When to focus on weaknesses

In my last post I argued the case for choosing jobs that play to your strengths, rather than trying to build up expertise in areas of weakness. Perhaps I was too sweeping. On reflection, context is critical and you need to correctly diagnose the situation you face – another lesson from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

I still see limited value working on weaker skills if they don’t matter match for the job you do, or the one you want to do in future. Even if they sit on your organisation’s ‘competency framework’. But weaknesses, including gaps in experience, do need addressing when they significantly hold back your ability to get – and do – the job you want in future.

When your performance in a particular job is determined by your proficiency and experience across multiple different competencies, it exhibits what Rumelt calls ‘chain link’ logic. At its most extreme this means overall performance is constrained by the strength of the weakest link. This link becomes a bottleneck holding up performance. An example in a career development context could be that you won’t be considered for a senior management position until you’ve completed some relevant training, or more frustratingly obtained some management experience (a classic chicken-and-egg problem).

More likely though, the different competencies could be highly complementary, so that there is value in building up proficiency and experience in all of them. Focusing on weaknesses will be particularly valuable when there are diminishing returns to investment in each competency – so that 1 day spent working on a strength pays back less than a day working on a weakness.

I don’t think chain link logic always applies though. Some skills and experiences just aren’t that useful for your ability to do a particular role. And often people can do the same job in different ways – and equally well – by applying different skills at different levels of intensity.

I found it quite useful to think through the logic from a running perspective, as an analogy to career development. It might help to illustrate these points.

As an marathon runner, it surely makes no sense for me to ‘broaden my experience’ by racing the 100m or investing in sprint training. Better to work on endurance and compete longer races.

However, that is only looking at situation from a very high level. Zooming in, a marathon runner gets better by doing more than just running long. Threshold runs, core stability and mental toughness are all important. If you have a major weakness in any of them it can seriously limit performance and it makes sense to focus energy on these, rather than just the training you enjoy and do well.

Extending the analogy, if I wanted to try my hand at triathlon, it would be foolish for me to invest much time in running training, when I have the potential for much greater gains from improving my fairly lamentable swimming technique.

What this brings home to me is that it’s vital to do a decent diagnosis of the situation. What skills and competencies do you actually need for the job you do, or the job you want to do? Which of them matter most? Where could you increase your level of proficiency most easily?

Can corporate strategy help us with career choices?

My book club loved Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt and I recently revisited it in preparation for a job interview. This time round I saw some insights that I might apply to personal strategy, in particular my own career. A caveat first – I’d be very cautious about applying this kind of strategic thinking to my work on a day-to-day basis. Corporate strategy is essentially about building competitive advantage over others, and I think our genetics already wire us to pursue status games that are mostly unhelpful at a corporate (and human) level. I don’t want to develop a consciously strategic approach to reinforce my unconscious biases.

However, I wonder if it might be useful in thinking about careers. What career do I want, and how do I go about getting it, especially in competition with other applicants?

Here are three insights I’ve been thinking about:

Play to your strengths

Firms should identify their strengths and play to them – ‘press where you have advantages and sidestep situations where you are weak’. Contrast this with the career development advice that we focus on areas of weakness, indeed that we actively seek out roles and opportunities that use them intensively.

I concede a case for building ‘foundation’ skills that are useful for all jobs, but if you are very good at one set of tasks, why spend time in a role that primarily requires others? Rumelt’s approach seems more sensible to me, for both the individual and the organisation. For example, I know I need some basic project management skills, but I’m pretty sure I’d can add more value in a role that plays more to my analytical and coaching strengths. It’s much more likely to help me deepen my advantages which I can use for future career progression. Moreover, I’m likely to find it more enjoyable.

I think the analogy stretches to job interviews too, where we should find every opportunity to showcase strengths in our answers, not to highlight weaknesses.

So my first conclusion is to seek out jobs that primarily exploit my strengths and develop them, not ones that utilise my weaker areas. Right now this means roles that value analytical thinking and intellectual curiosity, connecting people to ideas, a coaching approach and working creatively with groups.

Be less myopic

Making and benefiting from good strategy doesn’t require a precise forecast of the future, which is just as well given the huge uncertainties in my line of work. Moreover, periods of significant change can often provide the greatest opportunities for building competitive advantage, because relative strengths change and the next move becomes less obvious. The good news from an individual perspective is that most of us are so remiss in looking ahead that we can gain an edge simply by being just a bit less myopic . We don’t need to be right about the future, just more right than others.

Applying this to myself, I don’t know for sure how technological change is going to affect my workplace. But a bit of thought suggests that two areas that might be useful to build expertise in are harnessing intrinsic motivation (since knowledge work is so hard to measure) and working with virtual teams (since technology allows for remote working). And working amidst Brexit probably means I’d benefit from building up some insights in trade economics.

That gives me some development areas that both deepen existing advantages in coaching approach and economic analysis, and strengthen my position relative to others. It is also a reminder to take stock every so often about how the world is changing and what might be a useful way to respond. To steal another idea from the book, when the world is complex and you don’t know what the ‘right’ end point is, the best approach is usually to ‘improve your position and generate options’.

Question your own judgement

When we feel we need to act, it is very easy to jump at the first insight that seems to explain the data, but this is risky. There are usually several plausible explanations for what is happening and we should examine each of them before making a call. Even once we’ve made our strategic choice, we should be prepared to change it as we confront the messy reality of the world. Rumelt urges that we find ways to question our own judgement before deciding, and to revisit whether we right afterwards. We should commit to our judgements so that we can learn when they are proved right or wrong.

I should test my thinking with others (I welcome your comments!) and come back to this blog post to see how valid my strategic judgement has been!

How to open up your future in 30 minutes

Imagine that it’s some time in the future and construct five different futures for yourself. Make them distinct. Visualise them in some detail and write down what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. What you like and what you don’t. What here excites you? What fills you with dread?

I heard about this exercise and thought that now was a good time for me to try it out. I found pretty useful, even in the half hour or so that I allowed for it. Here’s what I noticed and realised:

• My life could plausibly turn out in quite different ways over the next five years, even restricting myself to fairly plausible options. This exercise can help to open up ideas and possibilities and I think it’s worth trying hard to have at least one radical, outlier scenario to give you some food for thought. Perhaps allow yourself an ‘if I could wave a magic wand’ option.
• Some futures excited me more than others. I realised that actually doing something different, beyond my current comfort zone, is something I’d like to do.
• All scenarios contained something that I found attractive, some outlet for creativity or growth. I suppose they all contained less nice features too.
• I value some outcomes more than others. For example, achieving objective success in my career is not a good outcome if it prevents me from being an active dad is not an attractive option. This helped me to understand my ‘bottom lines’ a bit better.
• The different scenarios could have important implications for other people such as partners and children

I didn’t spend long on this exercise and it could easily be extended. For example, if you like one of the futures, can you work backwards to work out how to get there? Or can you think about how to incorporate the attractive bits within other scenarios? Or can you assess the likelihood of each scenario, or their resilience to changes beyond your control?

Hit me, with feedback, one more time

I was recently unsuccessful at a job interview and I must confess it hurt. I thought I wouldn’t care that much but I did. It wasn’t the money. In part it was about my external status (others being promoted when I’m not) but most of all it was the blow to my own self perception. Subconsciously I had thought I was good enough and I didn’t like being told that I wasn’t.

I asked for feedback and when it came, it hurt some more. Which is why we all avoid it when things don’t go right. It hurts to be told that we didn’t come up to the standard required, and the reasons why too.

However, genuine and specific feedback, perhaps especially the negative kind, can be worth its weight in gold if we engage with it properly. I’ve told enough people that “there is no failure, only feedback” and now it’s my turn to put this into practice. This is my attempt to do so.

My first difficulty has been attaining some distance. My immediate emotional response to what I was hearing was anger – internally I was saying ‘how can you say that about me? It’s not true!’. Only now, a week after hearing the feedback, am I beginning to process it properly, and think about what it means.

There are at least three things I’ve learned.

First, in terms purely of interview technique, my answers were too long and detailed. This, I confess, was a surprise to me and I wouldn’t thought about how to correct it – and that’s why feedback is so useful. Perhaps I over-prepared and had too much to say. Next time I need to work on the pithy summary.

Second, I needed to demonstrate that I could make tough decisions, and communicate difficult messages to stakeholders. I could probably make better use of examples from my career, but there is probably also a message here to get out and seek that kind of experience, perhaps in a new role.

Third, the interview panel questioned whether my leadership style was sufficiently flexible. I strongly emphasised my coaching approach to management and leadership, and I’m glad that this came across. It is what I believe in. The panel believed that such an approach wasn’t realistic at a higher management grade, or at least not always. It is simply too time intensive. Moreover, some people might not respond to a coaching style, and at some points a more directive approach is likely to be necessary.

I think this third point requires more thought and exploration on my part – and I’ll return to it in a later post.

 

Are you prepared for the unexpected?

Recently I’ve been running scenario-planning sessions with teams to consider a range of plausible futures and what they might mean: the opportunities and threats they present and the resilience of current plans.

It has struck me how useful this approach could be for coaching individuals. Coaches often help clients to think carefully about what the best choice is given what they expect the future to be like. But perhaps we do little to test the resilience of the choice to some of the less likely, but still plausible outcomes.

If the events of the last week have proven everything, it is that the future doesn’t always pan out quite how we expect – or hope!

Is to meet murder? Then design better meetings!

Am I unusual in being excited at the prospect of reading a paper on how to run better meetings? Perhaps I am. But surely they matter – we spend hundreds of hours a year in meetings and complex organisations can’t readily function without them. Yet little serious attention is paid to designing and running them effectively. As with managing your inbox and writing good emails, a large chunk of our working life is seemingly regarded as unimportant and unimprovable.

I disagree. Meetings can be better or worse by design. As Geoff Mulgan’s fascinating (yes) paper points out, too often we fall back on a single standard meeting format regardless of our objective. Sometimes we don’t even make the goal of the meeting explicit (perhaps we can’t remember why it was arranged…).

We regularly fail to counter the most common problems such as fuzzy objectives, or the tendency of meetings to be dominated by the views of the most senior people, the extroverts or simply those who speak first. The paper points out that the very worst designed gatherings are often large conferences, which seem to ignore everything we know about how people learn.

There are tried and tested approaches that can help you run a better meeting. Work out what you are trying to achieve: is it to reach collective agreement, to generate ideas, review what’s happened or simply to share information? Make this goal clear to everyone, and tell them how the meeting will run. If there isn’t a clear purpose for the meeting, cancel it. Some other ideas were less obvious to me, but could be worth a try:

• Hold the meeting standing up, to keep it short
• Make everyone write down their view at the beginning, to counter people simply going along with the first speaker
• Use ‘strategic silence’ to encourage people to digest information and engage seriously with the issue at question
• Modify the order of contributions, with the most junior going first and most senior last
• Force participants to take certain roles (devil’s advocate, or being positive), to ensure different perspectives are considered

There is a herd mentality to counter here and trying something different can take courage. You will have to learn as you go, so adopt a growth mindset. You don’t have to accept meetings as they are: you really can get better at them and people will thank you for it. 

I’ve been inspired by this and have decided I’m going to try regular 10 minute stand-up meetings with my team. I hope this will help us all to understand what each other is up to, and free up the lines of communication.  It’s not what I’ve done before and perhaps it won’ work, but honestly, what’s the worst that can happen?

How to knit organisations together: a networking success story?

Most of us face a quandry: we would like to be better networked, yet the thought of networking fills us with utter dread. This is a problem for our employers too, particularly large organisations which face inherent risks of  silo-isation, communication breakdown and work duplication. Many firms try to tackle these risks by rotating staff, fostering communities of interest that cut across management structures, or organising corporate sports teams or social events.

We tried something different in n my department. Randomised Coffee Trials (RCT) is a simple and informal networking idea shamelessly stolen from Nesta, the innovation agency. RCT works as follows:

• People across the organisation are invited to join (it’s entirely voluntary)
• Every fortnight or month, members are randomly grouped into pairs
• The list of pairings is sent to all members
• Pairs arrange to meet for a chat over coffee
• They talk about whatever they want – usually work, but it could be career plans or what they’d been up to at the weekend.
• That’s it

RCT helps people to build social networks and to find out about their organisation. It promotes collaboration and corporate identity. I set up Whitehall’s first RCT in the Cabinet Office in 2012, and then in HM Treasury when I moved over in 2013. It has spread organically, with at least 7 schemes now operating covering 900 members in total. In HM Treasury, RCT has been running for 46 ‘rounds’ and more than one-fifth of staff are signed up.

RCT may not forge many deep friendships (despite City AM amusingly running a story calling it ‘Treasury Tinder’), but it is effective at creating weak links across traditional boundaries. These links help to bridge the gap between more tightly-knit groups and so help information to flow more effectively across the whole organisation. This insight lies at the heart of the most cited paper in social science, ‘The strength of weak ties‘.

For me, the format’s real strength lies in its contrast to  traditional top-down HR initiatives to promote collaboration, which can often feel forced and artificial to staff, and as a result struggle to obtain buy-in.  RCT is the opposite: informal, entirely voluntary, and grown organically by word of mouth. It is also a doddle to run.

Can we learn good management?

Is management consultancy a phony science? Is corporate strategy a chimera? The case for the prosecution is made forcefully in Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth, our most recent Book Club read. 

The book is part memoir of an escaped consultant and part potted history of the industry, from Frederick Taylor to Jim Peters and Peter Drucker. The case is well made, but I can’t help feeling that Stewart throws the baby out with the bathwater. 

I enjoyed the takedown of overpaid charlatans and I’m sure I’ve met a few in my career. I’m sympathetic to his view that most managers and management gurus overestimate the importance of the corporate leader. Hayek feels relevant here – no single individual is able to oversee, let alone control, the decisions and actions of hundreds or thousands of employees.  Corporate success is the consequence of more than one talented individual. 

Stewart’s also right that many corporate strategy gurus provide little evidence to back up their assertions about what matters. They usually rely on a few carefully chosen case studies which back up their claims.  I loved Richard Rumelt’s “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”, and found his advice pretty compelling, but there was nothing close to a robust testing of his methods.

However, here’s why I think Stewart goes too far. Firms exist and they exist for a reason. Some things can be produced more efficiently within organisations – thanks to specialisation and economies of scale – than they can between a number of of decentralised,atomised  individuals. The optimal size of the firm ebbs and flows with technological progress, the product lifecycle, the power of organised labour and much else. 

In my professional field of growth economics, one of the biggest recent developments has been the empirical research showing a strong correlation between the deployment of management practices and productivity at both firm and management level. Firms that implement more of the standard management procedures (such as setting targets, tracking and then reviewing performance) tend, on average, to have higher productivity. The researchers – who are highly respected within economics – suggests that as much of one-third of the UK’s productivity gap with the US could be explained by inferior corporate management. Finally, they’ve overseen rigorous trials that show a causal effect from implementing management practices to higher productivity.

This work suggests that there are some basic ‘rules’ that will yield better results, on average. This isn’t the same as saying one strategy will work for everyone, but then that’s the nature of social science. The world is a complex place and there are few certainties. But that doesn’t mean that nothing has predictive power. The phrase of one of my tutors has stuck with me:  good economic model is not a true description of the world but rather ‘the lie that reveals the truth’. This is my view with most management advice. It yields insight but it is not everything. Understand the assumptions and handle with care.

This leads to another question. If there are some basic management rules that ‘work’, at least on average, why don’t all firms use them? One answer might lie in the wealth of evidence from behavioural science that individuals often fail to follow the course that promotes their long term best interest. In particular, we tend to put off tough short term decisions. In the Knowing-Doing Gap, Pffefer and Sutton describe convincingly how these individual biases can be reinforced at the corporate level, when systems reward talking rather than doing.

As I was writing this post, an article appeared in the economics journal showing that implementing a basic checklist improved productivity in an auto repair firm. Despite this, workers only implemented the checklist under pressure from management.

10 tips for marathon race day

Sunday is London Marathon day and I’m excited even though I won’t be running. It’s a fabulous occasion and for the runners it is unforgettable, except when it comes to the pain – new psychology research has discovered that we recall the pain as much less intense than we felt it at the time!

I’ve had a fairly mixed bag of marathon races and have made some pretty basic errors, including bad travel planning and disastrous race strategies. Here are a few lessons I’ve picked up on the way, and they are all supported, at least in a suggestive way, by research.  The basic point is that our brains are not at their most rational when we are nervous, excited or completely knackered. So avoid making decisions on marathon day.

1. Plan your journey to the start, and your pre-race routine. You want to be calm before your race, not flustered. Plan what time you are going to get up, what you are going to eat and how you are going to get to the start. And leave yourself plenty of time. I’ve had several races where public transport has been full, or busy and I’ve started panicking about getting to the start. Not a good place to be.
2. Trust the training. Getting anxious before the race won’t help. If you’ve stuck to the training, you are prepared. Trust the training.
3. Surround yourself with positive people. Now is the time for geeing yourself up and adopting a positive mental attitude. Easier said than done of course, but one thing that doesn’t help is being with people, particularly other runners, who are sources of negative energy (‘I haven’t done enough training’).
4. Have a race plan and stick to it. This is the one piece of advice I give to anyone running a marathon for the first time and it is borne of painful experience. In 2009 I didn’t have a real plan and decided to just wing it. In a marathon, this is madness for two reasons. First, the race is so much longer than you usually run that going ‘on feel’ isn’t practical: you’ve no experience to base your intuition on. Second it is very easy to get carried away and go off too fast. There is good evidence that when we are emotionally aroused – nervous and excited as part of 40,000 runners – we are not good at thinking rationally. So work out the time you are going for and stick to the plan. By all means, if you feel fantastic at 20 miles, push on. The consequences of going off too fast are not pleasant. In 2009 I went through halfway in 1.15 and finished in 3.09. The last hour felt like a (deeply unpleasant) out of body experience.
5. Take extra clothes to stay warm and dry. The aim is to feel relaxed before the race and getting cold is not helpful. Take a t-shirt and if necessary gloves and a hat that you can throw away just before the start. If it looks like rain, cut holes in a bin bag and use it to keep dry. You may look silly but it’s worth it!
6. Drink some coffee. Ok, this one is down to personal taste, and it carries risk if you have stomach problems. But the fact is that caffeine is a proven performance enhancer, even for endurance events. It works for me.
7. Know where your supporters will be – it’s easier for you to spot them than for them to spot you. Seeing your friends and family on the way round can be an incredible boost for morale. But if you’ve ever watched the Marathon you will know that it is very hard to spot people because there are so many runners and the depth of the crowd means that you can’t see far ahead. It’s much easier for you as a runner to spot them – provided you know where they’ll be!
8. Plan your after race (or get someone else to). When you finish you will be mentally, physically and probably emotionally drained. You will not be in a good mental state to work out where you and your family should go for lunch. So either plan in advance or get someone else to take care of it.
9. Smile. This one sounds silly but I’ve found it works. There is good research that smiling and happiness are linked in both directions – we can make ourselves feel happier by smiling. So go on, trick yourself.
10. Savour it. Savouring enjoyable events has been shown to improve wellbeing. So take time to enjoy the build up to the race, the crowds in Greenwich and the camradarie before the race. And afterwards, look back and think about what a fantastic job you’ve done.

Now get out there and enjoy it.

How to be tidy

What more could a man ask for from his wife on his birthday than a book entitled ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying’? If you are like me, very little. While I cannot confirm yet whether it is truly life-changing, I certainly loved it and it has given me new ideas and a motivational boost to reorganise my space and clear out some clutter.

The author is a Japanese tidying consultant called Marie Konmar. While she doesn’t explicitly link her ideas to human psychology, it strikes me that much of what she says would be supported by research.

Her most radical argument is that by far the best approach to tidying is as a single ‘big bang’, at least for a given category such as clothing or books. This is a direct contrast to the traditional advice that we ‘do a little everyday’. Even contemplating such a task is rather daunting, but it is probably pragmatic given what we know about building and maintaining habits: namely that it is very difficult to do.  

Once the big tidy is done (about which she has many useful things to say), Marie claims that we simply need to designate a place for everything, and be sure to return things there once we’re done with them. This seems a good way to avoid decision-fatigue. Because taking decisions, however small, is tiring, we can become paralysed by indecision, or simply feel too tired to decide where something belongs. As a result, we end up with general piles of random clutter which makes it harder to find things and is pretty dispiriting to look at. By assigning a single place for everything, or everything of a particular type, we create a simple rule-of-thumb that can enable us to stay tidy without thinking.

I won’t say more about her KonMari method. OK, I can’t resist, here’s one more life-changing nugget: store your folded t-shirts vertically so that you can see them all like the book spines in a book case. The book will appeal to some while others will be horrified by the thought of spending their free time reading it. If you enjoyed David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’, I expect you’ll love this.