Who is the team really working for?

In the last post about getting the year started off right, we looked at the principles that drive how your year is going to feel…and how it’s going to go. These are the most visible principles on your team…you’ll see them at work constantly:

• Quality

• Speed

• Urgency

• Risk and Courage

• Accountability and Ownership

• Taste and Quality of Thinking

• How to treat people

• Beneficiaries: who wins? Who is the work and effort really for?

That last one is ground-zero. Deciding it has a way of deciding all of the rest.

If you manage or lead, I think it’s really wise to dwell on this question of who our work is really for. If you and your team can get this right, it is a gateway to getting a lot of other things right. Everything on the list above gets easier to justify, and as a bonus, it can also change the game for being happier and feeling like your work matters more.

The problem:

Here’s the problem right off the bat: this isn’t the easiest topic to talk about…or to grasp.

You know the saying, “You don’t truly understand something unless you can explain it to a 5 year old?”

Well, this a topic that’s actually easier to explain to a 5 year old than to us professional adults. I can tell a 5 year old to really think about their mom while they’re drawing a picture for her, and the 5 year old will make a thoughtful picture that mom will love. But it’s much harder to ask an adult to really think about their customer or market while they’re making something their market will love. The adult will push back:

• What’s the ROI?

• This isn’t in my OKRs.

• That’s not my job.

• We are too busy.

• We have a bias to action, not a bias to deep thinking or paying closer attention.

• That isn’t incentivized here.

• …and a lot more.

So, despite how simple this idea is, professional adults have a lot of stuff in the way. Our minds are constantly exposed to ideas that make being actually perceptive, thoughtful, and active on behalf of our market very difficult. In fact, some people even think it’s naive, wrong, and immature to work for our market instead of our company, our team, or just for ourselves.

So, this post is about answering a very real question: Who is our work for?

Unlike the last post which culminates into a presentation or a manifesto, this idea is ongoing. You’ll use this concept and tool many times per day, every single day, so it’s easier to see this as a habit / perspective to ingrain instead of a one-time change.

The 4 Beneficiaries

Everyone who works on anything works on behalf of one of these 4 beneficiaries:

1. Self - I’ll do what’s best for me

2. Team - I’ll do what’s best for the team

3. Company - I’ll do what’s best for the company

4. Market - I’ll do what’s best for the market

A few books on this topic draw a line between “supply side thinking” (seeing business through the eyes of the company) and “demand side thinking” (seeing business through the eyes of the market/customer), building a similar case to what we’ll explore here. But you might notice above that there isn’t just a supply side (company) and a demand side (market) when it comes to who people work for. There are actually two choices that benefit neither supply nor demand. 

And those are the ones a lot of people pick.

So let’s go a little deeper than the supply vs. demand talk. Even though the books that talk about demand-side thinking get the conclusion right, getting your team there might not be quite that simple. You might need to show up a little more prepared than that.

Everyone on your team has already chosen who they actually work for, and they will continually rationalize that choice based on all sorts of things like lived experience, advice, mantra they believe in, incentives, fear, relationships, and more. Their choice will affect almost everything they do. So, if we can understand their choice (using real empathy), and influence it (using clear reasoning and communication), it can change everything. Because we want our teams rationalizing objectively-great decisions instead of rationalizing objectively-bad ones.

The surprising twist for today was just mentioned: we are going to show people a lot of empathy about their existing choice. Why? Because the top 0.1% leader sees something most don’t: empathizing with a person’s choice is the only real way we can change it. Coldness freezes their choice in place. The cold leader tells the team what choice to make, and it usually doesn’t work. The 0.1% leader instead creates conditions where shifting to the best choice is the most natural option.

Why People Choose Self as Beneficiary

Even though self is first in the list, I’m going to come back and cover self last. Many assume that self is always ultimately the choice everyone makes. That even if people pick another beneficiary of their work, deeper down, they are doing it for selfish reasons.

I can see why this is the assumption, but this is actually logically-incomplete thinking. It’ll be easier to show that logical gap after covering the rest.

Why People Choose Team

So, we’ll start with team. A classic choice, often because it’s the choice the team’s leader makes, setting the tone for the rest of the team.

When the beneficiary is team, you will see people make decisions and steer their work toward what’s best for the team instead of what’s best for the company or the market. You will see tradeoffs around quality and convenience…constantly. You will feel scope-hedging and teams self-protecting in all compromises, negotiations, and timeline conversations. And you will see work get “done” (marked complete) but that work will often be ineffective for the recipient. But this is the obvious stuff. What I’d like to highlight is the non-obvious stuff, which we will get to in a moment.

It’s easy to be pissed off that someone would choose their team over their company or market. But judgment can actually make things worse, giving people even more reasons and examples of why it is right to pick team.

Instead, empathy is our most powerful tool here. That’s how we start to see and understand that a lot of leaders feel they have very good reasons to work primarily for their team:

1. They are protective of their people, and their people count on them for this - a common case is when someone is promoted to a senior role and now the people who used to be their peers and friends are suddenly counting on them to be representatives, advocates, influencers, and ultimately, protectors. If the leader fails to protect the team, it is treated as a betrayal. That’s a lot of pressure on a leader who needs their team to trust them. If the leader chooses to be a company person, their team will start to phone it in and disengage, so they feel like they’re in checkmate. This leader needs to learn a new technique (which is actually right here, in this post).

2. They truly believe that their team is exploited, unappreciated, and misunderstood. And they might be right. This is very common for engineering, analytics, support, marketing, sales, and product teams who often rightfully feel that there is an infinite volume of work, pushed on them late and impulsively, with an expectation that nothing falls through the cracks, followed by thanklessness for their effort and day-saving heroism. Their team is granted ever-shrinking resources couched with platitudes like “let’s do more with less.” If you were working under these conditions, not only would you be rational for protecting your team, you’d be fairly irrational not to.

3. They have literally been told this is what to do - you’d be surprised how many leaders are mentored to do this by those above them, even when it’s totally unnecessary.

Why it will ultimately fail

Ultimately, there is a downstream consequence of being a team-centric leader: they cannot be trusted.

Why can’t they be trusted?

Because your peers already know what your decisions are going to look like. They do not consider you to be objective, therefore they feel they cannot and should not trust you.

And is the team-centric leader objective? No! So, it is correct for other people to not trust them.

Unfortunately, this means that being a team-centric leader simply isn’t an option for the 0.1% leader. They’re going to have to find another way to have a team that trusts them, without that trust being rooted in protection. Fortunately, that way exists.

Why People Choose Company

This one seems right to a lot of people.

To most people, choosing to make the company the beneficiary of your work seems smart. About 99% of an MBA program is literally about how smart this choice is and how to do it well, maximizing shareholder value, ensuring ROI, removing waste, analyzing the numbers, optimizing the wellbeing of the company as an institution. Books, HBR, and traditional wisdom back this up: company first.

Choosing the company’s best interests feels like it closes the loop: we have shareholders, we need to make money to survive, the company employs and pays us, the leaders of the company choose my fate and opportunities, and doing what’s best for the company is the cleanest way of aligning interests and showing leaders and future employers that I am a good, value creating candidate eligible for raises, promotions, responsibility, and leadership.

Why it will ultimately fail

There’s just one problem with this line of thinking.

The market ultimately decides our fate.

When company-centric thinking drives decisions, the probability that the company will become progressively out of touch with the market grows. Probability? Yeah. More like a guarantee.

Every company-centric leader eventually becomes a market-blind leader (produce a few examples in your mind now…not that hard, is it?). They become blind to true customer needs and the true nature of the market. And they become blind to the threat of any competition that sees the market more clearly.

Why have over 50% of Fortune 500 companies disappeared in the last 20 years? This is why. Market blindness. Blockbuster. Kodak. Borders. Sears…

In established companies (largely riding the momentum of their earlier inventions/success), leaders will believe they are doing great when they’re actually doing poorly. Growth is happening, cash flow is happening, profound waves of customer churn aren’t happening (yet). Numbers look good. But any market-centric thinker already sees that we are out of touch. They are looking at the world instead of our numbers. They know what is coming.

Choosing Market

So, why doesn’t everyone naturally pick market as the target of their effort?

Well, it’s not only because of the natural obligation of protecting your team and the natural upsides to looking like a company-first thinker. It’s that there is a very real worry that being market-centric will make you not company-centric…

Let’s try a thought experiment: when you pick “market” as your target, does a fear set in? Have you seen others start to get itchy when we talk about putting the market’s needs first? Let’s address this by revealing exactly why it is irrational.

Let’s say there is someone on your team who wants to do what’s best for the market.

What’s the worry? Can you feel it creeping in?

That they might do something good for the market that isn’t good for the company.

But let’s think about this a bit differently. Choosing the market as your target doesn’t have to mean that we blindly do what is best for the market without thinking about the company. 

Thinking about the market thoroughly instead of quickly actually means this: We will know dozens or hundreds of things that are great for the market. 

Just imagine if we had a whiteboard, I handed you a black marker, and I said, “Just start writing everything you can think of that your market would love.”

Here’s what would flow from the tip of that black marker, effortlessly:

1. Better user experience

2. Confidence-building stories about people who have tried us before and how it went

3. Better documentation, instructions, and help getting early wins

4. A customer success program ensuring they keep winning and getting value

5. Better customer support

6. Faster workflows so they can get their task done easier/faster

7. Additional capabilities so we could help them do more things

8. Educational content that helps them grow their ability and in their career

9. A way of meeting peers and networking

10. Lower prices

It would take most people less than 60 seconds to generate that list (actually one much, much larger and more specific).

So, what would we do next?

Next, you get the green marker. Go circle the things we will do.

We would do 2, 5, or up to 9 of those 10 things. Based on today’s resources and capabilities, we’re going to see somewhere between 2 and 9 green circles.

And by doing 9 of those 10 things, we guarantee we do not do the tenth thing. Because 9 of those 10 things are mutually-beneficial value creators that perfectly justify the opposite of the 10th thing. They justify charging a higher price.

It is academic, oversimplified, irrational thinking to worry that “doing what’s best for the market” carries a risk that we might do something that isn’t also valuable for the company. All you have to do is ensure that the team generates lists of ideas instead of single ideas. There is zero risk that your team, presented with the 10 options above, would choose the last one. If they would, they should be on your competitor’s team, not on yours. You want them bringing unclear thinking to your competitor’s company, not your company.

Most people worry that market-centric thinking causes people to lose sight of what’s best for the company. But that is totally illogical, and it is quite the opposite of what you see in cultures that are market-centric. Instead, you see that market-centric companies enter the F500 instead of leave it. They’re the ones that beat the company-centric teams that failed to see the market well. They are innovative, loved, relevant, and massively profitable. 23% more profitable than their company-centric peers, to be exact (Gallup).

Oh yeah, and 18% more productive.

And experience 78% less absenteeism.

And have 51% less turnover.

Starting to see it?

Market-centric teams are not stupid teams that do things that are bad for their company. They are intelligent, perceptive teams whose companies experience more success and efficiency because they know what works.

The only teams that do stupid things that are bad for the company are the company-centric teams, and the self-and team-centric teams they inspire. What irony!

Choosing Self

So, in the end, are we just in it for ourselves?

Well, there is an immense logical difference between “in it for ourselves” and “benefitting from being in it for someone else.”

If we help the market…

…THEN it makes our company more successful…

…THEN our team can be rewarded for that success…

…THEN I, as a part of our team, can be rewarded for that success.

The cause of my good, self-centered outcome was not focusing on myself. It was focusing on the market and the customer.

Those who can’t disentangle themselves from this logic will never be able to focus on anyone other than themselves, therefore their market blindness will ensure they’ll never be able to realize their full potential.

That’s why we help people see that we are working for the market.

Want to stop being company-centric? Cure market blindness with the black marker. Set strategy with the green one.

Want to stop being team-centric? Let your team know we are going to work for the market. Make reality the bad guy when things are tough or inconvenient, not yourself. (more to come on this)

Want to stop being self-centered? Spot the logical error. If being market-centric is impossible where you are, start looking.

Have questions? Hit reply and I’m here to help.