Work Matters

Tag: leadership

  • Our New York Times Piece on Evidence-Based Management: The Uncut Version

    Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

    In addition, one point that we didn't emphasize even in the "uncut version" is that we are NOT arguing financial incentives are generally useless, dangerous, or unwise to use.  They do motivate human-beings, and seem to be especially effective (as Dan Pink shows us) for tasks that do not require high levels of imagination.  But a condition for any incentive system to work is that people need to have enough control over their work.  A big problem with many teacher incentive programs is that, all too often, individual teachers just don't have enough resources, enough influence over the preparation kids had before they enter their classroom, enough influence over what happens to their students outside the classroom, and enough support from the administration.  So no matter how motivated the teachers might be, they can't have a big impact on student's scores, at least through honest means. Although it isn't pretty or ethical, teachers and administration sometimes turn to something they can control: They give the kids answers, erase wrong answers and change them to right answers, or in some cases, find ways to get the weakest performing kids out of their classes and schools, even when those students need the most help.  Unfortunately, in too many schools, this means the weakest students are moved to special education classes, which raises mean test scores in regular classes, but hurts both the kids who don't belong in special education classes as well those who do.

    OK, here is the uncut version:

    Title:

    The Virtues of Evidence-Based Management

    Reading lines:

    We know a lot now about what it takes to build humane and effective workplaces.   Leaders and managers can avert a lot of unnecessary harm –and do much good – by learning and heeding the best evidence.

    Text:

    Consider this scenario.  You have a serious illness. Your doctor prescribes an intrusive, painful, and expensive treatment— and you have to pay for it.  What she doesn’t tell you—because she has not consulted the research – is that most studies show the treatment is ineffective and fraught with negative side-effects.  You go through the procedure, suffer severe pain, and spend a lot of money.  Unfortunately, as with most patients, the procedure proves ineffective. You later uncover the research your doctor failed to consult.  When you ask why she didn’t use this evidence, she answers, “Who pays attention to studies?  I have years of clinical experience.  Besides, the protocol seemed like it ought to work.”  

    Does that sound like malpractice?  It does to us.  Fortunately, pressures to practice evidence-based medicine are reducing preventable errors.  Not so in most of our workplaces, where failure to consider sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well-being and organizational performance.   But it doesn’t have to be this way.

    No workplace practice is as important—and apparently vexing—as pay.  Many people believe that pay for-performance will work in virtually any organization, so it is implemented again and again to solve performance problems — even in settings where evidence shows it is ineffective.  Consider the recent decision to end New York City’s teacher bonus program after wasting three years and 56 million dollars.  As this newspaper reported in July, a Rand Corporation study found this effort to link incentive pay to student performance “had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.”  This bad news could have been predicted before squandering all that time and money.  The failure of such programs to boost student performance has been documented for decades.  A careful review of pay for performance in schools in the 1980s showed these programs rarely lasted more than five years and consistently failed to improve student performance.   The 300 page Rand report emphasizes that (although exceptions exist) evidence against the efficacy of teacher incentive pay in U.S. schools continues to grow stronger and is especially evident in the most rigorous studies. 

    This practice doesn’t just waste money.  As Chicago economist Steve Levitt and others show, strong incentive programs can entice – or scare — teachers and administrators to “cheat” on the tests, either by providing students with questions and answers in advance or changing student’s answer sheets to increase apparent performance.  Recent well-publicized cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and elsewhere could have been foreseen by anyone who read and heeded this research.  Building a culture of cheating in schools corrupts both students and teachers for no good purpose.

    Evidence about numerous other practices is ignored too.  Harvard University’s J. Richard Hackman finds that stable membership is a hallmark of effective work teams.  People with more experience working together typically communicate and coordinate more effectively.  Although this effect is seen in studies of everything from product development teams to airplane cockpit crews, managers often can’t resist the temptation to rotate people in and out to minimize staffing costs and make scheduling easier.  This happens even though, for instance, the National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the safety incidents reported on commercial aircraft occur on the first day a new crew flies together. 

    Hiring the right people is another key decision in every workplace.  Many studies show that unstructured face-to-face interviews are biased; for example, interviewers prefer candidates who are likeable, similar to them, and physically attractive (even when these qualities are irrelevant to performance).  Numerous selection methods are superior – among the best is to simply see if the candidate can perform the work.  Yet interviews remain the primary selection method used by organizations.  And we’ve often been astounded by the refusal of seasoned managers and executives to even consider evidence that interviews are a flawed selection tool.

    Strongly-held but weakly supported beliefs about workplace practices reflect what psychologists call “confirmation bias.”  When people hold firm beliefs about something, they tend to ignore, reject, and forget facts that clash with their beliefs; and remember, accept, and more readily accept facts that support their beliefs.   A related impediment is the excessive self-confidence that plagues many people, especially those who wield power over others.  Decision-makers may acknowledge they use a practice that is ineffective for most other people and organizations — but believe they are so talented that the usual findings don’t apply to them.  

    To illustrate, numerous studies show that mergers typically inflict economic damage on the acquiring company.  Yet when one of us served on the board of a software company that was contemplating an acquisition — a “target” company in a different city and of comparable size (conditions that predict merger failure) — the CEO argued it would succeed despite the evidence because he wasn’t like most CEOs.  He was wrong.  It failed, just as most acquisitions do under these conditions.

    Despite such impediments, there is an evidence-based movement afoot in some organizations.  When Gary Loveman became COO of Harrah’s in the late 1990s, he decided that improving the service provided to the best customers—“the people who made the cash register ring”—was a priority.  Loveman had taught service management at Harvard Business School, so was well-versed in research on customer loyalty — and how employee turnover undermined it. Loveman’s team implemented numerous evidence-based tactics including realistic job previews. After candidates were offered a job, they were informed about the good and bad elements so they could decide if the work was right for them.  Turnover plummeted, service improved, and coupled with Harrah’s innovative marketing, the company went on a decade-long run of outstanding performance. 

    A recent study at Google demonstrates the power of accepting and acting on evidence, even when it clashes with ingrained beliefs.  For most of its history, Google’s leaders believed that deep technical expertise was the most important quality for a manager. They believed the best bosses pretty much left their people alone, and their main role was to help with technical problems when people got stuck.  Yet when Google examined what employees valued most in a manager, technical expertise ranked last of the eight attributes examined.  Attributes like being even-keeled, asking good questions, taking time to meet with people, and caring about employees’ careers and lives were most crucial.  Google found that managers who did these things led top performing teams, had the happiest employees, and suffered the least turnover. In response, Google is making many changes in how it selects and coaches managers, and is devoting particular effort to improving its worst managers.  We applaud Google’s leaders for overcoming their biases. But note the attributes of great managers Google “discovered” were evident in hundreds of prior studies. Perhaps if Google’s leaders hadn’t believed they were so “special” and “different,” they might have launched such efforts to improve their managers years earlier.

    The evidence-based medicine movement arose in response to thousands of unnecessary deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by implementing proven practices.  Similarly, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, bad group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes, and other preventable damage suggests the need for an evidence-based management movement.  Some organizations are leading the way.  It’s time for many more to do the same.

    P.S. Speaking of evidence-based management, Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle, had a great editorial The Times today called "Do Happier People Work Harder?"

  • 5 Warning Signs to Watch for at Apple

    I declined several media inquiries to comment on Steve Jobs and the impact his departure will have on Apple.  I did so because predicting the future of any company is always hard, but especially so for Apple where the secrecy is so severe.  For example, although Tim Cook has stepped in and out of the CEO role multiple times, the assumption seems to be that Jobs has retained influence on daily operations throughout the past three or four years. Clearly, Steve is quite sick and has been for a long time, which leads me to wonder to what extent Steve Jobs himself versus the IDEA of Steve Jobs has held stronger sway in Apple.  In any case, it is clear the Cook has been running a big proportion of day to day operations for years now.  But perhaps Jobs has had little more than symbolic influence for years.  If that is true — and I have no idea if it is — the odds that Apple will continue its impressive run might be a bit higher than pundits predict.  Regardless, in the short-term, my hunch is the capital markets have the right take on Apple (the stock is holding rock steady) as it has such great products, pizazz, stores, and operations that sudden trouble seems unlikely.

    When I finally did a media interview for FT Germany yesterday, I got to thinking about Apple from an organizational and cultural perspective.  I was especially influenced by Adam Lashinsky's magnificent Fortune piece called Inside Apple.  The story that emerges from Adam's piece and other bits of information is that Apple's structure, work practices, and beliefs about how to get done are woven together to support a highly centralized model of decision-making, where very talented individuals and small teams are given specific tasks, individuals are held highly accountable for implementation, and extremely strong cultural, interpersonal, and performance pressures are present. 

    Although I won't dig into the debate about trade-offs between centralization and decentralization, centralization works best when leaders face a relatively small number of important decisions, when they find ways to reduce the emotional and cognitive load on the relatively small number of people making major decisions, and tight personal, organizational, and cultural controls mean that decisions from on high are implemented quickly and without much question.  At its best, in a centralized system, there is much confidence in leaders, fast communication up and down, and relatively little time spent on dysfunctional politics (as there is no power vacuum, little second guessing, and severe penalties for ignoring or undermining orders from on high).   Although it is mighty hard to know exactly what is going on in Apple, this description seems to fit most stories and other information about the place under the shared leadership of Jobs and Cook. 

    Assuming this is more or less accurate, I started wondering, what would be some signs that such a system was heading for trouble? Consider five:

    1. The size of the board of directors starts to grow.  Apple has been criticized for having a board that is too small, only 7 people.  Smaller teams not only make better and faster decisions, and have better dynamics, a small board helps a senior management team move faster as there are fewer masters to serve and, on average, the speed and quality of their advice should be better.  If more members are added to Apple's board (especially if they get to 10 or more) it would suggest the board and top team are putting too many things on their plate, trying to please too many masters, and creating more complex group dynamics that will slow and complicate decision-making and implementation in both groups. 

    2. The number of products expands dramatically.  When Jobs first returned to Apple, they had a huge pile of products — he killed all of them within the year.  For example, as Jobs said ten months after his return, they had so many different kinds of Macs and other hardware that Apple employees couldn't even tell their friends which ones to buy (See this old 1998 video, especially minute 5:20 to 7:30 or so).  In contrast, look at the product line now, they only make one iPhone at a time, one iPad, and have a pretty narrow set of Macs too.  If you are going to run a highly centralized organization (as one friend of mine calls it "genius driven"), a smaller product line is especially important because, that way, the senior team need only track a relatively small number, which averts placing excessive cognitive load on them.  As I wrote here earlier, Jobs has argued that a hallmark of great companies is that they not only kill all the bad ideas, they kill most of the good ones too so they can focus on doing a few things well and not design inelegant products or experiences that reflect an effort to jam every seemingly good idea in someplace.

    If Apple's product line gets bigger, especially a lot bigger, it gets harder to run the organization without delegating more major decisions.  In addition, and perhaps most crucially, when an organization has an irrationally large product line, when consumers and even insiders can't understand the logic, the real explanation often is that there are many medium power groups that have enough resources and influence to build their own hardware, software, or whatever BUT not enough power to stop others.  As a result, many medium size fiefdoms emerge, attention turns inwards to gaining political advantage over competitors, and away from what is best for the company and customers.  I saw this at GM before the bankruptcy.  This was also exactly the situation that Jobs faced when he returned to run Apple in the mid 1990s. My conversations with Apple insiders suggest that dysfunctional politics explained the big product line, not the strategy.  So a big increase in products — and one that doesn't seem to make much sense — would signal the team is putting too much cognitive load  on itself, moving to a more decentralized model that does not fit with other elements of Apple, and that people are spending more time battling to get THEIR product out and to kill others developed by colleagues instead of making a few INSANELY GREAT products.

    3. Departures of senior executives.  One of the most consistent strengths of Apple that observers emphasize is the quality of their top team.  The same goes for their board too, with perhaps the star being the amazing Bill Campbell, one of the most renowned coaches and mentors on the planet and THE most desirable board member in Silicon Valley. Presumably, Tim Cook has had years to work with them, and the dynamics are healthy; I suspect one reason Apple is so effective partly is because of this stability.  When people start leaving any group, there is good evidence that the resulting disruption undermines group performance as it takes time for groups to absorb and learn how to work with new people.  I would be especially concerned if people who left are replaced by outsiders, as Apple clearly has distinct ways of thinking and acting that would take time for even the most able outsider to learn.  Moreover, when people start leaving a top management team at unexpectedly high rates, it often signals trouble: They are unhappy with their CEO and fellow executives, they are being forced out, or both. Note that there have been some key departures of senior executives  in recent months, so this is something to keep an eye on.  In particular, if head designer Jonathan Ive left, that would signal that something is terribly wrong.

    4. Leaks to the press.  As an outsider who would like to know more about Apple, and who often talks to journalists that cover Apple, the difficulty of learning anything about the company just amazes me.  It took me a good four months to confirm that my former Stanford colleague Joel Podolny had become head of HR after hearing the first rumor it had occurred — and of course Joel was too smart and well-socialized to answer the email I sent him asking him if the rumor was true.  While information does sometimes get out (consider Adam Lashinsky's great Fortune piece) a hallmark of Apple's culture is that people in the company take secrecy so seriously — especially when it comes to forthcoming products and release dates (the current secrecy around the iPhone 5 being a case in point).  I have friends who work at Apple, not just Joel.  It is amazing to see what happens to them when they go to work there.. they stop talking, they won't return emails, and you learn — if you do run into them — not to ask them about anything sensitive.  After all, should they slip and tell you, they are putting their own jobs at risk.  Now, such paranoia, although unattractive in some ways, does have advantages in that competitors are kept in the dark and consumers don't really know when an Apple product they buy will be outdated.  Apple has been able to do an especially brilliant job of tweaking production levels (thanks to Tim Cook's amazing supply chain) and pricing so they can squeeze the most out of existing but soon to be outdated hardware and software.  Perhaps even more important, Apple's infamously effective secrecy is a sign of fantastic cultural control and individual commitment to the company. If we start seeing more leaks than in the past, it signals the strength of the bonds among people are weakening and their fear of breaking this most sacred of Apple commandments in waning — that Apple's carrots and sticks aren't working as well as in the past.

    5. Acquisitions, especially big ones.  Just this morning, I was reading some stories quoting management professors who predicted that Apple is sitting on so much money that they would probably go on a shopping spree and buy a bunch of companies.  If this happens, I would really start to worry.  Yes, small strategic acquisitions to bring specific people or specific technologies that Apple needs to move ahead are probably necessary and wise.  But if you look at research on acquisitions, especially big acquisitions, not only do they tend to fail, they do a bunch of things to organizations (especially senior teams) that would be especially deadly for Apple.  They distract leaders from the day to day operations of their firms, increase the overall cognitive and emotional load, bring in different and change resistant subcultures that are usually harder to transform than senior executives predict, they result in additions (and subtractions) to the top management team and board of directors (and thus create the group dynamics problems outlined earlier), and often broaden the product line (The Compaq/HP merger being a case in point).  As such, it seems to me that doing a big acquisition — or worse yet, a stream of them — would be an especially efficient way to undermine Apple's seemingly magnificent structure and culture.  Apple got big by doing a fairly small number of things very well and by doing them for themselves.

    As I said at the outset, it is impossible to predict Apple's fate.  I would speculate, however, that regardless of whether all or none of the things above happen, the best bet is that Apple will slip a bit in the next decade.   One reason is simply regression to the mean, that things even out over time, so extreme outliers in any distribution tend to drift toward the average.   There are some forces that helps this process along in very successful companies.  As my colleague Jeff Pfeffer likes to say, whether it comes to a great restaurant or a great technology company, the inevitable distractions, overload, outside scrutiny,  arrogance, confusion, and fear of screwing things up (rather than focusing on making things better and better) mean, all too often, that "success ruins everything."   Regardless, regression to the mean seems to happen in most or all systems where large variance in performance is seen.  Certainly every high flying technology company that ever existed has eventually drifted toward the middle or bottom, at least for awhile.   Even the most enduring, such as IBM, have gone through some hard times and, of course, Apple had some mighty tough times in the mid 1990s. 

    Meanwhile, I confess that I hope Apple continues to be great and become greater.  If the iPhone 5 is as cool as I hope, I will get one.   My old 3GS is still running strong, but I don't think I will be able to resist.  About a year ago, I had dinner with design guru Don Norman , who was once a senior executive running advanced development at Apple,  Don was quickly fired when Jobs returned.   Don, who is smart, charming, and has a sharp tongue, noted that Jobs' decision was understandable, he just wished that Steve had been a little nicer about it.  Don — who owns both a Droid and iPhone — made an interesting comment.  That you could argue all day about the technical pros and cons of each phone, but he pretty much always grabs the iPhone because it is just more fun and that "fun thing"  is a reflection of Steve Jobs' and Jonathan Ive's combined genius: Something no other technology company seems to ever figure out quite so well or so consistently.   If Apple can protect and keep spreading that human magic across its products, and keep running that amazing supply chain, nothing that any of us say will matter.  Their greatness will persist.

  • A Rough But Intriguing Metric for School Assessing a School Principal

    Yesterday, I did an interview for the BAM network on Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The content expert on line was Justin Snider, who teaches at Columbia and has in-depth knowledge about K-12 schools, as that was the focus of the conversation.  Justin had great questions and comments about bosses in general (see this recent post) and about school principals in particular.  I thought he made especially good comments about how the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents. He especially suggested that school principals think about where their offices are located.. are they in a place that essentially requires them to keep bumping into teachers and parents, or are they in some corner of campus that reduces the amount of interaction.

    I like Justin's point about the office because it reminds me of the design for Pixar's building in Emeryville, which was inspired by Steve Jobs' assertion that they needed to make sure that everyone was basically forced to bump into each other as a result of the placement of the food and bathrooms.  At one point, Jobs half-seriously suggested that there be just one central bathroom so that everyone had to run into everyone else and there would be a lot of random encounters as people walked to and from that crucial location. The ultimate design resulted in more than one bathroom , but the food and bathrooms were located so that people need to walk through this central area constantly — one of those little things that has helped fuel Pixar's creativity over the years.

    After the interview, Justin and I exchanged emails,  I told him a story about how I saw the difference between the impact of a good versus a bad principal at my daughter's middle school, how there was a great principal who seemed to know every students name and was widely loved.   He retired and was replaced by a bad one who seemed to not know any student's name and was so out of touch that his lack of soul and other more objective acts of incompetence provoked widespread despair among students and parents, and quite a few teachers complained about his lousy leadership openly.    I was reminded of this difference between the two principals just a few weeks ago when, even though it is has been a few years since the good boss last saw my daughter, he greeted her by name in a local restaurant. In contrast, my daughter is still annoyed that the bad one mispronounced so many student names, including hers, at graduation (Her name is "Eve," he called her something that sounded like "Ev.")

    Justin had an interesting reaction to my little story:

    Actually, right after our call concluded, I realized I should have said that a great back-of-the-envelope measure of whether a principal is generally doing a good job is how many students' names he or she knows.  In my experience, there's a strong correlation between principals who know almost all students by name and those who are respected (and seen as effective) by students, parents and teachers.  It's not a perfect measure, of course, but I think it's probably a fairly good indicator of a school's climate and a leader's effectiveness.

    I like Justin's observation.  Of course, some us are better at remembering names than others and we all have cognitive limits. But Justin's argument is compelling to me because knowing people's names seems like a good sign that a boss is directing attention to those he or she leads and is responsible for helping and is not overly focused on him or herself, or on kissing-up to the superintendent, board of education, or other superiors.

    What do you think of this metric?  Is it right for schools? What about other workplaces?

  • Guest Column for CNN: On The Virtues of Drinking at Work

    I have been getting emails now and then from the folks at CNN.com asking if I would like to do a guest column.  I have not been blogging anywhere much because I've been traveling a lot (I did a workshop on design thinking in Singapore a couple weeks back and just got from giving speeches in Brazil on The Knowing-Doing Gap and Good Boss, Bad Boss)  and using my available time to focus on the scaling project with Huggy Rao. 

    As often happens to me, however, I ended-up writing something fun when I was "supposed to" be doing something else.  I was thinking about drinking in the workplace because I had been interviewed for Bloomberg about the subject where, although I was quoted as talking about all the evils (and there are nasty evils), I had actually spent much of the conversation with the reporter talking about how sharing a drink with colleagues can sometimes strengthen the social glue in a workplace.  This is an experience that many of us have enjoyed. And. more broadly, there is some interesting academic research here as well, notably a charming book called Drunken Comportment by Craig McAndrew and Robert Edgerton, which uses anthropological and other evidence to challenge to notion that drinking always changes things for the worse.

    The final motivation to write the column came after I had a lovely time sharing a drink with some colleagues one Friday afternoon a few weeks back.   So I wrote this little piece from CNN called "Drinking at Work: Its Not All Bad," which just came out today.

    Here is how it opens:

    At about 5:30 on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was running out the door to get home when I ran into several colleagues sitting in a circle and drinking some Scotch. They invited me to celebrate the end of the week with them, and after hesitating a bit, I joined the little group. Yes, I enjoyed the single malt they gave me, but I enjoyed the conversation much more. These are people I see all the time, but nearly all of our interactions are rushed and task-oriented.

    We talked about an array of topics — a sick friend, kids, a cool wireless speaker the IT guy had set up and our preferences for different brands of Scotch. Then we went our separate ways. I was struck by how much the brief interaction affected me. I felt closer to my colleagues, more relaxed from the great conversation and the Scotch, and I felt good about working at a place that allows employees to take a prudent drink now and then.

    That little episode illustrates the role that alcohol plays at its best. In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed — at least to a degree — to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others — because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

    You can read the rest here.

    I am curious to hear your reactions to this idea.  What are some of the other advantages of drinking at work? What can a company or boss to do maximize the virtues and minimize the dangers?   It is one of those complex subjects that, while there are times when it is clearly dead wrong (like when airline pilots drink on the job), there are many other times when complaints about imbibing some more like misguided morality plays than constructive objections. 

     

  • Funny Humility From Groupon’s CEO

    Julia Kirby, the amazing editor from HBR, who among many other things, made The No Asshole Rule possible, just sent me this great note about a Forbes story on Groupon CEO Andrew Mason:

    The money quote from Groupon's CEO: "Most CEOs will make stuff up about themselves to sound way smarter and cooler and people are disappointed to find out otherwise. I decided to set the bar very low and make up lies about myself that make me sound lame.”

    Very refreshing! Not a bad life strategy — there is an argument for delivering more than you promise, and this is a rather intriguing strategy for making that happen!

  • More Reasons Creativity Sucks: Creative People Seen as Having Less Leadership Potential

    Ever since the days when I was writing Weird Ideas That Work, I have been careful to point out various ways that creative people suffer in comparison to their less imaginative counterparts.  My focus has been largely on the differences between doing creative and routine work (see this post on why creativity and innovation suck).  Much theory and research suggests a long list, including:

        1. Creativity requires failing most of the time; routine work entails succeeding most of the time. So doing creative means screwing up constantly, while doing routine work means you are usually doing things right and well. As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

         2. Creativity involves constant conflict over ideas, although that can be fun when it is done right, even the most healthy groups struggle to avoid having conflict over the best ideas turn very personal and very nasty.

        3. Creativity is messy,scary, and inefficient. Routine work is clean, comforting and efficient.

        4. Doing creative work right means generating a lot of bad ideas, it also means that most of your good ideas will get killed-off too.

    I could go on and on. But the best quote I have ever seen on the probabilities and emotions associated with doing creaitive work is from James March (I quote this in Weird Ideas That Work), quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist. Rumor has it that he has come fairly close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics once or twice:

    "Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism)."

    I don't mean to bring you down even further, but a study with more bad news for creativity — actually an academic paper containing three intertwined studies — just came out by Assistant Professor Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called "Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?"  The upshot is that people who are seen as more creative are judged by others as having LESS leadership potential than their unimaginative peers UNLESS they are also seen as charismatic. 

    This bias against creative people is first demonstrated in their study of employees of a company in India who were in jobs where they were expected to do creative work.  It was then replicated in a controlled experiment, with about 200 students, half of whom were assigned to be idea generators or "pitchers" and half to be "evaluators." The pitchers were then divided into two groups.  As the researchers, they were asked to either '1) prepare a creative (novel and useful) or 2) a useful (but not novel) solution to the following question: “What could an airlines do to obtain more revenue from passengers?"' 

    The results are pretty troubling. In short, although the judges saw no significant differences in the usefulness of the ideas generated, and did construe that subjects who were instructed to generate creative ideas did, in fact, come up with more creative ideas than those instructed to come-up with ideas that were not novel, the judges also consistently construed the more creative subjects as having less leadership potential, measured with this 3-item scale: “How much leadership would this applicant exhibit?”, “How much control over the team’s activities would this member exhibit?”, “I think the applicant is an effective leader.” (α = .86).

    The bright spot, or perhaps the warning, is that, int he third study, where the "charismatic leader prototype was activated" (this was done by asking judges to list five five characteristics of a charismatic leader), things changed.  Here is how the researchers described their findings from this third study: "when the charismatic prototype was activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative idea condition (M = 4.08) as having significantly higher leadership potential than the candidate in the useful idea condition (M = 3.41; t = -3.68, p < .01). Conversely, when the charismatic prototype was not activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative condition (M = 3.08) as having significantly lower leadership potential than the candidate in the useful condition (M = 3.60; t = -2.03, p < .05)."

    BNET asked first author Mueller to explain these findings, and I thought she came-up with a pretty good answer: 

    'Muller notes that leaders must create common goals so their groups can get things done. And the clearer goals are, the better they tend to work, which means leaders need to root out uncertainty. One way leaders can do this is to set standards and enforce conformity.  But when asked to describe a creative person, words like “quirky,” “nonconformist” and “unfocused” often take their place right alongside “visionary” and “charismatic.” Says Mueller: “The fact is, people don’t just feel positively about creative individuals-they feel ambivalent around them.”'

    Yes, this is one just paper. But it is done carefully and uses multiple methods. And it is instructive as I do think — and there is evidence to show — that our stereotypes of the hallmarks of creative people do often see at odds with our beliefs of great leaders.  In particular, to add to Mueller's list, creative people are also often seen as inner focused (not just unfocused), inconsistent, and flaky.  That is not the boss that most of us want.  It is also interesting that charisma seems to be the path to being seen as both creative and having leadership potential.  It certainly has worked for the likes of Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola, IDEO's David Kelley, and Oprah Winfrey. 

     This research suggests that if you are a creative type, and want to lead, do everything you can to get your boss and other evaluators thinking about charisma — "activate" the charismatic leader prototype by talking about well-known charismatics, and perhaps engaging in actions congruent with the "prototype" of a charismatic person — articulate, inspiring, setting forth an emotionally compelling vision, and touching on themes and stories that provoke energy and passion in others. 

    On the other hand, there are plenty of successful creatives who have achieved leadership positions who seem to lack at leasst some of these qualities — Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, David Packard, and Bill Hewlett come to mind.   And there are still other successful creatives who led wonderful and important lives despite having little if any interest in leading others — Steve Wozniak and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman appear to qualify. Indeed, although we need great leaders, it seems to me that — especially at this moment in history — we need creative people even more.

    To me, the upshot is that these findings are intriguing and some people may find them useful — especially creatives who are trying to get leadership jobs. But it also strikes me that presenting a false front usually backfires in the end, and perhaps the most important implication is that, if you are in a position to judge and select leaders, keep reminding  yourself that you will probably be unfairly biased against creative people — unless you think they are charismatic (or you are just thinking about charisma), in which case you may be giving those creatives too much credit for their leadership potential!

    I love a careful and creative study like this one.   No it is not perfect or the final word, no study is or can be, but it is pretty damn good.  If you want to read the whole thing, here is complete reference, including a link to the PDF:

    Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, Dishan Kamdar (2011), Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

     

  • Carolyn’s Rule: A Great Test of Character

    My attempt to stave off email bankruptcy is not only going pretty well — I am down to 135 emails to deal with — I just found a gem from a couple months back that forgot to write about here.  A reader who asked to described as "Carolyn in Austin, Texas" wrote me nice note about The No Asshole Rule and especially emphasized that she liked my assertion in Chapter 1 that "The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. "

    Carolyn suggested a second test that I just love.  In fact, let's call it Carolyn's Rule:

    You can determine someone’s character by how quickly they realize they’ve made a mistake and how readily they admit it.

    Not bad, huh? It makes me think of one colleague I've know from nearly 30 years who has never admitted a mistake — even in multiple cases where it is clear this person has made big mistakes, has damaged other people, and it would be best for all concerned.  Indeed, as I implied over at HBR, Carolyn's Rule is also a good test of a boss's skill.

  • New Study: When NBA Players Touch Teammates More, They and Their Teams Play Better

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    I've written here before about research on the power of "non-sexual touching," notably evidence that when waitresses touch both male and female customers on the arm or wrist, they tend to be rewarded with bigger tips. Plus I wrote about another study that shows when either women or men are touched lightly on the back by women, they tend to take bigger financial risks.  That second study showed that touching by men had no effect.  Well, there is a new study that shows the power of nonsexual touch among male professional basketball players.  You can read the pre-publication version here.

    It is called : "Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA" and was published by Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang, and Dacher Keltner in a well-respected peer reviewed journal called Emotion earlier this year (Volume 10, pages 745-749).

    In brief, here is how they set-up the paper; these are opening two paragraphs:

    Some nonhuman primates spend upward of 20% of their waking hours grooming, a behavior primates rely upon to reconcile following conflict, to reward cooperative acts of food sharing, to maintain close proximity with caretakers, and to soothe (de Waal, 1989; Harlow, 1958). In humans, touch may be even more vital to trust, cooperation, and group functioning. Touch is the most highly developed sense at birth, and preceded language in hominid evolution (Burgoon, Buller, & Woodall, 1996). With brief, 1-second touches to the forearm, strangers can communicate prosocial emotions essential to cooperation within groups—gratitude, sympathy, and love—at rates of accuracy seven times as high as chance (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). Touch also promotes trust, a central component of
    long-term cooperative bonds (Craig, Chen, Bandy, & Reiman, 2000; Sung et al., 2007; Williams & Bargh, 2008).

    Guided by recent analyses of the social functions of touch (Hertenstein, 2002), we tested two hypotheses. First, we expected touch early in the season to predict both individual and team performance later on in the season. Second, we expected that touch would predict improved team performance through enhancing cooperative behaviors between teammates.

    I love that. As I always tell doctoral students, and I emphasized during the years that I edited academic journals.  A research paper is not a murder mystery.  The reader should know what you are studying and why by the end of the second paragraph — this is a nice example.

    Kraus and his colleagues go onto explain their research method a bit later:

    Coding of the tactile communication of 294 players from all 30 National Basketball Association (NBA) teams yielded the data to test our hypotheses. Each team’s tactile behavior was coded during one game played within the first 2 months of the start of the 2008–2009 NBA regular season. Games were coded for physical touch and cooperation by two separate teams of coders.

    They explain:

    We focused our analysis on 12 distinct types of touch that occurred when two or more players were in the midst of celebrating a positive play that helped their team (e.g., making a shot). These celebratory touches included fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.On average, a player touched other teammates (M = 1.80, SD = 2.05) for a little less than 2 seconds during the game, or about one tenth of a second for every minute played.

    They also had coders rate the amount of cooperation by each player studied during that same early season game:

    [t]he following behaviors were considered expressions of cooperation and trust: talking to teammates
    during games, pointing or gesturing to one’s teammates, passing the basketball to a teammate who is less closely defended by the opposing team, helping other teammates on defense, helping other teammates escape defensive pressure (e.g., setting screens), and any other behaviors displaying a reliance on one’s teammates at the expense of one’s individual performance. In contrast, the following behaviors were considered expressions of a lack of cooperation and trust: taking shots when one is closely defended by the opposing team, holding the basketball without passing to teammates, shooting the basketball excessively, and any other behavior displaying reliance primarily on one’s self rather than on one’s teammates.

    Karaus and his coauthors then used these imperfect but intriguing measures of touching and cooperation to predict the subsequent performance of players and their teams later in the season; I won't go into all the analysis they did, but the authors did at least a decent job of ruling out alternative explanations for the link between touching and performance such as players salaries, early season performance, and expert's expectations about the prospects for team performance in 2008-2009.  And they still got some rather amazing findings:

    1. Players who touched their teammates more had higher "Win scores," defined as "a performance measure that accounts for the positive impact a player has on his team’s success (rebounds, points, assists, blocks, steals) while also accounting for the amount of the team’s possessions that player uses (turnovers, shot attempts). "

    2. Teams where players touched teammates more also enjoyed significantly superior team performance than those where players touch teammates less (the authors used a more complicated measure of team performance than win-loss record, it took into account multiple factors like scoring efficiency and assists, and other measures, which correlated .84 with the number of wins that season.

    3. The authors present further analyses suggesting that the increased cooperation among teams where players engage in more "fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles" explain why touching is linked to individual and team performance.

    Now, to be clear, as the authors point out, this an imperfect study. They only looked at touching in one game for each team.  So there is plenty to complain about if you want to picky.  But I would add two reminders before we all get too critical.  The first is that there is no reason I can see to expect that the weaknesses in this study would inflate the effects of touching; rather, quite the opposite.  The second is that the touching and cooperation were coded by multiple independent coders who did not know the researchers' hypotheses or the patterns they were looking for, and there was very high agreement (over 80%) among them.

    As the researchers emphasize. more research is needed, but this study at least suggests that it is worth doing.  It is at least strong enough to increase rather decrease my confidence in the the touching-cooperation-team performance link.   And the way it plays out in different settings might require some careful adjustments in research methods and employee behavior.  For example,  basketball is setting where touch is clearly more socially acceptable than in the offices that many of us work in.  So if you and your sales or project team all of a sudden decide to start doing high-fives, group hugs, and chest bumps, it might backfire given local norms.  Perhaps a more reasonable inference is that, given what is socially acceptable where you work, touching on the high side of the observed natural range just might help.

    I would love to hear reader's comments ont his research, as it is quite intriguing to me.

    P.S.  No, this is not an invitation for you creepy guys out there to start grabbing your colleagues and followers in inappropriate ways that make them squirm and make you even more disgusting to be around!

     

  • CEO Decision-Making: A Great Observation By Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz

    I have been reading through "Ben's Blog," which is written by Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitiz (a firm that just raised 650 million, yikes!)  He wrote a great post awhile back on how the firm evaluates CEOs. Read the whole thing, it is inspired.  I especially love this part, because it is so true and explodes the myth of the all knowing and all powerful CEO:

    Courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. In fact, at the time of the decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10% of the information typically present in the ensuing Harvard Business School case study (emphasis added by me).  As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

    This point dovetails well with the quote at the top of Ben's Blog:

    There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. - John Von Neumann

    I will poke around more; he is a very thoughtful guy. Also, Ben's point reminds of something I heard Andy Grove say several years back along similar lines — see this HBR post on how a good boss is confident, but not really sure.

  • “Lend Me Your Wallets:” Research on the Link Between Charismatic CEOs and Stock Price, Featuring Steve Jobs

    I was exchanging emails the other day with Dave Ulrich, my co-author on Asian Leadership, and asked him what he was working on.  He answered that he was pretty interested in the link between CEO actions and stock price.  Dave's interest reminded me of a delightful and imaginative 2004 study of such links by Frank Flynn (co-author of the narcissism study I discussed last week) and Barry Staw.  It is called Lend Me Your Wallets: The Effect of Charismatic Leadership on External Support for an Organization.  Flynn and Staw did two studies on charisma in this paper, which they defined as follows:

    Such individuals exude confidence, dominance, a sense of purpose, and the ability to articulate a vision for followers
    to grasp (House, 1977; Conger, 1991). Charismatic leaders are able to communicate this vision to their followers, and by the force of their own excitement and enthusiasm, induce their followers to support this vision (Yukl and Van Fleet, 1992). In this sense, charismatic leaders are said to have remarkable influence over subordinates who internalize the leader’s vision of what can be achieved through collective effort (Bass, 1985).

    The first was a field study, where they compared 46 firms led by CEOs who were identified as charismatic (a total of 44 CEOs.. it appears two were used twice) who led Fortune 500 firms between 1985 and 1994.  They found that, independently of objective financial information, firms led by charismatic CEOs enjoyed higher stock prices.  Moreover, this effect was magnified during difficult financial conditions — during economic downturns, charismatic CEOs had an even stronger effect on stock price. (Perhaps when people are under duress, they especially gravitate to the hope and energy that such leaders exude).

    This first study was used to set the stage for a second study using Steve Jobs. Note that although this study was published in 2004, the data collection was actually done years earlier (things move slow in academia), in late 1998, barely a year after Jobs had returned to Apple.  There was a lot of hype and hope about Jobs, but he was not seen as the magical CEO heis now.  This research was done  in the very early and uncertain days of the turnaround. 

    The set-up of the study was as follows (I am simplifying): 150 students were asked to imagine they had inherited $10,000 from a relative and were asked to alocate the money among three investment options: an indexed mutual fund, a money market certificate, or Apple stock.  All were shown objective fiancial information about Apple's recent performance (and the performance of money markets and mutual funds too). Half were given information suggesting that Apple's prospects for a turnaround were bright and half were given information that Apple's prospects for a turnaround were dim.  Then came the big manipulation: Half were shown a videotape of Jobs doing a 20 minute presentation at a trade show (I am pretty sure I loaned this to them for the experiment, Jobs talks about all the ways things are getting better and is his usual compelling self) and half did not see the video. 

    The results were pretty interesting.  The subjects who saw the film rated Jobs as considerably more charismatic than those who did not. And those who saw the film were willing to invest more money in Apple than those who did not. This effect was driven primarily by people who were presented negative predictions about Apple's future. Those who did not see Jobs invested an average of $1329 but those who saw Jobs invested an average of $3327 (compared to a $400 bump for those who saw the film but were presented information suggesting that Apple's future was bright).

    This study is imperfect, as all studies are. But I find it fun, imaginative, and intriguing.  For starters, it shows both the dangers of charismatic leaders — because they can distract people from the facts or at least color the ways those facts are construed (especially when fear and pessimism are in the air).  This research also shows how charismatic leaders have the potential to start a positive self-fulfilling prophecy.  And in the specific case of Jobs, it is intriguing to think about the astounding long-term success of Apple under his leadership the last 13 years or so, especially in light of Jim Collins dim view of charisma in both Built to Last and Good to Great.  I have complained about Collins' mediocre and over-hyped methodology before (see here and here) and the fact that he elected to ignore literally hundreds of past studies (including many studies on charisma and performance) and to simply rely on two very small samples to make sweeping claims.  As I have also said before, I find his books to be compelling in terms of the writing and despite this specific complaint about charisma, I generally agree with his claims and  could point to many other studies that support them.

    What do you think?  Is Jobs' charisma an important part of the Apple turnaround?  And what are the virtues and dangers of charismatic leaders?