Leadership: boring vs charismatic!

Is ‘boringness’ the secret of great leadership? Read:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/boringness_the_secret_to_great.html

Stop being such a cow!

Picture the scene: you’re walking down the street trying to decide where to eat. But it’s early evening and all the restaurants are empty. So you pick what you consider to be the most appealing – you think it has the tastiest menu – and go in. After a while some more people come along and see you sitting at a table. They assume that if you’re in there it must be OK, and enter and sit at another table. Very soon there are lots of people in the restaurant and all the other possible eateries are lagging well behind. This process is called the information cascade.

Information cascades are important in economic psychology as they are used to explain the behaviour of financial markets. That’s because they feed the process of speculation, including frantic buying or selling: bubbles v crashes. Now of course all this starts at a vaguely rational level (remember the restaurant example) but rapidly moves into irrational herd-like behaviour. Thus maybe it’s no accident that we talk about confident or ‘bull’ markets! Although perhaps in reality it’s more cow-like: put your head down, eat the grass and stick with the herd.

The bigger point is that information cascades affect all manner of decision-making. And the movement of the ‘herd’ (group, team, board) can be very difficult to resist, even if you, the individual, recognise it as being irrational. People en masse are easily convinced they are moving in the right direction, and frequently do not stop to ask the obvious question: why are we doing this?

At work this is made worse by the fact that many managers do not know how to probe the thinking of their colleagues. They simply base their understanding on what they assume is going on, and assumptions, as we all know, are often vague and unpredictable beasts. The real trick is to return to the beginning and pose clearly framed questions about the logic of projects and plans, and also to ask questions about the organisation. Not just, ‘why are we doing this?’ but ‘why are we doing it this way?’ So maybe the competency lists that are so beloved of HR professionals should always include the ‘ability to ask good ‘why’ questions’ behaviour…

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Investigating the personality of companies

“When we think about other people, we do so in terms that can be boiled down to five discrete personality dimensions: extraversion, introversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness (known as the Big Five factors). A new study suggests that a similar process is at work in our perception of companies and corporations. Google and Apple have personalities too, it seems.”

Read this post from the BPS Research Digest, Investigating the personality of companies, to discover the four fundamental dimensions…

Anti-PowerPoint party formed in Switzerland!

There’s a new political movement in Switzerland that has a single aim: the outlawing of PowerPoint! Curious really, but perhaps the Swiss think that PowerPoint gets in the way of getting stuff done, and just clogs up the neural arteries with mind numbing charts, graphs and diagrams, and those slides packed with very small text. Nothing is of course further from the truth.

PowerPoint is a fine business tool that can transform any audio-visual presentation in to a thing of pure beauty. And what would people do if they didn’t have to spend endless hours looking for suitable images, getting the animations to work in the right sequence, and cutting the whole thing down to a mere 60 slides (for a 10 minute talk). No, I think our Swiss friends are barking up the wrong tree this time.

Think you know about PowerPoint, take the BBC quiz: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14125596

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a KPI!

Just a quick note to say that we all talk about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), but actually very few people know what they really are. Read this ICAEW article and be enlightened…

Do more in less time

It seems the key to getting more done, and getting it done better, may be in working in intense bursts for short periods of time… and also giving yourself plenty of breaks.

 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/leave-work-early-2011-5

The entrepreneurs of identity

As business psychologists we spend a great deal of time trying to identify leadership. And to help us there’s a mighty army of personality and leadership questionnaires, as well as numerous books that claim to pinpoint the ‘habits’ that distinguish successful leaders from the rest. In contrast there is little on the way in which leadership can grow from a leader’s role as part of a group.

Less I-ness, more we-ness

The group perspective on leadership, or the ‘social identity’ approach to organisational psychology, works on the premise that our sense of self isn’t fixed. It exists on a continuum that runs from self-interested personal identity (‘I-ness’) to group orientated social identity (‘we-ness’); with our position being determined by social context. What is more we tend to act on an individualistic basis when we compare ourselves to an ‘in-group’, such as one composed of our work colleagues; whereas when the comparison is with an ‘out-group’, such as a competitor, we are far more likely to act in a group-orientated manner.

Who are we?

It follows that if social rather than personal identity is better at explaining what we do in groups, then measures of the latter, such as personality questionnaires, are not going to be good predictors of behaviour.

In terms of leadership it also seems likely that a concentration on the individual isn’t the answer. If leadership is about group behaviour then it’s really about creating a shared identity that binds the group together. Thus true leadership is about helping to create, shape and sustain a sense of ‘who and what we are’.

What happened to my charisma?

Those that are masters at creating shared identity are also likely to be described as charismatic. However if charisma is dependent on the management of group identity, then if you lose your ability to shape this identity your charisma will evaporate – an effect that can be readily observed in the world of politics!

Overall then, perhaps there’s one expression that sums up social identity and leadership: great leaders are the entrepreneurs of identity. And what they do is to help us create our perception of who we are.

Note: The expression ‘entrepreneurs of identity’ is probably best attributed to Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher. If you’re interested in this area you might also like to read Alex Haslam’s book, Psychology in Organizations: The Social Identity Approach, published by Sage.

Picture credit: Ambro/freedigitalphotos.net

Silo thinking: always a bad thing?

Silo thinking, silo working, silo vision, silo mentality… I expect if you’re a consultant you’ve said rude things about silos, or the apparent lack of communication, cooperation and understanding between the various bits of organisations – those units, departments and fiefdoms that seem to do what they like, when they like. And I bet that you’ve banged on, given the opportunity, about the joined up benefits of ‘systems’ thinking, and nodded sagely when people have talked of the Fifth Discipline. Because let’s face it, the ‘silo’ word only seems to have negative connotations. But is this right? I’m changing my mind because I think silos often represent the USP of an organisation. That’s not to say that they’re always healthy, or indeed constructive, but you take them apart at your peril. And one guy I think has something useful to say on the subject is Venkatesh Rao (Venkat). Try this piece on his Ribbonfarm blog:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/06/20/the-silo-reconsidered/

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Brains and a ‘winning’ personality? Now that would be dangerous!

If you were only allowed to look for one thing in a prospective manager, what would it be? Business psychology tells us that it should be ‘brains’, or rather general intelligence, or if you want to be precise, the ‘fluid’ bit of general intelligence. That’s the sort of intelligence that helps you to solve problems you haven’t come across before. Why? Of all the things we could assess, general intelligence – or having sufficient brain power – is the most predictive of work performance. Now if you could pick a second thing (this is getting a bit like the three wishes granted by a genie, I admit), what would that be? Again if we go with what’s most predictive we would have select ‘conscientiousness’ – the personality attribute that’s associated with self-organisation, discipline, thoroughness and a need to achieve. It also happens to be the best predictor across all types of work. And if a third choice was available? Then it would have to be emotional stability: being positive, calm and relaxed and able to take what comes your way.

Do I need to pick anything else? Obviously knowledge and previous experience come into the frame, and it might also be useful to have a sociable (extrovert) manager, and maybe one who was open to new ideas, who was concerned for others, and honest, with a touch of insight… Stop. Actually we’ve already got the top three and we’ve known what they are for at least the last 20 years.

However it’s not quite that simple. Here’s the thing: whilst general intelligence and conscientiousness are both predictive of success at work, they do not correlate with each other; indeed some people have found a negative relationship between the two. What’s going on?  As you can probably imagine this has been the subject of much debate. One of the ideas is that a negative relationship is due to fluid intelligence affecting the development of conscientiousness. This has the snappy title of ‘intelligence compensation theory’ and it goes like this: fluid intelligence, being innate, is the most likely to influence a growing personality; and to cut to the chase, what then happens is that those with less intelligence compensate by developing higher levels of conscientiousness – and vice versa for those with higher intelligence. Well, it ties in with the statistics, but as you can imagine it’s rather controversial. Mind you it does help to explain the bright individual who flies by the seat of their pants (low conscientiousness) and who nevertheless tends to get away with it.

But getting back to our prospective manager, perhaps there’s a less esoteric explanation. Conscientiousness is a mix of different attributes, which usually include dutifulness and deliberation on the one hand, and achievement orientation and competence on the other. Thus it’s likely that the dutiful plodder aspects of this personality factor are negatively associated with intelligence; and the achieving, competent, striving bits are positively associated. So could it just be that we’ve been looking at personality at the wrong level?

So here’s the punch line -  looking for general intelligence, consciousness and emotional stability is still good advice, but don’t be surprised if those with brains can look like riskier bets because they sometimes get lower overall conscientiousness scores. You’re going to have to dig deeper to find out who you’re really dealing with!

Note: If you’re worried about the other bit of general intelligence, the learnt or ‘crystallised’ aspect, there’s an ongoing argument about whether that is or isn’t related to conscientiousness, and in what combination (or not) with fluid intelligence. Let alone those that think intelligence is part of personality. I expect you get the idea.

Barrick, M.R. & Mount, M.K. (1991). The big five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44, 1-26.

Moutafi, J., Furnham, A. & Paltiel, L. (2004). Why is conscientiousness negatively correlated with intelligence? Personality and Individual Differences, 37(5), 1013-1022.

Schmidt, F.L. & Hunter, J.E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings.  Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262-274.

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Cheese + Cheese = Cheese

The world’s most popular book on organisational change is called ‘Who Moved My Cheese’. It has sold (an amazing) 24 million copies. It’s basically a motivational work that explores change by looking at the reactions of two mice and two miniature humans during their hunt for cheese in a maze.

Allegorically the ‘maze’ is where we work and what we want is the ‘cheese’. Along the way we learn that change happens (the cheese keeps moving), that we should anticipate change (get ready for the cheese to move), monitor change (smell the cheese often so that you know when it’s getting old) and so on.

It’s actually a rather charming story. But it also gives the illusion that change is simple to understand and to cope with. It isn’t. It’s complicated and messy.

Some managers hand out copies of the book in advance of a change initiative. Perhaps in an attempt to label resistant employees as not being prepared to ‘move with the cheese’ or ‘enjoy the taste of a new cheese!’

I suspect you can see where I’m going: management parables are fine but communicating the need for change requires something rather more subtle. And the worst thing you can do is to be patronising, or cheesy for that matter.

‘Who Moved My Cheese’ was written by Spencer Johnson and is published by Putnam Adult.

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