The power of thanks

This story is going to be very short. After being some moments stopped by the red traffic light, the queue of cars started moving. I was about tenth in the line, so I didn’t have a good view of the next corner, but it seemed most of the cars were turning left, as it was my intention. When I was near to turn, I stopped to let the walking people cross the street. Then, something weird happened: at the same time I received an insult from the car behind me and from one of the persons I was giving pass to cross the street. The first one argued that he was going to miss the green light and would have to wait, and the pedestrian because nobody before let him cross.  I can not say they pissed me off, but it was a bitter time for me.

I have talked about people that get mad because other goes by the rules, so the driver behind me, even with no right, can be understood. The one I really don’t understand is the pedestrian’s behavior.

I will try to re enact the situation from his point of view: I am a pedestrian trying to cross the street, a lot of cars turn the corner in front of me, no one let me cross until one of the follows the rules and give priority to crossing people. The driver let me cross and, instead of “thank you”, I curse him because of the other’s actions.

Everyone expects the people follow the rules and obbey the laws. Every manager expects that a task, given to the people that should do it, will be performed in time and with the right amount of quality. But that person, even if he knows that he only followed the rules, expects at least a “thank you”. And what he really doesn’t expect is that you complain to him because others in his “class” don’t react the same way.

Thank you is powerful. Use it a lot, even if the one you are thanking for just did what he should.

Regards,

    Diego :D

Bringing down your image

I was going to my parents home, using the highway, as I mentioned in other blog entry. I was ahead of my schedule, so I was not hurry as other times; that means I was on the second or third lane, out of six. A small truck started to get near me, and the driver did not slow down until he was at no more than about two meters from me. Going at more than 60 mph, this was too close, for me and for everyone. There was almost no traffic, but the driver decided that I must move to another lane, instead of he moving to the left lane to overpass me. He put my kids and myself on danger, and really pissed me off.

It was a high stress moment. I reacted very bad and cursed the driver even with the kids in the car. After a while, having left the highway, I calmed down and, strangely, I remembered the phone number written in the front of the truck. I called and described my point, and the company told me they would talk to the driver. And there is more: I remembered the name of the company. From that moment, a company I will never use or recomend, even after the promise they made to me.

The image is a powerful but ephemeral concept. You can be a model of good behavior for years, and a small mistake is enough to go back to square one.

Companies, specially those who address a big portion of the population, seek, and need, acceptance of the society. They use a lot of means to achieve it, but the one of the first ones is showing the people that they are also part of the society. That includes that they will not do to the others what they do not like done to them.

You can not buy image. Image is constructed around a lot of aspects, some very concise and some than can be seen in an indirect form, but the number of repetitions is far larger than the others. In the case I mentioned at the beginning, an action from an employee affected the image of that company so negatively in my mind, that I will hardly choose that company in the event I need their services. The act was an employee reaction in the street, or with a client, or with a future client, an act that repeats a lot of times per day per employee. It is named as the “truth moment” in the theory: the moment an employee meets a client.

It is not enough to advertise, demonstrate civic responsibility, do donations or implement social help plans; if your employees are not aligned with the social responsibility that the company is claiming for, the image is negatively affected. It is like a policeman dressed in his uniform not acting in a robbery because he is not in service; just because he is dressing the uniform, he is seen as a policeman and must act like it is expected. In terms of image, one must be completely coherent. If a person is associated with your company by his uniform or by the tools he is working with, including the car he is driving, being him or not your employee, being or not in working hours, can affect the image of the whole company. It can be a positive or negative effect, but we all know that is more easy to see and spread the word about a negative action than a positive one. Is a manager responsibility to teach the team how to behave if they are seen as employees of the company.

As you can see, it is not enough to train the “Customer care” employees in the way they must behave in the name of the company. In fact, anyone in the company that talks on behalf of his employer can be seen as a representant of the company, and his word can influence people to construct, or destroy, the image they have about the company. Every little act counts.

See you around. Regards,

    Diego :D

Commitments

I was going to my parents home last weekend. I use to take the highway more because the fact that it us more secure than for being the speediest way to get there. About halfway, the traffic slowed down and what use to be a half an hour trip became an hour and a half. The traffic jam hadn’t ended when I left the highway, and there was no kind of indication nor alternatives signalled by the highway operator, but I must pay the toll charge anyway. They did not comply with their obligations, nor for the commitment of “free toll if delayed more than x minutes”. Off course, the rest of my family was taking the dessert at the time I arrived, ans I had to lunch alone the “very very well done” barbecue… I was not pissed off, but very dissapointed.

You and me rely on assumptions all the time. Those are based on some tacit and some explicit commitments from other people we interact all the time. It would be very ineffective if we don’t do it that way. Just imagine calling the bus company before leaving home everyday to ask if the bus service is working, just to confirm. Or checking the voltage on the wall before connecting any device.
Sadly, not all the commitments are made with the same level of responsibility or thought. Some people really work to accomplish their promises, some don’t think about what they are compromising for and make promises not taking into account if they have or don’t have to comply them.

Even some promises can be categorized as “white lies”, mainly because nobody plans to honor them, but they are, at least apparently, harmless. Or it can be a plain lie, period.

Everyday I rely on the people working with me doing their chores at a professional level. I supervise some of the projects personally if they have some impact on other areas, and leader a small number of them that can have a major impact in cross company areas or from a bunch to all the clients. The order of importance is based on the impact over others, as the others use my commitments to do promises to third parties and the impact can multiply by a big number.

Not going to very big commitments, we usually act and organize our lives, and l am talking now about the work life, around the promises of our coworkers, providers and clients. Getting on time to meetings, sending the email with the information we promised or give our people the free day we offered when we needed them to work very late that “budget night” last month are just very quick and dirty examples. Some of them will trigger new actions, some of them will build confidence about our word and honor and, probably, give us the opportunity of giving out very well backed up promises in the future.

I am tempted to promise you I will see you soon, but it is impossible to honor that promise.

Regards,

    Diego :D

Signals

I know that some day I will learn; in the meantime, I will continue making this kind of mistakes and collecting stories to share with you…

I was driving in a street and, having to turn right next corner, I positioned myself on the righmost lane. Some meters before the crossing the car ahead of me stopped without a warning, the driver step out the car and started to help his children out of it, there, stopped in the middle of the street. He was there three or four minutes during which I haven’t had a chance to change lanes to follow my way. I ended up really pissed off.

It is probably not the best example of what we are teached about signalling, but I think it applies to the concept. We face everyday situations like that one. We want to do something and we depend on the action or inaction if someone else to be allowed to do our movement. In my “story of the day”, if only the driver just turned on the emergency lights announcing his intention to stop, I wouldn’t changed my lane and continued my way without a problem.

We use to apply the term “signalling” to strategic decisions about competition moves, but it can be used more widely. For example, when someone from our team wants to do something we know it will be of negative impact in someone else, but we decide to silently let him do it and later stop him in the middle of the move, we fail to signal him. You can’t stop in the air after jumping; if you didn’t wanted me jumping, signal me before starting. The sooner the better.

We do it everyday; a look to let him pass ahead of me into the elevator, an email to warn about the effect a delay in the project will have in the company’s results, or simply the distribution of a new edition of the Code of Ethics of the company, can be an effective signal for those who are looking for them. Off course, some people need bigger signals than others, so feedback is necessary to be sure everyone understood the warning.

Going further, the same idea applies to our people’s careers. We can signal our teams if they can grow in other areas or if they can’t grow anymore in the company, for example, or if they must change some attitude or get a new skill to continue working with us; they can take a different decision path if only know that someone or something ahead will stop them.

From very small and almost insignificant situations, to very important ones, even to the point that it can change the life of someone, we are responsible if we could signal the other part and we fail to do it. Battles and wars have been won without human losses, just with the right amount of signals. And it is also our responsibility to understand the signals from the other parts. It is useless, or even harmful to ourselves, to ignore them.

I must stop writing right now. I think some is trying to yell me something, but I can not hearing him because the fire alarm is too loud.

Regards,

Diego :D

The phantom menace

I arranged to pick up my kids at school, so there I was, trying to park in the very car-crowded blocks around it. I picked an apparent empty place 50 meters ahead and, when getting there, it was the front of a building in construction stage. The space was “reserved” for the trucks delivering work materials the next morning, but it is reserved from the afternoon of the previous day by means of rests of iron bars and rocks on the sidewalk very near the border of the street. Anyone who dares to park there, can end with deep marks in the paint of the car. They really piss me off.

Is kind of a threat, tacit but it is a threat. Another everyday example: there are some areas in the city that have free parking. During special events, some people start to “help” the drivers to park, given the scarce spaces, and offer to “take care” of the car. They have no kind of identification, nor allowance from the government to do that, so it is up to you to give them money or not. But you know what can happen you don’t give them money: your car can be the only one in blocks with the windshell broken, the music equipment stolen and have a very nice “human product” gift in the front seat.

There are some tacit threats in your private life, as the previous examples, and some in your work everyday. You give a tip to the waiter of your everyday coffee store even if you have not had a good service, just to be sure your next coffee will be just coffee, and you laugh at a gross joke from your boss about a non-present person just to be part of the “team”. There is something in common to all the examples: a risk to loss something; it can be your position, your car, your health or your secrets, you fear to loose something.

There is a darker view to this kind of situations, and is the fact that there are people that take into account your fears. It is a group of people for who the threatening is a common situation, almost a way of life. Some of them are easy to nullify, but others are not so easy. The latters are the people that have someone or something that “protects” them; thay have power, or they are protected by someone who has it, or maybe just a very developed ability.

The fear directs people to do things that are very near to the irrational. Michael Jensen, creator of the REMM model, describes those kind of behaviors as “Pain avoidance” model, in contrast to the “Resourceful, economical and maximizer”, where people start to act to diminish the pain in that moment, not taking into account the future. You pay for the “protection” of your car, but that only generates a feedback loop that attracts more people to “aid” you to park.

The examples apply to the work, off course. If a Manager ask an employee to end certain “very urgent task” very near the annual revision date, it is very likely that he will accept the task, even when he knows for certain that it is impossible to end it in the timeframe imposed by his boss. Or the fear to signal a bad action of a coworker because you can be seen as a “non team working” by the rest of the team.

Are those real threats?  There is no blackmail, no verbal or written menace, just the feeling of the “victim” that there can be consequences. It is even very difficult to do a formal accusation, not because the probable revenge, but because there is no proof.

As I mentioned earlier, some people use this behavior in their own benefit. They have mastered in the art of psicological menace. They are law offenders in the street; at work, it is called mobbing. As managers, we are responsible of our employees. It is our job to know the mobbers and ask them to stop.

There is a thin line between “stressing” the team and threating it. The power of the words is huge; use them to good. Respect your team’s values and yours, not doing to others what is wrong if being done to you. At the end of the day, we all want to go home happy about the day and want to return happy tomorroy.

See you. Regards,

    Diego :D

 

 

 

The sting (Just in time)

I was driving in a shallow street, only three lanes wide, with the righmost allowed to park, so there were only two free for the cars. There was not too much traffic, but enough to fill both free lanes all the way. Suddenly everything started to slowdown a lot, almost to a full stop. After some minutes at near zero speed, there was the answer: a person parked ok the left; a taxi driver to be precise and he was with the emergency yellow lights turned on. He was for sure waiting for his passenger; in fact, we all were waiting for his passenger. Both of them, taxi driver and passenger, pissed me off.

I can assure, almost without a minor chance of a mistake, that there is in the world no city designed to support the number of vehicles in its streets in this days. But a lot of people, I assume, work everyday to redesign the traffic flows so the city, at least, doesn’t colapse. And is a very difficult task; and I know there are situations where people not doing his chores can ruin everything. Like the taxi driver and the delayed passenger.

This is a world of performance. There is so much distributed knowledge and is so easy to get that knowledge, that the competitive advantages a company can have over others will be effective only if they are doing their best in the most basic and commoditized areas. So, companies focus and spend a lot of time designing, redesigning and optimizing their processes, as the traffic experts do for the cities (I am not happy with the job done by the latters, but is not the point in this post). The production processes are so optimized that everything must go very smoothly; just in time, to add some theory. If something happens, it can crash the whole process.

I remember a professor in my last year in high school: he asked our team to design a platform that can be used to transport a car over it. When we where done, the question was: With what tolerance did you designed it? We asked back: Tolerance? And here comes the expert’s answer (the professor): did you expect that something four meters long will be built up to the millimeter? 

Today, some processes are build so tight, that a minor delay in one area can crash it completely. It can be human factor or mechanical or external, but there will be one. The responsibility of the process designer is not to have a backup for every situation, but to know all the significant situations that can occur and to have the impact evaluated for each instance, and to implement workarounds for those considered important enough. For the taxi driver example, probably the construction of booths where the taxis can stop to wait for a passenger will be enough to keep the rest of the traffic flowing smoothly. Another example: remember the movie The Sting? One of my favorites. The planner (Henry) decided to put a protection on a critical part of the plan (Johnny); he really didn’t know if it was going to be necessary, but the risk was so high that it paid by itself.

By the way: don’t forget to put the impact on the people, being them the company’s employees or the citizens affected, when evaluating the consequences. They are not just spectators; they area also your clients and investors, the people you live with. You do it everyday (add tolerance) when you add some minutes to the time you expect will spend for going from here to there to be sure you arrive on time. It is suboptimal for sure if you only take your time as the important factor in the equation, but is the correct one when you add the respect for the others as one of the factors. In a production process, you will probably size for 11 units if it is very critical to obtain 10; again, is suboptimal, but probably will be worst if something in the process fails and you can have only 8 o 9 units of output.

I am leaving; I have thirty seconds to get to a meeting two floors from here. I should take the stairs, just in case someone stops the elevator to chat with a person in the lobby…

Regards,

    Diego :D

 

The constant gardener

First of all, I tell you that one of the central ideas is not mine, but from a professor at a University where I teach when I have time, Universidad del CEMA.

Again, I will start with a driving example. It happens that I found a lot of examples while driving, probably because I have plenty of time to think about what is happening around me.

In Buenos Aires the transit is chaotic. I know: there are cities worse than mine in that aspect, but I live here and the example applies very well to other sites. I remember hearing the thoughts of an actor visiting BA, when the reporter asked about his feelings on this city. He said ‘I don’t know why you bother to paint the lines on the street, nobody cares!’. I agree. Almost nobody cares, but it is enough that only a few percentage do not care to generate this chaos.

That is what characterizes the transit in BA: there are more than a few drivers that don’t respect the laws. Probably is only a matter of obtaining benefits over the rest of the “group”, as I wrote in a former comment (A beautiful mind), but I am falling short if assigning all the responsability to sellfishness.

In my country die more than 20 people per day because of transit accidents. Not all of them are because the same problem, but I assign a very big number of them to one common cause: there are insufficient punishment for breaking the laws.

In the movie “The constant gardener”, some people were killed because they started to sniff around a pharmaceutical company testing new drugs in people at a country in Africa. The risk of punishment there for any of the crimes (the killing of some main characters and the killing of the africans who were using the drugs) was so low, that there was no incentive to act differently. Before anyone yell, of course it depends on your own values, way before the incentives (that will be matter of another blog entry).

The worst punishment one can receive because killing someone in an accident (providing it is not demonstrated that it was deliberate) is the indemnization you must pay in a civilian trial. And it is here where I am using the ideas from the paper: that amount is a number of pesos (my country’s currency) calculated based on the worth of the live of that person, which happens to be so low that the incentive to do the right thing is almost null. But even that situation have diminished risks under some circumstances, if you are a person with power, connections or lack of repentance.

As before, I will try to connect this to the attitudes at a job or in the society.

I live in a regulated world, where I supposedly receive benefits, provided I obey some rules. At the job, I am given a pay for doing some tasks according to some rules. If I don’t perform the tasks or do them against the rules, I should not receive the pay. Sorry to say this, but that applies only to some people and not to others. Some people know that the risk of not receiving the pay, or even being fired, is extremely low under some very known circumstances: if they are in a certain position (the power position), if they have a boss or a union that protects them (the right connections) or if their behavior was deliberate to benefit some person (lack of repentance) who can protect them, even hurting others.

There must be a balanced amount of prize and punishment, and both must be applied with the same rules for everyone. To live in a society or to work in a company means you are part of the system, there are a lot of people that depend on you doing the things you ought to and according to certain rules. You can not go through the live crashing people with your car just because you know nobody can punish you; in any moment, someone can crash you, knowing that he will not be pursued for doing it.

See you soon.

Diego :D

The godfather

I was in a hurry while driving (very frequent for me, mainly because I hate driving), but going by the rules, as always. I was going on the lane next to the leftmost because I needed to follow straight, but a bus
made me stop: he wanted to turn right, and was left of me. I don’t want to discuss how he got there given that the buses must travel on the two rightmost lanes, but instead about his attitude: he started to turn right, and he didn’t care about anybody else. He has the most powerful weapon and knows that his liability was almost null; neither he must pay for the damages he could incurr in his vehicle nor mine, nor even worry about a trial, because the owners of those companies are very well connected and can threat anyone who try to get justice. He had power and know he can use it, and he did. He pissed me off.

Reading again my own words, I discover two of the main reasons why a person uses what he thinks is power: he assumes there is no risk (he is not paying for the consequences for the others and for the assets he is
managing) and there is a very small chance that anyone will start an action against him because he is sorrounded by people like himself that will protect him.

There is only one side on his equation: himself. The harm that can be done to the others doesn’t count. Regretfully, these people use to be seen as very succesful, since they usually get very good results to
the eyes of their peers.

Companies used to reward very high the results oriented people in the past. But times changed; some very important people loose their jobs or even went to jail in known cases of threatening, sexual harassment or
mobbing, because the companies and government started to understand that not only the results matters, but also the means by which they were obtained. You can’t go through life getting what you want from
your neighbours just because you wanted it. The governments started to write laws against some damages that were not taken into account before, like the time the damaged people loose to get justice or the
psicological consequences of the actions; the companies started almost the same kind of actions, and started to evaluate people based in a mix of attitudes (competencies) and not only on results.

I am not against powerful people or getting power, but in the way the power is used. It is very different to use the power to get knowledge than is to use it to force people to your will, as a leader is different than a dictator, even when a lot of people is under his command in both situations. Even the first situation is border to the law (for example, if you used privileged information obtained by means of your power position), but to manipulate people’s will is not only criminal, but also shameful.

One point for those who think are powerful enough to ignore the law aspects: there is a very big chance that someone have power because someone else gave him that power, and that means that person is more powerful than the former, so he can take the power away from him in any moment. Is like natural numbers: there is always a number bigger than the one you thought about.

What this “naked” people will have in that case, is what they have constructed, without the faked environment. Did them make friends or just accomplices in their “powerful” life?

Anyone has a Sherman tank to replace my car?

See you soon. Regards,

    Diego :D

Out for lunch

Going home last night, the traffic was insanely congested. It was not very late, but it was not rush hour. After about 15 blocks, there is the reason: a public services company made a hole in the avenue, blocking more than half of it. I am sure the problem they have justify the hole, but there was nobody working, and it seemed that there would be no one working until the next day. And that, friends, pisses me off.

I know: everybody have the right to go to take lunch during work hours, and also have the right to rest, be it at night or when it was arranged with the employeer. And there would be no exceptions, but there is a phrase that characterizes the roman law principles: your rights are delimited by the rights of the others. This company, as a lot of others in the city, was causing a traffic congestion, very big traffic congestion, limiting my right to take rest. Should the workers of this company work all night? I think they should; not the same workers, but they shoud have shifts to work all night and all day to reduce the time to solve the problem, even during lunch hours.

Just picture in your mind a neural surgeon, in the middle of a surgery, saying all the people around ‘OK, i am going to take some lunch’ and leaving the surgical room. It is also wrong if that surgeon must work 10 or 12 hours without stopping. He must have a backup. It is very difficult to have that backup if you are the specialist, and that means that the situations where you are involved are not everyday. But the people that should fix the problem the public services company has at the beginning of this post are not specialist. They should have backup, or shifts, and that is a company responsability.

If you know the contribution you do to your company, I am sure you don’t regret working 12 or 14 hours in a row to solve a problem or an urgency. But it has to be an urgency. If everyday you have to work that much, there must be something else going on. We, the managers, have a responsability in that kind of situations. You ask one of your team leaders to prepare some kind of document and give him 3 days to do it. Pretty long time, right?  But that person have to choose between doing it by himself or delegate to his team. If he chooses the second, he must meet his team, give them the assignment and deadline, assure he will have time to review the resulting document before giving it to you, and even to have time to suggest changes. And, of course, to leave time to lunch and rest to his team. He will probably choose to solve it by himself. And he will probably do a wonderful work, surely delaying some other work he had planned. The next time you ask him for something you will think ‘Hey, he can do it in 3 days’. No, he can’t; at least, he can’t do it always.

So, the responsability of the manager is to really know how much time should take to solve the problem. And, if you have a deadline, to assign people to do it without hurting their rights, but also without missing the deadline. The public services company have a ‘deadline’: to disturb the citizens as few as possible. That means sizing their resources accordingly, so they can work, rest and go out for lunch, but without stopping the work.

There is another thing: the worker also has a very big responsability. He is paid for doing his best at the job. And that means that the “out for lunch” hour should be delayed if necessary, and he should not be so negligent to extend that time if he has work to do.

Do you want an open question? I like them, because they give me the opportunity to get feedback and to write another post. Does the government have a responsability in the traffic congestion caused by this company?

I am going out for lunch. See you in a couple of days.

Regards,

    Diego :D

It pisses me off en español

I started a parallel blog in spanish. You can find it in http://mehaceenojar.blogspot.com

Comencé a escribir este blog en español. Lo pueden encontrar en http://mehaceenojar.blogspot.com

See you. Regards,

    Diego :D