LEADING THOUGHTS

Let’s pump up employees and stoke their competitive juices by ranking them against their peers. Better yet, let’s throw cold water on them. Comparing workers to their peers is usually a lousy idea, and here’s why. Go to article

The organization is flying through the turbulence of change. What does it do? Throw gobs of money at senior execs and “star” performers to induce them to stay on board? There is a more shrewd and less costly solution. Go to article (requires registration)

The issue: When selecting a new leadership team, should CEOs use a scientific approach that is fact-based and analytical? Or should they emphasize subjective factors such as personality, loyalty, motivation, politics, and team chemistry? Let the debate begin. Go to article

C.K Prahalad gave us core competencies, the bottom of the pyramid, constrained innovation, and a few other mind-bending management theories. Until his dying days, he believed that individuals, not institutions, were central. Institutions are merely “different ways of combining skills and capabilities of the moment.” Go to article

Learning and development pros have been getting an easy ride when it comes to showing the business value of training. Lame surveys no longer cut it. Fortunately, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America can show how to tie training to key business performance metrics. Go to article (registration required)

Beefy bouncers at Manhattan nightclubs can tell us a thing or two about status cues and how rewards are doled out. I’ll let you connect the dots to organizational life. Go to article

A Conference Board of Canada study provides some welcome data on literacy and basic skills in the workplace.

Literacy in the workplace means the ability to understand instructions and read and apply printed information, among other basic skills. A workforce with a deficit in these skills will see lower productivity, higher health and safety costs, and more prevalent problems with product and service quality.

The Conference Board’s survey of employers, workers, union representatives, and providers of services to immigrants and Aboriginal groups shows that despite the importance placed on literacy skills in the workplace, training to build these skills is not often available through the workplace. Specifically,

• Forty-five percent of employer respondents and 55.6 percent of worker respondents said  training in the workplace to improve the ability to “listen to instructions” is never, or only seldom, available.
• Fifty-six percent of employer respondents and 58 percent of worker respondents indicated that training in the workplace to improve the ability to read printed information is never, or only seldom, offered.

According to the Conference Board survey, the biggest challenge resulting from workplace literacy training is the scheduling or reorganizing of work. Measuring success and determining the return on investment were other obstacles reported.

On the positive side, those organizations that offer workplace literacy programs see a boost in performance:

• More than 60 percent reported that productivity and the quality of products/services were improved.
• Fifty-eight percent of respondents said health and safety and workplace communications were improved.

The Conference Board survey also revealed a mismatch in perceptions between employers and workers. Employers in the survey, for example, reported a much higher level of confidence in workers’ understanding of health and safety policies than did any other responding group.

• Sixty-four percent of employer respondents said they felt that health and safety policies were understood fully or to a large extent, while 50 percent of responding labour representatives and 40 percent of workers agreed.

This mismatch has potentially significant consequences. “Because employers are already confident,” the report concluded, “they are unlikely to see the need to provide training to upgrade workers knowledge and understanding of the health and safety policies of the workplace.”

The Conference Board report includes the analysis of 10 Canadian workplace literacy and learning programs, particularly relating to their impacts on workplace health and safety.

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You: Literacy’s Impact on Workplace Health and Safety, by Alison Campbell; The Conference Board of Canada (July 2010)

Change can be stressful, no doubt. But not all employees experience change in a similar way, say researchers Loretto (U Edinburgh), Platt (U Edinburgh), and Popham (U St. Andrews). Downsizing, for example, could have a positive effect on mental health, they write in the British Journal of Management, if they lead to clearer roles and responsibilities for employees and increasing worker participation.

FACTOID: Employers in the UK are under legal obligation to prevent and control factors leading to stress in their workforce.

To fill in the research gap, Loretto et al set out to devise a comprehensive measure of organizational change (based on self-report questionnaires) and then to use that tool to explore the effects of change on employee mental health (using the well-validated General Health Questionnaire). Their study focused on nearly 5,400 employees in the National Health Service in the UK.

The study did show that the prospect of changing employers and terms and conditions of employment are likely to have detrimental effects on staff health and well-being.

But the researchers’ findings also challenge the assumption that change necessarily has an adverse effect on health. “Our findings indicate areas, such as promotion and development, where a positive impact can be anticipated.” They speculate that training and promotion may reduce employees’ uncertainty by increasing their control over their future.

Loretto, W., Platt, S., & Popham, F. (2009). Workplace Change and Employee Mental Health: Results from a Longitudinal Study British Journal of Management DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00658.x

It may disappoint you to read this but anger has a productive role in negotiations. Empirical studies (such as those by Sinaceur and Tiedens in 2006) have shown that expressing anger induces larger concessions when negotiating with another party. Angry negotiators are perceived to be tougher and to have higher “reservation prices” (higher standards for the worst deal they are willing to accept) than other negotiators. But these studies are all based on North American and Western European subjects. Is expressing anger in negotiations equally effective in other cultures?

Adam (INSEAD), Shirako (U of California, Berkeley), and Maddux (INSEAD) conducted the “first investigation of how the interpersonal effects of discrete emotions in negotiations vary across cultures,” according to their paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

They hypothesized that anger would elicit larger concessions from Western negotiators but smaller concessions from East Asian negotiators. They figured that anger is at odds with the East Asian emphasis on interdependence and social harmony and would therefore be perceived by East Asian negotiators as an inappropriate display.

The research backed them up. Adam et al conducted three studies using scenarios and computer simulations (none involving face-to-face interactions) and found consistent evidence that “anger not only may be less effective in East Asian cultural contexts, but may actually backfire and lead to worse outcomes.”

Culture, they say, has a significant impact not only on how people from different cultural backgrounds perceive certain behaviour but also how they actually react to that behaviour.

Hajo Adam, Aiwa Shirako, & William W. Maddux (2010). Cultural Variance in the Interpersonal Effects of Anger in Negotiations Psychological Science, 21 (6), 882-889 : 10.1177/0956797610370755

photo credit: Frederic Poirot

Professor Robert Hooijberg (IMD, Switzerland) studied 175 state government managers in the U.S. to assess whether or not leadership effectiveness is linked to integrity, as judged by the managers themselves, their bosses, their peers, and their direct reports.

Hooijberg found that goal-oriented behaviour — getting the job done — is far and away the strongest predictor of perceived leadership effectiveness. Integrity, by contrast, holds much less importance for a leader’s boss or direct reports. “Our study lends little support to the assertion that integrity is essential for effective leadership, a sobering thought indeed,” he writes.

Of course, there is more to this research. Hooijberg found, for example, that flexibility is a crucial value for leaders. And in his article, he lays out some important distinctions between the concept of “integrity” and what it actually means in practice. Sometimes acting with undiluted honesty can damage workplace relationships that need to be sustained. Do you really need to point that your colleague’s green-and-brown argyle socks clash with his black pin-striped suit?

Read the entire article here

Besides being a good friend of Leading Thoughts, Nick Nissley is Executive Director of The Banff Centre’s leadership development unit and a well-respected thinker in the area of arts-based management education.

Of late, Nick has been exploring the idea of “narrative leadership,” basically the use of stories — personal and otherwise — to effectively lead others. He delivers an entertaining overview of the idea, and throws in a few stories for good measure, in a TedX presentation from Calgary.

If you’re in a story and you don’t like it, change the story.

Here’s the clip. At the 6:00 minute mark, Nick tells us what researchers are learning about “narrative competence.” Researchers with the Center for Creative Leadership, for example, looked at how leaders develop; how do they learn what they need to know? The answer: 50% comes from experience; 20% from hardship or failure; 20% from mentors; and 10% from formal learning. That means that 70 percent of what leaders learn comes from their experiences, both positive and negative. “And we make sense of these experiences through stories,” Nick says.

At the 8:40 minute mark, Nick explains how effective leaders know their own story and lead with it. He follows it up at at 9:00 minute mark with the story of the M.S. Hershey Foundation and its role in lifting Nick out of life-limiting storyline and giving him a new script.

At the 13:30 minute mark, Nick says “we become the stories we tell ourselves,” with the implication being that we can change the world by changing our stories.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then perhaps it takes co-workers to help trainees shine.

Management development experts have long known that organizations get the most out of their training dollars when employees are supported before, during, and after training. Few organizations, however, actually follow this advice.

Models of training effectiveness focus on program design, trainee characteristics, and workplace environment as the key factors that determine transfer of learning. By contrast, Harry J. Martin (Cleveland State University) wanted to study the context in which employees apply and transfer the knowledge and skills learned, specifically the role of workplace climate and peer support.

(Workplace climate includes factors such as adequate resources, cues that remind trainees of what they have learned, opportunities to apply skills, barriers and constraints to transfer, and consequences for using training on the job.)

FACTOID: It is estimated that only 10 to 40 percent of learning transfers to the job.

Martin focused on 237 managers of a manufacturing company in the midwest U.S. who completed a comprehensive training program. He devised a global measure of workplace climate for each of the 12 divisions in which the employees worked and used performance ratings of the participants to measure the level of training transfer.

Martin found that trainees in a division with a more favorable climate and those enjoying greater peer support showed greater improvement. Even better, in terms of transferring learnings, peer support overcame or lessened the effects of a negative office environment.

“The results of this study suggest that follow-up programs should be designed to address both the immediate and general organizational environments,” Martin reports in Human Resource Development Quarterly. “Care must be taken to help ensure that peers and immediate supervisors help trainees put the skills to work. Co-workers could provide general encouragement or be involved in more structured activities such as the peer meetings employed in this study.”

“Workplace Climate and Peer Support as Determinants of Training Transfer,” by Harry J. Martin; Human Resource Development Quarterly (Vol. 21 No. 1 Spring 2010; pp. 87-104)

photo credit: gritphilm