Dan Erwin

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. 

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

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

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.

The Surprising Secret of Success is Failure

The blueprint for successful failure has no straight lines. Nor is it guaranteed.

At 77, I’ve long-since quit stewing and being embarrassed over the fact that I was expelled from college for both social and academic reasons when I was a freshman. Unlike Bob Sternberg, who blew it in the fourth grade, I blew it my first year of college. Fact of the matter, aside from the woman I married and our three daughters, that freshman failure was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

That failure made “I’ll show ‘em” one of the central motivations of my life. I took a mandatory year off, worked in a Detroit factory, and resolved never to find myself in that situation again. So in due time, I knocked off a baccalaureate degree, a masters of divinity from a theological seminary, most of a master’s in theology, an M.A. from the University of Colorado and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. And my careers, most anyone would say, have been marked by success—and great fun. Freud wrote that the “normal healthy life” includes work, love and play. That was a swell blueprint for me.

I tell this story with obvious relish, recognizing that I’m not the only one who wrested success out of profound failure. But I’m also aware that research has shown that failure can have devastating consequences for psychological well-being. There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that rejection can precipitate a psychological state resembling physical pain, often followed by long-term isolation. You expect psychologists to look for the grim human experience and the abnormal, and that’s what the early research revealed.

However, a fascinating series of studies from 2007 issued a strong caveat to that early research, and also explained my motivation in spades. Jon Maner of Florida State and a number of his colleagues asked whether social exclusion motivates interpersonal reconnection. Six different studies found that the experience of social exclusion increases the motivation to forge social bonds, but . . . with new sources of affiliation. Although it was possible for me to return to the college that expelled me, I chose to go elsewhere.

In retrospect, much of my life has been pure luck. Most probably don’t have the opportunities I was given, much less the mentors who walked into my life, gave me clear direction and were not at all shy about delivering “shape up” lessons.

Merely changing schools, however, did not necessarily imply a “successful failure.” Conventional wisdom says that we learn from failure. That’s far from the truth. Most of the time, we don’t. Failure anxiety rules us. We jump to conclusions, rationalize the hell out of failure to make it look good, ignore or distort feedback and, significantly, fail to separate skill from pure luck.

John F. Kennedy once said that “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” We are quick to take credit for success and deny responsibility for failure. Don’t think that the failure was anyone’s but mine or that the success was solely about my own ability. Again, much of it was luck. Being born a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant male in the 1930’s to a family that became moderately well-off, a family willing to fund experiences in one of the culturally richest cities of the world (Detroit in the thirties, forties and fifties), educated in a school system that provided experiences students would drool over today, attending a prominent church that pointed its kids to rich and fulfilling experiences and meeting people who took an interest in me, often for no discernible reason, played a large part in my successes. Furthermore, my success over that freshman failure certainly failed to inoculate me against more failure. That’s reality.

Still, motivation, ability and just gutting it out play a huge role in anyone’s life of successful failure. So along the way, I developed the learning competencies that support future success. Though invariably curious, I had to build those performance virtues of persistence, self-regulation, responsibility and what Duckworth calls grit. My small wins responded to the multiplier effect and my successes become more obvious. I found, as Paul Tough has put it so eloquently, that cultivating those strengths is a reliable path to “the good life,” a life not just happy, but meaningful and fulfilling.

Successful failure is not easily won. It’s hard work. But lest you be put off by the seeming demands of success, it’s important to say that I count many friends among my list of successful failures. People who rose to take advantage of their failures. I’ve gotten a lot out of my freshman failure. So maybe the failure never will be finally forgotten, and that’s not such a bad thing. Yeah, I seriously doubt that it’s possible to be successful without real failure. And Steve Jobs is the classic example of that truth.

Note: John K. Maner, DeWall, Baumeister, Schall, Does Social Exclusion Motivate Interpersonal Reconnection? Resolving the "Porcupine Problem." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 92, No. 1, 42 - 55.

"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

Time is Running Out

 The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost.—G.K. Chesterton 

I couldn’t help but laugh when I read this morning’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. Emblazoned at the top of the page was the blaring headline, Time is running out, says NFL. Act now before another city does. The reliance on what we in the persuasion field call the scarcity factor is frequent, widespread and systematic. In this example, the National Football League is attempting to persuade legislators on the need to act quickly to save the Vikings Football team for the Twin Cities.

The scarcity factor is a common persuasive strategy. In recruiting it surfaces as “if we don’t get this guy, our competition will go after him. And then. . . .” Fill in the blanks. But it also surfaces in our search for jobs: “If I don’t land this job, then. . . .” Fill in the blanks. We engage in self-persuasion also.

Don’t jump too quickly.  This is a strategy regularly employed in business, politics, religion, antiques and, well . . . you name the field. The most obvious place to see it is in the listing of autos for sale. On some weekends, the approach may be seen in up to one-quarter of dealer sales. 

Scarcity is a major weapon in the arsenal of the persuasion engineers. Robert Cialdini says the scarcity factor trades on our weakness for shortcuts. Underlying the strategy is the belief that the things difficult to possess are better than those easier to obtain. Of course, as opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms. And, if you’re like me, you hate to lose your freedoms. I watched the Twins baseball team get a multi-million dollar stadium almost solely on this basic strategy. The Vikings’ are using the same strategy for getting the taxpayer to partially fund a new stadium, costing close one billion dollars.

As Robert Cialdini says, the scarcity model works this way: when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting more. Simple. But it really works very well for the uneducated populace. That includes a lot of professionals. 

Becoming an educated business person and consumer requires a knowledge of this strategy. Indeed, as a student of persuasion I take the view that it is as much our responsibility to engage in self-protection as it is the business person’s to use the strategies available. 

The starting place for self-protecting is what we call “downplay.” In other words, when a persuader intensifies a proposal, downplay it. The flip side should also take precedence in your strategy: when the persuader downplays, then you intensify. So when you recognize a propaganda blitz, it’s to your advantage to be cool, detached, and skeptically alert. Not only to the inflated puffery with its dreams and promises, but also to intensified phenomena. Scarcity is one strategy for intensifying phenomena that you'll meet again and again. 

One way to deal with this is to create a scorecard. After you’ve done it methodically on paper, you begin to do it in your head as soon as the persuasive messages start coming. One way to do this systematically is to divide a sheet of paper into quarters, and then enter the kinds of downplaying and intensifying being practiced. Simply by seeing these, you can become more alert to what kind of manipulation is going on. 

The scorecard will look something like this: 

Intensify your product’s good     Intensify the other product's bad 

Downplay your product’s bad      Downplay the other product's good 

You can list what you hear and observe under each category and get a much better sense of what’s going on. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that persuasion is going on constantly, not only through the media, but just as much in our conversations. I have no problem with that. I do it too. But I also keep a data set of strategies so I become a responsible persuadee. It really is a matter of consumer beware.

Where New Employees Go Wrong

Effective socialization strategies can impact the company bottom line early in a new employee's tenure. 

One of my friends recently left her consumer products' firm and accepted a project role in a medium-sized software firm. Over the past two months, I’ve quizzed her about her firm’s assimilation process. Frankly, I’ve been surprised and delighted by the firm’s approach to new employees. They’ve emphasized organizational culture more than her new job. Unlike her organization, far too many firms fail in this fundamental process. And, as a result, the productivity of the employee suffers. But her new firm takes a multi-pronged, strategic approach to its assimilation process. The result, thus far, is one happy camper, who’s digging into her new role with a great deal of enthusiasm. 

Her experience reminds me that new employees easily go wrong because most firms provide far more information about the employee’s initial job tasks than about the organization’s culture.

Task information that comes from the top of the organization down to the lowest-level employee is usually specific and narrowly defined. Cultural information, in contrast, is vague or sometimes implied. That's a dangerous situation. Research shows that without effective assimilation processes, gossip often plays a large role in the employee's assimilation. Susan Hafen,at Utah's Weber State University,found that gossip has a major role in enhancing workplace deviance behaviors. Lacking cultural input, new employees have no way to evaluate gossip which detracts from the desired goals of organizational citizenry. Her research serves as an important warning to firms regarding the assimilation process. 

The cultural values and principles of the organization and the kind of supportive (or non-supportive) environment has direct bearing upon an individual’s ability to understand the task and its importance. For example, in some organizations, collaboration work is highly valued and rewarded, whereas in others only individual efforts are recognized. The more cultural information is unclear or uncertain, the more the new employee needs help in understanding it. Without detailed cultural information, employees have difficulty assessing cultural information from their new colleagues. That’s a potentially dangerous setting, one that could easily impact long-term productivity. 

Employee socialization is also especially important. One of my clients, a senior manager at a major small appliance firm, told me that the first problem he encountered in his job was one that took four years to get over. The facility was one in which the average years of service was about 10 years--yeah. . . there still are places like that. When he first arrived, the employees felt that he could not be trusted and that he couldn’t possibly know what he was doing. His predecessor had retired from the position after 15 years, and had given him his blessing as the new replacement. Still, he was viewed as an interloper and an incompetent by most of the employees--even though he came into the new role with extensive experience. The problem resolved itself after several years, but he told me it was very troubling at the start. An effective assimilation process, with a focus upon socialization, would have made for an easy adjustment. When he was promoted to VP a few years ago, one of the first issues he dealt with was the firm’s entire assimilation process. He emphasized the costs of poor assimilation processes several times as he related that story to the CEO. Once the CEO understood the finances of the problem, my client got the needed support—and made some significant changes in HR. 

How do better companies integrate the new employee? 

Rather than focusing solely on the formal orientation process, smart companies take a multi-pronged approach to employee entry. Traditional approaches include the formal orientation programs, socialization strategies, training programs, and formal and informal mentoring. Research from as far back as 2004 recommend advanced communication and information technologies including e-mail, web pages, voice mail, instant messaging and video-conferencing. A sizable amount of research and corporate resources are expended on socialization processes. What corporations and especially HR need to keep on the front lobes is that the socialization processes are critical to maintain a dedicated and loyal workforce. Indeed, how seriously the organization takes it obligation to socialize new members determines the degree of turnover and, ultimately, productivity.

How to Make a Smart, Zig-Zag Career Move

This is a riff on a fantastically simplified, even out-of-touch article in the latest Fortune, entitled How to Make a Smart Lateral Move. It’s obvious, as the article admits, that moving straight up the hierarchical ladder is not as common anymore. The article suggested that that this is a new approach to careers from the past five years, that it was due in part to the economy and that the conventional wisdom is that it’s a dead end. Baloney!

The economy just escalated a 20 year old strategy. The IT and marketing people in my Contacts list knew from organizational flattening--by the end of the 1980s--that the most prevalent opportunities were not up, but lateral zig-zags between companies. Many of them managed their career on that basis way back then. Even Ibarra’s seminal book on career change, Working Identity, published in 2003, shows an intimate knowledge of lateral moves as the primary means for career change and success. For that matter, Doug Hall, wrote on the issue in the 1970s. And if you want to get fussy about it, Dante Aligheri demonstrated its power at the turn of the 13^th century AD.

Still, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lateral career moves offer terrific career opportunities. I suspect that the best opportunities in the future will be mostly lateral.

Certainly, as Fortune suggests, it’s true that many execs and ordinaries are willing to take jobs with similar titles and pay in exchange for little more than a shorter commute to work. According to a poll from Right Management, 84% of employees planned to look for new jobs in 2011, which is up from 60% the previous year. A lot of people are yelling, “get me out of this job.”

The writer, Jena McGregor, says that lateral moves may not always carry a stigma these days. Hmmm. She must have been interviewing dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists. The people I talk to view laterals as an astute move. Of course, as she suggests, you want to do your homework about the potential firm’s financials and the real responsibilities of the new job. I thought that was a given. Anyway, it’s still true.

But here are the real issues. The key question is not about leadership opportunity as much as it is about developmental opportunity. Leadership is just one issue among many. It's also an overworked buzzword, used to catch the attention of people who don’t understand the necessary development beyond “leadership” required for success in the New Economy. Jobs go obsolete within 3 to 5 years, and if there’s no opportunity for a new job with a 3 year tenure, it’s time to start looking—unless you want to become just another obsolete worker. Recognize also that a lateral in this environment may provide the best way to get out from under a crappy boss.

I’d want to know the potential for mentoring and coaching within the potential firm. Just how much of an orientation to learning will you find at the company? I’d also want to be sure that the firm is strongly oriented to developing its technology. Above all, I’d want to know how astute the firm is around the issues of social intelligence. In today’s world, you need your own technology as well as a growing amount of social intelligence if you’re to succeed.

Furthermore, as a Deloitte exec pointed out, a key issue in your move is assessing how many future choices a lateral move might provide. A final accurate comment from the article is the admonition to be certain you’re going to comfortable with the new culture. Cultures vary greatly. Not only do you want to make certain the new culture makes decisions on the basis of evidence, but also that’s it not too concrete. Many cultures represent a specific, narrow psychographic within their employees. 3M, for example is classic. If you don’t perceive reality through the lens of chemical engineering and R & D, you’re going to be out of pocket. My friends in classic marketing always struggle in that culture. In contrast, if a culture is highly entrepreneurial, nailing few other constants down, you’d best make certain you’re going to be happy with lots and lots of change. You’d be surprised at the difference in cultures within the same industry. Old Pillsbury was strongly oriented to change, restacking in the high-rise, remodeling and creating new groups with new objectives all the time. General Mills, in contrast, was not at all entrepreneurial—always sticking to the tried-and-true. As you look back in time and say that General Mills now owns Pillsbury. Yeah, but they bought Pillsbury precisely because of its entrepreneurial nature, replacing many of the General Mills execs with Pillsbury people. Technology companies can be shockingly different. Moving from Microsoft to FaceBook could be trauma for plenty of people who have difficulty with rapid change. “Nuff said about culture distinctions.

The pay and promotion issue is still another complex matter. It's astute to prioritize development opportunities first, then future choices second. Indeed, some in IT won't accept a two-year position that provides no learning. In a good economy, IT people won't accept more than six months on a job without development opportunities. These complexities play out in surprising ways. Because of the insistence upon development opportunities and future choice, pay and promotion become secondary issues. The consequence is that numerous employees willingly and wisely take a pay cut for future opportunities. Titles and promotions seem to have far less cachet than in the past. Others accept similar salaries, some opt for more money and no promotion. You'll also find that many from all the disciplines, not just IT, are looking not to the first lateral, but to the next two moves to make up for salary and even promotion needs. Lateral moves are for people who are thinking several years ahead. The zig-zag assumes a strategic role in career thinking. It's not just a one-shot deal.

In sum, for the bulk of the working population smart laterals may well be the wisest way to go. Don’t get caught up in the dead idea that your company is going to take care of you. You’re going to have to take care of your own career—or end up on the streets.

When Feedback Goes Wrong

In significant contrast to industrial age workers, knowledge workers are rewarded and often succeed because of their mentoring and coaching expertise. Indeed, my blog, What the 21st century career looks like, emphasizes not only organizational needs for technical and analytical skills, but the competencies of persuasion, social perceptiveness, the capacity to bring the right people together on a project—and, coaching and mentoring skills. So if you want the most lucrative salary and the greatest growth and learning opportunity, you’ll involve yourself in coaching and mentoring. Feedback, of course, is the central competency of coaching.

But feedback can go very wrong and fail to achieve its fundamental objective. Why is that?

A recent web conversation among members of the Center for Evidence-Based Management alerted me to an intriguing study on feedback by Jodi Goodman and colleagues that deals with this very issue. But first, a little background.

Those who coach regularly are familiar with the cookbook statement on feedback that effectiveness is dependent on specific, timely, concrete input. As Goodman says, that means that effective feedback is immediate and includes information on the behaviors that were performed incorrectly and how to correct them.

However, as you become more focused on the feedback process, you soon recognize a real problem. When you give highly detailed, specific input, a certain proportion of people don’t seem to be able to apply the information to other contexts, demonstrating they haven’t truly learned from your feedback.

For all but the simplest of tasks, learning the correct actions typically requires some active search and processing about what will achieve the desired outcomes. And if the task is more complex, that increases the need for the mentee’s exploration of the different impacts of actions.

Goodman points out the double bind: If your feedback amounts to hand-holding (highly specific, concrete and timely input) throughout the performance, you’ll get the performance you want—yet inhibit the learning. That seems to go with hand-holding for most people. Alternatively, if you provide less frequent and specific feedback—no hand-holding—the result is often poorer practice, but better learning. That’s the result of searching for action impacts.

So the research shows clearly that hand-holding feedback won’t give you the learning you want for future projects. That doesn’t mean you should never do hand-holding, but it does seriously question the conventional wisdom about the value of specific, timely feedback.

Here are my conclusions:

• If you’ve got a tight deadline, do the hand-holding feedback so your mentee can meet the deadline. But realize the person is liable not to be able to repeat the actions in a different context. Learning probably did not take place.
• If your deadline is not tight, go for learning. Limit the amount of feedback you give, and turn the person loose to explore and search on their own. The person will learn, but may not achieve the level of performance you desire. You can refine the performance later.
• I’ve learned it’s important to provide the person similar opportunities in different context ASAP so that they may internalize the learning. Dedre Gentner of Northwestern has shown in numerous studies that behaviors need to be successful in several different contexts for learning to take place.
• I’ve also found that unless the person is clueless about a given task, it’s very important to emphasize that you don’t need to see them until they’ve exhausted their search and exploration. One of my friends, Eric Linner, an associate at Wold Architects of St Paul, is a master at insisting upon search and exploration—“do your homework”--before they come to him for help. The corporate culture, heavily oriented to learning and team work, has its answer in Eric--a straight-talking, poised, ex-marine who can be a bit scary to newcomers who don’t understand the ground rules. But employees quickly learn he’ll give them great feedback—if they’ve done their search homework before they come to him. Employees are immensely respectful and grateful to Eric for his learning orientation—in spite of his toughness. Indeed, I’d say that an architect that gets to work with Eric is very, very lucky.  

So there’s a definite danger in over-generalizing about feedback, and it’s easy to go wrong. There are plenty of people out there who, when needing feedback, want all the details. They want hand-holding. I rarely succumb to those demands—largely because it’s not good for them. Typically, I’ll respond to that expectation, “That’s enough information to get you going. I’m quite certain you can figure out what to do. And if you get caught in a bind, come back and we’ll talk about it.”

There are also plenty of employees who—rightly—don’t need or want hand-holding, but desire just a little input. I thrive with that kind, because when they come back I’m liable to learn as much from them as they learned.

In sum, don’t over generalize about feedback. Too much or too little specificity can cause feedback to go wrong. It all depends . . . on the task deadlines and your objective for the mentee.

Jodi S. Goodman, Margarethe Hendrickx and Robert E. Wood, Feedback Specificity, Exploration, and Learning, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2004, Vol. 89, No. 2, 248–262.

Flickr Photo by Rolleh