A Tale of Two Stores

Imagine my joy. On the plane to Chicago, I had read a review of Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Inherent Vice, and in the taxi from the airport, I saw one of the large chain bookstores just a block from my hotel. I anticipated the novel would transport me far from the blandness of one more hotel room.

When I entered the bookstore, I was greeted by a young lady eager to help. I asked her about the book and she took me over to the wall of best sellers. After scanning the shelves for a couple of moments, she informed me that they didn’t have it. When she left me to my own devices, another customer, having overheard our conversation, directed me to the shelf it was on. As I walked toward the cash registers with my book, I passed a section not ten feet away with hundreds of copies of the book prominently displayed.

We’re learning from brain science how flawed both our perception and our thinking can be. While we tend to focus on breakdowns in complex areas such as strategy, we can be remarkably thick when it comes to even the simplest of things.

I’m not talking about the young lady, for I suspect she did the best she could with what she had. I’m talking about the decisions of management, when it comes to the allocation of resources for staffing, training, or technology. Further evidence of just plain bad business judgement was apparent when I went to pay for my book.

There were two banks of cash registers. One had apparently not been used for quite a while, because boxes of books were haphazardly piled on the counter. The other bank had five registers marked with large numbers, but only two were staffed. A long line of customers waiting to pay snaked through several aisles.

It seems to me rather short-sighted to make people stand in line to give you their money, rather than making it as easy as possible. But there we stood, waiting and waiting, as the line inched forward. Soon we were grumbling to one another about the torture we were forced to endure.

Several customers simply gave up and left. Others told their fellow sufferers that they would never come back to this store. When it was finally my turn to pay, I couldn’t resist suggesting to the cashier that making people wait that long wasn’t good for business. He readily admitted that the store was always horribly understaffed.

What could management be thinking? Most likely, the same thing lots of business managers think during hard times: we need to cut costs. Labor is one the few variable costs, so it’s just common sense to reduce staff. Similar decisions are made in business everyday.

But such a decision will potentially cost far more in the long term than it will save in the short term. There’s no shortage of available labor, so doubling the number of cashiers couldn’t possible cost more than another twenty-five or thirty dollars an hour. With a two story building in a prime shopping area of downtown Chicago, such an expenditure is insignificant. And I heard enough people swear to never return to the store that the cost of lost business was at least several multiples of that twenty-five to thirty dollars.

But there is an even more profound flaw in management’s thinking. While a greeter at the front door is a nice touch, in my case it ended up detracting from my satisfaction as a customer. It doesn’t appear that anyone fully empathized and anticipated the entire customer experience, from beginning to end. If they had, the greeter would’ve been trained to locate books or at the very least have a handheld computer that would locate them for her.

In fact, I bet there’s an iphone app that would enable her to tie into the store’s central computer system, and the cost would be as insignificant as adding a couple of more cashiers. If management had walked a couple of blocks down the street, they would’ve found an Apple store where they could buy the technology. They would’ve also found a retail experience that was brilliantly managed from start to finish.

After finally completing my purchase, I went to the Apple store just to look at the new iphone.  Again, I was greeted at the front door, but then I was escorted to a specialist, who took me over to the iphone area, knowledgeably answered all of my questions, and in short order convinced me to buy the phone. He then set the phone up, taught me how to use it, and even downloaded the owner’s manual on to the phone.

The phone itself is enticing, both technically and aesthetically. Even the packaging is a treat. When it came time to pay, there was no line to wait in. My specialist had a handheld computer that managed the transaction and emailed me my receipt. Apple has created not only a great product, but a a great customer experience. I have to believe that strong empathy with the customer guides all of the company’s decisions, from product design to retail layout and staffing.

Brain science teaches us how just focusing on the numbers leads to trading off the long-term for the short-term, no matter how reasonable the anticipated cost savings may be. It also teaches us how buying decisions are driven emotionally and how important empathy is to building satisfying relationships with other people, customers included. But one doesn’t need sophisticated brain scans to see what better thinking will do for a business. Just stroll down Michigan Avenue and stop in both the bookstore and the Apple store.

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5 Tips for Failing Miserably as a Manager

There are many articles on tips for succeeding as a manager, but there aren’t any for those managers aspiring to failure. The benefits of failure are many: the chance to move away from a material lifestyle to a more parsimonious one, the free time to pursue the increasingly popular hobby of rummaging through dumpsters, and the opportunity to bond with other like-minded souls at the unemployment office, to name just a few. My research in brain science proves that these following tips are guaranteed to make any manager fail to achieve the results they intended:

Check with Your People Frequently to See If They Need Help.
Not only will this suck up huge amounts of your time, it will distract you from the more value-added strategic work you should be doing. Even better, though, it will drive your people nuts. Given their perspective, they’ll misinterpret it as you checking on them because you don’t trust their competence. They’ll become resentful and passive, ensuring that the performance of your business spirals downward.

Give Direct Feedback on Performance.
Even if you think it’s constructive, they won’t. Because it conflicts with their self-image, they’ll either reject the feedback or reject you. If it comes across even the least bit punitive, they’ll growl at you with aggression and be motivated to do exactly what the feedback tells them they shouldn’t. In other words, if you tell them “You could be better at punctuality” this will ensure that they won’t show up to work at all.

Set Stretch Objectives.
If they’re really a stretch, there’s no way people will be able to achieve them, and they’ll become so frustrated that they’ll stop even trying. Because the objectives come from you, rather than from them, you can bet they won’t be a good fit with the job. Plus, if you insist on managing only by the numbers, without reference to an aspirational vision, you’ll guarantee that people don’t use the emotional part of the brain. It will both sap their energy and bar them from accessing the past learning that allows them to make better decisions. So if you tell them to reach for the stars, they’ll instead reach for a sledgehammer with your name on it.

Focus on Behavior, Not Attitude or Intent.
If you tell people specifically what to do and don’t address the thinking behind the behavior, you can ensure they’ll do it badly. Without that overarching understanding, the behavior won’t fit the specific situation they find themselves in, different behaviors will conflict with one another, and they’ll be executed unwillingly. When AT&T insisted that operators say, “Thank you for calling AT&T,” their snarkiness reached new heights.

Install Tight Control Systems to Ensure the Right Behavior.
Control systems may just be the best tool for a manager that wants to fail. They signal that employees aren’t trusted to do the right thing and so demolish their loyalty. They’re costly and tend to squander resources, like the one that insisted on reports filed for even a fifty-dollar expense when it cost seventy-five dollars to process it. If they’re particularly irksome, employees will waste countless hours figuring out how to subvert them. Best of all, control systems eliminate any need for employees to feel they’re personally responsible for doing the right thing.

With proper attention to these tips, most managers should find themselves free to pursue other career options in a matter of months. There is a danger, however. In direct opposition to what we’re learning from brain science and management research, a number of organizations believe that this is the right way to manage. Should that be the case in your company, you may instead find yourself rapidly promoted up through the ranks in direct proportion to the lack of results you’ll achieve.

You’ll make a boat load of money in the short-term and sink the company in the long-term. The Board of Directors will eventually have to fire you, but you’ll leave with a nice severance package. Hey, everybody in finance has been doing it with proven results so why not you?

You’ll have to forego the camaraderie of the food bank and the carefree life of the homeless. But the mind is a wonderful thing. If you close your eyes and imagine hard enough, imported pate can taste just like the dog food the wiped-out shareholders in your company are forced to eat.

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Do Stereotypes Make Better Managers?

What with the Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley dust up, stereotypes have been on my mind lately. More specifically, I’ve become concerned with how and why we create them, and what they cost us, especially given the recent NYT interview with Carol Smith, entitled “No Doubts: Women are Better Managers.”

Now I have no bias toward the gender. In fact, some of my best friends are women, and even members of my own family are women. As neuroscientist John Medina has explained, there are fundamental differences between the brains of men and women that lead to different traits. I, for one, believe that there is also strong evidence that women are predisposed to acquire those skills that make them better at managing relationships.

Carol Smith may be a terrific manager. But given the errors our reasoning is prone to, her interview may drive readers to make the same kind of mental mistakes as Gates and Crowley. The best way I can illustrate the danger is by presenting the results of my own study on gender-based traits. I readily admit my sample is so small that the validity of my results is open to question. I used what I had at hand: my two daughters, ages nine and ten.

Ten-year-old Julia has an obsession with fashion. The pinnacle of self-actualization for her is a trip to the mall and her favorite clothing store. Everything else pales by comparison: her household chores, her homework, and even lectures from her father on proper deportment.An ancillary trait is a fondness for vampires and for a certain male actor that plays one in a popular movie. Julia is also an incredibly sweet girl, and even more so when a trip to the mall might be in the cards. 

Since I am a man with neither a fondness for the mall or vampires, I could reason that these traits are gender-based. But I’m a good enough scientist to recognize the need to test my hypothesis with another observation, in effect doubling my sample size. Emma, though well past the age when Julia’s obsession became manifest, has absolutely no interest in fashion. Instead, her wardrobe is just a means to state her self-affirming philosophy that “Life is Good.” The more infrequently her clothes are laundered, or even changed, the better. And no vampires for her; she prefers the Marx Brothers. Emma is also as sweet as can be, particularly when some tasty treat is in the offing. So I can’t conclude a gender-based predisposition for fashion or anti-fashion, vampires or Groucho.Based on a sample of one, it’s equally difficult to conclude that Carol Smith’s penchant for making lists, coming late to meetings when the small talk is over, or being willing to confront are gender-based.

Nor can one necessarily conclude that these traits are responsible for her being a better manager. When I doubled the sample size in my study, I did find one trait in common: a fondness for chocolate and an ability to consume enough in one sitting to plunge a horse into a diabetic coma. But it’s a stretch to conclude that’s why little girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice.”

Our ability to generalize is a valuable evolutionary adaptation. If we’ve had experience with one saber-tooth tiger, we don’t have to learn the hard way that the next one we encounter views us as lunch. But generalizations also lead to errors, such as the suspicion that a 5’7″ black man with a cane is so dangerous he needs to be handcuffed, or the conviction that a white police officer in the People’s Republic of Cambridge is a racist.

Stereotypes of minorities, police officers, women managers, or even bloggers, will highlight common denominators at the expense of the wide range of individual differences. My father was 6’4″ tall and mother 5’2″, but to conclude the average Jacobs parent is 5’9″ tall obscures the towering reality of my father and my mother’s need to perch on a phonebook while driving.

But generalization also haunts us when it comes to implementing the practices that make for good management. Smith advocates the use of a palliative–a positive statement–before she delivers hard feedback. While a boost to the ego makes it easier to accept criticism, palliatives come in all shapes and sizes. Complimenting me on my punctuation isn’t liable to reduce the sting of a follow on comment that my writing is as dull as dishwater.

Generalizing runs counter to fully appreciating the uniqueness of other people, along with their views, needs, and quirky social practices. While coming late to meetings may save time, for many men and women, small talk builds better working relationships and unhooks the mind from other concerns, making it easier to reach decisions on the critical business issues of the moment. Even if such chatter didn’t have benefits, I can only imagine how the male managers feel about Smith’s absence from such a waste of time.

There is a solid body of management research, with large enough sample sizes to be valid, to teach us what in general works or doesn’t. But because all of us are prisoners of our uniquely subjective views, our success in implementing good practices depends on our read of the people we manage. The more we use our mirror neurons and our theory of mind to move beyond stereotyping to empathizing with each individual, the better we’ll be at doing the right thing in the right way.

So what should an aspiring manager, male or female, do? Focus on developing the skills that research has established lead to improved performance, and trust in the plasticity of the brain to learn those skills, regardless of gender. Appreciate that the people you manage are individuals and step into their shoes before you determine how to act.

It’s a safe bet, given the way the mind works, few of us are as good as we would like to believe. So search for evidence not of the success of your actions, but of their failure. The more we accept our own fallibility, the more open we’ll be to all of the teachable moments that make management such a joy.

One last thing: never give an interview to the NYT on why you’re a good manager.

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