A Man a Plan a Canal Panama

 I recently experienced in rowing the benefits of approaching something with a plan and being flexible with that plan. As part of my preparation for rowing head race season (head races are long distance races of about 5000 meters), I have turned in a time for 6000 meters on an erg (rowing machine). In the last two weeks or so, I gone on the erg three times. The first time was to get a feel for what 6000 meters feels like on an erg, so I rowed three 2000 meters pieces. The second and third times, I rowed 6000 meters straight.

This story requires an explanation of the information the erg provides me (or to anyone else) rowing on it. The machine has a digital display that displays a simulated distance that you have rowed. It shows how many strokes per minute you are rowing. It also displays a 500 meter split time based on (I believe) your most recent two strokes to give you an idea of the pace at which you are rowing. You can modify the display to show other information such as calories burned or to show a graph illustrating the power curve of the effort you put into your stroke. I prefer seeing the power curve.

In the trio of 2000 meter pieces that I rowed on my first outing, I rowed an average of 25 strokes per minute. When I added the three pieces together – which, admittedly, had three minute rest periods between each piece – I had a 6000 meter time of 25 minutes and 41 seconds. I didn't know what to expect in terms of a time, I was neither pleased nor displeased with the results. I determined that I needed to improve that time when I talked to some of my teammates who were turning in times in the 24 minute range.

The next week, I rowed a 6000 meter piece on the erg. I rowed it in 25 minutes and 31 seconds at an average stroke rate of 23 strokes per minute (spm). I was happy to not go backwards in comparing my time to aggregated time of my previous outing, but I knew I still needed to improve. I noticed a couple key facts on this outing. First, I was able to basically maintain the same time rowing 6000 meters straight as I did rowing three 2000 meter pieces that had rest breaks. I did this with a lower average stroke per minute rate. Rowing is funny in that a higher stroke rate doesn't necessarily equate to a better time or a faster boat. I also noticed that during my warm up I had started at an 18 spm with an estimated time better than what I was rowing at the 23 spm or 25 spm range.

For my third outing, I incorporated my observations into a plan for improving my 6000 meter time. The first step in my plan would be to reduce the effort I was expending in my warm up. My strongest power curves (taken from the digital readout) were coming from those 18 spm warm up strokes. I would use the warm up just for that: to warm up my muscles. My next step would be to lower my stroke rating at 22 spm. I have observed in the past that I felt I could “row all day” at 22 spm on long erg workouts or outings on the boat. I would start out with a very strong press – the kind I was seeing in my 18 spm workouts – take a long recovery, and press hard again. I knew that, over the course of the 6000 meters, that strong press would diminish. I would still get a very strong start. My last portion of my plan was to bump up my stroke rating at the very end, two spm at a time so that I would close out the piece rowing at 30 spm.

I started out rowing my 22 spm with strong strokes getting a 1:52 500 meter split estimate every two strokes (according to the digital readout). I held that split for about 1000 meters. I fell off that split in the next 1000 meters, so that my first 2000 meters came in at about eight minutes. I maintained my stroke rating and kept pressing so that my 500 meter split estimate remained between 2:00 and 2:10 for the next 2500 meters. During the last 500 meters, I had planned to up begin increasing my rating, but when I did that, my 500 meter split estimate worsened. I was increasing the stroke rating my lessening my recovery time and loosing power on my drive. I made a quick decision to hold onto my 22 spm rating for a little bit longer and my 500 meter split estimate improved again. I rose my stroke rating in the last 150 meters or so to about 27 and finished the entire piece in 24 minutes and 44 seconds.

24:44 still isn't a great time, it is in the middle of times worldwide for my age group (just below the 50^th percentile). I was still pleased with my 47 second improvement and attributed it to approaching the piece with a plan and being willing to make quick adjustments to my plan while I was rowing. I could have just told myself to row as hard and as fast as I could and hope for the best, but I did better with having a plan.

The same concept can be applied to any of our endeavors. For years, I have done well in many of my efforts at work by just applying more energy and animation to whatever I was doing. That can be effective to a point. There are limits to what anyone can do by himself or herself by just applying more energy. At some point, applying that energy is just flopping around really fast. Planning our actions and working with others multiplies what we are able to accomplish. I realize as I type this that this is a basic concept, but my experience on the rowing machine provided me a concrete example of the benefits of having a plan.

I am using this experience to think about times at work or in volunteer work when I could have done better with a plan and with the willingness to be flexible in that plan. What experiences do you have where you know you benefited from having a plan?

Humility on a New Boat

 I recently started a new job with a new company in a new area. Likewise, I have recently joined a new rowing club and in the last few weeks joined a new boat. In both situations, I went from a comfortable situation where I possessed a certain amount of respect and responsibility to a new situation where I was an unknown quantity and knew less about how things work than anyone else.

At work, I have 11 years of help desk and call experience upon which to draw. I have had to learn what is the culture, how much I can leverage my experience to influence events, and how much I need to listen to those around me. In my first three months, I have been growing in confidence and acting independently. This has brought me some successes. One being in leading the team to develop a more efficient way of producing a client deliverable. Another being in pressing another vendor for details to confirm that they can provide us what we need (“leveraging my experience”). It has also caused me to make some mistakes, where I would act based on what sense at my previous jobs, but would find I acted in error based on what I didn't know.

On the boat, I have much less experience and have listened more. Even in listening more, I have still reached out for opportunities. The chief opportunity has been in signing up for a race in Philadelphia. This put me rowing in the “A boat” and rowing with much more experienced rowers. These are guys with better technique, greater strength, and faster times than me. I am clearly the weakest member of the team. This shows from my position on the boat. On the novice boat, I have often rowed in seat seven where I am one of the two people setting the pace. On this boat, I am rowing in seat two where I can follow the rest of the boat. The good thing for me is that my teammates are willing to help me and provide advice. Even in just two weeks, I am becoming a better rower.

In both situations – less so at work, more so at rowing – I have displayed genuine humility. At work, it has helped me get along with others whose experience differs from mine. At rowing, it has helped me focus on improving my own technique by following the advice of my teammates and the coach. A sense of humility is proper in any new environment. It enables me to be more aware of what I am doing, what is going on around me, and what people are saying and doing. I still trust in my own abilities and will do many things my own way (at rowing, I insist on carrying my oars the way people at my old club did – over the shoulder instead of by the hand), but a humble awareness of my surroundings helps me incorporate into my own experience what others have to offer.

Another Value of Networking (or Just Listening) and the Power of Analogy

I am wrapping up a business trip where I have been tasked to collect information for transferring work from one contracting company to another contracting company. This involves a lot of listening, observing, and being sensitive to people who work for an organization that is losing work. I accomplished what I set out to do, but I also gained a new perspective on something I have worked with for many years.

I have observed and measured help desk and call center phone calls for a long time.  In all of the measurements I have made, including DPMO (Defects Per Million Opportunities), I have looked at what happens per phone call. The person I spoke to today had a different perspective. He described phone calls in terms of book publishing: the longer the book, the more opportunities there are for errors. This provided me the epiphany, or the idea, at least, of measuring errors or events not in terms of errors or events per phone call, but errors or events per phone call minute. I have long known that short phone calls are easier than long ones, but it took talking to this person and hearing his book publishing analogy to consider the idea of measuring events per call minute. This perspective may turn out to be irrelevant in the work I do, but I am still thankful for hearing someone else's new way of looking at something that is familiar to me.

My point isn't that the idea itself is so important (it probably isn't important in your work). What is important to me, and I hope is important to you, is the value I found in listening to someone else. Talking to people outside your own organization is valuable because it gets you outside your own organization's culture of doing things a particular way. Limiting yourself to exchanging ideas only with people in your own organization is like limiting genetic selection in a closed population (think of birth defects occurring among European royalty at the beginning of the 20^th century or of the isolated lion population in the caldera of a dormant volcano in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania). Exchanging ideas only with your coworkers provides the same limitations and possibly limits the quality of your results.

Take opportunities to join professional organizations and civic groups. Find ways to visit organizations who do similar work as you do. Not only do you expand your professional network, but you get to hear new perspectives and new ways of doing things (think of it as cross pollinating your ideas and experiences with those of others). What you hear might be related to something that you have long taken for granted. That is what happened to me today.

The Last Days...Until a New Opportunity

Tomorrow is my last day at the company where I have worked for 11 years.  Eleven years is a long enough time to tie my experience to larger things.  Many people talk about how people grieve after being laid off in the same way that they grieve after losing a loved one.  My situation is different because I am leaving of my own volition to pursue a new opportunity with a different company, but I still think of my resignation as something of a complete closure.

During the last weeks since tendering my resignation, I have been working as normal:  meeting with my direct reports to coach and help them develop, investigating errors to identify the root cause and develop with other people the solutions, and performing the administrative tasks associated with my customer service supervisor role.  Some people have remarked their appreciation that I have continued to do that.  Others have expressed surprise that I haven’t kicked up my heels and relaxed these last days.

Working as normal, even after my resignation, is the most natural thing I could think to do.  Tying my work experience to larger things, I think of the remembrances I hear of celebrities and other people who work, or do what they believe in, right up until their death.  I always smile at those types of remembrances.  As an example, journalist Daniel Schorr, who passed away in July 2010, worked right up to the end of his life.  I listened to radio political commentaries he had recorded just two weeks before he died at the age of ninety three.  Ninety three!  I love the thought of being able to make the most out of your entire life, the thought of someone who is blessed and fortunate enough to be able to do so.  I hope that when my time is up, I have the strength and courage to keep doing what is important to me up until the end.

Working as normal also ties into my own reputation.  I try to lead by the example of my speech, by listening, and by my actions.  Even though my coworkers’ memories of me at work will, and should, fade with time, I want them to see that how I behave and act really is a part of who I am and not just a performance.  Each of our reputations, built on our own speech and actions,  are all that we have to carry with us throughout this life.

When you change jobs, whether or not it is after a long stint at an organization or a short one, take care to ensure that your actions during the last days of your job illustrate a part of who you are.

Successful Weekends

I just finished reading What the Most Successful People Do on Weekends by Laura Vanderkam. In the book, Ms Vanderkam states that weekends are important to our lives and that we need to apply the serious attention to them that we apply to our work lives. She uses a word that many people don't like in terms of free time: planning. Her general point is this: plan ahead of time what you want to do in your weekends that you find fulfilling. By having a plan, you can spend your weekend doing the things that you enjoy instead of thinking on Saturday morning what you want to do. The things you do might be as exciting as going to a concert or going to the beach, or it might be as pedestrian as taking an afternoon nap.

In reading her book, I could identify my own successful weekends and those less so. The successful weekends are the ones I feel good about and look back on and smile. These are also the ones that my coworkers comment on, “David, you do such interesting things”. My less successful weekends are the ones where I look back and ask, “what happened to my weekend?” As hard as we work in our jobs, it only makes sense that we make the most of the time that is ours.

My last weekend fell into the successful category. My wife and I went to dinner at a new restaurant on Friday night where we spent quality time talking. On Saturday morning, we volunteered at a rowing event where I was also competing. On Saturday evening, I played boardgames with friends while my wife read at home. On Sunday, we went to my parents' house to celebrate my mother's birthday. Looking back on it, it was an action packed weekend, but I felt good going into work the next week. We had specifically planned the Saturday and Sunday events, and while we didn't specifically plan the Friday night dinner, we often do dinner dates on Fridays.

You can purchase Laura Vanderkam's eBook version of What the Most Successful People Do on Weekends on Amazon for $2.99. It is a good, quick read. Our weekends are precious. What are you doing this weekend?

The Best Use of My Time

It is annual performance review season at my workplace. That means that for the last two weeks I have been formally meeting with each of my direct reports and discussing with them what they accomplished in 2012, how they accomplished it, and what are the goals for 2013. The meetings have been going smoothly: some review highlight a lot of accomplishments and demonstrated strong traits, others describe opportunities for improvements and examples of behavior that needs to change in 2013.

What has made these meetings easier than they otherwise might be is that my direct reports are used to meeting with me. The most important way I spend my time as a supervisor is meeting with my employees. It takes a conscious effort to do this and it takes time. It takes a conscious effort because there are many other things going on competing for my time: communications from clients, planning meetings for different ongoing projects, review of performance data – the list goes on. Each is important in its own way, but I always feel I am making progress when I meet with my people.

My people are my conduit into knowing what is going on in the business. Working at a help desk, I have all sorts of technologies at my disposal that tell me how many calls and emails come in, how quickly they are resolved, and many other data points. Regularly meeting and talking to my employees informs me what challenges they are facing, what new techniques they have discovered, and provides context and background to data points I see in reports.

Now it took time to develop a level of trust with my employees for them to be open with me, but it is worth it. As an example, I was able to develop an incentive program for my people that rewarded them when they emulated a certain behavior that increased revenue. I learned of this model behavior from one of my employees who told me what he was doing (simply because he thought it was the right thing to do). I used his performance as a goal for others on the team, set up an incentive program, and rewarded those who emulated the his behavior and success. Over the course of three month, this created a 10% increase in my team's revenue – something that originated from my regular meetings with my employees!

My scheduled one on one meetings are also my way of guiding and coaching my employees to more productive practices. Making these meetings discussions and/or conversations gets them involved in understanding their own performance. With that understanding, they take more ownership of what they are doing. I can leverage the technology of phone call recordings, email transcripts, and metric reports to foster discussion with each of them. The fact that these meetings are regular reduces the stress of “going to meet with the supervisor”. People don't dread coming to my desk (they did at first, because they didn't know what to expect).

So I come back to annual performance review season. For my team, these reviews are just another set of meetings with me. The opportunities for improvement are not surprises and neither are the commendations of success. They are both things we have discussed many timesin our recurring meetings.

As a leader, if you find yourself unable to schedule regular meetings with your direct reports or find yourself canceling many of these meeting because of other demands on your time, ask yourself what is the best use of your time as a supervisor or manager. You will probably be better off keeping, or at least rescheduling, your one on one meeting with your employee. I know I have been.

Knowing Your People

Different people are motivated by different things. While this may sound obvious on the face of it, many systems are designed to provide one type of motivation for all people. A company may, for example, provide higher pay and bonuses for its most successful employees. Another organization might provide highly visible recognition programs for its most successful employees. Yet another may provide training and development to its stars. The organizations most successful in motivating its people and leveraging their talents implement some kind of combination of motivators.

Using different motivators is not just something an organization must consider, but is also something a front line leader must use. One of the things I have had to learn as a leader was to connect different motivators with the people most motivated by them. I started out by projecting my own needs and outlooks on the people that reported to me. I would provide verbal praise, which is important to me, to all of my employees who did well. I saw some respond well to this and others not as well. Why wasn't this working evenly for everyone? One of my own managers helped me out of my quandary by helping me step out of my own perspective and learning what motivated my people.

I incorporated into my regular meetings with my people time to learn about them as a person outside of work. I learned that some people provided a second income to a household and because their spouses would be moving within a year or two, that they were not interested in promotion. I learned that others, because of their responsibilities in raising children, were more motivated by the money associated with promotion. Others were interested in getting time off (time off is also something that is extremely important to me). Others responded especially well to specific goals and to achieving them (yes, I know that all goals need to be specific, but I have found that some people respond especially well to specific goals, more so than some of their peers). Still others craved that verbal praise and public recognition of a job well done.

You are, of course, limited by the resources at your disposal. You may not be able to grant large additional chunks of time off to your employees, or you may not have the ability to award bonuses. You must search for ways to deliver what rewards you can to your employees, and perhaps find ways to deliver rewards that may not appear to be available. For example, I thought that I could not deliver a bonus program to reward my employees. I knew, however, that some of them were well motivated by money because of their responsibilities at home. Working with the site director (who had the authority to create a bonus program), I identified a specific action my employees could take that would increase revenue. I then created a monthly bonus program that was large enough to get the employee's attention, but small enough to achieve a high return on investment comparing the increased revenue to the cost of the bonuses. The program has served to motivate many of the people on my team – but not all of them (I have one member of my team who comes to work to contribute to the success of a team, he has commented to me on the bonus program, “let others who really nee the money work toward the bonus”).

The first step in linking motivators with your people is learning what makes your team members tick. Make sure that you are meeting regularly with your people, either formally or informally. Every week, you should ask yourself, “what have I learned about my team members today?”

Making Corrections Versus Making Speed

When you perform an action slower, you have more time to make little corrections to get the action right. We have all experienced this. The same holds true for processes, too. The slower an organization performs a process, the more time it has to make corrections to get the process right.

During this weekend's rowing practice, my crew made a significant strides in our ability to row together. For the longest time, we have struggled to keep the boat balanced while we rowed. This interfered with our ability to stay together. The faster we rowed, in fact, the harder time we had rowing in sync. For weeks, we could row in sync no faster than 22 strokes per minute (spm). As soon as we increased our rate to 24 strokes a minute, we fell apart, and our oars would move out of time so that we looked more like an octopus than a crew. We have recently been making changes to our individual rowing technique to correct our balance. We have practiced these adjustments at a low rating of 16 to 20 strokes per minute. This gave us the opportunity to concentrate on what we were doing (for me, it was not dropping my hands in between strokes).

On our Sunday row, with good weather and an energetic crew, our boat captain put us to the test. We performed a series of drills to test how fast we could row using our new found balance. We would row hard one minute at a specified rate, then rest one minute, then start again rowing hard at a higher rate. We started out at 22 strokes per minute, which was well within our comfort level. Then we tried 24 strokes per minute, which is where we had been falling apart. We stayed in sync and rowed well. Then we tried 26 spm, we still held it together After another minute of rest, we bumped it up to 28, then 30. We rowed a full minute 36% faster than we had ever rowed as a crew before. We increased our speed once more to 32 spm. Suddenly, I saw the oar handle of the guy in front of my flying toward my face – he had “caught a crab” and lost his oar. He leaned back, I leaned back, and l lost my own oar. At 32 strokes per minute, there is no time to make any corrections or to recover (I have, in fact, recovered from “catching a crab” at 22 spm, but I have no chance at 32 spm).

Despite losing grip on our oars at 32 spm, the practice was a rousing success. Losing the oars got me thinking about speed and the ability to recover. As I said in the beginning, processes work this way, too. When you perform a process slowly, your team has time to make adjustments and corrections. When you work a process quickly, you have to get it right or risk disaster.

When starting a new process that involves a lot of human touch or input, it is wise to set up a checking process – a quality assurance process – to correct mistakes and set up a feedback loop to your employees. These checkers prevent errors from impacting your customers, or at least mitigating the impact of the error. The weakness in using checkers to correct mistakes is that it takes time to complete the checking process (in my rowing story above, we performed internal quality assurance checks by making adjustments to our stroke, which we had the time to concentrate on when we were only rowing 22 spm).. The quality assurance checking places a cap on the maximum speed at which your process can operate.

A solution for overcoming this speed governor is to set up a way of sunsetting your checking process. This means that, at some point, your employees need to be able to perform the task or carry out the process correctly themselves without someone correcting their mistakes. To get to this point, you need a feedback loop in your checking process. It isn't enough that your quality assurance checker corrects the mistake. You must also get the message back to employee of how to correct the error: what was the mistake, discovering why the employee make the mistake, and taking action to correct the mistake.

As part of this feedback loop, you need to identify the root causes of the employee mistake. If the employee didn't know, update your training or retrain the employee. If the employee didn't have a necessary resource, get the resource. If there is a disincentive to the employe doing the process right, remove the disincentive.

Having the employee perform the task right the first time enables you to redeploy your quality assurance checkers to another, newer process. Your employees, performing the task correctly the first time, can now operate at a faster speed. The benefit is that your team is now providing service faster to the customer. The risk in operating at this faster speed, is that when mistakes do occur, they will impact the customer before you can make any corrections. Just like when the oars went flying on our boat when we were rowing 32 strokes per minute, you won't have time to correct the error that your team makes operating at a high speed. The question you have to answer as a leader is, does the higher speed and greater efficiency of the process outweigh the impact of the errors?

Teamwork: The Influence of an Individual on a Whole Team's Performance

-->I am continuing the practice of my first two posts of relating rowing experiences to the workplace. This time, I am describing how one person can benefit or hobble the performance of an entire team.

The boat I am on has a problem with balance. Boat balance is critical in rowing because without the boats either leans to one side or flops back and forth – both situations make it harder to row in time or with consistent power because the oars hit the water at wrong times and the rowers hands get pushed against the gunwales of the boat. With proper boat balance all of these things correct themselves and rowing because enjoyable.

I helped balance the boat in my latest practice by making an adjustment to my hand height right before I drop my oar into the water. I made this adjustment based on two occurrences the practice before. The first was the boat captain demonstrating the effect of hand height from one person on the entire boat's balance. Holding his oar, he lowered his hands about four inches which caused the entire boat to lean dramatically. The second occurrence was the post practice discussion where we discussed all of the things each of us can do to improve the boat balance: one of them being not to lower one's hands just before dropping the oar in the water (which is something I have been doing for months, but hadn't realized it caused a problem).

I concentrated on holding up my hands instead of dipping them down before I dropped the oar into the water. It appeared to make all of the difference in the world: the boat had a better balance and rowing was much easier. As a group, we made other adjustments, but I know that my own small adjustment improved the situation.

This experience gave me perspective on the impacts each member of a team can have on the performance of a group. It is important, therefore, for a leader to help each team member understand the difference his or her contribution makes to the whole team's performance. Are you not sure yourself what is the impact? Find whatever data you have on your team's performance and work to divide up and identify individual contributions. The easiest impact to find is absence. If someone is not there, your team's production capacity diminishes. If you are meeting some deadline or responding to some emergency, that individual's absence will reveal itself in poor team performance.

Many workplaces, such as help desks and other IT services, benefit from having many measurement tools to identify individual contributions. Learn what tools you have, find your team members' individual contributions, and help them see their importance to the performance of the team. By helping them understand their contributions, you can help them make a greater contribution to the success of your team.