Slow learner

I was talking to my old college roommate today and he was explaining the challenges of raising a teenager. "I told my daughter pretty clearly she needed to do something. I thought we had an agreement. Three days later she was doing 180 degrees different from what I asked. I said, 'I told you to do something different and yet you're doing this instead.' And she said, 'Yes, I thought about what you said, but decided that it wouldn't work for me.'"

This reminded me of my days as a programmer. When a manager looked over my shoulder and started to micromanage, for example, saying "try this," or "type this command now" or "don't forget to do this." I nodded politely, waited for him to leave and did it my own way.

The funny thing is that when I managed, I was often just like the ineffective manager who told me what code to write. In other words, I tried to work through my people, instead of letting them work. When I wrote the code, I had control. When someone else wrote the code, but worked for me, I thought I still had control. In retrospect, I treated management as an ordered rather than a complex system.

This is one of the problems with the promotion into management. The skills you need are so radically different that when pressed you revert back to what you know. Which is doing it yourself (or trying to do it yourself via another person). Can't be done. Staffers are not marionettes.

It took me years to realize the lack of control I had, and to trust the people more. But I'm not sure I ever learned that lesson completely.

Tags:
complexity, managing, management,

To succeed with a new idea, engage your opponents

Imagine that you want to build a manufacturing plant using cutting-edge green technology: a living roof, solar panels, a permeable parking lot and natural stormwater filtration system. Whom do you want as your project manager?

According to Bill McDonough, the architect responsible for Ford's Rouge River plant redesign, it's someone who thinks the project is a bad idea. McDonough said so in a speech at last year's Fortune Innovation Forum.

Please stop laughing and read this quote from May's Harvard Business Review. It's from "Even Commodities Have Customers," the story of how Francois Jacques created a high-value marketing function at the world's largest cement maker.

I told you, stop laughing. Here's the quote:

I felt there would be support within the division for investment in marketing capabilities if I could demonstrate to people on the front lines that top management was really serious. I decided to begin be getting one or two divisional executives to assume some formal sponsorship role for the program. I was looking for a couple of top executives to share responsibility for the program's success or failure....

Two people...took strong positions. One told me that my plan was far too ambitious to have any hope of succeeding. The other was supportive. Looking at the profiles of each man, I realized that I had found both of my sponsors.

My instinctual reaction, when faced with opposition, is to surmount it or sidestep it (or dismiss it). McDonough's and Jacques' strategy, instead, was to embrace the opponent.

Don't do it my way. As counterintuitive as their approaches are, both McDonough and Jacques realized two very important things: active opposition equals engagement. And winning over the opponent sends a powerful signal to others that the idea has merit. [And another thing: steamrollering an opponent will guarantee he becomes a fierce enemy of the idea.]

It's crucial, though, to ensure you understand why the opponent is against the idea, and to know that the opposition is based on reasons that you can address--rather than opposition that's based on personality or power plays. Lafarge writes:

[The opponent's] extreme response indicated that he was engaged with the idea, and... I learned that much of his apparent hostility stemmed from past bad experiences with marketing in another division of Lafarge.

I'll leave you with another paraphrase from McDonough's speech.

"Vocal opponents can be your best allies. The passive resisters you've got to get rid of."

(Photo by CraigPJ via stock.xchng)

gaining support, sales, managing, Harvard Business Review