Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Change Management: The Sponsorship Cascade
We’re cascading the message to you.
Remember the ice cream theory of communication? (Click here). It’s a cascade of information flowing step-by-step to the target you want to influence. Say that you want to influence the trade press. You know that reporters will want to know what analysts think, so you brief analysts before you talk to reporters. Analysts will want to now what customers think, so you brief customers before analysts. And so on.
The ice cream theory also works with internal communications — especially when big changes are afoot. When an organization needs to launch big changes, it often puts the CEO on a video broadcast to all employees. Everybody hears it at the same time. What’s wrong with that? Well, frankly … nobody trusts the CEO. It’s not that the CEO is a bad person; it’s just that most employees don’t know him or her. Without a personal relationship, it’s hard to know whom to trust. It’s like sending a press release to a reporter without first preparing the rest of the ice cream cone. The reporter needs further confirmation. So do your employees.
Bain & Company develops this concept in two parts: 1) the sponsorship spine; 2) the communication cascade. The sponsorship spine is very similar to the ice cream cone. Ask yourself two questions: Who are we trying to influence? Whom do they trust? Let’s say you’re trying to influence Department Z. Whom do they trust? Well … it’s Mary, a long-term employee who is widely respected for her experience and wisdom. Mary may or may not be Department Z’s manager. Then ask another question: whom does Mary trust? Let’s say it’s Inga. Then, whom does Inga trust? Let’s say it’s Grover. Keep asking the whom-do-they-trust question until you’ve reached the executive suites. You’ve now established the sponsorship spine.
Once you’ve identified the spine, you can start the cascade. The key ideas are to start from the top, speak to people who know you and trust you, speak to them personally in face-to-face settings, and always invite feedback (and listen carefully to it). If you need to make adjustments based on the feedback, then do so. Then ask the people you’ve spoken with to cascade the message down one level. Repeat the process throughout the organization. Ultimately, everybody in the organization hears the message personally from someone they trust.
And what about the CEO? He or she can still play a role. My advice is that the CEO should speak after the cascade is complete. The CEO confirms and reinforces the message, but doesn’t introduce it. People hear the message from a trusted source and then have it verified by someone in authority. That reinforces the sponsor’s trustworthiness and speaks to both our emotional and our logical sides. That, in turn, helps the message sink in and prepares us for action.
You can find the full article from Bain & Company by clicking here.
Creatively Creating Creativity
I alternate between fantasy and reality.
I recently wrote that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book, Creativity: Flow and The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, identified ten different pairs of opposing traits that occur commonly in creative personalities. We looked at three pairs in that post (click here). Let’s look at three more today.
Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other. Csikszentmihalyi notes that Albert Einstein believed that both art and science “are two of the greatest forms of escape from reality that humans have devised.” To create new truths — to change the paradigm in Thomas Kuhn‘s phrase — one needs a great imagination, bordering on fantasy. At the same time, the creative person realizes that the fantasy could actually be true. The imagination extends well beyond reality but, sooner or later, reality catches up. Csikszentmihalyi also notes how artists respond to Rorschach tests. Creative artists tend to respond with more original and more detailed stories than “normal” people. But the artists rareley give “bizarre” answers as normal people sometimes do. Csikszentmihalyi concludes, “Normal people are rarely original, but they are sometimes bizarre. Creative people, it seems, are original without being bizarre. The novelty they see is rooted in reality.” Thus, it seems that it’s good to study reality so you can connect it to your imagination. Imagination disconnected from reality is simply bizarre.
Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion. Being truly creative requires a lot of time alone. You need solitary time to master your domain, to learn how to play the piano, or to write your magnum opus. Yet many of Csikszentmihalyi’s creative people said it was equally important to interact with other people and just kick ideas around. As Freeman Dyson puts it, “Science is a very gregarious business. It is essentially the difference between having this door open and having it shut.”
Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time. Highly creative people understand that they “stand on the shoulders of giants” — they first mastered their domain and then they extended it. Csikszentmihalyi points out that they also understand the role of luck in their discoveries and that they’re more focused on future work, making past work seem less boast worthy. At the same time, creative individuals realize that they have indeed created new forms and structures that genuinely make them proud. Csikszentmihalyi sees this duality as the contrast between competition and cooperation. To change your field (or to change the world), you need to be aggressive. “Yet at the same time, [creative individuals] are often willing to subordinate their own personal comfort and advancement to the success of whatever project they are working on.”
Click here for Csikszentmihalyi’s book. By the way, his surname is pronounced Six-Cent-Mihaly.
How To Undermine Your Employees
What’s the best way to motivate employees? According to Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, it’s progress. In a recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly, Amabile and Kramer write that a sense of progress on meaningful objectives is fundamental to motivation. If your employees feel they’re doing something meaningful and making progress on it, they’re motivated. If they feel they’re doing something that’s not meaningful — or don’t understand why it’s meaningful — then motivation wanes. If they don’t sense that they’re making progress, motivation dies.
Amabile and Kramer go on to say that executives often commit four errors that undermine employee motivation. Here they are:
Mediocrity signals — your mission statement may include soaring language with emotionally appealing overtones. However, what you say to your employees day-to-day may say the opposite. Amabile and Kramer give the example of a company that claimed to be dedicated to innovation driven by autonomous teams. It’s quite possible that they believed their own rhetoric. In their day-to-day activities, however, they emphasized cost savings and undermined team autonomy by dictating cost reduction measures. Ultimately, employees came to perceive the rhetoric as hypocritical and lost their enthusiasm. Moral: what you say should be consistent with what you do.
Strategic attention deficit disorder — I once worked for a CEO who travelled a lot. After every trip, he’d come back with a new idea derived from an airline magazine article. We all braced for a YAGI — yet another great idea. Actually, some of them probably were great ideas. But there were too many of them. We were just getting started on one when another one superseded it. Amabile and Kramer give the example of a company led by a CEO with a short attention span and a “…desire to embrace the latest management trends. … If you blinked, you could miss the next strategic shift.” Moral: consistency over time is not boring, it’s motivational.
Corporate Keystone Kops — the Keystone Kops were famous for being uncoordinated. They literally couldn’t get out of each other’s way. Amabile and Kramer say the same phenomenon occurs far too often in the corporate world. Their examples include complex matrix organizations that make it difficult to know who’s in charge of what and a failure to hold departments and individuals accountable for meeting their commitments. If one team meets its commitments and another team doesn’t, the lack of coordination can spoil it for everybody. Moral: Keep it simple and keep it coordinated.
Misbegotten big hairy audacious goals — management gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras suggest that organizations should develop BHAGS — visionary goals that stir the emotions. The most cited example is probably John Kennedy’s challenge to NASA to put a man on the moon. It’s a great example but hard to emulate. Amabile and Kramer write that corporate BHAGs are often “… grandiose and [contain] little relevance or meaning to the people in the trenches. They can be so extreme as to seem unattainable and so vague as to seem empty. The result is a meaning vacuum. Cynicism rises and drive plummets.” The authors cite a chemical company whose BHAG was that all projects had to yield $100 million in annual revenue within five years of launch. “This goal did not infuse the work with meaning, because it had little to do with the day-to-day activities of people in the organization. … worst of all, it did not connect with anything the employees valued. Most of them wanted to provide something of value to their customers; an aggressive revenue target told them only about the value to the organization, not to the customer.” Moral: BHAGs are OK but make them meaningful to the people you’re trying to motivate. Keep them focused on customers and simple enough that the “people in the trenches” can get a sense of progress.
You can find Amabile and Kramer’s article, “How leaders kill meaning at work” by clicking here. You can also find their book, The Progress Prinicple, by clicking here.
More Thumb Thinking
Us versus them.
Remember heuristics? They’re the rules of thumb that allow us to make snap judgments, using System 1, our fast, automatic, and ever-on thinking system. They can also lead us into errors. Last time I wrote about heuristics (click here), we looked at three of the 17 different error categories: satisficing, temporizing, and availability. Let’s look at four more today.
Affect — what’s your first response? What’s your initial impression? What does your gut tell you? These are all questions about your affect heuristic — more commonly known as gut feel. System 1 usually has the first word on a decision. If you let System 1 also have the last word on the decision, you’re making an affect-based decision. It may be a good decision — or maybe not. If you want to double check the accuracy of your affect, you need to fire up System 2. People with “poor impulse control” often stick with System 1 only and don’t engage System 2.
Simulation — if it’s easy to imagine a given outcome, then it’s more likely that outcome will occur, right? Not necessarily. At least in part, it depends on how good your imagination is. Salespeople can use simulation to very good effect: “Imagine how you would feel in this new suit.” “Don’t you think it would be great to drive a car like this?” “Imagine what other people will think of you when they see you on this motorcycle!” Simulation simply invokes your imagination. If it’s easy to imagine something, you may convince yourself that it’s actually going to happen. You could be right or you could be a victim of wishful thinking. Before you make a big decision, engage System 2.
Representation — “She looks like my ex-girlfriend. Therefore, she probably acts like my ex-girlfriend.” You notice that there’s a similarity between X and Y on one dimension. Therefore, you conclude that X and Y are similar on other dimensions as well. You’re letting one dimension represent other dimensions. This is essentially a poor analogy. The similarity in one dimension has nothing to do with similarities in other dimensions. Generally, the more profound a similarity is, the more likely it is to affect other dimensions. Physical appearance is not very profound. In fact, it’s apparently only skin deep.
Us versus Them — “The Republicans like this idea. Therefore, we have to hate it.” Unfortunately, we saw a lot of this in our recent elections. In fact, politics lends itself to the us versus them heuristic — because politics often boils down to a binary choice. Politics is also about belonging. I belong to this group and, therefore, I’m opposed to that group. This is often referred to as identity politics and is driven by demonstrative (as opposed to deliberative) speeches. In warfare, the us versus them heuristic may be good leadership. After all, you have to motivate your troops against a determined enemy. In politics, on the other hand, it smacks of manipulation. Time to fire up System 2. (For my article on demonstrative and deliberative speeches, click here).
Do you see yourself in any of these heuristics? Of course you do. All of us use heuristics and we use them pretty much every day. It’s how we manage “reality”. Unfortunately, they can also trick us into mistakes in logic and judgment. As you become more aware of these heuristics, you may want to engage System 2 more frequently.
To prepare this article, I drew primarily on Peter Facione’s Think Critically. (Click here)
Six Ways to Be a Bad Listener
I don’t need your opinions. I have my own.
Bernard Ferrari, who has written a lot about listening skills, has identified six “archetypes” of bad listeners. As I read through the descriptions, I realize that I make some of these mistakes all too often. In fact, for one of these — I won’t say which — I thought, “Boy, that sounds exactly like me. Could it be that I’ve been a bad listener for all these years?” I hope you’re a better listener than I am. However, you may spot yourself in some of the following descriptions. If you do, you’ve still got plenty of time to take corrective action.
The Opinionator — may appear to be listening closely but is really just trying to judge whether what you’re saying conforms to his existing opinions. If it does, you’re OK. If not, the Opinionator is ready to squelch your ideas. Not a good person for helping you develop innovative but fragile ideas.
The Grouch — doesn’t like other people’s opinions and doesn’t want to waste her time listening to them. Through body language and via the things she says (and doesn’t say) she’ll let you know that she thinks you’re a fool. A hard person to get through to.
The Preambler — long-winded, prone to giving “stealth speeches” that are disguised as questions or introductions. May use slanted questions (or other rhetorical devices) designed to steer the discussion and get the answer he wants. Interrupting him may be your only defense.
The Perseverator — talks much, says little. What she says doesn’t advance the conversation but it does take time. By filling the time, she leaves you with less time to advance your cause. She may also simply talk past you — not acknowledging or responding to your points.
The Answer Man — always has an answer to everything, even before the question has been fully formed (or agreed to). Providing an answer before the question is asked suggests that he doesn’t really care what you have to say. He’s so eager to impress, that he’ll jump ahead of you. The Opinionator needs to be right; the Answer Man needs to impress.
The Pretender — appear to be engaged and listening actively but, really, they’ve already made their minds up. It’s hard to spot a Pretender during a conversation — they’re good at pretending. It’s only afterwards, when they do the opposite of what you expected (or do nothing at all), that you realize that they were just pretending.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these? If you do, you might try Ferrari’s 80/20 rule — a good listener speaks about 20% of the time and listens about 80% of the time. I find that hard to do; I’m always tempted to jump in with opinions and solutions. But when I do succeed in listening more and speaking less, I make better decisions and fewer mistakes.
This article is adapted from Bernard Ferrari’s, “The Executive’s Guide to Better Listening”, McKinsey Quarterly, February 2012. Click here for the full article.
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