PLAYING TO THEIR STRENGTHS
Telisa Yancy is the chief marketing officer at American Family Insurance (AFI). It’s her dream job. Before arriving at AFI seven years ago, she filled substantial roles with iconic American brands such as Burger King and Ford. She’s worked hard to move up the ranks. One might excuse her for relaxing a bit. But her boss has a different agenda. AFI’s CEO, Jack Salzwedel, doesn’t want her to be a middling CMO, he wants her to be exceptional. Yancy credits Salzwedel for always pushing her and never allowing her to be complacent or mediocre in her role. He doesn’t hesitate to dole out stretch assignments—and send people back to the drawing board, more than once, to improve and refine their efforts. “He’s not afraid to put you in a crucible to help the company and you personally,” says Yancy. “He always challenges me to be more, give more, serve more, do more, dream more.”1
This is what the most engaging part of the learning curve feels like: that “sweet spot” when you’re no longer a confused beginner but aren’t yet a slightly bored master. A good boss understands how to lengthen this most productive stretch of the curve, where a person has achieved competency but hasn’t yet been overtaken by stagnation. There is energy and power here. Ideally, 70 percent of your team will be in this sweet spot.
At the low end of the learning curve, your new hires experienced the natural constraints of inexperience. You imposed constraints in the form of milestone checkpoints to provide quick feedback and gauge momentum and helped them recalibrate when necessary. Now it’s time to reevaluate: Does an artificial constraint need to be imposed—a new stretch goal, for example? On the steep part of the curve is where people perform proactively. Where they think creatively. Where they innovate. It is a sweet spot indeed, and many of your people are there right now—your job is to maximize what they are already primed to do.
Stretch Assignments and the Law of Friction
In physics, there is the law of friction. “We think of it as bad,” says physics teacher Tina John, granddaughter of famed physicist Harvey Fletcher. “It makes motors and shoes wear out. We could all slide along faster if friction didn’t slow us down. But if there is no friction, you can’t even start moving.” For a person to move forward from standing still requires pushing against the ground. The ground then propels us forward. This is Newton’s third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Think about an icy hill in the winter. Your car spins its wheels because there is nothing to push off against. Because of gravity, we need friction to change direction, go around a corner—and to move up a curve.
Apply this to the sweet-spot dwellers on your team. They may seem to be doing just fine, sliding along with zero friction. Passing their workdays in a pleasant glide. But we don’t slide uphill to great achievement or coast our way to the top of an S curve.
Friction was intrinsic at the beginning, at the low end of the curve. As low-enders gain traction, natural friction dissipates, leading to loss of momentum. You can reintroduce friction by giving your employees a business challenge that’s not quite within their grasp, a force to push against that requires greater investment of effort to maintain momentum or even to accelerate it.
This can come in the form of stretch assignments. When challenged, 67 percent of people will demonstrate above-average creativity. Only 33 percent of people show above-average creativity in nonchallenging roles.2 Ideally, you’ll finesse assignments to fit within the Goldilocks rule: too big and you’re back to the low end of the curve, with work that can be so difficult that it can be crippling. Too small and it isn’t going to require stretching. You want to be in the land of “just right.”
There’s an orderly relationship between a task’s complexity and our enjoyment of it. It’s an inverted U-function when mapped on a graph. If the x-axis plots how difficult a task is and the y-axis plots how much we like it, if you’re at the bottom left of the graph, the task is too easy and therefore not much fun. As the task gets harder, the enjoyment level will rise as well. Challenge and fun remain positively correlated for quite a while, until a personal threshold is crossed. Eventually something becomes too formidable, enjoyment decreases, and you hate what you are doing. The Yerkes-Dodson law says that when stress is either too low or too high, performance declines.3
Lisa Joy Rosner, former CMO of Neustar, shares an experience from her university years, when she opted to take a certain course despite the fact that the professor, Jackson Bryer, had a reputation as being the most exacting teacher in the English literature department. She enjoyed the reading, class discussion was lively, and when her first paper was due, she worked hard and turned in what she was sure was a top-notch product. Imagine her dismay when it was returned to her heavily marked up and graded with a C-plus.
Eventually she went to discuss the grade with Bryer. When she appeared at his door, he told her he’d been expecting her. “If any other student had turned in that paper, they would have gotten an A. I hold you to a higher standard. I do not want ordinary ‘A’ work out of you. I want exceptional ‘A-plus’ work out of you, and I am going to teach you how to do it.”
He became a genuine mentor, and the will to excel that he instilled has influenced Rosner throughout her life and career. Timid management can be a career breaker. Great management can be a career maker.
Sweet-spot employees are confident in their abilities, having moved past the daily struggle at the low end of the curve. Yet it is common for managers to be reluctant to provide these employees with stretch assignments. That may be because these workers are high potentials, and you don’t want to discourage or derail them. But experiencing a genuine risk of failure is what motivates most of us to step up to the plate. Consider the tendency of top-ranking athletic teams to have some of their worst performances against poor-quality opponents. Allow, and even generate, opposition. It’s the friction that propels us onward and upward.4
A new stretch assignment doesn’t mean hands-off; in fact, you may want to be even more involved, actively coaching your employee. Naveen Rajdev, chief marketing officer of tech giant Wipro, shared with me a life-altering encounter with his best boss, a mentor who gifted Rajdev with a lesson that transformed his management style. Rajdev had a large deal in the works with a potential client. Because it was highly competitive, he was seeking leeway to offer a discount. His boss gave him the green light but warned him that discounting might cause Rajdev to fall short of profitability targets and trigger a domino effect on thousands of employees. “They may not get their quarterly bonus,” Rajdev was reminded, which they might be counting on to buy a car, for a house down payment, to help with education expenses, or to accomplish some other significant personal or family objective. In the end, Rajdev won the deal without offering the client a discount. “I think everyone became more human to me,” Rajdev reflects. He thinks about people’s needs more now, for every decision he makes. “I see a bubble of dreams, like a cartoon, above everyone’s head. And I have no right to pop it.”
But the challenge we give our employees must be achievable. We are trying to create circumstances in which failure, while a genuinely possible outcome, isn’t a predetermined one. Consider the successful professional who was hired to increase sales for a small but well-established language translation firm that targeted clients in the medical and pharmaceutical industries. The owner of the company wanted to grow revenue by 200 percent over five years. But the salesperson hired to make that goal a reality soon discovered that there was no intent to hire additional project managers or other staff to handle the new business. There was no plan to upgrade to state-of-the-art technologies. The business had been built on quick-turnaround translation projects of a few hard-copy pages each (most translation work today is done digitally, with little volume in hard copy work). After a few months of intense discussions, it became clear that the owner wanted to triple revenue selling translation services a page or two at a time, like they’d always done. The sales professional jumped to a more promising curve. Unrealistic objectives and expectations drive disengagement.
Most people, including those playing on your team, want to bring their intellectual prowess, creative gifts, and their time and effort to the table to address important issues. Make sure your employees understand what you envision for the company, team—and especially for them. Then give them a big problem to solve.
Stretch Assignments Aren’t Your Only Tool
Even without a new stretch assignment where you are adding something, you can keep your high-performing employee engaged by taking something away—by imposing the right constraints. That may sound counterintuitive, given that these are your most competent employees, the ones you can rely on to perform their jobs well. Why would you want to restrict them in any way?
When I work with organizations, we do an exploratory exercise that helps leaders reframe their constraints as a positive. In the case of your sweet-spot employees, consider imposing constraints that fall into the following categories:
Time
For almost everyone, time is the biggest constraint. A task that is less demanding becomes a major challenge if you impose a tight deadline. In many situations, time constraints are already built in. If they are not, here are some questions to ask your employees, and yourself.
•To hit annual targets in nine months instead of twelve, what would you do differently?
•If you were going to be away for three months, what would you do to make sure things could run without you? (The answer can provide solutions as you deal with health issues, pregnancies and new babies, aging, and so on.)
•What are the most important priorities? Which things aren’t as important? What must you absolutely get done so that your manager can advocate for your jump to a new curve?
•What doesn’t require human resources to accomplish? A university professor friend was drowning in a sea of tests to grade. A colleague suggested he hire a teaching assistant to help. Instead, he found a way to automate with an app that can grade multiple-choice question tests in a matter of minutes, rather than hours.
•If you knew that your star performers would be in their current assignment for no more than three years, what would you do differently?
Money
“If only I had enough money.” We’ve all heard that. We’ve all said that. As with time, we think constrictively when funds are limited. I frequently hear aspiring entrepreneurs say, “If I could raise money, then I could start a business.” A postmortem performed on two hundred failed startups found that the number-one reason the funded startups failed was that they ran out of cash; for unfunded startups, this was only reason number ten.5 Adequate funding is not a panacea, and empty pockets don’t necessarily doom us. If you have an idea, a simple question to ask is, “What is the simplest, cheapest way to test that idea?” Here are some other specific questions you can use to challenge the team.
•If your business unit had to be profitable as a stand-alone entity, what would your business model be?
•If you had to increase your margins to next year’s target this year, what would you do?
•If you only had half of the current marketing budget, what would you do differently?
•If you had to manufacture a product with 25 percent fewer components, what would you do?
•If you had to cut your budget in half and still deliver the same product or service, what would you do?
•If you had to assemble an A-team with only 80% of your current budget, what would you do?
After discussing these questions, ask your employees, “Why wouldn’t you do this now?”
“Necessity is the mother of invention.” This handy aphorism encapsulates the reality that desperation and disruption—and its innovative impulse—often go hand in hand. When there is no ladder, we try a rope. When we are at the end of our rope, we throw a belt over a zip-line and slide down it like James Bond. Right? When we are out of money, when we’ve exhausted the possibilities available through conventional channels, we explore or invent a new channel.
Expertise
The world needs experts, but it also needs novices. Sometimes the best ideas emerge from not knowing the conventions or “how it’s done.” To see how a lack of expertise can become a valuable constraint, ask yourself and your employee:
•What problems would your competitors who know little about the business (low-end disruptors and the 15 percent of your people at the low end of the curve) be “dumb” enough to think they can solve?
•If you were CEO for a day and ran the company based on your area of expertise, what would you change?
•What if everyone on your team were new? No experts, only novices. What would you do differently?
Buy-In
The challenge to expertise constraints is getting buy-in. When an expert has an idea, people are much more likely to green-light it. So one of the most important things you can do is require expertise-constrained team members to learn to solicit and get approval for their initiatives. Even when you know it makes sense to say “yes,” require your workers to make their case in a way that would earn buy-in.
To help them with this, you might ask:
•If you had to get buy-in for your idea from a ten-year-old, what would you say?
•If you had to explain your idea to a person who speaks a different language, how would you modify your approach?
•Suppose you are in marketing. How would you persuade the finance team to give your idea the go-ahead? For the product team, how would you adjust your approach?
•When you are ready to jump to a new S curve, how will you make the case that your move will be beneficial not only to you, but to the boss you are leaving behind?
Whenever you propose a new idea, you are asking your colleagues and boss to jump to a new S curve. Which is scary for them. Remember we tend to like the safety of our own ideas. So how can you explain your initiative in a way that makes it less risky for others, for your boss, and your boss’s boss?
Give People Real Responsibility
An excellent fictional example of utilizing constraints to drive people up the learning curve is Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game, a masterpiece of military science fiction. Ender, while still a young boy, has been sent to a battle school to save the world. By playing war games in a way that no one else has thought of playing them, he becomes the most successful general in the school’s history. He also has huge constraints. He gets unwanted soldiers, the ones everyone else rejects. Nor does he have enough soldiers, time, or adult supervision. Yet his commanding officer, Colonel Graff, says this lack of resources is crucial. “Ender must believe that no matter what, no adult will ever, ever step in to help in any way. If he does not believe that to the core of his soul, he will never reach the peak of his ability.” If the people who work for you don’t get real responsibility—the kind of assignments that could lead to a large-scale failure but also to engagement, innovation, and higher profitability—they will never reach the peak of their ability.
Constraints to Keep Sweet-Spot Employees Disrupting
When you see that your employee needs to be challenged to stay engaged, it’s time to consider some specific parameters of constraint. Here are some categories to consider when you’re ready to put on the pressure.
1.TIME: Add a “brick wall” deadline for greater challenge, move annual targets up, automate, and prioritize.
2.MONEY OR OTHER RESOURCES: Impose resource limitations to stretch workers’ creativity. Ask what they would do differently with half the budget, fewer marketing dollars, the need to bring a new product to market faster, or the need to assemble an A-team on a budget.
3.EXPERTISE: Challenge your employee to approach problems as a novice.
4.BUY-IN: Ask that your sweet-spot employees learn to sell their innovative ideas to others on your team and up the office hierarchy as if they were customers, because they are.
Vala Afshar, now chief evangelist at Salesforce.com, was trained as an engineer. Earlier in his career, he worked as VP of software quality and VP of services at Enterasys, a company that produced networking hardware and software. When Chris Crowell was hired as CTO and became Afshar’s boss, one of Crowell’s first moves was to eliminate some of Afshar’s engineering responsibilities. Crowell believed that the “one thing [customers] cherish more than anything is customer support, over features and functions, even pricing,” so he told Afshar to focus solely on customer service and support. Crowell told Afshar: “I am doing this because it is the most important thing for your career and your company.”
Over the next few years, Crowell gave Afshar several stretch assignments, eventually promoting him to chief customer officer, through which he was responsible for seven call centers, a hundred call center professionals, educational services, and a $200 million-plus business unit. When Crowell eventually became the CEO, and after wrestling through several CMOs, he tapped Afshar to become CMO of the $400 million company. On the face of it, this wasn’t an obvious move. But, Crowell shares, “Vala had great ideas, the best material in terms of presenting our products. He had a strong following among team members. And he was customer-focused because he was customer facing. It wasn’t that hard of a jump to promote him.”
Were it not for Crowell pushing him in a different direction, says Afshar, “I would [still] be in a lab with engineering, building and testing and releasing products.” Crowell’s willingness to push Afshar in a new direction and give him a responsibility—with the risk of a material failure—gave him the opportunity to see what he was capable of.
Think of spring bulbs, like daffodils and hyacinths. They need to go through a period of cold weather to flourish. Gardeners either plant them in the ground in the fall and let nature do its work, or they pot up the bulbs and chill them somewhere cool for two months before bringing them into a warmer area to signal to the bulb that it’s time to bud. The bulb doesn’t know or care whether the cold is real or artificial; what matters is that without that temperature constraint, it would never burst into flower. Shortfalls of time, money, expertise, and buy-in lend themselves to a strategy that favors disruption. Your job is to provide the soil, to impose the constraints, that allow your employees to bloom.
Support Them and Keep Them Happy
I realize I’ve talked a lot in this chapter about constraints and failure. This might sound like tough medicine. And yet, most us know from experience that management is most effective when constraints and the possibility of a bona fide failure are paired with meaningful support.
Ilana Golan was an F-16 flight instructor in the Israeli Air Force and a commander with oversight of all F-16 pilots. She and her team completely overhauled the training and education program for pilots, a feat for which she received a best commander award.
At twenty-three, she became an engineering student and an intern at Intel in Haifa, Israel. In a sense, she was at the bottom of the curve—a student intern—despite the weighty responsibilities she had shouldered in the military. Together, Golan and her boss, Ziyad Hanna, Senior Principal Engineer and Formal Verification Leader, analyzed which big engineering problems would need to be solved in the future. They knew their verification tools were inadequate for the next generation of chips due to their logical complexities; the current software would either run out of time or out of memory.
Hanna put Golan in charge of finding a solution. She started with academia, but it was too theoretical. She then surveyed startups, but this was 1997, and pickings were relatively slim. However, with Hanna’s help, she identified a startup in Sweden, Prover Technology, that was working on software solutions for increasing capacity and reliability for railway infrastructure. Intel invited the Prover management team to Haifa.
Jointly, they spent a week analyzing the railway-related software. Believing the algorithms and heuristics used by Prover Technology could apply to chips, Hanna then sent Golan to Sweden to work with Prover and to build a prototype. They conducted a thorough benchmark test to see how well the prototype functioned and to determine whether they should build or buy (create equivalent software in-house or shorten the timeline by buying the Swedish software). Intel eventually purchased the software for a few million dollars. It was used for decades and was the kernel of Jasper Design Automation, a formal verification company for systems on a chip, that was later sold to Cadence Design Systems for $150 million.
In giving Golan this stretch assignment, Hanna took a risk. He mitigated the risk by mentoring her. “Ziyad is very technical,” Ilana says, “so I needed to talk in technical terms. I had to explain clearly why it would work. He had a great balance between letting me feel freedom and trusting me to roll up my sleeves and helping me in a hands-on way.”
Hanna, now VP of R&D at Cadence, understood how to get the most out of a sweet-spot employee: he gave Golan a stretch assignment, with plenty of support and collaboration and the highest expectations for her ultimate success. Says Golan, “I didn’t realize what a remarkable boss he was until I became a boss.”
It’s easy to ignore the employees on this, the steep part of the learning curve. These are your happiest, most engaged, most productive people. They can be quite a contrast to the low- or high-end employees, where you need to be more hands-on, either because they are struggling or you are panicking because they are going to leave.
But sweet-spot employees need management too. Keep them happy! Pay is a shorthand way of signaling value, on both an absolute and a relative basis. If you’ve been in the workforce long enough, you may have experienced a situation where the performance metrics indicated you outperformed your peers, but you were paid the same amount or even less. Perhaps your contribution was something not easily measured, such as soft skills, or your ability to enable an employee to jump to a new curve, which created value for the team or company at a cost to you or your group. The truth is that there are few things harder to stomach in the workplace than being underpaid. Financial compensation is your starting and ending point. Get that right, and you signal to your employees that you are worthy of their trust.
You can add to your financial show of good faith with intangibles, like providing ongoing training. In my coaching at Harvard Business School executive education, I have been surprised that frequently the C-suite executives were tapped to attend not because their company wanted to train them but because the firm was afraid they would leave. You lessen the risk of losing high-performing people by making the investment when they want it, not when you need it.
You also show your star performers they are valued by giving them the spotlight. Consider Gina Moshier, director of organizational effectiveness at AgChoice Farm Credit in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. AgChoice is one of nineteen entities within the larger AgFirst Farm Credit system. Her boss, CEO Darrell Curtis, hired her right out of school in 2004. She holds a bachelor’s of science degree in animal sciences, a master’s of science degree in organizational development, and started as a credit analyst. Moshier has repeatedly been given new curves to jump to, and she’s continually added value to the company. She’s in the sweet spot of her current curve, overseeing training and development and IT implementation.
I recently facilitated a working session for AgFirst Farm Credit, which included, among others attendees, Curtis and Moshier. Not only was Curtis willing to showcase Moshier in front of the CEO at AgFirst, he openly praised her and willingly made her available to share her wealth of knowledge with executives across the Farm Credit system. “I’m lucky to work at AgChoice,” says Moshier. “Darrell continually supports my personal growth and challenges me to find new ways to make a difference. It’s easy to work hard when you have fun doing what you love.”
Summary
•To keep your team at its most effective, aim for 70 percent of your people to be in the sweet spot of their learning curve at any given time.
•When natural constraints have dissolved, you may consciously impose constraints of time, money, expertise, and buy-in. These forces can help bring to the fore the resourcefulness that stimulates innovation.
•Increased ease can be accompanied by a loss of momentum. Provide stretch assignments and the real possibility of failure to reintroduce the friction that is a natural feature of beginning on a new learning curve.
•Sweet-spot employees are easy to forget about because everything is working. Remember to show that you value them.
If you'd like more tips on applying personal disruption to building an A-team, email me at [email protected] or sign up at whitneyjohnson.com