Switch - Chip Heath [79]
Nine months into the job, Tucker solicited feedback from her team members about her performance as a manager. She was astonished when they complained that she didn’t seem to have time to talk to them. “Some of them were offended that when they walked into my office, I would often continue to look at my computer screen and type while they were talking. This of course gave them the strong signal that what I was doing was more important to me than they were,” Tucker said.
She knew they were right. It was a bad habit. And she also knew that the layout of her office was encouraging the habit. When people came to see her, they sat in chairs across from her desk. When she faced them, she still had the computer monitor in her field of view. So it was easy—too easy—for Tucker to glance back and forth from their faces to the screen.
Tucker simply rearranged her office. She moved the desk so it no longer separated her from her guests, and she added a meeting area with two small couches and a table. Now, when she was facing the people who came to see her, the computer was completely out of sight. No more temptation.
“Just by rearranging the furniture, I was able to connect much better with people who came to see me,” she said. Six months later, she solicited more feedback and was pleased that her communication scores had soared.
If you’d seen Tucker’s initial performance appraisals, you might have concluded that, despite her stated open-door policy, she was one of those insensitive managers who never listen to their subordinates. And you would have been committing the Fundamental Attribution Error. Simply by rearranging the furniture in her office, Tucker made herself into a different “kind of person.” That’s the power of shaping the Path.
7.
There is something satisfying about outsmarting ourselves. (By now, you realize what “outsmarting ourselves” means—that our Riders are outsmarting our Elephants.) Tucker’s solution was appealing in its elegance—a seemingly messy management problem solved by an afternoon office makeover. Tucker shaped her environment to disallow her own bad behavior.
This is a topic that hits home for the two of us (your co-authors). While we were writing this book, we got annoyed by our tendency to get distracted by e-mail. We were aware of the irony of our giving advice to readers about reining in their Elephants while our own Elephants habitually prompted us to check Outlook. So we decided to take some of our own medicine.
If you use Microsoft Outlook, you know that when you get new e-mail, an alert sound plays through your computer’s speakers. That sound is like digital catnip. How can you not check your mail when you hear it? What if a rich Nigerian politician went down in a plane crash and you had a limited time to capture part of his fortune?
Chip decided to tweak his environment: He rummaged through the control panel until he found the place that allowed him to delete the e-mail sound at the system level. Later, he noticed that new e-mail also triggered an alert icon on the taskbar—more irresistible bait for the Elephant. He covered it with a Post-it note blackened with one of his daughter’s felt-tip markers. Now it can’t torment him. Ignorance is bliss.
Meanwhile, Dan went nuclear. He bought an old laptop, deleted all its browsers, and, for good measure, deleted its wireless network drivers. Now when he needs to focus, he takes the “way-back machine” with him