Setting the Stage for Success
I’m going to get a bit naked here. Maybe I’ve been reading Naomi’s blog too much (don’t worry, my mom washed my mouth out with soap as a kid, so I’ll never talk like her). A few days ago Julie and I took a series of walks, whose dialog revolved around perception, motivation and sex. I asked Naomi for advice because I wanted a woman’s view and found out that she and her lad had a similar dialog. So for the woman’s perspective, check out her post (should be up tomorrow).
Our dialog over the last weeks have made me think a lot about setting the stage for success and giving someone what they need to perform. What food feeds their soul? What projects do they excel at? What feedback do they need? What turns them on and gets them going?
THE MARRIED SEX TALK: A SLANTED MALE VIEW
[This is a parody. A reading delicacy provided for your entertainment. No couples were harmed in the creation of this post. Any and all resemblance to a certain writer and his wife are a fiction of your own imagination and purely coincidental. Please don’t try this at home, and if you do, have some couth and say it a lot nicer that I did.]
wife: “why don’t you pursue me more often?”
husband: “why don’t you send signals that say you are interested in being pursued more often?”
wife: “if you pursued me I would”
husband: “if you dressed sexier when you got home from work, kept your makeup on and created a canvas for pursuing I would. In your robe and sweats, the desire often escapes me”
wife: “so I have to put lingerie on to attract you?”
husband: “not necessarily (thought totally encouraged) - you need to flirt with me and let me know that you are interested. I don’t tend to shop at stores when the lights are off”
wife: “well, why don’t you flirt with me”
husband: [pause] … “cuz I’m a dumb ass”
wife: “I don’t always want to put on lingerie. why do I have to be uncomfortable to turn you on”
husband: “there have got to be comfortable sexy clothes for goodness sakes. I would be thrilled to buy you some”
wife: “don’t you find me attractive as I am”
husband: “I do. You are my beautiful lady. I tell you all the time. I am going to try to use a metaphor.
I am very visual about my sexuality (hence men and porn - I’m not alone here). On the other hand, you are very emotional about sex. We just get turned on differently.
So in a metaphor:
When you look ratty and expect me to be turned on, it is like me yelling at you and asking you to be turned on.
It just doesn’t work that way. For you to be turned on, I have to give you my full attention and pander to you - it is foreplay.
For me to be tuned on - you need to pander to my visuals and flirt with me.”
Perhaps working with people is not that different that the act of courting. Which brings me to the heart of management. The way I get it, my job as a manager is to give you everything you need to perform and kick ass, then get the hell out of your way. I’ll still be there in the corner when needed. The goal is to set you up for success. What I am starting to learn though (it sounds obvious from the outside), is that we all run on different fuel and need different staging and props. What turns you on may have no effect on me at all, or even worse backfire.
Understand Motivation: Mana & Ambrosia
Last week, I went to Santa Cruz’s first geek dinner (go Santa Cruz!). I snuck over to the cool kids table and plunked my skinny ass down into the only empty seat. During our conversation that evening, David Beach, gatherer and organizer of people for yahoo brickhouse, turned to me and said, good luck on your goal for a million. Kind of cool as I had never met this guy before. Suddenly I was face to face with a reader of our blog who I didn’t bully, cajole or beg into reading my posts (I love you all, thanks for being here). He said he liked the blog and followed our doings. I was excited for days and even though I feel silly, I’m still stoked on it. The idea that someone who leads innovation within a company like Yahoo is actively listening makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
A few days later, Peter & I met with Sean Tarrio, Director of Sales for UnitedLayer and the following day with Gerald Barnett, Director of IP for UC Santa Cruz. Both were looking to get Peter & I involved in entrepreneurial development projects. Sean is trying to build a Venture Fund that will drive business in Santa Cruz and Gerald is spearheading a program for companies to fund and mentor students at the university with startup ideas. If you are local and want to know more, shoot me an email. They wanted our financial and business support. After some discussion, I expect we will participate in both. The interesting thing is that we get pitched quite a few opportunities. Why participate now? Because each made a pitch that targeted our personal hot buttons. They laid out a plan which offered the opportunity to be helpful and of service in a way that might help further our own business interests.
A bit long, but I’m making a point. Can you guess what is one of the key ingredients to get me to be energized and productive? How would you set the stage to make me get out there and kick ass?
Ding, ding, give me a gold star (and a sticker please). Yeah, I am a sucker for recognition and the chance to be of service and hence, what I call influence (Seth Godin style). I like seeing things happen and know that I participated. That is my fuel. If you were my manager you would want to make sure that I was in a project where I could help steer the outcome, my voice would be heard and I have a sense of shared risk. Oh, and you will need to add a fun, positive group with a consistent lineup of new and different challenges. This is my ideal situation. But that wouldn’t drive most of the people on our team. In fact, I think most people on our team would freak out in my ideas environment (as I would in their’s). It all comes down to personality.
Want to learn more? Go read my article on The Model of Human Behavior - Understanding Personality.
Get them the Tools and Information They Need
Not everyone needs the same level of information and support for a project.
In the 1899 issue of the Philistine magazine, Elbert Hubbard published an inspirational essay title A Message to Garcia. Andrew Rowan, a young American soldier was given the task of delivering a letter with military strategy to the leader of the rebel forces in Cuba. Rowan did not speak Spanish, did not know the location of Garcia nor his forces. He had never been beyond the borders of the United States. To frame his task, the Spanish army had been hunting Garcia and his band of rebels for over a decade and never found them. So with no information, no leads, and no preparation he went on his errand. And delivered his letter.
Now I tell you this story because it inspires me, but I have also found that from a management perspective, this is total bullshit. If I told my team, go deliver a message to Garcia, it might happen but it might not. I am a business man not a gambler. But, if I take the time go make them a map, my odds go way up. Each person needs a different level of detail. Personally I can function of minimal information while Peter needs a much greater sense of definition. It has a lot to do with our personalities. There is an optimal amount of information a person thrives with - too little or too much and productivity stops. Learning that information gap in yourself and in your team is vital to everyones success.
Get out of Their Way
Ryan, my breakfast buddy from eBay, and I were talking management yesterday and he threw me the three key ideals he lays out for each person on his team. He leads by example and expects them to be: honest, predictable and committed. In that order. I got me thinking that not only is that vital in a team, but that is really the heard and soul of being a manager. With that foundation, the people I work with can be vulnerable enough that I can learn their hot buttons and their panic buttons.
As Ryan explained to me, the goal is to set a stage of trust. Brandon called me a week ago with a quandary. Another client of his was pushing him to come to a meeting across LA after Brandon had already said no because he had committed to some tasks for us and some time with his lady. The client pushed hard in a hard nosed manner. Brandon called me. We discussed the situation and I asked him if the issue was the time or the way in which the request was done? Was it the inconvenience or the person? He wasn’t sure. I turned it around, “If I had asked you to do this, would you be feeling differently right now?” “Oh, sure” he responded, “I’d go because I know you would only ask if it was absolutly critical.” And that made me realize, I have his trust. Because I am honest, predictable and there is no doubt about my commitment both to the business and his well being.
Because of that, I trust that Brandon will come to me when he gets stuck. You see, I believe you can only get out of someone’s way once the mutual trust is built that someone can come to you and talk. That you are predictable enough they can count on your response. That trust is not explicit, it is earned. Hard earned at times.
I had a tough (for me) talk with one of our contractors a few weeks ago after I learned that he pulled an almost all nighter on his wife’s birthday. In my eyes - big faux pas. In her’s too. The issue was that he never told us. He is a relatively new contractor in our team. I basically had to tell him, if your wife decapitates you, then we won’t be able to work together, you’ll be dead. And we began to talk a little more about time management. Getting out of someone’s way is not abdication. I tried that too - kaboooom. Getting out of their way is an act of trust that needs to be earned, in both directions.
Get Over Yourself
I was on the end of a very tough lecture a few years ago. I was not relating well to someone and in retrospect we were both being a bit childish. The difference was that while they were clueless, I knew better. Tom sat me down. “It is the responsibility of the person who has the knowledge to act upon it. Sometimes, someone has to take the first step, and the second, and the third, before the other person can join us in a dialog.” That is the heart of setting someone up for success. After all, they wouldn’t need the help if they had everything they needed in hand.
As leaders of companies, of families, I write this to you because we need to have the courage and set our ego aside. The world is full of people who react to emotional stimuli rather than pausing and responding. Take a stand. Be a better you and catch yourself. As I tell Julie, “I know you asked twice already, please ask me a third time just as nicely. I notice when you are being the better person and it invites me to grow.” Be patient with your clients, your kids, your preachy as hell blogger, your parents, your employees and your contractors. Help set the stage for their success. Learn how to romance your spouse, I am and it pays delicious dividends.
I am always learning. How to manage better, how to sell, how to write and how to speak. I’ve had good and bad managers. I have had the blessing to have great mentors and follow amazing leaders.
What makes a great manager? How about a great leader? Do you think they differ?
What about a great student? Or a great follower?
Alright you all - it is late and tomorrow if Julie’s 32nd birthday. Time to be a good hubby and dote!
Agree with all, except, as someone who’s started a number of companies and managed a lot of people, I don’t agree with the priorities of being “honest, predictable and committed” as the three-biggies.
Actually, honest and committed, yes, but predictable scares me a bit, because one of the qualities I work fiercely to cultivate in anyone I hire (and in myself) is innovation and creation. And, very often, the best creators and innovators fall toward the less predictable side of the spectrum.
So, I believe you need to constantly either balance predictability with creativity or simply find people who lean to either end of the spectrum and assign them the tasks most likely to make them come alive and keep your business functional.
As for understanding motivation, whenever you try to make a decision based on what you assume someone else wants…you pretty much lose. Fundamentals of both sales and management…get inside your customer’s/employee’s/contractor’s heads. Understand what is meaningful to them and everything flows better.
Thanks, as always, for a great start to my reading and thinking week!
Oh, and, dude, I’m not touching the sex talk stuff this early in the morning, my rhinestone sleep-thong’s still clogging my brain!
Jonathan
ooohhh I totally disagree on predictable. Being creative is not being unstable. But I’ll give you some slack here and acknowledge I should have done a much better job and been more specific.
Be predictable in your reaction to other people.
Hollywood has made trillions of dollars over the drama between men and woman. For a good reason, it’s palpable at times - I bet on tv right now you could flip to the picture of baffled and somewhat scared male trying to deal with a mercurial female. We have been watching Scrubs on DVD and Julie pointed out that they pretty much all the female characters got themselves a dish full of crazy. And we laugh together because Julie can be that way some times.
So where am I going with this? People are scared of what they cannot predict and will not allow themselves to be vulnerable. If I am erratic, praising and punishing at random, them my team cannot trust me. Visa versa, I have some incredibly creative talent on our team right now. They behave in a consistent professional manner. When they don’t we talk it out as I wrote in the article. The emotionally erratic people never stay on our team long because I won’t put up with it. Nor should anyone else frankly. In fact, I find our team is only freed to be creative when they are safe within the boundaries of my consistent behavior. They don’t have to waste cycles worrying about my reaction, or the often manic depressive reactions of a client (I shelter them from that by providing consistency). Freed from the burden of always trying to guess my reaction, they can focus on their task at hand.
(so there)
As for motivation - you have me confused. Wouldn’t you define motivation as “what is meaningful to them”?
I’ll rain check the sex talk - though I’m always curious on your views.
wow, a lot of info there. i might have to read this a couple times just to make sure i got everything.
i have to agree with jonathon here. i do see the value of being predictable, but as a graphic designer (who hires freelance designers) i am always looking for someone who brings something new, but maybe the fact that they are cosistently bringing something new is predictable. i am getting a little confused here, i think i need to start sleeping more.
All nighters on wife’s b-day, really bad idea!
Women and men totally different creatures (when it comes to sex). I have become comfortable with my wife and we have this amazing bond. i know she loves me and she knows i love her, but do we show it? not always. I prefer to fuck, she likes to make love, so we compromise.
@ Shane - yeah, got it, we’re pretty much on the same page, then, if by predictable you meant “consistent in the way they relate to others.”
On the motivation thing, that’s what I get for writing with one eye open at 6am! What I meant was you need to go beyond what “you” would be motivated by and do a lot of searching to find what “they’d” be motivated by. I wrote a an article about this on my blog last week, the old you are not your customer concept.
@Brito - Exactly! You may get all rambunctious as bobby street - but I bet you deliver consistently. If you don’t, no one will hire for you for any extended period of time. Consistency is desirable in a vendor. Even consumers demand it - after all it is Macdonalds’ trade secret - that hamburger is the same in every store in every country in the world - except maybe Israel and India.
@Johnathan - That’s a great article () and I clearly need to improve as a writer, unless you are agreeing with me and all I want is conflict before I finish waking up! So we are in total agreement - You are not your Vendor or your employee! That is all I have to say. Except you said it first and better. So - Thats all you have to say. Except I am sure you have more to say .. so … I’ll just sit here.
I gave myself a self-imposed timeout from blogs and social media last week so I could kick butt and look what I come back to. I will definitely have to read this again (probably a few more times) and come back and make an intelligent post.
The most important thing to add is Happy belated to the Mrs.
Couldn’t take my eyes off of this post… and I’ll be back to comment more on it, but for now I’ll keep it brief around the “consistency” dialoge:
@ Jonathan (and Shane) - I understand what you’re saying about predictability being a potential flaw, but perhaps I can shed a little light on Shane’s style. Shane is what I’d call, “predictably vigilant”. This means that, as a designer, I can consistently rely upon his understanding of what I have going on in my life and my need to wander occasionally in the creative process. But I can rely upon the fact that he keeps his projects under well defined deadlines (no fog of war here) with clearly set expectations.
When I say expectations, I don’t mean “red here, white there, Arial 22pt font, etc.” - rather - we as a team define the business objectives of each project very clearly at the start, and Shane knows that there may be 10 different ways to achieve that goal. For me, that’s a good sort of consistency because I can always expect the same sort of creative dialogues (where I pitch ideas and he swat’s 9/10 of them down). This keeps me clearly in the artsy, designer role during the conversation and him clearly in the grounded, management role.
A bad type of consistency would be “consistently irritable”, “consistently a pushover”, or “consistently unclear”. Because we work on such a huge variety of projects with different goals, deadlines, and different senses of urgency, having consistency in the management position has allowed me the space I need to thrive around a project, not worry about how Shane’s going to react. This sets me up (the lowly contractor in this situation) for a clearly defined blueprint for “how to win”.
A good example of the opposite is what my girlfriend deals with at her restaurant job. Her primary boss tends to lead from the emotional side of things, which means she never knows what to expect, and therefore she never knows exactly how to perform to get into his good graces. Rather than knowing what the employees do wrong when he blows up at them, they all just sorta cower in fear on his shifts because they pretty much know that they can fail at any point during the shift for no reason other than his inconsistent attitude. Sure, it keeps them on the balls of their feet, but the overall morale of the team goes down because nobody has a map of “how to win”.
So, mark me down for a consistent manager any day of the week. Inconsistency is great for short term projects where urgency is high, but ultimately it undermines trust over the long haul.
Shane,
Good stuff! (Yes I do read, and enjoy your words, outlook, and perspective.)
Managing for me is about removing roadblocks and taking care of the little things. And like you, get out of the way. I don’t want my people to take care of me, I want to take care of them so they can do great work. Trust is key. I think that’s what Ryan is talking about. Honesty and predictability are about consistency. If there’s consistency with the work of your staff, then you don’t fall into the micro-management trap. I’ve seen Ryan in action. He knows what he’s talking about…
With regard to the sex talk? I made my wife toss out an oversize, red Mark McGwire t-shirt that she’d wear to bed. I didn’t need that. ’nuff said.
So this leads to my next question (thanks brandon, beach & ses)…
We are in triage time. I’ve got too much on my plate and it is the year end. Everyone is about to bail and trying to wrap things up. Certain projects suffer a little. What are some of the tricks of triage as a manager? I’ve learned how to handle this when I am the primary worker, but as a manager it seems somewhat different. The problem is that I have become a bottle neck.
Learned lessons this week:
Preperation is much more important than I realized. Taking the time to review the PM system and everyones comments helps avoid issues. I tried to cut that out to save time - xxxx will just fill me in. Seems like things are getting missed.
Schedule, schedule, schedule. Make sure everything important has a slot in the calendar and guard them.
The real interesting struggle is when enough people all clammer for your limited time, what criteria do you other managers use to portion out your availability?
Hey, in that sex discussion scenario I would like to add something.
I think it’s gross that men have to be cajoled into basic hygiene and then wonder why their ladies aren’t interested.
You want your woman looking hot?? Quid pro quo, biotches.
I don’t ask anyone to do anything that I am not willing to do myself. I would never demand my partner be ‘hotter’ while I lounger around in two-day old swiss cheese underwear. Or rewear a shirt ten times because ‘I haven’t actually sweated in it yet’.
Just a thought.
Hyaden, you are absolutly 100% correct.
This is a two way street. During our chat, my wife mentioned that she really preferred me shaved. She had mentioned it before but only in passing. We discussed it a little more and I realized that it really had an effect on her. Stubble was uncomfortable and just a turn off. So - I now make sure I take the time to shave. I have always liked the feel of a beard, I somehow connect it to a sense of masculinity. And it sucks to shave (I’m sure both sexes can relate). But Julie is worth it so I get uncomfy.