Authentic Communication

Otrazhenie

From http://hr.toolbox.com

 Authentic communication is not always easy, but it is the basis of successful relationships at home and real effectiveness at work. Yet people constantly back away from honesty to protect themselves and others.

As Sheryl Sandberg points out, this reticence causes and perpetuates all kinds of problems: uncomfortable issues that never get addressed, resentment that builds, unfit managers who get promoted rather than fired, and on and on. Often these situations don’t improve because no one tells anyone what is really happening. We are so rarely brave enough to tell the truth…

From The Grumpy Poet

However, authentic communication is not simply about saying what we think at all costs. Communication works best when we combine appropriateness with authenticity, finding the sweet spot where opinions are not brutally honest but delicately honest. Speaking truth fully without hurting feelings comes naturally to some and is an acquired skill for…

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Hierarchical Management – a reprise

Employers who want peak performance from their employees might do better by ensuring that they have a strong but fair hierarchy in place.

Aaron Kay at Fuqua Management School of Business at Duke University, Carolina,  thinks leaders should worry less about empowerment and equality.

He says “In organisations there is a move to become flat but that is not always the best thingy you want to keep employees working hard”.

“People may say that they want to work in an egalitarian workplace but sometimes they actually function better in a hierarchy” regardless of where they sit in the organisation.

It’s not  just that a hierarchy offers more chance of promotion – although some staff will appreciate seeing a ladder to climb – but that hierarchies offer staff a sense of order and structure which they like.

When times are turbulent and external circumstances reduce their sense of control preference for hierarchies increases. Kay says “People seek out guidance and leaders”  And a  hierarchy helps them feel that they are in a safe, stable environment … where they can predict the outcome of their behaviours.

His research also suggests that a strong hierarchy helps people feel that they are being more effective in tackling long-term goals. “If you lead an organisation where you need employees to work on long-term projects, committed to long-term goals, it’s tempting to think that if you give them autonomy they will be more interested and it will drive the right behaviour”.

But as he points out long-term goals are hard to achieve and people need to forgo immediate reward to focus on something way off in the future. They have to trust the system. Having a clear structure and a hierarchy reassures employees that things won’t change before they complete the task.

Hierarchy might also be better for complex tasks where each person needs to complete their part exactly as it is specified. This doesn’t necessarily mean managers should adopt a directive or autocratic approach. Employees obviously like to know where they stand but managers shouldn’t lord it over them and be open to new ideas.

Other experts disagree. One said  ‘it’s naive to think that structures always work the way they were intended”. In some organisations employees feel that although there is a structure and the rules are fair, they are not always applied fairly.

It seems to depend on whether or not you can trust the leaders and managers to be fair and whether or not the rules change as you are working.

See also my earlier post on this topic. 

Size Matters (3)

Andy Yapp, at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, examined the impact of ergonomics on people’s ethics.

They wanted to know whether or not your workspace would have an effect on your honesty.

What they found was that the bigger and larger the space and seating, which encouraged expansive gestures, the more likely it was that people would pocket overpayments, cheat on a test, and break the rules in a driving simulator.

In the first test they deliberately overpaid people for participating in the test and found that 78% of those with the bigger chairs kept it compared with 38% of people working in cramped spaces.

They also observed illegally parked cars in New York and found that when a driver’s seat increased by 1 standard deviation from the mean the probability that a car would be double parked increased from 51% to 71%.

The researchers say that when we have more space we can adopt more expansive postures and these often project high power whereas people working in constrictive spaces where they have to keep their limbs close to their bodies project low power.

The findings were not influenced by the height of the person nor by how corrupt the person might have been before the experiment as they were randomly assigned. The posture was the only variable.

This is interesting as I would have thought that people working in constricted or uncomfortable environments might be likely to cheat just to get back at their employer – a kind of organisational justice.

But we also know that power corrupts.

Yapp and his colleagues admit there might be cultural differences e.g. Asian norms of modesty and humility are inconsistent with the power posturing.

The research replicates that done at Columbia University on the size of desks (and they also looked at illegal parking in New York).

I also posted on the size of CEOs’ signatures based on some research at the University of Maryland.

Main source:  “Big chairs create big cheats” HBR November 2013

Does your company have a helping culture?

As mentioned in previous posts employee engagement and discretionary effort are the current holy grail for many organisations.

And leaders can contribute by encouraging helping behaviour. One of the hallmarks of a top-performing company is that people help each other to get the best performance.

Organisational psychologists call this “citizenship behaviour” without which companies, which are complex with competing demands for time, loyalty, and team input v individual effort, would not function as effectively as they might with strict boundaries and rules.

A design firm called IDEO was the subject of a case study in the Harvard Business Review earlier this year. A key element of the culture there is “collaborative help”.

It is an organisation of knowledge workers tackling complex problems and the authors of the study discovered a number of key elements.

Leadership conviction that collaborative help works. The CEO Tim Brown says “the more complex the problem the more help you need”.

But promoting helping is not enough. The other side of the coin is that workers sometimes need a sounding board for their ideas so they need to be okay about asking for help without seeming incompetent.

The culture of the organisation at IDEO embedded the helping idea. Research showed that 89% of employees showed up in the top 5 helpers for everyone in the organisation and almost every person was named as a helper by at least one other person.

These helper friendly organisations are more efficient even though they build slack into the system. This is to enable access to potential helpers.

People in one office were asked to name the 5 colleagues who had helped them most and rate them along with a randomly chosen non-helper on three attributes. These were competence, trust, and accessibility.

Trust and accessibility were more important than competence in the helpfulness ratings.

To read the whole story check out “IDEO’s Culture of Helping”  by Amabile, Fisher, and Pillemer in HBR January-February 2014.

It’s still all about Trust

Trusting people can make you vulnerable and checking them out can be time-consuming and counter-productive.

Research shows that accuracy in our ability to decide if someone can be trusted is little better than chance.

According to David DeSteno, a psychology professor at Northeastern University writing in March’s Harvard Business Review (“Who can you trust”), it’s because we place too much emphasis on reputation and perceived confidence.

We also ignore that fact that people can change in different contexts and we don’t trust our intuition enough.

DeSteno proposes 4 things to bear in mind:

1 Integrity can vary. People use reputation as a proxy for integrity but it isn’t a stable trait. Because someone has been fair and honest in the past doesn’t mean they will continue to be so in different circumstances.

His research into cheating shows that 90% of people will cheat if they believe they won’t get caught.  And they then rationalise those actions rather than accept that they are untrustworthy.

2 Power does corrupt.  Appearances can be deceptive but the author cites research by Paul Pliff, a social psychologist at Berkeley, which suggests that indicators of socio-economic status can predict trustworthiness.

Increasing status and power correlate with decreasing honesty and reliability. It’s not that rich people are inherently less trustworthy than poor people but that a person’s honesty depends on his or her relative feelings of power or vulnerability.

Assigning people to be a boss or a follower in office simulations Joris Lammers, a psychologist at the University of Cologne, found that those elevated to more senior roles displayed a high degree of hypocritical behaviour and were quick to condemn others for unethical, self-interested behaviour whilst judging their own actions to be acceptable.

When someone has a higher status than you, or even just thinks so, his mind tells him that you need him more than he needs you. Consequently he focuses on short-term outcomes and worries less about the long-term effect of being untrustworthy.

This explains why big companies often treat smaller clients less well than their larger ones.

3 Confidence often masks incompetence. Honourable intentions mean nothing if a person is incompetent. We know this instinctively from an early age (4-year olds will pick people as instructors whom they perceive as more competent).

But confidence is  so alluring that we tend to trust information provided by people who exude it, especially when money is at stake. Hence the success of confidence tricksters.

In newly formed groups those members who expressed pride in the group quickly rose to positions of leadership even though the abilities that their pride stemmed from weren’t relevant to the group’s objectives.

So while reputation isn’t a good predictor of integrity it is of competence because capabilities are more stable.

4 It’s OK to trust your instinct.

Despite decades of research into researching ways of detecting untrustworthiness most people do little better than chance. Even trained experts.

That’s because most of us look for a single “tell” to indicate whether or not someone can be trusted whereas we need to look for a set of gestures. This is something we can do instinctively.

So is it better to trust or not?  If you have no information to go on then a bias towards trusting is better for long-term gains. Otherwise remember these 4 rules!

Patrick Lencioni is a strong advocate of trust in teams. In his best-selling book, “The 5 Dysfunctions of Teams” he sets down a hierarchy (see diagram below).

But basically it’s all about Trust.

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

Informational Warfare – protect your reputation

Anyone in doubt about the impact of social media will have had to rethink their ideas after the Tunisian and Egyptian popular uprisings.

But is the tweet really mightier than the sword? Iran soon learned to curtail its impact and China and Libya, by shutting down mobile and internet services and using their internal security forces, prevented any sizeable demonstrations,

In the business world the BP Deepwater catastrophe was an undoubted PR disaster. To add to the company’s woes a tweeter began publishing from a bogus PR division within BP. As the world watched the marine disaster unfold the fake PR person published tweets about the canteen menu and other mundane issues. The satirical account of life within BP was followed by more people than followed the official BP twitter account.

The power of one man (in this case an aspiring comedian) and a laptop against a giant global corporation shows how the rules have changed. Critics and activists no longer need to have an institution behind them, This is what the military call asymmetric warfare – an uneven matching of resources which can nevertheless result in stalemate or worse – think the USA in Vietnam, think the soviets in Afghanistan.

And to make matters worse for businesses the critics don’t necessarily have to tell the truth, are probably emotionally driven because they are angry or desperate, and may also be irrational.

An article in the December 2010 issue of HBR suggests that businesses need to look at what the military are doing. After the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war the US Army War College Centre for Strategic Leadership and Canada’s SecDev Group carried out a review into what they called “informational warfare”. They found that although Hezbollah was mismatched in conventional military terms it had used social media to win “hearts and minds” (ironically a key part of psyops warfare) around the world and discredited the Israeli position.

SecDev scholars wrote a report called “Bullets and Blogs” in which they set out several principles which could be used to counter attack and which also apply to protecting corporate reputations. These were:

Avoid a disproportionate show of force: don’t come across as a bully. Companies are generally seen as Goliaths compared to individuals. It’s not a good idea to respond in an aggressive manner. A more considered, less emotional, response which shows you re listening and doing something about the problem pays dividends.

Train people to respond quickly: Companies can be slow to respond especially of they need to reach a consensus or call a board meeting to agree the content of a tweet. Having a media monitoring system and social media channels in place enables companies to respond quickly through key personnel.

Avoid bureaucracy and empower teams to respond: following on from the last point, the public would rather hear it from front-line staff than the board members. So letting staff blog about their experiences is a more trusted method. I’ve seen NHS web-sites with interviews with nurses and other clinical staff talking about their work. These testimonials can work. Even the US Army allows soldiers to post blogs (as long as they are not risking security) on ArmyStrongStories.com. General Freakly, in a podcast, basically said that if you trust soldiers to make daily life or death decisions you can trust them with social media.

Go rogue – apply the same tactics: New media are often seen as a threat rather than an asset. Used ethically however they can help neutralise criticism. Domino’s Pizza was badly affected by the YouTube video of a staff member doing unsavoury things with the food. Profits were hit and that particular store was closed. The company President apologised using YouTube reasoning that that’s where the audience was. That in itself created news which by chance also diverted attention away from the problem.

Use multipliers to echo your message: In the military force multipliers are things which amplify your strength. In media having 3rd party endorsements can add to your own efforts. Critics of cruise ships visiting Haiti after the earthquake were soon neutralised when independent organisations supported the cruise line which had invested heavily in the country already, were delivering relief supplies, and who had been asked by the government to continue visiting to help the local economy to recover.

Establish your credentials in advance: Of course all these things are made easier if you already have established yourself as an ethical, diverse, fair, organisation so that when you are attacked you can point to past successes or decisions.

With new media you now have less control over your corporate message so reputation management is even more important.

Queen Bees – victims or oppressors?

Queen Bees (QBs) are women in senior positions who boast about their own masculine attributes whilst putting down their female subordinates.

Some people believe that QBs cause as many problems as sexist men and are just as likely to cause gender inequality in the workplace.

A Dutch team has challenged that assertion and thinks that sexist workplaces are a breeding ground for QBs, that they are a consequence not a cause of sexism at work.

We can probably all think about women who came across as tough as nails – I saw a few around the NHS in my time there –  and those of you with long enough memories may be thinking of Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir – said to be “the toughest man” in the Israeli cabinet at the time.

Bella Derks and her team interviewed 94 senior women in a rage of organisations in the Netherlands and found that those who showed the hallmarks of being QBs all recalled suffering sexism and prejudice in their careers and also identified less with other women.

Derks thinks that women in those situations have two options: either strengthen their ties with other women or distance themselves from their femininity.  She is basically saying that it is the sexist culture which forces some women to make a choice and become QBs.

The research methodology means that you can’t be sure whether a sexist culture forces women to renounce their femininity and become QBs or whether being a QB makes it more likely that you will recall being the subject of sexism. The researchers think the latter unlikely and believe that it is more likely that QBs would play down the presence of gender discrimination.

But why would they? Wouldn’t they be proud to have overcome discrimination? And surely not all of them would become QBs anyway. And what about the ones who took the other option to get closer to other women? Isn’t it more likely that there is a predisposition to behave in this way, an aspect of their personality?

If Derks and her colleagues are right however it suggests that appointing token women into sexist cultures will backfire as they are more likely to become QBs thereby making it worse for their female subordinates. (Maybe that’s why most people prefer working for men).

The researchers say for women to become inspiring role models who have positive attitudes about the potential of female subordinates companies would have to ensure that; “women can achieve career success without having to forgo their gender identification”

In other words behave like women and don’t try to outdo the men by being more masculine. There is evidence that when women play to their strengths they are really trusted and respected in organisations

Updated 25 July 2011: Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times has picked up on a piece Derk published last week in Psychological Science in which she explains that QBs are bitchy because they do it to survive.

Derk says; “This isn’t just about women it’s a classic group behaviour. If you are  a member of a group which is undervalued in the wider culture you can pursue your own ambitions by distancing yourself from that group”. In the case of QBs they do it by identifying with the dominant men and by running down other women.

Or as Derk puts it; “QBs advance their careers through emphasising their masculine characteristics, expressing gender-stereotypical views of other women and denying g the existence of gender bias” and “QB behaviour leads successful women to distance themselves from other women reducing the likelihood that they will improve opportunities for other women or be seen as role models.”

The rest of Mills piece is about the lack of women at the top ie only 13.9% in FTSE100 although she concedes that women are well represented at what she calls the “marzipan layer” just below. And the building up of a critical mass as more women get on boards she thinks will do away with QB behaviour.

I still think that there are elements of QB behaviour which reflect personality traits and predispositions. Under pressure dark side behaviours will emerge and women are more prone to suffering ill-health when stressed.

Lies, damned lies

Goebbels famously said in 1941:” The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness.

The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous”. And so the BIG LIE idea, 16 years after Hitler had first used the term in Mein Kampf, passed into popular usage.

I thought of this when I read about Stephen Wilce. He was, until exposed by TV journalists, New Zealand’s Chief Defence Scientist and had a high security clearance and access to highly sensitive information.

According to his CV he had been in both MI5 and MI6, played international rugby for Wales, swam for England in the Commonwealth games, competed in the bobsleigh in the Winter Olympics, been a member of the New Zealand yacht squadron, fought alongside Prince Andrew in the Falklands and Gulf wars, been decorated for bravery, and had an honorary PhD from Cambridge university.

He did have an MBA, had been in the Royal Navy, had competed in bobsleigh events, and had worked as a bar manager at the Americas Cup but everything else was pure fantasy. It sounds funny but how embarrassing after all the security vettings and selection processes.

So while Wilce was clearly a fantasist, research tells us that people in positions of power are better liars.

Dana Carney, at Columbia University Graduate School of Business carried out research to see if it made a difference if you had more power. The research subjects were divided into bosses, with bigger offices and more power eg they could assign salaries, and employees. Half of each group were then asked, via computer instructions, to steal a hundred-dollar note then lie about it later when interviewed.

The subjects were then measured on 5 variables associated with lying:

1. accelerated speech – liars utter more syllables at a higher pitch and repeat words and sentences more
2. shoulder shrugs – liars shrug more when trying to suppress the lie
3. cortisol – liars’ saliva contains a higher concentration of the stress hormone
4. eyes – liars’ pupils dilate
5. mouth – liars press their lips together and involuntarily smirk when they think they’ve got away with it

Only the low-power liars could be seen to be lying. High-power liars were indistinguishable from non-liars. A sense of power seems to buffer people from the stress of lying and increases their ability to deceive others. As most people can’t detect liars better than chance unless specially trained it suggests most people in a position of power can get away with it. Perhaps they are in positions of power because they are good liars. (See “Leadership – the dark side“)

Occasionally of  course powerful people get caught out lying. MPs are a case in point and many lost their seats following the expenses scandal exposed by the press. More significantly perhaps, former Labour Minister Phil Woollas has been found guilty of contravening an old statute that prohibits “false statements” against a rival’s “character or conduct”. He accused his Lib Dem opponent of cosying up to Islamic militants (this was particularly sensitive in a town that had been the centre of race riots previously). His appeal against the decision – which means the election will be re-run – continues.

Another aspect of the research was about power posture compared with low power, non-assertive postures. Power postures take up more space, like a peacock spreading its feathers, whilst subordinates want to take up less space.

The researchers found that those people asked to adopt power postures, even though they didn’t know why, had higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of cortisol. In other words they felt more powerful and less stressed out.

Effective teamwork pays off for “los 33″

Not since the safe splashdown of Apollo 13 in 1970 has the world been so focussed on the lives of men in desperate straits as the events at the San Jose mine unfolded.

Camp Hope, set up in the Atacama desert 50km from the nearest town, lived up to its name as the rescue smoothly proceeded and families were re-united, emotions ran high, and the country celebrated and sensed it had been reborn.

Surely there will be books, films, docu-dramas and probably more personal drama as the miners attempt to return to some semblance of normality. Above all this proved what effective teamwork could achieve.

Hackman’s model of effective teams stands up well in this scenario. There was a team below the surface and there were teams of rescuers, all united in a single purpose – to rescue 33 miners from 2,000′ below the surface who had been there for 69 days in 90 degrees temperature and 90% humidity. Think Florida in the Summer but without the sunshine and AC.

Hackman’s 3 core conditions are:

1. The team must be a real team, not just a group of people doing their own thing – are they dependent on each other, do they know who is in the team and who isn’t, do they know how much authority they had, was it a stable team?
2. The team must have a compelling direction in its work. Did they have a vision which energised and engaged them?
3. It has an enabling structure which facilitates rather than impedes. Did they see their work as meaningful, did they feel personally responsible for work outcomes, did they receive trustworthy feedback on what they were doing?

In this model leadership is about creating and maintaining the core conditions using whatever skills and expertise you have and regardless of whether or not you have a formal leadership position. We know that there was a shift supervisor who was respected by the men and accepted as their leader. From reports we have learned how he organised people into teams, assigned specific roles and structured their day with prayer sessions, exercise, and rest periods. And let’s not forget that for the first 17 days they were on their  own and left to their own resources not knowing how much people on the surface knew.

Hackman also identifies two supporting conditions:

1. The team must operate within a supportive organisational context
2. It has available ample and expert coaching in teamwork

Once contact was made with the surface the rescue teams sprang into action. Communications were established (the telecomms expert simply said he was asked to make contact with the 33 and that’s what he did). Engineers, medical staff, psychologists, experts from NASA, special forces, survival experts, and rescuers worked together – encouraged by the President (who apparently was advised not to become so personally involved as it was considered a political gamble).

The miners were advised on how to cope, inventors responded by designing items small enough to fit in the “doves” they used to transport items down to the men. Beds and boots were all made to be re-assembled down below. The Chilean Navy designed and built the Phoenix escape pod. I think the miners, and just as importantly for morale their families, knew that they did have support and expert advice.

Hackman argues that effective teams shape and exceed expectations, it become more capable as time goes on, and that individuals acquire new skills and knowledge and new perspectives. And there is a sense of fulfilment and the knowledge that the team really achieved something together, something to look back on with pride.

Something like this can be life-changing and it is possible that some of the miners may suffer from PTSD or some will want to do something different with their lives. For some they may never again enjoy the comradeship they felt underground. But for almost 70 days, culminating in that extraordinarily successful rescue, we were reminded how great we can be when we work together for a common purpose.

Apparently the President was advised not to become so personally involved as it was considered a political gamble and he wasn’t that popular at the beginning. For whatever reason he did become involved and showed a very human face with his wife and cabinet colleagues at his side.