When I was a young manager, I read “The One-Minute Manager” by Blanchard and Johnson. I learned to “manage by walking-around” and “catch people doing things right”.
As a motivational tool, catching people doing things right is effective. But it doesn’t work long term if all you is praise their results.
I led the winning team on a bid worth $85 M in Hong-Kong. It was complex, with months of technical, commercial and legal negotiations. The team gave all it could, and then some.
Coming off the plane, I went to the office and attended the celebration party. Executives, heads of department and the entire team drinking champagne (yes, they allow this in France). Speeches. How happy the executives are. Proud of the team who worked so hard.
It was nice. The bonus was nice too. But it did not change much. Business as usual the next day.
But not for me. I had been debriefed, the “Encouragement” way.
Lead Engineers are promoted to Team Leaders typically because they were great at completing engineering tasks.
A new Lead Engineer will transfer the techniques that worked in managing her own work, into managing the team. Most often, this does not work as planned.
If Lead Engineers managed their team exactly as they did their own work, it might actually work. But they don’t. They assign tasks, but keep the thinking behind them, in their own heads.
From the coaching file: Coach speaks with Sophia (S), a team leader:
“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right” (Henry Ford)
People are capable of doing great things. Whether they do great things is up to you, the Leader.
As leader, you must believe that the team can achieve great results. In fact, believe more than the team itself is willing to believe. You can’t fake it though. It must be genuine because people can always tell.
From the coaching file (in a seminar I gave):
“Norm, this is all fine and good, but how do you use your methods when some engineers can’t even be trusted to get a can of soda from the corner store?”
What is the likelihood that these engineers will actually go the extra mile for this manager?
We are creatures of habit. We operate within our comfort zone and resist change that makes us act outside of it. The resistance level is proportional to how far outside of the comfort zone we are asked to go. Thus a change program must move our comfort zone by increment towards new practices. But that is not enough.Teams exist because we are creatures of habit. We need the consistency of others. It allows us to operate within our comfort zone within the team. In fact the team culture mandates it.
Culture is not something we define or prescribe. It emerges. It is a tacit agreement between all participants. I like to think of culture as an unconscious jigsaw puzzle, where each individual comfort zone is made to fit together. Team members fit in the team by adjusting their actions slightly. If we are in a team long enough, these adjustments become part of our comfort zone. And that’s the problem.
I have argued that improvement only occurs if we change our current actions. From books to seminars to training programs, finding best practices that will give better results is straightforward. Getting the whole team to adopt these is the problem. To implement change it helps to understand what we’re up against.
We individually resist change because we act within our comfort zone. And we can’t change that.
Though we would like to think otherwise, we are predictable in how we work. We favor actions and methods we have already mastered. We are creature of habit, because we trust our habits to produce repeatable and acceptable results. In this comfort zone, we are relaxed, confident, focused. We know how. We have experience. We may not always succeed, or produce great results, but we rarely fail.
It’s not that we don’t like change. In fact we crave it. We want to improve, to get better. But to produce better results we must act differently. This means doing things outside of our comfort zone. Unconsciously or outright we ask ourselves: Will I succeed? Will I do it right? Will it work, for me? Isn’t it most likely I will fail at first?
I am training a group of engineers and managers on planning R&D work. And I’m getting nowhere. A manager and his best lead engineer keep attacking every thing I say. For every example, they have a counter example. For every method, they are already doing it, only better and different. They never really overrun projects. Not if you take into account the fact that clients changed scope mid-project or management undersold it in the first place.
I’m at my wits end. But then I see it. I am up against “the” roadblock to change:
“That’s not how we do things around here!”
During a break, I asked the functional manager: Why are you here? “Management think we don’t know how to do our work”, he said. “The CEO blames us for overrunning. But in fact, if it was not for us, they’d be doing worse. We’ve been doing this work for 30 years, I think we know how by now”.
We resist change at various levels. And we must address each level, or change won’t happen. We might get short term improvement, – but it won’t stick. We have to climb the Resistance to Change Pyramid.
