The Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy - Part VIII

Time to revive an old series on the blog, and one of my favorites - on the (continuing) Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy.

Since it has been a while, here's a little refresher on just who Jeff Van Gundy is, and why management, leadership, and organizational culture types should listen closely to what JVG has to say about performance, talent, and team dynamics.

JVG is currently an NBA analyst and announcer for ESPN, previously he was the head coach of my beloved New York Knicks, as well as the Houston Rockets. He was successful as a coach, but may even be a better fit for broadcasting, as he over the years has shown consistent insights into the game, coupled with humor, irreverence, and fun that makes games in which he is broadcasting essential viewing for NBA fans.

We've covered many of JVG's insights on the blog in the past, (good examples are here and here), and while listening to JVG recently being interviewed on ESPN's (Zach) Lowe Post Podcast, he had this nugget of enlightenment about the importance of conflict amongst team members, and how it is necessary (often), to drive performance improvement.

Here's the JVG quote, and then a quick comment from me:

(Some context, Lowe and JVG were discussing if players who are 'bad' or who have abrasive personalities should have that held against them when judging their performance) 

JVG - To me, it is not about are you 'easy' in the locker room, it's are you right. If you are causing tension for the right reasons at the right times, to help spur your team to confront their issues, and their problems and you're willing to be confronted as well about your own issues and your own problems, then tension is a good thing. 

This idea that everything should be happy go lucky in a locker room when you are a mediocre team, I disagree with. It's hard to get from mediocrity to average then from average to pretty good and from pretty good to good and then from good to great if there's no conflict. Conflict puts everybody's cards on the table. If you are causing tension for the right reasons at the right times and you are willing to be coached as well and confronted as well then I think tension is a good thing.

A really interesting, and I think accurate, assessment of how conflict, how an occasional 'difficult' personality type on the team, and the tension and butting of heads that that kind of a person can cause should not be immediately looked at as a negative.

In NBA basketball, and probably in your organization as well, there are plenty of folks who think their performance and their contribution is perfectly acceptable, and their position on the team is totally secure. They may even be your 'top' performers. But even they, probably, need to be challenged from time to time. Even they need to examine their own performance at least once in a while.

And in basketball, and again, probably in your shop too, it often takes a gruff, difficult, hard to get along with personality type to force people into that kind of self-examination. And often in basketball, and for the final time, at 'normal' workplaces too, the tendency is to immediately point the finger at Mr. or Ms. 'Difficult' and ostracize them, (or simply get rid of them), for rocking the boat.

As JVG reminds us, when a team of any kind aspires to do more, to do better, to achieve great things, some conflict along the way is not only inevitable, it is likely essential.

Think about that the next time you are wondering what to do to make that hard to get along with person who likes to find the issues in what is going on around the office to simply pipe down and get along.

Maybe they're not actually the problem after all.

Have a great weekend! 

The most important relationship on any team

The most important relationship on any team (work, school, sports - any of them), is the one between the leader (boss, coach, manager), and the best or most talented performer on said team.

Want some context?

Check the comments from a recent interview with former Cleveland Cavaliers head coach David Blatt when asked about his relationship with the Cavs' top player, the legendary LeBron James:

“The role of the coach is much larger as far as impact and persona,” Blatt said. “It’s much more of a coaches’ show. In the NBA, it’s a players’ show.”

He also said: “You better be on the same page as your best player. If not, you’re going to be in trouble.”

Pretty savvy observation from Blatt, who was actually hired by the Cavs prior to LeBron's decision to leave the Miami Heat and return to his hometown club. Once LeBron made his decision to re-join the Cavs, Blatt's job quickly changed from one of developing a young team for the future to one of molding a more veteran club to compete for a championship right now.

And the key to all of this was LeBron, and how (or if), LeBron and the new to the NBA coach would be able to co-exist.

Fast forward about 18 months later and we know how things turned out. Blatt, LeBron, and the Cavs lost to the Golden State Warriors in the 2015 NBA finals and midway through the current season, and despite a stellar won-loss record, Blatt was fired by the Cavs.

Ultimately, Blatt's undoing was his inability to find the optimal common ground between himself and LeBron, the best, most talented, and most charismatic player on the team. On paper, Blatt was 'in charge', but in reality, and by virtue of his talent, track record, and sustained contribution, LeBron was and is the most important member of the Cavs organization. When the organization, (and LeBron), determined that the relationship between Blatt and LeBron was not salvageable, well, Blatt had to go.

It is probably tempting for managers and leaders to take an approach of treating everyone on the team more or less the same. It seems logical and equitable to spend equal amounts of time and energy on all the team members - making sure no one feels slighted or left out. We are all one team after all, right?

But as sports in general, and the Blatt - LeBron story in particular remind us, not everyone on the team is actually 'equal'. Some team members contribute to overall team success much more than others. Some team members would be much, much harder to replace should they leave than others. Some team members exert significant influence over the rest of the team, much more than the average team member.

Any leader's role is at least in part to be fair and honest with every member of the team. But the best leaders also realize that some team members play an outsized role in the overall team's success. And the very best leaders recognize that their relationship with these star performers is likely the most important one that they will have in the organization. 

That is if they want to succeed, and if they want to ensure they won't end up like our pal David Blatt, on the outside looking in while the Cavs chase the NBA Championship yet again.

Netflix ratings and what they might mean for your real-time feedback program

Everyone's favorite entertainment streaming platform/service Netfilix has been in the news plenty lately.

Their most recent earnings announcement was pretty fantastic, their revenues and reach are climbing steadily, and they continue to set the pace, tone, and standard for the modern entertainment experience. Just about everyone who is a Netflix subscriber loves it, and some think that Netflix (and some other services like Hulu and Amazon Prime), might one day ring the death bell for traditional broadcast networks and cable service providers.

Netflix is a case study example of a company that has managed growth, transition, technological change, and even making some strategic blunders to become one of the digital age's most interesting and influential companies. You might recall that Netflix made quite a stir in the HR/Talent Management space with their famous 'Culture Deck' a few years back. That document, which some have called the most important one in all of Silicon Valley, was seen and shared by thousands.

But why I was interested in posting about Netflix this week has nothing to do with their 'culture deck' or consumer cord cutting or the new season of Orange is the New Black. It is for another element of the Netflix approach I find really interesting and relevant to HR and talent management pros today - their approach and attitude about program ratings, the traditional way most TV programs have been judged, and their creators rewarded.

As consumers of TV we are all at least somewhat aware of ratings. They are reported on regularly. We all hear stories about TV's highest rated shows. And we know that when shows are cancelled, the usual reason is low ratings. In the traditional TV model, ratings are closely monitored, are made public and are widely reported on, and are the ultimate form of either validation and success, or rejection and failure. 

Want to know the ratings of any broadcast or cable TV show? That information is not that hard to find.

Want to know the ratings or even the total number of viewers for Netflix shows like Orange or House of Cards? Well, good luck finding out that information. Here is what Netflix thinks about ratings, from a recent piece on Business Insider:

Netflix thinks ratings are bad for television shows, and are a negative force on the talent that produces them.

Last week, executives from the likes of NBC and FX traded barbs with Netflix over ratings transparency.

FX CEO John Landgraf said it’s “ridiculous that we don’t have usage numbers on Netflix," while NBC’s Alan Wurtzel cited data from an outside research company that Netflix’s ratings weren’t all that impressive.

Netflix fired back, not just at NBC’s data, which content chief Ted Sarandos called "remarkably inaccurate," but at the very idea of ratings.

Netflix has always closely guarded its viewership data, so much so that many of its creators don’t even know how well their shows are doing. Tina Fey, who was the co-creator of the Netflix show “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” said she had no idea how many people were watching the show,according to the Wall Street Journal.

Now Netflix is saying this type of secrecy is actually good for shows. Sarandos said that instant ratings data turns TV into a weekly arms race between networks, and puts “a lot of creative pressure on talent,” Variety reports.

He asserted that the focus on ratings “has been remarkably negative in terms of its effect on shows.”

Quite a bit to take apart from that story but the key for me is not the 'old guard' sniping at Netflix from the NBC exec, but rather the Netflix point of view that a focus on ratings, particularly instant or 'real-time' ratings information is in fact harmful to the creative talent that it is increasingly engaging to produce its content.

It is kind of a remarkable point of view, and in the modern world of digital content delivery and availability of big data and powerful analytical tools, very counter-intuitive. Everything - marketing, politics, sports, and yes even HR and talent management is in an almost lock-step march towards compiling more data, gauging success or failure more discretely, and importantly - providing results and feedback to people much more often.

You can't swing a cat in a room of HR people today and not find at least someone, maybe a few someones, that are scrapping annual performance reviews and shifting towards some kind of alternative program for assessing and hopefully improving employee performance. While these new approaches differ at least some, they almost always have one thing in common - the encouragement of more frequent 'feedback' (if you like 'ratings'), given to employees in the course of a year.

Sure, this 'feedback' is meant to be less formal, more forward-looking, and less frightening than the annual performance review, but strip away the new terms we are using and underneath it all to many employees it is going to feel like you've replaced the dreaded annual performance review with anywhere from 12 to 52 'mini' performance reviews. And that is going to stink worse than any uncomfortable one-hour annual performance review meeting ever did.

The real thing to think about in all this is the effect that feedback/criticism/ratings will have on talented people, especially creative people that are increasingly the difference between organizational success and failure.

Netflix, the paragon of the modern company, culture, and talent engine has decided that less feedback (in form of program ratings), is actually a positive, and beneficial to the creative talent with which it engages, and which it needs to compete and succeed. It thinks for people to do their best, most creative work, they can't be constantly worried, on a week-to-week basis, with ratings and viewer numbers. Netflix is playing the long game.

So what does this mean for you, the HR and talent pro wrestling with these trends and changes in the way 'traditional' performance management has always been done?

It might mean this: Replacing traditional, annual performance reviews with a system that amounts to more frequent, if less formal, performance reviews might be exactly the wrong thing to do if you are trying to get the best, most creative results from your teams.

Or said differently, how many really, really talented people do you know that like to be told how they are doing all of the time?

You call it 'feedback', they hear it as 'criticism'

Let's start with some level setting and definitions:

Feedback (noun) - reaction to a process or activity, or the information obtained from such a reaction

Criticism (noun) - an ​opinion given about something or someone, esp. a ​negative ​opinion, or the ​activity of making such ​judgments

Feedback, especially when you fold in the more technical elements or applications of the term, (like feedback from a machine or from some kind of industrial or mechanical process), more or less connotes neutrality, impartiality, and crucially, accuracy. Sure, sometimes feedback slants negative, but it should be accurately negative, if such a term exists. Because when negative feedback gets interpreted by the recipient of said feedback as being unfairly or inappropriately negative, then it ceases to really be feedback at all, and becomes criticism.

And while most folks seem to appreciate and respect honest, accurate feedback, not nearly as many are down with taking accepting criticism, or for that matter, critics.  In fact, many really creative, innovative, and talented folks, the ones everyone is trying to recruit and retain, have little time for critics.

One example:

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius faced plenty of criticism in his career. Sibelius's response to criticism was dismissive: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic." 

If you have decided to throw in with the current trend and ditch the annual performance review process (that flawed as it is, has likely served its purpose over the years), you are going to have to get better at assessing how people are interpreting the 'feedback' you and your managers are now laying down on the reg.

One of the main reasons that the traditional performance review process has failed many organizations is that it only provides any kind of feedback to employees on an annual basis. Even if the feedback was kind of terrible, at least the employees only had to endure once a year. So sure, by making the process more regular, more frequent, and less formal solves most of that 'recency' problem.

But more and more regularly scheduled feedback does not by itself make anyone or any manager actually better at giving said feedback. And if more feedback simply adds up to or is interpreted as more criticism, then 'modern' performance management won't be much more effective than traditional performance management has been. 

Make sure you are not setting up managers (and yourself) for failure simply by taking an ineffective process, changing its name,  and asking people to do it more frequently. 

Stable, but not still

So this past Sunday morning I have to admit getting caught up in a several hour Law & Order marathon - that staple of American basic cable TV. To the unnamed friend of mine who got me hooked on these old dramas - thanks, I was probably watching too much English soccer anyway.

On one of the episodes the District Attorney dropped a fascinating line about a theory of law that he subscribed to, something along the lines that while there always will be fundamental principles that form the foundation of law, (and right and wrong), that changes in society, technology, values, etc. over time, demanded that the law be flexible and changeable over time.

This concept in law was first popularized (as far as my 8 minutes of extensive research was able to ascertain), by the American legal scholar Roscoe Pound, who said, famously, that "The law must be stable, but it must not stand still."

Pound contended that the law should adapt, slowly, to changes in society, and argued against the idea that the law should try to force or influence society to change. Pound fought the notion of a largely unchanging Common Law, a position not always in the majority then as now.

Why bring this up? 

Because the Pound maxim, "The law must be stable, but it must not stand still" could just as easily apply to most of what we do in HR and talent management and in trying to lead in organizations today. It is really easy and fun and less restrictive to talk only about radical change and disruption and need to move 1,000 MPH in modern business, but the truth is very few organizations are architected to operate in that manner, and even the ones that do probably fail as often as not.

Pound's take, that have a stable, (Note - 'stable' is not the same as 'rigid'), while simultaneously understanding the need to change, to evolve, to in his words, to not 'stand still', is about the most practical advice for the vast majority of organizations and settings today.

Stable, but not still. I dig that. Nice, shot Roscoe.

Now, back to the last hour of the Law & Order marathon...

Have a great week!