Posts from — November 2009

Ever wonder what what I write looks like? I Wordled the first page of my Organizations category archive. This is what it looked like:

click to enlarge

It would be interesting to do a full blog archive and see what I really think about.

SmartPlanet’s Andrew Nusca interviewe MAYA Design’s chief, Mickey McManus. McManus had some interesting things to say about making things so easy that they were intuitive, so easy that the user becomes “smug”:

We have a graph we write out. On one end is the customer that apologizes or make excuses. At the other end of the spectrum is smug. We want users to be smug. We’ll paper prototype it, then we’ll Wizard of Oz prototype it. After a few iterations, they’re smug. “This is so obvious, I don’t need to say it out loud.” And we want that.

If you think about it, this is something that Hidden High Potentials do regularly. More on that below.

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Bully boss? Maybe he just feels incompetent at power

Research published this month “examine[s] the effects of self-perceptions of incompetence on power holders’ tendency to aggress.” Or, why bully bosses are likely to be incompetent at their role.

From the Workplace Bullying Institute’s summary:

In a 4-study research paper to be published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science, by Nathaniel Fast (University of Southern California) and Serena Chen (University of California, Berkeley) linked aggression at work to perceived inadequacy of people in power (bosses). [Fast, N.J. & Chen, S. (2009) When the boss feels inadequate: Power, incompetence and aggression. Psychological Science, Nov. 2009]

In this study, incompetence means that the boss feels that he or she has a “low ability to influence other people” within that role. This is more salient for power roles (such as executives) and less so for someone without subordinates.

Nathanael Fast & Serena Chen conducted four experiments, some with adult workers, to determine whether one’s feeling of competence to power affects one’s willingness to do harm to another. They also tested to see if ego-stroking would help mitigate one’s desire to harm.

It turns out that bosses who feel that they are less competent at influencing people are more likely to “bully”. What was interesting was that in study 4, when they allowed participants to write about a value that they hold, a task which has been shown (apparently) to boost self-worth. Whatever that is. The important thing may be affirming one’s values, because it mitigated the tendency to aggress.

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Might not be the best person for the job. Then again, she might.

We all want to be happy. At least in the States, being happy is the closest thing to Nirvana. But it turns out that research has shown that sad workers will often out-perform happier ones.

Two psychologists at the University of Alberta, Professor Robert Sinclair (now with Laurentian University in Sudbury, ON) and PhD student Carrie Lavis, published some research in 2001 on work they did with workers in a printed circuit board factory. They made some of the workers sad, about as sad as one would get after watching a sad movie. These workers didn’t make more boards, but had fewer errors, and therefore made more usable product (less rework).

It seems that sad people use work to distract themselves from their sadness. They may also be more reflective. Happy workers see work as a distraction, too, but from their happiness.

Of course, there are several caveats.

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Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news

“Broader Measure of U.S. Unemployment Stands at 17.5%”

The New York Times reports today on the situation of unemployment in the United States. The numbers, which I have been mentioning, differ from the standard ones issued by the government because they include those who have stopped looking for work, or who have part-time work but want full-time work. This does not include those who consider themselves “underemployed” while working full-time.

The Times notes that had we been keeping records that far back, this number would surely be the highest since the Great Depression.

At the end of the article — interestingly placed — the author mentions some of the most troubling aspects of today’s unemployment:

One of the more striking aspects of the Great Recession is that most of its impact has fallen on a relatively narrow group of workers. This is evident primarily in two ways.

First, the number of people who have experienced any unemployment is surprisingly low, given the severity of the recession. The pace of layoffs has increased, but the peak layoff rate this year was the same as it was during the 2001 recession, which was a fairly mild downturn. The main reason that the unemployment rate has soared is the hiring rate has plummeted.

So fewer workers than might be expected have lost their jobs. But those without work are paying a steep price, because finding a new job is extremely difficult.

Second, wages have continued to rise for most people who still have jobs. The average hourly wage for rank-and-file workers, who make up about four-fifths of the work force, actually accelerated in October, according to the new report.

This is has not happened since the Great Depression, which was a time of foment for various movements for change in how America was run. Since official unemployment is expected to continue to remain above 10% through sometime in 2011, I would imagine that this army of forgotten men and women will be fodder for similar movements here.

What would the feds do if 1 million unemployed people, most of whom will have lost their homes, decide to march on Washington?

Last I found it interesting that all of this gets reported on Saturday, when almost no one reads the paper.

The old research has been pretty consistent: optimists are lousy at predicting what will really happen because they always assume “happy day”. But no one has ever seen how optimists predictions change as they get more information.

Until now.

A recent study (currently a working paper) tracked MBA students performance predictions across semesters. It turned out that the students more who had more optimistic projections in the beginning (and were wrong) got much more accurate over time as they got more information and feedback. Pessimists, oddly, got less accurate as the semester progressed. Apparently having the initial optimism about success (when they have no data) doesn’t color their ability to make more accurate evaluations as they get more data.

However, we all know stories about business leaders who kept on thinking that things were going to go their way when they clearly weren’t. There is probably a nuance that needs to be addressed here that is being missed by everyone.

I’d also be interested in how level of capacity affects these findings. Were the “pessimists” simply working at the wrong level? I think MBA work, even at Duke, is level 2 or less.

Read the whole working paper:

Ron Kaniel, Cade Massey & David T. Robinson. 20087/8. “Optimism without illusion: The impact of experience on expectations“. Yale Working Papers.

Maybe I can convince Alan, our resident recruiter, to chime in on this, but I’m pretty sure that the rule is this:

If you have to pay for placement, it’s a ripoff.

“Job Search Firms: Big Pitches and Fees, Few Jobs“, New York Times, 2009 Aug 17.

I meant to post something more on this, but you should read it if you are using job search firms or thinking about it.

I don’t do job placement. I don’t even promise people with whom I work will get a better job. I can only promise that they will understand what will work and what will not. If I know some people who can use you, then, sure, I’m going to want to try and connect you with them. High potentials are hard for other people to find, so connecting you may help my reputation with these other people.

Which is always good.

Of course, many of you also have some wickedly weird coping mechanisms that we have to disable so that you can do the work at the level you are capable. It’s just a matter of giving you new techniques that work when you are working at the right level, and helping you identify the situations where those old techniques are still useful.

Don’t ever give money to anyone who says that they can get you work. It’s almost always a ripoff. Where it’s not, it’s usually just luck that you get the work.

Besides, most job placement people do not have any idea to help hidden high potentials find work in good times, much less when the economy is a mess and unemployment is still rising. Because being unemployed means that you will be more unemployed these days, you can’t do things they way that you have been doing them. Or the way that everyone else is doing them.

You probably can’t really look for a job. You have to meet people while seeming to be gainfully employed.

I’ll talk more about this later. It’s a trick that many of you can deploy.

Here’s a repost of something from 2004 about what job posting are best for learning how to be a manager. It’s still relevant.

Philippines Marine Corps parachuting.

Morgan W. McCall, in Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job
(1988), cites the following as the Top 5 job assignments to produce learning:

• Project / Task Force: limited duration assignments to complete either a goal or solve a project. I would imagine that special projects are what he is talking about and not the “project-oriented” organization where everything is projectized.
• Line-to-Staff switches: where you go from working within a Line of Service (LoS) to a cross-departmental position. This is pretty obvious: staff positions require you to know about the business as a whole instead of just your little part. They also have you work on a variety of problems under greater pressures, much like projects.
• Start-ups
• Fixits / Turnarounds: I’ve worked on several of these and I doubt that someone who can’t learn quickly could survive. One of the issues with a Fixit is that the common knowledge doesn’t work. You have to listen to the system and just try things until something works. You often have no idea why it worked, only that it did. Which may not really be learning.
• Leaps in Scope of Responsibility: Although if you leap beyond your actual level of Competence (as defined by Jaques in Requisiste Organization) you may end up learning to fail. In a wretching, awful way.

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I’ve been writing about work levels and stratified systems theory since 2003, just after I started writing this blog. Some of these older posts are great, full of wonderful information that you’ll no doubt find useful. Other posts are clearly wrongheaded: I had much to learn.

My clean up is just to get rid of some of the problems in the text: bad characters, formatting that failed to make some conversion to a newer version, dead links, etc. I’m thinking about putting together some ebooks that would aggregate the better ones, clean them up and make the necessary corrections. It might be more useful than having to trawl what was at the time simply a place to put notes on what I was reading. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I still do half the time.

I don’t do as much reading any more. Maybe it was a phase, but I rather think that it was a time to shove a massive amount of information into my head as quickly as possible. These days I’m trying to assimilate all this information and figure out how to deliver it. My work with Warren Kinston taught me something relevant to this: most of the time, you have to present information that challenges preconceptions several times and in several different ways for it to be useful. It means fewer posts, because there is a few number of things to say or simple things to think through.

Anyway, if you see lots of updates coming on the RSS feed, it’s because I’m continuing to clean up these old posts.

“He’s such a cold bastard! Even the room gets a chill when he walks in!”

We’re weren’t even out of the room and my consulting pal was already berating our client. He had point: it had been chilly in there, and the client — never someone who filled your heart with bonhomie — was in particularly icy form that day.

I’d always laugh when my pal said these things, of course: we all know that the “cold bastard” was (a) statistically likely born in wedlock given where he came from and (2) had a body temp around 98.6°F (37°C), give or take.

It turns out that my colorful pal was onto something. Temperature really does affect one’s affect, changing the emotions considerably, and even affects one’s intellectual performance.

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Tom Foster has a post recently about what to do when your manager starts to give your management tasks to a coworker, all the time saying that you are still the boss.

I’ve had this happen and I wish that I had known this bit of advice back then. It wouldn’t have helped any — but I would have perhaps resolved things earlier. It also complements some things I’ve been telling my private clients in my coaching of Hidden High Potentials.

Politics uncovered. This is a script from Dunder Mifflin, but it’s not funny when it’s your job being worked around. You are either already out and your boss doesn’t have the guts to tell you or the “substitute” project manager has an alternate agenda, probably hidden.

Either way, your response is still the same. As you enter this conversation with your boss remember this:

The person who can best describe reality without laying blame will emerge the leader.

I’ll add something that Tom would probably not recommend but that the research shows is highly effective: angry outbursts. It’s amazing how effective doing this sporadically can be. People respond to this, partly because it makes you unpredictable, which is an effective trait when it’s a small part of your reactions. You have to figure out how to pull it off, whether to do it on your boss or the usurper.

People who worked with him commented that George Washington always seemed to be controlling a massive temper bubbling just below the surface, ready to explode at almost any time. It made people fear him a bit, and that’s useful. It’s amazing how many of his “You dishonor me!” outbursts worked, even early on when there was considerable bad talk about him. But it showed that he was willing to actually fight to defend his honor.

You have to seem like you could come across the table and rip someone’s head off but be totally controlling it. So it’s a limited outburst.

Psychopaths pull this off really well. When you are confronted with someone doing the outburst thing, a good technique is to stand your ground and be levelheaded, just like Foster recommends. This disables one of the psychopath’s most effective manipulations and shows you as someone who is fearless when everyone else, including the managers, is cowed by this person.

I should emphasize that I’m saying follow Tom’s advice first and most often. Outbursts can be very useful when they are seen as you defending your honor. Tricky to pull off.

Anyone else used angry outburst to good effect at work?