FastCompany.com has posted an article on how the current crisis might affect you career (seen on Yahoo! Finance). It’s a mostly useless article except for the Mitchell Feldman’s comment in the third paragraph: “the real answer is that all employees are vulnerable right now.”

Which is about like saying that they have no idea.
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I have sat on my remarks about the current financial crisis for several weeks now. I’m taking this week to address it as it pertains to your career.

I’m not an expert in some of the topics I will discuss. You need to correct me where I have facts wrong. Also, I will be speculating on what is likely to happen. That means that I am doing no more than making a guess. These guesses will focus on what you might need to do for your career.

Several of you have already contacted me. Because you have no debt and no depreciating assets, you are in a better condition than others who are held captive by their current financial position. Who knew that the years of underemployment that has prevented you from enjoying “the good life” would turn out to be useful?

Gov. Palin visiting US Airmen in Germany, July 2007

I talk a lot about judgment and one can get a good idea of someone’s current capacity (how big of a job that they can do) from an interview where they “do work”. Elliott Jaques and Kathryn Cason describe this in Human Capability. But it can’t be just any interview topic: you need to get the person talking about a topic that they have spent time thinking and learning about.

I started thinking about this when I watched the recent interview that Katie Couric, an American television news anchor, did with the US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, governor of the state of Alaska. (CBS has the Couric/Palin interview available online [Part 1 & Part 2].) Couric is asking probing questions to get to Gov. Palin’s opinions on economic issues. Gov. Palin seems quite flustered and doesn’t really include details.

The interview was widely held as a poor one on the part of Gov. Palin, even by Republican editorialists. (Democratic editorialists were unlikely to view the interview as a success regardless.) But you can’t use this interview to gauge Palin’s capacity for work because it did not engage her on issues that she work on in the past.
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The chickens have come to roost, as my grandfather used to say. The insane practices around bundling loans that never should have been made, along with our own greed, have led to a massive crisis internationally. I was first warned of this a year ago by some Australian investors but it’s still shocking to see how much damage can be done.

That said, crises are often a great opportunity for Hidden High Potentials. (And for Machiavellian personalities who use fear to gather more power: something to keep in mind.) You might be able to get something happening now when others can’t, because the world now needs people who can see past this current situation.

Paradoxically, those of you who have been living austerely will be able to move more than those who haven’t hit that wall yet.

It’s odd: during good times, people tend to look at high potentials as a threat. In a crisis, they turn to them for leadership. (I’ve written about this happening in a day-to-day way, too.)

What type of opportunities do you see?

Lafayette with George Washington, who was a favorite manager of many

To succeed, you not only need to do what is natural for you, you also must work inside of naturally fitting relationships. The relationships that you have with others have to be natural. Remember: what is natural will flow, feel right. You will still have to work hard but you won’t feel like you are going two steps forward, three steps back.

Your manager has to naturally fit being your manager: he or she must be a size bigger than you. You’ve felt this before. You loved the work but your manager kept micro-managing you. Or you wanted to do more but constantly felt your boss pulling you down. When your boss is not a discrete size bigger than you are, the role will feel unnatural even though the work feels natural.

You grow over time and that can mean losing a natural manager. If you grow to be able to handle the same timeframe of exercising judgment (our definition of work) as your boss, he or she will no longer feel like a natural manager. This makes keeping a natural manager hard and difficult. One of the most agonizing experiences is to outgrow your mentor or great boss. [Read more →]

GE: Needs to have a light on the things it brings

Recently, Michelle Malay Carter discussed the “decimation” practiced by Jack Welch at GE: where employees whose performance was in the “bottom 10%” were fired, in regular purges. Michelle, a colleague in North Carolina, does a great job at describing why this practice is simply a cover for poor management.

She links to a post by Judy McLeish which discusses some recent numbers showing broad support of the practice in the UK.

The latest research from Hudson Recruitment shows that UK business leaders do want to dismiss an annual quota of underperforming staff. The findings reveal that 61% of senior UK bosses believe that a fixed target for annual staff dismissal is healthy.

But who can really judge “performance”? If you are organized naturally, the manager has enough capacity to actually look at performance and make a judgment. But that’s only true for only about 20% of the workforce (PeopleFit research). Most managers are systematically incompetent to gauge the performance of their staff.

This becomes an exercise in monkey politics, where the Machiavellian personalities rise to the top. Which explains our current financial crisis.

I agree with Michelle in her assessment. This post makes two corrections to points made in comments to her post.

Research has shown that having low-performers actually produces higher team performance. I know that this is a counter-intuitive finding, but I’ll hazard the guess that having a deviant allows us to gauge our own behavior better. That may have actually been the secret at GE: it forced managers to hire low performers and then expel them from the community as deviants. You can get the same effect by keeping small numbers of low-performers around and simply identifying them as deviant. This may only work when you have a unnaturally organized company, though. [Read more →]

What’s natural can often look strange

With the latest financial disaster still going on and the Canadians predicting another six months before we even get close to what will pass for the bottom, it’s a good time to rehash something that will help you be as successful as possible. Nothing can guarantee success, but the following along with a lot of hard work can make it a lot more likely.

No matter what you do or where you are in your career, you find more success by doing what feels natural. You may not find success doing what’s natural, but doing what is unnatural is a surefire way to avoid it.

When I talk with clients, I always insist that they take whatever I say and compare it to what they already know. Sometimes they resist a truth, but if it doesn’t fit their reality then they should just cast it off and look for something else. You have to go with what fits naturally.

So many hidden high potentials (HHPs) work at jobs that don’t feel natural. Maybe you’re lucky enough to never have felt it. You always had work that fit. But many of you know this feeling all too well. You are straining in your job, out-performing everyone else but getting the same pay. Or your job is crushing you, destroying your very soul.

Because doing what is unnatural for you will kill you. It’s not what you were meant to do. [Read more →]

Our next article from Warren Kinston, which I had to make electronic for my own uses, is:

Warren Kinston. 1988. “A Total Framework for Inquiry“. Systems Research, 5(1): 9-25. [18MB PDF]

(Also, A Total Framework for Inquiry-FIGURES ONLY [3MB PDF])

I’m pretty happy with this scan: I’ve switched to ReadIris Pro, a bit of Belgian ingenuity to go with my Rijndael, that is currently to be had for ~US$60 currently. I will be revisiting the other articles, just to get better handling of columns.

Abstract after the jump:

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From the Scottish Socialist Voice, here’s a note about how far Glacier Metal Company has fallen from the structures created through years of hard work by so many people during Wilfred Brown’s tenure as CEO of the company.

Let’s note how ill-thought this was on management’s part. Even if they worked only 5 days per week, at “£200,000-a-day” this 7-week strike cost them £7 million (>US$10M at the time), plus legal and administrative costs of fighting the strike. And they lost not only the strike but their former stronger position against the union.

Here’s an exquisite example of why Brown’s ideas about Works Councils and the unanimous vote make management stronger, not weaker. Had Turner & Newall had the guts to restore this strong institution — instead of the cowardice of underhanded union-busting — they would have been in a stronger position overall in their discussion with the union.
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I ran across a quotation from Leda Cosmides about the idea that a person can be shaped into anything, that all minds have the same potential. This idea, still dominant in social sciences and even HR, is a reaction against the racist psychologies so fully realized by the National Socialists in Germany. (But let’s be frank: they are popular everywhere, and my own countrymen created some of the important works.)

Radical behaviorism — so well debunked by then grad student Martin Seligman — took the message even farther so that one of them could cry that given any child, he could make any type of work desired by simply changing the environment, regardless of the child’s natural inclinations. Odd, of course, that so many twins separated by birth have such similar jobs. Given a choice, we will gravitate to work that fits our natural selves.

I have no problem with the postmodernist goal of understanding how ideologies and power relations affect discourse in a society – indeed, I think evolutionary psychology has a lot to contribute to this. Nor do I have a problem with the idea that certain concepts are “socially constructed”. By understanding our evolved cognitive programs, we can understand how this is possible, which information is filled in by others, and which information is generated by evolved inferences that go beyond the information given by the cultural environment.

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