LEADING THOUGHTS

I’m a big fan of management thinker Meg Wheatley. Actually, to describe Wheatley as a management thinker doesn’t quite do her justice. Since the early 1990s, she has been researching and writing about organizational learning, change management, and spiritually grounded leadership. But she’s also devoted a considerable amount of energy to building heathy communities both in organizations and in impoverished locales.

Of late, Wheatley has been writing about how to persevere in the face of adversity and how to shift thinking in the midst of difficult circumstances, both timely skills.

So I was eager to read the recent conversation between Wheatley and the sharp-thinking Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business. They don’t disappoint.

Wheatley says that it is a difficult time for leaders to be innovative, and that there is little time in modern organizations for reflection and learning what works and doesn’t work.

“For me, community — people working together and knowing that others are there to support them — is a critically important but largely invisible resource. . . But community is hard to find in most organizations. Not only do many leaders deny that this capacity is important, but they’re actually destroying it through their current management approaches.”

Such as? Whteatley says she many forward-thinking business leaders are being driven by their boards and bosses to implement continuous cutbacks and produce more results with fewer resources.

“Too many leaders fail to realize that the old ways, their mental maps, aren’t giving them the information they need. But instead of acknowledging that, they push on more frantically, desperate to have the old ways work. When human beings work from fear and panic, we lose nearly all of our best reasoning capacities. We can’t see patterns, think about the future, or make moral judgments.”

When you’re lost, Wheatley says, the solution is to admit it and call together everyone who might have information that’s needed to construct a new map, people from all levels of the organization.

Kleiner pushes Wheatley to explain her view that the only leaders who succeed are those who practise a spiritual discipline. Wheatly doesn’t back down, though she makes clear that, by “spiritual discipline,” she doesn’t mean a religious practice per se but rather “some regular activity that leads you to reflect on your struggles and challenges in a larger context.” That might be meditation, time in a natural space, or even Alcoholics Anonymous. Her point is that leaders must engage in some practice that pushes them out of the perception that they are the centre of the universe.

You can find the original article here (registration may be required)

In search of the entrepreneur’s risk-taking mentality, a professor of corporate strategy undertakes intensive field test. . . at the casino. His lesson: lousy at Baccarat, lousy in the boardroom. Read the article

Organizations are hollowing out their middle manager ranks. Pity: these folks have a greater impact on company performance than almost any other part of the organization. Their influence stems from their role in project management: allocating resources, imposing deadlines. Not sexy stuff but critical for effective operations. Read the article

Over the past decade, neuroscientists have come a long way in figuring out how ideas form in the human mind. As it turns out, their findings contradict how most companies understand and organize innovation. The new model of the brain is based on “intelligent memory,” combining analysis and intuition and requiring a different form of brainstorming.

Read the article

Women are entering higher education on par with their male counterparts but few are making it into the executive suites and boardrooms during their subsequent careers. For all the gains women are making, there remain two significant gaps: pay and leadership.

Read the article

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

Are people who take leadership positions motivated mainly by selfish interests or the interests of their followers? It is easy enough to cite examples proving one side or the other but researchers Gillet (U Osnabrueck), Cartwright (U Kent), and van Vugt (VU Amsterdam) wanted to add rigor to the debate.

Among evolutionary biologists and psychologists, there are two theories on the origins of leadership. The dominant idea views leadership as the outcome of status battles between group members. The winner (leader) exercises power over lower-ranked individuals.

The alternative idea sees leadership as a coordination device that helps group members plan, execute group tasks, and divvy up resources. In this view, leaders serve the interests of followers.

To test these two ideas, Gillet and colleagues conducted two social decision-making experiments. They examined the behaviors of individuals in four-player coordination games in which the individuals had the option to go first (lead) or wait (follow); their decisions were associated with certain monetary pay-offs. The researchers then linked the players’ decisions to data from personality questionnaires and their earnings in the game.

“The core question in these games is who leads and how do they fare compared to followers in terms of their earnings in the game?” the researchers report in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Gillet et al found that leaders were more likely to be rated as pro-social rather than selfish. And they discovered that these “servant leaders” seemingly sacrificed some of their own gains for the benefit of the group.

“Leaders, on average, earned less money than followers and dispositionally social participants (on the basis of their social value orientation) chose to lead more often than selfish participants,” the researchers report. “Additionally there is no relationship between leadership and the kind of personality traits that are usually associated with selfish leadership, most notably personal dominance.”

As the researchers admit, the experiments were run in an anonymous setting that did not enable group members to form status and dominance hierarchies commonly seen in the brutish real world. So this line of thinking is a work in progress, albeit one that gives servant leaders a measure of redemption.

Gillet, J., Cartwright, E., & Vugt, M. (2010). Selfish or servant leadership? Evolutionary predictions on leadership personalities in coordination games Personality and Individual Differences DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.06.003

photo credit: Clinton Steeds

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.

Organizational development and change management more than ever before are being linked to learning and talent development, according to a report recently published by the UK-based CIPD.

“It is clear that organizational development and design will become increasingly important as organizations seek to change, innovate and to link learning to organizational goals,” according to CIPD’s 2010 Learning and Talent Development survey report. But the report also noted that “practitioners are less involved in discussing the design, delivery and impact of learning with other managers. This alignment issue is a key one as L&TD seeks to build its reputation and impact.”

The survey found that for 46 percent of respondents, the major organizational change affecting learning and talent development in the next five years will be a greater integration between coaching, organizational development, and performance management to drive change. For 37 percent, it will be greater responsibility devolved to line managers.

Other findings from the CIPD survey:

• As a result of the economic downturn, learning and talent development is becoming more focused on value and impact; in other words, doing more with less. “It will be particularly important for professionals to ensure that their L&TD activities are even more closely aligned with business strategy and to be able to assess the return on investment generated.”
• Almost 60 percent of organizations undertake talent management activities. Among these, half rate such activities as “effective” and only 3 percent consider them “very effective.” The three most effective activities to manage talent are coaching (39 percent), in-house development programmes (32 percent), and high-potential development schemes (31 percent).
• The three most common ways to evaluate talent management activities: feedback from line managers (42 percent); rretention of those identified as high-potential (35 percent); and  anecdotal observation of change (35 percent).
• In terms of leadership skills, the main gaps identified by employers were performance management (setting standards for performance and dealing with under-performance) and leading and managing change.
• Internships are growing in popularity, partly because employers want to provide a lifeline for talented young people. The results are encouraging. “The fact that a third of firms report higher productivity as a result of their internships is particularly encouraging, given that many interns are new to the workplace and are still in the process of learning new skills.”

About 86 percent of responding organizations (623) had headquarters in the UK and the remainder (101) were based outside the UK.

photo credit: Limmud