©2007-2010 Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
Hazy Thought, Big Risk : Getting Your People to Think
The crux of this generation’s economic calamity is the unwillingness to think past the desired immediate goal. Whether a function of an age of instant gratification or the popular elimination of rigors of logic in favor of marketing and hype, business teams have been weakened by mythologies of winning strategies, power of positive thinking and the hype of sales systems. Eschewing voices of prudence, dismissing identification of risk as pathologies of gloom, doom and defeat, they walk brazenly and self-blinded into traps and disaster. They shrug off advance warning, citing competent counsel in the wings to “document around it” or to file suit in the event. The reality is that teams are fitted out with tall thin managers, siloed and over-specialized (like counsel). Too many of your team would rather buffalo their way through than think things through–they would rather bully others than admit the wider thinkers who could guide the analysis they and you need. What do you do? You have to understand that the confidence, the ambition, and the defiance of exogenous reality is underlain by fear. Fear of not getting the bonus, not scoring the win, certainly drives them, but the essential fear is the fear of simply being told “no.” You have to talk them around the fear, through the reality of certain facts, processes and consequences so that they, and you, can concentrate on what is really to be done.
These managers have stalled somewhere around their 16th year. They have never learned that acknowledging risk does not equate with giving up. Their thought process is immature. They would rather flit in excitement, bully in arrogance and move forward in folly than simply sit down, assess the risks with those who work beyond the silo, and then cost-benefit balance the risks. They don’t want their enthusiasm dimmed by the laws and facts of the physical world, the relationships and behavior of the natural world, and the complications of pesky regulation, law and insurance.
Of course, they really do want to be brilliant center stage in the sun and get the closing bonus. In an age which venerates spending as representation of wealth, it is not surprising that teams would be quick to idealize the path to a lucrative goal, a state known as “having dollar figures in their eyes.” From dotcom to biotech, from weather trading to derivatives, from the eternity of the China miracle to white nights riches in Russia, through every sector and region, daily business has been so obsessed too long.
In all these years of hearing both true believers and aspiring commercial climbers fend off questions, insights, doubts, and the actual red flags and fog horns of disaster ahead, I have realized that the process of achieving reality thinking is laborious and very individual. The process is the more challenging the thinner the manager, or entrepreneur, and thus the more dependent on outside specialized expertise person has come to be. Thin managers who rely on specialized experts never test the model and themselves against the whole, wider reality.
The CXO who has come up through a narrow regime of a single specialized silo is the worst: arrogant, narrow and all too often inclined to bully rather than lead. Moreover, reaching reality with any CXO is never sufficient; one has to reach the entire team. Unless one reaches the entire team, the necessary will not get done. If one does not reach through the entire team, the CXO will be coaxed into moving forward in error in a critical moment or schisms will appear or passive-aggressive noncompliance will ensure that the metaphorical O-rings are not re-engineered. The project will still blow up, even as it seems to achieve the stratosphere.
To be effective in reaching the entire team, you have to figure out who is who. Some team members are rationalists and are pressured only by the need not to dim the Sales/Marketing enthusiasm (hype) with sticky floor facts. They can be faced with facts and will set about to solve the problems and balance the risks and benefits. Others are blind cheerleaders who, apprised of the factors to be considered, may crumble entirely but could instead subdue the hype while the team works out problems to reignite the former enthusiasm at the same fevered pitch.
Yet others are not able to compute distinctions and have to be led through the facts, risk, consequences and alternatives; once given alternatives, they are able to pick and choose on the basis of a screen for success: dollar values, physical consequences and legal penalties. The most obdurate may need to balance dollar figures with prison terms. (As in this decade’s Enron/Tyco business cocktail query: What would you do for $5 million dollars (both misconduct and prison term, presumably).) And then there is the worst case: the arrogant hitherto successful narrow bully who will need to be bludgeoned with pertinent fact, factors, truth and consequences. (Do not go to talk to these alone.)
Once you do have the team at the table, acknowledging risk, acknowledging fact, you can get down to further research and consideration leading with the rationalists, bolstered by the cheer leaders. It is key to offer constant avenues of new opportunity and benefits of solutions to the risks even as you plod a prudent course to minimizing risk and maximizing value.
You yourself maximize value if you have breadth and depth of knowledge about the matter at hand, knowledge far beyond mere exposure, so that you can do critical thinking where they cannot or where they have been conditioned to not think critically. Meanwhile beware of cynical counsel or consultant who blandly reassures, cynically knowing the firm will get the litigation or the bailout file when the inevitable complications, and even disasters, come. Redirect the team to understand that to say “”that never happens” is merely a terrible substitute for thinking or a blind for ignorance. Help them choose the best path, the one not airbrushed and Photoshopped, the legitimately prudent path to the greatest and most likely success which does not take the business to the edge of an inconvenient abyss. And no derivatives until the team are grown.
© 2009 Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All Rights Reserved.
