12 Ideas I Learned This Week From High Output Management
/Intel’s Andy Grove is considered a must-read in the tech and business world. Grove’s High Output Management provides several lessons for both organizations and individuals, even for those outside the tech industry. Grove was a visionary not only on the technology side, but on the organizational and leadership side. His ideas span big picture strategy considerations to practical advice on running meetings and employee feedback. Every organization makes decisions. Grove’s advice improves the decision-making process. Grove’s insistence on the importance of writing and removing interruptions are even more relevant today than when he wrote his books.
The 12 Best Ideas
o Take control of your career and skills – no one else will do it for you
o Be a micro-CEO: even as a middle manager, you still have control over certain decisions, regardless of what the organization has done
o How writing improves thinking and decisions
o Make a tough call; don’t waffle
o Following rules and procedures isn’t valuable unless people understand the purpose
o Interruption destroys the ability to create meaningful work
o Make one-on-one meetings worthwhile
o How to structure employee reviews
o How to run a meeting
o Stop trying to get consensus
o Negate Peer-Group Syndrome
1. Take Control of Your career and Skills – No One Else Will Do It for You
From High Output Management:
The consequence of all this is very simple. If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are a lot of them, and many of them are very hungry…As a general rule, you have to accept that no matter where you work, you are not an employee—you are in a business with one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses.
The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. You own it as a sole proprietor. You must compete with millions of individuals every day, and every day you must enhance your value, hone your competitive advantage, learn, adapt, get out of the way, move from job to job, even from industry to industry if you must and retrench if you need to do so in order to start again. The key task is to manage your career so that you do not become a casualty.
You compete with everyone, not just local talent. Remote work is an opportunity for those growing their skills; a threat for those maintaining the status quo. You are in the business of yourself. You are the CEO of your career. Your company or boss will not prioritize your career. They are not actively going against you, it’s just that they are overwhelmed other issues so they’ll never keep your interests top of mind. Some companies won’t develop their talent because they’re afraid people will leave, not realizing that good talent doesn’t stick around if they don’t grow. Avoid these companies. Only you determine what you want out of a career. Devote the necessary time to achieve what you want. No one will do it for you.
From High Output Management:
…When someone graduates from college with a technical education, at that time and for the next several years, that young person will be fully up-to-date in the technology of the time. Hence, he possesses a good deal of knowledge-based power in the organization that hired him. If he does well, he will be promoted to higher and higher positions, and as the years pass, his position power will grow but his intimate familiarity with current technology will fade. Put another way, even if today’s veteran manager was once an outstanding engineer, he is not now the technical expert he was when he joined the company. At Intel, anyway, we managers get a little more obsolete every day. So a business like ours has to employ a decision-making process unlike those used in more conventional industries. If Intel used people holding old-fashioned position power to make all its decisions, decisions would be made by people unfamiliar with the technology of the day. And in general, the faster the change in the know-how on which the business depends or the faster the change in customer preferences, the greater the divergence between knowledge and position power is likely to be.
There’s a common belief that as you gain experience, you gain knowledge. But that’s pure fantasy. Employees stagnate by relying on years of experience as a proxy for ability. It’s not years that matters. It’s effort and results compounded over those years. The world is beginning to realize credentials and experience are lazy substitutes for skills. It’s a slow change as there’s still safety in seeking experience, degrees, certifications, etc. Don’t go through the motions. Focus on producing real output, not substitutions.
2. Be a micro-CEO: Even as a Middle Manager, You Still Have Control Over Certain Decisions, Regardless of What the Organization Has Done
From High Output Management:
As a middle manager, of any sort, you are in effect a chief executive of an organization yourself. Don’t wait for the principles and practices you find appealing to be imposed from the top. As a micro-CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit.
Managers have more discretion than they realize. Create policies and habits that aligns with what you thinks makes sense, not just because it’s been done a certain way for a long time. There’s flexibility in how to run things so you don’t have to do it the same way as the rest of the company. Most business behaviors are done because they’ve always been done that way, not because they’ve been proven superior. Many managers don’t push the boundaries and accept the status quo. It’s easier to give up than fight for what you think makes sense. Most changes will be acceptable if you’ve given the issue thoughtful consideration.
3. How Writing Improves Thinking and Decisions
From High Output Management:
So why are written reports necessary at all? They obviously can’t provide timely information. What they do is constitute an archive of data, help to validate ad hoc inputs, and catch, in safety-net fashion, anything you may have missed. But reports also have another totally different function.
As they are formulated and written, the author is forced to be more precise than he might be verbally. Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with trouble spots in his presentation. Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
Written memos are powerful – they require thoughtfulness, discipline, and precision in your thinking, something easily faked when talking. Writing reveals bad thinking. It’s painfully obvious reading rambling, incoherent arguments. Use writing to test you and your team’s knowledge. Yes, writing takes time and people will complain about having to do it. It’s hard for a reason – it challenges your thinking and decision making. Writing will make you think, “Do I really know what I’m talking about?” It’s difficult to bullshit your way through the written word. Those who push back against writing understand their bad ideas are about to get exposed. So they complain about writer’s block, not having enough time, etc. It’s just an excuse to avoid the necessary hard work to have an opinion worth sharing.
Writing allows readers to review, deliberate, and consider responses to the arguments well before any in-person meeting. How often have you been in a meeting and no one has given any thought to the topic at hand? The meeting is then wasted catching up on basic ideas that could have been done earlier. Of course the resulting discussions are terrible because no one has crafted thoughtful discussion points. Participants concoct whatever ideas they can string together in the 5 minutes they’ve spent catching up.
Writing is thinking. It’s not something that happens after the thinking. Even if no one reads your work, you’ve improved your understanding through the writing process.
For more reading on why the power of writing is embraced by many leaders across various industries, see:
· Pioneering Portfolio Management by David Swenson
· Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock
· Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos by Walter Isaacson and Jeff Bezos
4. Make a Tough Call; Don’t Waffle
From High Output Management:
Another example is waffling, when a manager puts off a decision that will affect the work of other people. In effect, the lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision; no green light is a red light, and work can stop for a whole organization.
Both the depressed and the waffling manager can have virtually unlimited negative leverage. If people are badly affected by a poor sales training effort, the situation can be handled by retraining the group. But the negative leverage produced by depression and waffling is very hard to counter because their impact on an organization is both so pervasive and so elusive.
Don’t waffle on decisions. Leaders lose their team’s respect when a decision is obvious (albeit hard), but won’t make a call. A decision, especially a hard “no”, lets people move on and provides closure. There are of course times when more work is needed, and a decision should be postponed. If that’s the case, make sure the work required is specific and actionable. Don’t just ask people to think about it for a week before reconvening. Research the knowledge gap then come back and make a decision. When specific research needs to be done, the delay is justified. When there’s no specific reason for the delay, the leader is waffling.
For more reading on making a tough call, see Jocko Willink’s books. Willink is a former Navy Seal and provides great perspective on decision making under tough conditions.
· Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win
· The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win
5. Following Rules and Procedures Isn’t Valuable Unless People Understand the Purpose
From High Output Management:
As we become more consistent, we should also remember that the value of an administrative procedure is contained not in formal statements but in the real thinking that led to its establishment. This means that even as we try to standardize what we do, we should continue to think critically about what we do and the approaches we use.
Don’t obediently follow procedures without knowing why. Mindless task completion doesn’t help anyone. Rigid thinkers love rules because it’s provides the comfort of completeness. It’s the thinking behind the action that counts, not just doing the action. Most incentive systems reward checking the box and not the hard work of considering nuance, 2nd order effects, or interrelationships just beyond the scope of the procedure.
6. Interruption Destroys the Ability to Create Meaningful Work
From High Output Management:
The most common problem cited was uncontrolled interruptions, which in remarkably uniform fashion affected both supervisory and know-how managers. Everyone felt that the interruptions got in the way of his “own” work. Interruptions had a common source, most frequently coming from subordinates and from people outside the managers’ immediate organization but whose work the managers influenced.
The most frequently proposed solutions were not very practical. The idea mentioned most often was to create blocks of time for individual work by hiding physically. But this is a less than happy answer, because the interrupters obviously have legitimate problems, and if the manager responded by hiding, these would pile up. One “solution” was a suggestion that customers not call marketing managers at certain hours. No good.
Interruptions are a pain point for employees and it’s only getting worse as we expect everyone to be on-demand all the time. Great work isn’t done in an environment of open floor plans, constant instant messages, and urgently responding to all emails. People want the ability to concentrate and produce meaningful work, not be interrupted every two minutes for unimportant issues.
For more reading on how to create environments for thoughtful, uninterrupted work, see:
· It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried
· The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel Levitin
· Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal
· The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler
· The Power of Agency by Anthony Rao
7. Make One-on-One Meetings Worthwhile
From High Output Management:
A key point about a one-on-one: It should be regarded as the subordinate’s meeting, with its agenda and tone set by him. There’s good reason for this. Somebody needs to prepare for the meeting. The supervisor with eight subordinates would have to prepare eight times; the subordinate only once.
What is the role of the supervisor in a one-on-one? He should facilitate the subordinate’s expression of what’s going on and what’s bothering him. The supervisor is there to learn and to coach. Peter Drucker sums up the supervisor’s job here very nicely: “The good time users among managers do not talk to their subordinates about their problems but they know how to make the subordinates talk about theirs.”
How is this done? By applying Grove’s Principle of Didactic Management, “Ask one more question!” When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all he wants to about a subject, he should ask another question. He should try to keep the flow of thoughts coming by prompting the subordinate with queries until both feel satisfied that they have gotten to the bottom of a problem.
I’d like to suggest some mechanical hints for effective one-on-one meetings. First, both the supervisor and subordinate should have a copy of the outline and both should take notes on it, which serves a number of purposes. I take notes in just about all circumstances, and most often end up never looking at them again. I do it to keep my mind from drifting and also to help me digest the information I hear and see.
The supervisor should also encourage the discussion of heart-to-heart issues during one-on-ones, because this is the perfect forum for getting at subtle and deep work-related problems affecting his subordinate. Is he satisfied with his own performance? Does some frustration or obstacle gnaw at him? Does he have doubts about where he is going? But the supervisor should be wary of the “zinger,” which is a heart-to-heart issue brought up at an awkward time. More often than not, these come near the end of a meeting. If you let that happen, the subordinate might tell you something like he’s unhappy and has been looking outside for a job and give you only five minutes to deal with it.
One-on-one meetings are the one time a leader can really assess what’s going on in an organization. It won’t happen during group meetings where conformity and politeness are prized by avoiding big, controversial issues. And never will personal issues be voiced in front of others.
As Grove said, it’s the employee’s meeting. Make sure they have a say in the agenda and can bring up topics that are deeper than just the daily activities. Is the employee feeling satisfied and valued with the work being done? Are there underlying frustrations that can’t be brought up in group meetings? Are there communication or relationship issues? One-on-ones are a time for meaningful conversation, not a quick update meeting. One-on-ones are also a great way to provide constant feedback over the course of a year, rather than the typical once a year review.
Make sure one-on-ones’ are given the time (1 hour, not 15 minutes) to allow deep conversation.
8. How to Structure Employee Reviews
From High Output Management:
The fact is that giving such reviews is the single most important form of task-relevant feedback we as supervisors can provide. It is how we assess our subordinates’ level of performance and how we deliver that assessment to them individually.
But what is its fundamental purpose? Though all of the responses given to my questions are correct, there is one that is more important than any of the others: it is to improve the subordinate’s performance.
You must level with your subordinate—the credibility and integrity of the entire system depend on your being totally frank. And don’t be surprised to find that praising someone in a straightforward fashion can be just as hard as criticizing him without embarrassment.
…“On the One Hand…On the Other Hand…” Most reviews probably fall into this category, containing both positive and negative assessments. Common problems here include superficiality, clichés, and laundry lists of unrelated observations. All of these will leave your subordinate bewildered and will hardly improve his future performance, the review’s basic purpose.
A poor performer has a strong tendency to ignore his problem. Here a manager needs facts and examples so that he can demonstrate its reality. Progress of some sort is made when the subordinate actively denies the existence of a problem rather than ignoring it passively, as before.
For training to be effective, it also has to maintain a reliable, consistent presence. Employees should be able to count on something systematic and scheduled, not a rescue effort summoned to solve the problem of the moment. In other words, training should be a process, not an event.
A couple key points from Grove on employee reviews - complete honesty is required when giving negative feedback. Sure, it’s uncomfortable, but employees will see right through attempts to soften the language (which often ends of confusing the message). It’s a long process to get cultural buy-in to make honest and clear feedback the norm. It’s not something that can be mandated or put in a company manual. Provide concrete examples to make sure there’s no confusion about the issue at hand. When feedback is vague, understanding and improvement doesn’t occur. Employee reviews also need to happen consistently at one-on-one meetings, not just on an annual review basis. In the sports world, you would never coach someone once a year, and the same applies for business leaders.
9. How to Run a Meeting
From High Output Management:
What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting—a leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker? The answer, of course, is all of them. Please note that lecturer is not listed. A supervisor should never use staff meetings to pontificate, which is the surest way to undermine free discussion and hence the meeting’s basic purpose.
An estimate of the dollar cost of a manager’s time, including overhead, is about $100 per hour. So a meeting involving ten managers for two hours costs the company $2,000. Most expenditures of $2,000 have to be approved in advance by senior people—like buying a copying machine or making a transatlantic trip—yet a manager can call a meeting and commit $2,000 worth of managerial resources at a whim. So even if you’re just an invited participant, you should ask yourself if the meeting—and your attendance—is desirable and justified.
The chairman is also responsible for maintaining discipline. It is criminal for him to allow people to be late and waste everyone’s time. Remember, wasting time here really means that you are wasting the company’s money, with the meter ticking away at the rate of $100 per hour per person. Do not worry about confronting the late arriver. Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.
If society understood what time was worth, you would see 1) fewer meetings and 2) for the meetings that did occur, participants would be 100% prepared ahead of time. It’s unfortunate that organizations and individuals treat time as less valuable than money. But wasting time is never as obvious as wasting money, so the waste continues…
From High Output Management:
Assuming the meeting does need to be held, the chairman faces a set of obligations. The first one has to do with attendance. As the chairman, you must identify who should attend and then try to get those people to come. It is not enough to ask people and hope for the best; you need to follow up and get commitments. If someone invited can’t make it himself, see to it that he sends a person with the power to speak for him.
Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more than six or seven people attend. Eight people should be the absolute cutoff. Decision-making is not a spectator sport, because onlookers get in the way of what needs to be done.
Once the meeting is over, the chairman must nail down exactly what happened by sending out minutes that summarize the discussion that occurred, the decision made, and the actions to be taken. And it’s very important that attendees get the minutes quickly, before they forget what happened. The minutes should also be as clear and as specific as possible, telling the reader what is to be done, who is to do it, and when. All this may seem like too much trouble, but if the meeting was worth calling in the first place, the work needed to produce the minutes is a small additional investment (an activity with high leverage) to ensure that the full benefit is obtained from what was done.
Once a meeting has more than 5 people, the ability to have thoughtful, concentrated discussions is hindered. The group is too big to stay focused on one issue. And the bigger the group the more the responsibility diffuses amongst everyone, so no one becomes the champion of action. Everyone can hide in the shadows. Only have key people in attendance. Make sure they are prepared with the agenda and materials sent days in advance. It’s mandatory that people prepare for the meetings. This expectation should be peer-enforced. Don’t tolerate those who waste your time. Meetings are not time to get caught up on the issue.
There’s a significant burden on the organizer of the meeting for good reason. Those who call a meeting need to have an exceptional reason. Leaders need to send a written memo (see point #3) and agenda several days before the meeting. Attendees then have adequate time to thoroughly review the memo and clarify any questions before the meeting. It should always be the goal to clarify and solve as many issues as possible before meeting in person. The leader is also responsible for keeping the meeting focused on one issue, not trying to cover multiple items. The leader should send out minutes/a summary and identify next action steps. This helps identify and correct any miscommunication immediately. While this may seem like overkill for some people, remember how much time and money is wasted from participants unclear about next steps or forgetting what progress has been made.
For more reading on how to effectively run a meeting, see:
· Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More by Morten Hansen
· The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer by Jeffrey Liker
· Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
· The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
10. Facilitate Robust Debate and Decision Making
From High Output Management:
The first stage should be free discussion, in which all points of view and all aspects of an issue are openly welcomed and debated. The greater the disagreement and controversy, the more important becomes the word free. This sounds obvious, but it’s not often the practice. Usually when a meeting gets heated, participants hang back, trying to sense the direction of things, saying nothing until they see what view is likely to prevail. They then throw their support behind that view to avoid being associated with a losing position. Bizarre as it may seem, some organizations actually encourage such behavior. Let me quote from a news account relating to the woes of a certain American automobile company: “In the meeting in which I was informed that I was released, I was told, ‘Bill, in general, people who do well in this company wait until they hear their superiors express their view and then contribute something in support of that view.’ ” This is a terrible way to manage. All it produces is bad decisions, because if knowledgeable people withhold opinions, whatever is decided will be based on information and insight less complete than it could have been otherwise.
The next stage is reaching a clear decision. Again, the greater the disagreement about the issue, the more important becomes the word clear. In fact, particular pains should be taken to frame the terms of the decision with utter clarity. Again, our tendency is to do just the opposite: when we know a decision is controversial we want to obscure matters to avoid an argument. But the argument is not avoided by our being mealy-mouthed, merely postponed. People who don’t like a decision will be a lot madder if they don’t get a prompt and straight story about it.
Finally, everyone involved must give the decision reached by the group full support. This does not necessarily mean agreement: so long as the participants commit to back the decision, that is a satisfactory outcome.
Most meeting interactions become a game of organizational politics and communication conflicts. There are hidden agendas among the participants. Some are looking the please the boss and will follow whatever the boss says rather than what they believe. Some just want to leave. Some want to avoid any conflict and will agree with anything. Some are looking to show how smart they are.
You can avoid these situations by having subordinates speak first and debate, and only then have the senior person opine on the issue. Otherwise, once the leader’s opinion is known, participants hide their true thoughts and parrot back what the boss says.
The leader controls the meeting by actively calling out each person to participate. Meetings are often dominated by extroverts or those who like to argue and it’s easy for others to hang back and not feel comfortable speaking up. The leader balances the conversations by corralling those who dominate and actively asking for opinions from those holding back. It’s fine if a participant doesn’t have anything meaningful to say, but they at least need to be given the opportunity to speak.
For more reading on improving debate and group decisions, see:
· Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
· Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant
· Working With Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
11. Stop Trying to Achieve Consensus
From High Output Management:
Many people have trouble supporting a decision with which they do not agree, but that they need to do so is simply inevitable. Even when we all have the same facts and we all have the interests of an organization in mind, we tend to have honest, strongly felt, real differences of opinion. No matter how much time we may spend trying to forge agreement, we just won’t be able to get it on many issues.
But an organization does not live by its members agreeing with one another at all times about everything. It lives instead by people committing to support the decisions and the moves of the business. All a manager can expect is that the commitment to support is honestly present, and this is something he can and must get from everyone.
But if you feel that you have already heard everything, that all sides of the issue have been raised, it is time to push for a consensus—and failing that, to step in and make a decision. Sometimes free discussion goes on in an unending search for consensus.
If good decision-making appears complicated, that’s because it is and has been for a long time. Let me quote from Alfred Sloan, who spent a lifetime preoccupied with decision-making: “Group decisions do not always come easily. There is a strong temptation for the leading officers to make decisions themselves without the sometimes onerous process of discussion.”
The goal of a group decision is not consensus. It is making the right decision, even if some disagree. Leaders have the idea that if only the group can reach consensus everyone will be happy and the group will have made the best decision. Consensus sounds great in theory but it’s a nightmare in reality. First, if the issue is complex, there’s not going to be one obvious answer that everyone can rally around. So demanding consensus will only force people to give in and conform to keep the meeting moving. The urge for consensus shifts the goal from making a great decision to making an expedient, yet subpar decision that keeps the peace and concludes the meeting. No one wants to be the person holding up the meeting by continuing to press alternative points of view. Accepting the idea that people will have different views and there won’t be one answer is incredibly liberating for an organization. There’s no longer the fear that you’ll be in meetings all day debating the same issue until consensus. You also make it easy for people to speak what they really think and allow a decision to be made even if not everyone agrees. Debate and disagreement reflect the reality that we never know the best answer so disagreement should be rewarded and encouraged, not minimized.
12. Negate Peer-Group Syndrome
From High Output Management:
The most common problem is something we call the peer-group syndrome. A number of years ago, at Intel’s very first management training session, we tried some role-playing to show people what can occur when a group of peers meets to solve a problem or make a decision. We sat the people around a table to tackle what was then a live issue for them in their real jobs. Everyone was an organizational equal.
The chairman of the meeting was one level higher, but was purposely sent out of the room so he couldn’t hear what was to happen. Observers in the audience couldn’t believe their eyes and ears as the mock meeting proceeded. The managers working on the problem did nothing but go around in circles for some fifteen minutes, and none of them noticed they weren’t getting anywhere.
When the chairman was brought back in, he sat down and listened for a while and couldn’t believe things either. We watched him lean forward as if he were trying to glean more from the conversation. We then saw a black cloud form over his head; finally he slapped the table and exclaimed, “What’s going on here? You people are talking in circles and getting nowhere.”
After the chairman intervened, the problem was resolved in very short order. We named this the peer-plus-one approach, and have used it since then to aid decision-making where we must. Peers tend to look for a more senior manager, even if he is not the most competent or knowledgeable person involved, to take over and shape a meeting.
Why? Because most people are afraid to stick their necks out. This is how John, an Intel software engineer, sees things: One of the reasons why people are reluctant to come out with an opinion in the presence of their peers is the fear of going against the group by stating an opinion that is different from that of the group. Consequently, the group as a whole wanders around for a while, feeling each other out, waiting for a consensus to develop before anyone risks taking a position. If and when a group consensus emerges, one of the members will state it as a group opinion (“I think our position seems to be…”), not as a personal position. After a weak statement of the group position, if the rest of the mob buys in, the position becomes more solid and is restated more forcefully.
You can overcome the peer-group syndrome if each of the members has self-confidence, which stems in part from being familiar with the issue under consideration and from experience. But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this.
A related issue to consensus is Peer-Group Syndrome. Many participants are more focused on avoiding contentious debate rather than getting to the right answer. When people don’t speak what they really believe then meetings become a game trying to tease out what everyone else thinks so an easy group decision can be made. People need to take a risk and say what they believe rather than censor their thoughts. Sometimes it takes a senior person to come in, cut through the games, and make a decision.