I said yesterday I’d provide a simple way to get back in sync with your people.

It’s not rocket science and certainly not new.

In fact, I’ve been telling managers for decades that if they want to know what someone thinks or wants to ask, instead of assuming or “figuring it out.”

They rarely listen, so I thought that if it came from Dan Amos, chairman and chief executive of Aflac, the giant insurance company it would carry more weight.

Aflac chief Amos admits his solution sounds obvious: If you want to know what would keep someone from quitting, ask. “It sounds like common sense, but not many companies really do it.”

I’ve also been saying that money is around five on most people’s list; making a difference, recognition, challenge and opportunities to learn and grow come first.

Employers often assume, Amos says, that everyone will just want more money. But most people’s wish lists are more complicated — and more realistic — than that. Amos started polling Aflac’s employees when he became CEO in 1990. The top requests: More recognition for their work and day care for their kids.

Many companies survey their people.

The difference is that Amos acts on the results of the survey—both requests were implemented — not just in the home office, but across the country (read the article).

Amos says that “the survey rules” and the proof is found in ease of recruiting and turnover numbers.

That willingness to listen has helped Aflac — the only insurance company to show up in Fortune’s Best Companies ranking for 13 years running — to successfully recruit talented women from all over the U.S. and from as far away as India.

It also, apparently, builds loyalty: Aflac’s annual employee turnover is pretty close to zero.

Flickr image credit: Aflac

Just as people are hard wired to respond to attractiveness they harbor other biases.

And just as the bias for attractiveness is anthropological, not biological, so are other biases.

Biases are fueled by assumptions, which are rarely logical—or conscious.

Google, along with most of tech, is rife with biases—both pro and con.

The idea of unconscious bias came to the attention of Google HR boss Laszlo Bock via a story in the New York Times about the biases among American university science professors regarding the difference in competency between female and male students (the women were ranked as less competent).

Unconscious bias, the sometimes useful tendency to make snap judgments (that subway car is empty for a reason), guides us into unexamined bigotry (she’s a woman, not a leader). 

Google being Google they approached the situation using a combination of education—not just for executives and managers, but for everybody—

plus four specific steps to identify and deal with unconscious bias;

• Gather facts.
• Create a structure for making decisions.
• Be mindful of subtle cues.
• Foster awareness. Hold yourself — and your colleagues — accountable.

Google’s efforts are driven by competitiveness, as opposed to political correctness.

“If we have an employee base that reflects our user base, we are going to better understand the needs of people all over the world,” said Brian Welle, the researcher in charge of Google’s diversity training workshops. “Having people with a different worldview and different ways of solving problems gives you the raw materials to be more innovative and to be able to solve problems that nobody has asked before.”

Flickr credit: Don Graham | YouTube credit: Life at Google

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Have you defined your market?

Do you know what it takes to reach your market?

Who do you talk to when your market doesn’t respond?

That’s the problem that edX, a consortium started by MIT and Harvard University to develop free online courses, faced and here is what they found.

Though edX aimed to reach the world, its initial courses were designed for the people professors at MIT and Ivy-caliber partners know best—the ultraqualified students they’re accustomed to teaching in their hallowed halls.

edX needed to learn why they weren’t reaching their target market, since it there was no question of the need.

And learn they did, but not from the brainpower already involved in the project.

They learned from a 15 year-old user from Mongolia who aced the course in spite of the way the experts designed it (it’s been changed).

The edX team and contributors show the error in looking to ‘stars’ and assuming what they say/do is the best approach.

While Battushig Myanganbayar is a genius, one of the best skills I offer clients is my ignorance of their project, but they will literally fight to forcibly educate me about it.

But it is ignorance that allows me to ask the question-sans-assumptions that light up inconsistencies, missing pieces, and other customer turnoffs.

The Lean approach pushes founders to talk to their market early and often, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the main market.

Often you can learn more talking to outliers, both inside and outside the company, than you can from the majority and the experts.

Image credit: HikingArtist

When chatting over dinner the conversation often takes on a more philosophical turn; this happened recently in a discussion of good places to work.

One mid-level manager commented wistfully that while he understood that business was a game, he wished it could be a bit more gentlemanly—like chess.

While we understood what he meant, the example was a source of amusement.   

Chess is the last game to use as an example of function over dysfunction.

The latest intrigue revolves around corruption allegations by the two candidates for the federation’s presidency, Garry Kasparov, the former champion and Russian opposition figure, and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the incumbent president and self-described space-alien abductee.

Such charges would normally hardly raise an eyebrow in the world of organized chess, which has been rife with rumors of corruption for decades.

This time there are smoking guns, although each side claims theirs is being misinterpreted.

As Lady Macduff said, “things are not always as they seem,” but, at times, we all attribute certain qualities or abilities based on assumptions.

We think of chess being a scholar’s game and scholars are usually gentlemen, therefore the world of chess must lack the typical nasty interactions of other human organizations.

An assumption that is obviously false—as most assumptions usually are.

Flickr image credit: M.J. Ambriola

Do you live in Silicon Valley or one of the Silicon clones (Alley, Forest, etc.)?

Do you focus your early marketing efforts on the tech world of which you are a part?

If so, you may be in for a shock or should I say rude awakening?

The problem is that that market is not the world and much of the “common wisdom” regarding early adopters is misleading or just plain wrong.

Common wisdom says that blacks are not early adopters or a prime target market. But according to Tristan Walker, who helped build Foursquare and was entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, that so-called wisdom is way off base.

“The demographic is starved for a company that cares about it,” he said, noting that while blacks tend to be among the early adopters and consumers of social technologies, it is rare for companies to acknowledge that or to market to them directly.

Common wisdom would expect techies to be the perfect audience for Aarthi Ramamurthy’s service that lets people try out high-end tech gear before purchasing it, but they weren’t.

“I thought it would be Google and Facebook employees with disposable income,” she said. But as it turns out, she added, it’s the “middle of the country that is very interested” in the service. (…) but much of the early adoption of its business occurred in states like Texas and Idaho.

Common wisdom says a company that sends customers boxes of personally tailored clothing would resonate with fashionistas in urban areas, but Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, found her service just as hot not only in less urban areas, but also with an unexpected customer.

“But the service was received almost as well by women in Wyoming, Alabama and Minnesota (…) Ms. Lake said she had expected her market to be busy women in their 20s and 30s who have no time to shop but want nice clothes for brunches and engagement parties. “But it turns out that concept really resonated with moms and people who were busy with their kids and families,” she said.

Common wisdom says that if you spend two years developing a product with the help and input of a specific audience they should be your customers, but that’s not always true.

The Mira Medicine Team…spent years building their first tool MS Bioscreen, which was developed for the physicians at the UCSF Dept of Neurology. So they naturally believed that their first customers would be neurologists. [They weren’t] 70 customers later they are no longer talking to neurologists.

Here are the three critical take-aways—

• Common wisdom is often wrong.
• Niches are often larger than they appear.
• ‘Should’ is a bad assumption and never a guarantee.

Flickr image credit: Chris Potter

Research by two economists at Kellogg Turned up an interesting insight.

“…CEOs with a military background are much less likely to engage in corporate fraud compared to their civilian-only peers—up to 70% less likely, in fact.”

The problem, to my way of thinking, is that those studied came from a different military culture than the current one.

“…biographical data on chief executives from the 800 largest US firms each year from 1980 and 1991 and from approximately 1500 publicly traded US firms from 1992 to 2006.

The current military is a bit different than the one they were a part of; you might even say it’s not your father’s military any more, let alone your grandfather’s.

The Air Force cheating and drug scandals come at a time when a large number of senior officers in other branches of the military have been investigated, penalized or fired in connection with allegations of sexual improprieties, sexual violence, financial mismanagement or poor judgment.

None of this means you should avoid hiring ex-military, since cheating is just as, if not more, prevalent in the civilian population.

What it means is that you should interview everyone, at every level, carefully and not make assumptions based on generalizations or previous positions.

Flickr image credit: Mike Baird

No question about it, I am a Malcolm Gladwell fan and his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, sounds fascinating.

I can’t comment further, since I haven’t had a chance to read it, but two points from this interview stood out among many others.

First, I have always believed the road to Hell was paved with bad assumptions and Gladwell seems to see that also.

“We are misled by the narrowness of our assumptions about what constitutes an advantage in any given situation.”

Second, his comments regarding leaders and managers score a perfect bulls-eye, as do his thoughts on why hiring a good fit is so difficult.

I realize now that an effective leader or manager can come in a virtually infinite number of forms. I have way more respect for the heterogeneity of excellence. That took a long time because it is so tempting to try and paint a very specific picture of what you think effective leadership is or what an effective organization looks like. The older I get and the more I see, I realize high performers of one sort or another have certain things in common. But they are almost more distinguished by what they don’t have in common than what they do.

Understanding fit is a much more important issue than defining the characteristics of excellence — understanding the combination of individual and organization and why at different points in your life cycle you might want a very, very different kind of person. The purest example of this is in sports, where the notion of fit between the athletes that you have and the coach that you hire is only occasionally considered. You will read that they brought in a coach whose plotting style is ill-suited to the athletes that he has. And then you wonder: Why did they bring in that coach? Why do a plotting style if no one on your team wants to play the plotting style? It is interesting how hard that notion is. Maybe it’s because it renders the task of defining what you want a lot more complicated, and we would rather not deal with that.

Below is the video interview or, if you don’t have time to watch, you can read the edited transcript.

I had a solid dose of déjà vue when I read yet another article about the cancellation of Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, but this one from a different angle.

What about all the single people? And all the people without kids? We need to stop acting like they’re not part of the work-life conversation.

Some things never change.

I never married and after five decades in and around the workplace I find it dispiriting that almost nothing has changed.

The original version (before my time) was “Jim won’t mind, because he’s single”; the great improvement is now it’s “Jim or Judy won’t mind, because s/he’s single.”

Back then companies/managers assumed that singles were easy to relocate, because they didn’t own homes and moving costs would be minimal, since singles don’t own furniture or much stuff.

There are plenty of managers who still think that way.

Males were given hiring preference, because “they had families to support,” and while it may be 2013, that attitude still exists, however deeply buried.

Bias.

Unconscious or not, it has the power to taint, damage and even destroy anything/everything.

Bias drives homophily, not just in people, but skills; is grounded in assumptions and negates the diversity that leads to success.

Bias can lay waste to your culture and, in doing so, destroy your company.

Bias is a four letter word.

Flickr image credit: Jim Linwood

You know that old saying, ‘when in Rome do as the Romans’?

As a boss you need to apply that idea to all your communications.

Good communications start with being sure that you and whoever you are talking to are speaking the same language.

Everybody has a mental model through which they hear, so the meaning of what they hear may have little to nothing to do with what was actually said.

One of the most common errors is the assumption the person to whom you are talking has the same model as you.

An even larger error is the assumption, especially if you’re the boss, it’s your subordinate’s (or kid’s) responsibility to speak your language when, in fact, it is the higher ranking person’s responsibility to speak theirs.

There are things you can do to make sure that you are understood.

They aren’t rocket science, but you need to remember to do it.

• Start by carefully explaining your model and your assumptions when giving direction;
• give your people clear, complete information on the subject (what you want done, project outlines, etc.,) at the start, so they don’t to have to keep asking for more; and then
• check to be sure that they not only heard, but understood what you meant—not what they thought you meant.

Do it today, do it all the time; it may feel a bit awkward at first, but eventually it’ll become second nature.

Your payback will come in rising productivity, more motivated people, and lower turnover—all positively affecting your personal bottom line.

Flickr image credit: Christopher Reilly

I frequently write about the importance of self-awareness, knowing yourself, understanding your MAP  and looking in the mirror for solutions when problems arise, instead of assuming the cause and its fix are external.

In the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School started researching the effect of obstacles on organizations and people and found two distinct responses.

Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning — an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.

LESS common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions.

While finding the answers within, instead of without, is the subject of a new book, it will take more than a book about high achievers to induce people to look inside first instead of as a last resort.

Why is looking inside so difficult for most people?

Probably because it requires an objective, no-holds-barred, nothing-is-sacred look at every opinion, thought and assumption we have.

It is a concentrated effort that can’t be done while multitasking or in-between games of Angry Birds.

In many ways this kind of intense self-assessment plays against current social norms and, for many, even how they were raised.

So the question becomes, is the gain worth the pain?

It is if what you really want are solutions to problems and success in your endeavors.

Flickr image credit: Siri Spjelkavik