Liane Davey's Blog, page 21

11 Mistakes to Avoid in Decision-making

If you could name the single bad habit that has the most detrimental effect on your team’s decision-making, what would it be? Do you have to ponder it for a moment or did you just shout the answer at your screen?

Even if it takes you a few minutes, it’s worth answering that question because your team is probably capable of changing one thing without too much difficulty and when it comes to decision-making, changing even one suboptimal part of your process will lead to far better results.

Decision-making Mistakes

To jump-start your thinking, here’s my list of the decision-making mistakes I see most often. Recognize your team in any of these?

Coming in cold How often do you find yourself in a meeting where someone raises an issue and expects you to be able to opine without any preparation? This is an unreasonable expectation for anyone and it’s a particular nightmare for introverts and those who prefer to have evidence to back up their opinions (we extroverts aren’t so likely to be held back by the absence of facts). You know those posters that say “no shirt, no shoes, no service?” Meetings should have their own version “No context, no info, no opinion.” Want a little more on this, try Read the damn pre-read people! Who’s the boss? Do you ever start talking about an issue and wonder who the heck put it on the agenda because no one seems to be taking ownership of the conversation? Brutal. Decisions need owners and if no one is stepping up, it’s either too inconsequential for anyone to care or too hot to handle. Either way, ask the ranking person in the room to make a call about who owns the issue and don’t contribute until that’s clear. Is your team trying to make decisions collectively, you might be interested in Do Teams Decide? Help me help you Another big waste of time and energy I see often is when the decision-maker isn’t clear what they want from you. You get some vague instruction like “tell me what you think.” The only problem is that when you tell them what you think, they get all offended because they didn’t want input on that! Ugh. Faux for show How often has someone brought something to the table making it seem like they want your input, when actually what they want is your approval and your accolades? Or they ask for your input but absolutely nothing changes between the plan they walked into the room with and the plan that they walk out with. It’s pretty clear that you are giving input to a decision that was already made. A colossal waste of time. Refried themes . What percentage of the time you’ve set aside for decision-making is actually used to understand the nature of the problem, the characteristics of good solutions, and the options for moving forward? For most teams, it’s about 10-20%. Instead, 1hr 45min of your 2-hour meeting is taken up by the decision-owner reading out the slides that you had in advance. That leaves no time to actually interrogate the options. Don’t stick the landing Is your team prone to rushing off to the next meeting without clarifying what you’ve actually agreed on? If you leave a decision-making discussion without defining key terms, aligning on specific steps, identifying the action owners, or setting the deadlines, you aren’t likely to be any further ahead the next time you meet. Any gymnast will tell you, it doesn’t matter what phenomenal acrobatics you accomplish in the air if you don’t stick the landing. You might be interested in this article on how to end a meeting. Chasing your tail How often do your decision-making meetings meander all over everywhere without any logical order or progression? If you don’t take time to frame the conversation into different sections and then to solve for one thing before opening up another, you’re going to bounce around without much forward progress. There’s a skill to facilitation, if no one on your team has it, you’ll waste considerable time going around in circles. If your decision-making discussions need a little more structure, try this. Majority rules Are you treating your business decisions as if they were a first-past-the-post vote? If you ignore or marginalize people the minority voices who think differently about the issue, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. The most valuable voices in a decision-making process are the ones who are thinking about it differently. Fewer people violently agreeing, more people making space for dissenting opinions. Breathing your own fumes Are your decision-making conversations really just giant love-fests where you talk about how awesome your decisions are and cherry-pick the data that support your view? Confirmation bias is real. If you’re not actively seeking out data the disconfirms your default views, you’re deciding by default, not by deliberation. Fear factor Is your team risk-averse and quick to spot the risk in any potential course of action? If so, I bet you aren’t considering the risk of just staying put or continuing on the same path. Humans are more motivated by fear than by opportunity. How is that showing up in your decision-making processes? If your team is petrified of change but oblivious to the peril you’re already in, try reading The Status Quo is Risky Too Can’t we all just get along I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the profound mistake teams make by abandoning group discussions when the temperature rises? Whether you rush to a crappy consensus, take it offline (or pretend you will), or just abandon the issue in hopes it will go away, forsaking your responsibilities because making the decision is too uncomfortable is too common and too costly. You might want to dig deeper into the costs of Conflict Debt.

Which of these is the #1 way that your team erodes the quality of decision-making? Let me know. And if you have others that I didn’t mention (I had at least four more I could have added) share those too!

Further Reading

Improve decision-making by separating phases

Dysfunctional Behavior in Disguise

9 Easy Ways to Improve Decision Making on Your Team

 

How to Make the Hardest Decisions

Has your team ever faced a vexatious decision that required you to trudge through clashing perspectives to get to a solution everyone could live with? Maybe you found the prospect of this heated discussion so unpleasant that you kept putting it off. Or maybe you waded into the troubled waters more than once but couldn’t agree on a path forward. Hard problems, high-stakes decisions, heated arguments—there must be a way to make these discussions easier.

In The Good Fight, I shared a technique for making contentious decisions that I call “Common Criteria.” I was reminded of it recently when writing an article about how to handle difficult conversations about returning to work. The technique is great for so many difficult decisions so I’m revisiting it today.

The Hardest Decisions

The idea behind the Common Criteria technique is that hard decisions aren’t simply about negotiating on the relative merits of one solution or another. There’s no simple math of one plus one equals two in a hard decision. Instead, the hardest decisions are those where you and your teammates don’t even agree on what you’re solving for or what a good solution looks like.  These decisions have hidden agendas that make the conversation treacherous.

Hard decisions are hard because the people around the table have diverging perspectives on the problem that stem from your diverse expertise, your specific stakeholders, and most importantly, your unique values. Until you can understand and appreciate those different interests, you’re not likely to agree on a solution.

Why then do we tend to go into a decision-making process blind to one another’s values? It’s like entering a minefield with no sense of which wayward step could trigger an explosive reaction. The Common Criteria technique maps the terrain before you try to find a path through it.

Common Criteria Process

Here is the simple process to define a set of common criteria and then use them to align on a decision.

Define the decision that needs to be made. (This should be done by the decision-owner. If you don’t have a decision-owner, get one before going any further. You can read my case for why teams shouldn’t decide, here.)Ask each person to identify one or more criteria that the team should be using to evaluate your options. Continue to add criteria until the list includes all that your colleagues think are salient.Rank the criteria based on which are the most important to address with the decision. You don’t have to get this perfect, just have a cluster of the need-to-haves, want-to-haves, and nice-to-haves.List the possible options. Spend a little time specifying what’s included in each option but DO NOT discuss the merits of any of the options at this stage. Try to broaden the options beyond the original set that you had been considering.Begin to evaluate each option on each of the criteria. Give people ample time to be able to explore one another’s perspectives.Triage the options, removing one or two options that now seem less compelling.When you get to only two or three options, add in a discussion of different ways of structuring or implementing the decision that might make the difference one way or the other.End the discussion and have the decision-maker share their decision.Example

Imagine you’re a member of the leadership team of a law firm. You’re trying to decide on what your workplace policies will be following a year of Covid work-from-home arrangements. The scuttlebutt tells you that your colleagues’ opinions are all over the map. Some are advocating for a full return to the office for everyone, others are pushing for a remote option because they’ve been working most weeks from their lake homes and are pretty darn happy about it. This is not going to be fun.

The first questions are 1) what’s the decision and 2) who is (are) the decision-maker(s). It’s possible that you’re going to have one policy for the whole firm, in which case, it might be the managing director who arbitrates the final decision. Alternatively, you might decide that there will be thresholds set by the firm (a managing director decision) with room for different practices or offices to set their own rules within the framework (those decisions would fall to the practice or office leads). Let’s assume for the sake of keeping this post south of 3,000 words that the firm wants one answer.

Next, convene the team and start talking about criteria. You might hear about:

Client service and convenience. We need to provide an exceptional level of service to our clientsTalent development and knowledge sharing. We need an arrangement that ensures our team members are constantly growing and developing and have the information they need to do their jobs wellFirm culture. We want the intangible benefits of a strong sense of belonging and camaraderieEfficiency and productivity. We need to assess how different arrangements will affect the speed and ease of completing our workCompliance and risk. We need to consider the security of sensitive client information that flows among team membersWe should factor in the cost of the working arrangementEmployee experience. We need to think about how different arrangements will impact employees and their families

I would guess that you’d have a few more criteria, but you get the point. Just naming these criteria will have put so many people at ease. The IT person who has survived a year of sleepless nights thinking about sensitive client files passing through unsecured home networks has briefly stopped sweating now that they know you’re willing to consider the issues inherent in work-from-home scenarios. The head of HR is feeling heard now that you’ve committed to weighing onboarding and development in your decision. The tenor of the conversation is already more constructive.

Now rank the criteria. Are there some that need to be high on the list whereas others are just secondary factors?

Once the criteria are set, it’s time to start drawing out all of those fantastic (or fantastical) ideas people have for what the new working arrangements might look like. Maybe one leader is advocating for a full return to the office with a 9-5 schedule. Another might be thinking that this year has worked great and that people should be able to work from home whenever they want.

The important thing is to use the criteria to help guide you to a few more options. For example, you might moderate the full-time office scenario (an option) to consider employee experience (a criterion) by setting a core window of 10-3 when everyone is expected to be in the office, but with room for people to time-shift their office hours to minimize the commute or provide childcare flexibility.

Try to get to 3-6 options.

Once you have the set of possibilities, do the drudgery of rating each option on the criteria. Don’t worry about two-decimal-point scoring schemes, just use something simple like red, yellow, green, or bad, neutral, good. As you go, you might be thinking that forcing the team to work through this drudgery is a bad idea, but it’s amazing how the process allows most of the emotion to dissipate, which is a good thing.

At this stage, you’ll likely find that one or two solutions are pulling out ahead. That often leads to a scenario where you can break the decision into two parts: what is the best thing we can do; and how can we best implement the decision to take into account other issues?

In the law firm example, you might be leaning toward allowances for 2-3 days a week of working remotely but right in the decision, you’re factoring in what investments IT would need to strengthen the security of the network. Once the Managing Partner feels confident enough to choose an option, the process ends.

The magic of the Common Criteria technique is that it sets you at ease by reflecting what’s important to you in the criteria that will be used to make a decision. You’d be surprised how reassuring it is to see your criteria written on a whiteboard. Once you and your teammates hear your concerns being validated, you’re more willing to listen to the other factors at play. From that point on, it becomes an exercise in problem-solving rather than an unruly, uncomfortable fight.

I talk about the common criteria process like algebra. Once we understand each other’s equations, we can solve for the unknowns.

Further Reading

Improve decision-making by separating phases

The Problem with Agreeing to Disagree

A View or a Veto?

 

Why You’re So Busy and How to Ruthlessly Prioritize

Do you believe in the adage, “less is more?” Would you love to have fewer priorities, a shorter to-do list, and more time to focus on the few activities that really make a difference? Then you’ll probably find new research published in Nature as interesting and disheartening as I do.

In a series of studies, Gabrielle Adams and her colleagues show that we are much more likely (about four times as likely) to try to improve an idea or a situation by adding more to it, rather than subtracting something from it. Oh sure, we talk a good game about doing less, but it turns out that our default approach is “more is more.” Ironically, the higher the cognitive load the researchers put participants under, the greater the likelihood that they would add, rather than subtract. We’re sinking in work and our tendency is to load more cargo rather than to jettison anything. Ugh.

Don’t despair. The findings also give us hope. When the researchers cued participants to consider subtracting, rather than adding, the percentage of people who chose simplification strategies increased by half. We’re daft, but we can learn.

Becoming Less Busy

I’ve started using the expression, “ruthless prioritization.” It’s inspired by a client of mine who shares his “ruthless priorities” as a way of focusing his team on what matters most. What I love about the phrase is that it signals that the way you’ve been prioritizing is probably too gentle, too tentative. Now that we understand the magnitude of the challenge of subtraction, thanks to Gabrielle Adams, we know that we can’t expect ourselves to make things better by subtracting. We need help.

Here’s my two-step process to get focused.

Get to 1

The first step is to get clear on the single most important thing you need to be paying attention to at the moment. Can you? What’s your answer? What’s your single most important priority this month? If you lead a team or an organization, can every single person in your charge name the one most important thing they’re supposed to be paying attention to?

Does that feel too extreme? But Liane, my boss has handed me 8 priorities for the year, and I can’t say ‘no’ to any of them! I’m not saying that you need to have fewer priorities for the year, I’m just saying you need to have few priorities for the minute. If you can’t specify the most important priority for the quarter or the month, shrink the time horizon. What’s the single most important thing you need to accomplish this week? What do you need to pay attention to this morning?

Try it. It’s so liberating to feel focused.

Cue the Subtraction

You’re wise now to the fact that while you’re trying to ruthlessly prioritize, your brain is surreptitiously looking for opportunities to add more to your plate, to compleximify where you want it to simplify. Dastardly brain.

The solution is to specifically look for things to subtract. Remember, the researchers demonstrated that with a few cues, we’re able to spot the unnecessary elements and improve with less, not more.

As you commit to your one most important thing, ask yourself, “What are three things that I’m deprioritizing?” Similarly, if you’re leading a team, what will you take off their plates? You have options for how to pick off competing tasks.

Delete it: You might have been doing something that you can just stop doing altogether. For example, you might abandon your research into a new service offering because the timing is no longer right.Delay it: Some things can comfortably wait for later. Maybe you were getting a jump start on a presentation for next month and you can pause your preparation and come back to it once you’ve finished your current priority.Distribute it: Consider whether there are tasks that could be done more efficiently or effectively by someone else. Ask for their help.Diminish it: This is my favorite approach. How can you shrink the lower-priority, but still necessary tasks to make more room for your priority? Could you attend part of a meeting instead of the full thing? What if you wrote the section of the report that’s most valuable but left the full report for next month? Paring work back to its most valuable or essential elements is a subtraction strategy you can be using all day, every day.Go Forth and Multiply Subtract

That’s the formula. Consider the situation you’re in. Select the one, single, unitary thing that is the most important thing you can be focused on. If you’re a leader, make sure the one priority is clear for every member of your team. WAIT! Don’t run off and get started, yet. Specify three things that need to be subtracted to create the kind of focus that you’re looking for.

The resulting approach is what I call, “1 Yes, 3 Less.” I did a handy-dandy five-minute video about it that you can watch and share with your team.

 

So, what do you think? Is it a relief to know that it’s not just you and that humans seem to have a natural propensity to add rather than subtract? Are you willing to try the 1 Yes, 3 Less approach? Or are you just going to keep on keeping on, now backed by a Nature article about how it’s not your fault?

Further Reading

Make work projects

Busy is a self-inflicted wound

Killing your busy culture

 

What if you’re the jerk?

So far this month, I’ve talked about flip-flopping bosses, toxic bullies, and overly sensitive colleagues. Those are just a few of the many difficult people you might have to deal with at work. But to this point, the one possibility we haven’t considered is that the difficult person on your team might be you.

What?!?

I KNOW… it’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? But it’s worth taking a moment to consider the ways in which you make life harder for the people you work with. Here’s a sampling. Do any of them ring a bell?

The Jerk is in the Eye of the BeholderLate Entry

You don’t do the pre-reads for your meetings and only throw in your deal-breaking brilliance with five minutes left to go in the meeting. You think about how your idea saved the day. They think you ambushed them.

Shades of Gray

You overcomplicate things. Your colleagues are just trying to make a call on what’s included in the pilot project, and you’re four steps ahead talking about the roll-out of the full program. You think you’re bringing rigor. They think rigor mortis is more like it.

The Cup Runneth Over

You are always chipper. You make a round of cheery hellos every morning. You respond to every challenge with, “but on the bright side!” And you remain fiercely optimistic no matter what. You think you’re a glass-half-full person. They think your optimism can be noxious and that you don’t take concerns seriously.

Lone Wolf

You are a person of action. When someone mentions an issue, you grab the bull by the horns and get to work solving the problem. You think you’re the most accountable person on the team. They think you’re a control freak who doesn’t value anyone else’s input.

Or maybe you’re the one who…

always sees the nuances and confuses everyone by contradicting yourself mid-sentenceplays peacemaker and smooths things over instead of getting the tough issue resolvedturns everything into a friendly rivalry and a battle for who gets the “gold star”says, “it just business, it’s not personal” even when your teammates are clearly upsetdebates over whether to use “enable” or “support” in a document only the team will seestarts talking about version 2.0 before version 1.0 has had a chance to succeedtalks things through with those you trust before meetings, creating an inner circle

Here’s the thing; you’re probably not a jerk. The issue is that you know why you’re doing these things and, in your mind, there’s plenty of justification for your actions. But your colleagues can’t read your mind. They don’t know your excellent rationale for slowing down their project, or taking charge, or diverting from the original plan. They just see how your behavior impacts them. And sometimes, that impact is frustrating, upsetting, or demoralizing.

Just for a few minutes, stop and think about the behaviors that might land differently than you intend. Better yet, think about behaviors that you don’t normally think about at all. What are you doing that might drive your colleagues around the bend? How might adding some context, sharing your thinking, or admitting the downside of your approach help your teammates better appreciate what you offer?

If “Late Entry” is your style and you’re prone to chiming in at the last minute, start with apologizing, “I added that point really late in the game and by then there was already a lot invested.” Then commit to reading the documents in advance and if you’re going to scuttle a project, do it before the person is on the spot in a meeting.

If “Shades of Gray” is your style and you’re the one who likes to have everything buttoned down before you take the first step, start talking with your team about the right level of clarity and certainty. Be willing to go from 90 percent certainty to 70 if that’s what the situation calls for.

You get the point. Know your foibles. Where possible, be more deliberate about where your preferences and tendencies work for the team and where they don’t. When you inevitably trip up, show your teammates that you know your behavior has a downside.

What do you do that might make life difficult for your teammates? What advice would you give yourself to become a better colleague?

Further Reading

Hey leader, it’s not about you

You get the team you deserve

It’s not too late to change who you are

 

Are Your Teammates Too Sensitive?

Last week, I talked about the toxic phenomenon of bullying in the workplace. Based on a few comments on my LinkedIn post, it’s clear that long-term, aggressive, harmful bullying is something we need to worry about. If you didn’t get a chance to learn about the three different forms that bullying takes and the steps you can take to counteract bullying aimed at you or a teammate, have a read here.

Now let me be controversial. In that post, I cited research that said 30% of people report being bullied (it rises to 43% among remote workers). I don’t buy it. I suspect that a large percentage of those cases wouldn’t meet the threshold of bullying. For my part, I have certainly witnessed bullying behavior, both as a member of several teams and as a facilitator of hundreds of them, but those instances have been exceedingly rare, less than a handful in my 25-year career.

Do you agree with me that people use the term bullying too casually?

What’s behind the overuse of the term? What should we do about it?

If It’s Not Bullying, What Is It?

I hear people talk about being bullied when I would describe what they experienced as nothing more than uncomfortable or unpleasant. Is all discomfort unwarranted, unproductive, and intolerable in a healthy team? Of course NOT!

I believe that the heart of the problem is that our culture is becoming exceedingly intolerant of discomfort. When one team member questions or challenges another’s work, suddenly it’s considered team dysfunction, bullying, toxic. It’s getting ridiculous. As soon as we’re admonishing the person who’s pushing for stronger, better work and protecting the person who’s content to stay comfortable, we’re in trouble.

Bullying

I talked in the previous post about what counts as bullying. It needs to include aggressive interactions, job interference, or attempts to socially isolate a person before it’s considered bullying. To qualify as bullying, bad behavior also needs to include repeated attempts to exert psychological power over the person. What you’re seeing is likely not bullying.

But is it necessarily healthy?

Bad Behavior, But Not Bullying

No, just because it’s not bullying doesn’t mean it’s healthy or warranted. There is a long list of behaviors that I think are short-sighted, self-centered, and ultimately harmful that don’t pass the threshold of bullying but should be addressed and eliminated. On that list, I would include:

Belittling a work product. For example, “this is amateur hour,” “this is a piece of crap,” “This argument has bigger holes in it than the Titanic.” If you’re on the receiving end of a comment like that, try saying, “If you want me to make it better, I’m going to need something specific that you’d like changed.” If you are the witness to the comments, try, “Amateur hour isn’t helpful, what specific aspects of the report do you find lacking?”Changing expectations mid-stream. When a person sets to work and then the expectations change halfway through, that’s frustrating and inefficient. Don’t change the rules in the middle of the game. If someone does that to you, reiterate the initial instructions, “I did it this way because you asked me to include the feedback from the top five clients. If you want to add our top 50 clients, I can do that.” If you see someone changing the expectations of a colleague, you can help by pointing out the inconsistency, “I heard you ask for the report to include the top 5 clients, not the top 50.”Leaving people out of relevant discussions. If a colleague starts to marginalize you by not inviting you to meetings, walking out (or clamming up) when you enter the break room, or copying others on emails but not you, it’s worth speaking up. You might say, “I heard that you had a conversation about the Midwest marketing strategy. I’m going to be responsible for implementing that, so I’d like to be included next time.” If you’re the witness to a teammate’s efforts to exclude someone, try saying, “I would like Kathy to be included in this conversation, I’m going to text her to drop by.”Too Sensitive for Collaboration, Constructive Criticism, and Consequences

If it’s not bullying, and it’s not bad behavior, it might just be hardwork.

If you expect that working on a team is going to be all smiles and pats on the back, you’re delusional. Collaboration is hard. Constructive criticism is uncomfortable and important for growth. (Negative) consequences are unpleasant and critical to fostering accountability.

Here’s my list of behaviors that we need more of, not less of. If you or someone on your team is bristling at these behaviors, it’s not the person who’s engaging in these constructive approaches who needs to change.

Looking at your draft work product and asking for it to have more, less, or different content or stronger, fresher, or snazzier stylePointing out the stakeholders that have not been considered in your plan and advocating on their behalfHighlighting the assumptions you’ve made in your work and what would happen if those assumptions proved untrueCommenting or getting frustrated when you’ve made the same mistake more than onceNoting that you’ve been using the same process for your work for several years and asking where there might be efficienciesDisagreeing about the optimal solution to a problem or about the existence of a problem in the first placeAsking clarifying questions to understand where you’re coming from and using follow-up questions if your answers aren’t clear or compellingWithholding a positive outcome because your contributions weren’t sufficient or not commensurate with your role or responsibilities

There is zero room to tolerate bullying. That’s clear-cut. It’s also important to be intolerant of behavior that doesn’t qualify as bullying but does detract from a healthy, happy, and productive team. But that leaves A LOT of room for uncomfortable, tense, icky moments that you should be encouraging, rather than trying to eliminate. For goodness sake, let’s stop calling every uncomfortable or heated interaction bullying.

Further Reading

Why are women so mean to other women?

Should I get involved?

4 Quick Tips for Those Who Have Been Told to Tone the Conflict Down

 

How to Deal with a Workplace Bully

The term “bullying” gets bandied about liberally in conversations about team dysfunction. For what it’s worth, I believe too liberally. How often do you hear someone claiming to be bullied?

Bullying is an extremely serious, toxic dynamic that causes profound stress for both the target and the witnesses and can derail a team’s performance. It’s not a charge to level lightly. But if you are seeing the start of bullying, it’s critical that you can recognize it and help put a stop to it.

What is Bullying

According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, bullying is, “repeated mistreatment: abusive conduct that is threatening, intimidating, or humiliating; work sabotage or verbal abuse.” The WBI’s 2021 survey suggests that bullying is on the rise, with 13% of respondents reporting being bullied in the past year and 30% reporting being bullied at some point in their careers. That’s up from 19% in 2017. It’s even more worrisome that the rate jumps to 43% among remote workers.

Catherine Mattice wrote a very helpful article outlining the criteria for bullying. She argues that bullying has three necessary conditions:

Bullying must be repeated. It’s not incivility. It’s not an isolated incident. Bullying is frequent (defined in the research as once per week) and sustained (lasting more than six months)Bullying must cause psychological harm. And although the primary damage is stress, anxiety, and depression, the secondary and tertiary damage can be physical.Bullying is about psychological power. The bullying dynamic is facilitated by an initial incident in which the bullied person doesn’t advocate for themselves, and then amplifies as the bully exerts increasing power over the person.What to Watch For

If you see any of the following behaviors, you are witnessing (or experiencing) the start of bullying.

Aggressive Interactions

If you see aggressive communications, threats, or pointed personal criticism, treat it as the start of a power imbalance that could lead to bullying. If someone levels criticism about the ideas being discussed, that’s fine. If those complaints belittle the individual, it’s not.

Example of uncomfortable but acceptable debate: “That argument has 16 holes in it and would never hold water as a business case. It’s completely unacceptable. We need something much stronger before we present it to anyone.”

Example of intolerable behavior: “Your argument is flimsy, your thinking is juvenile, you’re going to embarrass the whole team if you present that to anyone. What were you thinking?!?”

Note, when personal criticism extends to a person’s race, gender, sexuality, or differential abilities, it becomes harassment and is illegal in most jurisdictions.

Job Interference

If you see someone behaving in a way that hinders the target from doing their job, treat it as the start of bullying. You might see someone withholding resources that the target needs to complete their assigned tasks. Alternatively, you might see someone continually working to undermine or overturn the target’s decisions. A bullying boss sets double standards where the target is never good enough, even if they’re performing as well as everyone else on the team.

Social Isolation

A bully might begin to wield power over their target by isolating them from others on the team. They might do this subtly by omitting them from meetings or informal conversations or by disregarding, criticizing, or making fun of the target’s ideas while ingratiating themselves to other team members. Alternatively, they might engage in a more obvious campaign to discredit the target with gossip and even outright lies.

What Can You Do?

If you witness these behaviors or if you’re on the receiving end of them, there are a few things you can do to prevent the relationship from spiralling into full-fledged bullying.

Start Early

It is absolutely essential that you address these attempts to disempower the target as soon as possible. I can’t emphasize that enough. A person prone to bullying might push on many different people to test whether or not they can get away with their aggressions. If the first or second attempt gets shut down, they are unlikely to keep trying. This is not a time to excuse someone’s bad day or to worry about whether they will stop liking you if you say something. If you’ve seen a person interacting aggressively with a team member, or interfering with their ability to get their job done, or attempting to socially isolate them, make it a zero-tolerance situation.

Stand Strong

There are misconceptions that bullies only target people who are weak and won’t stand up for themselves. It’s not true. Bullies also go after people who are having too much success, getting too much attention, and threatening their position and power on the team. The reason that we associate introversion or timidness with being bullied is that those who stand up to bullying often curtail the problem quickly and only those whose words, tone, and body language reflect their diminished power stay as attractive targets to the bully.

If someone engages in any one of the inappropriate behaviors I listed above, say something.

Aggressive interactions:

Target: “I don’t appreciate how you’re talking to me. If there’s something I need to improve in the presentation, I’ll be happy to do that. It’s not ok to make it personal.”

Witness: “I don’t appreciate how you’re talking to Pat. If there’s something she needs to improve in the presentation, you can share those concerns without making it personal.”

Job interference:

Target: “We had agreed to those expectations, and I had confirmed in an email last week. If you are going to set different expectations, you need to communicate the change in plan to me with at least a few days lead time.”

Witness: “I had the same understanding as Robert and his approach is exactly what I was expecting. Did you change the expectations at some point?”

Social isolation

Target: “I learned from Antoine that you had a meeting without me. I need to be included in meetings about the Acme project from now on.”

Witness: “Where is Marie? We shouldn’t be having these conversations without Marie because she needs to be in lockstep with us on the Acme project. I’ll see if she’s available.”

Enlist Allies

Research on bullying in children demonstrates that it’s the witnesses that fuel the power dynamic that perpetuates bullying. If witnesses do nothing (or worse, buy into the power of the bully), the cycle continues and even accelerates. When the bystanders are unimpressed by the bully’s attempts at a power grab and instead intervene, almost all bullying stops.

If you’re the target of bullying behaviors, seek out support from your teammates by sharing your experiences and linking them to outcomes for the team. Rather than saying, “She makes her comments personal and calls me stupid or sloppy,” try, “When she criticizes my work as stupid or sloppy, I don’t get any information on how to make it better. If it happens again, could you help me by asking for specific examples of what she would like to see?”

If you witness personal attacks, job interference, or social isolation, be a good ally. Stand up to the bully’s behavior. If the bully is your boss, you could say, “I know Tim’s draft wasn’t what you’re looking for. What would you like to see in the next draft?” If the boss comes back with, “How about something I wouldn’t use to line a hamster’s cage!” you can try one more time, “What would be three things that could be included that would save it from the hamster’s cage?”

Keep Track

Regardless of whether you’re the target of the attacks or the one witnessing them, jot down a few notes about what you see. These notes should include specific examples of language and behavior that will loan credibility to your case if you need to seek help.

Seek Help

If you’ve started early, stood strong, and reached out to allies but the bad behavior continues, it’s time to seek help. If the aggressor is anyone other than your manager, go to your manager first. If it’s your manager, you’ll have to decide whether you feel more comfortable engaging human resources or whether you want to go to another manager in the organization.

In the first request for help, you might consider sharing the situation, outlining what you’ve tried, and asking for coaching about what you could do next. That way, you maintain your accountability and portray yourself as someone who wants to solve their own problems. That’s the best approach if you’re still feeling strong enough to get a fresh perspective and make a new attempt to change the person’s bad behavior. If your mental health is suffering or if you just can’t stay focused on constructive behaviors when you’re under attack, it’s time to ask for someone else to intervene.

Bullying is toxic. It’s a horrible, destructive power game that will leave the target in crisis, the witnesses in distress, and the team in ruins. Do not tolerate even a single instance of aggressive behavior, job interference, or social isolation. Start early, stand strong, enlist allies, keep track, and seek help to make sure that bully never takes hold on your team.

[Sneak preview] Next week I’m going to get controversial. I’m going to argue that the vast majority of instances that people describe as bullying are nothing of the sort. Instead, people who don’t like their ideas challenged and who don’t know how to advocate for themselves claim to be bullied at the first sign of discomfort. Stay tuned.

Further Reading

Managing Fear and Emotions

Should you mind your own business?

The Vicious Cycle of Bad Behavior

 

 

How to handle the Flip-Flopping Boss

Have you ever had to work for someone who changed their opinion more frequently than they changed their socks? It’s an incredibly frustrating situation to deal with. You prepare plans diligently, present them compellingly, and then get ready to execute. But just when you think you’re all set to go, the flip-flopping boss loses interest or changes tack. AAaaaaaahhh!!!!!

To be fair, working for a flip-flopping boss isn’t all bad. In fact, meeting with a flip-flopper can be invigorating. You go into their office, apprehensive about pitching your idea, but the conversation goes well. They listen, smile, nod, reassure you, contribute a few thoughts, and leave you with the distinct impression that they are on board. All good. Better than a critical, nay-saying boss, right?!?

Not so fast.

The day after your fantastic meeting with Flip, you talk to someone who pitched a completely different approach and learn that they got a similarly warm reception. Your colleague describes their awesome conversation and exudes confidence that the boss is going with their approach.

Um…what?

Don’t worry, you won’t envy your colleague for long before both of you realize that the boss isn’t taking action on either plan. This lame excuse for a leader’s modus operandi is to agree with whoever is standing in front of them, shifting with the winds, avoiding ever appearing as the bad guy while consistently failing to make a tough call or to get on with it.

Tell-tale signs of a flip-flopper:The person is attentive and responsive in one-on-one conversations and more passive in group discussionsThey love a catchy phrase, a snazzy graphic, or a big number…more sizzle than steak.They leave you feeling like they’ve given you the green light, but upon closer inspection, you realize they haven’t made any definitive statements or decisionsThey seem excited about the possibility in public, but privately all they focus on is risksYou only find out what they’re really thinking from third partiesHow to Cope with a Flip-Flopping BossDon’t Take the Bait

Sure, start with the catchy phrase, snazzy graphic, or big number to get Flip excited about your vision, but when the boss starts to buy in, don’t let it go to your head. Don’t take the bait. Instead, stay grounded and focus on results. Make simple statements about the features and benefits of your approach and then quickly share the risks of what you’re proposing. Although this seems counter-intuitive, the flip-flopper is going to start thinking about risks the moment you leave their office, so better that you make it a two-person dialogue rather than an inner monologue.

Stop Presenting Ideas One at a Time

I know it’s SO tempting to get that one-on-one time with your flip-flopping boss because it feels amazing…for a while. You get the boss’ attention, their interest, their empathy, their support and for a short time, you feel like you’re killin’ it! Really all you’re doing is letting your lame, conflict-avoidant, needs-to-be-liked boss feel like THEY’RE killin’ it while actually, they’re killing the business.

Rather than allow Flip to get away with this bad behavior, come to an agreement with your colleagues that you’re going to present contrasting ideas at the same time so there’s less room for the boss to talk out of both sides of their mouth.

Converge and Communicate

Flip-floppers become skillful at using vague language to make you feel that they’re on your side (all with the goal of getting you to like them). Your job is to translate hollow platitudes into solid plans. Each time you get a comment that seems directionally supportive, translate it into a more definitive, closed-ended question.

If you get a, “That sounds like a good idea,” follow up with, “Am I authorized to start spending the budget?” I realize that I’m usually advocating for open-ended questions, but the flip-flopper responds to open-ended questions by pumping up the smoke machine. You’re going to need closed-ended questions to cut through.

As you’re getting answers to your questions, take notes…in fact, make a show of taking notes. Show the boss that their words are being captured. If you’re writing in a notebook, put it on their desk and accentuate the steps… 1, 2, 3. Add a big circle for flourish. If the boss has a whiteboard, write their answers and your plans straight onto the whiteboard.

As soon as you leave the boss’s office, document the conversation and the outcomes in an email. For any unresolved issues, include the steps that either you or the boss have agreed to take to get to the next decision point. Include dates and deadlines. Copy those affected by the decisions.

Reinforce Substance Over Style

Remember, the flip-flopper wants to be liked, wants to be a hero, wants to be seen as innovative, a mover-and-a-shaker, a great leader. Right now, Flip is getting that each time you and your colleagues meet one-on-one and give that instant gratification of your appreciation and enthusiasm. If you want Flip to be more decisive, you’re going to need to reinforce that behavior instead. Save your smiles and gratitude for situations where the boss is making tough calls, and take Flip’s empathy, enthusiasm, and flattery for the pathetic attempt to gain your affections that they really are.

Working for a flip-flopping, nailing Jell-O to a wall, whichever way the wind blows boss is infuriating. It’s a constant ride of being excited and hopeful about possibilities and then having those hopes dashed by indecisiveness and inaction. Once you realize what’s going on, you can be more deliberate about presenting the risks upfront, presenting options and choices at the same time, and drawing the flip-flopper into yes/no and go/no-go decisions. It’s not going to be fun at first, but once Flip learns that the fastest path to your adoration is through clear and decisive action, you’ll be on a better path.

Have you worked for Flip? What worked for you?

Further Reading

Working for a wimpy leader

Working for a lazy leader

How to work for a leader who needs to be liked

How to work for a good news leader

How to work for a selfish leader

How to work for a childish leader

How to work for a lazy leader

Dealing with a Boss with Double Standards

How to work for an egomaniac leader

How to work for an abusive leader

How to work for an insecure leader

How to work for an incompetent leader

 

How to Sell Your Strategic Idea

This post is a part of Strategy Month—my 30-day LinkedIn series aimed at bringing strategy down from its lofty perch and providing the ideas, techniques, and tools to democratize strategy in your team or organization. So far, we’ve had Strategy Creation week, Strategy Mobilization week, and last week was Strategic Thinking week, focused on how to reflect, connect, and make choices. Today is the start of Strategic Influence week. You can follow along here .

You’ve been spending more time reflecting lately. You’ve seen a connection between a few disparate opportunities emerging in your industry and you’ve got a great idea for a move that would really help your team be successful. Awesome!

Only one problem, how do you convince the team that it’s a great idea?

Being strategic requires more than just having great ideas, it means being able to communicate your ideas in a compelling way and to overcome the resistance that might derail your progress.

Common Mistakes

Here are three mistakes I see in influence attempts that fall flat:

Mistake #1: You over-weight the facts

You’re the “who can dispute the cold, hard facts” type. You focus on having iron-clad data presented in eye-catching charts and graphs. You’re confident that those facts will speak for themselves. Won’t they?!?

Well…not likely. Or not always. Or not with everyone.

Humans are less logical than you expect. People proceed with decisions they’re comfortable with, and that’s emotional, not rational. If you don’t internalize this, you probably overemphasize the facts that show why the action is good and under-represent the facts that counter the little voice inside people’s heads saying that the action is risky. The people you’re trying to persuade are making an emotional decision and then using facts to support their choice. Fear speaks louder than excitement. Give them the data to make them feel more excitement and less fear about your idea.

Mistake #2: You try to persuade people with whom you have no credibility

You have zero credibility with the decision-maker, but why should that stop you when you have such a great idea! Surely everyone will be receptive to an amazing opportunity!?! Isn’t it about the quality of the idea, not some political B.S.?

Just because there’s a credibility gap in your influence attempt doesn’t mean the other person is being political or that it’s bullshit. You’re not just asking the person to take a risk on an idea, you’re inflating the risk by asking them to take a risk on an unknown quantity (and if you’re a known quantity with a spotty track record, it’s even worse).

In situations where your credibility is low, it can be much more effective to enlist someone who is better positioned to make the suggestion. You’ll find that exactly the same points coming from a different mouth will resonate much better.

Mistake #3: You start at the end not the beginning

You love your idea so much that you want to do it justice when you finally present your baby to the world. You’ve got it honed to such a degree that the team just needs to say “yes” and you’re off to the races. You walk into the meeting, hand out your gorgeous materials and give your laser-light show presentation. You blew it.

Presenting what looks like a finished project implicitly says, “I didn’t need you,” and depending on the internal monologue of the audience, might be interpreted as “I don’t like you,” “I don’t value you,” or “How could you possibly when I am so very, very smart?!?”

Trying to influence someone without incorporating their ideas is hard.  Instead, engage early with drafts (that look like drafts) and use successive iterations to demonstrate where you’ve included people’s ideas.

Other Useful ApproachesConnect your idea to an existing strategy

Drawing links between your idea and an existing strategy (or process, or product, or project) can make your idea seem less foreign. It’s also valuable because then your idea feels like a validation of past efforts rather than a rebuke of them. It’s the difference between “you guys were getting it wrong and I’m the hero here to fix it” and “you guys are really smart, and I want to build on your smarts.”

Frame your idea in the perspective of a key stakeholder

Discussing how your idea would benefit a key stakeholder is another effective way of increasing receptiveness to your idea. It’s a way of borrowing someone else’s clout when you don’t have enough of your own. It’s the difference between “imagine what a rock star I’ll be when you implement my idea” and “imagine how happy our suppliers will be when we implement this idea.”

Respond to criticism with curiosity

Responding to criticism with questions and openness will not only help you improve your idea, but it will also help your team feel like you value their contributions. It’s the difference between “I’m invested in being right” and “I’m invested in this being the best it can be.”

Engage with any passive-aggressiveness

Bringing passive-aggressiveness (such as sarcasm, eye-rolling, or silent disapproval) into the open and engaging with it as if the concerns were more overt will allow you and everyone else to differentiate between those who have something legitimate to contribute and those who are just cranky, cowardly, or lazy. A quick “I’m noticing the body language. How should I interpret all the crossed arms?” might just do the trick. It’s the difference between “Let me get out of the room unscathed” and “Let me give this idea the best chance of being implemented.”

There are many things you can do to improve the quality of your strategic ideas but the best idea in the world doesn’t assure you of a fair hearing if the innovation disrupts your teammates’ sense of confidence, competence, or comfort. More energy invested in making your idea palatable will increase the likelihood that it gets a fair hearing and that neither it nor you are dispatched.

Further Reading

Checklist for Effective Business Communication

Everyone is Pitching Something. Including You.

Checklist for effective one-way communication

 

 

 

 

How to Be More Strategic

This post is a part of Strategy Month—my 30-day LinkedIn series aimed at bringing strategy down from its lofty perch and providing the ideas, techniques, and tools to democratize strategy in your team or organization. The first week was Strategy Creation week, with videos, exercises, and tools to help you develop a great strategy. Last week was Strategy Mobilization week, focused on getting your whole organization aligned and executing. Today is the start of Strategic Thinking week. You can follow along here .

How strategic you are (or are perceived to be) can have a big impact on which conversations you get to take part in, how you’re evaluated and compensated, and on whether or not you’re promoted. It’s safe to say that for most knowledge workers, the label of strategic or non-strategic has significant repercussions. Now try asking your boss or someone in HR for a definition of what it means to be strategic, or some examples of what being strategic would look like in your role…you’ll likely get vague, unhelpful answers.

Let’s see if we can fill the vacuum.

What Being More Strategic Isn’t

The good news is that you don’t have to have a C-suite role or control over a multi-million-dollar budget to be strategic. You don’t have to be a management consultant, have an MBA, or even own a suit. Being more strategic is NOT building more plans, plotting more charts, or presenting 84-page PowerPoint decks. (In fact, I’ll give you strategic points if you never use the word “deck” to refer to a set of slides ever again.)

What is Strategic

Being strategic is framing the smallest decision in the context of bigger goals—then seeing how the choices available can create different, better paths to achieve what you’re trying to accomplish. Period.

Now imagine all the decisions that become strategic with that definition.

Reading an industry publication (even better, an industry publication from a different industry)Nurturing a relationship, such as one that could provide unique insight into a supplier or a customer (whether that’s at a trade show or on the bleachers at a little league game)Triaging your workload to prioritize the highest value tasks

Everyone has an opportunity to think more strategically.

Be More StrategicReflect

One factor more than any other is stifling strategic thinking—activity. Busy people with cluttered minds rush from one task to another with too little consideration of whether the task is the right one. Here’s my favorite quote on the subject

“As you climb the ladder of success, be sure it’s leaning against the right building.”

Allen Raine

When you’re rushing to do, do, do, you don’t stop to think about the context, the connections, or the consequences of your actions. The result is decisions that are based more on reflex than on reflection. Reflex is great when you want to repeat something you’ve done a million times before. Reflex is efficient when you’re in a situation that is unchanging. Reflex gets you in big trouble if you’re doing what you’ve always done in a world that’s morphing at an unprecedented pace.

To move from reflex to reflection, to engage strategic thinking requires that you practice meta-cognition, which is just the fancy-schmancy way of saying thinking about how you think. A recent study by Chen et al shows that strategic thinking is a combination of two things. First, having the right questions to ask to take a novel view of your situation (the skills) and second, the disciplined application of these skills in the heat of the moment.

It’s critically important to make time to reflect before making decisions (even everyday, run-of-the-mill decisions). What is this about? Who’s impacted? What’s at stake? What’s the opportunity and what are the risks?  What at first seems like an opportunity might reveal significant risk and what seemed risky at first might reveal a significant opportunity. But you’ll only have these epiphanies if you make the space for them.

Connect

Your other response to your harried life might be to make a list of things to accomplish, put your head down and get busy doing them. But focusing too narrowly restricts your chance to be strategic. Blinders help the racehorse go very fast, but the racehorse is going around and around the same predictable oval. Strategic people cast their gaze broadly and create connections between ideas, plans, and people that others fail to see.

And remember, relationships are strategic too. One very tangible way that you can be strategic is to form networks and connections of people. No, I don’t mean going to smarmy cocktail events where you fumble to hand out your business card while holding a canape in one hand and a cocktail in the other. I mean putting yourself and others into novel situations with diverse people so that ideas, resources, and support can flow in directions they haven’t before.

Strategic people see the world as a web of interconnected ideas and people and they find opportunities to advance their interests at those connection points. If you want some fun homework, watch an episode of James Burke’s fantastic show Connections, from 1978. I LOVED this show as a kid. Or, if you can’t handle the 1970s fashion (or video quality), the awesome Latif Nassar has done his own version, called Connected on Netflix that I also really love. Either of these shows will show you the value of pulling a thread to find otherwise unseen connections.

Make Choices

Even if you reflect on opportunities and connect ideas and people, you still have one enduring problem: it isn’t possible to do everything! Possibilities are unlimited; time, money, and resources are not. That necessitates choices.

Making choices, both about what you will do and what you won’t, is a critical part of being strategic.  Closing one door in favor of another requires the courage to take action (for which you could later be blamed) and confidence to abandon an alternative (which could be a missed opportunity). It’s at the point of choice that your ability to be strategic is finally tested.  It isn’t without risks, but the risk of not choosing, of spreading limited resources over too many options is greater.

You will be seen as more strategic if you take action and course-correct than if you choose to stagnate and do nothing or, alternatively, stall from trying to do everything.

You don’t need a new title, more control, or bigger budgets to be more strategic; you just need to look beyond the moment to connect your actions to something bigger.  Invest time and energy to reflect not just on what is, but what could be. Find ways to connect ideas and people that you had never linked before. Have the guts to make choices about what you will do and what you won’t. Soon people will be looking at you differently, calling on you more often, and maybe even giving you that promotion you’ve been hoping for.

 

I did some investigation into this quote and although it’s been attributed in various forms to numerous people over the years, quoteinvestigator.com says that Allen Reine is the most probable answer. Allen Reine was the pseudonym of a Welsh novelist named Anne Adaliza Evans.

 

Further Reading

Running a great strategic meeting

Are you too busy to be curious?

Envision What’s Possible