performance reviews) and “solid line” reporting (the true boss who evaluates your performance.) Do your best to accommodate the latter, but don’t overlook the other(s.)

Further, with cross-functional teams, it’s common these days to have multiple team-based supervisors, each overseeing your work on different projects. If you’re not cautious, it’ll become all too easy for each supervisor to regard you as if you have no other commitments, and you can end up letting them both down.

The key to managing expectations at odds is insisting on boundaries. If you aren’t too careful, you could become totally overwhelmed—each boss isn’t mindful of what the other’s sending you. Each ends up pushing their own agendas regardless of what you already bear on your plate.

To resolve the two-boss dilemma and try to please everybody, take the initiative and get your bosses to cooperate and liaise regularly:

  • Create and maintain one master priority list of everything on your plate. Update it at the beginning of every week, and make sure both bosses have a copy. This should help each understand how any emergent task would jibe with the other items on your list.
  • When one boss drops an urgent task on your lap, refer to the master priority list and ask, “If you want me to do this, what is it you want me to take off the list because I also have three other deliverables due in the next few days.”
  • Establish a daily 5- or 10-minute standing coordination meeting (“scrum”) with all the bosses. In the meeting, point out your current and impending priorities. They can adjust their relative preferences for you.
  • Don’t be the “go-between” and agree to speak on behalf of one boss to the other—especially if they aren’t speaking to each other. There’s much ambiguity, and managing conflict can become a significant challenge for you.

Even if you have multiple supervisors whom you take direction from, you’re likely to have one boss who’s ultimately responsible for their career. This boss will judge your performance and decide about your compensation and promotions. Tell her about your double bind and see if she can work out an acceptable arrangement with her colleague.

Idea for Impact: Remember to maintain good relations with everybody you work with. Personnel changes are widespread and frequent in most companies, and you never know who’ll be your next boss. Don’t strain your relationships with the other.

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How to … Deal with Meetings That Get Derailed

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Refuse meetings that swallow up your time with little benefit. Unproductive talk and time tend to fill the space at protracted meetings.

Cut the meetings you have in half. Cut the time of the meetings that remain in half. Then cut the number of attendees in half.

Show up only if you’re required—not just to be seen, and be prepared with your contribution.

Anecdote: When Andy Grove was CEO at Intel, every new employee, from a production worker to an executive, was required to take the company’s course on effective meetings, often taught by the acclaimed CEO himself. Grove believed good meetings were of such consequence to Intel that it was worth his time to train all employees.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. A Tagline for Most Meetings: Much Said, Little Decided
  2. At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It
  3. How to Stop “Standing” Meetings from Clogging Up Your Time
  4. Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting
  5. The Bikeshedding Fallacy: Why Trivial Matters Eclipse the Important Ones

Books in Brief: The Power of Introverts

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Susan Cain’s bestselling Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (2012) investigates how our schools and offices have an intrinsic cultural bias towards extroverts—they’re more likely to be social and enjoy being in high-stimulus environments.

At a business meeting, for example, extroverts hog the conversation, while introverts are often quiet. Extroverts think by talking and arguing, whereas introverts think and process internally.

I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas. It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They’re valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.

Idea for Impact: Don’t miss out on introverted excellence.

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Goal-Setting for Managers: Set Tough but Achievable Challenges

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Finding the middle ground between setting the bar too low and too high can challenge managers.

Sure, aggressive goals can spark great accomplishments, but they also can induce employees to bend or break the rules in pursuit of those goals, as the Wells Fargo and Volkswagen scandals illustrate.

When employees get comfortable with their usual tasks, it’s time to push them outside their comfort zones. New responsibilities can propel employees to take on new challenges and learn new things.

However, before giving employees new tasks, take away some of the older responsibilities they’ve already mastered. Many people feel they have an unrealistic amount of work to do already. If you aren’t prudent enough to keep your employees’ workloads in check, giving “stretch” assignments can lead to burnout, not growth.

Idea for Impact: Goals that are too high or low can be demotivating. Set goals that are challenging and inspiring but with extra effort, realistically attainable.

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