Relationship budgets

Seth Godin recently posted about Dunbar's Number, which is the number of productive relationships most people can generally maintain at any given time, essentially a relationship budget. The number is about 150, despite social networking's attempts to convince us that we have 400, 1000, 2500 "friends."

This got me thinking about organizational design and how a relationship budget could be applied to leaders in a large organization.

Take an executive and give him a budget of 150 relationships. 10 go to his family (spouse, kids, parents, siblings, etc.). Another 10 go to personal friends. If he has been around for a while, he has networking contacts to maintain as well, maybe 50 throughout his industry. That leaves 80 for his job, of which another 30 are devoted to peers and bosses, leaving 50 for subordinates...his span of control. (Note that all numbers here are arbitrary, but the central concept of a limited number of relationships is independently valid.)


The span of control will not only consider direct reports, but also those reporting to them. This means that if you lead an organization larger than this, you will not have a relationship with everyone. Additionally, they will not have a relationship with you.

What are the implications of all this rambling?

• Consider spans of control in light of productive relationships during organizational design.
• If leading an organization larger than you can directly relate to, deliberately and continuosly monitor the transfer of information and the transfer of relationships down the line.
• If you use up your relationship budget at work, there will be nothing left outside. Beware the curse of the workaholic.
• Do not over-reach. Trying to expand too far past your relationship budget will cause everything to collapse.

Are there other implications?  Have you seen this concept used well or poorly in your experience?

Business and the status quo

Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics has been an interesting listen for me (in audiobook form). One of the fascinating points he made is that pro-business does not equal pro-free market. In fact, it is often just the opposite. A free market thrives on open competition, while existing businesses thrive on keeping competition out.

A more accurate statement is that pro-business means being in favor of the status quo, both in a positive and negative sense. In the positive, businesses can best provide services and earn profits when they know what the rules of the game are. In countries where the laws change with the whims of the current ruler, the risk to businesses is too great to make investments and generally conduct profitable business.

In the negative, the status quo protects current business at the expense of innovators who may be able to produce the same good or service at a lower cost or a better product at the same cost or some combination.

I have nothing to add to Sowell's view paraphrased here except to encourage us all to think about what people are saying and what it means. Is GM really for free trade and fair competition? Is libertarianism in the best interest of businesses? My assumptions have been challenged, and yours might be, too.

He who is faithful with little

Jesus once told a parable about a master and servants. Toward the end, he shares this line:

Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. (Matthew 25:21)

I  was reading a book where this was discussed, and I was struck by how counter this is to my own way of thinking, which I think is a reflection of either the nature of man, current culture, or both.

Don't waste time with the small stuff...put me in charge of many things RIGHT NOW!

I have the education. I have the test scores. I've read Drucker and Collins and Lencioni. It is clearly a waste to put me in charge of only my own work, or just my kids, or some other small and (seemingly) insignificant responsibility. Paying your dues is such the Baby Boomer thing to do. We Gen XYZ-ers don't have time for that.

... ... ...

Color me convicted. Maybe there's some merit in demonstrating competence with small things before being entrusted with large ones. Humility is critical for great leadership, and expecting responsibility to be handed to me instead of earning it may indicate a touch of arrogance. Maybe just a little.

Pyramid report writing

Report writing is an important activity in any large organization where projects span space and time. I was told once that the work doesn't exist until it's been documented. Trouble is, not very many people do it well. Without claiming any particular insight, I did receive one piece of advice from a senior coworker once on how to structure reports.

Most reports can be viewed in three sections of equal importance and unequal detail. The two pyramids below show the three sections in terms of Detail and Readers.

• Section 1 - Usually called the executive summary, it's the only part that most people are going to read. Put your key points, but don't worry about detail. Most people just don't really care.
• Section 2 - The body of your report contains some detail. Describe what's going on so that a peer can know enough to agree with your conclusions. A few people will read this, mostly folks that you specifically ask to.
• Section 3 - Appendices. This is where all the detail goes. The only person who will ever read this besides you is the sucker who has to pick up the project again in 3 years and doesn't want to start from scratch.

I realized that once I started writing like this, my reports got better and faster. Better because I put the right level of detail in the right places so readers didn't have to wade through trivia to find what they wanted. Faster because there's less need to make sure the entire report is linguistically perfect. In the end, everybody's happier.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

The Goose - good for the gander, too.

I'm into learning stuff. One big group of stuff I like to learn about is personal leadership/productivity/improvement, and there's no shortage of books out there feed that need. So many, in fact, that there's no way I can read them all, or even a small fraction of them. Which is why The Goose is so fantastic.

They read books, summarize them, extract key nuggets (Golden Eggs) and send you an email every Tuesday with the information nicely written up. Since a lot of books contain no more than one or two original, useful ideas (if that), this saves a whole lot of time.

Check them out. You'll be glad you did.

 

 

The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge)

Nearly everything we do or experience is part of a system. It is the very rare circumstance where we can attribute cause and effect to independent entities. Yet we do it all the time.

"The Fed/housing bubble/Lehman Brothers caused the financial break-down."
"A public option will fix healthcare."
"I'm eating because I'm hungry."

All these statements have truth in them, but they are incomplete. They are incomplete because they leave out the system. They leave out the history, the other players, the unintended consequences, the emotions, and all the other subtle, critical influences.

The 5th discipline of Senge's title attempts to capture all that other stuff through "systems thinking." Everything is connected, and only by broadening our view to encompass the whole system will we ever understand what's really going on. If not, unintended consequences will reign supreme.

The other four disciplines, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning, all feed into systems thinking, particularly as part of an organization. At one time, Shell excelled at this, but I'm no longer convinced it's part of the culture.

Although somewhat academic in style, the world today is too complex not to be moving toward thinking in terms of systems. If you're not doing it now, this classic is well worth reading.

The Five X's of Y

Some books are just easier to read than others. Stories are nice. They move quickly, keep the reader's attention, and when well done, communicate something of value. Such is the case with two of Patrick Lencioni's books, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Five Temptations of a CEO. Both are written as "leadership fables" where a typical Bay Area team (CEO) is shown the error of its (his) ways through a simple story with short chapters and lots of white space.

There are thousands of books out there with a few easy steps to better whatever. Most make sense, usually because they are common sense. Business books don't sell because they have new ideas, they sell because they have good packaging. Much like businesses themselves sometimes. Now I'm not saying this is bad, just that there's not much new to be learned, but much to be implemented (see You are Being Lied To at ChangeThis).

Lencioni's books are the same. In fact, he even gets away with selling two books with the exact same material. The five dysfunctions of a team are simply the result of the team leader giving into the five temptations of a CEO. But the team book sells more because corporate leaders can give it (the book, seminars, classes, whatever) to their teams rather than work on their own stuff. But I digress. Here are the 5 temptations with their corresponding dysfunction.

1. Choosing status over results leads to Inattention to results
2. Choosing popularity over accountability leads to Avoidance of accountability
3. Choosing certainty over clarity leads to Lack of commitment
4. Choosing harmony over productive conflict leads to Fear of conflict
5. Choosing invulnerability over trust leads to Absence of trust

Written out together like that makes the parallels obvious. In fact, it doesn't even look like the "leads to" conjunction really applies, but rather the dysfunction is equal to the temptation. Which I guess is the point. Lencioni's ideas are not revolutionary. He's not even the first to put them in a list. But they are simple, they are effective, and they are hard to do. And his books take about 2 hours to read, packaged in a very nice little tale.

So the moral of the story is simple. Be honest, take responsibility, focus on results. And if you want me to read a lot of your books...write short ones.

The Leader-Manager: Guidelines for Action (William D. Hitt)

I borrowed William Hitt's The Leader-Manager: Guidelines for Action from my own manager many months ago after asking for book recommendations. In the meantime, many other books got onto my reading lists, and I've just finished this one. Fortunately, being published in 1988 means that another 6 months didn't hurt it at all.

The author approaches leadership from a practical perspective, proposing what he calls a "functional" theory of leadership. This is compared to the functional theories of management where the functions of a manager (leader) in this case are laid out and the specific methods for fulfilling those roles are left up to the individual. Eight functions of a leader are proposed and described:

1. Creating a Vision
2. Developing the Team
3. Clarifying the Values
4. Positioning
5. Communicating
6. Empowering
7. Coaching
8. Measuring

Executing those 8 functions well is the job of a true leader-manager, one who acts as a change agent in their organization. The leader-manager is described as one who creates a vision (knows where to go) and then puts it into action (leads a team to get there). Contrasting leadership styles are put on a traditional 2x2 matrix; the Victim neither knows where to go nor manages to get there, the Doer cares naught for vision, but simply action, and the Dreamer is full of possibility, but doesn't get off their duff.

From the beginning, The Leader-Manager looks like a textbook. There is no fancy cover or attempt to be more than it is, a list of actions for managers who want to be leaders. The eight functions are clearly described, with rationale for each one and at least one list of possible activities to bring it about. Some might argue that Hitt takes a checklist approach to management that fails to incorporate the softer side of things. This is certainly true, but the issue would seem to be that his approach is not incorrect, but rather insufficient. For a leader or manager looking to cover all their bases, this book provides a solid foundation for further study and practice.

Overall Rating: 3 out of 4