The Leadership Formula
I was watching David Rock’s Google Tech Talk recently, and he mentioned a ‘formula’ from Tim Gallwey’s book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ that I thought was a pretty powerful and novel way to look at leading and managing people. Here’s the formula:
Performance = potential – interference (or, P = p – i)
Using the game of tennis, he shows how he’s able to coach a woman who’s never played to become proficient in about a half hour without a single word about how to hold the racket, follow through or any of the typical ‘skills’ that we think you’d need to ‘learn’ in order to play. Instead, he asks her to focus on which way the ball is spinning, and if she feels like it, hit it over to him. Lo and behold, she’s able to hit a pretty decent forehand a half hour later. Contrary to popular belief, it seems people actually are capable of quite a lot more than they give themselves credit for, if they’d just get out of their own way. Focusing on how the ball was spinning took her attention away from all her fear and anxiety about hitting the ball right, so that she was able to unleash her natural ability to hit the ball.
So maybe one of the primary jobs of a manager, and even an organization, is to reduce this thing called ‘interference’ and help people get out of their own, and one another’s way. David talks more about this in his book ‘Your Brain at Work’, taking what he calls a ‘brain-based’ approach to coaching and managing, and sharing how a leader’s job is to help people improve the way they think, rather than providing solutions or telling them what to do. I personally think both David and Tim are onto something profound here. In my work as an executive coach, I’m sensing a frustration on the part of CEOs and executives in not being able to tap into the creativity and resourcefulness of their people applying all the traditional ‘management tools’.
It seems that our economy and our organizations have evolved much faster than the management structures and principles designed to run them. We’re stuck using the basic, blunt instruments of the industrial age – carrots and sticks, command and control, top-down management. It turns out that, for the most part, those tools no longer apply. Daniel Pink’s research is brilliant on this. Science has now proven (proven!) that providing contingent rewards for creative work not only doesn’t work, it actually hampers performance. Sticks do even worse.
Again, David Rock’s work is insightful here. Activating the fear response apparently shrinks our pre-frontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that controls conscious thoughts and reasoning, so the fear actually narrows our focus and makes it harder to think (which actually was effective when the predominate tasks were routine manual labor which required more focus and less thinking).
Moreover, Rock shows that traditional problem-solving techniques, where you rely on your rational, reasoning brain are fairly ineffective at creative tasks. This makes sense if you think about it for a few seconds – how many really tough, creative problems have you solved just by sitting down and trying to reason your way through them? Much more likely, the solution popped into your head on a morning run or in the shower, when your head was clear and you were pretty clearly not thinking about the problem.
So these old tools and principles are not just ineffective, they’re part of the interference. What are managers supposed to do to get creative work out of their employees? Hint: Performance = potential – interference; P =p – i
In my next post, I’ll analyze what it looks like to run an organization or team with the formula (Performance = potential – interference; P = p – i) in mind. Stay tuned!
Photos by Chad Johnson and mischiru. Licensed under CC.
I think there is this nasty perception that the more you do, the more you accomplish. That's stupid. The more you do, the more you are interfering. Get out of the way and let other people take responsibility.
My only question: are these companies finding anyone willing to accept the responsibility? Do they find people who want to just get after it, or do they like their mediocre work with continual disruption? In essence, do they want to play the game, or do they just want to learn how to hold the racket in a way that keeps them from getting yelled at?
Thanks for the comment Tony. Good question. My perspective is that not only are there people willing to accept the ‘responsibility’, but the ‘right’ people will actually enjoy the game and want to play it for its own sake (to continue with the metaphor). Part of the challenge is re-defining what it means to be the ‘right’ person for a job. Too often, managers focus on hiring people with a specific skill sets and experience, rather than potential and passion. Especially for work that requires creativity and novel thinking (and more and more American workers are doing this kind of work), intrinsic motivation is key. People who are truly passionate about the company’s mission and the job at hand are more likely to tap into their creativity to do it well and to continue to develop their skill set. The traditional management methodology has been to hire someone who can already ‘do the job’ and use compensation and the promise of promotion to motivate them to do it well. Unfortunately, research is increasingly showing that contingent rewards can actually undermine creativity (and therefore become part of the interference). So, my perspective is that the real challenge for managers and leaders is making sure the people they hire want to play the particular game that their company plays and that their individual roles entail (and then get out of their way!).