LEADING THOUGHTS

I am a big believer in the power of storytelling to help organizational players think in new ways and move through periods of change. “Stories” in this context can relate how an enterprise was born, how a team faced a business challenge or coped with the sudden loss of a key executive, or even how a leader learned key insights.

Storytelling has been long considered a quaint yet fringe leadership communication technique but, judging by recent buzz, it is inching closer to the management mainstream.

A useful contribution to the field appears in a recent issue of the Center for Creative Leadership’s Leadership in Action journal. In an article, Nick Nissley of The Banff Centre and leadership coach Stedman Graham develop the concept of “rescription.” Scripting, the authors point out, is how screenwriters propel a story forward. In an organizational setting, rescription refers to the process by which leaders find new stories to replace old ones no longer serving their organizations’ best interests.

Nissley and Graham spell out a three-step process for rescription:

1. “Titling the present script”: Leaders must articulate what’s stuck and, “like good writers, identify a future turning point and what needs to become unstuck.”

2. “Founding the Future Script”: Once leaders have confronted the dysfunctional script, they need to courageously open the door to an alternative script.

3. “Actualizing the New Script”: The rubber hits the road only when a new script is enacted.

The Narrative Lens and Organizational Change; by Nick Nissley and Stedman Graham; Leadership in Action (Center for Creative Leadership); January-February 2009

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: Patrick Charles

Impact: Journal of Applied Research in Workplace E-learning (a publication of the E-learning Network of Australasia) is a new publication focusing on e-learning in organizational settings. It will be an online journal, publishing refereed and non-refereed
contributions from both researchers and practitioners relating to the design, implementation, evaluation, and management of workplace e-learning.

Here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor: Submissions are invited for the inaugural issue. The theme: “Current issues and future directions in workplace e-learning: Mapping the research landscape”. In addition, best practice examples and commentary articles may be submitted to be either peer or editor reviewed. Non-refereed contributions in the form of technical/application notes (tools, how-tos) and book/Web site reviews are also invited.

Manuscript deadline: June 1, 2009.

Everything you need to know can be found at this site.

Labour relations in North America’s school systems can be highly political, brutish, blamestorming affairs. Always in the middle are the hapless students who are often used as pawns.

Critics says collective bargaining raises the cost of education, blocks reform, protects incompetent teachers, and increases we-they tensions. Union supporters say bargaining empowers teachers and increases their input in policy decisions. But when you get right down to it, does collective bargaining have any impact on the academic performance of students?

It is a brave research question posed by Robert Carini of University of Louisville, Kentucky. In the Journal of Collective Negotiations, Carini writes that the “thin body of research” linking collective bargaining with academic outcomes is inconclusive and of “widely varying quality.”

As Carini points out, studies on bargaining often analyze only math gains or de-emphasize reading gains by combining math and reading gains into a composite score. In contrast, he used data from the U.S. National Education Longitudinal Study to see whether student gains on standardized math, reading, science, and history tests differed for students in public schools with and without collective bargaining.

His conclusion: collective bargaining is not negatively related to student achievement. Students in schools with and without collective bargaining showed comparable changes in
educational expectations between the eighth and tenth grades.

“Although there is mounting evidence that bargaining shapes the social organization of schools, these effects taken together do not appear to depress student achievement,” Carini writes. “There is evidence that teacher unions are more willing to be at the vanguard of reform than in the past, yet the degree to which unions oppose and effectively block reforms counter to their interests is still open to debate.”

Is Collective Bargaining Detrimental to Student Achievement? Evidence from a National Study; by Robert M. Carini; Journal of Collective Negotiations (2008, vol. 32 [3], 215-235)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: Old Sarge

According to the U.S.-based Center for Effective Organizations, the number of Fortune 1000 companies using team-based incentives increased to 85 percent in 2005 from 59 percent in 1990. Seems to make sense: organizations are busting silos in favour of cross-functional teams, and if you want to encourage teamwork, reward the collective effort.

Research by Kimberly K. Merriman of Pennsylvania State University casts some doubt on that logic. She has found that team incentives are often counterproductive to motivating teamwork because of perceived inequities.

Merriman studied 49 project teams comprising graduate students within a U.S. business school. The team reward was grades. Collectively, the team members in her study strongly preferred rewards based on individual contribution to the team (equitable team member rewards) as opposed to rewards based on collective team performance (equal rewards for each team member). Not surprisingly, those who viewed their teams as less trustworthy in terms of ability or honesty expressed stronger preference for equity than more trusting members.

The question is, how do individual team members perceive “fair” team reward? In a follow-up study, Merriman identified four ways that organizations fail to make team rewards appear equitable.

Consistency across the team: The value of team rewards is undercut when certain team members are overlooked, perhaps because they are from a different department or lower on the hierarchy. “It seems that many managers are under the mistaken impression that team members do not compare rewards,” Merriman writes.

Consistency over time: It is better for long-term team member motivation to maintain a no-reward policy than to provide a one-time reward that skews expectations.

High or low performers recognized differently than other team members: “It seems if at least extreme differences in performance are acknowledged—providing greater rewards to top performers and penalizing very low performers—employees may feel equity has been served.” Easier said than done: a good way to identify high and low performers is to ask for confidential feedback from team members themselves.

Tolerance for pay risk: “Whereas an employee may be content to risk a meaningful portion of their pay on their own performance, the same amount of pay tied to the collective performance of team members is often seen as too risky.”

In her paper, Merriman also offers a short case study of one manufacturer’s approach to the issue.

On the Folly of Rewarding Team Performance, While Hoping for Teamwork; by Kimberly K. Merriman; Compensation & Benefits Review (Jan-Feb 2009, 61-66)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: fisserman

I often wonder why some management theories seem to have great legs and others can’t get out of the stable. How do paradigms shift?

To find out, Nick Oliver of University of Edinburgh studied the adoption of Japanese “lean” manufacturing methods in the UK, in a couple of unconventional ways. First, he was a participant-observer in a one-day seminar by lean guru Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. Second, he studied the response of the UK engineering community to the publication of a report questioning the financial benefits of lean manufacturing methods.

Oliver found in these two cases that the language used to discuss lean ideas sounded a lot like the language used in religious conversions, and the responses to criticism of the methods were similar to responses to religious blasphemy. So much for rationality.
Oliver concluded that factors such as the aesthetics of ideas, their intuitive appeal, the method by which they’re delivered, and the characteristics of their promoters all influence their acceptance at least as much as hard evidence of their efficacy.

There is a payoff for change management practitioners. If the author is to be believed, purveyors of new ideas (such as org change) should project “expertness”, trustworthiness, and personal dynamism. As for the ideas themselves, there should be local demonstrations of applicability and they should somehow predict events and/or solve problems previously considered to be intractable.

Rational choice or leap of faith? The creation and defence of a management orthodoxy; Nick Oliver; The Learning Organization Journal (2008, vol. 15, no. 5, 373-387)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: systemsrelaunch

Does having a diverse workforce make good business sense? One body of research suggests that a max-mix of genders and races actually has a negative impact on group dynamics and communication. Now comes a study that says diversity means higher sales and customer numbers and greater profitability.

In the April issue of the American Sociological Review, sociologist Cedric Herring from the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs found that companies reporting the highest levels of racial diversity brought in nearly 15 times more sales revenue on average than those with the lowest levels of racial diversity. Gender diversity accounted for a difference of $599.1 million in average sales revenue.

Herring found racial diversity to be a better determinant of sales revenue and customer numbers than company size, the company’s age, and the number of employees at any given work location.

Other findings:

• Companies with the highest levels of gender diversity reported an average of 15,000 more customers than organizations with the lowest levels of gender diversity.
• Racial diversity is among the most important predictors of a company’s competitive positioning relative to other firms in its industry. As racial and gender diversity levels increased in a company’s workforce, its profits relative to those of its competitors also increased.

Herring analyzed data from the National Organizations Survey, reviewing a subset of 506 United States-based for-profit businesses that provided information about workforce diversity, sales revenue, customer numbers, market share and profitability between 1996 and 1997.