Dan Erwin

Top Workplaces for Millennials

You'll be very surprised to learn which firm is number one in the nation for the huge millennial generation. You might guess Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or even Buzzfeed. They're in the top ten, but none of the usual standbys are #1. Facebook is not even in the top 25.

The National Society of High School Scholars partnered with Hanover Research on the survey. They surveyed over 13,000 students and young professionals between the ages of 15 and 32. The goal was to understand the preferences and attitudes of "high achieving millennials." It's no surprise that career interests are heavily focused on science, technology, engineering and math...

Text, Tweet or--Email? Try Prairie Dogging.

It’s become a recurring storyline for newspapers, magazines, tv and the web. Joe, for example, was a leading candidate for a good position in a hot firm. Before the final recommendation the recruiting firm checked out his use of social media. There was no badmouthing of his current firm. But a 20-something, Joe had sent one “harmless” picture of sexting while in college and the picture was still there. No recommendation for Joe! Even though he was now embarrassed by his college prank, there’s practically no disposal. And the recruiter found it.

Surveillance monitoring is nothing new. At the least, it dates back to the beginning of Henry Ford’s assembly line in the early 20^th century. (I suspect the Egyptians were monitoring their slaves’ production of granite block for the pyramids.) Ford’s systems were set up ...

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...

Why Leadership-Development Programs Fail

In an insightful and practical paper, McKinsey addresses four reasons why leadership programs fail. Three were standard fare, but with a thorough-explanation, rationale and suggested resolution of the problem. The fourth issue was especially insightful. It’s one that’s very difficult to deal with in group sessions, but very significant. I’ve dealt successfully with it in one-on-ones, but it’s a different animal, especially tough in group sessions. I’ll explain the why and how further on, moving beyond what the McKinsey report has to say.

Since there’s fairly widespread knowledge about three of the insights, I’ll summarize them briefly. McKinsey emphasizes that failure comes from overlooking context, decoupling reflection from real work and failing to measure results.

--Overlooking context. Expertise in one situation does not guarantee expertise in another. So successful training will focus upon the specific organizational and/or group context. Limit the development to two or three issues for effective learning. My program typically works with an executive in face-face situations for a year, inside the organizational premises. That includes about 15 sessions, exceptionally ...

Smart Dad with Smart Kid

"The 'State of Hockey' is. . . excessive." Anyone who reads enough to compare cultural values in the Western world is aware that we in the States are not known for our moderation. That was best illustrated by a comment of a lead character in the British espionage series, MI-5. In one episode he commented regarding the chaos in Iraq Middle East that he'd be glad when "the US Military could find no more countries to invade."

I've often been smitten by holding a similar attitude toward the complete lack of any sense of long-term priorities or moderation in the attitudes toward local sports and the public schools, whether grade school or college. So I thought the lead commentary in today's Star Tribune on the role of hockey in Minnesota was both daring and long overdue. It also elicited a huge guffaw with the final statement.

The extended comment, written by Dale Vaillancourt, a young father from the middle class suburb of Burnsville, paid attention to the fact that Minnesota is a hockey crazy state. He was quick to say that he enjoyed watching "two evenly matched teams battle it out on the ice. If there's some brutal checking or a fight. . . even better." Obviously, Vaillancourt is also a sports guru. He just completed his 12th American Birkebeiner ...

What Are You Reading? Here Are Five Especially on Career Development

What’s often frustrating about the plethora of web material on personal development is the difficulty of sorting the highly useful recommendations from the fluff or the just plain wrong-headed. A terrific amount of so-called career research suffers from the halo effect—the bias that because an attribute is productive in one occasion, then the other related attributes will also be productive—and in other situations. The halo effect is also at work in the distinction between cause and correlation. Still, there is far more empirical, social science and humanistic research in the field than most would imagine, so whenever that’s available, I recommend it to my clients. On other occasions, I recommend the work of well-known authorities. Here are a number of potentially useful recommendations.

Stanford’s Bob Sutton, on Five signs that your mentor is giving you bad advice, an expert in the field of career and behavior, supplies us with an unusual, even unique set of valuable insights. Sutton reminds us of the struggle to take something that works well in one place and replicate it in another (the halo effect). As Sutton points out to mentees, they “have to play an active role in judging the advice they get.” Sheryl Sandberg is among those who reveal that mentors have played a key role in her success, but that she’s learned . . .

You Don't Need an IQ Score to Figure Out How Smart That Guy Is

How can you figure out the smarts of a colleague without having a consulting PhD? I shouldn’t be giving this away, but the basics are actually so simple that anyone willing to keep her eyes glued and ears open to another person can figure out that person’s basic work smarts. Quickly and easily. By testing and watching for three simple behaviors.

But first, does it really matter how smart that person is? You bet your sweet bippy it does. You want to know whether you can trust his advice, whether he’ll have much to add to a new team project, whether he can be counted on to meet his objectives, whether he can accept added responsibility and even whether he’ll make an effective manager.

Before I lay out my secret, remember this. . . 

Racism, Business Diversity and the Ballot Box

In Saturday’s NYTImes, Charles Blow provided his readers with an exceptionally articulate statement on Disrespect, Race and Obama. Blow’s insights are accompanied by fascinating data from the 2012 election revealed by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Harvard PhD student in behavioral economics. Reflecting on Blows insight and using the data from Stephens-Davidowitz, it strikes me that there is a more significant than usual interpretation of the current political scene—and business diversity. 

In the 1970’s and ‘80’s, Virginia Satir was one of the most respected and revered psychotherapist in the country, and for good reason.  Widely known as “The Mother of Family Therapy,” Satir took a family systems approach to counseling, an approach that was just gaining credibility. Indeed, her change processes are still applied successfully to organizations. But one of Satir's most novel ideas at the time, was that the "presenting issue" or "surface problem" itself was seldom the real problem; rather, how people coped with the issue created the problem. This approach is supportive of systems problem solving in business. Thank you, Peter Senge, et al.

And it’s an insight that applies. . . 

The High Performers Are Not the Best Mentors

Recent research into role model and mentor selection reveals that the best choices are counter-intuitive. You’d think that a top expert or an exceptional performer would make for the best role model or coach. That, however, is patently false—and it could hurt you.

Both role models and mentors can be so far removed from your day-to-day work that they are of little value to you. Instead, you want folk who have recently walked in your shoes and can give you relevant, practical, concrete insight into your work.

Second-best makes a better role model
Alina Tugend of the New York Times summarized several studies on role models and reported on a number of problems with using exceptional performers as role models. As she writes, we Americans tend to fetishize the guy who’s number one—certain that that if we do what he or she does, we’ll be successful. But the research doesn’t support that.

Two profs from the University of Warwick (U.K.), Chengwei Liu and Jerker Denrell, drew their conclusions from simulated data. They studied how average skill levels differ with the number of successes achieved. They found, surprisingly, that workers who achieved exceptional success had an average skill level lower than those with fewer successes. Typically, the most impressive over the long term are the moderately successful rather than the exceptional performer.

Why do the exceptional performers have less skill than the moderately successful? In short, luck—those chance events outside the control of individuals. Furthermore, those at the pinnacle of their field may have taken huge risks—risks which are dangerous to imitate. Indeed, exposure to “illustrious” models often causes us to think we’re not at all like that.