Great teams "see what they can improve," even after winning

A little nugget from Andrew Garda's article in Sports on Earth on the New England Patriots - Denver Broncos matchup on Sunday night. The Patriots, led by quarterback Tom Brady, beat Denver 43-21.

"It's back to work tomorrow to see what we can improve," Brady said after the game as his team headed into a bye week. "We can always improve."

It was a sentiment shared by left tackle Nate Solder.

"We have to continue to improve because we didn't do everything the way we wanted to," he said post-victory.

Never being satisfied is the mark of a good team. It's one thing to be unhappy when you lose, as Manning was. It's entirely different when you win, and win handily. It's a special sort of madness which makes great players great and carries teams to championships.

What's true in football is also true in sales, and in management. If you won a deal, or beat your numbers for the year, you didn't do everything "the way you wanted to." There's room for improvement, and the best leaders and teams will think this way.

Front-line nurses discover small process innovations can cure medication mistakes

Bob Sutton posted on this 2009 San Francisco Chronicle article, but it had so much good stuff relating to areas I’m passionate about that I need to write about it too.

The article concerns an effort by Bay Area nurses to reduce the occurrence of medication errors, which, according to the Chronicle, cause 400,000 preventable injuries and cost an extra $3.5 billion in medical costs each year. The results of the effort: a 88% reduction in medication errors in the participating hospitals.

Here are a few quotes that talk about areas I’m interested in – listening to and empowering customer-facing (patient-facing?) personnel, and the value of simple, low-tech solutions to business problems:

Striving to reduce interruptions that lead to mistakes, teams of nurses at the different hospitals came up with a variety of methods – often surprisingly low tech – to alert others they were administering medications…. 

The solutions “have to be low tech because we, as staff nurses, don’t have the money or ability to make high-tech changes,” said Celeste Arbis, a registered nurse in the medical-surgical unit there. “Something as simple as changing the process just a little bit can make a big difference.”… 

Nurses attributed much of the program’s success to allowing those on the front lines to develop and tailor their own solutions.

I’ve seen both these situations in action: the ability of front-line personnel to understand and fix problems with the processes they use, and the effectiveness of often-overlooked simple and low-tech solutions. Sutton wrote something very profound in his post on this subject: “I think that people — especially managers — often use spending money as a substitute for thinking, when inexpensive and low-tech solutions work just fine.”

For learning, "knowledge-hungry" beats "grade-hungry" every time

In this Newsweek NurtureShock post, Po Bronson references an experiment by Stanford researcher Carol Dweck - the pioneer of looking at students' views of achievement vs. learning.

Bronson effortlessly summarizes a complex set of experiments by Dweck and co-researcher Jennifer Mangels, and you should read the entire post, but the major point was this: "knowledge-hungry" (in Bronson's terminology) students learned better from their mistakes than "grade-hungry" students. Knowledge-hungry students were interested in where they had made mistakes so they could learn the correct answer. Grade-hungry students were more concerned simply that they had made a mistake - the error itself obsessed them, not what they didn't know. As a result, knowledge-hungry students did better on a retest: they learned better.

Even when we leave school and enter the work world, we often remain "grade-hungry." Companies, frankly, enable and reward this focus with their HR management tools: promotions, numerical performance reviews, "merit" raises. Workers tend to be more concerned about the effect a mistake will have on these measures than on learning from what they did. This is bad for the company, of course. And bad for the worker.