Bad Management is Easy!

Recently I came across a manager who gave her entire team a negative feedback. Strangely, the feedbacks for the same people for jobs done for other managers before and after this particular job were fairly positive. This got me thinking: did the people drop dead for two weeks or was there something else going on. I was surprised that this did not get any alarm bells ringing anywhere else. Even worse, the blame and negative consequences got apportioned to the team rather than the manager. I think this is a very good example of bad management compounded by poor organisation response.

I think a good manager lies at the heart of a vibrant organisation and needs three crucial skills to succeed: project management, communication, and team building.

Project management can be learned by studying and adapting project management techniques and frameworks like Scrum/Agile, PRINCE2, etc. Alternatively, it can simply mean being organised and keeping on top of the project and actively managing its risks. 

Good and effective communication is an integral part of project management. I write it as a separate skill as I have now seen too many poorly worded emails and negative communication as one used by the manager above. For example, in the above case the manager did not effectively communicate with her team during the project, holding on to a grudge and giving a negative feedback two months after the job to a surprised team. Not to let the team off the hook, it can be argued that they could have tried to communicate with the Manager as well. However, if the Manager is deemed more senior, paid more, and given more responsibility, I think it is fair to say that bad team communication is primarily a managerial failing.

Team building is a skill that I would look out in manager who I expect to take on a leadership role in the company at any time in the future. If you are operating in a super-competitive knowledge based industry, success will be defined by being able to hire and retain top-quality talent. And, managers can be pivotal to this: most of the times when people leave a company, more often than not they leave their managers.

In the above case, I would definitely try to dig a bit before readily blaming the team (especially if they seem to be doing a good job otherwise). I would pull them up for taking an initiative on communication if the manager was doing a poor job of it. However, my main target would be the manager from whom I would expect more than trying to escape blame for a badly run project by blaming the team.  

All the skills above are not rocket science and can be taught. Really, these are the basics, and better organisations stick to them.

Re-discovering a Ghost

Just finished reading "A Ghost's Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan's 'My Years with General Motors' " by John McDonald. It is a small book of 187 pages, and I found it so interesting that I finished it in barely 2 days. That is what can happen to reading speed when a book is good. Perhaps in terms of pure business education this book may not have as much to offer in absolute terms, but in terms of realism, strategy, organizational behaviour and group dynamics, the book offers some remarkably deep insights. It is an ode to a person without whose effort the world would not have seen one of the best books in business studies. The book does not reflect well on Peter Drucker, whose introduction to the revised edition of Sloan's book appears both delusional and ridiculous in light of the facts presented in McDonald's book.

I cannot help but observe one thing: a strategist needs to remain unobserved and even under-estimated while being very alert and perceptive, making the right moves at the right time to be silently influential. This, however, can translate into a genius dying unheard and unsung in his time. Only in the long-term and only if somebody is willing to dig enough does the genius appear. A strategist needs somebody who can handle his PR and marketing without jeopardizing the strategist's position of power or influence. A tricky bit but is perhaps necessary. Like Mr. McDonald became a channel to show the world the genius that was Mr. Sloan, sadly nobody was able to play that role for Mr. McDonald. In fact, had it not been for Mr. Drucker's inaccurate foreword, his story would never have been told. We also learn of the importance of the discipline of business historians and their corresponding role as Ghost Writers in bringing out an accurate description of the history of successful enterprises.

The book brings out the importance of chance, networking, strategy and perseverance in any kind of conflict. Luck plays its part, but fortune does favour the brave and the persistent most of the times. It is important to start over with a basis to fight on, without which the fight may prove to be unsustainable. As McDonald discovered that he could bring up a case against GM for suppression of the book and found lawyer friends willing to fight it out, he persisted with it and played his cards right. He never took what was told on its face-value and tried to place it in larger scheme of things. Overall, it is a good example of group dynamics in hostile situations and I would recommend the book to anybody who has read and enjoyed the original book by Mr. Sloan.

My VICTOR Framework

How does one get the best performance out of the team? This is a fundamental question with no definite answers, a question to which considerable academic research and books have been dedicated. For the uninitiated it can be like the search for an ever elusive fountain of youth. My thoughts on it out of my experience. I believe keeping an eye on the following is necessary to maintain a top level of performance (my VICTOR framework!):

1. Vision: What does your company stand for? If your company has no concrete vision, what do you think your group stands for? If you can articulate it in few words and communicate it effectively to your team, and then go on to implement it in every aspect of your functioning; you will be able to build a strong team. Your hiring needs to be careful and needs to carefully consider the culture of the company.
2. Individualization: You have to remember that what motivates and drives you does not necessarily drive everybody. Spend time with your team, get to know how people fit and what they can do best. Focus on strengths and put people in the right place instead of picking on their weaknesses.
3. Consistency: Whatever you do, you will have to be consistent with it. Random changes (changes that appear random to your team) can confuse and demoralize.
4. Transformation: If you talk, walk the talk. Make real changes, put systems on the ground and take people into confidence. Else you will loose credibility sooner than later.
5. Output: Put in place ways to measure the output,without which there is no way to credibly measure the success of the changes.
6. Reward: Encourage positive behaviour by rewarding it. Take the career of each member of your team member seriously and let them know that what kind of growth path you have in mind for them

I will expand on this more in my future blogs. I will end with saying that any development methodology and any process can do only so much. Without the passion of the leader, consistent top-level performance is only a pipe-dream. If you cannot nurture talent, the talent will leave you. Especially in sectors like IT, where the demand is much higher than the supply, understanding and nurturing your team is of paramount importance.

Gaming the World

Group dynamics should be of interest to anybody who needs to deal with a group. This can include nations, corporates, religious groups, unions, professional associations and the likes. It can be interesting for individuals in general and can help them to try and understand their position in the society and their contribution to the resulting dynamics. Game theory has been an important step towards rationalizing this dynamics. Its concept of equilibrium between various competing forces is a nothing but a stroke of genius. The theory, however, abstracts the results and a sequence of events. A framework that maybe able to account for human motivations and behaviour may be able to complement the theory. There are two places where I see the potential of extracting such behaviour patterns: the animal kingdom and astrology.

Game theory has found its way to biology. What I propose is that in addition to this we can extract basic behaviour patterns that can be observed. As in physics we begin with the simplest of assumptions, why not first try to extract behaviour patterns from animals? Most animals, after all, exhibit a fairly consistent behaviour when compared to humans. Humans differ from animals in their ability to choose and switch behaviour. A cheetah can never become a vulture but a human producer can transform to sloth. A series of predictable, simple animal behaviour patterns can be used to describe a complex human one, and similarly the way animal groups interact can be used for group dynamics as well.

For example, the diverse wildlife of an African savannah can make an interesting study in basic patterns. We can see that in order to survive the animals seek or develop some kind of advantage. This can take form of numbers, size or specializations. Numbers are sought as either an offensive or a defensive strategy. Most herbivores generally seek groups for a nominal defence against predators, though only few like wild buffalo would take the fight back to the predator. Even carnivores like lions and wild dogs seek numbers to ensure success and survival. Some animals, like the rhino and elephant, count on their size to bully and get their way. Finally, some kind of specialization is used for survival. Giraffe uses its long neck, a cheetah uses its speed while vultures use their flexibility. At the end, various unknown choices on the path of evolution determine the place occupied by any particular animal. This determines their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat; so to say. For example, a cheetah goes hungry despite of being the most successful hunter on the savannah due to its inability to defend what it is able to hunt. Lions, hyenas and vultures manage to harass the cheetah enough to forfeit its hard-earned food. So, when Ayn Rand talks about the fact that the creators are taken for a ride, I think it is a brave defence of the heroics of an achiever (cheetah) but ignores the fact that the strength to defend what one has is as important to succeed. For ages, hungry barbarians at the gate have ravenously consumed civilizations smug with its achievements. Be it ancient Rome or India, the story is the same. Similar parallels can be found in other animal behaviours as well. The bottom-line is that each one tries to maximize their advantage as they know best. Be it the chest-thumping of morality to induce guilt, brute force, majority, cunning, intelligence or hard work; the whole question is about getting an advantage and trying to maintain it. Morals come up to try to enforce stability as such a purely Machiavellian society may tend to get totally turbulent. All forms of social institutions come up with a view of creating stability. Nevertheless, a few always manage to find a way to game the system and the ones who feel left out, feeling taken for a ride, push for changes and alternative systems of organization. So, effectively, we have managed to transform power games between individuals into power games with in groups and alternative organizing principles.

Similar patterns can be found in astrology. Astrology gives us a classification system that tries to crystallize "human" elements (picture a periodic table of elements) and defines a set of rules for their reaction in various circumstances. Most people think of astrology only as the sun sign. My observation says that it is NOT about the sun sign as sun is only one out of nine planets influencing a person. Think of it like a vector problem in Mathematics. It is not the presence of one force that counts, it is where the resultant vector would point to that determines the personality. Or a chemical reaction in which certain elements react to produce a result that may be quite different from the reacting elements. In fact, after some observation, it is possible to map the result to its constituent elements without seeing the birth chart, to see how a person behaves and then try to classify it under any of the observable patterns in the matrix. If we are able to see a fit, it immediately gives us a perspective on the person's current state of mind and the possible behaviour he is expecting. And you do not need any birth chart for this! This, for me, has been the most practical application of astrology. A tool to better understand myself, people around me and behaviour patterns. It has certainly helped me to be more understanding and modify my behaviour according to the situation. It has also helped me to understand my own prejudices & thought patterns.

Further, linking this to artificial intelligence and reducing the patterns to programs can help to further refine the framework. Using studies from emergent behaviour or modelling of a probabilistic systems of interlinked events (a system in which events are not definite but probable, and occurrence of any one event has the potential of affecting the probability of all other events in the system) around this could prove to be interesting.

IT Management Practices: Involving the Team

I have an experience that I feel may be useful to share. Till date, I have worked on two excellent new product development projects and it has been a wonderful learning experience. However, each team had its challenges. Since I do not want to name the companies or the managers, let us say I am talking for company Alpha and company Beta.

Both companies are technically very strong. However, company Alpha had to put together a team to develop a rich Internet web application when RIA as a concept was pretty new. This initially led to ambiguity in terms of experience and possibilities, but the manager ran a tight ship and delegated responsibility. The whole team was encouraged to develop skills and participate very closely at every stage - including interviewing, requirement gathering and architecture. This ultimately led to technical skill development, team bonding, growth of all team members and decent execution of the project. The stress and responsibility were evenly divided, but there was no doubt on who was leading the pack. Leadership was inclusive and far-sighted.

Company Beta, on the other hand, had significant experience with web applications and RIA was relatively known by this time. So they could hire the people with right skills and there was less ambiguity to start with. But the structure was more hierarchical and the manager less keen on sharing "power" across the board, giving less influence to team members on requirement gathering, designing or interviewing. Of this, for me, the most difficult part was not being included in requirement gathering. Working with a requirement document may be the norm in big companies, but for entrepreneurial setups it is absolutely critical to be involve the team closely. This can save a lot of time down the line lost to bugs resulting from misunderstood requirements. Moreover, such involvement creates more urgency, creates an aura of responsibility and gives additional perspective to the whole process. This can be critical in long term.

Ultimately, both companies managed to launch a good product. Nevertheless, Alpha is playing for the long term - trying to nurture second rung of leadership - while Beta will increasingly get dependent on one row of leadership with a big vacuum below. In the long run, it may indeed make a difference between great and good, and would be another testimony to Jim Collins.