Coaching for Leadership

The Background to this Blog

2021-05-12T11:53:00.000+02:00

I started this blog when I was teaching on the British Open University Business School MBA program, mostly on the Creativity, Innovation and Change course, which is now defunct but was probably one of the best courses on creativity and innovation ever offered by a university or an MBA program anywhere in the world. The first part of the course taught the students about psychometry and how different character traits impacted, tacitly, intuitively, or unconsciously on one's approach to creativity, innovation and personal or corporate change. When I look on what is on offer today, worldwide, to teach mature students, or remote-learning students, about creativity and innovation I am sad to see that many universities or business schools in 2021 still haven't caught up with what the Open University was offering back in the 1990s, and which I had the privilege of teaching until 2012.

Concurrently with my teaching at the OUBS I worked as a consultant and coach, in English and French, with companies like Coca-Cola, EADS, Hewlett-Packard and parts of Veolia and I also did some work in West Africa on Internet Freedom, with Clemson University, advising African journalists on how to protect themselves from surveillance on the Web. Everything I had learned about psychometry, in order to teach the OUBS course, came in useful in my coaching of managers, especially the parts that taught Michael Kirton's groundbreaking work on adaptive and innovative traits in people and professions. How come some people, especially those in marketing, can come up with thousands of ideas and never manage to implement a single one of them, while other people who have only come up with one big idea in their lives have been able to implement it from A to Z?

Although I haven't updated the blog for a number of years now I see that some of the articles are still being consulted, so I will leave it up as long as it continues to be of interest. I may even add an article from time to time, and the first one of the new series may address the subject of how adaptive and innovative traits in journalists condition their cautious, incautious or middle-of-the-road approaches to being surveilled on the internet and the impact of their styles on their long-term safety.

Why it's important to understand one's genetic predisposition toward stress

2012-09-24T10:45:00.003+02:00

In the September 19, 2012 issue of the daily Harvard Business Advantage newsletter ('HBR's daily scouting report on provocative ideas for business'), I read the short article below by Dana Rousmaniere

Feeling Stressed By Your Job? Don’t Blame Your Employer.

Chalk one up for nature. Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, recently studied nearly 600 twins (some identical, some fraternal) and found that being raised in the same environment had little effect on personality, stress and health. Genetics turned out to be four times as important as shared environment. In an article for Science Daily, Judge says that changing a job to free yourself of stress is probably not going to do the trick unless you appreciate your own genetic predisposition toward stress.

Here is how the Science Daily article begins:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2012) — Work stress, job satisfaction and health problems due to high stress have more to do with genes than you might think, according to research by Timothy Judge(*), professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.

The lead author of "Genetic influences on core self-evaluations, job satisfaction, work stress, and employee health: A behavioral genetics mediated model," published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Judge studied nearly 600 twins -- some identical, some fraternal -- who were raised together and reared apart. He found that being raised in the same environment had very little effect on personality, stress and health. Shared genes turned out to be about four times as important as shared environment.

"Assume James and Sandy both work in the same organization," Judge says. "James reports more stress than Sandy. Does it mean that James' job is objectively more stressful than Sandy's? Not necessarily. Our study suggests strong heritabilities to work stress and the outcomes of stress. This means that stress may have less to do with the objective features of the environment than to the genetic 'code' of the individual."

The battle of nature vs. nurture shows that even at work, nature wins. Changing a job to free yourself of stress is probably not going to do the trick unless you appreciate your own predispositions toward stress...

Read the rest of the article here: Feeling Stressed by Your Job? Don’t Blame Your Employer, Study Shows

(*) Timothy A. Judge, Remus Ilies, Zhen Zhang. Genetic influences on core self-evaluations, job satisfaction, and work stress: A behavioral genetics mediated model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2012; 117 (1): 208 DOI:10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.08.005

How genetic is that distinctive chuckle or curious disposition?

2012-06-29T12:24:00.001+02:00

In the MBA module which I teach on creativity, the first third of the work requires the student to learn about psychometric inventories, such as MBTI, NEO-FFI and Kirton Adaptor-Innovator theory. They fill in the necessary questionnaires and then get a rough idea of their enduring traits, creative style and personality. After that, they take a look at previous work experience, what they did well and what they would have liked to do better, and they analyze what sort of organisational climate can make the best use of their talents.

Quite often,when I read an assignment, a student will write, "When I look at my NEO-FFI results, it seems that I have quite a high level of resiliency (linked to a low sensitivity) score. This may be because..." and the student then lists some work experiences which may have toughened him or her up. The comment I make in the margin often has to do with the chicken and the egg. "Have you succeeded in that environment by learning from experience or because you had a natural tendency to be resilient?" Some students can get quite upset when I mention that I think nature is about 50% responsible for how they turn out, while nurture is responsible for the other half of their temperament. This goes against all their acquired beliefs. They would like a situation where every child starts off with a blank slate, where nurture or socialization explains everything about a person's behavior: people who do bad things could then blame everything on a bad upbringing while people who do good things could thank the fact that they were born and socialized in a better environment.

Many parents realize that although their children were brought up in the same familial, cultural and (perhaps) religious environment, they showed marked differences from an early age. Perhaps one was much more extravert, while the other was more conscientious when it came time to do homework. One had a high level of agreeableness while the other sulked even in the cradle. My own experience, including study of the work of Doctor Michael Kirton, has shown me that elements of personality, such as an adaptor or innovator creative style, have become measurably stable by the age of fifteen or sixteen.

I was reminded of this when I read a recent Wall Street Journal review, by Bryan Caplan, of Nancy L. Segal's new book, Born Together - Reared Apart. I have been an admirer of Nancy L. Segal's work ever since the 1999 publication of her Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior.

Below are a couple of paragraphs from the WSJ review of the new book:

Some findings go down easy: As most would expect, identical twins raised apart have virtually identical heights as adults. Some findings seem obvious after the fact: Genes, but not upbringing, have a pretty big effect on personality traits like ambition, optimism, aggression and traditionalism. Other findings perennially cause outrage: The IQs of separated identical twins are almost as similar as their heights. Critics of intelligence research often hail the importance of practice rather than inborn talent, but a three-day test of the Minnesota twins' motor skills showed that how much you benefit from practice is itself partly an inborn talent.

The Minnesota study's IQ results hit a nerve years before their publication in 1990, overshadowing other controversies that might have been. Many of its findings are bipartisan shockers. Take religion, which almost everyone attributes to "socialization." Separated-twin data show that religiosity has a strong genetic component, especially in the long run: "Parents had less influence than they thought over their children's religious activities and interests as they approached adolescence and adulthood." The key caveat: While genes have a big effect on how religious you are, upbringing has a big effect on the brand of religion you accept. Identical separated sisters Debbie and Sharon "both liked the rituals and formality of religious services and holidays," even though Debbie was a Jew and Sharon was a Christian.

Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: HR Software designed to screen out talent

2012-05-31T12:15:00.000+02:00

Today's Wall Street Journal has a very insightful article, by David Wessel, that centers on Peter Cappelli's book Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It and an interview with the author. In the article, titled Software Screening Raises Bar for Hiring, Wessel underscores a growing problem, which Cappelli includes among his reasons for why good people can't get jobs: sofware screening.

This problem became evident with creativity software a long while back. When you put in place a number of filters to screen out "sub-standard" ideas, you end up with a lot of false positives (if you end up with any), which look good, upon superficial examination, but which, in the end, never amount to anything much. The ideas that get through the system are "me-too", while all the original ideas, that get held up by one filter or another, are "false negatives" which are, in fact, exactly the positive ideas you are looking for to boost the business. Those "stage gate" filters are now integrated into HR screening software, with unintended consequences for both organizations and the economy as a whole. The article says, "Mr Capelli's favorite email came from a company that drew 25,000 applicants for a standard engineering position only to have the HR Department say not one was qualified."

In large organizations, creative engineers know that to get their ideas through so-called "stage gate idea generating systems" they will have to mask their originality. They write them up and present them in a way that will satisfy all the filters and thus reassure the heads of innovation programs that they can get innovation without risk. In much the same way, according to Cappelli, and there is a lot of evidence to back him up, the software screening programs used by HR departments now have such tight filters that anything resembling a talented human being automatically gets filtered, not only by the software filters but the sort of blinkers/blinders now discarded by most equestrian disciplines but still favored by HR departments.

"One job seeker reported that "he had been told he was perfect for a given position--except for the fact that his previous job title didn't match that of the vacancy," a title unique to the prospective employer."

So, in the same way as creative engineers know that they need to game "idea generating" software if they wish to be accepted, savvy job seekers have begun to realize they have to game the HR software used to screen applications. Here's how:

"As anyone who has applied for a job lately knows, the trick is parroting all the words in the job description but not just copying and pasting the text, which leads the software to discard the application. It's a whole new skill: Clearing the software hurdle is as important as being able to do the job."

Below are a few more excerpts from the article:

As in other parts of the economy, software has its benefits. It makes applying for a job easier. One doesn't have to trudge down to the HR office to fill out forms. It has broadened the pool of applicants from which employers can choose. It saves money.

But at a time of widespread unemployment, the volume of applications is swamping HR departments, many of which have been downsized to cut costs. That has led employers to further automate hiring—and to become incredibly specific about experience and skills they seek. Screening software weeds out anyone whose application lacks particular key words.

With so much talent looking for work, why not get what you really need? Here's why: Managers pile up so many requirements that they make it nearly impossible to find anyone who fits.

Why External Hires Get Paid More, and Perform Worse, than Internal Staff

2012-03-29T17:28:00.001+02:00

It is well-known that if a person does a part-time MBA, and continues to work after graduation with the same company, the effect on pay grade or job title is often zero. To get a higher wage, the MBA graduate usually needs to move to another company. But that move does not come without risk and can provoke envy from the new colleagues, who have been in the job longer and are probably paid less than the new MBA hire.

The Human Resources section of the Knowledge@Wharton website carries a provocative article, based on sound research, with the above title.

It begins:

Here is some research sure to rankle every employee who has applied for an internal promotion and been passed over in favor of someone brought in from the outside.

According to Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell, "external hires" get significantly lower performance evaluations for their first two years on the job than do internal workers who are promoted into similar jobs. They also have higher exit rates, and they are paid "substantially more." About 18% to 20% more. On the plus side for these external hires, if they stay beyond two years, they get promoted faster than do those who are promoted internally.

"Most jobs are entered into through a variety of different routes, sometimes by being hired from the outside and sometimes by moving up from inside the firm," says Bidwell. "I was curious as to what the effect of these different routes would be" on an individual's job performance. His research is presented in a paper titled, "Paying More to Get Less: The Effects of External Hiring versus Internal Mobility."

The issue has significance for organizations, Bidwell says, as they think about where they source their employees, especially higher-level ones. Do they "grow their own" or do they go out into the job market and hire outsiders? "My research documents some quite substantial costs to external hires and some substantial benefits to internal mobility," he notes.

Go here to read the whole article: Why External Hires Get Paid More...

Why the Best Coach for a Senior Exec Could Be a Subordinate

2012-03-06T17:53:00.000+01:00

An article by Leslie Brokaw on the MIT Sloan Management Review website, with the above title, mentions an article by Robert S. Kaplan in the McKinsey Quarterly. This reminded me of the very worthy practice of "teaching up".

One of the biggest risks for senior executives is isolation. One of the smartest solutions is coaching — from subordinates.

The problem for senior executives is that the people who give them feedback don’t usually see them in action. Robert S. Kaplan, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, writes that senior executives “may be ‘overseen’ by a board of directors or very senior boss,” but those superiors are probably not closely watching their daily behavior.

“One of the first questions I ask senior executives is, ‘Who is your coach?’ Many respond with a list of mentors who are outside the company or perhaps on the board of directors.” But these mentors have huge blind spots and only know the narrative they’re provided, Kaplan says.

In McKinsey Quarterly, Kaplan offers a counterintuitive suggestion: Seek out feedback and coaching from direct reports.

Subordinates actually observe an executive’s behavior on a regular basis. Normally, though, they don’t have any incentive to be candid. “Subordinates do not want to offend the boss and may believe that constructive suggestions are unwelcome and unwise,” writes Kaplan. “Many senior executives also unwittingly send off a ‘vibe’ that while they claim to encourage constructive criticism, they really don’t want to hear it.” ...

Read the whole article here:

Why the Best Coach for a Senior Exec Could Be a Subordinate

Coca-Cola: the Recipe for a High Reliability Organization

2012-03-05T14:32:00.000+01:00

I have had the privilege, in various European countries, of working with some of the world's best companies. One of them is the Coca-Cola company. While reading the different editions of Karl E. Weick's book Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, and subconsciously analyzing why Coca-Cola has managed to stay so successful for so long, I have become more and more convinced that the Coca-Cola company demonstrates many of the characteristics of mindfulness Weick has identified as being necessary for a High Reliability Organization (HRO).

At the beginning of the book, Weick and his co-author Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, have a short section on "The Basic Message of This Book". Below is an excerpt:

"This book is about organizations, expectations and mindfulness. Our basic message is that expectations can get you into trouble unless you create a mindful infrastructure that continually does all of the following:

Tracks small failures

Resists oversimplification

Remains sensitive to operations

Maintains capabilities for resilience

Takes advantage of shifting locations of expertise

Failure to move towards this type of mindful infrastructure magnifies the damage produced by unexpected events and impairs reliable performance. Moving towards a mindful infrastructure is harder than it looks because it means that people have to forgo the "pleasures" of attending to success, simplicities, strategy, planning and superiors."

Based on my experience of working with people in the Coca-Cola company, and my reading of Weick, I made a short resume of the following six behaviors which are fairly plain to see in any person who functions successfully in the Coca-Cola culture. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the culture rapidly and implicitly decides who it will keep, and who it will let go, based on how well the qualities and behaviors described below are demonstrated. When people who have been successful in the Coca-Cola culture leave the company, for whatever reason, they usually take these HRO behaviors with them to the next company.

Behavior #1 - Ability to Bounce Back

To become successful at Coke, people need to bounce back quickly from mistakes or constructive/negative feedback. The worst thing is to make a mistake and not tell your manager or another responsible person about it. Keeping quiet about a potential bad situation is even worse; you will lose the trust of the culture. However, if you do make a serious mistake or notice an event which can harm the system and you communicate it to your manager or to another person who can trigger immediate corrective action, so that a serious situation in the market or public opinion is avoided, you will be thanked and this will build trust in you.

If you are a senior person working for Coke, your behavior will be assessed on how well you handle challenging situations, whether or not they are of your own making. Depending on how unflappably you manage such situations, the Coke culture will know whether it can count on you or not. The Coke culture continually encourages this resilience and autonomy in individuals throughout the system, thus making it less dependent than other FMCG companies on one or two high profile people.

Here are the sort of tacit and explicit questions that are asked about team members, with regard to their ability to bounce back: “How rapidly and visibly does this team member bounce back from difficult situations? How well does he or she take constructive feedback and translate it into positive action?”

Behavior #2 - Absence of Complacency

In the Coke culture, it is good to feel bad and bad to feel good. It is known that satisfaction with past successes breeds complacency. However, if people are constantly, pro-actively looking at how the system can fail they will pick up weak signals which they would not see if they were continually congratulating themselves. If noticed, these weak signals of systems failure, of crisis or discontinuities in the market can help to avoid potentially serious incidents or help to seize opportunities.

The questions that define the absence of complacency: “How well does this team member make a realistic assessment (i.e. an assessment that is not too optimistic) of plans and actions he or she is undertaking? How well does this team member put in place contingency plans in case something goes wrong? How well does this person pick up on signals that show the present course of action may not be the right one?”

Behavior #3 - Respectful and continuous communication

There are limits to what can be planned or anticipated in a company like Coke. Just putting a plan in place doesn’t mean that it will automatically happen in six months or a year. Therefore continuous and respectful communication is needed on a daily basis to update “current reality” about the plan and/or to make everybody aware of discontinuities or potential failures as they happen. Also, Coke knows that lack of respectful communication between people can be very dangerous during crises or incidents. At such times everybody needs to constantly and naturally update each other from minute to minute and they will not know how to do this if they have not developed the habit of communicating respectfully during ordinary times.

The questions that the system asks about the ability to maintain continuous communication: “How respectful is this person in his or her daily communication? How well has this person been able to build up easygoing communication with a wide variety of internal and external partners? Would other team members easily communicate sensitive information to this person in a time of crisis?”

Behavior #4 – Sensitivity to daily operations

You will often see Coke Management giving a strong response to what others consider a weak signal coming from present operations or the market. Coke people have to be able to pick up on discrepancies which even world-class experts, such as external consultants, have missed. That is why, very high-level creative and conceptual thinkers who work for Coke also need to show a sensitivity to operations and/or potential crises. If the very technical people, who are also needed by the system, can see that a marketeer willingly takes on-board operational problems, they will help him or her to realize their ideas. If you can interpret day-to-day operations not as time-wasting procedures, but keep your eyes open and see the opportunities and the discontinuities you are demonstrating an important behavior for the Coke culture.

The questions the system asks: “How well has this person shown in his or her behavior that he understands and takes into account the point of view of the people in operations? Does this person take into account operational constraints (best use of existing resources, existing processes) when putting forward ideas or does he or she propose ideas that are never feasible because they do not take into account such constraints?”

Behavior #5 – Ability to Manage Creative Friction

An organization like Coke is visible all over the world and it is impacted by events in nearly every industry. This world is complex, chaotic, unstable and unpredictable, and it will not respond to “solutions” stemming from black and white simplifications. The Coke culture encourages people who can cross boundaries, who have diverse experience and who are skeptical towards orthodox wisdom (as long as they can communicate respectfully). This diversity allows people to see different things when they talk about the “same” event. Sharing of opposing viewpoints can and does, however, create friction between people. A successful person in the Coke culture knows how to use respectful communication and negotiating tactics to reconcile differences of opinion without destroying the nuances that diverse people have detected.

The questions asked by the system: “How well does this person demonstrate behavior which gets to grips with the full extent of a challenge or a problem with a diversity of people? How well does this person solicit a wide variety of views and expertise and build his or her work on solid understanding of the system? What is the amount of rework that this person has to perform as a result of faulty execution resulting from hasty, incomplete or one-sided decision-making?”

Behavior #6 – Deference to expertise, not to a rigid hierarchical structure

A resilient and reliable structure is an enabler for ongoing success, whereas a rigid hierarchical structure limits access to expertise in the organization. That's why you will often see managers in the Coke culture going straight to whomever they consider the expert, and they will not rest until they’ve located and listened fully to him or her. At times such as these, comments made by disgruntled middle managers about short-circuiting the hierarchy will fall on deaf ears. Overall reliability and security of the company is more important to the Coke culture than any one person’s feelings about his or her job description, especially if that person has shown he or she doesn’t have the expertise necessary to handle an unexpected situation.

The sorts of question asked by the system: “How well does this person show in his or her behavior that he s/is capable of giving accurate information and expert opinions, unconstrained by hierarchy? How well does this person show in his or her behavior that he puts the reliability and security of the company above the natural desire to defer to managers?”

You can buy the book by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe at Amazon:

Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty

Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions

2012-02-21T13:01:00.001+01:00

Excerpt from an article, written by George Bradt, that appeared last April in Forbes Magazine:

"The only three true job interview questions are:

Can you do the job?
Will you love the job?
Can we tolerate working with you?

That’s it.
Those three.
Think back.
Every question you’ve ever posed to others or had asked of you in a job interview is a subset of a deeper in-depth follow-up to one of these three key questions.

Each question potentially may be asked using different words, but every question, however it is phrased, is just a variation on one of these topics:

Strengths
Motivation, and
Fit."

You can read the whole story:

Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions - Forbes

Candidates asked to send proof of "web presence" instead of résumés

2012-01-24T19:53:00.000+01:00

Here is an excerpt from an article by RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN in today's Wall Street Journal, under the title No More Résumés, Say Some Firms.

Union Square Ventures recently posted an opening for an investment analyst.

Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their "Web presence," such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog. Applicants also had to submit short videos demonstrating their interest in the position.

Union Square says its process nets better-quality candidates —especially for a venture-capital operation that invests heavily in the Internet and social-media—and the firm plans to use it going forward to fill analyst positions and other jobs.

To read the rest of the article, see how other companies are by-passing résumes, and readers' comments please go to No More Résumés (paying article).

How to evaluate true intuitive experience

2011-10-23T14:04:00.000+02:00

Managers and coaches often lay a great deal of store in the value of intuitive management. I do too, but it depends on who the intuitive decision or advice is coming from and how much experience they have of their professional field. Below is an excerpt from today's Sunday New York Times Magazine article adapted from Daniel Kahneman's forthcoming book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow".

We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field (note from John Gaynard, based on an earlier part of the article, when Kahneman demonstrated how it was impossible to correctly evaluate who would be a good leader in the Israeli army based on a series of standard tests or levels of confidence shown in ad hoc groups), people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.

Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

Read the whole article:
Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence - NYTimes.com

Only one in seven companies has managers that enable workers to progress

2011-09-04T09:23:00.000+02:00

In today's New York Sunday Times Review, Teresa Amabile constructs an article around her own research, a Gallup Healthways ongoing poll and two books: The Limping Middle Class and One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities. Both books will be published tomorrow, September 4, 2011. The title of the article is: Do Happier People Work Harder?

Below is an excerpt:

As long as workers experience their labor as meaningful, progress is often followed by joy and excitement about the work. “This time it looks good! I feel more positive about this project and my work than I’ve felt in a long time,” one programmer wrote after she’d completed a small but difficult task. This kind of rich inner work life improves performance, which further supports inner work life — a positive spiral.

Unfortunately, many companies now keep head count and resources to a minimum and this makes progress a struggle for employees. Most managers don’t understand the negative consequences of this struggle. When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

This failure reflects a common experience inside organizations. Of the seven companies we studied, just one had managers who consistently supplied the catalysts — worker autonomy, sufficient resources and learning from problems — that enabled progress. Not coincidentally, that company was the only one to achieve a technological breakthrough in the months we studied it.

So what is the lesson for managers and coaches? Create a climate in which you allow your staff or team members sufficient autonomy to do their jobs, give them the right resources and allow them to learn from problems. Is that rocket science?

Read the whole article:

Do Happier People Work Harder? - NYTimes.com

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised Test for CEOs

2011-08-16T15:11:00.003+02:00

In a July 21 article in Businessweek, Bryant Urstadt reviewed Jon Ronson's book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. The article is subtitled: "Why are so many CEOs jerks? Because they're psychopaths" and it goes on to show that many corporate leaders score way above average on a test known as the The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised test. By following a link from the review you can take test yourself. Here is how the review begins:

The very first thing to know about psychopaths, at least according to Jon Ronson, is that they’re very charming. They’re also usually smart, easily bored, and ruthless power mongers who watch suffering with interest, have an inflated sense of self-worth, lie compulsively, and rarely take blame for their mistakes. For those reasons and others they tend to congregate in places such as London and New York. And a relatively high percentage end up running big companies.

Ronson, the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, wrapsThe Psychopath Test around the research of Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who is the authority on psychopaths and co-author of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. Hare is also the author of the definitive psychopath test—Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)—which has become the SAT for diagnosing nutjob behavior. Throughout decades of research, he’s found that many corporate leaders score way above average.

Actually, alarmingly high. While studies suggest that about 1 percent of the general population qualifies as genuinely psychopathic, Hare believes that about 4 percent of people with substantial decision-making power can be classified as such, and their influence is outsized. Hare even tells Ronson he wishes he’d spent less time studying psychopaths in prison and more time studying those who work in the markets. “Serial killers ruin families,” Hare says. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.” Although Ronson leans heavily on Hare’s research, he explains that other psychologists feel the same way. “The higher you go up the ladder,” says Martha Stout, a former Harvard Medical School professor and author of The Sociopath Next Door, “the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.” (Ronson uses the terms socio- and psychopath interchangeably.)

You can also find reviews of the book in the New York Times: Running Down a Sanity Checklist, or by following some of the links to:

The best way to kick off a new organisational change is to give the skeletons from previous changes a decent burial

2011-07-08T10:17:00.000+02:00

I remember once talking to a marketing VP about a major organisational change that had gone wrong in his company. I asked him if he would call in a person with no experience of marketing to launch a major new product. "Of course I wouldn't," he replied.

But, often, that is exactly what happens when a company decides to implement a major organisational change. It may never have implemented a change in the past, may never have laid off people, but it decides to confide the task to HR staff who have never had experience of change management.

That marketing VP was faced with implementing another major change. He had learned from the company's past mistakes. That is why he was talking to me and why he asked me to advise him on better planning change, better comunicating change, and then managing the transitions provoked by change. I use the methods, developed by William Bridges, to manage the organisational and individual transitions provoked by change.

One of the main lessons I learned from Bridges is that it is often necessary to begin a new change by going back to old changes and seeing what went wrong and how those things continue to pollute the organisational culture. It is necessary to show people how to take their skeletons out of the closet, so that they can give them a decent burial. Many managing directors don't want to hear of this. Sometimes they even get irritated when they hear a consultant advising them to repair the errors of the past. All they want to talk to their staff about is a "bright new beginning", and to hell with whatever went wrong with the last change.

By giving staff about to enter a new change, the time, even if it's only a couple of hours, to give their still clanking skeletons a decent burial, and to talk about their personal lessons learned, it allows them to come to terms with the past. It augments trust in management, and allows the new change to move forward more smoothly than it would have done if things had been kept under the carpet.

I was reminded of this when I saw the latest edition of Strategy+Business, in an article that uses case a few real-life case studies to explain how a new change can be unsuccessful because of poor experience with change in the past. Here is an excerpt:

The first study involved a property and development firm in the Philippines. Unable to meet the demands of a booming population and increasing competition, the company’s executives had decided to merge with another firm. At the time of the study, the organization had announced the merger to its employees and begun the transition — including the evaluation and redefinition of jobs.

In interviews with the human resources department, the researchers learned that the company had a poor history of change implementation: In the past, senior managers had created satellite offices and reassigned employees without consulting them, leading to resentment among those affected. With the help of HR, the researchers split employees into two groups — those who had reason to resent upper management for previous actions and those who didn’t.

Two months after the merger was announced, 155 employees at the firm completed surveys assessing previous change management projects, their perceptions of the current transition, and their level of trust in the organization. The results of this first study confirmed that employees who had had poor experiences with change in the past felt more cynicism about the current transition as well as less trust.

You can read the whole article at : Dealing with the ghosts of change management.

Six 21st century rules of thumb for reinventing your career

2011-06-27T11:20:00.004+02:00

The latest edition of Fortune Magazine, which will be on sale until July 11, contains a really informative set of articles titled "Pulling off the ultimate career makeover". While providing case studies of five people who have successfully reinvented themselves, it extracts some rules of thumb for reinventing yourself in a world of social media.

Here they are :

Get online, for real. Reinvention these days is digital. You're not too old to learn social media, and it's not too hard. In fact, technology has become more, not less, accessible. So get going!
Start from scratch. In the Age of Disruption, we're all starting from scratch. Don't get hung up over it -- embrace it. (Anyhow, you don't have a choice.)
Learn by doing. Don't worry about being perfect before you post something or try out a new site. The beauty of the medium is that there's often no right answer -- so you won't be wrong.
Share the wealth. Competitive advantage used to be about keeping a juicy nugget to yourself. But today knowledge is practically a commodity. Sharing raises your personal brand and connects you to others on a higher level. (Now go post this article.)
Cut back fast. To change your career, you need to be financially fit. So forget about status; the neighbors will be more impressed by your reinvention than your country club.
Prioritize your passions. The great thing about remaking yourself is that you can jettison all those things that you hate. Plot your passions and skill sets, and see if it gets you to a new place.

The six rules above just give a hint of what is contained in the stories of the five people who reinvented themselves. I encourage you to read the whole article at : Reinvent Your Career

Alerting Foreign Managers to Risks in the United States

2011-05-30T21:49:00.000+02:00

Amazing as it may seem there are still managers who are not given coaching about the appropriate behaviours to have and respect when they are asked to manage in another country.

In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair it seems that American Human Resource professionals are wondering how to ensure that foreign managers play to the rules.

Below is an excerpt from an article by Andrew R. McIlvaine on Human Resource Executive Online:

Human Resource Executive Online - The Risks of Foreign Managers: "HR must ensure that foreign nationals receive training on U.S. workplace laws before they begin supervising employees, says Celia Joseph, a management attorney at Fisher & Phillips in Philadelphia.

'They don't necessarily need to memorize every law, but they should have a clear understanding of when to recognize a potential issue, when they should seek guidance and who they should turn to,' she says.

Foreign managers, especially executives, should also sign an employment agreement in which they acknowledge that harassment is illegal in the United States and that they will comply with the law, says Arpin.

'It's not at all unusual for executives brought over here to sign an employment agreement,' she says. 'You can include a provision in which the executives agree to read all the materials passed on to them regarding the treatment of people in the workplace and to indemnify the company for any legal costs associated with a dispute. That's extreme, but what we're often dealing with here is the need to change behaviors, and if you hit them in the pocketbook, they're likely to pay attention.'"

Disruptive Innovations Within Integrated Health Systems

2011-05-03T17:58:00.000+02:00

There is a tendency to think that the latest "new" book on innnovation is the best, but that is far from the truth. The books on the subject that I find truly worthwhile are a few years old and most of them have been written by Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma.

One of Christensen's most recent books is The Innovator's Prescription, co-written with Jason Hwang, M.D. Since the publication of that book and another one on disruptive innovation in education, Christensen's mission has been extended through the work of the Innosight Institute, which recently announced that it will be publishing a series of case studies on disruptive innovations within (U.S.) integrated health systems. The first case study is of Grand Valley Health Plan, which has

"served the greater Grand Rapids, Michigan, area for nearly 30 years as a regional, for-profit integrated delivery system, specializing in primary care with a guiding focus on wellness and prevention. Though it is a small plan with an enrollment of fewer than 8,000 members, the staff-model HMO has earned national distinction for health care innovation and quality. It is regarded as one of America’s “Best Health Insurance Plans,” ranked #4, for two consecutive years, by U.S. News & World Report/National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) for consumer experience, prevention, and treatment."

You can download the case study from this page: Grand Valley Health Plan.

The ideal manager in Europe is a good planner and organizer

2011-04-25T14:19:00.000+02:00

According to an article written by Laurance N'Kaoua, based on research done by BVA/BPI among employees in 11 European countries the quality/competence most sought in a manager is that of being a good planner and organizer.

Below are the managerial competencies/qualities that were listed in the article, in their order of importance to employees (for the purposes of this blog post I am using the words capacities, competencies and qualities interchangeably):

The capacity to plan and organize
The capacity to motivate employees.
The capacity to communicate and explain decisions.
The capacity to evaluate, recognize and reward the quality of the work done by his/her team members.
Self-confidence.

The five qualities or competencies that seemed the least important were:

The capacity to delegate without micro-managing
Intuition
Open-mindedness, curiosity
Ethical behavior
Expertise

Read the original article in Les Echos:
Le portrait-robot du manager idéal - Les Echos.fr

The Science of Evil: Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

2011-03-27T15:24:00.004+02:00

Simon Baron-Cohen does some very interesting research and he writes well. His most recent book focuses on the subject of empathy, or, to be more to the point, the consequences of the lack of it. In the U.K. it is titled "Zero Degrees of Empathy" and in the United States it is titled The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

In today's English Observer newspaper Simon Baron-Cohen has written an article which, as I read it, brought to mind a whole lot of other books, most notably Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" and "Defiance" the story of Tuvia Bielski's partisan otriad in the Belorussian forests during WWII. Although Bielski's Jewish partisans fought the Germans, like other partisan groups in the forests, his emphasis was on "saving jews" not on killing Germans. In Nechama Tec's book about Bielski it was interesting to see that although Bielski was heavily criticized by other partisans for such empathetic behavior saving children, women and the old--the other partisans didn't want to be burdened down by non-fighters - fact more members of Bielski's group of so-called weak people survived longer than the men-only, fighter-only groups

There is a neat inventory attached to the article that can allow you to find your empathy quotient (EQ) score, but as with all such self-marked questionnaires the results should be taken with a small pinch of salt. The best way to analyze your EQ results would be to look back at recent experience with people and see if you can find occasions that seem to confirm or deny the score. If a situation in which you showed low empathy bothers you, what can you do to make it different next time around?

Baron-Cohen's article, on the other hand, needs to be taken very seriously. His previous book about autism has helped me enormously in trying to understand different styles of creativity.

Below is an extract from the article:

Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. It leaves you feeling mystified by why relationships don't work out, and it creates a deep-seated self-centredness. Other people's thoughts and feelings are just off your radar. It leaves you doomed to do your own thing, in your own little bubble, not just oblivious of other people's feelings and thoughts but oblivious to the idea that there might even be other points of view. The consequence is that you believe 100% in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, and judge anyone who does not hold your beliefs as wrong, or stupid.

Zero degrees of empathy does not strike at random in the population. There are at least three well-defined routes to getting to this end-point: borderline, psychopathic, and borderline personality disorders. I group these as zero-negative because they have nothing positive to recommend them. They are unequivocally bad for the sufferer and for those around them. Of course these are not all the sub-types that exist. Indeed, alcohol, fatigue and depression are just a few examples of states that can temporarily reduce one's empathy, and schizophrenia is another example of a medical condition that can reduce one's empathy.

Read the whole article at:

The science of empathy | Science | The Observer

How clueless bosses suffer from annual review "rater bias"

2011-03-05T12:11:00.002+01:00

A couple of powerful sentences, in an answer to a reader's query, by Marie G. McIntyre, in the Inside Bay Area section of the Oakland Review and titled "Managers rigid reviews shortchange best workers" caught my eye. Here they are:

Your clueless boss provides a perfect example of "rater bias," a common phenomenon which contributes to unfairness in performance reviews. Research has shown that many managers have preconceived ideas about how rating scales should be used. "High raters" freely distribute top scores, while "low raters" refuse to use them at all, even for exceptional employees.

While high-rating bosses need to become more discerning, low raters need to recognize that this tightfisted attitude automatically de-motivates their most valuable employees. People who do truly outstanding work ought to be recognized with an outstanding rating.

*** Marie G. McIntyre is a workplace coach and the author of "Secrets to Winning at Office Politics."

The Importance of Connectedness

2011-03-04T11:55:00.001+01:00

In an informative March 31st post on Customer Think titled Why are Clever Executives Failing? John Todor provides many answers to his question. One of them is the fact that the isolated manager no longer has the knowledge to do his or her job.

Excerpt:

In 1987 people felt they had 75% of the knowledge needed to do their jobs. In 1997, they had only 20% (Kelley***). Today we would expect the percentage to be much less. For virtually all of us it is impossible to function independently these days. So the question is do you have a networked brain trust to help you in your sense making?

*** Robert E. Kelley How to Be a Star at Work: 9 Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed

How to eliminate the color line with other colors

2011-01-06T18:07:00.001+01:00

At lunch today I talked to a client about a conflict situation I had to mediate in Congo Brazzaville a few years ago. The company was under Dutch ownership. There were three groups of managers. The first group was made up of expatriate managers sent out from Holland for a few years. The second group was made up of Congolese citizens who had grown into their jobs and acquired responsibility based on time spent in the company. The third group of managers was made up of young Congolese nationals who had been brought up in France and who had been to French Business Schools and worked for large French consumer goods companies before they were recruited to work in Brazzaville and Pointe Noire.

The home grown African managers refused to recognize the expertise of the younger managers who had been to Business School, and who had been hired because of their mastery of modern management techniques. The younger African managers disliked the fact that when the older managers talked to them it was often in terms of "Hey, you, the student!" The Dutch managers had often come up through apprenticeships and both the homegrown African managers and the French educated ones both felt that they were being lorded over by Dutch people with inferior qualifications who knew nothing about Congolese consumers.

The conflict between the three groups eventually settled down into one of Africans against Europeans. The Dutch managers refused to believe that they had been condescending and overbearing to their African colleagues. The Africans refused to believe that their Dutch colleagues could bring skills to the company that they did not already have.

The way the conflict was defused was serendipitous and quite simple, in hindsight. Searching for an approach to resolve the conflict, I asked all the managers to fill in a simple Questionnaire developed by William Moulton Marston, the person who came up with DISC theory back in 1928. DISC postulates that there four main personality styles. Individuals tend to favor one of these styles of behavior when communicating and trying to influence other people. Each style is associated with a color. The four styles are :

DOMINANCE (color RED) - Dominant individuals tend to be assertive and use control and power to exercise mastery over a situation.
INFLUENCE (color YELLOW) - These individuals tend to use metaphor, analogy, colorful language and many examples when they try to get their message across.
SUBMISSION (color GREEN) - Submissive individuals tend to be patient, persistent, empathetic and favor group harmony above all else.
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS (color BLUE) - Detail oriented individuals who tend to favor structure and the use of precise facts and evidence when they communicate.

It took me a few minutes to score the responses to the questionnaires and then I asked all the managers to get into their style groups and discuss how to resolve the differences. The people with a Blue style joined up with others of a Blue style, the Greens with the Greens, the Reds with the Reds and the Yellows with the Yellows. I asked each group to spend fifteen minutes talking about the problems, then to do some brainstorming and come up with practical ideas to help all the managers work better together. As individual differences that can be measured by psychometric instruments are usually at a higher logical level than national differences, each group of similar color that emerged was made up both senior and young African managers and Dutch managers.

After a few minutes to break the ice, each group settled down and began to work amicably together. The Blue group began to get into detail about the situation and joked about the crazy solutions that the Yellows would no doubt produce, the Reds quickly came up with bullet points to demonstrate how to solve the problem in five minutes, the Yellows spent all the time talking and joking, and the Greens lamented the lack of group harmony and how comfortable, in contrast, they felt with each other.

Each group then presented its ideas. The Greens concentrated on how to restore empathy, the Blues presented a lot of logical, rational, detailed ideas about how to solve the situation, the Reds gave their ideas about how to restore control and the Yellows concentrated on how to improve communications between the managers. There was a lot of joshing about how impractical the different sets of ideas were, with Blues criticizing Reds, Yellows criticizing Greens, and so on.

But the main impact that came from using the Marston's Colors questionnaire was that the line between Black and White had disappeared to be replaced by the colors representing the different personality styles. Some of the managers said to me afterwards that being called a "Blue" or a "Red" had provided not only welcome relief from being categorized as a "Noir" or a "Blanc" but had shown them that, in fact, the conflict had had much less to do with nationality than with the different ways in which individual managers of different styles approached the task of managing their teams.

Burnout and how to avoid it

2011-01-05T16:12:00.000+01:00

Yesterday's edition of the Financial Times carried a long article titled Stress in the executive suite, which I recommend to anybody who may be suffering from job stress and possible burnout.

The article underlines the value that coaching can bring to 24/7 executives. It begins:

When it comes to burnout, Garry Savin has pretty much seen it all: chief executives who cannot bring themselves to get out of bed in the morning, hedge fund managers with drink problems and leading industrialists unable to turn off their phones for a 10-minute consultation.

There is a lot in the artilce in the preventive value of coaching, for example the following paragraphs:

Matt Paese, a vice-president of executive solutions at Development Dimensions International, the talent management consultancy, observes that 10 years ago his firm would work on the appointment of a chief executive and then move on, but now about 75 per cent of the projects he does involve ongoing coaching and support for leaders. Sessions can continue for up to a year and help clients adjust to their role by prioritising goals.

Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive of Google, has said the best advice he ever received was to hire a coach. He picked Bill Campbell, a tech industry veteran and chairman of the board at Apple, who once coached Columbia university’s football team.

The need to train and empower managers to deal with dificult people

2010-11-12T17:10:00.005+01:00

In an article with the above title on the HR.BLR.COM website it is stated that:

Dealing with difficult people is one of the top areas searched by visitors to Employaid.com, an online community for corporate employees that offers videos and tip sheets for handling a variety of situations.

In the Creativity and Innovation MBA module on which I tutor the students are presented with a number of psychometric instruments that allow them not only to understand their own temperaments and creative styles, but also to analyze why they find other people difficult or why colleagues can find them difficult. In many cases a difficult person does not mean to be bad, s/he just thinks differently.

For example a "big picture thinker" may find a person who is always asking for more detail very difficult. One of the main tasks of leadership is to bring together a team of diverse personalities and coach them in such a way that they understand and appreciate each other's differences and what those differences can bring to problem-solving. But, in the absence of good management or leadership, what can start off as simple differences in style can degenerate into personal conflict and even open warfare. This is especially true of conversations in which two individuals come at a problem from two entirely different directions, cannot understand why and then end up saying that the other person is bad or evil.

In the article mentioned above, Barbara Poole advises that managers should be trained to handle difficult people. Barbara is the founder and CEO of Employaid.com. She says that:

Employers should be proactive about managing difficult people in the workplace instead of “batting cleanup” and trying to fix a problem after it has escalated, says Barbara Poole, founder and CEO, of Employaid.

If I were to advise on any type of training for handling difficult people I would include the use of valid and reliable psychometric instruments. MBTI is an old favorite, but new instruments such as NEO-FFI and KAI Theory are emerging.

Read Barbara's whole article here:

Empower Managers, Employees To Deal with Difficult People

The six keys to achieving excellence in any field

2010-11-09T11:29:00.009+01:00

Tony Schwarz, the author of The Way We're Working Isn't Working has an article full of practical advice on the Harvard Business Review Guest Blog, under the title Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything.

The six keys are:

1 - Pursue what you love

2 - Do the hardest work first

3 - Practice intensely

4 - Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses

5 - Take regular renewal breaks

6 - Ritualize practice - for example, do it at regular, inviolable times.

The article reminded me of the work done by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers. I encourage you to read it. Tony Schwarz acknowledges the work done by Anders Ericsson and others to determine that if you wish to be excellent at anything you need at least 10,000 hours of practice.

How beliefs can put limits on leadership

2010-11-06T16:01:00.001+01:00

There are probably about 136 different definitions of leadership in "the literature" and another three hundred million in people's heads. All of them, in some way, are influenced by belief systems: national or religious belief systems, family belief systems and unconscious personal belief systems. At the national level we know that leadership in Japan calls for qualities that may not always be needed in the United States or France, and vice versa.

At the level of the individual who has been designated, or who has chosen to be, leader qualms about the adequacy or inadequacy of his or her leadership practice usually come from the feeling that personal thought patterns and habits are limiting day-to-day effectiveness and efficiency.

Andy Smith has a useful article on his emotional intelligence blog (one of many useful articles, in fact) that recounts his personal experience in dealing with a belief system that imposed limits on the leader he was coaching, a person who had been promoted to be the boss of former colleagues, probably one of the toughest challenges any manager can be confronted with.

Excerpt:

"Last week I had a first coaching session with the Managing Director of a medium-sized company. Although he had a long and successful track record as Operations Director, and had a wealth of experience and an MBA under his belt, he was fairly new in the MD role, and had doubts about his ability to lead.

In the course of our conversation he described various examples of how he had made a difference to staff at more junior levels. I was impressed by how neatly he had created the conditions where staff could come up with necessary adaptations to changes in the marketplace themselves, ending up where the business needed them to be with far less resistance than if he had tried to impose the same changes from above.

Leading people at a more senior level was a different story. Specifically, his doubts were around how he could lead his fellow directors - the guys who not long before had been his colleagues. 'How can I tell the Sales Director what to do?' he asked. 'I don't know anything about sales.'"

Read the rest of Andy's blog post at:

How Limiting Beliefs Can Affect Your Leadership - Coaching Leaders Blog - Coaching Leaders: NLP, Coaching, Appreciative Inquiry, Emotional Intelligence

Coaching for Leadership

The Background to this Blog

Why it's important to understand one's genetic predisposition toward stress

How genetic is that distinctive chuckle or curious disposition?

Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: HR Software designed to screen out talent

Why External Hires Get Paid More, and Perform Worse, than Internal Staff

Why the Best Coach for a Senior Exec Could Be a Subordinate

Coca-Cola: the Recipe for a High Reliability Organization

Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions

Candidates asked to send proof of "web presence" instead of résumés

How to evaluate true intuitive experience

Only one in seven companies has managers that enable workers to progress

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised Test for CEOs

Related articles

The best way to kick off a new organisational change is to give the skeletons from previous changes a decent burial

Six 21st century rules of thumb for reinventing your career

Alerting Foreign Managers to Risks in the United States

Disruptive Innovations Within Integrated Health Systems

Related articles

The ideal manager in Europe is a good planner and organizer

Read the original article in Les Echos:Le portrait-robot du manager idéal - Les Echos.fr

The Science of Evil: Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

How clueless bosses suffer from annual review "rater bias"

The Importance of Connectedness

How to eliminate the color line with other colors

Burnout and how to avoid it

The need to train and empower managers to deal with dificult people

The six keys to achieving excellence in any field

Related articles

How beliefs can put limits on leadership

Related articles

Read the original article in Les Echos:
Le portrait-robot du manager idéal - Les Echos.fr