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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Consultants collect team-building tools. There’s the “make a square out of these parts” exercise (solution — team members have to swap parts). There’s the penny exercise — everyone gets a penny (for their thoughts, of course) and has to relate a personal anecdote from the year the penny was coined (“1951 … I was conceived.”)

One year, I participated in “Match the secret to the team member,” so often that I didn’t need the Internet to eliminate my right to privacy — by the end of the year I’d even had to reveal that I’d played Glockenspiel in my high school marching band.

These are just ice-breakers. When you want to get hard-core about team building, nothing compares to personality profiling tools. Myers-Briggs, DISCO, Forte … you could choose one for each team member and have tools left over.

Don’t get me wrong — these things do have value. People tend to see the world through their own eyes. Lacking a degree in psychology I can only speculate as to why. My guess is that it’s because connecting someone else’s optic nerves to our own visual processing centers is too hard.

Unfortunately, content to use only our own eyes, we take the next illogical step and conclude that the way we think is the only valid one. That attitude leads to cliques, not to effective teams — when everyone thinks the same, whether two people or ten focus on a problem, the range of solutions they develop will be about the same.

Personality profiles help frame discussions of how different thought patterns complement each other in crafting optimal designs and solutions. With IS and Marketing interacting with increasing frequency, the importance of appreciating diversity of thought can’t be overstated.

Regrettably, that’s rarely where the conversation stops.

Instead, team members commonly use their personality profiles as a stereotyping tool. Having learned that there are just sixteen kinds of human being (or eight team roles, or four determinants of personality, or what-have-you), team members use each others profiles to build ad hominem arguments during disputes (“Well of course you think that — you’re a Perceiver!”) and excuses for themselves (“That’s not a natural act for me — I’m low-empathy.”)

The worst part of some of these tools is that they’re built on forced-choice selection of false dichotomies. Are you a driver or an analytical? Yes, I am … depending on what the circumstances require.

Okay, that’s the second-worst part. The worst part is that these tools should be opening people to new possibilities — new ways of thinking about things. They ought to be expanding horizons, and instead they have the exact opposite effect.

There’s another version of this “scientific stereotyping” that’s even more pernicious. You don’t have to look very far to find books and articles explaining how to manage Generation X’ers, the difference between male and female leadership styles, or how to motivate the vertically challenged (Hint: Don’t play Randy Newman over the intercom).

Let’s follow this logic: I have a 27-year-old team member. She works in my area, we work together on a regular basis, and I meet with her one-on-one every two weeks. To understand what motivates her … I know — I’ll read a book written by authors who have never met her!

Works for me.

Want to motivate a twenty-something employee? Want to understand a new female manager’s leadership style? Do you have an African-American on your team and you aren’t sure what he needs to succeed?

Here’s an advanced leadership technique, hitherto known only to Zen masters living at high altitude in remote regions, brought back to the United States by a courageous consultant since assassinated by the cult charged with protecting the secret:

Get to know your employees. Empathize with them. Ask them what’s important to them. Treat them as individuals.

I know it’s more complicated than administering a Myers-Briggs test and reading a book, but if you master these techniques you’ll be a far more effective leader.

But then, I have to think that way … I’m an INTP.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

A good friend told me, “I was terminated with 20 minutes left in the day, on a Thursday. They had said I would be severed sometime during the month but they had led me to believe it would be closer to the end of the month. Nice treatment after 24 1/2 years …”

Another company bought his employer a few years before. He had known the day was coming, and he never once expressed resentment over his coming layoff. Elimination of redundant staff is one of the realities of a merger or acquisition. Yes, it’s painful, but there’s no foul — business is out to make good business decisions.

Why was it was managed so badly?

Consider the Portuguese man-of-war. As we learned in high school, although it looks like one animal, it’s actually a colony of independent coelenterates, each of which feeds and reproduces separately.

We’re colonies, too. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, a body is just a gene’s way of making more genes. Even that is a simplification. An unknown proportion of our internal constituents began as independent critters. Mitochondria, for example, the organelles that make oxygen the key to metabolism instead of a toxic gas, started out as free-living bacteria.

Even though each of us is a colony, we manage to act as a purposeful organism – so much so that we harm individual colony members with callous disregard. (Example: Every time someone goes on a diet they starve or kill billions of fat cells – and just think of how many are destroyed during liposuction!)

Liposuction creates personal change. How about business change?

IS projects have always been about business change, and an increasing number of companies recognize that all IS projects are really business change projects that inject significant new technology into the equation.

Most business changes both create and eliminate jobs within the enterprise. Whatever your role in IS, at some point in your career you’ll help eliminate the jobs of innocent employees who did their jobs competently but whose roles are no longer needed because of the business change you helped the company achieve.

Companies are getting better at managing business change. They’ve learned to redesign processes, integrating technology into the new process design. They’ve learned to train employees in the new processes and technology rather than assuming everything will be self-evident. Most have learned to communicate the reason for a change, not just “here’s your new job – now go do it.” Some have even learned that redesigning the organizational chart comes after redesigning processes and technology, not before.

Sadly, though, many companies still see employees as nothing more than adipose cells … hence the phrase, “Getting rid of the fat.” And if you raise your hand to protest a layoff you risk being branded as soft – the business equivalent of “bleeding heart liberal.”

So here’s some advice: If you have an opportunity to influence how your business will manage a change that requires layoffs, don’t get all righteous about what is ethical, compassionate, or the right thing to do. In business, ethics is a personal matter, and ethical businesses get that way through leaders who act ethically, not through preaching.

Instead, be practical.

Point out that the long-term goal of business change is growth, and the cost of laying off one group of employees and then recruiting a different group is far higher than the cost of retraining the employees you have.

Suggest that when “trimming the fat” the company should use a sharp knife, not a sledgehammer. If valuable employees who support change find opportunities while non-performers and change resistors find themselves on the outside, most employees will quietly applaud when they no longer have to cover for their non-producing peers.

Most important of all, point out that every time the company treats departing employees like the cast-off byproducts of cosmetic surgery, the morale of every remaining employee plummets, and employees who might otherwise support change will become sullen and passive resistors of it, something every bit as poisonous as some colonists in a Portuguese man-of-war.

That’s bad for profits, and even worse when the next big change comes around.

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