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Build a Decision-making Culture, with Timothy Geithner, Former United States Secretary of the Treasury
“No peacocks, no jerks, no whiners”
I use that phrase, that simple phrase “no peacocks, no jerks, no whiners” – it’s not a very affirmative way of thinking about management and hiring but the virtue of it – it’s very understandable. People know what it means, and it’s a very good discipline on behavior – you know, partly because everybody’s under a lot of pressure and partly because, as you said, people who are – people get a lot of rewards in life often from being self-promoting and aggressive in that sense. You need to give people a simple understandable way to deter and disincent that behavior. What you want people to be worried about is making the right decision, not whether they get credit for it. And you want to make sure they have the incentives to work together to collaborate so that there’s a bit more trust and people are focusing on the right things, not dissipating energy on the type of competition for credit that so often drives institutions.
Set up a dynamic for feedback
The most important thing, of course, is you surround your people with people who are ethical, who are smart, who you can trust and that are worried about the right things. And it’s also important that they’re strong enough that they can challenge the people who work for them. You create this sort of sense of responsibility and obligation on them to be for stuff, not just to be against stuff, not just to describe the problems you face but are willing to commit themselves to a view on “I think we should try X in that case.” That’s a very important dynamic to set up.
It’s a really important part of culture in any institution if you want to get good decisions: you need a diversity perspectives, you need people who feel safe about expressing their opinion, you need people who feel safe in pushing back against people more senior to them, and you need them to be again willing to commit to a view.
It’s not enough to let people get away with just saying what they’re against or expressing their concern or disparaging the alternatives of others. You have to be able to make sure that people can have that – not just the opportunity to express a view but the obligation to commit to a view on these things because again, you know, what matters in the end is not just your feel for the dilemma, your feel for the challenge but whether you can find some plausible solution to that challenge.