Passive Aggression in the Workplace

All this talk about talent may lead you to think that talent is the only consideration to performance. Unfortunately, this post is about how behaviour can undermine performance in the workplace. Here I wish to waste some time on the topic of passive aggression.

This should be the second law of psychology (which it is not), after the pleasure/pain principle: Emotion will always find a way to express itself.

If a child is taught to not express anger, then they express their anger as frustration and after a delay of time. This learnt response is called passive aggressive behaviour, and the frustration can take the form of gossiping, sarcastic remarks, back stabbing, forgetfulness of critical information, sabotage, and other poor performances, and is characterised by its consistency. They know that their behaviour is wrong, and this leads them on a quest to not get caught. It is a power play, and when these individuals enter the workforce, they typically have had many years to perfect their art. It is never an asset to the organisation, as it is motivated by malice. The question is, how do you deal with it?

1. Refuse to be engaged in a power struggle. Remember, you have to take responsibility and power over your own actions, and show that they are expected to do the same for theirs. When you confront them about their behaviour, they will see this as an attack. You are victimising them, and their self image does not allow for them to be the victim, so they will attack you. Expect this, do not take it personally, and see it as an opportunity to learn their methods.
2. Make them take responsibility of their actions by explaining to them how their actions affect others, and ask them to come up with ways they can change their own behaviour. Answer all objections of responsibility by calmly explaining that you are aware of the contradiction between what they say and what they do, and ask them to explain their motives for doing it.

If all else fails, there are mediation services you can consider, and unfortunately the best option may in fact be to leave/quit/divorce/move away permanently. But always remember the power to act in your own best interests is yours.

BarCamp Sydney 5

Quick announcement : Warwick Hall of GreenBoy will be registering to present a session at BarCamp Sydney 5 Un- Conference on the topic “Psychology of Innovation”. The Un- Conference will be held at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern NSW Australia on the 27th of June, 2009. We do not anticipate a lot of time to present, so instead of presenting all the theory on this blog, we will be conducting a practical session.

One or more teams will be created and configured according to a personality assessment, and given a mandate to invent a technological solution to a real world problem and bring it to the marketplace in return for a profit. The invention will not be predetermined. Each team will be encouraged to complete that mission as much as possible in the time allowed.

Please register and attend if you are in Sydney that day, by visiting the official web site http://www.barcampsydney.org/. Our twitter hash tag for this presentation only will be #gbbcs5. Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

Bondi Rocket Science : A Story of Innovation

As an Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving personality myself, my talent verb is to design. I will never be a born inventor, which requires more extraversion, but if I were to fake a different talent then invent would be it. I thought it maybe interesting to explain how invention can be done, from a design perspective by recounting a personal story.

A few weeks ago I found myself in an environment I rarely venture into : in the water and waves of famous Bondi Beach here in Sydney Australia. Doing my best to look like I belonged there I was reminded of the power of nature when I felt a moderate current called an under tow tempting me out to the wide open ocean. It was not a strong current, but I could imagine nature threatening me, as if to boast “you would be dragged to your watery grave, if only I could be bothered.” I remembered a lesson for my childhood that if you were to find yourself in a strong under tow current, you must not swim back to shore – a natural first reaction. Even as the current drags you miles out to open waters, you need to swim across it until you are no longer in the current, and then make your way back to shore. Lesson is do not fight the forces of nature, you will loose.

On a completely different topic – keep up, come on – last week I rented a film I had meant to see in the cinemas but never seemed to notice it was released before it was gone. The film starred Billy Bob Thornton and it was called “Astronaut Farmer”. Basically the story is Bob is a rejected NASA astronaut who settles into the life of a farmer. But he dreams of making it into space. So he builds his own rocket. Now the secret about Bob is he always takes roles where he fails – he plays the heros of failure. So sure enough, when he launches, the rocket creeks and groans under its own weight, clunks back down on the pad, tips over onto its side, and then it starts to move. A barn, and a few fences and cows later he smashes into a field. (He survives this which would be impossible, but hey Hollywood, right?) Lesson is a rocket can go horizontally to the direction of gravity with much greater ease than against the focus of gravity.

On a completely different topic – hurry up! – somewhere, don’t ask me where, I came across this story about a company making something called a Turtle Ship. Basically think of a blimp, those helium filled balloons that float around sport stadiums during big games. Replace the blimp cover sheet (which is soft) with a hard shell. Make it much bigger. Essentially you have a lighter than air craft which can go at 200 MPH. And it is shaped similar to a turtle. Wow!

On a completely different topic – is this getting annoying? – launching payloads (stuff) into low earth orbit in space is expensive and dangerous. Most of the expense it the fuel required to lift payloads into space and gain speed in order to maintain orbit – 17,500 MPH give or take. Our friends at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena California are always trying to do this cheaper and more reliably (two space shuttle disasters is not a good record).

By way of connecting the previous experiences I had above (an intuitive process), the idea “just came to me”. Basically, gravity is like a current, pulling everything to the ground. Lesson at Bondi : do not fight the forces of nature! By launching vertically, you are fighting gravity more than getting up to orbital speed. If you could launch horizontally just like Bob, the game changes to one of fighting inertia before gravity. Once you get close to the speed of low earth orbit, fighting gravity becomes a much farer fight.

Problem: stuff (cows, fences, barns) get in the way. So you need to launch rockets horizontally from high altitude. But then we are back to square one: you need to launch vertically in order to attain that altitude. Solution: turtle shaped hard shelled ships (say that ten times!). And don’t fill it with helium. Hydrogen. Yeah, the stuff the Hindenberg was filled with when it burnt and killed lots of people – but the hydrogen did not catch fire, it was the paint on the blimp that caught fire. Everyone blames hydrogen, but it was the paint, people!

So you have a turtle ship filled with hydrogen and with a payload of a rocket. As the ship ascends, the atmospheric pressure decreases and it is safely possible to pump the hydrogen in the ship’s balloon thingy into the rocket’s fuel tanks, which in turn gives the ship more buoyancy (it goes higher still). Then, when the system is as high as it will ascend, launch the rocket horizontally across the direction of gravity. Meanwhile the turtle ship descends gently back to earth. Doing this would change the game of launching into space. Less fuel needed making the rocket smaller and lighter, which in turn makes for more fuel savings.

Even so, this may not work. The brainiacs at JPL may have thought of this and discarded it for some reason I cannot know. Maybe the turtle ship would need to too large to be practical. Maybe it has to do with PR : the initial launch would not go bang and boom, but more like phfffft. But, the point of this post is to attempt to describe the intuitive nature of true innovative thinking. It is a process of connecting experience and knowledge that was gained in the past in ways that at first have no connection, and then connecting them.

Have a good long weekend!

AORD vs NASDAQ

In Australia we have one main stock market, the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). The ASX lists stocks from companies in many sectors, but there are two categories of stocks: mining and resource stocks, and everything else. The mining and resources sector makes up the majority of Australian blue chip companies and equities. This category on the stock exchange can only come about by political and economic focus from the “powers that be”.

What type of personality would a mining and resources company be? These companies are very much about logistics. Digging, purifying, extracting, transporting. Moving physical matter from point A to point B and repeating. This is what the Sensing Judging personalities are all about. So with such a focus on mining and resources within the Australian economy you could say we have a logistician economy.

Now look at the United States stock markets. They go so far as to form different stock markets for their categories. There is the New York stock exchange (NYSE), which is the largest general purpose exchange in the United States (and the rest of the world for that matter). Then there is the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), which is not actually a stock exchange, but a quoting system for stocks, but whatever. This NASDAQ lists the who’s who of the high technology world. High technology, or innovation, is a strategic operation. So if the United States makes a special case for technology companies, then you could say they have a strategic economy.

Our GreenBoy agenda is to change the focus of the Australian economy from logistical to strategic operations. We do not want to get rid of logistical companies, just to make the power elite know there is another category to concentrate on in the economy – that of innovation, patents, ideas, and strategy. Only then will the Australian economy be resilient to fickle commodity prices. Only then will Australia have the real motivation to increase home grown manufacturing, and add value to our natural resources before exporting them.

Innovation Hits the Road : ESTJ

We have mentioned in earlier posts that we are not concerned with the concept of leadership in innovation management. Having said that, there are two key personality profiles which are concerned with leadership. We have already discussed the Extraverted Intuitive Thinking Judging (ENTJ) profile in an earlier post. The ENTJ is the strategic leader who is ultimately responsible for the direction of the entire innovation endeavor. Being a strategist, and like the other three strategic profiles, the ENTJ is easily tripped up on detailed logistical tasks. But, without a good logistical team, the innovation remains a bunch of “head in the clouds” theories, possibilities, and ideas.

How the strategic team interfaces with the logistical team is probably the greatest factor for success (or failure) in innovation endeavors. Since the ENTJ is furthest removed from logistical competence, there is a need for a personality which can do for logistics what the ENTJ does for strategy. The best personality profile to do this is the Extraverted Sensing Thinking Judging (ESTJ) profile whose talent verb is to supervise.

The most important service the ESTJ gives to the organization is the administration of justice, which they impart fairly and according to agreed upon principles. Along with their natural impatience for inefficiency, they supervise the logistical operations for the organization and ensure everything is in its place on time and there is a place for everything. Regardless of wether they are moving steel or monies, the logistical operations typically take the greatest number of people to manage and operate. By taking the day to day requirements for overseeing these operations away from the less practical ENTJ, the ESTJ is vital to the process of manufacture and delivery of the product or service.

Observe Before Judgment

The ESTJ can be abrupt and resistant to change – not so good when you are dealing with innovation, which is about change. This is due to their strict adherence to principles regardless to their situation. To combat this they need to accept tactile (sensing) observations of their environment before passing judgement. This allows the ESTJ to be more effective at forming principles in the first place. And the ESTJ needs to be prepared to redefine principles when the information cannot be understood, or new relevant information becomes available.

The ESTJ also needs to understand the difference between principles and personality preferences. For example the ESTJ may consider it a measure of maturity, intelligence and humanity for a person to perform exactly like the ESTJ does with logistical tasks, and can become agitated when a Intuitive Perceiving person is less clean or orderly.

The Drums of War are Starting to Beat

Everyone has a personality. And however hard as it may seem to imagine, that includes our politicians. As such it is possible to analyze politicians personalities over time by listening to them speak in their own words. From this it is possible to make certain predictions of behavior and performance. Here in Australia, we have received evidence from the federal government that an election maybe close at hand. If we assume that the current Prime Minister the Honorable Mr. Kevin Rudd, and the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Malcolm Turnbull Minister of Parliament square off at this next election, how will each conduct their campaign?

Let us start with Mr. Rudd. Like the previous 3 prime ministers before him, Mr. Rudd is a logistician. This means he will run the type of campaign Australians have grown accustomed to. Mr. Rudd will attempt to be the common man, delivering more goodies and cheer to swinging voters than his rival. He will be slower to make policy decisions, but once his mind is made up he will go down his chosen path like an unstoppable force. He will work with the philosophy of cooperation and associate himself, his policies and his party (Labor) with the needs of “average Australians”. If he wins, it will be due to him being more accessible to the common man, one of the blokes at the barbeque.

Mr. Turnbull is something else altogether. You could hardly ask for two more distinct personalities to choose form. Mr. Turnbull is a strategist. He will make quick decisions based on pragmatism, and show a calm steady hand with a comfortable grip on power. He will adopt a slogan, but unlike Mr. Rudd who will also adopt a slogan, Mr. Turnbull will repeat his slogan over and over and over and over and over and over again and again… and you get the point. This slogan will hit hard at Mr. Rudd’s weakest point, and show the advantage Mr. Turnbull offers the voters. (The slogan maybe already chosen: “Jobs, jobs, jobs”, but we will see.) Politicians in Australia have long valued the common man touch, and Mr. Turnbull is not that. What he is is an executive, a man that belongs in power, and if Mr. Rudd is not careful the Australian voters may help Mr. Rudd be common and let Mr. Turnbull take care of business in Canberra.

Australian’s will get a taste of what US voters got in their last election, insofar as the US has never had a diplomatic president like the Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Judging (ENFJ) personality that Mr. Obama is. Australia has not had a strategic candidate for election in living memory. As such there will be an undefinable mysterious quality about Mr. Turnbull; no one will know quite what to do about him. Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Turnbull will not be popular so much as confident and calming in a time of economic trial.

Mr. Rudd has the definite advantage of political donations to finance an ad blitz campaign. With is he can and will produce a logistically intensive media campaign in support of his party and against the Opposition. But it would be a mistake to rule out Mr. Turnbull’s ability to strategize, as strategy is concerned about the most efficient use of resources, and history can show how effective smaller but better strategically align forces have shaped humanity.

We watch with interest.

A.T.G.C. : Paradigm Shift 2

If you wish to publish a printed book, audio track or serial publication in the USA, you are required by law to present a copy of that document to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. With approximately 142 million items in its collection at last count, it is America’s largest repository of printed information.

 

US Library of Congress

Now, imagine a library that accepts from each of its publishers the equivalent volume of information of the Library of Congress every month and that this information is presented free to the world. This library was formed to store and provide all the genomic sequences being sequenced by all the gene sequencing companies in the USA. Remember the Human Genome Project? This library stores that. And countless other species of life. And that is what it ultimately is: a library of the code of life itself. An incomprehensibly massive storage of sequences of the four letters used to represent DNA : A. T. G. and C.

The rate at which this data is being accumulated is accelerating at what is called a super logarithmic rate, which means really really fast. Soon this library will need to accept, catalogue and make available the equivalent of the Library of Congress every few seconds. But free does not mean unmonitored. This library keeps a record of who downloads this information across the internet, and they report that 70% is being downloaded to labs in the USA, about 25% of that goes to Europe and the UK, and 5% to Japan. The rest of the world is too small to register.

This is the map of the future of world power. It is this research and development working on genetics and stem cells that will make the revolution of digital bits and bytes seem like a blip. And if Australia does not take this development seriously, we will miss out on this revolution just as we have missed the digital revolution.

Within the USA, the concentration of where the data is being downloaded to is mostly around the University of Southern California and around Harvard, MIT on the east coast. The number of people who are behind this research in the USA can fit in a half of the stands of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, so we have enough people on this island to do the same. And the economic advantage, if not the advantages to the quality of life, are to great to comprehend.

Mending Hurt Relationships : INFP

There is a lot at stake in innovative environments. The pressure to perform and the innate competitive drive can cause frictions and factions to rip the team apart. It is important to note that time does not heal anything. It festers. Conflicts need to be sorted out in a constructive manner. And the best talent for this task is the Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving (INFP) personality profile whose talent verb is to heal.

These people are rare and often reclusive due to a very sensitive nature. As such they are like the INTP, in that they seem odd to the vast majority of people with no experience interacting with them. Ironically, perhaps the most famous person in recent times was also the quintessential example and demonstrator of this talent : the late Princess of Wales Lady Diana. To study her life with the perspective of knowing she was an INFP is to understand her deep empathy for the plight of suffering children who had their limbs blown off by land mines left active after times of war. And her aversion to the hordes of photographers intruding on her every private moment.

 

The quintessential INFP

When the INFP finds suffering in others they care about, it is taken very personally. The INFP suffers for them, with them. The other’s pain is there pain. It is hard for other types to appreciate this fully, but the only thing that seems to make the INFP talent “come alive” is when they are healing the suffering in others, because it amounts to healing themselves. It is not a physical healing, although it can include that. It is more than that. It is the healing of emotions, and reengaging of empathy and human dignity.

Yet, like the other talents, there are some things you should look out for when selecting an INFP.

Why So Sensitive?

If there is one thing that defines an INFP it is that they are hyper sensitive to criticism. They have a very structured belief system made up of emotions and feelings. Even when you do not intend to hurt their feelings, you may still do so. They are very very sensitive! It is important for the INFP to explore the world around them and have the strength of self to know that the new information the world offers is not a threat to their emotions. The famous serenity prayer should be every INFP’s motto:

God grant me the serenity 
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Otherwise, the INFP can retreat to the country and refuse to join society. Talent can only be engaged in relation to others. And there are not enough INFPs to go around as it is.

Just Say “No”! Just Once! Please!

The INFP who has not learnt to allow the outside world to touch their emotions will say “Yes” to every request. Automatically. Without fail. This leads to the INFP being easily taken advantage of, and sooner or later, they get sick of it and flip. One day they are saying “Yes” to everything and the next “No”. It is a bewildering switch, and takes everyone off guard, but you want to ensure the INFP learns to balance “Yes”ses with “No”s. One trick is to require them to have a day planner/ diary in which they allot time to various tasks, but only one task at a given time. Then they must stick to it, regardless of the state of the work when the time is up. When the planner is full, then the INFP can say “No”, but blame the planner for their unforgivable denial of service!

Perspective and Beliefs

We advocate a segregation of talent insofar as it relates to employment of tasks. We warn against the idea that an Extraverted Sensing Feeling Judging (ESFJ) personality should ever be given a role as a designer of complex computer systems for instance; that is a task best left to an Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving (INTP) personality. The main purpose of this blog is to discuss (with the exception of some of our posts, we admit) the best way to get the talents to work together.

If you concentrate on differences, teamwork will be impossible. So the act of segregation can lead to counter productivity. For instance, all the Intuitive Thinking and Sensing Perceiving personalities believe the ends will show the means were justified. This is in direct opposition to the Intuitive Feeling and Sensing Judging personalities who believe the means must justify the ends. But it is these beliefs that shape talent, and make teamwork possible as long as each talent sticks to what it is best at, and leaves the other talents to do what they are best at.

For example, I know a lovely lady who happens to be an Intuitive Feeler. As such she believes in the cooperative, diplomatic ideal of means justifying the ends. She is a human resources executive, a job she naturally excels at. A colleague in the marketing department got in a heated argument over this very concept of means and ends and which comes first. I did not meet this other person, but I hope he/she/it is a Sensing Perceiving person as they are better at the roles of marketing and sales. Try as they might, neither could convince the other – one felt the other was downright evil, while the other thought my friend was stupid.

How could you believe THAT????

The real problem was that each one thought their role was the most important, and that in order to do their role, you must – MUST!!! – believe my beliefs. And they are right, both of them, at the exact same time. The irrational element is that they forget they are in separate roles. You do not want an Intuitive Feeling personality in sales or marketing. You do not want a Sensing Perceiving personality in human resources. (If they are mixed and muddled, untangle the mess. Fast!)

Working together

Revel in your own talent, do what it is you were meant to do in life. Let the other talents support you by taking care of the tasks you are not talented at, freeing you to do what you are talented at. Differences in personality profiles are needed, and do not require fixing.

Hit the Wall : Paradigm Shift 1

Necessity is the Mother of invention.

Before the early 1950’s computers were monstrous machines that took up office buildings and had less power than the computer controlling your modern day microwave oven, and soaked up copious amounts of electrical power. As a result there was a strong economic drive for miniaturization. At the core of this focus was the effort to make a more efficient device known as a vacuum tube transistor. These devices looked similar to incandescent light bulbs, and inside were delicate wires and assembly that needed to work in a near vacuum state (no air). But they took up lots of power (for their size) and generated a lot of heat. This heat would cause structural stress on the tube, and sooner or later they would spring a leak and pop.

But as they made them smaller, they also made them weaker resulting in faster blow out rates. It soon became apparent that while more electronically efficient, there would come a point where the tubes would blow out before they had a chance to be useful. And a computer required 10,000’s of them.

They were hitting a developmental wall. When this happens, the pace of technological progress slows. Engineers have to stop engineering new useful inventions and have to work as investigators to find the next invention to replace the limited one(s). It is like building better and better houses only to find one day your foundation technology cannot sustain the weight and you must reinvent what you had grown accustomed to thinking was a wheel that needed no re invention. Nature starts playing Mother.

It was on 17 November, 1947 that John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of AT&T Labs were credited as inventing the greatest invention of the 20th century (and to date even the 21st!) known as the silicon micro transistor – the basic building block of the computer you are now reading this blog post on. Overnight, computers went from office block size to filing cabinet size, took less power, did not pop a leak, were much cheaper, and many many times faster.

Intel's first 45 nm transistor micro processor (it has lots and lots of transistors!)

But today in 2000-and-whatever we have a new problem, and again it has to do with leaks and shrinking sizes. You see, as we make the silicon transistors smaller and smaller, the electrons (you can think of them as packets of electricity) start misbehaving. Instead of traveling in the direction of the wires, they decide to disappear and reappear in a nearby but non connecting wire, or move into places electrons are not supposed to be able to go. All very strange, and has to do with quantum mechanics, but the point is, we cannot make transistors much smaller. We know we are hitting another wall.

In the meantime, advances in replacing silicon with a material like gallium nitride have pushed the day of reckoning back. But in response over the last decade or so, more and more effort has been invested into creating all sorts of alternatives to the micro transistor. Computers based on DNA (the building blocks of life), on light waves (optoelectronics), quantum electronics, and a remarkable material called carbon nanotubes. Any of these would decrease the size of electronics by orders of hundreds or thousands, and increase the speed by similar amounts overnight. If these approaches succeed, then the pace of digital innovation will explode in orders of magnitude greater than we have already witnessed in the past 60 years.

But what is exciting is not the result, it is the intellectual stimulation that the necessity to invent brings. That is how new industries are created and take shape. If you want to be a “player” in future innovation and high technology, you need to wade the mine fields of innovation brought about by these walls to progress. It is here that the market is already waiting for the team that succeeds.