Ed Batista

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 3 (On Attrition)

In Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1, I discuss the factors that cause leaders to mistakenly delay a necessary termination. In Part 2 I explore why leaders rush to fill an empty role when they should actually slow down. Here I address a third, related situation in which a leader's misplaced concerns can contribute to suboptimal outcomes: the unwanted departure of a valued employee, which I'll call attrition.

Leaders strive to avoid attrition for understandable reasons. Valued employees represent a substantial investment of time and effort, ranging from recruiting and hiring to onboarding, training, and management. They possess hard-earned institutional knowledge. And they've demonstrated their trustworthiness and sound judgment.

So a theme in my practice is how a leader can retain valued employees in order to ensure that the organization will continue to benefit from these qualities. But such retention efforts can go awry when a leader is so concerned about a potential departure that they make choices they later regret. What issues tend to arise in these circumstances, and if you're in a similar situation, what can you do about them?

Fighting Inflation

When a leader learns that a valued employee is thinking about leaving, they may feel that they're in a negotiation that they must win, and their response is to offer more: a bigger compensation package, a higher-status title, a broader scope of responsibilities.

In many cases these negotiations conclude successfully, and leader and employee resume their productive partnership, albeit on modified terms. But sometimes that "must-win" attitude causes a leader to offer too much. They retain the employee, but on inflated terms: a compensation package dramatically higher than the employee could command elsewhere, a title that outstrips their real level of expertise or authority, responsibilities that they're unable to truly fulfill.

If you're a leader in this position, what can you do? How can you fight inflation? The first step is assessing your attitude toward the negotiation. Roger Fisher and William Ury, founders of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, suggest an approach to ensure that you don't "win" a negotiation on inflated terms:

The reason you negotiate is to produce something better than the results you can obtain without negotiating. What are those results? What is your BATNA--your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement? That is the standard against which any proposed agreement should be measured. This is the only standard which can protect you both from accepting terms that are too unfavorable and from rejecting terms it would be in your interest to accept... If you have not thought carefully about what you will do if you fail to reach an agreement, you are negotiating with your eyes closed. [1]

When you take a "must-win" approach, you assume that you have no BATNA, increasing the likelihood that you'll retain your employee on inflated terms. You'll "win" today but may well lose in the long run. I'm not suggesting that you make no effort to retain a valued employee, but, rather, that you reassess your options and calibrate the terms on offer accordingly. You may well find that what your employee really wants are other "currencies" that are less subject to inflation. [2]

Short-Term Pain vs. Long-Term Pain

As was the case in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, a challenge leaders face when they learn that a valued employee is considering a transition is the assumption that the short-term pain will be greater than the long-term pain. This belief is at the root of a leader's assumption that they have no BATNA and must avoid attrition at all costs, so it's necessary to challenge its accuracy.

Seeing a valued employee leave will undoubtedly cause short-term pain in a variety of ways: the loss of their individual capabilities, a potentially expensive and time-consuming search, the prospect of a gap in continuity and important work going undone. But leaders sometimes fail to appreciate that their efforts to avoid short-term pain may make the long-term pain even worse.

Retaining an employee on inflated terms can have far-reaching effects. Compensation packages don't always remain confidential, and when significant discrepancies come to light other employees will be rightfully upset. Titles are by definition visible, and raising one person's status can make others feel that they've been demoted, triggering a cascade of discontent. [3] And employees who are "over-scoped" tend to under-perform, making it necessary to level them [4] or manage them out. [5]

If you're a leader facing the departure of a valued employee, balance the value of their retention against the costs of the means required to do so. And some of these costs may not be evident for a length of time, requiring you to project into the future and think well beyond this specific individual.

Irreplaceable?

The anxiety leaders experience in the face of attrition is exacerbated when they imagine that the employee is "irreplaceable" in some way, and on occasion this fear has merit. I've worked with many leaders whose valued employees included co-founders, personal friends, or family members. Those unique individuals couldn't be replaced, nor could the unique relationships the leader enjoyed with them. Leaders may also view an employee as truly mission-critical, fearing that their departure would permanently impair company performance or even, in extreme cases, cause it to fail.

If you're a leader facing the departure of someone you're close with, I appreciate your desire to avoid the loss of that person and your working relationship with them. And yet in my experience it's vital that a leader grow more comfortable with the inevitability of such departures. You can't replace unique individuals, but accepting that colleagues will come and go over time allows both you and the organization to be more adaptable in the face of change.

More generally, if you're concerned about company performance I'm not in a position to tell you that your anxiety is misplaced. It's conceivable that a particular employee is so essential to your business that you'll struggle to succeed without them, especially if you're at a very early stage of development. Should they depart, there will be some short-term pain, to be sure. But I launched my coaching practice in 2006, and I've never seen a company fail because of the departure of any one individual. I've concluded that organizations are often far more resilient than leaders think they are.

Optics

Even when leaders recognize that a valued employee isn't irreplaceable, they may be concerned about how a departure will be perceived by fellow employees, customers, investors, and other stakeholders. Leaders are right to pay close attention to the potential optics, as I wrote in Part 1 of this series, on terminations:

Perceptions matter, particularly for a growing company that may be facing a great deal of uncertainty. In this context leaders must attend closely to the narratives that surround the company and actively shape them through storytelling... The departure of an employee contributes to a company's narrative and may well be perceived negatively, particularly if they're a senior executive or have strong relationships with other employees or external stakeholders.

This is even more pertinent with attrition, and an unwanted departure may well raise questions about the company's future prospects and your capabilities as a leader. But the solution may not be to induce the person to stay--again, the costs may outweigh the benefits. As with terminations, the key is agreeing upon a shared public narrative that helps others make sense of this potentially troubling development, and this is generally easier to accomplish in the case of attrition.

The narrative shouldn't be false or misleading, but it will focus on certain reasons for the employee's departure at the expense of others. This allows the narrative to serve both parties' purposes, but it's also a function of the fact that all public discourse has a limited capacity for nuance and complexity. A shared public narrative must be true, but it need not encompass the whole truth.

The Risk of Changing Minds

Optimally a leader has some awareness that a valued employee is considering a transition, enabling them to intervene before any decisive commitments have been made. But sometimes a leader is completely surprised by an employee's sudden resignation or announcement of a new position. This may prompt a frantic effort to undo what's been done.

Not only is this likely to yield inflated terms, but there's also an inherent risk in trying to change someone's mind here. The employee was reluctant to be candid with the leader, or the leader was oblivious to the employee's discontent, or both. Reversing course won't necessarily change the circumstances that led to this outcome. I'm not suggesting that you should never try to talk someone out of leaving if they've tendered their resignation or accepted another role, but you should be circumspect about the possibility that it might happen again.

When a departure is unavoidable, the leader may seek to negotiate a lengthy transition. This can offer some benefits, but it will also come at a cost. Even a well-meaning employee will find it difficult to give best effort beyond a reasonable length of time, and people underestimate how quickly and dramatically motivation and power dynamics can change once an impeding departure has been made public. If you're a leader in this situation take care not to pressure a departing employee to agree to a transition period that's too long.

An Ounce of Prevention...

...is worth a pound of cure, as an astute letter-writer observed in one of Benjamin Franklin's newspapers. [6] Similarly, while efforts to "cure" unwanted departures can be quite expensive and even counter-productive, efforts to prevent them in the first place are generally much more economical. What does this look like in practice?

At the individual level, as a leader you should know the extent to which each of your direct reports are satisfied with their responsibilities, their compensation, and all other aspects of their role. Barring a sudden, unexpected change in an employee's life that may impact their feelings about work, if you're surprised to learn that a direct report is "loose in the socket," that's a managerial failure.

This is one reason not to have too many reports--while some employees will openly express dissatisfaction, many will not, and the leader needs to create the conditions for a more candid dialogue and actively inquire about an employee's fulfillment (or lack thereof.) The best means to accomplish this is holding regular one-on-ones that go beyond a tactical agenda and make sufficient room for an employee's concerns. [7]

At the team level, you should have a contingency plan for the potential departure of any given member. This involves maintaining a network of potential candidates, relationships with search firms, and an up-to-date assessment of skip-levels' capacity to replace their manager on an interim or permanent basis. And at the organizational level, a more strategic approach to People leadership can help a company increase retention, raise awareness of impending departures, and be better prepared to replace outgoing employees. [8] You should certainly strive to retain valued employees, but you need not live in fear of the empty chair.

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1 (On Terminations)

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 2 (On Hiring)

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Footnotes

[1] Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, page 100 (Roger Fisher and William Ury, 1992)

[2] Currencies (On Motivating Different People)

[3] Very Cheap, Then Very Expensive (On Job Titles)

[4] The Fine Art of Levelling

[5] Merciful Exits (On Under-Performing Executives)

[6] On Protection of Towns from Fire (The Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Benjamin Franklin, 1735)

[7] How to Have Better One-on-Ones

[8] The Truly Strategic People Leader

 

Photo by Votchitsev Viacheslav.

Drowning in Feedback

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. It is not enough to know how much it costs to produce and transmit information; we must also know how much it costs, in terms of scarce attention, to receive it.

~Herb Simon [1]

A recent theme in my practice is a leader who feels overwhelmed by feedback purportedly intended to help them improve company and personal performance. Employee engagement surveys, executive 360s, performance reviews, NPS results...the list is long and growing, and the reports keep piling up. There's no shortage of feedback, and some leaders feel like they're drowning in it. What's happening here, and what can we do about it?

First, we can characterize feedback and its value as a source of learning using a schema articulated by the late Wharton professor and systems thinker Russell Ackoff, who described the distinctions among data, information, knowledge, understanding, and, ultimately, wisdom [2]:

Data are symbols that represent the properties of objects and events. Information consists of processed data, the processing directed at increasing its usefulness... Information is contained in descriptions, answers to questions that begin with such words as who, what, when, where, and how many. Knowledge is conveyed by instructions, answers to how-to questions. Understanding is conveyed by explanations, answers to why questions. [3]

The feedback processes noted above generate plenty of data and information. You can undoubtedly review the various reports at your disposal and answer any number of questions "that begin with such words as who, what, when, where, and how many." But if you're like my clients, this is the point at which things get more difficult.

You can surely glean some knowledge from these reports, extracting answers to some "how-to questions." And you may be able to obtain some understanding, uncovering explanations and formulating answers to a few "why questions." But these insights will be hidden from view, revealing themselves only after careful thought and reflection.

Such efforts will require time and freedom from distraction, qualities that may be in scarce supply in your environment. And by the point at which you've arrived at any meaningful level of understanding, there will probably be several more rounds of reports waiting for your review. You're already behind.

This dynamic reflects another aspect of "management information systems" that Ackoff observed: they reflect a series of mistaken assumptions that ensure "the continuing failure of most of these systems to satisfy the managers they are supposed to serve":

The first is: management's most critical information need is for more relevant information. This is false: management's most critical information need is for less irrelevant information... Most managers suffer from information overload and, as the overload increases, the amount of information they use in making decisions actually decreases. Most managers could not read all the written and printed material they receive even if they spent all their working hours in reading. Moreover, more than half the data and information they receive are unsolicited. [4]

I've observed this same pattern in some of my clients' working lives. The excessive amount of unsolicited feedback and the consequent inability to translate data and information into more useful knowledge and understanding is demoralizing. In some cases, leaders simply give up and stop trying to keep pace with the endless flow of reports. The more systems intended to yield improved performance, the less influence they actually have on leaders' behavior and decision-making.

These challenges only compound further should you try to take the final step up the ladder, transforming whatever knowledge and understanding you've obtained into true wisdom. Ackoff considered this quality exceedingly rare, comprising perhaps a fraction of a percent of the contents of the human mind. [5] But wisdom is worth pursuing because of its unique ability to generate value:

Information, knowledge, and understanding enable us to increase efficiency, not effectiveness. The efficiency of behavior or an act is measured relative to an objective... The value of the objective(s) pursued is not relevant in determining efficiency, but it is relevant in determining effectiveness. Effectiveness is evaluated efficiency. It is efficiency multiplied by value, efficiency for a valued outcome. Intelligence is the ability to increase efficiency; wisdom is the ability to increase effectiveness. [6]

So even when it's possible to distill knowledge and understanding from the vast quantities of available data and information, the net result will be the ability to pursue existing objectives more efficiently. This is valuable under many circumstances, but if you're like my clients, you're operating under dynamic conditions that render it necessary to regularly reassess your objectives. At such moments it's insufficient to ask, How can we do this more efficiently? One must ask, Why are we doing this at all? and What might we do instead?

If any of this resonates with you, what can you do about it? Here are some questions to ask and proposals to consider:

What is our feedback culture?

The proliferation of feedback systems and the generation of excess data and information that you're experiencing isn't happening in a vacuum, but in a specific organizational culture. In this context I refer to the definition provided by management professor Michael Watkins:

Culture is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in organizations... Culture is a process of "sense-making" in organizations [which] moves the definition of culture beyond patterns of behavior into the realm of jointly-held beliefs and interpretations about "what is..." Culture is a carrier of meaning. Cultures provide not only a shared view of "what is" but also of "why is." In this view, culture is about "the story" in which people in the organization are embedded, and the values and rituals that reinforce that narrative. [7]

So "drowning in feedback" is not only an "observable pattern of behavior," but also a manifestation of your organization's "narrative," the collective set of stories you and your colleagues tell yourselves about who you are, what you value, and why you do what you do. One story that's likely relevant here is the idea that "feedback is a gift," which I wholeheartedly reject--it's not a gift, it's data. [8]

Another potentially relevant story is the assumption that people aren't being candid and can't be trusted to speak up, so you have to rely on anonymous surveys and other instruments to obtain "the truth." While your organization may or may not be an environment in which it's safe to speak up, the idea that anonymity will yield objective "truth" is another idea that I reject. Anonymous feedback is hardly free from bias. [9]

There are no doubt other elements of your culture that are causing you to "drown in feedback," and no single initiative to solve the problem will succeed without addressing this broader context. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that you stifle efforts to provide feedback or stop seeking it out, but far too many organizations today have taken the concept of a "feedback-rich culture" to counter-productive extremes. [10]

How am I part of the problem?

You must also assess your own contributions to the generation of excess data and information in the form of surveys, 360s, reviews, and any other type of feedback that you request or initiate. The impulse underlying these processes is usually positive, springing from your desire to be helpful. But bear in mind Ackoff's warning: "Management's most critical information need is for less irrelevant information." You may be most helpful by providing less data and information, and by finding other ways to offer support, as I've written before:

Providing information is a form of caring and an effort to demonstrate our worth as leaders. We care about the people we're working with, and we want them to know that. We we want to feel competent in our roles and to know that we're adding value. But the excess information that we're shoveling at people is a proxy for these qualities, not the thing itself. [11]

And if you're a People Leader, such as a Chief People Officer or VP People Ops, you have a particularly important role to play. As I've noted before, "The People Leader must not only oversee the process of selecting and deploying [engagement surveys, performance assessments, and periodic review platforms], but to truly add value they need be able to help the CEO and other leaders interpret and act upon the resulting data." [12] Bear in mind that merely generating more data is not the solution, as noted by Herb Simon, the late computer scientist, economist and psychologist who comments open this essay:

The proper aim of a management information system is not to bring the manager all the information [they need], but to reorganize the manager's environment of information so as to reduce the amount of time [they] must devote to receiving it. [13]

How will I transform data into wisdom?

No matter what role you occupy, your ability to influence the generation of excess data and information is limited. Most of my clients are CEOs, and even the most powerful at times find themselves at the mercy of the systems they ostensibly command. But you can still control your most precious resource--your attention.

Only your focused attention will transform data and information into knowledge and understanding and then, with patience, wisdom. But this entails cultivating a number of habits, starting with the awareness that your attention is finite, and it must be directed toward your most important tasks. My work with clients often involves the development of an "information ecosystem" in which they're more mindful of the many demands on their attention, their own tendencies toward distraction, and the necessity of filtering out much of the data at their disposal. [14]

Some of this work is as straightforward as managing your calendar to ensure that you have "longer blocks of uninterrupted time, free from distractions, to think creatively and to augment logical reasoning with intuition and inspiration." [15] This is simple to describe, and yet it will be difficult to put into practice, in part because the fact that your attention is a precious resource means that other people want more of it. But the hard work of protecting your attention in order to transform data into wisdom may be one of your greatest responsibilities as a leader.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World [PDF] (Herb Simon, pages 37-72 in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Martin Greenberger, editor, 1971)

[2] In common usage this schema is condensed by omitting understanding, and the result is described as the DIKW Pyramid. Ackoff is often cited as the originator of the schema in a 1988 speech and 1989 article (noted below), but that's not entirely accurate. In The Origin of Data Information Knowledge Wisdom (DIKW) Hierarchy, Google researcher Nikhil Sharma notes that economist Milan Zeleny articulated a similar schema in a 1987 article, Management support systems: Towards integrated knowledge management, and that engineer and author Mike Cooley did the same in his 1987 book Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology. Sharma also cites a 1982 article by diplomat and information theorist Harlan Cleveland, and although I can't locate the article itself, the illustration that accompanied it is reproduced at the top of Sharma's paper.

I haven't explored these other sources any further, so I don't know whether their various schemas merely resemble one another, serving as variations on a theme, or whether Ackoff built directly on one or more of them. Apparently there are even more possible progenitors, including versions by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and historian Daniel Bell, cited by Cleveland. However, as Sharma notes, they probably all owe a debt to these lines from T.S. Eliot's 1934 play "The Rock":

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

[3] From Data to Wisdom [PDF] (Russell Ackoff, Presidential Address to the International Society for General Systems Research, St. Louis, June 1988). An edited version of this speech was published the following year as a journal article, From Data to Wisdom (Russell Ackoff, Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 1989), also available in Ackoff's Best: His Classic Writings on Management (1999). My citations here draw from both versions--this passage is from the 1989 article.

[4] Ackoff, 1988.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ackoff, 1989.

[7] What Is Organizational Culture? (Michael Watkins, Harvard Business Review, 2013)

[8] Feedback Is Not a Gift

[9] The Problem with Anonymous Feedback

[10] For more on a "feedback-rich culture":

• Building a Feedback-Rich Culture
• Building a Feedback-Rich Culture from the Middle

[11] Stop Providing Too Much Information

[12] Simon.

[13] The Truly Strategic People Leader

[14] A Better Information Diet

[15] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

 

Photo by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

How to Have Better One-on-Ones

One-on-one meetings with employees are seemingly among a leader's most straightforward tasks. Two colleagues have yet another conversation about work--what could be simpler? But a theme in my practice is that a more deliberate approach to one-on-ones can turn them from perfunctory exchanges into much higher sources of leverage. [1] If you're a leader who'd like to hold better one-on-ones, here are some questions to ask yourself and a set of proposals to consider:

If you're not holding formal one-on-ones, why not?

Andy Grove, the late CEO of Intel, noted that managers from other companies viewed formal one-on-ones as unnecessary, telling him, "I don't need scheduled meetings with my supervisor [or subordinate]; I see [them] several times a day." [2] I sometimes work with early-stage CEOs who feel similarly and view formal one-on-ones as superfluous bureaucracy. But this approach has several problems.

Even when you're communicating frequently with employees, it's likely that those interactions are highly tactical, with with little time devoted to more strategic issues, and no time at all to address the quality of your working relationship or anything of similar complexity. And, as Grove continued, "there is an enormous difference between a casual encounter by a supervisor and subordinate, or even a meeting to resolve a specific problem, and a one-on-one." [3]

The absence of formal one-on-ones means that when you do schedule a meeting to address a bigger challenge, you signal to your employees that such events are for "tough conversations," rendering them more stressful and less likely to succeed. (And this may be equally true when an employee schedules a one-on-one with you.)

Alternatively, holding formal one-on-ones on a regular basis normalizes the experience, allowing you and your employees to grow more comfortable addressing complex or difficult topics. Simultaneously, it highlights that this is a particular type of conversation and not just an ordinary meeting, motivating both you and your employees to be more thoughtful about how you prepare and participate.

Who merits a one-on-one?

Having formalized the process, it's important to assess how you're allocating the time you have available for one-on-ones, which is one of your organization's most precious resources. This isn't self-aggrandizing--it's simply a consequence of the fact that your attention is finite. [4] And a one-on-one meeting involves a major "investment" of attention from which you should expect a substantial "return," just as you would with any other limited resource. [5]

In addition to meeting with their direct reports, some of my clients initiate or make themselves available for skip-level one-on-ones with more junior employees. This practice can provide you with a new perspective on the organization, but it comes with potential dilemmas. It doesn't scale, and can leave you spread too thin. It can also short-circuit normal managerial channels--although if you have concerns about one of your direct reports, this may be the point.

I've had clients who levelled an employee and offered ongoing one-on-ones as a way to cushion the blow, but again, this doesn't scale and is generally a short-term fix. The key is recognizing that people want the leader's attention because it's a valuable resource, and beyond a certain point in your career it's unlikely that you'll be able to meet this demand entirely without compromising on other responsibilities.

What's the appropriate cadence? How long should a one-on-one last?

Here Grove offers some useful guidelines:

How often should you have one-on-ones? Or put another way, how do you decide how often somebody needs such a meeting? The answer is in the job- or task-relevant maturity of each of your subordinates. In other words, how much experience does a given subordinate have with the specific task at hand? This is not the same as the experience they have in general...

The subordinate should feel that there is enough time to broach and get into thorny issues... I feel that a one-on-one should last an hour at a minimum. Anything less, in my experience, tends to make the subordinate confine themselves to simple things that can be handled quickly. [6]

Given that your employees' "job- or task-relevant maturity" likely varies, the cadence of regular one-on-ones need not be uniform, nor is there a single best practice. Most of my clients hold weekly one-on-ones with most of their direct reports, but meeting every other week is also common. A longer cadence with direct reports is less typical, but skip-level one-on-ones are often monthly or quarterly. Ultimately it's up to you and each employee to determine what works best.

The key is predictability, so you should only ever cancel or reschedule a one-on-one as a last resort. If you do this repeatedly you send a very clear message that it's a low-priority event, and your employees will act accordingly. And if you have a direct report who's reluctant to hold one-on-ones or who cancels on you, this merits further investigation. It may be a sign of a deeper problem in the relationship [7], or it may simply be that the quality of your one-on-ones needs to be improved. Make clear your desire for one-on-ones to be valuable to them, solicit feedback on your current arrangements, and enlist them in joint problem-solving.

What's on the agenda? How should we prepare?

As with cadence, there's no universal template for agenda-setting or preparation, but there are some general principles to bear in mind. Grove stresses that the employee should feel a sense of ownership:

A key point about a one-on-one: It should be regarded as the subordinate's meeting, with its agenda and tone set by [them]... So the [subordinate] should be asked to prepare an outline, which is very important because it forces them to think through in advance all of the issues and points [they] plan to raise. Moreover, with an outline, the supervisor knows at the outset what is to be covered and can therefore help to set the pace of the meeting according to the "meatiness" of the items on the agenda. An outline also provides a framework for supporting information, which the subordinate should prepare in advance. The subordinate should then walk the supervisor through all the material.

What should be covered in a one-on-one?... The most important criterion governing matters to be talked about is that they be issues that preoccupy and nag the subordinate. These are often obscure and take time to surface, consider, and resolve. [8]

Claire Hughes Johnson, the former COO of Stripe, expresses similar sentiments:

I generally tell folks, especially more experienced people, that the 1:1 is their time. We set up a mutual doc that we can both edit, and we track action items and link out to goals and career conversation notes. Beyond that, I ask the individual to propose each 1:1 agenda, and I only edit the doc to add in agenda item suggestions when I have them. [9]

When your employees own the agenda, not only is this much more efficient for you, it also ensures that the discussion will focus on issues that are most important to them. But having your employees set the agenda doesn't mean that you have no input, as Grove and Hughes Johnson make clear. You can also give feedback to an employee on the quality of their agenda if you conclude that the time isn't being well-spent. My clients who've asked their employees to take responsibility for agenda-setting typically find it a useful exercise in revealing who's well-prepared and who's not.

A particular form that lack of preparation can take is the employee who treats the one-on-one primarily or even exclusively as a vehicle to report out. If you find yourself listening to extensive updates that should have been written reports or automated dashboards for you to review in advance, you can let them know that it's a missed opportunity to have a more meaningful dialogue.

How should one-on-ones be conducted? What role should I play as leader?

An employee who sets the agenda and provides you with sufficient time to digest any preparatory materials enables you to add value not by directing the conversation or even having answers to all their questions, but by posing questions yourself. While there are limits on the extent to which you can serve as an employee's "coach," you can readily employ coaching as a methodology. [10] This not only scales, it also allows you to add value in one-on-ones even with senior employees who possess specialized expertise that you lack. Grove recommended what he called "dialectic management":

What is the role of the supervisor in a one-on-one? They should facilitate the subordinate's expression of what's going on and what's bothering them. The supervisor is there to learn and to coach... How is this done? By applying Grove's Principle of Dialectic Management, "Ask one more question!" When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all they want to say about a subject, [the supervisor] should ask another question. [11]

And your questions should include inquiring about your employee's state of mind and well-being. Hughes Johnson notes that a one-on-one should always begin by "asking how someone is doing--checking in really matters." [12] Grove firmly agrees: "The supervisor should also encourage the discussion of heart-to-heart issues during one-on-ones, because this is the perfect forum for getting at subtle and deep work-related problems." [13]

It's by attending to the logistical details above that you create an environment in which employees are willing to truly tell you how they're doing and be candid with you on "heart-to-heart" issues. Holding formal one-on-ones that are rarely cancelled or rescheduled and for which both of you are fully prepared goes a long way toward creating the psychological safety that's necessary for real openness. This doesn't mean that you should avoid contentious issues, as I've noted previously:

Psychological safety entails candid and direct communication. It requires asking and answering hard questions. It does not mean "being nice." It does not mean avoiding difficult conversations or fraught topics to ensure that no one experiences distress. To the contrary, a setting in which people are reluctant to be candid and direct for fear of triggering any distress in others is psychologically unsafe. [14]

I opened with the idea that better one-on-ones can be a great source of leverage for a leader, and I'll close with Grove's thoughts on the same subject:

What is the leverage of a one-on-one? Let's say you have a one-on-one with your subordinate every two weeks, and it lasts one and a half hours. Ninety minutes of your time can enhance the quality of your subordinate's work for two weeks, or for some eighty-plus hours, and also upgrade your understanding of what [they're] doing. Clearly one-on-ones can exert enormous leverage. [15]

 

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Footnotes

[1] 1x 10x 100x (On Leverage)

[2] High Output Management, page 73 (Andy Grove, 1st edition, 1983)

[3] Ibid.

[4] Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial Attention (Linda Stone, 2009)

[5] Growth, Profitability and Return on Attention

[6] Grove, pages 73-74.

[7] Better Working Relationships

[8] Grove, page 75.

[9] Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company-Building, page 399 (Claire Hughes Johnson, 2023)

[10] For more on coaching as a leadership tool (and its limitations), see the following:

• Connect, Reflect, Direct...Then Ask (On Coaching)
• How Great Coaches Ask, Listen and Empathize
• Investment vs. Attachment

[11] Grove, pages 75-76.

[12] Hughes Johnson, page 399.

[13] Grove, page 77.

[14] Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination

[15] Grove, page 77-78.

 

Photo by World Bank Photo Collective.

Defensiveness Is in the Eye of the Beholder

A theme in my practice is defensiveness, which I define as an unwillingness to accept responsibility for setbacks, characterized by a disproportionately hostile, anxious or evasive response to critical feedback. When it arises as a topic I'm usually working with a client who's figuring out how to deal with a defensive employee or colleague, but occasionally I have a client who's been accused of defensiveness and is wondering what to do in response.

The key word in the definition above is "disproportionate." When someone is slightly hostile, anxious or evasive in response to critical feedback, we don't think of them as "defensive." Critical feedback is stressful under the best of circumstances. [1] So when someone responds with curiosity and calm we view that as a sign of maturity and professionalism, but a moderately negative response is normal and expected.

And yet we also expect this negative response to be temperate and short-lived. It's only when the other person's hostility, anxiety or evasion seem excessively emotional or unduly persistent that we label them as "defensive." This is highly contextual, determined by the surrounding cultural norms, our relationship with the other person, and our individual standards. What qualifies as defensiveness is truly in the eye of the beholder. So what are the implications of all this, and what can we do about it?

When You're Dealing with a Defensive Person

Don't call them "defensive."

Don't even use the word, as it will only make the situation worse. Bear in mind that they don't think of themselves as "defensive"--no one ever does--so being labeled as such will feel to them like an unjustified accusation and amplify the negative emotions they're already having difficulty managing. You may be perfectly justified in thinking of them as defensive, but keep it to yourself, at least for the moment.

In the present moment, de-escalate.

Defensiveness emerges in response to unexpected bad news, and you and your counterpart may be facing an immediate crisis. In this moment your task is to help them de-escalate their threat response and regain the ability to regulate their emotions. [2] Slow down--choose your words thoughtfully, make decisions judiciously, be mindful of how you might be contributing to their sense of threat. [3] In some circumstances, encouraging the other person to discuss what they're feeling can help them down-regulate those feelings. [4]

As soon as possible, make it a learning opportunity.

When the sense of urgency has abated--but before so much time has passed that the details have grown hazy--make use of this situation as a learning opportunity for the other person. At this point it may be useful to acknowledge that you perceived their response as defensive, but don't stop there. Offer behaviorally-specific feedback that allows the other person to gain a new perspective on their response and understand why you experienced it as counter-productive. [5]

In the meantime, clarify your own lessons.

There's undoubtedly ample learning here for you as well. Why did this bad news come as such a surprise to the other person? How did you share it with them? If you hired them, why did you fail to identify their defensiveness in the process? [6] How successful were you at de-escalating their defensiveness? Did you inadvertently make it worse, and if so, how? And if you're repeatedly encountering defensiveness over time, that merits a look in the mirror. Just because defensiveness is in the eye of the beholder doesn't mean it's always a fair or reasonable perception.

When You've Been Accused of Defensiveness

Don't make it worse by rejecting the label.

You almost certainly don't feel defensive, nor is that how you would describe your behavior, and it's unfortunate that the other person has chosen to label you this way. But reflexively responding, "I'm NOT defensive!" will only be perceived as further evidence of your defensiveness. Remember that defensiveness is in the eye of the beholder, and the fact that you feel unfairly maligned has no bearing on the other person's belief in the validity of their perspective.

If you haven't heard this very often, it's a learning opportunity.

It's likely that the behaviors being perceived as "defensive" are the result of your surprise and disappointment at encountering an unexpected setback. If you've enjoyed sustained success in your career, this may be the first time that you've experienced a meaningful failure. And if you've rarely (or never) been called defensive before, you're learning that your responses to setbacks are perceived as problematic by this person at this moment. As challenging as it may seem, this presents you not only with an opportunity to transform setbacks into fruitful experiences [7], but also to accelerate your overall growth and development. [8]

If you've heard this repeatedly, take it very seriously.

Learning opportunities sometimes come at a cost, and being called defensive can be career-limiting if the label sticks. When I'm working with a client who's hiring to fill a role, I encourage them to test for defensiveness in the interview process because defensive people can have such a corrosive effect on company culture, and it's difficult if not impossible to get them to change. [9] If this person has perceived you as defensive multiple times, it's a signal to invest in your working relationship. [10] And if you've been called defensive at multiple points in your career, consider whether a failure to take responsibility is holding you back professionally. [11]

No matter what, it's feedback, and feedback is data.

Being called defensive is a form of feedback, and like much feedback, it can be stressful, confusing and unwelcome. As I've noted before, feedback isn't a "gift" that we should automatically express appreciation for, but it is potentially valuable data that merits investigation to assess its utility. [12] You're not obligated to agree with this feedback, nor are you required to take any particular action in response, but consider the extent to which you trust this person's judgment and value their opinion of you. Should you conclude that they're trustworthy and acting in good faith, thank them for taking the risk to speak up, and ask them to tell you more. [13]

 

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Footnotes

[1] For more on feedback and stress, see the following:

• Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful
• Why Some Feedback Hurts (and What to Do About It)

[2] The Tyranny of Feelings

[3] How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)

[4] Talking About Feelings

[5] How to Deliver Critical Feedback

[6] Surfacing Defensiveness (Three Questions for Candidates)

[7] The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

[8] Learning How to Learn

[9] Surfacing Defensiveness (Three Questions for Candidates)

[10] Better Working Relationships

[11] The Trium Group on Responsibility

[12] Feedback Is Not a Gift

[13] Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

 

Photo by West Point.

Currencies (On Motivating Different People)

A theme in my practice is the leader who's seeking to increase employee motivation. In this context it's important to bear in mind the work of Frederick Herzberg, a 20th century psychologist who had a profound influence on our understanding of motivation in organizational life. Herzberg offers a sharp critique of the conventional approaches to motivation, which he refers to as "kicks in the ass" or KITA. These aren't only negative, in the form of criticism or threats--they can also be positive, in the form of desirable rewards:

Let us consider motivation. If I say to you, "Do this for me or the company, and in return I will give you a reward, an incentive, more status, a promotion, all the quid pro quos that exist in the industrial organization," am I motivating you? The overwhelming opinion I receive from management people is, "Yes, this is motivation." I have a year-old schnauzer. When it was a small puppy and I wanted it to move, I kicked it in the rear and it moved. Now that I have finished its obedience training, I hold up a dog biscuit when I want the schnauzer to move. In this instance, who is motivated--I or the dog? The dog wants the biscuit, but it is I who want it to move. Again, I am the one who is motivated, and the dog is the one who moves. In this instance all I did was apply KITA frontally; I exerted a pull instead of a push. When industry wishes to use such positive KITAs, it has available an incredible number and variety of dog biscuits (jelly beans for humans) to wave in front of employees to get them to jump. [1]

Herzberg is exaggerating for comic effect here--I don't think he ever kicked his dog. [2] But his larger point holds: rewards like dog biscuits and jelly beans may result in movement, but that's not the same thing as motivation. This doesn't mean rewards are irrelevant as incentives, but a key in deploying them effectively is understanding that there are two different types of motivation, intrinsic (deriving from the work itself) and extrinsic (deriving from by-products of the work or aspects of the environment in which work occurs). As I've written before,

Herzberg's research suggests that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction aren't endpoints on a single spectrum, but two distinct scales. Satisfaction is derived from sources of intrinsic motivation such as a sense of achievement, recognition, responsibility, and opportunities for growth. In contrast, sources of extrinsic motivation (also known as "hygiene factors") such as working conditions, compensation, status, and security generate dissatisfaction if they're perceived as inadequate. [3]

But this understanding only gets a leader so far. Intrinsic motivators increase job satisfaction, and a sufficiency of extrinsic motivators prevent job dissatisfaction--but what does this look like in practice? If you're a leader seeking to increase employees' motivation, what can you do? Leadership experts Allan Cohen and David Bradford offer some suggestions. [4] In Influence Without Authority they articulate a set of principles and frameworks to support the development of stronger working relationships and more effective collaboration. [5] Although the title indicates that they're writing for people who lack directive control, I find their ideas highly relevant in my work with leaders. My clients are typically in senior positions, but their employees expect a high degree of latitude and autonomy, and leadership in these settings rarely involves "giving orders." [6]

One of Cohen and Bradford's most useful concepts related to motivation is what they call currencies: "resources that can be exchanged [as] the basis for acquiring influence." The list below is adapted from Chapter 3 in Influence Without Authority, "Goods and Services: The Currencies of Exchange." I've followed Cohen and Bradford's general schema, while modifying some of their terminology.

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Inspiration-Related

1. Vision: A compelling view of the company's future and a description of how someone could contribute to its accomplishment.

2. Excellence: Opportunities to work at the highest standards of achievement.

3. Values: Opportunities to pursue moral or ethical virtues through work.

Task-Related

4. Resources: Additional budget, personnel, technology, space, etc.

5. Challenge: Opportunities to pursue difficult goals and develop enhanced skills and capabilities.

6. Assistance: The ability to delegate unwanted duties or obtain support in facing difficulties.

7. "Air Cover": Public or private help in influencing decision-makers and overcoming resistance.

8. Speed: Confidence that requests and inquiries will be met with a rapid response.

9. Information: Access to restricted or private organizational knowledge.

Position-Related

10. Recognition: Public or private acknowledgment of effort, accomplishments or abilities.

11. Visibility: Opportunities to be known by and interact with senior figures.

12. Reputation: A positive image that opens doors to additional opportunities.

13. Status: Participation in select groups or events.

14. Contacts: The ability to join or build a larger or more valuable network.

Relationship-Related

15. Inclusion: Feelings of closeness and emotional intimacy with specific individuals or groups.

16. Understanding: Opportunities to voice concerns and feel heard.

17. Kindness: Thoughtful and timely expressions of support during difficulties.

Personal

18. Gratitude: Expressions of appreciation in the form of thanks, deference, or a recognition of indebtedness.

19. Ownership: An intrinsically fulfilling sense of control and responsibility.

20. Affirmation: Reinforcement of a person's values, beliefs, sense of identity or self-worth.

21. Comfort: The minimization of headaches, hassles, interruptions or embarrassment.

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If you're seeking to increase employee motivation, Cohen and Bradford's inventory offers a wide range of potential interventions--and here's where it's important to apply Herzberg's insights. Any number of the currencies above can be dispensed like "dog biscuits or jelly beans," but will the result be motivation or merely movement? When people move in response to a promised reward, that's a form of compliance, but motivation springs from a deeper level of commitment. And as I've written before,

Compliant people remain so only as long as they aren't too dissatisfied, but the absence of punishment and the promise of rewards doesn't generate sustained motivation. Committed people are motivated, and the fulfillment they find in the pursuit of their aims makes them more likely to persist in the face of difficulties. [7]

Herzberg indicates that the most significant intrinsic motivators are "[a sense of] achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility, and growth or advancement," while the most significant extrinsic motivators are "company policy and administration, supervision, interpersonal relationships, working conditions, salary, status, and security." [8] Some of Cohen and Bradford's currencies fall readily into one category or the other, but in many cases the distinction is unclear or may be highly contextual.

None of this is to suggest that intrinsic motivators are somehow superior, but recall that Herzberg originally dubbed extrinsic motivators "hygiene factors" to express his finding that sufficiency prevented dissatisfaction, but a surplus didn't necessarily yield more satisfaction. This is where I see many leaders make a category error--they're surprised when increases in compensation or status don't result in sustained motivation, and yet that's common with extrinsic factors that are subject to the process of hedonic adaptation. [9]

But all of this guidance needs to be assessed in light of the needs and preferences of the specific individuals you're seeking to motivate. Herzberg's work can be viewed as a map to help you navigate these issues, and yet, as with all findings from social psychology, "the map is not the territory." [10] Hopefully Cohen and Bradford's inventory expands the possibilities under your consideration, but what ultimately matters isn't whether a given currency is intrinsic or extrinsic in an abstract sense, but the value it holds for a particular employee.

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

• Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)
• Mind the Gap (On Leading Senior Executives)

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Footnotes

[1] One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? (Frederick Herzberg, Harvard Business Review, originally published 1968, republished 2003)

[2] I don't really know anything about how Herzberg felt about dogs. But he helped liberate Dachau as 22-year-old U.S. Army sergeant, an undoubtedly searing experience that influenced his interest in motivation, and I'd like to think that such a man would only be kind to animals.

[3] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

[4] David Bradford has been an important mentor to me.

[5] Influence Without Authority (Allan Cohen and David Bradford, 2nd edition, 2005)

[6] Force Isn't Power

[7] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

[8] Herzberg, 1968/2003

[9] Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"

[10] The Map Is Not the Territory

 

Photo by Philip Brewer.

We Don't Get What We Deserve...

We don't like to acknowledge this. It feels unfair, an injustice. I talk with clients every day about perceived injustices, some grievous, even outrageous. But in my capacity as coach I don't do my clients much good by merely validating their grievances or affirming their outrage.

Sometimes that's a starting point. Leaders need to vent like anyone else, and their colleagues may be unsympathetic (or implicated in the injustice), and their family and friends may not really understand the problem. But empathetic listening has its limitations, and when we reach those limits in a given conversation, I'll remind my client of this fundamental truth:

We don't get what we deserve. We get what we negotiate.

This isn't to deny the injustice, or to dismiss my client's feelings of grievance and outrage, or to excuse the actions of others that may have caused or contributed to the situation. Nor do I lack empathy--this isn't code for "Tough shit. Try harder."

To the contrary, empathy plays an essential role here. I must empathize with my clients' sense of injustice to be an effective coach to them. More importantly, my clients must empathize with their presumptive adversaries--but here's another fundamental truth: Empathy isn't agreement.

Empathizing with adversaries does not mean agreeing with them or abandoning our efforts to change the situation. It means getting out of our self-centered mindset and fully inhabiting an alternative view in order to be a more effective agent of change.

Because whenever we think, "I'm not getting what I want, but I deserve it," we diminish our agency and make it less likely that we'll achieve that desired outcome. We make ourselves victims of circumstance, and if the world has anything to teach us it is that victims may deserve justice, but that has very little bearing on whether justice will be done.

Empathizing with adversaries does mean seeing the world as they see it, understanding their emotions in response, and suspending our judgment about the accuracy of their view or the validity of their feelings. And the intent is to make use of this data in negotiating with them.

To be clear, we should think of "negotiations" more broadly than we usually do. Negotiations don't occur only in rare or special circumstances, such as compensation discussions or peace treaties. Life is an endless series of negotiations, particularly in our professional relationships.

Many people are uncomfortable with negotiating--they view it as unseemly or grasping--so they don't engage in deliberate practice, and they never improve their skills. And when they inevitably run into a savvy negotiator, they lose--which makes them feel uncomfortable, and the cycle continues.

But we need not assume that negotiations require a zero-sum, winner-take-all attitude, or that they're characterized by distrust or rancor. This is a caricature, one that enables people who are uncomfortable with negotiating to justify their discomfort. And yet in my experience very few negotiations benefit from this approach. (Some do, of course, but not many.)

So if you find yourself unhappy with a situation, feeling that an injustice has been done, and yet unclear on how to move forward, what can you do?

Consider your beliefs about yourself and how you respond to adversity.

• Learning How to Learn
• The Tyranny of Feelings
• The Value of a Good Fight

Consider your beliefs about power, influence and negotiation.

• Power Struggles Among Nice People
• Force Isn't Power
• Culture, Compensation and Negotiation

Engage in deliberate efforts to develop your skills and learn from experience.

• Conscious Competence in Practice
• Comfort with Discomfort

 

This piece is perhaps another way of saying Make It Better.

Photo by Jernej Furman.

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 2 (On Hiring)

In Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1, I discuss the factors that cause leaders to delay a necessary termination. A mirror image of this fear can affect leaders during a hiring process, one that causes them to rush. They're so concerned about a role going unfilled that they make missteps or discount potential red flags along the way. Sometimes this is the result of inexperience, but even long-tenured leaders can be affected. What do leaders driven by a "fear of the empty chair" overlook or ignore when hiring? And if you're a leader preparing to make a hire, what can you do about it?

Cognitive Biases

There's ample research on the limitations of job interviews in predicting performance. [1] A particular problem is the unstructured interview, in which the interviewer lacks specific questions designed to elicit responses about the candidate's real-life experiences to test for a desired set of characteristics. The unstructured interview moves randomly from one topic to the next, with the candidate guessing what the interviewer wants to hear and eagerly seizing on any points in common. And the results are readily subject to cognitive biases, the mental shortcuts that preserve our limited capacity for logical reasoning at the cost of systematic errors:

• Confirmation bias: Searching for and promoting data consistent with pre-existing hypotheses about a candidate, while rejecting disconfirming data.
• Halo effect: Viewing a candidate's attributes more positively (or negatively) than is merited on the basis of positive (or negative) impressions of other attributes.
• Stereotypes: Assumptions about a candidate's fitness based on similarities to (or differences from) the interviewer's often vague assumptions about an "ideal candidate." [2]

Leaders will obviously continue to rely on interviews, despite their drawbacks. This isn't irrational behavior--even unstructured interviews have benefits [3], and structured interviews can be difficult to implement. [4] However, as organizational psychologist Robert Dipboye has noted, "The evidence is compelling that the inclusion of formal job analyses, standardized questioning of applicants, and behavioral rating scales improve the validity and reliability of interviewer judgments." [5]

If you're a leader who's feeling a sense of urgency about making a hire, it will likely be worth the effort to slow down and take the advice of Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman: 1) Create a structured set of questions to prevent you from simply pursuing the questions that you find most interesting, 2) Use the time available in an interview to obtain as much information as possible about the candidate's life in their normal environment, 3) Do not make decisions solely on the basis of your global evaluations, and 4) Rely upon statistical summaries of separately evaluated attributes. [6]

Defensiveness

More specifically, hiring processes should screen for defensiveness, which I define as an unwillingness to accept responsibility for setbacks, characterized by a disproportionately hostile, anxious or evasive response to critical feedback. When one of my clients has an under-performing employee, defensiveness is almost always an issue. Jean Leslie and Ellen Van Velsor of the Center for Creative Leadership studied "derailed" executives who left their organizations non-voluntarily or were plateaued at a level short of expectations. The two leading factors in such cases were "inability to develop or adapt" (61 percent) and "poor working relations" (57 percent), and in my experience defensiveness is a primary contributor to both. [7]

But a candidate is unlikely to show signs of defensiveness during hiring, when they're striving to be their best selves, so if you're a leader making a hire it's up to you to test for it. Here are three questions to ask candidates during the process, and in this order (although not all three may be necessary):

1. Tell me about a time when things went wrong.

If the candidate can't answer this question thoughtfully, that's an initial red flag, suggesting that they're unwilling to be forthright about their setbacks or unable to observe and interpret such situations without experiencing distress. But some candidates will provide an adequate answer while leaving themselves out of the story, blaming the setback on the failings of others or inescapable misfortune. In these cases, proceed to the next question:

2. Tell me about a time when you made a mistake.

The wording here is deliberate, providing the candidate with an opportunity to take responsibility for a setback without using unduly fraught language. We all "make mistakes," and only the most defensive among us will refuse to admit it. Still, some candidates will respond with an example in which the consequences of their mistake were relatively trivial, providing little data on their capacity to acknowledge and learn from serious missteps. In these cases, proceed to the final question:

3. Tell me about a time when you failed.

The wording here is also deliberate, inviting the candidate to identify a situation in which they bore personal responsibility for a meaningful setback. Some candidates who were less forthcoming in response to the first two questions will finally avail themselves of this opportunity--and others will not, providing examples of inconsequential "failures," or evading the idea that they failed, finding others to take the blame.

If a candidate's unable to provide a satisfactory response to any of these questions, consider that a likely sign of defensiveness. And if you're still bullish on their candidacy, ask whether your eagerness to fill the role might be distorting your judgment. [8]

Leverage

Once the top candidate has been identified, the leader has to close them, sometimes requiring multiple rounds of negotiation across a range of issues. The leader's goal shouldn't be to extract the most concessions possible from the candidate. By adopting such an aggressive stance, not only do they run the risk of losing the best candidates over relatively minor differences, they also increase the likelihood that a qualified candidate will accept the role begrudgingly, or that only less-qualified candidates will remain available, in either case sowing the seeds of future difficulties.

But it can be equally problematic when a leader is so anxious to fill a role that they give up their leverage in the negotiation, making concessions that they later regret. When the dust settles after the hire's completed, the result is an employee who's one of the following:

• Over-compensated: This can take the form of excessive base pay or equity grants, but it may also reflect unsound management practices, such as poorly-structured variable or bonus plans. Even confidential information about compensation rarely remains so indefinitely, and any arrangements that are outside the company's norms have the potential to wreak havoc should other employees come to feel that they're now under-compensated or have been treated unfairly.
• Over-titled: They candidate is really a Director, but they held out for VP. Or they're really a VP, but they held out for C-level. Or the role shouldn't even have a hierarchical title, but the leader felt obligated to award one to close the candidate. As I've written before, "at first...titles may seem cheap--I've even had clients call them 'free.' But not only are those hidden costs eventually revealed, they also tend to escalate--so supposedly 'free' titles ultimately become very expensive." [9]
• Over-scoped: This isn't to say that the candidate is unqualified per se, but, rather, that their ambitions extend beyond their current capabilities, and they negotiated for a set of duties that will stretch them to the point of failure.

Again, the solution isn't to adopt a bare-knuckles negotiation style and pick a fight over every single issue. But if you're a leader in the midst of making a hire, pay close attention to how you feel about the prospect of losing the candidate and the extent to which such feelings might be causing you to underplay the leverage you hold in the negotiations. In this context it can be helpful to better understand your strengths and weaknesses as a negotiator. There's no one right approach, but in my experience there are two distinct negotiating "cultures":

In a list-price culture, there's a high degree of transparency and very little flexibility. An opening offer may not be take-it-or-leave it, but there's relatively little gamesmanship... In a haggling culture, the opposite is true. There's very little transparency and a great deal of flexibility. Opening offers are never take-it-or-leave-it, and gamesmanship abounds. [10]

A challenge in hiring is that you and the candidate probably haven't negotiated before, so you may come from opposing cultures without realizing it, which is a recipe for miscommunication:

When a list-price leader meets a haggling candidate, the leader may be surprised by a seemingly outrageous counter-offer, and the candidate may be surprised by the leader's rigid inflexibility. And when a haggling leader meets a list-price candidate, the leader may be surprised by the candidate's apparent lack of responsiveness, and the candidate may be surprised by the insultingly low opening offer. [11]

Short-Term Pain vs. Long-Term Pain

As I noted in Part 1, a theme here is the belief that the short-term pain will be greater than the long-term pain. When filling an empty role, the short-term pain is evident: Important work is going undone. This includes not only the work that is the purview of the role, but also the work that the leader must defer or forego in order to dedicate time and energy to the hiring process.

It's also not uncommon for leaders to find hiring itself a somewhat painful experience. Even when recruiters or other employees are available to source a pool of candidates and conduct the initial screens, the leader must ultimately spend a substantial amount of time in later rounds with candidates who won't work out--and in many early stage companies the leader is doing all this work on their own. And some leaders enjoy negotiating, but many find it onerous at best. In most cases, the leader is driven to seek relief and put an end to the short-term pain by selecting a candidate and closing them quickly.

However, as I also wrote in Part 1, what gets left out of this equation is the possibility that the long-term pain might outweigh the short-term pain, and perhaps by a substantial margin. Candidates who breezed through a series of unstructured interviews might look the part but be woefully underqualified. Candidates whose defensiveness wasn't surfaced during the process (or, worse, was ignored) will almost certainly fail to fulfill their potential. Candidates who extracted outsized concessions in their negotiation may be overmatched by the role or create perceptions of unfairness, undermining trust in management.  And someone who fits any of these criteria may well need to be managed out or terminated abruptly. The long-term pain of a poor hire is nearly limitless.

If you're a leader preparing for or in the middle of an important hire, you're undoubtedly feeling some pressure to fill the role. But managing your "fear of the empty chair" and tolerating some short-term pain in order to create a more structured interview process, test deliberately for defensiveness, and carefully assess your leverage as you conduct negotiations may well spare you from much more pain in the long run.

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1 (On Termination)

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Footnotes

[1] For more on the shortcomings of interviews, see the following:

• Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection (Scott Highhouse, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2008)
• Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion (Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson, Judgment and Decision Making, 2013)
• Overconfidence in personnel selection: When and why unstructured interview information can hurt hiring decisions (Edgar Kausel, Satoris Culbertson and Hector Madrid, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2016)
• The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews (Jason Dana, The New York Times, 2017)

[2] For more on cognitive biases in interviewing, see Structured and Unstructured Selection Interviews: Beyond the Job-Fit Model (Robert Dipboye, Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 1994) and How Cognitive Biases Make Interviews Unreliable (Huy Tran, TRG International, 2016).

[3] Dipboye, page 112:

Unstructured approaches allow for richer communication among interviewers and between interviewer and the applicant (Daft & Lengel, 1986); as a consequence, those involved in the selection process can achieve greater reductions in the equivocality associated with hiring decisions (Weick, 1979). Second, the political behavior that can emerge with an unstructured procedure can prove valuable in resolving conflict over underlying objectives and alternative job candidates. Third, when knowledge of cause-effect is incomplete and there is no consensus on standards, fairness becomes more of an issue, and the interactional quality of an unstructured interview can provide for greater procedural justice. Fourth, the overall fit of the individual to the job context becomes more important in these situations and as discussed earlier, unstructured procedures seem to provide a better basis for achieving a good fit to this broader context. Finally, it is in these ambiguous situations that the personal commitment of those conducting the interviews is especially important to the ultimate success of the decision, and through providing autonomy, an unstructured procedure may help build this commitment...

[4] Ibid, page 113:

There are several ways that a structured selection process can conflict with the existing system, and as a consequence can be rejected or destructured. In the search for personal satisfaction, interviewers deviate from guidelines by incorporating task characteristics such as variety and autonomy. In the attempt to achieve a good fit to the organization, interviewers stray from the job-related attributes to consider the personality, values, and goals and to allow recruiting, socialization, rind self-selection. Other deviations occur as a consequence of power tactics, such as building coalitions or controlling the decision process. In the attempt to be fair, interviewers deviate from the one-way interrogation."

[5] Ibid, page 94.

[6] Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

[7] A Look at Derailment Today: North America and Europe, page 11 (Jean Leslie and Ellen Van Velsor, Center for Creative Leadership, 1996)

[8] Adapted from Surfacing Defensiveness (Three Questions for Candidates).

[9] Very Cheap, Then Very Expensive (On Job Titles)

[10] Culture, Compensation and Negotiation

[11] Ibid.

 

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1 (On Terminations)

A theme in my practice is the leader who's been delaying a hard decision. [1] This can be particularly challenging when it involves terminating an employee. Sometimes this reluctance is well-founded, but my clients often look back on these scenarios and wish they'd been more decisive and less hesitant. [2] Instead, they were held back by a set of concerns that in hindsight don't seem to justify their prior inaction. What's behind this "fear of the empty chair"? And if you're a leader in similar circumstances, what can you do about it?

Self-Doubt

Some of my clients are relatively new to leadership roles, and they don't fully trust their intuition. Termination decisions should not be made purely (or even primarily) on an intuitive basis, nor is our intuition is always accurate. [3] But few difficult decisions are made on the basis of objective data alone--when the data is that clear, the decision is easy. In termination decisions there's always some data--the missed quarter, the botched project, the critical feedback--and it's the leader's responsibility to interpret that data and determine its significance.

This involves a degree of intuition, but it's not some sort of mystical process. Economist and psychologist Herbert Simon offers a straightforward definition: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition." [4] If you're wrestling with self-doubt, the first step is creating an environment that's free from distractions, so you can tune into your intuition more accurately. [5] The key over time will be tracking your decisions to assess when your intuition pays off and when it's subject to cognitive biases that lead you astray. [6]

Guilt

Alternatively, a leader may be clear that termination is the right decision, but they're held back by feelings of guilt. They may have hired the employee, and even offered inducements to convince them to accept the role. The employee may be a friend, family member, or classmate, and termination may damage or end the personal relationship. Or the leader may feel that they've let the employee down by failing to provide appropriate resources or guidance.

Guilt is a powerful motivator of prosocial behavior, in large part because we go to great lengths to avoid the actions that induce this unpleasant feeling. [7] But we may also fail to take necessary actions to prevent the feeling from arising in the first place. If guilt is holding you back from following through on what you believe to be the right course of action, the key is emotion regulation. This doesn't mean suppressing those feelings, as I've noted before:

Suppression is essentially an act of make-believe--we pretend we're not feeling what we're feeling and hope to distract ourselves until the feeling passes... In contrast, emotion regulation involves improving our ability to sense, comprehend, articulate and express what we're feeling, and we develop those skills by getting closer to our emotions, not by distancing ourselves from them. [8]

Once you've determined how to prevent guilt from serving as an obstacle, there's still a valuable learning opportunity here for you: If you hired this person, what red flags did you miss or discount? If you have (or had) a relationship with them outside of work, how will you balance your personal and professional relationships in the future? If you failed to provide necessary resources or guidance, how will you alter your approach to management?

Obstinacy

Leaders are often persistent, and that's generally an admirable quality--but at some point a capacity to endure difficulties becomes irrational obstinacy. One way to prevent this is to recognize and write off sunk costs. An under-performing employee usually represents a substantial sum of time, effort and money. Meaningful amounts of these resources were expended to source a pool of candidates, identify the best prospects, select and close one, and onboard them. And the longer they've been in the role, the more resources that have been directed toward their training and management.

Tallying up these resources often fuels a hope that they can be recovered through improved performance and long-term retention. But it's essential to view such expended resources not as investments that may yield a return, but as sunk costs, a concept explored by professors of management Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier in their research on why entrepreneurs persist in striving toward goals when the rational choice is to quit:

An uncompleted goal prevents production costs from being treated as sunk because they are mentally categorized as investments rather than expenses until evidence overwhelmingly disconfirms the likelihood that they will produce the expected return... Sunk costs and time invested are costs of abandonment that grow from delay, further increasing the desirability of outcome attainment for decision makers who do not want to appear wasteful. [9]

If you find yourself resisting an otherwise rational decision to terminate an employee, consider the extent to which you remain hopeful that the resources expended over the course of their employment might somehow be recovered. Now write down the value of those resources to zero, and take a fresh look at the situation. Rather than asking yourself how those resources could be recovered, ask yourself whether you should continue trying.

Optics

Perceptions matter, particularly for a growing company that may be facing a great deal of uncertainty. In this context leaders must attend closely to the narratives that surround the company and actively shape them through storytelling, as I've written before:

Why is [storytelling] such an important aspect of leadership? Because reality is socially constructed, and the vehicle for that process is narrative. There are few ground truths in social structures, organizational life, or interpersonal experience. Once we get beyond the realm of physics, the "truth" is what we believe to be true, and when enough people, or the right people, profess their belief in a given narrative its influence is as irresistible as gravity. The converse also holds, of course: when enough people, or the right people, withdraw their belief in a given narrative, it has no influence at all. [10]

The departure of an employee contributes to a company's narrative and may well be perceived negatively, particularly if they're a senior executive or have strong relationships with other employees or external stakeholders. This is one reason why terminations should be handled in a way that affords the affected employee as much grace and dignity as possible, maximizing the possibility that the leader and employee can agree on a shared public narrative that explains their departure. This narrative will undoubtedly be simplified--public discourse doesn't afford much room for nuance or complexity. But this isn't always possible, even when both parties make a good-faith effort.

In such cases leaders often overemphasize the risk of bad publicity resulting from a termination and resist taking needed action. But in my experience people are increasingly skeptical about such claims, recognizing that adverse publicity about a company in the media or on review websites represents the subjective viewpoint of the claimant, not objective truth. Further, leaders often discount the possibility that the narrative attached to an unwilling departure may be a net positive for the company, signalling a commitment to high performance or accountability for professional behavior.

If you're a leader who's reluctant to pursue a necessary termination because of concerns over optics, first consider how you might reach agreement with the employee on a shared public narrative. This shouldn't be false or misleading, but it will leave out certain details and focus on others in order to serve both parties' interests. This is why departing executives so often profess a desire to "spend more time with the family"--this is never the whole truth, but it is almost always true.

If agreement on a shared public narrative proves impossible, consider how you might judiciously communicate with your stakeholders. To be clear, in almost all cases you should not make public details regarding the employee's performance or behavior in order to justify your decision. This will generally be perceived as a violation of privacy and undermine trust in you and the company. But in some cases you can comment on general standards of performance or behavior, without sharing any details related to this particular situation. Or you may have an opportunity to simultaneously announce other, happier departures with a degree of fanfare, while electing not to comment on the termination. Silence is also a form of communication. [11]

Short-Term Pain vs. Long-Term Pain

An element in all of these rationales is the belief that the short-term pain will be greater than the long-term pain. Sometimes the leader doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of long-term pain--they imagine that an under-performing employee can be retained indefinitely without causing irreparable damage. More typically, the leader is aware that allowing an under-performing employee to continue in their role will cause long-term pain, but they resist taking action because the short-term pain of a termination seems so much more evident and troublesome.

Moving forward with a termination will compel the leader to overcome any lingering self-doubt and trust their intuition. It will require a confrontation with any feelings of guilt and taking responsibility for their contributions to the situation. It will entail admitting the futility of recovering all resources expended on the employee's behalf and writing them off as sunk costs. It will be necessary to struggle to craft a shared public narrative, or to run the risk of adverse publicity if this proves impossible. All of this work will be painful.

In many cases leaders are also concerned about a gap in continuity, which will generate even more short-term pain. The terminated employee's duties will have to be delegated, and it may fall to the leader to take them on. Or this may simply not be possible, causing pain for customers or other stakeholders. Shortening or eliminating the gap in continuity will require an expedited search for a replacement, which is often arduous work under the best of circumstances. There will be no shortage of pain.

But what gets left out of this equation is the possibility that the long-term pain might outweigh the short-term pain, and perhaps by a substantial margin. An under-performing employee can take a toll on everyone around them, not just their manager, and left unchecked this can cause very painful problems. The employee's poor performance or unprofessional behavior is rarely evident only to the leader, and the leader's inaction will be noted and raise questions. The best employees may choose to leave, while others may lower their own standards of performance. And as education experts Steve Greunert and Todd Whitaker have noted, "The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate." [12]

In encouraging you to weigh the risk of long-term pain more carefully and perhaps overcome your reluctance to move forward, please note I'm not suggesting you act rashly or terminate an employee over a trivial offense or a single setback. Very few mistakes are truly fatal, and the ability to grow and learn from failure is a vitally important quality to cultivate in organizational life. [13] But it's also worth considering that your under-performing employee is also suffering, and allowing them to remain in the role is not merciful, but cruel. As the great management thinker Peter Drucker once wrote, "I have never seen anyone in a job for which he was inadequate who was not slowly being destroyed by the pressure and the strains, and who did not secretly pray for deliverance." [14]

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

Merciful Exits (On Under-Performing Executives)

On Firing a Senior Team Member

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 2 (On Hiring)

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Footnotes

[1] Kicking the Can Down the Road (On Hard Decisions)

[2] Don't Wait

[3] For more on intuition, see Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut? (Interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, McKinsey Quarterly, 2010)

[4] What is an "Explanation" of Behavior? (Herbert Simon, Psychological Science, 1992)

[5] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

[6] For more on decision tracking, see Creating a Decision Journal (Shane Parrish, Farnam Street, 2014) and Decision Journal (Shane Parrish). For more on cognitive biases, see When Heuristics Go Bad (On Cognitive Biases).

[7] For more on the value of guilt, see Guilt and Helping (Christian Miller, 2010) and Avoiding and Alleviating Guilt Through Prosocial Behavior (Mica Estrada-Hollenbeck and Todd Heatherton, Chapter 20 in Guilt and Children, 1998).

[8] The Tyranny of Feelings

[9] Trapped by the Entrepreneurial Mindset: Opportunity Seeking and the Escalation of Commitment in the Mount Everest Disaster, page 679 (Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier, Journal of Business Venturing, 2016)

[10] The Importance of Shared Narrative

[11] "No matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate. Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value... The mere absence of talking or of taking notice of each other is no exception to what has just been asserted." (Paul Watzlawick et al, Pragmatics of Human Communication, page 49, 1967)

[12] School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It, page 36 (Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker, 2015)

[13] The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

[14] The Effective Executive, page 89 (Peter Drucker, 1966)

 

Photo by Votchitsev Viacheslav.

Are the Best Salespeople the Best Sales Leaders?

Not necessarily--and sometimes they're terrible. A common figure in my clients' companies is the high-performing salesperson who aspires to sales leadership, is promoted to a managerial role, and promptly fails to meet expectations. In some cases this stumble motivates them to improve their managerial skills, but just as often they have to be replaced, and occasionally they drag the entire sales org down with them. I'm not merely relying on observations from my practice--this dynamic has been documented in the management literature:

Using detailed microdata on sales workers in U.S. firms, we provide the first large-scale empirical evidence showing that firms prioritize current performance in promotion decisions at the expense of promoting the best potential managers. Our findings are consistent with the "Peter Principle," which, in its extreme form, states that firms promote competent workers until they become incompetent managers. In particular, we show that high-performing sales workers are more likely to be promoted, but that prior sales performance negatively predicts managerial performance. [1]

And by sales expert Bruce Sevy, who advises companies on their talent strategies:

GrowthPlay has assessed hundreds of thousands of candidates for sales and sales management roles and we do this in a way that lets us empirically assess a person’s fit to both roles. What we found is more than a bit counter-intuitive. First, only about one out of every six candidates who is a strong fit for a sales role is also a strong fit for a sales management role. Perhaps equally surprisingly, as many as five out of every seven candidates who are poor fits for sales roles are strong fits for sales manager roles. [2]

And by sales SaaS founder Steli Efti, an exceptional salesman himself:

My style of pitching only worked for me. It was a unique way of doing things for a unique person. And by trying to inspire my team to do the same instead of coaching them on the fundamentals, I was taking good, hardworking, ambitious people and setting them up for failure. [3]

What's happening here? There are three underlying factors:

• The characteristics that support exceptional sales performance don't correlate with exceptional sales leadership.
• But many ambitious salespeople remain motivated by status, titles and managerial responsibilities.
• So companies strive to retain top salespeople through promotions while mitigating the costs of their mismanagement.

Part 1: Why (So Many) Great Salespeople Can't Lead

David McClelland was a prominent social psychologist in the 20th century, and his "motivational needs theory" explains the surprising disconnect between exceptional sales performance and exceptional sales leadership. [4] McClelland's research suggests that people have three primary needs--for achievement, power, and affiliation--and that an individual's combination of needs renders them more or less suitable for different professional roles. People with a high need for achievement tend to make outstanding salespeople, as sales expert Sevy underscores:

At the heart of every great sales person you will find a strong achievement motive... What’s special about the achievement motive is that it’s only ever really satisfied by personal accomplishment. It’s not enough that the team did well, I have to excel. And the achievement motive simply adores sales. Sales is the perfect environment for achievement. Sales has everything achievement needs to take root, grow and flourish. [5]

So sales as a profession attracts high achievers, but such people don't make the best leaders. Their emphasis on individual excellence and personal autonomy can cause them to view colleagues as obstacles rather than resources. They prioritize activities that require their direct involvement over building systems that enable groups to accomplish more at scale.

In contrast, great leaders are much more strongly motivated by power. To be clear, as McClelland and his co-author David Burnham note, "Power motivation refers not to dictatorial behavior but to a desire to have impact, to be strong and influential." [6]. The best leaders recognize that power in organizational life is realized through others, and there's a necessary tradeoff between accomplishments achieved through individual effort, and the ability to have extensive influence without being directly involved.

Such leaders also have a relatively low need for affiliation--put simply, they care about power more than being liked. This doesn't mean that they're unpleasant or abrasive, but they're not going to let a desire for interpersonal harmony get in the way of accumulating or exerting the power that's necessary to accomplish their goals.

What does all this look like in practice? In my work with clients I've observed three primary ways in which their highly-effective salespeople typically fail as sales leaders: They're poor systematizers, unable to distill their methods into a teachable playbook. Or they're reluctant delegators, slow to hand off accounts and quick to re-insert themselves at the slightest sign of trouble. Or they're people-pleasers, scared to offer critical feedback and hesitant to hold under-performers accountable. (These failings are distinct but not mutually exclusive.)

Part 2: Why (Some) Great Salespeople Want to Lead Anyway

Not every stellar salesperson aspires to a leadership position, and one of the most valuable resources a company can have is a sales star who just wants to get rich. They don't want to manage, they don't want to teach, and they don't really want to talk to anyone who's not a prospect. Give them the tools they need, and get out of their way.

And yet so many great salespeople yearn for more--why? The specifics vary, but the single most important reason is status, a topic discussed by contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton:

The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. [7]

Great salespeople will get rich, but in some organizations (and in some domains of life) they won't be viewed as high status. I first realized this when I was an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business many years ago, where I was astonished to learn that there were no classes on sales. I eventually grasped that sales was viewed as a low-status function, presumably a consequence of the fact that there's no such thing as a PhD in Sales. The GSB has since added courses on sales to the curriculum, but it remains a surprisingly marginal discipline in academia relative to its vital importance in commerce.

Our desire for status isn't just the result of egomania or insecurity, although these can be exacerbating factors. Even the most well-adjusted among us are subject to social comparison, the psychological process by which we gauge our success in life relative to the accomplishments of those we consider peers. [8] Net worth plays a significant role here, but it's not always visible--and obvious displays of wealth will be viewed as low-status in certain settings.

But title, headcount, and managerial responsibility are the self-evident manifestations of status that accompany a leadership role. The great salesperson who's not content with getting rich and desires higher status, either within the organization or in their personal life, will invariably strive for a promotion--sometimes to their detriment.

Part 3: How Companies Respond (and What You Can Do Differently)

As a consequence of these factors, companies reliably promote the highest-performing salespeople into leadership roles--but why? Are they acting irrationally? Not according to the research cited above:

Finding evidence of the Peter Principle does not imply that firms make mistakes. Alternative promotion policies that maximize managerial match quality may lead to the loss of incentive benefits associated with existing promotion policies. Indeed, a promotion policy that favors top sales workers may provide a variety of incentive benefits that justify the costs of managerial mismatch. [9]

Further, as Sevy notes, "No salesperson worth their salt wants to work for a manager who hasn't 'carried a bag.' This is understandable--who doesn't want a manager who has the experience and battle scars to understand what I'm going through? But it leads to the common but mistaken belief that you can't lead a sales team unless you carried a bag." [10]

My clients who have promoted a great salesperson into a leadership role are by no means unaware of the risk that this person will under-perform as a sales leader--this is often one of our main discussion topics. But they also have to take into account the possibility that the great salesperson who's not promoted (or who's levelled under a proven sales leader) may well become a flight risk, seeking higher status elsewhere.

So if you're a CEO or another leader who oversees sales, what might you do differently? How can you keep ambitious salespeople happy while minimizing the likelihood that they'll flame out as sales leaders? The starting point is simply acknowledging that great sales performance alone is no guarantee of great sales leadership and may actually be a risk factor. Then consider the following:

Promote differently.

In addition to sales performance when making promotions, be sure to assess candidates' managerial abilities. One measure cited in the research is their willingness to collaborate, as determined by the number of colleagues with whom a salesperson shares credit on deals. Collaboration is positively correlated with subsequent managerial performance but is generally not a consistent factor in promotions. And yet in companies where sales managers lead relatively larger teams--and where the cost of poor management would be more significant--collaboration is weighted more heavily in promotion decisions, resulting in better sales management. [11]

You can employ any number of alternative metrics or incentives, from peer feedback to team compensation, but the overarching goal is ensuring that your salespeople know that promotions are contingent not only on their personal performance, but also on their ability to positively influence others' performance. Note that this isn't about rewarding likeability--great salespeople can summon that quality at will--but, rather, about creating an environment in which high achievers are motivated to look beyond their individual scorecard.

Manage differently.

As high achievers, great salespeople value autonomy and will resist anything they perceive as "micro-management" after being promoted into a leadership role. But management isn't micro-management, and you can't simply make a promotion and hope for the best. As I've written before, "It's possible for a less-experienced CEO to get in the way of their senior leaders--but more typically I see the opposite problem. The CEO gives their executives a great deal of space, only to find several months or quarters later that they backed off too far, and some important objectives were neglected and fell into the gap." [12]

Even--and especially--if you're not an experienced salesperson yourself, you can still offer your sales leader meaningful guidance and support in the form of active management. But this may well entail revamping your understanding of what it means to manage, a topic I've discussed previously:

Senior leaders manage people who sit much closer to the problems being solved and who may have more expertise in their functional area than the leader. Directive guidance from a senior leader can be counterproductive by preventing execs and employees from making full use of their own knowledge or from taking responsibility for a problem they would rather leave to the leader. Such an approach also keeps senior leaders involved with tactical details and distracts them from larger strategic issues, which is a particular concern in rapidly growing or changing organizations. An alternative approach for the senior leader is to employ coaching skills to help direct reports come up with their own solutions to the problems they face. [13]

Provide status differently.

Finally, consider how to fulfill a great salesperson's legitimate need for status in ways other than a promotion. Leadership experts Allan Cohen and David Bradford discuss the concept of "currencies," resources that can be exchanged as a basis for mutual influence. [14] Of greatest significance here are what they call "position-related currencies," such as public recognition for accomplishments, visibility throughout and beyond the organization, a reputation for competence, a sense of belonging to a group of insiders, and opportunities to expand one's network.

These currencies are precisely the forms of status that cause a great salesperson to desire a promotion, but they can usually be made available via means other than a leadership role. A challenge in some technology-centric companies is that Product and Engineering are the dominant power centers, while Sales is viewed as less important. Occasionally this is a rational arrangement--product-led growth isn't always a fantasy--but it often reflects a set of biases, as I once observed at Stanford. The key is managing the balance of power across functions, so that your best salespeople don't feel that a leadership role is the only path to high status.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Promotions and the Peter Principle (Alan Benson, Danielle Li & Kelly Shue, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018). For a concise summary of the research that resulted in this paper, see The Best Salespeople Don't Make the Best Managers (Alex Verkhivker, Chicago Booth Review, 2017).

[2] Why Great Salespeople Make Terrible Sales Managers (Bruce Sevy, Forbes, 2016)

[3] Why Great Salespeople Make Terrible Managers (Steli Efti, Close, 2018)

[4] For a discussion of motivational needs theory and its broader implications for organizational life, see McClelland and Burnham on Power and Management. Their original work is best summarized here: Power Is the Great Motivator (David McClelland and David Burnham, Harvard Business Review, originally written 1976, revised 1995, republished 2003).

[5] Sevy doesn't mention McClelland or motivational needs theory in his Forbes piece, but I suspect that he drew specifically on this concept and (understandably) chose not to make an academic reference in an article for general readers.

[6] McClelland and Burnham, HBR.

[7] Status Anxiety, page 6 (Alain de Botton, 2005)

[8] For more on social comparison, see the following:

• Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, pages 33-34 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)

• The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 131-132 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)

[9] Benson, Li & Shue, NBER.

[10] Sevy, Forbes.

[11] Benson, Li & Shue, NBER.

[12] Mind the Gap (On Leading Senior Executives)

[13] Coaching and Feedback Tools for Leaders

[14] Influence Without Authority, Chapter 3 (Allan Cohen and David Bradford, 2005)

 

Image via moviememe1978. If you don't recognize Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, then you owe it to yourself to watch his (very NSFW) monologue, written by David Mamet:

How to Think Long-Term

We're not well-served by treating successful leaders as oracles. Patterning ourselves after someone else's example and expecting similar results ignores survivorship bias and the role of random chance in success. [1] That said, it's equally foolish to imagine that we have nothing to learn from successful leaders, and Jeff Bezos' perspective on long-term thinking is instructive:

When somebody congratulates Amazon on a good quarter, I say "Thank you," but what I'm thinking to myself is, "Those quarterly results were fully baked about three years ago." Today [in 2017] I'm working on a quarter that is going to happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already, and it's probably been done for a couple of years. If you start to think that way, it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you put your energy. And it's not natural for humans--it's a discipline you have to build. That's something you have to steel yourself for. [2]

Bezos' emphasis on discipline is key here, particularly when we appreciate the difference between importance and urgency. Important activities are meaningful and make a difference over the long-term to you, the people who matter to you, and your organization. But they’re not necessarily time-dependent, and if they go undone for a short stretch no one may even notice.

Urgent activities have a deadline attached to them that matters to someone, although not necessarily to you. They are time-dependent, at least in someone’s mind, and if they go undone that person is going to be unhappy. But they’re not necessarily meaningful and accomplishing them may not make a significant difference.

Some tasks are both important and urgent, and in professional life we tend to be very effective at identifying and accomplishing them. (If we're not, we don't last very long as professionals.) But many tasks are one but not the other, and this often causes us great difficulty. Important but not urgent activities are like brushing our teeth or exercise or meditation. There are no real consequences if we skip a day, but if that becomes a trend we’ll miss out on significant benefits and may run into serious problems. These activities tend to matter more to us than to others, at least in the near term.

Urgent but not important activities matter to someone else, but not to us. We feel pressure to complete them, not only from others, but also internally, and yet their accomplishment may not yield significant results. There's an inherent tension that results in a constant battle: The time and attention we would otherwise devote to important but not urgent activities is often sacrificed to address urgent but not important matters. A challenge is that we may be the only ones who care about the former, while the latter often have many advocates. [3]

This describes a pattern I see in my work with leaders, and it applies not only to their organizations, but also to their individual careers: They're under constant pressure to pursue urgent activities--sometimes from others, sometimes from within. And yet if they always yield to that pressure--if they lack the discipline to resist it--they will under-perform in the long run. If you're like my clients, you face similar pressures, and you also understand the importance of resisting them. So what can you do about it? What helps?

Create Open Space

The type of reflective thought that allows us to solve hard problems (and to even understand the nature of these problems in the first place) generally requires some time to allow our minds to wander and to make unexpected associative connections. Creative solutions rarely come when commanded--instead, we spot glimpses of them on the margins of conscious thought, and we invite them to join us. This process is short-circuited when we’re distracted with more immediate concerns or interrupted by others’ agendas.

Learn How to Think

A characteristic of environments that help almost all of us think more effectively is freedom from distractions--and in an era of open offices (or no office at all), shared calendars, and ubiquitous messaging, it's increasingly difficult to find such a space, particularly for a leader whose attention everyone is seeking to capture.

Value Your Attention

Focused attention is both finite and our most precious resource. Spend a dollar, we can always earn another one. Direct our attention somewhere, for any amount of time, and we'll never get it back. Although our store of focused attention is replenished overnight, we begin each day with a limited amount and deplete it steadily.

Make This a Habit

The difficulty of sustaining change over time, and the stark contrast between what we imagine change will be like and what it actually involves can leave us feeling demoralized and incapable--and so we give up. But if our conventional model of change hurts our chances of success, an alternative model can help. Instead of thinking of change as something grandiose, we can break it down into some simple building blocks.

"If you start to think that way, it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you put your energy. And it's not natural for humans--it's a discipline you have to build."

 

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Footnotes

[1] Survivorship bias occurs "when a visible successful subgroup is mistaken as an entire group, due to the failure subgroup not being visible." From Why do we misjudge groups by only looking at specific group members? (The Decision Lab). For more on the role of random chance (and our resistance to it), see Significance Junkies.

[2] Jeff Bezos interviewed by Michael Beckerman (Internet Association Gala, 2017). The passage above begins at the 7:07 mark in this video.

[3] Adapted from Importance vs. Urgency

 

Photo by Pacific Southwest Forest Service.