As you consider joining your fate with others, would you rather work with a lazy genius, or an average person who won’t give up?
While you’re thinking about your answer, I’ll tell you a couple of stories.
Many years ago, in one of my improbable professional assignments, I managed a technical sales group. Our company, Willis, was a subsidiary of Smith International. We made precision-machined high pressure control valves for the oil and gas industry. My group’s job was to calculate the valve specifications required for the pressure, type of fluids, types of suspended solids, corrosion and erosion parameters, etc. Each valve could cost up to $10,000 (in 1981 prices).
One of the applications engineers who worked for me didn’t appreciate that his supervisor was not an engineer. I don’t blame him. I can’t really explain why the company asked me to take on that group. I never asked, now that I think about it. But Richard was understandably irritated by my selection; he had thought himself a viable candidate.
Every time I asked Richard to do something, no matter how simple or complex, he would procrastinate, shuffle his feet, make excuses about his lack of compliance and spend three times the energy avoiding the task as it would take to complete it. But Richard was also brilliant. He could find the elusive weaknesses in any set of specifications for a particular valve operation environment, in a very short period of time. He had an intuitive feel for what combinations of conditions would do to the valve’s functioning and length of service. These valves were expensive and they didn’t last longer than a few months. They had dozens of these valves on every work site. Every additional day of operability saved the customer lots of money.
So Richard was on one hand indispensable for his brain and skills, and on the other hand a resistive, lazy pain in the butt.
Five years later, I was again asked to take an unlikely assignment, this time at TRW. The general manager put me in charge of “back end” manufacturing at the LSI Products division here in San Diego. In 1986 we were doing about $80 million in annual sales of AD and DA converters, and CMOS digital signal processors. The “back end” was responsible for taking finished wafers from the fab, assembling them in ceramic or plastic packages, completing electrical and environmental testing, reliability testing and shipment.
I had a group of 120 people, comprised of packaging and industrial engineers, production planners, test technicians, wire bonders, maintenance technicians, quality system administrators, assemblers, shipping staff and administrative assistants. Prior to my arrival, the manufacturing department had been creating rising scrap rates, missed ship dates and increased returns. When I assessed the talent in the group, I learned that there wasn’t a bright bulb in the lot. I questioned the general manager’s sanity in putting me in charge of something I knew close to nothing about, when its unimpressive employees were struggling.
In both cases, the supervisor, (moi), was reliant upon the knowledge, skills and experience of the staff being “led.” In both situations there was active resentment at my appointment which caused initial dysfunction in the group. I was equally ignorant in both assignments, at the outset. I did not have the choice of supplying the missing ingredients I needed. So we return to the question that began this story. I had to bet on being able to figure out a way to create functional teams out of these problematic conditions. If you had to choose which scenario to bet your career on, which would you select?
My experiences with Willis and TRW were types of experiments in group behavior and leadership that would be repeated over the ensuing years. After much trial, and many errors, I learned that each scenario has a solution. But I will take an average group of people who won’t give up any day over a truck load of geniuses, whether they are lazy or not. Here’s why.
To solve the lazy genius problem, you have to appeal to their ego. You pay attention to them, you praise their genius, you are humble about your lack of equivalent expertise and you infer at times that you would provide them experts to consult if they ran into a problem that was too complex for them. This ensures they will solve every problem without help. You validate their importance. You spend a disproportionately greater time with the lazy, resentful genius than you do with any other staff member. You feed their insatiable need for reinforcement.
To solve the average-skilled, under-performing team problems, you set the example for work ethic. You speak with respect to everyone from the floor expeditor to the production engineer. You provide the ignorant ideas, some of which will prove useful. You listen carefully to the roadblocks the team faces and you remove as many of them as possible. You advertize what the shipping department did well to the rest of the department. You make them blush with pride. You incessantly communicate objectives, establish vision and demonstrate passion.
I’ve seen lazy geniuses produce incredible value when (literally) “played” by a skilled conductor of the ego’s symphony. And I’ve seen “B” and “C” teams achieve outstanding results through amazing tenacity, when they feel respected and considered. But from my experience as a leader in business, I would choose an average rag-tag gang of misfits over a lazy genius every time. People with average talent have had to be tenacious and hard-working to accomplish anything. They’ve had to face their limitations, and they have no illusions about their capabilities. They are pragmatists who know how to work hard. And if they know you truly care about them, they will walk through concrete to help you.
Friday, May 6, 2011