How Individual Performance Scales Up

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green. I’m talking today with Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School Center for Digital Business. He is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas. He also blogs for hbr.org. Michael, thanks so much for joining us.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: My pleasure.

SARAH GREEN: You’re known for being an innovation guy, but a lot of your recent blogging has been about issues of personal performance. So I wanted to start our conversation today by asking you why issues of personal performance should matter to innovation guys?

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: Boy, that’s a very easy and straightforward question to deal with, because if you’re talking about having an organization become more collaborative, more innovative, more agile, more responsive, or more customer centric, you can of course have a top-down approach and just do an executive wave of the hands, and say, we’ll be more collaborative, we’ll be more innovative, et cetera, but what does that really mean? And my view in working with organizations is that you really have to invest in the bottom-up, you really have to invest in empowerment, and that means giving people ideas and tools and techniques for improving their personal productivity and performance along the lines of what the organization has defined as it’s strategic intent and strategic aspiration. And that’s what this blog is about and that’s really one of the focuses that I have brought to my work, which is how do we increase individual capacity to empower and enable people to be more collaborative and innovative and responsive.

SARAH GREEN: I’d like to dig into this a little deeper, perhaps by pulling out one example of something very common, which is email. I think anytime you talk about productivity in an organization you hear people saying things like, I could just get so much more done if I didn’t have so much email to respond to. And actually, something that you wrote that really resonated with me was the notion that email dysfunction is more than a personal annoyance. It’s actually sometimes a symptom of a deeper weakness in the company.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: Well, honestly I wrote that post because as I do, it’s based on observing how people actually behave as opposed to how they’re supposed to behave. And for one, let’s deal with the way you premised the question, which is people say, oh, I’d be much more productive if only I didn’t have to deal with email. Sure. And the surest way to get people to scream in an organization is to cut off their email. So we go from one extreme to the other. Your head’s in the oven, your feet are in a bucket of ice, but on the average you’re comfortable. And that’s the kind of false view of how we get value and how we get productivity out of our tools.

What struck me in listening to people complain and moan about their email overload, and this is key, miscommunications and misunderstandings surrounding email, attachments that were sent or things that were forwarded that shouldn’t have been forwarded or things that were forwarded without appropriate context was, good Lord, so many people, so many projects, so many processes are dependent upon the emails associated with them. But when we sit people down for performance reviews, how often does their email style come up as a value-add, a differentiator, or a flaw or a problem in the way they perform their duties?

And to my astonishment– actually, to be fair it wasn’t to my astonishment, I kind of suspected this would be the case. Performance reviews have taken the path of least resistance. We sort of continue on with the matrix or the tick chart or the tick boxes that we did five years ago, seven years ago, a decade ago. And the reality is how we run ourselves and how we run organizations rely upon a repertoire of pools that really weren’t even around a decade ago. And organizations, for completely logical reasons, have been slow to catch up and invest and figure out how do we align our new capabilities and resources with the way we’re evaluating people and teams in accomplishing their jobs.

SARAH GREEN: So I like that when you talk about something like fixing the disparity between how people say they work and how they actually work, you talk a lot about sort of doing a kind of audit and whether that’s sort of bringing real work into a performance review or completely re-engineering the very concept of a performance review, what do you think is most useful as a manager if you’re trying to do this kind of observation in your company to see where those gaps between what people say they do and say they want and what they actually do and what they actually want?

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: At risk of sounding like a suck-up that’s an actually much more profound question that really requires a focus and really reflect my own biases. And a quick aggression before I come to grips with your explicit question– the quick digression, I’ve read boatloads and boatloads of management books and self-help books in the course of my research, in the course my advisory work, et cetera. And there seems to be a dominant theme emerging from those books, and that dominant them is as follows: gee, if only you were someone else you’d be a much better manager, which may be true, but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful. And so I think you really need to begin with where people are and who people are instead of just saying here’s who you need to become, let’s go there together and hold hands, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So let’s deal with that with the email audit question. Many people were offended, literally offended, by the title of that post. Because the notion of auditing implied surveillance, spying, you’re doing something wrong. But if you actually read the post, which, of course, some people who comment don’t bother to do, but if you actually read the post, what I recommend is that managers, leaders, ask people to bring in examples of where they believe they’ve been effective in using email and the media to manage tasks, to manage themselves, to manage others. Because one of my design themes, one of my design heuristics, is that anything that we can do to promote useful and meaningful introspection by managers and employees and people in business, that’s a win.

I don’t want analysis paralysis, but the reality is the way we change, the way we improve, is by having the courage and the discipline to examine ourselves and ask ourselves particular and explicit questions and have the courage to measure ourselves by the answers. And so that is what I’m really trying to do. That’s where I’m really marrying the innovation ethos with the personal effectiveness and personal productivity ethos, which is we have new tools that allow us to do new things, that should prompt us to ask new questions about what we’re trying to accomplish and who you really want to be as a person. And email is a wonderful window into our behavior but it’s also a wonderful mirror.

SARAH GREEN: Now when we start talking about improving performance and controversy it seems like something that shouldn’t be particularly controversial is the very notion that we all want to improve, we all want to get better at our jobs, we all want to perform better. But when you blogged about what you called the self-improvement vortex, that also seemed to elicit a pretty impassioned reaction from the readership. So what is the self-improvement vortex, and why are people reacting so strongly to it?

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: My belief in the abstract of the self-improvement vortex, I don’t think we can go forward, I don’t think any business these days can afford to have managers or employees who are not genuinely interested, authentically interested, in self-improvement. Just coming in quote, unquote, doing your job, quote, unquote, and going home. I’m sorry. That doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t cut it in a convenience store, it doesn’t cut it in a fast food environment, it doesn’t cut it in a big box store, it doesn’t cut it in customer service, it shouldn’t cut it in any kind of professional service firm.

The issue then becomes what we want to self-improvement to mean. Do we mean that along cognitive competence, that means I can solve problems better? Does it mean being able to speak different languages, computer or human? Does it mean taking drugs that allow me to remember things better or perform better in my chosen task, like certain athletes have done in baseball and football?

That’s where we run into this interesting intersection, or this vortex, of ethics and productivity and economics. And my bias is that the ethical challenges of the future are not going to be about honesty and dishonesty, because quite frankly those are pretty, pun intended, black and white. I think a lot of the ethical questions that senior leaderships all over the world are going to have is, what kind of investments in self-improvement are fair and ethical or legal, and which ones aren’t. What does it mean for an executive to lead by example in terms of self-improvement. If everybody in your organization you saw was learning another language or taking executive ed courses or going online and going to one of those iHow sites to learn how to fix things or do things better on the job or doing things at home, my gosh, that’s going to have a cultural and personal influence on you.

And I think that’s the kind of issue that a lot of organizational environments have to confront, which is what kind of self-improvement environment do we wish to have. 20 years ago that was the province of HR or personnel. Now it’s the province of the C-suite and even the board of directors. What kind of examples do CFOs, CEOs, CMOs, want to set for their direct reports in terms of how they should invest in themselves to improve themselves as performers and as individuals, and to set an example for their direct reports. That’s what corporate cultural change is becoming. And that’s why I’m so interested in this notion of creating an alignment between personal productivity and improvements and organizational effectiveness and capability.

SARAH GREEN: Now you mentioned that it doesn’t work for organizations to have employees who sort of just come into work from 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday and forget about it the rest of the time. But it strikes me that it may also not work for individuals to have that kind of attitude about their work anymore. Is that notion that your job is just your job, is that something that we just need to let go of in the future?

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: I think you’ve put your finger on a very interesting dichotomy here, which is what does the individual do for their self-interest versus what does the organization do for its self-interest, because they don’t always align. And I think this is going to be an enormous source of tension. What happens when you want to learn another language but your organization prefers that you just learn the next generation XML? What do you do then? Now you can always consider looking for another organization, but this is where one of these key– to your point, which is as you look at not just your job, but your career, when you look at not just your career, but who you want to be as a person, what do you want self-improvement to mean?

And to what extent is self-improvement defined along your own internal axis of desire versus what the organization, what the organization that employs you, what your clients who pay you have defined as what they would like to see you improve at. When you post, when you write, you consult, you are always looking for areas of agreement, but from my perspective you get the most useful insights observing where the legitimate tensions and conflicts exist between individual aspiration and organizational aspiration, the inherent tension between individuals as individuals and organizations as organizations. I love that. I think it’s fascinating.

And what makes it particularly fascinating, let me connect it to the innovation issues, is there are more technologies that empower and enable investment in self in this decade than there were 10 years ago or 50 years ago or 100 years ago. And you know what? The pace of innovation for self-improvement, investment is accelerating. So these issues, these tensions, these conflicts, are going to grow in import rather than shrink or level off. And that’s huge. That is absolutely huge. It matters for every single reader of the Harvard Business Review, and it matters for every single executive who oversees individuals, not just organizations.

SARAH GREEN: Now I have to confess as we’re talking about all this improvement stuff I’m a little bit biased on the side of the self-improvers. So I’m going to ask you, why is this not indulgent to be talking about during a recession. I won’t ask you whether or not it’s indulgent, just tell me why it’s not indulgent.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: Well, I suppose it depends on one’s definition of self-improvement. I can’t think of a better time to invest in self-improvement than during a recession, during a slowdown. For one, there are fewer demands. There’s just less work. So what do you invest– Do you cold call more? I think you’re always looking for opportunities to meaningfully differentiate or to meaningfully add value. Look, it used to be that in a recession, depression, what would we do? We’d cut prices. We would look for ways to cut costs. Well, with apologies to my friend Chris Anderson, how do you compete against free, when things are given away.

So I think individuals and organizations are driven to look at how do we create new value, how do we add to existing value. My God, what’s that called? A search for improvement. Where is that going to come from? It’s going to come from on high? Is it going to come from, if you’ll forgive me, McKinsey or Bain or BCG or Tata? Oh, we just need to find some sort of an idea? But you know what? Even if you can find some sort of an idea, it has to be translated into action. What is translating an effective idea into action called? It’s called an improvement. The unit of analysis ultimately boils down to improvement.

Now you can debate with me, and I’m happy to have that debate, whether it makes more sense for the organization to invest in organizational improvement versus individuals, investing in individual improvement, but one way or the other, you’ve got to improve. And with all due respect to the era of paternal organizations, and with great admiration for Harvard as a university, even though I’m an MIT guy, and the Harvard Business School press, I wouldn’t put all my eggs in the employer basket in these times. I think investing in yourself is a good idea not just for meaning and value in your life, but for the ability to be flexible and adaptable in difficult times.

Which is how this question began which is, is self-improvement an indulgence during a recession. An indulgence? Excuse my language, hell no. It’s a necessity. It’s an imperative And people who don’t think so are increasing their risk exposure and increasing their chances of something not good happening to them.

SARAH GREEN: Well, Michael, thank you so much for talking with us and for reassuring me.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE: My pleasure.

SARAH GREEN: That was MIT’s Michael Schrage. To read his blog go to hbr.org, and, as always, please send your feedback to ideacast@hbr.org. Michael can be reached at schrage@mit.edu. That’s S-C-H-R-A-G-E at MIT.edu. Thanks.