How (19 page)

Did you cheat?

About our experiment: It has nothing to do with Janet Jackson. Rather, having just read the inspiring story of David Toms at the British Open, how did you feel when I asked you not to cheat and look ahead to the answer? Did it enter your mind as you were reading? Were you insulted by the intimation that you
might
cheat? Did you read the passage more lightly? Lose focus and have to read part of it again? Or perhaps just read a little slower in order to
make sure
you wouldn’t cheat by reading ahead? People are sensitive about cheating, and rightly so. To casually tell someone not to cheat immediately raises questions of trust. “What does that person think of me, that I’m a
cheat
?” In the few moments immediately after a small comment like that, those voices in your head get activated, and without necessarily realizing it, you get distracted.

Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction prompted 500,000 or so complaints to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the largest fine ever levied by the FCC on a television broadcaster at the time, and whether you judge the action innocent, misguided but harmless, inappropriate, or offensive, the total amount of productivity lost while people discussed it over the watercooler (or e-mail, or instant message, or the blogosphere) was probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
⁵
The actions of any single individual can drain significant resources from a company and affect the fortunes of many. Major failures of conduct can bring about the downfall of a company or cost it millions in fines, legal fees, and lost business. But far more significant (and ultimately more detrimental) are the million small events—like that comment about cheating—that crowd our attention each day, activate our inner voices, and pull our minds out of the game.

SMALL LAPSES, LARGE COSTS

The game doesn’t stop, of course, when your head leaves it; it goes merrily on without you, leaving you to play catch-up. If the passion and integrity of Krazy George can make a positive Wave, one that propels innovation and success, the Janet Jacksons of business can make a negative one, a Wave of distraction and de-focus. Both positive Waves and negative Waves derive their force and power from the ways we choose to interrelate. Our experiment demonstrates the many ways in which small lapses of HOW can harm us in significant ways.

Business consultant Stephen Young made popular a new management buzzword about these small moments; he calls them
microinequities
.
⁶
Bad body language in a meeting, a question asked in a mocking tone, an off-color joke told at an inopportune moment—all lapses in how you fill the spaces between you and those with whom you work—can subtly leech productivity from any organization. Checking your messages while speaking with colleagues devalues their time and thus them. Glancing at your watch while someone makes a presentation dismisses his or her effort. You can frame performance reviews in a way that sends underperforming colleagues back to their desks inspired to improve or in a way that leaves them demoralized and revising their resumes. These microlapses create distraction by infecting interpersonal relationships with doubt and fear. Doubt and fear increase the Certainty Gap between us and others. Energy that should be focused on the task at hand or a common goal gets diverted to concerns of politics and survival. An individual or team distracted and without focus will almost always lose.

Let me ask another question (no test this time). In the past week or two, how many times have you opened an e-mail and had one of the following reactions?

• This is not what we agreed to.

• This pisses me off.

• Why did you cc: my boss?

• Are you trying to make me look bad?

• I’m offended.

• I don’t find this all that funny.

• Why are you filling my in-box with this stuff?

Did you forward this e-mail to someone? Did you call a friend or loved one and say, “How’s your day going, honey? Let me tell you about this e-mail I just got.” Or did your annoyance pop into your head again the next time you saw that person and prevent you from relating to them? These things happen all too frequently in the course of a business day. They generate bad feelings, and those feelings accumulate and take their toll. In business, distractions caused by lapses in human conduct reduce everyone’s ability to focus, and thus to function well. It is hard enough to succeed in the competitive world of global business, but if you can’t focus on winning, you don’t stand a chance. One distracting e-mail or phone call can break your concentration on the task at hand.

Such distractions happen all the time. An inappropriate comment by one worker to another during lunch gets escalated into a charge of sexual harassment. The entire team and the focus of the managers immediately get diverted into an investigation. Relationships that were easy and cordial become strained and formal, and productivity quickly suffers.

Distraction can be quantified in all sorts of ways, some anecdotal—like the loss of productivity one can easily imagine following the wardrobe malfunction—and some scientific. Studies have shown, for instance, that the distraction of talking on a cell phone while you are driving exerts a more powerful negative influence on driving performance than alcohol consumed at the legal limit. Some drivers in one study actually reported that it was
easier
to drive under the influence than while talking on a cell phone, a powerful testament to the mental resources necessary to balance attention and distraction while pursuing a goal.
⁷

In Chapter 5 we looked at Jenapharm and the University of Michigan Health System and their different approaches to a legal challenge. The time, money, and organizational concentration that go into fighting legal battles are nothing but distraction. People go into business to make things, provide services, solve real problems, create more efficiency, and even better mankind. No one goes into business in order to make better lawsuits. A friend told me a story about a businessman who left an extremely high-paying career selling enterprise software to major corporations in order to strike out on his own.
⁸
With his wife and brother-in-law, he opened a gelato store in a hip Los Angeles neighborhood to sell epicurean Italian ice cream with flavors like lemoncello with basil and chocolate martini. The store was an immediate success, tripling all expectations right out of the gate. But when I asked him how the first month went, he told me they spent almost their entire profit in legal expenses fighting with a litigious neighboring bakery owner about whether the ham-and-cheese croissant they were selling technically qualified as a “sandwich” or a “pastry,” and as such whether it violated their lease by impinging on the bakery business. It was all he could think about. Major corporations suffer the same fate on a much grander scale. The demands of discovery for even the most frivolous of lawsuits can cost corporations millions of dollars and, more crucial, thousands of man-hours’ worth of distraction.

Humans have good and bad days, distractions at work and distractions at home. Wardrobe malfunctions happen. Recognizing this and learning to reduce the distractions that take your mind out of the game can make you a step quicker than your competitor, make you more focused, and help you to use your energies more productively. Keeping your mind in the game—learning to recognize and tame both the voices in your head and the HOWs that affect others—is a constant challenge, but more important than ever in a time when small lapses can mean large costs.

DISSONANCE

You walk into a bakery to buy a roll. Behind the counter in plain view is a sandwich preparation area, and on it sits a large bread knife. You order your roll, and when the counterperson hands it to you in a bag, you ask her if she will cut it in half and butter it for you. She looks at you sweetly and tells you, “I’m sorry, but we don’t cut.” You look again and, just as sweetly, point out that there is a bread knife sitting in plain view obviously used for cutting bread. She again refuses, telling you it is against bakery policy to cut rolls. Then she hands you a plastic fork and some butter. How do you feel?

A bakery with a bread knife that sells sandwiches should have no reason not to cut a roll for a customer. They represent one value—bread service—and yet enforce a policy that blatantly contradicts it. Perhaps the store manager believed there was a good reason for this seemingly inane rule—an employee once injured herself cutting that type of roll, a customer with a plastic knife might take someone hostage and rob the store, or the manager, a bread connoisseur, believes rolls should only be torn by hand and never touched by a knife—but no rationale will ever resolve the basic incongruity of the situation. So you react. Maybe you get angry, feel put upon, or feel disrespected. You might yell at the counterperson and make a scene. Or maybe you just grumble about it while you sit and have your roll and tea. This emotional response is called
dissonance
or, more precisely,
cognitive dissonance
.
⁹
It results when the mind is asked to accommodate new ideas that conflict with already held beliefs.

As silly as the bakery story might sound, it actually happened to a colleague of mine, and it illustrates well the effects of dissonance on how you think. Despite our best intentions, we are sometimes confronted with messages we can’t avoid whose contradiction creates tensions that activate an emotional response. The voices in our heads go wild. This is not just a psychological effect; it’s a change in how our synapses fire. Studies have shown that when confronted with situations like these the reasoning parts of your brain—normally employed for effective decision making and sound judgment—actually turn off, and the emotional parts of your brain turn on. Dissonance physically impedes your ability to think clearly, act with reason, and make good decisions.
¹⁰

Businesses send conflicting messages all the time, unaware that the dissonance they cause brings negative results. How many managers say they encourage the input of their subordinates but interrupt them by taking three phone calls, including one from a golfing buddy, while meeting with them? How does it feel to sit in that office, seemingly secure in the belief that your well-considered suggestions are desired, and receive undermining signals to the contrary? Do you lose your train of thought, start stumbling over your words, or bail out in the middle of your proposition, no matter how important it seemed when you entered the office? The next time you have an idea, do you just keep it to yourself? How many companies talk about trust and individual empowerment, and yet require their employees to get the boss’s signature on every expense reimbursement or multiple signatures on a purchase order? If they claim to trust you, shouldn’t they show they trust you? How do you feel when you have to fill out a form, get it signed by your boss, and then get it approved by accounting before you are reimbursed for a $10 business lunch? How much do you grumble, procrastinate, or resent the system for making you go to such extremes? Do you look to find ways to get paid back for your trouble, maybe slip in a personal receipt or two?

How about the retail store that, with a smile and a swipe of a credit card, takes your money in seconds, but requires you to stand in line for 10 minutes, fill out a form, surrender personal information, and obtain a manager’s approval to return your purchase? Are they still smiling? Does that affect your purchasing decision next time you need something? The message management is sending to their retail salespeople is just as dissonant: “We trust you enough to take their money, but not enough to give it back.” One might try to explain away this dissonance by suggesting that businesses require a higher level of scrutiny in matters of money because of the commensurately higher potential for abuse and fraud. But trust, as we know, begets trust. Employees who feel truly trusted are less likely to betray that trust because they understand innately that it works to their benefit. Employees who feel disrespected or not trusted by their management and companies are more likely to strike back in subtle ways—like cheating on expense reports or dipping into the till—to get payback for the burdens they feel unjustly placed upon them. The layers of additional rules in fact create the conditions that prompt people to game the system.

The opposite of dissonance is
consonance
, a sense that things belong together. Consonant messages inspire in those around you a greater sense of alignment to a common cause. That creates strong synapses and makes more Waves. It is more profitable in the long run to send signals of trust to employees submitting expense claims, verify them in a random and diligent manner, and deal harshly with the few people who betray that trust than to institute layers of procedure that send the message that you don’t really trust anyone. When people are subject to dissonant messages that seemingly make no sense—like the bakery that doesn’t cut rolls—they lose their sense of connection to whoever is sending them and strike out on their own, either physically or intellectually. They view your Wave with suspicion and a wait-and-see attitude; then they may get up slowly or without passion, or they may leave the stadium entirely.

Even more damaging is the profound, deleterious effect dissonance exerts on people’s ability to learn and adapt to new information. French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget gave this phenomenon specific language to describe it.
Accommodation
—the ability to reconcile conflicting ideas—is more difficult than
assimilation
—the ability to accept a new idea as wholly true.
¹¹
In other words, if someone is called upon to learn something that contradicts what they already think they know—particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge—they are likely to resist the new learning. Studies of the brain have shown that not only will they reject the dissonant message, but, amazingly, will feel good about so doing; their brain actually
rewards
them.