I Am Not Like You, Thankfully
Three Short Stories That Demonstrate Why
I occasionally fall prey to a bad habit of assuming everyone else is basically me. They’re thinking what I’m thinking. They’ll ask what I ask; react as I would; do what I’d do. What follows are reminders I’ve had that I’m dead wrong. It still happens sometimes, though, and it’s usually hilarious. Or disastrous. Or both.
I fully expect you, the reader, to read each one of these and say: “Well of course that happened. You idiot.” But hopefully you’ll at least be able to chuckle at the expense of the protagonist. (Sometimes me, sometimes not.)
Red Card / Green Card, A Prisoner’s Dilemma
I was in manager training, called “Leading Others” in 2005. Generally based around The Leadership Pipeline, this facilitated course at AOL exceeded my expectations. The facilitator walked in on Day 1, and with no preamble said: “We are going to play a game. The objective is to make as much money as you can.” It works like this:
A room of twenty-some people is divided into 4 tables. Each table gets 1 red card and 1 green card. Each round, the table holds up a card. Scoring is as follows:
If everybody holds up a green card, everyone gets $12. If everyone holds up a red card, everyone loses $12. In between those extremes, there’s $48 a round and it’s a zero-sum game with reds making money and greens funding them.
“Hm, tricky,” I thought, “If anyone goes red, they’re making money unless everyone goes red. But you only make money going green if everyone else does it. I doubt EVERYONE else will go green. Someone probably will.” Seemed like the only logical choice was to go red. Our table went red.
Round 1: RED RED RED RED
Well that didn’t work out very well. Our facilitator gave us a disapproving look. “Let’s try this again.”
Round 2: RED RED RED RED
This time she just shook her head and called round 3. I bet you can guess what happened.
After nine rounds of this, we were all over $100 in the hole. Nobody could quite figure out how to get anyone else to raise a green card. I desperately wanted to. Turns out this is a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma as we’re not allowed to be in cahoots… and to that end, we’re not allowed to communicate. Well. That was all about to change.
The facilitator announced that there was to be a captain of each table. I was my table’s captain. We assembled at the front of the room to discuss.
I advocated strongly for all of us going green. There were naturally skeptics: “How do I know you’re not lying?” And pessimists: “What if someone still goes red?” And mavericks: “Good luck. I’ll believe it when I see it.” It took a while, but I got head nods from every captain. They’d go green.
I knew the maverick was lying.
It took a while convincing my table to go green as well. I knew the other captains had the same challenge. I glanced over at the maverick, but I couldn’t tell what he was up to. I came clean: “Look, there’s a chance Table 4 will go red. I didn’t get a good vibe from him. But this is our only shot at getting out of this hole.
Round 10: GREEN GREEN GREEN … RED
Ugh. “Okay, okay. It’s okay. Let’s hang in there. We’ve just proven that three of us are willing to go green. If we go green one more time, there’s a chance he’ll come around.” I knew it was a long shot, but seriously, it was our only chance.
Round 11: GREEN GREEN RED RED
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re done here.
Round 12: RED RED RED RED
For another five rounds.
Our facilitator finally called it. A couple of tables were feeling pretty good about themselves because they lost less money than the rest of us. Then she said, “I walked in here telling you that the objective here was to make as much money as you can. Not more than someone else. You meant all of you. Not just one table. Together you have lost … [calculates] … [gives up] … a lot.”
And then she hit us while we were down, “This is one of the reasons teams here are having so much trouble. You’re working against each other instead of towards a common goal. When you do that, you all lose.”
If you’re running a business, some of your folks will want to go GREEN. Others will default to RED. If your incentives pit your teams against each other instead of aligning them towards a common goal, or your vision of success isn’t unified, you’re not setting your teams up for success.
Just Stand Right Here, Like This
As a follow-on to “Leading Others,” was a training class called “Leading Leaders.” My boss, “Luke,” went.
Turns out our facilitators had a flare for the dramatic. This one walked into his class and asked everyone to stand up. She then arranged everyone on the square tiles — each on a different tile, seemingly randomly spaced apart and facing in different cardinal directions. And then:
“Great, thank you all for being so cooperative. Now, what we’re going to do is … ah, hang on.”
She realized she had forgotten something. Not on the desk. Not in her pockets. Nowhere in the room. Hmmm.
“I’m so sorry everyone, I need to go get something, but I’ll be right back. Just stay right there and don’t move a muscle.”
She left.
Not thirty seconds passed before the first senior manager in the room started moving, “This is ridiculous,” he complained. Luke tells this story and claims it wasn’t him. I’m not so sure. He has the patience of a toddler. Usually. I’m sure he was seething with the need to do something regardless.
A brief argument ensued. Several folks felt they should stay put. Others were convinced this was a waste of time and, frankly, unprofessional. By the time two minutes rolled around no two people were where they started. Fortunately, before a riot broke out, the facilitator walked back in…
with a smile on her face.
Nobody saw this coming. They didn’t have the benefit of context clues while reading about it on Medium. So. What was this all about?
She had provided very specific instructions to a group of smart, free-thinking people and expected them to simply comply. She “told ’em what to do.” What she didn’t offer was any rationale, any context. Her point was this:
When you tell people to do something specific and you don’t explain why… and then you wander off — don’t be surprised when it doesn’t get done the way you expected, within the timeframe you needed, or even if it doesn’t get done at all.
And sure, standing still facing East is obviously not going to get anything accomplished. It’s a bit of a contrived example. And yet, when you delegate without context you’re only passing on the “what,” not the “why.” That’s actually not too far removed from saying “Hey Mack, face East. kthxbye.”
Luke’s staff meetings had a tremendous amount more information from that day forward. Delegation typically came with a conversation & context — questions back and forth so we were both sure why something needed to be done, what would happen next, by when, and when we thought we’d be done.
And when you’re not doing the delegating? Ask proactively. After all, it’s hard to hit a target you can’t see.
Sometimes There’s an F in Team
Note: This anecdote was written by and belongs to Justin Bajko. It was too great to not include.
Early in my management career and about 10 years ago, I was on vacation with some friends on Edisto Island, South Carolina. I was determined to be on vacation and not ruin it by checking email all the time. So instead I only checked it every 15 minutes or so. At some point, I got an invitation for a two-day “manager’s meeting.” I immediately decided that this would be a waste of an otherwise marginally productive two days in the office.
I was wrong.
The meeting was a communications workshop led by our internal Learning and Development Team. Without walking you through the whole two-day workshop, I’ll share one of the exercises that, looking back, probably remains the single biggest professional lesson that I’ve learned in my career.
Before we arrived, we all had to complete Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessments. According to the assessment, I’m an ENTP. My interpretation of the ENTP type means that, basically, I like to talk to people and I kind of fly by the seat of my pants. Yea, that’s a fair assessment.
We ended up doing exercises designed to highlight the differences between each of the four attribute pairs (it can be confusing if you’ve never done MBTI, so here is a quick primer if you’re interested), and my epiphany happened as we explored the third preference pair: Thinking vs Feeling. Thinkers, according to MBTI, tend to make decisions based on logic and data. Feelers, as you might imagine, are heavily influenced by emotion and the feelings of those involved when making decisions.
The scenario: You are the coaches of a 10-year-old girls’ softball team. Congratulations! Your team has made it to the state championship! Unfortunately, though, you have 15 girls on your team but you only have the budget to take 12. Now go figure out how to handle the situation.
The Ts were directed to one room, the Fs another. We had 10 minutes. Team-T, my team, needed three. We couldn’t figure out what was taking Team-F so long. After 15 minutes or so, the facilitator went to the other team’s room and called time.
The facilitator asked a representative from Team-T to come up and explain how we would handle the situation. My buddy Tom strode confidently to the front of the room and, looking dumbfounded that this even needed to be explained, said, “We are going to look at the stats and practice reports and take the best 12 girls. This is the obvious answer.” And it was! Why wouldn’t you want to field a team of your best? Why even spend any time on this question when the answer was so simple? The facilitator thanked Team-T and called for a representative from Team-F.
The Team-F captain walked to the front of the room and said, “We didn’t think it was fair that only 12 girls would get to go. So we are going to organize a bake sale to raise the money to be able to send all 15 girls.”
I. Was. Floored.
Not because I thought it was wrong, or a bad idea. In fact, I thought it was a fantastic idea! I was floored because it never even entered my mind to think about solving the problem that way. And looking around at my fellow Team-T folks, I was not alone. We were flabbergasted.
And that was the point where I realized just how much someone’s personality can influence the way they think about, and find solutions to, a problem. Thankfully.
It’s a Trap!
It’s so easy to take for granted what other people are going to do in a given situation. “It’s obvious to me,” that we should all hold up a green card, cut three players from our softball team, and give up this standing still business. But obviousness is a trap and opposing viewpoints can be tremendously helpful.
Diversity is more than just age, sex, or skin color. There’s a tremendous amount of diversity in our individual perspectives, and having these differences is a good thing. Keep this in mind and don’t let your own reactions cause you to infer others’. Instead, try out this simple recipe:
- Catch yourself when your instinct says, “obviously we should…”
- Stop & solicit opinions.
- When you’re expecting certain behaviors, provide related context.
- When you’re asked to do something specific, ask for context.
After all, you are not like me either. Thankfully.
If you found this worth your time, consider following @reefhack and/or @justinbajko on Twitter, RT, and recommend this article by clicking the heart below.
