Dan Erwin

College for Me, But Not for Thee

David Leonhardt, the well-known business columnist of the NYTimes, challenges the skeptics who say college is overrated. And he does it with well-supported statistics and argument. I had argued that Newsweek's pontification about "useless college degrees" was just more career nonsense, ready for the circular file. But Leonhardt does me one better--far better.

Leonhardt points out that nearly a century ago the US made high school near universal at the same time that Europe's elitists decided that universal high school was a waste. Clearly the US made the right decision. As Leonhardt writes, the educated American masses helped create the American century. . . . The new ranks of high school graduates made factories more efficient and new industries possible. 

Today we're getting the same negative arguments from the skeptics, emphasizing that teenagers aren't ready for college work and that college costs saddle students with debt. Leonhardt dissects the anti-college arguments piece by piece. And as he says, the most discouraging part of the case is that it encourages parents and students to aim low. There are no statistics, but I'm appalled by the number of parents that aim so low that they refuse to provide kids with either emotional or financial support for college. But I also note that immigrant parents will starve so that their kids can have a college education. Intriguing distinctions. 

"Sending more young Americans to college is not a panacea," says David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who studies the labor market. "Not sending them to college would be a disaster."

The statistics are especially unique and illuminating. A new study has found that the value of college is that it gives grads entry to high-paying occupations. Skeptics continue to say college is overrated, but degreed workers make more even when their jobs don't require a degree. These are eye-stopping median stats: dishwashers without college degree, $19,000. Dishwashers with college degree, $34,000. Dental hygienist without college degree, $30,000. Dental hygienist with college degree, $53,000. Hairdresser without degree, $19,000. Hairdresser with degree, $32,000.

Furthermore, the costs are not nearly what we've been led to believe. Sure the Ivies cost more than $50,000 a year, but less than 1% of college students attend the Ivy League schools. All the journalistic alarms about college costs and college debt need to be taken with a grain of salt. Many colleges are just not very expensive. Once financial aid is taken into account, average net tuition and fees at public four-year colleges this past year was about $2,000. Take that to the bank.

Another issue of significance. The much-quoted study casting doubt on college education based on statistically significant progress, or lack of, misses a highly significant point. The general skills that colleges teach, skills such as discipline and persistence, may be far more important than academics. 

Leonhardt's last two comments should be pasted across some foreheads. 

Then there are the skeptics themselves, the professors, journalists and others who say college is overrated. They, of course, have degrees and often spend tens of thousands of dollars sending their children to expensive colleges.

I don’t doubt that the skeptics are well meaning. But, in the end, their case against college is an elitist one — for me and not for thee. And that’s rarely good advice.    

Is Talent Overrated? If So, Why?

It was Mark Zuckerberg who commented that "Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good. They are 100 times better." Picking that up, Bill Taylor, one of the cofounders of Fast Company magazine, recently asked whether talent is overrated.

This is not an unfamiliar issue. Underneath it is more than three centuries of American history and myth- making about individualism. Historically, the notion of individualism has been shown to be a mixed bag. A very mixed bag of good and evil. Taylor's blog, which I've linked to above, states his answer to the question: Great people are overrated. And, he argues, the belief that the gap between a highly productive individual and the average person is getting larger and larger is false. So he sets out to right that wrong.

More than 300 have commented on his two blogs, many with a great deal of rejection and hostility toward his ideas. Taylor wasn't surprised at the rejection, but he wasn't prepared for the derision and hostility to him and his notion. What crossed my mind as I read many of the comments was not the accuracy of his comment, but why so much hostility? Why so much protest? Why so much rejection? Why so many unwilling to even give consideration to his idea. That was a Harvard blog with a readership,I assume, of fairly literate people. Methinks the commenters were protesting a bit too loudly.

Understand that there's a lot invested in the belief of the highly talented individual. Although Taylor was concerned with the implications of this belief upon organizational productivity, there are other implications. Including executive compensation. Executives are so much more capable than the average worker that they deserve the huge pay they receive. Or so the argument goes.

The Washington Post reported just a few days ago on the compensation issue. Seems that companies and CEOs are trying to limit the publication of the information. Wonderfully, the article included research by Carola Frydman and colleagues at MIT showing that though average executive pay at the nation's top companies in 1970 was 28 times the average worker income, by 2005 executive pay had jumped to 158 times that of the average worker. Some CEOs receive as much as 400 times average worker pay. Obviously the compensation committee thinks CEOs can make a unique contribution. But are the compensation differences truly representative of a huge gap between executives and workers? The research doesn't support that idea.

The issue is up front in the sports business. A huge majority of sports teams spend their time looking for those standout players. And the financial offerings suggest that team leadership believes that their success is tied solely to individuals. Although, Taylor calls our attention to some important exceptions to the rule.

Ever ask why team play is so difficult in business? The truth, I suspect, is that people don't really believe in it. Instead, organizations reward bonuses to individuals, believing that it's always the individual that makes the difference. Is this really true?

What we have going on here is what we with background in American studies call the "John Wayne syndrome." There's always one unique person out there who'll rescue us. The team may not be able to resolve our problem, so we'll have to find that one highly talented individual and leader. Could it be that what's going on has cultural blinders so strongly fixed that we can't see reality. Thankfully, one highly successful organization completely rejects the notion of the standout person: the US Marines.

But back to Bill Taylor's question: Is one standout person better than a team of pretty good people?

Malcolm Gladwell dealt with the same issue a few years ago and put it into focus in a New Yorker article, The Talent Myth. This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish. In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus all over the world.

More often than not, Gladwell writes, it's the other way around. The system builds the talent.

Talent and leadership certainly matter, but the notion of the standout person turns out to be a half truth. James Meindl and Jeff Pfeffer, among many researchers, who have studied this issue, found that the US culture romanticizes leaders, anointing them with "esteem, prestige, charisma, and heroism" that outstrips the weight of evidence.

The most recent research is that of Boris Groysberg, whom I've referred to in previous blogs as one one of the best researchers in the business. Taylor quotes from the publisher of Groysberg's book, After examining the careers of more than 1,000 star analysts at Wall Street investment banks, and conducting more than two hundred frank interviews, Groysberg comes to a striking conclusion: star analysts who change firms suffer an immediate and lasting decline in performance. Their earlier excellence appears to have depended heavily on their former firms' general and proprietary resources, organizational cultures, networks, and colleagues. There are a few exceptions, such as stars that move with their teams and stars that switch to better firms. Female stars also perform better after changing jobs than their male counterparts do. But most stars who switch firms turn out to be meteors, quickly losing luster in their new settings.

But why do we hold so tightly to the half truth of the standout person?

Given that Groysberg's research is just the latest contribution to a systematic analysis of the subject, why does this half-truth persist? In their book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, Pfeffer and Sutton line up the studies and then suggest four major reasons for its persistance. Reasons that are worth chewing on. They reveal an awful lot about our thinking and they also suggest serious limitations to it.

1. Overly-simplified perceptions. When we look at organizations, we see the people who are in charge. We don't see the constraints that affect both behavior and performance. We attribute the outcome to the person in charge and miss all the work others carried out. We see the tip of the iceberg and miss the mountain beneath the surface.
2. Cognitive shortcuts to make sense of confusing information. All humans simplify complex information by means of shortcuts. The huge list of ever-shifting possible causes of organizational performance are difficult to predict and control, so we search for a way to controlling that data. Putting excessive faith in leadership is one way to manage the information. It also makes for a lot less mental demand and effort. Pfeffer recounts a telling conversation with a former GE exec, Spencer Clark who joked about Jack Welch, "Jack did a good job, but everyone seems to forget that the company had been around for over a hundred years before he ever took the job, and he had 70,000 other people to help him."
3. Generalizing from unit performance to the leader. People readily conclude that good companies have good managers (and bad companies have bad managers) regardless of other mitigating factors. It's especially true when organizational performance is particularly good or particularly bad. Having consulted at Sunbeam shortly after Chainsaw Al Dunlap's destructive leadership in the mid-1990s, it struck me that he wasn't the only thing wrong with the company. The company had a surplus of less than mediocre people, teams and processes, but that was never mentioned in all the press releases. The strategic bankruptcy that followed was not only a way to handle the financial mess, but also a means to revamp the entire organization and put it on a stronger performance track.
4. Money, money, money. The financial rewards mentioned above incentivize the behaviors of execs fueling the half-truth that leaders are lords and masters of all that transpires around them. That means, of course, that these "lord" are completely responsible for the organization. And, since they're master of all, they can hand out raises and promotions, hire and fire high-priced consultants and attorneys, and allow or forbid media access. Of course, those of us who consult to them, and especially the executive search and compensation firms have the same incentive.

There are great many reasons for all of us, execs, consultants and workforce, to believe that one standout person is better than a team of "pretty good" people. The truth, of course, is that a team of "pretty good" people typically performs better than the solo standout person. But there's a lotta money involved in the myth.

Photo from Flickr: Courtesy Pierre-Olivier

I'm O.K., But You're a @!%$## Narcissistic Arse

Studies show that only about 1 in 100 persons is a psychopath, but there is a higher proportion in prisons and corporate board-rooms. But a more relevant fact on the other end of the psychological spectrum is that studies show that narcissism is on the rise. That means a lot more narcissists in the board rooms and the workforce.

A study released by researchers from the National Institutes of Health, in a survey of 35,000 Americans, asked about narcissistic symptoms. It found that only 3% of people over 65 had ever experienced narcissistic symptoms,but that nearly 10% of people in their twenties had. A 2009 study by Jean Twenge of SDSU and Josh Foster of the University of South Alabama showed that narcissistic traits are increasing even faster than previously thought. From 2002 to 2007, college students' scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory rose twice as fast as in an earlier study covering changes between 1982 and 2006.

The traits that were studied included an unfounded sense of entitlement and overly high self-regard. In business, narcissism results in a serious lack of empathy for others and an exaggerated sense of the person's own importance and abilities. People with this trait believe themselves to be uniquely gifted and often show up as arrogant and egotistical. They tend to be very critical of other people. They'll also push for special benefits and status. In addition, most narcissist managers won't give credit where due and won't support their workers. Unless there is something in it for them, they won't work on behalf of their team and others' career development. I've found that in corporate America narcissists can't listen, aren't coachable, always think they're right, keep score and can't collaborate. You'll also find that many narcissists are masters at sucking up. As one exec said of a colleague narcissist, "He can play the CEO like a violin."

Sure, some of these people make great actors for the entertainment world (think Mel Gibson and Britney Spears). And many of them are able to perform at a high level for their organizations (I won't name those familiar names). But as many of you know, they're a terrible pain to work with. They are a category among the group of difficult people that Bob Sutton (Stanford Business) labels assholes.

So how do you best deal with a narcissistic manager?

I want to go at this from two perspectives: short term and long term.

Myra White, a psychologist and clinical prof at Harvard Med School, who also teaches in the field of organizational behavior, has four suggestions:

1. Since they like to be associated with high status people, keep your distance and demand the respect your position deserves. Get wired to other status people, and keep dropping their names in front of the narcissist.
2. Since they're not good team players, whenever possible make certain to get people on the team whom they admire and consider high status.
3. Since they're liable to push you for special favors and bend the rules for them, stick to the rules. Make sure you don't cave in to their demands.
4. Since they're liable to claim credit for other's contributions, protect yourself and others. Speak up for the colleague who's really made the contribution and don't let the narcissist get away with bullshit. When you're not comfortable speaking up to the narcissist, it's valuable to go around to team members and point out that your colleague made the contribution, not the narcissist. That'll be good for future relationships. But more significantly, it'll educate your team members to what's going on. Eventually, as a number of people become more aware of the narcissistic behaviors, that info filters up to higher levels. That strategy can result in a termination for the narcissist--at least in the better companies.

At a more profound and long-term level, Bob Sutton's very practical recommendations in The No Asshole Rule (listed on the left side of my blog site) are masterful. Sutton goes at the subject in his chapter When Assholes Reign with recommendations for all kinds of difficult situations--recommendations you'll want to memorize and act on.

A basic way to deal with narcissists is to reframe, to change how you see things. Psychologists have found that if you can't escape a stress creator, the first step is to change your mind-set about what's happening to you. Martin Seligman (Learned Optimism) has found that when people view difficulties as temporary, not their fault and as something that will not pervade and ruin the rest of their lives, that way of thinking, that frame, protects their mental and physical health. Reframing a narcissistic situation is a step in liberating you from that person's clutches, and will sustain your physical and mental health.

A second step is to hope for the best, but expect the worst. Unwavering hope that that narcissistic arse is going to someday be transformed into a nice person sets you up for one disappointment after another. Lowering your expectations, focusing on the few good things, and becoming optimistic about how it will all end can help you endure a horrible situation.

A third step is to develop indifference and emotional detachment. Sutton is one of the few to wisely point out that passion in organizational life is an overrated virtue, and indifference is an underrated virtue. Business books, all caught up in naive success and optimism ideas and illustrations, never say this. But it needs to be said. Even shouted from the rooftops. To quote Sutton: All this talk about passion, commitment, and identification with an organization is absolutely correct if you are in a good job and are treated with dignity and respect. But it is hypocritical nonsense to the millions of people who are trapped in jobs and companies where they feel oppressed and humiliated--where their goal is to survive with their health and self-esteem intact and provide for their families, not to do things for a company that treats them like dirt.

The ability to gain control over seemingly trivial things, to look for small wins, even trivial things, is the hallmark of people who survive horrible and uncontrollable things. Indeed, as I've noted elsewhere, Karl Weick has found that aiming for small wins is both more comforting and more effective than aiming for big wins. Feeling that you are in control, in even the smallest things can reduce the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that a narcissistic ass can engender.

Finally, it's important to build pockets of safety, sanity and support. Learn to hide from the jerk and hang out with decent people. That'll provide you with both a bit of control over your life and also reduce your exposure to jerks. Supportive colleagues and even thoughtful clients can buffet you from working with a slew of narcissists.

The point of all this is that you can manage even the flaming narcissists that you'll inevitably encounter in business. Learn how now, because it's obvious that the good old USA is becoming a nation of narcissistic assholes. During the depression of the 1930s, depression was the national disease. In the technological age, narcissism is going to become more and more the national disease.

The Surprising Values of Self-Disclosure as Work Tool

The break down of work silos and the technology revolution have forced workers and managers to realize that expertise in emotional intelligence is an absolute requirement for career and work success. David Goleman led the way in helping us understand that emotional smarts, the subtext of conversations, is something you can't do without.

Self-disclosure is one of the more important pieces of emotional smarts, a conversational skill and a tool that's often misunderstood. Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about making highly personal confessions about your past life. Self-disclosure is revealing how you're reacting to the present work demands, and giving relevant info from the past. These are often things that would never have been discussed. In business it makes for better organizational insight and decisions, and often positively impacts personal growth and one's career options. Self-disclosure is both ordinary and unique. It's one of the tools that initially evokes a "Ho-hum" or "of course." But then when I explain further, it's "Wow, I never thought about that."

Here's a "ho-hum" example. Let's suppose you're building a new team to handle a major project. Since scope management could be a major problem, and none on the team has the experience to manage project scope, you immediately think of a past experience. "One person we should add is Jane Moran. I've worked with her on two past projects and found her insights very helpful. She'd be a valued addition for helping us manage the scope of this project. When I worked with her, I found that she . . . blah, blah, blah." Note that the comments about Jane were focused on present needs, but also disclosed info about the past.

Self-disclosure's value goes far beyond the ho-hum. In fact, it's a tool that's highly useful for leveraging your career success.

Why are self-disclosure skills so important?

1. Self-disclosure is the basis of close personal relationships. In fact, self-disclosure is key to enhancing your working relationships. Self-disclosing is a way of identifying with others, creating value for yourself and surfacing the values of others. It automatically pulls out comparable experiences from others. "You had that experience? I had a similar experience. Blah, blah, blah. . . ." And so effective self-disclosers get a lot of attention for who they are, what they know, who they know and what they can do. All kinds of studies show that when you're valued by others, your opportunities for exposure, challenging experiences and promotion will be multiplied.

2. Self-disclosure is essential to feedback and growth. People who reveal their attitudes, assumptions, thinking and objectives, as well as actions, are far more likely to receive feedback and input from others. The research is clear: without direct or indirect feedback, growth is an utter impossibility. To resist self-disclosing is to sicken a relationship and limit the synergies. Indeed, the energy poured into hiding adds to the stress of relationship and dulls your own awareness of your inner and outer experiences. Being silent is not being strong. Strength is the willingness to take risks in an organizational relationship, to disclose with intention of building a better self, a better relationship and a better organization.

3. Self-disclosure is inevitably reciprocal. The more self-disclosing you are to another person, the more likely that person will self-disclose to you. Extensive, even systematic research in this field reveals that a person willing to be self-disclosing will likely be a competent, open and socially extroverted person who feels a strong need to interact with others. He is likely to be flexible, adaptive and, surprisingly, more intelligent than his less self-revealing peers. Furthermore, self-disclosers (because of the input and feedback they inevitably receive) are more objectively aware of the realities of organizational life and relationships. Not surprisingly, the self-discloser tends to view his fellow persons as more good than evil, an optimistic perspective that is often self-fulfilling, resulting in more overall life success than might be normally expected.

4. Self-disclosure is strongly related to interpersonal effectiveness, especially for the development of self-regulation. If, for example, I self-disclose to a colleague, and she gives me the feedback that I can be perceived as so demanding that others shut down (a not unusual response to the highly ambitious), that sets me on the path to monitoring my "demandingness" in order to keep the channels open for relationships, information flow and business input. Interpersonal effectiveness can be defined as the degree to which the consequences of your behavior match your intentions. Viewed this way, self-disclosure is a highly important interpersonal building block.

Photo: Courtesy Ben Heine, "Mute" Flickr

So U.S. History Doesn't Flip Your Kid's Switch. So What?

Diane Ravitch, who recently changed her mind and decided to support public schools, took a look at the test, the scores . . . and blew her cork. "The answer was right in front of them. This is alarming."

The test was the National Assessment of Educational Progress given to 20% of our fourth graders, 17% of of eighth graders and 12% of high school seniors. It showed that our students are less proficient in their nation's history than in any other subject. The other subjects? Math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, economics. No surprise. Students scored highest in economics. That won't, by itself, resolve 21st century corporate--or political--needs.

So why does it matter that kids don't know U.S. history? (Before I go any further, I need to 'fess up. I was an undergrad history major, who also took a bit of political science and econ. Smart advisor guided me. And that was the 1950s.) Sure, the data of historical events, dates, people, cultures, politics, wars and movements helps us understand what's going on in our world today. But there's also a second, far more important reason for understanding history. And it gets practically no press.

My answer to the question tells you why I nearly went bonkers when I read Penelope Trunk's blog telling her readers to avoid the humanities, of which history is one of the major disciplines. She couldn't have been more wrong. I was so pissed that I almost wrote a blog on why a business major is the absolute worst undergrad major to major in. If my daughters had even let business as an undergrad major cross their minds, I'd have indicated that they'd get no money from me for college. What a dumb major for smart kids. Might as well take cheer-leading or basketball. Ninety-five percent of the stuff you'll get at work anyway. The only thing it possibly offers is a faster track to your first job out of college. By your fifth year of work, practically everything you got in it is obsolete. Zip. Nada. Useless.

What history offers, instead, is a phenomenally important, permanent set of critical tools. History forces you to investigate an endless set of highly complex issues [religion, culture, politics, scientific thought (Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse), media, wealth, taxes (for the unenlightened, "taxation without representation"), natural resources or lack of (Jefferson, Lewis and Clark)] to enable you to figure why something happened, and what else might have happened, if. . . .

In short, there is not a single undergrad major more effective for teaching critical reasoning for a highly complex world. No critical reasoning tools is exactly why 95% or more of business people can't do strategic thinking and legislators have so damn much difficulty with policy-making. Simply no tools in the toolkit.

History is an inquiry-based study and a problem-solving activity. So it teaches you how to ask the really significant questions and deal with the complex problems that business and government people struggle over. (Here's a successful humanities grad who really gets it.)

History requires students to deal with social problems that are poorly structured, very controversial and with all kinds of reasoning and built-in illogic. It requires different kinds of thinking than a student would learn in the well-structured problems of philosophy and basic logic. Furthermore, it forces students to look at conflicting accounts of the same problem (the residents of Boston versus the British military perspective on the Boston Massascre). It also presents students with moral and ethical challenges (were the colonists justified in using violence against British authority?) Finally, students who study these challenges learn to recognize the different biases asssociated with perspectives. (Here's one ninth grader who gets it.) Significantly, they learn to compare their moral suasion against the different persuasions within a historical context.

There's endless stuff about all kinds of wars. Lack of historical tools is a major reason why Iraq, which the Bushies thought would be delighted with their intervention, blew up in their face. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that you can't take a country like Afghanistan, that's living in the ninth century, into the twenty-first century in just ten short years. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that the Medicare and Social Security systems impact all kinds of people, businesses, state governments, classes and generations of people in half-a-million different ways. Lack of historical tools is also why so many don't understand the conflicting perspectives and conflicting ethics of the different political parties involved. Lack of historical tools is why the resolution of the problems those programs have given us is evidently impossible to manage.

I think it was Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the first Senator of Missouri early in the 19th century, who commented about a certain decision and a certain legislator, that the decision was not nearly as simple as some simple-minded people would like to think. In today's highly complex world, "don't do nuance" and no critical historical tools can lead a person, a company and a nation into tragedy.

You can't possibly imagine how good it feels to vent my spleen and stick my middle finger into the air on this issue..#!%@!!

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!

David Brooks Tells the Truth on Democrats, Republicans, Medicare, the Deficit and American Politics

At last, someone who's astute, knowledgeable and wise tells the truth about American politics. And a Republican voter, no less. This morning's article by a homeless Hamiltonian lashing out finally put all the issues in print.

Brooks, a "pundit under protest,"emphasizes the clear fact that this election is about how to avert national decline. As he notes, this election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle. But what's obvious to him and seemingly few others, is that we're dealing with an accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed.

The challenges that lie ahead are exposed by a McKinsey study, An economy that works. The statistics are terrifying, but they form an enlightening backdrop for Brooks' column.

The challenges ahead:

• 21 million jobs needed by 2020 to return to full employment
• 9.3-22.5 million, the range of jobs created in low-and high-job-growth scenarios
• 1.5 million, the estimated shortage of college graduates in the workforce in 2020
• 40%, the proportion of companies planning to hire that have had openings for 6 months
• 58%, the employers who say that they will hire more temporary and part-time workers.

In sum, the projected length of our "jobless recovery" is expected to be 60 months. A research article just published by Wharton faculty came up with the same conclusion. Happy days are not going to be here anytime soon.

But back to Brooks:

The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible. Gigantic tax cuts — if they were affordable — might boost overall growth, but they would do nothing to address the structural problems that are causing a working-class crisis.

Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal. Republicans have taken a pragmatic policy proposal from 1980 and sanctified it as their core purity test for 2012.        

The Democrats are just as guilty and just as irrelevant.

As for the Democrats, they offer practically nothing. They acknowledge huge problems like wage stagnation and then offer... light rail! Solar panels! It was telling that the Democrats offered no budget this year, even though they are supposedly running the country. That’s because they too are trapped in a bygone era.

Mentally, they are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity. They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won’t be for decades. Democrats dream New Deal dreams, propose nothing and try to win elections by making sure nobody ever touches Medicare.    

What conclusion can a person draw?    

The appropriate agenda, still impossible for both parties, is to be pro-market and pro-government. This either/or business is liable to be the death-knell of life they we've had it in the past.

What can a person do?

I'd raise political hell with every voter you know and keep the truth on the agenda. Challenge the one-noters: the issue is not just about the deficit and the issue is not just about Medicare. It's a lot deeper and more complex.

When it comes to your career and you job, here are a few suggestions:

1. Stay on top of your company's business, finances, the industry and the competition.
2. Make certain you know what your firm's customers are thinking and griping about. That's liable to be as valuable as your firm's finances.
3. Keep your internal and external network growing and useful so you know when to take on other opportunities and jump ship.
4. Keep rebuilding your interpersonal skills. The interpersonal demands are becoming tougher every day. Technology won't save you. But a bit of technology and superb interpersonal skills are an absolute necessity. They give you info, support, and make you invaluable to any organization.
5. Build your leadership skills. Whether you're low on the totem pole, or high, you need to be able to work successfully with people over whom you have no power. Chemistry is rarely the issue. Leadership and the interpersonal are all about skill.

In summary, it's wise to be very skeptical about media, all media. Don't trust cable, the internet, or even my blogs. Check out the statistics, the insights, the inferences, the conclusions writers and talkers draw. Recognize bias, emotion and reasons for what they are. It's a messy world out there.

No Line for the Men's Room

Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, has gotten more press over her Barnard commencement address than the rest of the nation's speakers combined. It's appropriate. One journalist writes that Sandberg provides a different "spin" on women's work/life issues. That's not only an understatement, but dead wrong. Sandberg offers a different strategy on the subject and reframes the issue.

Barnard, the woman's college known for its great commencement addresses about women's issues by prominent figures (e.g. Hillary Clinton, Meryl Streep, Anna Quindlen), still grants the Columbia University degree from the little school across the street. (Since our youngest is a Barnard alumna, I admit to bias.) 

My teaser blog title appears early in the speech, but it's not to take away from the valuable contribution she makes to women's work/life issues. A word cloud finds that her speech emphasizes women's choices, decisions, success and work world. 

Sandberg's context-setting emphasizes a number of relevant statistics: Of 190 heads of state, nine are women. Of all the parliaments around the world, 13% of those seats are held by women. Corporate America top jobs, 15% are women; numbers which have not moved at all in the past nine years. Nine years. Of full professors around the United States, only 24% are women.

That's only part of the problem that women face. The message argues that women are needed at all levels to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation and make certain women are heard and heeded rather than overlooked and ignored. 

No question that the personal perspective and psychological issues that she illuminates, some I've addressed previously, are salient. You'll want to check them out in the speech. No doubt, also, there are external forces holding women back from owning success. Studies have shown—and yes, I kind of like studies—that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. This means that as men get more successful and powerful, both men and women like them better. As women get more powerful and successful, everyone, including women, likes them less. An absolutely and completely accurate analysis.

No question also, that a world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.

And so, Sandberg focuses on a different strategic approach and formulation for women. Historically, women's work/life balance has focused upon early planning and recognition that if women want children and career, they should start thinking about that route as soon as they get into their first job. Sandberg rightly reframes the issue and recommends that you focus upon your career wholeheartedly until the time you need to make other decisions. 

So, my heartfelt message to all of you is, and start thinking about this now, do not leave before you leave. Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision (about children, family, etc.), and then make a decision. That’s the only way, when that day comes, you’ll even have a decision to make.

Strategy, we know, is about "no" as much as "yes."  Otherwise any strategy is liable to fail. What you don't want to do is to start planning your life for your children before you face the decision of having children. Otherwise you'll miss out on the inevitable success that single-minded focus can bring. Changing strategy before it's necessary is a dilution of strategy. It will keep you from full-fledged success. 

In short, if you're smart enough to improvise and succeed in business, you're also smart enough to improvise and succeed in family and career. That goes for men as well as for women.

Behavioral scientists have found that the way we think about things has a terrific impact on the way we act. If, for example, we keep family concerns up front before we have to make that decision, it takes away from our power and energy to get things done. This follows even in daily priority setting. I've learned that it's very important to decide quickly what I'm not going to do, toss that in the circular file, and then figure out what and when I need to get more important things done. All of us are faced with more and more information, decisions and tasks. The only way to deal with that reality is to set aside that which we don't have to deal with now, and get on with the rest. My coaching of execs reveals that a lot of the stuff they think they have to do can be easily delegated, set aside, or just plain ignored.

Sandberg has a great strategy for a very important subject. Set aside the decisions you don't have to make now, she says. And get on with the rest, pedal to the metal. That includes family.

Most of us are not immune from those problems. I learned early on as a parish minister that my way of ministering could require six nites a week. With three daughters, I simply was not going to take that route. Thus, eventually, I took a teaching position at a theological seminary. As I realized that world was too small, my wife and I decided it was time for me to go on grad school, build a different kind of education and move on from teaching. She also made different decisions at critical points in our family life. The most liberating result of those decisions, of waiting until forced to make decisions (often, an excellent pattern), is the profound satisfaction and integrity we have about the consequences of those decisions for our children. 

The Way You Sit or Stand Can Make You Feel More Powerful

Students of non-verbal communication have long been aware that gestures and posture can have a great deal of negative or positive impact on others.

If, for example, you stand up in a team meeting (when the rest are sitting) and lean forward in a hawk-like pose, you convey confidence and power to the team members. Occasionally I meet someone who questions that conclusion. If I'm standing in a conversation, I lean forward and look directly into their eyes, continuing with my conversation--and then watch them change their posture and tone. A quick debrief of what has just happened puts an end to the doubting Thomases. 

Or take my nonverbal recommendation for women in a man's world--occupy as much space at the conference table as possible. Amazing that the space you take is a power and status statement. But it is. Women (and men) who take more space at the conference table are listened to and get more attention. With the rare exception of a non-verbal knowledgeable colleague (there ain't many of those), it's all very covert. We know that a number of nonverbals command attention and power.

But what we don't know is whether certain postures could make people feel more commanding and powerful. That's not a small issue. Dacher Keltner and his Berkeley colleagues talk about power leading to "approach" behavior. Those who feel powerful will try to obtain what they want more actively. They are not as limited by social rules and organizational constraints that might hinder them from achieving their goals.

Ninety percent of the workforce misses out on their career objectives and limit their future because they fail to use power. Although the media suggests that the world is filled with money-grabbers and power-hungry people, lacking any ethics whatsoever, that's not reality. Yes, power remains the dirty word in political and organizational worlds. And most attempt to gain power by flattery and obsequious behaviors. The truth of the matter, however, is that if you want to get your wishes granted and achieve your career goals, you're going to need to use power. 

But some of you may say that you need to start with your attitude, first, not the behavior. The research has shown that entire perspective is dead-wrong. Act "as if" . . . or "fake it and you'll make." The behavior will lead to the appropriate attitude.

So what do we know about how you sit or stand impacts you?  

Studies of the relationship between physical and psychological states, what is nicely called "embodiment," is a growing focus of research in the behavioral sciences. Behavioral scientists have found that a broad range of physical gestures and postures produce thoughts, feelings and beliefs. That happens without situational factors to drive those reactions. So, thought a team of researchers at Columbia and Harvard, it just might be that the way we sit or stand might make feel more powerful and commanding.

Lab Rat (John Cloud) reports on the results of the research Time:

To see if the researchers were right, I went to a Columbia lab, sat down in my typical slouch and spat into a little tube. Have you ever tried to spit on demand? It's harder than you think. Columbia assistant professor Dana Carney gave me a piece of gum to help. Then Carney put me in the hawk and feet-on-the-desk power postures, and 15 minutes later, I spat into another tube.

Carney sent both spit samples to a lab at Penn State. When the results came back a couple of weeks later, it turned out my testosterone had doubled in the short amount of time I spent in the power positions.

My response wasn't unusual. In the most recent issue of Psychological Science, Carney and her colleagues Andy Yap at Columbia and Amy Cuddy at Harvard published a paper evaluating the responses of 42 people who underwent a test similar to the one I took. They found that cortisol and testosterone levels significantly changed for most people after they had been placed in high-power postures. Conversely, testosterone levels fell significantly in participants who were placed in low-power positions — those who had to either sit with shoulders slumped or stand with ankles crossed and arms hugging the torso.

Humans--and other animals--express power through open, expansive postures, and they express powerlessness through closed,contractive postures.  That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

So the next time you want to make certain you both act and feel powerful, put on your nonverbal display. Or, as my college voice teacher emphasized on numerous occasions: "when you sing, stand up straight, eyeball your audience, use your arms and hands expansively, and act like you own the world." 

Oh yeah, my grandson's public school (5th grade) teaches social skills and the same nonverbal expansiveness in their dance classes. His response? "Cool!" As a result, he has no difficulty inviting a young lady to dance with him.

Pictures and the research report by Carney and colleagues can be found here: Power Posing.

How to Get Information Out of Your Boss When He Doesn't Want to Give It

One frustration most employees meet very early in their work experience is that they can't get info out of their boss. Their boss stonewalls them.

Glenn Roberts, an engineer at his firm's national headquarters in Indianapolis, had been working on a project for the firm's Los Angeles plant. He'd been very successful with his projects in LA. So when he took his proposal to his boss, he expected an immediate OK. But the boss turned him down flat, telling him to do the proposal differently. When he reminded the boss that he knew the client and that he'd had success with him in the past, his boss stopped him and said, "Do it the way I told you."

Thinking the conversation was over, Glenn, frustrated and angry, went back to his desk to make the necessary changes. The LA client, as Glenn anticipated, was unhappy with the new proposal. When Glenn reported back to his boss, he simply responded, "Too bad," and turned away, ending the conversation.

These kind of experiences are not all that unusual. Even though you might not get your way, the truth of the matter is that if you understood what the hell was going on in such situations, you'd be a lot better off. You'd be able to make still better decisions in the future.

How do you get information out of your boss when he doesn't want to give it to you?

Although this kind of experience is happening less in today's workplace,  Glenn's interaction is still not unusual. First and foremost, cool off and put on your analytical hat.

Based on all the potential players, there are at least four different ways to think through Glenn's experience: issues with himself, his boss, upper management or the client. Although you may not be able to figure out the exact problem for some time, you can usually up the ante on your knowledge base and come up with a way to get some information for future use.

FYI: As a general rule, think management first--both your boss and upper management. Not the client or yourself.

But don't waste your time ascribing your boss's response to defensiveness. You want to know what's going on. So forget the psych crap and go for the facts. This is not Oprah stuff. I had to write a PhD dissertation to understand that, but it can be learned on the first week of anyone's career.

Understanding the situation

To understand your boss's response you should have a general understanding of his business and your division, the client's business (Los Angeles) and the company's business. So keep up-to-date on the company's important fiscal and competitive issues. Is the company losing business or under an unusual amount of financial pressure? That will quickly lead you into what's going on in that LA plant. Is that plant doing well or not, and why? If the company is under pressure or the LA group is in trouble, those difficulties may be impacting Glenn's proposal and his client. And often, because of organizational politics or concerns about competitive intelligence, the boss is not free to comment on issues like that. For a better understanding of such issues, go to my blog on strategic ambiguity.

Then, what do you know about your client's relation to headquarters and the company? If there've been recent problems or he's having difficulties of any sort that might possibly affect your proposal, you've got another potential explanation for your boss's resistance. For personal and professional reasons many bosses aren't going to comment on another's difficulties. You'll have to look to your internal network to get that information. Perhaps from a trusted colleague. If that client is having personal issues such as productivity, relationships, etc., that might explain the situation. Never forget that all business issues always have a people side to them--they're always political as hell and that's reality.

What about your boss? Is he under pressure? Are there some new players he's having to deal with? Or has he failed to manage power inside the organization? Furthermore, studies show that bosses have vastly different perceptions of their relationship with their subordinates and they're very consistent in their use of the chosen relationship. At one extreme are bosses who see clearly defined roles and contracts for themselves (very hierarchical). They will keep information close to the chest. At the other end of the continuum are bosses who whose relationships are built on trust, support, liking and a lot of interaction (participative). Dealing with the differences requires flexibility on your part. Companies tend to be moving to rewarding bosses who are far less hierarchical, engage in a lot of coaching and readily offer both power and responsibility to their people. Obviously, the participative boss is easier to deal with. (BTW: Under pressure, over the long term bosses can change and move from one extreme to another. When a culture changes its management expectations, most managers will adapt. Painful, but they'll do it.)

Finally, look at yourself. Has your boss been consistently giving you information and solid feedback, occasionally intervening and making suggestions? Is there a great deal of liking and respect between you and him? Are you getting the cold shoulder and is the relationship getting difficult? Don't just pay attention to your own insights. Ask a few trusted colleagues to weigh in with you on what they see happening.

Steps to take

If your boss's comment is frustrating and/or out of character, you should be ready with some smart talk to check out his comment. He's not liable to answer directly, so calculate your conversation. Use an affirming, knowledgeable statement--a paraphrase--rather than a question.

Here are some evaluative paraphrases I've found to be very useful. When your boss shuts down, look at him directly, and with a smile, say:

• Sounds to me like that was a decision made above our grade level. (Not my or your. You want to know whether upper management made the decisision. Furthermore, no boss will easily admit to a decision made above his grade level.)
• Sounds like somebody else has his finger in that pie.
• I wasn't ready for that response. Guess you know more about my client and his plant than I do. 

Enunciate clearly so there's no question about what you're saying. If you're a fast talker like me, slow down your speed and hit the consonants with a punch. You want to make certain there's no question about what you're saying.

There's a less than 50% chance when your boss is stonewalling that he'll comment. That's to be expected--and OK. Watch his nonverbals with a laser focus. A smile, wink, knowing grin, etc. mean that your guess was correct. This also assumes that you've got a baseline sense of what your boss's nonverbals mean and how he uses them. (If you can't read your boss's nonverbals, get with the program. Nonverbal failure will land you in la-la land or on the streets looking for a new job.) I've also found that a deadpan response and no discussion more often than not means my paraphrase was correct. No information is information. Using a paraphrase for information gathering is liable to earn your boss's respect rather than his rejection.

Once you've gathered your info, you can check it out elsewhere. It is especially important to adapt to that new information. With the changes in place, you'll be back in your boss's good graces--or working your network to look for other job prospects. Both options are a lot better than fuming about the information you didn't get from your boss. This is just a job, not life or death.

It would be stupid of me to promise that you can always get information out of your boss. But I'm after raising your batting average. And these processes will significantly raise most workers' batting average--as much as 25%. Any baseball player would be thrilled with such an improvement.