Behavior Grows Better Before It Grows Worse

March 18, 2010 by Bret L. Simmons · Filed under: Leadership

The reason this third law of Peter Senge’sThe Fifth Discipline” is true is because of compensating feedback from the system. If your intervention is at the symptom level, you might be able to eliminate or improve the symptom in the short term, but watch out. Unless you address the root cause of the symptom, you are likely to see an even uglier version of it again.

For example, if your business is struggling to turn a profit because of declining revenues, you can fix that by cutting back on line items (e.g. lay people off, reduce pay, use cheaper raw materials). You might be able to maintain a steady bottom line in the face of evaporating revenues, but the actions you take to cut costs can hurt your growth in the long run. Shoddy products get shipped, customers get worse service, your facilities are not maintained properly and become unimpressive – all of these will hurt your top line, necessitating more and more short-sighted intervention on line items.

Your problem is more about revenue than about costs, and unless you change your assumptions about how to drive revenue growth in your business, you will be chasing an increasingly elusive bottom line.

Symptom thinking is a hard task master. It is very skilled at hiding its lessons from those unable and unwilling to learn. And we are very skilled at hiding our learning disability from ourselves and others.

Resist the temptation to apply any solution until you thoroughly understand the root causes of the problem you face. Master the causes of your problems or become constrained by the symptoms.

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The Harder You Push, The Harder The System Pushes Back

March 16, 2010 by Bret L. Simmons · Filed under: Leadership

This is the second law of systems thinking from Peter Senge’s classic book “The Fifth Discipline: The Art And Practice Of The Learning Organization.”  The reason the system pushes back harder the harder you push is due to “compensating feedback : when well-intentioned interventions call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention” (p. 58).

We have a compensating feedback loop at work in my state. Due to a severe budget crisis, we are cutting funds to K-12 and higher education, and we already spend less on this than almost any other state. We really need to attract new businesses and new jobs to the state, but the high tech businesses with the best jobs will balk at a state where they cannot have access to a highly skilled workforce and where the families of their employees will be forced into a substandard public education system. The money we save in the short term is likely to cost us more money in the long term. Make a different change in the current system (i.e. cut money from something else) and it will have its own compensating feedback loop.

If you want different results, you have to face the fact that you probably can’t get what you want with your current system. The leverage lies in creating new systems to generate new results, not in expecting broken systems to produce the same or better results.

Push your system and the people in it as hard as you want and you might get short term results, but you will inevitably create new problems and probably never see how your heroic efforts contributed to the mounting malaise.

There is a reason why you are having to push harder on your system, and unless and until you discover that reason and address it, you are chasing your tail around the wrong learning loop.

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Student Branding Blog: Mediocrity Sucks

March 15, 2010 by Bret L. Simmons · Filed under: Personal Branding

Mediocrity Sucks” is the title of my most recent post at The Student Branding Blog. I first started telling my students this over 11 years ago. It was part of my value added “two cents worth” I gave them on the last day of class. I learned this in my 18 years of organizational life, not in academia.

If all you are ever willing to do is what everyone else is doing, you are by definition mediocre. Read more here about why I think that sucks.

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Strength-Based, Individual Leadership. How Does It Affect Your Team?

March 14, 2010 by Bret L. Simmons · Filed under: Leadership, Purpose

“When leading a group, should the leader pay differentiated attention to individual members and the group as a collective simultaneously?”  This is the question raised by Joshua Wu, Anne Tsui, and Angelo Kinicki in a recent Academy of Management Journal publication.  Their study of 70 work groups in eight companies found that successful team leaders manage the team, not the individuals.

If you have bought the prevailing wisdom that managing the strengths of individual group members is the best way to manage your group, you could be making a big mistake. This study found that if you provide highly differentiated leadership to each member of your group, you will indeed increase the individual self-efficacy of those individual members. But the increased individual self-efficacy had a negative effect on the group’s collective efficacy, and a negative effect on the group’s effectiveness.

Group collective efficacy, on the other hand, had a significant positive effect on group effectiveness. The researchers measured collective efficacy with items that assessed the all kinds of tasks the group might perform, not specific tasks any single group member might perform.

Group collective efficacy resulted from group-focused rather than individual focused leadership. Group focused leadership produced group identification, which in turn produced a collective sense of efficacy among group members.  This is the type of leadership where group leaders specify the importance of group members having a strong sense of collective purpose and mission in working with the group as a whole.

Popular thinking on leadership asserts that effective leaders must not only inspire the group as a whole, but must also be attentive to the unique needs of each and every individual in the group. The results of this research suggest “that leaders who attempt to satisfy both individual and group needs may inadvertently compromise group processes and group outcomes” (p. 101).

If your individualized approach to leadership creates a group full of members where some have high self-efficacy and see themselves as “high potentials” while others do not, you are likely sub-optimizing the performance of your group as a whole. The differences in individual efficacy among group members affects how they feel about each other and their ability to accomplish things together. This is especially critical when group tasks require extensive interdependence among members.

When group performance matters, and people need to work closely together for the group to be effective, the belief that “we can do it” is more important than any individual’s belief that “I can do it.” If you lead a group like this, you probably want to keep that strength-based snake oil on the shelf.

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