First Chapter of GoLocal MINDSETTER™ Paul Levy’s Book: Goal Play!
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Paul Levy, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™
Understanding How Your Team Learns
CHAPTER 1
“I just hadn’t reached a conclusion.”
DIFFERENT MODES OF LEARNING.
Let’s start with some background about the game of soccer. Then, I’ll tell you what happened on that particular fall day, and from there we can together explore the lessons for leading a firm or institution.
One of the most important parts of soccer is the first touch. Clearly, the object of the game is to score goals and keep your opponent from doing the same. The better you can control the ball when it comes to your feet, the easier it is to maintain possession of it and keep it moving in the right direction— eventually towards the goal. This is, however, a difficult task, which even some of the best varsity high school players have not mastered, notwithstanding a decade or more of playing. The ball bounces off their feet, sometimes by just a few inches, but that is enough for an opposing player to snatch it away or ruin an attempt to pass the ball to a teammate.
Controlling the ball from the first touch is something that should be taught early in a player’s career so she can practice it over and over and develop the muscle memory to implement it while under the pressure of a game situation. As a coach of young players, I view it as one of the most important parts of my job to incessantly work on this skill.
There are options for a first touch. You can trap the ball and stop the ball dead. You can pass it with a single touch to a teammate. You can touch it twice, first to control it and then to pass it along. You can dribble with it. You can shoot. But these are just the physical aspects of the skill. The most important factor for a successful first touch happens in the brain. The key is to think about what you are going to do with the ball before it gets to you. It is neurologically and technically difficult to wait until the ball has arrived and then, often under pressure from an opposing player, execute the appropriate first touch.
On that fall day, I carefully explained all of this to the girls. I emphasized the need to think ahead. I clearly explained that if they waited until the ball arrived, they would be under too much pressure to do the right thing.
Then I started a passing drill, and 30 seconds later a ball arrived at Margaret’s feet. Despite my elaborate lesson, she reflexively booted it away to nowhere.
Margaret
Me: “Margaret, you weren’t thinking about the ball before it got to you!”
Margaret: “Yes, Coach, I was thinking about it. I just hadn’t reached a conclusion.”
This simple comment was a sharp reminder that people learn in different ways and at their own pace. If your job is to be sufficiently empathic to help them through the learning process, you must be cognizant and respectful of different learning styles and speeds, and you must adjust your training approach accordingly.
In the corporate world, the equivalent of the first touch is the interactions your staff people have with others. If adult Margaret (now in the corporate setting) knows that she will be meeting with someone to plan a new project, discuss a policy, or resolve a dispute, she will find that it is much better to plan what she is trying to accomplish and how she will do so long before she sits around the table. Thinking strategically and tactically about your options, and about your interests and the interests of the other parties, allows you to formulate approaches to the issues and the processes that are much more likely to be successful.
This is one of many types of skills you as leader can pass on to your colleagues. This particular one is based on principles of negotiation, an area in which a great deal of empirical research offers guidance. (3) Of course this is just one example. You may want to work on other skills such as financial analysis, writing, oral presentations, root cause analyses, and the like.
The challenge we face, which Margaret highlighted for me, is that just telling someone something doesn’t always work. We can explain all of the reasons and logic behind what we are trying to get her to do, and it still may not sink in. Where does this leave you as a leader? You need to find a way to engage your subordinates in the learning process. But there is something even more exciting and challenging at play in an organization. There, your job is not only to enable a single person to learn but also to enable groups—indeed, the whole organization—to learn.
Whatever the skill sets you are trying to impart—whether to an individual or a group—how do you do so in a consistently effective way given the different learning styles that our soccer player Margaret brings to mind? I have found that Socrates had the answer: Educate through inquiry.
Enable Adaptive Learning
Building on Socrates’ theories, Ronald A. Heifetz, known for his seminal work in learning and leadership, notes:
Unlike rote learning situations in which the answer is sup- plied . . . by the teacher, adaptive learning situations demand that people discover, invent, and take responsibility. Leader- ship is a special sort of educating in which the teacher raises problems, questions, options, interpretations, and perspec- tives, often without answers, gauging all the while when to push through and when to hold steady. (4)
Under this model, your trainees set the pace of learning. This was not how I had tried to teach the girls. Instead, I had engaged in a didactic approach: “Do this!” Imagine if, instead, I had spent some time asking them the questions that would have led to the desired result. “What are you thinking about as the ball is rolling to you?” “What do you want to think about?” “What game/exercise could we invent to practice that?” “How can we keep track of how well we do it?”
It might seem like it would take longer to teach in this manner, but it is actually more efficient. The time spent up front in inquiry and self-training turns out to be far less than the time wasted by the miscues and errors and forgetfulness associated with rote learning.
In my corporate life, I came to this realization inadvertently. It was 1999, and I had already had several leadership positions and taught many classes as a faculty member at MIT. Now, though, I was Executive Dean for Administration at Harvard Medical School, and I thought it would be fun to watch how some of our brilliant faculty shoved medical knowledge into the heads of some of our equally brilliant students.
HMS uses a tutorial approach to teach much of the curriculum. I attended a session on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). There were ten or twelve students being “taught” by a professor, but he didn’t say much.
I learned that in the previous session, he had posed a question and a student had been assigned to lead the next class discussion. In the class I attended, the student began, and a back-and-forth emerged with the other students. From time to time, but not often, the professor would say, “Why do you think that?” or, “What would be the implications of that conclusion?” or some such open-ended question. I could see the students work through the problem—individually and as a team—learning the lesson of the day. I could see the professor’s display of empathy as they struggled to apply facts and judgment to a new set of problems and the positive reinforcement he demonstrated as they finally found pleasure in their accomplishments. He then set forth a related assignment for the next class: He showed them two charts related to lung function and said, “At our next class, please be prepared to explain the relationship between these two charts.” Note the open-ended nature of the assignment. It was not, “Please present a list of the symptoms of COPD.” To fulfill the assignment, they would not just need to know the symptoms. They would also have to incorporate them within a broader understanding of the respiratory system.
In later months and years, I extrapolated from this experience and applied it in my leadership roles. I reasoned that if I wanted to create an environment that would enable people to learn in the context of solving corporate problems, I would need to create a structure that supported a more effective approach to learning. So, turning back to Socrates and Heifitz, I started to apply this approach in meetings in my office and conference rooms. I would pose the opening question but not offer an opinion or bias to the others. I would ask what I tended to call “dumb questions:” What data do we have to support that conclusion? Are we asking the right questions? Should we be bringing in other people or resources to get the right answer?
The meetings would progress in a very democratic fashion. Everyone’s point of view was valued, regardless of his or her place in the organization. Participants felt engaged and even excited by the interaction and vibrancy of the discussion. My comments displayed empathy, support, and encouragement for the learning process. We were all learning together.
All? Yes, especially me. I had the advantage of watching a group of committed, experienced, dedicated people play out options, ideas, and concerns right in front of me. Since I was not invested in a particular answer, I could keep an open mind and gain insights about the topic at hand, while also thinking about the implications for broader strategic issues. The less I said and did, the smarter I got.
I can already sense some readers getting edgy. Some might be feeling that they would be seen as weak or indecisive if they behaved in this manner. Others might fear that the group would come to a different conclusion than their own. “What if I know the right answer or have a strong feeling about how we should proceed? Don’t I have an obligation to push the group in that direction?”
It is certainly fine to have your own ideas about how to resolve a thorny business issue. And, in certain settings, it is all right to impose them on the group. There is an apocryphal story about President Abraham Lincoln at a cabinet meeting. He asked the group to discuss whether to take the controver- sial step of issuing an Emancipation Proclamation. They unanimously recommended against it. His response, “Seven nays, and one aye; the ayes have it.” He knew that his proposal was too politically explosive to be approved by a consensus- driven cabinet.
Sometimes, too, you find yourself leading a particularly stubborn organization, one to which the kind of open participation we have been discussing is a foreign concept. You might be facing a serious and important problem.
Then, you need to be firm and more direct in leading people to the kind of solution you have in mind. Here’s an example from the Massachusetts state government.
Cowbells Solve the Problem: Some Groups Need Extra Direction
When Bill Geary took over as Commissioner of the Metropolitan District Commission (the regional parks and roadway agency for the Boston area) in 1983, he noticed an odd traffic phenomenon. About once a week, a truck that was too tall would enter one of the two main roads along the Charles River—Storrow Drive or Memorial Drive—and attempt to go through the underpasses below the main bridge crossing at Massachusetts Avenue.
Those underpasses had only nine feet of headroom. The truck would hit the bottom of the bridge assembly, its roof would roll up like the top of a sardine can, and it would get stuck, blocking one or both of the two lanes of traffic. Traffic would back up two miles or more. The MDC police and road crews would go to work, rescue the truck driver, deflate the tires, and tow the truck away. Meanwhile, thousands of drivers would be delayed.
On the Cambridge side, the freshmen women living in MIT’s McCormick Hall would at first jump with a start when they heard a crash and would watch the rescue operation. By second semester, they had become so accustomed to this pattern that they didn’t even look up from their homework.
Bill brought his team together and suggested that having a truck crash into a bridge every week was not acceptable. Couldn’t something be done? “No, Commissioner,” he was told. “Besides, we have a routine all worked out. The police handle the traffic. We bring in the tow truck, the Jaws of Life to pry open the crushed vehicle, whatever we need. We clean out the whole problem within an hour.”
Bill had been around state government long enough to understand the institutional environment he faced. For years, the MDC was the resting place of hundreds of patronage appointments. Many people in the agency owed their jobs to a legislative “sponsor,” a member of the state Senate or House of Representatives who had prevailed upon a previous commissioner to hire a friend, a relative, or a friend or relative of a friend or relative. Most of the world is characterized by six degrees of separation. At the MDC, it was two degrees. Employees had a lifetime sinecure that allowed them to retire with a pension worth 80 percent of their highest salary, not to mention health care and other benefits.
Bill liked to describe the MDC as an agency where “the momentum is with inertia.” In other words, people could always find an excuse not to do something. Indeed, they had been trained to be that way over the decades. It was never to your advantage, as a staff member, to make a creative suggestion or take initiative. If your suggestion went awry, you would be blamed. If it worked, you would never get credit; you would more likely be ostracized by your fellow workers. After all, if your idea resulted in greater efficiency, it might suggest that someone’s job was not necessary. Or if another improvement resulted, it was, effectively, a reproach of one or more of your colleagues, who had been doing it the old way for decades.
Bill knew that, in this inertia-laden environment, he was going to have to lead his staff to a solution to the truck crashes.
“What if,” he said, “we put signs up at every entrance to the river roads, at the height of the underpasses, with a pictogram warning taller trucks to stay out?”
“Commissioner,” someone replied, “Can you imagine the liability if our sign breaks a windshield and sends glass flying into the face of a truck driver?”
“Well, what if we make the signs out of rubber so they don’t break the windows?”
“Rubber signs, Commissioner? There is no such thing.”
This stymied Bill for a while. He didn’t have the facts at hand to rebut this assertion. Luckily, shortly after this conversation, Bill was driving his car along the Massachusetts Turnpike when he approached a toll booth displaying an elevated sign saying, “Cars only.” He looked closely. The sign appeared to be made of rubber. He stopped in the toll plaza, climbed up onto the hood of his car, and grabbed the sign. It was made of rubber!
He got on the phone and called Jack Driscoll, then head of the Turnpike Authority, and found out where he had purchased the signs.
At the next meeting with his staff, Bill reported that he had found rubber signs and suggested that they be ordered.
“But Commissioner,” someone said, “What good is a rubber sign? Truck cabs are noisy places. A trucker will just hit the sign and drive right through without even hearing that he has hit it.”
“Well, then, let’s hang cow bells on each sign, so drivers will hear a noise as they approach our roadway if their vehicle is too high to go through the underpass.”
“Where will we get cow bells?” he was asked.
“I don’t know. Call a dairy farmer and ask where they get their cowbells.”
The signs were installed, cow bells and all:
The frequency of crashes in the underpasses went from one per week to less than one per year. Absent Bill’s persistence and personal involvement, we would still be cleaning up those weekly truck crashes three decades later.
Enraged! Some People Need Extra Attention
As you seek to get to the point where you can rely on your group’s decision-making processes, and as you engage in leadership that empowers your staff, you may find that other surprises arise, deriving from entrenched behavioral patterns. Here’s an example.
As soon as Amy Schectman was hired as CEO of Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly, a not-for-profit group in the Boston area, she began a process of leadership development for her top-level managers. They were well-intentioned and experienced people with a wide range of responsibilities who ran the various housing developments. The housing units had apartments, of course, but there was also a food service to operate, as well as many service programs for the seniors. But as well-intentioned and experienced as they were, these managers had not had much chance to develop leadership skills of the sort we have just discussed. As a result, meetings among the senior team were often inefficient and inconclu- sive. People would come in and propound strongly stated opinions. Sometimes they were based on experience. Sometimes they were based on belief. Sometimes they were based on fear of change. The opinions of the senior team often conflicted. Positions would harden, and paralysis would result. Or sometimes, the meetings had an entirely different character. In these, a particularly domineering manager would take charge, run roughshod over others, and drive the decision in a particular direction.
About a year after Amy’s arrival, one manager came to her and said that there was an unresolved issue in her building. The roof was in disrepair and needed fixing, but there were many variables to consider. When should it be done? What physical process of repair would be best? How would they deal with disruption to tenants? Marcia was afraid that if she brought together all of the other managers whose jurisdictions might overlap on this problem, each would have a position on how it should be handled. How would they ever reach consensus and make a timely decision?
With some coaching from Amy, Marcia came into the meeting with a strategy. She did lots of research, organized the relevant materials and set forth the problem. Then, rather than setting forth her view, she asked for advice. When people made statements, she quietly and persistently asked the “dumb questions.” “Oh, why do you think that is a good way to proceed?” “What do others think about that?” “How will our tenants react if we do it that way?” Her questions were respectful of everyone’s prerogatives, experience, and good intentions. The questions led to a rigorous and well-reasoned discussion of the options. A consensus emerged. After an hour, all agreed on the plan of action, and it could go forward.
A couple of days after the meeting, Amy ran into Marcia and tried to apply some doses of positive reinforcement. In Amy’s view, Marcia deserved plenty of credit. Like Margaret eventually learned on the soccer field, Marcia had thought through her “first touch” by preparing her strategy and approach to the meeting. But something even better had happened. She had learned how to be hard on the problem but gentle on the participants. She had learned to be the coach!
But Amy found that her offer of praise was met by a sour disposition and fiery glances. “Is there something the matter?” she inquired. Marcia responded:
“I am ENRAGED! I did all this research and had a clear sense of what we should do to fix the roof and how we should do it. But you made me ask other people’s opinions. It was MY TURN to decide this, and you took that opportunity away from me!”
This was not at all the reaction Amy expected. Despite her understandable surprise, she was able to hold herself together and calmly respond. She recognized the need to more deeply explain why she had encouraged Marcia to be more inclusive with her colleagues. She explained that under her administration, the kind of meeting that Marcia had so ably run was exactly what she was hoping for. Respect, consultation, and collaboration would be the watchwords. There would not be meetings where one person got to dominate the discussion and have his or her way. “Don’t you think that will be more pleasant and effective?” she asked. This seemed to resonate with Marcia. She allowed as to how she would find that more comfortable and engaging. She walked off with a smile on her face and a sense of accomplishment.
I am not going to suggest to you that the challenging attitudes expressed in these examples are rare. You should be alert to the possibility that the kinds of leadership action presented here may be necessary, especially in the early days before you have been able to exert a deep influence on your organization’s culture. But, even then, this sort of intervention by the leader should be reserved for those cases in which a strong stand is needed to implement a tough and potentially unpopular choice, like Lincoln’s; or where the organization is so calcified that the leader has to constantly prod people to keep anything moving, like Bill Geary’s MDC; or where a dysfunctional culture is so embedded that personal counseling might be necessary, as Amy Schectman found.
With time and persistent attention by the leader to the dynamics of his or her organization, the dividends will become evident. You will be able to get over your feeling of edginess in letting the team define the solution. For most issues and in most organizations, a recommendation presented by a group that has been engaged in a rigorous and thoughtful discussion is likely to be more on target than the intuitive musings of the CEO. Also, as we will discuss in future chapters, such recommendations are more likely to have the support of the various constituencies in your organization, facilitating their implementation. First, though, let’s turn to the issue of how a leader can create a learning environment.
Creating A Learning Environment: Value Everybody
In order to best take into account the various learning styles of your staff members, you need to create a setting that permits them to be effectively employed. It almost seems too simplistic to say, but a person cannot engage in his or her approach to learning if the overall environment is not open and conducive to the kind of mental experimentation and exploration in which he or she needs to engage. That it takes time to learn is evident. That a person needs to be made to feel comfortable taking that time should be equally so. This sense of comfort comes when an organization clearly values one’s activity, but people only feel that their activity is valued if they are personally valued.
Accordingly, if you as a leader are interested in creating successful learning, you need to make clear what I have mentioned above: Everyone’s point of view is valued, regardless of his or her place in the organization. As Alcoa’s former CEO Paul O’Neill put it, each person should be able to say that “I am treated with dignity and respect by everyone I encounter, every day. (Without regard to my ethnicity, my title, my pay grade or rank, the duties I perform, my educational attainment, or any other distinguishing characteristic.)” (5) In the coming chapters, you will see that I put a huge emphasis on the power of process improvement that can come from the front-line staff. A leader tends to trust and value his or her senior management team, and this is essential. In order to be truly effective, however, you need to also trust everyone in the organization and understand the value they bring to solving problems and creating strategically important initiatives. We must go overboard in making it comfortable for “lower level” staff people to present their points of view. Let me give an example:
John Rowe was CEO of New England Electric System, a large regional utility company. In the 1990s, the electric power industry was facing immense challenges. There had been cost overruns associated with huge nuclear power plants. As a result of federal legislation designed to diversify the nation’s power sources, the utilities had also been required to sign uneconomic power supply contracts with small scale hydroelectric plants, cogeneration units, and other “qualified facilities.” Retail rates soared while, paradoxically, there were massive reserves of lower priced wholesale power available. Large commercial and industrial users were seeking discounts, arguing that they should get direct access to those lower wholesale prices. Absent that, they argued, they would move their companies to other parts of the United States, where electricity rates were lower. If either of those events occurred, the remaining sunk costs would be spread over a smaller base of retail customers, creating a vicious cycle of rate increases, customer departures, and further rate increases.
This phenomenon was threatening to bankrupt the electric utilities. After all, they couldn’t thrive, or even survive, in a world of ever higher prices and ever fewer customers. Eventually, they would be hit with a huge bolus of “stranded costs,” power supply costs that would exceed the equity in the firms. In other words, the stakes were very high.
As a leader in the field, John understood that a massive restructuring of the entire industry and the relationship with its regulators was necessary. This would take legislation in all of the states in which the company operated, settings in which there were powerful political and economic interests from multiple directions. A brilliant lawyer and finance and public policy expert, John clearly had his own ideas as to how this restructuring should take place, but he never set forth that scenario. Instead, he worked with his leadership team to define the nature of the problem, and then he left it to them to come up with options and approaches for dealing with it. He also brought in the best and brightest industry consultants to advise the firm.
At one of the most important meetings on the topic, one that would lead to codifying the company’s proposal to the state legislatures and other governmental authorities, the room was packed with the country’s foremost experts and all of the senior management. John set the stage with some opening remarks. The first comment came from the back of the room, not from one of the high level executives, but from a third level financial analyst in the company. It was something like, “John, I think you have misconstrued this point, and we need to make sure we get that straight before we reach our policy recommendations.” This is the sort of comment that could get a junior staffer in trouble. Some might even consider it insubordination. But not here.
This CEO’s response was immediate and direct: “Thank you so much for bringing that up. You are right. I got it wrong. That was an important point. Thank you.” I was struck by two things. First, John’s reaction was impressive and, I dare say unusual, for a CEO. I then thought how brave the young man had been to speak. I quickly realized, though, this wasn’t quite true. If he had been brave, there would have been twittering in the room or knowing glances among the senior executives in the nature of, “Wait till he gets back to the office. He’ll get an earful from his supervisor for contradicting the CEO.” But no. John had long ago established an environment in the company in which everyone was expected to participate, where all were welcome to offer their thoughts.
The young man, then, hadn’t been acting bravely. He was just doing his job. John, the leader, had made sure that such participation was valued, expected, and encouraged. In this specific case, the plan adopted by the company was stronger for the participation of this young man. His story also exemplifies the larger lesson: Individual and group learning will not occur in an organization if this ethic of encouraging individual participation is missing from the corporate culture. Why do I call it an “ethic?” Because it is fundamentally based on respect for the individual, regardless of his or her position in the firm. Only the leader can make sure that this ethic is present and dominant in the company. As we will discuss below, CEO should stand for “chief ethics officer,” the person who models, insists on, and celebrates an environment of respect, trust, and appreciation for all people in the organization. He knows that a deficit on this front will kill a learning environment. Absent a learning environment, any firm is on the downward slope to obsolescence and irrelevance.
Don’t Just Feel Empathy: Show It
Before we move on to the next chapter, let me leave you with one more thought. Earlier, I talked about the need for empathy in the learning process, to help people through the three stages of learning: interest, discomfort, and pleasure. But, as a leader, it is not enough to be empathetic during the learning process. It is also essential to demonstrate empathy, to show that you understand what employees are going through as they work through problems.
I learned how not to do this while running the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority in the 1980s. This agency was responsible for providing water and sewerage service to the Boston metropolitan area, had a staff of about 1600, an operating budget of over $200 million, and a $3 billion capital budget. As is often the case in the corporate world, when the organization was facing an important budgetary or policy issue, the staff involved would write a comprehensive memo outlining the nature of the problem and the options before us, and recommend a solution. Our staff at the MWRA was very competent, and the memos I received were generally complete and analytically rigorous.
So, the time would come for my meeting with the authors of the memo. To be respectful, I would have read the document beforehand. They would come into the meeting and I would immediately say, “Thanks for your memo. It is an excellent summary. I agree with your recommendation. Let’s proceed. Do we have anything more to discuss?” Stunned, they would sit there with nothing to add, and they would file out of my office... but not before I took their memo and threw it in the trash. After all, I figured, they had a copy and the issue had been decided. Why did I need it cluttering up my desk?
Of course, in so doing, I was not being respectful of their need to spend some time recapitulating their thinking and learning process. They may have been concerned that I had not really understood all the ramifications of their analysis or recommendation. Additionally, I should have acknowledged the work they had done—the interest, distress, and pleasure they had experienced in tackling a tough issue. Imagine how they must have felt as their document headed towards the trash bin!
Fortunately, one of my close assistants attended one of these meetings and pointed out my mistake. From then on, I took the time to explore with my staff how they had reached their conclusions.
A few years later, my training came in handy. We suffered a construction disaster while drilling a tunnel for a sewer line in one of Boston’s suburbs. The tunnel boring machine became trapped behind a huge boulder 18 meters below the surface. The “mole” could not move backward either, because the sewer pipe had gotten jacked in behind it, narrowing the diameter of the escape route. It was a public relations embarrassment and a costly problem.
There were numerous theories as to how to resolve the issue. (6) As CEO, I made an obligatory visit to the town and met with the construction manager, the engineers, and the contractor. Even though I knew the whole story, I encouraged them to present it, compare the options, and recommend a solution. I respectfully asked a number of questions, even though I was fairly certain they had already come up with the best solution. Then I said, “Thank you for such a comprehensive briefing. It seems to me that you have all thought this through very clearly. I agree with your recommendation. Please proceed.”
I heard later from my staff that I had left a very positive impression with the engineers and contractors in that they felt I fully understood what they had gone through and their decision-making process. As a result, they felt even more confident in proceeding with their proposed plan. My empathy had paid off.
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3 Lax, David A., and James K. Sebenius. The Manager as Negotiator: Bargaining for Cooperation and Competitive Gain. N.Y.: Free Press, 1986.
4 Heifetz, Ronald A. Leadership Without Easy Answers. Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA. 1994. Pp 244-245.
5 O’Neill, Paul, “The Key Leadership Behaviors in a Lean Organization?” Thedacare Center for Healthcare Value, http://networkedblogs.com/ol8i9.
6 “Sewer Infrastructure, An Orphan of Our Times,” Oceanus. Volume 36, No 1. Spring 1993.
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