Those Darn "People Skills"

My reflex answer to "what are your weaknesses" is: a) hiring people and b) "people skills".

Yet the people I have hired over the years have all gone on to do well for themselves. I cheat, of course, because I only hire smart people - it makes my life so much easier. I have had to let people go, and in both cases I believe I did so in a manner that let them keep their self-respect and dignity.

When I'm talking about something with someone, I'm fine, even if it's a "personal" matter like behaviour or even dress. I can do that so indirectly and tactfully they don't even notice - and sometimes I don't realise I've done it until later. As long as there's a thing we're both talking about, I'm fine.

I'm not so good with dealing with people in authority, I tense up the same way I do if someone points a camera at me - and what are the odds of that for an ACoA? I am not good at being polite to people who are supposed to be helping me but clearly don't know enough to help me (most IT help desks and shop assistants): I tend to cut the conversation short. That's not unique to me.

I think I'm bad at dealing with and communicating with people because I know they don't understand me, nor me them, unless we're just exchanging practical information. I read that sharing mutual interests with another human being is supposed to give you a warm glow of belonging: I'll assume you have felt that. I haven't, or if I have then it was so faint I missed it. The thing is, the Normals don't know this about my communications with them: they think they are communicating as if with another Normal. I really should stop worrying about this.

I'm really bad at dealing a bureaucracy that's designed to make my life more difficult for no actual reward - we're talking about a large retail bank here. Its IT and data security would not stop a halfway decent Russian hacker from stripping it of valuable data at the end of a six month stint, but sure as heck stops us doing our jobs. Which is a special case of what my real weakness.

Which is dealing with people who are not actual rogues but are practicing denial, lying, misleading, obfuscating, playing games, or who are insecure in their job, or who aren't quite up to the job and have to hide it or try to bring the job down to something they can manage - to the detriment of my plans and intentions. You can be as mendaciously bureaucratic as you like if it doesn't affect me. Once you mess up my plans, you are no longer a person, but an obstacle, The Problem. You are not with me, so you must be against me, and are therefore The Enemy. You. Personally. No hiding behind job descriptions: a decent person wouldn't do a job like that, so you cannot be a decent person. In the movie Clean and Sober Morgan Freeman gets the line "You know the addict's least favourite word? It's NO". When you become an obstacle, you are saying NO and I can barely contain my anger. My father's first reply was always NO and a boy can get fed up and angry of hearing that after a while. It turns you to that Jesuit thing about being easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

This world is full of such people and I have no patience with them. That's my weakness.

Preliminary Remarks on Denial

Denial is the failure to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defence mechanism. If you're in denial about something, you know it's true, and you're refusing to admit it to yourself, other people and the relevant authorities, whosoever they may be. Denial is always selfish, and because it is a choice and leads to others becoming confused about how to interpret large chunks of their world correctly, it is always malicious. That malice is often the subject of its own denial: the secrets are held to be harmless or our enforced ignorance was for our own good. Hiding the truth about something that matters to someone else is always bad - though that doesn't mean you should rush into blurting it out any old way and when. You are allowed to hide the truth from your enemies. Your children, your family, your spouse, even your employees, customers, suppliers and stockholders - these are not your (official) enemies. When you hide a truth that is their business from them, you are treating them as if they are (officially) enemies. That is malice and bad faith. The fact that the denier is often themselves the victim of someone or something else does not let them off the hook: the correct way to deal with whatever it is, is to name it, shame it and if need be divorce it, not to fabricate a fairy-tale in which it doesn't exist. Weakness may be a reason, but it is not an excuse.

There are times I think that ordinary people no more listen to the words they hear and use than they do the lyrics of their favourite songs. They hear the sound and the inflections and the subject and that's all they need. They pick up the emotional markers and draw political consequences from that - "manager X thinks that project Y is a good thing, so I shouldn't make rude noises about it to her" - but do not listen to the actual words and draw substantive conclusions - "manager X thinks project Y will help us one jot? hasn't she seen it? I should explain why it sucks".

If you grew up with denial you can't do what normal people do: ignore the lyrics and listen to the song. It isn't that you can't hear the song, it's that you know that a song is just a singer's trick. You can't trust the words, you can't trust the emotional signals around the words, so you trust only the actions. You work backwards from consequences to intentions because you can't trust what anyone says about their motives. You take words at their face value, because that's all you can do, even though you know as a matter of abstract principle that what they said is not what they mean. After a while, you can recognise denial by its very manner of expression. And because you know about the malice behind it, you are upset and insulted, it triggers memories and reactions from way, way back when you were vulnerable and upset. If you grew up around denial, it's hard to handle it when you're an adult.

This is what trips me up time and time again at The Bank. I'm not going to list all the things The Bank's management is in denial about - life is too short and I'll just get upset. And all this has consequences for what I think I'm good and bad at as regards that dreaded phrase "people skills".

IT and Analytical Skills Audit

In the previous posts I described the Dreyfus model of skill levels and explained why experts are not to be found in service industries. I've worked in service industries all my life and it makes me wonder how smart I really am or how much I didn't bother learning because I didn't need to.

So here's my view of myself. I am a proficient problem-solver and decision-maker. Part of that proficiency is learning to use the tools at hand to solve the problem, to produce something that does whatever needs to be done. At work I use Excel and VBA to produce reports off Teradata and Oracle databases not because I think those are the best tools, but because until recently The Bank didn't have anything else. (That's right, one of the largest retail financial companies in human history didn't have SAS or Business Objects as standard analyst's kit. You couldn't make it up.) Those solutions do the job and the job is what I was hired to do. Now that we have SAS and Business Objects, I'll look into using those. I extend my knowledge of what those tools can do and I've tightened up my programming style since reading Code Complete a couple of years ago. Another part of that proficiency is having enough background knowledge of a lot of subjects so that I can pick up and understand what I need, covering subjects from statistical significance tests to buyer psychology.

Am I a proficient VBA programmer and Excel user? Here's where I have a problem. Probably I am, but because I've always worked in service industries where the technical requirements are very low, I've never really been pushed to learn all that I can learn. And I don't learn that stuff for the enjoyment of it - I'm a philosopher and mathematician, not a programmer who goes home and works on open-source. So maybe while I have proficient technique, my knowledge level is only competent.

If I'm a proficient problem-solver and decision-maker, how come I'm, not in management? Because except right at the top, management is not where decisions are made nor problems solved. Most management jobs are mostly administration, reporting, supervision, some light project- and process-management and people-development. A handful offer opportunities for leadership-by-example and even fewer for leadership-by-inspiration. The Bank flatters call centre team group supervisors by sending them on "leadership" courses, but that's just linguistic inflation. You want to make decisions? Seek out the trading floor my son. You want to solve problems? Go into programming, engineering or medicine.

I'm a proficient pricing analyst / manager as well. In a lot of companies, pricing is where a lot of decisions are. Just not in The Bank. The pricing I do is neither insurance nor financial instruments, but that's enough. I don't want to price CDO's thank you. You can't be good at pricing without being competent at management accounting and such related matters.

So at what do I suck?

R I P Tony Peluso

Tony Pelso is the guy who played the guitar solos on The Carpenter's Goodbye to Love and along with Richard Carpenter invented the Big Ballad Guitar Solo. He wasn't the greatest guitarist in the world, but he didn't need to be. He just needed to do this...



In Heaven as I think of it, that's enough to get you in.

Why Experts Don't (Usually) Work in Service Companies.

A service company uses stuff that other people make and design to provide a service to other people. Telcos use optical fibre and highly specialised computers ("switches" if it's a SS7 / C7 network, routers if it's a VoIP network) built by someone else running software that implements very abstract and specific standards designed by someone else. You don't need to know the innards of C7 signalling or electromagnetic theory to run an telco operation, you do need to know how to make relationships and negotiate. Banks are service companies, so are bus companies, railways (unless they are vertically-integrated), travel companies and all retailers. So are hospitals and GP's - medics don't know how drugs work, but surgeons at least know their way round their bit of the human body.

Service quality can range from a five-star hotel with a concierge paid a very high salary for his knowledge of the town to a one-star bed and breakfast with a single girl on reception who seems to be there (as far as you can see) all the hours the place is open and who can just about direct you to the local railway station. The service sector tends to drift down the skill scale: if you need a palladium widget you have to pay for palladium and that puts a minimum price on the widget, but you can always live with a little less hotel service on this trip to save some money. A sustained bout of cost-cutting customers later and none of the hotels can afford to offer good service, so they don't. Quality decrease is the other side of the inflation coin: heads we put up the prices, tails we reduce the quality and quantity.

After a certain point on the way down the price/quality slide, the senior management of a service organisation gets concerned about the organisation's ability to handle any tasks requiring specific abilities, talents and knowledge. It make sense to outsource your freight forwarding to a specialist company because you probably don't do enough to keep the people you would need busy. The same applies to advertising, as very few companies have a culture that's friendly to the kind of erratic sparks who think up good ads. The problem starts when you outsource all your creative thinking about anything to outsiders, so that all your people are doing is managing agency relationships and the internal bureaucracy. Telcos and banks are nothing more than information-processing machines, yet many outsource their serious operational IT work (The Bank doesn't run your ATM's and current accounts, EDS does.). As a result, no-one in the business actual understands the systems any more and if they ask, it costs them a fortune in fees for meetings and Work Requests. So they don't ask.

A service organisation can wind up consisting of a large number of people who graft at heavily-supervised very specific front-line tasks, a senior management with a small supporting staff, and a middle management that is little more than groups of people managing relationships between the people who actually know something. In fact, that's a pretty good description of a lot of people in the product areas of The Bank. Relationship managers, project managers, team leaders, business managers, account managers - call them what you like, they don't need and often don't have much industry knowledge or technical skills. What matters is that they can handle people, politics and bureaucracy, and they don't rock the boat.

Which is not going to produce a culture that encourages skill and knowledge development much beyond the lower end of the advanced beginner on the Dreyfus scale. Why not? Well, what kind of person gets to be really good at something? Or to ask the same question a different way: do you really think that Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, Alexander Grothendieck or for that matter Brian Kernighan and Denis Ritchie are (or were at the time they did what made them famous) well-balanced "normal" people?

Uh-huh. Normal people do many wonderful things, but only after those wonderful things have been invented by their neurotically-driven inventors. Think of the famous story about the discovery of penicillin: just how desperate for a discovery do you think Fleming was that he thought there might be something in what a normal person would have seen as a dirty Perti dish and cleaned without a further thought? Exactly.

People get to be good at anything because they push their current limits of knowledge and accomplishment a lot of the times they practice and work. There's a whole literature on this: the 10,000 hour thing and the idea of Deliberate Practice - see Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated. Try it at the day job: you have to read the manuals, acquire the background knowledge, find time and projects to learn on - which means you have to dodge the time-consuming routine junk work and be prepared to miss those fake deadlines so you can learn and experiment with something new rather than hack out an answer with what you know. You're going to do this how while you have a day job, a commute, a wife and children or you want a social life and to spend the weekends wind-surfing? Why bother even ascending to competent when you can get paid just as much for being an advanced beginner? Especially when that's all the company expects?

If you want to be good at anything, and you are in a large service company, you will leave for a small firm, a consultancy or private practice so you can concentrate on what it is you want to learn and work on. Which is the final part of the explanation as to why service companies don't have experts working in them, and precious few proficient people either. Now you know why governments, banks and other organisations don't have someone who Knew Better when they made that crazy decision. There was, but they left. Before they went crazy.

The Dreyfus Skill Levels

A few weeks ago I picked up a book called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt of Pragmatic Programmers fame. Hunt discusses a thing called the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, which applies on a per-activity basis to people. So you can be an expert chef and a novice windsurfer. Or vice versa.

The top level is the expert: experts write the books, give the conference addresses, get called on by governments and television producers and as practitioners have "forgotten" what they know so that it has become second nature to them. It all looks intuitive and mysterious, because you can't see the thought process.

Which you can with the novice, who needs strict instructions and has no experience or background knowledge with which to exercise judgement. Think offshore IT help desks. Next up from the novice is the advanced beginner. These people know enough not to telling what to do every time, but not so much they can sort stuff out when it goes wrong. These are the "party trick people", who know the tricks needed to do their job but not much more and who copy code from the Internet. They frequently use tools and refer to ideas that they don't really understand but can "use properly". They still need showing how to solve something, rather than being able to get a hint and figure it out from there.

Figuring out an approach to solving a problem and troubleshooting are the hallmarks of the competent. Competent people take on new problems because they will learn more by solving them. They have a fair chunk of background knowledge and can use general principles in their problem-solving. There are a couple of books on their desk, strictly utilitarian reference textbooks.

When you start reading books like The Pragmatic Programmer or How To Solve It and want to know the abstract ideas behind a subject - from theories of how food tastes to the grammar of the language compiler - and you can comfortably interpret and use maxims and rules of thumb in context, then you are at the proficient stage. There's a lot more background knowledge, not just of the technical stuff but of the wider business and social context. The proficient person hears a conversation about how someone fixed a problem on the corporate website and gets an idea about how to solve a database problem - they are operating at a much higher level of abstraction.

The news is this: forget all that stuff about "subject matter experts" and "excellence": most people are at best advanced beginners at everything. You shouldn't be surprised: how much time do you have left in a week to get really good at something that isn't your day job? And how much time do you have in your day job to learn and practice new stuff? After all the routine crap work is done?

Rules for the In-House Training Course

At the start of all the courses I've been on recently, there's a little ceremony where the trainer(s) ask us "what we want the rules to be" for the duration of the course. There's a moment's silence and then someone says something fairly applie-pie-ish. The rules have turned out to be fairly consistent:

Confidentiality: what is said on the course, stays on the course. These are not prescriptive courses - for complicated reasons to do with institutional denial, The Bank can't do prescriptive courses - but rather ones where we're presented with some ideas and invited to discuss what various concepts mean to us and what we think of this or that fairly simple case study. (It's a lot like Teacher Training, and for the same reasons. I feel another article coming on.) The value of these courses is what you learn about yourself and the benefit of that is the out-loud admission of your faults and revelations. A lot of frustration, confusion and a little hurt gets expressed in these sessions. If we thought any of that would get back to the Bosses, the sessions would be useless.

No Mobiles: no comment needed.

Let everyone have their say - no talking over people: people like me need to be reminded not to do that. It's a really bad habit I have.

Honesty: within reason, of course. What this partly means is that people must not say "I've never done that" or "That doesn't happen here" or "Of course I do that all the time". Not so much dishonesty as what the psychologists call faking good. The other part of what it means is that everyone has to share a little: no sitting there saying nothing.

No deferring to the senior guy. Ever noticed how everyone in the room shuts up and does deferential listening body language when a Senior Person makes a contribution? Even if you didn't know they were a Senior Person, they minute they start talking, you know it: there's the quietly confident body language, the measured tone that doesn't expect to be interrupted, the measured, placatory, ambiguous language and the sense that they are delivering a message, not speaking from the heart or soul. The training people advertise the grades who are eligible for the course so this doesn't happen. But when it's an open-grade event, the deferring happens.

No apple-pie and no jargon. This is mine and I'm horrified at how few people know what "apple pie" means in this context, or for that matter, what "drinking the Kool Aid" means. How can you identify the action if you don't have the concept? Apple pie, if you don't know, comes from a 1950's phrase: Mom, the flag and apple pie, three things no-one is going to find fault with. It means anything that is uncontroversial, unarguable, received wisdom and hence bland. Drinking the Kool Aid is what you do when you decide to go along with the prevailing or required beliefs - with the suggestion that it's a little bit cultish, uncritical and yet that one's acceptance is slightly ironic. I'm asking that the participants don't hide behind platitudes - as one woman did when asked for her action at the end of the Resilience course: "well, it's about making time for me, really" she said. Apple pie.

I liked the guy who said that he wasn't keen on profanity. Everyone at The Bank is far to well-behaved to be profane of speech, but it did perk the debate up a notch. He was a nice guy as well.