Strycher – Gen X in 2K

Watch a group of animals sometime. Cesar Millan is always talking about the pack leader. We have a term/phrase for it, we call it the "alpha male", though it is not always a male that is the alpha in a pack.  Sometimes we just call it the "alpha dog", and we even tolerated the creation of a movie about alpha tendencies.  In any pack, only one alpha can preside, and animals understand this.  In my house, the "alpha" is actually a Siamese cat, the pack leader over all the other cats and dogs.  Yes, the dogs submit to my alpha cat's dominant lead, and he is dubbed "king of the house".  This is, of course, if you accept that the animal pack has an animal "alpha" and that a human, i.e. me, is not the true "alpha" of the household.  Probably not, I let my Siamese walk all over me.

Surprisingly enough, humans seem unable to grasp the alpha mentality in groups of humans.  We also have a term for it in human behavior, calling it Type A personality. In any group of humans, there is a potential to have not just one, but several Type As in the group, depending on how diverse the group population is.  However, the Type As have a certain myopia about their own Type A alpha tendencies, and regularly fail to recognize that any group will rapidly become dysfunctional if the true "alpha" is not identified and acknowledged.

What I see happen, and am guilty of myself, is when more than one alpha types are present in a group, each seeks to solidify his or her dominance over the group and the discussion. The longer it takes to solidify that dominance, the more likely the group is to break up into factions and arguments. I, myself, am guilty of losing my cool and making some pretty sharp statements to others, though my ability to deal with these situations has improved over time. This is a type of destructive conflict, and can, over time, result in a permanent division within the group — not what you ideally want in a business setting.

You might be wondering though, are all alphas outspoken and vocal? In my experience, the answer is no.  However, the quiet ones can sow just as much dissent, though it is usually behind the scenes.  Sometimes an alpha can be the least vocal person in the group, and you may not even notice their behaviors for quite some time. This type of alpha can be harder to deal with than the vocal one, because he or she is so hard to detect at times.

As I have considered this topic, I have wondered why it is that humans struggle to understand this natural personality tendency. What I believe is that we are aware of the behaviors and tendencies, but our conflict resolution skills are so poorly developed that when an alpha fight initiates, we do not know how to diffuse the conflict.  Animals resolve the alpha dispute over time as one alpha wins fight after fight, sometimes with one combatant being severely injured, killed, or forced to leave the pack. In human groups, we do not allow a conflict to degrade to that level in business, which just extends the life of the fight, sometimes across many years.

How, as leaders, can we handle this tendency better then? The first step is always detection and awareness. If we do not notice that this behavior is arising, we cannot take actions to diffuse it before the fight explodes. After detecting, we need to develop and practice skills at bringing the alphas together to establish a productive working relationship, with constructive, not destructive, conflict. This skill is not easily obtained, and is often dependent upon the leader's charisma and earned respect. Each leader I have studied has his or her own way of addressing these situations, but inevitably they all involve bringing the two alphas together to bridge the gap via discussion. Once the alphas bridge the gap in their disagreement and establish a working relationship, the combination can often be a very powerful component of a functioning team. Of course, sometimes this conversation also helps work out in a more peaceable means the true alpha, with one submitting to the other to some degree. Regardless of the mechanics, the end result should be a peaceful agreement between the alpha personalities that enables productive participation in the group.

I often find when participating in business discussions that we have a myopic view of task achievement.  For example, we have all heard the metaphor about being unable to see the forest for the trees.  I think this happens a lot more often than we acknowledge in business, and it can have very damaging long-term effects.  Basically, I have worked on many projects or process improvements where we are trying to improve something, but essentially the outcome is that we are putting a band-aid on the process, perhaps on top of many other band-aids, without ever considering the whole.

A CEO of a fortune 100 company recently made the following statement:

At the same time, we need to stop doing things that no longer make sense. Challenge bureaucratic processes that no longer provide value. Another simple question will help: “Would the customer see enough value in this process or program to pay for it?” If the answer is no, we need to stop doing it – - now.

Quite a strong statement, and a good one to make.  How often do we encounter a business process that legitimately makes no sense?  Or a step in the process that if we looked at it carefully would be classified as adding little to no value?  Six Sigma and Lean both have a designation for such steps – "Non-Value Add" or "NVA".  Process improvement methodologies recognize that some activities outgrow their usefulness or effectiveness, and become extra steps in the process "because we've always done it that way."

The inherent issue I see in the activities I am involved with is a short-sighted, short-term task that does not align with long-term value and objectives.  We have a term for these decisions, and we call them "tactical decisions".  However, in a military sense, tactical decisions are supposed to align with the strategic plan, yet in business, there is enough evidence that tactical actions often do not align with the strategy. Once we understand that it happens, we should be asking ourselves "why does this happen?" and "how do we prevent it in the future?"

The issue, in part, is one of measurement.  Although we have many formulae in business for many different measurements, we have few that tangibly measure the objective value of an activity, and of those, few comprehend long-term value or time.  Sure, we have ways of financially measuring, but can we, in most cases, quantifiably associate resource effort in a meaningful way with time value of money?  My sense is, this is a difficult undertaking, because it is predicated on the assumption that we were finitely tracking the time invested by our employees in a variety of tasks and activities, down to a very granular level.  It also assumes that, regardless of historical tracking and its granularity, that we will in all cases track it to this level in the future.  Truthfully, we do not do that.  We might do it here and there, but we rarely have a quantifiable measurement of every activity invested in every process.  If we did, we would not have to initiate projects to determine this investment.

Let's say that we had this information though.  Now that I have the input, where do I plug it in?  Arguably, we often talk about the inputs to the equations as Yes/No values instead of a scalable value, such as a percentage.  I encountered this recently when asking the question "is it broken?"  The responses to this question were varied.  Some said "Yes".  Some said "Sometimes".  Some said "not enough to fix it".  After hearing the responses, I asked the question a second time, but in a different wording.  The new question became "in what percentage of cases is it broken?"  After asking it this way, I received a fairly common percentage back from the team.  I then asked, "what percentage marker would we use to define broken?" and received the response of 80%.  Since the assessment was that it was only broken in 5% of cases, the process itself was not broken enough to require a full rewrite, but the 5% exception case had to be treated differently.

Now that we grasp that the formula is not 1 + 1 = 2, but rather, a much more complex equation, we need to discuss the inputs.  If we were going to measure Value (V), then how would we do that?  What factors do we want to incorporate?  Some factors we might want to look at include:

• Cost to implement
• Cost to operate
• Likelihood of rework
• Rework instances (defects)
• Effort to rework
• Lifecycle of solution (how long is it viable?)
• Likelihood of delays to meeting customer needs
• Average delay duration
• Benefit to the organization
• Benefit to the customer

If we took those factors and turned them into an equation, it might look like the following:

Value (V) = [Benefit to the Customer (BC) + Benefit to the Organization (BO) ] – [ TVM(Cost of Implementation) + (Years * Cost to Operate) + Rework Effort(RE) + Delays (D) ]

Admittedly, a bit complex to assess for every task we undertake.  So maybe something more simple is worthwhile.  Perhaps the following questions.

• Will I have to revisit and revise this again in 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months?
• Am I re-doing a task that someone else should have done right in the first place?
• Is this solution resolving a symptom of the problem?
• Is this project, discussion, or activity costing more than we will save after we finish?
• Are we solving a problem that affects only 20% or less of the population?

If any of these questions are answered "Yes", you are probably working on something that is adding little to no value to the customer or the organization.

As managers, we should be re-evaluating, as often as necessary, whether the activities we and our employees are engaged in are adding value and solving long-term solutions, or whether we are slapping a band-aid on and hoping for better times in the future.  Not all solutions can be deferred to the next team, the next phase, the next project, or the next year.  Sometimes, we need to re-assess whether an action we take today will cost us more to resolve in the future, and even though it might delay a schedule, we should reconsider whether we should meet the short-term tactical need, or work on a more sustainable, strategic solution to the problem. We need to think more about value, and less about time pressure, more about sustainability and less about symptomatic crises.

Although I am sure that there are many, many assessments out there of how much human resource capital organizations invest and expend on non-value adding activities, I can only say for myself that a high proportion of my time is spent on short-term tactical crises, resolving the same issues over and over with no end in sight.  I suspect this sentiment is true for a good number of other employees of large organizations worldwide.  Despite the fact that I try to use this assessment scheme in determine what activities I really need to invest effort in, I often find myself buried in conference call after conference call making no headway and resolving little.  While getting a paycheck to resolve very little might be acceptable for some, I feel a need to have my time spent on more active resolution of business challenges, as I find that I am happier when I have that sense of accomplishment — as I suspect others may be as well. My advice to an employee, a manager, or a strategic leader, is to work to develop an environment that enables an honest assessment of activity value so that less time is tied up in bureaucratic red tape and more is spent on actually creating and achieving value for the organization and the customer.