The Right Fight

Saj-nicole Joni, Damon Beyer

• Editore: HarperCollins e-books
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780061968259
• Argomento: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoria: Verwaltung

The Right Fight, the new management guide from noted business strategists Saj-nicole Joni and Damon Beyer, turns management thinking on its head and shows why, in the fast-moving, hyper-competitive marketplaces of the 21st century, leaders need to both foster alignment and orchestrate thoughtful controversy in their organizations to get the best out of them. The authors' groundbreaking research—including examples as diverse as Unilever, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Dell, the Clinton Administration, and the Houston Independent School System—shows that happy workers can become bored or complacent and thus less productive than workers who are subjected to a little properly managed tension. Readers of Good to Great and Winning, as well as the Harvard Business Review and Strategy + Business, will find much to ponder in The Right Fight.

PART ONE

Alignment and Tension in Organizational Life

ONE

Alignment Is Not the Whole Answer

WE CAN HARDLY blame you for being skeptical.

If you’re like most people in the business world, you’ve always been told by teachers, managers, colleagues, and business gurus that the single most important thing leaders have to get right is alignment.

To accomplish anything, the logic goes, employees must agree about the mission, strategy, and goals of an organization. Aligned employees are happy employees, and happy employees are productive employees.

Simple, right?

Well, in a word, no. What’s going on here is that many people mistake the comfortable feeling that alignment brings for the real conditions necessary for optimal performance.

A well-aligned, smoothly functioning team can do a bad job well, or a job that shouldn’t be done at all. The Titanic, by all accounts, was being run smoothly and well when it collided with an iceberg and sank. Because the team of sailors believed the ship was unsinkable, they ignored the initial signs of danger until it was too late. Ditto for Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that had one of the strongest cultures of teamwork and loyalty on Wall Street. They hit their own virtual iceberg and sank as well, almost taking the entire global economy with them in 2008. They, too, were aligned around their belief in an unsinkable ship and they were running it smoothly. Up until the moment that the water began pouring over the side and the ship began to tip into the ocean, the team was happy and satisfied with its lot.

Don’t mistake what we’re saying. Alignment is important. In fact, it’s necessary. All those business books are right about that. You cannot win with a team that is badly aligned. The problem is, it’s not sufficient. Achieving perfect or near-perfect alignment is not the end of the road. It’s merely the beginning.

Let’s take this a step further. Counter to conventional wisdom, the dirty little secret of leadership is that a leader’s time is not always best spent trying to help his or her teams make nice and get along.

They don’t tell you this in business school. Quite the contrary—business school, like everywhere else in the management world, is constantly harping on the value of teamwork and alignment.

Wait a minute, you object. I’ve worked for nice bosses and nasty bosses. The nice ones dole out the doughnuts or the compliments, and that makes your day. The nasty ones forget to praise, or throw out a cutting remark, and make the workplace poisonous.

What’s wrong with being nice? What is the alternative?

Don’t worry. We’re not going to defend the nasty boss. And nice bosses the world over have our praise and thanks. What we are arguing is that in an environment where alignment is the only goal, alignment robs us of necessary dissent, of the checks and balances that mitigate risk, and of the tensions that create innovation and sustainable value.

TENSION IS PRODUCTIVE

At the heart of our argument is the counterintuitive, hard-to-swallow insight that a certain amount of healthy struggle is good for organizations and for individuals. Indeed, people and organizations perform optimally when they are under the right kinds and amounts of stress.

Tension is a good thing: for workers, for teams, and for organizations.

The concept of creative tension is not new. It’s in the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita. It’s been written about in the lives of artists, musicians, and scientists who have created breakthroughs that have changed the world. The U.S. Constitution depends on it, and we call on it as a motivating force every time we go out to vote. All successful treaties between nations—not to mention all successful relationships between people—work because it is not only possible but empowering to release in creative ways the energy inherent in tension.

It follows then that a key aspect of a leader’s job is to create the right battles and to make sure they are fought right. Right fights unleash the creative, productive potential of teams, organizations, and communities. Right fights make for better possibilities. Right fights lead to better results.

With alignment and properly managed tension, organizations hit a sweet spot and start realizing their potential. With right fights, organizations can achieve breakthrough performance, real innovation, and leadership growth.

That’s it. That’s the central insight of this book. Right fights unleash the creative energy in people and organizations and allow them to thrive and achieve at their best possible levels. Right fights encourage diversity of views, they engender checks and balances, they inspire complex thinking and respect for difference. They are the cauldron in which new ideas are heated and mixed into the stew of new markets, processes, and products. They are the fuel of human innovation. And they provide a rich training ground for future leaders.

FINDING THE RIGHT LEVEL OF TENSION

Theresa Wellbourne, CEO of eePulse, has studied thousands of leaders, managers, and workers in businesses undergoing change over the past twenty years. She has found that the single greatest predictor of poor performance in a business group is when the employees are happy. That may surprise you. It seems counterintuitive. Isn’t happiness what we’re all aiming for?

A little detail helps here. Employees perform poorly when survey scores show they are complacent and thus not motivated to rock the boat and push the company in new directions.

The second greatest predictor of poor performance is when employees are overwhelmed—that is, when survey scores show low employee satisfaction and a large dose of dysfunctional fighting. The one thing both groups have in common is that they score very low on “energy.” Complacent groups and overstressed groups both lack the necessary energy to perform at their best. Tension in the right measure creates the emotional energy people need to change.

Recent brain research points to the same thing. Dr. Paul Rosch, president of the American Institute of Stress, puts it simply: individual performance improves as stress increases—but only to a point. Past that point, performance declines precipitously, and if subjected to distress for extended periods of time, people get sick. Too many or too threatening fights trigger the amygdala and primitive, destructive “fight-or-flight” impulses flood the brain.

But within an acceptable range of competition and tension, more of the brain is firing, more pathways are stimulated, and more creative centers are engaged. In short, more of what makes each of us unique, creative, and passionate is available for use.

It’s time to stop candy-coating our management teaching, training, and practice. It’s time to stop pretending that teamwork is the be-all and end-all of organizational life. It’s time to own up to the truth that the right balance of alignment and competition is what pushes individuals and groups to do their best. And once we do this, it’s time to master the principles and skills to make this work.

LEADERS MUST SHOULDER NEW RESPONSIBILITY

This realization places great responsibility on your shoulders as a leader. It’s simply not enough to create a peaceful and safe place to work. Your job is not done once you’ve explained the goal or shared the vision and gotten everyone to agree to it. That’s only table stakes for competition in the twenty-first century.

The real game today is figuring out how to get a group of aligned team members, or an aligned organization, to produce its best results. What does it take to stay ahead of the marketplace, to serve the customer brilliantly, to dream up the next big thing? Where must we put in place checks and balances so that we don’t collectively run off the cliff because we squelched some crucial dissent? Where must we counter the very real factor of human greed and systematically keep our passions in check to create sustainable futures, not disastrous bubbles?

From one organization to another, the answers will be different. Graphic designers work differently than structural engineers. A television newsroom requires different kinds of alignment and pressure than a state budget office. A university responds to different kinds of competition than an automaker’s shop floor.

In the end, too, personal integrity will be at stake. We must look deep inside ourselves to our core beliefs, and create environments where people can collectively do more than they can do alone—with wisdom, humor, and a sense of honor for both peace and conflict. Tension brings out both the best and worst in workers and managers alike.

It’s our goal to help you pursue the right balance of alignment and tension for your team, your division, your organization.

The good news is the skills are learnable. Although there is still a lot of art to this kind of leadership, the Right Fight Principles are clear. Applying them, you can easily distinguish a right fight from a wrong one, decide when to fight and when not to, and learn to turn the inevitable conflicts into productive performance.

PREPARE FOR THE RACE

Think of it like racing a sailboat. You have to prepare the mast, the sails, the boat itself, and the team. That’s alignment. It’s the key prerequisite because it ensures that once you get going, everything will be working together. But alignment by itself gets you nowhere until you have the tension of the wind in your sails. You’re literally stuck at the dock.

And when you’re actually at sea, the winds are going to change. The point of alignment is not to avoid the rough seas, but rather to be ready to exploit the tension created by the winds and the waves and the priorities of your crew—in the moment—in order to win the race.

So the job of the leader is to get the alignment right first, and then to find out how and when to inject the correct amount of tension into the organization to keep the sails taut, the line true, and the boat on an even keel. That’s the only way in the end to win races in the marketplace.

You might say that our goal is to show leaders how to harness the power of the wind.

Let’s get started. Let’s get practical.

Let’s look at some examples of right fights and wrong fights.

CASE STUDY: Doug Conant Reinvigorates Campbell Soup Company

• The CEO had to work on alignment first, tension second.
• Conant kept the focus squarely on the future—a right fight.
• A right fight is a process, not an event.

Be careful what you ask for. Doug Conant wanted a challenge when he stepped down as president of Nabisco and took the chief executive role at Campbell Soup Company in 2001. At the time Campbell was the poorest-performing major food company in the world.

Having experienced significant declines in performance across many measures, the company had fallen prey to an ill-advised effort to aggressively cut costs in hopes of restoring prosperity. Throughout the previous decade, management had systematically worked to lower the cost of its signature products, while at the same time raising prices. Finally, the situation became so challenging that they ...