Tag Archives: Leadership

Leadership

Leadership Qualities that Lead to the Corner Office?

Adam Bryant

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor at the New York Times interviewed more than 200 CEOs of top companies for his column, and distilled the leadership qualities that moved them to The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed :

Passionate curiosity, deep engagement with questioning mind and a balance of analytical and creative competencies
Confidence based on facing adversity, knowing capabilities
Collaboration, ability to “read” and shape team dynamics
Ability to translate complex to simple explanations
Fearlessness in acting on considered risks

These five characteristics augment qualities that might be considered “table stakes” – or “must-haves” for any leadership candidate:

Preparation
Patience
Navigating organizational obstacles
Building a team of diverse members by galvanizing with a clear mission and spending time with members

Bryant argues that these behavioral competencies may be developed through attentive effort, but he acknowledges that some people have greater natural predisposition and aptitude for these “ways of being.”

Lois Frankel

Lois Frankel’s earlier book, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers provided different recommendations for women seeking leadership roles, later empirically validated in research studies:

Act like a mature woman rather than a “girl”
Frame statements as assertions rather than questions
State and initiate a course of action, rather than waiting to request permission

In contrast, Bryant particularly advises women to “meet as many people as possible and build relationships because serendipity and chance encounters can lead to unplanned opportunities.”

Research organizations like Catalyst and Center for Talent Innovation conduct social science research to investigate these behavioral and attitudinal recommendations.

Both groups have questioned the applicability of mainstream recommendations in leadership development curricula when implemented by women, minorities and “people of color.”

Their continuing research agendas include analyzing the behavioral components of general recommendations such as “demonstrate gravitas” which the majority of top executives affirmed as “… critical for leadership. I can’t define it but I know if when I see it.”

These research organizations seek to more clearly define what these key executives see in critical leadership attributes like “gravitas” and to define them in replicable behavior terms.

-*Which leadership behaviors do you consider most important for any executive?
-*Which behavioral competencies are most crucial for aspiring women leaders?

©Kathryn Welds

“Nudging” Compassion, Resilience to Reduce Conflict, Stress

Leave a reply

David DeSteno

David DeSteno, directs Northeastern University’s Social Emotions Lab, where he investigates cognitive and neurological mechanism related to social behavior.
In Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us , and at his PopTech talk, he shared how he investigated whether evoked compassion and empathy is associated with reduced aggression.

He described experiments in which volunteers solve math problems for money.
In some conditions, one of DeSteno’s associates posed as another volunteer and noticeably cheated to earn more money than the real volunteer.
In other conditions, the confederate abided by the rules.

For some experiments, the cheating confederate, a professional actor, evoked empathy and compassion by saying that she was worried about her brother, who was just diagnosed with a terminal illness.

In these situations, the volunteers were less likely to intentionally inflict discomfort on her in the following study of “taste perception,” a measure of aggression.

In this experimental trial, the volunteer measured a discretionary amount of extra-hot sauce into a cup for the cheating or non-cheating confederates to taste.

Volunteers poured five times more hot sauce for cheating confederates than non-cheating confederates, but they treated cheaters who evoked empathy the same as non-cheaters.

DeSteno noted most people are willing to help others who have some similarity to them, such as a shared identity of sharing a religious faith or hometown, or even are moving together as in conga lines, military drills.

He suggested that movement “synchrony causes separate identities to merge into one,” and demonstrated this trend in a music perception study, where volunteers in the same room tapped their hands on sensors when they heard tones.

In some conditions, the tones were synchronized so the volunteers were tapping at the same time as other volunteers, and in other conditions, the tones were independent.
De Steno found that 50% of volunteers who tapped at the same time were willing to help other volunteers, whereas 20% of those who tapped at different times helped others.
He concluded that volunteers felt more similar by tapping together, so felt more compassion, and were more likely to help others.

DeSteno is investigating social media like Facebook as a platform for sharing similarities to reduce aggression in conflict, cyber-bullying, victims of distant natural disasters.

He said uses Cass Sunstein’s and Richard Thaler’s idea that small behavioral and organizational changes can “nudge” people to healthier, safer, more productive, and prosperous habits outlined in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Their practical recommendations for designing effective “choice architecture” are consistent with DeSteno’s research-based findings:

* Align incentives with desired outcomes
* Identify possible alternative outcomes in familiar terms
* Provide default options that favor desired outcome behaviors
* Offer prompt, relevant feedback about choices and outcomes.
* Expect deviation from the targeted outcome, and build in ways to prevent, detect, and minimize this variance.
* Structure complex choices to reduce the difficulty of decisions-making

-*How have you seen “similarity” affect workplace collaboration and support?

-*Where have you seen organizations implement “choice architecture” to encourage employee behaviors toward positive goals?

BJ Fogg

See related Post – “Tiny Habits” Start, Maintain Changes

Twitter @kathrynwelds
Google+
LinkedIn Open Group – Stanford Social Innovation Review
Facebook Notes:

©Kathryn Welds

Performance Excellence linked to Recognizing, Preventing, Correcting Failures — and Coaching

Leave a reply

Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande a Harvard Medical School professor, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and New Yorker staff writer, investigated excellent performance across disciplines in search of ways to improve global medical care.
His findings suggest simple behavior changes, such as following a structured checklist, can avert poor performance and related negative outcomes.

In a recent talk at Harvard, he said, “people that were focused on achieving something more than competence…weren’t smarter than anybody else, they weren’t geniuses…Instead they seemed to …come to grips with their inherent fallibility—fallibility in the systems that they work in, and with what it took to overcome that fallibility.”

Gawande discusses three elements of better performance in Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

Diligence – Attending to details, to avoid errors and overcome obstacles.
Gawande offers a rationale for checklists and principles for their optimal structuring in his The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Doing Right –Ensuring that skill and will and incentives are aligned to drive excellent performance
Ingenuity – Deliberate, mindful monitoring of potential and actual failures, continuously seeking innovative ways to improve performance and solutions

All of these elements can be improved with attentive coaching observation and feedback

Gawande distinguishes making mistakes because we don’t:

Know enough (ignorance)
Make proper use of what we do already know (ineptitude)

He notes that because we have extensive access to information, ignorance occurs less frequently than ineptitude.
In addition, he argues that both can be improved by systematic analysis through tools such as checklists to detect, avert, and remedy failures.

Geoffrey Smart

The application of systematic checklist-based analysis was linked to Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in Geoffrey Smart’s study of investments by Venture Capital (VC) firms, The Art and Science of Human Capital Valuation

He described the VC firm’s approach to assessing the “human capital” that would lead new ventures in seven categories:

The Art Critic – The most frequently-used approach in which the VC assesses leadership talent at a glance, intuitively, based on extensive experience.
The Sponge – Conducts extensive due diligence, researching and assimilating information, then decides based on intuition
The Prosecutor – Interrogates the candidate, tests with challenging questions and hypothetical situations
The Suitor – Woos the candidate to accept the leadership role instead of analyzing capabilities and fit
The Terminator – Eliminates the evaluation because the venture is funded for the best ideas, not the originators, who are replaced
The Infiltrator – Becomes a “participant-observer” in an immersive, time-consuming experientially-based assessment
The Airline Captain – Uses a formal checklist to diligently study past mistakes, which rendered the top average Internal Rate of Return (IRR), 80%, in contrast to all others, which were 35% or less for all of the other types.
This approach had 10% likelihood of later having to fire senior management, whereas the others had at least 50% likelihood.

Smart said that Venture Capitalists said that two of their most important mistakes are:

Rushing to close a deal and investing insufficient time in analysis of the talent and the deal
Being influence by “halo effect”

Both Gawande and Smart present evidence for the value of systematic reminders to execute all elements required for expert performance, to prevent failure and alert to potential failure points.

-*How do you improve performance?
-*What value do you find in expert coaching?

See related posts on Performance Improvement:

Geoff Colvin

Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated and

Anders Ericcson’s Making of an Expert in The How and Who of Innovation

K. Anders Ericcson

Task structuring tools:

David Allen’s classic, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Six Apps to Increase Your Productivity

Twitter: @kathrynwelds
Google+
Facebook Notes:
©Kathryn Welds

Positive to Negative Feedback Ratios – 3:1 @ work, 5:1: @ home

Leave a reply

Sandra Mashihi

Kenneth Nowack and Sandra Mashihi provide “evidence-based answers to 15 questions about leveraging 360-degree feedback) in a recent article in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research.

Kenneth Nowack

Their first question was “Does 360-degree feedback do more harm than good”?
Nowack and Mashihi concluded that found “poorly-designed 360-degree feedback assessments and interventions can increase disengagement and contribute to poor individual and team performance.”

Specifically, individuals can “experience strong discouragement and frustration” when feedback is not as affirming as anticipated.
In addition, negatively-perceived information may be discounted and disregarded.

John Gottman’s studies of positive-to-negative interaction ratios in marriage suggest that intact and well-functioning marriages have a a 5:1 ratio, and research by his colleagues, Schwartz and team, found a similar effect for 360-feedback sessions, though the ratio was closer to 3:1 to encourage enhanced individual and team performance, individual workplace engagement, effectiveness, and emotional “flourishing,” according to Frederickson and Losada.

Proportions of negative feedback and interactions that exceed these ratios can interfere with insight and motivation and diminish willingness to engage in work-related practice and performance effectiveness.

Barbara Fredrickson suggested in Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive that this 3:1 ratio of positive to negative feedback is a “tipping point.”

Research by Eisenberger, Lieberman & Williams demonstrates the physical and emotional impact when the balance tips toward an overload of negative feedback: the same neurophysiologic pathways associated with physical pain are triggered.
Under these circumstances, volunteers report higher levels of physical pain and demonstrate diminished performance on a cognitively-demanding task, according to Chen, Williams, Fitness & Newton.

Anyone providing evaluations or 360-degree feedback may organize and “titrate” negative (“constructive”) feedback to remain within tolerable ratios so that those receiving this coaching can assimilate and execute recommendations.

-*What ratios of positive to negative feedback do you apply in helping others improve performance?

Twitter: @kathrynwelds
Google+
LinkedIn Open Group – Psychology in Human Resources (Organisational Psychology)
Facebook Notes:

©Kathryn Welds

How and Who of Innovation

Leave a reply

Many innovation experts urge overcoming roadblocks by “doing something different”, and Alex Cornell joins the chorus in his Breakthrough!: Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination

In contrast, Tom Kelley offered more specific guidance in the stages of “how” innovation is managed at IDEO in
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm:

•              Analyze the market, potential client groups, technology, and constraints for each innovation problem
•              Observe people in typical life situations
•              Visualize novel concepts and their intended customers
•              Evaluate and refine prototypes during rapid iterations
•              Implement new concept for commercialization

Steven Johnson offers seven non-linear principles of innovation in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation:

• Adjacent possible: Timing is essential for innovation to be accepted

• Liquid networks: Connections between different disciplines to enable ideas development and implementation

• Slow hunch: Insights incubate, germinate over time before becoming executable

• Serendipity: Spontaneous, chance juxtaposition of ideas applied to other

• Error: Outcomes considered “failures” from numerous trials may lead to – and be required – to successfully implement ideas

• Exaptation: Reusing existing ideas, technologies for a different purpose

• Platforms: Adapting, recombining existing knowledge, components, implementation approaches to develop something new

Expert innovators seem to follow these guidelines and have developed skill through what Geoff Colvin calls “Deliberate Practice” in “What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else”, the sub-title of his book, Talent is Overrated.

He notes that Deliberate Practice is not considered “fun”, but is a highly demanding and repeated mental challenge, systematically designed to improve performance with consistent expert monitoring and feedback.

Colvin’s premise is based on K. Anders Ericsson’s classic Harvard Business Review article, “The Making of an Expert“, which outlines three contributors to superior performance across disciplines:

•             Deliberate Practice to improve existing skills and to extend the reach and range of skills
•             Expert coaching with consistent monitoring and corrective feedback
•              Support from family and mentors
Kelley of IDEO focused more recently on the “who” of innovation in The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization, organized by Learning, Building, and Organizing capabilities:

•              Experience
•              Set Designer
•              Caregiver
•              Storyteller
•              Anthropologist
•              Cross-pollinator
•              Hurdler
•              Experimenter
•              Collaborator
•              Director
Meredith Belbin offered similar analysis of eight team roles in his Team Roles at Work and Management Teams: Why they succeed or fail to ignite collaborative strategy definition and execution.

These findings suggest that processes and practices can help shape innovation, but consistent, focused and attentive practice increases capacity to innovate more than “natural talent” — validating the well-known homespun advice to “work hard” and demonstrate a “strong work ethic.”

-*What processes and roles do you use to increase innovation at work?

Twitter: @kathrynwelds
LinkedIn Open GroupThe Executive Coach
Google+
Facebook Notes:

©Kathryn Welds

It’s Mostly Random, So Just Do Something

Leave a reply

Several recent books showcase Big Ideas in innovation:

Success often has random elements
Active experiments and reflective “incubation” are required for effective innovation.

Frans Johansson

Frans Johansson argues that most success “comes from things we cannot predict and plan: serendipitous moments, unexpected and spontaneous approaches, unusual combinations, and lucky breaks,” in the form of “click moments”, which can move people and ideas to a new, unexpected direction” in in Click: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World.

Leonard Mlodinow

Johansson, Leonard Mlodinow and Nate Silver (“American statistician, sabermetrician, psephologist”) all demonstrate that events are more random than people typically acknowledge, and Johansson recommends specific actions that individuals and organizations can take to favorably focus this randomness

Nate Silver

Follow your curiosity: Capitalize on interests and “passions” to drive creative explorations

Use cross-disciplinary, “inter-sectional” thinking to break “associative barriers”
Examine surprises and unintended consequences for possible inspiration and re-usable ideas
Be aware of opportunities everywhere, requiring a mindful engagement rather than living “automatically”, and explore “all” opportunities
Scan for momentum and align to it
Choose a less predictable, or more “contrarian” solution
Act: Place many “purposeful bets” to try many options, with no expectation or guarantee of “success”
Minimize bet size to reduce the impact of loss
Take the smallest executable step (measured by time, money, partners)
Calculate acceptable loss rather than focusing on return on investment
Create “large hooks” to scaffold and leverage creative “borrowing” from existing sources
Shift focus from the problem to enable cognitive “incubation” of ideas
“Double down” when opportunities are not obvious

Many of these recommendations are more similar to behaviors intended to increase creativity and innovation than to quantitative finesse maneuvers.

For example Johansson’s recommendation to engage in “purposeful bets” draws from Peter Sims’ recommendations to place Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, which are low-risk experiments to discover, develop, and test an idea.

Experiment to “fail quickly to learn fast” – see post on Eddie Obeng
“Play” by establishing a fun environment to cultivate innovation
Immerse by interacting with customers
Reorient by make celebrating small wins and undertaking improvement “pivots”
Iterate by frequently testing, refining and improving-*How do you detect and optimize opportunities?
How do you manage uncertainty in your career?

See more recommendations to boost innovation and creativity at: How and Who of Innovation LinkedIn Open Group The Executive Coach

Twitter @kathrynwelds
Google+
LinkedIn Open Group-Mindful Leadership:
LinkedIn Open Group – Women in Technology (sponsored by EMC)
Facebook Notes:

©Kathryn Welds

Integrating Natural Sciences and Business to Consider Strategy as “Structured Chaos”

Leave a reply

Shona Brown

Former Google Senior Vice President of Business Operations Shona Brown and Stanford Engineering Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt assert in their best-selling book, Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, that “the key driver of superior performance is the ability to change. Success is measured by the ability to survive, to change, and ultimately to reinvent the firm constantly over time.”

The book investigates matched pairs of anonymized companies in the computer industry as an example of strategy in fast-moving, unpredictable, competitive markets.

It draws upon concepts from the natural sciences, such as evolutionary theory and natural selection, as an analogy to change in businesses.

The authors state that decisions on what to structure or not, draw on:

-Improvisation
-Co-adaptation
-Regeneration
-Experimentation
-Time-pacing

These considerations set the pace of change by “balancing on the edge of time” from the past to the future.
They assert that these five phenomena enable a “semi-coherent” strategy, that is “unpredictable, uncontrolled, inefficient, proactive, continuous, diverse.”

Kathleen Eisenhardt

Brown and Eisenhardt define natural science concepts in business terms:

• Complexity Theory
• Evolutionary Theory
• Dissipative Equilibrium
• Coadaptation
• Natural Selection
• Mutations
• Complexity Catastrophe
• Error Catastrophe
• Repeated Layering
• Genetic Algorithm
• Recombination
• Rearchitecture
• Modularity
• Entrainment

The authors advise to move to “the edge of time” and “the edge of chaos”, and offer guidelines including:

• Prune to reveal the core of the business
• Build the business through growth, not assembly, of modular parts
• Recognize that the business’s starting point and the order of implementing change strategies, are among outcome determinants
• Devote 15% of the product portfolio to experimental probes
• Apply successes from experimental probes in new ways
• Institute regular planning meetings focused on the future
• Exploit current capabilities in new ways
• Develop time-pacing through regular benchmark reviews
• Watch for missing linkage between key processes and innovation elements
• Use “patching” to match the best people resources with required tasks

This book offers an original examples and metaphors for change strategies in business, including jazz improvisation, The Tour de France, American Baseball.

-*What models do you use to understand and execute business strategy?

LinkedIn Open Group – Business Strategy & Competitive Strategy Forum
Twitter: @kathrynwelds
Facebook Notes:

Silicon Valley Executive Recruiter’s Advice for Getting to the Top

Leave a reply

Kathryn Ullrich

Kathryn Ullrich is a Silicon Valley executive recruiter who also advises UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management Career Center.

She notes that companies have delegated career development responsibilities to employees, so she advocates the critical importance of individuals taking responsibility for their own career success.

In her book, Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success, Ullrich outlines executive skills she finds critical for career, and has organized these in a 3-D pyramid-shaped model including:

• Strategic vision
• Customer perspective
• Communications
• Team leadership
• Distinguishing skills

In contrast, Cisco Systems conducted research on characteristics and correlates of successful performance among its executive leaders and found that these different capabilities are essential:

• Collaboration
• Learning (Developing self and others)
• Execution
• Acceleration (Alignment with organizational goals)
• Disruption (Innovation, Change management)

Both models are a “convenient heuristic” for effective career performance in Silicon Valley’s culture of innovative technology and business models.

-*What do you see as top five skills for leadership effectiveness?

LinkedIn Open Group – Mindful Leadership
Twitter: @kathrynwelds
Google+
Facebook Notes:

Doonesbury Celebrates Women’s Contributions to Work Groups via Thought Diversity and Emotional Intelligence

Leave a reply

Doonesbury Celebrates Women’s Contributions to Work Groups via Thought Diversity and Emotional Intelligence

-* How have you seen women’s Emotional Intelligence applied in the workplace?

Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact

Leave a reply

Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons asserts that the power of stories derives from stimulating feelings and focusing these sentiments on a goal or action in her book, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact

Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte, who designed Al Gore’s original Inconvenient Truth slides, concurs in her most recent book, Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences

George Lakoff

UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff, in his classic, Metaphors We Live By, contends that stories create a framework that directs and filters attention, and enables the speaker to “control the conclusions.”

Simmons suggests the following sources of stories:

1.Personal stories of your successes
2.Personal stories of failures, to demonstrate learning, and to build trust and credibility
3.Stories of mentors and other people who influenced you
4.Memorable stories from books, movies, and current events that influenced you.

Aristotle

She referred to Aristotle’s premise that the best stories contain knowledge (logos), feeling (pathos), and credibility (ethos) when she offered guidelines for effective story-telling:

1. Describe events in a way that evokes a concrete, sensory experience, as it is the way to stimulating emotion
2. Be brief
3. Offer measurable outcomes
4. Enable the listener to similar situations, organizations
5.Solidarity, or enabling the listener to experience another person’s point-of-view

-*What practices enable you to craft influential, memorable “stories”?

LinkedIn Open Group – Psychology in HR (Organisational Psychology)
Twitter: @kathrynwelds
Google+
Facebook Notes:

Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary

Creating value by connecting people, information, ideas, to deliver strategic results

Tag Archives: Leadership

Leadership Qualities that Lead to the Corner Office?

“Nudging” Compassion, Resilience to Reduce Conflict, Stress

Performance Excellence linked to Recognizing, Preventing, Correcting Failures — and Coaching

Positive to Negative Feedback Ratios – 3:1 @ work, 5:1: @ home

How and Who of Innovation

It’s Mostly Random, So Just Do Something

Integrating Natural Sciences and Business to Consider Strategy as “Structured Chaos”

Silicon Valley Executive Recruiter’s Advice for Getting to the Top

Doonesbury Celebrates Women’s Contributions to Work Groups via Thought Diversity and Emotional Intelligence

Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact

Follow “Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary”