Ingredients, heat and cakes - bringing individuals together

Hi,

I hope you are having a wonderful and spectacular day. 

This edition of Meeting Notes is a little later than usual due to me taking time out to celebrate my son’s 17th birthday. Wow. Time flies. 

My first print run of Zero To Keynote is stacked up by the front door. It’s weird really - I’m scared to open them. It’s such a big financial and time commitment, that I’m worried they won’t be right. I checked it 100s of times before printing a larger batch, but still…..I’ll open them later. 

I’m hoping to have the book on sale for next week’s edition of the newsletter where I will share a reduced price for you. I only have 100 copies available for this first print run, but aim to print some more if it sells. 

In this edition:

1. Ingredients, heat and pancakes - bringing individuals together
2. Link worthy of energy and attention

For those new to the Meeting Notes newsletter, welcome, I’m Rob, Chief Economics Officer at Cultivated Management. This newsletter is about being the difference that makes a difference. It’s about learning, communication, leadership and the art of being effective at work. Welcome.

Ingredients, heat and cakes - bringing individuals together

There are countless posts, especially on LinkedIn, about how to bring a team together using the analogy of cooking food.

I read one a while back about making pancakes. The idea being that the individual ingredients alone aren’t that good/useful (I’d make an exception for the eggs, butter, milk and sugar - but you get the point). 

• 110g/4oz plain flour, sifted
• pinch of salt
• 2 eggs
• 200ml/7fl oz milk mixed with 75ml/3fl oz water
• 50g/2oz butter

Only when these individual ingredients come together do they form something worth eating; the pancake. 

Teams are indeed made up of individuals who come together, and bring with them their own behaviours, skills, perspectives and personalities, to make the whole better than the individual.

It's why we build businesses full of people, because it’s no longer possible to do the work on our own - we need to leverage people and scale. 

But almost all of these analogies about making pancakes (or casseroles etc) misses one key ingredient; heat. 

If you mix all of those ingredients together all you have is the batter mixture. You need heat to turn the batter into pancakes. 

It’s the same at work. Simply bringing suitable individuals together without any heat, gives you individuals sitting around, potentially doing nothing. You need some form of heat.

Heat comes in many forms, and there is no way I will cover all of them here. Hit reply and let me know what I miss. Here are some to play with. 

Fear 

Fear is a very fine form of heat - stick with me. 

When we feel something we move into action, and fear is a sure fire way of moving people into action. 

At an individual level this may be the fear of continuing to diminish our soul in a job we dislike. We are putting comfort potentially above the continued destruction of who we are; our soul. With enough fear of what continuing to give up our soul could lead to though, we may forgo the comfort and make the leap to something else. 

I spoke with someone last month who said her job was “crushing her soul” and she was afraid of what that would lead to. She was becoming a shadow of her former self.

The fear drove her to quit the job and give up the comfort the job brought. She had no other job to go to, but was more fearful of what her work was doing to her, so she quit. We’re not all able or willing to do that - but it was fear that drove her to this brave decision.

A micro example of the great resignation. 

Fear can move us into action to avoid that fear. 

But fear has no place in the workplace, when directed from leaders, managers and colleagues

A manager or leader who drives a team through fear will soon find a depleted team; people will leave, people won’t speak up, people will start fighting with each other and poor work will ensue. 

Fear is like lighter fuel on a fire - it burns brightly for a short time but ultimately is not sustainable.

Avoid fear as a form of heat coming from leaders and managers - never instil fear through behaviours.

But fear in certain business contexts can help. A dichotomy.

For example, I worked in a startup and we had the near constant fear of being unable to meet payroll. This fear drove energy and attention to do the work, to fix problems, to improve the quality of our product. 

Equally, I worked in a company run by tyrants who induced fear through their behaviours.

Every day, even opening my emails, was a fearful activity. What horrors would await me that day? Fear in the workplace is a surefire way of creating panic, competition and a general lack of focus on the work itself. Plus, your good people will leave. 

Fear has no place in the workplace when invoked, directed, inflamed or encouraged by leaders and managers.

As Edward Deming once said in his rules for management - “drive out fear”.

Clarity and alignment

Clarity and Alignment is by far my heat of choice.

When we’re clear about what we’re trying to do and there is little to no confusion, and we couple this with an emotionally compelling purpose, we get heat. 

Especially so if you hire talented people who want to help you overcome your obstacles towards this bright future. 

By being passionate about your clear direction, and building an equally impressive strategy, you give people clarity. It’s easier to align around something clear, tangible and motivational. It’s easier to overcome problems when we know which direction we’re going in, and it’s easier to keep measuring your progress towards your clear vision of the future. 

Heat comes from this process as people know how their work contributes to the goals and progress, and they know that everyday they’re doing work that leads to something meaningful.

Heat comes from the motivation and inspiration to move towards the next milestone, the waypoint, the horizon - all in service of moving towards a vision and goals that are compelling and interesting. 

My go to choice. 

Deadlines

Deadlines are a micro version of heat.

Well thought through deadlines drive a sense of urgency. As long as they’re not stupidly and arbitrarily created, a good deadline gives us focus. 

For example, every year, when we go on holiday, there are a myriad of things to do the day before (pack the boys suitcases, sort the cats out, put the house in vacation mode, turn off electricity etc) and it all gets done. A deadline creates heat. Use them carefully. 

Meaningful personal growth

When we feel like a job is developing us we provide heat, energy and attention. A good manager balances the demands of the workload and the potential growth of people in the business. 

When we’re working on activities that are a little taxing - and we know how this work is making us a better person - we bring energy - there is heat. There is something in it for us - our work is developing us. This is especially powerful if you combine this with a clear mission and vision for the business.

Forced Cooperation Goals

Overarching forced goals can be a very good form of heat. 

There are lots of teams in a business who often have competing goals - which causes competition, conflict, a lack of clarity and no way to align. There is heat as people wrangle over the work, or spend energy and attention arguing - but it's misplaced. 

It’s very common that different teams, or people, need to work with each other to achieve an outcome. 

Let’s say you’re making two different types of pancakes to be served on a single plate (pushing the analogy far now). One is a blueberry and mixed spice pancake and the other is a chocolate fudge pancake. Some similar ingredients, some different - both need to come together to achieve the final outcome (served on a single plate). 

When making pancakes we may need to mix them separately, cook them for different times, or in different ways, or with different temperatures, but they both need to come together in the end. 

Setting an overarching end goal, across two different teams, is a way of “forcing cooperation” in the workplace. There is clarity and a way to align. There is an end goal that is bigger than the individual teams - and this can provide heat for people to come together and deliver the end result.

In one company I worked the Development team had the goal of new features and new launches to remain competitive in the market. The operations team had a goal of platform stability at all costs. These team goals were counter to each other. To release software is to risk destabilising the platform. To keep the platform solid and reliable, it makes sense to do as little with it as possible. 

So, we set both departments the same goals; new releases every week WITH a 99.999% platform uptime. DevOps was born. The heat was the forced goal across both teams. 

Incentives

Incentives are often considered the main form of heat in a business, but they often lead to spurious outcomes - certainly when there are no behavioural standards in place, nor work that can be easily split down and attributed to an individual. 

A lot of our work is collaborative and cooperative in nature, so individual incentives run the risk of breaking apart the team. The logical move would then be to set team incentives, but this can often lead to unfairness. What if 50% of the team are slackers and the other 50% carry them through? Is it fair to give everyone the bonus, or pay rise, or corner office? 

Good management - and studying of behaviours - is the key to either individual or team incentives, but consider something more important than this - the construct of the incentive model itself. 

Incentivising people through stakes in outcomes is a good model. The cooperative model as we call it in the UK, or a startup where everyone has options (be careful though, these options often get diluted with subsequent rounds of funding), can bring people together to create the heat needed to share in the outcomes.

There is heat; we come together, work with each other, play our part and achieve our goals, and we all win; we have stakes in the outcomes at an individual level. 

Perks and rank is the opposite. We reward individuals with more perks or higher ranks - and this can create competition, the shooting down of ideas and siloed thinking. We try to outdo each other for the limited perks and ranks available.

Heat ensues as individuals chase the ladder of perks and ranks. More money, more vacation time, a corner office, a cool title, more bonus money - heat. If we win, someone else loses. If we want the perks and ranks, we may have to trample on others to get them. All of this creates heat, but is it well placed?

Competition

Competition is often pushed hard by leaders as a way to generate heat, but competition violates a few of the above as we compete with each other, or different teams, for glory, or perks, or rank, or money, or for no other reason than leaders have said this is a good idea. 

It’s heat but it has consequences. “We/I must win” is the inherent message when leaders create a culture of competition within the business. Yes, you get heat, but when someone wins, some else loses. 

Sure, this may feel like the game of life and something to be utilised in the workplace, but it’s also a surefire way of losing any good team spirit or positive collaborative behaviours in the long run. It can work as a form of heat in the short-term.

But, have you ever tried to solve a cross functional problem in a business, when each function's leaders are competing with each other? It’s not easy. 

Mix it up

A mixture of all of the above may make sense, but I guess a lot of that comes down to the goals you have and the kind of company you / the leaders are trying to build. 

A simple test, if you’re a manager or leader, is to ask whether you’ve created a company you’d enjoy working in.

Would you like to work in a company full of fear? Or in constant competition with each other, where the chances of being thrown under the bus are high? Or where we’re trying to outpace one another for limited perks and ranks? Or where everyone shoots down good ideas because the idea is actually really good, and it will put someone else ahead of you in the ranking?

Or where people don’t come together to solve problems? Or a business where teams have competing goals? Or a company where nobody has any real clue about what they’re trying to achieve anymore? Or in a job where it’s not clear how you’re growing through the role?

Or.

One where energy and heat are used, released and generated by like minded people trying to move towards a bright future and tackling obstacles with interest, because they know it’s worth it? Where the job is developing people and the work is connected to something meaningful?

You can probably tell which one I’m in favour of. 

To bring together people with no heat is to squander human potential. The forms of heat that are in place are varied, contextual and likely ever changing, but you need some heat from somewhere, to turn the ingredients into something more impressive than the parts.

Here’s what I do:

1. Paint a bright, compelling and interesting picture of the future. 
2. Define a strategy that overcomes the obstacles to get there. 
3. Gather like minded people who are interested in overcoming the obstacles. 
4. Set deadlines and goals.
5. Force cooperation with shared goals
6. And if you can, incentivise people with stakes and outcomes. 

And above all else, ensure the job people are doing is developing them, and it’s clear how their work connects to the bright future.

If people feel like the job is making them a better person, and their work has value to the business, they will likely thrive in a myriad of cultures, incentives and with a variety of forms of heat. You’ll also get employee engagement for free as a side effect.

A link worthy of energy and attention

This is a good piece by Rory Sutherland.

It's about our constant desire to go faster. I've written many times about the fact that speed isn't everything - and can actually provide worse results. Instead, reframing problems and looking at them creatively is the key to building better products, better companies and importantly, better collective intelligence that will grow the business (and ourselves).

What you do is pretend this is a high school math problem with a single right answer, you solve for the right answer using high school math, and then nobody can argue with you because apparently you haven’t made a decision. You’ve simply followed the data.

This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.

I'm all for closing down and narrowing down on problems, but not if we try to find a "single right" answer when many possible answers could be good.

Until next time

Rob..