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THE INFLUENCE-ACCURACY TANGLE

American president Teddy Roosevelt defined a good executive as "one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it." That's a pretty good description of any good manager, and it gets right at the biggest problem you face when you handle a team in a participatory management style. The problem is seldom that of getting your team members to contribute their opinions; they'll always be willing to do that if you motivate them to do so by reinforcing them when they speak up. The problem is usually that of getting yourself to shut up - to take firm control, but from the back seat - so they can come forward in the first place. Roosevelt wasn't the first person to recognize that this takes a tremendous amount of self-restraint.

One reason this is so hard for managers to do is that we've been trained to believe that we know more than the team, and that we therefore have a right to influence the group's decisions more radically than the others do. And, since we're in positions of authority, we do tend to have more influence on how team meetings go. The only hitch is that "influence" does not equal "accuracy" or "intelligence" or "creativity" - no matter how much we wish it did. So, a strong, influential manager can sometimes find himself directing the course of a discussion to an entirely inappropriate conclusion. His team members will let him get away with this because, what the hell, he's the boss.  And the whole team will end up in the cellar, because the boss and the members alike confused his influence on others' opinions with what they assumed to be wisdom.

You can run into this Influence-Accuracy Tangle even when the ostensible "leader" of a group is not the most influential member. In those cases - cases where an "expert" junior manager, say, will bring everyone else, including the leader, around to his way of thinking - it's not the boss who's doing the bossing, but the smart guy in the corner chair.

He might be a senior accountant who "knows" before it's ever employed that the government's new depreciation schedule is going to save (or cost) you money. Or a marketing veteran who doesn't want to waste her valuable time on an "obviously blue-sky" test marketing plan. Or a line supervisor who can "prove" to you by impeccable logic that his Quality Circle has to meet on Wednesdays or it will fall apart.

Whether the dominant voice in a team meeting is that of the leader or another resident "expert," though, the trouble and the tangle are the same. Unless you as the facilitator can fluidly, but firmly, direct the meeting by the rules I've outlined above, the consensual nod will often go not to the person with the best idea, but to the one with the appropriate reputation. He might have the best solution, but there is no guarantee of that. He might just as easily be aggravating your current problems by focusing on yesterday's answers.  We see this all the time when our client managers do the Arctic survival exercise that I talked about in the chapter on Involvement.

You'll remember that was the exercise where team members were supposed to imagine that they had just crashed in northern Canada with nothing between them and death but a pile of salvaged items: some sleeping bags, a knife, a bottle of rum, and so forth. They were to decide, first individually and then in a Consensus fashion, which of those items was most important, which was next, and so on down the line. The big lesson of that exercise was that, every time the exercise is done, the Accuracy of the group ranking of the items is better than the Accuracy of any individual member - no matter how "expert" that member may be. The danger is always that the supposed expert will, simply because he does know something more about the Arctic than the others, assume that his Influence ought to be absolute.  In groups where the team members let the expert get away with that - where they defer to his wisdom - the overall Accuracy always goes down. Only in those groups where everybody's opinion - including that of the most Influential member - is subjected to rigorous questioning and analysis does the group really profit from expert advice, and shoot its Accuracy score up.

So, in group decision-making situations, you have the irony that the presence of a supposed expert can actually retard your progress, if the team leader or "facilitator" lets him take the reins. Your role as a facilitator, remember, is to get everybody to participate by appropriate reinforcement, and to see to it that everyone's expressed opinion receives the same open hearing and group judgment. That means you don't ignore someone's view simply because he or she is "unfamiliar" with the problem at hand. It also means you don't let the "eagles" in the group run over everybody else just because they've been "right" in the past.

There's obviously a need for balance here, and part of your role as a team facilitator is to achieve that balance. I don't mean that everybody's opinion is just as good as everybody else's.  That's a dimwitted distortion of democracy, and it's not what team decision-making is about. I mean that, until all the opinions are in and until everybody has had a chance to discuss and assess them, you cannot assume that Joe's view is going to be better than Jane's, or vice versa.

There's a natural tendency for managers to forget this because they're impatient to get the problem solved, and they would like to believe that Joe, who has solved a similar problem five times, must have the answer to this one - so let's just let him call the shots and be done with it. The impatience here is an aspect of one common element of vertical thinking: the expectation that the best course of action is the one that looks and feels right at every step of the way.

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