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)

Between LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networking sites, it’s easier than ever to reconnect with colleagues and friends from your distant past. Maybe you’d rather keep those connections in the past. But there’s a good case to be made that dormant ties can be even more valuable than current ties. “Insights from dormant ties tend to be more novel, and more efficient to get, than those from current ties.” Read the article

They are too infrequently performed, though they can help employees immensely. When they are done, they can be biased or focus on the wrong metrics. Can performance reviews be redeemed? Turns out, feedback loops and other innovations are giving performance reviews new life. Read the article

Losing employees, even solid performers, can end up strengthening your organization in the long run, at least in the topsy turvy world of the fashion industry. The trick is to keep up the connections to your long departed employees and their gold-plated networks.

Read the article

It’s easy to blame corporate culture for all manner of ills. But if you’re seeking change in your organization, you’ll need to use the existing culture to change the behaviors that matter most. Over time, the culture you have will evolve into the culture you need.

Read the article

You’ve been managing knowledge workers for a few years now and you’re still flummoxed about how to wring more productivity from these colleagues without wringing their necks. Do you get rid of the foosball table? Pay them extra to come into work on time? Spike their java with Red Bull?

How about starting by reducing the barriers that get in the way of productive interaction and collaboration with colleagues. Matson (McKinsey) and Prusak (Institute for Knowledge Management) advise organizations to look here for answers because knowledge workers spend a great deal of time interacting with other knowledge workers.

Matson’s and Prusak’s research shows that half of all interactions are constrained by one of five barriers.

1 and 2. Physical and technical barriers: geographic distance or lack of tools for locating the right people. Workaround — Communities of practice supported by online tools to help workers find colleagues with useful information.

3. Social/cultural barriers: rigid hierarchies that discourage sharing. Workaround — Organization-specific case studies discussed in small groups to promote a better understanding of company culture; incorporating knowledge sharing in performance reviews.

4. Contextual barriers: difficulty translating knowledge widely. Workaround — Rotate employees across teams and divisions; stage creative forums where specialists can learn about other specialists’ projects.

5. Time barriers: perceived lack of time to interact. Workaround — Identify employees that knowledge workers need to interact with and on what topics.

“Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers,” by Eric Matson and Laurence Prusak; McKinsey Quarterly (September 2010)

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

Alas the “glass ceiling” is one of those sad facts of modern organizational life that knows no national boundaries.  Doesn’t matter the country: despite rising female labour participation rates, women can’t seem to crack senior management ranks.

There are the usual reasons: the lack of transparency around promotion policies; work-family conflict; the old boys’ network; and the lack of visibly successful female role models. In her study of female managers in Ireland, Christine Cross (U Limerick) found similar dynamics at play but also what she calls an under-appreciated phenomenon: that “visibility” or being known to the senior management team is a crucial “career progression strategy.”

It is a strategy for which women of a certain age are ill-equipped, Cross says. “The age during which women are most often taking time out of their career for childbirth coincides with the time they are most active in seeking promotion,” she writes in the Leadership & Organization Development Journal. “As a consequence of taking maternity leave, a woman’s absence from the organisation directly impacts her visibility in organisational life. This study highlights that where women are away from the office for these extended periods, they believe, because of their absence, they are ‘forgotten about’ by the senior management team.”

Cross’s conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with 30 female managers from across a wide range of industry sectors in Ireland. The women in the study also observed that men in their organizations overtly engaged in self-generated visibility, a strategy the female respondents did not want to employ.

Hmm. . . do you buy that?

I have seen the way some men network and it’s not a pretty sight. Everyone knows they are doing it, just to get in with the ‘in crowd’. People talk about them behind their backs about how they are always smoozing up to the most senior people, and there is this one guy who is really junior, but wants to hang out with the ‘big boys’. But it’s working for him, even though we are all saying he shouldn’t be doing it because he’s making a laughing stock of himself.
—Retail store manager quoted by Cross

“Barriers to the executive suite: evidence from Ireland”, by Christine Cross; Leadership & Organization Development Journal (Vol. 31 No. 2, 2010, pp. 104-119)

photo credit: Let Ideas Compete

Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook, wikis, and blogs are making their way into organizations, in many cases brought in by employees rather than as part of an enterprise strategy. Some organizations, however, are proactively exploring how new collaborative tools can change the way people work for the better.

Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, sizes up this trend in the book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. In this interview with McKinsey Quarterly, he discusses some of his findings.

At the 9:08 mark (note: the video clock counts down), McAfee talks about the top-down versus the bottom-up approach to adopting new technology. In the end, he believes culture change is more likely to result when it is led by senior managers.

At 6:26, McAfee talks about the forces that can undermine Web 2.0′s enterprise-wide adoption.

And at 3:54, he talks about what Web 2.0 means for middle managers. If you see yourself as a gatekeeper of information, McAfee says, you’re in for a rough ride. “If you have another view of yourself, which is that you’re someone who’s responsible for output, you’re someone who’s responsible for making good things happen in your team, then these tools should be your best friend.”

Leaders who excel over time utilize organizational networks in distinctive ways to compensate for weaknesses in formal structures, says Rob Cross (U of Virginia) and colleagues who have conducted network analyses at more than 100 organizations.

In Organizational Dynamics, Cross et al map out five principles that drive productive organizational networks.

1. Manage the centre
Cross finds that 3 to 5 percent of people in a network account for 20 to 35 percent of the “value-added ties” – collaborations that generate sales, efficiency gains, or key innovations. But these hubsters are often not managed or leveraged intelligently. The lesson for leaders: locate employees at the centre of networks and manage them well.

Specifically look for bottlenecks and hidden stars. For bottlenecks, figure out if they are central because of their position on the org chart or because of their expertise and leadership qualities. If they are central because of their roles, shift decision rights or responsibilities to others. If they are experts or born leaders, identify the strengths that the network is seeking from them and build these capabilities in others.

And hidden stars? “We have found that there is only a 25 to 40 percent overlap between the individuals classified as ‘top talent’ by the organization and those who are revealed in a network analysis to be critical enablers of others.” The researchers suggest acknowledging the contributions of hidden stars with promotions or increased pay.

2. Leverage the periphery
For maximum benefit, focus on two outlier groups: newcomers and high performers who have drifted. For new hires, create initial assignments and encourage behaviors that integrate people into existing networks rapidly. For underutilized high-performers, re-engagement has to be done on a case-by-case basis. “Roughly 30 percent of the employees considered as top talent – those on high performer lists or in the top 20 percent performance category – have migrated to the fringe of the network.”

3. Selectively bridge collaborative silos
The strength of the network idea at a unit level, writes Cross and colleagues, “is that it allows us to see more precisely how to connect not everybody – but only the four, five, or six junctures that can allow the organization to differentiate itself strategically.” To bridge the “white space” created by divisional boundaries, geography, or hierarchies, a network analysis can be commissioned to show unit heads how they are connected across regional and product groups.

4. Develop the ability to surge
Cross says “surging” happens when networks sense opportunities or problems in one pocket of a network and rapidly tap into the expertise of others in the network to coordinate an effective response. Cross: “As new opportunities arise, employees need to know who has relevant expertise that can be helpful; they need to have a sense of who knows what in the network.”

5. Minimize insularity
Effective networks do not stop at “city limits” but extend out to clients and sources of expertise. For example in professional services, Cross writes, understanding touch points with key customers is a critical network view.

How Effective Leaders Drive Results Through Networks, by Rob Cross, Amanda Cowen, Lisa Vertucci, and Robert J. Thomas; Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 93–105, 2009

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

photo credit: edmittance