Loud Thinking

Archive for January, 2014

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862);
naturalist, author, philosopher

Pakistan’s top batsmen got out in a manner as if they belonged to a non Test plying nation like Afghanistan or Kenya.

Still there is time to recall Anwer Ali, Sharjeel Khan and Sohaib Maqsood, else we may end up losing the Test series.

HBR Blog Network

The Dangerous Rise of “Entrepreneurship Porn”

by Morra Aarons-Mele | 12:00 PM January 6, 2014

Sir Richard Branson has proclaimed 2014 “The Year of the Entrepreneur.” Breathless coverage abounds: sexy stories of the young and old who threw off the yoke and started their own businesses. It’s all goodbye cubicle — hello freedom, vitality, creativity.

Fed by media and online coverage of an idealized lifestyle, this “entrepreneurship porn” presents an airbrushed reality in which all work is always meaningful and running your own business is a way to achieve better work/life harmony.

But the reality of starting and running a small business is different from the fantasy – and I should know, because I run one, and am married to a long-time entrepreneur. Starting a company doesn’t mean being freed from the grind; it means that the buck stops with you, always, even if it’s Sunday morning or Friday night.

Moreover, it’s just not possible that every smart young graduate can launch her own successful enterprise. Part of me wants to cry every time I meet a smart young student and the notion of joining a respected, existing institution cannot compete with the thought of creating her own.

Very few of the talented young people I meet want to work for something that already exists. On the contrary, they want to create new enterprises. They want to work according to their own rules, not a boss’s rules. Part of this may be youth, but surely part of it is what these young people have seen: their parents and older friends grinding it out, feeling unrecognized and judged on the wrong criteria. Women leaving high-powered jobs once they have children and stifled in a desire to be both a good mother and good worker, and men who cannot express their need to have a life at home and at work.

I went to graduate school to study why people — women in particular — leave work, and how employers can help them to stay. I also went to graduate school to escape my own struggles with a frustrating corporate environment; I quit 10 jobs before I was 31. In the years since, I’ve spent hours interviewing both experts in human capital and the men and women who’ve left firms.

I’ve come to suspect that the rise of “entrepreneurship porn” is at least as much about escaping a company as starting one. Most Americans don’t like their work. Data on Americans’ dissatisfaction regarding their work – in corporate environments, in particular, show:

2 million Americans voluntarily leave their jobs every month (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
74% of people would today consider finding a new job
32% of employees are looking for a new job
Only 47.3 percent of currently employed Americans are satisfied with their position (Conference Board)
The majority of American employees are disengaged from their work (Gallup)
Entrepreneurs are more likely to have an optimistic view about their futures than other employees (Gallup).
Entrepreneurial escapism thrives in such an environment. A joint study from INSEAD/Princetonshows that “Non-pecuniary motivations are more important than monetary motivations for people to start a new business. One is autonomy: People want to be their own boss. The other is identity fulfillment, which is more about people having a vision about a product or a service. But their employers do not give them the freedom to develop within the company structure. That is a key driver.”

Despite these noble yearnings, the data show the most effective workplaces with happy employees are not necessarily startups. The criteria that define happy workplaces are work-life fit, autonomy, job challenge and learning, a climate of respect and trust, supervisor task support, and financial security. None of these spells “small business” to me.

The longer the fantasy of entrepreneurship continues and the media continues to churn out entrepreneurship porn the weaker our established institutions become. The data on creating effective workplaces are clear, and can basically be boiled down into simple tenets: Create an environment that treats employees like grown ups. Focus on accountability, not face time. Allow men and women to live whole lives.

A good friend who runs a professional services firm told me with some shock that his most profitable employee is a single mother who works part time. So this year, she got a big bonus. Despite working for someone else, she feels recognized and rewarded. And by being part of a larger organization, she gets to have more time with her kids. This sort of story is rare – but it doesn’t have to be.

Entrepreneurship may always be a sexy story for the media to tell, but our needs as working people are about much more than zeitgeisty startups. We can’t all start the next Facebook, but we all deserve a work life that recognizes our diligence and unique contributions. What if 2014 could be the “year of working for someone else — and loving it”?

More blog posts by Morra Aarons-Mele
More on: Entrepreneurship

MORRA AARONS-MELE
Morra Aarons-Mele is the founder of Women Online and The Mission List. She is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first Internet chat, and launched Wal-Mart’s first blog. Morra tweets at @morraam.

Taking Over from an Incompetent Team Leader

Becoming the leader of an existing team can be challenging, but taking over from an incompetent leader is especially difficult. Even if you find your new team in disarray, you’ll get better results from your team members if you invest the time to appreciate and respond to their needs and concerns before making changes. By understanding what they have experienced, you’ll better understand the issues that must be addressed to move forward—and your curiosity will show your interest in your people’s well-being, another value that may have been lacking in the previous leader.

Adapted from “Taking Over from an Incompetent Team Leader” by Roger Schwarz.

The FBI had an opening for an assassin. After all the background checks, interviews and testing were done, there were 3 finalists:

Two men and one woman…

For the final test, the FBI agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun.

‘We must know that you will follow your Instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside the room you will find your wife sitting in a chair .. . . Kill her!!’

The man said, ‘You can’t be serious. I could never shoot my wife.’

The agent said,’Then you’re not the right man for this job. Take your wife and go home.’

The second man was given the same instructions.

He took the gun and went into the room. All was Quiet for about 5 minutes. The man came out with tears in his eyes, ‘I tried, but I can’t kill my wife.’ The agent said, ‘You don’t have what it takes. Take your wife and go home.’

Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same instructions, to kill her husband. She took the Gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one After another. They heard screaming, crashing, Banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was Quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the Woman, wiping the sweat from her brow.

‘This gun is loaded with blanks’ she said.. ‘I had to Beat him to death with the chair.’

If you want the job done, give it to a Woman.

HBR Blog Network

Should Leaders Focus on Results, or on People?

by Matthew Lieberman | 8:00 AM December 27, 2013

A lot of ink has been spilled on people’s opinions of what makes for a great leader. As a scientist, I like to turn to the data. In 2009, James Zenger published a fascinating survey of 60,000 employees to identify how different characteristics of a leader combine to affect employee perceptions of whether the boss is a “great” leader or not. Two of the characteristics that Zenger examined were results focus and social skills. Results focus combines strong analytical skills with an intense motivation to move forward and solve problems. But if a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%. Social skills combine attributes like communication and empathy. If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of the time — a paltry 12%.

However, for leaders who were strong in both results focus and in social skills, the likelihood of being seen as a great leader skyrocketed to 72%.

Social skills are a great multiplier. A leader with strong social skills can leverage the analytical abilities of team members far more efficiently. Having the social intelligence to predict how team members will work together will promote better pairings. Often what initially appear to be task-related difficulties turn out to be interpersonal problems in disguise. One employee may feel devalued by another or think that she is doing all the work while her partner loafs – leading both partners putting in less effort to solve otherwise solvable problems. Socially skilled leaders are better at diagnosing and treating these common workplace dilemmas.

So how many leaders are rated high on both results focus and social skills? If this pairing produces especially effective leaders, companies should have figured this out and promoted people to leadership positions accordingly, right? Not hardly. David Rock, director of the Neuroleadership Institute, and Management Research Group recently conducted a survey to find out the answer. They asked thousands of employees to rate their bosses on goal focus (similar to results focus) and social skills to examine how often a leader scored high on both. The results are astonishing. Less than 1% of leaders were rated high on both goal focus and social skills.

Why would this be? As I describe in my book, Social: Why our brains are wired to connect, our brains have made it difficult to be both socially and analytically focused at the same time. Even though thinking social and analytically don’t feel radically different, evolution built our brain with different networks for handling these two ways of thinking. In the frontal lobe, regions on the outer surface, closer to the skull, are responsible for analytical thinking and are highly related to IQ. In contrast, regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch, support social thinking. These regions allow us to piece together a person’s thoughts, feelings, and goals based on what we see from their actions, words, and context.

Here’s the really surprising thing about the brain. These two networks function like a neural seesaw. In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got more active, the more the other one got quieter. Although there are some exceptions, in general, engaging in one of the kinds of thinking makes it harder to engage in the other kind. Its safe to say that in business, analytical thinking has historically been the coin of the realm — making it harder to recognize the social issues that significantly affect productivity and profits. Moreover, employees are much more likely to be promoted to leadership positions because of their technical prowess. We are thus promoting people who may lack the social skills to make the most of their teams and not giving them the training they need to thrive once promoted.

How can we do better? For one, we should give greater weight to social skills in the hiring and promotion process. Second, we need to create a culture that rewards using both sides of the neural seesaw. We may not be able to easily use them in tandem, but knowing that there is another angle to problem solving and productivity will create better balance in our leaders.

Finally, it may be possible to train our social thinking so that it becomes stronger over time. Social psychologists are just at the beginning stages of examining whether this kind of training will bear fruit. One exciting prospect, one that would make the training fun, is the recent finding that reading fiction seems to temporarily strengthen these mental muscles. Wouldn’t that be great — if reading Catcher in the Rye or the latest Grisham novel were the key to larger profits?

“Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Perseverance is persistence to continue, despite difficult obstacles.

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.”

Horace (65-8);
Roman lyric poet

Embrace Constructive Conflict

Finding the right balance between the need to deal with conflict and the instinct to avoid it is one of the toughest challenges that managers face. While unbridled conflict can create a toxic atmosphere, insufficient conflict can be just as damaging: creative ideas and better ways of getting things done – which help organizations advance – often stem from constructive conflict. Encourage constructive conflict by reinforcing the notion that people can disagree about ideas and strategies, practices and processes, but still respect and like each other – it’s not personal, it’s business. Rather than leaving it to chance, schedule time with your team to question norms and change the way things are done. If someone pushes back or raises an uncomfortable question in a meeting, back them up rather than shutting them down. If possible, make those moments teachable and encourage others to do the same.

Adapted by HBR from “Nice Managers Embrace Conflict, Too” by Ron Ashkenas and Lisa Bodell.