Guest Post: The Trouble with Leadership By The Numbers
Filed under: Fresh Voices, Leadership, Management Education, Performance, Talent Management
Note from Art: I’m pleased to share the thoughts of Scott Spreier, head of the Leadership and Talent Practice in the Federal Sector at Hay Group, a global management consultancy. I was a happy customer of Hay Group in a prior lifetime, where they provided my team with valuable input and guidance on a complex and fast-moving sales restructuring. I am pleased that they reached out to share this thought-provoking post exclusively with readers of Management Excellence. Enjoy!
You can follow Scott and his colleagues on Twitter @ Hay Group.
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The Trouble with Leadership by the Numbers by Scott Spreier, Hay Group
Ah, those geeks from Google.
After months of crunching numbers, a team of their top statisticians cracked the code on what it takes to be a good leader. Their finding, as reported by The New York Times, was that what employees valued most in their managers was not technical expertise but “even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”
Now, is that surprising?
A few paragraphs into the story, the Times’ turned to human resource experts to help put Google’s research into context.
They quoted Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, who noted that Google is at the “leading edge” of trying to apply a data-driven approach to what the Times calls the “unpredictable world of human interactions.”
Project Oxygen, as the research was named, is unusual, Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.
Two observations here: (1) We (the HR experts of the world) are a sincere, but dull lot whose lingo about leadership is indeed often limp; and (2) it is this habit of sounding warm and squishy, not hard and businesslike, which drives organizations like Google to try to create leadership by the numbers.
The truth is, for more than 50 years researchers, particularly behavioral scientists, have been studying and linking these so-called softer attributes of leadership to performance. At Hay Group, we’ve done numerous studies that tie the hard stuff of business − gains in productivity, revenue, and profits − to the human stuff of leadership, such as providing vision and context, showing empathy, and engaging, coaching, and developing employees.
In general, our body of research has shown that when managers and executives use a good combination of these behaviors or styles, the performance of their teams − again in terms of measures like sales, productivity, and even revenue − tends to jump 15 to 30 percent.
That Google had to rediscover this, however, is not cause of smugness or ridicule. Like most organizations and the people who run them, it’s human nature to try to succeed by the numbers. All of us, not just Charlie Sheen, want to win. And winning in our society is defined by the specific, not the squishy: scoring more points, putting up better financial numbers, the number of goddesses one lives with, etc.
David Brooks, in a recent column, The New Humanism, blamed this in part on the fact that we view ourselves as “divided creatures” who try to separate reason, which we trust, from emotions, which are suspect.
“We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below,” he wrote. “When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relations, we often have nothing to say.”
And, we might add, when those parents and kids go to work, their focus switches from SAT to ROI.
What our research and Google’s show is that organizations need to put more emphasis on the softer behavioral attributes of leadership. They need to move beyond what Brooks calls the “amputated view of human nature,” and embrace the role that motives, values, and behavior have in engaging people to do their best and ultimately driving performance.
Equally important, they have to let go of this nonsense about technical skills and financial results being the perfect equation for running a successful organization. Certainly they are critical elements, but as Google has confirmed, leading solely by the numbers is not only bad science, it’s bad business.
Strategic Awareness: The Second Leg of the Emerging Leader’s Three Legged Stool
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Professional Growth, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
One of the things that I truly love about this time we are living and working through is the front-row seats that we all have to some fascinating experiments in strategy. Things happen so quickly and with such widespread coverage in today’s world, that it often looks and feels like a strategist’s living laboratory on Miracle Gro.
A quick scan of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on my remarkable e-book reader, Kindle, indicates that Google Plans to Launch an Operating System for PCs and that Kodak’s CEO is Betting Big on Printers. Take a second and comprehend the strategy issues and implications of that last sentence. At least two out of three are staggering (Kindle and Google) and one is either the last gasp of a dying giant or a brilliant move to disrupt an entrenched industry.
There’s more:
As a consumer, I’m in the process of switching phone service providers for two of my family members and the one that I’m moving to cannot get the newest iphone in under a week. Sold out.
Just yesterday, my oldest son approached me about a new application for the iPhone that converts it to a true navigation device like those we buy in our cars from Garmin and Tom Tom and others. Hmmm, wonder how that meeting is going inside those device makers.
We live in an era where the platform is King. Think iTunes and the remarkable and industry-disrupting ecosystem that has sprung up around it. Consider Twitter and how it has revolutionized interactions and network building and how it supported a near-revolution in Iran.
The Three Legged Stool of the Emerging Leader/Senior Contributor:
I make no secret about my belief that emerging leaders…the executives and senior contributors of tomorrow must develop remarkable competence in three areas: leadership, strategy and communication.
Effective communication skills can be taught and with practice mastered. Learning to lead is difficult, and experience is the only teacher, but individuals armed with good philosophical underpinnings and supported by good mentoring and feedback can develop and improve their leadership skills.
The remaining leg: developing a sense of strategy and ultimately developing the ability to see and pursue strategic vectors is the most difficult to cultivate. It’s abstract, it’s creative, it’s often risky and there is little in the way of developmental support for emerging strategists.
Business schools tend to treat strategy as history lessons (cases) or as a sterile simulation game. Both are interesting and even fun, but of little use in my opinion in fostering the type of thinking, experimentation and action that leads to winning strategies.
The strategy events and processes inside corporations are often so dysfunctional and poorly managed that an invitation to be involved can seem like a ticket to the county lock-up. The best outcome is getting out.
Guidance for the Emerging Leader on Developing a Sense of Strategy:
While I’ll stop short of offering a “how to” prescription on developing as a strategist, there are certainly some actions and steps that an individual can take to increase their strategic awareness.
- Study and monitor the many strategic experiments occurring in real-time right in front of you. Is the Kindle the spark that rewrites the publishing business, like iTunes was to the music business? Can a floundering old giant regain its footing on a technology that consumes resources in the electronic and green era? Is Google’s move to an operating system brilliance, arrogance or just plain futile in a Microsoft dominated world? And for that matter, can Microsoft…the strategy giant of two decades ago reinvent itself?
- Think about your business and your products in the context of the most compelling and uncertain experiments occurring in front of you. Do you have a mini-platform option in your industry? If you truly understood your customers needs, what business and products would you create from scratch?
- Quit thinking about your competitors from a mimicking mind-set. In fact, quit preoccupying on their every move. It’s healthy to monitor but it’s better and even to battle, but save some gray matter for rethinking the business in a manner that ensures your competitor is obsolete.
- Beware the Innovator’s Dilemma. If you don’t know what that is, read the book!
- In addition to Innovator’s Dilemma, read: Tuned-In and Inside the Tornado and Crossing the Chasm. You could do much, much worse than base your strategic thinking on the principles espoused in these great works.
- Get involved in shaping, executing and monitoring strategy in your area of influence.
- Ask questions of those around you to better understand your firm’s situation in the marketplace and its strategic objectives.
- Work hard to ensure that your activities connect to the firm’s core strategies.
The Bottom-Line:
The world and the workplace are filled with people going through the motions, taking orders and executing and acting without really thinking. Strategists on the other hand are constantly striving to connect ideas and patterns to needs and value creating activities. Great leaders have a strong sense of strategy. Take responsibility for developing your sense of strategy and for supporting that development in others. You might just find that life and work are a lot more fun and rewarding this way.
In Search of the High Performance Team
A special note: today is Veterans Day
While we may struggle in business to consistently produce high-performance teams, our soldiers in service of our country live this on a regular basis. Thanks to those who have served, those who are serving and to all who have sacrificed. Our gratitude has no end.
In Search of the High Performance Team
I regularly poll my seminar participants and MBA students on their team-focused experiences in the workplace and I am consistently surprised when very few report ever being part of something that they would classify as a “high performance” team.
The results of my unscientific polling are all the more surprising given that we live during a time when involvement in short-term projects with individuals across functions is a part of the regular work experience of most professionals.
The business literature is filled with articles and interviews from leaders and pundits on topics tied to innovation, business execution and team heroics. Of course, the same companies tend to be the focal point of these articles. It seems like we cannot get enough of the stories of heroics pulled off in companies like Apple, Ideo Google and the few others that seem to make the short-list for the popular business press. It’s curious that those companies got the memo on creating high-performance teams and the rest of us are relegated to reading about their successes.
When I ask about involvement on high-performance teams, there is invariably someone in the audience sharp enough to ask me what I mean. Admittedly, my definition is one of those kind of squishy, you’ll know it when you experience it answers. It’s also a multi-part answer that goes something like this:
- A high-performance team is a group of people that have figured out how to work together to knock down and succeed in pursuit of audacious goals. They’ve learned to leverage their respective strengths, compensate for weaknesses and tap into the power that a group of people uniquely focused on a goal are able to generate.
- High-performance teams thrive on challenges, revel only momentarily in successes and mostly seek the next big challenge. They tend to be paranoid about becoming overconfident and in general, they don’t seek significant public recognition.
- The working environment on this team is comfortable for collaboration, encouraging of disparate opinions and singularly focused on turning ideas into actions. High-performance teams are
self-policing. Values and accountabilities are clear and there is an explicit expectation that membership requires honoring the values. Membership on this team is a true privilege.
- The leader on a high-performance team recognizes that his or her role is teach, to knock down obstacles and to constantly focus on creating the environment that allows others to succeed at high-levels. This leader may be tough, but this leader tends to be quiet, letting actions talk. You generally won’t find this leader to be loud and boisterous, although they may be a great cheerleader as well as a stern disciplinarian behind team walls.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leadership is a pre-requisite for the creation of a high-performance team. Perhaps if more leaders focused on their responsibility to empower others, I would see some more hands raised when I ask about whether your employees have been part of a high-performance team. It’s not too late to start working on this.
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