Category Archives: Teams

Learning From Mistakes

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“We got it,” Roland said. “This was very painful, to examine the sequence of events that caused our last project to fail. It cost us a lot of money, wasted energy and almost got us sued. But, I think we know how it happened. Expensive lesson.”

“So, you are trying to learn from your mistakes?” I replied with a question.

Roland nodded in agreement. “I think it is important, part of our debrief, a post-mortem.”

“It’s valuable to look at your mistakes,” my nod matched Roland’s nod. “What did you miss?”

“It’s a very tough client. They had an unreasonable timeline, very demanding, put us under a lot of pressure,” he replied, as if his team had been tortured.

“I assume you knew this client?” I stared. “I assume you looked at the project schedule, and agreed to it. You knew what the stakes were. These are NOT things you missed. What did you miss?”

“I was just trying to tell you why it was such a difficult project for us,” Roland pushed back. “Final analysis, I don’t think we missed anything.”

“People always tell me they learn from their mistakes. Mistakes are rarely that instructive. The reason we don’t learn from our mistakes is that we fail to examine our own contribution to the problem. You are going to have difficult customers, with unreasonable demands inside a high pressure project with tight deadlines. All of that was known before you signed the contract. What you missed, your failure in the project was not due to the project. The failure was your assessment of your internal capability, or lack of capability. Your contribution was that you ran out of talent.”

Management Panacea

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“I have a new team,” Alex announced. “We had a tough week. I think I may have thrown them into the deep end of the pool and just expected them to swim.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I know it was a complicated project, but it was the next project on the schedule, had to be done,” he described. “Lots of moving parts, a bit of coordination. Problem is, this new team didn’t even have the basic fundamentals down, much less the ability to sequence each step of the process.”

“And, your game plan?” I wanted to know.

“I was thinking about one of those team building programs, you know, get everybody to know each other. I hear good reviews for that type of activity.”

“Do you really think that’s the problem?” I shook my head. “You have a new team, no skills, no understanding, practically incompetent. No little program, no matter now popular, is a substitute for incompetence. That team building exercise may be useful down the road, but what would be a more important first step?”

Perfectly in Flow

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“My team struggled with this problem all last week,” Regina was almost giddy. “I took one look at it and knew exactly what to do. Like a pop up fly right into my glove. It’s really satisfying to solve a problem, almost by instinct.”

“You seem pleased,” I responded.

“Perfectly in flow,” she replied. “Athletes get like that sometimes, where the world slows down, they are one with the motion that perfectly connects.”

“And, your team? What of your team?”

“They were relieved. It was a really hard problem. They discovered the cause, and generated some alternative solutions. It was actually staring them in the face, but the real solution, the one that saved the day was the first part of one alternative connected with the back end of another. Honestly, I don’t know why they didn’t see it.”

“And, you, in flow, took their discovery away?”

Regina’s delight turned cold. “It’s not like I took candy from a baby,” she defended. “I solved a problem for them.”

“So, the next time your team struggles with a problem, what are they going to do? Who are they going to call on?”

Increasing Customer Service

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Regina was proud, “We just got an increase to my annual budget for my customer service team.”

If you engage with your customers through email, you can use various tools like timetoreply to improve response times instantly.

“Oh, really?” I replied.

“Yes. Two years ago, we had a small team and our customer service scores were 1-2 on a 5 point scale. Not good.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“I spent a lot of time working on how we respond to the various glitches in our product and warranty claims. Turns out, there were five problems we had to deal with most often, so we trained hard on those.”

“And?” I nodded.

“And, our scores improved. I got the green light to hire ten percent more to the team. Last year, we actually won a customer service award, averaging 4.8 on our scores.” Regina was bursting with pride. “And, this year, I got the go-ahead to really ramp up the head count on my team.”

“Regina, did you ever have a conversation with your operations team to talk about the five things that created so much customer service traffic?”

Can’t or Won’t

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“My team seems to think there are some problems they face that will never be fixed,” Kari explained. “It’s always, here we go again. Same problem, different customer.”

“Do you think they can’t fix the problem or won’t fix the problem?” I asked.

“Can’t fix or won’t fix, what’s the difference? The problem still ends up on my desk, again,” Kari flatly stated.

“Often, people prefer a problem they can’t fix to a solution they don’t like.” **

Kari thought for a moment. “You’re right. To fix the problem, they have to stop production and figure out what’s going wrong. Instead, they would rather flare a few tempers and call for help.”

“This is where you have to decide if this is a matter of can’t or won’t. Often, someone who won’t solve a problem, or even try to solve the problem, feels like they don’t have the capability to solve the problem. They feel incompetent and give up. Your job, as a manager is not to solve a solveable problem, but to build the competence of the team to solve the problem.”
—
**Shades of Lee Thayer, Competent Organization

Multiple Paths

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“Stop with the frantic heroic efforts,” I said. “That is supervisor strategy. You’re a manager, now. Your strategy is a system focus. Stop working harder and longer and start working smarter. How can you see the work as a system?”

“You mean starting with when we get the work order from sales?” Paula wanted to know.

“That’s the way your team sees the work,” I disagreed. “As the manager, you have a larger scope than the team. You know the work starts way before the team gets it. The work starts back in sales, informal discussions about unsigned contracts in the hopper. Your system has to account for all the anticipated work volume AND the unanticipated variability in the work volume.”

“I can sit in on the sales meeting and get some visibility on projects in the works,” Paula nodded. “But, then what happens when the project gets delayed or completely scuttled?”

“Variability means variable,” I replied. “As the manager, you have to make contingency plans, multiple paths to the goal, anticipate what might happen and be ready to call an audible. A system not only has to account for the same characteristics of every project, but also has to account for the individual nuances that are different about every project.”

Go Find Out

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“So, what you are saying is that I am stuck with the team I have?” Paula floated, uncertain in her conclusion.

“Yeah, pretty much,” I nodded. “Unless you think you should fire them all and do the work by yourself.”

Paula huffed a little sigh. “So, if I am stuck with the team I have, where do I start? I mean, sometimes things get tight out there. We have deadlines and things going wrong. Sometimes, we need extraordinary effort just to get to the end of the day.”

“You seem to think it takes heroic effort to just keep up with the work on the schedule? That if you worked a little harder, or worked a little longer, you could stay above water?” I asked.

“But I can’t,” Paula protested. “I can’t yell at them any more than I already do and I can’t work overtime more than one hour per shift.”

“What if you could dispense with the heroics?” I wanted to know. “What if you could still meet your schedule, but things were dull and boring? What would have to change?”

“Not going to happen,” she put her hands on her hips. “We start the day, then get a priority rush job right off the bat, throws everything off schedule. I mean, if I knew we were going to get a rush job, I could have re-shuffled some of the work, pulled someone off another project. But, I never know.”

“And, why don’t you know?” I asked. “The day before, could you meet with the sales team and find out the unreasonable promises they were making with customers? You are the manager. You have the authority to re-shuffle resources to accommodate a rush order, if you only knew about it. So, get out of your office and go find out.”

Ordinary People

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“My team is a bunch of idiots,” Paula started. “They can’t get anything right. Everything they touch turns to rust.”

“Oh, really?” I replied. “When did this start?”

“Always been this way,” she said.

I nodded. “Before you were promoted to manager, weren’t you a member of this team? Were they idiots then? Were you one of the idiots?”

“Okay, okay,” Paula agreed. “Maybe I was an idiot, back then. It’s just so frustrating being a manager. I wish I could get better people on my team.”

“Why would that make a difference?” I asked.

“If I had better people, I could get better results,” she pursed her lips with a defiant look in her eyes.

“So, you think you would get extraordinary results if you had extraordinary people?” I prodded.

“Yes, absolutely,” Paula sat up straight.

“What if I told you there were not that many extraordinary people out there. That most people are just like you and me, more ordinary than brilliant. Your challenge, as a manager, is to get extraordinary results from ordinary people. If that were true, what would you do? What would you work on? By the way, if you WERE able to get extraordinary results from ordinary people, maybe your team wouldn’t look so ordinary.”

Contain the Steam

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Aspirations are good, but not the best measure of potential success. It’s not the aspiration of a developed skill, but the reality of the lowest capability on the team. You stand for what you tolerate.

When times are good, things are smooth, the flywheel turns over predictably well. We can tolerate a bit of underperformance, even cover it over, make excuses for it and little difference is noticed. It’s when the pressure cranks up, deadlines get tight, specifications to three decimal places, that underperformance emerges with its full impact.

Your team’s ability for success does not depend on your aspirations, but depends on the capability of the weakest, the newbie, the slowest, the person not paying attention.

Do not sing songs of inclusion. Select well, induct, train and test. For one day, the cork will seal the pressure cooker and everything will depend on the weakest seal to contain the steam.

Competence Distorted

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How we fool ourselves. It’s not a question, it’s an observation. Each of us has a sense of our own competence. And, we have a version we keep tucked inside and a version we portray to the world. Woe to the person whose versions get too far apart.

Others can listen to your version of competence and in short order observe the difference in your story and reality. They may accept a slight space of difference, chalk it up to braggadocios. Or are willing to keep quiet about the distortion as a quid pro quo to their own sense of exaggerated competence.

The competent individual knows exactly what they are capable of and where they underperform or fail. The competent individual needs no distortion because their underperformance is not permanent. Each day, they make moves toward mastery, inch by inch, with a firm grasp of capability in hand, a fixed vision of the goal and the willingness to proceed in the face of failure. The competent individual, most importantly, possesses the competence of learning.

The competent organization, most importantly, possesses the competence of a learning organization.