Run from Micromanagement!

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To me, micromanagement is one of those organizational behaviors that its impacts are not well understood by people unless they have had a direct or indirect experience with a micromanager. Another tricky point about micromanagement is that the negative impact on the micromanager is not so obvious and people usually focus on the person being micromanaged.

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Let me summarize it for you.

You should not micromanage because:

  • It conveys a weakness of yours to your employees. People with strong influence who can get things done through others do not need to micromanage
  • It instills doubt about your leadership (you might want to learn about transformational leadership). If you just want to be a ‘manager’, and not even a good one, then be my guest
  • It suppresses your employees’ creativity and personal development, they literally become your agents
  • It spreads the culture of ’not taking responsibility and offloading accountability’; why someone would feel responsible for a decision (almost) made by others?
  • It gives you stress, if you could do the whole job yourself and make all the decisions, why you have 10 people reporting to you anyway?
  • It is a potential cause for defective communication. You might start noticing you are either getting looped out of lots of communications or trying to keep up with the pile of reports of every details of what your employees do – depending on which one your employees think makes you bother them less!
  • It impacts your personal relationship with your employees

In the end, you might lose a lot of talented people, reduce your organization’s productivity significantly, impact your personal life, or even end up losing your job.

Also, you should not be micromanaged because:

  • You never reach your productivity peak. To make the boss happy, you try to shape things as she likes it – which is almost never for a micromanager. So you start spending insane amount of time on unimportant tasks
  • You lose your ability to make decisions because you get used to being told what to do
  • You are scared of making mistakes, so you stop taking (calculated) risks or voicing your opinion
  • You start accumulating negative thoughts and feelings about yourself and your career, when apparently you can’t even get a format of a document right (really??), i.e. a significant drop in your confidence
  • You get exposed to a great deal of stress as you are constantly expecting feedback on even very minimal matters of your daily routine

So, micromanagement can turn a dream job into ‘I wish I could just quit now and be done with it’.

The worst part about micromanagement is that it is contagious! That is, people who have been micromanaged are more likely to micromanage, even though they hated it (sorry, no scientific evidence here, just my personal experience).

Have a good day,

Hamed

What Reduces Productivity in an Organization?

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I have a passion for improving organizational performance. I’ve been studying and working on this issue for quite some time now. Recently, I tapped into the rich and diverse pool of talented members of the HBR LinkedIn group to get some feedback on the most common factors that reduce productivity in organizations. I got a very good set of feedback (thanks HBR members!), which I am summarizing here. The below chart shows the percentage that each factor was mentioned as a productivity road block in organizations.

NOTE: Although this was not anywhere near a proper statistical survey, but I appreciate the input. I tried to transfer the data as it was presented, but in some cases I needed to take the meaning instead of the actual word. I also eliminated the points that were mentioned significantly less than the ones presented here.

Based on the collected data, the most top three factors are 1) unclear organizational goal and vision, 2) distrust and lack of transparency, and 3) lack of empowerment and accountability.

A lot of comments were also made about ‘poor leadership’. This was a broad category and could be the root cause of other problems so I did not include it in the above chart.

Just like any other performance related problem we face in organizations, productivity issues ought to be investigated by taking a deep look into the three fundamental aspects of the organizational performance: people, structure, and culture.

I am always interested in what you think, so I appreciate it if you share your thoughts with me.

– Hamed

Not every man running is a thief; well, you are a dog!

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I was out for a run the other day and I broke my own speed record trying to escape from a dog attack. In addition to helping me be done with my workout faster, the dog made me thinking. A running man passing by the house is what triggers her to run after him. She does not have the capability to analyze the situation and determine whether a person is a threat.

To be honest, a lot of us grown-ups act the same way in many situations. We have rules, procedures, and processes that we follow; we are too much used to our surroundings that we rarely ask “why?” or “does this make sense now?” or “can’t we do this differently?” So think about this again: why we have a ton of inefficiencies in our lives? Someone wrote a procedure or taught you to do things in a certain way and you just keep doing it the old fashion way, no question asked.

You do not see this behavior in kids. Their minds are not imprisoned in the box yet, so when they ask you “How do they get the deer to cross at that yellow road sign?” they really want to know the answer. They are not shy or embarrassed by what they ask and consequently they learn a lot.

So here is a challenge for you: ask questions like a kid, answer them like an adult.

– Hamed

Marketing Innovation: Theory vs. Practice

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Yogi Berra, the legendary baseball player, once said: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they aren’t!”
The theorization enables us to transform our imagination into something that ‘looks’ reasonable based on our knowledge. Then the theory gets tested and refined over time and becomes a proven fact. So until it is not shown by practice, there is a (great) chance that our theory is wrong. We sometimes rely too much on our thoughts and theories as if they are given and that is when we get into trouble.

Market analysis and revenue projection for new innovative products and services are among those things that are, in my opinion, mostly theory. Although we do all kinds of market research and gather data, the conclusion we draw is not based on any hard evidence for the most part, our sample is not statistically significant and simply not reliable. You just cannot trust people’s judgment on a new innovative product because users often do not know what they want. God forbid if you ask them how much they would pay for your product (I know, you use 100 different marketing research tricks to implicitly ask that, but I still would not count on it too much).
If you have more than a few pages of business plan, you are setting up a trap for yourself. You have to be agile and be ready to change course a lot in your marketing, business model, customer acquisition strategy, pricing and even the value prop and target segment.

It is kind of ironic; until you are making money, your plans (or I should say dreams) to make money are almost worthless (they are still theories); you do not need a plan anymore when you are making money.Conclusion: plans in this context are creators with a very short life time span.

– Hamed

Are You Insane Enough to Change the World?

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Here is what Oxford dictionary says about sanity: ”the ability to think and behave in a normal and rational manner”, and the dictionary defines normal as “conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.”

Now we can understand why the first person who voiced his opinion about earth being round was considered insane; because he was not thinking or behaving to the norm and standard of the society. People did not expect to hear that. And that is how the world changing ideas are born. Whenever “…well, that is impossible” is followed by “why not?” something amazing starts. If you are to follow the standards, think and behave like everyone else, and try to keep people happy, get a job at post office. But if you think you are worth to be remembered, live differently. Who do you think define ‘normal’ anyway? that is right, we do. Any ‘normal’ in history had been ‘abnormal’ one day. The power of the idea and the impact it has on people’s lives make it normal. You just need to believe in it.

–Hamed

Facebook is Turning the Depth of our Relationships to Breadth

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Social media, especially Facebook, has changed the online space drastically; in fact, I think it changed the web from an information dump to a very interactive and interesting place to live in. Now, Facebook is interwoven into our lives. I am sure ten years from now, young kids will ask us: “what do you mean you did not have Facebook when you were my age?”

However, we need to be aware of how Facebook is changing our behaviors. I am particularly concerned about our relationships. It seems that we are spending a good chunk of our time on our relationships (which most of them are limited to the online world), but something does not feel quite right. We are spending the quality and in person time we used to spend with a specific number of people, who were important in our lives, on filtering through the noise on what is going on with other 500 Facebook “friends”, some of whom are not closer to us than a person we saw in a party for 10 minutes.

Five years ago, friends and family would call each other up on birthdays and that would turn into a long conversation on how the business was doing or what had happened in the soccer game the day before. These conversations were like vitamins to the relationship. But now, it is “Happy BDay” on the Facebook wall (I am guilty of it too, and disappointed for that matter). Even our empathies used to be stronger. When someone in the circle of my friends or family achieved something significant, she would convey the news in person and shared her joy through her voice and I would get a chance to respond right away. Now she is lucky if she gets a “Congrats” (not even the full word or a custom message!) on her post announcing her victory.

The wakeup call for me was an incident that happened a few weeks ago. I was talking to a friend about a mutual friend that we had not seen for a while and during the whole conversation, his Facebook profile picture, instead of his real face, kept coming to my mind; I could not remember his face from the last time I saw him, and that was a disaster in my book.

If you do not take care of your relationships in person, you are also going to be a bunch of text and pictures to people who matter in your life.

– Hamed

The Wise Man’s First Law of Survival: When You Find Yourself in a Hole, Stop Digging!

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Not long ago, I was talking to a ‘smart’ guy who was running a $10 million project for his company. He was telling me that the project was not going very well and he had already figured that the company was not going benefit from the project; not to mention that it actually required more money! Unfortunately, they found this bitter fact after spending $7 million.

So I asked him what his plan was. He sadly smiled, gathered his energy and replied: “I am going to finish this F*** project, we’ve spend a lot on it so far!” I talked to him about his decision but he must have not listened because a couple of months later I heard he lost his job.

Even some experienced businessmen do not pay attention to the sunk cost when making decision. In general, human is more sensitive to loss than gain and could easily be trapped in a hole he has been digging for himself. Where ever you are, stop and think whether the next move is going to take you closer to the other side of the tunnel or just make it harder for you to get out. If the latter, for your own sake stop digging!

– Hamed

Success is a Random Phenomenon

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I can’t imagine how many studies, books, and interviews have been done to figure out the secret sauce to success. Some say you need to be born with specific abilities to achieve certain things (e.g. high IQ, being a visionary, having strong leadership capabilities etc.), some stress on skills you learn such as communication and collaboration, and others mix the two. I probably do not need to enumerate all the different speculations on this subject here.

With all due respect to psychiatrics, statisticians, and scientist who have been studying this topic for years and also all the successful people, I would like to suggest that success is a random phenomenon! Before you start passing judgment on my statement, let me elaborate a bit more.

First of all, everyone has a different criteria for a successful life: money, fame and recognition, career, or maybe intangibles like helping others. Combining all the criteria and their possible values, we face a ginormous baseline to compare our lives to. Even where you draw the line is constantly changing, isn’t it?

Second, a human’s life is not contained in the box of his behavior and capabilities; it is not isolated from the environment. I view it as a collection of incidents or a big coincident, if you will. That means, any particular event/path in our lives, including successes or failures, is made possible through a sequence of previous events/paths and external factors which are not under our control. A very simple change in any of these factors can pivot our path dramatically. The whole world’s available computer clusters will not be sufficient to simulate all the possible outcomes of one person’s life. And that is what I mean by the word “random”.

Putting my engineer/statistician hat on, I can explain this easier: let’s just think of our lives as a system with bunch of inputs and outputs. When we have a system with large enough set of inputs, each of which taking too many possible values, the system’s input is technically random. In other words, the probability of having a specific input is almost zero. So what happens when the system behaves differently on each of those random inputs? You get a random output!

Don’t get me wrong though. People have different capabilities turning inputs to outputs. Some are more effective and productive than others. Given the exact same circumstance, I may act different than or the same as Bill Gates. Fortunately, no one can judge me on that because I did not (and will not) get the same set of input to my system as Bill did. So stop comparing yourself to others! Next time you read a bio or story of someone you consider successful, instead of trying to repeat what they literally did, pay attention to how they turned opportunities into result, i.e. the process… Things that went on in other people’s life are just not going to happen to you or yield the same result for you because you are absolutely unable to simulate the input that went into their ‘system’.

My 2 cents: self awareness and understanding what you want from your life are two lenses of the glasses you need to put on to see those opportunities. Ultimately, it is your life, live it like yourself!

- Hamed

Empowering, the Secret to Invisible Leadership

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When I was a kid, we had a neighbor, let’s call him Joe, who had two kids of my age group. Joe was a very vocal, directive, micro-manager type of person. I could hear him once in a while trying to ‘lead’ his kids through different activities by giving clear directions and checking frequently on the result; he was involved in details and cared about the result much more than the process. The kids were grown up very aligned with the Joe’s thought process. They were pretty much like their father and mostly did not have disagreement with him (at least they did not surface it to the best of my knowledge). Despite all the fabulous remarks made about his leadership, there was a big flaw in his method. The kids grew up but they did not develop certain skills!

On the contrary, my father was a very quiet leader. He used different tools to lead his children. He often gave us a somewhat vague description of the problem or activity with a very high level clue on how to approach it. Then he would ask us to try to solve it on our own within a reasonable timeframe . When we went back with our thoughts, he would make us analyze and criticize our own thought process and discuss how a different approach would have come to a different result. He never treated failures negatively as long as we learned from them.

Well, these are all great stuff that have been studied for many years. However, I believe he had a secret sauce and that was empowering his followers:

He showed a great amount of trust in us granting tasks to accomplish things that were important to him. Furthermore, he encouraged us to challenge his ideas and let us experiment with ours (and even fail to some degree) when we were not convinced by his.  The result was that we developed a great sense of responsibility and problem solving skill as well as an extraordinary respect for him.

The point that still amazes me is that people were not seeing the “leadership signs” in my father like they did in Joe. That is what I call the invisible leadership. Invisible leaders empower, trust, and help at the same time. They are the people who are mostly noticed when they are not there anymore!

– Hamed

Customer is Always Right, but not Everyone is the Right Customer

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Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge department store, is known as the originator of the slogan “Customer is always right”. This phrase has actually been used (directly or indirectly) by other companies in the past century, some really believed in it and some just used it for marketing purposes. Many people also have questioned the accuracy of this phrase. Here is my take on it.

The ability to keep customers satisfied is a key competitive advantage, something that Amazon and Nordstrom have leveraged very well. However, it is very important to focus on the right customer and fire the non-profitable or non-important customers. You might ask how is that possible? Here is how Kelleher, the CEO of Southwest, did it after hearing a lot of complaints from an individual around things that were actually part of the company’s strategy. He wrote to her: “Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.”.  Anthony Tjan also describes the concept pretty well in this article.

So the point is, if the customer is the right one for your business, she is always right.

- Hamed