What do you do when the truth gets in the way?

I believe that truth brings focus. I also believe it keeps you from making mistakes when the desire to be liked takes over. The problem is that sometimes the truth gets in the way of what you think will lead to success. What do you do when the truth gets in the way?

The fact that it does get in the way is exactly why you must define the truth.  It will get in the way when you want to make a bad decision that may have short term gains over long-term benefit, it will get in the way when you want to abandon process, it will get in the way when you want to push an issue under the rug, and it will get in the way when dealing with employees, when dealing with customers, when dealing with your boss . But you need it to get in the way, you need it to define what is right and wrong, that is the rule of truth

If you are not going to allow the things that you hold true to get in the way then don't even bother going through and defining your truth. By the very definition of true, "being in accordance with the actual state of affairs", these items cannot be negotiated, the truth is part of the actual state of affairs.  It is a lot like the law of gravity or light. Your truth is the law to you. Do you negotiate with gravity?  Do you negotiate with the speed of light? No, you do not negotiate, it is what it is and it's the same in this case.

These are your laws that you and your organization live by. So when you go through and define truth, get ready to use it as a bulwark in those situations that you may struggle against.  It's making the right decisions in those situations that will pay the longest term benefit. No one needs truth for easy situations, you need to have it for those challenging situations.

How do you give your employees more freedom to do their jobs?

I am writing a series of blog posts on how important it is to define the truth for yourself and your organization.  Earlier I wrote the first reason: Define your truths, the items that are fundamental to you, so that you do not place being liked over the right thing to do. The second reason to define your truth: Defining what is true helps you focus on working on the right things.  Now the third reason, operating under a structure of truths brings freedom to you and your employees.

It is critical that you clearly define the truth up front.  If truth is not defined clearly, published, circulated, and socialized people may be operating with the best intentions but against your truth. But if you have clearly established the truth and you know people are working towards it then you can give them freedom to work. They don't need to be micromanaged, they don't need to have every action reviewed, because you know they're operating within the truth  framework. The truth does set you free.

While your employees may not work exactly like you would work the fact that they're working towards the same goals and the same truths should enable you to free them to work without you looking over their shoulder. For instance, say a truth of your organization is that the customer comes first, the customer experience is primary, and you have documented this truth, published, and trained people on this truth. Unless they are choosing to be ignore you, your employees will not be making decisions that go against the truth. You don't need to worry about the freedom people have because they are operating within that context. They aren't going to take action against it and if they do there will be appropriate ramifications.

But that is freedom, the fact that their work is informed by the knowledge that they put customer experience first means they can operate without as many explicit instructions. People value freedom because that is how they can do meaningful work that utilizes their potential.  The best work gets done in that freedom.  Instead of having an additional person, namely you, working to accomplish what you asked, you're able to enable people to accomplish the work on their own. Oversight is adding nothing if it's solely there to establish guard rails which could be established by just clearly defining your truth up front.
This idea scales to you to your team to your larger organization into your company. Have you gone through to find the truth in your organization? Not the best practices the actual fundamental truths, the themes that you cannot deviate from. If you have have you got through and documented them then go make it clear to everyone exactly what they are.  

How can you improve your team's focus?

I am writing a series of blog posts on how important it is to define the truth for yourself and your organization.  Earlier I wrote the first reason: Define your truths, the items that are fundamental to you, so that you do not place being liked over the right thing to do. Here is the second reason: Defining what is true helps you focus on working on the right things.

It is easy to spend your days working on items that feel important in the moment, but in reality do not advance your efforts.  Your truth can function as your North Star, informing what you should work on so you are headed in the right direction.  Perhaps more importantly, what can slow your progress as an individual can kill your progress as a team.  Failure to define truth for your team or organization can lead to the senseless arguments we have all been a part of, where the battlefield is semantics and no meaningful decisions are made.  Once again I think it is instructive to return to Google's "Ten things we know to be true", which I included below for quick reference.  By defining the items that constitute truth for Google, they have clearly defined to employees where their focus should be and help eliminate the senseless discussions.  When defining the next product the focus should be pretty clear for teams at Google, focus on the user, do it really, really well, make it mobile, fast, and social.  While the specifics of a product are obviously not laid out as part of their truth statement, the big items, the fundamentals are there.  

Question: Have you defined the items that you hold to be true?  How about your team?  

Google's Ten things we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

   Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

   We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

   We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.

   Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

   The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

   Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
   • We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
   • We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
   • Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There’s always more information out there.

   Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

   Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

   Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn’t good enough.

    We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
    Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

Does the lack of creative thinking hold your organization back?

Perhaps the most valuable skill for work and for life is the skill that is least taught, the ability to think. In fact, not only is the ability to think not taught, in some ways what is taught discourages good thinking. What I mean by the ability to think is how people discover new ideas and explore new concepts. This is a highly under valued skill. If we were able to see how some of the great minds think it would really bring great insight into how to approach problems and discover new ideas.

We would be surprised at how much we could learn if we allowed ourselves to think. Read what children can do when given the opportunity,

In 1999, Sugata Mitra was chief scientist at a company in New Delhi that trains software developers. His office was on the edge of a slum, and on a hunch one day, he decided to put a computer into a nook in a wall separating his building from the slum. He was curious to see what the kids would do, particularly if he said nothing. He simply powered the computer on and watched from a distance. To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the machine.
Over the years, Mitra got more ambitious. For a study published in 2010, he loaded a computer with molecular biology materials and set it up in Kalikuppam, a village in southern India. He selected a small group of 10- to 14-year-olds and told them there was some interesting stuff on the computer, and might they take a look? Then he applied his new pedagogical method: He said no more and left.
Over the next 75 days, the children worked out how to use the computer and began to learn. When Mitra returned, he administered a written test on molecular biology. The kids answered about one in four questions correctly. After another 75 days, with the encouragement of a friendly local, they were getting every other question right. “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”

It was an amazing story a story that is almost unbelievable, except the methods have been shown to work with other children as well, 

In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things. For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute and then let them play with the toy. Another set of students was given no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to do discovered only about four. A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

These stories show the power of creative thinking. They show that if we were able to take a childlike approach to learning how much more we can learn on our own. I think it would be fascinating to see the search history for Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin,  or Warren Buffett to understand how they approach the exploration of different ideas and concepts. What really distinguishes them as leaders and innovators is the way they work through these ideas. The problem is how to think is not something we teach in schools. Thinking is not something we teach at work. We teach rote learning and not the exploration of ideas.
There is evidence that the more we are told the less we learn.

How does the lack of thinking manifest itself? The two ways I see most prominently are:

1. When asked to accomplish a task, the response is either "How do I do this?" or  "That can't be done."  I find it very frustrating when I receive one of those responses, yet I am able to find the answer with some simple exploration.
2. The other manifestation is when individuals are asked to contribute ideas.  Most often the response is to think for a few minutes about the issue and then write down some ideas.  While that may appear to be creative thinking, it isn't.  The lack of curiosity to understand what others have done or to do analysis on past data is a lack of creative of thinking.

I think real creative thinking starts with research and exploration. Is there existing data? What have others done in our space that has been successful? Where have others found success in other areas that may not be related?  While researching you let your mind explore what the data says, what others have done etc... iterate through what it means, how you can apply it to your situation, where else does it take you? Once you have done some real thinking, then start to solve the problem. The work of others and your exploration should bee fuel to the fire not a how to manual.

Stewardship vs ownership

I once had a discussion with an employee of mine who disputed the idea that people "owned" their tasks.  I disagreed, believing that people should be responsible for the success or failure of their jobs.  Recently though a much better word has come to my attention, which I believe more accurately portrays the relationship between the worker and the work, which is "stewardship."
Here is the definition from dictionary.com:

stew·ard·ship

 [stoo-erd-ship, st:yoo-]  Show IPA

noun

1.

the position and duties of a steward, a person who acts as the surrogate of another or others, especially by managing property, financial affairs, an estate, etc.

2.

the responsible overseeing and protection of something considered worth caring for and preserving:New regulatory changes will result in better stewardship of lands that are crucial for open space and wildlife habitat.

These definitions are fine, but what I think stewardship conveys is being responsible for the success or failure of something that someone else owns.  The distinction being that someone who owns something can destroy it primarily at their expense, a steward is not approved to destroy something because someone else actually owns it.  The owner trusted the steward to care for the item.

So an employee, a team, or really even a company are not owners of what they are working on, they are stewards, responsible for success or failure, but charged with caring on the behalf of someone else.  

Can celebrating individual achievement hurt success?

While celebrating individual accomplishments is great and needed, it is important that the individual achievements are tied into the larger goals as well. The reason why this is important is because we don't want an organization where people are just striving for their individual achievements, instead we want individual achievement tied to the larger goal.  

In "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" the dysfunction at the top of the pyramid is "Inattention to results."  One of causes of this inattention is that team members are too focused on their own success rather than the success of the team.  

While I certainly wouldn't dismiss the necessity of recognizing individual accomplishments, I do believe that it should be done carefully.  Individual recognition can have a ripple effect, "She was recognized for her individual accomplishment when she did X" --> "I want to be recognized so I will do Y for myself" and it quickly becomes that the standard is set around individual achievement rather than team achievement.  

Question: Think about the last time someone was recognized for success, if you go beyond the the high level platitudes to the team, were there incentives (either monetarily, verbally, or otherwise) given to the individual that might reinforce the idea that individual achievement is paramount?