Role Reversal
The entrepreneur Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Opsware and currently a venture capitalist, found himself confronted several years ago with a management problem. Two outstanding departments at a company he managed—Customer Support and Sales Engineering—were at loggerheads. Sales Engineering accused Customer Support of not responding promptly enough to customers, thereby hampering sales. Customer Support accused Sales Engineering of writing defective code and ignoring their suggestions for improvement. Obviously it was essential the two departments work closely together. Considered separately, both were well managed and superbly staffed. Appealing to them to try and see things from each other’s perspective accomplished little, but then Horowitz had an idea. He made the head of Customer Support the head of Sales Engineering—and vice versa. Not temporarily, mind you. Permanently. Both were initially horrified, but a week after stepping into their antagonist’s shoes they had got to the bottom of the conflict. Over the following weeks they adjusted their operations, and from then on the two departments cooperated better than any others at the firm.
Thinking yourself into your opponent’s position seldom works. The requisite mental leap is too great, the motivation lacking. In order to genuinely understand someone, you have to adopt their position—not intellectually but in actual fact. You have to step into their shoes and experience your opponent’s situation first-hand.
I never took mothers’ work seriously until we had children of our own and I occasionally looked after the babies (twins) by myself. After half a day I was more exhausted than after a ten-day business trip. Of course, various mothers had already told me that, and it’s also in countless parenting books. Yet all that had left me cold. Only by doing could I begin to understand.
It’s surprising how rarely we use this simple trick. “We’ve got to see things from the customer’s perspective,” is a platitude of every corporate mission statement. It’s a noble idea, but it’s not enough. Really, it should be “We’ve got to be customers.” There are firms that have understood that. Schindler is the leading worldwide supplier of lifts and escalators. In their first year, every Schindler employee—from secretary to CEO—has to spend three weeks on site. He or she climbs into blue overalls and helps install lifts or escalators. This is how novices not only learn about the complicated inner life of their products but also experience what it’s like to work on a building site. It also makes a statement: “Look, I’m not too good to get my hands dirty.” This alone fosters deep goodwill between the individual departments.
Companies love pretending they’re in touch with their workforce. You know the kind of thing I mean: hardly a company report gets published without photos of the ladies and gentlemen in senior management posing in front of an assembly line. Only one in every hundred reports features images of top executives actually working on the factory floor, dressed in work clothes and hardhats. Evidently they’re not too good to ruin their hairdo for at least one photograph. Those are the firms whose stock I tend to buy.
Thinking and doing are two fundamentally different ways of comprehending the world, although many people confuse the two. Business Studies is an ideal degree if you want to obtain a Business Studies professorship, but not if you want to work in business. Studying literature is perfect if you want to be a literature professor, but don’t imagine it’s going to make you a good writer.
Does thinking at least translate into doing when it comes to abstract areas like morality? Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust tested precisely this question. Are professors of ethics, who are occupied day in and day out with moral questions, better people? It seems a reasonable assumption. The researchers compared ethicists with other professors across seventeen categories of behavior, from how often they gave blood to whether they slammed doors or cleared up after themselves at conferences. The result? The moral philosophers behaved no more morally than anyone else.
Once you’ve accepted that thinking and doing are separate spheres, you can put this knowledge to good use. Churches, armies and universities are among the most stable organizations in the world. They’ve outlasted several centuries and survived dozens of wars. What’s the secret of their stability? They recruit from within. Each level of management possesses intimate, practical knowledge about how it feels to be below that level. To become a bishop, you have to start at the very bottom, as a priest. Every general was once a soldier. And you won’t be head of a university unless you were once a lowly assistant professor. Do you think the CEO of, say, Walmart—a man who leads two million employees—would make a suitable general, commanding two million troops? Clearly not. No army in the world would consider recruiting him.
The upshot? It’s worth slipping into other people’s shoes and actually walking around in them. Do it with the most important relationships in your life—your partner, your clients, your employees, your voters (if you’re a politician). Role reversal is by far the most efficient, quick and cost-effective way of building mutual understanding. Be the proverbial king who dressed as a beggar to mingle among his subjects. And because that’s not always possible, here’s another recommendation: read novels. Being immersed in a good novel, accompanying the protagonist throughout both highs and lows, is an efficient workaround that sits somewhere between thinking and doing.