Teamwork Archives - Page 23 of 32

One-way and two-way doors

In the 2015 shareholder letter, Bezos divided decisions in two. Type 1 are consequential and irreversible — one-way doors — and must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. Type 2 are changeable, reversible, two-way doors, and should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups.

He gave the irreversible kind one sentence. The rest of the passage warns that large organisations apply the heavyweight process to reversible decisions, producing slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, insufficient experimentation and diminished invention.

The framework is not a case for careful analysis. It is a case for identifying which decisions do not need it.

The standing meeting

American organisations schedule the follow-up before it is needed — the weekly one-to-one, the Monday stand-up, the biweekly check-in, the quarterly business review.

The meeting exists in the calendar whether or not there is anything to discuss. Its function is not the agenda. It is the guarantee that the status will be revisited at a known interval.

Seventy percent

In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had — and that if you wait for 90 percent, in most cases you are being slow.

He added the necessary companion: either way, you need to be good at quickly recognising and correcting bad decisions.

The threshold is named as a number, published to shareholders, and adopted across American business as a rule of thumb.

The rating nobody will give

Across the federal workforce of roughly two million people, about 60 percent are rated outstanding or exceptional, and 0.3 percent are rated below satisfactory.

The Office of Personnel Management’s own commentary notes that most organisations of that scale would expect to see five to ten percent underperformance in any review cycle.

Managers will not write down a judgment about work, because in the American reading it is a judgment about the person — and they will be the one delivering it.

Praise in public, criticize in private

A standing American management maxim, taught in manager training and repeated in HR guidance: when there is something good to say, make sure others hear it; when there is a correction, handle it one to one.

The rule pairs the two halves deliberately. The same event either gets an audience or is kept from one, depending entirely on which direction it points.

Isn’t that what management is paid for?

Americans and Germans have very different expectations about how to manage interpersonal conflicts when they arise, which can lead to huge misunderstandings. As part of an ongoing series of articles, an American consultant living in Germany offers some advice.

When Germans and American collaborate, there will be conflict. This is normal. However, their respective approaches to conflict resolution differ. These differences, if not understood and properly balanced, can hinder just and lasting conflict resolution. And unresolved conflict threatens collaboration and success.

Gift of gab

In his post on Forbes online – Six Reasons Small Talk Is Very Important and How To Get Better At It – Brett Nelson writes:

„Whether getting a job, working with colleagues, winning new clients, entertaining existing ones, all of it requires small talk. You better have the gift of gab.“

He then quotes from How To Get A Job On Wall Street, written by Scott Hoover, Associate Professor of Finance at Washington and Lee University: “In trying to generate business, the deal pitch is obviously critical. What is not so obvious is that simple, seemingly innocuous conversation with potential clients can be just as important. Companies want to hire people who can think on their feet.”

MerriamWebster defines gab as: to talk a lot in an informal way usually about things that are not important or serious; to talk in a rapid or thoughtless manner. First know use 1786. Synonyms: babble, blab, cackle, chatter, chat, jabber, rattle, run on, schmooze, talk, twitter.

Iteration

The term iteration has become common within American companies: to communicate several or many communications, back and forth, between two or more parties, in which information is exchanged, decisions made, activities (action items or more simply actions) agreed to.

Merriam-Webster online defines iteration as a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result.

Americans iterate, some intensely so. It allows them to maintain flexibility, to ensure information flow, to discriminate between what is important and unimportant, to reduce risk. Like any strength, however, it can be inflationary: too much communication, too little action.

Instead of front-loading an agreement with in-depth discussion about the details, Americans iterate.

Need-to-know

In the Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms of the U.S. Dept. of Defense need-to-know is a criterion used in security procedures. It requires the custodians of classified information to establish, prior to disclosure, that the intended recipient indeed must have access to the information in order to perform his or her official duties.

Streaming: An act or instance of flowing; relating to or being the transfer of data (as audio or video material) in a continuous stream specifically for immediate processing or playback; first known usage 1980; online video streaming such as Megaupload, Pirate Bay; audio streaming such as Grooveshark, Pandora and Sogza.

The American parties to an agreement are in constant communication with each other, streaming relevant information as they receive it. There is no need to front-load the agreement with the details.

One of the most critical success factors in the U.S. business is speed. Parties to an agreement are more interested in getting started on carrying out an agreement than in defining and discussing its details.

Check with Colleagues and Manager

Agreements of substance and importance have effects, ramifications, influence on the work of others. And since Americans work in teams, many of them in several teams at any given time, they are not inclined to enter fully into an agreement until they have checked out what those effects might be.

Why invest additional time discussing the details of a potential agreement, if one or two aspects of it are counter to their other responsibilities? Instead, Americans will check with key colleagues in those organizations potentially influenced by the agreement. In many cases, they will also briefly discuss the case with their direct manager.

This approach is often mistakenly interpreted as a sign that many Americans are either incapable or unwilling to make decisions on their own, without having to run to their boss for permission.

American team leads ultimately carry all responsibility for what occurs within their organization, and are therefore keenly interested in what obligations their team members make in their – the team leader’s – names.