LEADING THOUGHTS

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)

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

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.

The March/April 2010 issue of Communication World includes an article on how to communicate a changed employee value proposition to a skeptical audience. I was less interested in that storyline than in a set of statistics cited from the Towers Watson’s 2009/2010 Communication ROI Study. Here’s the noteworthy finding.

Phase at which communication function became involved in the change process:

• Identifying the problem > 8%
• Identifying possible approaches to resolve the issue > 23%
• Implementing the change > 27%
• Selecting the approach to resolve the issue > 11%
• Planning the implementation > 31%

Frankly, I’m surprised that almost one-third of the organizations surveyed involve their comm people only when they are planning how their change project will be implemented. I would have figured that communications is more embedded in change management than that. Could that be why so many change projects rot on the vine?

The Towers Watson survey involved 328 companies and 5 million employees.

According to social network theory, people on average are only a few connections away from the information they seek. But in large organizations, this theory falls apart: some employees clearly have longer search paths than others in locating the knowledge they require. Is this simply because they have an inferior network?

Not really, say researchers from INSEAD and Apple University. Singh, Hansen, and Podolny suggest there are two dynamics at play. One, employees who belong to the periphery of an organization — women and those with lower tenure or poor connectedness to experts — have limited awareness of who knows what in an organization and a lower ability to seek help from others best suited to guide the search. Two, when these employees do seek information, they tend to contact colleagues like themselves who are also outliers.

The researchers say employees on the periphery need to cross social boundaries to discover “who knows what,” and that their managers have a role in making this happen.

“We speculate that reliance on interpersonal networks remains crucial when a firm’s knowledge cannot be easily codified and stored in databases, when it changes
quickly (making it difficult to keep track of who knows what), and when it is distributed across people who are not official experts,” the researchers write in their working paper The World is Not Small for Everyone. “This calls for managers to recognize that formal IT systems are rarely substitutes for inter-personal networks. The implication is that managers need to help members on the periphery develop their networks.”

“The World is Not Small for Everyone: Inequity in Searching for Knowledge in Organizations”, by Jasjit Singh, Morten T. Hansen, and Joel M. Podolny; INSEAD working paper 2009/49/ST/EFE

photo credit: Sambhu Sankar

When you call a meeting at work, do your colleagues roll their eyes? I feel for you. Here is some advice on how to win some meeting credibility, from Desmond J. Leach (Leeds U Business School) and colleagues.

Leach and his team surveyed 958 people in the U.S., UK, and Australia, trying to determine what makes people perceive a meeting to be effective. He focused on five meeting design characteristics: using an agenda, keeping minutes, starting and ending on time, meeting in an appropriate facility, and having a chairperson.

The results of the first phase of the study: the use of an agenda, punctuality, and meeting facilities rose to the top.

Respondents were then asked to consider more specifically the effectiveness of the last meeting on the day of their survey (to get around “recall bias”). The results this time: agenda completion, facilities, and the chairperson were the most important meeting design elements.

These perceptions held true for various types of meetings, such as those dealing with routine issues, information sharing, or addressing special problems. As well, neither the size of the meeting nor its duration seemed to effect peoples’ perceptions of meeting effectiveness, except when the meeting agenda was not completed.

If you really want to score points for your meeting prowess, do a good job involving attendees. The researchers found that higher levels of involvement predict greater perceptions of effectiveness.

“Perceived Meeting Effectiveness: The Role of Design Characteristics,” by Desmond J. Leach, Steven G. Rogelberg, Peter B. Warr, and Jennifer L. Burnfield; Journal of Business Psychology (2009, 24:65-76)

photo credit: Wildstar Beaumont

Communication and trust go hand in hand. Good communication builds trust within organizations and boosts employee involvement. But what qualifies as “good” trust-building communications? Well, it depends on who is on the receiving end.

Thomas (Naval Postgraduate School), Zolin (Queensland U of Technology), and Hartman (Colorado State U) set out to investigate the linkages among quality of information, quantity of information, trust, and outcomes such as employee involvement. For data, they used communication audits from 218 employees in the Texas and Oklahoma oil industry. Audits are used to identify communications patterns within an organization.

Thomas et al found that for building trust among co-workers and supervisors,  quality of information — its accuracy, timeliness, and usefulness — is most important for building trust than quantity of information. But for building trust in senior management, it is the quantity of information that is most important.

Information coming from top management is seldom specific to an individual’s job and is generally focused on the big picture, write Thomas, Zolin, and Hartman in the Journal of Business Communication. “Top management depends on supervisors to translate this abstract information into more task-related, relevant communication. While employees count on top management to set the strategy and determine criteria for organizational success, then, supervisors must be trusted to show workers the connection between employees’ jobs and the organization’s goals and to provide the more specific, high-quality information needed to perform their jobs well. Coworkers, likewise, are depended on for high-quality information needed for job execution.”

The researchers also found that, in all cases, trust was very closely tied to perceptions of organizational openness which, in turn, is linked to high employee involvement.

“The central role of communication in developing trust and its effect on employee involvement”, by Gail Fann Thomas, Roxanne Zolin, and Jackie L. Hartman; Journal of Business Communication (Vol. 46, No. 3, July 2009; pp. 287-310)

photo credit: evilpeacock

CEO of Yahoo! Carol Bartz argues in The Economist (Nov. 13, 2009 issue) that, in the age of ubiquitous information, traditional management is “impossible, or at least ill-advised.”

“The hierarchical, layered corporate structures in which company information was carefully managed and then selectively passed down the line have crumbled,” Bartz writes. “The online era has made command-and-control management as dead as dial-up internet.” Ouch.

The problem, she says, lies in the stream of 24/7 commentary and instant opinion and gossip generated and amplified by bloggers, tweeters, and their ilk. It makes it impossible to control the message and hampers decision-making. So what’s the answer?

Learn to live with it, for one thing. Develop a thick skin. And understand “how important they [leaders] can be to their own team by interpreting both the news and the disinformation that swirls around them,” Bartz writes.

Bartz advises leaders to identify and mentor thought leaders, employees who have the ability to digest and interpret information for others. “Grooming these in-house ideas people helps foster a culture of openness to fresh thinking—the greatest energy an organization can have.”

photo credit: nregimbal