Seth Michael Stone's Blog, page 2

Let’s Get Rid of ‘The Hot Seat’

Yesterday morning I scanned the headlines over coffee as I usually do, both in real news and sporting news (I prefer the latter, but know I need the former). When it comes to writing about organizational life, I love tying sports into it at any reasonable opportunity and yesterday provided a great one!

According to the Miami Herald, Mike Redmond, the manager of the Miami Marlins is on ‘the hot seat’ and the team is contemplating firing him, just 13 games into a 162 game season. This is Redmond’s 3rd season with the club. He took a turnaround project (that most people didn’t want) and actually turned it around. So the expectations were a bit higher this year and there were rumblings of playoff contention in south Florida earlier this spring. 3 wins and 10 losses into this very young season presumably have some calling for Redmond’s firing!

Does this sound as crazy to anyone else as it does to me?

Let’s put this scenario in an organizational context that most of us can relate to, after all, most of us won’t be managing big league ball clubs anytime soon…

So imagine this scenario…A couple of years ago an organization takes a chance on you and hires you for a tough project, one where the odds of success were relatively small, but it’s a new opportunity and career step, so you go for it. Two years later, by all accounts you’ve succeeded and the organization extends your contract for a few more years and provides you with additional resources. They task you with your next project, a six month endeavor and now the expectations are higher. Two weeks into the project, things have gotten off to a slower than expected start, there’s certainly no reason to panic yet, but you start hearing rumblings that senior management might be looking to get rid of you if things don’t turn around quickly…

This is what’s going on with the Miami Marlins in a nutshell. See the problem? ‘The hot seat’ has devastating psychological consequences:

It creates limbo. If you want to fire someone, fire them. Don’t put a senior level manager in occupational purgatory.

It destroys trust. All of the sudden a manager hears rumors of their demise; trust is broken, even if they’re just rumors.

It erodes confidence at the subordinate level. Just imagine your entry level employees whispering, “if she’s going to get fired, what’s going to happen to us?”

I’m not advocating that we avoid taking appropriate corrective measures; including letting the wrong people go. What I am saying is there’s a right way and a wrong way and using the proverbially ‘hot seat’ doesn’t have the best track record for panning out well for the organization.

So let’s expunge this phrase from our corporate vernacular and more importantly from our thought process. Who’s with me?

5 Practical Lessons From March Madness

It’s that time of year, March Madness is upon us! Personally, it’s one of my favorite sports tournaments and I know many people share that sentiment. I think some of that has to do with the madness itself and from the time of the selection show right up until the final weekend the plot takes sudden unexpected twists and things seldom go according to plan.

When you think about it, the same thing happens in our organizations, doesn’t it? New competition emerges, you stumble upon that idea that could revolutionize your organization, or you win that contract that you thought you didn’t have a chance at.

Based on the incredible number of similarities I began noticing between March Madness and the marketplace, below are five points to consider to help smooth your organization’s journey and leave the madness for the tournament.

1. The better team doesn’t always win – We see it every year in the tournament, upsets. Where a team is seeded doesn’t ever give them a golden ticket to the final 4. There’s times your organization will be the favorite and times it will be the underdog, but your approach should be the same regardless. Don’t be over-confident if you’re the favorite and don’t think less of yourself if you’re the underdog, compete just as hard either way.

2. You have to show up if you want to have a chance – Why does the number 16 seed even show up to play the number 1 seeded team? Because, if they don’t they’re guaranteed to lose. A 16 seed has never beaten a 1 seed, but it will happen one day. Maybe your organization could be the 16 seed that makes history and if you’re number 1 you don’t want to get caught on the wrong side of that. Always be prepared, you never know what the outcome might be.

3. Hard work really can pay off – Many of the teams in the tournament are unfamiliar to those watching and often these teams contribute to the fun of the madness and you wonder, where did this team come from? What we don’t get to see is all the hard work they put in to get in that position, it wasn’t magic. So as you work tirelessly and sometimes thanklessly, remember that there are no shortcuts and it really can pay off.

4. Sometimes life just isn’t fair – Every year when the bracket is revealed the media immediately turns their attention to the handful of teams that ‘should have’ gotten into the tournament. Sometimes your organization will make the big dance and other times it won’t. Enjoy the victories, but also learn from the failures and turn your attention to your next season.

5. Subjectivity rules – Every year a committee sits in a room and decides who’s in the tournament and where they’re ranked. Is it 100% objective? Probably not. Your customers make decisions about your products or services based on their own subjectivity. Don’t leave that to chance, understand what makes them tick and try and solve a real need or desire in their lives.

Understanding these realities and embracing the multitude of opportunities within them could one day be the difference between coming out on top or getting lost in the rest of the pack.

Failing Virtuously

Last week we talked a bit about the importance of creating cultures of experimentation and listed a few practical ways to remove the fear from stepping out into a space of unknowns. Now it’s time to expand on them. We’re going to go through them one at a time and today we’ll look at embracing failure.

The notion of embracing failure is a topic I’m seeing a lot of lately, particularly on Twitter. Initially, I wondered if I had a case of new car syndrome…you know where you’re thinking about buying a particular kind of car and then every time you go out on the road it feels like you see a million of them?

But I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think the general trend is toward a higher level of awareness surrounding the idea of embracing failure. Yet, I don’t see it in practice nearly as much as it’s preached. There are champions of this concept out there walking the talk, but generally it doesn’t appear to be widely practiced.

We have a disconnect somewhere. Why? I believe it’s because, when those two words are left to stand alone or are even a part of a catchy phrase or quote it sounds like fortune cookie wisdom. That’s exactly what it is until you put some context to it. So let’s crack open the stale tasteless cookie and examine why it’s so important.

It’s reality – In order to eventually succeed in anything, we have to embrace the reality of our situation and one reality we all share is that we’re all human and we’re all going to mess up. It’s what we do about it that counts. To expect perfection opens the door for perpetual disappointment and very unhealthy employee morale.

It promotes learning – If you want to see your people grow and thrive both professionally and personally they need to learn. They can’t do that if they’re asked to check their creativity and curiosity at the door. Over time, their increased knowledge base is your organization’s enhanced intellectual capital and their individual success stories.

It adds value – When we think of failure, often times we think of the catastrophic variety, ones that cost millions of dollars. Most failure isn’t like that, it’s usually the small stuff, but that’s not what we see in the news. If failure is documented, shared properly and learned from you can quantify how much your small failures save your organization. It becomes compelling bottom-line stuff.

How do we put it to practice? There’s hundreds of ways, but these are two quick ones to start with that are widely known to work:

Fail early – This is why experimentation is so critical. Sometimes the best ideas just don’t pan out and sometimes the ones that look awful actually have some merit to them. You’ll never know unless you experiment with ideas in a casual and cost-effective way. It can save you a fortune and lots of headaches down the road.

Find the good – You can always find something good in an experiment gone wrong, so find it and share it. Be a champion for the successes that a failure yields and make sure people know what didn’t work so you don’t do it again. It’s ok to fail, but not at the exact same thing twice.

Without context for why we should embrace failure and a system to implement it, we’ll never even peel off the wrapper of the fortune cookie to find out if there’s anything valuable on the inside.

Creating Cultures of Experimentation

When’s the last time you tried something new in your organization? I don’t mean changing a supplier or buying a new copy machine. I’m talking about when you see an issue, need or gaping void in your organization; do you revert to ‘tried and true’ or do you seek out a new alternative? The first option is safer, it allows us to sleep easier at night for a period of time, but in the end will cause more damage to the organization than it could ever fix. The second is scary, it requires us to experiment.

Why are so many of us afraid of experimentation? The answer is really simple. Experimentation has at least one unknown variable (often times several) and we don’t know how those variables are going to react when we put them to the test. Thus, creating uncertainty, something most of us can’t stand.

There are two reasons our organizations need to start becoming more comfortable with experimentation.

One, you can’t produce anything new without trying new things. Duh, right? Well, I think we might be far more disconnected from this concept than we realize. When it feels like you’re beating your head against a sharp corner that’s usually the result of trying to get new outputs from the same old inputs…and the more you feel that feeling, chances are the less you’re experimenting with new concepts and ideas.

Two, there are very few things in the lifecycle of your organization that will stand the test of time. Values are about the only thing you’ve got that have a chance. Everything else will change, from personnel to processes and you have a choice to make, sit back and let change force itself upon you or proactively go out toward the leading edge.

If you’re ready to get rid of the pain that comes from lack of experimentation, it’s time to step out into that scary place of unknowns. There’s a few practical ways to help remove the fear and we’ll be discussing each one of these points in depth over the next two weeks, but this will get us started for now:

1. Embrace failure – By the nature of what experiments are you’re going to fail, a lot. We live in a culture where often perfection and excellence are the benchmarks. Somewhere along the way we decided to equate excellence with never making mistakes. Talk about setting yourself up for a letdown. Get over it!

2. Take good risks – Just because you’re going to fail with experimentation, doesn’t mean that you should start throwing fistfuls of money at every half-baked idea that comes down the pike. There’s going to be some great ones, some good ones and some really bad ones and they don’t all necessarily deserve the same level of attention. Proper experimentation should feel like well-controlled chaos.

3. Learn to capture value – A significant feature of innovation is improving people’s lives. Therefore, value only comes when your solution, product, or service meets real needs and desires in the marketplace. When this happens, you make your customers happy and you make money. You’ve just triggered commercial viability.

Much of this is counter-cultural, it might feel difficult at first, but if you want to break your organization’s addiction to ‘tried and true,’ there aren’t many other viable alternatives.

Monday Morning Quarterbacks: A National Dilemma

The final seconds of this past Super Bowl will undoubtedly go down in history and become American folklore for generations to come. Outside of New England, however, it won’t be because of what Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and the rest of the Patriots did, it will be because of what Pete Carroll, Russell Wilson and the Seahawks didn’t do.

Aside from those who have a fan or other affiliation to either of these teams, much of the media and social media would indicate that the majority of people who watched that performance are so consumed with judging the miscues of the Seahawks, that there’s no time left to celebrate the accomplishment of the Patriots.

In the initial moments following “the interception,” I was guilty of it too, why did they do that when they could have…? As I pondered my reason for this reaction, it began to dawn on me that we’ve created a national culture where we don’t just play Monday morning quarterback with football, we do it with life and I had just played right into the trap. How do we fix this?

Lesson 1: Avoid the trap of ‘what if.’

We live in a society where we’re constantly living in past ‘what if’ scenarios…what if I had done that a different way? Should I have done X instead of Y? I wonder what would have happened if I had…? When we project these questions onto scenarios relating to other people, we’re wasting our time and when we project them onto ourselves, it’s personal torture.

I’m not saying not to critique your performance or the performance of those you manage, what I am saying is there’s a difference between learning from failure and dwelling on it. Something that’s deemed present failure becomes a historical event rather quickly, in less than a second, in fact. At that point it’s no longer your present and it’s time to move forward. So collect what you’ve learned, process it and turn that information into a tool to add to your skill set to make you and your organization sharper and more equipped to capitalize on future opportunities. I would be willing to bet that virtually every member of the Seahawks organization has already learned, moved on and are strategizing about how to get back to the big game next year. It’s what successful organizations and people do.

Lesson 2: Do what you actually do.

Let me preface this by saying if I were a Seahawks fan, I know I’d be very disappointed. I love sports and I get it, I’ve been a diehard New York Mets fan my whole life, so painful sporting disappointment and I are more than just passing acquaintances. However, the fact remains that there’s a reason most of us were watching last night’s game on a couch and not from in between the lines of the field or the sideline. It’s not what we do. We were powerless in the outcome, yet there was so much emotion surrounding the end of the game.

This isn’t necessarily bad when you’re watching sports, but it’s really dangerous in your organizational life. The point is, in organizations, we often like to play Monday morning quarterback with our supervisor’s, colleagues and direct reports. We criticize and ask the ‘what if’ questions about them and the sad part is, most of the time we don’t even have the courage to do it to their face. These questions drive our emotions about other people and circumstances that are often completely out of our control and may never have a direct impact on our own function in the organization. Simply put, they’ll distract you from utilizing your capabilities and achieving your full potential.

Focus on your mission and what it is that you do. When you stop distracting yourself with these personal and organizational time killers and negative emotional drivers, you’ll stop asking ‘what if’ questions about the past and start asking ‘what if’ questions about the future, something both the Seahawks and the Patriots are probably doing right now…