Please forgive me for this one, but the tai chi links here are abundant! Listening, spontaneity, not knowing the next move, conflict resolution, change, curiosity, openness, honest self reflection, generosity, team work, being flexible, sense of humor. Take a look if an original way of living in the corporate world is of interest. Tom
April 16, 2011
WET Design and the Improv Approach to Listening
By ADAM BRYANT
This interview with Mark Fuller, C.E.O. (which stands for chief excellence officer) of WET Design, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Q. What’s unusual about your company’s culture?
A. We have three classrooms and a full-time curriculum director who teaches all the time and also brings in outside instructors. One of the really fun classes we do is improv.
Q. Why improv?
A. Improv, if properly taught, is really about listening to the other person, because there’s no script. It’s about responding. I was noticing that we didn’t have a lot of good communication among our people.
If you think about it, if you have an argument with your wife or husband, most of the time people are just waiting for the other person to finish so they can say what they’re waiting to say. So usually they’re these serial machine-gun monologues, and very little listening.
That doesn’t work in improv. If we’re on the stage, I don’t know what goofball thing you’re going to say, so I can’t be planning anything. I have to really be listening to you so I can make an intelligent — humorous or not — response.
So I got this crazy idea of bringing in someone to teach an improv class. At first, everybody had an excuse, because it’s kind of scary to stand up in front of people and do this. But now we’ve got a waiting list because word has spread that it’s really cool.
You’re in an emotionally naked environment. It’s like we’re all the same. We all can look stupid. And it’s an amazing bonding thing, plus it’s building all these communication skills. You’re sort of in this gray space of uncertainty. Most of us don’t like to be uncertain — you know, most of us like to be thinking what we’re going to say next. You get your mind into a space where you say, “I’m really enjoying that I don’t know what he’s going to ask me next, and I’m going to be open and listening and come back.”
We’ve got graphic designers, illustrators, optical engineers, Ph.D. chemists, special effects people, landscape designers, textile designers. You get all these different disciplines that typically you would never find under one roof — even making a movie — and so you have to constantly be finding these ways to have people connect.
So we do things like improv, and I think they really have developed our culture.
Q. What else?
A. We also encourage people to put their ideas on our walls. Or if you’ve got a drawing, you can stick a couple of magnets on it. The point is to get people to put their stuff out where other people can see it. We don’t want a culture of, “That’s my idea. I don’t want anybody to see it. Maybe they’ll find a flaw in it.”
I had a teacher once who said, “Whenever you guys are sitting here, and you realize that you’ve made a mistake on something you’re working with, I want you to applaud yourself.” He said: “That will accomplish a couple of things. First of all, instead of saying, ‘Oh, I made a mistake, I’m never going to learn this stuff anyway,’ you’re going to reward yourself because you caught the mistake before I did.” We all rolled our eyes in the class, but I’ve never forgotten that.
So one of the things I will do is to start some meetings by saying, “Let me tell you where I just screwed up.” That sets the tone of, we’ve got to put our mistakes out there. They don’t call it “learn by trial and success.” You learn by trial and error.
Q. What else have you done through the years to set the tone for your culture?
A. Early on, I decided that whenever somebody comes into my office and starts blaming something on another department, I will say: “Really? Let’s get them in here. Hold that thought.” It’s just like with your children at home — you don’t want serial tattletaling. You get everybody together, and then suddenly people are saying that maybe they exaggerated a bit, and things weren’t quite as bad as they said.
I’ve been in environments where a C.E.O. will sit back and try to watch a gladiator match for entertainment. That’s totally not cool. It’s so common, I think, in corporate life. You want to have the conversation and say: “O.K., what really went wrong here? There’s three of us in this room. We’re going to fix this thing. How do we do it?”
Q. You’ve clearly thought a lot about cultures and how to get people to work together.
A. I really love coming to work to develop the workplace and the team. I think it’s either a virtuous or a vicious spiral, and it’s exposed when you go to hire somebody.
To get really good talent, you need to be doing interesting stuff. Take a great kid out of college or somebody from another company — they’re not going to come if there’s not something really interesting to work on. I suppose you could throw gobs of money at them or something, but that’s not the idea. So you need to build the company so you have great talent, and great projects, and a great environment. You get those three, and then they just feed off of each other.
Q. I’ll keep asking: What else is unusual about your company?
A. One thing we do is we move people around a lot into different positions. And quite honestly, it’s pretty unsettling because everybody loves to be comfortable. I think we’re built that way. Find your cave, and draw some nice picture of a mammoth on the wall so it feels like home.
Most of my key people have held really different positions. That helps prevent these silos and fiefdoms that tend to get sclerotically reinforced over time in companies when people say: “Oh, the fifth floor is engineering. You don’t go up there without a hall pass.”
The world is driven by change, so part of my job, I think, is to stir things up.
Q. But at what level are you moving people around? You’re not taking the Ph.D. chemist and saying, “Learn sheet metal,” are you?
A. Not full time. We do take all of our key employees and put them through an immersion program that typically lasts six weeks. I can show you some great receptionists who are pretty darn good welders because they spent a week or two in the machine shop. They get it, and they understand what’s going on. Again, they’re not permanent assignments for everybody, but it’s really about walking in the other person’s shoes to understand their job.
Q. Let’s shift to hiring. What are you looking for? What questions do you ask?
A. There are two questions I would definitely ask after we’d been talking for a while. One is, “Do you like to read?” and, “What do you like to read?” I’m an unbelievable reader. Jeff Bezos is in the black only because of Mark Fuller’s daily Amazon orders.
And then I will ask: “What do you build? Do you do anything with your hands? Do you have a hobby? Pottery? Do you fix old cars? Do you have any kind of a shop in your garage? Do you play an instrument?” I’m listening for something tangible — something that tells me you’re not just all about work. I really value intellect, but I like people who are connected with real stuff, too.
Q. Are you asking that of everybody, even, say, a finance chief?
A. I do. If a finance person chops motorcycles or likes to repair his own computer when it breaks, they’ll have a connection to our technical people or our hands-on people as opposed to somebody who’s just Mr. Spreadsheet.
Q. Can you talk more about the qualities you’re looking for?
A. There’s sort of four things when you’re interviewing somebody. There’s passion and commitment. If you’ve got that, you can go a long way.
The next one is I.Q. I mean, you’re kind of born with that. So we look for signs of a high I.Q.
The third one is the one that most people focus on, which is explicit knowledge and experience. That’s actually the one thing that’s easiest to fix. I mean, you can pour knowledge into somebody’s head, and you can build experience over time. We try to get a blend there. We don’t want all just fresh kids out of school because then you’re inventing everything over and over again. So we also like some seniority and experience.
And then the fourth one is the negative category: we look for X factors. We may even try to prod them a little bit. Do they have a hair-trigger temper? Have they got an ego that’s going to get in the way? Those are our interview criteria.
Q. What else do you look for in an interview?
A. I like to find out what makes people laugh, because if people don’t have a sense of humor, if they can’t laugh, they’re really just not going to make it.
I also like to take people we’re considering for a key position on a tour of WET. I’ll take maybe an hour and a half, and I’ll listen for their level of curiosity. It tells me a lot. So most of my interview is actually walking around in the tour.
Q. And how long does it take you to get a sense of whether the person’s right or not?
A. I can tell pretty fast, and those are sometimes shorter tours.
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