No Surprises
1. Do you get critical information in a timely manner?
I have one rule on which I am very strict and that is: "No surprises".
You will see throughout this book that communication is king. This may be intuitive and obvious, but it is easy to forget when you are in the tough part of a project and incredibly busy.
When I am introduced as the new leader of an organization, my first comment to employees is the rule state above: I expect no surprises.
Here are some examples of surprises:
* Learning that a schedule will be missed at the end of a development cycle. * Learning from a product manager that an employee got angry and yelled at someone instead of the manager of the employee reporting to you. * Learning from the CEO (instead of your engineer) that a customer had an installation problem while a developer was at the site. * Learning that an employee is leaving the company on their last day even though they gave two weeks notice.
Your employees may surprise you for a variety of reasons including:
* Believing things will get better and trying to wait until they get better before reporting an issue. * Believing that they can address the issues themselves and not wanting to inform or involve management. * Avoiding reporting an issue because they are embarrassed. * Resisting an approved plan because they have their own agenda. * Not communicating with each other and not even knowing some problems are occurring.
The more time you have to solve a problem, the more options you may have. You have more flexibility to trade off or help your employee make a tradeoff between things like features and schedule. You can only do so if you have the information.
2. Have you established a culture that encourages addressing tough issues?
Problems are just things you get to solve together with your team. The corollary to No Surprises is that you should not kill the messenger unless he or she is three weeks late in providing the information (although kill is never the correct term!). People are scared to share information at times. Previous managers might have taught them that they will only get grief for sharing hard or bad news.
Each manager must extend himself or herself in a lot of different ways and venues. Not all people communicate the same way. Some communicate best by email or phone messages, others in one-on-one meetings, and yet others over a beer. You have to take the time to reach out and give people the chance to share.
You also have to show by example that you appreciate information. This includes active listening to show that you heard them and being polite and thanking them for coming to you. In addition, you must follow up. If someone shares information, it should not matter whether you decide to act on it or not; you need to show that you value that person by sharing what decisions you made.
I attribute the words "No surprises" to Mike Chow with whom I worked at Apple in the mid-1990's. I remember that there were a lot of behind-the-scenes discussions and intrigue, and those words were part of his efforts to bring things out into the open. Later I also saw a small mention of it in the popular book The One Minute Manager1.
Live by the No Surprises rule in interacting with all the people with whom you work. No one likes surprises. It does not matter if you are communicating with your boss or your peers or your employees. Set an example and communicate everything you can.
There are times when your company may ask you to make changes that significantly affect your group. This is also a good time when you should exercise No Surprises as completely as you can. It is important to let people know what you are doing. Obviously, there are times when you respect confidentiality for legal reasons and for propriety's sake, but in general the rule holds.
One great example occurred when I was working at Apple and one of my groups had its budget cut. Unfortunately things were in flux, and the company would not allow me to redeploy or lay them off. This went on for three months. The situation would not have been so bad if the news of the budget cut had been kept quiet, but other folks in the company had been told. In fact my group was denied support from other groups in the company when they needed to work with those folks since we were not funded. I could have kept things secret from the team and then they would have found out from other parts of the company. Instead, I employed No Surprises. I was very clear and honest with my group. I told them that if they wanted to look for other jobs, they could and I would write references for them; but if they wanted to stay, I would continue to fight for them. In the end, we were funded and only two people out of 30 moved on.
3. Do people surprise you outside your organization with information regarding your organization that you did not know?
Here is another great example about surprises: one of my employees was responsible for tracking box failures with our contract manufacturer. He did not follow up with the manufacturer on some specific failures, and our contract manufacturer did not follow up with us independently. When we had our fifth failure in two months, I was surprised that my employee did not follow through the failures until they were addressed. I was surprised that I heard about this from someone outside my organization before hearing it from my employee. I was surprised that our contract manufacturer did not follow up with us on those issues.
In the end this caused a lot of problems. Our customers saw more failures. Our support team panicked. Bad feelings arose with our support team and with our contract manufacturer. By just communicating in a more timely and effective manner, we could have quickly and easily addressed the issue. Please see the section on Accountability as it further addresses issues like this.
1 Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager (New York, NY: A Berkley Book published by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1982), p 26.
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