Bosses: What Will You Do Differently Today?

I awoke this morning anticipating a National Boss Day like years' past: a happy acknowledgement of bosses everywhere — cards signed by staff, inspirational stories, and perhaps even parties of celebration here and there. Instead, after reading the findings of the first Bad Boss Study, I find myself saddened by the number of bad bosses in America who should be hanging their heads in shame.

Released by psychologist, Michelle McQuaid, the study is based on interviews of 1,000 U.S. workers across the country of all ages in a wide variety of professions — and its conclusions are nothing short of alarming:

• Almost a third (31%) of employees polled feel uninspired and unappreciated by their bosses — and close to 15% feel downright miserable, bored, and lonely.

• Only 38% describe their boss as "great," 42% say their bosses don't work very hard, and close to 20% say their bosses have little or no integrity.

• Close to 70% say they'd be happier at work if they got along better with their bosses. That breaks down equally among men and women, but rises to an astonishing 80% among workers in their 20s and 30s.

• Close to 60% say they'd do a better job if they got along better with their bosses.

• When stress levels rise at work, a disturbing 47% say their bosses do not stay calm and in control (although, to be fair, 70% of the boomers say their bosses keep their cool when the heat is on).

A recent Gallup poll I wrote about a few months ago on employee engagement came to a similar conclusion, finding that engaged employees are twice as likely to stay with an organization but that more than half (about 54%) of U.S. employees were not engaged in their organizations.

Overall conclusions: Many bosses lack integrity and work ethic and are leaving U.S. workers feeling unappreciated, uninspired, lonely, miserable, and bored at work. Ouch.

Still, McQuaid points out, there's hope: Almost 10% of those polled said they will use today as an opportunity to talk to their bosses and improve their relationships.

As bosses, we can do better. Let today be the day we recognize the responsibility we hold for the lives of the tremendous individuals who work in our companies and who serve our customers. As a boss, what will you do differently today?

Here are six simple suggestions to make your employees feel more valued and engaged before you lose them:

Communicate: Do your employees really know who you are? Do they know what you stand for? If not, tell them. Welcome new employees personally. Hold — and be involved in — regular staff meetings. Send out regular company e-mails with your personal insights and strategy. Make people feel like they are in the loop, and they'll feel more engaged and more positive about you as a boss.

Be Positive: Encourage everyone. Show empathy when employees mess up. Even when they're in the wrong, always try to weave something positive they've done into the conversation. Give them the confidence they need to repair any damage and succeed.

Be Honest: If you say you're going to do something, do it. Period. If circumstances require a change in plans, go back to step 1: Communicate.

Set Goals: Do your employees know what's expected of them? Are these goals written down and measured? Do your people have the resources to reach these goals? Don't make your employees guess about whether they're doing enough or fulfilling your expectations. When they have measureable goals you've both agreed to, they'll know if you're happy or if they need to step it up a notch.

Show Support: Support your employees' career development and growth by providing training programs. Send them to conferences to help them advance both the company and their careers. Keep them engaged in the industry, and they'll continue to be engaged with you and the company.

Reward: Are your employees rewarded for a job well done? Give them financial bonuses. Personally congratulate them and let them know how much they're appreciated. Keep them posted on what resulted from their work. Sometimes a simple pat on the back and "good job" is enough to change an entire relationship for the better.

You may not convince every employee that you're concerned about them personally, but if you follow at least a few of these suggestions, you can hold your head up high when next year's National Boss Day rolls around. 

Alan E. Hall
Investor and serial entrepreneur Alan E. Hall is the founder and chairman of sales-outsource firm MarketStar, and the founder of Grow America, an organization dedicated to helping entrepreneurs nationwide.
Source: blogs.hbr.org

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The Best Debater May Not Be the Best Leader

With tonight's U.S. presidential debate just hours away, there are many people who assume that the winner of the debate will be the superior leader. But having worked with hundreds of senior leaders over the years, I'm not convinced that debating skill is a good indicator of leadership potential. In fact, from my experience, the ability and willingness to debate is often a leadership liability.

This is not to say that debating is unimportant. Being a good debater requires a mastery of facts and issues, and the ability to put them together in a coherent and convincing manner. It also calls for rapid adaptation of arguments and being fast on your feet, which is a great skill for managers who need to make quick but informed decisions.

At the same time, it's important to recognize that some amount of successful debating is based on theatrics as opposed to content. Good debaters work on timing, rhetorical flourishes, one-liners, and body language — all of which can overcome weaknesses in messaging. As historian Thomas V. DiBacco pointed out in a recent article presidential debates are often "won" by the best actors or those with the best voices, which is why, for example, Ronald Reagan was so effective.

The bigger question is whether debating itself is a useful leadership skill. There are times when it's important for a leader to marshal logical arguments and put forth a convincing case for a particular policy or strategy. Most of the time however, getting other people to move in a certain direction is less about "convincing" and more about "engaging." Effective leaders spend much more time listening, probing, exploring, and facilitating discussion than they do debating. In fact, debating the issues, trying to score points, and focusing on "winning" arguments is usually a recipe for shutting down dialogue. Each side ends up becoming more attached to their position and it becomes harder to find middle ground.

A number of years ago I worked with a senior executive who had been trained as a trial attorney, and therefore was a fantastic debater. As such she could bring together facts and figures to support her positions, and do it in a way that made opposing arguments seem unsupportable. The problem was that she always had to be "right," which meant winning the argument. While this style worked well in the courtroom, it was a disaster in the boardroom. Team members stopped pushing back or hesitated to raise issues altogether, which was easier than arguing and being humiliated. Eventually this led to poor decisions which colleagues didn't often buy into.

Obviously this is an extreme case. But in organizations, debating skills — such as presenting logical arguments, responding to questions, and challenging opposing views — should instead be leveraged in the service of exploration and engagement. This means that the objective should not be to win, but to bring out the nuances of the issue. This way, you'll reach a better conclusion that people will be confident in, because they've heard the various sides. One way to do this, for example, is to intentionally "stage" debates on an issue by assigning people to opposing positions, giving them time to prepare, and then letting them have at it with you and other colleagues in the audience. The key is to use this process as an intentional way to enrich the dialogue, rather than shut it down.

Presidential debates do indeed help us understand each candidate's position on the issues; and they make great theater to boot. But let's be careful about assuming that the best debater will be the better leader. In most organizations, it's just not the case.

RON ASHKENAS
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org

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The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure

Never once in my life until my mid 30s did anyone ever (to the best of my recollection) call me "creative." But now, I hear it all the time.

So what happened?

Well, after a traditional education, business school, and five years working in strategy consulting and venture capital, I went to a cocktail reception at Stanford's d.school, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, where I met George Kembel, cofounder and executive director of the school. While I cannot remember one thing that we discussed, I do remember laughing for about 40 minutes straight as we riffed on odds and ends. (I've since learned that anyone who has a sense of humor is creative.)

Over the next five years, what Kembel and his colleagues at the d.school taught me changed the way I thought about everything, leaving me to wonder why the hell I had never learned the basic methods for thinking like a designer (especially in a world where the leading company, Apple, has a culture built around design methods).

For me, the most important insight from design thinking was that you have to make sure you've defined the right problem before you try to solve it. So, you act like an anthropologist to understand human needs and problems before jumping to solutions. Most of us in business, if we need to discover how to do something new, use PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheets to rationalize our approach. This is what I call "the illusion of rationality." Whether motivated by a lack of insight arrogance, or stupidity, the illusion of rationality is a waste of time and resources — yet one that keeps a lot of people employed in management consulting, as I learned first hand.

Instead, if you don't have the data, you have to create the data. That does not mean plugging random numbers into your spreadsheet. It means generating real insight, from nothing. Designers and bootstrapped entrepreneurs I've worked with use rapid low cost experiments to create data. I refer to these "affordable losses" in the interest of learning, creativity, and discovery as "little bets."

This seems like common sense; so why is it so hard? Three words: fear of failure.

If you're an MBA-trained manager or executive, the odds are you were never, at any point in your educational or professional career given permission to fail, even on a "little bet." Your parents wanted you to achieve, achieve, achieve — in sports, the classroom, and scouting or work. Your teachers penalized you for having the "wrong" answers, or knocked your grades down if you were imperfect, according to however your adult figures defined perfection. Similarly, modern industrial management is still predicated largely on mitigating risks and preventing errors, not innovating or inventing.

But entrepreneurs and designers think of failure the way most people think of learning. As Darden Professor Saras Sarasvathy has shown through her research about how expert entrepreneurs make decisions, they must make lots of mistakes to discover new approaches, opportunities, or business models. She frequently references Howard Schultz who, when he started Il Giornale in Seattle, the company that Schultz used to later buy the original Starbucks brand and assets, the store had nonstop opera music playing, menus written in Italian, and no chairs. As Schultz has often said, "We had to make a lot of mistakes" before discovering a model that worked.

So, I ask you: how do you personally define a "failure"?

If it's going bankrupt with a company you started, getting fired for doing something inconsistent with your values, or needing to break off a wedding engagement or a divorce that could have been avoided if you listened to your heart originally, then, yes, that is a failure, and I can empathize.

However, if your internalized view of failure is anything that is not perfect, then you are disempowering yourself from exercising your inherent creativity.

You're certainly not the only one shackled by these norms, and I don't blame you with the way our educational system is focused so rigidly on "correct answers" and standardized testing. This must change. And modern management systems must become far more adaptive.

For instance, at GE, led by Jeff Immelt and Beth Comstock, we are learning in real time with GE's Innovation Accelerator how an organization long focused on Six Sigma, the antibody of innovation and entrepreneurial discovery, can help its leaders develop a discovery mindset for those situations where there are many unknowns and uncertainties.

Fortunately, the US Army provides a lot of insight about how a highly bureaucratic, command and control organization (the Army of the Cold War) can become more adaptive and creative (which it must when facing rapidly adaptive enemies, and when soldiers and officers can rarely predict what problems they will encounter). It starts with every individual, and unlearning many old bad habits. As Col. Casey Haskins, who heads up military instruction for West Point, has said, "You have to make it cool to fail." Slow as culture change may come to a behemoth like GE or the military, Comstock, Immelt, and Haskins understand the same insight.

At GE, instead of focusing on completing solutions, Comstock focuses on providing tools and resources to drive a discovery mindset, to identify problems first before jumping in with solutions. And, to do so, they've got to change a bunch of internal review approaches so that it becomes cool to be imperfect and half-baked at the early stages of new projects — so long as you're learning quickly.

One little bet after the other, GE, Cisco, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Clorox and many other companies are on the path to becoming more adaptive. Amazon and Pixar are leaders already. Bill Hewlett, cofounder of Hewlett Packard, an ardent proponent of what he called "small bet" innovation, found that HP needed to make 100 small bets to find 6 breakthroughs.

Ultimately, while basic design and creative methods can be learned much like muscles, and developed and strengthened through practice, this shift in mindset requires a different kind of leadership. In my opinion, Beth Comstock and Col. Casey Haskins are part of a new breed of leader who have developed and can use both sides of their brain — linear analysis for planning and executing when the decision-making information is known, and a discovery mindset when they must use small bets to create the data.

As the technologist Alan Kay says, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."


By PETER SIMS
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_no_1_enemy_of_creativity_f.html

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Being the Boss Isn't So Stressful After All

A new study just out from James Gross of Stanford University and six other researchers has shown that the higher people go as a leader, the less stress they experience. It turns out that being the CEO is less stressful than being a senior manager. It's an intriguing idea, as it flies in the face of the current thinking about leadership, which has supported the notion that top leaders are under enormous stress.

But new research in neuroscience tends to support Gross's findings. One of the big ideas that has emerged out of the connection between neuroscience and leadership is that leaders are largely motivated by what we've come to call theSCARF model. SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness — the five social experiences that create strong threats or rewards in the brain.

From the SCARF perspective, while top leaders might have plenty of stress, they also have lots of rewards (literally activations of the reward center in the brain) that offset this stress. They obviously have very high status. Cameron Anderson from Berkely showed in a study that respect from others (which comes from having high status) mattered more than money for happiness in life. He defined the term "local status," (which is how you rank compared to people are around you), and found that it was more important in terms of personal happiness than socio economic status. Anderson believed that high local status is like the "gift that keeps on giving," one of the few rewards that will not diminish much in value over time. So while leaders might be stressed, this is offset by high status, which literally activates the reward centers in the brain.

What about the other SCARF domains? Senior leaders have higher certainty than most people, with long term contracts and big pay packages giving them the confidence and wherewithal to weather economic storms. Studies show that a sense of certainty is deeply rewarding, in and of itself, whereas the experience of uncertainty creates further stress in the brain.

As the Gross study explored, senior leaders also have a lot more autonomy (what this study calls a sense of control) than lower level leaders. A sense of autonomy also activates a strong reward response.

Finally, I suspect that senior leaders perceive the world as being quite fair (as most people would if paid $50 million a year,) giving them a reward in this domain too.

So while senior leaders might have plenty of stress, they experience rewards from at least four of the five domains that could be offsetting this stress. Without even considering the big pay packets, we can see that senior leaders in theory may be a whole lot happier than is widely believed.

However, like many studies, Gross' finding doesn't tell the whole story. The average large company might have one CEO, an executive team of 20, and then 1,000 other people in "leadership" roles, out of a staff of, say, 100,000. So, we've learned that 21 people out of 100,000 are less stressed than we thought. What about the rest of the leaders in that firm?

Let's look at followership from the SCARF perspective. Speaking to one's boss is likely to put employees into a threat (stress) state, because the employee has less status, less certainty, and less autonomy. When someone is feeling under threat, small threats can become much larger. Imagine how people feel about their boss when the employee experiences large threats, like a sudden drop in income and assets, and an increase in uncertainty because of global economic conditions.

In short, while top bosses are less stressed than we thought, the life of the average manager, the people who make up many of the middle class, is getting more stressful than ever. As one example, more people than ever are staying connected while on vacation, yet the trend is the other direction for senior executives.

There is another side to top leaders being generally "happy," which I think deserves teasing out. First, experiencing positive affect makes you more likely to perceive other people's situations as positive, even when they are not. Second, a number of studies show that high social status tends to make people less aware of social cues. Third, high cognitive load, which senior leaders indeed experience, makes it harder to fully grasp how others experience the world. Finally, high cognitive load also makes it harder to displace the well documented "false consensus effect," which is the tendency to automatically assume other people feel the way that you do.

So, senior leaders might be happier than we thought, though this mental state combined with their position could be the source of how deeply unaware they can be of the stress that others are experiencing.

By David Rock
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/being_the_boss_isnt_so_stressful.html

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Do Your Employees Make You a Better Manager?

Successful leaders and managers alike constantly stress the importance of developing their employees. But do they appropriately recognize the importance of how their employees might develop them? One of the world's top coaches thinks not.

While chatting about "coachability" with Sir Clive Woodward — who had coached England's world champion rugby team and served as Director of Elite Performance for the wildly overachieving British Olympic team — he casually observed that, in reality, the best athletes he had invariably improved his abilities as a coach.

"My top performers ended up pushing me harder than I pushed them," Woodward said, adding that you can't help but learn from watching top athletes perfecting their craft.

This mutuality of professional development was a theme of his. Back in the late-nineties, Woodward was arguably the first coach of a national squad to give a laptop to every single player, insisting they be as world-class as IT users as they were as athletes. "Simply using it as a tool wasn't good enough," he insisted. "We wanted to be the best using IT." That squad won a world championship.

Needless to say, Woodward learned a great deal observing how his players used their laptops to learn and make themselves more competitive. Those lessons, of course, made him an even better coach.

That truly great players make everyone around them play better is one of sports' better championship clichés. But arguments that great players actually educate their coaches are considerably rarer. They're just as rare in the managerial literature. Woodward and I were on a panel for Tech Mahindra's European customer event in the U.K. In the panel's aftermath, I messaged a few friends and colleagues. I asked them to name employees — not colleagues or bosses! — who had dramatically improved them as leaders and/or managers. The most common response was that they'd never been asked before. (One colleague who'd helped grow a start-up to a nine-figure sale responded with the name of a particularly gifted software development project leader who blew him away with his standards of excellence and expectations management.)

Clearly, there's a "turning bugs into features" quality to this question. Often, coaches and managers learn the most from their most difficult, recalcitrant, or challenging charges. Not to diminish the importance of managing "talented temperamentals," but that explicitly wasn't Woodward's focus. He thought it critical for his own professional development to learn from his players. Do most managers and executives similarly believe it critical to learn from their direct reports? The data suggest not.

Not a single member of my network — nor the organizations I've worked with — have a performance review question assessing whether — and how well — bosses improve their own performances by learning from their employees. That seems odd. Reverse mentoring by millennials (and talented college students) to help their 40+ elders acquire better Internet and social media expertise has become more common. Certainly, project managers and new product leaders observe best practices worth sharing.

But how well — and how often — do they monitor how their own management style and insight have been improved by their best people and performers? Our human capital and professional development conversations and evaluations should be more symmetrical. Yes, everybody can recall that boss that made a huge difference. But who celebrates the one or two employees that dramatically improved managerial verve and effectiveness?

Which employee had the biggest positive impact on who you are today?

By Michael Schrage
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org

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