management | P Morgan BrownP Morgan Brown

In Seth Godin‘s latest book, Linchpin, he talks about the concept of leaning into your work in order to be successful. He argues that a change in posture, leaning in vs. standing by, is one way to tell the linchpins (irreplaceable people in an organization) from the employees. I love this concept because it is a powerful metaphor for thinking about how you show up each and every day. Are you leaning forward, into problems, roadblocks and opportunities? Or are you idly standing by waiting for something to happen, to react to?

Those that lean win. Those that stand by whine. It’s as simple as that.

I haven’t finished the book, so I’m not sure if Seth tackles this, but in thinking about leaning in, I’ve found in my own past experience that leaning in during times of change is absolutely critical. Because change is opportunity, even if oddly dressed. Too many people see change and stand by – waiting to see where the chips will fall. Waiting to see how the power structure will change or where and what the fall out will be. The people standing by at best miss an opportunity, at worst they find themselves in the fall out.

When change comes it’s time to lean – harder than you ever have.

Leaning into change is scary, and it doesn’t feel natural. I think it’s because you have to make a bet, and you’re often doing it with limited, incomplete or imperfect information. You may have a new boss whose agenda you can’t quite read. You may have a corporate shift is strategy, or a reorganization, or a brand new competitor named Google, or a million other things that create uncertainty. And our instinct is to stand by – let’s see what happens before I make a move. And I argue that that reaction is the exact wrong one to have. When the ground is shifting under your feet it’s time to asses the best you can and lean in hard. Sure, sometimes you’ll bet wrong, and that’s ok, because you can course correct along the way. Working with good intentions and a strong desire to improve your organization’s situation during a time of change is rarely why people get fired these days. It’s the people standing by that tend to get left in the dust.

Leaning in is easier to do when there isn’t any perceived risk. It gets harder as the stakes go up in times of change. It’s precisely why leaning in is that much more valuable at those moments.

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Hard work and good work. Two things that should be rewarded and are. But sometimes I believe we place more reward on hard work then on good work. I think this is backwards, and it hurts companies more than they know.

It goes something like this. Stay late, get rewarded. Deliver a day ahead of a deadline, get rewarded. Create a great design in half a day and cut out early? Well, the boss wants to know, what else could you have done with that extra 30 minutes?

It doesn’t always happen like this, and, in the long run, good work is what is rewarded, by the market. But for the day-to-day it’s the martyrs that tend to get the kudos. Regardless of whether that extra work is of any real benefit to the company at all.

Why is this? I think it’s two fold. One, good work is much harder to do than hard work. Hard work, ironically, is the easiest pursuit in business. It’s easy to put your head down and grind out a ten hour workday. Much easier, than say, creating a product that resonates with your audience. Two, it is exceedingly hard to evaluate good work as it is happening; to the point where it’s easier to revert back to the tried and true, and ask “how hard are they working?”

In this TED talk Daniel Pink, author of the new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (affiliate link) describes a fascinating study call the “Candle Problem” wherein a group of people motivated by financial rewards based on performance (speed in this case) perform worse at solving the problem than those without any incentive to solve it as fast as possible.

And I believe that this thinking, that rewards for metrics like speed and volume over quality, is what ruins many work places and diminishes the value of the employees that work there. For example, it’s been said that Apple’s upcoming tablet computer has been in prototype for at least 6 or 7 years. Never quite ready for the big time in the world of high Apple standards. Is there any question that it will crush the slew of PC-based tablets just released at CES last week in order to get “ahead” of the Apple launch? There shouldn’t be. Apple will own the dominant tablet device.

Now, do you think that the product managers and designers on the tablet are more worried about making the tablet their life’s work, or shipping something quickly? The answer is obvious. Apple values good over hard or fast or any other attribute. More and more the successful companies are the ones that value good thought and products over hard work and speed.

It’s not that hard work and speed to market aren’t important. Of course they are. But on a continuum of business priority in what order do they fall and in what way are they rewarded? Is good thought rewarded above hard work? Is it even rewarded in the same way that hard work is? Highly doubtful. Highly foolish.

So back to you. When is the last time you evaluated how you reward your people? If successful companies are more successful at rewarding good thought over hard work, it seems imperative that your people are rewarded the same way.

P Morgan Brown

A work in progress

Tag Archives: management

Leaning into Change

Rewarding Hard Work Rewards the Wrong Thing