Lately I’ve been struck by a surprising phenomenon finding its way into all kinds of discussions. That would be the expression of certainty.
It seems increasingly in many of the conversations I’m having that others have reached conclusions they feel no further need to revisit. It’s more than certainty. It’s absolute certainty.
Here are some varied examples:
Let me tell you what the Fed is going to do at its next meeting.
Let me tell you what the NASDAQ will do between now and Christmas.
Let me tell you how the conflict in the Middle East will end.
Let me tell you what Elon Musk is really after.
Let me tell you what’s ultimately behind climate change.
Let me tell you who is going to win the presidential election.
Let me tell you what’s going to happen to the nation after the election.
Note the lack of the words might, probably, likely, or even most likely. The statements above are followed by declarations of certainty. Needless to say, these utterances do not come from people who are experts in all areas of knowledge. Who can claim broad insight — approaching clairvoyance — across such a broad spectrum of complex topics? These statements are offered by ordinary folks whose opinions form much the way too many undisciplined declarations emerge in real time.
These days, I often find myself the least certain person in the room. I wonder, how can everyone be so sure about what they are proclaiming?
I work in a business where decision-making is data-driven. We have spirited arguments about work strategies all the time, and the boss doesn’t always win the debate. We argue with facts because there is shared value in our outcomes. Sometimes opinion prevails, but only when subjectivity is guided by objectivity.
We also require a lot of close listening before we get to conclusions. We know our choices have consequences on our company’s results, the actions of our customers, the well-being of our employees, and the financial impact on all our stakeholders. Data drives rigorous thinking. We take our choices seriously.
I realize company culture has little to do with random conversation or even the talking heads clamoring for attention on the media platforms that flood our lives. We are aware fake news creeps into all corners of communication. Somehow a justification for lying has woven its way into popular opinion, where the deliberate application of false information seems to some less of a vice in mainstream conflict if it is deemed a means to an end. Still, when I hear people parrot incoherent arguments expressed by others either for some concocted agenda or strictly entertainment value, it surprises me how willing we can be to compromise our credibility for nothing that would warrant it.
I wonder how so much claimed certainty continues to pierce our uncertain world. The internet fills our lives with noise. You’d think it would humble us to seek more truth before we convince ourselves we have found an answer. You’d think our personal character and integrity would matter more to us. We are endlessly willing to let a social media algorithm drive conflict in our discussions and stir our ire, rather than invest a bit of time validating our expressions before we pile onto the verbal brawl.
Do I expect this to change broadly anytime soon? Probably not. It’s too easy to speak without citing facts, to claim the right to say what we want, when we want, how we want, and believe this is without consequence because one voice self-corrected has little bearing on arena spectacle.
Yet that’s not true. One voice self-corrected is an example that leads to another and another. If those with authority won’t lead by example, imagine the influence of the broad population accepting the burden of that same leadership by caring enough to speak with a tad more precision.
I’m not suggesting anything outlandish. It’s a matter of individual commitment to modest self-reflection over boisterous hubris. Before you say something with absolute certainty, simply ask yourself: How sure are you?
The mantra of modern business decision-making is often tied to the basic concept of data-driven reasoning. If you hold a leadership position within an organization, you know that understanding data is a mandate. Data is the foundation for supporting a thesis, building consensus around a point of view, or building an argument for change. Data won’t tell us everything we need to know, and data can easily be misinterpreted, but if we aren’t looking at objectively collected data in forming an analysis, we might be better off buying lottery tickets than investing our company’s money in a resource-heavy plan.
If we know that data is essential to our success, and we know that critical decisions are better informed with data than without it, how is it that so many myths creep into the workplace? By myth, I mean a widely shared belief in a set of rules that a company has adopted without a sufficient test or challenge. In the worst of all circumstances, that myth may have no foundation at all.
As companies grow and practices become routine, repeated behaviors can be handed down from one generation of managers to another. I’ve often written about the notion of “but we’ve always” to point out the routines we come to follow without question, long after the reasoning for those practices has become obsolete. Most companies are guilty of this in one form or another. The good ones find a way to eliminate obsolete practices before they do real damage. Failed companies often find themselves immersed in a death spiral because they stopped questioning what made them successful and found it more expedient to repeat the same actions long after their relevancy left the playing field.
Each year in our cycles of strategic planning, we ask ourselves what is working and what isn’t. Data is often a great indicator in both directions. When we see metrics trailing downward and don’t ask ourselves why, we allow passive behavior to perpetuate itself. Often when we dig into that data, we find there are reasons something that was working no longer is creating the value that was expected. Several things could be going on: a once solid practice has become obviated, a proven practice that was working is no longer ardently being followed, or a practice has emerged from grassroots innovation to replace an existing practice because the people who created the variation come to believe it works — without proper data to support it.
Any of these cases for decline are possible, as are a host of others. All of them allow myth to replace math. When myth in a company takes over workflow, nothing good is likely to happen. It is always our job to sniff for myths — to question existing practices when data reveals a negative trend that must be corrected. Bringing deliberate change is what effective leaders do. Allowing myth to perpetuate is how once-great companies join the dead brand graveyard.
We are always fighting myths. We discover practices we put into place a decade ago were never updated for new technology. We discover a practice we reinvented to drive better results is quietly being rejected by staff members who either don’t like it or don’t understand it, but are sure they are helping matters by covertly sticking to the old practice.
Perhaps we observe a decline in KPIs and temporarily conclude something must be wrong with raw materials because we know the processing methodology we put in place is sound, only to discover that methodology has been misunderstood by the team members utilizing it. We may discover that a team’s interpretation of methodology widely differs from the guidelines developed, not because the guidelines are unsound, but because they have been explained poorly.
In each instance, a myth of what we are doing and why we are doing it overtakes what should be standard operating procedure. It could be an honest set of mistakes. It could be a misunderstanding. It could be a lack of rigor in reevaluating once-proven practices. Regardless of cause, data tells us if we are winning or losing in the form of metrics and dollars. If those signals are getting worse and we fail to delve into the practices behind the decline, we let the myth of proper functioning triumph over the innovation required to unseat the myth.
Company culture is highly efficient at enforcing rules. Veterans in companies are eager to tell rookies “how things are done here.” Sometimes rookies learn existing processes, immediately convince themselves there is a better way, and think they are doing us a favor by doing things that better way without a proper framework for evaluating results. Sometimes company culture is our ally and creates peer reinforcement of best practices. Sometimes company culture invents its own set of operating principles assuring the peer group everything is going as planned when that is not true.
Organizations function from an agreed set of rules, but often the origination of those rules is long-forgotten while the perpetuation of those rules lives on. Myth-busting makes old rules go away, ad hoc rules become exposed, and misunderstood rules become clarified. If we’re looking at data that tells us something is wrong, our intuition in identifying wrongness is only a first step toward correcting it.
Ask yourself if there might be a myth undermining your success. Then go look for it, and without embarrassing anyone, quickly build a consensus to reveal the misapplied rule. Do this often enough and the myths you sniff will be systemically corrected. No company can eradicate all its myths, but companies in constant learning mode can shorten the longevity of misconceptions and revitalize broken practices by reconciling conjecture with data.
That’s how teams get past myth and win together with shared understanding.
Over the past weeks, several major companies have announced various return-to-office policies. That means a requirement to be in an office some number of days each week. Thus far I have resisted sending a similar memo because I think for the most part this is best left to the judgment of department leaders who understand their goals, More than that, I am counting on the good judgment of individuals to make sense of advancing their career horizons.
Let me offer this one bit of advice: If you have the opportunity to be in the room and are not taking it, you might be doing yourself an enormous disservice. The time you spend at home may make your current life easier. I have significant doubt it will make your future more successful.
In my experience, there is no substitute for being in the room. It is where true bonds are created. It is where you can see in person how difficult challenges are met. It is where your gifts can be shared and recognized not just by your peers and boss, but by your boss’s boss, and anyone up the chain who might poke in their head and see you in action.
That’s not office politics. That’s reality.
Willingly giving up a chance to be in the room is a choice you make at your own risk, to the extent you have the choice. If you still have that choice, consider what you might be giving up in exchange for those nasty commute hours and a refrigerator full of your own preferred food.
Several decades ago, I was a recent college graduate desperate for an opportunity. I offer the word desperate quite deliberately. Despite a bachelor’s degree in the humanities from a known college, a string of paid jobs and internships, and a resume filled with extracurricular projects, I was just another unknown job applicant in a huge pool of recent college grads. The economy was in rough shape. It seemed no one who mattered even wanted to talk with me, let alone hire me.
All I wanted was to be in the room.
Like so many others, I ceaselessly kept at it and eventually got interviews. After many of those I got hired into a lousy job, then another lousy job, then several other lousy jobs, then finally a good job that I believe started my real career. At no time during that arc or any subsequent arc did the notion of willingly working remotely ever cross my mind, although one of those jobs happened to be such four out of five days each week because they had no desk for me. Any time I was able to be at work I considered it a catapulting privilege to be among accomplished, ambitious colleagues.
I never forgot what it was like being in a small apartment waiting for the phone to ring for an invitation to be in the room. I also can’t imagine doing what I do today without those many decades of watching other people perform their jobs across the spectrum from expertly to incompetently.
Every chance to be in the room for me has been a chance to learn. At the same time, it has been a chance to collaborate, creatively engage, and be a part of innovation.
Have I taken solo work home to review evenings and over the weekend regularly? You bet.
Do I believe there are times when telecommuting makes sense? Absolutely.
Do I see the internet as an unrivaled tool to share ideas globally among people who might never have the chance to gather under the same roof? Without question.
Would any of it convince me that forgoing an opportunity to be in the room for comfort, convenience, or an alleged increase in productivity was a reasonable trade? Not on your life.
Working alone may increase efficiency. I don’t see it increasing creativity.
Covid-19 response was an anomaly. Did it teach many of us a new set of behaviors, that we could accomplish things remotely if it was a necessity? It certainly did. Is the continuing right to work remotely an entitlement that is the result of that learning? Well, not exactly.
I suppose in an employment market where talent has unlimited options, the benefit of working remotely might be a trading card that management can offer to attract team members. Yet if management is only offering this benefit because it has no choice if positions are to be filled, how positive do you think management feels about that? Hiring managers want choices just like you want choices. When anything becomes a mandate, it often does so with a nagging amount of reservation.
One of the things I noticed when Covid first grounded us was how quickly and well our leadership team adapted to remote meetings. In many respects, I think it is the reason our company succeeded and curiously accelerated during Covid. Many colleagues at other companies weren’t as lucky. Some tragically saw their companies in demise, not only as a result of unprecedented business conditions but of the challenges in responding to those conditions with untested practices.
The more I thought about this, the more I was convinced that we succeeded because of the years we previously spent together in the room. Those many years of collaboration established a solid foundation for crisis management we could apply remotely. We were able to talk in shorthand because we had established that shorthand. We were able to use humor because we knew each other’s sensibilities and sensitivities. I couldn’t even imagine the idea of trying to onboard a VP into a remote setting, where I knew others were trying and failing at this.
Our team knew this management paradigm was intended to be temporary and that we would be back in person as soon as practicable. Personally, I couldn’t wait and was back in the office as soon as I could. We also didn’t overreact. We knew that five days a week in person for everyone no longer made sense because it had never made sense. It was obvious that forty or so required office hours was too broad a brush. We knew workplace equilibrium would work itself out, while we counted on individuals to make sense of their careers in tandem with company needs.
Moderation always seems like a better approach to consensus than absolutes. Individual decisions always seem preferable to sweeping mandates when inspiring people’s best work.
I had a sense that every individual would come to understand the value of being in the room. To be in the room is to absorb the skills you will call upon to address the next set of challenges you will face. To be in the room is a gift, perhaps not every day, but on the days that matter and will stay with you for a lifetime.
You may be arguing with me in your head. You may be telling yourself this is a new day, a different generation, a wiser and more inspired collective that embraces work-life balance and knows to mistrust corporations that don’t have their best interests at heart. You might be convinced that because technology advances have made remote work viable, we’d be silly not to ride the horse in the direction it seems to be going. You might be right, but I am always reminded of those very dangerous words that creep up every time I think they are going away forever: “This time is different.”
I have written before about leverage in getting your way. It can be an effective tactic as a matter of last resort, but it is seldom a path to trust, long-term relationships, and compounding progress. If the only reason you are allowed to work remotely is that you think your employer has no other choices, I wonder whether you really want to work for that company. If there is a mutual understanding about workplace arrangements that benefits you and your employer in agreeing to a schedule that helps you with childcare, quiet time to think on your own, and still leaves room for in-person collaboration, that’s one thing. If either side is making a demand of the other, that seems like a shaky platform to advance together.
Some types of professions like software engineering seem particularly well suited to remote working as has been evinced by decades of sharing libraries and contributing to enterprise projects, where most of the engineer’s time is spent on individually created program code that is later assembled with other modules. Even then, when I see software engineers in a room with marketing and finance professionals, I often see exponential progress in shorter windows of time.
Don’t undervalue intangibles. Learning to read a room can help you secure unexpected allies to support a controversial strategy. The most unassuming bits of advice acquired from unfamiliar colleagues in the breakroom can be life-changing. Lifelong friendships emerge and develop from unplanned acts of empathy and compassion. You can say all of that plus mentorship and coaching are available electronically and you’ll be right. The in-person impacts you might be underestimating are tone, degree, and happenstance.
When we are together, we learn from each other. We have peripheral vision that lets us see not just what Zoom or Teams puts on the video screen, but what catches our attention in the corner of our eye. We take in winning and losing arguments and approaches. We have the unique opportunity to establish and build company culture.
My advice: Don’t wait for the company directive, don’t even wait to be asked politely. If you have the opportunity, be in the room.
Last month I reminded you that no big-brand company lasts forever, and few of today’s technology phenoms last long at all. One of my readers emailed to ask if I might dare to note some of the warning signs that suggest company extinction might be zeroing in on your own workplace.
Of course if I knew the full answer to that, I would spend the rest of my career shorting all those imminent losers traded in the public markets. Creative destruction is difficult to see in its earliest phases because it often begins simmering silently in the background when your company is riding a wave of enormous good fortune. Funny how that infecting vulnerability sneaks its nose under the tent precisely when a business seems to be at its healthiest peak.
While the corrosion can be deceptively invisible at first, there are usually festering symptoms we can observe, watching the makings of a crash in slow motion long before opposing forces collide. Here are eight thumbnail questions to help diagnose the severity of your company’s illness and whether it’s likely to be terminal.
What is the company’s R&D budget as a percentage of sales?
If research-and-development spending is declining as your company matures, it’s possible that company is being harvested by its owners as a cash cow. While strong cash flow is an indicator of company health, take notice of how much of your business is being driven by recent successes vs. legacy brands. If new products aren’t breaking, sniff around and see how much of that cash is being invested in next-generation ideas. If increasingly more cash is going to ownership and less to building your company’s future, you may have reason to worry.
Is your CEO surrounded by people who hold the same views of the company’s excellence?
Without gadflies who question everything, you’re likely to keep doing the same things. That could make you a cash cow, a one-hit wonder, or any number of limited-thinking results. Great senior leadership in a company encourages constructive conflict, because no single viewpoint in management can possibly see around every corner or predict a competitive threat. If lots of ideas are flowing, you have a much better chance to reinvent yourselves. Where dialogue is limited and funneling to a singular point of view, trouble is coming.
Does senior management actually use the product or service you produce?
This is the old argument for eating your own dog food. If the people who make and sell something only talk about why it’s great rather than obsess over what will make it even better, it’s likely to stay the same. If there is cynicism around your success and products become passionless widgets, customers will see that soon enough. Your customers can’t reinvent your products, just reject them. If you’re not a fan of what you’re doing, why should they be?
Does senior management regularly sample, investigate, and dissect competitive products?
If you think what you’ve got is the best and don’t even bother to see what could soon be eating your lunch, your lunch will soon be eaten. Be paranoid, be aware of everything competitive, commission and dissect research, never be comfortable that your moat is impenetrable. It’s okay not to use your competitor’s products day-to-day. It’s not okay to ignore them. If you happen to like them better than your own, wake up, the nightmare is about to become real.
In your company’s last earnings crunch, was marketing expense an early and severe casualty?
Marketing is an investment spend. If the money you are spending on marketing doesn’t add value to profitable sales, it should be cut now. If it’s driving profitable sales, it’s downright irresponsible to cut it. Marketing should be seen as a profit center, not a cost center. If there is no measurable return on your marketing spend, you’re already killing the company from within. If the return can be quantified, cutting it in bad times is senseless and irresponsible.
Is great marketing intended to help a mediocre product perform better than it deserves?
Said another way: outstanding marketing helps a bad product fail faster. If the product is garbage, all marketing can do is get it in the hands of early adopters. Once these market influencers trash the product, all is lost. If the product needs refinement before you invest to take it to market, take the extra time to get it right. If the product stinks and can’t be saved, kill it without a dollar of marketing spend.
Does your company culture resist rather than embrace change?
Also earlier this year I suggested that you keep your ears open for the phrase “But we’ve always…” whether it’s uttered in the break room or a key milestone review meeting. If your colleagues have unending excuses as to why you should stick with tried-and-true ways to fail because your company has always utilized a set of urban legends in your planning, you’re going to find it hard to carve a new path into the future. Doing what you’ve always done simply because you’ve always done it that way is a great way to succeed in any business that isn’t dynamic. Go make a list of businesses today that aren’t dynamic and tell me you should remain set in your ways.
Are you patching your platform or re-envisioning a new one?
Never confuse maintenance with progress. Think about just how fast industries are moving. I recently had the pleasure of watching the movie First Man. One of my favorites lines reminded me that it was a mere 66 years from the Wright Brothers first motorized biplane flight at Kitty Hawk (1903) to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon (1969). If you’re anywhere in the vicinity of 60 years old, that doesn’t seem like much time at all. If you’re fixing your biplane while your competitor is building a Saturn V rocket, it doesn’t matter that you’ve happened upon some world-class glue. When the rocket launches, you’re toast.
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