Dan Erwin

Experience Rules in Today's Job Market

Even recent college grads had better be able to put experience on their resume and be able to talk about what they've gotten out of their experience. So says Katherine Brooks' latest blog. And she knows what she's blogging about. She has a most uniquely titled position at the University of Texas Austin: Director of Career Services for Liberal Arts Graduates. Don't concern yourself thinking she's just another ivory tower type. She wears the hat, but it doesn't fit her blogging.

When I first stumbled on Brooks' blog, Career Transitions,a couple weeks ago, her name grabbed me. I realized that she was the author of that fine book for graduating seniors with a liberal arts degree, grads looking for a job that'll provide a decent living. Her book has the catchy title, You Majored in What? And it gets right to the issues, deciphering the job market and relieving stress from grads in humanities and social science. I wrote a review of her still very timely book nearly two years ago. My blog, You majored in what? provides a bit more background for you.

There are a lot of things right about a liberal arts degree, if. . . you graduated from one of the most selective schools in the nation. Or, if you have the wherewithal and support to go on to graduate school. And if you fill in your liberal arts with a year of computer science, economics, communications, etc. If you were smart enough to get summer internships, work experience build a network. And if you got a STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) liberal arts major.

- - - - - - -

Many liberal arts faculty don't want to become vocational school teachers. That makes sense, but it overstates the case. As a nationally-experienced executive coach, I've learned that liberal arts grads tend to be the better thinkers in business, know how to learn, are adaptable and, typically, have solid communication skills. That means they can come up to speed quickly. Just exactly what firms are looking for. So if you're thinking about liberal arts, a recent liberal arts graduate or are not certain about your major's financial future, here's the jobs' blogger for you.

Prof. Brooks' blogs are filled with great stuff, solid research and spot-on recommendations. What I most appreciate about her blogs is not the intense relevance or even her smart use of statistics, but the fact that she has a bias toward evidence-based recommendations. Brooks blogs regularly on the Psychology Today site. Here are the titles of just a few of her most recent posts:

• Employers seek proof of your skills
• Five steps for improving your job search
• The question isn't "Are resumes dead?" The question is "Are resumes enough?"
• Are you T-Shaped? The most sought after candidates are.
• How to benefit from losing the lottery.

Brooks provides a fascinating stream of research on careers and jobs. She also has her own website, Wise Wanderings, filled with practical, highly useful stuff. Her website strategy is straightforward:

Welcome to CareerArtistry, my website dedicated to helping liberal arts students and alumni (and just about anyone who is seeking a new way to earn a living) navigate their way through the 21st century job market, where linear systems are fading away and chaos reigns.

Check out Brooks' blog. I'm certain you'll find it exceptionally valuable.

If You Need a Mentor, Forget the Expert

Be very, very careful whom you target for your mentors. Especially if you’re in the early years of your career, there’s a tendency to go for the real expert, those people with a depth of experience. But that can be a serious mistake.

As a general rule, always add a slightly more experienced peer into your mentor and coaching network. If you’re a new manager and want management coaching, be sure to use at least one person no more than a single level above you.  

Why forget the expert?
I don’t mean this as a put-down, but too often the difference between an early career person and an expert mentor is similar to that between a kindergartner and a college professor who’s never had kids or taught them. The college prof has no experience putting the cookies on the bottom shelf, assumes language above the kindergartner’s vocabulary, uses abstractions instead of concrete, simple words, draws conclusions that make no sense and offers big picture insights that connect no dots whatsoever for the kid. He even lacks the good sense to get down on his knees and look the kindergartner into his eyes when he’s talking to him. And the child is not at the place where he can formulate relevant questions.

On several occasions I’ve observed HR putting a new manager into a mentoring relationship with a smart vice-president. The relationship breaks down quickly because the mentor and mentee are reading from different sheets of music. Inevitably, the VP views the communication failure as the manager’s problem rather than his own. So he interprets the failure as lack of follow-through, motivation, intelligence and savvy. Guess what’s just happened to that mentee’s future?

So, mentors can be so far removed from your day-to-day work that they are of little value to you. You want at least one or two with little more experience than you. Those are the folk who have recently walked in your shoes and can give you relevant, practical, concrete insight into your work.

Build the social contract
Once you’ve targeted a willing mentor, you want to deal with two very important issues right up front. First, lay out very specific, very concrete objectives and be certain you’ve got buy-in from your mentor. Your mentor will clarify those objectives and often modify them. It’s imperative that both of you get full agreement on the objectives.

At that same first meeting start building a social contract. A social contract is not a legalistic document. It’s simply an explicit, conversational agreement of what you expect from your mentor and how you’re going to work together. Social contracts typically need to be renegotiated throughout the mentoring and coaching process. But any social contract should enable you to behave authentically and get the kind of mentoring you want and need. So you should be able to ask direct questions, find out what the mentor expects of you, probe directly into the mentor’s orientation to confidentiality, get agreement on when and how often you’ll talk with each other, even how to deal with conflicts should they arise, and when the relationship is expected to end. And if you’re really gutsy, I’d ask the mentor how you’ll get in trouble with him. Mentors typically have personal, tacit rules that they don’t share unless asked. It’s not that they’re being secretive, but simply that it never crossed their mind to let you know.  And somehow, in all of this, mentees need to be effective listeners. That’s one thing that the mentor really expects.

Very often long-term relationships develop emotional connections. Nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s to be expected. But the social contract will protect both of you from future difficulties that might arise.

Mentoring is not only a key to organizational success; it’s also a key to personal success. If you check around, you’ll find that all top, successful leaders have been mentored. It should be no surprise that those who’ve been mentored are socialized into the organization, make more money, get more opportunities and are promoted--all faster than other employees. So use mentoring wisely. 

So How Are You Going to Frame This Issue?

“We now face the exact predicament we expected. We must either allow interest rates to rise on student loans, or stick taxpayers with another multibillion-dollar bill.”

--Jennifer Allen, Republican spokeswoman, Minnesota Legislature

“On behalf of my generation, I should apologize to all of you. We tell you your education is important, which it is, that you should get as much of it as possible, which you should. That it will benefit you and society and the world, but we’re not going to help you pay for it. It’s a profound breakdown of the inter-generational compact.”

--Mark Dayton, Democratic Governor of Minnesota

It’s rare that I permit a newspaper article to strongly impact my emotions. I normally either ignore reports or add the data to my mental filing system and think through any needed system changes. When it’s a serious case of conflicting values like this morning, then the conflict can be challenging. So the front page of this morning’s Minneapolis Star Tribune really, really pissed-me off. The article reported on a conversation that UMN’s President Kaler, Governor Dayton and Senator Franken had with a number of students about loan indebtedness. (Lest there be any doubt, education is one of my highest values.)

The student loan debt of Minnesota students is fourth highest in the nation. The state’s college students who graduated in 2010 and borrowed had an average of $29,058 in student loan debt.

And there are plenty of students who are walking out of college with loan debt between $27 and $40,000.

Framing the issue
Democrats (Dayton) framed the issue as an intergenerational failure and Republicans (Allen) framed the issue as a tax-and-spend issue.

So the Democrats want us to think about the issue as an intergenerational failure. That’ll be a tough sell to the older generation who do much of the voting.

And Republicans want us to think about the issue as a demand on our pocket books, another tax issue. That’ll be an easy sell to the older generation.

FYI: Studies show that most of our decisions are made on an emotional basis. That’s not a completely negative way of deciding. Sometimes our emotions are smart. They’re useful for survival. Furthermore, it’s important to recognize that our tribal membership (Republican or Democrat) deeply impacts our decisioning. We have deeply held values and commitments, often lacking serious rationale. But they still impact our decision making. However, if the issue is personally or organizationally important, rational decision-making is the best route to success.

What you get is how you frame the issue
Most of us intuitively know something about frames. We allude to them when we talk about “thinking outside the box” or “not being on the same page.” A frame is simply a mental structure that simplifies and guides our understanding of complex issues. Our world is too complex for our brains to ever hope to fully process what’s coming at us. Even prior to the information age. If we didn’t use frames, we’d be quickly consumed with trying to make sense of all the data flowing at us.

Most of us pay no attention whatsoever to this automatic mental process. But we can pay a very high price for this much-needed simplicity. It can limit what we see and what we understand. The analogy of a window frame shows us the difficulties. Architects designing a new house choose where to place windows to give us a desired view. But no single window can show us the entire panorama. When we first moved from Colorado and Arizona to Minnesota nearly 40 years ago, my wife and I went nuts about the windows in Minnesota homes. They were very small. We didn’t like what we got from a small window: little light and no perspective. There’s an important lesson in that. Both Governor Dayton and Jennifer Allen are using frames that are far too small for their subject. But few people will recognize that.

Frames and policies
The fact of the matter is few see their frames for thinking unless they’ve had the training to do so. Frames are like stereotypes or mental models. They’re very powerful. With Dayton and Allen, the frame difference is the major cause of the policy difficulties. As long as the legislators are working with those two frames, the public will never hear or even understand the issues. And as I said, that’s good for the Republicans and bad for the Democrats. That’s because the rhetorical world of the older voter is filled with tax issues and largely lacking in any sense of the broader good. So how the hell do you talk about the “broader good?” The Democrats better figure that one out. The Democrats are winning a lot of battles, but losing the one about the broader good. And it’s all about framing.

Frame distortion
Frames guide our thinking in a chaotic world. They can play tricks on our minds. Here, from Russo and Schoemaker, are some of the built-in dangers of frames:

• Frames distort what we see.
• Frames themselves are often hard to see
• Frames appear complete. We don’t even notice that something’s missing.
• Frames are exclusive. It’s hard to look out more than one window at a time.
• Frames are “sticky” and hard to change. We’ve been locked into the same frames for years—with a lot of reinforcement—so it’ll take conscious effort to change them.

Making frame change
About ten years ago my frugal wife decided she needed a new car. Her old Pontiac was dying. She turned the planning and research over to me, so I checked out her frame. Her conclusion was that she wanted a very “secure, safe” car (she taught in the inner city), preferably a four wheel drive, heated front seat and it should be small to move around in traffic and park. Using her frame, my research found that there was only one car that fit the bill: the Audi A4. “But that’s a very expensive car,” she responded. I pointed out that she hadn’t factored cost into her frame and that there was only one car that could give her what she wanted. She agreed that I’d framed the problem correctly, but still . . . . I finally sold it to her on the basis that it was a “Kraut car,” German made. Since she’s half German, with all the analytical precision thereto appertaining, she rolled. She got the Audi—and I was the proud, status-oriented husband of a wife who drove an Audi. She’d framed the issue correctly and as a result she got exactly what she wanted--and needed! (She agreed that as empty-nesters and the kids out of college, money wasn’t an issue. So we took that out of the framing.) I assume you realize that my case for the Audi was both rational and emotional decision making.

Is Leadership Passé?

Not quite, but you’d better start learning how to “do” collaboration. Competency needs grow out of cultural, economic and organizational demands. And today’s world, more and more, needs the skills of collaboration.

Recognize this!
The manufacturing age, which began with Henry Ford in the early 1900’s, focused on manufacturing’s needed competency: managing. Employees weren’t knowledge agents. They pounded widgets and followed orders, and everyone, bosses and ordinary employees, was fairly clueless about leadership. The only related term was “leader.”

A leader was the next rung up the manufacturing ladder from us peasants (I spent my year off from college—summer 1957 to spring 1958—in a Detroit manufacturing plant. And I was one of those peasants. But, since it was Detroit at the height of the manufacturing age, I made a huge pot of money, got my shit together, and went back to college and graduate school. Astute move.) The ascending order of company hierarchy was peasant (or whatever), leader, foreman, supervisor, then white collar executives who drove big Detroit cars. The leader was merely a very low level manager, responsible for five to ten people and their widget production. He usually drove a little Detroit Chevy, Plymouth or Ford. I had a great leader for my manufacturing education. You might find my experience very enlightening, here.) But the leader was totally a very controlling manager. He wasn’t interested in your ideas. He was not what we think of today as a leader.

By the 1970’s there was a fair amount of clarity on managing. When the explosion of technology in the 1980s demanded a different kind of smarts—Drucker’s knowledge worker—leadership was required to manage those people. Unlike my experience in Detroit, organizations began to realize that we humans weren’t merely peasants or robots. So the talk circled around the need for leadership, the definition of leadership, the differences between leading and managing, and questions of whether leaders are born or made. (They’re made!)

But society, economics and business continue their volatile move into the future. And in today's world, the great need for competency is the discipline of collaboration.

What’s collaboration?
Don’t be too quick to say that you know how to collaborate. Few do. It’s a tough skill to navigate. Like leadership, there are no born collaborators. And it’s very easy to go off the rails when you’re attempting to “do” collaboration, wondering what the hell just happened.

The first major shot across the bow on the subject of collaboration is Morton Hansen’s Collaboration: How leaders (there’s that word again) avoid the traps, create unity, and reap big results. It’s exceptionally good for the first pass at a major business subject. (Although not nearly as much fun as the first major shot at leadership by Warren Bennis. But no business writer can match the fun in Bennis and I’ll be very sorry to see his smarts and literary brilliance pass off the scene. God, what a well-rounded, well educated, highly practical, humanistic thinker!)

But back to Hansen. It takes him 14 pages to get around to defining his subject (He needed a better editor). He talks about it as the process by which people from different units work together in cross-unit teams on a common task or provide significant help to each other. Though accurate, his definition is pretty flat, lacking pizzaz. But, as I said above, there ain’t many Bennises.

Where Hansen is especially useful is his in analysis of what is and is not collaboration, when to use it and when not to use it, and what it can do for an organization.

Why collaboration?
In chapter 2, Hansen lays out his case for collaboration. Though his rationale is simple-minded and obvious, it’s exceptionally important and highly reflective of business needs today. Don’t forget, everything is obvious once you know the answer (see Duncan Watts). Hansen sees better innovation, better sales, and better operations providing a huge rationale for the competency. And he supplies a superb set of examples to explain his rationale. Every organization from P&G and Norwest Bank to British Petroleum.

Hansen needs to make much clearer that because of the knowledge explosion, no single person in business today, no single division or group, has the intelligence to create a product or service ready for the consumer to buy. You’re simply going to have to access a lot of smarts, from more than one place, or else you’ll get beat up badly by the companies that do understand and act upon the knowledge explosion. I wish that was obvious, but sadly, it isn’t. That’s one of the reasons many companies go bankrupt and disappear from the stock market.

Why so tough?
Though I have both extensive education and extensive experience in the field of collaboration it's still tough as nails to pull off. For a number of reasons. We have all these business silos still very much in place and their members aren’t interested in cross-silo collaborating, even when needed. Indeed, collaborators often find themselves in hostile territory attempting to pull off collaboration. Hansen’s comparison of Sony and Apple makes the point exceptionally well.

Another related issue, just as important, is that a huge portion of the business population is congenitally incapable of collaboration. It seems not to be in the genes. It's like strategic thinking. Ninety-five percent of business folk are incrementalists and can't think strategically. The training in collaboration, thus far, is also piss-poor. And long term, when organizations get around to recognizing the absolute necessity for the competency, they may have to terminate some of their folk to fulfill their organizational needs and succeed financially.

Collaboration relationships between business people and their clients is just downright terrifying to many. They have no models for collaboration, no personal experiences of the subject, and frankly, don’t really believe it can be pulled off. But as Apple has proved exceptionally well (in spite of their fascist leader, Jobs), great success in the knowledge economy absolutely requires the competency of collaboration.

It’s plainly obvious that long term, collaborative abilities are going to be more important than leadership. Besides, if you can “do” collaboration, you can "do" leadership. Leadership is merely (that’s right, “merely”) a subset of effective collaboration.

Photo fm Flickr: by starheadboy

What a Real-Life Yoda Looks Like (Part I)

Mentoring and coaching have been consistently revealed as the fundamental key to career and life success. Nearly every manager will tell you about the mentors that made him or her successful. Yet mentoring, like counseling, lacks a sterling success record. Those of us with a psych background are well aware that in more than half the cases of counseling, the results pale in significance.

What keeps mentoring and coaching from achieving its promise? Certainly the fault might be that mentees fail to follow through, lacking motivation, adequate insight and/or organizational support. Also, mentors can be overly controlling, unable to create a motivational ambience for the mentee. But both of those issues are small potatoes. The real issues making for successful mentoring are rarely discussed. More than any other skill, successful mentoring is built upon two foundations: passion and perspective.

Mentoring anticipates a number of typical questions. What does it mean to have a career? Why do we work the way we do and do what we do? The questions rarely come out that way. Instead, it’s “What do I have to do to earn a promotion? How can I get along better with the jerk next to me? How do I get more productivity out of my team? How can I get the support and resources I need?” Or even, “Where do I go next with my career?” Passion and perspective underlie all those questions.

Passion
In one form or another, the beginning point of effective mentoring is passion, a lively, eager, compelling desire that insists that one’s career(s) can be a meaningful and fulfilling way of life. Passion is obvious with mentors in the arts like dance, music, painting or even law, architecture or medicine. But how do business mentors demonstrate their passion?

Passion is demonstrated not in the relating of specific, concrete processes—the mechanics--within a given competency, but in the telling and hearing of stories that are deeply rooted in business interactions. These are stories imaginatively told with many different scenarios, depending on need, possibility and other circumstance.

Stories told by effective mentors exude real life and business experience. And they are more than tales of well-being and success. The effective mentor wants his student to be aware of the potential for dangerous miscarriages. So they readily admit to organizational evils. His stories will also provide for a critical and evaluative assessment of one’s career and organization. The most brilliant stories are open-ended, begging for the mentee to apply them to his/her own career. They are developmental tales, allowing great freedom for their hearers to imaginatively interpret them into their own life and future.

Not naive
Assuredly, the mentor’s passion is not naïve. His stories equip people to talk about their frustrations and failures, the assholes and jerks that are a part of the business world. And yes, to bitch and agonize over work problems. But they also empower mentees to care about their organization and its objectives. To understand that business is not merely a profit margin, but that it exists to provide a livelihood for its employees, its financial stakeholders and the community. In short, they are disciplined confessions in conversation on a face-to-face basis: questions, complaints, agonies, ecstasies and all.

Abraham Lincoln talked about the story passion this way: “A good story has the same effect on me that I suppose a good drink of whiskey has on an old toper (drunkard); it puts new life in me.”

(Part II to follow)
Flickr photo: The Sergeant of Randomness

Getting Newcomers Up to Speed Quickly

As the economy begins to loosen up, more and more companies are looking for new hires. And more employees are looking to leave that old job and find a better company for their future. On average, Americans will change jobs 10 times between the ages of 18 and 37. Furthermore, with the constant state of internal restructuring, managers are being continually pushed to assimilate waves of employees. 

The key question for new employees as well as for their new company is how to transform a new hire into a productive employee. 

In a cool piece of research, Rob Cross, Salvatore Parise and Keith Rollag studied that important question. The challenges are tough. From jump-starting productivity and tapping into the new hire’s creativity to keeping them long enough to justify their training. Of course, it’s the first few months that are especially critical for new hire since the probability of quitting reaches a peak at around 18 months.   

To figure out how to overcome those challenges, Cross and his colleagues interviewed both the newcomers and their managers at a number of companies. But they didn’t stop with the usual interview approach. Instead, using social network analysis, they explored the patterns of collaboration and information flow between the newcomers and managers. 

Initial training typically focuses on the organizational culture and the person’s job. This provides the newcomer with a smorgasbord of information about company routines and technologies. However, if you’ve been through that route very often, inevitably you’ve found yourself needing far more and spending a great deal of time trying to find that information. Research outside this study has found that many, if not most newcomers stop with the info about company routines and technologies, either incapable of or unaware of the importance of the network to their success. In short, they know what they want, but aren’t certain how to get that information. 

Cross and his colleagues' research is especially seminal in that it takes a far more holistic approach to assimilation and deals with all the issues. Instead, their research finds that the single most important step for getting a person up to speed quickly is relational. 

But, changing from an informational approach about the job and the company culture to a relational approach is not a simple matter. Instead of asking themselves, “What does my new hire need to know?” they have to ask, “Who does my newcomer need to know?” This will then help them focus on generating a strategic list of key experts and information providers with whom the newcomer needs to meet. From this they can then structure the necessary interactions into the new hire’s assimilation process. 

What’s fascinating about the process is that although it requires a different kind of mental and action effort, it doesn’t require any more time than the old informational approach. Of course, if newcomers can be introduced to a set of coworker relationships, they’ll have far less need to approach their own bosses for information. 

But what if your company doesn’t provide this for you? My clients and colleagues have found it especially useful to ask the relational question themselves and gain the assistance of bosses and others in building their relationship.  It’s as simple as “who do I need to know for my job success?” and “will you introduce them to me?” 

Photo by Flickr: jannetajeda

How to "Wow" Your Boss

Managing your boss and other execs isn’t just apple polishing, brown-nosing or sucking up. You need to wow your boss to get the resources to do the best job for yourself, your boss, your boss’ boss and your organization.

Your boss can either help or hinder your career: wowing him will help your career. With an effective relationship, your boss can give you all kinds of support, insight and linking to others in the organization. Actually, managing your boss is not manipulation, but forging ties based on mutual respect and understanding. Harvey  Golub, the former CEO of American Express, always told his people they needed the skills of influence management. “Wowing” your boss is nothing more than “upward influence management.” Managing your boss is so important that many of my senior clients ask me to teach their subordinates to manage them better. In short, they want their people to manage them because they can get “more done better.”

Four tips for wowing your boss.

1.      Manage your boss like he’s your client. Is he print-oriented or ear-oriented? Listener or reader? Detail-oriented or big picture-oriented. Strategy oriented or tactically-oriented? Play to his orientation when you give him information, but protect him when his orientation will get him into trouble. Decision-making styles differ significantly. If he’s highly involved, touch base frequently with him like some strategic clients who just want to be kept posted about important decisions already made.  

2.      Give your boss what he wants and needs, organizationally. Effective bosses lay out their business goals and objectives on a regular basis. Make sure you understand them clearly and that you demonstrate they’re important to you in your performance. Make your boss’ goals your priority. If they conflict with your own goals, communicate with your boss and get his help setting priorities. Don’t think you can read your boss’ mind about his organizational objectives. Ask him. Check in with him so he knows that you’re taking care of his needs. But find out how often he wants you to touch base with him.

3.      Remember what matters to your boss, personally.  Your boss’ personal life and career are just as important to him as his business objectives.  Find out his career objectives, keep him updated on related opportunities, and keep him out of trouble. Pay attention to his family and lifestyle objectives, and provide whatever resources possible for those wants and needs. You may know someone who can offer him insights for his kids’ college decisions, a unique developmental opportunity, a vacation location, or even an investment opportunity.

4.      Flatter your boss. The surest way to keep your position and build your future is to make your boss feel good about himself. As Stanford’s Jeff Pfeffer puts it, worry about the relationship you have with your boss as much as you worry about your job performance. Most people, not just the insecure, like to feel good about themselves. That means be very, very careful about criticizing your boss. If possible, get someone else to do it. Most people underestimate the value of flattery, and therefore underutilize it. The technical term is ingratiation and it has been thoroughly studied. An overall, meta-assessment of the research finds that flattery works and it works well.

Furthermore, a study by JD Watt (1993) found that ingratiators were thought by their supervisors as being more competent, more motivated, and more qualified for leadership positions than their nongratiating counterparts. Not too shabby results. But use flattery as a compliment to the other three tips, not solely. To the degree possible, be sincere. Most execs are clueless about many of their strengths—so take advantage of that weakness through the use of flattery.

I have little doubt that some, perhaps many subordinates resent that on top of all their other responsibilities, they also need to make managing their relationships with their bosses a work priority. These folk fail to realize the importance of managing their bosses, how they can simplify their jobs and build their own careers through this task. They think that if they perform well on the job their boss will take care of the rest.

In more than twenty-five years of consulting with leading American companies I’ve never met an executive who failed to make managing his boss a job priority. But I’ve met plenty of employees who failed to manage their boss, either because they don’t believe in it or don’t know how. But I never saw one of those employees become a senior manager or an executive.

Flickr.com: by Koulutus.fi

How Leaders Kill the Joy of Work

Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees,” say Harvard’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. Amabile and her associates have successfully studied the inner work life of employees. And often, the picture is not very pretty.

These aren’t union leaders. This is management. The sample isn’t from the factory floor or your local public school. No. These are business professionals. The objective of the research was to better understand the role of upper-level management. To get at that objective, Amabile and Kramer dug back into 12,000 electronic diaries from dozens of professionals working on important innovation projects at seven North American companies. They selected only entries from diarists who mentioned bosses—868 narratives in all.

Progress: Key to meaningful work
As the researchers remind us, understanding the traps should help execs determine whether they risk falling into some of the traps themselves—unknowingly. And dragging their organization into the abyss with them.

In their book, The Progress Principle, Amabile and Kramer argue that managers routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their subordinates through “everyday words and actions.” They found “that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.” So, they wanted to see whether meaningful progress is on the radar screen. In survey research of 669 managers at all level from dozens of companies and industries around the world, they sought to rank five employee motivators: incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and progress in the work.

Their conclusion, reported in the McKinsey Journal, reveals that most managers and execs don’t act as though progress matters to their direct reports. Only 8 percent of senior executives ranked progress as the most important motivator. Had they chosen randomly, 20 percent would have done so. In short, our survey showed that most executives don’t understand the power of progress in meaningful work. And the traps revealed by the diaries suggest that most executives don’t act as though progress matters.

But back to the first research. The study revealed four traps that leaders fall into—often inadvertently.

• Mediocrity signals. The diaries that the researchers studied were full of references to innovation. Yet, those senior managers were so focused on cost savings that they repeatedly negated their teams’ autonomy dictating cost reduction goals that were primary. By the end of the diary reports, employees were “completely disengaged.” Mediocrity was also signaled by top managers’ risk aversion.
• Strategic ‘attention deficit disorder.’ A second trap, far too familiar for those of us who’ve done much consulting, was starting and then abandoning initiatives, making for an attention deficit disorder. What workers call “the fad of the day.” Of course, if execs don’t have their act together on where the organization is heading, the troops will quickly lose the joy of work.
• Corporate Keystone Kops. You remember those Keystone Kops from the silent films—fictional policemen, running around in circles and bashing each other on the head. Some execs contribute to the “comedy” by failing to hold support organizations accountable, overly complex reporting structures and last minute changes. A chronic indecisiveness.
• Misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals.’ It’s important for organizations to give strategic direction, audacious, relevant goals, articulated in a way connects with peoples’ values and emotions. (Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In contrast, the researchers found that goals are stated in ways that seem unattainable and vague, even empty.

What to do?
Although Amabile and Kramer don’t address it head on, this is a masterful study of the creation of strong motivation. Think about that subtext: leaders must create forward momentum in meaningful work. Leaders who can provide meaningful work for their employees are on the road to success.

FYI: As I’ve worked through these recommendations, thought over their implications and seen their immense relevance, four issues kept cropping up in my ever-busy gray matter:

1. The notion of meaningful work has a long history, dating from the Reformation. Martin Luther and John Calvin both spoke to the importance of meaningful work in ways that haven’t been on our 20^th and 21st century radar screen. But some workers are caught in meaningless work. Flipping burgers is little more than a few bucks in the pocket of a teen-ager or poorly-educated adult.
2. Amabile and Kramer’s conclusion are spot-on. They couldn’t be more accurate. On those occasions where they’ve been implemented, the productivity rates skyrocket.
3. Most leaders don’t think in terms of the subjective or of soft power. Yet when they do, success is often inevitable.
4. When someone asks me why, at my age, I haven’t retired, I have one answer. “I’m having too much fun. My contributions have been exceedingly meaningful for me as well as for others. Why would I want to retire?” Duhhhhhh.

Want to motivate your employees? Make sure their work is meaningful.

Photo from Flickr: Intermayer

What the Hell Is Water?

Two young fish are swimming downstream. On the way down, they meet a wise old fish. “Morning boys,” he says. “How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” The point of David Foster Wallace’s little fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.  Indeed, in the day to day trenches of business existence, the most important issues to deal with are often missed. 

For example, the single best test for assessing development needs is either completely unknown or beyond the skill set of a single manager. The fact of the matter is a huge majority of managers and execs initially question the validity of this test, which is neither a paper test nor a 360 feedback test. 

Malicious behavior?
If the behavior of an individual consistently (3 or 4 times) fails to achieve the expected level of performance there are three possible reasons. In 1% of the time, the person is malicious and is essentially attempting to screw somebody or sabotage the organization. Malicious behavior becomes obvious fairly soon, but it’s rarely seen today because of the need for job security. In 2 – 3% of the time, the person is thoughtless or careless. 

But in 95 – 96% of the time the failure is because the person simply lacks the tools in his or her toolkit to carry it off. The test is quite simple: can a person deliver what she’s promised or committed to? If she has failed to deliver on her practice or performance three or more times, she lacks the necessary tools. And 95 – 96% of the time you’re staring at an obvious developmental need. That’s as a good a developmental assessment you’re ever going to get. 

A surprisingly large number of people have difficulty believing this statistic. Execs, especially, can’t believe that someone lacks the tools to do such and such. . . . However, since today’s manufacturing employee may well need to know calculus to operate a machine on the factory floor, or the ability to manipulate and interpret sophisticated data monstrosities at corporate headquarters, you’re going to see a lot more failures in the future. These obvious failures may be the inability to resolve a recurring work breakdown, to calm passengers while turning a plane around in a storm, to complete a client’s website on time and with little to no errors, or to devise algorithms to make sense out of regular incoming data. 

I’ve gone through the following conversation with managers on this issue an infinite number of times. “You’re telling me he lacks the tools?” Yeah, if he’s consistently failed to achieve that objective. “I can’t believe that. He’s been around the barn.” OK. What makes you think that his experience means that he has the tools? “Well, he should have the tools.” Shoulda, woulda, coulda. But what actual data do you have backing up your conclusion? (silence) “I have no real data.” No data, no performance. That should always be your test. Period.  

And then there’s typically a two to three week time-lag in which the manager wants to think about the conclusion I’m forcing on her. “I’ve been thinking about your test. I think it’s accurate. . . but I don’t like it.” I understand. But don’t forget it! 

 FYI: It’ll take three more observed failures of other people before the manager or exec actually believes the rule and puts it to work. And some never get there. You can count on that, too. 

Weird reasoning
For some reason people don’t get this rule immediately or easily. The reason people don’t immediately get this rule is the belief that if someone can talk about something she can also do that something. This is false reasoning, though understandable. I can talk about how to play the oboe, the fingering, the breathing, how to place my mouth on the mouthpiece and read the music. But I sure as hell can’t play the oboe. And you wouldn’t want to be around if I tried. It’s what Pfeffer and Sutton call the “knowing-doing gap:” the inability to turn knowledge into action.   

This is not a moral issue. The worker doesn’t intend to lie. She’s often plainly unaware. Most people actually think that if they can talk about something, they can do it. Don’t waste your time drawing negative conclusions about that person. We all get caught in the problem. The lack of tools and people’s disbelief that that’s impossible happens at the lowest levels and it happens also at the highest levels—all the way up to the CEO. 

BTW: I know that we all have difficulty holding two ideas in our head at the same time. But I have also found that we can apply the rule to the assessment of our own personal developmental needs. 

What to do?
If you’re a manager, coach, coach and coach the person some more. And put the person in a work setting where they’ll get the opportunity to learn the behavior. Of course you may ask whether you want to invest that much in a person. I can’t answer that question for you. You may coach him, bring in a mentor or consultant, move the person around, put him in another job or terminate him. Execs really, really hate to terminate someone for performance issues. That means that those failures may hang around for awhile, until the exec finally decides to let the person go. And that could be six months to a year or longer, sometimes years. Unless there’s a major recession cutback, a significant reorganization, or, well . . . bankruptcy. 

In the meantime, eat your peas, don’t gripe, and circumvent as much as you can without getting in trouble. And don’t forget that that’s the only foolproof, developmental assessment test.

"Selling Out, Or Buying In?" Three Keys for Decision Making

There are few things we hate more than uncertainty. When our work situation is ambiguous and not clear to us, it’s easy to feel uncomfortable. Just being “different” from others may cause you to wonder whether you’re “selling out” when you join a new company. Those “differences” may be the result of race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or language. You know the feeling: uncomfortable, unaccepted, different and unique. 

The more different we feel in an organization, the more we look for someone to explain—or some rules that make sense. Renee Blank and Sandra Slipp have identified three very useful guidelines for helping you decide whether you’re “buying in” or “selling out.” Their guidelines will help you determine what you’re trying to do. 

• Your basic value system. Those values that you hold close to your heart are the final “decider.” If your values—which you learned as a child and solidified as an adult—are in direct violation of the organization’s values you’re in trouble. If you have to discard those beliefs that are important to you, you could be in danger of “selling out.” 

• If you know yourself—you’re certain about your talents, skills and abilities and you’ve validated them over time—and you’re performing a function or accepting a position well beneath them, you could be in danger of “selling out.” 

• If you accept the culture of an organization that flaunts its discrimination against or disrespect for your culture, you could be in danger of “selling out.” 

These are very personal matters. The organization is trying to help you become a part of their culture, but you must decide if that organization is asking you to give up too much. 

You’ve got several options in that kind of setting. If you decide that becoming a part of the organization means you’re going to have to give up too much of your own culture and that you will not be accepted no matter what, you can leave and seek employment elsewhere (if the economy and your skill set will make that possible). More and more, the quality of your skill set is the determining factor for work success. There are jobs out there—if you’ve got the skills for them. 

 You can also remain in the organization and drastically change your style. Finally, you can adapt to the organization’s values while maintaining your own values and political views. That’s schizophrenic, but it’s a possibility for many of us. 

In today’s economy, seeking employment at another firm is not always an easy task. You may find yourself splitting your personality between work and home. Some of us can do that for a long time, but eventually it catches up with us. It’ll impact our work productivity, but more than that it’ll affect our emotions and personal life. Our family and friends may notice it before us, so you’ll want to pay attention to them.  

One of our favorite family stories was the result of my decision to leave a job where the organization’s values and mine were just too much in conflict. Unlike her husband, my wife has no history whatsoever of using expletives--aside from one single situation. So I’ll never forget sitting on the living room sofa, telling her that I was going to leave my decade-long position and go elsewhere. Without missing a beat, she said, “It sure as hell took you a long time to make a damned obvious decision.” Two expletives in one sentence. So out of character, she got my attention instantly. She had refused to make a recommendation prior to my own decision because, wisely, she knew the decision had to be mine. But she had known all along that my job was causing deep, personal conflicts in my life. 

I suspect that most of the significant people in our lives can tell rather clearly when we’re facing a serious value conflict in our work setting. So. . . when deeply conflicted about your job, . . . get on with whatever.

Blank, R. & Slip, S. From the Outside In: Seven Strategies for Success When You're Not a Member of the Dominant Group in Your Workplace, AMACOM