Author Archives: kathrynwelds

About kathrynwelds

Creating value by connecting people, information, and ideas, to accomplish strategic results Global Change Strategist-Organizational Psychologist Professional experience spans roles as an organizational psychologist, technology consultant, software industry analyst, marketing and sales executive.

What is Your Signature Story in Behavioral Interviews?

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Behavioral interviews require advance preparation for both the interviewer and the job applicant, in contrast to the frequently unplanned volley of unstructured Q&A intended to assess candidate fit and potential effectiveness in a work role.

Tom Janz

Behavioral Interviews, developed by Tom Janz, now Chief Scientist at peopleassessments.com, ask job candidates to provide examples of past behaviors in specific situations deemed relevant to the target role.

The questions are typically framed as an invitation to tell a story about a situation, a challenge, the candidate’s action or solution, and the outcome:

Give an example of an occasion when you used logic to solve a problem
Think of a goal you reached and tell me how you achieved it
Describe a decision you made that was unpopular and how you implemented it
Tell me about a time you went “above and beyond the call of duty”
When was the last time you handled interruptions to your schedule? How did you do it?
When and how did you convince a team to work on a project they didn’t like?
Provide an example of handling a difficult situation with a co-worker
Tell me about how you worked effectively under pressure

Sometimes the questions are structured to explicitly request that the candidate reply in the “STAR” format:

Situation
Task
Action
Results

Candidates increase odds of memorably and skillfully conveying relevant qualifications by preparing “Signature Stories” – theirs alone – to demonstrate how they resourcefully and innovatively:

Solved challenging problems
Improved strained work relationships
Met deadlines and budget
Applied “Lessons Learned”
Initiated transformational change
Demonstrated courage and integrity

Gary Oliphant

Besides being noticed and remembered, signature stories told in behavioral interviews can help both the candidate and interviewer evaluate whether the fit between the role requirements and the candidate’s skills would likely lead to strong future performance.

Becky Oliphant

Evidence for the predictive validity of signature stories told in behavioral interviews was provided by Gary Oliphant and Becky Oliphant of Stetson University with Katharine Hansen of quintcareers.com in their evaluation of 10 Gallup Organization “Life Themes” relevant to loan sales.
From these signature stories, the researchers accurately predicted post-hire performance and retention at a large financial sales organization.

Katharine Hansen

“Stories are 22 times more memorable than facts or figures alone,” contends Jennifer Aaker of Stanford, and she offers four elements that increase the impact of signature stories:

Goal: Defines a clear purpose and Call to Action, conveying what the listener should think, feel, do
Interest: Attracts focused attention by using a “hook” of surprising truth, visual effect, unusual problem-solving approach
Caring: Establishes empathic emotional connection with the storyteller’s challenge and journey to reach a meaningful goal
Memorable: Makes the story compelling, unforgettable, “re-tellable” and worth “going viral.”

Jennifer Aaker

Aaker suggests testing stories by asking others to what extent the story:

Changed the listener’s perspective
Resonated with the listener’s experiences, values, interests
Delivered “Moments of insight”
Had incomprehensible, inconsistent, or disjointed parts

She says that the mark of an effective “signature story” is that “others look at you differently” and the story moves you closer to a goal.

-*How do you craft dramatic, memorable Signature Stories to illustrate your values and capabilities?

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Air Time Matters: Speak Up in the First Five Minutes of a Meeting

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Women’s expertise, influence, and impact in work and school settings continue to be undervalued.

Marvin Shaw

More than thirty years ago, University of Florida’s Marvin Shaw observed that participation in small group approximates the 80/20 Principle:

In a 5 member team, 2 members make 70% of comments
In a 6 member team, 3 members make 70% of comments
In a 8 member team, 3 members make 67% of comments

Most of the comment contributors were men, and those who speak most are typically viewed as most influential, according to Melissa Thomas-Hunt of University of Virginia.
This suggests that women can be at a disadvantage in groups if they don’t speak up.

Melissa Thomas-Hunt

Thomas-Hunt found that women were less influential in small groups even when they possessed specific expertise in a stereotypically male endeavor, survival skills.
Further, women with expert knowledge were judged as less expert by others.

Conversely, men who possessed expertise were more influential than expert women.
Overall group task performance was affected by these dynamics: Groups with a female expert made less accurate assessments than groups with a male expert, perhaps because females’ expertise was discounted or ignored due to gender-related expectations for specific competencies.

Christopher Karpowitz

Women spoke less when there are fewer women in a group, but not when women predominated and decisions were made by majority rule, according to Christopher Karpowitz of Brigham Young University, Princeton University’s Tali Mendelberg and Lee Shaker of Portland State University.

Tali Mendelberg

They also found that women spoke equally in small groups when there were few women but the decision required unanimous vote.
One implication is that women benefit from building consensus when they are in the minority.

Lee Shaker

Women’s tendency not to speak up in groups begins well before they enter the workplace, found Harvard’s Catherine Krupnick.
She and her team investigated differences between male and female students’ participation in classroom discussion and the impact of the instructor’s gender on students’ participation.

They reviewed videotapes of 12 women and 12 men instructors, and concluded that male students talked two and a half times longer than female students when the instructor was male and the majority of the students were male — a frequent situation in many educational and work organizations.
On the other hand, female students spoke almost three times longer when instructors were female.

Women students were interrupted more frequently than their male counterparts, most often by other women, and leading them to withdraw from the discussion for the remainder of the class.

Krupnick posited that women’s lower participation in classrooms – and perhaps in other small groups – may be explained by their:

Inability or unwillingness to compete against men
Vulnerability to interruption
Inability to interject into men’s and other women’s discourse “runs” – long uninterrupted statements
Individual differences in assertiveness, confidence, and speed of formulating responses

Elizabeth Aries

Amherst’s Elizabeth Aries noticed that groups composed entirely of women students tended to have a participatory style in which women took turns and spoke for about equal amounts of time throughout the class hour.

In contrast, male groups appeared more contest-like, with extremely uneven amounts of talk per man.
They competed by telling personal anecdotes or raising their voices to establish hierarchies of participation, and this competitive style persisted in mixed-gender groups.

Kathleen Welch-Torres, then of Yale, compared women’s and men’s assertiveness in class discussions at Yale and Brown (mixed-gender institution) with women’s class participation at Wellesley and Smith (single-gender).
She reported that women at both of the mixed-sex institutions were verbally less assertive than men, by using “hedges,” qualifiers and questioning intonations.
However, women at the single-gender institutions Smith and Wellesley were more assertive than women at Yale and Brown and more assertive than men at the coeducational institutions.

Larraine Zappert

Kendyll Stansbury

Welch-Torres linked these behaviors to measures of self-esteem and her findings are similar to those of Stanford’s Laraine Zappert and Kendyll Stansbury who reported that female graduate students held lower self-esteem, less trust in their judgments, and greater fear of making mistakes than male graduate students.

Recommendations to help women move toward fuller participation in small groups from Melissa Thomas-Hunt and Margaret Neale of Stanford include:

Margaret Neale

Before a meeting:
- Ask trusted attendees to:
  - Support your ideas during the meeting
  - Solicit your input in the meeting
- Refer to your specific expertise during the meeting
- Set a goal for number of contributions in the first five minutes of a meeting
- In a meeting:
  - If interrupted: Restate, rephrase and provide specific evidence based on expertise
  - Showcase others’ expertise by soliciting their input
  - Create environment in which other participants have equal opportunity to participate
  - Urge members to consider each alternative, rather than disregarding suggestions presented by “lower status” individual

-*How do you ensure that your expertise is recognized and influential in small group settings?

-*What “best practices” do you apply to ensure active participation by women and minority-group members?

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Is Optimistic View of the Future associated with Disabilities, Shorter Life Expectancy?

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Frieder Lang

Frieder Lang of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and German Institute for Economic Research and his colleagues challenged the robust, replicated finding that optimism is associated with positive health outcomes.

David Weiss

Lang with University of Zurich’s David Weiss and Denis Gerstorf of Humboldt-University of Berlin and German Institute for Economic Research examined data from 1993 to 2003 German Socio-Economic Panel household surveys.

Denis Gerstorf

The team collaborated with Gert Wagner of German Institute for Economic Research and Max Planck Institute for Human Development evaluated approximately ratings from 40,000 people 18 to 96 years old, concerning their current and predicted life satisfaction in five years.

Gert Wagner

Their disruptive finding is that participants who expected highest life satisfaction in five years were more likely to experience disability and death within the following decade.

Five years after the first interviews:

43 percent of participants were more satisfied with their lives than predicted,
25 percent predicted accurately
32 percent overestimated their life satisfaction with an optimistic bias.

Lang, Weiss, Gerstorf, and Wagner calculated that overestimating future life satisfaction was related to a 9.5 percent increase in reporting disabilities and a 10 percent increased incidence of death.

The youngest participants had the most optimistic outlook, whereas middle-aged adults made the most accurate predictions, but became more pessimistic over time.

Lauren Alloy

Older adults’ predictions of future life satisfaction may be more accurate, albeit less optimistic, consistent with Shelley Taylor, Ellen Langer, Lauren Alloy, Lyn Abramson and others demonstration of an “optimism bias” and “depressive realism.”

Lyn Abramson

In contrast to findings that higher income is associated with better health outcomes, Lang’s team found that stable, good health and income were associated with expecting a greater decline compared with those in poor health or with low incomes.
In contrast to other findings, higher income was related to a greater risk of disability.

Shelley Taylor

Lang and team concluded that the outcomes of optimistic, accurate or pessimistic forecasts may depend on age, available resources, and motivation to adopt health-improving behaviors.
They acknowledged that unrealistic optimism about the future may help people feel better when they are facing inevitable negative outcomes, such as terminal disease.

Neil Weinstein

Similarly, Neil Weinstein of Rutgers found that people may underestimate susceptibility to harm from a variety of hazards.
Close to 300 volunteers across age, gender, educational levels and occupational groups, demonstrated an optimism bias that they were less at risk than peers.

Weinstein hypothesized that optimism bias may be introduced when people extrapolate from their past experience to estimate their future vulnerability.
Therefore, volunteers future expectations may be biased because they tended not to expect problems they had not already experienced.

He demonstrated that these personal risk judgments were not correlated with volunteers’ actual objective risk factors, suggesting that volunteers did not modify their optimistic biases based on laboratory findings, physical examination, and reported health habits.
Positive illusions persist even in the face of contradictory evidence.

Eric Kim

These findings that optimistic bias may not be associated with positive health outcomes contrasts with findings from including University of Michigan’s Eric S Kim, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson, who found that “Dispositional Optimism” protects older adults from stroke.

George Patton

Similarly, George Patton and colleagues at Royal Children’s Hospital in Parkville, Victoria, Australia reported that optimism has a somewhat protective effect on adolescent health risks in a prospective study.

Eric Giltay

Yet another counterpoint to Lang and team’s work was offered by Eric Giltay and colleagues at Leiden University Medical Center Johanna Geleijnse, Frans Zitman, Brian Buijsse, and Daan Kromhout, who demonstrated that optimists typically report healthier habits, like less smoking and drinking alcohol, more physical activity and consumption of fruit, vegetables and whole-grain bread.

-*What do you make of these conflicting findings about optimism’s role in health outcomes?

-*How have you seen optimism relate to health outcomes: Does it seem to drive healthy behaviors and outcomes or poorer health?

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Interrogative Self-Talk Trumps Self-Bolstering Pep Talks to Enhance Performance

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Do affirmative self-statements actually help people perform better?

Joanne Wood

Joanne Wood and John W. Lee of University of Waterloo with University of New Brunswick’s Wei Qi “Elaine” (Xun) Perunovic confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective.

However, two experiments demonstrate that the value of positive self-statements depends on the individual’s level of self-esteem.

Participants with low self-esteem who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) felt worse than people who used no positive self-statement.
They also felt worse than the comparison group when they focused on how the statement was only true.

William Swann

Wood, Lee, and Perunovic explain the result with William Swann’s Self-Verification Theory, which suggests that people prefer that others see them as they see themselves.

Swann, of University of Texas at Austin posits that if someone has low self-esteem, a positive self-statement is inconsistent with the person’s experience and self-assessment.
As a result, it would not have “the ring of truth”, and would not have the intended bolstering effect on self-confidence and self-esteem.

This view was validated by their finding that participants with high self-esteem felt better when they repeated the positive self-statement statement and when they focused on how it was true.

Ibrahim Senay

Ibrahim Senay of Istanbul Sehir Universitesi, Penn’s Dolores Albarracin, and Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi investigated the relative impact of “declarative” self-talk, such as “positive thinking” or affirmations (“I will prevail!”) espoused by Maxwell Maltz, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Anthony Robbins.
They compared this well-known self-improvement practice with “interrogative” self-talk, such as introspective self-inquiry (“Can I prevail?”).

Dolores Albarracín

Half the participants spent one minute asking themselves whether they would complete a series of anagrams before that actually began to work on the anagrams, whereas the other half to told themselves that they would complete the task.
Surprisingly to advocates of self-affirmation, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.

Kenji Noguchi

The researchers extended and replicated the finding by asking one group of volunteers to write “Will I” 20 times before attempting to solve the anagrams.
Another group wrote “I will” 20 times, and the third group wrote “Will” 20 times.
Those were “primed” with the self-questioning “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other groups.

Albarracin hypothesizes that “asking questions forces you to define if you really want something…even in the presence of obstacles,” so is more effective than possibly unrealistically-positive self-affirmations.
The researchers suggest that interrogative self-talk, like interrogative discussions in behavioral counseling, persuasive messages in advertising, editorials, or legal settings, and culturally “polite” behavioral requests, may elicit more intrinsically-motivated action and goal-directed behavior.

Mark Lepper

Stanford’s Mark Lepper and David Greene collaborated with Richard Nisbett of University of Michigan in a classic study that showed routinely predictable extrinsic rewards can extinguish intrinsic motivation.

Richard Nisbett

Interrogative self-talk may counteract suppressors to intrinsic motivation and seems to be a learnable practice that may be transferred or “generalized” from individualized learning in counseling settings.

Robert Burnkrant

Rohini Ahluwalia of University of Minnesota, Ohio State’s Robert Burnkrant and Southern Methodist University’s Daniel Howard found that this form of inquiry can be persuasive because it focuses the listener’s attention to the argument itself if the question isn’t especially relevant to the listener, or to the message’s source if is more pertinent.

Min Basadur

Subjunctive interrogative self-talk, rather than its rhetorical counterpart, can ignite innovation and creativity in organizational settings.
Min Basadur suggests that asking oneself and other How Might We (HMW) ….? enables innovators to defer judgment and create more options without self-conscious limitations.

Tim Brown

Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown, advocates embracing the uncertainty of “might” because it enables innovators to propose ideas “that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”

This type of self-interrogatory, sometimes presented in group innovation “sprints” at Google Ventures, IDEO, Frog Design or other thought-leading organizations have been effectively been combined with structured innovative problem-solving:

Understand by analyzing problems and requirements through process evaluation
Diverge by applying constraints to “think differently”
Decide by selecting solution to develop
Prototype by “storyboarding” the user experience, process, obstacles
Validate by testing prototypes with potential solution users

-*Under what circumstances have you found ‘interrogative’ self-talk to enhance performance more than affirmative self-talk?

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What Do (Executive) Women (and Men) Want? Accenture Uncovers Priorities

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Martha Bernays Freud-Sigmund Freud

Accenture’s online survey of 4,100 business executive women and men born between 1946 and 1994 from medium to large organizations across 33 countries sought to answer the updated version of Sigmund Freud’s question: “What do women want?”

Conducted in November 2012, the survey’s margin of error is +/-2 percent, with at least 100 respondents from each country, except Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden where the combined number totaled 200.

It provides some answers: Women’s – and men’s top priorities in defining career success are:

Work-life balance
Money
Recognition
Autonomy

Frederick Herzberg

This finding contradicts Frederick Herzberg’s theory that people are less motivated by “hygiene factors” like work-life balance and money than “motivation factors” like recognition and autonomy.

In contrast to Yahoo’s much-publicized ban on working remotely, 80 percent of male and female respondents reported that having flexibility in their work schedule is extremely or very important to work-life balance and more than three-quarters (78 percent) agree technology enables them to be more flexible with their schedules.

This is an important value statement in light of landmark findings that lack of flexibility and control in work environments has been associated with poorer health indicators and status than roles with greater flexibility

Hannah Kuper

Hannah Kuper and Michael Marmot of University College London analyzed health outcomes of British civil service workers in the Whitehall I and II studies and found employees with least control over their work lives, typically associated with lower employment grade and lower social class, consistently had the poorest well-being and the highest mortality rates.

Michael Marmot

Marmot with other researchers who analyzed Whitehall study data, including Geoffrey Rose, surmise that not having discretion over how a task is accomplished, underutilizing skills, lack of clarity and predictability in job role can lead to job stress and physical indicators like abnormal heart rate and blood pressure, increased blood cortisol.

Erin Kelly

Phyllis Moen

More than half of all respondents said they declined a job due to concerns about its impact on work-life balance, also reported by Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen of University of Minnesota, suggesting that Yahoo’s policy could lead to significant attrition over time.

To realize monetary goals, the majority of respondents – 49 percent of women and 57 percent of men – had asked for or negotiated a pay raise, and four out of five respondents who negotiated a pay raise received one.

These rates represent a substantial increase over the year before in which 44 percent of women and 48 percent of men reported asking for a pay increase.
Notably, the percentage of men requesting more money increased considerably more than the percentage of women in that year period.

Linda Babcock

This result is more encouraging than Linda Babcock’s finding that women tend not to ask for raises, and tend not to receive them when they do ask.

Sheryl Sandberg

Even Sheryl Sandberg wasn’t inclined to negotiate for her salary when offered the role as COO of Facebook until she forcefully urged by her husband and brother-in-law, she revealed on 60 Minutes while promoting Lean In.

The Accenture study may demonstrate a changing trend for the better: Almost half of all respondents reported that they had asked for a promotion, suggesting greater willingness to advocate for themselves to achieve the second priority, monetary reward.

-*How well do Accenture’s findings reflect your career priorities?

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Women’s Likeability – Competence Dilemma: Overcoming the Backlash Effect

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Madeline Heilman

Aaron Wallen

Almost a decade ago, New York University’s Madeline Heilman and colleagues Aaron Wallen, Daniella Fuchs and Melinda Tamkins, demonstrated the challenge women face when they are seen as successful in traditionally-male roles.

Melinda Tamkins

The team conducted three experimental studies with 242 volunteers to investigate reactions to a woman’s success in a male gender-typed job and found that when women are recognized as successful in roles dominated by men, they are less liked than equally successful men in the same fields.

Tyler Okimoto

Heilman extended the work with Tyler Okimoto, now at University of Queensland, in three additional experimental studies to evaluate whether successful women’s likeability challenge is attributable to perceived deficit in nurturing and socially- sensitive “communal” attributes, which include warmth and “niceness.”
They found that successful women managers avoided interpersonal hostility, dislike, and undesirability when they or others conveyed “communal” attributes, through their behaviors, testimonials of others, or their role as mothers.

Frank Flynn

Stanford’s Frank Flynn demonstrated the competence-likeability disconnect when he taught a Harvard Business School case of Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur Heidi Roizen.

Heidi Roizen

He and collaborator Cameron Anderson of UC Berkeley changed Heidi’s name to “Howard Roizen” for half of the students.

Cameron Anderson

Flynn and Anderson asked student who read the Heidi case and those who read the Howard case to rate Heidi and Howard on several dimensions before the class meeting.

Students rated Heidi as highly competent and effective as Howard, but they evaluated her as unlikeable and selfish, and wouldn’t want to hire her or work with her.

Whitney Johnson-Lisa Joy Rosner

A more recent example of backlash toward high-profile, accomplished women was illustrated by Whitney Johnson, co-founder of Rose Park Advisors (Disruptive Innovation Fund), and Lisa Joy Rosner, Chief Marketing Officer of NetBase, in their evaluation of social media mentions of Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Johnson and Rosner evaluated “Brand Passion Index” (BPI) for Mayer, Sandberg, and Slaughter over 12 months by

Activity (number of mentions)
Sentiment (positive or negative)
Intensity (strong or weak sentiment).

These competent, well-known women were not liked, and were evaluated with harsh negative attributions based on media coverage and at-a-distance observations:

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, was described as impressive and super-smart, and annoying, terrible bully
Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg‘s was characterized as truly excellent, successful working mom and crazy bizarre
Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, was depicted as an amazing, successful mother and destructive, not a good wife

Laurie Rudman

The competence-likeability dilemma is illustrated in hiring behavior, demonstrated in experiments by Rutgers University’s Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick of Lawrence University.

The team asked volunteers to simulate hiring decisions for male and female candidates for a “feminized” managerial role and a “masculinized” managerial role.

Peter Glick

Applicants were presented as:

“Agentic” (stereotypically male behaviors) or
“Communal” (stereotypically male behaviors) or
“Androgynous” (combining stereotypically male and female behaviors)

Women who displayed “masculine, agentic” traits were viewed as less socially skilled than agentic males.
They were not selected for the “feminized” job, but this hiring bias did not occur when agentic women applied for the “male” job.

In contrast to the “agentic” women, both male and female “communal” applicants received low hiring ratings, pointing to the penalty for being perceived as “nice.”

“Androgynous” female applicants were not discriminated against.

Rudman and Glick noted that “… women must present themselves as agentic to be hireable, but may therefore be seen as interpersonally deficient.”
They advise women to “temper their agency with niceness.”

Linda Babcock

Once women receive job offers, the competence-likeability disconnect continues when they negotiate for salary and position, reported by Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon.
Her research demonstrated and replicated negative evaluations of women who negotiate for salaries using the same script as men.

Deborah Gruenfeld

Stanford’s Deborah Gruenfeld suggested that the likeability-competence dilemma may result from women’s challenges in integrating expansive, powerful body language with more submissive, appeasing behavior to build relationships and acknowledge others’ authority.

She posited that many women have been socialized to adopt less powerful body positions and body language including:

Smiling
Nodding
Tilting the head
Applying fleeting eye contact
Speaking in sentence fragments with uncertain, rising intonation at sentence endings.

In addition, many people expect women to behave in these ways, and negatively evaluate behaviors that differ from expectations.

Body language is the greatest contributor to split-second judgments of people’s competence, according to Gruenfeld.
She estimated that body language is responsible for about 55% of judgments, whereas self-presentation accounts for 38%, and words for just 7% — in less than 100 milliseconds.

Her earlier work considered the impact of body language on assessments of power, whereas her more recent work investigates gender differences in attributions of competence and likeability.

The likeability-competence dilemma may be improved by shifting from “playing high” or taking space when demonstrating competence and authority.
Gruenfeld noted that this powerful body language may be risky for women unless counterbalanced with “playing low” or giving space when conveying approachability, empathy, and likeability.

Posing in more powerful positions for as little as two minutes can change levels of testosterone, a marker of dominance, just as holding a submissive posture for the same time can increase cortisol levels, signaling stress, according to Gruenfeld.

To enable versatile application of powerful “playing high” with more familiar “playing low,” Gruenfeld urges women to practice both awareness and “the mechanics of powerful body language.”

Alison Fragale

Women’s competence-likeability dilemma is not mitigated by achieving workplace success and status.
University of North Carolina’s Alison Fragale, Benson Rosen, Carol Xu, Iryna Merideth found that successful women – and men, like Mayer, Sandberg, and Slaughter, are judged more harshly for mistakes than lower status individuals who make identical errors.

Benson Rosen

Fragale’s team found that observers attributed greater intentionality, malevolence, self-concern to the actions of high status wrongdoers than the identical actions of low status wrongdoers, and recommended more severe punishments for higher status individuals in two experiments.

Iryna Meridith

The team found preventive and reparative value in the shunned qualities of warmth and likeability.
Wrongdoers who demonstrated affiliative concern for others, charitable giving, and interpersonal warmth built a reservoir of goodwill that could protect from the impact of subsequent mistakes and transgressions.

Navigating the Likeability-Competence dilemma requires demonstrating both capacities, depending on situational requirements.
Learning this skill can take a lifetime.

-*How do you convey likeability AND competence?

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ROI of Effective Managers

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Dilbert and Pointy-Haired Boss

Inept managers cause stress, cynical posting of Dilbert cartoons, and foment incredulous recounting of unparalleled cluelessness.
However, the all-too-rare effective manager delivers a creditable Return on Investment.

Edward Lazear

Stanford’s Edward Lazear and Kathryn Shaw collaborated with Christopher Stanton, now of of University of Utah to study the impact of nearly 2000 supervisors on more than 23,000 employees’ output productivity in a large services firm.

Kathryn Shaw

They found that although there is substantial variation in managerial quality, as measured by their effect on worker productivity, the skillful managers in this workplace improved productivity by 10 percent.

Christopher Stanton

Lazear, Shaw and Stanton demonstrated that replacing managers rated in the lower 10% of boss quality by employee output with managers in the upper 10%, the resulting increase in team total output is about the same amount as adding one worker to a nine member team.

In addition, effective managers are associated with increased productivity among both top-rated workers and the lowest-performing workers, with greater performance increases among the firm‘s top performers.

The researchers noted that employees’ peers had negligible impact on productivity measures, so they concluded that productivity increases are significantly influenced by managerial behaviors.

These findings point to the importance of hiring skilled managers and improving or removing unskilled managers to drive productivity and associated profit.

As a result, pre-employment assessment and managerial training industries are required to demonstrate efficacy in selecting already-skilled managers, and transforming less-skilled managers into top performing supervisors.

Some argue that developing managerial skill is a long-term behavior change because many of the interpersonal behaviors of effective managers have long-standing characterological roots.

For example, Lazear reported that the best managers in this large sample demonstrated humility and a sense of humor in their efforts to teach and motivate employees.
These attitudes develop over years, and may not be amenable to short-term training interventions.

Randy Hodson

Randy Hodson of Ohio State University conducted an ethnographic study of “worker citizenship behavior”, including level of work effort, absenteeism, and employee engagement.

He found “manager citizenship behavior” has the greatest impact on employee engagement, work effort, and employee’s related productivity.
These management behaviors include:

Leadership practices
Communication style
Commitment to worker job security
Providing appropriate work supplies and tools to achieve workers’ output requirements
Absence of “management abuse.”

Managers who respected worker rights and maintained an effective, productive environment for workers had workers who invested more efforts in work and achieved greater productivity, besides having a better relationship with each other and with bosses.

Watson Wyatt’s WorkUSA 2009 survey of 13,000 full-time U.S. workers across all job levels and in all major industries that organizations with highly engaged employees had:

26 percent higher employee productivity
13 percent higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years,
Lower turnover risk
Greater ability to attract top talent.

The report found waning employee engagement over job tenure: Employee engagement is highest in the first six months on the job, and is more than 11 percent higher during that “honeymoon period” than for longer-tenure employees.
Employee engagement drops nine percent after the first six months on the job, and continues to decline.

Watson Wyatt’s regression analysis of these data found that this 11% decline in employee engagement has the same expected impact on employee productivity as a decline of assets per employee of nearly 0.6 percent.

To offset the impact on productivity, a typical firm would need to invest more than $2,700 per employee.

A similar regression analysis controlled for industry, firm size and capital intensity and estimated that 11% decline in engagement is associated with a 1.7 percent reduction in market value.
For the typical S&P 500 firm, this decreased expected market value could be $216 million, suggesting that managerial behavior is a critical determinant of productivity and ultimate market value.

The challenge for top management is to evaluate sustained improvement in managerial behavior attributable to managerial learning and development interventions, to ensure Return on Investment for managerial development.

-*What managerial attitudes and behaviors have you seen increase employee productivity?

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Will the ROWE Revolution Reach Yahoo? Results-Only Work Environments, Productivity, and Employee Engagement

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Cali Ressler-Jody Thompson

Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler proposed compensating employees based on outputs, rather than elapsed time, in a “Results-Only Work Environments (ROWE)” policy.

This management strategy evaluated “performance, not presence” practices at Best Buy and has been implemented at another large retailer, Gap.
Is this is a return to a “piece-work” approach of decades ago?
Or is it a performance management practice that emphasizes achieving targeted results?

ROWE is being considered at such tech giants as Cisco Systems, in direct contrast to Yahoo’s recent call for employees to be present in offices.
The underlying goal of Yahoo’s “presentism” policy may be to increase innovative performance outputs, although the explanation provided to employees emphasized presence as a prerequisite for effective collaboration.

Widespread negative reaction to Yahoo’s on-site work policy, based on complaints that the policy:

Conveys lack of trust in employees
Undermines opportunities to manage complex work-life responsibilities
Places emphasis on “face time” rather than results
Leads to employee resentment and disengagement.

Erin Kelly

In contrast, University of Minnesota sociologists Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen with University of Delaware’s Eric Tranby documented the positive impact of ROWE practices in their survey of more than 600 Best Buy employees before and after the program was implemented.

Phyllis Moen

The researchers found turnover was reduced by 45 percent after they controlled for gender, job level, organizational tenure, job satisfaction, income adequacy, job security and turnover intentions.

Participants reported reduced stress and improved work-home interfaces by increasing employees’ schedule control, and reduced the “opting out” of the workforce due to personal commitments for both men and women.

Eric Tranby

Kelly, Moen, and Tranby opine that ROWE “moves us away from the “time cages” developed around the work day…ROWE challenges these taken-for-granted clockworks…our mantra is ‘change the workplace, not the worker’.”

Rachelle Hill, also of University of Minnesota collaborated with Moen and Kelly in a related study that documented ROWE moderated turnover effects of negative home-to-work spillover, personal troubles, and physical symptoms.

-*What impacts – positive and negative – have you seen in “Performance, not Presence” workplace policies like ROWE?

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Managing “Triadic Managers” and Navigating Office Politics by Becoming a Little Like Them

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Oliver James

British psychologist, journalist, and television documentary producer and presenter Oliver James asserts that many business leaders exhibit three problematic – even pathological – behaviors styles: Psychopathy, Narcissism, Machiavellianism.
He labels these “triadic managers.”

The stress wrought upon others by “triadic managers” has been satirized in comedies, and dramas, but each element of the triumvirate have been investigated by clinical researchers and social scientists.

The most extensively researched of the three personality trends is Psychopathy, given its relevance to law enforcement.
Psychopaths typically display:

Callous manipulation, lying, and exploitation
Grandiosity, entitlement, and shallowness
Impulsiveness and thrill-seeking
Little interpersonal empathy and remorse

Ronald Schouten

Harvard’s Ronald Schouten and former federal prosecutor with current criminal defense attorney James Silver estimate that 3 million Americans and perhaps one in 10 on Wall Street are psychopathic.

James Silver

They add that as much as 15 percent of the general population or about 45 million Americans as “almost psychopathic” – and many are employed as senior executives.

Robert Hare

Robert Hare of University of British Columbia and leading expert in psychopathy collaborated with industrial-organizational psychologist Paul Babiak reported that senior managers are four times more likely than the general population to display psychopathic tendencies.

They differentiated three types of psychopath, each operating in the workplace:

“Manipulator”
“Bully”
“Puppetmaster”
Paul Babiak

Clive Boddy

Middlesex University’s Clive Boddy extended examination of psychopaths in global business and financial contexts.

Sharing some characteristics of psychopathy, narcissism is characterized by:

Grandiose sense of self-importance, superiority, entitlement
Vanity and insatiable need for attention
Exploitativeness
Lack of empathy

Like psychopathy, three sub-types have been identified:

Cluster A, “odd” disorders, including paranoid and schizoid disorders
Cluster B, “dramatic” disorder, including antisocial and histrionic disorders
Cluster C, “anxious”, including dependent and obsessive-compulsive disorders

Katarina Fritzon

Affecting about one per cent of the population and up to 16 per cent of clinical groups, narcissists tend to prefer professions where they can control people and elicit adulation, like politics, finance, entertainment, medicine.

Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon, then of the University of Surrey, confirmed this observation when they found that senior business managers were more likely than criminal psychiatric patients, to have narcissistic, histrionic, or obsessive-compulsive personality disorders.

Sam Vaknin

Sam Vaknin provides and insider’s view of narcissism, as a convicted felon incarcerated for securities fraud and diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, who raises awareness of NPD and its management through his book and website.

The third element of “triadic managers”, Machiavellianism, is characterized by:

Detachment and coldness
Manipulation
Ruthless self-interest
Calculating maneuvers to advance self-interest

Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

Centuries after Machiavelli’s classic book, Richard Christie and Florence Geis studied the Machiavellian personality and developed a personality assessment to identify these characteristics

After raising awareness of “triadic managers”, Oliver James asserts that skillful maneuvering among political landmines laid by these leaders and colleagues.

Based on his 50 interviews with narcissists, psychopaths, “Machiavels”, and others, he cites the importance of managing the “perception of performance” as well as actually providing results, because pay and advancement depend upon one’s valuation by others.

In addition, he advocates that anyone operating in organizations develop greater acumen in recognizing potentially problematic psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian maneuvers, and carefully crafting counter-moves.

James acknowledges that some psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian behaviors lead to desired outcomes, and suggests that anyone working in an organization selectively adapt these strategies and apply them in moderation.

He summarizes political survival skills, including

Astuteness in “reading” others, the organization, and oneself to accurately assess the situation
Effectiveness in applying effective tactics toward the correct individuals at the right moment while appearing genuine
Networking to maintain relationships and allies for use in moving to a new role
Appearance of Sincerity, by strategically managing personal emotions and reactions.

-*How do you detect and manage colleagues who manifest characteristics of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism?

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Perseverance Increases Skill Increases Luck: “The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get”

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Samuel Goldwyn

Thomas Jefferson

Samuel Goldwyn recast Thomas Jefferson’s earlier observation: “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Michael Mauboussin, of Columbia University, and previously Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management Inc. investigated this relationship between effort and luck in his book, The Success Equation.

Michael Mauboussin

Mauboussin, an innovator in behavioral finance, adopted Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s “paradox of skill” to analyze the interaction of effort, skills, and luck, and best strategies to optimize outcomes in investing, sports, and career performance.

Stephen Jay Gould

He posits that as skill improves in activities where outcomes are affected by skill and luck, the standard deviation of skills narrows.
In this case, luck becomes more important in determining outcomes:

“Whenever you see an outlier in sports, it is always a combination of really good skill and really good luck… (Often) they are about one and a half or two standard deviations away from the average…not all skilled players have (winning) streaks, but all (winning) streaks are held by skillful players.”

For example, as investors become more sophisticated and have access to advanced computational tools, as athletes benefit from targeted training and development regimens, and as students are groomed for admission to top universities, differences among these skilled performers decreases.
Chance influences can determine outcomes.

Mauboussin says that luck has several elements:

Affects an individual or organization,
May be evaluated as “good” or “bad”
Another outcome could have occurred
The outcome is uncontrollable, but is comprised of several elements

To increase luck, he advises assessing each contender’s strength in the situation and finding “…something completely different to get you on the right side of the tail of the skill distribution,” such as employing an unusual or unexpected tactic.

The stronger player has positive asymmetric resources, so the effective strategy is to simplify the game.
In contrast the underdog should seek to complicate the game, such as through disruptive innovation, a flank strategy or a guerilla tactic.

Because most people have a bias toward optimism and overestimate personal capabilities, it may be difficult to assess oneself as an “underdog” in a performance situation.

Daniel Kahneman

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explained that individuals who adopt an inside view gather substantial information, combine it with their own inputs, then project into the future without considering “distributional information” about a wide variety of previous instances.
This approach risks developing an idiosyncratic, overconfident perspective by underestimating costs, completion times, and risks of planned actions, while overestimating benefits.

Amos Tversky

In contrast, people who adopt the outside view consider the problem as an instance of a larger reference class and consider the entire distribution of outcomes when this type of situation occurred previously.
This approach can reduce overconfidence.
However, this approach could discourage entrepreneurs, who will realize that a small percentage actually succeeds.

In addition, besides the bias toward overconfidence, people tend to “under-sample” instances of failure when a previously successful approach is applied in a new situation and doesn’t succeed.

Nate Silver

Sabermetricians like Nate Silver, posit that worthwhile statistics provide:

Persistence or correlation from one period to the next, a strong indicator of high skill
Predictive value or high correlation with the target objective

The Oakland As baseball team uncovered these principles in determining that a superior measure of athletic performance in this sport is on-base percentage rather than the traditional measure, batting average.

In this case, on-base percentage has a higher correlation from one season to the next and a higher correlation with run production than batting average, fulfilling both criteria.

Daniel Kahneman also suggested that skill, expertise, and intuition render more uniform results in a predictable environment.

However, many organizational environments are unstable and non-linear, rendering experts less accurate because they cannot employ an effective predictive model.

Collective judgments through “the wisdom of crowds” may mitigate the challenges of unstable contexts because they provide more data points.

Mauboussin advocated considering the continuum of stability vs instability in which the issue is situated to determine strategy and to beware of applying simple heuristics that are vulnerable to bias, and social or situational influences.

He suggested the guideline “think twice” to prepare, detect and correct for common mental traps, including:

The Inside-only View
Tunnel Vision
Oversimplification
Situational Power
Overvaluing Expert Knowledge

-*How do you optimize your performance when chance elements can affect your outcomes?

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Managing “Triadic Managers” and Navigating Office Politics by Becoming a Little Like Them

Perseverance Increases Skill Increases Luck: “The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get”

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