Motivating staff – the Dan Pink seminar

Motivating staff is not the easiest thing to do. In fact is it possible to motivate someone else to do something at all?

We can coerce or threaten and, to use that horrible word, “incentivise” people but most people only really do things they want to unless in desperate straits. In other words motivation, for most people, is internally generated.

Maslow‘s idea of people seeking self-actualisation may be considered old hat now but you can still see evidence of that human potential philosophy in the field of positive psychology.

Similarly Herzberg’s two-factor theory distinguished between motivators –  which were intrinsic to the job, and demotivators, or hygiene factors, which constantly need attention like money which motivates for a while but then loses its incentive value.

Dan Pink‘s seminar on this topic is interesting and thought-provoking and you can watch it by clicking here.

First posted September 2010

Potential or Achievement

Anyone working in a large organisation will be familiar with the talent matrix, the 9-box model used  to score high potentials.

A recent survey by SHL suggests we have good leadership in the UK at the moment but might struggle in the future because we’re not getting people with potential coming through the pipeline.

From the 25 countries in the SHL database it was Mexico, Turkey and Egypt who have the greatest source of potential future leaders. The UK fell 18 places and out of the top 20 and Hong Kong dropped from 1st to 20th position.

AN SHL spokesperson said that; “the UK  has a leadership time bomb on its hands if  it doesn’t invest in learning and development to cultivate future leaders. Rising education standards in other countries along with a culture of entrepreneurialism are factors driving the emerging economies such as Brazil, India, Mexico, and Turkey, up the rankings for future leadership potential. These nations have a huge growth opportunity if they can identify, nurture and develop this potential“.

In their survey SHL found that only 1 in 15 managers and professionals qualify as effective leaders today but there are six times as many managers who have the potential to develop if they are targeted for investment. And note the word “if”. No doubt SHL would love to help them identify and develop their potential.

So little in the way of hard facts and the future may turn out differently depending on investment.

But given a choice between choosing someone who was a proven leader with solid achievements and someone who had potential what should UK plc do?

Researchers have found that in some situations people will choose potential over achievement. They asked participants to choose between two candidates and select the one who they thought would do better in 5 years time.

They both had the same qualifications but one had two years of high achievement compared to no experience but a high potential score – perhaps surprisingly the participants in the experiments chose the high potential, “the next big thing” even though they accepted that objectively the experienced candidate was the stronger.

And that reasoning applied not just to job candidates but to evaluations of restaurants and stand-up comics. The research, published in the Journal of personality and social psychology (2012), suggests that using potential can be an effective means of persuasion whether in getting a job or winning business.

The recession however may have turned the research on its head. PWC’s Key Trends in Human Capital report 2012 states that productivity is at a 5-year low since 2011.

This is partly because payroll costs rose 16% from 2009 to 2011. And the reason? Organisations turned to more experienced, and expensive, managers to get them out of trouble rather than inexperienced but cheaper alternatives.

It’s good to talk – or maybe not?

An analysis of over 20 years research into team effectiveness revealed that talkative teams are less effective (Journal of Applied Psychology Vol 94 No 2, 2009).

Teams which talk more aren’t necessarily sharing useful information and are not therefore getting better outcomes. And more introverted types will feel entitled to think “I told you so”, because what you talk about is more important for teams than how much you talk.

The researchers also found that teams communicate better when they are told to come up with a correct or best  solution rather than a consensus.

This is yet another report which shows teams aren’t always as effective as people believe.

A report in the Quack Quack column – “We debunk the myths behind the headlines” - in The Times 27 April – cites research from the University of Arizona, reported in Psychological Science, which shows that the more people engage in superficial communication, the lower their morale.

This followed on from criticism of the report that you could measure the happiness levels of celebrities by analysing their tweets, some not very convincing research from the University of Edinburgh.

Updated since first posted 06/04/2010

Are your employees engaged?

The Sunday Times “Best Companies to Work For survey”, which has now canvassed over a million workers since 2000, has identified eight factors that foster workplace engagement.

The factor with the strongest correlation is Leadership: employees must have faith and trust in their senior management team to be engaged.

To do that leaders must gain their trust, live the values, and inspire the team.

Their 2009 survey revealed, in answer to the statement “I have great confidence in the leadership skills of the SMT”, there was a 54% difference between engaged and disengaged employees. In answer to the statement; “senior management truly live the values of this organisation”, there was a 51% difference.

In the top 10% of companies there was a massive 94% confidence rating that the leader ran the company on moral principles.  Would that figure be so high today in the depths of a recession?

Giving something Back (GSB) is one way of engaging employees. Organisations with a good track record of this get higher scores from staff for leadership, pride in their company, and personal well-being.

There does seem to be a rash of books and articles on the new leadership approach needed since the recession. And values and principles are high up among the key factors which is maybe why organisations turn to women when they are in a crisis as they appear to be more trusted as CEOs even though, or maybe because, they  seem more willing to criticise their organisations.

Updated since first published 02/04/2010

Teams and Diversity – not so simple

Current thinking is that diversity is a good thing.

Diversity is claimed to increase creativity and the quality of work and there are several examples of where this has proved to be true.

However a review of research over 50 years (described by Elizabeth Mannix and Margaret A Neale at Cornell and Stanford universities respectively) shows it’s not all good news.

More worryingly researchers at MIT, Harvard, and other institutions found it was difficult to support a business case for diversity in terms of financial RoI.

Mannix and Neale define diversity as; “any personal attribute that someone else may use to detect individual differences”.

How and why a company diversifies is critical. Without proper management or worker training diversity can damage performance.

The ways managers recognise diversity e.g. by race, age, gender, or ethnicity, can have negative effects on collaboration and affect group performance, commitment, and satisfaction negatively, perhaps because they trigger preconceived biases and stereotypes.

Racial diversity, for example, was found to damage team processes. On the other hand less obvious, underlying differences such as functional background, education, or personality, tended to improve team performance as long as it was managed effectively.

Earlier research ( Jehn, Northcraft & Neale, 1999) differentiated between social category diversity such as age and sex; informational diversity such as education and functional role; and value diversity as measured by differences in goals and values.

With social category diversity heterogeneity positively influenced group member morale; differences in informational diversity increased task conflict i.e. differences of opinions, which enhanced group performance; and values diversity decreased individual satisfaction and commitment to the group.

Other research (by Pelled, Xin & Eisenhardt, 1999) found that whether or not diversity was job-related was important. Diversity in functional roles and background beneficially intensified task conflict which improved cognitive performance whereas racial diversity, which is highly visible but not related to the job, boosted affective conflict ie it increased interpersonal tension and emotional conflict and depressed group performance.

Age diversity lowered affective conflict but gender diversity didn’t seem to make any difference either way to group performance. The longer groups worked together the less the emotional conflict. This is in line with Hackman’s work on teams.

Another interesting finding is that university department’s with high proportions of women don’t necessarily welcome more of them. Increasing the proportion of women made it a more negative environment for them.  This might be explained by  the Queen Bee phenomenon.

Research, admittedly 30 years ago, suggested that men were happiest in a male or female dominated settings but not where there was gender balance that led to lower self-esteem and depression. It’s hard to believe that is still the case although the same research showed the women preferred either gender equity or male-dominated work-places. That may still  be the case as most women say they prefer a male boss.

More recent research suggests that adding women to a team can make it collectively smarter (unless they are given feedback in a group setting) but adding women to boards doesn’t necessarily make the company more successful – it depends on their experience and competence, as evidenced by high performing NHS boards.

So what can managers do to harness the talents of a diverse workforce more effectively?

As the research shows just having a group of superficially diverse people i.e. easily identifiable by race, gender, or age, doesn’t work, perhaps because these factors are not job relevant or because of stereotyping.

Clearly picking the right people for the team regardless of their social categories is important. Then having functional or educational diversity and rites or rituals, common values and goals helps. As does the culture and any training (although diversity training doesn’t work).

Information needs to be kept flowing and the influence of minority members enhanced (giving them a voice as the corporate anthropologists at a recent Global Leadership conference would say).

Exploratory team tasks such as fact-finding and research are better served by heterogenous groups, whereas exploitation of knowledge to accomplish a task is best served by an homogenous group. Unless there is a matrix/project management type structure in place this is difficult for a manager to achieve with a fixed team.

Another disappointing finding about teams is that when making decisions they focus on shared information rather than the information that hasn’t been shared. But the better connected the team members are the more likely they are to risk sharing their unique information.

Values and goals diversity was mentioned earlier and there is evidence that having superordinate goals and shared values can overcome many of the differences in a diverse multi-national group especially when the shared values are collectivistic rather than personal.

One key finding is that minority views need to be heard as these views can enhance creativity and problem-solving ability in the team. So the manager needs to create a tolerant environment with an emphasis on interdependency to reach cooperative goals that recognise the minority viewpoint. In practice many organisations weed out mavericks or people managers might consider difficult and prefer to clone what they already have. HR people should know better!

Based on “Diversity at Work” by Elizabeth Mannix & Margaret E Neale in Scientific American Mind August/September 2012

Are leaders more guilt-prone?

Which  employees work harder, are more altruistic and willing to help others, are higher performers, more committed to their employers and able to see the bigger picture?

According to research at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business it’s people who are more guilt prone who make better leaders.

Using the TOSCA (Test of Self-Conscious Affect) and performance ratings Francis Flynn and Rebecca Schaumberg found that those employees with higher levels of guilt were also the ones with the higher performance evaluations.

They were also seen as more committed to the organisation and seen as stronger leaders by their peers.

Even stranger you might think is the fact that there were also more likely to accept redundancies as being necessary for the company and carry them out. They may feel guilty about it but they can rationalise layoffs in the interests of the organisation. So they see the bigger picture.

Previous research has shown that being conscientious is a good predictor of employee performance and an important element in effective leadership and recruiters often look for stable extraverted personality types. This is the first research to suggest that employing people who are more neurotic has advantages for the employers.

And you might think that behaving in this way might have a downside for the individuals but according to Flynn they are no more stressed than other employees and don’t have lower levels of job satisfaction.

It seems that there is also a connection between guilt proneness and altruistic behaviour in terms of giving to charities and helping out colleagues.

The research was carried out in a Fortune 500 company’s finance department so may not be applicable in other functions. But it’s intriguing and if you believe that we should have more diversity in terms of personality variables you will probably welcome it.

Source: HBR Jan-Feb 2011 issue

Golden Skirts don’t necessarily add Midas touch

David Cameron has been taking advice about Norway’s 40% quota of women on boards.There is a campaign to get the UK up to 25% by 2015.

Someone has even started a 30% club to improve on that figure.

So the general impression is that this is a good thing. Cameron says there is overwhelming evidence that having women on boards is good for business.

The government has also said that if companies won’t do it voluntarily the government might have to impose a quota.

That’s what happened in Norway after the 2003 legislation failed to achieve its target – moving from 9% to 40% – by 2005. So on January 1st 2006 publicly listed companies were given two years to comply or be dissolved.

So is there “overwhelming evidence” that it’s a good thing? Unfortunately researchers at the Ross School at the University of Michigan found that having the 40% quota negatively affected companies. They also believe the same thing would happen in the USA and the UK as they have similar systems of governance. Amy Dittmar, associate professor of finance, says “boards are chosen in order to increase shareholder wealth. Placing restrictions on the composition of boards will reduce value”.

First the stock price dropped by almost 3% following the introduction of the new law and 5% for those companies with no women on the board at the time. A measure of the firm’s corporate governance used to determine a company’s value, Tobin’s Q ratio, dropped 18% where companies had to increase the number of women by 10% or more.

One of the researchers, assistant professor of finance Kenneth Ahern, said that their findings support the view that board structure affects value. “Firms that were required to make the most drastic changes to their boards also suffered the largest negative returns. …constraining the selection of board members has a large negative impact on value”

Ahern and colleague Amy Dittmar point out that this is not because of the gender of the new board members but because of their lack of experience and young age. The constraint imposed by the 40% quota led firms to recruit women board members that were younger and with different career experiences. Dittmar says “when firms were free to choose directors before the rule they tended to choose women who were similar to men directors”. Recent research suggests women perform less well than men in competitive situations so could that have a bearing on it as well?

With a large demand and a small supply firms were forced to select directors they wouldn’t otherwise have chosen. And one newspaper report said that one women had ended up on 14 different boards.

Perhaps this research should give everyone a pause for thought. What’s good for diversity is not necessarily good for the company’s performance.  I’m sure women want to be in top jobs on merit and with more women than men graduating you might think it’s only a matter of time before we see more of them up there and the number of women on boards has increased lately in the UK.

However the number of women in senior management positions seems to have dropped – to around 20% globally, according to the Grant Thornton International Business Report. And in privately held businesses the number with no women at all in senior management has increased to 38%. Recent UK research shows that women managers are more critical of  organisations so does that influence women in deciding whether or not to go for promotion?

Whatever the reason with fewer women in senior management how will they provide succession at board level?

And should we really be worrying about gender imbalance. Don’t shareholders want the best person for the job irrespective of gender?

FYI the country with the most women in senior management positions is Thailand (which also has most female CEOs with 30%), followed by Georgia, Russia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Not what you might have expected? But probably no surprise to find India, Japan and the UAE have less than 10% of women in senior management.

Update March 2013

In contrast to the US research a study of the French blue-chip CAC Index found that companies with at least a third of females in management positions had a 30% higher return than others over the last 6 years.

Professor of the management of human resources at Geneva University, Michel Ferrary, found that the CAC 40 had lost 35% of its value between since 2007 but the 10 companies which employed at least 35% of women managers (dubbed the Femina Index)  lost only 5% of their value.

The 10 companies in the Femina Index included Axa, Accor, Danone, and L’Oreal. Ferrary said that these companies were; “less discriminatory, drew their employees from a wider pool, and were more in tune with consumers.”  More diversity seemed to improve decision-making (see also:  Teams & Diversity).

The French government requires companies to have 40% women directors by 2017 but not one of the CAC 40 companies has a female CEO.

 

 

Feedback & Women’s Team Performance

Receiving feedback on how individuals in a group are performing on can reduce your cognitive ability.

That’s according to researchers at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute who used MRI technology to study how the brain was processing information about the group processes and how it effected cognitive capacity.

Researchers ranked  performances on tasks and then shared that information with the group. After the feedback some people’s problem-solving ability declined significantly and that was particularly true for women.

The researchers think that subtle social signals in group settings affect cognitive functioning or, as the Daily Mail put it: “being in a group lowers your intelligence especially if you’re a women”.

This is interesting because not long ago I posted on how adding women to your group raised its collective IQ. This was attributed to women having better social skills, or more social sensitivity (similar to emotional intelligence). Teams displaying social sensitivity would be more open to feedback and constructive criticism.

I wonder if in this experiment the sharing of feedback introduced an element of competition rather than cooperation and raised stress levels which impact on problem-solving ability. Other research has found that men are more competitive than women on the whole and this gender competition gap could explain why in this experiment giving feedback was not  an advantage for women and of course for the team as a whole.

Women & Teams

not always words you find together given that many women in business have reputations as either “Queen Bees”, people who make the most of their “erotic capital”, or simply aggressive. 

Then we had the research finding that said that to make a team more intelligent – simply add more women.

But the question is whether or not women like working in teams?

The Observer this  weekend reported that two academic economists (and have you noticed how economists are trespassing on research topics more typically associated with psychologists) have published results of an experiment in the Economic Journal.

They found that in competitive tasks 80% of men chose to do it as individuals compared to just under 30% of women (they were equally able on the tasks). They called this the “gender competition gap” and found that it shrank by more than half when the only option was to compete in teams. Then 67% of men and 45% of women chose to compete.

Previous research has shown that men prefer to compete more than women even when they are equally able to do the task. The economists, Andrew Healey and Jennifer Pate, say that it is the environment which is important and changing that can narrow the gender competition gap.

They point out that there are only 5 women CEOs of FTSE100 companies and think that if the emphasis was shifted away from “testosterone-fuelled gladiatorial-style competition” to an environment that focusses on their team-working ability, things could change in favour of women. We know that women are frustrated by their perceived under-representation on boards but it is improving, and some writers think that women have already won the battle of the sexes at work.

They also point out that men will apply for jobs for which they are under-qualified  whilst women do the opposite and if selection or competition was based on teamwork more women and fewer men might apply.

I posted on this issue a year ago following the publication of a management survey which showed that people trusted female CEOs more than male ones to get their company out of recession and save jobs. But women suffer more than men from “imposter syndrome” and are therefore less likely to apply for jobs unless they are highly confident they can do them, whereas men are more likely to overestimate their capability and apply regardless.

Do Executive Assistants add value?

There’s a debate about whether or not executive assistants (EAs) improve productivity.

Some executives argue that having to complete their own travel and hotel bookings, complete expense reports, and schedule their own meetings, gives them less time to do “real” work.

On the other hand companies often see executive assistants as just adding to the “headcount” whilst critics think that some executives abuse their power with executive assistants asking them to do personal tasks.

For example, one former EA said she had a really good relationship with her boss who got her to pay her bills,  organise her holidays, and even go house-hunting with her. On the positive side her boss supported her in her studies and in moving into a managerial role.

Perhaps in America Executive Assistants are more common or the term Personal Assistant isn’t used. I’m sure PAs would argue that they are more than glorified secretaries but where are the boundaries?

Source: HBR