Dan Erwin

You Know a Lot More Than You Can Tell

Or, it's not only who you know in the organization, but also what you know about how the organization works.

The ability to speak a language, use algebra, design and use complex processes or work with complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is rarely known explicitly, even by expert practitioners. The same is true of the knowledge of "how" an organization works, it's real priorities and deeply held impressions. This "tacit knowledge" in the form of "rules" and "mental models" has far-reaching consequences and impacts our career futures.

I've always liked to pride myself in the fact that as a consultant I only lost three gigs over the past thirty years, often staying with clients for a couple decades. But in all three instances my failure was tied to the fact that I was simply unaware of the organizations' unique, tacit mental models--its "rules"--by which people worked.

In a previous post, I commented that knowing the organizations' gossip often held keys to figuring out the "rules" or "mental models." I learned that one way to get at these "rules" was to finish interviews with the question "how do you get in trouble in your organization?"

Some essential mental models
As a result of an in-depth study of two major organizations and an analysis of a dozen or so other organizations, I've learned that there are nearly a dozen issues providing potential for organizational rules or out-of-awareness mental models. Typically, however, a division or group won't hold tightly to more than 3 or 4 mental models built on these issues. But knowledge of those mental models can ...

How Do You Stay Career Focused?

It's an important question made especially difficult by today's organizational demands. Tim Butler, from Harvard Business School, brings some smarts to the party as director of its career development program.  In this job climate it's easy to lose sight of your goals, but you can stay focused.

There are a number of issues that professionals should give some serious thought to today: 

How far out should I be looking? 

According to Butler, if you've got a Master's of some sort under your belt, you should be looking out from five to seven years.  Well, maybe.  Even the best companies rarely give more than five years of thought to their strategic thinking.  A better focus is to think deeply about the next three years. But keep a clear vision for the next five years.  That means if you're in your twenties or thirties (and have a satisfactory position) you'll want to keep your actual responsibilities more congruent with your longer term vision. 

How do you deal with career limitations?  

Most firms are saddling their employees with less flexibility and more work.  Complaining about it won't help.  Dig in, but keep ...

How to Get Smarter

"You're Telling Me I Can Develop My Intelligence?  Like a Muscle?  I Don't Believe It."  

I'd have thought by now that most people would understand that you can grow your intelligence.  But no, the notion is still a shock to the system.  As one acquaintance put it succinctly:  "That can't possibly be true." He got riled up about it, but I suspect that's merely a bit stronger than what 99% of the adult population believes.  In fact, check it out (or check yourself out).  Most people still believe that a person is born smart, average or dumb--and stays that way for life.

Research over the past twenty years has shown beyond a doubt that the brain is more like a muscle.  It gets stronger, a lot stronger, when you learn--and keep learning.  Use it or lose it. 

David Brooks pulled all this together in a fascinating column on human nature in which he summarizes the developmental issues, pushing back on over-zealous evolutionary psychology and innate beliefs.  I quote the article:

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations...

6 Steps for Women Who Deserve a Raise

One of the continuing inequities in the American workforce is the paygap between women and men.  Even though women, on average, tend to be better educated than men, those women who work full time only earn about 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. I suppose it's good news that the figure has gone up 2 cents since 2010.

FYI: To my amusement I've learned that a few women get frustrated by a man writing about this, but I have plenty of reasons, not least three daughters, who are professionals, as was my now deceased wife. At different times in their marriage all four made more than their husbands.  (Furthermore, it's important to take truth wherever you can get it.) ...

How Does Who You Know Affect What You Decide?

Bad decisions are a big drain on personal time--and they often waste precious resources. But why do these failures happen? Early on researchers focused especially on problems inherent to small groups, including bad chemistry, ineffective leadership and groupthink. Then there was a strong suggestion that bad decisions were the result of "cognitive biases." That included overconfidence and the tendency to overlook or ignore alternative viewpoints.

Although all of the above are definitely a part of the problem, Cross, Thomas and Light seem to have a better resolution of the issue. In an intriguing piece of research reported in the Sloan Management Review, they focused on how informal networks affect the decisioning of leaders. They've found the most significant answer to the question of bad decisions: network bias.  

Two conclusions are very significant:

--Leaders often try to rectify inefficient and ineffective decision making by increasing collaboration.  Cross found that engineers and scientists looking for information were more than five times as likely to turn to friends or colleagues than to a different network or research.

--Leaders are often blind to the way ...

Gossip Isn't Just for the Tabloids

I’m not at all certain why gossip has acquired such a decidedly shady reputation. But before you send me off to Dante’s 8^th Inferno, reserved solely for management and executive development consultants, let me explain my thinking. Two-thirds of all conversations, whether in business or otherwise, are about social relations. Most of which can be labeled gossip. Only a very small amount of that can be thought of as malicious. Indeed, the term gossip originally meant “godsibs,” what business people refer to as their peer group of friends. Gossip is typically the most useful information about an organization. It also comes equally from both men and women. So, I want to shine a significantly different light on all gossip, including “malicious” gossip.

First, some important conclusions: I soak up gossip like a monstrous sponge because it’s just damned useful stuff. It’s also utterly impossible to stop organizational gossip, so don’t waste your time trying. Actually, attempting to stop gossip is futile at best and destructive at worst. It’ll just go deeper underground. Furthermore, you’ll be very sorry if organizational gossip is no longer readily available. 

Gossip and the big picture
Before we narrow in on gossip, it’s important to understand the stuff of communication in organizations and societies. The beginning place for all language is to understand that language evolved ...

The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Hierarchy, Its Inevitability, and Usefulness?

“Matt,”a graduate from a top business school, joined Facebook, one of California’s innovative high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. He was told: We’re not political here. We’re young, cool, socially networked, hip, high-technology people focused on building great products. We’re family-friendly, we have few levels and less hierarchy.

We hear that message a lot from today's businesses and business gurus. The work environment is changing drastically and that today's companies are becoming fundamentally different from the companies of old. And that you're company needs to get on board the bandwagon. We’re told that not only are companies more global, but, they emphasize, to succeed companies must become more dynamic and innovative—and less formal and hierarchical. Less hierarchical?

Demise of hierarchy?
Seemingly, there are good reasons for the end of hierarchy. In the last few years both Harold Leavitt and Gary Hamel have argued that hierarchy discourages innovation and employment engagement. It makes employees into “disaffected Dilberts.” Furthermore, inexpensive communication technology, social networking and crowd-sourcing ...

You Got the Answer You Wanted. But You Asked the Wrong Question.

One of the most effective tools for successful communication is nearly always off the radar screen. Two words sum it up: anticipate misunderstanding. No matter the business situation, talkers inevitably overestimate their effectiveness. Even when they’re warned of the likelihood of misunderstanding.

Stuart Hall, the cultural theorist, has a delicious way of expressing this: There is no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding. In other words, just because you composed a message for a specific listener doesn’t mean she’ll understand it.

So if you think your colleagues don't express themselves well, even in very important settings, you may be right.  Most of us seriously overestimate our ability to communicate effectively.  We’ve known that for years, but now comes a business study demonstrating how great the potential for miscommunication really is. 

Ambiguous messaging
Boaz Keysar and Anne Henley, psychologists at the University of Chicago, studied 40 pairs of listeners and speakers.  In the research the speakers were given ambiguous messages to deliver. Fully aware of the ambiguity at the time they assessed the respondents’ understanding, they still overestimated the recipients’ understanding. The talkers believed that their intended meaning was understood "most of the time."  That belief, like a lot of other so called "soft skill" beliefs, doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of research. 

The research showed that nearly half the time those speakers thought they were understood, they were actually wrong.  In 46% of the cases there was a breakdown--the listeners didn't get it.  What was most surprising was that even though the speakers were warned that the information that they were to  communicate was ambiguous, "they still thought they managed to convey their intention with intonation."

Illusion of Control
Keysar and Henley suggested that this overestimation of communication effectiveness is indicative of the "illusion of control."  The psychologist Ellen Langer defines it as the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for instance, to feel that they control outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.  People show a high illusion of control when they are allowed to become familiar with a task through practice trials—like, for example, throwing dice. Lottery devotees often believe that when they select the numbers, they have a better chance of winning than when the numbers are selected randomly. 

Team Canada beat Team USA in the 2002 Olympics, but it was later believed that the win was the result of the luck of a Canadian coin that was secretly placed under the ice before the game to control the outcome. The members of Team Canada were the only people who knew the coin had been placed there. The coin was later put in the Hockey Hall of Fame where there was an opening so people could touch it. People believed they could transfer luck from the coin to themselves by touching it, and thereby change their own luck. Though the coin is not actually lucky or helpful in any way, people believed it was so they thought it could give them better luck. Completely irrational.

Raising your batting average
So how can a person get beyond illusion to check out the effectiveness of his or her communication when the issue is really important?  Here's where effective questioning can come to the fore. Notice my adjective, "effective."  All too often, checking on the accuracy of message reception or understanding is of little value. Some of the most popular means of checking accuracy are merely clichés. Here’s a list of typical examples, along with an analysis of their real value.

In each instance, a person makes a statement, then “checks” to see whether he’s understood. The tone of the question may be kind, arrogant, demanding, or even thoughtful. Take your pick. Whatever choice you make, the question doesn't anticipate misunderstanding. The analysis of the question is always spot-on.

"Did you hear me?”    Absolute waste of time and verbiage.  The answer is nearly always yes and means zip.

"Do you understand me?"  Nearly absolute waste of time and verbiage.  (It's just possible, though rare, that someone might respond in the negative and ask for further clarification.)  Still, probably zip.

"What did you hear me say?"  Nearly absolute waste of time and verbiage.  People can parrot and paraphrase without ever understanding the meaning or implications of a message.

Using the implication question
The most effective means of checking a message is through what's called an "implication question."  After a message, you come up with a question like this:  "Based on my conversation, what do you see as the next two or three steps?"  You're asking a question regarding information you have not given, and asking them to draw some conclusions.  Then, by listening closely, you can tell whether or not the message was clear and understood.  If so, hurray!  If not, you've got to start over.

If you want to check your own understanding, use what I call the "reverse implication question" to validate your understanding.  You've thought through what you understood was said, and made some tentative conclusions.  So you respond with your own question: "Based on what you've said, here's what I think needs to be done. . . . What do you think?"  And let the speaker respond.  If he agrees, hurray!  If not, the two of you have got to go back to ground zero again.

One thing is not debatable about communication. Overestimating our effectiveness is a regular source of miscommunication. But the implication question is one highly effective remedy.

How Do You Say "I Don't Know?"

I've been musing about why, even when the consequences are harmless, some will and some won't say, "I don't know" about an issue of their obvious ignorance?  If you're anything like most of us, it's a mixed bag.  

Being a pragmatic soul, I'll ask why you should confess to ignorance.  What's in it for you?  Of course, it's an issue of simple honesty.  But I'm unconvinced that simple honesty all the time is valued that much.  When I’m presenting before a group, I look for an opportunity to say “I don’t know.” But no more than a couple times. Too many “I don’t knows” suggest that I’m unaware and dumb. It would be great if more people could occasionally admit to ignorance, but too much of that doesn't make for a job promotion. Overall, one or two “I don’t knows” in a half hour presentation makes for great credibility, but hold it to one or two. 

The fact of the matter is that we all lie or cheat a little.  Don't think so?  In a charming study, the wry Dan Ariely of MIT, explored the subject of cheating, using--you guessed it--poker chips.  To no surprise, he found that, yes, most of us will cheat a little, given the opportunity....

How to Select a Great Non-Fiction Book

The one thing that nearly all my clients seem to remember about my coaching is that I’m book nuts. Just last week, I checked in with a former client and after updating each other on what was going on, his next question was “so what are you reading and recommending now?” I suggested just one book that I thought might pique his interest. The subtext of his question was about its main idea, whether it has some “good stuff” or “new stuff” and relevant to him. I evidently picked the right book for him: he ordered it while we were talking!

I recommended Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to Be Wrong: The power of mathematical thinking. I told him that Ellenberg takes the dull math we learned in school—or in my case, didn’t learn--and shows how it ties to everything in life. He finds real-life situations that are reflective of math, asks hilarious questions and is a masterful comedian through it all. He completely reworks my understanding of math. I wished I’d had a math teacher like Ellenberg.       

Early in my career, I had one bright engineer who used to hand me a book he was certain I would like, tell me to keep it, but let him read it after me. Why? Because he wanted to ...