#006 - The Seven Deadly Leadership Sins: Greed

Robert Greiner 0:07

Hey, Tiffany, good afternoon. How are you?

Tiffany Lenz 0:09

I'm very well, Robert, thank you. How are you?

Robert Greiner 0:11

off and closing the books on: 2020

Tiffany Lenz 0:22

Yeah, I'm not quite there. I've got another few days of cranking away at some deliverables and some proposals to line up for January, but getting very close, I'm very much looking forward to Christmas.

Robert Greiner 0:34

So we are on our Seven Deadly leadership sins, and how to get to the good place series. Our deep dive into each of the seven sins. But what are we talking about today?

Tiffany Lenz 0:46

Today, we're

going to talk about greed,

Robert Greiner 0:48

Greed, one of my favorites. So we all know we can picture at least other people who are greedy, that people around us who are greedy times where we've maybe been a little bit too greedy in retrospect. What does greed look like as far as organizational behaviors go? What do we have to watch out for at work in organizations with our teams, as it relates to greed?

Tiffany Lenz 1:11

When I think of greed, in almost like storybook form, I think of like Brothers Grimm, fairy tales that were then turned into Disney style fairy tales, where there's always some evil looking little creature that's hoarding things. And it whatever the story manifests itself to be, it's always about them like they are at the center, and their desires are at the center. When I think about greed in a business sense, it's the only one of the deadly sins, Robert that I frame up as what you don't hear. So this entire series is finding the signals in the noise, it's listening for very specific behavior patterns and word choices that become habitual, so that we can as leaders, weed them out, when they're small before they become embedded. And for this, it is the only one of the deadly sins that is to me representative of something you don't hear. And I think of it as its customer obsession is assumed. So whoever your customer is, think about it this way. My customer is internal, external operations. Whether I am a project team lead, a middle level, middle tier manager, I'm an executive, and my customers are varied. They're buyers. And they're also people sitting on my board. And they're also the stock markets. There, I have a wide variety of customers, my conversations, almost always with an initiative or a project, they start out with the customer at the center. It started out with Agilus writes this so beautifully, at the most granular level, when they use the quote, story, there's always a, so that at the end of the story, I want this because this so that, and that last phrase is always about the user, the person who has a need. And that's always where we start, no matter how big the initiative is. But over time, almost accidentally, to streamline conversations, I find that the person we're doing x for is left out of the actual conversation, and they're assumed to be present in the conversation, you follow what I'm saying?

Robert Greiner 3:24

I do. I think one reason for that could be things are easier when you focus internally. So it's very hard to think about customers, you may have to make really hard decisions. If you focus internally, I think there's a very derogatory term called bike shedding where I've actually been accused of that before. But the idea is, if you have

Tiffany Lenz 3:43

I don't know this one.

Robert Greiner 3:44

If you have someone, like a group of people building something really complicated, like a nuclear power plant, for instance, you will have a group that focuses on the paint color, and things that are inconsequential, because they're afraid of or not willing to do or not capable of doing the really hard work. And so they're just basically that the term is there out in the back designing a bike shed when we should be building this nuclear silo. And so it's one of those things where you can really create an incentive structure internally with a tighter feedback loop that benefits you for focusing on internal metrics or desires or budget that does that have nothing to do with the end customer and you can get away with it because you also control in some sense, the the measures and, and things like that within the organization. Is that am I on the right vein there?

Tiffany Lenz 4:38

I think you're on the right vein, because think of put this into a high level technical company, and what you hear in the spirit of bike shedding, when an initiative starts out, you hear about the business case, you hear about the customer who we're building for and then as the conversation goes on, here's where bike shedding comes in. What you have is say one party arguing for their own feature set or a piece of security that has to be included. And not continually restating what should be obvious. They're not constantly restating that they need this feature set because of the customer's expectation around x, or they need this piece of security enhancement because of the protection and value to the customer. It's this assumption that slips in. And when we allow that to happen, all of a sudden, it's it's almost, we're not talking about nefariousness here, right, we're talking about valid needs that are raised and important decision making criteria, but not key decision criteria, because the key decision making criteria would be customer centricity, or customer obsession.

Robert Greiner 5:51

So I want to pull on the accidental shift over time, because I think it's also true that, especially the more junior you get, you just may not know who your customer is. If you work for Nike, Nike sells shoes, to people like you and me. But that's not to your definition of customer earlier, that's it's so broad. If you have an internal function at Nike, your customers might not be useful to think of them as the shoe buyers, but maybe the marketing department. And so the more junior you are, maybe you just don't know who they are, you're making decisions based on your best knowledge, your best understanding of the current situation, but you can't be aligned because you have no vocabulary for it. And I have a friend who owns a business and I remember every time so it's like a brick and mortar thing. And every time someone came in and bought something from his store, he would say, Hey, thank you for your trust. And I was always thinking that's so such an interesting thing. Like why do you always say that like every time? And he said, Oh, yeah, growing up, my parents would always tell me if people give you money, if they give you dollars, that indicates that they trust you. That's a vote of trust. And so in this case, your customers are rewarding you with a tremendous amount of trust, they're voting with their dollars. And over time, your actions, your behaviors, your mindset shifts away from customer focus to more internal focus, so you're still reaping the rewards in some sense of your customers trust and funds. And yet, you're not reciprocating that trust with behaviors and actions that serve their best interest.

Tiffany Lenz 7:26

Absolutely. I like your example of someone being junior and just simply not knowing better or not having the vocabulary. This is you're hitting like the bull's eye right in the middle in terms of what leaders responsibilities look like in this instance, because our people will mirror what we do, they'll mirror what we say. They will also mirror what we don't say. So if we don't emphasize something, they won't, if we don't restate things constantly to keep priorities clear, they will step right into naturally an assumption that thing is not important because it was left out. I was very fortunate early in my career, to be mentored by the founder and former CEO of my past firm Thoughtworks. And he had grown up in a political household, his dad was a politician, and had learned at a young age, this concept of listening for what isn't said. So when he translated that into a business sense, and he would take me on sales calls with him. And I just had the privilege of sitting at the feet of a master listening to him get to know clients and try to understand their problems and pitch, what we could do for them. When we would debrief after those meetings, he would ask me this what I thought were the strangest questions. He didn't really want to hear me recap what had been said, that was easy, he would ask me to tell him three things I didn't hear. So I had to think about what hadn't been said, by him by them, what in what context those things had been left out. And we would talk about why that might be. And it would help us formulate our approach to come back with another proposal. And he instilled in me at an early point in my career that often what is not said is more important than what is said. I think that's true of all sorts of relationships. In this context, it becomes the leaders imperative to continue to bring what feels like restating the obvious to the forefront. You're teaching Junior people a certain vocabulary. You're also though, as a senior leader, you are connecting a root structure through the entire organization from Nike as an example from what Nike actually does to who they sell to to whom they're accountable to and what each person's part is in that. It's constantly retraining to stay focused on the right priority, which in this example is customer obsession.

Robert Greiner: 10:02

This is a really difficult one to really assess and experience and be aware of as a leader in an organization, because you're actually looking for, hunting for the absence of something. Yes. It's not like you can see someone behaving poorly, provide feedback and rally around that thing that happened, and use it as an example. And that's a data point that you can create trend lines around. And there's historical accounts. This one, you're hunting for things, the absence of things. So what are some examples of stuff that goes unsaid, which leads to this organizational greed? We all know what greedy people look like? What are the absence of things that create greedy organizations?

Tiffany Lenz: 10:42

Well, it often is the reinforcement and the restating of what caused something to be important in the first place. So if, let's say we're having a team status meeting, and we're three months into an initiative, at the beginning, it's very common to keep looking at the pieces, the components of the business case, or the value that will be delivered to a particular party. That's how one would have made the case to secure funding in the first place. Three months in, now that funding has been secured and the initiative is kicked off. We bleed that out of our, our discussion, we're not constantly reminding ourselves of a success at a status meeting or a miss on a plan and what the ramifications are to the customer from the original intent, what the ramifications are to internal customers or external customers because of a miss, because we all miss on our plan. That's why we add in buffers and and why we constantly replan. So it's, I think even my example is a bit vague to you. Because it is, for me it is whatever particular customer and customer set I'm delivering for I want to hear their name come up constantly, I want to hear their organization come up constantly. I want to hear the value statement restated constantly. So that I just know what my and my team's number one focuses.

Robert Greiner: 12:15

So I remember this Steve Jobs story where I think it was in the Macintosh Lisa days very early on. And he was really taking this engineer to task around how quickly the Mac booted from being completely shut off into, you can start clicking around the operating system. And he kept pushing and pushing and they got it down from let's I don't know that the specific details but three minutes to a minute and a half to a minute. And he's basically I want to get this down to 20 seconds. And they're like, Steve, why are you so intent on getting this load time down? He's like, Hey, we're gonna sell this to millions of people. You start extrapolating that out into large numbers do the math like we're, we're saving whole human lives, when we're making this boot sequence more effective. Like, it seems like everyone else was focused on delivering whatever was keeping them busy. And Steve Jobs kept really bringing them back to, hey, this is about the customer. This is and he acquainted it maybe a little dramatically to saving lives. But it was still, in his mind. He was thinking about the end users, the customers, that people who are buying his machines.

Tiffany Lenz: 13:23

Yeah, and I, Steve Jobs was brilliant at that, right. And every I can think of a number of different examples, with the focus on the user experience, everything from the creation of the gumdrops to the way that one felt about using the interface that was just so it was transformative on so many levels in the industry, because it was not, it wasn't necessarily for the tech savvy in a way that all computer systems had been in the past, it was for the user, for the novice, it was it made people you were supposed to feel good using it feel good interacting with your machine. And that was a first right feeling good. But that's what I would say is you're giving a great example of the presence of customer value. Even if it's not stated in words, like the placement of this icon here will create value, it was a focus on the way a customer would feel the way a customer would experience something. So the statement is still there. The under the undercurrent and the intent is even present and discussed.

Robert Greiner: 14:38

That makes a lot of sense. So as a leader, then it's your job to maybe constantly inject. I like what you said to who define the customer. Who are we talking about? What are we doing for them? What are they when things go wrong, especially like what will be felt by the customer? What is the impact to the customer? A lot of if you're a Tesla or something like that, but things That you may be rolling out or may be delayed a month could save lives and so you really has this material impact on the end people who are using your product or service.

Tiffany Lenz: 15:11

I had another example around Johnson and Johnson but I can't remember it exactly it was when it was talking about even a reframe of their branding overall as a company like what do you, what do they produce? Do they produce shampoo, they produce baby products and talcum powder and band aids? Or do they produce comfort and health? Do they help produce healthy families that focus on who their customers are, was something that was revolutionary when they relaunched their brand. Now you see it from time to time in different places, whether it's Walgreens and Duane Reed reframing or whether it's Dunkin Donuts, reframing themselves to America runs on Dunkin with a little running icon and now they call themselves Dunkin and not donuts, because that's supposed to make you feel better about the calories you're consuming. But it really is cleverly re repositioning around an understanding of what their customer needs, their customer needs to feel good about consuming a gajillion calendar calories in fried donuts for breakfast. So beeping like every Dunkin Donuts you see has a line of people out the door. So there's thought there around customer obsession. I love those words. I heard them I was MCing leadership conference a couple of years ago, and was privileged enough to introduce this gentleman by the name of Surinder Singh, he was an executive GM at National Australia Bank and he retired older gentleman, he'd retired twice, and then been pulled back out of retirement, he referred to himself and was known in the industry as a serial transformer. And he would be brought into organizations because he knew how to transform and his whole synopsis like everything that encompassed his brand, even though he was referred to as a serial transformer. He referred to himself as someone who was customer obsessed period, he key would generate metrics and reports and dashboards at the executive levels for a full, you know, global transformation of an organization. All around customer obsession, customer centricity. And any metric that made sense for that organization that showed how their changes were directly positively impacting the customer, he would look at. It was just a fascinating way of rethinking what one even measures.

Robert Greiner: 17:43

And that's a really hard thing to define, you think it's, it would be straightforward, but on the surface, it's really challenging. So I looked up the, I think it was Procter and Gamble that you're talking about earlier. So there's a really good book called playing to win by Alan Lafley, who is an executive at Procter and Gamble, okay. And they part of it is talking about defining your purpose. And they said, We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers now and for generations to come. So what that means and and what he talks about in his book is, when they're designing razor blades, for third world countries, that they really had things like sent their people there to go and learn about what, how do people shave in third world countries, they might not have access to running or hot water consistently 100% of the time. So you can't put this multi blade kind of assumption together, they designed products at a price point that allowed people to be more hygenic to take care of themselves to what they say is improved their lives. We've all had those stupid simple products. One of the most recent ones I saw was the like Daisy sour cream, instead of having the like little jar where you get the spoon in and always gets like taco meat on the spoon and messes up the sour cream. They have a little squeeze bottle now, that's perfect, right that that improves your life in a little way, in a silly way. And so I think having that laser focus of, it's different, when you have that mentality of that constant focus on improving the lives of consumers, when they talk about diapers or whatever product focusing on that really, I think helps make sure that the organization's priorities are valued and you don't fall into greedy behaviors where you become self oriented as an individual as an organization, because your focus is in the wrong place.

Tiffany Lenz: 19:35

Mm hmm. Yeah, and again, I all of these are a bit tongue in cheek, but greedy behavior. It doesn't look like the cartoon characters that we remember as kids. It's these are well intentioned people, very gradually walking down a path one step at a time. That's the wrong path, and not just simply not realizing that they have left there. What should have been the center of their universe, their whole point of existence as a company that just got left out. And I do think that's why I like the word assumed. We assume customer obsession. It's not an intentional removal, an intentional absence, it's an accident. So as a senior leader, it's our job to keep reinstating this at all different levels. I do think we understand this. It resonates with us in a in a critical way. I was talking to a colleague not long ago, who was struggling a little bit with building relationships at the operational level in her organization. And a suggestion I made to her was, but what if you started thinking about those people as your customers, you can think about your customer, and deliver them with great value. She was also at a consulting firm. But what if you thought about those people that are your service providers, as your customers also what would happen then, and for the for her, that was going to be a lightbulb moment that changed the way she interacted with different groups of people,

Robert Greiner: 21:01

I like that there's a level of responsibility that you have when you're serving a customer. And so you may view other organizations as that they're always nagging me about this report, or this thing that I need to give. They're never meeting their commitments, whatever, it can create an adversarial relationship. But if you view them as, hey, they're our customer, we're here to serve them, that can help unlock some professional will or in general well being thoughts when you think when you frame up another human or another organization in that way. Great. So what what are some remedies to greed?

Tiffany Lenz: 21:36

I think the remedy is similar to gluttony, where the remedy was self control was a different kind of self control, like a reprioritization. Overall, the remedy here is also self control. But this time, it's a different spin on self control, instead of self control that causes us to prioritize differently and make something work inside constraints or, or not fall into victim mentality, like we've talked about before. This is a self control that puts others first. And in this case, it's the customer. So it's a reframing of controlling my own need, and my perspective, because I'm putting the thing that's important back in the center. I love the technique, the five why's technique from Toyota, I use it all the time in lots of different instances. But this one in particular, five why's would allow you to look at any particular discussion point in a meeting and start probing yourselves as a team like asking deeply, like, why are we doing this? But why are we doing this? And why are we doing this? And as you continue that thread back, you will eventually get back to the purpose? What was the vision? What was the business case? What was the customer need and value statement. And then that can be brought back forward, it does take courage from someone, presumably the leader, in this case, being willing to say, I'm just going to call a pause on this discussion and bring this awareness to the table in a way that doesn't make people feel ashamed, but in a way that allows them to just reset and be willing to be vulnerable enough to go through an exercise that would reset all of their discussions.

Robert Greiner: 23:24

So when we talked about the self control that was related to gluttony, that's a organizational leaders job to prioritize, and to make those very clear, this one is a little bit more around communication and facilitation, around getting to the core we are engaging in or not engaging in these behaviors, making these decisions, let's dig into that and figure out how this actually impacts our customer satisfaction, the lives of our customers, their well being things like that. Is that accurate?

Tiffany Lenz: 23:54

Yes. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It's a it is a subtle difference, because you could you can look at self control is a nice broad statement. It's a hard thing to do. It's a very simple set of words. I think with gluttony, what we were talking about was a prioritization that takes one's focus off of what you don't have, like they get all the X was the phrase we use so much in our last discussion, so that you're not thinking about what you don't have. But prioritizing how to work inside the constraints in the situation that you do have. Being very meticulous about prioritizing. This is where it dovetails into greed. How can you prioritize? How can you keep your number one, number one, because if everything's a priority, nothing is a priority. How do you keep number one priority exactly what it should be and your laser focus on delivery, what it should be? If you are not customer obsessed. I don't know how you would because your Northstar would constantly be deviating.

Robert Greiner: 24:57

Yeah, you've hit on a really key point here, which these sins which are all, like you said tongue in cheek, none of these dysfunctions ever exist independently. They're all an amalgam that differ, that combination of them differ between organizations. So some of the good habits, that you may self control whatever that you may need to exhibit, really span across and can help solve multiple things. I keep bringing it back in my mind as you talk about this to individual humans, right? If you have, like a weight problem, there's a self control aspect of eating, of exercise. There's even been this research, which I know you've learned about our read about in atomic habits around like Keystone habits, where if you spend less, you weigh less, and those two things like don't shouldn't seem like they're correlated, but they are. I think within an organization too, those behaviors are that span across the sins. But really, as a leader, it's your job to figure out, where are we? Where's our biggest blind spot? Where's our biggest risk area? And then that's based on what you hear? Or in this case, don't hear. And then over time, you can put in those steps to resolve as well. Because if you have a greed problem, you probably have a gluttony problem as well.

Tiffany Lenz: 26:15

Exactly. That's a great way to tie them together. The sad thing about these deadly sins is that rarely do does an organization just have one, or does the team have one, they tend to feed off of one another, almost on a downward spiral, which does, then the positive of that makes it such that if you start to fix one, it becomes easier to remedy the others. So there's always hope, but with greed, and listening for what's not said, as you so rightly said before, it's not as clear cut, because you have to look for what you have to listen, and you have to keep searching for patterns of things that are missing, and not lose your own truenorth of being customer obsessed, and then have the courage to put a remedy in place that can make some team members and professionals feel a little bit bad, right? It could make them feel a little bit embarrassed that they somehow lost or assumed the customers need and stopped stating it and stopped reminding people of what they were doing collectively as a team.

Robert Greiner: 27:21

That's absolutely right. And at our firm, we have this sort of expectation around making difficult decisions where we're incentivized through how our performance is judged to do what's right for the group that you're in, for the client, for the team. And it's helpful that that aligns an incentive structure. But there is this as a leader, this requirement, this need to make tough decisions. Because, yes, when you go specifically go down one direction, you are, by definition, not going down the direction that other people who have their own incentive structures and their own ideas on how things should run, it's going counter to what they want. So part of this, really, to your point on the greed side comes down to communication, and making sure that you're almost annoyingly squeaky wheel about who the priority is, what the customer focus is, what the impact is to them. And then over time, that consistency will help drive the priority. And also the decision making around Hey, we're doing what's best for the customer. And then hopefully, those incentive structures across the organization can be adapted over time to match to be aligned with because it's becoming so obvious what our focus is and should be.

Tiffany Lenz: 28:36

That's exactly right. There are a lot we've both been because we're consultants, we've been in a lot of different organizations. And I know we've both been in organizations where you see that almost like a obnoxious looking poster that's posted everywhere. That reminds you of one thing that the organization wants you to remember. But in a way, repetition aids learning, we say that to kids, and we know it's right. But it's true for adults too. Our brains get busy and our lives get busier and our teams have to move faster and be more and more efficient and more and more competitive. We lose track of that one true north that one thing we need to be focusing on and measuring. And so I almost chuckled to myself when I'm in organizations. And I see those posters, but I think what it remains to be seen if they live that value, but the fact that they were willing to put it all over their walls is a step in the right direction, and then instituting it as another. But I'm always hopful when I see things like that.

Robert Greiner: 29:33

That's interesting, because I view it as oppositely. I view it as an organizational anti pattern where if you go through the trouble of having to write it down and put it on the wall, it's probably because you're not doing it and you did it as a way to feel better about yourself, but I could be wrong there. I think that maybe the right combination is both right. Post everything up for people to see, make it painfully aware what the priorities are and then if you live those out, that's probably the best combination. I think where You can get into trouble as if you take the time and energy and effort to post those things. And then you don't live them out. That's almost a worst case. That is the worst case. Because then you're not you're purposely or inadvertently or conspicuously being almost hypocritical.

Tiffany Lenz: 30:16

Yes, yes. Yes. So sadly, I find what you're saying to be true that it often is that those sorts of reminders are ignored, and they're just lip service or a requirement that marketing went through. But that's maybe why we make a good team glass half full glass half empty. We're still half they're just looking at it from a different perspective.

Robert Greiner: 30:42

That's, right. Yeah. And usually I'm the optimist, so maybe some kind of trauma in my professional past or something. Thanks for taking the time to talk today about organizational greed. It was a lot of fun.

Tiffany Lenz: 30:53

Thank you. It was fun.

Robert Greiner: 30:55

All right,

and we'll see you next week.

Tiffany Lenz: 30:56

Take care.

Robert Greiner: 30:57

All right. Have a good one. Bye.