The cost of anger

On his consulting blog, Jerry Weinberg says:

"Anger, for a consultant, is a costly luxury, and I am by nature somewhat of a cheapskate. By eliminating there-then-them anger, I cut my angry outbursts in half. By noticing my pattern of anger escalation, I dampen nine-tenths of the remaining half to the point where it doesn't interfere with my consulting practice. That leaves only about 5 per cent of the angry episodes I used to have, just one in twenty. Although this seems a dramatic improvement in frequency, it doesn't result in an equally dramatic improvement in the cost of my angry outbursts."

Anger is equally costly for managers:

Managers who blow up when they hear bad news stop hearing information about problems until those problems can no longer hide. By that time, many avenues for action aren't viable any more, and the manager is left with few choices and poor options.

Managers who display anger at the people who report to them -- belittling them in public or private -- lose trust, dampen creativity, and lower productivity.

Managers who rail against other departments, units, or managers crush collaboration and joint problem-solving.

Here's Jerry's explanation of there-then-them anger:

"...sometimes I find myself growing angry at my clients, only to realize that I'm responding to something similar the client said or did at another time or place. Or perhaps I'm responding to something similar my mother used to say to me when I was five years old. Clearly, I'm going to have to bring my mind into the present context if I'm to be effective."

This is more common than you might imagine. One colleague, Todd, realized that part of his difficult with a peer was that when the peer was upset, her facial expression mirrored the expression Todd's father wore when he was angry (and about to smack Todd).

The there-then-them trigger doesn't have to be a person, it can be a situation.

When someone (maybe you, maybe someone else) is in a there-then-them dynamic, the task is to bring that person into the present. One way to do that is to differentiate the past from the present by consciously noticing what's different about the person / situation in the present and the person / situation in the past. Sometimes it's the physical details (Todd's dad didn't wear glasses, and his peer does. His peer is female, not male. His peer doesn't have parental authority...etc).

If you notice that you have angry outbursts, try journaling to see patterns in triggers or explore similarities with past interactions and events.

The point isn't to eliminate emotion, but to not be hijacked by it, so that you can choose how to respond.

Website 3.0

I just rollled out version 3.0 of my website.

I've changed the look a bit, added search and updated the list of articles. I removed some out-dated material. And I've made the site easier to maintain. Which, in theory, means I'll update it more often.

In the next few weeks, I'll update the articles-by-topic index and add more articles (I added Entrust to Another, a blog post grown up to be an article). There are over 25 articles on the site now, I've lots more to add.

A Compensation Story

I found this snippet by Dick Dauphinais of the Herman Group via the Dear Workforce email newsletter:

Compensation experts for years have preached that discussions on performance with employees should not be linked to pay discussions, although most companies ignore this advice.

I am not a fan of using employees' performance ratings or scores as a basis for pay decisions. Employees should know at all times how well they are performing and also need to see periodic adjustments to their base pay that keep wages in line with their peers in the marketplace (we are not talking about a cost-of-living adjustment, though).

I'm not a fan of using performance ratings or scores as a basis for pay decisions, either.

Contrary to popular belief, performance-linked pay isn't a huge motivator for most people, and in fact it's more often a demotivator.

Here's an example:

My friend Jennifer is a pretty driven person. Her standards for her own performance are high, and she's allergic to sloth, slovenliness, and slacking. You can count on Jennifer to do the job right--and then some.

So when Jennifer had her annual performance review, she received a top ranking.

Then she got her raise... a piddly 1.5%. Her manager told her it was a high raise for Jennifer's salary range. Jennifer didn't feel great about it--it seemed sort of strange that her ranking was high, and yet her raise was so small--but accepted the rationale.

....until she found out that two other people in the group (and in the same job grade) had received 5% raises. One of them was relatively new, and still needed a lot of guidance and help. The other scrapped by doing as little as possible.

After learning how the raises were parceled out, Jennifer stopped going above and beyond. She's not slacking off, but she's not doing as much as she was, either. "What's the point?" she said. "No matter how much I do, my raise will be less than barely competent people who are at the bottom of the salary range. Where's the fairness in that?"

Jennifer's company has managed to take someone inately inclined to go beyond the call of duty and actually deminished her desire to contribute.

Mr. Dauphinais goes on to say,

In addition, your pay programs should focus on company-established business goals and the professional development of employees by improving their skill sets. Pay programs that fit into this category include gain-sharing, profit-sharing, skills-based pay and milestone pay (common in project work), as well as other custom programs that emphasize sharing financial success with all or most employees based on meeting certain milestones.

The purpose of a pay system is to attract and retain employees. To do that, people need to feel that they are being paid a fair rate and that they are treated equitably. (Notice I didn't say "treated equally." Equal treatment often is not equitable.) The thing you don't want is for pay rate and raises to be a distracter or a dissatisfier.

Most of the performance ranking/rating linked pay systems I see backfire. Sometimes in the way the one at Jennifer's company does, sometimes by creating cutthroat competition.

It's worth looking at how the pay systems in your company works. You may not be able to change it, but you may be able to mitigate the demotivating affects on the people who report to you.

Making Good Teams Great

I didn't make a single post in May. That's because I was working on Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, which I co-authored with Diana Larsen. It's due out in July from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Yippee!

getting ready to coach

I recently talked to a person who billed himself as a coach. Here's how he expained what he does: "I explain the obvious to the stupid."

Oh, my. It isn't very helpful to dismiss the people as stupid. They may not know as much, or have as much experience. But no matter how hard this guy tries to hid it, his contempt will leak through.

So inspired by that conversation, I wrote a little article on perparing for coaching. It's on the Scrum Alliance site.