This has nothing to do with massive animals found in Africa.  It has to do with getting things right in an office environment.

HIPPO is an acronym that stands for HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion.  And if your company or team is run via the HIPPO method, you are doing “It” wrong.

And what is, “It”?   In this case, “It” means that either your company leader has hired small talent and purposefully wants a team of people below him who are there to execute his/her orders.  This should tell you how you and your colleagues are perceived by your leader.

Or “It” could mean your HIPPO does not realize that they have hired knowledgable staff, who are paid by the company to solve problems with their domain expertise.  HIPPO is rightly associated with loud-mouthed jerks.

Either way the employees are gonna be unhappy and short-lived.  Talented workers do not want to work under an authoritarian HIPPO.  They want to be asked to solve problems, be given the resources to do so, work with colleagues to finalize solutions, then implement.

As for me, I only want to see HIPPO’s when I go to the zoo.

The below are excerpts taken from the first chapter of an extensive article in the New York Times magazine.  I have always been a student of capturing performance in organizations.  Some of the information in this article (I have only yet gone through Chapter One) goes against traditionally-accepted norms for building and managing teams.   My personal highlights are below.  Italicized words are directly copied from the NYT Magazine Article.

• When building teams, does it matter the personality types involved?  If there were similar interest?  Motivated by similar rewards?  Google’s analysis showed that the team composition did not mater to the performance of the teams.  Differing mixes of personalities, ages, goals did not make a discernible difference to the effectiveness of any team.
• Group norms, led by a strong leader but agreed to and embraced by all members is a hallmark of successful teams.

• “As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’

  Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

  In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Team A may be filled with smart people, all optimized for peak individual efficiency. But the group’s norms discourage equal speaking; there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance the members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent.

  In contrast, on Team B, people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.”

• Psychological safety, a feeling by each member that they were free to speak their mind and to be listened to, is one of the few behaviors found in almost all the successful groups.
• “What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.“

Great educational content from Inbound Marketing leader, HubSpot.  Talk about taking a page from your own playbook.  HubSpot offers an Inbound Certification program that is a useful, in-depth education on Inbound Marketing.  Video instruction that you can use on your own, associated, downloadable materials, a community forum, and finally a legitimate test that you take online and must pass to earn their Certificate.

As I look at the sales processes that are in place for many firms in the Margin Trading Products (“MTP”), I see the leaders in the industry using Inbound Marketing techniques, and small sales staffs.  Where as the traditional industry players are still staffing call centers and attempting to sell to prospects and leads by interrupting their day.

Now back to my certification class.