Rick Ross on Business, Software and Life

Child's Play: A Lesson in Team Communication

2010-03-11T23:51:18-05:00

The Game

Whether in grade school or at summer camp, most of us played a game that offers insight into team communication. While its name, the Telephone Game may not be familiar, how it's played should quickly refresh dusty memories.

To start, participants form a line and the facilitator whispers a story to the first person. That person is then asked to whisper the story to the next person. The process is repeated until the story reaches the line's opposite end.

At the point, the first person and last person in line are asked to repeat what they've heard. What follows is predictable. Usually the room breaks out in laughter as participants enjoy with disbelief how twisted the details have become.

For project teams, one of the game's lessons is obvious. Keep communication paths as short as possible.

The Real World

Of course, the game is simplistic and doesn't fully reflect other real world challenges. Project communication paths are relatively short, but damaging distortions are introduced in other ways.

For example, each of the Telephone Game's participants is more or less equally qualified to pass on a basic story. On project teams, this is not the case. Experts often need to collaborate with experts on the same team or on a partner team. This communication is most effective when it's direct.

The "Single Source" Problem

A common problem is a well-intentioned, but dysfunctional communication rule. Project managers sometimes insist that all communications be routed through them.

Their argument is that they need to know what's happening and want to provide a "single source" for accurate communication. Of course, there's another unstated and usually less than beneficial purpose - control.

When inter or intra-team members can't collaborate directly:

The communication path is lengthened by at least one person.
Due to lack of expertise, distortions can be introduced by the intermediary.

When applied appropriately, the "single source" idea does have merit. Project status updates are best handled via communication from the project manager.

But even this has its downside. In an effort to look good, project managers may downplay or hide problems. This issue is surprisingly common and often has serious consequences.

According to the NASA investigation, the Challenger disaster was due in part to team member concerns not being communicated to upper level management. For more on other contributing factors read Can Good Graphical Presentation Change the World?

The Solution

To avoid problems:

Let people collaborate as needed. Ask that they keep the project manger informed and "in the loop".
Use "single source" communications with caution
Allow team members to review project status updates before they're sent out by the project manager. Encourage them to express any concerns to the project manager or to higher level executives if necessary.
Finally, reiterating the lesson from the Telephone Game - continually look for ways to keep communication paths as short and direct as possible.

Interesting Posts #2

2010-02-19T22:08:20-05:00

Making Sense of Data Overload

No news here - the internet and social media are providing us with overwhelming amounts of potentially useful information. Beyond simplistic tools, like trending topics and tag clouds, how can we mine valuable business information from the morass?

A picture is worth a thousand words and carefully constructed graphical representations of data are even better. Unfortunately, old standbys like pie charts and bar graphs struggle under the weight of increasing complexity.

Using data collected from Twitter, the author of the first post provides four examples of more sophisticated emerging representations of what are becoming known as "business intelligence graphics".

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter

An Unstoppable Dynamic Duo

In a business context, software is developed to enhance results. The typical thinking is that while employees use software, software has its job and people have theirs.

Instead of a division of labor, developers need to consider another option: human /computer collaboration. The combination works extraordinarily well, and is shockingly underutilized. Yes, you can read this as: major opportunity for competitive advantage.

The following article provides a clear example of this approach. Consider how it can be applied to your business.

Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model?

Too Much Control?

As companies encounter problems, they add controls to prevent recurrence. What could be wrong with that? The short list appears below.

Controls:

may be ineffective and never serve the purpose for which they were intended
may have unintended consequences
become outdated over time
may accumulate to the point where they hamper effectiveness

What can you do to prevent these problems? The author of the final article uses airport security to highlight problems with controls and offers a suggestion to keep them in check.

What Shoe Bombers Tell Us About Office Bureaucracy

Interesting Business Posts #1

2010-02-10T15:19:35-05:00

This collection of posts is comprised of three excellent reads from the Harvard Business Review blogs.

Motivation

The first post takes note of an interesting phenomenon regarding motivation. The author underscores the results of an experiment with a related personal experience.

Who's more motivated? Someone paid at their regular rate, someone asked to work at a discounted rate or someone asked to help as "a favor".

While the post will be of interest to all leaders, this one's essential for nonprofit execs. For them it contains a gem of a practical tip.

A Story About Motivation

Metrics

Metrics must be used with caution. Without careful consideration and design they can introduce unintended bias.

The author of the next article puts it this way:

"As humans, we're hard-wired to infer causality from correlation: when the numbers go up, we tend to take credit. But when the numbers go down, we tend to blame someone or something else."

The article concludes by describing three valuable ways to avoid common mistakes when formulating metrics.

Entrepreneurs: Beware of Vanity Metrics

Consumer Behavior

This collection's final post describes how product labeling affects consumer behavior. How did customers react when Starbucks began publishing calorie information about its offerings? Read the surprising results in the article linked below. Note that it's labeled!

Calorie Labeling at Starbucks (727 Words, 6 Minutes to Read)

The Hidden Costs of Turnover

2010-02-07T13:00:00-05:00

Hard to measure business costs are often treated as if they don't exist. Consider employee turnover. Does your company underestimate its cost?

Of course, some turnover is unavoidable and even desirable. When it becomes obvious that an employee is a poor fit, it's a net positive when they leave.

However, many valuable employees leave for completely preventable reasons. This unnecessary and undesirable turnover costs the company substantial, but usually unacknowledged dollars. Since inexpensive retention measures can dramatically mitigate the problem, what steps is your company taking to limit unwanted departures and retain experienced staff?

Should you be doing more? As you consider your answer, review the partial list of turnover related expenses below. Give special attention to those listed under the "Hard to Measure" (the hidden costs of turnover) section and add additional costs that apply to your own situation.

Measurable

Background checks, drug testing and other screening
Recruiting fees or costs to advertise the open position
Staff time will be spent reviewing applications and conducting interviews
Lunches or dinners that are part of the process
The cost of formally training the replacement
Setup of the new employees computer, voice mail, ID badge and network access

Hard to Measure

While the already mentioned cost of the formal training is clear, it's hard to assess how much staff time will be taken up helping the new employee learn "the ropes".
How long will it take the new employee to deliver value at the level of the previous employee and how much money will be lost in the process?

How will the employee's departure affect customers or clients with whom they've been working for years? How many of them will follow the employee to their new job?
Employees usually leave because they're unhappy. When this is the case, they probably haven't been doing their best work. How much has this underperformance cost the company? How much has their undesirable attitude impacted that of their co-workers?
When an employee quits, other staff are required to bear an extra burden during the transition - usually without being asked or given extra compensation. How might the resulting resentment harm effectiveness?
True or not, the former employee may make derogatory comments about you or your business to friends, family or even to the web's worldwide audience. How much will this damage to your company's reputation cost? (Of course, this same cost can be incurred from disgruntled employees who are still on the job.)
Will management credibility and effectiveness be damaged because remaining team members resent that a valuable colleague was needlessly lost?

Leading Distributed Teams

2010-02-03T21:03:09-05:00

Point

Projects that utilize distributed teams pose unique challenges. Active leadership and practices designed to address these challenges are required for success.

What is a Distributed Team?

For the purposes of this article, a Distributed Team is any team where at least one member regularly works from a location that prohibits regular face to face contact with other team members.

The dynamics to which this article refers become more pronounced in direct proportion to the number of remotely based members. They apply to teams brought together for a single project and to a lesser extent to teams with a limited common purpose, for example a company with offices in multiple locations.

Advantages

Distributed teams have an obvious advantage over those that are locally based. Members can be drawn from a much larger talent pool resulting in higher team competency.

Web-based collaboration tools help facilitate meetings that can surpass the effectiveness of those that are physically attended. Benefits include the ability to record and playback entire meetings for later review as well as digital tools that offer benefits like the ability to save "whiteboards", ad-hoc team survey results and presentations.

Challenges

Without active leadership team dynamics can quickly degenerate into "us vs. them" complete with unhealthy doses of finger pointing and animosity. This is not an inherent problem with distributed teams, instead it stems from a lack of effective leadership.

The "us vs. them" dynamic develops because people often fail to establish relationships similar to those they have with their local counterparts. The result is a failure to view their remote cohorts as human and they treat them accordingly.

To understand how this happens consider how relationships develop in a shared physical space. People take unstructured time to get to know one another and keep up to date on each other's lives.

By contrast, interactions with remote staff are often highly scripted and impersonal. They're often limited to agenda driven group settings where anything beyond obligatory pleasantries is considered un-businesslike.

Action

For healthy team dynamics to develop, leaders need to promote interactions that mimic those that naturally occur between people that share office space.

As new remote members are added to the team, encourage, but don't force, team members to setup unstructured introductory meetings. Authenticity is key; be careful not to exert too much pressure. This seemingly small step usually delivers results that often exceed all expectations.
If available, suggest that colleagues use webcams instead of the phone for one on one conversations.
Strongly discourage the use of email "CC" and "BCC". While "keeping everyone in the loop" is a good idea, many of us have experienced firsthand how quickly habitual CC users can clog inboxes with information that's only mildly relevant. The bigger problem with this email device is more insidious. Having an "audience" often leads to undesirable social dynamics.
Encourage frequent interaction between individuals. Insure that conversations between team members aren't restricted to team meetings. Don't force team interactions exclusively through formal channels.
Encourage occasional in-person visits when practical.
Individuals with local access to a manager will often find that they have an advantage and will sometimes attempt to unduly place blame. Leaders must thwart the tendency to be influenced by proximity and must never pass judgment before getting both sides of the story.
Common purpose must be continually reinforced.
Leading by example is never more important. The leader should highlight and remind everyone of notable individual contributions, while looking for opportunities to underscore the value each member provides.

Email - When the Line Goes Dead

2010-01-22T18:56:34-05:00

In his Harvard Business Review blog post, "How to Handle Silence, the Worst Kind of Feedback", Peter Bregman tackles the common, yet difficult to deal with, problem of communications that go silent.

He suggests that after two unanswered communications, you "reach out one more time" with the message, "I don't mean to hound you — but I figured I'd reach out one more time. Please let me know if you are able to discuss this further. If I don't hear from you, I'll assume you're not interested."

While the solution he proposes is reasonable, there's a special case that requires further consideration - email. That's because we often can't be reasonably sure that the intended recipient is receiving our emails, even if they have in the past.

Here are a few of the possibilities:

Even some of the most organized people have allowed their inbox to grow out of control. They may regularly miss messages they consider important.
Procrastination - your emails have been placed in an "answer later" folder.
Your address book contains an outdated or infrequently checked address.
After a recent update, your SPAM filter no longer considers responses from your recipient "worthy" and discards them.

Who knows how many avoidable misunderstandings have resulted from emails not getting through or inadvertently not getting read.

The Solution

Never let a conversation end on an unanswered email. If you're about to "reach out one more time" and the previous attempts at communication were via email, call the person. Let them know that you're calling because you're not sure if they've received your emails.

I've appreciated this additional courtesy on those rare occasions where I've unintentionally failed to respond.

The Genius of Simplicity

2010-01-18T22:09:51-05:00

"Text “Haiti” to 90999 to give a $10 donation". Genius! Credit the Red Cross with leveraging the power of simplicity and convenience. Their strategy is resulting in a highly effective campaign to help those devastated by the recent earthquake in Haiti.

On the surface, the campaign might seem unremarkable. It's when you consider the roads not taken that the effort becomes extraordinary. They managed to hold-off complexity and over-analysis.

In most organizations, response to a major crisis would require a meeting of top executives. These are usually people who have demonstrated exceptional analytical and critical thinking skills to climb the career ladder. Each desires to add their mark to the final result.

While in this case the decision certainly made pre-crisis, imagine the discussion: Why $10? Let's make it $25. Shouldn't we offer different size donations? Why only one? What if donors don't want the charge on their phone bill? What if they want to pay by check or credit card? Many people don't use text messages! We're going to alienate important demographic groups!

Somehow simplicity managed a win and the results speak for themselves. The succinct message allowed for rapid no-cost dissemination that far outweighed legitimate limitations.

A firestorm lit up on Twitter and Facebook. Most members saw the message within a matter of hours. Beyond those bounds, it was so simple that it could accurately spread by word of mouth. It was so quick to repeat that Radio and TV personalities could easily spare 30 seconds to add it their newscasts. For listeners, it was easy enough to remember that they could take action later, if for example, they were driving at the time they heard it.

Once potential donors heard the message, its effectiveness hinged upon how quickly and easily they could take action. No forms to fill out, no need to register on a website or type in credit card information. For most, the donation took less than a minute.

What about all those who don't text, wanted to pay using another method or donate a larger amount? The text campaign didn't prevent the Red Cross from relying on it's more traditional channels. Those who had more than a casual motivation to donate, easily found an alternative means to do so.

If you're part of a non-profit group, how and when might you employ a strategy similar to the one that was successful here?

Planning, Prognosticating or Procrastinating?

2010-01-09T20:09:26-05:00

The word "plan" connotes a degree of certainty. One expects a thoughtfully constructed timeline consisting of activities and contingencies. Attention to a few common issues can help avoid compromising the plan's integrity or unnecessarily delaying the project.

Issues

Wanting to eliminate the unexpected, investors and stakeholders often demand that managers "get it right". They insist on knowing the precise details of how a project will play out.

Unfortunately, their "need to know" doesn't alter reality. Uncertainty is part of life and always a part of projects. Efforts to mitigate it are essential and a key goal of planning. However, attempts to banish uncertainty completely by sweeping it under the rug just setup a vengeful return at an inconvenient later date.

Feeling the pressure, managers are tempted to cross an unnoticeable but dangerous border. Instead of clearly differentiating the knowns from the unknowns, they venture headlong into speculation and wholesale prognostication treating their resulting thoughts as facts. The plan's value diminishes accordingly.

Another problem is that like the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing, "planning" is sometimes the cloak for a vice - procrastination. Have you ever had someone tell you about plans for a new initiative or business only to find that six months later they're still "planning"?

5 tips for writing effective plans

A commitment to action is essential. As you begin any plan, agree on the latest date on which action will begin - whether or not you have the "perfect" plan.
Prominently list the known risks, exposures and uncertainties in your plan document. Make every effort to reduce them, but also reiterate those that remain as part of every progress update.
Numbers imply precision and in plans feign accuracy. When adding estimates to plans, use ranges whose widths correspond to the degree of certainty. The greater the uncertainty, the wider the range.
It's common for project managers to predict how long a task will take and then ask staff to hit the target. Yet, staff members are in a better position to understand the required work. Managers should request estimates (using ranges as described above) without subjecting staff to the coercion of wishful management speculation or unreasonable expectations.
As the project progresses, teams invariably learn more about its requirements, demands and challenges. The most effective teams quickly update their plans to reflect their improved understanding and embrace change as positive. They've learned something that's now reflected in a more accurate plan.

One Million for Me and None for You

2009-12-16T18:59:38-05:00

How vulnerable are your leadership skills to self-deception?

Imagine you're the President of a thriving technology company. You work to attract the best and brightest students for summer internships. Your goal is to evaluate their potential for permanent positions.

One day one of these interns knocks on your door with an idea. You decide to implement it and the idea ultimately adds a million dollars to your company's bottom line. This isn't a hypothetical example, but is instead a true story.

How should you reward this employee?

First, consider the legal angle. You agreed to compensate the intern for their work. You owe them nothing more or nothing less than the agreed upon amount, regardless of their performance. As the business owner, you're burdened with the risk and are fully entitled to the rewards. From this standpoint, the million dollars is all yours.

So what happened in the real life version of this story? Believing that performance bonuses are problematic, the President was against providing a monetary reward. Instead he offered the student shares of company stock contingent upon him accepting a permanent position at graduation.

The President was open about the fact that the stock, issued by a private company, was "hard to value". Not surprisingly, the employee declined the offer.

Of course, this isn't a performance bonus issue at all, but rather an ethical one. At the time of the compensation agreement, no one anticipated the extraordinary results that would dramatically exceed even the most optimistic expectations.

It's under just such unexpected circumstances that leaders have the duty to seek an equitable solution and do the right thing.

There's also a practical consideration. Given the intern's demonstrated abilities, what further contributions might he have made if the offer had been different and he'd accepted a permanent position?

Was the President's offer based on sound business judgment or self-deception? What would you have done?

Business Game Changers #2 - 5 Surprising Ways to Learn More

2009-12-09T23:02:49-05:00

Point

The internet provides a daily deluge of information and ideas. Failure to utilize them means risking your business or professional edge. A carefully crafted learning strategy is needed to derive maximum benefit.

Action

Use a blog reader

The best blogs provide the latest information in concise high value packages. Blog readers save selected sources for ultra-efficient review and provide significant advantages over email subscriptions.

For those that don't currently use a one, the advantages may not be obvious. They become more apparent in direct proportion to the number of sources you follow. Blog readers help you visually scan only posts that have been written since the reader's last use. The task of separating posts into "read" and "don't read" becomes fast and easy.

Make a written list of sources to ignore

It's impossible to review everything that becomes available each day. Being highly selective about the sources you review and, even more importantly, those that you don't is a key to success.

Do you really need to read about the latest violent crime or the latest celebrity scandal? Add these items or others that don't support your educational goals to a written "don't read or watch" list. At a minimum, commit to limiting your exposure to them to a few minutes a day or just ignore them completely.

Don't spend much time making the list. Instead, consider it a "work in progress" and update it as needed.

Find and dialogue with peers

Low tech as it may be, dialogue between peers or groups of peers is an outstanding way to learn. It's especially effective at exposing blind spots, information, sources or ideas which you may have overlooked.

In the past, finding others with enough interest and the willingness to get together was difficult. As a company executive or professional hoping to commiserate with someone facing similar issues, who would you call? And who had time? The circle of people with whom you could easily meet was mostly limited to those you already knew.

Social media has completely changed the picture. In a few hours, you can identify people with similar interests. Once you've established rapport, meeting virtually or in-person is the next logical step. This aspect of social media tools like Twitter is easily overlooked, yet it may be more valuable than any of the more well publicized benefits.

Geographical, cost and travel time barriers to discussions have also been obliterated. From online meeting tools and webcams to free long distance, it's now easy to collaborate and hold discussions regardless of your location.

Exercise

Research makes it clear. Regular exercise has a profound effect on our ability to learn and assimilate information. For more on this topic, I suggest reviewing the research from Harvard trained psychiatrist John Ratey.

Don't just read, listen!

Of course there are times, for example when you're driving or exercising, where reading is impractical (although we've probably all seen a driver or two that would disagree).

Purchase a book on CD or download an eBook. Move it to your multimedia cable cell phone or to your MP3 player for listening at your convenience. Also note that some Bluetooth headsets will automatically pause playback if you take a call.