Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Leading Teams

Employee Surveys: Asking for Feedback is Not Enough

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Nothing undermines employee trust faster than inviting employees to provide feedback about their work experience and then not following up.

Don’t take the employee satisfaction survey results at face value. Don’t discount the importance of the findings by brushing them off, “the data were what we expected” or “there were no real surprises here.”

Show that you’ve listened to what employees are saying. Initiate strategic conversations with selected employees and explore critical issues in more depth. Establish cross-functional teams to react to the survey’s findings. Let the team consist primarily of non-senior employees. A senior manager could sponsor and support—not manage—the team and see an action plan through.

Idea for Impact: Employee surveys, focus groups, and discussions that don’t change how an organization functions ultimately undermine employees’ faith that their leaders really care what the employees think. Close the communication loop.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Employee Surveys: Perceptions Apart
  2. Should Staff Be Allowed to Do ‘Life Admin’ at Work?
  3. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees
  4. Giving Feedback and Depersonalizing It: Summary of Kim Scott’s ‘Radical Candor’
  5. Can You Be Terminated for Out-of-Work Conduct?

What To Do If Your New Hire Is Underperforming

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If a recent hire, particularly one brought into the team with high expectations, isn’t delivering, start by asking the following two questions:

  1. Is the employee in an environment that allows her to perform at her best?
  2. Are you clear on what her personal objectives are?

Only after answering both these questions with a ‘yes’ can you move to consider coaching, reassess the employee’s suitability, and examine if you need to terminate the bad hire quickly and cut your losses.

Idea for Impact: Nothing puts wind beneath a manager’s wings more quickly than asking these two questions when dealing with employee underperformance. Ask, don’t guess, how you can accommodate each employee’s strengths and needs and create an environment that works best for each individual.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to creating a positive culture, empowering employees, and tackling performance problems. Each employee faces individual challenges and has her own goals and preferences.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  3. Why Hiring Self-Leaders is the Best Strategy
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. Fostering Growth & Development: Embrace Coachable Moments

Don’t Over-Measure and Under-Prioritize

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There’s a difference between what you can measure and what you must prioritize.

If you let the data drive the process, you’ll end up with an abundance of metrics that you don’t really know what to do with. Don’t build metrics based on what is easy to measure instead of measuring what matters.

While you might want to track many metrics, you need to prioritize a few of them—just the ones that matter most for your team. Start with strategic goals, and frame the data collection and analysis around those goals. Be clear about these goals in your internal communications.

Idea for Impact: The more you measure, the less prioritized you can be. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to measure everything. Focus on developing reliable metrics and models that consistently link the data to your team’s performance. Measure what matters.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Why Incentives Backfire and How to Make Them Work: Summary of Uri Gneezy’s Mixed Signals
  2. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  3. Numbers Games: Summary of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller
  4. When Work Becomes a Metric, Metrics Risk Becoming the Work: A Case Study of the Stakhanovite Movement
  5. Be Careful What You Count: The Perils of Measuring the Wrong Thing

Why Amazon Banned PowerPoint

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One of the distinctive features of the Amazon management system is its use of the long-form to facilitate decision-making. Jeff Bezos has claimed that banning PowerPoint presentations—more specifically disallowing bullet points for sharing ideas—as Amazon’s “probably the smartest thing we ever did.”

Since June 2004, Bezos has forbidden bullet points and PowerPoint at a senior leadership level. Instead of presentations, teams are expected to iterate an approach to sharing information that involves writing memos of running copy, usually a “six-page, narratively-structured memo.” Meetings typically begin in silence as all participants sit and read the memo for up to half an hour before discussing the subject matter.

Ram Charan and Julia Yang’s The Amazon Management System (2019) reproduces the original email from Bezos explaining this dictum:

Well-structured, narrative text is what we’re after, rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in Word, that would be just as bad as PowerPoint.

The reason writing a good four-page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.

PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.

Using memos may seem counterintuitive in an age when communication is increasingly visual. However, long-form has a way of forcing rigor to think through ideas properly, reconcile viewpoints pro and con, iron out logical inconsistencies, and consider second-order consequences.

Bezos’s approach is brilliant not just because sentences and paragraphs enable a certain clarity in thought and exchange of ideas. It also inhibits some of the usual shortcomings of brainstorming meetings, viz., interruptions, biases that initiate groupthink, and the tendency to reward rhetorical ability over substance. Forcing all meeting attendees to read the memo in real-time prevents them from pretending to have read it before a meeting and then bluffing their way through the meeting.

Idea for Impact: Think complex, speak simple, decide better.

Bullet points and “decks” are often the least effective way of sharing ideas. Having a narrative structure allows you to clarify your thinking and provide a logical, sequenced argument to support your ideas.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Starbucks’ Oily Brew: Lessons on Innovation Missing the Mark
  3. Learning from Amazon: Getting Your House in Order
  4. How Jeff Bezos is Like Sam Walton
  5. Persuade Others to See Things Your Way: Use Aristotle’s Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Timing

Why Sandbagging Your Goals Kills Productivity

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Sandbagging is managers believing they can accomplish more if they lower the bar and set goals their team can easily hit. Sure, managers often purposely set comfortable goals so that there’s room for “under-promise and over-deliver.”

Setting low goals may appear a clever strategy, but it’s a recipe for underperformance. Sandbagged goals don’t demand much in the way of performance when managers already know precisely how their teams will achieve the goals.

However, sandbagging can let teams down. Under-setting goals actually does what it’s created to avoid—teams eventually find such easy goals boring and demotivating. Low goals require little and inspire less, and ultimately undercut productivity. According to this study by Chancellor University’s Steve Kerr and Douglas Lepelley, when goals are fixed “too low, people often achieve them, but subsequent motivation and energy levels typically flag, and the goals are usually not exceeded by very much.”

Idea for Impact: To generate the greatest levels of effort and performance, set demanding goals outside your team’s comfort zone, but not so challenging and unattainable as to break your team’s morale. Aiming to achieve extraordinary things—hitting the farthest target and missing—can often be more worthwhile than successfully hitting a easy target.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Over-Measure and Under-Prioritize
  2. Why Incentives Backfire and How to Make Them Work: Summary of Uri Gneezy’s Mixed Signals
  3. Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize
  4. Goals Gone Wild: The Use and Abuse of Goals
  5. Be Careful What You Count: The Perils of Measuring the Wrong Thing

Don’t Demonize Employees Who Raise Problems

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One of the traps of successful leadership is being surrounded with “yes men.” Your team could hesitate to challenge your decisions, no matter how bad or mistaken they may be.

Hearing what others rally think can give you a valuable perspective. Nevertheless, it’s not really in human nature to invite others to inform you how—and why—you’re wrong. Human nature is such that we all want to hear nice things about ourselves and be reassured that we’re on the right track.

“When in doubt, keep your mouth shut,” indeed

Employees are terrified to speak up owing to the need for self-preservation. The apparent risks of speaking up are very personal and immediate, especially in comparison to some potential benefits to your organization someday. Employees impulsively play it safe.

Even if your employees are more knowledgeable, they may think twice before giving you candid feedback, especially if you’ve demonstrated tendencies of being vindictive, penalizing—even reprimanding publicly or sacking—anybody with a dissenting view.

Disciplining employees who raise problems only exacerbates the problematical frame of mind around a successful leader. It promotes the toxic culture of unquestioned power. As the American general and diplomat Colin Powell reminded in a famous speech at Sears headquarters, “The day your people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either is a failure of leadership.”

Idea for Impact: Cultivate a culture in which psychological safety thrives.

Create a work environment where your employees aren’t afraid to speak up and express their concerns. People will stick their neck out only if they sense a low psychological threat level.

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  3. Leadership is Being Visible at Times of Crises
  4. Lessons from the Japanese Decision-Making Process
  5. A Superb Example of Crisis Leadership in Action

Employee Engagement: Show Them How They Make a Difference

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The sure-fire way to assist employees find meaning and fulfillment at work is to get them to have even a small interaction with people who directly benefit from the work they’re doing.

One research showed that radiologists developed a stronger sense of the significance of their work if a photo of the patient were attached to an X-ray. “It enhanced their effort and accuracy, yielding 12% increases in the length of their reports and 46% improvement in diagnostic findings.” Radiologists typically don’t interact with patients directly—they work in the background providing interpretation services to other doctors.

Idea for Impact: People are inspired less by what they do and more by WHY

How people see themselves and their meaning and purpose in this world may be the most significant incentive of all.

Empower your employees, especially those that aren’t on the frontlines, with direct reminders of task significance. Invite next-down-the-line customers (virtually or in-person) to share meaningful insights, give appreciation, and share feedback. Promote regular dialogue with customers to help stay relevant and become responsive to customer issues as they arise.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. From the Inside Out: How Empowering Your Employees Builds Customer Loyalty
  2. People Work Best When They Feel Good About Themselves: The Southwest Airlines Doctrine
  3. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  4. These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions
  5. The Speed Trap: How Extreme Pressure Stifles Creativity

Entitlement and Anger Go Together

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Exaggerated entitlement could possibly explain what’s driving the recent surge of abusive or violent incidents on flights in America.

We live in a time where everyone seems hypervigilant to the point where even a slight snub can be taken as an act of deliberate aggression—either reactively or without provocation. People want to assert themselves, and every little social interaction seems to turn quickly into a battleground of entitlement.

Self-Protective Efforts Heighten Entitlement

To make things worse, air travel sits at the confluence of so many things involving so many people (and circumstances) where each “participant” has little direct control over what’s happening to them and others around. Political polarization and mask mandates seem to have intensified these anxieties too. Moreover, the FAA’s zero-tolerance policy toward disturbances and the threat of massive fines are unlikely to disincentivize passengers and staff in the heat of the moment.

When people feel entitled, they’re not just frustrated when others fail to acknowledge and entertain—even listen to—their presumed superior rights. People feel deceived and wronged. They feel victimized, get angry, and exude hostility. Worse, they feel even more justified in their demands and thus assume an even stronger sense of entitlement as compensation.

Idea for Impact: Entitlement and Responsibility are Inextricably Linked

Underlying this kind of anger process is a lack of separation of rights from responsibility. No professional, social, or domestic environment can remain stable and peaceful without everyone respecting the fact that rights and responsibilities are inseparable.

Nobody is entitled to compassion or fair treatment without acting on the responsibility to give it to others. If you don’t care about how others feel, you can’t demand that they care about how you feel. It’s a formula for disaster in human interactions.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Don’t Abruptly Walk Away from an Emotionally Charged Conflict
  3. Think Twice Before You Launch That Truth Bomb
  4. Who Told You That Everybody Was Going to Like You?
  5. Think of a Customer’s Complaint as a Gift

Choosing Your Leadership Style: Detail-Orientation

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As Amazon’s Andy Jassy takes over the reins from Jeff Bezos, the Wall Street Journal has a profile of Jassy’s ultra-detail-oriented management style:

Former colleagues say Mr. Jassy would spend enormous amounts of time on the narrowest of details if he thought it was important. … When an AWS data center in Virginia was hit by a major outage, Mr. Jassy personally got involved in figuring out the problem. It turned out a technician had been checking a generator and the door accidentally bumped into a switch, shutting it off. Mr. Jassy dug into the incident and pressed the team to redesign the generators. When the CEO is digging at that level, everyone at the company starts to dig at the same level.

Flexibility and a detail-oriented mindset are leadership qualities that Jassy shares with Bezos. As at many founder-led firms, Amazon’s corporate culture has mimicked these traits, and the colossus has historically been able to jump on opportunities quickly and quality-control its organizational capabilities.

Idea for Impact: A fundamental duty of leadership is to guide an organization’s collective awareness. Attention to detail (without micromanagement) matters. When leaders don’t really care about the details and are content to produce low-quality work, their teams will start to do, too.

In areas where influential leaders aren’t detail-focused, they have somebody on their teams that does. Apple’s Steve Jobs famously focused on creativity and innovation while relying on Tim Cook and his tight-knit team of operations executives to run Apple’s operations.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Learn “On the Floor”
  2. Heartfelt Leadership at United Airlines and a Journey Through Adversity: Summary of Oscar Munoz’s Memoir, ‘Turnaround Time’
  3. Success Conceals Wickedness
  4. How to Handle Conflict: Disagree and Commit [Lessons from Amazon & ‘The Bezos Way’]
  5. Learning from the World’s Best Learning Organization // Book Summary of ‘The Toyota Way’

The Unlikely Barrier to True Diversity

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As much as companies like to tout diversity, the definitive rule of getting ahead at work is to be likable—to follow the unwritten set of norms and adhere to your company’s culture. That is, you must fit and mix well with the rest of the “gang.”

As I’ve written before, likeability is a significant predictor of success. Well-liked people, especially those who work well with others, will advance. Those who aren’t very likable don’t usually get as far. If your company is conservative, you should be conservative. If the leadership is aggressive, snappy, and rule-bending, be the same. It’s better to be “one of them” to progress your career and endear yourself to your colleagues and higher-ups.

Every grouping of people, whatever the institution, community, or population, has an unwritten set of norms. It’s true for nations, in social groups, sports teams, and businesses. Wherever people form a group, they organically form rules. They institutionalize ways of doing things, traditions, and unquestioned assumptions. Such norms give the group a sense of identity. It’s natural. It’s tribe mentality. We, humans, are social creatures, and this is how we foster a sense of belonging.

Affinity Bias

Per affinity bias, human nature is such that people instinctively associate other people with labels, relate, and play favorites. Groups establish the norms and embrace and propagate them. The resulting categorization not only resists differences but also initiates prejudice and favoritism.

In professional settings, most workplaces tend to hire similar people and encourage them to think and work in the same way. I’ve previously written,

Even if nearly all corporate mission statements extol the virtues of “valuing differences,” managers stifle individuality down in the trenches. They are less willing to be receptive to different viewpoints. They seek to mold their employees to conform to the existing culture of the workplace and to comply with the existing ways of doing things. Compliant, acquiescent employees who look the part are promoted in preference to exceptional, questioning employees who bring truly different perspectives to the table. The nail that sticks its head up indeed gets hammered down.

Defining, fostering, and defending a corporate culture often becomes an exercise in clarifying ‘this is who we are’ and ‘this is who we are not.’ It engenders a strong norm, which builds an even more significant incentive to get people to think alike, get on, and tolerate or repel incompatible people.

Idea for Impact: Culture is a Barrier to Diversity and Inclusion

Culture is the unlikely—if unintentional—barrier to true diversity. Culture has a pernicious effect on hiring. It gives people ample reason to favor and engage who they believe to be “the right people.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Duplicity of Corporate Diversity Initiatives
  2. Why You May Be Overlooking Your Best Talent
  3. The Double-Edged Sword of a Strong Organizational Culture
  4. Don’t Manage with Fear
  5. The Business of Popular Causes