Finding Your Team's Hidden Abilities

I'm a student of martial arts.  I study a variety of karate known as kempo. For me, martial arts is unsurpassed in its ability to build and support the qualities of leadership, self-reliance, initiative, persistence, and strategic thinking, that I seek to reinforce in myself. And, oh yes, let's not forget humility, which is especially relevant in my case, as I tend to get my butt kicked at least once a week.

Today I was watching a mixed martial arts match on TV.  I figured I knew how it was going to turn out:  one of the fighters was gigantic, towering over his opponent and enjoying about an 8-inch reach advantage.  Neither fighter was very experienced, and the match figured to end with the bigger dude, Marcus "Big Baby" Jones, beating the heck out of his opponent with his enormous fists.

But that's not what happened.  Yes, Jones won, and won convincingly.  But, to my utter surprise, he won with finesse, rather than power, trapping his opponent in a painful submission known as an arm bar. True, submission techniques aren't solely the province of small, wiry fighters; still, they do require some skill and experience, and I sure didn't expect to see that kind of grappling ability in former NFL player Jones.

Part of the lesson here, of course, is not to judge a book by its cover.  But there's more to it.  It wasn't just Jones' stature, broad shoulders, bulging biceps, and absurdly large hands that led to my incorrect prediction; after all, his opponent wasn't exactly built like a chimney sweep either.  But I'd watched both opponents train; I knew a bit about their backgrounds.  At one point prior to the fight, Jones said he was going to tear off his opponent's arm and hit him with it.  All in all, I felt safe in concluding I was about to see a beat-down.

Instead, I was treated to an exercise in strategy and timing I'd never anticipated. I thought I had a reasonable picture of Jones the fighter, but in reality, I'd missed his hidden abilities. Of course, people can surprise you - even people you think you know pretty well, like the members of your team. I've had a few opportunities to build teams from scratch, but most of the time, I take over an existing group.  That means that individuals on the team have spent time - perhaps a long time - in their respective roles.

These roles form the context in which I get to know them.  In the early stages of our relationship, I learn their personalities, as well as their skills and work habits. But it's easy to forget that I'm looking at them through a narrow window bounded by their job descriptions, that there's much more to each person than is evident to me in my usual interactions with them.

The best way to find the buried nuggets of talent on your team is simply to dedicate a portion of your busy schedule to meet and speak with each of them individually.  I've mentioned before that I'm surprised to see how infrequently senior leaders are willing to make this simple, though admittedly time-consuming, effort.

In hard times, it's more important than ever that leaders take the time to see sides of their employees that they might otherwise have missed.  Automation, outsourcing, and the poor economic climate have formed the perfect storm, robbing workers of opportunities and, in many cases, their livelihoods.  Knowing your team member's hidden talents may mean the difference between finding her a new role or having to let her go.

Keeping your employees employed is noble and appropriate, but it's not the only advantage of taking a closer look.  The more you know of your team's hidden abilities, the broader your range of responses can be when faced with new business challenges. That makes you, and your team, more valuable to your enterprise.  And that is a good place to be, whatever the state of the economy.

Genius

Wow - I knew it had been a while since I'd posted, but I was amazed to see just how long.

So back to work. If you've been in a leadership position for any amount of time, I hope you've noticed that good ideas come from all quarters. At a given moment, anybody in the room might come up with an insight that all the really important folks (like yourself) have missed.

Still, it can't be denied: some people are just smart. Really smart. You know who you are.

So I was interested in this David Brooks piece, entitled “Genius,” in the New York Times. As the author relates, and as we all know, the path to success is the same as the route to Carnegie Hall: practice.

When I was a kid, I was a huge Lakers fan, and my particular favorite was number 44, Jerry West. As a teen, West “practiced in the rain, mud, and snow. He would forget to go home to eat dinner, and would practice shooting until his fingers bled.” Result? Well, among his many other accomplishments, West still holds the NBA record for free throws made in a season – and that was in 1966!

Sure, West was born with talent. But lots of people are, and only West has held that free throw record for nearly as long as I've been alive. What made a kid from a West Virginia backwater into a superstar were those hours and hours of relentless, painful, mind-numbing practice.

But I wondered, when I read the Brooks piece, about intellectual, rather than athletic, accomplishment. Brooks mentions Mozart, but implies that Mozart's early and regular practice with the piano is what led to his reputation as a genius. That might be true if he were best known for his playing, but of course, Mozart is actually famous for composition. The most brilliant pianists aren't necessarily great composers (Chopin being a notable exception).

So how to account for superior intellectual achievement in areas like composition, or leadership, or innovation?

Whenever I think of the term “genius”, I take a moment to lament my own lost potential, and then I get past that and I think of the physicist Richard Feynman. In part, of course, because that's the title of James Gleick's terrific biography of Feynman. But fundamentally, it's for the same reason that Gleick had when he chose the name of his book. Feynman was – second only perhaps to Einstein – the iconic genius of the 20th century.

But if repetition, more than innate gift, made Jerry West what he was, and Kobe Bryant and Tiger Woods and Yo-Yo Ma what they are, what made Feynman, Feynman?

Thanks to Feynman's habit of writing about himself, and to Gleick's account, we know the answer: Practice. Nobody worked through problems in their head more than Feynman. No matter what else was going on, Feyman's inner dialog was never silent. Feynman himself writes, “I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.” There are too many examples to relate here, but when he says “use”, he means: rehearse. Over and over again.

Don't believe in “intellectual practice”? Consider Jill Price. You may have heard of her: she's the woman who remembers virtually every minute of her life. Misleadingly labeled “the woman who can't forget,” Price can recount what she was doing at any given time, or tell you the exact time she was doing any given activity. Scientists are fascinated by her, and are seeking biochemical or anatomical clues to her incredible capabilities.

But, as Gary Marcus suggests in Wired, Price's amazing recall may be due less to biology than to (wait for it): Practice! Marcus believes that “Price remembers so much about herself because she thinks about herself—and her past—almost constantly.” He goes on to conclude:

[Michael] Jordan wasn't born the greatest basketball player of all time; he became the greatest, combining considerable but not unique innate talent with an incredible amount of hard work shooting free throws and practicing jumpers long after most of his peers were out carousing. Whether intentionally or not, Price has shown the same sort of daily dedication to chronicling her own life.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that leadership takes practice. Innovation takes practice. The fact that the practice occurs in your head, or in a meeting, or in a memo, doesn't make it any less fundamental. And surely the fact that you aren't always successful shouldn't deter you: even in his record-setting '66 season, Jerry West missed 14% of his free throws.

The lesson for me? I need to post more often. I simply need the practice.

More on Lifelong Innovation

A quick followup to my earlier post: a short piece by Clive Thompson in the October issue of WIRED (16.10) also touches on the question of innovation among the, er, mature set.

Thompson raises an important point. I'm one of those people who feel that Google, for example, has measurably improved my quality of life. Perhaps one day LinkedIn will, too. And without the mysterious, magical Shazam, I would never have learned that "Feelin' Alright" was a Traffic tune before Joe Cocker recorded the version that unfailingly has me turning the volume to 11.

But what will really have an impact on my existence? What will change the world (and not just the printed map industry) in our lifetime? It will be the creation of cheap, renewable, pollution-free energy. Or a cure for diabetes, or autism. And in those categories, it's the older, more experienced entrepreneurs who will be more likely to be able to raise funds, lobby, and generally put together the expensive, resource-intensive, government-subsidized, multi-discipline efforts required to get the job done.

PS I was going to offer extra credit for spotting the bug in the snippet of BASIC code at the top of the article, but some other aging geek already commented on it. See if you can figure it out without sneaking a peek at the reader feedback on the bottom.

Empowerment at Every Level

A very accomplished and smart friend of mine tells this story: at the age of 19, he was working at a leading national department store as a stock assistant. Although he was hired into the position with little training, he worked hard to figure out the best way to stock hundreds of items in such a way that they would be organized and easily retrievable. Unfortunately, regardless of how hard he worked, his boss was never satisfied. The boss criticized him frequently for taking too long to do his job – never mind that there were no established guidelines for how the job should be done or how long it should take. In his performance review, the boss noted that my friend had been recommended by another department, and that therefore the boss would henceforth view that department's recommendations with skepticism.

Without even hearing the rest of the story, I knew where it had to be going. My friend is extremely intelligent and self-aware, and even in his 30s has accomplished things that others spend their whole lives trying to achieve.

Eventually, my friend got a new boss. The new boss encouraged him and gave him room to figure out the best way to handle his responsibilities. And what happened? My friend developed a system that the chain ended up deploying in several Orange County stores, realizing a savings of about a million dollars.

Now, dear reader, this may seem like an obvious lesson, particularly if you currently manage, say, a team of programmers. But remember – he was just a stock assistant, and a teenager at that. As yourself how much latitude you'd offer such an employee.

Give your people an opportunity to innovate – give them time to learn and room to fail – and the most amazing things will happen.

Lifelong Innovation

It can't be denied: I'm not as young as I used to be. But, in spite of the shoulder ache that keeps me up at night, and the various other reminders of the onward march of time, I do not believe that my best years are behind me – quite the opposite, in fact.

That's why it was refreshing to read this piece in the Wall Street Journal, written by George Anders. Leading companies are looking for ways to support creativity in employees well beyond the traditional age for epiphanetic experience. Indeed, according to the article, over the course of the last 75 years or so, the average age for breakthrough discoveries has risen about 10%, to 40.

Is it reasonable to expect our more experienced staff to contribute at the same level as energetic, recently matriculated newcomers? Much has been made of the simple fact that employees produce according to what is expected of them. (If you have a citation for me on this point, please send it along - I couldn't come up with one quickly enough to make it into this entry.) If we expect creativity and innovation from our employees – all of them – a few interesting things will happen:

• We will set goals according to that expectation.
• We will reinforce creative behavior among all our employees, young and not-so-young.
• We will see breakthrough thinking coming from unexpected quarters.

Accepting less from more mature employees amounts to simple disrespect. I am pretty sure that my bosses expect me to supply, directly or through my team, a more-or-less ongoing series of innovations and creative solutions, in spite of my graying (remaining) hair. I wouldn't insult any of my own staff by expecting less from any of them. As the article suggests, finding ways to support that level of productivity among employees of all ages is an important characteristic of people centered leadership.

Empowerment and Innovation

Today I happened to be speaking to one of my team about empowerment and innovation. Probably I was influenced by an article I had picked up in the doctor's office earlier in the day*. The piece, written by management power-duo Jack and Suzy Welch, addresses the culture at Google (and, I hope, many other places), which “freely permits employees to work off-site and encourages them to use one day a week to explore any kind of ‘what-if’ project that interests them.”

Jack Welch, of course, is famous for his tenure at the head of GE, the nice folks who bring you so many Sunday morning talk shows. I've always thought of GE as a stereotypical, big, conservative, stodgy American corporation. But, when I focus on their core business, I realize that they are essentially a giant technology innovation engine (literally – if you don't believe me, check out their cool tutorial on jet engines.) Even their motto – “Imagination at Work” – sounds like it belongs to Disney... or perhaps Google. So it probably shouldn't have surprised me that Jack and Suzy had some interesting insights into empowerment and innovation.

“Empowerment,” they note, “is less likely to happen in bigger companies, which is the opposite of how it should be... Big companies do tend to be risk-averse, keeping decisions near the top, while small ones, and in particular startups—short on resources, formality, and time—tend to unleash every brain.” (Emphasis mine.) They go on to point out that big companies can afford the risk that empowerment represents, while smaller companies can often go under due to a single erroneous decision.

It's fairly obvious that real empowerment – and, frankly, real innovation – is more common in smaller companies. What is new is the recognition by a Fortune 10 CEO that this isn't the way it should be. The challenge for Google is to keep alive the spirit of innovation that got it to where it is now, a challenge shared by any big company that wants to avoid getting pantsed by a couple of PhDs in a garage in Palo Alto, Pasadena, or Cambridge.

Have I seen any evidence that big companies are getting this message? Outside of a few technology firms, no. Instead, thanks in part to Sarbanes-Oxley, individual empowerment is at a nadir. There is little room for creativity when all business problems are supposed to be addressed in the same, regimented manner, using the same, tired techniques, and requiring the same, groupthink approach. Requirements. Development. Unit testing. Integration testing. User acceptance testing. Migration. Celebratory lunch. Repeat.

Small, private firms are exempt from SOX, and have not yet developed the culture of risk avoidance shared by so many large public companies. Employees are less likely to have HR-prescribed, set-in-stone job descriptions, and auditors are unlikely to drop by to ask for copies of approved change controls. As a result, individuals have much more room to innovate; indeed, they are generally strongly incented to do so by stock options whose value they can thereby impact directly.

Until big companies can find a way to create space within their latticework of regulations, policies, and procedures for employees to innovate, they will continue to earn their reputation as places where cool ideas go to die.

*) Quick question: if you have an 8am appointment, and the office opens at 8am, shouldn't you actually see the doctor well before 8:30? Because that's when I saw him. Sheesh.