Dan Erwin

Just a "Taste of College" Can Boost US Success in the Talent Wars

The need for hard-to-find talent has some of America’s best companies getting involved in high school education. A former client, now senior executive at General Mills, nailed the problem. “If we don’t build relationships at high school level, another major firm (Target or Best Buy) will steal some of our best potential talent,” she said. Business support and pushing of talent development, even at the pre-college levels, will more and more become a key strategic necessity for American companies. Talent development in K – 12 will take many different forms. 

What top researchers in Minnesota have found is that just a “taste of college” can boost high school student success, providing more opportunity for building our talent base.   

The program, emphasizing dual credit in high school and college, has been pushed by Joe Nathan, one of America’s most respected educationists, who specializes in inner city education. Nathan, formerly of the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, now runs research out of the Center for School Change at Macalester College.  Nathan believes that if we can develop a sense of “I belong here. I understand this world,” through dual credit classes for poor and minority students, we can keep kids who might otherwise leave school. The growth through advance placement classes, International Baccalaureate programs, or dual credit classes (taught by college profs in high school), has shown surprisingly significant results in developing potential talent. 

The report recommends that “dual credit” courses be available to younger and perhaps the less academically successful.  It also notes that a study of New York and Florida students revealed that dual credit programs demonstrated an “ability to raise the achievement of students not traditionally seen as successful in high school”—low income and low-achieving students. 

Participation increased from 17,581 in 2007-2008 to 21,184 in 2009-2010. That’s a huge change in a state will little over 60,000 public high school graduates per year.  

The program offers a number of significant advantages to both students and families.

• Students can earn a two-year associates degree while enrolled in high school.
• The programs, paid for by the various school districts, are free.
• It keeps some of the kids in school who might otherwise drop out.
• Students and parents can save as much as $40,000 on a four-year degree.
• Provides lower income and minority students a better understanding of school options.
• Provides students with a clearer understand of life goals.
• Makes for a far easier transition for students from high school to college.
• Makes it possible for those who do not see themselves at college to complete relevant certificate programs.
• Studies from several states show that students who take college courses in high school fare better in college. 

At first glance, “dual credit” programs may sound like just another flaky educational idea, but, as the statistics above demonstrate, longitudinal research strongly supports Nathan’s ideas. If you’ve been around inner city kids, you know that it’s their attitudes that get in the way of motivation and prevent them from achieving. And what Nathan’s program does is to focus on those attitudes, and provide constructive opportunities to impact the students’ learning context. 

Extensive research by Carol Dweck and her associates at Stanford has consistently shown that students with a growth mindset—a fundamental attitude--do better in school. Moreover, the research demonstrates that the growth mindset raises motivation and achievement, especially in difficult courses or across difficult school transitions. Though faculty may not label or talk about the dual credit experience as a “growth mindset,” that’s exactly what the experience can provide for students. 

Though I grew up in a family with college background, I have never forgotten how important my trips to the University of Michigan with our high school choir were. Years later, I can still see myself on that magnificent campus, talking to recent grads from my own high school. I recognize that those experiences were a piece of my drive for higher education. They impacted my attitudes and served to motivate me as strongly as anything anyone could say.    

Sure, I know that what works in Minnesota, Massachusetts or Michigan in the 1940s, may not work--because of resources--in Nevada, New Mexico or Alabama today. If you’ve lived and worked in several different parts of the country, you know that state cultures and state resources differ profoundly. That’s why smart thinkers in the US Department of Education are encouraging individual states to figure out what works locally, experiment with it, create a pilot program, tweak it, and when successful, celebrate and publicize the stuff. The “dual credit” program is one such successful strategy for developing talent. It’s actually quite amazing that just a “taste of college” can boost student success.

Carol Dweck and Greg Walton on Willpower

Is willpower about your biology or your brain? Are we constrained by the narrow limits of our biology?

After nearly a two-week hiatus from blogging--and Thanksgiving week in glorious Boston with my kids, spending some of that time going over my grandson’s list of potential colleges, I’m back home again. So I chuckled to see Carol Dweck and her associate, Greg Walton, reporting still more of their ground-breaking practical research in Sunday’s NYTimes. 

The Stanford profs have studied another important issue of human capital: willpower. And they’ve found that we can actually manage our willpower. 

The authors begin by posing two important illustrations of the problem, both depicting the popular belief that willpower is about biology not mindset. In one, they quote a recent nutrition book, arguing that because of how the brain’s hypothalamus works, it is a “myth” that anyone can will himself to lose weight. A second illustration from a just published book concludes that willpower is “limited and depends on a continuous supply” of glucose. Dweck and Walton’s assessment is spot on: these theories attribute our failures of willpower to our fixed biology—and wrong. 

The theories, as Dweck and Walton point out, have an obvious appeal: attributing failures of willpower to our fixed biological limits justifies our procrastination as well as our growing waistlines. Not only that, we also get to consume more sugar. 

In stark contrast, their research has found that what’s limiting our willpower is our mindset. And when people believe that willpower is self-renewing and work hard, they’re energized to work more. 

Recognizing that many people are skeptical about renewing willpower, their research found the following: 

When the initial task was easy and willpower wasn’t required, people did well on the tricky cognitive task, making few mistakes. But when the initial task was hard and involved self-control, people who believed that willpower was limited made almost twice as many mistakes on the tricky cognitive task as did the group that performed the initial easy task. This finding replicates many studies by Dr. Baumeister and others that have been interpreted as evidence that willpower is limited and easily depleted. But, strikingly, we found that people who believed that willpower was not limited continued to perform well on the second task, making few mistakes, even after facing the difficult initial task. They were not “depleted” and kept on doing well.

This study and others put the lie to our common notions about the limitations of willpower. They also reinforce the well-known research that shows that the more we learn, the better and the faster that we can learn.

You may contend that these results show only that some people just happen to have more willpower — and know that they do. But on the contrary, we found that anyone can be prompted to think that willpower is not so limited. When we had people read statements that reminded them of the power of willpower like, “Sometimes, working on a strenuous mental task can make you feel energized for further challenging activities,” they kept on working and performing well with no sign of depletion. They made half as many mistakes on a difficult cognitive task as people who read statements about limited willpower. In another study, they scored 15 percent better on I.Q. problems.

When faced with skepticism about this kind of research I remember that old dogma dies hard. Once concepts are deeply embedded, a superstructure of assumptions and ideas grows around it. Rejecting a dogma means that many ideas are now questionable, and . . . as a result a close read of a book or thoughtful analysis of a new and complex idea is impossible. As an acquaintance of mine said about these ideas: "I don't believe it. I can't believe it. Everything I've ever learned about intelligence and achievement would go out the window." He tuned out. It was a losing battle I chose not to fight.

This research reminds parents of some very important truths for their children—and themselves as adults, businesspersons and professionals.

At stake in this debate is not just a question about the nature of willpower. It’s also a question of what kind of people we want to be. Do we want to be a people who dismiss our weaknesses as unchangeable? When a student struggles in math, should we tell that student, “Don’t worry, you’re just not a math person”? Do we want him to give up in the name of biology? Or do we want him to work harder in the spirit of what he wants to become?

So Strivers, Talent Really Matters Too?

A Sunday NYTimes article by two psychologists under the eye-catching title, Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters, once more raises the issue of the role of academic intelligence, personal development and expertise. The authors would have you believe that people who score high on IQ inevitably do better in business than those who don’t score as high. But if you read the thirty page research report you’ll realize that they’re pushing the envelope on the interpretation of their results. They also argue, with more success, that working memory capacity, a major component of intelligence, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. But more about that later. 

For the uninitiated, this is another shot across the bow in the complex battle between inherent intelligence and learned intelligence. Once more, it’s a strong push for IQ intelligence (academic or analytical intelligence) as the be-all, end-all. Not so fast. 

The authors take aim at several popular writers, but two paragraphs stick out as a summary of the evils of deliberate practice: 

Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.” 

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book “Talent Is Overrated,” adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance. 

Thus, the writers argue, science tells quite a different story—that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields. 

Well. . . before you buy their argument wholesale, think about the following: 

Nowhere do the practitioners of deliberate practice argue that practice alone makes for expertise. Indeed, the gains you’ll get in practicing depend heavily on your training environment, your coach, and the quality of your feedback. I address this issue in my blogs, Are top salespeople born or made?, and Success is not just about practice, practice, practice. What I remind readers is that that feedback and expert coaching are also part of the deliberate practice model and key to the development of personal expertise. 

Furthermore, leading cognitive psychologists, including Robert Sternberg, point out that there is no way that the maximum capabilities of any person can be measured or predicted. 

The researchers in deliberate practice have also found that memory—that core measure of intelligence--can be improved.

Intelligence theorists don’t agree about much other than the ability to adapt flexibly to the environment. But most theorists, especially Robert J. Sternberg, believe that intelligence has at least three forms:

•  Analytical intelligence (IQ intelligence)--the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions. Hambrick and Meinz are stretching this kind of intelligence to make it into practical intelligence.  That’s too big a stretch.
• Creative intelligence—the ability to go beyond what is given to generate novel and interesting ideas.
• Practical intelligence--the ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment.

Although the three forms of intelligence overlap, people who succeed in business are specialists in practical intelligence. Furthermore, a significant study in which correlations between a test of practical intelligence and tests of academic or analytical intelligence reveal that the correlations between the two are significantly negative.

Let’s be candid. Intelligence testing is widespread. Many questions remain, however, as to what conventional intelligence tests actually measure. There’s also some question as to what the companies that produce most of the tests really want to find out. Tests are used in numerous settings, including schools, the military, corporations and for a variety of purposes including placement and selection. The testing business is worth billions of dollars every year. That’s right. . .  billions of dollars. If Brooks, Gladwell, Colvin and Sternberg are right, you can see plenty of intelligence shops in deep trouble.

Let’s be even more candid. I give tests and I’m trained and qualified to do so. Though they are merely snapshots or pointers to what’s going on at a given point in time with a client, an overarching reason that I give them is that clients expect them. So, well. . . ka-ching, ka-ching. But I sure as hell educate the client on the validity, usefulness, and long-term lack of predictability for most of them.

To put it bluntly, really smart people don’t necessarily make for good business people. That’s why being a member of MENSA certainly doesn’t guarantee success in business. If you’ve been around the business barn a few times, you know, like Brooks, Gladwell and Colvin, that inherent talent is really, really overrated.

Do You Have to Take the Scientist's Word for It?

On regular occasions I converse with my business clients about the difference between business science (technically, social science ) and consultantancy snake oil. It's an important issue because a lot of the snake oil is regularly touted in business magazines and among execs. In today's world, where evidence-based management is available on an awful lot of issues, it's downright stupid to follow just any consultant's recommendation without analyzing it. That includes my own recommendations.

So how do you tell the difference between snake oil and genuine science? And do you have to have a research degree to be able to figure out the validity of many recommendations? Janet Stemwedel, one of those rare birds with two PhD's from Stanford, has simplified the issue for us. Furthermore, she doesn't think a PhD is necessary to assess the validity of science. 

In two blogs, posted on the Scientific American site, she deals forthrightly with the issue. She emphasizes that though scientific knowledge is built on empirical data and that though the data can vary significantly within the different disciplines, there are common patterns of reasoning that all scientists use.

In what follows, she spells out an approach that most any slightly critical thinker can use. Because the material is very relevant to much of what's going on in business--much less all the political conversations regarding science-I am printing parts of two blogs, the first distinguishing between baloney and real science, and the second explaining the scientific method.

The big difference (Karl) Popper identifies between science and pseudo-science is a difference in attitude. While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications.

There is a corresponding difference that Popper sees in the form of the claims made by sciences and pseudo-sciences: Scientific claims are falsifiable — that is, they are claims where you could set out what observable outcomes would be impossible if the claim were true — while pseudo-scientific claims fit with any imaginable set of observable outcomes. What this means is that you could do a test that shows a scientific claim to be false, but no conceivable test could show a pseudo-scientific claim to be false. Sciences are testable, pseudo-sciences are not.

One of the things I like about her emphasis is that she's made the route to knowledge "potentially" open to any of us. So here's the core input on scientific reasoning:

One way to judge scientific credibility (or lack thereof) is to scope out the logical structure of the arguments a scientist is putting up for consideration. It is possible to judge whether arguments have the right kind of relationship to the empirical data without wallowing in that data oneself. Credible scientists can lay out:

• Here’s my hypothesis.
• Here’s what you’d expect to observe if the hypothesis is true. Here, on the other hand, is what you’d expect to observe if the hypothesis is false.
• Here’s what we actually observed (and here are the steps we took to control the other variables).
• Here’s what we can say (and with what degree of certainty) about the hypothesis in the light of these results.
• Here’s the next study we’d like to do to be even more sure.

Lest there be any question, the usual Webster definition of "hypothesis" is appropriate to the above: a proposition tentatively assumed in order to draw out its logical or empirical consequences and so test its accord with facts that are known or may be determined.

The underlined terms will take you to the relevant blogs in The Scientific American.

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

Why Do Men Hold Back Women in the Workplace?

I’ve got a lot invested in this issue. It’s not just the many clients of the female gender whom I’ve coached over the years or my background in gender communication. But three beloved daughters, all professionals. So Joann Barsh and Lareina Yee’s article in the September McKinsey Quarterly struck a chord with me. Their article sets out to change companies’ minds about women. And they’ve done a swell job.

Despite the Arianna Huffington’s of the world and corporate commitment to women’s career advancement, progress appears to be stalled. The stats are telling:

• Women account for 53% of entry-level employees
• Women hold only 37% of middle-management positions
• Women hold only 28% of vice-president and senior management roles
• Women hold only 14% of seats on executive committees

[This week’s Newsweek reports that women in the U.S. seriously outpace men in college degrees: 36% of women and only 28% of men in the age group of 25 to 29 hold bachelor’s degrees. (The U.S. is tops in the world for educated women. That includes education level, literacy and gender parity in schools. Who says government legislation and campaigns can’t impact problems from the mid-twentieth century? Those statistics are a far cry from my generation of septuagenarians.The flip side of that issue is that the educational attainment of men is of tragic proportion.)]

As the authors of the McKinsey research point out, corporations have trouble retaining promising women or promoting them into top jobs. The real issue is the “invisible, but powerful beliefs” held by managers. These mindsets subtlely and unintentionally hold back women.

Long term, this is an important issue for corporate America. Systematic research shows that companies gain very solid business benefits from a more diverse senior team. Consumer products firms take this issue seriously.

The McKinsey study digs deeply into the problem, finding that at every point in the U.S. talent pipeline, the odds of advancement for men are twice those of women. When it comes to the big leap, from executive committee to CEO, nearly four times as many men as women succeed.

So why do men hold back women? This is what surfaced in their research:

• “She’s too aggressive” (or “too passive”) I can’t imagine a man getting the feedback. Furthermore, women won’t receive that info directly. In my interviewing for women clients I’ve picked it up, but in every instance the client told me she had never received that feedback. They quickly set out to remedy the problem in constructive fashion.
• “I don’t want to tell Bob he didn’t get that job.” Leaders are not comfortable telling their male protégés, whom they have groomed for years, that someone else is getting that job. What McKinsey didn’t point out is that that response is the remnant of the “boys club.”
• “I don’t know how to talk or mentor her.” Men tend to sponsor men. They gravitate to the sex with whom they find more common interests. There’s also plenty of nervousness about mixed gender relationships in the workplace.
• “If I put a woman in that role and she fails, it’ll set back all women.” This is an inadvertent mind-set that treats women as representative of their whole gender. I can’t imagine men being treated as other than individuals.
• “A woman isn’t right for that job.” Those stereotypes are still there, though vestigial. One of the upsides of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is the placement of women in the front.

This is a vicious cycle for women, difficult to deal with primarily because the statements are deeply held. They can be resolved one-on-one, but that approach is unfair to women. It’ll be the 22^nd century before the change takes place.

Why Is Real Collaboration So Very Difficult?

Collaboration skills are very tough for people to learn. You'd think that teamwork, where people have shared values and objectives would facilitate collaboration. But no, put people from two different divisions or groups together--and it can be a really painful mess.

Today's Times alluded to a terrifically cool piece of research, reported by Patricia Cohen, that explains the problem. So I had to dig it up. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber looked closely at our human capacity for reasoning.  Remember that collaboration is about working through differences and coming to a workable joint decision. Team members walk into collaborative discussions with a lot of ideas. Typically, they're conclusions they've held for a long time. Collaboration is all about joint reasoning. As you know, when you get together to collaborate on something, most everyone already has their own conclusion to the problem.

So bear with me. A person's conclusions are simply mature inferences, a mental representation based on a lot of other ideas. Let's suppose, for example, that you're a school superintendent who's brought in an architect to build a new elementary school. In order for the planning to move forward, architects have to collaborate with the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers to put together their proposal.

As soon as the architect sits down with the teachers, the architects find themselves dealing openly with some "conclusions" (mental models) that can make collaboration very difficult. What comes up are statements like, "we don't want a Taj Mahal," "you're just in this for the money," "you don't understand education, why should we trust you," or "you guys always build what you want, not what we need." That's a setup for a breakdown, not a collaboration.

Similarly, architects have to work with the contractors, the construction people--and their reasoning can be just as difficult. Contractors are especially difficult because they get to talk to the school's representatives nearly every day. They can easily sabotage the relationship for the architect with reasoning that sounds like this: "architects just draw lines on paper," and "you guys don't know anything about building a building." How's that for collaborative reasoning?

The same stuff happens in most any collaborative effort in law, medicine--and business. Get into any collaborative team setting, and the same kind of stuff starts surfacing in ten minutes, making collaboration a very difficult exercise.

It's all about why people reason, not how people reason. 

Mercier and Sperber assume, like all of us, that reasoning is the best way to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Yet, plenty of evidence shows that reasoning often leads to off-base distortions and poor decisions. So they decided to take a different tack. Rather than look at how people reason, they wanted to know why people reason. 

There was one very important clue. When a team is trying to come up with a decision they noticed that everyone was mostly interested in arguments for themselves and against the other people. The confirmation bias is always a feature of collaboration. 

I won't lay out all the research, you can read it yourself if you've got time for 50 pages. But their conclusion is very important. Why do people reason?  To win. The entire history of reasoning since Socrates is not tied to improving knowledge and making better decisions, but focused on winning. Winning is in the genes, but not collaboration.

So how the hell can we collaborate successfully?

As some of my clients have told me, I tend to play dirty. I explain the problem. Then I'll ask permission to intervene anytime I think someone has switched his/her model to winning. And I wait until everyone agrees to my intervention. As you can guess, sometimes there's a bit of silence before I get assent. Then whenever I think the conversational model needs to change from winning to collaborating, I intervene. I make this a lot of fun and stay away from being "serious Dan." 

As a facilitator, I've learned to get all the undiscussables on the table. And do it throughout the meeting. For example, I'll repeat something like, Hey guys. This is not an argument to win. That sounds like a "win agenda." As soon as you start looking to confirm your own beliefs, we're going to be in trouble. I know it's tough, but let's get all the stuff on the table for a better decision.

As I'm writing this, it crossed my mind that Republicans and Democrats in the House really need me. But, truthfully, I sure as hell don't need them. Enjoy!

Why Are Some Skills So Damned Hard to Learn?

Recently I've been musing over a number of blogs focused on two very important issues: collaboration and a customer-centric approach to business.

In one the authors rightly emphasize the necessity of a strategic orientation that’s focused primarily upon the customer, not the organization’s product line. The recommendation is spot on. That's been a widespread emphasis of strategy ever since Tom Peters got hold of the business world, shook it, and made it see the light. But a customer-centric approach is not nearly as easy to implement as some would think.

Just this past week Herminia Ibarra and Morten Hansen wrote a blog on getting collaboration right. They underscored the challenges that companies face and discussed the organizational traps of under-collaboration and over-collaboration. It was a very useful and pertinent discussion of an issue facing many organizations today. But in their focus on organizational collaboration, they, too, ignored the immense interpersonal difficulties underlying collaboration.  

I've worked with senior clients and their teams on these subjects for years. My own experience with executives reveals a huge amount of difficulty with both of them. They talk about them and use the appropriate buzz-words.  But when it comes to the needed implementation of collaboration or customer-centered relationships, the stuff really hits the fan.

It’s very difficult to develop a customer-centric approach when you spend 95% of your time on the firm’s product, rather than the customer. General Motors was a classic example of the problem. The firm’s focus on its auto resulted in a failure to understand the customer—so the Germans, Japanese and Koreans ate their lunch. But it’s a problem a clear majority of firms must deal with.

Collaboration has shown itself to be a very specific kind of talk. Numerous clients have revealed that it also takes a great deal of courage. The fears underneath collaboration, especially in client relationships, make it especially problematic. Furthermore, the language is quite new to most people, not something they have either experienced or observed.

Why then are some skills so difficult--almost impossible to learn? That's a question demanding an essay, not a one sentence answer. But here is some research that answers that question. Ummmm. Be aware that the research is not especially intuitive. It’s not common sense. So you may have difficulty accepting it. But it's well done and quite systematic.

The underlying assumption in my coaching and training business has been that if a needed behavior is not showing up on the radar screen, whether collaboration or a customer-centered approach, there are three possible reasons. And I've even got some statistics, compliments of Virginia Satir, that long-gone genius at changing behavior. In one-percent (1%) of issues, the person is malicious. In two-three percent (2-3%) of situations the person is thoughtless or careless. And in ninety-six percent (96%) of situations there simply are no relevant tools in the person’s toolkit. Those statistics seem to stop people in their tracks. Why of course, they suggest, people understand customer-centered or collaborative relationships. I remind them that understanding a subject has little to no relationship to being able to practice the competency. I understand how to play a clarinet, but you wouldn't want to hear the noise coming out of it with me on the mouthpiece. Getting people to apply this research to themselves or their colleagues is like pulling teeth. However, since my clients ask to work with me, they'll accept it at face value . . . and then eventually do an "oh, shit," when they experience its truthfulness. But this is research that takes a while to stick. It takes a long time to become a fundamental rationale for explaining failure, and then setting out to do something about it.

Given that no tools in the toolkit is often an issue, why are some skills so hard to learn? There's a great deal of research that shows that one of our primary--and fastest means--of learning is through analogy. In other words, we understand and learn to handle a new situation by transferring knowledge from well-understood situations in the past. But what happens when the structure and skill demands of effective collaboration cannot be compared to any of our past experiences? Nearly all of our education and our experience of problem solving, for example, is done alone. We're individualists and many of us have practically no experience of effective problem solving--of collaborating--with others. The research indicates that people who have experience at only one extreme of an experience distribution (such as individual, rather than collaborative problem solving) do not have the smarts to operate under other conditions--and especially conditions at the opposite extreme. 

Furthermore, research that builds upon the previous studies finds that even if a person perceives something new, without comparable memories it's difficult to understand and learn.  If something is not on a person's radar screen, it's often because there is no memory material (neuro-receptors) to attach the information being dished out. In short, when we try on something new, without a comparable experience we're very liable to be resistant and defensive about the learning--but largely out of ignorance. And as often as not—more often than not—collaboration and customer-centric strategy languish in the deep, dark ocean of the Doldrums.

Implementing some skills, like collaboration or a customer-centric strategy, is just very difficult stuff. It’s not going to happen overnight or on a three-day training session. The bad news is that it will require frustration over the way things have been going, extensive practice, mentoring and coaching, adaptation to feedback and an eventual integration of the new behaviors. The good news is that any set of skills can be learned.

Do You Have An Immunity To Change?

As a personal coach to managers and executives for more than 25 years, I've learned that humans differ in their ability to make change.  Even though nearly all my clients have been highly motivated achievers, personally desirous of making change, I've found that their ability to make change differs significantly. Some it seems, have almost an immunity to change.  Often, they understand the need for change and they may even understand what the change might look like, but for some reason they seem stymied, and unable to achieve long term change.

It's an issue I've worked with for years, and thankfully, with some unique and useful breakthroughs.  Still, change is a very messy, sometimes fuzzy process.  And so I was delighted to see that the Harvard profs, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow, who've spent years analyzing and researching the same problem, have come up with some especially intriguing insights and very useful strategies.  Indeed, they've clarified my own conclusions, making them ever more practical.

The basic question I've been asking is what really drives personal change and growth?

A system-wide study of research, as well as their and my own experience finds that the real driver for change is what can be called optimal conflicts.  By optimal conflict I mean conflicts that are of the greatest degree that provide the most favorable conditions for resolution.  These are messy drivers that draw on both our head and our heart, on both our thinking and our feeling.

Kegan and Laskow lay out their understanding of optimal conflicts this way.

• The persistent experience of some frustration, dilemma, life puzzle, quandry, or personal problem that is . . . 
• Perfectly designed to cause us to feel the limits of our current way of knowing . . .
• In some sphere of our living that we care about, with . . .
• Sufficient supports so that we are neither overwhelmed by the conflict nor able to escape or diffuse it.

If you or your colleagues seem to be immune to change, I suspect an analysis of what's going on will be serious enough to fit the above template.  

An unforgettable example: A few years ago, I was asked by a marketing executive at one of America's leading companies to assist him with change--one that fit the above categories perfectly.  In his early 40s, he'd worked in a very hierarchical manner with his employees for his entire professional life.  His firm was making major changes, pushing down responsibility, and making executives into team facilitators rather than "order givers."  Because his people especially liked the new direction, they were beginning to complain about his old hierarchical ways.  It went on for some time and he got more and more frustrated. He also realized that if he didn't change, he'd gain a bad reputation, lose his job and be at financial risk. You can readily imagine that both his thoughts and his feelings were intertwined.  So, when he came to me asking for support in making the change, he put the statement clearly:  "Dan," he said.  "I'm a dinosaur (at age 43), and if I don't make some changes, I'm gong to be on the streets.  How can you help me?"

A small proportion of us have worked through our immunity to change, but that VP was caught in a trap. Thankfully, he recognized his mess.  But the drivers were all in place, forcing him to get beyond that immunity.

Since I am especially interested in this topic, I'd be delighted with any comments you have.

Reference: Robert Kegan and Lisa Lakow, Immunity to Change.  (Boston: Harvard Business Press), 2009.

Photo: Flickr.com, FrenchKheldar 

Will Job Performance Guarantee Job Security?

In April last year, I wrote a blog focusing on how important it is to manage your boss.  One of my readers, recently asked an astute question out of that blog.  Here's his query:  If you are talented and intelligent then there is no need to impress your boss as your job performance will automatically impress your boss and I think he/she would love to support you in your career. Correct me if I am wrong. 

Here in the Upper Midwest my reader would find agreement with his idea.  There's a long history of belief that performance is the final arbiter of security and job success.  Anything else tends to be looked at with a jaundiced eye.  For example, when I suggest that a person's boss may be clueless about performance, or may want to keep you right where you are because of your performance, the person quickly moves to a political statement.  It takes one of two forms.  Either, "I don't believe in playing politics," or, "I don't believe in sucking up." 

Once and for all, the truth of the matter is that your performance has very little to do with job security or job opportunity.  There's a very weak link between your performance and your career success.  This always goes down hard.  People want to believe in justice, and this is not fair.  But this is an idea that you need to forget.  Business doesn't work that way. Job performance will not guarantee job security.

In Jeff Pfeffer's marvelous new book on power, he puts it succintly: The data shows that performance doesn't matter that much for what happens to most people in most organizations.  Extensive and systematic research reveals that performance doesn't guarantee either a promotion or a raise, and it may not even keep you from losing your job.  

So what really does guarantee job security, promotions and raises?  To quote Pfeffer's studies and summary of the research: You need to be noticed, influence the dimensions used to measure your accomplishments, and mostly make sure you are effective at managing those in power--which requires the ability to enhance the ego of those above you.