Why do we cooperate?

The simple explanation is that cooperation is evolutionarily rewarding. The story goes like this:

‘We were only able to defeat much larger, more dangerous species because of our ability to work together – to cooperate, work in teams and help each other out. That’s how we became the earth’s dominant animal’.

But this only makes sense at a species level. If we look at our own individual survival, it would be far more beneficial sometimes not to cooperate. We could hoard more resources for ourselves, benefit from other people’s misfortune and generally get ahead.

And this sometimes happens. People forgo cooperation in favour of their own individual benefit.

So how do we enforce cooperation and fairness? There are some simple rules, spawned from evolution and game theory, that tend to work for all species. And, whether inadvertently or be design, eBay has implemented these principles to create one of the true self-regulating markets of the information age. So let’s take a look at the principles

Principle #1 – Open-Book Play forces cooperation

Open-Book Play simply means that all people participating in the ‘game’ are able to see how everyone else has played in past games. If everyone knows what sort of strategy you adopt (do you cheat regularly or do you usually do the right thing?) then you are more likely to cooperate. eBay publishes your feedback right alongside your username. If people can see what you’ve done in the past, you’re more likely to do the right thing.

Principle #2 – Repeated Interactions

We are most likely to cheat if there is a one-off interaction with no future consequence. eBay can’t stop people having only one interaction, but this is obviously rare. And even though you might have only one interaction with a particular buyer or seller, you will have repeated interactions with the eBay community. This works in conjunction with Principle #1 to ensure cooperation.

Principle #3 – Third Party Punishment

One of the most compelling ‘rules’ of cooperation is the idea of third party punishment. Cooperation flourishes when A does something bad to B, and C, an observing bystander, punishes A for doing so. eBay makes this happen again through the publishing of past performance. If you do the wrong thing, you can essentially be ‘punished’ by way of others excluding you from the game. At eBay, that means that no one will want to sell to you or buy from you.

So how can we apply this in an every day business setting? Here are four things you can start doing straight away.

Make the rules transparent

Rules are the first thing that we need to focus on. Before we are able to hold people accountable for any behaviours, we need to make the rules of engagement clear. Work through these with your team. How do you want to treat each other? How do you want to treat clients?

Enforce the rules in public

There is an age old management saying: praise in public, punish in private. This is a great thing to remember, but there also needs to be a delicate balance. If someone breaks the team rules, people within the team need to know that something is being done about it. If they think that you are not paying attention to these behavioural discrepancies, they won’t understand that the rules are genuine.  Also, as the above principles of cooperation demonstrate, if your team members don’t understand that their reputation is on the line – they can break the rules without fear of damaging their reputation.

Make working together a part of every day

Make sure there are repeated, mutually beneficial interactions amongst your staff in some way, shape or form every single day. You’d be surprised how little cooperation is necessary in most teams – because we don’t create common goals that people genuinely need to work together to achieve.

Create mutual accountability

Mutual accountability is the holy grail of teamwork. Set an expectation that you want your staff to hold each other accountable – that it shouldn’t be up to the leader to do it all the time. After all, what happens when the leader isn’t there to see something happen? This is something you can do only once you have a high level of trust and support in the team and a commitment to open and honest communication.

If you can somehow implement the cooperation principles, then your level of collaboration is going to go up enormously. It’s a tough thing to do, but it’s worth the investment.

See www.tony-wilson.com.au for more

“Your job as a manager is to make yourself redundant.”

It’s an old line that has helped inspire many leaders to manage their teams in such a way that they, as a leader, are not really needed anymore. The team can run itself and the leader can happily go on holidays without a care that the team will be in great shape when they return.

However, I recently spoke with a manager who does not believe in empowering his staff at all. And I was quite surprised to find out that he had come back from a holiday and found that the team had functioned terrifically.  That’s when I learned of the shortcut he had taken.

There are two ways to make sure that your team can run by itself. You can help them achieve Autonomy or you can force them to be Automatic. There is an enormous difference.

The Automatic team is so well drilled that they don’t put a foot wrong. They are like a well-oiled machine and will do the same thing over and over again without so much as a mistake. These teams can work well without a leader – all they need is for someone to wind them up and go. But what is the expense?

The Automatic team is great for tasks that require auto-pilots. However, if they have to solve an out-of-the-ordinary problem or give a client special attention, or if something out of left field goes wrong, they are toast. These teams don’t really have the ability to do anything outside of the norm. They wince at the need for abstract thinking and cannot make decisions by themselves. In short, they have been so well drilled that they become fearful of doing something different. ‘Correct’ is so well defined that they are paralysed at the thought of doing something ‘incorrect’.

On the other hand the Autonomous team will thrive in this kind of environment. They are empowered to make decisions that will greatly benefit the team and have no hesitation in problem solving and choosing the correct path, even when thrown a curve-ball. Even if they are in an auto-pilot task, they will look for ways to improve and try new approaches to get things done.

Autonomy and Automatic are mutually exclusive. If you have shown your team that there is only one right way, then you miss out on the potential benefits that your team members can bring. However, there are probably also times to be Automatic – especially when under enormous pressure or following a strict protocol. Be sure to understand which one your team will benefit from the most and then strive to make it happen.

More than merely annoying, rude behaviour is a catalyst for aggression and decreased productivity. When an employee is getting on everyone’s nerves, too many managers are too quick to say “oh, that’s just him”…. especially when it’s a star performer.

Addressing behaviour is one of the hardest things that leaders have to do. We don’t like calling out behaviours – generally because it can be pretty subjective and the ‘rules’ are a little ambiguous. But some new research might make you think again about accepting a team member’s rudeness.

Professor Ido Erev, a specialist in behaviour explored the effect of rudeness. Simply, he asked students to turn up to an office to take a test. Outside the door of the office, obscured by a million post it notes, was a small sign that said “test moved to another location”. Most students, unable to locate or read the sign, walked into the office anyway, interrupting a lecturer. The lecturer did one of two things: they either turned on the student saying things like “are you stupid? Can’t you read?” or else they pleasantly told the student of their mistake, and pointed them in the right direction.

Down the hall, in the new location, the students took a problem solving test (this is what they thought the experiment was about). The results were astonishing: the students who were treated rudely scored significantly worse in the test than those who were treated pleasantly.

But here’s another impact. The students also did a classic creativity test – in two minutes, they had to think of as many uses as possible for a brick. Those who were treated rudely concocted far more aggressive uses for the brick than those who weren’t, including smashing windows, using it as a weapon, and weighing down a dead body in a river!!

So next time you hear complaints about rude or unfair behaviour amongst your team, think twice about looking the other way. You just never know how big the impact is to those around you. You might even find yourself on the wrong end of a brick.

Why Should People Believe Your Vision?

We’ve talked about making a Vision emotional and memorable. We now move to making it credible. If it’s not credible, then people won’t put in the effort.

This draws a fine line: you want to stretch and inspire people, but you also want them to believe that what you say is possible. People are willing to put in superior effort for something that they really believe in, but once you tip that into the impossible, then all effort evaporates and you end up looking just plain stupid.

If Usain Bolt’s coach says “I think you can run 9.42 seconds for the one hundred metre dash, he trains his butt of, but if the coach says “I think you can run 7.31 seconds, Usain probably starts looking for another coach.

So how do we make sure it’s credible? Well, apart from just making sure that you set something that is within their reach, there are a few other tactics that you can employ.

Here are three.

1) Show Evidence

Why is it possible? People don’t mind being stretched if you can show them the plan. Sony said they wanted to ‘put a radio in your pocket’; Apple’s original plan was to put ‘1000 songs in a matchbox’; JFK said that the American people could “put a man on the moon”. These things sounded incredulous at the time, but people got behind them and made them happen. They believed in them.

And part of the reason they believed was because the leaders had a credible plan. They could see the steps involved and they could make a logical connection. Better yet, where possible, ask your people to come up with their own plan. They might just see the logic and be inspired.

2) Why this time?

Why should people believe that this time is going to be any different? This is a difficult challenge to surmount. Firstly, most employees are conditioned to believe that whatever new vision/mission/strategy you formulate really doesn’t mean anything. Unfortunately, too many managers say things are going to be different – but they rarely are. The big idea gets put in a drawer and everyone goes back to business as usual.

The only way to overcome this sort of apathy is to constantly show, through action and communication, that you are serious. Remember, it takes about 1000 repetitions to form a new habit, so changing people’s perceptions is a similar undertaking.

The other challenge to overcome is if a similar vision has been implemented in the past and failed. Why would it be different this time? In this case, showing the evidence (and possibly a sense of urgency) is the means by which you can show people that it truly is different this time.

3) Show them through stories

Whatever your Vision, you will find that you already have people who are displaying the behaviours that will help achieve it. Whether it’s an employee that is showing exceptional customer service commitment, or someone that has challenged the status quo and made the company a better place, these stories do two important things:

Firstly, they show people that it’s possible. People can listen to these and say “hey, they did it, so can I – maybe it’s not that hard.” Secondly, they give concrete parameters about what you expect to see from people in order to achieve the Vision. They positively reinforce the behaviours that you hope for.

There are many reasons why a Vision will fail. But if you do some of these things, you increase your chances of success dramatically. Make your Vision emotional, memorable and credible.

This is the third in the series on creating a Vision that means something.

For Part One “Vision, Emotion and the Five Million Dollar Question“ – click here

For Part Two “Times Table, Humiliation and Two Tips for an Emotional Vision“ – click here

Last week my wife was sick. So it was up to me to look after the kids (lunches, school drop off, pick up, organise activities for the ones not at school etc). But I also had a couple of impending deadlines that I had to meet. I juggled this for four days, and felt pretty proud of myself. However, when my wife finally rose from her sick bed (and I told her how easy her job was – big mistake), she pointed out that I hadn’t done a lot of things she usually does: Namely the washing and grocery shopping.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think these things were important, or that I didn’t really have time – I just didn’t ‘see’ them. With all the other stuff going on, these things didn’t even get my attention, so they didn’t get done.

Our actions are the sum of what we pay attention to.

If we pay attention to the right things, and shut out distractions (the wrong things) we end up choosing the most productive behaviours. If we attend to the wrong things, the opposite happens.

Those domestic chores weren’t front of mind because they weren’t going to affect me that week, and they hadn’t affected me before. I didn’t pay attention to them.

Vision Front of Mind

In many ways, a Vision acts the same way for people. If the Vision is front of mind, we find ways to affect it more often. We look for opportunities to contribute, we find time to do things that actively help us work towards it. If it isn’t front of mind, it ends up like the washing – with no attention and therefore no effort.

In the last post, we discussed how to make a Vision appeal to emotion – thereby making it somewhat memorable. Here are two other tips keep it front of mind:

1)   It needs to be short

If your Vision is more than a couple of sentences, then it is not going to be memorable. There is enough research to suggest that we only remember about 4-7 bits of information (words, numbers etc) at any given point in time. For a Vision – the shorter the better

2)   Hang it on something people already know

In their breakthrough book “Made to Stick” the Heath brothers mention that information is easier to process if it attaches to something we already know.

Their example is in the description of a fruit called the ‘polemo’. The first explanation talks about the rind, the colour, the flesh etc and it gives you a certain interpretation. The second, more effective explanation merely says “a polemo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind.” Much easier.

If we can attach the Vision to things that people already know, we capitalise on current interpretations

3)   Make it sound familiar

An extension of #2 above, the more you can make the vision sound like something they already know, the better. Think of current slogans, proverbs and popular culture and then try to design your vision to sound somewhat like those.

This is Part II in our series on creating a Vision that means something. See the related posts below for the others

We want people to remember our vision, right?

Well it pays to understand exactly what we remember and why. Think about these two things that I am sure you have no trouble remembering: 1) the equation 3×3=9, and 2) a time in your life when you were humiliated.

How do we learn?

Whether it is memory or motor skills, learning is the result of something called Long Term Potentiation (LTP). Very simply, as we learn (say, 3×3=9) we build a ‘pattern’ of neural activity, which is essentially an electrical current. Now, at first this electrical current travels slowly – we may need to count 3×3 on our fingers – like the ‘wires’ don’t carry the signal too well. But eventually 3×3=9 becomes automatic and at this point the ‘wires’ seem to become super-conductive and the electrical signal literally races along the neurons. This is learning – or LTP – the neural pattern for a certain memory or behaviour is so well trained that it happens automatically. And it only takes place when the electrical signal is ‘strong’ enough.

There are two ways that this electrical signal becomes ‘strong’ enough.

Firstly, the signal itself may not be that strong, but if it happens over and over again, the cumulative effect can be strong enough. Take the case of 3×3=9. Why do you remember it? Because you have heard it so many times. While the signal isn’t that strong, the cumulative strength of hearing it over and over again is.

The other way is if the signal is so great that LTP happens immediately. For a signal to be this strong, it needs to be tied to an emotional signal. While 3×3=9 is not emotional, that humiliating event definitely was. So, although that event hasn’t happened over and over again (I hope), you still remember it vividly.

The Vision that you want people to remember needs to have the same components: it needs to be repeated often and it needs to be emotional, which is what I’m dealing with in this post.

How do we make a Vision appeal to emotion? Here are two tips:

1)     Create an Imbalance

Most theories of motivation and behaviour propose that all behaviour and learning is the result of an imbalance between what we currently have and what we would ideally like to have. For the majority of workers, there is no imbalance – they are quite happy going about their work everyday.

To create an imbalance, we need to contrast what their position is currently, versus what it could be in the future. Painting a picture, and a contrast, between the current state and the potential future state is a surefire way to create an emotional response.

We all like to hold onto our positive self-perceptions and when we see a better alternative to what we have now, we are pulled in that direction.

One caveat – the future state has to reflect something that your staff actually wants.

2)     Use common language

Consider these two differing statements that I heard recently at a management retreat:

a) “We set high business outcomes for our clients and we deliver on those expectations in a timely and complete manner”

Does that inspire you? Probably not. Now consider this alternative:

b) “We do what we say we’re going to do”

The second option actually makes you feel something and one of the reasons is that it uses common language. Or more accurately because it doesn’t use business-speak.

The problem with humans is that we have competing parts of our brains for emotions and logic. If you’ve ever had an emotional argument and left thinking: “I had so many great retorts, but I couldn’t think of them!” then you know this is true.  In fact, it is impossible for us to switch on our Limbic System (emotions) at the same time as our Pre-Frontal Cortex (analysis and logic).

Business-speak forces us to analyse. It makes us turn on the analytical part of our brain and this switches off the emotional part. A Vision with too much analytical language literally forces people to switch off emotionally.

To create a Vision that means something, you have to go out on a limb. That is why it is so hard. Go out on a limb to create something that means something emotionally to your people, set a path for something better, and go out on a limb and sound like a normal person instead of a manager.