Managers the world over get frustrated when they are fired up, and wanting to change the world, but their staff all seem to have long faces and lots of excuses. Instead of matched enthusiasm to reach for the stars, they get faced with attempts to put the fire out on their exciting new vision or challenge. With their emotions fired up they want to bang the table and demand action or start looking outside their team for new, more motivated players, but there is another way.

Motivation is an odd thing. A few weeks ago my two step children competed in Tough Mudder. This is a half marathon, where contestants have to crawl through thick, stinking mud, climb over obstacles, dodge rib breaking poles and even get electric shocks. Bizarrely, they were not being punished for doing some terrible crime. They voluntarily paid good money for the privilege and afterwards talked about how great it was and how motivated they felt. Why? In my view, it’s about having a stretching yet attainable goal and then being with a group of people who are in it together to achieve it. Team leaders should take note. If someone banged their fist on the table and demanded that they do it, they would have found every excuse under the sun to avoid it. They did it because the marketing promotions told them it was tough. So tough that if they finished it they would be regarded as elite. Plus there were other people in it together. It wasn’t going to be done under the cover of darkness on their own. It was a shared experience, albeit shared physical suffering. The motivation came from inside themselves as they visualised what it would mean to complete the challenge.

Good leadership starts with articulating a vision. Why does this team exist? Why would I want to be on the team? What are the team going to do and why does it matter? Even if it’s not a new team but an existing one, that seems to have lost their motivation, go back to the fundamental goals of why the team were established.  Articulate even some answers to the key “team forming” stage,  and you are well on the way to getting the team fired up and out of bed.

Trevor Manning

In a previous blog, I discussed how allowing your emotions to create some passion in what you are doing is a positive thing. I said I would come back to discussing when we overdo it, and our emotions get high-jacked, and we behave seemingly irrationally. The first thing to come to terms with, is that we are not nearly as rational as we (especially technical people) think we are. I am reading an interesting book by Daniel Kahneman “Thinking fast and slow”, who explains we can think of it as though we have two systems in our brain – a fast instinctive, emotionally driven one, and a slow, thinking rational one.
 
These two systems generally work in harmony, to help us function as rational, decision making human beings, but sometimes they also clash. Why is it that sometimes we get worked up and feel like we are “losing it”. Our perfectly justified reactions in the heat of the moment, often seem a complete over reaction, when we reflect on it, after we have calmed down. It seems that our fast thinking can sometimes overstimulate our emotional responses, and we feel, and indeed experience physiological changes in our bodies that replicate, a life threatening scenario. Before we have time to rationally assess the true threat, our quick reacting emotional brain highjacks all the resources thus draining the fuel from our slow thinking brain, thereby leaving us unable to rationally assess the reality of the situation.  

When we feel we are not thinking straight, in fact that is exactly what is happening.  Our rational thinking is gone and so we behave in ways that may surprise or even embarrass us later on, once everything is back to normal and we are able to think with our rational part of the brain. At the time, no amount of appealing for ourselves or anyone else to calm down and be rational will help, as its like calling for assistance from a vehicle that has run out of fuel. What helps is to break the cycle of emotional high-jacking, by deliberately doing something else or removing ourselves from the situation and coming back to it, once our emotional balance is restored. Deliberately asking yourself to identify what is happening, without putting any meaning to it, can help to draw resources back to our thinking brain a little faster.  

So next time you see one of your team members acting a little crazy and over reacting to something, have a heart because they literally may be feeling like they are being attacked by a cave bear!

I attended a seminar this week on Staff Engagement and a CEO I met told me how he was working on changing the culture of his organisation to go for perfection and nothing less. He then quoted statistics of the number of failures that would occur if 99.9% was good enough. How many planes would fall out the sky per week etc.  In his business where he is producing a high quality, very expensive product for the top end high street retail stores, any failure is costly and so he is changing the culture to go for perfection. “We are only hiring A grade players”, he told me, and “mistakes, however small, are not tolerated.  People need to realise that getting close to perfection is not good enough. Its 100% or out the door”. 

This got me thinking. I specialise in helping technical people move into management and they bring this perfection thinking into management with disastrous consequences. Decisions do not get made, people get demotivated and workloads increase. I learned the 80/20 principle a long time ago. It is based on an observation by Italian economist Vifredo Pareto that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods and that 80% of the wealth in Italy was owned by 20% of the people.  Applying this non-linear cause-effect ratio changed my life at the time.  I started looking for those few companies that generated the majority of the revenue, and by focussing on them, got an exponential return on my investment in time. In 20% of the time, you can get enough information to make fast decisions. By prioritising those 20% of customers, the customer management issues simplifies dramatically. By deliberately not going for perfection but extracting 80% of the value, a manager’s life can be transformed overnight. 

So was the perfection driven CEO wrong? The answer is no! Apple didn’t get the i-product success through applying the 80/20 principle to quality. Steve Jobs was famous for caring about the inside of the product that only technicians would see. In engineering, perfection is king. Just sit in a German luxury car to feel the over engineering and attention to detail that creates that emotional attachment to the car. But in management, where speed of a decision is often more important than a perfect decision, the 80/20 principle is, and should be, alive and well.