Dan Erwin

How Did Chief Justice Roberts Make His Decision?

Thankfully, Roberts didn't lay out his personal rationale. So I don’t have the answer to that question. But I suspect that Charles Krauthammer’s thoughtful analysis was definitely a piece of Roberts’ thinking, though probably not the entire picture. Krauthammer argues that the reputation of the court was at stake. Although I’m not certain that Krauthammer is completely correct,this one thing I do know: making significant change is tough as nails. It’s so tough that most of the time we simply reject change when faced with that option.

Change is an issue that my businesses and my person have forced me to struggle with most of my life. If you’re in the organizational change business, you know that change fails more often than succeeds. And if, like me, you’re a coach who’s working with people who might be resistant to change, you recognize that what you’re doing may be a waste of time. The change ain’t going to happen very easily. (Thankfully, 95% of the folk who come to me today want to make a change and are merely asking for procedural help.)

Why is significant change so very difficult?
Historically we’ve answered that question by suggesting that we miss the big picture, that if something ain’t broke we don’t want to think about fixing it, or even that we’ve taken on outsized expectations. But over the past twenty years, researchers have dug into that question a bit deeper and come up with a far more useful answer to the problem. And it’s just been over the past few years that we’ve figured out how to deal with that research data.

The research finds that we think differently about an issue prior to making a decision than after making that decision. Prior to a decision about an important issue (“predecisional”), we explicitly spend our time analyzing options and alternatives. All the decisionmaking principles apply. However, once we’ve made a decision about an important issue, we stop the decision making processes. From that time forward (“postdecisional”), we focus on implementing our decision.

In other words, once we move from planning, deciding and goal-setting to the implementation of our plans, we “cross a metaphorical Rubicon.” We work to protect and foster those goals. You know the line: “I’ve made my decision. Don’t bother me with new information.” And so we build thick, nearly impenetrable walls, around our decisions. We are resistant to new information and resistant to change.

So how did Roberts make his decision?
I assume, based on his previous rulings, that Roberts’ conservative political and judicial walls are fairly thick. And initially, he may have been willing to work with his conservative colleagues. In short, initially he may have been fairly complacent about the decision.

But, and this is very important. The conversations surrounding the nature and practice of Court have become front and center over the past 10 years. Judicial complacency was no longer possible.  

Complacency about any issue is built on the basis of historical success. If a person can think that he can succeed in the future on the same basis he has in the past, you can be certain there will be no change.

In the past, the Roberts Court had consistently found success by voting on a partisan basis, typically 5—4 on most decisions. However, over the past 10 or so years, the background conversations, especially as a result of the Bush/Gore decision and the Citizens-United decision had begun to challenge the reputation of the court. The conversations had switched from rulings to reputation. As Chief Justice, Roberts is responsible not only for managing decisions, but also for managing the long-term reputation of the court. In this instance, the reputational conversation had become so noisy, that I suspect he had to turn his focus to court reputation—and his legacy. Roberts has demonstrated political acumen that neither Scalia nor Alioto have in their toolkit.

Call it political. Call it bipartisan. Whatever. If Roberts intended to preserve the reputation of the court, it was a terrifically smart move. In any instance, he realized that complacency was no longer an option.

Change management
One of the most difficult issues change managers have to deal with is organizational complacency. There are a lot of ways of conversing about complacency. “Why mess with success?” “Don’t rock the boat.” “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Etc., etc. Those are tough background conversations to change.

If we hope to be successful at change management, that will inevitably mean that we have to change those conversations. That will mean that we have to bring them into the foreground, examine them and shift the conversation. The only way, then, will be to reinvent new conversations. Reframe, reinterpret and interact with the world differently. I suspect that’s exactly what happened with Roberts. He found himself, because of all the noise about the Court, having to reframe the issue not as judicial. But as reputational. Ummm. A reminder. All decisions are political.

Flickr: by Talk Radio News Service

It's Still Not What You Know, But Who You Know

“Even in a digital age, word of mouth is the best way to find a job,” says Businessweek's Chris Farrell in the June 18 issue. That's still true for recent grads. I’ve been thinking for some time that I was wrong-headedly beating a dead horse on the issue of face-to-face networking. Especially with the all-present digital networking buzz. Turns out, says the research, I wasn’t off the mark.

The online networks are trying to replicate the word-of-mouth, face-to-face networking. But with limited success. A large body of research reveals that 50% or more of all new jobs are gotten through informal channels such as family or friends. And that’s still true today. Indeed, even Charles Purdy, the senior editor at Monster Worldwide, reinforces the fact that “Hiring has always been based on reputation and who you know.” 

Social networking tools, says Chris Farrell, allow people to build up a network. Ummmm. Not quite. What Farrell and many others fail to emphasize is that the ultimate key to success is a high quality network. The potential for a high quality network built solely on the web is seriously limited. 

Really effective networks provide information about jobs, work, organizational culture and useful company contacts. McKinsey’s James Manyika says that for recent grads, a quality informational network is difficult to come by. And as Wharton’s Peter Capelli has emphasized, employers control everything about the process. “They define the job, they create the requirements for the job, then they decide how the word gets out to people, recruiting-wise. They set the rate of pay, which helps determine how the attractive the job is, and then they handle the selection part where they look at the applicants and sort them out.” That makes for very poor odds unless you’ve got an internal company contact or just happen to be the purple squirrel a company is looking for.

On top of all that, the recent study by Capelli emphasizes that the hiring software really sucks. And further, companies tend to be looking for someone who has the exact experience they’re looking for—the so-called purple squirrel. That’s a very unique person. This means that you’re going to have to figure out how to get around the hiring software. So the best advice is to see whether you can get to a real person where you can make the case about why you’re the employee they’re looking for. Of course, once again, you need that quality contact or two.

Who you know: the “quality contact”
One route to the quality contact is through internships. It’s new and even tough for students to be thinking about internships early in their college career, but using summers for those internships is one route to quality contacts. Strategic thinking about an internship is a must. If at all possible, it’s important to intern at medium and larger firms with people in the know. Make certain you do your best and get to know the knowledgeable folk.

The second route is often overlooked: temp jobs. Temporary grunt jobs at middle-sized or major corporations can help with your finances, but also provide contacts who can recommend you based on your observed performance. Temp firms also provide a great deal of free training, what other companies are less willing to do. More and more, people who’ve been out of work for a long period of time are finding that temp jobs can offer a lot more than a few bucks: training and contacts.

The third route to quality contact is through volunteer work with strategic non-profits. Non-profits are always looking for free helpers. Non-profits inevitably have a few people in the know in the work community. They’re good for contacts—if you’ve performed well for the firm.

My little network secret
Few seem to be aware that the best networked folk are non-profit fundraisers. If a fundraiser has been in the business for a few years, she or he knows everybody of substance. "They know somebody who knows somebody."  But you’ll probably need a good contact to get to that fundraiser. They’re going to be very cautious about recommending someone.

Networking rule number one
Networking is all about giving, not getting. So before you start making those contacts, figure out what you can bring to that person. That’ll require some creative thinking and the insights of experienced folk. But you’re not going to get very much help unless you’ve got something to give. Networks are like banks: You can’t withdraw unless you’ve made some deposits.

But keep this on the front lobe: It's not what you know, but who you know.

Flickr photo: malbordesign

The Skills Gap Is Bunk

You name the business pundit or educator. They’re all saying that the US labor market has a skills gap, a gap that has a heavy impact upon the unemployment rate. But how accurate, really, are those statistics. And more significantly, when you drill down into the jobs data what does it reveal?

The basics are scary. Four years after the start of the Great Recession, US business is making record profits. But we have a “jobless recovery” with unemployment stubbornly high. Two-thirds of manufacturing employers decry the lack of qualified applicants. Fast-growing companies say that finding really qualified candidates is a huge impediment to growth.

On the flip side, there are stories about employers who can’t find qualified applicants. Here’s one intriguing story from Peter Capelli: One of my favorites is a job ad for a cotton candy machine operator—if you’ve never seen cotton candy made, it is not rocket science—where the requirement for applicants was demonstrating prior success operating similar cotton candy machines. To test whether his company’s hiring standards were too high, a Philadelphia-area human resources executive applied anonymously for a job in his own company. “I didn’t make it through the screening process,” he notes.

I learned years ago that nobody, but nobody, understands the work marketplace from a macro/micro, employer/employee perspective better than Peter Capelli, Wharton’s GW Taylor Prof of Management and codirector of the National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce during both Bush and Clinton’s administrations. The statistics and the story above are from his brilliant, 100 page, readable analysis of what’s actually going on in the marketplace, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The skills gap and what companies can do about it. If you’re in HR or a corporate exec, I recommend that you don’t let the sun set before you pick up your copy. You can read it in two hours.  Use your red pen, but be ready to find yourself more than a little unhappy with what he has to say about companies, execs and HR departments. Nobody comes out unscathed. Obviously, I’m going to have to revamp my thinking and some of my approach.  Aaargh!!

So why can’t good people get jobs? Among the conclusions which Capelli draws from his in-depth analysis of the data are the following:

• Higher productivity is a culprit. The simple math is that productivity was 6.7% higher at the beginning of 2012 than it was in 2008. Some of that is because companies work people harder—which has its limits. The new normal is partially impacted by higher productivity, which reduces employee need. And that's structural. 
• Population and workforce keep growing. US population is 4% (140,000 new people per month) higher now than in 2008. Fewer jobs and more people aren’t in sync.
• Employers are unwilling to pay the market wage. They shop around to see who’ll do the work for a lesser wage.
• Employers are defining job requirements in such a way that applicants have to have done the job previously before they can get hired. This is a distinct departure from the past, getting past the HR folk because of the downsizing of HR groups.
• Employers ask employees to move geographically to get a new job, but they won’t/can’t guarantee the job will last. Put yourself in the employee’s shoes. Who wants to relocate when the job may not last long, and up jobless in a community with no contacts?
• Hiring software sucks.  Really bad stuff. As Capelli’s anecdote above reveals, not a chance even in your own company.
• Employers now expect the feds, the states and the schools to do the training. In 1979, young workers on average received about 2.5 weeks of training with the company. By 2011, Accenture found that only 21% of employees had received any training whatsoever in the past five years. A huge proportion of training also used to be supplied by unions, but you know what business has done to the unions. 

So overall, employers can afford to be picky, applicants need to be overqualified, and employers focus on the skills associated with work experience, not education.

In sum, software driven hiring is a mess. And employers are unwilling to do the training that they once took for granted. It's a training gap, not a skills gap.

Capelli’s recommendations
This is too important a book for me to tell you everything Capelli has to say. Check the book list on the side of my blog to purchase it from Amazon.com. Capelli has built-in recommendations (very practical and feasible) for employers. And some very strategic recommendations for those in the job hunt.  

Capelli's little monograph grew out of a Wall Street Journal article where he ruffled more than a few feathers (441 comments, but thankfully, not all negative) by saying rather bluntly, “The real culprits are the employers themselves.”  So don’t pay too much attention to the business pundits or company representatives—about jobs or education.

Flickr photo: by Pat Rafferty

"Leadership Is Conversation"

In a groundbreaking article, Michael Slind and Harvard’s Boris Groysberg come very close to a conclusion my colleague and I have been analyzing for the past two years. Focusing solely on leadership, they emphasize what they define as an “emerging truth": Leadership is conversation.” But they didn’t push the envelope far enough. Building upon leading-edge research and personal experience, we conclude that the real business of business is conversation.  

Conventional business action and thinking are highly situational. That’s what you learn in business school. So you automatically pay close attention to the environment, culture, business processes, senior executives and organizational structure. Those, you’re told, are the limitations and constraints upon your future. From that perspective, conversation is, at best, an ancillary tool for achieving one’s personal and organizational objectives. In other words, this conventional and very limiting model argues that the path to success and leadership requires you to bend your conversational strategies to the situation.  

 
In contrast, we turn this out-dated paradigm on its head. Indeed, this constant, overweening focus on the limitations and constraints of the situation is a program for failure. In stark contrast, we view language and conversation as the primary means by which an individual or organization succeeds or fails. Language is never innocent or neutral.  Indeed, in business, as in life, language is highly subversive. It makes change inevitable. For the willing and focused professional language is the power for social possibility, creativity and innovation.

Conversation as creative force
Over years of experience, I’ve worked with numerous clients who were limited--and underperforming--because they were blind to the resources and opportunities provided by the conversational paradigm. There are examples from all the business disciplines, but this one from sales is typical. Hired to coach an architectural director in client relationship skills, I found him fearful, defensive, and imprisoned by the difficulties of his situation. Twenty years ago, I’d have worked with those personal, behavioral issues. Instead, I focused immediately on his conversational interactions with the potential client, guiding him in the development of interactional scripts. I explained that “initiating conversations” should emphasize, authentically AND transparently, that he faces the same kind of problems as the client. His conversation should share stories that make his values clear, and that he’s really not what the client expects—a salesperson. 

In this sales example, situations such as physical environment, a project’s financial demands and the limitations of the economy are secondary. Here, the linguistically-astute salesperson has a single initial objective: conversations that can develop a social contract of mutual problem solving, a contract where authenticity, transparency and trust are at the forefront.   

It is the conversational paradigm, supported by situational actions, that best achieves personal and organizational objectives. And that is true, no matter your profession, business or discipline.   

Why does the conversational perspective work so well?
“Initiating conversations,” for example, focus upon what we call a “replacement strategy.” Replacement strategies dislodge a client’s logic and replace it with a deeper understanding of the clients’ business, revamping their thinking, and taking control of the sales conversation. Such conversational assertiveness with clients and bosses may include even potentially controversial views. These conversations make it possible to rethink one’s business, deconstruct it, change it as times change and even joke about it, granting us power to deconstruct our limited worlds, create new thoughts and opportunities that situations can never limit. Certainly, these conversations require a degree of verbal competency. But uniquely, they also free us from both personal and organizational constraints.

There are numerous advantages to organizational conversations, what we call “organizational rhetoric.” Put differently, we find that in today’s economy business folk win not because they’ve mastered business situations, but because they’ve mastered the conversational perspective and methodology. And so in the near future, we’ll break out these advantages, illuminate them with experiences from past projects, back them with piles of rigorous, intriguing studies, and make very practical suggestions for exploiting them.

To tease you a bit, we’ve listed the advantages of the conversational perspective below, knowing full well that over time you’ll find them exceptionally rewarding.

• Situational expectations no longer constrain the smart conversationalist.
• Situational threats go by the wayside.
• Conversations provide unlimited means for reframing dominant logics
• Conversations can shed light on issues that situational constraints might not permit.
• Conversations offer solutions well outside the box.
• Conversations significantly extend opportunities in adaptation, creativity and innovation.
• Intentional conversations (rhetoric) are the driving mechanism of all change.
• The employee and manager have far more control over their reputation and identity.

The best conversationalists succeed because they keep chipping away at a huge pile of dull, interesting, fun, rewarding and often ridiculous chores. The good news is that extensive studies in the fields of neuroscience and deliberate practice place no limitations on anyone’s potential. And we wish that we could promise you that the path will be easy. Despite the horseshit spewed out by too many coaching gurus, there are no shortcuts and no magic bullets. But the payoff for those who build their conversational toolkit is well worth the work. 

One of those business thinkers way ahead of the conversational curve is Karl Weick. He summarizes what we’re doing this way: Rich conversational vocabularies matter. They matter a great deal. They provide unique options for action and reveal opportunities that otherwise might be perceived as threats.

Flickr photo: Allensma 

Introverts? Both Romney and Obama Are "Almost Shy"

The man who knows both Romney and Obama says, “Both are almost shy, which is amazing in this business.” Actually, it’s not that unusual. Many in corporate America report the difficulty of dealing with their own problem of shyness. In the May Fortune, for example, Doug Conant, the former CEO of Campbell Soup, says that he just tells people that he’s shy. Although Conant says that it’s not “in his nature” to be outgoing, I doubt that his “shyness” negatively impacted his successful tenure at Campbell soup.

Shyness is far more widespread than many would believe. Philip Zimbardo, the reigning expert in the field of shyness, reveals that more than 80% of those questioned in his research reported that they were shy at some point in their lives. Thankfully, Zimbardo’s research and  practice have found a number of key to the resolution of those difficulties. 

Deep-seated emotional states?
Psychologists and psychiatrists used to think that shyness, like many other so-called pathological issues, could be traced to deep-seated pathological, emotional-motivational states. But now, they focus less on unobservable inner mechanisms and more on specific behaviors and their consequences. Behaviors are the target of change, not people.

Although it’s rare to see much in the media about shyness, The King’s Speech addressed a form of shyness—stuttering. Now that the movie is making the rounds on the tube, it provides us with a fine opportunity to visualize what some go through in their experiences of shyness.

Upside of shyness
Many of us can tick off the downside of shyness: awkward and intimidated in social situations, lacking confidence and social skills, anxious and even incapacitated, and in some instances, paralyzed. But like all human attributes, shyness has some distinct upsides. Zimbardos’ research finds that 10 to 20% of shy people prefer shyness. They enjoy appellatives like “reserved,” “modest,” “unassuming,” and “retiring.” Shyness makes a person appear discreet, seriously introspective and in some cases, very intelligent.

Moreover when these behaviors are polished, they are often considered “high class” and “sophisticated.” The number of celebrities who have used their shyness in this fashion is surprising. Among the group are David Niven, Prince Charles, Katherine Hepburn and Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy.

Furthermore, shyness provides an anonymity that some feel releases them from the sense of “ought” or “should.”  They don’t stand out from the crowd. That also makes it possible for them to take their own good time in making decisions and taking action. Zimbardo nails it: “Shyness is prevalent, often a problem full of anxiety and grief, but for some a sought-after state of being.”

Chutzpa, pride, and not-shy Jews
But if you want to develop a more open and less shy competencies, there’s a lot to learn about shyness from Jewish-Americans. Among the students who answered the Stanford Shyness Survey, Jewish-Americans were the least shy. Although more than 40% of the respondents considered themselves shy, only 24% of the Jewish-American group reported themselves as presently shy. They were less introverted, more extroverted, and when they thought they were shy, they tended to be more situationally shy.

Resolving shyness
The statistic regarding cultural Jewishness, however, is highly instructive. In research by an Israeli, Dr. Ayala Pines, a survey of 900 Israelis finds that only 35% report being shy in any situation or thought it to be a problem. And that is the lowest, by far, when compared with people of other nationalities. The study found 73% of Americans, 75% in samples from Japan, 58% from Taiwan and 82% from India viewed shyness as a problem.

Why so much statistical difference? Israelis argue that there are cultural reasons operating within society that support the extroverted style. Persecuted for centuries, communal life and life within the family has become very strong. Indeed, children are usually included in adult conversations, invited to perform their tricks for family and friends and then lavishly praised for their actions. That’s much in contrast to the parental admonishment that children are meant to be seen and not heard.

Not inborn, but learned
Thus, it ought to be clear. Shyness is not inborn or inherent, but a learned behavior. Shyness can be polished or unlearned and the relevant social skills added to one’s toolkit. Zimbardo recommends the development of social skills and even lays out a path for building self-esteem and for resolving the issue of shyness. I’ve worked with Zimbardo’s approach, coaching at least one hundred clients through those issues. Like Zimbardo, I’m convinced that a key issue is the lack of social skills.

But think carefully about the notion of social skills. Social skills are not merely the ability to converse openly. Instead, effective social skills are intentional. They are oriented to achieving specific objectives: building relationships, achieving personal objectives, sharing ideas and experiences, gathering personal information and so forth.

Well, do you consider yourself a bit shy? There are two clear-cut paths to change and growth.

Flickr photo by Claimin