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When Cuyahoga County executives decided to complete a round of layoffs in 2011, they decided to experiment with a new way of letting people go. As their employees opened the front doors of their homes the next morning, they were greeted with a plainclothes sheriff’s detective to deliver their pink slips.

The company claims it was trying to find a method that was easiest on the people being laid off. But it seems obvious that they were really looking for the easiest path for their own management. 

After questions came up regarding the idiocy of this decision, the HR Director doubled down, saying this method was “the smoothest way and most dignified way of doing layoffs.”

Personally, I don’t see anything dignified about receiving your lay-off notice in the same manner as an arrest warrant. And the only person who would consider this “smooth” is the manager that’s too much of a coward to have the necessary conversation.

But while this is may be an extreme, the process of firing people is rarely handled well. It’s often one of the most difficult jobs a manager will ever have to do. Even when it’s clearly the right business decision, you’re still telling someone that he no longer has a job and no longer has a means of supporting his family. That’s a tough situation for anyone, especially if it’s someone you’ve worked with for years.

And despite this difficulty – and despite the importance of handling these situations well – most companies offer no training or preparation on how to fire people. Maybe because it’s a difficult topic to discuss. Or maybe people believe that they’ll be able to prepare once they’re in the situation.

Except the process of letting someone go with professionalism and dignity begins well before the final meeting. And unless people understand the fundamentals of firing someone well, they’re unlikely to stumble their way into it.

While letting someone go will never be an easy part of a manager’s job, there are a number of things you can do to better manage the process. And hopefully avoid sending sheriff’s detectives to your employees’ houses.  

Don’t Think That You Don’t Need a Reason.

If you work in an employment-at-will state, that means you can fire someone for any reason or no reason at all, right? Wrong.

For one, employment-at-will does not authorize discrimination. There’s an ever-growing alphabet soup of legislative exceptions that limit an employer’s ability to fire people “at-will.” To name a few: 

• Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA)
• Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
• Civil Rights Acts
• Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)
• Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA)
• Equal Pay Act (EPA)
• Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
• False Claims Act (FCA)
• Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA)
• Genetic Information and Nondiscrimination Act (GINA)
• National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)
• Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA)
• Worker Adjustment, Retraining, and Notice Act (WARN)
• Multiple Human Relations Acts and Workers’ Compensation Acts that are dependent on the state.

There are plenty of others and the list keeps growing. And while it’s completely ridiculous that you can still be fired for being LGTBQ in many states, in general, employment-at-will doesn’t offer a blank check to fire anyone you might not like.

Which, although it may add to your own paperwork, is a very good thing. While the majority of people aren’t bigots looking to fire anyone of a different gender, race, or religion, everyone does have their own biases. And while we’re often quick to spot them in others, most of us will overlook the same behavior in ourselves. 

Firing someone without an objective reason – because they just don’t feel right – is a sign that you’re falling prey to an internal bias. And making a critical decision based on irrational data.

But while it’s always important to understand the legal requirements, your standard of behavior shouldn’t be dictated by that minimum. Your own ethics and integrity should demand a higher threshold of performance.

Firing someone will have an immediate, negative impact on their life. Doing so for reasons other than an objective performance issue is both unfair and unethical.

It also sends the message to the rest of your team that they can be let go for ambiguous reasons. And few things undermine the creative output of a team like a fear for their jobs. 

Regardless of whether you work in an employment-at-will environment, good leaders always have a solid, performance-based justification for letting someone go. Anything less is just poor management.

Don’t Fire Anyone without First Giving Them the Chance to Improve.

“Be transparent about why the termination is happening. If you did things right, it shouldn’t be a surprise to the person.” – Christine Tsai 

Few things make someone angrier than feeling blindsided on performance issues. And nowhere is this more critical than in making a decision to fire someone. 

Unless it’s an egregious act – or brings up issues with someone’s integrity – there’s little excuse for not trying to help people improve through coaching and feedback. 

Yes, giving negative feedback is tough. It’s easy to look the other way while performance problems are minor. But problems rarely get better on their own. And the longer you wait to address them, the more difficult they’ll eventually be to resolve. 

People deserve the chance to understand where they’re falling short and take action to correct these areas. This only happens when we’re transparent, offer constructive feedback, and give people the chance to make an improvement.

The actual termination will likely be somewhat of a surprise. No one ever thinks they should be fired, or believes you’ll actually go through with it, regardless of the feedback they’ve received to date. But hopefully, it doesn’t come without warning. 

Firing someone is a difficult situation for everyone. If people have the opportunity to improve and don’t take advantage of it, it makes a difficult situation a little easier. And it makes it clear that it’s the best overall decision for everyone involved.

Don’t Fire Anyone While You’re Angry

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret,” Ambrose Bierce advised. And just like our words, decisions made and actions taken while angry often become a major source of regret. 

Firing someone should never be a snap decision. In addition to the impact on the employee, it creates a significant cost in hiring and training a replacement. Before going down this path, we should objectively see it as the only viable path forward. 

Anger prevents this rational analysis. It makes us hotheaded. It causes us to choose long shots over safe bets, rely more on stereotypes, and ignore the advice of others. Mainly, anger clouds our ability to rationally assess the situation and weigh different options – setting us up for a poor long-term decision.

Take some time to cool down. Make sure that you can say you’ve calmly assessed all of your options before taking action. And make a sound decision – preferably one you won’t regret later.

At the very least, don’t create a reputation as someone who can’t control himself when things don’t go his way.

Don’t Procrastinate.

“Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt,” wrote the great David Mamet in Ronin, emphasizing the importance of being decisive and moving forward. And whether it’s battle or business, the ability to make a decision and commit to a necessary course of action is often the difference between success and failure.

Once you recognize the need to let someone go – or even just start the process – it’s critical to act quickly and decisively. It’s easy to let personal sympathies prevent you from following through once you know the right decision. And it’s easy to rationalize giving people yet another chance. But doing so just delays the inevitable. And it makes the eventual termination much more drawn out and painful for everyone involved. 

Managers rarely regret acting too quickly in letting someone go, but many regret waiting too long. Doing so is unfair to the organization, the rest of your team who’s picking up the slack, and most importantly, to the employee. As Peter Drucker wrote in The Effective Executive, 

“It is the duty of the executive to remove ruthlessly anyone—and especially any manager—who consistently fails to perform with high distinction. To let such a man stay on corrupts the others. It is grossly unfair to the whole organization. It is grossly unfair to his subordinates who are deprived by their superior’s inadequacy of opportunities for achievement and recognition. Above all, it is senseless cruelty to the man himself. He knows that he is inadequate whether he admits it to himself or not. Indeed, I have never seen anyone in a job for which he was inadequate who was not slowly being destroyed by the pressure and the strains, and who did not secretly pray for deliverance.“

Don’t Try to Handle It Alone

Firing someone is not a regular occurrence for most managers. So you shouldn’t expect to be a practiced expert. Yet there are likely other managers who’ve handled this situation before. And your HR department will have the benefit of being involved in similar occurrences as well. Use the resources at your disposal.

The other concern is that, especially in the US, anyone can sue anybody at any time. Having someone else involved, especially someone more practiced, can help keep things in control and make sure people are treated equally across the organization. 

Don’t Drag it Out

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

When it comes time to deliver the message, don’t drag out the conversation. Starting out with some pleasant small talk is disingenuous and sends the wrong signal. Doing so is simply a way for you to delay what’s necessary.

You want to demonstrate both concern and respect, but make sure your words are straightforward. Being vague or indecisive only confuses people and makes them believe that the decision isn’t final.

People will ask for reasons and explanations, but avoid getting into a debate over the decision. There’s little benefit in repeating past performance discussions and doing so will only lead to an argument. And again, there’s no benefit it letting people believe they can change your mind at this point.

While it may seem harsh in the moment, delivering the message quickly and in a straightforward manner is much kinder than drawing it out or letting someone believe it’s up for further debate.

Don’t Tell People That They’ll Be Better Off.

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” – Steve Jobs

Yes, Steve Jobs was ultimately better off after having been fired from Apple. And the same ends up being true for many people over the long course of their careers. If someone’s struggling in their current role, starting fresh somewhere else is likely to be in their long-term best interest. 

But no one wants to hear that the moment they get fired. They’re worried about what they’re going to go home and tell their family. They’re worried about paying next month’s bills. They’re not thinking about how this will impact their long-term career. Reserve this thought for yourself.

And don’t tell people that’s it’s just as difficult for you as it is for them. It’s not. Not even close. 

Don’t End on a Negative Note.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

Losing a job can be traumatic. And people will likely look back on this day as a very difficult one. But through it all, they should always be treated with empathy, respect, and dignity. 

The intent isn’t to demean or debase anyone. It’s in everyone’s best interest if they move forward with as little issues as possible.

So make sure to end things on a positive note. Wish him or her well. Help them understand the next steps. And be encouraging that they’ll find a job that will better fit their skills. 

The Right Way to Let Someone Go.

“My advice on firing is simple: Treat that person the same way you’d want to be treated if you were in that situation. They’re still a good person, just not the right fit. So how do you help them move on in a productive way that allows them to maintain their dignity?” – Mary Barra

How you treat someone who’s on their way out the door will say a lot about your character. We’ve all seen managers who’ve handled this situation with professionalism and grace. And we’ve all seen managers who’ve acted like petulant children.

People deserve the respect and dignity that we would want if the situations were reversed. Remembering that golden advice we’ve heard since kindergarten:  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” shows us which practices are appropriate, and which are just our own rationalizations. 

How would you want to be treated?

• To not be let go without an objective, performance-based reason.
• To have understood you weren’t meeting expectations and given the chance to improve.
• To be treated with the respect of a direct, straightforward conversation.
• To be told without delay once a decision is made instead of being strung along.
• And to have things end on as positive of a note as possible.

How you handle this situation really does matter to the employee who is being fired. And it matters to the rest of your team – all of whom are using this as a measure of how they could be treated at some point in the future.

When Walter Mischel ran his famous marshmallow test in the 1970s, he wanted to show how our willpower develops with age. At a nursery school, he tested a series of 3, 4, and 5-year olds to see if they could refrain from eating a treat, such as a marshmallow. They were shown the treat, told that the adult was leaving for a while, and if they wanted to, they could eat the treat right away. But if they waited until the experimenter came back, they would be rewarded with two treats.

Some children ate the treat immediately. Others stuck it out until the experimenter returned and got two treats. And others managed to wait a little while, but then gave up and dove in.

Decades later, Mischel and his colleagues checked in on the participants, now adults with families and careers. Surprisingly, they found that those children who waited the full time grew into more successful adults. And since then, everyone with an internet connection has preached the importance of willpower and self-control as a critical aspect of life’s success.

But what if the study tells us something else entirely?

A team of researchers at the University of Rochester ran a similar experiment, but added a twist. Before bringing out the marshmallows, the researchers split the kids into two groups and set them to work on an art project. The experimenter gave them some mediocre art supplies and promised to come back with some better items. In one group, the experimenter delivered on her promise and came back with better art supplies. In the other, she didn’t, and returned with nothing but apologies.

Afterwards, the researchers recreated Mischel’s marshmallow test. Not surprisingly, the children who saw the experimenter as reliable were more likely to wait and earn two treats. And those who learned the experimenter was unreliable were more likely to eat the marshmallow before she came back.

How people respond to the marshmallow test – and the level of success that they go on to achieve in life – does involve a sense of discipline and self-restraint. But it’s also influenced by how willing people are to put their trust in others.

Willpower and self-control are important. But so is being able to trust in others and earn their trust in kind. And for a leader, there’s nothing more important than building and reinforcing this behavior.

Trust is Leadership.

“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships,” wrote 7 Habits author Stephen Covey. And just as trust is critical for relationships and communication, it’s an absolute requirement for leadership. Leaders cannot lose the trust of their people and continue to influence them. It just doesn’t happen. 

Consider those you see as leaders. Consider the criteria you run through in your head before putting them in this category.

The most important one rarely involves skills or experience. It likely doesn’t have much to do with position or title. And the amount of followers someone has usually doesn’t factor heavily into the equation. 

The most important question concerns trust. Do we trust this person? Do we trust her to help us reach a better place in the future? Do we trust him to help us accomplish things that we can’t on our own?

Trust is always the foundation of leadership. As people lose trust in their company’s management, it’s easy to see how their leader’s ability to influence quickly goes with it. Politics is no different. How many people consider their elected officials to be true leaders? For the majority of the country, they don’t equate grandstanding false claims and furthering personal agendas to be trustworthy behaviors. So it’s not surprising to see how few people consider our “political leaders” to have earned their self-proclaimed title.

So if we expect to avoid this fate – and continue to be seen as the leaders we aspire to be – building and maintaining trust should always be our top priority. The good news is that it isn’t complicated – no more so than managing a bank account.

Keep a Positive Trust Bank Account

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” – J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

More than 250 years ago, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an English Presbyterian minister, wrote one of the most influential papers in all of mathematics. Yet working on other things, he never published it in his lifetime. After his death in 1761, his friend Richard Price reviewed his papers and came upon an essay that discussed a method of estimating future likelihoods based on a limited amount of available data.

This spawned Bayesian thinking, which offers a model for updating our beliefs or predictions based on new information. It tells us to take our preexisting beliefs and combine them with observed evidence to create an updated view of the topic. Initial Beliefs + Recent Experience = New and Improved Belief. And as the posterior becomes the prior of every new iteration, it’s an evolving system, bringing us ever closer to more informed ideas and beliefs.

Straightforward enough, and for those who are willing to consider changing their minds from time to time, it’s nothing new. At one point you believed in the Tooth Fairy, eventually you were presented with enough evidence to question that belief, and eventually (hopefully?) you changed your mind on the topic.

Trust works in much the same way. Most people see trust as an on/off switch or as a black-and-white decision. As in, I trust you, but not that guy sitting next to you. But in reality, trust is more grayscale. It’s a gradient that evolves with every interaction and experience. As in, I may have trusted you 50% yesterday, but after you ate my yogurt from the fridge, it’s down to 45%.

Trust isn’t something that’s gained and held indefinitely, it’s something that needs to be built and reinforced with every action and decision. 

In this way, trust operates similar to a bank account. Everyone, particularly people who start in new leadership positions, begin with a certain amount of trust in their account. Every good leadership decision adds more to it. Each poor decision causes you to pay out some of that account to your people.

As we see leaders make repeated bad decisions, they continue paying out of their account. Until one day, one final poor decision bankrupts them and it’s too late. Once your account is empty, you’ve lost the ability to lead that group of people.

Conversely, leaders who make good decisions that benefit their people and their organization will continue to put deposits into their trust account. Then even when they make a mistake, and everyone does, they’ll have plenty stored away to pay it out without bankrupting themselves.

So how does a leader keep their trust bank in the black? By consistently demonstrating three things: integrity, empathy, and ability.

Integrity: Live Your Values

“No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.” – John Morley

Many managers will claim that they’re willing to hire someone of questionable character if it comes with a lot of talent. But they usually end up regretting this decision. Because regardless of someone’s talent, if you can’t trust their integrity, you can’t trust them.

Talent on its own is never enough to earn trust. Think of the people you trust, it’s likely those who’ve demonstrated strong character regardless of the adversity or situation.

When we ask people to trust us, we’re asking them for more than mere reliance. I rely on my phone’s alarm clock to wake me up in the morning, but I don’t trust it. I rely on one of my coworkers to tell overly embellished stories, but this is the very reason that I don’t trust him.

When we ask people to trust us, we’re asking them to accept a certain level of vulnerability and open themselves to the possibility of betrayal. As Suzanne Collins wrote, “For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.” It only makes sense that for people to accept this risk, they’ll need to feel secure in the knowledge that we won’t forsake it.

And one of the few ways to show people we’re worthy of this trust is through a foundation of integrity.

As leaders, we demonstrate integrity by living out our values every day – not just when things are going well, but when adversity is piling on and it becomes easy to take a shortcut. As Ulysses S. Grant once put it,

“The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.”

We demonstrate integrity by following through on our commitments and keeping our promises – a path that requires us to say no to things that fall outside of our core mission. Because the best way to keep the promises you make is to only make the promises you can keep.

And we demonstrate integrity by admitting our mistakes. The great thing about mistakes is that your people already know you made one. It’s usually obvious to everyone involved. They’re just waiting to see how you’re going to handle it- will you recognize it and fess up or refuse to take agency? One path turns a bad situation around and builds trust while the other draws down your trust account.

Integrity alone won’t build trust. But without integrity, trust can’t happen. As the Greek philosopher Democritus wisely said,

“Do not trust all men, but trust men of worth; the former course is silly, the latter a mark of prudence.”

Empathy: Show People You Care

“Any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves.” – Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.

No one trusts the stereotype used car salesman. That guy wearing a checkered blazer and calling himself Honest Bob may be spewing out a lot of things, but trust is definitely not one of them. Because we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he is not looking out for our best interest.

One of the most common ways that leaders lose trust is that they lose empathy with their people. People begin to see them as in it for themselves or self-distracted. Which, given how busy we all are, is an easy trap to fall into. As the relentless demands on your time grow, sacrificing the time needed to connect with people and demonstrate empathy inevitably happens. 

But this puts us in a vicious cycle, because suddenly everything becomes more difficult. As you lose empathy, trust erodes and it takes more time and effort to accomplish things with your team. Which leads to further frustration, more time commitments, and less time to re-establish this connection.

So one solution is to make empathy a part of your daily or weekly schedule. We sustain those behaviors that become ingrained in our process, and demonstrating empathy is no different.

Find ways to take an interest in people’s lives outside of work. Start each morning by grabbing a cup of coffee and holding informal discussions with your people. Focus some work discussions on career development and aspirations as opposed to operational status. And reinforce your interest by giving people support in their pursuit of those goals.

When Eric Schmidt ran staff meetings at Google, he began each one by asking people to provide an informal trip report of the activities they did over the weekend. What came across as impromptu conversations was actually his way of making sure his team members got to know each other as people, with families and passions outside of work.

Marissa Mayer developed a variation during her time at Yahoo. Rather than trip reports she started her staff meetings with thank-yous. In her words,

“My staff called it the family prayer. You have to thank another team member for something that happened last week. You can’t thank yourself, and you can’t repeat what someone else said. This ends up being a nice way to recap the entire week.”

Whatever the method – and having borrowed both of these for my own staff meetings I can attest to their effectiveness – the intent isn’t to force more small talk into an already busy day. It’s to demonstrate, as leaders, that while we care about the work, we also care about peoples’ lives. As the old leadership saying goes,

“No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Like many managers, I hold weekly one-on-one meetings with each of my people. The agenda is simple: 10 minutes discussion on a topic of their choice, 10 minutes on a topic of my choice, and 10 minutes talking about career development. But it’s easy to get caught up discussing a technical problem in the first 20 minutes, lose track of time, and end up sacrificing the career discussion – a move that, if repeated enough, forces me to pay out of my trust account.

So each week I reflect on where I’ve fallen short of reinforcing this connection, and adjust next week’s plans accordingly. What gets measured gets managed and this applies to empathy as well as production yield.

Above all, take the time to show people that you genuinely care and want to help them. Once you do this, they’ll usually respond in kind.

And primarily, be present. Put away your cell phone. Few things tell people you’re not interested in them like checking social media posts in the middle of a conversation.

Ability: Help People Reach Their Potential

“What is our aim? I can answer that in one word: Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” – Winston Churchill, in his first speech after becoming Prime Minister

When we think of a leader’s ability, it’s easy to tie it to the technical ability of their people. An engineering manager’s ability may focus on technical depth while a sales manager’s ability could be their capacity to close a deal.

Yet many of us have seen the problems that result from promoting the best engineer into management. It’s not surprising that a superhuman ability to code doesn’t easily translate into leadership skills.

Our ability as leaders isn’t measured in technical skills, but in the capacity to make those around us better. And in our capability to bring positive results and victories for our teams.

Watching the Women’s World Cup, it’s easy to see how the U.S. Women’s team has strong leadership. In every match, it’s clear that the team has one, unified vision. No players are working from different agendas or putting themselves before the team. Everyone is consistently working towards the team’s success. Without a unified vision, teams don’t succeed, regardless of talent. It’s true in sports. And it’s true in business.

The U.S. Women’s coach, Jill Ellis, also understands that every team needs diverse talent to succeed. Each player brings different strengths and skills that complement the others. As talented as Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan are, different skillsets are needed for different positions. It’s easy for a leader to overlook this aspect and build teams full of individuals just like them. I, regrettably, used to have this very blindspot. Following one interview, as I was criticizing the candidate with our management team, a peer said to me, “No manager in this company wants to have ten Jake Wilders in his section.” He was absolutely right. Every person has something to contribute. A leader’s ability is in figuring out how to best leverage that for the success of the group.

Third, it’s clear that the U.S. Women’s coach and team leaders drive every player to improve and reach their potential. They simply wouldn’t have the level of success they’ve achieved without it. The primary job of each leader is to help people be more effective in their job and develop in line with their goals. We do this by maintaining high standards and giving people the tools and support they need to succeed against those standards. A leader’s ability isn’t based on a proficiency of technical skills, but in the continuous effort to develop these skills in their people.

When we can help people see a unified vision, build teams with diverse skillsets, and drive people to reach their potential, trust will follow.

Start Building Trust Today

The responsibility is not on others to trust you. The responsibility is on you to earn their trust.

How trustworthy would your team, or your followers, consider you to be? Do they provide candid feedback to you, even negative things that you may not want to hear? Do they provide bad news as quickly as good news, without fear of reprisal? Do they share their concerns and improvement ideas with you?

Trust is difficult to measure. But if your people operate with candor and are willing to have open and honest discussions with you, it’s a good sign. If not, it just means that you have some more work to do. Or as Ed Catmull would say,

“If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.”

Trust isn’t a one-time gain. And it’s not reserved for major events. It’s built through the little things that we do every day to demonstrate our integrity, empathy, and ability.

You step into an elevator and push the door-close button. Nothing happens. You push it again and wait a second. Then give it one more push before it starts the process of sliding the doors shut. It must have been that third push that did it.

Except it didn’t. Those buttons don’t work.  

Following the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, elevator doors were required to remain open long enough for anyone using crutches, a cane, or a wheelchair. So subsequent elevator refurbishments disabled this function. And newer elevators are manufactured without it.

Without the function. But with the button. 

Possibly because the door-open button would get lonely on its own. But more likely, because we have an inherent need to take action, even if it never actually has an impact.

People feel better after pushing the door-close button. It offers an illusion of control. And the door will eventually close. So our button-pushing efforts will be reinforced and we’ll feel better having exerted our influence over the situation.

Which, if you just enjoy pushing buttons, probably isn’t too big of a deal. But if you’re trying to be more effective, it is.

Action Bias: Our Need to Do Something, Even if It’s Not Helpful

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization,” said the Roman satirist Petronius Arbiter, nearly 2000 years ago.

It’s easy to think that the obsession most companies have with reorganizing was borne of our instant gratification culture. Yet, as Petronius shows, it’s been a problem for at least two millennia.

And yet, for all of fanfare given to reorganizations, very rarely do they impact actual results – a lesson the Buffalo Bills never seem to learn as they replace their entire coaching staff every three years.

Which is understandable. Well, not with the Bills, there’s really no excuse there.

But for the rest of us, it’s easy to see how people fall victim to this action bias.

You’re faced with a problem. There’s no obvious solution. So you can choose to (a) do something, or (b) do nothing.

Which is easier to tell people? Which is easier to tell yourself?

Movement is perceived as progress. It validates our self-image as someone who takes control and makes things happen. And it distracts people from thinking about the magnitude of the challenge in front of them.

But most importantly, it gives us a feeling of control. Even if it’s just a perception. And we always feel better doing something than nothing.

But movement without direction is rarely progress. And actions that don’t drive us closer to success are merely distractions. 

We can see this same behavior in loan repayments. Imagine having several loans of varying sizes and interest rates. Logically speaking, you should pay off the loan with the highest interest rate first. 

But researchers found that people often tend to pay off their small, low-interest loans first to reduce the quantity of loans outstanding – even though this will cause them to pay more interest overall. 

Our need for action – our desire to keep moving and generating some measure of progress – is a double-edged sword. In many ways this is a positive – the world tends to reward those that take initiative in the face of crisis. But like any strength, too much of a good thing becomes a liability.

The key is in recognizing this difference.

Know Your Problem

“Don’t just do something…stand there,” is the common advice Charlie Munger offers to investors on not overreacting to market fluctuations. But as Michael Bar-Eli and his colleagues at Ben-Gurion University demonstrated, this same advice could equally apply to soccer goalies. 

They analyzed penalty kicks at the professional level and found that goalies jump to the left 49.3% of the time, jump to the right 44.4% of the time, and stay in the center 6.3% of the time. 

The kicks, however, go to the left, right, or center 32.2%, 28.7%, and 39.2% of the time, respectively. Thus, the study concluded that if the goalies just stayed in the center, they would have saved 33.3% of the kicks, while diving left or right would drop this percentage to 14.2% or 12.6%, respectively. 

When the researchers asked goalies about their preferred strategy for penalty kicks, the majority said they choose to dive, even though that cut their chance of making a save in half. When asked why, most responded that they’d regret letting up a goal more while standing in the center more than if they dived.

They wanted to do something – and be seen doing something – even if that something was wrong. 

I’m guessing you see this same behavior at work on a daily basis. We create more reports and metrics that look nice, but never precipitate any real action to improve a situation. People hold meaningless meetings to philosophize on the problem without actually solving anything. And managers love to throw more resources on a struggling project, even though this rarely helps the situation. As Warren Buffet once put it, “You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

In the face of uncertainty, our default choice becomes action over inaction, regardless of whether that contributes to the desired end state. 

But our choice isn’t one of action or inaction. It’s in recognizing the specific problem that we need to solve.

And if we don’t know that, then that becomes the problem you need to solve.

Have Direction

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” – John F. Kennedy

If you want to get to New York quickly, would you just start traveling as fast as possible in a random direction?

Probably not. Most people recognize the problem with this strategy. Yet they employ this very mentality when handling more complex problems. 

They settle for speed. When they really need velocity. 

Speed is distance traveled over time. If you’re making a lot of movement, say, running around in circles very fast, you’re likely generating a lot of speed. 

Velocity, on the other hand, has a directional component. It’s aimed towards a specific purpose.

Most people look to generate speed. They look for the immediate action that gets them moving and checking things off their list. Yet while they’re busy moving fast in unrelated directions, they’re quickly passed by those who think in terms of velocity. 

Action for the sake of action is like generating a lot of speed. It’s nice to move fast, but it’s unlikely to take you where you need to be.

Focused action, however, that directs us towards our end state, creates velocity. It applies that same speed in a productive manner. And it effectively closes the gap between where we are today and where we need to be.

Which all starts with clearly defining the problem that we need to solve. If we don’t know where we’re going, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get there. 

Put another way, ask yourself, “How will we know when we’ve succeeded?”

If you can’t answer that, there’s a good chance you’re just settling for speed. And tiring yourself out in the process. 

Think in Second and Third-Order Consequences

“By recognizing the higher-level consequences nature optimizes for, I’ve come to see that people who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second-and subsequent-order consequences rarely reach their goals.” – Ray Dalio, Principles

The other main defense against action bias is to think in terms of second and third order consequences.

Most people think in terms of first-order consequences. They’re the easy, superficial answer to a problem. You’re hungry and you like chocolate. So you eat a candy bar.

First-order thinking is common – pretty much everyone can do it. Which, as with most things that pretty much anyone can do, doesn’t offer much of an advantage.

But the best choices tend to be first-order negative and second-order positive. Exercise has a negative first-order consequence (pain, time spent) with positive second-order consequences (better health, more energy). Personal growth always begins with a level of discomfort and inefficiency until it brings you closer to excellence. And starting a new company or innovation is never an easy trek in the beginning, but hopefully has long-term payoffs (even if it’s just experience and a bunch of great stories to tell).

It’s the people who look past these first-order obstacles and recognize the nth stage benefits that end up achieving their long-term goals. This minority is happy to invest in the initial difficulty based on the knowledge that it’s in pursuit of a bigger purpose.

People who fall victim to action bias typically fail to consider the second and third order consequences of their actions. If they did, they’d see that while the immediate consequence is a feeling of productivity, the secondary consequences don’t bring them any closer to their goals.

Keep asking yourself, “And then what?” to consider the downstream consequences – both intended and unintended – of your choices. And make sure you’re choosing actions whose long-term consequences bring you where you want to be. As Ray Dalio wrote,

Quite often the first-order consequences are the temptations that cost us what we really want, and sometimes they are the barriers that stand in our way. It’s almost as though nature sorts us by throwing us trick choices that have both types of consequences and penalizing those who make their decisions on the basis of the first-order consequences alone.

Be Useful. Not Just Busy.

“Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.” – Doug Firebaugh

We’ve been trained to perceive hesitation as weakness, and restraint with indecision. We idolize those who make quick decisions and jump into action. Yet it’s often those who take the time to consider the problem and take more targeted action that affect real change.

Our bias for action is a powerful motivator – one that’s reinforced in many of our organizations. But it’s in having the discipline to overcome this mindset that we’re able to deliver greater success.

The next time you find yourself falling prey to action bias, stop. Take a breath. And ask yourself what problem you’re trying to solve. Ask how you’ll know when you’ve succeeded. Make sure your actions are focused towards this purpose. And cultivate a mindset that considers the second and third-order consequences.

Don’t just be busy. Be busy about something useful.

Or at the very least, just stop pushing that door-close button.

The modern typewriter had a problem. When Christopher Sholes developed the first model in 1868, it was an amazing development for its time. But if you tried to type too quickly on it, the type bars had a tendency to bang into one another and get stuck.

Sholes consulted an educator who helped him analyze the most common pairings of letters. He then split up those letters so that their type bars were farther apart and less likely to jam. 

He slowed down typing speed to prevent the typewriter from jamming. Which then sped up the typing.

This dictated the layout of the keyboard, which came to be known for the first six letters in the upper row – QWERTY.

In 1873, the Sholes & Glidden typewriter became the first to be mass-produced, and its keyboard layout soon became standard. Nearly 150 years later, despite the fact that sticking type bars are an obsolete problem, the original inefficient design continues to be the standard.

It’s a telling lesson in the power of inertia. And in the barriers that prevent innovation. 

The Least Innovative System Imaginable

“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” – Albert Einstein

Imagine trying to design a system that prevented innovation. Your goal is to structure a company in a way that will actively discourage people from innovating. What would it include?

People told to develop new, innovative ideas and then not given any time to work on them?

Cut the resources available to everyone looking to advance new opportunities?

Create inconsistent messaging as senior management lauds the importance of innovation and plasters the walls with motivational posters, yet actual policy and daily decisions run counter?

Bureaucratic processes that require layers of approvals to depart from the typical methodology?

Harsh judgment of any experiment that doesn’t yield spectacular results on the first try?

Systems that reward maintaining the current status and are unforgiving of risks that jeopardize it?

It’s easy to see how a system with these aspects would discourage new ideas and innovation. Yet these same traits are also present in many of today’s companies. 

Somehow, many of the features of a hypothetical organization designed to stifle innovation, are present in the places we work today. Despite leaders citing a love of creativity and innovation, putting this desire into practice continues to be a struggle. As Charles Eames warned, 

“Recent years have shown a growing preoccupation with the circumstances surrounding the creative act and a search for the ingredients that promote creativity. This preoccupation in itself suggests that we are in a special kind of trouble — and indeed we are.”

But why? Why do so many companies want to create innovative cultures yet somehow end up creating the polar opposite?

Because many of these companies have good managers. And good managers tend to discourage innovation. 

Customers (and Hence Managers) Don’t Want Innovation

Good managers stay close to their customers. They know that if they’re to consistently support the company’s bottom line, they need to be attuned to customer needs and desires. 

Before managers decide to invest in a new technology or strategy, they’ll consider their customers – Do they want it? Will this be profitable? How big is the potential market? 

The better that managers ask these questions, the better their investments are aligned with customers. And the less likely they are to put out the next New Coke.

But while this is an advantage in identifying the next round of product improvements, it’s a major liability to wholesale innovation. 

Most customers can quickly identify incremental improvements. Those areas are at the forefront of their experience and it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to come up with some improved features. So good managers, as you’d expect, are very adept at leading teams to identify and incorporate incremental improvements.

But major innovation – 10x type changes – often come from completely new perspectives. They come from thoughts and ideas that most customers haven’t even considered. As the old (dubiously quoted) Henry Ford saying goes,

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

With a typical management structure, it makes it nearly impossible to justify diverting resources from known customer needs and desires to unproven markets and questionable investments. The systems and processes that keep the business running are specifically designed to identify and cut those initiatives that do not align to the customer’s current needs.

The solution then, needs to reverse this structure. It needs to override the systems that are highlighting innovation as unprofitable in the short-term and encourage their pursuit. It needs to protect these new ideas from the typical business plan mentality and be willing to take a shot on the unknown. Mainly, it needs to be willing to divorce innovation from customer needs. As Steve Jobs said,

“Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want. But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”

And to do that, you need to separate this out from the traditional mainstream business. 

The Chance for a Billion Dollar Return

Choice A: You can give a million dollars, bottom line, to your company through your efforts this year, guaranteed.

Choice B: You can give a billion dollars, bottom line, to your company through your efforts this year, with one chance in a hundred.

Dr. Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots (CEO) of X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, offered these two choices to his audience as he began an A360 talk on how to 10x your thinking. 

In response to his question, most people prefer to chance the billion-dollar return, particularly with a 10x expected utility on the odds. Yet when asked whether their bosses would agree with that choice, most people say no – they feel their management would prefer them to opt for the safe returns.

People want to take risks. They want to deliver large-scale innovation. But they feel that their management disagrees. 

And in many cases, they’re right.

Imagine you’re managing a team of employees to produce and support an existing product line. Now ask yourself, is innovation absolutely critical to grow your business? 

If not, and you can meet demand based on your existing business plan, what’s your motivation to invite additional risk?

Most managers – and as a result most teams – don’t need to rely on major innovation to survive. They’re able to sustain their business with the same things that have worked for them in the past – until suddenly and without much warning – it no longer will. 

Most people see innovation as an idea problem. But it’s not. It’s a resource allocation problem. 

The question isn’t how do you generate more ideas, but how do you align your best people, and sufficient resources, to your best opportunities. As the great Peter Drucker wrote,

“Problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.”

Sergey Brin recognized this concern at Google and developed a 70/20/10 responsibility model. Seventy percent of time was reserved for daily operations and taking care of the current business. Twenty percent went towards the next level of advancements. And the final ten percent went towards major innovations and moonshots.

Google then implemented tracking systems to ensure people were prioritizing this breakdown – and make sure managers didn’t allow the urgent to override the important. 

Not every idea would work out – actually the vast majority would end up as flops – but by continuing to prioritize innovation, Google put themselves in a position to take advantage of the ones that did. As Eric Schmidt described it, 

“You can systematize innovation even if you can’t completely predict it.”

Separate Your Moonshots from the Main Business

“Leaders who order their employees to be more innovative without first investing in organizational fitness are like casual joggers who order their bodies to run a marathon. It won’t happen, and the experience is likely to cause a great deal of pain.” – Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

Yet in many companies, simply prescribing a breakdown isn’t enough. Existing management practices and systems are too ingrained in the culture. Stability and near-term returns will always override the long-term investment needed to encourage major innovation.

The solution then, lies in separating out those who focus on major innovation from the standard product line. It’s taking a group and telling them that their entire job is to choose Choice B – and creating an environment that encourages that mentality. 

If their job is to choose Choice B, and pursue ideas with a 1% success rate, failure will be unavoidable. So experimentation happens in a controlled environment, with quicker learning and much less negative consequences.

If their job is to choose Choice B, they’re not held to a quarterly return, so new innovations can be protected and developed. 

They don’t need to guarantee a quarterly return, so risk-taking is easier to encourage. They can experiment and fail within controlled environments, so learning happens much more quickly and with much less negative consequences. 

And since most new innovations don’t begin as clear successes, they can be developed within a protected space until they’re formed into more defined ideas. Sir Francis Bacon recognized this four centuries ago when he wrote, “As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.”

But most importantly, the difference between delivering a million dollar return and a billion dollar return is not about working 1000 times as hard. And it’s not about being 1000 times smarter. 

It requires a complete perspective shift. It requires separating this group from the typical management business plans and customer demands and pushing them to tackle completely new challenges. As Dr. Teller put it,

“If you push them – if you give them the freedom and the expectation to be weird, that’s moonshot thinking.”

Success Comes from Feedback Loops

“If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” – Steven Berlin Johnson

In a conversation with Shane Parrish, former Y Combinator partner and the founder of Pioneer, Daniel Gross, describes the key to success as positive feedback loops. Our surrounding environments create feedback loops that either reinforce or discourage critical behaviors – which initiate chain reactions of either positive, or negative, behaviors. 

Alexander Graham Bell, no stranger to innovation himself, agreed with Gross on the importance of surroundings towards creative success. In the 1901 volume, How They Succeeded, Orion Swett Marden interviewed Bell, then 54, who shared the following life lesson,

“Environment counts for a great deal. A man’s particular idea may have no chance for growth or encouragement in his community. Real success is denied that man, until he finds a proper environment.”

For innovation to be a success, it needs an environment of positive feedback loops – one that traditional management practices and business models are ill-equipped to support. The inertia towards supporting today’s needs and demands is too great to maintain enough focus on long-term innovation.

We cannot expect people to pursue moonshots within an environment designed for incremental improvements. We cannot expect people to pursue Choice B, when every feedback loop in place reinforces Choice A. 

Until this responsibility is separated from the current management decision-making model, companies will continue to miss the opportunities for major innovations. Not because they’re making poor decisions. But because they’re making decisions based on criteria that are soon to become obsolete.

The alternative is to create groups that encourage these new perspectives and experimentations. Which leads to ideas where people say, “there’s no way that could ever work.” Until, of course, they do.