Tag: leadership

A group of two dozen corporate leaders, including Warren Buffett, is trying to influence American companies to increase the number of women in positions of senior leadership.

The effort, called the 30% Club, is an expansion of an effort in Great Britain to increase female

Michelle Duguid

corporate board representation there to 30 percent by the end of 2015.

But can it work in the United States? Maybe, with more defined objectives, says an expert on women in the workplace at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I think this is a good start,” said Michelle Duguid, PhD, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School and author of the paper “Female Tokens in High-Prestige Work Groups: Catalysts or Inhibitors of Group Diversification?”

“In order to increase representation of women at the highest levels of organizations,” she said, “it is very important for business leaders at the level of chief executive and chairman to show their commitment to the outcome.”

By making this public commitment, business leaders themselves will put more effort into reaching this goal, Duguid said.

However, unlike the club launched in Britain — which has the specific objective of getting 30 percent female representation on the boards of FTSE-100 companies by the end of 2015 — the U.S. group does not seem to have very definite goals,” Duguid said.

According to the British club, there are now 92 members of the 30% Club in the U.K. The FTSE-100, a stock index in London, has moved to 20.8 percent women directors as of March 2014 from 12.5 percent in 2010, with the 30% Club seen as a driving force behind the change.

“Specifically, the United States group does not have a percentage goal for women in leadership positions, and they have not specified the types of leadership positions they intend to focus on,” Duguid said. “For example, does female senior leadership mean representation in the corporate suite and boardroom?

“Individuals tend to work harder to meet clear and concrete goals vs. ambiguous goals,” she said. “Therefore, I am not sure we will see the dramatic increases that we are noticing in the U.K.”

“We should also keep in mind,” Duguid said, “that as women move into the higher levels of organizations they should receive comparable compensation to their male counterparts.”

Article by Neil Schoenherr, WUSTL News

Image: A Mirror for the Clouds by Tony Ibarra, Flickr, Creative Commons

Often, I see micromanagement in the guise of accountability from the highest levels. It stifles empowerment. Upper management gives the directive to empower their employees and then demands weekly reports on the progress. Then they institute goals, quotas and deadlines. This doesn’t feel like empowerment to me. What conversation can I have with my manager to get me personally to a place where I feel more empowered, more emboldened and able to take risks?   –Anonymous

Empowerment can be a valuable approach to leading people.  The basic approach to empowerment is to develop employee capabilities for tackling complex challenges beyond their previously narrowly defined tasks and then to delegate the leader’s decision-making authority to them. Empowering employees can lead to greater adaptability, flexibility, innovation, and long-run performance as subordinates take ownership of their roles.

Empowerment does not mean abandoning responsibility and accountability; instead, it means the leader must set expectations and find agreement with subordinates on how they will be evaluated. Then, the leader must avoid micromanaging. With empowerment, leaders spend much of their time serving their subordinates by removing bottlenecks and barriers that they cannot easily do on their own.

As many an experienced manager will know, empowering employees is more easily said than done. Transitioning to an empowerment approach is made easier by providing appropriate training to employees. The more challenging part of the transition, however, is shifting both the leader’s and subordinates’ thinking and mindset.

Empowerment does not come easily when either leaders or subordinates have “grown up” in a directive and compliance-based culture. All too easily, a leader who wants to empower subordinates can fall back into micromanaging by unilaterally directing activities and demanding additional measures and reports. What is going on when this happens and what can subordinates do to achieve a more empowered relationship?

Growing up, my dad had many quaint sayings. The one that comes to mind in response to this question is, “it takes two to tango,” a phrase made famous in a 1952 melody sung by Pearl Bailey. Trying to shift to an empowerment approach is challenging if the leader and subordinate do not know each other’s dance moves.

One challenge is that a leader may state they want to empower subordinates, but in times of stress, they quickly return to the thought patterns that worked in the past. In other words, the leader may want to try a new dance but hasn’t learned all the moves.

Another challenge arises when a subordinate acts in a way that does not meet the leader’s expectations. Perhaps the expectations were not clearly communicated or clearly understood. Or, perhaps the leader did not provide sufficient training or the subordinate did not make the most of the training. No matter the source, the leader who initially trusted the subordinate enough to delegate “decision rights” now has a diminished level of trust. With a lower level of trust comes increased oversight including goals, quotas, deadlines, and more frequent direction as these moves reduce the leader’s uncertainty about performance expectations. They also reduce empowerment.

The fundamental challenge for the subordinates, if they want to regain empowerment, is to figure out how to repair trust.  As you might imagine, repairing trust is more difficult; far more difficult than building trust in the first place.  What can you do to repair trust with your leader?

My recommendation is to begin by engaging in a reflection technique I call Aperio Examen. The Aperio Examen has four steps:

1.     The reflection begins by first thinking about what has gone well in your job—especially between you and your boss.  We all have successes each and every day.  Acknowledge these successes, at least in your mind’s eye, and give yourself a pat on the back.  Doing so is an important precursor to the next step.

2.     Now, identify what has not gone well between you and your manager.  Use your “literary creativity’ to make up a story—a narrative—in which the entire situation is your fault.  Crafting such a narrative may be difficult for some but is a very important exercise.

3.     With the imaginative story in mind, reflect on each part of the story and evaluate which parts might be true.  If you are like most people in these situations, you will discover you do share some blame and may have inadvertently contributed to the loss of trust.

4.     Having identified ways in which you may have contributed to the situation, think about what you could have done differently and how you could have known to act differently. Try to recall these heuristics over the next several days (practicing the Aperio Exam on a daily basis for issues at work as well as at home, can fundamentally change your thinking and relationship).

With your reflection in hand, you can now have a discussion with your manager.  Explain what has happened from your perspective.  Share and acknowledge your role in what happened.  In other words, apologize, which will signal that your transgression does not reflect the true nature of who you are.  Also, explain what you would have done differently now that you have reflected on the situation.  Finally, ask how, together, you can rebuild trust to again move in the direction of empowerment.

You may be thinking that you did nothing wrong.  That it was entirely your manager’s fault so why should you take any blame?  That sentiment is your ego talking.  Ego can get in the way of both the Aperio Examen (which means “unguarded examination”) and having this important conversation with your manager.   This same ego also gets in the way of you becoming a better leader, at the base of which is taking responsibility and learning from the situation.  If you listen to your ego, you will continue to foist blame on the manager, which will come through in your words and deeds and only widen the loss of trust.  Remember, it takes two to tango.

Duce a mente (May you lead by thinking),

Jackson Nickerson

With the pitched battle in Congress that led to the recent government shutdown and the growing debt-ceiling debate, can leadership lessons be drawn from this conflict to help leaders of organizations deal with similar internal battles?

–Jackson Nickerson

This column typically is reserved for responses to leadership questions from government executives.  The government shut down is so rare and striking that I took liberty to pose my own question, the response to which I hope will be of value to government executives who face such pitched battles in their own organizations.

From time to time throughout history, across civilizations, and within organizations, communities occasionally experience epochs of righteousness.  Righteousness is a word invented by William Tyndale, who first translated Greek and Hebrew bibles into English around 1526.  This earliest meaning of righteousness is associated with an attribute of God and describes upright, moral, and guiltless actions.  Ironically, his translation, which eventually formed the basis of the King James Bible, was viewed as heresy by righteous clerics who executed him and then burned his corpse at the stake.

Today, we live in an age of righteousness in which we find polarized communities in the United States as well as around the globe.  Each pole believes that their own righteousness is moral and just and believing that the other side is immoral, the devil, or worse.  Whether it is health care, the gun debate, abortion, the debt, size of government, social transfers, or other wedge issues, both sides have a righteousness that resists easy resolution.  What can leaders who experience such polarizing righteousness in their organization do to resolve the conflict and move forward?

Leaders can travel along four paths to resolve the conflict of righteousness.  Each path has different implications for organizational leaders.

1.  War:  When two righteous sides confront each other the most common pathway to resolution is war.  Ultimately, one side must vanquish the other, which can sow the seeds of later insurrections.  The American Civil War offers one example and modern day terrorism offers another.  Current behaviors in Congress too might be described in this way.

In an organizational context, the conflict between executives and their fiefdoms ends only when one side wins and the other is defeated in battle.  The leaders of the defeated side are retired or fired.  Leaders who choose such a path end up winning by using strategy and tactics to destroy their enemy.  Doing so, however, can be extraordinarily costly because of the great enduring harm that is inflicted on everyone in the organization.

2.  Concessions:  An alternative path is to negotiate and find a middle ground by each side making concessions.  In practice, concessions can be effective but rarely are when righteousness is involved.  Righteousness implies that people believe they are taking a moral and ethical stance, which means they are unable to understand and feel empathy for the opposing side.  Indeed, in such situations debates reduce to name calling, which only hardens righteousness and makes negotiation impossible.  All one needs to do is read commentaries below any online New York Times article on a wedge issue to see the dynamic play out.  Also, one round of concessions encourages the righteous to demand more and then take more extreme positions in successive issues, which can stimulate greater righteousness from the opposing side.  The net result is that making concessions among the righteous typically leads to war.

The challenge for organizational leaders is to find ways to restructure incentives so that it becomes in the best interests of both sides to negotiate in a way that saves face.  Incentives are not only economic, but also can be social, emotional, and career concerns designed to build trust and reputation instead of destroying them.  Also, the leader must rebuild respect and understanding by keeping righteous actors from demonizing each other, which is no easy challenge.  Leadership success by making concessions is rare when dealing with righteousness opponents.

3. Governance:  In many situations, communities can resolve conflict from righteousness if a large and powerful enough interests use mechanisms of governance as a pathway to remove and replace righteous leaders.  In essence, an often-silent middle must rise up and use the institutions available to them to bring in new leadership.  Governance mechanisms sometimes can be manipulated, like a gerrymandered electorate found in many Congressional districts, thereby inhibiting the use of the institutions of governance to constructively resolve conflict, which leads back to the first pathway—war.

Overarching leadership, hierarchical authority, oversight boards, ethics and audit panels, investigations, etc., all can question the legitimacy of leaders who display righteousness in organizational settings.  Such leaders can be fired.  Of course, fired leaders can fight back in various ways and in some instances challenge the legitimacy of the various governance decisions.  Protests, litigation, and reputational assaults all impose costs on organizations and surviving leaders.  Such assaults can even weaken or permanently effect the organization or institution.   In sum, organizational leaders can appeal to institutional supports but in so doing must assess the extent to which those who are removed from power can damage these supports.

So far, the three paths don’t offer much hope.  Conflict among the righteousness ultimately is resolved by creating winners and losers.  But costs on people, organizations, and institutions are excessive and potentially destabilizing.  In other words, most lose.  Is there any way in which the righteousness can be brought together to collaborate and find, on balance, a positive outcome for all?  Is there hope for a better way?

4.  Formulation:  I believe that there is a fourth path if warring factions adopt an appropriate mindset and process for inquiry.  Battles between the righteous take place in large part because combatants focus on solutions.  Their righteous zeal has convinced them that they have the right solution for which they are willing to fight.  It is this dynamic and focus on solutions that creates wedge issues and destroys hope.  For example, those involved in the gun debate focus on either eliminating regulation of weapons or restricting assault weapons and magazine size, competing solutions that largely ignore formulating the challenge in a comprehensive way.

Organizational leaders have the ability to convene meetings among combatants and use specific expert processes to formulate first symptoms and then causes without ever speaking of solutions.  Engaging combatants in formulation is a source of hope.  Doing so in a way to achieve consensus necessarily requires opponents to engage in conversation, share information and knowledge, to listen and understand each other to comprehensively formulate challenges.  Such comprehensive formulation gives rise to the development of creative solutions that will never be found or adopted in a war filled with righteousness.  While such processes may be difficult in a national political context, they are feasible in an organizational one.

Perhaps the organizational leadership lesson from an age of righteousness is that either the war better be worth fighting, as the paths of concessions and governance are unlikely to resolve the conflict, or that specific expert processes better be used to comprehensively formulate the challenge before trying to solve it.  Either way, it might be wise for organizations and even society to reserve righteousness for an attribute of the gods because in humans, all too often it leads to the costs and tragedies of war.

Duce a mente (may you lead by thinking).

Jackson Nickerson

When it’s so hard to fire a federal employee, why are so many federal leaders risk averse? I’ve never seen anybody get canned for making a mistake, yet we all walk on eggshells as if any mistake will mean our heads. Why do you think federal leaders are so unwilling to take chances?

–Anonymous

Several of the recent Ask EIG columns have explored questions about performance measurement and encouraging innovation among workers. This week’s commenter asks a similar question but one that focuses on leaders instead of employees.

A recent report on innovation in the federal work force by the Partnership for Public Service using OPM’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government survey data, argued that based on the extent to which government agencies are innovative, that on the whole, innovativeness has been slipping in each of the past three years.  If being fired is an unlikely and extraordinary act for federal leaders, as the commenter suggests, why might innovativeness be falling?  Why are leaders unwilling to take risks, especially when risks in the name of innovation could lead to substantial benefits to agencies and citizens?

A first place to look for an explanation is at the benefits versus costs on taking innovation risks.  What is the upside if someone takes a risk and it leads to an innovation versus the downside risk of failure?  In today’s environment, successful innovation rarely leads to any type of financial reward, especially during the past three years, which may explain why innovativeness generally is in decline.  Perhaps a successful innovator receives a reputation boost and receives some acknowledgement, but does success translate into career benefits?  With OPM Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs) spanning so many categories (five major ECQs with 28 component competencies) even a successful innovation likely counts for little toward promotion.  If too many competencies are measured (in my view, measuring more than a handful dilutes the impact of any one measure) then good performance in one dimension will have little effect on career advancement.

Collaboration is a never-ending challenge in my office. Many of us prefer to work alone yet we’re constantly encouraged to work together (which doesn’t seem to work). Is it wrong to be more effective working individually? How can I let my leadership know that I prefer to work by myself to develop an idea before bringing it to the team while still seeming like a team player?
— Anonymous

A common mantra in most organizations is that teams, especially diverse ones, lead to higher productivity and employee satisfaction. The belief that teams represent a superior way to organize all too often translates into leaders calling for teamwork in every task. Yet, the reality is many teams — some argue the majority of teams — don’t perform well, which can hamper productivity. Why are individuals so often asked to be on teams? When can people work alone yet still contribute to the organization in a productive way? How can these issues be resolved?

Sometimes a team offers a productive way to organize work and sometimes it doesn’t. Moreover, some teams work well and some times they don’t. The challenge for leaders is to figure out when to use a team and how to help the team be successful.

Teams offer efficiencies in three types of situations.

First, teams are useful when a task is physically beyond a single person. Lifting a large and heavy box is the classic example of a task where teamwork between two or more people is needed. But these kinds of tasks probably are not the norm in your organization.

Second, teams can be useful in settings where tasks are repetitive but interdependent. For instance, consider an auditing team. An audit is a relatively standard process, yet sometimes what an auditor discovers in one part of the review can affect the productivity of another auditor. In other words, team productivity is enhanced when individuals adjust to and help one another. Having incentives and workers monitoring each other to achieve those incentives can further boost productivity. Teamwork is valuable when coordinated efforts allow for constant and mutual adjustments. In such instances teamwork can be substantially more productive than individuals working independently.

Perhaps the most valuable kinds of teams arise from collectively formulating and solving wicked problems. Ending veteran homelessness is an extreme example of a wicked problem. In this case, no one person has enough information and knowledge to comprehensively figure out what the problem is, let alone how to solve it. Teams, if they function well, can bring together individuals with diverse information, knowledge and motivations to collaboratively and comprehensively formulate as well as solve the problem in ways that individuals simply can’t accomplish on their own.

Just because a situation calls for teamwork doesn’t mean that a team automatically will be successful. Randomly throwing people together and asking them to work as a group is recipe for failure, if not disaster. For teams to work well, they need to be trained in and follow proven processes appropriate for the task. Collaborative Structured Inquiry, for instance, is a process taught at Brookings Executive Education for tackling complex enterprise problems. This approach can help a team build trust, develop understanding, and comprehensively formulate and solve enterprise problems. Other methods, like Six Sigma, are appropriate for other tasks. Yet few teams are trained to use such processes.

Even if a leader correctly determines that a task is best tackled by a team and then trains the members in an appropriate process for coordination and collaboration, one more thing is needed for the group to be productive. The team members must like working with others. The fact is some people don’t like to work in a team setting. This doesn’t make them bad workers. But, just like in basketball, if a star player does not enjoy collaborating with others then the team is unlikely to win a championship.

One option is to restructure the task so that teamwork is not needed. Of course, if the task is best suited for teamwork then reconfiguring the tasks so they can be performed individually structurally locks in low performance—a choice that few leaders would want to make. Another option is to help the person who prefers to work alone find a position, perhaps in another organization, where the tasks better match the worker’s capability. Otherwise unhappiness and low productivity could impair both the worker and the organization.

In sum, three questions need to be addressed. Have the tasks been designed for the greatest productivity? If so, and a team approach is best, have the team members been trained in an appropriate process for cooperation and collaboration? Finally, does teamwork offer the best match for you or will some other job be a better match?

I hear so much talk about performance metrics. The reality is, I’m not really sure what we’re talking about in these conversations. I do my job and try to ensure my team does theirs, but when it comes to measuring performance, I don’t know where to begin. What have you found to be the best, and most telling, metrics when trying to measure and help improve federal performance?

–Anonymous

Much confusion exists around where and when to use performance metrics. All too often, performance metrics are used inappropriately to reward or punish, decreasing organizational performance instead of improving it. To help unpack the confusion and complexity surrounding performance metrics, please consider four types of jobs:

• A-Jobs: involve tasks where all aspects of the job’s output can be measured in an accurate, precise, and objective way. An example of an A-Job might be operators for the U.S. Postal service who manually key-in postal addresses for letters they read (most letters now are optically scanned). The job’s output is well defined and can be measured in an accurate, precise, and objective way if letters processed per hour and error rates can be tracked. Operators need not interact with anyone to perform their tasks.
• B-Jobs: Other tasks, like some of those found in B-Jobs, may not be so easy to measure accurately and precisely. For instance, analysts at the SEC may be required to review and assess the 10-K reports for public companies. These reports vary considerably, with some more complex and difficult to analyze than others. With such variety, managers will face great difficulty in assessing the quality of each analysis. Moreover, if a requirement of ten analyses-a-day is specified, it will be quite natural for analysts to focus on producing what is easily measured (reports per day) and focus less on those tasks that are inaccurately, imprecisely, and costly to measure, if at all, like the quality of the analysis.
• C-Jobs: Involve interactions with other individuals in ways that, while the team’s output is measureable in an accurate, precise, and objective way, individual contributions are difficult to measure. For instance, measuring the productivity of any specific TSA agent at airport security may be difficult but the number of passengers, error rate, and complaint rate can be measured for the entire team.
• D-Jobs: The most complicated of the four types. These jobs have tasks that involve interactions with others but in ways that cannot be measured in an accurate, precise or objective way. Many types of projects across the federal government satisfy these conditions.

My hope from this four-part classification scheme is that you will realize that appropriate metrics will depend on the specific job and on what the jobholder does to produce a valuable output. No single metric or set of metrics can be used for all jobs.

Perhaps less clear is what these four types of jobs can tell us about how to use metrics to improve federal government performance. For instance, except in those instances where the utmost integrity is needed, research shows that A-Job positions, ones where performance can be completely specified, should be outsourced to non-governmental vendors employing their own workers. For such jobs, outsourcing typically leads to lower costs as well as greater adaptability because contractors that do not perform well can be readily dropped and others hired.

The same can be said for C-Jobs. Outsourcing the entire team typically leads to lower costs because of the ability to adapt to the changing circumstances of time and place. To understand why, imagine that the federal government hires a team of workers where the output of the team is accurately, precisely and objectively measured. If they perform below expectations, what can managers do to improve performance? Dismissing employees from the federal government requires much effort and takes a long time. Moving workers who do not fit well to new positions may simply pass the poor fit on to another manager. Such poor fits benefit neither the worker, who is unhappy and unlikely to excel, nor the organization, which suffers low performance and complaints that may contaminate the organization’s culture. By contrast, if the team is outsourced the government can much more easily adapt by switching vendors or the vendors can adapt by finding workers who are a better fit.

B- and D-Jobs offer a different story. Outsourcing these positions can lower performance, sometimes dramatically, as workers shift efforts to deliver what is measured and away from tasks that are poorly or not measured. Switching to another vendor fails to solve this problem. With employees, managers can provide oversight by assessing the effort (instead of outcome) workers put forward to deliver on both the measureable and difficult to measure tasks. Alternatively, ongoing education, establishing professional norms of behavior, and developing communities of practice, and other organizational and leadership levers can be used to encourage both high productivity and difficult to measure high quality.

Herein lies the critical rub. Those jobs (absent accuracy concerns) that should be within government (B and D-Jobs) are precisely the ones where managers, using performance metrics to drive productivity, can cause disastrous results. It is in these positions that the old saw “what gets measured gets done” lowers performance; focusing on performance metrics can cause workers to not provide the difficult to measure outcomes of high quality, collaboration, or innovation. As a result, overall performance for these situations will be lower, sometimes dramatically lower, than it could be.

If you don’t know where to begin developing performance metrics for you and your team then there may be a good reason for it. You and your team may have B- or D-Jobs. If so, use your leadership skills to focus on establishing high professional norms, use ongoing education to establish higher expectations of performance, and develop a community of practice that recognizes the importance of measurable as well as non-measurable dimensions of performance.

Duce a mente (may you lead by thinking),

Jackson Nickerson