When they discover Myers-Briggs personality types, many people are transfixed by the dichotomy between “extraverts” and “introverts.” This may be because this is the easiest and most in-you-face concept.
That was my own experience, when I first learned that I am an ENTP personality type.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has four factors, each of which has two possible values. Knowing these values can allow us to understand what our biases and inclinations are when it comes to our personaties, as well as those of others. This is useful in the workplace (and, in fact, in any situation where it’s all about how people get along: families, civic efforts, etc.).
 "Equal Opportunity Employment" by Flickr user pasukaru76 It’s especially useful to know (or be able to identify through observation) others’ types, because that can help you get along with them better and — as a leader — can help you create balanced teams that are the most effective. It helps to have lots of different types around.
Here’s a quick breakdown:
- Extravert / Introvert — Where you get your energy
- INtuitive / Sensing — How you take in information about your world
- Feeling / Thinking — How you like to make decisions
- Judging / Perceiving — How you organize your world
One’s Myers-Briggs type is not destiny. It is more a description of what your “default” or preferred way of handling things is.
Each of the factors is important in its own right. But, in the workplace, I have found the last letter-pair in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to be particularly important. This is P vs. J — “Perceiving” vs. “Judging.”
Peceivers And Judgers
Many people misunderstand this factor, because of the pejorative sense the word “judging” conveys — they hear “judgmental,” which people see as negative. But it has nothing to do with that. This factor describes how a person organizes their world.
A P is always scanning for new information and prefers to defer making decisions until absolutely necessary. A J, on the other hand, is always on the lookout for decisions already made, and prefers to make a decision and move on whenever possible. For a P, decisions are contingent and new ideas can reopen decisions that had already been made. To a J, decisions are only reopened in extreme circumstances.
In the workplace, J’s tend to get on P’s nerves, who see them as overly uptight. Meanwhile, P’s tend to absolutely infuriate J’s, whe often regard them as unstable and mercurial.
Seth Godin’s recent article on hunters and farmers can be seen as a description of P’s (hunters) and J’s (farmers).
Tips For P Leaders
Lots of nonprofit leaders, in my experience, are P’s. I’m one myself. Over the years I have learned a few pointers in getting along and thriving.
Advice for leaders who are P’s:
- Remember what others are hearing. Remember the J’s around you are looking for and actively cataloging commitments made. So, when you muse about things, talk through alternatives, and suggest you might be rethinking this or that initiative — others may be hearing definite plans. This can cause anxiety and misunderstandings.
- Find a safe sounding board. As a P, you need to find someone to bounce ideas off of. It might be safest to look for someone outside your organization to talk to.
- Play to people’s strengths. J’s are incredibly good at identifying the commitments people make — who promised to do what by when. They are the best people to have taking notes at a staff meeting, they are in their element driving complex projects with intricate deadlines, and in ensuring that policies are adhered to. Do you need solid and consistent performance, day-in, day-out? Get a J on the job.
- Be clear when you’re just talking. Make sure you let people know that sometimes you are raising ideas without any decisions attached — and that you will definitively say when you do make a decision. It is important for others around you (especially J’s) to be able to know what is stable and what is fluid.
- Careful you don’t get distracted! If you work with many other P’s, it’s easy to get sidetracked. P’s are distracted by shiny objects and, get a few of them together in one room, it’ll be one new initiative after another! That’s great, but . . . older initiatives may tend to fall by the wayside. As a leader, make sure there are enough J’s around to keep things on track.
That last point, about getting sidetracked, cannot be overemphasized.
The Distracted Organization
In my experience and observation, it is very easy for an entire organization to take on P characteristics if there are too many P’s in senior leadership without any J balance. And, for whatever the reason (we can speculate all we want) it seems like there are a lot of P people throughout the nonprofit sector.
Furthermore, people often (not always) tend to gravitate to folks like them. So, a leader can end up surrounding themselves with people they like, but who do not necessarily complement or balance their skill sets.
So, many organizations can themselves become mercurial, easily distracted by shiny objects and new ideas. I can remember returning from a meeting with one organization. The meeting lasted three hours and we never even touched the agenda. “That is a totally P organization,” I told my colleagues. (I even wrote a memo about it for others, for their use in working with the organization.)
Knowing this, knowing the potential for distractedness (the downside of the P factor), it is important to work against that and actively seek out people who are different from you. This is of course true in an inclusionary sense (gender, ethnicity, orientation, background, and so forth) but it is also true in a personality type sense.
What Are P’s Good For?
Are P’s a terrible thing? Distracted, mercurial, flighty . . . they sound like a nightmare in the workplace!
Speaking as a P, certainly not. P’s can drive a lot of energy, creativity, and out-of-the-box breakthroughs (these are not solely the province of P’s, don’t get me wrong).
If you need a stalled project accelerated, put a P on the job. If you have a high-energy and time-limited task (like prepping for an important meeting or event), a P can really shine. Because of their omnivorous approach to things, a P can be great in a generalist troubleshooter position and (balanced with a good J as a partner) can be a great manager.
In a future post, I may outline my thoughts about some of the other Myers-Briggs factors and how they relate to leadership. Please note, though, that this is just based on my experience and I am not an expert on personality types. I’ve just thought a lot about them and try to use them in my day-to-day life.
What’s your type? How has that impacted how you get your work done?
Yesterday Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, in response to a question at a congressional hearing, suggested that Toyota owners ought to avoid driving their cars.
 MotorShow 2007: Toyota Rav4 by Flickr user Gaspa Specifically, he said: “My advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to the Toyota dealer because they believe they have the fix for it.”
The result was widespread pandemonium and criticism across the Internet. In a hyper-connected age, the episode raises some good points.
(Note that I am not talking about the new issue regarding the Prius braking system; this particular episode revolved around the accelerator issues for other vehicles.)
Certainly, it’s reasonable advice to tell someone to quit driving their car, too, but did the head of transportation for the nation have to say that? Toyota has a valid argument that this unfairly kicks them while they are already down. Why not, they might respond, just tell folks to go to the dealer, and omit the whole get-it-off-the-road part? In fact, they responded Toyota responded with a straightforward “they are too safe.”
And, LaHood quickly retracted his statement and said it was an “obvious misstatement.” But I think he may be overreacting to his initial overreaction. LaHood faced an honest dilemma: what to say? There is no perfect answer. My colleague Rush Kidder would point out that he faced a right-vs.right ethical dilemma.
On the one hand, LaHood needs to take a measured stance, not provoke pandemonium, and weigh his words carefully. But, on the other hand, as the chief transportation safety officer of the country, LaHood has an equally strong obligation to place safety first and if that means a company is upset then so be it.
The fact that one clause in one sentence bounced around the Internet so quickly adds intensity to the fundamental dilemma that any leader faces when faced with the need to advise citizens on what to do in difficult times.
The Dilemma Of Evaluation
On a smaller scale, yet no less intense sometimes, foundation and nonprofit leaders face similar dilemmas. We live and work in a world where evaluation and impact measurements are the rage. Grant seekers are under pressure to show potential funders that their programs actually do what is hoped and that they have a decent bang for the buck.
Funders, at the same time, are under pressure from their boards and from economic forces to ensure that they are spending their money wisely.
What this means is that the independent sector has become evaluation-happy. And, this places philanthropic leaders at a crossroads. They are learning a great deal about what works — and what does not work. The question is: What to do with negative reports?
On the one hand, it’s important to share information about effectiveness so that people don’t waste their time and money. And, certainly in the case of absolute failures that’s a no-brainer. But most evaluations are more nuanced and it is not entirely clear if an initiative absolutely failed or whether it just didn’t work as well as it could have.
Given that, and on the other hand, what right does a foundation leader have to spread around such ambiguous information, when such evaluations might dissuade other funders from donating and so hurt the organization in question? So there is a strong moral argument behind not sharing evaluation information. But this leaves possibly ineffective initiatives potentially running indefinitely. Because new funders need to start at square one with their own studies.
Resistance to evaluation is as natural an urge as any — who wants to examine their own possible failures? But there is also the broader question about what use is made of evaluation data. There is no simple answer to this, and I am not about to offer one here.
I will suggest that one thing that is needed is for individual leaders to be more willing to face their own fears. It is not a calamity if a charitable effort is not very effective.
Once, some time ago, I was asked to perform a self-evaluation on a fairly large initiative. The results of the study would, in part, determine if our grant would be renewed. It turned out that the evidence suggested our hard work was tilting against too strong a headwind. It’s effectiveness was questionable, especially on the expansive level we were considering.
My report was met with consternation from my organization as well as from our funder. It threw a monkey wrench into things. We recalibrated and ended up doing something different (and arguably more effective, though that too had ambiguous results). Not the end of the world. But — in the moment — all of us involved had a great deal of fear. Our reputations, our livelihoods, our organizations were at stake.
Still, expressing honesty takes a culture that supports it. While easily said, this can be a hard thing in practice.
My latest article on my blog at the Washington Times Communities, Public Square Today, is now live:
Donate Services To A Candidate?
A good friend asks:
In your experience, are most services used by local candidates donated? A candidate for the . . . State House, whose staffer attended my recent social networking class, asked me today if I could provide free services. . . . I know that this candidate is getting some services for free. For example, a large and expensive web design company is donating her website. I would like to see this [person] elected, but I’m not in the position to spend a lot of time on a volunteer job. Reduced cost, yes, but free, no. I know I could make a case that my services are necessary to her and worth the money, but there is no use making the point if campaigns for State Houses are normally run completely by donations and volunteers. Any thoughts about this?
This is the dance that all campaigns (even national ones) play. Political campaigns are inherently time-limited and relentlessly focused on one thing: winning. Any money spent that does not have a clear and direct impact on votes is avoided at all costs.
 "Donations" by Flickr user freakapotimus So, campaigns know they need to pay for media time, there is no way around that. They know they need to pay for mailings. Everything else is fair game — staff time, phones, office space, Website (as you note), and social networking consulting services.
However, just because the campaign would like services donated does not mean that you have to provide them gratis. It is up to each individual person. Any free consulting work is a contribution in kind to the campaign (and would need to be valued and reported as such). So, not only is the campaign asking you to work for free, but they are also asking you for a donation.
And so, what is “normal” is not the issue here. The issue is: Do you want to make this campaign contribution?
People make campaign contributions for a lot of reasons. Some do it because they really want a person elected. Others do it because they want to be noticed later, if that person is elected. Some do it to feel closer to power. And, some companies donate their goods or services in part to market them to others, or in hopes that they will be retained on an official basis once the candidate wins.
Whatever your own decision, just make sure you follow all the relevant campaign finance rules for your state.
I’ve been thinking about workplace literacy lately. I’m thinking especially about professional offices (not so much the shop floor — my experience there is a lot older than my experience in front of a computer).
It seems to me that we are in the midst of a major change in how work gets done. Again. But people in management and leadership positions are increasingly unable to operate effectively within this environment. They are reliant on others to do simple tasks, or they work very inefficiently.
 "Keyboard and Encyclopedia" by Flickr user brad.rourke This is nothing new. Professionals have always had to learn new things and update their skills — using voicemail, getting by without a receptionist, learning how to use Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook.
Now, with so much work taking place almost completely within the digital, online realm, there is a new set of basic skills that every professional ought to have. People need to have a basic facility with online tools.
This is my list. I’ve probably missed a few items. What would you add?
- How to make hyperlinks. In the professional world, people are sharing links more and more. It is important to understand what a link needs to have, what it does not need to contain, and how different programs parse them. This may sound like rocket science, but it’s not.
- Always start a link you are emailing with “http://”. Why? Because most email readers look for that to tell them to make something into a clickable link.
- Include only what you need to. Lots of links are longer than necessary. For instance, look at your Facebook address. Everything after the “?” in your Facebook address is extraneous. How can you tell? Try deleting parts of the link and see if it still works! “http://www.facebook.com/bradrourke?ref=name” is functionally the same as “http://www.facebook.com/bradrourke“
- If it’s really, really long, consider using a url shortener like bit.ly. Why? Long links can get brokenb when they word-wrap. Short links don’t!
- Read and edit simple html code. This sounds scary but it is not at all. There are many occasions when you are adding something into a text box that will accept rudimentary html — for instance, most blog comment boxes (like the one at the bottom of this post). Facebook notes also use it. Knowing how to use basic html puts you in much more control of what you are doing. Some tips:
- To make something bold or italic, surround it with the right tags. Use <b>WORD</b> to make bold and <i>WORD</i> to make italic. See how it works? There’s a tag that says ‘turn on bold,” then there’s the word you want bold, then there’s the tag that says “turn off bold.” Simple!
- To make a real-live html link, you use the same kind of system, with an “opening” and a “closing” tag. Let’s say I want to make the word “Brad” into a link to my blog. Do this: <a href=”http://blog.bradrourle.com”>BRAD</a> See? the “<a href=”blah”> part says “here is a link and here is the address. The “</a>” says “OK, now the link is over.”
- Control metadata in documents. Someone shared a Word document with me that was supposed to be anonymous. I easily found out who wrote it with just about three clicks. That’s because of what’s known as the “metadata” embedded in all Microsoft Office documents. Professionals need to know about and be able to control that to avoid embarrassment.
- To look at and delete metadata in Office 2007 (the newest version), click on the big round button in the upper left of your document and choose “Prepare” then “Properties.” That’s where you will see who wrote the document, and various other useful bits of information.
- Use search tools. This sounds crazy, right? How hard is it to type something into the Google box? But you’d be surprised.
- People should know how to control their search results through the use of quotation marks. For instance, if you search for me by typing in my name, you will get lots of sites about Brad Pitt and Mickey Rourke. You need to enclose my name in quotes to get me!
- People also need to know how to use the + and – signs. Add “+” before a word, and you are telling the search engine, “this word must appear in the results.” Use the “-” sign and you are saying “only give me results that do not include this word.” Let’s say there are two Brad Rourkes (there are). You might make sure you find me as opposed to the other guy by searching for “Brad Rourke” +Maryland.
These, to me, are just basic skills but I encounter a number of people who seem to be flummoxed by them. I do know there are others. What’s on your list? Let me know in the comments!
 By Flickr user madmolecule I have worked in a lot of different kinds of offices in my career, and I’ve been a cubicle drone as well as a manager. I’ve hired and fired, and received my fair share of reviews.
Today I’m going to talk about feedback — getting it and giving it.
There is a great deal of conventional wisdom out there about feedback. It’s good, you should seek it out, you should give it in positive and constructive ways, et cetera.
But here’s what I’ve learned. Few people really want feedback.
More often than not, when we seek out feedback, we are really hoping to get validation. “Atta boy, great job!” is what we hope to hear. And more often than not, that’s how it works out. If you really gave me your honest feedback on the job I did, it would be painful. So we find good things to say about one another.
But no one does a great job all the time. And, in any professional environment, there are screw-ups every day.
I was fortunate enough to work in one office where feedback was taken seriously. It was a tough place to work, but it was very good for me. I learned to give honest feedback — including things that needed to change. I also learned to get feedback without going to pieces.
But very, very few places really value honest feedback. You can tell because meetings end without anyone having taken accountability. Mediocre product goes out the door because no one wanted to speak up and say it was mediocre (or, just as often, a senior manager spent all night fixing it because it was too uncomfortable to bring to the attention of the people who ought to be making the changes).
In my professional, civic life, and personal lives, I have been getting a lot of feedback lately. Some of it has been critical, and to be honest I have reacted poorly at times. Part of me hates being told I screwed up. (Even people who really want feedback can find it hard to take.)
But, all in all, I value negative feedback and I go out of my way to get it. People don’t like to give it and sometimes you have to prod them.
Because I now work with a variety of clients and partners, I have to calibrate what kind of feedback I give, and what kind of feedback I can expect. Some folks really want to know — and can take it. Others really don’t want feedback and it is hurtful to give it — at least bluntly. There’s usually a way to get the message across, even diplomatically.
But, speaking for myself, if you’re too diplomatic with me I won’t hear whatever negative feedback you are trying to convey. I need it straight, no chaser.
Because of this approach to feedback, folks who know me and have worked with me know to trust me when I tell them I think they did a good job: I only say it if it is true. No one is helped by the little workplace lies that keep us all comfortable.
My latest piece is posted at Public Square Today, my blog at Washington Times Communities:
Wikipedia And What To Do About Growth
 "Typing Contest" by Flickr user topgold According to the Wall Street Journal, at least for those who pay to subscribe, the number of volunteer contributors to the massive Wikipedia has plummeted. 49,000 editors dropped out in Q1 2009, compared to just one tenth that in Q1 2008. . . .
[But] Wikipedia is [still] the fifth most popular web site in the world. It gets something like 325 million visitors per month. In the last twelve months, the traffic has grown 20%. It’s not about to collapse.
But it is changing. It is a different animal than it was when it was founded in 2001. It used to be freewheeling, dependent on consensus. Now it is dependent on hierarchy and swift corrections.
It’s become an institution. It now has institutional concerns (perpetual survival, reputation) that it did not used to have.
Many public leaders who establish initiatives find themselves facing the same inflection point.
Continue reading to see what to keep in mind when faced with such things!
 "Newspaper" by Flcikr user brad.rourke This morning, as I went outside to pick up the many newspapers to which I subscribe to home delivery (I’m old school that way), I saw an extra bundle in the middle of the driveway. It was a free print version of a new online newspaper, being helpfully delivered to my doorstep.
My immediate thoughts were very negative. More to recycle. More to pick up every morning. More to read.
But my main thought was: No one asked me if I want this, they just toss it my way for me to deal with. This is the anger that so many feel when confronted with intrusions in daily life, and why spam is so objectionable. No one asked me. The implicit statement by the organization doing the spamming is: “Our goals are more important than your convenience.”
In the commercial world, junk mail has long been despised for just this reason. But, as the imperative to communicate more effectively spreads throughout the nonprofit and public sectors, we get more and more such unwelcome messages.
I get emails that seem to be directly from the heads of small- and medium-sized community benefit organizations from which I had never heard before. I am suddenly on new lists. They all tell me to click here, or respond there, in order to unsubscribe, which is nice. But I don’t unsubscribe, as I sort-of know the people and don’t want to hurt feelings.
This has caused me to pay far, far less attention to my email inbox than I used to, because I cannot control what comes into it. That’s the “push” approach to social marketing.
Meanwhile, information streams over which I do have control, like Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds, have become my main source of information.
The Pull World
That is the new, “Pull World.” There is a new best practice being developed before our eyes when it comes to social marketing. As is often the case, the nonprofit or community benefit sector is a bit behind the curve. It seems like they are all suddenly discovering targeted email newsletters, just as their utility is flying out the window.
What works in the Pull World? Useful sharing. This is what can drive effective social marketing in a world where mindshare is moving from passive receptacles (reading my Inbox) to active engagement (who am I following, what feeds am I reading). When organizations share usefully with me, I go ahead and pass those messages on to my own network.
The Pull World requires discipline from any organization. It’s not easy to move from a Push mentality to a Pull mentality. It’s even harder when you factor in the organizational needs that must be met – even in the public benefit sector, organizations are not in business just to share and make people feel good, they need to survive and thrive. That means, in many cases, that their marketing messages must get out there.
It is a fine line to walk between letting people know what we are up to, and just plain vanilla PR that will be ignored. There’s no magic bullet, and different organizations are answering this question in different ways:
- Some organizations designate a few people to be their public face and unleash them to share however they choose.
- Some organizations try to create an engaging mix of equal parts organizational PR, sharing of others’ work, and just useful information regardless of source.
- Some organizations try to create communities where users create and share material that has to do with the organization.
Since there is not a consensus set of best practices yet, many organizations are trying all of these and more tactics all at once. For someone looking for The Answer, it may be dispiriting to learn that there isn’t one. But that’s just how things go at the beginning of adoption curves.
For now, most of these strategies are playing out in social media, but as the novelty of Twitter and Facebook wears off and they become unremarkable platforms, I believe these overall approaches may migrate across platforms.
The Push-Pull World
Eventually we may get to a Push-Pull world, where organizations will put out messages for people to pull down on the various sharing platforms, and will also have a set of close-in friends who have given permission to be pushed to. A great deal of an organization’s attention will be directed toward moving people from the Pull category to the Push category.
Thinking about that helpful newspaper in my driveway, it’s an attempt to create a Push relationship. But because it starts with Push, it is inherently intrusive. It’s essentially a strategy that goes like this: “We will push something into your life (a newspaper) and if you don’t complain we will keep pushing it. Our revenue model (display advertising) depends in part on the numbers of such packages we are pushing. We hope that eventually you will act in some way on something that is contained in one of our pushed messages, which will allow us to point to impact as well as reach.”
I wonder if strategies like that one will survive. They’re expensive, both in wasted material (newsprint), wasted energy, and wasted goodwill. On the other hand, maybe enough people respond, and they push enough numbers, to make it worthwhile.
But I think things are changing and someday soon we will chuckle at some of what we take for granted nowadays. The same way we chuckle at press releases sent by postal mail.
When will we get there? I don’t know. What will that look like? I don’t know that either. Some of today’s experiments will pan out, others won’t.
Now, I have one last admission to make. I do have an email list to which I send every week or two. I think that everyone on it wants to be there. But just in case, please let me know if you ever get an email you don’t want from me. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Meantime, I am going to spend a little more time on my sharing usefully.
I’ve had more than my fair share of occasions to hire someone. I’ve done it on my own, and in teams of people. I’ve been the one making the decision, and I’ve been in an advisory capacity.
 "failure" by Flickr user tinou bao There’s a question I always ask, but that I myself have never been asked. Indeed, when I ask it, most colleagues seem to respond somewhere between rolling there eyes and looking at me in shock. But I think it’s one of the most important questions you can ask.
It’s this: “Tell me about a time that you, personally, failed.”
What I am listening for is the quality of being able to admit that I failed. In my experience, this is an incredibly rare quality. It is the building block for the kind of humility I want my colleagues to exhibit and that I want the initiatives I lead to exhibit.
I am looking for someone who actually has an answer to the question.
In fact, so few people actually answer the question as posed, that I have had to rethink my approach. I used to see the question as fundamental and not being able to answer it was a serious downcheck. Now I’ve flipped it around — not having a good answer is neutral, while having a decent answer (or any answer) is a big-time plus.
Failures Are Not Mistakes
Note that the question does not ask about a project that failed. That would elicit interesting information and reveal something important about how a candidate goes about understanding and organizing their work.
The question also does not ask about a “mistake.” We all make mistakes and they can be big and small. I am looking for a mistake that rises to the level that the person individually would call a failure. It may not have momentous consequences, but it needs to have significance.
This question is all about mindset.
I prefer to work with people who can admit they were wrong, because it makes it easier for me to admit when I am wrong. It’s so easy to see admission of failure as a sign of weakness. It’s what we’re taught from the beginning, especially when it comes to the workplace.
But people who behave that way are a drag. When they do fail, by not being able to own up to it, they create churn, resentment, and inefficiencies. Plus they seem to have bad karma that can just be a bummer to be around.
The Humility Of Organizations
But humility is an increasingly critical skill for organizations and their leaders to have, too. The last decade has seen the empowerment of the individual in ways no one could have imagined. As organizations make missteps in this environment, they will have to apologize. For an object lesson, look at the difference between Domino’s Pizza (who addressed a problem head-on, with sincere remorse) and United Airlines (who stonewalled and tried a token donation to a nonprofit).
In this environment, to pretend that one is always right is no longer just ludicrous. It is a recipe for — well, for failure.
Everyone fails. I want the organizations, initiatives, and people I work with to be able to own up. This is the kind of weakness that makes everyone stronger.
Last night, on vacation with extended family, a few of us stayed up late playing Risk. As players of this game know, these episodes can go on for hours and hours. We laughed harder than I had laughed in a long time.
 "Board Game Meetup #1 @ Firenze" by Flickr user katsuma As I went to bed (of course the game is not finished, it is likely to last for another day at least), I remarked to myself on what a good time we had talking. It’s not often people spend such extended time together in conversation. It seemed to me that one of the functions of board games and card games is to create a diversion for people, so that when conversation ebbs we can focus on something else. Then, renewed, we can focus again on the conversation. Without this alternative focus, the conversation might burn out.
The game also provides a constant stream of fodder for conversation, adding in new minor events on which to comment.
It felt good and this morning I am thankful for the role board games play in our lives. It makes me wonder how we can translate that second focus into other things too — it’s helpful to be able to take a break within the intensity of conversation, to be able to keep it rolling. For instance, in a very intense project, how could we use an alternate focus to create the opportunity for a little rest, to help maintain intensity?
 "Tortoise and the hare" by Flickr user Bad Rabbit, Inc. The White House has announced that it will divulge details shortly about how it will wind down the seemingly successful Cash for Clunkers program. As of July, car dealers nationwide had done $1.8 billion in deals under the program, and are on track to exhaust the $3 billion available for the program. The initiative has been held up as an unmitigated success, burning through its initial capital quickly and needing more because it’s just so popular.
But there are cracks showing. Car dealers are complaining about slow reimbursements from the government. In some states, half of the car dealers have ceased offering Clunker deals because they can’t afford to wait for the funds anymore. Automobile manufacturer financing arms have stepped in to offer short term loans to dealers who are in trouble.
These difficulties show what can happen when two cultures that operate at fundamentally different paces have to work together. These are the same kinds of problems that can get in the way when any two organizations hook up as partners.
On the one hand, you’ve got the car dealer world, where things operate on a monthly basis but where deals need to get sewn up within days. Dealers operate on very slim margins and need to stay afloat from month to month. They’ve got payroll and debts to service.
On the other hand, you’ve got government, which has to make sure it does the right things and doesn’t make rash actions that can’t be undone. Government has to take the long view. It also is hard to get it moving. There aren’t many (any) mechanisms to get money flowing into the commercial sector easily or quickly.
These are two worlds that just operate on a fundamentally different pace. Each one must see the other as behaving unreasonably.
Sometimes, when organizations are planning to work together, they come from worlds that operate at different paces. For instance, foundations and service organizations have wildly different time horizons. This isn’t something that can just be papered over, but there may be some ways to plan ahead and mitigate troubles:
- Be honest about comparing your timelines. Often, organizations will like to say they are “responsive” when their default rhythms are 60 or 90 days and more. Other organizations operate to the rhythms of their semiannual board meetings. Still others look at the end of each week as a make-or-break deadline. Compare these — honestly.
- Recognize there may be pace-related problems. Once you see the different paces involved, you can see if there may be problems. If you recognize this ahead of time, it will be easier to handle them with equanimity. That way if trouble brews it won’t be seen immediately as failure.
- Acknowledge the need to change course if need be. There may need to be creative solutions to problems that crop up (for instance, short term loans from auto financing arms). There needs to be room to make these happen.
- Create a no-hard-feelings exit path. Sometimes it just doesn’t work for organizations with different paces to work together. That doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s fault that the plan failed — it’s just the way things are. If there’s an easy way for organizations to get out of the deal without engendering ill will, maybe they can come back around later.
What is your experience when organizations with different paces collide?
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