Dan Erwin

Doing a Better Job with People Analytics

There are some jobs that you just can’t trust algorithms to do. Yet more and more organizations are trusting algorithms to make their people decisions. Yet, writing in the Sloan Review, Wharton’s Cade Massey makes what to me is an obvious point. Objective distance is overrated. Although many in artificial intelligence think you can reason better when you’re uncorrupted by the subjective, that doesn’t follow in many people decisions.

The facts are that when you’re dealing with hiring, developing managing and trying to retain people, the better approach is about relationships and trust. That doesn’t mean you need to ignore those algorithms, but that you need to work them in tandem to people. For some analysts, “networking is not only uncomfortable, but dubious.” This mindset can be a real handicap. Being a loner eliminates the safety net of both information and goodwill. And like it or not, sometimes when you’re let go, it’s not about your skills, but about the good will and relationships you’ve failed to create.

I’ve used Richard Burt’s seminal studies on networking for years—and found that it’s applicability in organizations is profound. Decades of research reveal that people gain professional benefits –including both formal and informal power—from the quality and size of their social network—their relationships. I put “quality” first in that sentence, because some confuse size alone with the power of their networking. Quality is usually more important than size. But don’t confuse your algorithmic brain with the total of reality. Algorithms ain’t everything. And being a loner will inevitably get you the short end of the stick, and sometimes serious trouble..

The Trouble with Saints

If you’ve read sociology, you’ve probably read Max Weber. Weber (1864—1920), one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, is the update to Machiavelli. Weber's brief pamphlet, Politics as a Vocation, is the best prescription for politics, especially the politics of the past two years. So, I was both amused and delighted by a brief article in the 1/24 issue of The Economist on Max Weber’s enduring wisdom. Lecturing in the midst of German turmoil of 1918, The Economist emphasizes how his insights still make sense of politics.

Germany was in a far worse state than our Trump world. Rival Berlin factions battled for power in the streets. Several leaders were murdered. On January 28th of that year, Max Weber lectured liberal students “On Politics as a Vocation,” one of the most important contributions to modern political theory, as valuable a map to the contemporary political landscape as it was 100 years ago. (The thirty-page pamphlet is available free on the web, via Google.)

Weber was contemptuous of leaders solely determined to stick to their principles, whatever the consequences. “This ethic of conviction was the hallmark of saints, pacifists and purist revolutionaries...

The Flip Side of Happiness

Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.

American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...

The Better Decision is Unconscious

You’ve just moved out of state and are looking for a new house in the new location. The local real-estate broker informs you elaborately about several available houses and takes you on a tour. After a couple hours you find yourself completely lost.

The houses differ so many ways that you find yourself completely lost. You’re not certain you can actually make a sound choice. One house is bigger than the others, and also more expensive. You’ve been promoted to director, not vice-president. Another house has a beautiful garden, a great opportunity for you and your wife to unwind and also enjoy some fresh vegetables. Still a third house is a rickety old mansion. It has three bathrooms, one of them with Tuscany marble. A glorious room. . .

If you want to be great at something, who should you learn from?

In an absolutely fascinating opinion article, Adam Grant opined that "those who can do, can't teach." I laughed as soon as I saw the title. It was pretty clear to me where he was going. Grant argues rightly that the greatest experts in a subject are not necessarily the best teachers. My usual way of getting to this issue is to tell an entry-level person that the best coach will never be more than two levels above you. Beyond that, the expert will be highly abstract, assume the unassumable about you, and won't be able to put the skills in a concrete package.

But Grant's way of going at the issue is so very useful, it needs to be added to your toolkit for coach selection. 

First, pay attention to how long since the teacher studied the material. Ignore the top universities' boast about how most of their classes are taught by top faculty. The best teachers are probably grad students who just learned the material and know what it's like to be a beginner. In my post-doc work, I signed up for a course in adult learning and was initially disappointed that it was going to be taught by a teaching assistant, a grad student in his last year of PhD. From the start, he surprised me with his thoroughness. Later in the semester the top prof in the field subbed for his grad student when he had a bad case of the flu. Wow, was I glad the TA was teaching. The expert couldn't get the cookies on the bottom shelf for us no matter how many questions we asked...

The Demands of Extreme Teaming

In an interview with Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, the professor points out that today’s managers have to work with teams that cross distance, discipline and hierarchy—a task that doesn’t come naturally. She refers to the task as “extreme teaming,” arguing that with the complications of 24/7 global operations, more people than ever are required to collaborate outside the context of a formal team.

Edmondson is extremely cautious in her conclusions. For example, when asked why we’re seeing more extreme teaming, she responds, “beyond the increasingly globalized workplaces, there’s a recognition that we’re not always going to rely on vertical integration to solve all of our challenges. It sometimes just makes sense to team up with another organization to get something done.”

Note the language: “not always going to rely…” “increasingly globalized workplaces” “sometimes just makes sense.” That many caveats and qualifiers in just two sentences of 37 words including articles? Really? In medium-sized or large corporations, 90% of execution is cross-disciplinary. And in small tech firms, close to 95% of execution is cross-disciplinary.

There actually are hurdles, as the interviewer writes, “Many managers are not equipped with the skills to capture the full value of these multifaceted collaborations.” And what about the ordinary workers who are involved in all these cross-disciplinary teams?

Actually, team failures abound in virtually every organizational change. One recent study of 95 teams in 25 leading corporations found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional. Engineers don’t converse well with designers, marketing doesn’t converse well with development, and so on. It’s becoming rather clear that the real business of business is conversation. Yet few have these skills at the level necessary for today’s successful business person.

And what about the few that have these skills in spades?

Do Chameleons Get Ahead?

Most employees make getting ahead a very high objective. Promotions can drastically change the lives of both those who stay in a company and those who move to another company. Promotions do more than provide different job duties and better rewards. They can also change where you live and who you get to interact with. In today’s high-pressured workplace, gaining new skills and working with different people can help keep you on the learning curve—and provide for job security.

 

Recently, studies have assessed the power of personality traits to impact promotion and rewards. The studies have ignored the actual performance of individuals and focused, for example, on the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism. Systematic studies have found that personality can predict job performance fairly well—but only under certain conditions. In fact, you may have lots of job relevant talent and personality traits, like conscientiousness and extraversion, but nevertheless fail to gain power or get promoted. . .

How Trustworthy Is Our Self-Awareness?

There’s no question but what we develop our identity based partially on our self-perception. But can we really trust our own self-perception? Do we accurately know what we did and said? I love telling stories to my grandkids about our family. More than often than not, at least one of my daughters will very quickly say, “that’s not how it happened. I was there.”

That brings a lot of laughter, especially from me. My general attitude to my kids is that if they’re not intelligent enough to poke fun at me, they’re not my kids. But it’s still a very important question. Do we really know what we said and did in a past experience. The police say never to trust an observer’s narrative. There are a number of reasons for that. We usually see what we want to see, we look but often don’t see, we wear rose-colored glasses, or sometimes we connect dots that really don’t connect.

One study goes for the jugular on this question: do people know how they behave?   

Do Your Conversational Skills Need Upgrading?

More and more research is revealing that conversational skills can put you ahead of the game. Sure you need cognitive ability and emotional insight, but it's the ability to converse well that's tied to career success and even to innovative competence.

For example, one study investigated implicit communication strategies on complex team tasks. The researchers contrasted project team conversation: teams which readily shared goal information without being asked, versus teams that were reactive—teams whose members had to be questioned to gain goal information. In the study which involved 13 teams of four people performing the collaborative tasks, they found that the five teams with the fastest task completion times and lowest idle times exhibited higher rates of conversation and free-flowing sharing. In contrast, the five teams with the slowest completion times and longest idle times were primarily reactive. So people with proactive conversational and deliberative communication skills are far more successful performers.

In another example, Robert Baron and a colleague developed a 30-item social skills inventory to study such conversational skills as social perception, social adaptability and expressiveness.  Research on 159 independent sales contractors and 71 top high-tech executives found some startling revelations.  The higher the social competencies, the greater the financial success of both independent sales contractors and the top high-tech executives.

Who makes the money and who gains the opportunities? ...

The Lost Art of Thinking

On numerous occasions as a management consultant, I asked execs about how much time they took to think about process, innovation or strategy. Often, the response was that they didn’t have time to think. A couple said that they were paying me to do the thinking. A compliment, but very unwise. And I provided a very deliberate rationale for refusing that business opportunity.

So how did we get to the place where managers don’t realize that thinking is part of their job? In a very thoughtful and fascinating article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Duncan Simester pointed out that the bias for doing, not thinking, is built into business. Companies succeed by creating a successful business model—and then scaling it massively. Massive scaling requires a “finely tuned system with highly standardized processes.” So, getting promoted requires “almost a singular focus on execution.

In other words, it requires action more than thinking.” So guess what? It’s inevitable that we focus on what we get rewarded for. And in business, that’s execution.

The smart thinkers I’ve met in business simply refuse to get involved in much execution which would set aside their need for thinking. In other words, to get more thinking people firms are going to have to change the work situation--for at least a select group. Admittedly selection processes have a limited record of accuracy. Still, the process for developing thinkers will have more success than what goes on today. Years ago, one of the major firms to which I consulted offered year long, internship experiences with senior officers for their fast track people. They had a significant amount of success in developing thinkers who could take on the jobs of creativity and complexity. and strategists. 3M Corporation has had great success with similar projects over the years. And of course, the better business thinkers, like 3M, have better business.

The need for thinkers in business is obvious to many executives. One of my clients, a Pillsbury EVP in research and development...