Fear Can Stifle Collaboration, or Jumpstart It

greveby Henrich Greve

During organisational change, play the radicals against the moderates to foster collaboration.

Many firms that emerge or grow by making technological breakthroughs owe a lot – maybe everything – to their engineers, and in return give them benefits both formal (organisational power) and informal (status and gratitude). These days, however, innovations are metabolised quickly. As their technology’s wow factor fades, firms tend to shift their emphasis from engineering derring-do to improving market performance. Engineers don’t know how to do that; the marketing department does. So can firms really divert authority and prestige away from the source of their success and into a new path to success? Often the answer is no, as seen in firms applying technological innovations that ignored marketing challenges – such as Sony’s continued development of disc-based music players after flash media enabled firms to make compact players like the iPod.

But there are also successful cases, and a forthcoming article in Administrative Science Quarterly by Emily Truelove and Katherine Kellogg (of MIT Sloan School of Management) explains one mechanism. The authors followed an unnamed car-sharing company that made a strategic shift to marketing following a period of strong engineering success based on disruptive innovation. This was a classic case of a firm with a dominant engineering department that had proven track record of success and professional norms that were completely different from the rising stars in marketing. They had every opportunity to resist, which they did – until they suddenly started making compromises. What happened? Continue reading

Why your ‘personality’ is getting in the way of a promotion

by Marisa Taylor

One of my “favorite” – ie just plain awful – recent stories to expose the staggering tone deafness around gender parity came courtesy of John Greenhouse, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was sharing some supposedly helpful advice for women seeking equality in the business world.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Greenhouse suggested that in order for women to rise above unconscious gender bias online, they ought to go by their initials and hide the fact that they’re women. Female readers weren’t so thrilled by the suggestion that they should be the ones responsible for fixing male bias against them.

For better advice, look to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 48% of the incoming freshmen at the School of Computer Science are women, far greater than the national average of 18%. Rather than urging women to change their behavior, the school changed the culture by launching a faculty-run mentorship group for female computer science students, which “opens doors for women across campus through networking ”, according to the college newspaper. That has attracted increasingly more women to apply to the program. Continue reading

Give Your Team More-Effective Positive Feedback

Christine-Porath by Christine Porath

Research shows that one of the best ways to help employees thrive is to give them feedback. It’s one of the primary levers leaders have to increase a sense of learning and vitality. Giving your direct reports regular updates on personal performance, as well as on how the business is doing, helps them feel valued. Negative or directive feedback provides guidance, leading people to become, over time, more certain about their behavior and more confident in their competence.

Highlighting an employee’s strengths can help generate a sense of accomplishment and motivation. A Gallup survey found that 67% of employees whose managers focused on their strengths were fully engaged in their work, as compared to only 31% of employees whose managers focused on their weaknesses. IBM’s WorkTrends survey of over 19,000 workers in 26 countries, across industries and thousands of organizations, revealed that the engagement level of employees who receive recognition is almost three times higher than the engagement level of those who do not. The same survey showed that employees who receive recognition are also far less likely to quit. Recognition has been shown to increase happiness at work in general and is tied to cultural and business results, such as job satisfaction and retention. Continue reading

The 5 Elements of a Strong Leadership Pipeline

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By Josh Bersin

Investments in traditional leadership development are often misguided and a waste of money.

It’s not that development itself isn’t important. In a Deloitte study of 7,000 organizations this year, 89% of executives rated “strengthening the leadership pipeline” an urgent issue. That’s up from 86% last year, and the trend makes sense. Organizations are continuously promoting people into management, and those new leaders struggle with the transition. To help them in their new roles, companies spend almost $14 billion a year on courses, books, videos, coaches, tests, and executive education programs — and such spending rose 10% last year.

But there’s little evidence that much of this works. Barbara Kellerman from Harvard, Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford, and numerous other experts have pointed out that the development market is filled with fads — slick behavioral models and fun, engaging tools — that don’t really move the needle. Continue reading

Should You Chat Informally Before an Interview?

 

by Brian Swider, Brad Harris,Murray Barrick

 

photo_uniqueJob interviews typically begin with a set of seemingly innocuous questions unrelated to the job: How is your day going? Got any plans for the weekend? How was traffic on your way in?

It is commonly assumed that job candidates and interviewers both prefer to start with these types of questions rather than just diving into the more rigid and formal structured interview topics. After all, small talk is typically how most interactions between strangers begin. Interviewers also believe these little interactions, academically referred to as “rapport building,” help to loosen up nervous job candidates and lead to candid responses in the subsequent job-related questioning. (Note: Although this premise is intuitive, research has yet to substantiate it.) Continue reading