Fact: culture stems from manager MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Fact: there are two basic, unconscious attitudes that underlie MAP.

• “TaIk to me, I don’t know everything;” or
• “Shut up and do what I say; my vision, my way.”

Know which you are — brutally honest inside your head.

If you are the first then it should be a critical factor when hiring (easy to confirm when checking references).

If the second applies be prepared for higher attrition.

It’s your choice.

Image credit: Grace Keogh

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

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast/lunch/dinner” has become the byword among the startup community and for good reason.

Culture is what attracts talent; it’s why they stay and when it changes it’s why they leave.

Of course, that refers to good culture.

Many founders buy into prevailing myths, such as programmers live to program and allow 80+ hour weeks to become the norm.

The founder who got trounced on Quora is a good example of problematic values.

1. He calls himself a CEO, but “manages a startup” with one employee.
2. His employee is a new dad and always leaves between 6-7pm, but he also indicates that the work is getting done.
3. He says “it’s hard for a startup that the commitment lasts for work hours only,” but gives no indication that there is founder or any kind of equity on the table.
4. He disregarded the negative feedback and defended his concerns, basically saying ‘you’re all wrong and the problem isn’t me’.

He ignored the research that shows productivity takes a nosedive after 40 hours.

 …employees simply become much less efficient: due to stress, fatigue, and other factors, their maximum efficiency during any given work day may become substantially less than what it was during normal working hours.

I’ve know thousands of programmers over the years and not one has ever claimed that the code written after 12+ hours was particularly usable and code done during all-nighters often wasn’t even salvageable.

Much worse, and predictive of serious problems to come, was his refusal to entertain the idea that he was wrong.  

I especially appreciated the response from Drew Austin, Co-Founder of Augmate, who took time to explain how he had been there/almost done that and thanked his lead engineer for helping him change.

**Special thanks to our lead engineer Alex. If it wasn’t for his patience and ability to communicate, I would have been the one writing this question, instead of responding to it.*

I hope you take time to read the whole thread; it’s a crash course in how to build a great culture.

Because great cultures pay off in real money.

Image credit: HikingArtist

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

I’ve cited Harvard Business School’s James Heskett’s insightful questions and the discussions they foster many times.  

This time he asks if listening is becoming a lost art.

In his new book Quick and Nimble, based on more than 200 interviews, Adam Bryant concludes, that, among other things, managers need to have more “adult conversations” —conversations needed to work through “inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings” —with our direct reports. Such conversations require careful listening.

In the same book he reports that CEOs expressed major concerns about the misuse and overuse of e-mail, something that they feel encourages disputes to escalate more rapidly than if face-to-face conversations had taken place instead. The latter, however, would require people to listen.

As to the concerns about email, I would add abuse to the misuse and overuse, as well as adding texting, instant messaging and, although not as obvious, cell phones. (Nobody is really listening while navigating rush hour, zipping down the highway at 70 or listening to the GPS when they are late to a meeting.)

Listening is both skill and art, but it’s also a revenue generator—just ask Tony Hsieh, whose own willingness to listen helped create a culture that’s the envy of corporations everywhere, while the listening skills he encourages in his CSRs have sold millions of pairs of shoes, or the Asana founders, who built the company on mindfulness, a philosophy grounded in listening.

Incorporating listening into your cultural DNA requires it to be universally manifested starting with you.

If you aren’t willing to put down your phone, discuss stuff in person, facilitate and carefully listen to disagreement then don’t expect anyone else to do so.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I find obituaries fascinating and inevitably learn a great deal reading them.

Although not familiar with Eiji Toyoda, a member of Toyota Motor’s founding family and an architect of its “lean manufacturing,” who died recently at age 100, I am familiar with his results.

In addition to lean manufacturing, he championed the idea for the Prius and, most importantly, the concept of kaizen.

Kaizen is the philosophy that underlies Toyoda’s culture and is responsible for its amazing decades-long growth and success.

…“kaizen,” a commitment to continuous improvements suggested by the workers themselves, and just-in-time production, a tireless effort to eliminate waste. Those ideas became a core part of what came to be called the Toyota Production System and a corporate ethos known as the Toyota Way.

I’ve heard the concept discussed by hundreds of managers over the years and heard many say that it didn’t work when they or their company tried it.

Kaizen reaps only modest success or fails outright in many companies for the same reason that consultants are hired.

Much of American management prefers its solutions and improvements in the form of slickly designed reports and impressive PowerPoint presentations from outside the company and that attitude seems to increase with rank.

Unlike Toyoda and its ilk, where, sans monetary rewards or stock options, workers strive to improve both products and processes.

“One of the features of the Japanese workers is that they use their brains as well as their hands,” Eiji Toyoda said in an interview with the author Masaaki Imai for the 1986 book “Kaizen.” “Our workers provide 1.5 million suggestions a year, and 95 percent of them are put to practical use. There is an almost tangible concern for improvement in the air at Toyota.”

Too often, when US companies invite suggestions from throughout their ranks, they implement only a small number of them and those usually come from “recognized” stars.

That approach/attitude does, however, create jobs by giving rise to an entire industry of high-earning consultants dedicated to teaching management how to “increase employee engagement.”

I wonder if one of the slides is about listening to everyone and then using the ideas.

Image credit: Toyota, 2000GT.net via Japanese Nostalgic Car

An executive once asked me what the single most import thing he should do and how best to do it.
I told him the answer was simple and the key to execution was found in an anagram of the act.
Can you guess the action and anagram?
The action is to LISTEN.
The anagram is SILENT.
The first is impossible without doing the second.
Flickr image credit: RebeccaBarray

If you are a manager at any level I suggest you take time to read the results of research on managing from the London School of Economics.

“…concentrate on putting into practice things that we know work but somehow never do — less Management 2.0, more making Management 1.0 work properly. At least on the face of it, a surprising amount can be altered for the better, with little investment and to significant effect. (…) focus on why we don’t put into practice principles of good management that aren’t rocket science and have been known about for years.”

Management by walking around, spending time with your team; listening; coaching; cross-training—definitely not rocket science!

Your approach need not be as tightly structured as described in the article, because that was done in order to rigorously evaluate and measure the results for publication.

Basically the study proves what the best managers already know and practice—it’s people that make the difference and the difference is measurable.

You can achieve similar results in your group, whether your company uses the same approach or not.

Set your own goal to practice Management 1.0 actions consistently and authentically.

Then (as Nike says) just do it.

Flickr image credit: Ol.v!er [H2vPk]

Ask most people if they hear people or listen to them and they’ll say they listen.

But if you are checking email, doing stuff on your smart phone; thinking about dinner, plotting a date with the hot guy/gal you chatted with while getting your morning coffee, listening to the conversation at the next table or any of a myriad of other things then you aren’t listening.

The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention.

Attention means you focus on the person talking.

Focus involves your eyes, ears and mind,

Focus does not include thinking about and formulating your reply based on the first part of what is said.

This is especially important if you are a boss.

Think of listening as an investment in your people that carries a high return.

Your ROI comes in the form of improved productivity, increased innovation and greater loyalty.

And the only cost is a little self-discipline.

What a deal.

Flickr image credit: Rich Anderson

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

It may sound like complete heresy, but entrepreneurs rarely build companies—they found them.

Founding a company requires a product vision and enough passion to draw a few others to the cause.

Building a company in the 21^st Century requires the ability to both lead and manage.

“Increasingly, the people who are the most effective are those who essentially are both managers and leaders.” –HBS professor David Thomas

Today’s knowledge workers, especially the type that gravitate to and succeed at startups, demand both leadership and management skills from those in charge.

And the key attribute is communication.

“Communication is the real work of leadership. Great leaders spend the bulk of their time communicating, and they know how to employ all three of Aristotle’s rhetorical elements.” –Nitin Nohria, Dean, Harvard Business School.

The best communicators are also the best listeners; moreover, they listen to everyone not just those in certain positions or at X level and above.

But listening and communicating require time and energy and many entrepreneurs are too busy.

They are company founders, not company builders.

Which are you?

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Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

Reams have been written extolling the virtues of listening.

Consultants and coaches spend hours convincing management to listen to their customers and employees.

Therapists and relationship coaches advocate listening as the foundation of building or healing a marriage.

Psychologists and experts admonish parents to listen to their kids.

But did you know that the secret of listening is found in its letters.

‘Listen’ contains the same letters as ‘silent’, which is logical since you can’t do one without the other!

Image credit: ky_olsen on flickr

See all mY generation posts here.