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148. Diana Jones: The New Management Model — Guarding Group Relationships

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Human action lies at the core of the application of Austrian economics to business: how do people act and how can we develop the best understanding of why they act that way. We apply that thinking to customers, and we can also apply it to business organizations. If we are able to answer these questions well, we can develop a profitable business model and an effective management model. Our guest Diana Jones has a distinctive perspective about the management model that’s based on understanding people’s personal and private experiences rather than their place in the hierarchy or their formal role in the process.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Relationships are fundamental to all systems thinking, and to all business management. Sociometry is a tool to measure relationships.

Sociometry measures relationships between people and within groups. The unit of measure is distance. People can feel close to each other and other group members, and this closeness results in certain types of behavior. People can feel distant from each other, resulting in a different kind of behavior. They can also feel close or distant to concepts, like the company mission or the annual plan, and to institutions, like the Board of Directors or the HR department or a firm’s way of pursuing innovation. They can feel close or distant to colleagues in a meeting, or to the meeting purpose and agenda. Measuring and understanding relationship distance contribute directly to performance management.

Sociometry reveals the disproportionate importance of informal structures over formal structures.

It’s easy to think of the formal organization chart as the model for managing a firm. Planning descends from higher levels to lower levels, along with instructions on how to implement and what to do. It’s not how companies function in reality.

What makes companies work is relationships. People form bonds with each other, and the bonds they form shape the work that they do and how they do it. The bonds are often forged via sharing of knowledge and experiences that are private and personal rather than business and process knowledge. Productivity comes from people connecting on shared experiences, so that these personal and private relationships become more relevant to business operations than the formal structures, such as hierarchy. When relationships change, behaviors change, and vice versa. When relationships shift, the whole business system shifts.

Formal structures don’t work, at least not in the way top management thinks. And the titles associated with hierarchical position can be alienating and toxic to relationships, symbolizing and reinforcing distance rather than closeness.

Sociometry helps to focus on these informal relationships and especially on the most important ones that make a big difference: for example, to improve customer service.

There’s a role for leadership in this system of informal relationships, but it’s not the one that generally taught or written about.

Leadership can emerge amidst informal relationships, but it doesn’t come from authority. Leadership is not to be confused with position in the hierarchy. Leadership entails the communication of vision and helping people understand it, share it, and do the right things to achieve it.

The informal structure and its relationships make the formal structure work. The formal structure produces cynicism, anxiety, and reactionary behavior. The informal structure can eliminate these negative tendencies, unleashing untapped talent and enabling and refreshing the firm.

Leaders help people as guardians of these informal relationships: monitoring, empathizing, and nurturing.

Many people need help working in groups.

It’s typical practice in business management to assign people to groups: agile teams, project teams, product development teams, functional teams, and so on. It’s seldom questioned whether or not individuals understand how to work in groups. Usually, they don’t. They’re unsure whether to speak up or be compliant, or whether conflict is valued to arrive at consensus or is to be avoided.

This is one more element of Diana Jones’ thinking and method that tells us that the traditional thinking of business organization and management process is mostly wrong. Hierarchy and formal organizational models don’t work, titles and authoritative roles are counter-productive, and reporting relationships are irrelevant when compared to relationship distance / closeness. There’s a lot of the traditional management model blueprint we need to scrap.

The better route to exceptional team participation and team results is via empathy.

In Economics For Business, which is the application of the principles of Austrian economics to business management, we allocate great importance to the use of empathy as a tool, usually in the relationship between a business or brand and its customer. For example, we use empathic diagnosis to understand a customer’s dissatisfactions and unmet wants.

In Diana Jones’s model, empathy is an internal organizational tool. She deploys it in a sophisticated way that identifies four different types of application.

  • Cognitive empathy: imagining and understanding how a person feels and what they might be thinking.
  • Emotional empathy: accurately reading and sharing the feelings of another person, and reflecting on those feelings in a way that helps everyone involved.
  • Compassionate empathy: going beyond understanding to taking action that helps people deal practically with difficult situations about which they’re emotional.
  • Group empathy: the capacity to read the emotional tone of a group that’s sharing a challenging experience.

The core competency is the ability to read people and their emotional tone or state. Diana Jones gives the skill a name: interpersonal perception. It’s a skill that can be developed in a learning loop of experience, experimentation, curiosity, and intuition.

Additional Resources

“Trust-Distance Matrix: Assessing the Cost of Distance in Business Relationships” (PDF): Download PDF

Leadership Levers: Releasing The Power Of Relationships For Exceptional Participation, Alignment, and Team Results by Diana Jones: Buy It On Amazon

Visit Diana’s personal website at Diana-Jones.com

For A New Entrepreneurial Organization Of Our Economy.

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Biologists tell us that life is not the result of the carbon-based matter of which we are composed but of the organization of that matter. For example, none of the atoms or molecules or neurons in our brains are conscious, but the ways they are connected and organized results in consciousness as an emergent property.

Biological systems and economic systems have many shared characteristics, and the influence of organization on system outcomes is one of them.

The organization of firms in our system of economic production may be becoming dysfunctional. Instead of a network of highly productive entrepreneurial innovators driving betterment and economic growth, some sectors of the economy are witnessing  new forms of more concentrated organization in which dominant large corporations command outsize shares of transactions, revenues and profits.

Why is this a problem? We can identify at least two consequences of this trend. One is the emergence of what Ludwig von Mises called in Human Action “a salaried managerial oligarchy”. Such an organization is the opposite of what drives innovation and growth.  What Mises calls “the marvelous achievements of corporate business” are determined by the entrepreneur who decides “without any managerial interference” where to employ capital and how much capital to employ. These are “the essential decisions which are instrumental in the conduct of business. They always fall upon the entrepreneur”.

The second, related, consequence is the build-up of bureaucracy in large corporations. These bureaucratic structures are counter-productive – i.e. their purpose is not to increase productivity but to constrain it. Much of the bureaucracy results from a response to or is a requirement of government intervention. A lot of the bureaucratic activity falls under the heading of compliance, i.e. confirming the corporate subordination to government regulation and interventions.  The rest of the “woke” HR internal policy making is similarly driven by government requirements for demonstrated alignment with so-called social justice policies.

A more entrepreneurial organization of the economy around smaller, innovation-focused firms could result in less waste of resources and people by eliminating or reducing the total incidence of bureaucracy. We could also expect less lobbying for government favors (another form of wasted resources and effort), and less corporatism (the tendency for government and corporations to converge in counter-productive activities such as surveillance and anti-competitive lawmaking).

On the positive side, we could also expect that more entrepreneurial organization will produce a shift back to consumer sovereignty, the positive feedback process whereby consumer perception of value determines what goods and services are produced. Government and their corporate allies would rather believe that they know better what consumers should value, and would like to enforce their superior knowledge by limiting consumer choice. Healthcare and health insurance are a good example: an unholy alliance of big corporations and big government leaves consumers with an artificially narrow set of choices at artificially high prices. The energy sector is analogous to healthcare; the recent Texas blackouts provided an example of regulated corporations in alliance with their government controllers reducing the available options to the degree that the constrained power supply was unable to meet demand at a critical time. Entrepreneurs exist to ensure that supply meets demand, and the government-corporate failure in Texas was a particularly egregious example of how this feedback loop can break down.

The economy is a network of trust relationships. We can’t create complex, durable networks of cooperation unless the contracts between the customers and firms who are cooperating are fair and inclusive and engender trust. People are beginning to suspect that the contracts with big business corporations are unfair. Facebook, Google, and others take individuals’ personal data and re-sell it in different forms without compensating the individual who generated it in the first place. Amazon offers a platform to third-party sellers then uses the learning obtained to under-price them or undermine them through the use of corporate economic power. Energy providers conspire with government to limit user choices and drive up prices.

In an entrepreneurially organized economy, we’d base exchange on fairer contracts that are more innovative, more dynamic, and more inclusive in terms of sharing the gains of growth, and we’d create positive networks or positive feedbacks, where fairness and inclusiveness lead to more cooperation in the system. We’d put simpler – less corporately bureaucratic – pieces together to generate responsively dynamic behavior in economic systems. The crony capitalism of big government-entangled corporations has damaged the idea of fair economic contracts and thus has actually harmed the positive consumer feedback loop. This reduces trust, thereby reducing capitalism’s capacity to innovate and reducing capitalism’s capacity to create progress. Instead, it has created a system that rewards rent-seeking and value extraction rather than value creation.

56. Steven Phelan on Building Trust and Exerting Control in Collaborative Business Relationships

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All business relationships have downside risk: your counterparty / partner / vendor / customer / investor may not perform as you expect or require. In today’s interconnected economy, more and more elements of your business model are provided by relationship partners. It’s wise to recognize downside risk potential and to know how to mitigate it.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

There are two relevant types of risk to consider:

  1. Relational risk, sometimes thought of as character risk: that your business partner may not perform as you’ve agreed to because they are taking advantage of you in some way.
  2. Performance risk, sometimes thought of as competence risk: your business partner intends to perform as agreed, but is incapable of doing so for competence, capability or resource reasons.

For entrepreneurs, there are two levers for risk mitigation: trust and control.

Trust includes Goodwill Trust and Competence Trust — trusting your partner’s character and capabilities respectively.

Control includes output control, behavior control and social control.

Output control is generally thought of as setting measurable targets and monitoring performance relative to those targets. Did your partner meet the agreed-to sales targets in dollars or units? If they did not, they are not performing. This is a means of performance or output control.

Behavioral control focuses not on output but on behavioral inputs: did all the team members check in at 8am this morning as agreed? There is no guarantee that the desired behavior will lead to the desired output performance, but you think they are correlated and the behavioral commitment sends a signal of positive intent.

Social control is thought of as shared values and norms. If the collaborating teams or individuals have shared values and a highly-networked clan-like environment, they are more likely to have shared commitment to the goal.

Trust is much more positive for business relationships than control.

When people in business relationships exhibit integrity and good character, and perceive it and experience it in their collaborators, there is less need for output controls and behavioral controls. They’ll do the right thing without those controls in place.

From an economic point of view, trust reduces transaction costs — the cost of making sure that people are following agreements and doing what is expected of them.

Trust is a business competency.

Trust holds relationships together. For this reason, it is a business competency. It’s the kind of competency that fits well into the Austrian economics mindset: it’s a soft skill, not quantifiable, highly individualistic, with a significant moral component to it (doing the right thing).

Viewing trust as a business competency means that entrepreneurs are able to develop trust-building as a skill, one that can be reinforced and strengthened over time. It starts with an individual’s nature: you are someone who can be trusted. Such a nature attracts others who value it. Business speeds up, and runs more smoothly, with less need for high-litigation problem solving and more instances of viable handshake agreements. Start with your own character and seek to identify the same character type in those you deal with. There’s an element of Austrian subjectivism: there is no formula for “how I can trust someone”, but you can develop the skill over time, even learning from entrepreneurial error when you mistakenly trust someone who doesn’t deliver.

Trust is a value.

People want to feel trusted and seek relationships that feature trust. Trust is a business skill that’s as valuable to you as operational knowledge or financial expertise. Learn how to build and maintain trusted relationships with other stakeholders.

Trust is a resource.

Resource and competency are two sides of the same coin. Trust is a resource that fits into Austrian Capital Theory as an asset that generates revenue from customers. Think of relationship capital and social capital and the culture of the organization that generates trust as assets on the balance sheet, even if conventional accounting can not recognize them.

The 4 Cores Of Trust

In The Speed Of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, Stephen M.R. Covey identified 4 cores of trust.

Integrity: Honesty — telling the truth and gaining credibility by doing so. Leaving no gap between what you say and what you do. Humility — being concerned about what is right and not just with being right. And the courage to do the right thing.

Intent: People judge you by your intent, which grows out of your character. If you “declare your intent” and your behaviors are consistent with your stated intent, people will trust you. Your motive is clear and honest, and your agenda is open.

Capabilities: Can you do what you say you intend to do? Do you exude confidence in your own capacity?

Results: What’s your track record? Do you take responsibility for results?

Integrity and Intent relate to character, capabilities and results relate to competence.

In a high trust relationship, everything speeds up. Trusting people give you the benefit of the doubt. Morale is high, people volunteer to go the extra mile, and they don’t resist changes you want to make. High trust liberates the relationship and its potential.

But don’t trust too much, or where it’s not justified.

In the long run, we all gain by trusting each other to give and not to take. But at the outset, you may not know if you are dealing with a taker or a giver. You should maintain a contingent element in your business relationships.

When you have many opportunities, you should be very intolerant of people who do not live up to their word. Do not be forgiving at all.

If you have fewer opportunities, maybe you have to be more tolerant of others doing the wrong thing and try to remedy the situation while maintaining the relationship. But giving people more than 2 or 3 chances to do the right thing is about the limit. Be willing to cut people off. Re-evaluate and measure the level of trust continuously. Be on guard especially at the earliest stages.

Trust-building Mechanisms

Trust in relationships is a business principle, and, as always, entrepreneurs need mechanisms to apply their principles effectively. Steve Phelan gave us the story of a large and successful General Contractor in the building industry. This GC put an enormous amount of time and effort into relationships with sub-contractors, so that there came to be tremendous trust between the parties. He would start them on small jobs, and gradually increase the size of the job in which they were invited to participate. At each escalation, the sub-contractor had the opportunity to prove that they could handle both the competence and character aspects of the relationship, as well as the capability and results aspects. Trust was built over time — a learning process for trust.

The same was true on the customer side. The General Contractor would decline to bid on very large jobs from a developer with whom he had not worked before. He would always start with a small commitment, and demonstrate mutual integrity and shared intent at that level, before proceeding to larger jobs.

Over time, as a result of this trust learning process, the General Contractor’s reputation and relationships became stronger and stronger, enabling smoother and more efficient operations in good times, and resiliency in downturns.

Summary

You can build trust in relationships and you can recover it. Don’t just think in terms of compliance, think about building a network of trust around you with customers, suppliers, employees, investors and partners. You can lower transaction costs and make your business run more efficiently. Make the investment to strengthen your capabilities in trust-building. Build a culture and a set of norms where people mange themselves and don’t have to be watched around the clock 24/7. Shape the organization you want to operate and live within for the rest of your life.

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