Allen Weiner Blog

Last week at dinner with a C level executive who had asked me to work with her team, we debriefed about my workday.  I gave her my impressions on each participant.  At one point, she said, “OK.  Let’s talk about Janet.  She’s an indivdual contributor…a  grinder.”  Individual contributor is a euphemism for an employee who’s gone about as far as she an go if the organization’s best talent can do more than grind out work.   He talked about Janet’s PowerPoint presentations as evidence of someone who’s pouring a ton of time into process without connecting it to meaningful results and that’s as good an example of grinder as I’ve ever heard.   My client, while clear about grinders, did not know about the other two types:  minders and finders.  

Grinding, minding and finding is a framework often used in professional services firms such as accounting offices. Here, for instance, is the headline of an accounting firm internal newsletter: Finding New Clients, Minding Existing Ones and Grinding Growth for 2010 and Beyond.  If you apply minding and finding to any company employees, at any level, it’s possible to suggest the following: 

The way you nurture your team or business unit reflects skill as a minder.  If you build it with great recruiting and training, position the unit’s people to succeed, and if you build, maintain and project the unit’s credibility within the larger organization…you’re a minder.

When senior leaders want to align themselves with your business unit, when they call you for advice on issues not specifically in your expertise area, when company stars start looking at your shop as a great place to work, and your existing internal “clients” seek to use your group’s services, you’ve reached buycialis the exalted level they call finder.  Are you doing absolutely everything you possibly can to enhance your relationships with these contacts and clients?

It’s time somebody said, “Team cohesiveness, run amok, phentermine online is a problem.”  So, it’s me who’s saying it. A Communication Studies academic curriculum always includes classes called Group Communication.  And we talked a lot in those days about “group think.”  The more I think about this, the more I realize what linguists talk about when they suggest that behavior is partially a result of language.  It wasn’t politically incorrect to have concerns about the downsides of conforming to the group mentality.  But the word group was commercialized to the word team and that seemed to make it OK to push for cohesiveness.  No one called it “team think.”

I swear I think the word team has reached iconic status.  Jackets, hats, bowling dates, serious hiking trips, and group pictures that line the halls of all my clients are proud badges of having formed a team.  Every bookshelf has titles extolling the wisdom of teams.  And anyone who doesn’t participate in that joy is described as not a team player.  And one of the ways that is manifested is someone at a team meeting who has the temerity to say to a colleague, “I’m disappointed in the results,” is thought of as negative.  I had a chance to observe someone recently who simply said, “I don’t think your attitude is moving us forward.”  An awkward silence fell over the room.

The ultimate consequence of team cohesiveness is a demand for consensus and the ultimate consequence of that…nothing gets decided and nothing gets done!  Group members are almost applauded, certainly supported, for unbelievably useless contributions.  I was joking around the other day with someone.  I said, “It’s almost gotten to a point where if a team presenter looked at the group and said, “Let’s make a list of ingredients in a cherry pie,” and someone raised his hand and said, “green beans,” the presenter would say, “Well OK.  That’s good input.  Let’s get that down.  John would you be our scribe and let’s put this list on the wall.”

For years I’ve claimed that every human quality reaches a point where there are serious downsides.  The relationship between a behavior and the credibility or value it creates is curvi-linear.  Things get better as we see more of the behavior and then the benefits begin dropping.  Readers…that’s what’s happened, in many cases, to quality, responsible, timely decision-making.

In my last blog entry, I told you I’m reading one of Steven Ambrose’s books about World War II, The Victors. I also told you that Eisenhower encouraged always being on offense and looking at possibilities. In military terms, he’s saying it’s difficult to defend a fixed position, like a pillbox on the Siegfried or Maginot Line. There are so many ways to get around it or simply blow it to kingdom come.

If I reflect on some of the most common client requests for advice, one of them has to be “some of our people are too stuck in their own point of view. They’re coming across as overly-defending a position and not being open to alternatives.”

Like a medical doctor with a variety of cures for both symptoms and the underlying disease, I’ve given advice like this:

For the underlying disease, make sure you’ve looked at the three main issues at the heart of every decision so you can listen to your colleagues as those issues are played out. The three main issues are speed, cost and quality.

For the symptoms of “overly defending” I’ve suggested what’s called a two-sided message. After you are argue your own view, be sure to argue at least one alternative view with the same passion as the person who believes in it so that you’ll come across as having been open to it.

But now I’m going to add to my underlying disease advice. I’m going to explain to all clients that Eisenhower’s advice buy phentermine about making war applies to all of us responsible for problem solving. Don’t defend a fixed position. Be the leader who finds ways to solve problems by going around or simply destroying obstacles.

In the spirit of staying on top of communication technique by paying attention to popular culture, here’s an interesting couple of sentences from Ernest Hemingway.  To set it up, in last few years of his writing career he published Across The River And Into The Trees (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950).  He didn’t get a lot of positive feedback from his peers including William Faulkner.  Faulkner’s reaction to the book included the observation that Hemingway cialis generic has “never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.”

Hemingway’s reaction:  “Poor Faulkner.  Does he really think big emotions come from big words?  He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right.  But there are older and simpler and better words and those are the ones I use.  Did you read his last book?  It’s all sauce-writing now.”

He must’ve thought that plain English, true and simple words, communicate the real, the basic food for thought.  The big words are dressing.

John Burns wrote a terrific piece for the New York Times on June 18, 2010.  The title was Seventy Years Later, Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’ Yields Insights.  Here’s the part I really liked.

Equally intriguing, the final typescript of the speech is set out, at least in the final passage building up to “their finest hour”

In blank verse format, with five line paragraphs set out in indented type, a form that the Churchill Archives Center’s director, Allen Packwood compared to the Old Testament Book of Psalms, regarded by many literary scholars as one of seminal influences, with Shakespeare, on Churchill’s literary and rhetorical style.  Mr. Packwood offered his own theory for the verse form: ‘Because it looks like poetry, generic cialis it gave him, I think, the rhythm that brought life to his oratory.  This was a man who raised the art of speechmaking to high literature.’

Now for those of you who don’t know many psalms, you probably remember some of the 23rd.  Here it is the first part:

         The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,

        He maketh me lie down in green pastures:

        He leadeth me beside the still waters.

        He restoreth my soul:

Imagine writing out the bullets of a PowerPoint slide but talking to it more poetically.  It might sound like this:

         We’ve got a great team; I couldn’t ask for better,

        They’ve given me all I could ask:

        They’ve never failed to show up.

        I’m certain we’ll get it done.

 Great tips come from the most unexpected places!

Continuing to push all of you to learn and practice leadership from biography and not self-help or “business” books, I’m going to begin a blog series featuring my personal favorites.  For the remainder of July and August I’m going to tell you about Dwight Eisenhower as General during World War II.  Stephen Ambrose was Eisenhower’s biographer and had best sellers with Eisenhower, D-Day and Citizen Soldiers.  Right now, I’m reading The Victors (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

On December 12, 1941, five days after Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower was called to Washington to meet with George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff for what was then called the War Department.  After Marshall briefed Eisenhower on the state of affairs in the Pacific theatre, he asked the question every real leader wants to be asked, cialis to buy “What should be our general line of action?”  “Give me a few hours,” Eisenhower replied.  He returned and outlined his plan under the title, “Steps To Be Taken.” 

First Lesson:  Get right to the point with action items.

Marshall listened to him and said, “Eisenhower, the department is filled with able men who analyze their problems but feel compelled to always bring them to be for final solution.  I must have assistants who solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.”

Second Lesson:  Suggest solutions and then explain your thinking.

Marshall needed assistants he could trust. In picking them he took professional competence for granted and concentrated on personality traits.  (Does that ring a bell as in So Smart But…?  Certain types were unsuited for command.  Here’s the list:

Self seeking in matters of promotion

Passing the buck

Doing everything themselves

Getting bogged down in detail

Shouting and pounding the desk

Pessimism

He wanted people who were offensive minded and concentrated on possibilities rather than difficulties.

Third Lesson:  Stay on the offense and talk about possibilities