Work Matters

Tag: leadership

  • 12 Books Every Leader Should Read:Updated

    I first posted this in 2011, but I update it now and then.  Note I have removed two from the list: Men and Women of the Corporation and Who Says that Elephants Can't Dance?  They are both great books, but I am trying to stick to 12 books and the two new ones below edge them out. Here goes:

    I was looking through the books on Amazon to find something that struck my fancy, and instead, I started thinking about the books that have taught me much about people, teams, and organizations — while at the same time — provide useful guidance (if sometimes only indirectly) about what it takes to lead well versus badly.  The 12 books below are the result. 

    Most are research based, and none are a quick read (except for Orbiting the Giant Hairball). I guess this reflects my bias.  I like books that have real substance beneath them.  This runs counter the belief in the business book world at the moment that all books have to be both short and simple.  So, if your kind of business book is The One Minute Manager (which frankly, I like too… but you can read the whole thing in 20 or 30 minutes), then you probably won't like most of these books at all.

    1. The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.  A masterpiece of evidence-based management — the strongest argument I know that "the big things are the little things." 

    2. Influence by Robert Cialdini the now classic book about how to persuade people to do things, how to defend against persuasion attempts, and the underlying evidence.  I have been using this in class at Stanford for over 20 years, and I have had dozens of students say to me years later "I don't remember much else about the class, but I still use and think about that Cialdini book."

    3.Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath.  A modern masterpiece, the definition of an instant classic.  How to design ideas that people will remember and act on.   I still look at it a couple times a month and I buy two or three copies at a time because people are always borrowing it from me.  I often tell them to keep it because they rarely give it back anyway. 

    4. Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman.  Even though the guy won the Nobel Prize, this book is surprisingly readable.  A book about how we humans really think, and although it isn't designed to do this, Kahneman also shows how much of the stuff you read in the business press is crap.

    5. Collaboration by Morten Hansen.  He has that hot bestseller now with Jim Collins called Great By Choice, which I need to read. This is a book I have read three times and is — by far — the best book ever written about what it takes to build an organization where people share information, cooperate, and help each other succeed.

    6. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie.  It is hard to explain, sort of like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll as the old song goes.  But it is the best creativity book ever written, possibly the business book related to business ever written.  Gordon's voice and love creativity and self-expression — and how to make it happen despite the obstacles that unwittingly heartless organizations put in the way — make this book a joy.

    7. The Pixar Touch by David Price.  After reading this book, my main conclusion was that it seems impossible that Pixar exists. Read how Ed Catmull along with other amazing characters– after amazing setbacks, weird moments, and one strange twist after another — realized Ed's dream after working on it for decades.  Ed is working on his own book right now, I can hardly wait to see that.  When I think of Ed and so many others I have met at Pixar like Brad Bird, I know it is possible to be a creative person without being an asshole.  In fact, at least if the gossip I keep hearing from Pixar people is true, Jobs was rarely rude or obnoxious in his dealings with people at Pixar because he knew they knew more than him — and even he was infected by Pixar's norm of civility.

    8. Creativity,Inc. by Ed Catmull. Price's book is fantastic, but this is one of the best business/leadership/organization design books ever written.  As I wrote in my blurb — and this is no B.S.- "“This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: making films that make them feel proud of one another.”  Note also that Catmull has a chapter on Steve Jobs that offers a different perspective than anyone else I have seen –and they worked together for decades.

    9. The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May.   This 2012 book has more great ideas about how to get rid of what you don't need and how to keep — and add — what you do need than any book ever written.  Matt has as engaging a writing style as I have ever encountered and he uses it to teach one great principle after another, from "what isn't there can trump what is" to "doing something isn't always better than doing nothing."  Then each principle is followed with five or six very short — and well-edited pieces — from renowned and interesting people of all kinds ranging from executives, to researchers, to artists.  It is as fun and useful as non-fiction book can be and is useful for designing every part of your life, not just workplaces.

    10. Leading Teams by J. Richard Hackman.  When it comes to the topic of groups or teams, there is Hackman and there is everyone else.   If you want a light feel good romp that isn't very evidence-based, read The Wisdom of Teams.  If want to know how teams really work and what it really takes to build, sustain, and lead them from a man who has been immersed in the problem as a researcher, coach, consultant, and designer for over 40 years, this is the book for you.

    11. Give and Take by Adam Grant. Adam is the hottest organizational researcher of his generation.  When I read the pre-publication version, I was so blown away by how useful, important, and interesting that Give and Take was that I gave it the most enthusiastic blurb of my life: “Give and Take just might be the most important book of this young century. As insightful and entertaining as Malcolm Gladwell at his best, this book has profound implications for how we manage our careers, deal with our friends and relatives, raise our children, and design our institutions. This gem is a joy to read, and it shatters the myth that greed is the path to success."  In other words, Adam shows how and why you don't need to be a selfish asshole to succeed in this life. America — and the world — would be a better place if all of memorized and applied Adam's worldview.

    12. The Path Between the Seas by historian David McCullough. On building the Panama Canal.  This is a great story of how creativity happens at a really big scale. It is messy. Things go wrong. People get hurt. But they also triumph and do astounding things.  I also like this book because it is the antidote to those who believe that great innovations all come from start-ups and little companies (although there are some wild examples of entrepreneurship in the story — especially the French guy who designs Panama's revolution — including a new flag and declaration of independence as I recall — from his suite in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and successfully sells the idea to Teddy Roosevelt ).  As my Stanford colleague Jim Adams points out, the Panama Canal, the Pyramids, and putting a man on moon are just a few examples of great human innovations that were led by governments.  

    I would love to know of your favorites — and if want a systematic approach to this question, don't forget The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

    P.S. Also, for self-defense, I recommend that we all read Isaacson's Steve Jobs — I still keep going places — cocktail parties, family gatherings, talks I give and attend, and even the grocery store where people start talking about Jobs and especially arguing about him.  As I explained in Wired and Good Boss, Bad Boss I have come to believe that whatever Jobs was in life, in death he has become a Rorschach test — we all just project our beliefs and values on him.

  • Rare Wisdom from Citrix CEO Mark Templeton about Hiearchy and Respect

    I confess that as an avid reader of The New York Times, I have been disappointed in recent years because they devote too much space to interviews with CEOs and other bosses. Notably, it seems to me that they run the same column twice every Sunday: Adam Bryant's "The Corner Office" and another interview column called "The Boss."  I do love many of these interviews anyway, as The Times gets interesting people and their editing makes things better.  And I am a big fan of Adam Bryant's book, The Corner Office, as it did a great job of transcending the column.   What bugs me, however, is that The Times devotes so much of the paper to interviews now, I suspect, because it is simply cheaper than producing hard-hitting investigative journalism.  They do an occasional amazing in-depth story, but there is too much fluff and not enough tough for my tastes.  

    That said, some of the interviews are still striking.  One of the best I have ever read appeared a couple years back, with Citrix CEO Mark Templeton. The whole interview is unusually thoughtful and reminds me that people who don't see themselves as CEOs and don't lust after the position often turn out to be the best candidate for the job (related point: see this study that shows groups tend to pick people with big mouths to lead but that less pushy and extroverted leaders tend to lead more effective teams — at least when the teams were composed of proactive members).   In particular, however, I was taken with this quote from Templeton:

    You have to make sure you never confuse the hierarchy that you need for managing complexity with the respect that people deserve. Because that’s where a lot of organizations go off track, confusing respect and hierarchy, and thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect. So hierarchy is a necessary evil of managing complexity, but it in no way has anything to do with respect that is owed an individual.

    If you say that to everyone over and over and over, it allows people in the company to send me an e-mail no matter what their title might be or to come up to me at any time and point out something — a great idea or a great problem or to seek advice or whatever.

    There is so much wisdom here, including:

    1. While there are researchers and other idealists running around and urging companies to rip down their hierarchies and to give everyone equal power and decision rights, and this notion that we are all equal in every way may sound like a lovely thought, the fact is that people prefer and need pecking orders and other trappings of constraint such as rules and procedures. As Templeton points out so wisely, organizations need hierarchies to deal with complexity.  Yes, some hierarchies are better than others — some are too flat, some have to many layers, some have bad communication flows, and organizational designers should err on making them as "light" and "simple" as possible — but as he says, they are a necessary evil.

    2.  His second point really hits home and is something that all too many leaders — infected with power poisoning — seem to forget as they sit at the top of the local pecking order "thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect."  When leaders believe and especially act on this belief, all sorts of good things happen, including your best people stay (even if you can't pay them as much as competitors), they feel obligated to return the respect by giving their all to the organization (and feel obligated to press their colleagues to do as well), and a norm of treating people with dignity and respect emerges and is sustained.  Plus, as Templeton points out, because fear is low and respect is high, people at the top tend to get more truth — and less CYA and ass-kissing behavior.

    No organization is perfect.  But a note for all the bosses out there.  If you read Templeton's quote a few times and think about what it means for running your organization, it can help you take a big step toward excellence in terms of both the performance and well-being among the people you lead.

  • Malicious Compliance

    I appreciate the interesting comments and suggestions in response to my last post on different levels of felt accountability.  Readers may recall that I proposed — from best to worst – that a team or organization can be characterized as having people who feel everything from authorship. mutual obligation, indifference, and mutual contempt.  I have especially been thinking about this comment from Justdriven, which builds on a prior comments by AnnieL:

    "Regarding
    your first question, I think AnneL may have identified a fifth category
    between mutual obligation and indifference which would be fear driven
    box checking. This would be the case where individuals follow procedures
    out of a fear of retribution rather than an endorsement of said
    procedures. This would seem to be what the pilot experienced. This stage
    would be a slippery slope that takes you from mutual obligation to
    indifference and then contempt."

    I am taken with "fear driven box-checking" as it seems to be both a symptom and a cause, where people who feel powerless have no ability — and thus no obligation — to help make things go well because the system makes it impossible regardless of how good their intentions might be.  This comment also got me thinking about how, in some systems, people can zoom past indifference and move to mutual contempt by following the rules exactly as a way to fight back against a bad system or boss — especially when there are bad standing rules or orders for a given challenge.   "Working to rule" is a classic labor slow down tactic, and there is some sweet revenge and irony when you get back at company or person  that you don't like by following their instructions to the letter. 

    More broadly, I have been interested in the notion of "malicious compliance" for a long time.  In Chapter 6 of Good Boss, Bad Boss I wrote about how it is sometimes used to get back at a bad or incompetent boss, or in the example below, by bosses to shield their people from a lousy boss up the chain of command:

    I know bosses who employ the opposite strategy to undermine and drive out incompetent superiors. One called it “malicious compliance,” following idiotic orders from on high exactly to the letter, thereby assuring the work would suck. This is a risky strategy, of course, but I once had a detailed conversation with a manager at an electronics firm whose team built an ugly and cumbersome product prototype. After it was savaged by the CEO, the manager carefully explained (and documented) that his team had done exactly as the VP of Engineering ordered, and although he voiced early and adamant objections to the VP, he gave up because “it was like talking to a brick wall.”
    So this manager and his team decided ‘Let’s give him exactly what he wants, so we just said “yes sir” and followed his lousy orders precisely.’ The VP of engineering lost his job as a result. Again, this is a dangerous and destructive strategy, and I would advise any boss to only use it as a last resort.

    I would be curious to hear of other examples of malicious compliance — and if you have any ideas of how to create conditions so it won't happen. Its is one of this sick but fascinating elements of organizational life.

  • Adding Women Makes Your Group Smarter — The Evidence Keeps Growing

    I was intrigued to see the new study that shows companies perform better when they have women on their boards.  Check out this story and video at CNBC.   Here is the upshot: "Credit Suisse analyzed more than 2,500 companies and found that companies with more than one woman on the board have outperformed those with no women on the board by 26 percent since 2005."

    This result becomes even more compelling when you pair it with a rigorous study done a couple years ago.  It showed that groups that have a higher percentage of women have higher "collective intelligence" — they perform better across an array of difficult tasks "that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments," as this summary from Science News reports. In that research, the explanation was pretty interesting, as the authors set out to study collective intelligence, not gender.  As Science News reported:

    Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. "We didn't design this study to focus on the gender effect," Malone says. "That was a surprise to us." However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average. "So having group members with higher social sensitivity is better regardless of whether they are male or female,"

    Yet, despite all this, there is still massive sexism out there, especially in the upper reaches of many corporations. Note this report from the Women's Forum: "While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards." 

    Pathetic huh?  And it is pretty good evidence that all those sexist boys who love going to board meetings and retreats unfettered by those pesky women are just hurting themselves — and their shareholders — in the end.  But perhaps there is justice in the world, as this just may be a case where "times wounds all heels."

    Indeed, I wonder when we will see the first shareholders' suit where a company that has no women on the board, and suffers financial setbacks, is sued.  Their failure to do so could be construed as a violation of their fiduciary responsibility.  I know this sounds silly, it does to me.   But lawyers and shareholders have sued — and won — over far more absurd things, as this would at least be an evidence-based claim (albeit one that stretches the evidence a bit too far for my tastes).

  • Dysfunctional Internal Competition at Microsoft: We’ve seen the enemy, and it is us!

    My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I have been writing about the dysfunctional internal competition at Microsoft for a long time, going back to the chapter in The Knowing-Doing Gap (published in 2000) on "When Internal Competition Turns Friends Into Enemies."  We quoted a Microsoft engineer who complained there were incentives NOT to cooperate:

    "There are instances where a single individual may really be cranking and doing some excellent work, but not communicating…and working within the team toward implementation.  These folks may be viewed as high rated by top management… As long as the individual is bonused highly for their innovation and gutsy risk-taking only, and not on how well the team accomplishes the goal, there can be a real disconnect and the individual never really gets the message that you should keep doing great things but share them with the team so you don’t surprise them."

    And we quoted another insider who complained about the forced curve, or "stacking system:"

    This caused people to resist helping one another.  It wasn’t just that helping a colleague took time away from someone’s own work.  The forced curve meant that “Helping your fellow worker become more productive can actually hurt your chances of getting a higher bonus.”

    This downside of forced-rankings is supported by a pretty big pile of research we review in both both The Knowing-Doing Gap and in Hard Facts, and I return to a bit in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The upshot is that when people are put in a position where they are rewarded for treating their co-worker as their enemy, all sorts of dysfunctions follow.  Forced rankings are probably OK when there is never reason to cooperate — think of competitors in a golf tournament — or perhaps when sales territories or (for truck drivers and such) routes can be designed so that people don't need to cooperate.  And there is one trick I've seen used (at GE for example) where people are ranked, but part of the ranking is based on how much they help others succeed — but people at GE have told me that forcing the firing of the bottom 10% can still create lots of problems (in fact, my understanding is that GE has softened this policy). 

      As my colleagues Jeff Pfeffer loves to say, the assumption that the bottom 10% have to go every year is really suspect — it assumes a 10% defect rate!  Imagine a manufacturing system where that was expected and acceptable:

    Well, the Microsoft stacking system is in the news again. A story by Kurt Eichenwald in coming out in Vanity Fair that bashes Microsoft in various ways, especially the "stacking system."  It is consistent with past research and reports that have been coming out of Microsoft for decades — I bet I have had a good 50 Microsoft employees complain about the stacking the system to me over the years, including one of their former heads of HR.

    The story isn't out yet, but according to Computerworld and other sources, this is among the damning quotes:

    Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. 'If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,' says a former software developer. It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.

    To be clear, I am not opposed to pay for performance. But when unnecessary status are created, when small quantitative differences that don't matter are used to decide who is fired, anointed as a star, or treated as mediocre, and when  friends are paid to treat each others as enemies, creating the unity of effort required to run an effective organization gets mighty tough — some organizations find clever ways to get around the downsides of stacking, but some succeed despite rather than because of how they do it. 

    The late quality guru W. Edwards Deming despised force rankings.  Let's give him the last word here. Here is another little excerpt from The Knowing-Doing Gap:

    He argued that these systems require leaders to label many people as poor performers even though their work is well within the range of high quality.  Deming maintained that when people get these unfair negative evaluations, it can leave them "bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of the rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior.”

  • Boring = Good? Inspirational = Bad?

    LeadershipINCSutton20012

    That is the title of weird interview that just came out in INC this month, which I did with Leigh Buchanan.  And the above drawing is by Graham Roumieu. 

    Here is the story on the INC website. The title is different online than in the print version, they call it "Thoroughly Counterintuitive Approach to Leading."  

    Leigh is always fun to talk to, and after having done interviews on both The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, she has emerged as one of my favorite journalists.  For starters, she has such a sense of fun — most of us involved in doing and working with management are entirely too serious — I certainly plead guilty.  Leigh has the rare ability to talk about real ideas while at the same time conveying the absurdity of so much of organizational life .  She is also a great editor. In every interview I have done with her, I've rambled incoherently on for an hour or so, and she somehow put it in a form that made sense.

    This new interview a conglomeration of some of the stranger ideas from the various books I have written, especially Weird Ideas That Work along with some new twists.  As with weird ideas , I offer these ideas to challenge your assumptions (and my own) and to prompt us all to think.  I don't expect you to agree with them (I am not even sure I agree with all of them), but there is actually a fair amount of evidence and theory to support each of these sometimes uncomfortable ideas.

    To give you a taste,here is how the interview kicks-off:

    Leigh: You and I have been e-mailing about leadership traits, and at one point you suggested, “Good leaders know when to be boring, vague, emotionally detached, and authoritarian.” Under what circumstances might such traits be desirable? Start with boring.

    Me: There are two situations in which it’s a good idea to be boring. One is when you’re working on something but, so far, all you’ve got is bad news. Under those circumstances, any outside attention is bad.

    Don Petersen was the CEO of Ford after the Iaccoca era, and he was responsible for turning the company around. He told me a story about being invited to speak at the National Press Club. He didn’t want to do it. At the time, Ford had no good cars at all. But he and his PR chief decided he would go and give a speech about the most boring subject they could think of. At the time, that was safety. He practiced speaking in the most boring way possible, using the passive voice and long sentences. He put up charts that were hard to read, and then turned his back to the audience to talk about the charts. After that, the press lost interest in him for a while, so he could concentrate on doing the work.

    The other situation is when you’re dealing with controversy. Stanford used to have this brilliant provost, James Rosse. When Jim talked about something like the school’s Nobel Prize winners, he would be animated and exciting and charismatic. But when he had to talk about something like the lack of diversity on campus, he would ramble on for 20 minutes while looking at his feet. I thought it was brilliant

    And so it goes.  I hope you enjoy and I think Leigh for being such a delight to work with and for reminding me not to take myself so seriously.

  • Check-out J. Keith Murnighan’s “Do Nothing” for Strange and Fact-Based Advice

    Do-nothing-cover3d_400px

    Kellogg professor J. Keith Murnighan, my colleague and charming friend, has just published a lovely  book called "Do Nothing." I first read the manuscript some months back (and thus could provide the praise you see on the cover) and I just spent a couple hours revisiting this gem.

    This crazy book will bombard you with ideas that challenge your assumptions.  His argument for doing nothing, for example, kicks-off the book. I was ready to argue with him because, even though I believe the best management is sometimes no management at all, I thought he was being too extreme. But as I read the pros and cons (Keith makes extreme statements, but his arguments are always balanced and evidenced-based), I became convinced that if more managers took this advice their organizations would more smoothly, their people would perform better (and learn more), and they would enjoy better work-life balance.

    He convinced me that it this is such a useful half-truth (or perhaps three-quarters-truth) that every boss ought to try his litmus test:  Go on vacation, leave your smart phone at home, and don't check or send any messages. Frankly, many bosses I know can't accomplish this for three hours (and I mean even during the hours they are supposed to be asleep), let alone for the three weeks he suggests.  As Keith says, an interesting question is what is a scarier outcome from this experiment for most bosses: Discovering how MUCH or how LITTLE their people actually need them.

    You will argue with and then have a tough time resisting Keith's logic, evidence, and delightful stories when it comes to his other bits of strange advice as well.  I was especially taken with "start at the end," "trust more,"  "ignore performance goals," and "de-emphasize profits."  Keith shows how the usual managerial approach of starting out relationships by mistrusting people and then slowly letting trust develop is not usually as beneficial as starting by assuming that others can be fully trusted until they prove otherwise.  He will also show you how to make more money by thinking about money less!

    As these bits suggest, Keith didn't write this book with the aim of telling most bosses what they wanted to hear.  Rather his goal was to make readers think, to challenge their assumptions, and to show the way to becoming better managers by thinking and acting differently.  In a world where we have thousands of business books published every year that all seem to say the same thing, I found Do Nothing delightful and refreshing — not just because it is quirky and fun, but because Keith also shows managers how to try these crazy ideas in low-risk and sensible ways.

     

  • “I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole”

    The No Asshole Rule emphasizes that one of the best ways to avoid the negative effects of workplaces that will leave you feeling demeaned and de-energized is to carefully assess your boss and colleagues during the interview and recruitment process.   Guy Kawasaki and I had fun with this challenge a few years back when we developed a list of 10 signs that your future boss is likely to be a bosshole.  In this spirit, I got a remarkable note the other day from a fellow who used his job interview to determine that his future boss was likely to be an asshole. Note the often subtle signs he observed.  This are his exact words, I just removed a couple key sentences (with his permission) to protect his identity:

    Dr. Sutton,

    Just wanted to thank you.  I read your "no Asshole rule" book on the plane my way to an interview.  I suspected from our initial phone interview that he could be a jerk.  I decided to take a new approach to the interview…to see how he interacted with shop floor employees and people that worked directly for him, to see how he spoke to me, and his verbal and visual actions, to see if I wanted this position instead of trying to impress them so they want to hire me.  I watched people that worked for him stand away from him when talking to him.  I saw he never smiled, and no one smiled at him.  He passed people on the line without so much as a nod to them.  And to top it off, he cut me off TWICE when I was talking like I wasn't even speaking, and then once even rudely didn't even PRETEND to listen to me as I talked about my background. In fact, I believe he started looking around and saying "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh" rudely "rushing me along" about 15 seconds into my background discussion.  To top it off, I remember you saying "assholes hire assholes", so I asked him if he had recommended the hiring of the people on his current team, and he boldly bragged "I hire EVERYONE on my team, it is all MY decision"…so I turned down the offer.  I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole. .  And life is too short to do that again.

    I find this guy to be very astute.  What do you think of his analysis?

    What are other signs that you look for that a future boss — or colleague –is likely to be a certified asshole?

  • The Narcissistic Personality Quiz

    I sent out a tweet the other day about a study showing that men who score high on a narcissism test appear to experience more stress than those who score low (but not narcissistic women).  Stress was measured by "cortisol levels,"   a hormone that  "signals the level of activation of the body’s key stress response system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis." 

    You can see a report about study here.  I thought the most interesting part was the link to the 40 item Narcissistic Personality Quiz, which is based on the measure in this paper: Raskin, R. & Terry, H. (1988). A Principal-Components Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and Further Evidence of Its Construct Validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5). Note that Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is one of the best and most rigorous psychology journals, so the source is excellent.

    Try taking the quiz. I just did and scored an "8,' which suggests a low level of narcissism.  I confess, however, that I am wondering if my low score was a reflection of my lack of narcissism or of my knowledge of the narcissism literature in concert with a bit of self-delusion.  I also confess that I completed it a second time as if I were one especially narcissistic boss that I once worked with.  That boss (in my opinion) earns a 32 — a very high score as above 20 indicates narcissism.  The quiz omits one thing this person did which indicates narcissism:  It was amazing how, no matter what the topic, how within 3 minutes, every conversation with that boss always became conversation about what a successful and impressive person he was and all the people who admired him and his work. 

     If you really are the mood for self-assessment, you can take both this quiz and the (less scientific) Asshole Rating Self-Exam or ARSE.   That way you can find out if you are a narcissist, a certified asshole, or both!

    Enjoy.

  • Powerful Men Talk More, Powerful Women Don’t Because It Damages Their Likeability, Power, and Effectiveness

    Perhaps one of the men cropped3

    The depths of societies ingrained sexism — and the degree to which successful women understand it is a fact of life that requires constant vigalance and adjustment — never ceases to amaze and trouble me.  A new study in the Administrative Science Quarterly (Volume 56, pages 622-641) by Yale faculty member Victoria L. Brescoll presents a trio of studies that examine gender, power, and volubility (talking time).  The headline above contains the upshot.  Here are some details:

    1. In a study of United States senators (using data from 2005 and 2007), more powerful male senators talked quite a bit more on the senate floor than less powerful male senators. But there were no significant differences between how much powerful female senators talked compared to less powerful female senators.

    2. This finding was replicated in a controlled experiment — again, more powerful men talked more, more powerful women didn't. Additional analyses suggested that powerful women hesitated to talk more because they were concerned about "potential backlash," that they would be seen as less likable, "out of line," domineering, too controlling, would lose power, and be less effective.

    3. These fears of backlash were confirmed in a third study. The basic set-up was that research subjects were asked to assess hypothetical male and female CEO candidates –one who tends to express opinions in meetings and the other who tends to keep opinions to him/herself.  The effects — the ratings by both male and female subjects — were troubling.  The talkative male CEO candidate was rated as more suitable for leadership than the less talkative one on measures including whether or not the person should be hired, is entitled to power, and competence.  BUT for the female CEO, the exact opposite pattern was seen. The female CEO candidate who withheld their opinions were rated more highly than the female candidate who tended to express their opinions.

    Pretty disturbing, huh?  But it does show that the paths to power for women and men are quite different.  The blabber mouth approach works for guys, but backfires on women.

    The question is — what can be done about this problem? Certainly a bit of self-awareness is in order, but I do wonder if there are ways to dampen or reverse these effects by developing organizational cultures — through employee selection, socialization, rewards, and punishments — in the right way. There are some organizations I work with where more talkative and opinionated women do seem to get ahead, and others where the women who get ahead learn to talk less.

    In any event, powerful women are often quite adept at finding ways to press their opinions without increasing their talking time. One trick I have seen is that they feed their opinions and evidence to talkative male colleagues "backstage" and convince these guys to present such opinions and evidence as their own in meetings. 

    Thoughts?

    P.S. The entire paper is available here.

    P.P.S A big thanks to Carol for sending me the cartoon, just perfect!