New Ideas and Motivation

A successful team has a good manager who is helping them be successful. Also, a successful manager has a good team that is helping him/her be successful. Regardless of which role you are playing in this success, you are helping generate new ideas and out of the box thinking. You participate in innovation and improvement – be it products or processes.

It’s important for a manager to understand that handling new ideas effectively is a multi-step approach. The core of such discussion must be, not to prove your abilities or others’ inabilities, but to generate new ideas and encourage constructive participation. It is not uncommon for team members to compete with each other. However, this is not a forum for competition, but a forum to generate new ideas. To that end, I submit the following for your consideration.

Required Personality Traits are:

1. Listening – patiently and attentively to the complete idea presented, without interruption or dismissing
2. Constructive and Positive Attitude – to analyze the idea from a positive and how to make it work perspective

What to do during the discussion/presentation?

1. Listen carefully and patiently to the idea presented
2. Identify and highlight the positive aspects (why it is a good idea and will work)
3. Only identify, not highlight or verbalize, the issues that may hinder the successful working of the idea
4. Frame and ask questions around the issues identified in step 3 (Have you thought about this issue or that need?
5. Encourage the presenter and/or the group to find solutions to the issues that may have tempted you to dismiss the idea at the beginning

At the end, you may or may not have a working solution, but what you definitely have is a positively charged team that is willing to come up with more new ideas.

1. Presenter – My ideas were heard, discussed and (a) were accepted, or (b) were not accepted because… Next time, I will have better solutions and fewer issues
2. You – I heard some good ideas today and my problem is solved, or encouraged my team to come up with more such ideas that will eventually provide a solution

What is not taken away from this discussion is

1. Presenter – My manager does not listen to my ideas. There is no point in presenting any more ideas, only to be shutdown immediately and then feel humiliated
2. You – My team is a worthless bunch of people that cannot come up with a single good idea to resolve my problems. I am still where I started with no end in sight. I look bad in front of my superiors for no fault of mine. My team is to blame.

Negotiation

One of the modern day negotiation mantras is “win-win”, essentially stating that everyone at the negotiating table has to win. At Microsoft, it’s a “win-win-win”, underscoring the importance of the “invisible” and often ignored customer/partner as the third winner. Excellent strategy at the outset! However, it may not always work because of its premise – everyone has to win.

What I have come to realize is that there are times when one may have to lose – and that one may very well be me. There are times when the larger interests should be kept in mind – such as corporate goals – to ensure what is best for the company is agreed upon by all involved regardless of who wins and who loses. While it’s not always about winning or losing, it’s also not always about winning for everyone either. This gives a whole new dimension to the art of negotiation. It’s most certainly about winning for the company – an attitude that demonstrates the negotiator’s value add to the company.

It’s important to realize that Negotiation is not a battle, but a tool available for negotiators to ensure the interests of the party they represent are safeguarded at all times. The challenge I have seen that many negotiators have is identifying the party they truly represent. This is often times mistaken to be the organization they fall under.

Last year, I was working on a project in collaboration with over a dozen different groups. All these groups were contributing for my project, and a couple of groups were actually developing components. Everything was going smoothly until… the time of delivery to user acceptance came. One of the groups delivered a mismatched interface from original requirements. Thus began the negotiation. While I was pushing hard with the group to get their interface changed so that it matches my requirements, my opinion at that time was that this particular group was not cooperating, despite their “failure”. This was a challenge I had to overcome to ensure success for my group or I am looking at the failure of the project. I knew that I had all the “ammo” to win the battle.

Right about this time, I was given some very high level insights into what else was going on in that group, an insight I did not have before. This made me look at the challenge from a different angle. My goal is to ensure success for the party I represent – not the org I fall under, but the company I work for. Winning for my group would mean at least a couple of things – one, putting a severe strain on the relationship with this group, and two, putting strain on the corporate goals. So, I discussed the issue with my team, did some research and found that accepting the deliverable “as is” and changing the component my team developed would be easier than pushing forward with my narrow agenda of winning. I would have ensured my victory, but would have lost a possible ally, made many professional enemies and strained corporate goals.

In the next meeting, I communicated to the other group's representative that my group will make the necessary changes to complete the integration successfully. It required some more testing on our part. However, it did not strain the relationship nor the corporate goals.

Strictly speaking, this was not a win-win. However, after properly defining some key terms, and understanding what is not being said at the negotiating table, it turned into an all-round win – project was successful, the group relationship and the corporate goals were at a status quo.

Key Message – Negotiate to succeed, not necessarily to win.

Decision Making

Often times, we tend to see decisions as rigth or wrong decisions. However, we often tend not see them as good or bad decisions. We also tend to ignore the fact that a right decision at one point in time may transform into a wrong decision at a later point in time. This transformation or lack thereof does not necessarily make the decision a bad or a good one. We tend to ignore these other two forms of decisions and settle with “right” or “wrong” classification, especially when we are judging others.

Decision Making involves answering questions that fall into three broad buckets

1. Questions you know answers to (the Known)
2. Questions you don’t know the answers to (the Known Unknown)
3. Questions you don’t have (the Unknown Unknown – what you don’t know that you don’t know)

Broken down into these three buckets, it is not prudent to make a decision purely based on the first. This is the point where you do due diligence on the three aspects. Due diligence involves

1. Verifying items in the first bucket (the Known)
2. Get answers to the second category – the known unknown. If the decision is time-bound and you cannot get the questions answered in a timely manner, make some reasonable assumptions that would answer these questions. Then, move these items into bucket one and go thru that process.
3. The third bucket is, by far, the most risky in the decision-making process. First step in mitigating this risk is to try and move the items into the second bucket – the known unknown. Then, follow the procedure you have used to handle the items in that bucket.

This is an iterative process until you either have only bucket 1, or you have worked closely with all the stakeholders to accept the risks around the items in the other two buckets. The second part is especially important when your decision-making process is time-bound.

At the end of the due diligence process and by the time you are ready to make a decision, ideally, you should have eliminated all items from the third bucket. You should have also built and verified reasonable assumptions around each item in the second bucket. And of course, you should have verified each item in the first bucket to be accurate.

Having completed the due diligence, now you are ready to make your decision. Ensure that the decision you make takes into account all the information you have, including the assumptions you have made. The decision you make should accommodate a change of course in the actions you take, should the information you have or assumptions you made were to change.
Once all this happens, then you have made a good decision! If you have ignored any item in these three categories, depending on how critical the ignored item is, the decision becomes good or bad decision.

Being a Perfectionist

Here I would like to talk about what it means to be a perfectionist, and how the rest of the world perceives a perfectionist.

Let me start of by saying, nobody is perfect, including the perfectionist - the degree of imperfection varies. Perfectionists are more of an anomaly than the norm. I was recently talking to a great friend of mine who is, as I am, a perfectionist. We started as colleagues and turned into great and trusting friends. One of many reasons we had a great working relationship that turned to great friendship is that we understand each other. As I was talking to her, I realized a lot about myself and how the rest of the world sees us. When we do a piece of job or deliver a product, we want to ensure it is perfect. We are masters in picking holes. We are just as hard on ourselves as we are on others which could be troublesome for many! A few weeks after a “perfect” job, we revisit our own work and wonder how we could get away with such a sloppy job. That’s how we think and operate. We never have a problem working with the people of our own kind, but the rest of them have trouble with us. They think we are insane, nitpicking, and/or controlling.

What I have come to realize is that a piece of work need not be perfect from our perspective – just from the perspective of the recipient of the work product. The rest of the world doesn’t care about the perspective of a perfectionist if the perfectionist doesn’t care about the rest of the world. So, with that thought and realization, I respectfully submit the following.

Define the term perfect from the perspective of the users of your work product. What is the acceptable level of perfection to your users? If your work product is a document, does it address all the areas required to realize the purpose of the document, without confusing the reader? Does your work product meet your customer’s minimum requirements/needs? Once you answer these questions, you have your parameters defined. Anything more, is more than required and the customer doesn’t care.

A good way of verifying if you, or someone you are directing/working with, did a perfect job is to ask the customer. Review your work product with one who actually is going to use it. If it satisfies the end user (not you, the initial reviewer or project manager), the work product is at an acceptable level of perfection. If it does not, do not speculate as to what is below the level of perfection. Ask the end user again, correct it and re-review. As a general rule, if the work product leads to more unanswered questions or confusion for the customer, it is not perfect. Typically, for a job well done, you would not require more than two such iterations. However, after several such iterations in concert with the end-user/customer, you have a perfect product or deliverable without upsetting the rest of the world. What’s more, the user actually cares about and appreciates the perfection. Remember! Your customer, not you, says whether the work product is perfect or not.

Note to Self: Learn to let go of being a perfectionist from your perspective. Learn to identify and deliver acceptable levels of perfection from your customer’s standpoint. Make it so.