"I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven"

It's a long story (so I won't bore you with it), but my wife and I will be finishing up a move to a more permanent residence today.  We've been renting a condo in downtown Chicago for the past 2 years, and while we are going to miss living downtown, we are excited to finally have a place of our own.  Needless to say, transitions are never easy.  We switched our cable and Internet to the new place, so for a few days in our condo we were without cable and Internet.  We decided to watch a DVD of Game 7 of the 2016 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians.  You may remember that I am a diehard Cubs fan (see the excitement in my post, "The World Has Changed - Fly the W!" and the despair in my two more recent posts, "Lovable Losers Once More and "The Chicago Cubs Fire Sale").  While I was watching the game, I was quickly reminded of the importance of so-called role players.  

Not everyone can be the superstar of the team.  And to use a sports analogy (I promise I will get away from sports in a minute), not everyone can be a starter.  Every successful, championship team has a good mix of superstars and at least one role player.  According to at least one coach, "A role player is often the player who comes off the bench. He/she understands and accepts his/her role on the team. While on the bench, the good role player keeps his/her head in the game, and observes what's going on, where the weaknesses are in the defense, which opposing players are "killing us", what's happening on the boards, etc. He/she is "ready to go" when the coach calls." 

Most sports teams have role players - individuals who specialize in one or two areas of the game and who focus his/her attention on that specific aspect of the game in order to serve the needs of the team.  The role player accepts his/her job, even if it is a limited one, because the team's success depends upon it.  The role player is often behind the scenes, or as another coach put it, "The role player shuns the glory of attention, praise, and impressive statistics for the sake of the team. In doing this, the role player revels in another kind of glory."

Dexter Fowler played centerfield for the 2016 World Series Champion Chicago Cubs.  Even though he often started (he played in 125 games that year), but his key role on the team that year was to bat in the lead-off spot.  As sports commentator Joe Buck said during the Game 7 broadcast, "When Dexter Fowler gets on base, the Cubs win."  One sports pundit described Fowler's role as the "You go, we go" mantra.  There is absolutely no question that Fowler had a great year for the Cubs (his on-base percentage of .393 was a career-best), which he turned into a five-year $82.5 million deal with the St. Louis Cardinals the following year.  Unless you are a diehard Cubs fan, you probably wouldn't even mention his name if you were asked to name the best players on the Cubs roster that year (you'd probably name Kris Bryan, Anthony Rizzo, Kyle Schwarber, and Jon Lester).  

Every team - whether its a sports team or an organization - needs role players.  Harvard Business School professor Thomas J. DeLong  and health care consultant and entrepreneur Vineeta Vijayaraghavan call them "B players" (they use the label "A players" for the superstars).  They write, "A players, it is true, can make enormous contributions to corporate performance.  Yet in our collective 20 years of consulting, research, and teaching, we have found that companies' long-term performance - even survival - depends far more on the unsung commitment and contributions of their B players."

These B players (role players) may lack the luster and ambition of the superstars - DeLong and Vijayaraghavan find that the B players typically avoid the limelight.  But make no mistake, the team's success depends upon them.  They are the "glue" that holds the team together.  They are the "table setters" that keep things in motion.  They are the "go to" people in the company, the ones who seem to be connected to everyone and everything in the organization.  

Every team needs a Dexter Fowler.  Legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne once said, "The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team.  As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven."  Rockne had his share of superstars, but more importantly, he had his role players too.  

The view from above

I read another great piece in Ryan Holiday's daily devotional text, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living the other day.  I thought it was worth sharing.  He started out with a passage taken from the book Meditations by the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher-king, Marcus Aurelius:

"How beautifully Plato put it.  Whenever you want to talk about people, it's best to take a bird's-eye view and see everything all at once - of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings, and divorces, births, and deaths, noisy courtrooms, or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markers - all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites."

What is Marcus Aurelius trying to say here?  The data scientist and blogger Ranjani Mani suggests, "Step back, zoom out and look at life and what it offers from a larger vantage point. Despite how difficult that seems to sound in implementing, I believe this helps figure out the trivial from the important."

It's amazing what happens when we take another look at things from a new perspective.  I've certainly talked about how two different individuals looking at the same event from two different perspectives can come up with vastly different interpretations of that event (see "HRO: Reluctance to Simplify"), recalling to mind the famous effect in cognitive psychology known as the "Rashomon Effect" (the name of the effect is based on a 1950 Japanese movie Rashomon in which the plot device features different characters providing alternative and contradictory versions of the same incident), as well as the 2008 movie, Vantage Point, starring Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, and William Hurt.  Just as important, when we view the same event or issue from a "bird's-eye" perspective, our interpretation of the event or issue changes as well.  We look at the event or issue in an entirely new and different way.

The astronaut U.S. Navy Captain Edgar Mitchell, who as the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 14 was the sixth person to walk on the moon, once said after looking at the Earth from outer space (see my post "The Blue Marble Project"), "In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."  

Just look at the way that the Earth looks from outer space - indeed, it looks like a beautiful, big blue marble.  Seeing the Earth in this way gives a new perspective (it's called the "Overview Effect") - there are no longer any boundaries or borders between countries.  All you can see is one Earth - united in all its beauty.  There are no differences from this viewpoint, only similarities.

We can take a similar approach when we take a more global, bird's-eye view of issues we face as leaders.  Changing our viewpoint will force us to change our perspective, and changing our perspective often leads to discovery of new and different ways to tackle a problem.  Ryan Holiday ended his devotional with, "Many a problem can be solved with the perspective of Plato's view.  Use it."

"Eat that frog!"

What in the world did frogs ever do to us to deserve our contempt?  Consider just one of our leadership metaphors - have you ever heard the story about the boiling frog?  Basically, we are led to believe that if a frog is suddenly dropped into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out and live to tell the tale.  If on the other hand the frog is placed into a pot of cool water which is brought slowly to boil, it will not perceive the danger and will slowly be boiled alive.  The take-home message is that individuals usually react slowly, if at all, to gradual or slowly accumulating changes or threats.  These same individuals, when faced with rapid or sudden changes or threats will react appropriately to remove themselves from the dangerous situation.

Have you ever heard the fairy tale about the frog prince?  In this one, a prince is punished for his arrogance by being turned into a frog, only to be rescued when a princess comes to kiss him.  Again, we assume that frogs live such a miserable existence that turning someone into a frog is the ideal form of punishment.

Finally, do you remember hearing the nursery rhyme about the five frogs on a log?  Compared to the two earlier examples, here the frogs in the story are playing a relatively passive role.  All of these stories came to my mind when I heard something that the 19th century American writer and humorist Mark Twain (one of my favorite authors) reportedly once said, "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day."  Here we go again - frogs are such poor, miserable creatures apparently!

Laura Blinder posted an article entitled, "We tried it: Eat That Frog (productivity system)".  The self-help guru Brian Tracy even wrote a book based upon Twain's quote, "Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time".  Here, the proverbial "frog" is a difficult task that we probably should do (based upon its impact and level of importance), but one that we can't seem to get started doing.  Essentially, Blinder and Tracy are telling us that we should prioritize our lives based upon the goals we set for ourselves.  If a difficult task is one that will help us achieve our goals and priorities, then we should be doing it first before we try to tackle anything else.  

When you think about it more, Twain's metaphor makes a lot of sense.  We usually have a lot more energy and motivation at the beginning of the day, so tackling the toughest problems first (as long as they help us achieve our goals - if not, we should prioritizing other things) when we have the most motivation and energy is a smart move.  Tracy added his own version of Twain's quote, "You cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being."

"Something that could never, ever possibly destroy us..."

I came across an interesting fact the other day.  Apparently, the city of Ligonier, Indiana (a small town in the Northeastern corner of Indiana with a population of just over 4,400 people in the 2010 Census) is the marshmallow capital of the world!  I know what you are thinking - and the answer is no, I don't have all that much spare time!  I was trying to research the "Marshmallow Spaghetti Tower Challenge".  My wife is a middle school math teacher, and every year she asks her students to form into teams to see how high they can build a tower out of marshmallows, raw spaghetti, string, and tape.

Marshmallows absolutely fascinate me.  They actually come from plants (Althaea officinalis, a plant that is found in the marshy areas of Europe and western Asia) and were first made by the ancient Egyptians around 2000 BC.  The Egyptians revered the tasty treats and generally reserved them only for the pharaohs and the gods.  Marshmallows were once used by physicians to treat sore throat, cough, and wounds.  The 16th century English philosopher Francis Bacon once said, "Life is a marshmallow, easy to chew but hard to swallow."  The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was the villain at the end of the 1984 film Ghostbusters (Dan Akroyd's character Ray chose the marshmallow man, because he thought it was "something that could never, ever possibly destroy us").  All of us know marshmallows as one of the three ingredients for the summer treat S'mores (the other two being graham crackers and chocolate).  

Marshmallows have been the subject of at least one other famous study in psychology (conducted by Walter Mischel and Ebbe Ebbesen), known as the "Stanford Marshmallow Experiment", which I have posted about more than once in the past.  Today, I want to revisit my wife's classroom and talk about the "Marshmallow Spaghetti Tower Test".  Basically, as I mentioned above, the challenge is to see how high a team of students can build a tower from several pieces of raw spaghetti, string, tape, and marshmallows (they only have twenty minutes to build their tower).  Scott Anthony wrote about this unique challenge in a Harvard Business Review article from a few years ago ("Innovation Leadership Lessons from the Marshmallow Challenge"), and Tom Wujec talked about his experience using the challenge with business executives in a short TED talk ("Build a tower, build a team").

As I mentioned, my wife uses this challenge in her classroom every year.  I am fascinated by what she has found year after year - the students in the lower grades frequently outperform the students in the upper grades!  In addition, she has also found that the advanced classes don't do as well as the regular classes.  She tells me, "The older and advanced classes waste a lot of time trying to plan out the steps that they will take before getting started, while the younger and regular classes jump right in and learn by trial-and-error."  

It also seems that the older and more advanced classes go through Bruce Tuckman's classic stages of group formation ("forming, storming, norming, and performing").  Tom Wujec talks about his experience with this challenge in his TED talk.  He consistently finds that kindergarteners outperform business school students and lawyers!  Check out the figure below:

Similar to what my wife's experience, Wujec finds that the business school students spend a lot of timing trying to identify the group leader (with students frequently jockeying for position), going through the stages of group formation, and planning out in detail what they are going to do in order to construct their tower.  Conversely, the kindergarteners just proceed and learn by trial-and-error.

Does my wife's and Wujec's experience suggest that kindergarteners are more creative than business school students?  As Scott Anthony writes, "It's hard to escape the conclusion that we all begin with creativity and curiosity, which too many of us systematically unlearn as we go through the education system and scale up the corporate ladder."  The best way to drive innovation and creativity may be to adopt a "beginner's mind-set" and continue to foster curiosity by continuously challenging yourself with new things and new experiences.

It's also interesting that Wujec's teams comprised of CEO's and Executive Administrators outperform the kindergarteners, perhaps indicating that "innovation happens most often when different mind-sets and skills collide."  Here the lesson is to diversify your personal and professional networks.  Studies consistently find that diverse teams, particularly ones where everyone on the team feels empowered to contribute, identify creative and innovative solutions and ideas.  It may also help to ask a few kindergarteners how they would tackle a problem!

Scott Anthony concludes his article with the following point.  "It's reasonable to assume that leaders will confront more, not less, ambiguity in the future.  The best way to prepare is to seek every opportunity to plunge into chaos and radically diversify your innovation network."

Find your "yes" burning inside

Last time I talked about the fact that "working hard" is not the same as "working productively."  I mentioned Ryan Holiday's daily devotional text, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I have been faithfully reading since the beginning of the calendar year.  As it turns out, Ryan Holiday also has a blog and a daily email on the philosophy of Stoicism.  I wanted to continue on the theme of working productively with a passage from one of Ryan Holiday's recent posts.  The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca said, "We will benefit from that helpful precept of Democritus, showing us that tranquility lies in not undertaking tasks, either in public or private, that are either numerous or greater than our resources."

Democritus is frequently referred to as the "laughing philosopher" due to his emphasis on being cheerful (another big proponent of looking on the bright side!).  Incidentally, we have Democritus to thank for the term, "atom" which comes from the Greek word "atomos" meaning "indivisible" (Democritus and the Atomists believed that atoms were the smallest indivisible bodies from which everything else was composed).  But I digress - let's get back to Seneca.

My point (and Seneca's too, I believe) is that "good working hard" doesn't always get us to where we want to go or need to go.  We have to take into account what we can reasonably accomplish with the time, energy, and resources that we have available.  As leaders, we need to learn to prioritize.  As Ryan Holiday writes, "What's the most important thing in our lives?  What's the next most important thing?  What are we going to say no to so we can focus on those things?  What are we going to say no to (or yes to) in order to protect our personal happiness and peace?"

We just can't say "yes" to every opportunity, project, task, or initiative.  We have to prioritize based upon what's most important for our organization (when prioritizing our professional lives) or our own personal goals and objectives (when prioritizing our personal ones).  Prioritization forces us to do less "so that we can do more of what we care most about."  Management guru and author Stephen Covey had this to say about setting priorities, "You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside."

"Never mistake motion for action"

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to read a small passage from Ryan Holiday's daily devotional text, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.  We are almost halfway through the calendar year, and so far, I've been able to keep up with this resolution (some of my others, not so much).  One of the recent devotions came from the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus (the passage can be found in Book 4 of his Discourses):

"I can't call a person a hard worker just because I hear they read and write, even if working at it all night.  Until I know what a person is working for, I can't deem them industrious... I can if the end they work for is their own ruling principle, having it be and remain in constant harmony with Nature."

I liked this passage a lot.  As Ryan Holiday writes, "We tend to associate busyness with goodness and believe that spending many hours at work should be rewarded."  I would expand further and suggest that we generally associate "busyness" (i.e. working hard) with being productive - in this case, "working hard" equates with "doing good work."  Unfortunately, this statement is not always true.  Far from it, in fact.  How many times do you find yourself working hard without necessarily making any progress towards things that truly matter?  It's like the proverbial mouse running in circles on a spinning wheel.  

Holiday suggests that rather than just simply "working hard", we should "evaluate what you are doing, why you are doing it, and where accomplishing it will take you.  If you don't have a good answer, then stop."  We should carefully reflect on what we are doing when we are "working hard" - are we truly "hardly working"?  In other words, are we actually getting something useful done?  If the answer to this question is "no", then we should just stop.  

Ernest Hemingway said, "Never mistake motion for action."  Similarly, Tim Ferriss said, "Focus on being productive instead of busy."  And finally, Steve Jobs said, "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it."

Lessons from Gross Anatomy

The 1989 film Gross Anatomy starring Matthew Modine, Daphne Zuniga, and Christine Lahti came out right before I started medical school.  Modine plays a first-year medical student named Joe Slovak.  The first scene (which plays while the opening credits are rolling) shows Slovak answering questions from the members of the medical school admissions committee.  At first, Slovak answers the rather clichéd question, "Why do you want to be a physician?" with the equally clichéd answer, "Because I want to help people."  Slovak goes through a series of exhausting exchanges, including my personal favorite:

Interviewer: "What does your father do?"

Slovak: "He's a fisherman."

Interviewer: "What kind of fish does he catch?"

Slovak: "Cod"

Interviewer (whispers to himself as he writes the answer down): "Cod"

By the end of his day, Slovak responds to the same "Why do you want to be a physician?" question with a less clichéd but more humorous answer, "Because I want to make lots of money."

Here's the key point.  Almost no one in medicine today chose to enter this profession because we wanted to make a lot of money.  As a matter of fact, I could certainly make the case that if money was the sole motivation, we would have been better off choosing another career!  However, even if it's true that most, if not all of us, became physicians because we were interested in helping people (and not because of any potential future earnings), the fact that physicians make a good living (relatively speaking) was reassuring too.

I know what you're thinking.  What's he getting at here?  My point is that many of us in health care are intrinsically motivated to help and serve others.  As I have posted about in the past, there are two kinds of motivation - intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.  Intrinsic motivation (also called "internal" motivation in some studies) refers to when we engage in a certain behavior or activity because we find it rewarding (the behavior or activity itself is the reward).  Extrinsic motivation (also called "instrumental" motivation in some studies) refers to when we engage in a certain behavior or activity because we want to earn a reward or avoid punishment.  Using the medical school example above, an intrinsic motivation to study to be a physician would be the desire to help people, while an extrinisc motivation would be to seek prestige or monetary rewards.

What happens when we try to combine both intrinsic (internal) and extrinsic (instrumental) motivation together to drive performance of a demanding, effortful activity (such as going to medical school to study to become a physician)?  One would expect that these two types of motivation would be additive or synergistic.  Unfortunately that is not the case.  Studies consistently show that extrinsic motivation can undermine intrinsic motivation, a phenomenon that psychologists and social scientists call the "overjustification effect" and economists call the "crowding out effect".  Most of these studies involve either laboratory or field experiments in which intrinsic motivation is either established beforehand or assumed, followed by the introduction of some reward (extrinsic motivation).  The problem with these studies is that the real world rarely, if ever, works this way - case in point is my medical school example above!

With all of this in mind, investigators at Yale conducted an interesting observational study a few years ago, publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (see "Multiple types of motives don't multiply the motivation of West Point cadets").  The investigators conducted data from nine consecutive classes at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (11,320 cadets from all but one class from 1997 through 2006).  Each cadet participated in a survey that included questions to determine their motivation for studying at West Point and joining the Army.  Two reasons of interest were cited - an individual's desire to become an Army officer and serve his or her country (intrinsic motivation) versus an individual's desire to take advantage of the quality education provided at West Point and the career opportunities that such an education would provide (extrinsic motivation).

The investigators then looked at whether each cadet extended beyond his or her mandatory five-year tour of duty, as well as whether they had been selected for early promotion (both factors which would be consistent with "high performance").  As expected, after controlling for a variety of other factors (age, gender, race/ethicity, parental income, SAT score, entering year, etc), the investigators found that a stronger internally based (intrinsic motivation) desire to attend West Point was strongly associated with high performance (extending service beyond the mandatory minimum of five years and being promoting early).  Again, as expected (based upon the overjustification effect), cadets having both an intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to attend West Point were more likely to leave the Army after their five year mandatory minimum.  In addition, cadets having both an intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were more likely to be passed over for early promotion.  Finally, the higher the degree of extrinsic motivation to attend West Point, the less likely cadets would stay in the Army beyond five years and get promoted.  

These results are consistent with prior studies, demonstrating that extrinsic motivation can undermine intrinsic motivation and lead to lower performance.  The study is particularly important to this body of research.  As the investigators write, "It is hard to imagine a meaningul domain of human activity that does not have instrumental consequences" (again, they are using the term "instrumental" to refer to extrinsic motivators, such as money, fame, prestige, or status).  They go on to say that "because instrumental consequences cannot be eliminated from human affairs, what the results suggest is that attention should be paid to motives in addition to consequences, and that efforts be made to structure activities so that some consequences do not become motives."

How can leaders (and organizations) prevent consequences from turning into motives?  First, leaders should emphasize the organization's purpose, particularly if the organization is mission-focused, as most health care organizations are today.  Second, while instrumental consequences (extrinsic motivators) such as bonuses, raises, etc are important, leaders can also emphasize meaningful consequences that focus more on internal rewards (mastery of a skill, impact on others, etc).  Finally, and I've spoken about this before (see my post, "Holes" for more in-depth discussion of this point), when individuals have a role in shaping their work activities, they are more engaged and focused on the meaning and purpose of the work, which drives intrinsic motivation even more!

As it turns out, the opening scenes of Gross Anatomy were not all that far off from the truth.  Spoiler alert, Slovak goes on to learn about his true desires and motivation for studying to become a physician, focusing on the service aspects of the profession instead of the monetary rewards.  Like the West Point cadets who wanted to serve their countries, Joe Slovak becomes a better physician in the end.