toxic leadership

[Tony] Fadell’s reputation for being intense, very animated, and prone to raise his voice (not necessarily in anger) spilled over to push the Nest team. Carr wrote, "A meme is floating around the office comparing Fadell's style to that of the Mountain in Game of Thrones, the towering brawler known for beating his opponents to a pulp. But surviving as a startup consumer electronic brand requires just that sort of attitude." Another anecdote reveals: "When one employee failed to live up to his standards, Fadell ordered a manager to fire the employee, saying, "You gotta Glock Glock that dude," as he mimed shooting off a handgun. He was joking, but unapologetic."

All of that fist-banging and hard driving for perfection is supposed to bring out the best in his employees, according to his cofounder Matt Rogers. "But at the same time, he is incredibly caring and passionate about their development," Rogers said.

You can’t develop much of anything under such circumstances, according to workplace experts. As psychologist Paul White notes, toxic leadership may appear successful for a while. "Over the long term, their attitudes and actions catch up with them," he says, "Trust and teamwork deteriorate in their areas; they have a high turnover rate in their department, and they will eventually destroy the health of the organization."

Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi, co-authors of Primed to Perform, underscore the importance of total motivation and how it erodes or boosts bottom line results. "In one company we surveyed, salespeople with positive "total motivation" produced 28% more revenue than their more negatively motivated counterparts."

Lydia Dishman

"What's Going On At Nest?" FastCompany. 2/17/2016

thoughts for managing a creative culture

John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, VES Awards. 2/28/2010

Here are some of the principles we’ve developed over the years to enable and protect a healthy creative culture. I know that when you distill a complex idea into a T-shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding – and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior. But while I have been dismissive of reductive truths throughout this book, I do have a point of view, and I thought it might be helpful to share some of the principles that I hold most dear here with you. The trick is to think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.

• Give good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the right team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.
• When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight

people are more important than ideas

The gestation of Toy Story 2 offers a number of lessons that were vital to Pixar’s evolution. Remember that the spine of the story – Woody’s dilemma, to stay or to go – was the same before and after the Braintrust worked it over. One version didn’t work at all, and the other was deeply affecting. Why? Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet – in my experience – is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

This is an issue I have thought a lot about over the years. Once, I was having lunch with the president of another movie studio, who told me that his biggest problem was not finding good people; it was finding good ideas. I remember being stunned when he said that – it seemed patently false to me, in part because I’d found the exact opposite to be true on Toy Story 2. I resolved to test whether what seemed a given to me was, in fact, a common belief. So for the next couple of years I made a habit, when giving talks, of posing the question to my audience: Which is more valuable, good ideas or good people? No matter whether I was talking to retired business executives or students, to high school principals or artists, when I asked for a show of hands, the audiences would be split 50-50. (Statisticians will tell you that when you get a perfect split like this, it doesn’t mean that half know the right answer – it means that they are all guessing, picking at random, as if flipping a coin.)

People think so little about this that, in all these years, only one person in an audience has ever pointed out the false dichotomy. To me, the answer should be obvious: Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas. 

Ed Catmull

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House 2014.

many hands and hearts and minds

It seems to me shallow and arrogant for any person in these times to claim they are completely self-made, that they owe all their success to their own unaided efforts. Many hands and hearts and minds generally contribute to anyone’s notable achievements.

Walt Disney

As quoted in "The One Attribute All ‘Servant Leaders’ Have In Common" by Dan Veitkus. CEO.com. 8/28/2014

the better you were

Some bandleaders I’ve known and worked for, when you had a solo and you got a real big hand, you didn’t get another solo. I worked with one: I won’t call names, but he played clarinet. Everybody in the All Stars got a chance, your spot where you went out and did your thing, your solo spot. He wanted you to go out there and get a standing ovation if you could, stand on your eyelashes and get a standing ovation – he loved that. Because he knew that all he had to do was walk right up behind you, smile, unfurl that handkerchief and look at the audience and he’d wash you away! And it wasn’t an ego thing, it was just the way it was. Because he realized the better you were the better it made his band.

Arvell Shaw

As quoted in Armstrong by David Bradbury. Haus Publishing. 2003. p. 92

engage face to face

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

He had the Pixar building designed to promote unplanned encounters and collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium; the café and the mailboxes were there; the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it; and the 600-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalls. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

Jobs hated formal presentations, but he loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings. He gathered his executive team every week to kick around ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon doing the same with his marketing and advertising team. Slide shows were banned. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out.

Walter Isaacson

"The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs." Harvard Business Review the Magazine. April 2012.

communities... make change believable

There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they're by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

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For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters. There are simply communities—sometimes of just one other person—who make change believable.

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We do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

Charles Duhigg

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House. 2012.

building an effective team

Building an effective team begins with a brutally honest process of self-evaluation and reflection. The leader must be open to a humble assessment of his or her own strengths and weaknesses mapped against the qualities, knowledge and experience necessary to succeed. There are numerous consultants and assessment tools available to assist in this process, but the most effective leaders I have known grasp this aspect of team building intuitively, naturally gravitating to partners and advisers who “make them whole” and who make the team-leader appear almost super-human by placing a vast array of talents and information at their fingertips.

Leadership teams should be comprised of the most talented people you can attract; they are not merely there to row, but also to help you steer. The sincere respect that the leader shows for each team member is critical to maintaining equilibrium within the group. In general, members of the this kind of team are less prone to competition and have superior cohesion because each member is explicitly recognized for bringing a unique and essential skill to the table. A team comprised of people with distinct talents and perspectives is also less likely to succumb to ‘group think’ and will engage in honest and open dialogue with the team leader. Over time, this frank give-and-take builds an atmosphere of trust within the team, which increases the members’ willingness to surface uncomfortable concerns in a timely manner.

Kerry Healey

"The difference between a great leader and a good one." Fortune. 8/4/2015

collaboration. not efficient... most effective

Collaboration is a time-tested practice on the path to greater results. The concept is so elementary it doesn’t need much explanation or defense. If you can create the environment for men and women to pool their experience, expertise, education and passion to tackle your most challenging problems, you can create huge competitive advantage....

We have to invest more time together to gain the benefits we seek. Time together is the price you pay for better results. We are discovering this can be both formal, scheduled time, and informal. Regardless, time is essential to be a more collaborative team....

Collaboration is not the most efficient way to work. However, we believe it is the most effective way to work. The more work we have to do the more we need to collaborate; even though it requires more time. This may feel counterintuitive – it is!

Mark Miller

"One Word... Collaboration." Great Leaders Serve. 8/17/2015