Thursday, June 30, 2016

where should organizational training emphasis be?

One of the things I try to bring out when I interview executives for the Health Leader Forge is how they made the transition from individual performer to supervisor, and supervisor to manager.

Victor Lipman in this article in the HBR points out the fact that organizations tend to invest more in leadership training than in basic management training:
And as I neared the end of my corporate days, I realized I’d received much more management training in the last five years than I did in the first 20 years — when I really needed it — combined.
My experience in the Army is probably not reflective of corporate America. The Army invests a lot of effort in training junior leaders. Whether that training is effective or not kind of depends. But the effort is there, and the Army regularly evolves its training efforts.

My sense from the interviews I have done with executives in the civilian healthcare sector is closer to what Lipman talks about: if the executive was lucky, s/he had a mentor in her/his early days who could coach her/him.

Should organizations do more for individuals transitioning to supervisory roles? There's a fair amount of literature that reflects the fact that high performance as an individual does not translate well into high performance as a supervisor/manager. It seems that would be a good place to invest. How should it be done seems the question. It seems most organizations assume that the manager a new supervisor reports to will do the training, or the new supervisor will just figure it out. What kind of formal training is particularly effective for new supervisors? Are classes effective? Or would some sort of formal mentoring program be more effective? If mentoring, who should do the mentoring? I know I was always a bit leery of telling my boss I was struggling with anything leadership related.

It's a short editorial, but it raises some interesting questions.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

false positives vs. false negatives

Was just listening to Adam Grant talk about his new book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World on Innovation Hub and what really piqued my interest was his comments about false positives vs. false negatives in the workplace. In the interview he talks about how Seinfeld was pretty much panned by the execs at NBC after focus groups hated the show. It only survived because one exec had some extra space and he thought it was funny.

I think the key reason Seinfeld survived was because this not because this particular exec had a lot more courage or insight than his colleagues, but because he could afford to absorb the failure - failure was low cost. A false positive - i.e., choosing to go with Seinfeld and taking a chance - and being wrong would have had no cost to him. He had space that needed to be filled, if no one liked Seinfeld, no one would remember that he had given the show a chance.

The execs who rejected Seinfeld did not have that freedom - if they gave a thumbs up to Seinfeld and it turned out they were wrong (false positive), it would have been costly to them. Thus they passed on Seinfeld (a false negative) because institutional incentives made them more conservative than they should have been.

I've been reading about IDEO and how they try to fail early in their creative processes so that they can learn more quickly.

Grant's Seinfeld story is a great example of how organizations build in conservatism and miss opportunity.

How do we create organizations so that employees can take more chances without being punished?

significance of fun job titles

Fun article in HBR about the value of letting employees make up their own job titles. I especially liked "Germ Slayer" for an infectious disease specialist)

https://hbr.org/2016/05/creative-job-titles-can-energize-workers

From the HBR article:
The researchers surveyed the workers, along with members of two control groups, about their attitudes toward their work before the retitling and five weeks later. They found that those who had been asked to choose new titles had lower levels of emotional exhaustion, felt more validated and better recognized for their work, and experienced greater “psychological safety,” which can promote free information exchanges. They concluded, “Rather than viewing titles solely as sources and reflections of formality and rigidity or mechanisms of bureaucratic control, our research suggests that titles can be vehicles for agency, creativity, and coping.”
The underlying academic paper is "JOB TITLES AS IDENTITY BADGES: HOW SELF- REFLECTIVE TITLES CAN REDUCE EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION" at Academy of Management Journal 2014, Vol. 57, No. 4, 1201–1225. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0338 .

from the article:
Similarly, when one of the authors of this article was an assistant professor, an executive
once asked, “Who do you assist, and when will you get to teach your own classes and do your own research?”
I have had the same experience and hate using that title - especially since I am in my mid-40's. It makes me sound like a TA instead of an actual faculty member.

The authors conduct a mixed methods study, doing a qualitative, grounded theory study at a local chapter of the Make A Wish (MAW) Foundation where they initially discovered that this chapter encouraged employees to come up with their own job titles (in addition to formal titles granted by the organization). They made some generalizations, then ran a quasi-experiment at a hospital where the treatment group was encouraged to make up their own job titles. After five weeks, the treatment group showed reduced emotional exhaustion.

Subjects from both the MAW and hospital treatment groups liked their self-reflective job titles, though a significant minority at the hospital did not use them and/or did not think they were appropriate for the organizational context.

The authors point out some risks - namely that cynical employees could take advantage of the freedom to create names and create inappropriate/disruptive titles. My thought is it would take a fairly strong culture to overcome that kind of behavior - if management simply vetoed employees who made inappropriate names, the cynicism would just be enhanced. For censure to be effective and not counterproductive, it would have to come from peer rejection - employees would have be feel ashamed of making cynical names.

I really liked this article. Very creative and interesting.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

failures of new managers

Good article in the HBR about new managers. A list of things new managers fail at:

If the new manager doesn’t fully understand that, they might hold things up by:
  • Doing tasks that should be delegated to team members
  • Taking back the tasks that they have delegated because they believe they can do them better
  • Undercommunicating with direct reports, making them unsure of their duties
  • Micromanaging in a way that doesn’t allow team members to expand their own capabilities
rest here:  https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-to-know-if-someone-is-ready-to-be-a-manager

Thursday, June 2, 2016

better to be a generalist

Interesting, especially since the observed field was investment banking where I would have expected deeper experience to be a strength:
Experienced hiring managers said they preferred people who had a diverse range of skills. They said things like “Someone who has accomplished a lot of things is better than a one-trick-pony who just keeps doing the same thing and isn’t taking advantage of what the MBA has to offer.” People who’ve demonstrated talent across different areas seem to have an edge.
 https://hbr.org/2016/06/generalists-get-better-job-offers-than-specialists

Fits my view of the world - it's nice to see it validated.