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MANAGING MASTERS

There is a moment, a cusp … we are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

—Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

George Washington, familiar as a war hero and the first president of the United States, struggled with an issue many managers face: allowing a top-performing staff member to jump to a new learning curve.1 Alexander Hamilton was Washington’s secretary, his most capable aide, for four years. Hamilton recognized that wartime provided opportunities to demonstrate his abilities and further his ambitions. Extraordinarily gifted, he possessed the commensurate desire to advance in rank. He became insistent, ever more eager as time passed, but Washington turned him down, claiming that he couldn’t promote Hamilton over full colonels.

The real problem for Washington was that no one could match Hamilton’s writing ability. After being in “hourly contact with Washington for four years, Hamilton had become [Washington’s] alter ego,” says biographer Ron Chernow. He “was able to capture [Washington’s] tone on paper or in person. Hamilton was a casualty of his own success.” When he finally had the courage to disagree with a man for whom most people had “God-like awe,” there was a falling-out. Unlike what other bosses might have done, Washington made a “large-hearted, conciliatory gesture”: he apologized and “reluctantly honored” Hamilton’s decision to leave his staff.

Here’s the challenge: after months, maybe years of investment, our employee shoots up the learning curve. They have become our go-to person, willing and able to do whatever is asked. We’ve become accustomed to an outsized return on this stellar employee. Why would we push them to try something new, when we’re still reaping the rewards of our investment? Like Washington, we like our high performers right where they are, where they do us the most good.

But if we are managing for engagement (and innovation), this is the danger zone where boredom, complacency, entitlement, and stagnation do their mischief. As growth peaks and flattens out, if change isn’t on the horizon, our high performer may gradually—or not so gradually—become a low performer. They will stop doing their best work because they’re no longer challenged to do so. This is seldom intentional, but it happens anyway, either because they feel stymied, their ambition thwarted, or because work has become too easy, and routine is boring. They may even be feeling, like you, comfortable where they are. The urgency and pressure of earlier times has eased, but so has the friction that moved them forward.

When your team member has reached the pinnacle of their learning curve, they may express it openly (as a desire to learn something new or to leave your organization for a challenge elsewhere), or it may become clear through changes in their approach to work (they are less driven, coasting on past success). With a leap to a new curve imminent (more on this in chapter 7), make the most of the time that remains by identifying and exploiting opportunities for them to contribute.

Have Your Best Workers Share What They Know

High-end-of-the-curve employees are skating across a plateau, teetering on a precipice. They are also the most experienced members of your team, and optimally you’ll want 15 percent of your people here at any given time. So how can you manage this human resource you’ve worked hard to develop in a way that will work for your organization, your team, and you?

Start by making use of their mental bandwidth. Task them with sharing their competency. While they’re waiting to jump to their next curve, deploy them on crucial, but often neglected, tasks like setting the pace, passing along the tribal memory, and facilitating collaborations between less-experienced employees. Specifically, there are three important roles they can play:

1.Pacesetters: pushing low-enders to excel

2.Trainers: conveying corporate memory

3.Mentors: facilitating collaboration

Pacesetters: Pushing Less-Skilled Employees to Excel

Thelma Schoonmaker has edited films for Martin Scorsese for more than forty years. That’s a long time to be at the top of the heap. Perhaps she’s stayed at the top because she finds satisfaction in pushing those around her to succeed.

Kyle Ann Stokes, best known for her work on The Thomas Crown Affair, was Schoonmaker’s protégé. Schoonmaker “was at the top of her game, one of the best, but never acted like a diva,” says Stokes. “She was always very human, and lovely, gracious, and kind.” She made Stokes feel comfortable asking questions and never considered her to be a bother. Schoonmaker also pushed Stokes: big projects, tight deadlines. When Stokes nailed it, she recalls, “There were fresh flowers (sweet peas) on her workbench. [Schoonmaker was always] a joy to be around.”

Schoonmaker could have been a prima donna. Instead, she used her experience to bring colleagues up the learning curve. Put your top performers to good use by showing low-enders what success looks like.

Trainers: Passing On What They Know

David Warsen, a principal electrician for 39 years at the office furniture manufacturer Steelcase, turned 65 in February 2017. Rather than leave the plant cold turkey, he opted into a phased retirement plan. The plan was launched in 2012 to stem the flood of outgoing expertise as baby boomers retired. “It’s a win-win because David has vast experience and skills we’re short on,” says Steve Kempler, manager of skilled trades at the Steelcase plant in Kentwood, Michigan. Warsen reduced his hours from a six-day-a-week full-time schedule to 30 hours a week over four weekdays. “There’s a need for more companies to do this if they want to preserve their best practices, innovations, and customer relations,” says Paul Irving, chairman of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging. “And there’s receptivity among older workers, a majority of whom want to stay engaged and keep working, but in new ways.”2

Mentors: Encouraging Others to Take New Leaps

Kimberley Krakowski, formerly the informatics manager at Inova Health System in Washington, DC, was looking for candidates for an informatics analyst role when one résumé stood out: that of Carolyn Lopez, who had been a bedside nurse for eighteen years before shifting to clinical documentation. After Lopez had trained sixteen thousand end users during the organization’s rollout of an electronic record health initiative, Lopez’s role was no longer necessary. Krakowski had by chance observed Lopez in that job and was impressed by her work ethic. She decided to hire Lopez and coach her up the learning curve.

Lopez recalls that Krakowski, though younger than she, was an impactful mentor as they worked together from 2013 until 2017. Krakowski provided unexpected opportunities for Lopez to be a presenter at national conferences and walked her through how to turn her work into a presentation that could be adapted for different audiences.

Under Krakowski’s tutelage, Lopez earned additional educational degrees and certifications, and advanced to senior informatics analyst in one year. The next year, when Krakowski moved to a more senior role, Lopez took over for her as informatics manager. Lopez has been honored by Inova as IT Nurse of the Year for nursing excellence in management and as a finalist for the 2017 Leadership Excellence Award. She attributes her great success in this most recent career iteration to Krakowski. “Kimmie constantly challenged me to set higher professional goals and then supported me so I could achieve them,” she says.

In many ways, mentoring continues the long tradition of master–apprentice relationships that were once the principal way that knowledge and expertise were transmitted from skilled workers of one generation to the up-and-coming workers in the next. Mentoring of this sort was often the sole source of schooling and job training available for craftspeople and tradespeople in the days before higher education became widespread.

A dynamic mentoring program can help low-end curve-surfers reach competency more quickly and increase the number of workers available to take the place of high-enders as they move on to new curves. But the benefits of mentoring go beyond the advantage it provides for novice employees: It offers a fresh angle on the job for someone who may be a bit idle while they await the jump to a new curve, and it disperses the training responsibility through a wider pool of talent.

Bring Those at the Top Down to Earth

What if despite your best efforts to keep the work interesting, and despite encouraging your top-of-the-curve masters to become mentors, they still seem a little too complacent, a little too comfortable? What do you do about people who have paid their dues, are at the top of the curve, and they like it?

These employees are not to be confused with those who have been in a role for an extended period but are still at peak performance. No, I’m talking about people who not only like things as they are but feel threatened (often without consciously recognizing it) by anything or anyone that could mess with their cozy station. In trying to buffer themselves from change, they become critics of the innovators who threaten them with the change they fear. In such cases, there’s an overtone of That’s not how we do it here.

So how do you deal with these critics? Those who are, often by accident, squelching the very innovation that is the lifeblood of a successful business?

Start with Yourself

Helen Jane Hearn was the director of content strategy at Federated Media, a digital-influencer marketing agency; she was at the top of her S curve. Mary Gail Pezzimenti, former managing editor at GQ, was brought in at the same level but then became Helen Jane’s boss. This was awkward, but Helen Jane was humble enough to realize she could learn a lot from Mary Gail, not only about print media but also about managing people. Mary Gail had her team take Gallup’s popular StrengthsFinder test. “Then she did something none of my bosses had done,” Helen Jane says of Mary Gail “She said, ‘Helen Jane, you are great at working on fast-paced, quick-turnaround projects. Sue is good at wrapping up long-term programs. This project has both elements. Learn from each other and support each other.’” It’s telling that this seemingly obvious management technique was unprecedented in Helen Jane’s experience, but terrific that Mary Gail identified her employees’ strengths and directed their efforts to be cooperative rather than competitive.

Meanwhile, Mary Gail had a learning curve of her own. She didn’t know digital. Fortunately, ego and being the smartest person around weren’t priorities for her. Instead of co-opting credit for the expertise that Helen Jane possessed, as managers sometimes do, Mary Gail acknowledged publicly Helen Jane’s contribution. Top of the curve, bottom of the curve—wherever you are, you gain moral authority when you are willing to change yourself.

Employ “Righteous Shame”

When everyone is clear about expectations and the rules, you can judiciously leverage a little peer pressure to encourage the reluctant top-ender to change. Venkat Rajendran, a serial entrepreneur whose most recent venture is ConvertCart, an e-commerce platform, was among the early founders of C-DOT, India’s telecommunications enterprise, one of the first dozen or so employees in a business that has grown to approximately six hundred. He relates an experience in which his then-boss, Sam Pitroda (remember him from chapter 2), employed righteous shame.

C-DOT had taken two floors of a five-star hotel for their workspace. Upon discovering that the main boardroom had a broken doorknob, they called a handyman. The repair was made and the handyman was about to leave the boardroom—and the mess he’d made fixing the door. He didn’t consider cleaning to be part of his job. Pitroda, the head of C-DOT, a powerful man who had a direct line of communication to India’s prime minister, thought differently. Pitroda asked for a broom, invited the handyman to sit in a chair, and tidied up while he watched. The message was clear: You made this mess. You can clean this up. It is not beneath your dignity. Word of this exchange spread quickly through the organization. Sometimes, a good example is the best way to get the job done.

Moral suasion and righteous shame are a powerful combination. When we willingly disrupt ourselves, we’ll hold the upper hand in dealing with the entitlement that can creep up on top-of-the-curve employees.

Don’t Sugarcoat It

If someone’s performance has gone downhill, it’s your job as their boss to tell them—even if it seems like it’s not a great time or you’re worried that the conversation might go badly. It’s not only the respectful thing to do; chances are, if your employee really is a master, they probably already know there’s some kind of problem (even if they don’t agree with you on what it is).

Josh Coffin holds a customer-facing role at Workday, an enterprise-software firm for financial and human resources. He works with clients to help them scale their business from a financial and human resources perspective and then works with product managers to build those resources. During his first year, he earned great reviews. He then got a new manager, Pete Marcotty, who had a different, more hands-on leadership style. It threw Coffin off. Meanwhile, his wife was pregnant with their third child and experiencing complications. Concerned about his wife, and miffed that “things were being done differently,” his performance dipped.

Once his wife had safely given birth and Coffin had returned from paternity leave, Marcotty told him his performance had become subpar. Tough to say. Tough to hear. Importantly though, Marcotty didn’t disengage. He encouraged Coffin and gave him a solid new assignment, telling him he needed to make specific changes and reassuring him that once he made those changes he’d be back on track. Six months later, Marcotty was pleased with Coffin’s performance and told him so. Pete Marcotty’s willingness to be forthright helped Josh Coffin reconcile his differences and swing his performance back to excellence.

Let Them Feel the Risk of Failure

One of the reasons it’s hard to get university professors to change is that tenure ensures their job security: they have absolutely nothing to lose by embracing self-satisfied comfort with the status quo. Depending on the discipline, they can get by without updating their lecture notes for decades. I had uninspiring courses with some of these professors, as I suspect most of us did. There is insight in this dialogue from the 1987 film Moonstruck: “I teach these classes I’ve taught for a million years. The spontaneity went out of it for me a long time ago. I started off, I was excited about something, and I wanted to share it. Now it’s rote, it’s the multiplication table … I’m just a burned-out old gasbag.” The university professor in question, long disengaged from his work, seeks fulfillment through serial philandering among his female students. This is a movie, of course, fiction not fact, but it is true to the reality that a great deal of career self-sabotage results from boredom settled in at the top of the curve. How would this character’s arc have been different if he’d been continuously challenged whenever complacency crept in?

An employee who feels the platform burning under their feet is motivated to jump. This does not require heavy-handed threats, only a challenging new assignment. In such cases, fear of failure can be a useful tool of motivation. We can help people see what failure might look like, that it is real—and that it really can happen to them. We talk a lot about carrots, the incentive dangled attractively to get someone moving. There are times, of course, when this works and is appropriate. But fear of the stick is not to be overlooked.

Of course, when you give your employees daunting assignments, some of them will not succeed. When an employee toward the low end of a learning curve fails, it’s not disastrous or even really that surprising: they’re brand new at what they’re doing, and they are still learning. Training or knowledge may be inadequate. You can help them get more of both.

But when someone toward the top of the learning curve fails, even one of your stars, it’s a little more complicated. Often, super-proficient people are stunned to have failed. You, as their manager, may be rather shocked by it as well. The way you react to their failure is going to be instructive, not just for the employee in question but also for the other employees you manage who are watching how you handle it.

Alan Mulally (whom you met in chapter 1) provides a great example of how a leader’s reaction to failure can either support innovation or hinder it. Mulally was brought in to turn around an ailing Ford Motor Company.3 An engineer by training, who before Ford was the CEO of Boeing Commercial Planes, was—and still is—a big proponent of a working-together management system both in terms of process and of expected behaviors. During Ford’s weekly executive team business plan review meetings, he would ask for a report on the status of every new automobile product program. The status of these product programs would be color-coded based on their technical, schedule, and financial plan: green for product programs on track or ahead of their plan, yellow for those with potential concerns, and red for those off their plan. For the first six weeks, every single program was coded green. Mulally had promised that honesty wouldn’t be penalized, but no one believed him. Under previous regime cultures, leaders were scared to share their problem areas, because the accepted culture dictated that you only surfaced a problem when you had a solution for it.

When a senior executive finally decided to enter the high-stakes ring and display red as the status for the launch of the new Ford Edge, there was dead silence. Dead man walking, thought one of his peers. But suddenly, there was applause. It was Mulally, who thanked the senior executive. “That is great visibility. Who can help with this problem?” Mulally identifies this as “the defining moment for the transformation of the Ford culture. Now everyone knew they could trust me and trust the process.” Once people knew they wouldn’t be fired, or even shamed, they could share their real status against their plan and work together to find solutions to get back on track. This clarity of vision, strategy, openness, transparency, and collaboration became the foundation of a spectacular turnaround, one that eventually led Chief Executive magazine to name Mulally CEO of the Year in 2011.4

I wanted to understand how Mulally thought about failure. When I spoke with him, he essentially said, “I don’t.” He is one of the sunniest people you’ll ever meet, and his attitude is I don’t think about or see failure. For me, that answer was astonishing: the fear of failure is one of the reasons why disrupting ourselves tends to be so difficult. Mulally then shared his insights on how he led Ford to such heights, and it’s a lesson for a lifetime. “Success is everyone knowing the plan,” he said. That means knowing “the status and forecast against the plan, the areas that need special attention to get back on plan, and [being willing to work] together to move from red to yellow to green. There are no failures. Knowing the status, the problems, and the challenges are the gems. With this attitude and transparency, we can work together to deliver toward the plan, the strategy, and the vision.” That is how Mulally built an A-team at Ford—and became a leader that people love and want to work for.

If something goes wrong, especially if it goes seriously wrong, what you as the leader do to support your employee will make a huge difference. So make it your mission to fix the problem rather than wasting time and expending effort assigning blame. Like Mulally, in a single stroke you can demonstrate that failure doesn’t precipitate a witch hunt. In 1963, philosopher and academic Donald Schön wrote in Harvard Business Review, “The new idea either finds a champion or dies.”5 This is also true for people. Every individual who jumps to an S curve is innovating. They have become a stranger in a strange new S-curve land. Without a champion, they wither and die. Do you champion your people? Are the people who work for you afraid to fail or to even make a mistake? These are good questions for all of us to ask. And it leads to many more questions that, when answered, can provide valuable input to the decisions we make—and the culture we create—around the ever-present issue of failure. (See the sidebar “Responding to Failure.”)

Recovery time from a failure will vary, depending on the severity of the problem and the personality of the employee. Again, avoid a witch hunt mentality or assigning blame, and do assist with a confidence reboot. Studies suggest that women struggle more with confidence after a fail than men, partly because human beings have a tendency to judge men on potential and women on track record.6 We also judge women’s failures more harshly than men’s and remember them for longer.7 A blot on the record can hit hard and make it difficult to rebound.

Responding to Failure

When an employee or team has experienced a major misstep, try this exercise to understand, bounce back from, and make the most of failure:

1.Begin with why the failure happened. What process was not in place or could be improved?

2.Was the failure a result of lack of effort or due to trying something new and having it not work?

3.Is this person or team failing because they are in the wrong role(s)?

4.Are unrealistic expectations partly to blame for the failure? Could expectations be managed differently?

5.How quickly will you recover from this failure? What important truths did you learn from this experience? Meaning, now that you’ve invested in this mistake, what kind of return will there be for your organization?

Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson has studied failure extensively, from NASA space shuttle explosions to mining disasters to hospital accidents. Her analysis is that responding wisely to failure is exactly how companies become “learning organizations” and avoid future catastrophes. “Failure is not always bad,” she writes in her 2011 article “Strategies for Learning from Failure.” “In organizational life it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good.”8 But as people become masters, they get out of practice at failing—it starts to feel scary and threatening in a way that it didn’t when they were beginners.

Techniques to aid in recovery should be in the toolbox of every manager. Like encouraging your employees to embrace mistakes. Jeff Michalski, founder of famed comedy club the Second City, told comedian Stephen Colbert and his other improvisation students, “You have to learn to love the bomb.” Colbert explains further: “It took me a long time to really understand what that meant. It wasn’t ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get it next time.’ It wasn’t ‘Laugh it off.’ No, it means what it says. You gotta learn to love when you’re failing … The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you.”9

You may not learn to love watching your employees bomb, but you can learn to value failure for the education it can provide. You can see it as the price of taking the risks required to venture onto the frontier of a new learning curve. And you can come to handle it sensitively and help them reap the benefits that a resounding failure can produce.

On the Cusp

In chemistry, when a reacting atom or molecule stands at the top of the mountain between one chemical state and another (like from water to steam), it is part of what’s called a “transition complex.”10 A transition complex is a combination of all the particles involved in a reaction. They are unstable, but for a brief instant, they act as one.

As with a chemical reaction, an employee at the top of the curve is in a state of transition. Will they regress, sliding down the curve into complacency? Or progress, bringing others along the curve, before they jump to a new one? You help inform this choice. Your employee is waiting for you to provide a seedbed for the germination and blossoming of their talent. They want opportunities to beef up their skill set, keep them relevant, and add value to their career portfolio. They want big, meaningful problems to solve. They want to contribute. Your high-enders can still be part of your A-team, but if you make the mistake of managing them as if they are still in the sweet spot of the learning curve, they may fall into the precipice.

Summary

At the top of the S curve, progress levels out. Boredom and stagnation can lead to lower productivity and a loss of human resource value.

Some employees will actively seek a new opportunity. Others may enjoy the comfort of their position and lack the motivation to jump. There are managerial techniques available to help in both situations as well as those that fall between the extremes.

While high-enders (roughly 15 percent of your employees) are waiting to jump to a new curve, deploy them as pacesetters, trainers, and mentors to those at the low end of the curve.

Failure is inevitable. Manage it well, and it can become a powerful tool for progress. Be a force for changing the corporate culture around failure when necessary.

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

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