- Hire people who want the company to succeed and trust that they will be rewarded when it does
- Keep the upper management "political pain points" under clear transparent and fair rules. never ever deviate.
Sensible but it misses one utterly vital thing - the iron clad trust that must must exist from the employees to the CEO - that they will only and ever be evaluated on clear criteria, that the company has their back and will not fire them because it just needed to. I do not remember trusting any employer except one to that level.
Look at Facebook " You can either be good at hiring of good at firing. I'm good at firing"
We glibly talk about the death of the job for life, even in Japan. But without that contract everything Ben talks about here is words written on the wind.
When you hire someone be sure that you will keep them through Hell, reward them with your daughters hand in marriage and half your kingdom. Then you can believe they might trust you back.
It's a lot more tactical than that. That's just his first step (which is fluff, as you say).
He suggests some methods for sorting out problems which seem really counter-intuitive; but political problems are not most problems.
A political problem (to him) is one that gets worse as you discuss it with other people. Either because it's zero sum, confrontational, or because it encourages squeaky wheels.
Let's factor his tactics out:
1. If you can make political stuff formal, it shuts down squabbling.
2. If something comes up outside the formal process, don't talk to the person who brought it up. Just shut them down, and figure out what to do about it without them.
Eh, these formal review processes with 0 outside discussion can REALLY hose you though if you have the pay scale at some tier off. You'll basically force that tier to leave to get the compensation they deserve. And when the economy in that area opens up, it will not necessarily just be one person who leaves at that time.
If you have a pay scale slightly off, but people trust you have their interests in mind and intend to do the right thing - if there is suboptimal pay but good conditions - they won't leave.
What worries me about the original article is that he seems to say: don't ever do anything in the interest of an individual employee; only do whatever is in the direct interest of the company.
That seems a good way to create negative feeling amongst staff, which may indeed result in people seeking out better compensation.
Zero outside discussion doesn't mean zero awareness. There's bound to be someone who brings it up. But he's saying that you don't have a debate over it, and certainly don't pay off the people who complain - you fix it quietly.
If the manager doesn't realise that they are paying too little ... honestly they are so dim I don't think any good advice will help. A manager should know more about the business side than the people they are managing.
> certainly don't pay off the people who complain - you fix it quietly.
But that's exactly what the person i'm responding to said: No raises if you mention you are (all) underpaid (or you personally are underpaid).
It leads to those games where promotion gets linked to compensation, so people are promoted because otherwise you'll lose them, not because they're best for that role.
Companies pay low 5 figures to many databases to figure out how much to pay role X or Y or Z. I don't think managers and the people make budgets for departments are always aware of the salaries of different roles. And I don't think HR people are always aware of the differences between different people who make them worth X over worth 1.5X
This is advocating for paying the way governments do. Is that really the solution? Because govt: that's the definition of apolitical.
This is a solution that doesn't lead to the objective of the policy.
Yep, and therefore you want to create a completely unreasonably transparent organization. That'll solve everything. (Or, at least, that's what I got from the article.)
No mention about not creating huge hierarchies in the first place, and not concentrating decisions at the top.
They do not pay competitively, especially for people that live in California.
There's a ~5-10x cost of housing difference between where I live now (Texas) and where I lived in California. $22k would not make up that difference.
They're denying themselves access to better people because they can't avoid politics without using blunt instruments. That gives me less rather than more faith in the management.
Their base salaries aren't even competitive for a middle-of-the-road remote expat programmer working out of Thailand.
That having been said, I'm all for more experimentation. Good on them for being willing to take a risk and be open about it.
I doubt that method would scale - it would seem like it would encourage open season on poaching employees since it introduces inflexibility and other companies knowing what it would take to entice someone away. It may minimize some form of politics to a degree, but it also increases the risk that you will lose quality employees.
I interviewed there (didn't get an offer, but agreed with the decision, felt too limiting technically).
In practice, it's a company wide pissing match that seeks to incubate and accelerate growth for hyper-achievers with hard heads that can openly give and receive criticism. This actually works extremely well for a certain type of personality (think Type A), especially if you are early on in your career. The growth potential was why I interviewed in the first place. I'd say the most accurate summary is:
Inherently, this type of culture results in one major drawback; lack of diversity. If you need a specific type of personality in order to join a company of others who have very similar personalities, what happens to innovation? Where do new ideas come from? How do you evolve? How do you understand different markets and audiences? etc etc. The best teams I've seen have had very diverse sets of backgrounds, level of experience, and personality.
While BW has worked out much of this (being in finance helps), that was my burning thought throughout the process. My conclusion was that such a culture would be an excellent place to be for some time, but staying too long would only serve to pigeonhole you.
Pretty sensible article. I think political problems in a company become more likely as companies grow and add more people. A dozen close-knit people who trust each other will have less trouble than a 200+ person company with layers of management and numerous colliding ambitions.
If possibly perhaps the best thing is to keep your company small? We don't all have to try to be Facebook. I like to dream about starting a small company that offers a simple product that just does one thing well so that me a handful of others can just run the thing.
Small companies can also be affected very severely. In many 2nd-3rd world countries it's almost guaranteed that small companies and startups will be infested with politics and in fact large corporations are seen as better places to work in terms of politics (and pay actually). Depends on the culture and mindset of the founders.
In 1st world countries too most likely. Small companies bring their own political challenges certainly, and for some people a large company where they can just blend into the noise might be better. I just think I'd have an easier time navigating political issues with a small group where everyone knows each other well.
Caustic internal politics in my experience seem to come from two things:
1 - lack of a clear direction and focus
2 - lack of good clear and transparent communication
No matter what, you are going to have politics in an organization, a good leader needs to direct the tone and shape of those politics.
With #1 - you end up with multiple people jockeying for ad hoc positions of leadership in an organization. A clear organizational structure (it doesn't have to be a complex hierarchy) with clear and transparent methods for moving up down and across it, prevents this. I see this mistake being made often with "flat organizations" where that's a code word for "no organizational structure" and you end up with powerful personalities in charge of little fiefdoms they've carved out in the company each with their own set of rules and politics. Nothing sucks more or wastes more company time and resources than playing Game of Thrones with all the assertive personalities in your company.
Some "code words" that might mean a place suffers or will eventually suffer from this: "flat organization", "no manager titles", "hands-off leadership", "management that gets out of the way" etc.
I'm not saying these are always indicative of a cultural problems, a flat organization can still be well structured and have strong focus, or a manager may have gifted the mantle of leadership onto somebody else for the duration of a project and taken a "hands off approach". But in my experience this is pretty rare.
This doesn't eliminate politics, but it makes it take the shape of people who want to align with the focus and people who want to go a different direction. This becomes a high level metric you can use to evaluate reports. If they aren't with the program then perhaps they should go work elsewhere?
With #2 - information vacuums breed rumors and rumor trading/gossiping becomes information control, another kind of leadership metric. The kind of backstabbery and reputation ruining gossip only breeds in organizations where intentions and direction and expectations of the company are not clearly communicated.
I remember one place I worked at, over a 6 month period, a bunch of senior managers all left. There was zero communication about this and rumors started running around "the CEO has lost his mind!" "I heard this guy was having an affair with the receptionist" "this group is going to be next!" "I be we're running out of money!" etc. etc. turns out two things were actually happening, the technology platform was changing and many of the senior managers weren't comfortable with this and wanted out. The CEO thanked them for their years of hard work and gave them a few weeks to find something else as a token of thanks. The other was that he wanted to grow the company and needed a different team to get him there -- his previous team was excellent for early stage growth, but the kind of loner term growth just needed a different set of skills. These two events coincided, were easily explainable and would have squashed most of the rumor trading. But the company had a culture of secrecy, starting at the top, and rumor trading became the cultural norm in the company. People probably spent as much time gossiping as they did getting work done, and it wasn't an effective organization at the time.
In other cases, I've seen this used specifically as a proxy for keeping the employees well managed. Spread disinformation from the top and watch the employees fight with each other over conflicting stories. They won't be fighting for actual positional authority and you, as the CxO, can be free to do what you want. It's called "Machiavellianism" and they make probably with worst places on the planet to work outside of a traditional leather factory.
Completely agree on your #2 - even in cases where management sincerely believes that they are "open and honest", if you haven't established trust at all levels the rumor mills will fire up as soon as closed door meetings happen.
Even worse (and I've seen this probably too many times): at various meetings talk about openness, transparency, etc. - then a day or two later announce a reorg, let a few people go and send vague boilerplate e-mail to all hands.
I'm always amazed at various managers/leaders that are totally oblivious to the fact that they are developing their own reputations primarily through their actions and the opinions of "ex" employees. If you're a shop in town with more 'ex' employees in the general workforce than actual employees, smart people will figure it out.
Nothing sucks more or wastes more company time and resources than playing Game of Thrones with all the assertive personalities in your company.
The answer is not to put a rigid organizational structure. It's to avoid hiring people you wouldn't trust to have your back, or, if one has been hired, to avoid promoting him or her into a position of leadership.
Do you think power games are more common or more toxic in schools among teachers, who are part of a rigid organizational structure, than among students, who are not? All evidence suggests that alliances, betrayals and bullying are far more rampant in less rigid organizations, because that's where they matter more.
Saying you should hire people who will have your back is as practical as saying buy low and sell high. Nobody intentionally hires people that are clearly disloyal or disruptive.
>You might even give the employee a raise. This may sound innocent, but you have just created a strong incentive for political behavior.
...and if you don't, you just created an even stronger incentive for all your talent to quit so you're left with the people who coast, knowing they are paid their actual value at most or who feel they would get less in another job. People who are good at what they do always, ALWAYS keep an eye on their value vs pay. Not to mention word of mouth - if you pick up a reputation as underpaying or unwilling to give deserved raises, it will affect who applies, reducing the quality pool by limiting applicants to people in an even more underpaid job, unemployed, or otherwise desperate, while anyone better will be seeking to use it as a stepping stone to somewhere that pays them fairly for their skill.
I've worked at a company that followed that 'advice' before and as a result, everyone was grossly underpaid and there was a high employee churn rate, despite themselves advertising in their job listings (which they still do) as having good career opportunities.
>>> By conducting well-structured, regular performance and compensation reviews, you will ensure that pay and stock increases are as fair as possible.
Simply installing formal processes won't solve the problem if it's widely known that those processes have to be bypassed in order to get anywhere. It doesn't take long to figure out that all real career advancement activity occurs out-of-cycle.
There's good politics and bad politics. Good politics seems to emerge when people really care about the greater mission, but disagree on how to go about it. It's still frustrating, because there are disagreements to be resolved, but usually you can get everything out in the open if there's good management. Bad politics is when people are out for self-advancement and will continue with disruptive behaviors until terminated. Bad politics tends to be personal, as decisions about unrelated matters become referenda on the people the topics are associated with.
If you don't have the good politics or bad, it means that people don't really care. However, the stakes in white-collar America are usually high enough that the bad kind of politics will typically emerge no matter what.
What I think is important is keeping enough transparency that the good kind of political activity doesn't devolve into the bad kind. That's a fairly common scenario. Usually, people get tunnel vision about the specific victories they need (or think they need) and start lashing out at the people they think are blocking them (often, without telling anyone why they're doing it) when it would be better to figure what the actual conflicts are and how to make everyone win, as much as is possible.
What's the best way to translate a meeting with one executive complaining about the behaviour of another executive into a meeting with both executives? Even if you schedule the meeting, aren't you admitting that you can be swayed by the influence of the first executive whispering in your ear?
If B were to come to me to complain about A. I would ask the following:
- Did you talk to A about the problem? (generally the answer is no)
In whatever case, you set up a meeting. And you LISTEN.
What comes out of the meeting depends on the situation. It might be a real problem, or just a misunderstanding. You might be surprised how much A and B will be grateful for the meeting.
By doing this you send a clear message to potentials As and Bs.
"If you come to me and talk about someone, I will make you say that to his/her face."
"If someone comes to me and complains about your behavior, I will include you in the problem solving, nothing will happen in your back."
"If you come to me and talk about someone, I will make you say that to his/her face."
Ya, this doesn't really work. It's like a lawyer asking a question in court: You had better know what the answer is before you ask the question. If you are the CEO and you set up this meeting to "ask/answer" such a question, you've already lost game. You've already been manipulated into a high-stakes "false dichotomy" problem with assymetric information, to your dis-advantage. Or maybe I'm mis-understanding your proposal?
"- Well, I can't work with A, s/he's always voting against my proposals.
- I'm sorry to hear that. Did you talk to her/him about this problem?
- No, you know how s/he is
- So why do you come to me?
- Well, could you talk to her/him?
- No. You will. I will be in the room as a neutral observer."
If B wanted to slander A, the problem is that now A will know about it and will have an opportunity to defend him/herself. Also, B might be less aggressive when complaining directly to A.
In your company you really want to have a culture of "let's fix minor people problems before they become big problems", and as a CEO you can do that by promoting a direct communication culture.
This reminds me of what someone smart told me a while ago: If you're supposed to be the leader and no one comes to you with their problems you're not really the leader any more. This may cause people not to come to you with their problems any more.
I'm not saying your approach is always wrong but I would guess it would backfire around 50% of the time. Sometimes, B comes to you because he doesn't trust A. Getting A in the loop isn't going to restore that trust. If A and B could work it out together most likely they already would have. You need to do more in this case than simply getting them to talk. You need to understand why the trust was broken and work to repair it. Or, split them up.
If you're supposed to be the leader and no one comes to you with their problems you're not really the leader any more.
A lot of ego and politics in that definition of a leader.
What about this: the purpose of a leader is to become useless?
A leader is there to empower his team, and yes, there are always problems to solve, but you're job isn't solving your problems, it's to teach them to solve problems.
How is your company going to grow otherwise?
Sometimes, B comes to you because he doesn't trust A.
When two people in your team no longer trust each other, it means you had a problem running for a long while and you haven't been doing your job correctly.
It also falls in Ben's category two and must be treated differently.
You need to do more in this case than simply getting them to talk. You need to understand why the trust was broken and work to repair it.
When trust is broken, this is what I call a "broken arrow" situation and this isn't something you just "fix". This generally ends up with someone leaving.
I see where you're coming from but I think it's not as black and white. There are going to be situations and problems the individual or the team feel like they can't solve themselves. The definition isn't about ego, it's something observed externally, it has to do with the official structure vs. the un-official social order.
I think trust builds and breaks over time (breaks more easily) and external intervention can help to prevent this from getting to the point where someone has to leave. My point though is why is B coming to you about A in the first place and why is forcing them to talk in front of you a good solution to that?
I'm guessing you didn't mean this in a general sense. An approach like this would fail horrifically in any of the following scenarios: Claims of harassment/discrimination, claims of incompetence, any form of whistleblowing (on the exec) and probably many others.
The problems you are talking are much bigger than executive vs executive issues and probably fall in the "Complaints about an executive’s competency or performance" where Ben suggest that you shouldn't, indeed, solve this with a meeting as it may imply many actions on your side.
What I can add to Ben's advices is: assume everybody lies and work on facts only.
You don't want someone innocent to be slandered and you certainly don't want someone guilty to get away with it.
Fortunately, this is extremely rare, unless there is something very wrong with your company.
I guess that you stop the meeting on the spot ("we'll continue this conversation once the other executive is here to discuse this with us"), if possible call the other executive right away, if not, do a new meeting with both asap, and don't talk about it before the meeting.
This way only people with serious objections will dare to start a complain, also the resolution of the complain must be fair, if not the CEO will be the one loosing the team trust.
- Hire people who want the company to succeed and trust that they will be rewarded when it does - Keep the upper management "political pain points" under clear transparent and fair rules. never ever deviate.
Sensible but it misses one utterly vital thing - the iron clad trust that must must exist from the employees to the CEO - that they will only and ever be evaluated on clear criteria, that the company has their back and will not fire them because it just needed to. I do not remember trusting any employer except one to that level.
Look at Facebook " You can either be good at hiring of good at firing. I'm good at firing"
We glibly talk about the death of the job for life, even in Japan. But without that contract everything Ben talks about here is words written on the wind.
When you hire someone be sure that you will keep them through Hell, reward them with your daughters hand in marriage and half your kingdom. Then you can believe they might trust you back.