THE SEVEN ACCELERANTS OF LEARNING AND GROWTH
Consider a chunk of broken asphalt—a road full of potholes. At some point, there was a hairline fracture, tiny, certainly not worthy of repair. There was rain or melting snow. Water seeped into the asphalt, froze, and expanded—and the asphalt broke.
Asphalt has enormous compression strength: it can withstand thousands of pounds of surface or external pressure. So why did it break? Because it has far less tensile strength. It can’t withstand pressure from within.
People are a bit like asphalt. We can handle a lot of external pressure. If this gives us the strength to persevere, that can be a good thing. If we resist and batten down the hatches when faced with the inevitable, it’s not.
What happens if the pressure comes from within? What if you have the courage, or even the pressing need to try something new? To ride, rather than resist, the wave of disruption? This is where the relative weakness of tensile strength can work in your favor. Just a few small changes, like drops of water, permeate, expand, and break your hold on the past, creating space for a new and better version of you.
In my book Disrupt Yourself, I outlined the seven-stage process of personal disruption. Because we’ll refer to these seven points throughout this book, I’ll include them here so they are all in one place. I’ll also explain how they apply to you as a manager. While it is true that change must come from within, there’s a lot you can do from the outside to help your employees along.
Identify the Right Risks
The low end of an S curve is an uncomfortable, risky place. Everything is new, there is so much to learn, and progress can be slow, sometimes for quite a while (we’ll talk more about this in chapter 4). Your new hire is stretching, working at the edge of their abilities. As a manager, it’s easy to become impatient or nervous about their rate of progress. You may even doubt the hiring decision.
You can mitigate this doubt by taking the right kinds of risk.
There are two kinds of risk to consider: competitive risk and market risk.
Competitive risk involves head-to-head competition. How successfully can you compete against ten, twenty, even fifty applicants for a single big opportunity? Or against six similarly qualified peers vying for a promotion? This is brutal math; the ratio of winners to losers is daunting.
Market risk, however, is about creating entirely new arenas of competition. There may be no official job posting or even an established position. But you detect a gap and articulate a way to fill it: with a new job, tailor-made for your expertise. You may be told “no thanks,” but if a manager says “yes please” to your idea, there is no competition for the spot. There is a risk of being denied but not of being outmatched.
Sarah Feingold, general counsel at car seller Vroom, shared with me how she landed her previous role as senior counsel at online retailer Etsy. In addition to being an attorney, Feingold is an accomplished custom jewelrymaker. She had been selling her pieces on Etsy, learned they were changing their legal policies, and decided to write to the customer service team and offer advice pro bono. When they brushed her off, she recounts, “I said, ‘You know what? Why don’t I just speak with your founder?’ They gave me his number. We spoke for about a half an hour. When I hung up the phone, I thought, ‘This company is amazing. I love this company. I can add value. And they clearly can use the value I can add.’ I booked a JetBlue ticket and called the founder back. ‘I’m coming down for an interview, I said. ‘You need in-house legal counsel, and you need it to be me.’”1
People gravitate toward competitive risk because it seems safer. It’s known. We know there is a job available: that’s got to be less risky than a job that doesn’t yet exist. It seems counterintuitive, but according to disruption theory, this risk assessment is flawed.2
Managers are not immune to the lure of certainty. Vacant positions are frequently advertised the same way they were the last time we hired, without the slightest evaluation of what the job calls for. The result being that new employees are often brought in to do a job that a current employee has, out of necessity, already started doing. There is now an overlap, a duplication of effort, that causes your people to butt heads. When you put people in competition with one another who are supposed to be on the same team, failure, at some level, is almost guaranteed.
Each employee (and each manager) requires an individual curve to climb. In hiring for, or moving an employee to, a new role, skew toward market risk whenever possible. What needs aren’t being met on your team or in your business? Does it make sense to redistribute responsibilities among current team members? Create a new role? Would more high-quality candidates be available if you looked beyond the margins of a currently available job?
If you assume market risk and deploy employees where no one else is playing, you will improve the odds of your workers’ (and your own) success.
Play to Individuals’ Distinctive Strengths
When I asked a group of 100 people in a large multinational how many of them played to their strengths on the job, less than 5 percent raised their hands. This was unusually low as straw polls go, but still indicative.
To perform at the highest level, each member of your team must operate from a position of personal strength. I’m not talking about the strengths of the team in general but of each individual’s distinctive strengths. What does each person do well that other people on the team do not, and what sorts of problems do those strengths equip them to solve? As a manager, your job is to pinpoint what people do uniquely well and pit these abilities against assignments that make their strengths relevant. This powerful combination (abilities + assignments) busts through the challenging low end of the learning curve.
Don’t assume people know what their strengths are. Usually, we have a tough time spotting our own superpowers. Because these are things you do reflexively well, like breathing, your strengths are often invisible. And you dismiss them: it’s human nature to undervalue what comes easily. Which is why sometimes we hire people into the wrong roles. Because they include on their résumé what they worked hard to do, not what they do without thinking. Identify your reports’ strengths—their superpowers, their genius—and play to them.
Be aware too that if your reports aren’t strong in the ways you are, you may be blind to their strengths. Walter O’Brien, founder of Scorpion Computer Services and the inspiration for the television show Scorpion, was a child prodigy who started programming computers at age nine. He went on to compete in the World Olympics of Informatics and placed sixth in the world at age 18. O’Brien started his company to help people solve problems (originally they were mostly technical problems, but the company’s mission has expanded over the years to take on a wide range of other challenges).
From the beginning, O’Brien hired people who were like him: technology geniuses with high IQs. “I thought having a company full of geniuses was a good idea,” he says. “I was wrong. When I put two geniuses on the same project, they tried to kill each other, all while insulting the customer. That’s when I started to realize there was a thing called EQ—emotional intelligence—[that involved] common sense and social skills. Often the higher the IQ, the lower the EQ. So I needed to go get some of that EQ stuff.”3 Recognizing he needed people who were strong in ways he wasn’t, O’Brien started hiring single moms, elementary school teachers, psychologists—people with skills such as self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to manage conflict. These high-EQ employees liaise between Scorpion’s high-IQ technology specialists and its clients and are nicknamed “Super Nannies.” It’s important to play to your strengths, like being a computer genius. But in a room full of computer geniuses, the distinctive strength is emotional intelligence. Play to your people’s distinctive strengths, encourage them to play where others aren’t, and you’ll create a flywheel for climbing the S curve of learning.
Impose Thoughtful Constraints
Constraint is a word that tends to evoke a negative response. We want unlimited, unbounded freedom. Or so we think.
Consider gravity, a constant, unseen, but potent constraint. If we want to manipulate the strictures of gravity, it’s a given we’ll need to innovate. We invent parachutes, hang gliders, and hot air balloons. We master aerodynamics and the chemistry of jet fuel. Experiment with rocket propulsion and more.
Constraints work the same way within our organizations. At the low end of a new curve, constraint is almost inevitable. There may be inadequate expertise, buy-in, or funding. These limitations can halt progress. Or they can force us to be resourceful. This act of creation propels us up the learning curve.
Kelly Hoey was working in professional development at the global law firm White & Case. After four years, she’d outgrown her role. She and her boss, Timm Whitney, discussed her options, roles that were open and ones she might create. They weighed numerous factors, from career paths to budgets to politics. She settled on the job of rebuilding a global alumni program which had previously launched with fanfare, but failed due to lack of follow-up. It was an enormous task, allocated virtually zero resources—except Kelly. No budget. No staff. No reliable database. Faced with this meaty new challenge, Kelly’s creativity came to the fore. She found ways to track and collect data on alums. Though it was the early days of social media, she figured out how to leverage it. Eighteen months later, Kelly had connected a disengaged audience.
For a management team that already feels long on challenges and short on resources, the idea that people cycle through a new role every three to four years may feel onerous. Why would you want a person to move on when they are at their best? Because “best” is temporary. After three to four years, most employees won’t continue to perform at their highest level without a change in the scope of their activities. Timm Whitney, Kelly Hoey’s boss, understood this. Even the sharpest knife grows dull through repetitious use.
Time Constraints
I crave—and that is not too strong a word—a free workday to focus on whatever I want. No calls. No pending deadlines. No emails that need to be answered. But when that coveted free day arrives, I get anxious. What will I do? I have so much to do. I’m late. For what? I don’t even know. I can fritter away hours. On good days, I manage the anxiety by breaking my day up into smaller time units. I’ll schedule an hour, even a half hour, of writing, for example. Then I’ll take a break: walk around the block. When I give myself a time constraint, such as one hour to work on a project, my productivity soars.
The same is true when we are managing people. When we try to keep a good thing going well beyond its pull date, the law of diminishing returns is in play. Think of what we know about food. Our first bite of a food is the most enjoyable, according to Pierre Chandon, a professor of marketing at INSEAD, but our last bite is the one that determines how we felt about the overall experience of eating it. If we eat too much, that last bite isn’t very satisfying, and what might have been a positive dining experience becomes far less enjoyable.4
These attributes have their equivalent in the workplace. People often share with me that they made a job change because their gut told them it was time. They remembered the pleasure of trying something new and wanted to have that feeling again. Others ignored their gut, wooed by job security, compensation, or benefits. Work became increasingly unpleasant, even painful. The overall experience, though it began well, was remembered negatively.
In any given role, there is a “best by” date for an employee. To maximize that person’s value, break their tenure into time segments: the first three months, the second three months. What needs to be accomplished for them to tip into the sweet spot of the curve after roughly six months? Once they are moving into confident competence, what do you want them to accomplish in those three peak performance years? Knowing that things don’t get better forever, establish clear expectations around the achievement of mastery. For example, what knowledge do they need to transfer before graduating to the next in-house opportunity? The bonus is that training is shouldered by several people, not just you, their manager.
There are exceptions to the general rule of three years. Franz Busse, formerly of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and now the CTO of the startup Hala Systems, is a rocket scientist. He believes that his domain, and a few others, such as neurosurgery, are so intellectually rigorous and rapidly evolving that “in three years, [practitioners] still don’t know nearly enough to make the right decisions.” In these cases, the S curve has a long, shallow, slow back, rather than a steep one. It may take an entire career to exhaust it. The refreshment provided by disruption can be achieved through new projects, assignments, and team configurations. The key is variety. As with a farmer rotating crops or a dog breeder introducing a new bloodline.
Exceptions aside, the mandate is clear: three to six months to get up to speed, three to four years to contribute, three to six months to help others get up to speed. Focus and productivity are the fruit of short stints. By adding the constraint of time to the S curve of each role we manage, we can expect better individual performance and higher-functioning teams.
Expertise Constraints
When we consciously create teams with people at the low, middle, and high end of the S curve, we accept that at any given time, up to 15 percent of our team will be at the low end—a built-in constraint of inexperience. These employees may be struggling or unsure. We will need to practice patience as people move, sometimes slowly, up the curve. This lack of competence can be offset by the novel perspective new hires bring to the table. Their ideas may seem naive or even arrogant at times—they haven’t yet earned the right to question. But their vantage point of being new, and the ability to question that comes with it, will be brief. Entertain their suggestions. It can bring enormous value to your team.
Liz Wiseman is a former Oracle executive and New York Times best-selling author of the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. When Wiseman was just a year out of business school, she was tasked with building a corporate university for Oracle, then a scrappy young software company. “Because I lacked experience, I stayed close to my stakeholders, eagerly seeking guidance from product experts and senior leaders,” she says. “The obvious gap between the size of the job and the length of my experience forced me to leverage all available resources. What my team and I lacked in experience and conviction we compensated for with our willingness to learn, to think creatively, and to deliver quick wins to prove ourselves.” Within a year, Wiseman was asked to expand Oracle University to serve more than one hundred countries around the world.5 Inexperience was her tool of creation.
The other side of the expertise coin is that because people know they are going to be in their role for a limited amount of time, once they reach the top of the S curve, there will be an urgency to share what they know so the tribal memory remains intact.
Constraints can feel adversarial, a challenger to all the good things we might accomplish. But when properly embraced, they provide structure that liberates us from chaos, reducing the waste of time and money that results when resources are too liberal. When we welcome constraint as friend, not foe, we keep our energy in reserve for the battle against entitlement, the true enemy of growth.
Fight Entitlement at Every Turn
Entitlement is the sneaky saboteur of an S curve climb. It comes in many guises. Like when things aren’t fair. And at some point, they aren’t. On the merits, we deserved a promotion, a raise, or credit for our good idea, and didn’t get it. So we decide the universe is in our debt. Self-absorbed, we backslide.
Then there’s the flip side of this: This privileged position should always be our lot. As we give the right people, on the right part of their curve, hard problems to solve, our team will hum with innovative energy. It’s human nature to start believing this is the way things will and should always be. I’ve built this team. I deserve a fiefdom. Now worried that the loss of a star performer will dim our prospects, we become talent hoarders.
Our best self will let people grow, even help them go. Raju Narisetti, CEO of Gizmodo Media, who has previously worked in senior leadership for News Corp, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, says, “I’ve increasingly measured myself by saying, ‘Where are the people that I’ve hired? What have they gone on to do … ?’ I’m proud of the people who are doing bigger, greater things now.”6 Stockpiling people and rationing talent may boost your team for a time, but it cheats your business overall. Aspire to be the boss who sees people not only for who they are, but who they can become. Become known as a talent developer, and when that talent moves on, there will be even more great talent around the corner.
As you lead your team up their learning curve, contending with your own sense of entitlement—also watch out for theirs. More skills will equal more confidence. But they still aren’t masters. The word “sophomore” comes from the conjunction of two Greek words, wisdom and foolishness; a sophomore is literally a “wise fool.” And that’s where your employees are as they start to climb out of the low-end learning curve: They know a little, but they don’t know enough.
Fearing an increased sense of entitlement, managers sometimes dial back on praise. Instead, turn the volume up. Consultants Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman reviewed some ten thousand 360-degree assessments and found that the best managers give a mix of praise and criticism. Sounds obvious—except that the people who saw themselves as great managers (but were not seen that way by their employees) tended to give mostly criticism.7
Our employees are desperate for praise. And we rarely give it, in part because genuine praise is hard to give.8 Gretchen Rubin helps explain why. She wrote The Happiness Project, a book based on her yearlong initiative to be happier, inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement efforts. As she set out on this journey, Rubin set the goal to “give positive reviews.” “People who are critical are often perceived to be more discerning,” Rubin writes. Various studies conclude “… that people tend to think that someone who criticizes them is smarter than they are. Although enthusiasm seems easy and undiscriminating, in fact, it’s much harder to embrace something than to disdain it. It’s riskier.” Rubin suggests, “Enthusiasm is a form of social courage … Giving positive reviews requires humility … A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence … ”9
Smart managers will learn to be enthusiastic and encourage their team members without entitling them. It’s a delicate balance. Focus on praising what is within a team member’s control, such as effort expended and a willingness to play nicely with others. Be stingier in extolling the attributes that are not under the individual’s control: native talents, appearance, the various manifestations of good fortune. These are the things that most often lead to an outsize sense of privilege.
Disruptive innovation thrives in an environment of gratitude, rather than one of entitlement. This may explain the high percentage of successful immigrant entrepreneurs. In 2010, more than 40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies included an immigrant or the child of an immigrant among its founders. It may be that coming from other places and cultures makes them less jaded or blinded by personal privilege and more appreciative of a wide-open playing field in which to make their mark. Life is not accommodating. Work is not accommodating—luckily for us. A constant flow of gratification isn’t conducive to moving up the S curve. It distracts us from disturbing the universe.
Stepping Backward Is a Way to Move Forward
When Michelle McKenna-Doyle became CIO (Chief Information Officer) of the NFL (National Football League), she observed that a lot of her people were struggling, not because they weren’t talented but because they weren’t “slotted to their strengths.” She did a deep analysis and started switching seats. But this meant that some people felt they were taking a step back. John Cave, VP of football technology, for example, could create products and build things. However, he didn’t have time to do this because he was responsible for all systems development, including enterprise systems. “Why was he weighed down with the payroll system when he could figure out how to evolve the game through technology?” McKenna-Doyle asked. She envisioned a better fit for him.
The NFL wanted to make it easier for coaches to talk to each other during a game. McKenna-Doyle tasked Cave with making this happen. “At first, he was concerned because his overall span was shrinking. ‘Just trust me,’ I said, ‘You’re going to be a great innovator.’ And he is.” John Cave is now even more integral to the football operation, providing top value to the NFL. It’s not organizational disruption but personal disruption that drives innovation. Managers who can pair skill sets with problems to be solved are invaluable in initiating this disruption.10
In researching this book, I posted the question on Linked- In: “Who was your best boss?” Among the many respondents (It seems there are a lot of great bosses in the world!) was Vikas Bagri, social media and civic innovation adviser for the government of Chhattisgarh, India. Within a few weeks, I was sitting in the Chicago office of Vikas’s former boss: Sam Pitroda. Pitroda, as it happens, is one of the world’s great business leaders and entrepreneurial thinkers. He was instrumental in telecom and technology development in India, a onetime adviser to former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and the holder of over a hundred international patents. During Pitroda’s stint at the helm of C-DOT (Center for the Development of Telematics) in India, over the course of a few months, several employees announced they were going to pursue additional study in the United States. Their managers were so angry they wanted to fire them. Instead Pitroda threw a party. “I’m happy they are going abroad,” he said. “They’ll take with them all the things they’ve learned here … and if you guys have any problems, you can call them in the United States, and they’ll give you answers.”
Pitroda recognized that these innovative engineers would eventually move on to new endeavors. He didn’t begrudge these departures. He wanted C-DOT to be known as a great laboratory for skill development, a name that would shine brightly on a résumé. Former C-DOT employees are now common in Silicon Valley and fill leadership positions in companies around the world.11
Think of a slingshot: it creates forward impetus with a backward pull. For Pitroda’s seven employees who wanted to study in the United States, there was an initial step back—a short-term loss of income, the disruption of their professional networks, and moving to a new culture. But in the long term, they saw this as a necessary, temporary backwards move that would help them grow further. And, that’s how Pitroda saw it for his organization, too: in the short term, he’d be losing seven very talented employees. A definite step back. But in the long term, by celebrating their success, his organization would become a hub for talent.
Supporting additional education or training is one way of stepping back to grow. In onboarding a new team member or encouraging a person to jump to a new curve, we sacrifice a little near-term productivity. Listening to a curious, clear-eyed, new team member is a step back from our ego.
It’s hard to step back. You may be enjoying the exhilarating ride up the steep back of a curve, firing on all cylinders and reaping the payoff of efforts invested at the low end. Why step back now? Or, for that matter, why would an employee be motivated to step back while resting on their laurels at the top of the curve, enjoying a little privilege and entitlement? Because stepping back is your slingshot.
Give Failure Its Due
Not all failures can be sidestepped, nor should they be. Sometimes things break down and we confront the consequences. We may have to let an employee go. If they have been a star performer in the past, it may make sense to reassign them to a different curve. But often failure is the point at which it’s important to encourage an employee to try again and keep trying. It may take time for our employees to incorporate and adjust for the feedback they receive. This will require humility on their part, patience on ours. Learning from failure isn’t instinctive. But, allow it to be instructive, and it can be a big boost to personal disruption.
Scott Pulsipher knows the sting of failure. He also knows how pivotal a boss can be in using the feedback that comes from failure to create momentum. Soon after business school, he became a VP of product management and marketing at Yantra, a supply chain software startup with $50 million in revenue. When Yantra was acquired by Sterling Commerce (now owned by IBM)—a $450 million company—Pulsipher’s responsibilities quickly expanded from managing seven people to managing seventy-five. He was leading vision and strategy, connecting with and influencing people on an individual and a group basis. His executive assistant was also attuned to the needs of others and helped him track and write personal notes weekly. During Pulsipher’s tenure, revenue climbed to $600 million while annual employee turnover declined from roughly 18 percent to less than 2 percent. Pulsipher was a boss people loved, because of his people focus.
Fresh off these big wins, Pulsipher joined Amazon, where he reported to Tom Taylor, VP of fulfillment, now senior VP of Alexa. Pulsipher took on the role of GM of a new business called Amazon WebStore. He started in August 2009 and was tasked with launching the venture, which had only pilot customers and zero revenue.
During this high-stakes period, Taylor tapped Pulsipher to attend a leadership training off-site. During one activity, a real-world simulation with twenty-seven high potentials from Amazon, Pulsipher was chosen to receive feedback from every person in the group. They praised him for everything he did that was effective and then told him the truth about everything he wasn’t doing well. One criticism hit him like a ton of bricks: while he claimed to be a caring individual, he didn’t come across as caring at all when he was tasked with an impossible deadline and high stress. He had become the boss no one wanted to work for.
Pulsipher recalls, “It was rough. Twice I had to stop. It was so emotionally draining, I remember coming home and feeling worthless. Now I realize it was the most meaningful training program I’ve ever been to. But it wouldn’t have worked if Tom Taylor hadn’t been there.” Taylor pulled him aside: “Sometime between Sterling Commerce and establishing yourself at Amazon, you lost sight of who you are.” Under pressure, Pulsipher had become mechanical. Taylor reminded him that he was most effective when his priority was people.
Pulsipher evidently listened to Taylor’s good advice. Today, he is president of Western Governors University, one of the largest nonprofit universities in the United States, with more than 85,000 students. One wonders: Would this role have been possible without the punch-in-the-gut of the 360 review, and especially without Tom Taylor encouraging Pulsipher to give failure its due on his path to choosing success?
A manager is a bit like a parent. You push your charges into uncomfortable situations and are willing to see them fail to help them grow and to initiate disruption. At the low end of the curve, this tends to be easier, especially when you hire within the organization. You expect them to flounder. But they have a history of strong performance. So, you (and your boss) can be patient. This gives them the luxury of learning, rather than trying to be loved, allowing them to quickly engage in the actual work.
With employees in the sweet spot of the S curve it can be a bit harder. You may find yourself wanting to shield them from failure. In the short run, this may feel good. In the long run, though, it’s riskier to be overprotective. Tasked with undemanding assignments, their confidence begins to falter. They become reluctant to play where others aren’t—a hallmark of innovation—and instead of outperforming, they underachieve. Give your employees—especially high potentials—real stretch assignments.12
Feyzi (pronounced FAY-zee) Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology, a cloud and SaaS enablement platform, recounts the experience of a valued and high-performing member of his technical team. We’ll call him John. As part of John’s career development plan, he asked if he could negotiate and manage a high-stakes strategic partnership. He got what he asked for and pursued it passionately. It didn’t work out—in part because he hadn’t identified the people who had decision-making authority, but also because John made significant investments without validating his assumptions.
There was a near-term cost to John’s misstep. He didn’t make his numbers, and there was a resource opportunity cost. But Feyzi leveraged that cost into improving future partnerships as well as into the development of John, a key player, who now, among other lessons learned, identifies decision makers early on. Says Feyzi: “Partly due to John’s drive to succeed and our culture of respect and giving each other leeway to experiment, we turned [John’s failure] into an investment in his and the company’s future.”
One possible starting point for giving your team room to make mistakes is to frame expectations for those you report to. For example, if you are a VP reporting up to the C-suite, Stacey Petrey, senior executive compensation consultant at wealth management firm Solenture, suggests the following script: “I can take direction ‘XYZ.’ There is an 80 percent probability it will work, but there are risks. It is also a stretch assignment for ‘so and so.’ Win or lose, it’s the right risk to take from a business and people development perspective. My team and I will give it our all to succeed, but if we don’t, will you back us? Will you support the team and me through this risk?” Most senior leaders forget to frame expectations. “Be honest about the risks,” says Petrey, “but also emphasize people development that results from smart risk-taking.” Any C-suite executive who is serious about growing their business will sign on.
Encourage Discovery-Driven Growth
In the field of business strategy, discovery-driven planning, made famous by Columbia Business School professor Rita Gunther McGrath, can almost be described as a make-it-up-as-you-go activity.13 Instead of learning to plan, you plan to learn. Your initial plan is skeletal. It includes questions like, “What would need to happen for this plan to work?” It is then fleshed out as the feedback rolls in, a little at a time.
We can use this approach with managing people, too. For example, to give a promising sales employee time to develop in their position, the sales metric might be, “What can be their minimum sales target for the first six months before we should start to get concerned?” As you learn about that person’s capabilities you may periodically redeploy them, improving the match between their strengths and the unmet needs of your team or business. Job descriptions and requirements would be deliberately vague and minimalist rather than rigid. This would help attract talented prospects who can contribute now, while offering potential for roles you haven’t yet considered. The data tells us that 70 percent of successful new businesses end up on a course different from the one they initially pursued. Why would it be any different with a person? Flexibility is strength.
It’s true that people tend to overlook their innate talents (their superpowers) and instead advertise the skills they’ve worked hard to acquire. This means that you will occasionally discover you’ve hired someone onto the wrong S curve. It’s not that they don’t have the will; it’s that they advertised what they do well during the interview process, not what they do best. In such cases, find another S curve for them. If the employee has the skills but not the will, they are similarly on a wrong curve, possibly even in the wrong organization.
As a disruptive manager, you have a purpose, a destination in mind. But how will you get the team there? And what role will each team member play? The story arc is discovered as it is traveled. Quin Snyder, head basketball coach for the NBA’s Utah Jazz, manages his players with a discovery-driven approach. During the 2016–2017 basketball season, the team was plagued with injuries, which forced Snyder to constantly reconfigure his five-man lineups. Throughout the first seventy-five of the season’s total eighty-two games, he used an incredible twenty-two different starting lineups, figuring out how to optimize his available resources as he went.14 Snyder emphasizes adaptability in the development of his players. Their ability to move competently from role to role gives them a competitive advantage over teams where players are singularly gifted in just one capacity.
Chatbooks, a Series B–funded startup that helps people create printed scrapbooks from their Instagram photos, also takes a discovery-driven approach to hiring and assigning people to roles within its company. It hires candidates for “high-performance creativity” by seeking qualities such as “grown up,” “amazing,” “kind,” and “optimistic,” rather than focusing on pedigree. “Sometimes there’s an obvious, long-term fit, sometimes there’s not,” explains cofounder Vanessa Quigley. “Either way, if they’re excited and flexible, we try to hire them, and then they shift into various roles over time. For example, one of our marketing directors took over our email campaigns for six months while we searched for someone to do that job. Now she’s spearheading a new content initiative. Our business development director came on to lead a product extension, but we found that we wanted to use her skills for chasing new deals. We are willing to shift people into new roles so that the business needs—and their passions—align.” Chatbooks’ model of matching S-curve development with changing business needs has served the company well. It has printed hundreds of millions of photos and millions of books and tripled revenue for each of the last three years.15
The discovery-driven approach lets you decide what you want to accomplish (growing equity returns by 15 percent per year, for example), then figure out who can make it happen. Who can incur the cost (the skill and the will) to achieve your goal? What are your assumptions about the contribution each team member can make? Create a milestone chart so you know if people are on track one month in, three months in, etc. If needed, course correct. As a discovery-driven manager, you are continually load-balancing your team, optimizing for the different phases with skills and will as the foundation. Pit people against real challenges—and innovation will follow.
Summary
Managers need to know about seven accelerants of learning. These include:
1. THE RIGHT RISKS: Become a talent developer.
2. DISTINCTIVE STRENGTHS: Pinpoint employees’ talents and utilize them.
3. EMBRACE CONSTRAINTS: Use time limits to motivate and hone focus.
4. BATTLE AGAINST ENTITLEMENT: Celebrate success, and be generous in helping employees fulfill their potential.
5. STEP BACK TO GROW: Sacrifice short-term productivity to encourage curve jumping.
6. GIVE FAILURE ITS DUE: Let employees take on uncomfortable challenges, and support them through failures.
7. BE DISCOVERY DRIVEN: Shift players on your team as their skills and talents emerge.
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