Peter Bregman on why friends matter at work and in life
Peter Bregman
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Susan Harrison, my mother-in-law, died several months ago after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Like most of us, she was not famous. If you didn’t know her you probably didn’t know of her. She lived in the relatively small community of Savannah, Georgia.
Yet she did some amazing things there — she was the first ordained woman Deacon in Georgia, she founded a soup kitchen, and she helped create the Savannah Homeless Authority. In addition to raising three children and, some would say, a husband.
One of the problems we faced after her death was finding a church big enough to hold the people who wanted to attend her funeral. We picked the largest one we could find, with seating for 600, and still many had to stand in the back and along the aisles.
Susan had a particular quality that drew people in. It wasn’t her accomplishments. It wasn’t money. She had no access to famous or important people. She couldn’t hire you; she wasn’t a stepping stone.
Susan was, quite simply, a really good friend.
Which is an art. To be a good friend, you have to give of yourself, but not so much that you lose yourself. You need to know what you want and pursue it, while helping others achieve what they want. You need to have personality while making room for, and supporting, other people’s personalities. You need to care about, and even love, people you might disagree with (I’m pretty sure she didn’t vote for the same candidates as her husband). You need to be willing to give at least as much, if not more, than you take.
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Want to stay in that job you have? Then you’d better have friends. As a friend of mine who runs sales for a successful technology company told me recently, “People try hard not to fire their friends. It’s the difference between ‘he’s a good guy’ and ‘I don’t know about that guy.’”
The happy truth is that the people who say they’re not here to make friends don’t win. That’s true for reality TV. It’s true for business. And it’s true for life.
During Susan’s last few days she was surrounded at all hours by her family and friends. During those moments she managed to get some advice out. Among her parting words? “Surround yourself with a loving community.”
In other words, it’s a pretty good bet that we really are here to make friends.
* * *
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Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.
Bob Morris on Know What You Don’t Know: A Book Review
Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen
Michael A. Roberto
Wharton School Publishing (2009)
Michael A. Roberto stresses the importance of mastering seven sets of skills and capabilities that are essential to effective problem-finding. He makes the same key point (among several) in his previously published book, Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer: Managing for Conflict and Consensus, asserting that the most effective leaders are those who “cultivate constructive conflict so as to enhance the level of critical and divergent thinking, while simultaneously building consensus so as to facilitate the timely and efficient implementation of the choices that they make.” He goes on to assert that “effective leaders can and should spend time `deciding how to decide.’ In short, creating high-quality decision-making processes necessitates a good deal of forethought.”
Throughout Roberto’s lively narrative, there is a strong recurring theme: “leaders must strive for a delicate balance of assertiveness and restraint.” In this book, he explains, “I argue that leaders must become hunters who venture out in search of the problems that might lead to disaster” for their organizations. The title “Know What You Don’t Know” has all manner of critically important implications. Here are three. First, it correctly suggests that identifying and then filling knowledge needs requires the same “level of critical and divergent thinking, while simultaneously building consensus” that the problem-solving process requires. And that consensus should be the result of rigorous scrutiny applied to a number of options even if (especially if) some seem counterintuitive and perhaps even contradictory. Only then will it be possible “to facilitate the timely and efficient implementation” of the choice(s) made.
This book’s title also correctly suggests that this process requires high-impact leadership, one that insists on both good will and principled disagreement throughout group discussion and consideration while maintaining “a delicate balance of assertiveness and restraint.” High-impact leadership also serves as an example of seven critical skills and capabilities that are needed to ensure that problems do not remain hidden (more about them later), to discover “the bad news that typically does not surface until far too late.” However, Roberto adds, becoming an effective problem-finder (a “detective”) also requires a “different mindset,” one that “begins with a certain level of intellectual curiosity, is based on systematic thinking, and meanwhile realize that “every organization, no matter how successful, has plenty of problems [and they] often lie beneath the surface, hidden from view.” This is what Andrew Grove, former Intel chairman and CEO, had in mind when asserting that “only the paranoid survive.”
The most effective problem finders must also be effective navigators and politicians, as the following correctly suggest:
1. Circumvent the “gatekeepers” (i.e. those who control filters and other barriers)
2. Become an ethnographer (observe carefully, ask questions, listen intently, etc.)
3. Hunt for patterns (e.g. identify verifiable causal relationships)
4. Connect the dots (but only after you have identified which dots to connect)
5. Encourage useful failures (i.e. those that are small, brief, inexpensive, and especially informative)
6. Teach how to talk and to listen (also when and why)
7. Watch the “game film” of past performance (make adjustments, practice deliberately and strategically)
I wholeheartedly agree with Michael Roberto that organizations should commit at least as resources to encouraging, training, supporting, recognizing, and (yes) rewarding their Problem-Finders (“Detectives”) as they do their Problem-Solvers (“Firefighters”). Of course both are needed. And both require leaders who demonstrate intellectual curiosity, adopt systematic thinking, and exhibit a healthy dose of paranoia. He goes on to point out, “They do not wait for problems to come to them. They behave much more proactively. They seek out problems. They embrace them…The very best leaders know that speed is critical. The earlier you discover a problem, the more likely you can contain the damage, and the more likely you can solve it readily. Most important of all, successful leaders do not see problems as threats. They see every problem as an opportunity to learn and improve.”
Max Atkinson on how to act and speak with power
Max Atkinson
1. Use us-versus-them references. “It is widely known that the need to resist an external threat, whether real or imagined. Has always been an extremely effect8ve rallying cry when it comes to strengthening group solidarity.”
2. Pause for emphasis and invite approval or even applause through a slight delay. “A pause just before getting to completion and a slightly extended final segment of talk are both common features in the design of most types of claptrap [a rhetorical device designed to produce applause and approval].”
3. Use a list of three items, key points, benefits, perils, or enumerations in general. “”One of the main attractions of three-part lists is that they have an air of unity and completeness about them.”
4. Use contrastive pairs, juxtaposing one whatever (issue, situation, etc.) with another and using passages that are similar in length and grammatical structure. “The use of contrast as a rhetorical device relies in part on the ‘use versus them’ construct, but it also invites explicit comparison that is structured to be favorable to the ideas advocated by the speaker.”
5. Avoid using a script or even notes. “If you can’t speak five minutes without a note in front of you, about a subject you know cold, you’re not working at your job.” As Atkinson correctly suggests, those who speak without aids are perceived to have mastered the given subject. Also, they can establish and sustain direct idea contact with the members of the audience.
This Time Is Different – NO, it’s Not! (insight from Reinhart & Rogoff)
This blog is about business books, about ideas found in business books, about thoughts prompted by business books… we are interested in people finding paths to success, and avoiding paths to great mistakes, and on this blog we share what we read, what we think, what we find… Sometimes we simply quote the words and insights of others, and at other times, we throw in our reflections and thoughts.
A few months ago, I prepared a synopsis of a true tome (you know, one of those big thick books that takes a lot of work to dig through and understand). It is this book:
This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press; 2009) by Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff. It is a book filled with charts and data from eight centuries of financial folly.
Here’s a short quote from the preface:
Our basic message is simple: We have been here before.
They wrote:
The global financial crisis of the late 2000’s, whether measured by the depth, breadth, and (potential) duration of the accompanying recession or by its profound effect on asset markets, stands as the most serious global financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis has been a transformative moment in global economic history whose ultimate resolution will likely reshape politics and economics for at least a generation.
Should the crisis have come as a surprise?…
And the answer is – “no.” It should not have been a surprise. And the premise of the book is that, no, this time is not different, in spite of the fact that many have argued that this was a unique problem in human economic history. Again, from the book:
This time may seem different, but all too often a deeper look shows it is not. Encouragingly, history does point to warning signs that policy makers can look at to asses risk – if only they do not become too drunk with their credit bubble-fueled success and say, as their predecessors have for centuries, “This time is different.”
(Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times) Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart at Ms. Reinhart’s Washington home. They started their book around 2003, years before the economy began to crumble.
The New York Times published a major multi-page piece about the work and collaboration of these two authors: They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It) by Catherine Rampell. The article/profile is definitely worth reading. Here are quite a few excerpts.
“The mainstream of academic research in macroeconomics puts theoretical coherence and elegance first, and investigating the data second,” says Mr. Rogoff. For that reason, he says, much of the profession’s celebrated work “was not terribly useful in either predicting the financial crisis, or in assessing how it would it play out once it happened.”
“There is so much inbredness in this profession,” says Ms. Reinhart. “They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.”
“I have a talent for rounding up data like cattle, all over the plain,” she says.
“You know, everything is simple when it’s clearly explained,” she contends. “It’s like with Sherlock Holmes. He goes through this incredible deductive process from Point A to Point B, and by the time he explains everything, it makes so much sense that it sounds obvious and simple. It doesn’t sound clever anymore.”
But, she says, “economists love being clever.”
Perhaps because “This Time Is Different” is empirical rather than proscriptive, it has defied categorization.
MICROECONOMICS — the field that focuses on smaller units like households and workers, as opposed to big-picture questions about how national economies function — has embraced real-world data-mining. (Think “Freakonomics.”)
Macroeconomics has been slower to change, but the popular success of “This Time Is Different” and related work seems to be changing how macro practitioners approach their craft.
It has also changed how policy makers think about their own mission.
Mr. Rogoff says a senior official in the Japanese finance ministry was offended at the suggestion in “This Time Is Different” that Japan had once defaulted on its debt and sent him an angry letter demanding a retraction.
Mr. Rogoff sent him a 1942 front-page article in The Times documenting the forgotten default. “Thank you,” the official wrote in apology, “for teaching the Japanese something about our own country.”
I think this is a book worth putting on your reading stack. The breadth of their research is genuinely impressive.
What Went Wrong? – A Question Worth Asking (wisdom from James Bagian)
James Bagian
Slate.com has a terrific interview up with James Bagian. It is in their The Wrong Stuff: What It Means To Make Mistakes series. This interview is titled: Risky Business: James Bagian—NASA astronaut turned patient safety expert—on Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz.
Mr. Bagian was scheduled to be on the Challenger mission, and his crew was switched out. He has studied failures/mistakes for many years. His current job is director of the Veteran Administration’s National Center for Patient Safety. The entire interview its absolutely worth reading, but here is one brief excerpt:
You were part of the team that investigated the Challenger accident. Were you satisfied with how that investigation was handled?
Overall I didn’t have big problems with it. But one thing that was deliberately buried was what happened to the crew. I did that part of the investigation, and there was tremendous political pressure not to tell anyone what happened—not even the other people in the crew office. They didn’t learn for months, which was totally inappropriate. They wouldn’t even let us put in checklists about what to do in the case of a breakup similar to Challenger. (emphasis added). There’s ways you could probably survive it, but politically we weren’t allowed to discuss that for years, which to me is total hogwash. There are still many people that don’t understand that the crew of the Challenger didn’t die until they hit the water. They were all strapped into their seats in a basically intact crew module; their hearts were still beating when they hit the water. People think they were blown to smithereens, but that’s not what happened. And the problem with that is the same one we were talking about with regard to medicine: if you don’t learn what you can from a tragedy, you can’t mitigate that risk in the future.
The entire interview, without ever mentioning Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, is an argument for such checklists – for multiple checks throughout the system – to reduce mistakes.
Studying what went wrong is truly worth the time…
Ron Chernow on “the feuding founders”
Ron Chernow
Consider these brief and pungent observations:
John Adams on Benjamin Franklin: “His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and decency.”
Benjamin Franklin on John Adams: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
John Adams on Alexander Hamilton: “The bastard brat of a Scottish peddler” who possesses “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.”
Alexander Hamilton on John Adams: “The man is more mad than I ever thought him and I shall soon be led to say as wicked as he is mad.”
Thomas Jefferson on Alexander Hamilton: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.”
Alexander Hamilton on Thomas Jefferson: He is not scrupulous about the means of success, nor very mindful of truth, and…he is a contemptible hypocrite.”
* * *
Ron Chernow is the author of The House of Morgan, Alexander Hamilton and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. His next book, Washington: A Life, will be published by Penguin Press HC in October.
Interview: Ira Chaleff
Ira Chaleff
Chaleff has been named one of the top 100 best thinkers on leadership in the U.S. by Executive Excellence magazine. He lives in Washington, DC, and plays several interesting roles there including executive coach, author, workshop leader and chair of a non-profit board that studies best management and communication practices in political offices. As a coach, he provides a supportive forum for executives to examine and improve their leadership and management styles and processes, their interpersonal and political skills, and their focus on mission achievement. Chaleff’s coaching experience includes a broad range of financial, manufacturing, legal, pharmaceutical, not-for-profit and government organizations.
As an author he has been acknowledged in the Harvard Business Review as one of the pioneers in the emerging field of followership studies. One of his books, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders, is now in its third edition and has been translated into half a dozen languages. He also co-edited, The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Make Great Leaders and Organizations with Ronald E. Riggio and Jean Lipman-Blumen, published by Jossey-Bass in 2008. He has given hundreds of speeches and workshops on this topic for a wide range of public and private sector groups and recently, with his publisher Berrett-Koehler (www.bkpub.com), developed an online version of the Followership Styles instrument he uses in these workshops (www.courageousfollower.net).
Chaleff also occupies a unique niche in Washington, DC. He has served as executive director of the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) and is currently the chair of its Board. CMF is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that helps congressional offices serve their constituents through better communication and management practices in their own offices. From this vantage point he has a unique view of leader-follower dynamics in political cultures.
Morris: Before focusing on your books, I have some general questions. First, what is it about executive coaching that you most enjoy?
Chaleff: It’s rare for promising performers, mid-level managers or senior executives to stop the world for awhile to examine how they are interacting with that world, what impact their style is having, and how they might interact more effectively. Coaching gives them that opportunity.
When you make the environment safe, both through confidentiality ground rules and non-judgmental questioning and feedback, people open up and become vitally engaged in their own growth. In addition to the process being of significant benefit to them, it provides the coach with a privileged window into the dynamics of organization life. This helps me keep real and fresh when writing about leadership and followership. I also work with a terrific group of talented coaches so we learn from each other (www.exe-coach.com)
Morris: You have much of value to say about strengthening skill sets. In your opinion, what will be the most important skills that business leaders will need during the next 2-3 years?
Chaleff: Every age has its anxieties. Ours is no exception. Globalization, recession, climate change, aging populations, the mind-boggling speed of change, the rise of giant economic and scientific competitors, the 24/7 media cycle all contribute to a background of anxiety. Leaders need to possess or learn the capacity to not add to that anxiety but rather to channel it into adaptive responses. This is where leadership “being” is as or more important than “doing”.
A concomitant skill will be creating cultures that make it explicitly safe for candor between all levels of the organization. Vast knowledge resides at the bottom of the organization that must be able to reach and inform the strategic decision makers at the top. Otherwise warnings about suspect practices do not reach the top of a Lehman Brothers or an Arthur Anderson until those practices sink the organization. They must be able to hear these warnings and look deeply into the organization’s culture, its metrics and its reward systems to understand how it is creating unacceptable risk.
Leaders of the 21st century will encourage their younger staff to imaginatively utilize ever-changing technology to break down walls between levels of the hierarchy, functional departments, partner organizations, stakeholders and customers. They will encourage reverse mentoring and leadership based on competency rather than on position.
They will also understand their power to model the values and behaviors that are needed throughout the organization. These include continuous learning, self-development, authenticity, resilience and personal and social accountability. Gosh, these sound like the qualities of a well developed, mature human being!
Morris: You occupy a very interesting niche in Washington, DC. Some would say bringing good management practices to Congress is both oxymoronic and quixotic. What is your experience in this realm?
Chaleff: Congress has many critics and much of the criticism it receives is well-deserved. Yet most of its members are passionately dedicated and the legislative branch is a crucial institution for our republic. So we need to think about how to make it work better for us.
Congress operates on several levels. The primary unit is the individual member of Congress and his or her office. All members have both a Washington office and one or more offices in their district or State. Representatives are allowed up to 18 full time staff. The size of Senate office staffs varies by state population and can go as high as 80 or so. For these offices to best serve the member’s constituents they need to be well managed. The non-profit I chair has been able to make a significant difference in this realm.
The larger institution is a different kettle of fish. Some of its support services such as the Library of Congress, the Capitol police, the finance functions, can benefit from good management the way any organization can. But at the heart of the institution, which is the two chambers and their elected members, the process becomes so intensely political that good management emphatically takes a back seat to the need for principled leadership. Unfortunately, our system rewards those in leadership roles far more for party victories than for policy achievements. It is a great conundrum as to how to alter those dynamics.
There are small fixes that could curb the worst consequences of this system but the larger dynamics are unlikely to radically change. Therefore, it comes down to the values of the leadership. We need individuals with the courage to be “patriots instead of partiots.” It is said that people get the government they deserve. I interpret this to mean if we want a better legislature we need to individually and collectively raise our voices to demand dialogue instead of posturing, and principled collaboration instead of politically motivated “gotcha”. The Congressional Management Foundation (Read more »
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