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Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Impact of Quality of Management Practices on Firm Performance
As a follow-on to my last twoposts, I want to call attention to a piece of experimental research (pdf) conducted by Nicholas Bloom and several colleagues that provides evidence in support of the hypothesis that the quality of management practices significantly influences firm performance.
Bloom et al. summarize their work (which is due to continue through April) as follows:
We run a field experiment on large Indian textile firms to evaluate the causal impact of management on performance. To generate changes in management we provide management consulting to a set of randomly chosen treatment plants, and compare their performance to a set of control plants. We find that improved management practices led to significantly higher efficiency and quality, and lower inventory levels, substantially increasing plants’ productivity and profitability. Firms also transferred these improved management practices from their treated plants to other plants within their group. Since firms adopted and replicated these apparently profitable management practices this raises the question of why these were not adopted previously? Our results suggest that informational barriers are important in explaining this lack of adoption, with modern management practices a type of technology that diffuses slowly between firms. These Indian firms were either unaware of many modern management practices, or did not have the know how to implement them.
The photo below, one of several included in the preliminary draft (pdf) of the authors' paper currently available on the internet, illustrates quite concretely the degree of operational slack crying out for systematic management attention.
Takeaway: This research supports the proposition that it is effective to teach managers specific lean manufacturing practices that help optimize factory operations, inventory control, quality control, human resources, planning, and sales and order management.
There is a little parable in The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, by John M. Barry, that I particularly like: … a young graduate student entered a laboratory and saw a renowned Harvard professor at the sink washing glassware while his technician was performing a complex task at the workbench. The student asked him why the technician was not washing the glassware. “Because,” the professor replied, “I always do the most important part of the experiment and in this experiment the most important thing is the cleanliness of the glassware.” [pp. 286-287]
I'm always on the lookout for materials that clarify central concepts in the training area. One such concept, important in work aimed at reducing poverty in developing countries, is capacity building.1 The training materials placed online by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) mentioned in my last two posts include a paper (pdf) on policy processes that has a helpful section on the components of capacity building in irrigated agriculture.
Olivier Dubois, an FAO consultant, explains the three levels of capacity development:
Level I, the enabling environment, represents the broad national and international context within which irrigated agriculture can develop. It is concerned with policy at the highest levels in government, the socio-economic conditions that enable or constrain development and the legal framework that provides, for example farmers with security of tenure for land and water and the power to seek legal redress when contracts are broken. This level can have immense influence over what happens at the lower levels. It is often given insufficient attention, particularly in project interventions, because it is seen as too difficult and diffuse to address.
Level II is the organizational level, which refers to the wide range of organizations involved in irrigation such as water user organizations, research groups, government extension agencies and private companies that share common objectives such as improved livelihoods at the farming level, improved water management or increased agricultural productivity at a national level. The capacity of an organization is embedded in the ability of its individuals to work together within established rules and values and to interact with other organizations.
Level III, the individual level, is the most structured and familiar part of capacity development and includes education and training of the various stakeholders, from farmers to local professionals.
Dubois goes on to enumerate the components of each level:
Level I — Environment
Policy framework
Legal and regulatory framework
Management accountability
Resources
Processes and relationships
Level II — Organization
Strategic management
Culture/structure
Processes
Human resources
Resources – financial
Resources – information
Infrastructure
Interrelationships
Level III — Individual
Job skills and needs
Professional development
Access to information
Performance/incentives
Values/attitudes/motivation
Relationships/interdependence
Professional integrity
Communication skills
With this enumeration of the levels and components of capacity development, policymakers have a schema for analyzing where significant gaps exist that need to be addressed in order to achieve real progress in improving agriculture in poor areas of the world.
Dubois' section on capacity development includes additional guidance, e.g., on conditions that make it difficult to develop capacity and conditions that are favorable to capacity development. The section is well worth reading in its entirety.
__________ 1 Some previous posts touching on capacity building are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Back in June I wrote a post about David Kennedy's approach to deterring criminal offenders, who had not yet perpetrated violent crimes, from continuing their illegal activities. Now, thanks to a book review, also dating from June, I've become aware of an approach to reducing recidivism among jailed offenders that seems to be attracting increasing attention in the US after being used successfully in San Francisco since 1997.1
Schwartz is a program administrator in the San Francisco Sheriff's Department who co-founded the department's Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP), along with Assistant Sheriff Michael Marcum and Captain Rebecca Benoit.
Participants in the RSVP Expressive Arts program learn about replacing the macho image of superiority that contributed to their violent behavior, with a more humane view of the male role in society. The theater program also helps participants learn ways of expressing their feelings and needs in a nonviolent manner. (sunnyschwartz.com)
RSVP is a version of what has come to be known as restorative justice, which is most simply defined as:
all approaches to crime that attempt to do justice by repairing the harm crime causes.2
RSVP's founders made a point of designing the program based on input from an advisory committee made up of representatives of a broad cross-section of law enforcement and community stakeholders, including crime victims. The program was the 2004 recipient of the Innovations in American Government Award, presented by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
You can get a quick overview of RSVP in the 3:08 video below.
A longer account of the program is offered in the 28:23 video below, which ran on PBS in 2005 as part of the Visionaries series hosted by Sam Waterston.
Among those interviewed are Sunny Schwartz; Michael Hennessey, Sheriff of San Francisco; Ronald Rosado, a Deputy Sheriff working in the dormitory where the RSVP program is based; George Jurand, RSVP Program Coordinator and Manager; Sheryl Corke, Principal of Five Keys Charter School (see below); Teresa Camajani, a history teacher at Five Keys; Delia Ginorio, Survivor Restoration Coordinator; and Jean O'Hara, a former Victim Impact Coordinator, who lost her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson to murder.
There is also footage of unnamed inmates participating in RSVP discussions, including a victim impact presentation by Jean O'Hara.
Using data from a two-year period beginning nine months prior to the inception of RSVP, and continuing for fifteen months after its launch, James Gilligan, then a visiting professor of psychiatry, criminology, and public policy and practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bandy Lee. a clinical professor of law and psychiatry at Yale, evaluated the program's effects on inmate behavior. Their hypothesis:
... the dormitory in which violence-prevention skills are taught through RSVP would create a cultural environment that would generate fewer violent incidents than the dormitory without such a programme, [which] turned out to be the case.3
The effect on the frequency with which ex-offenders were re-arrested for violent crimes was also positive: Among jail inmates who took part for a full sixteen weeks, the reduction was over 80% for the first year after release, compared to a control group of non-participants.4
Gilligan and Lee argue that
The seeds of a change in [the in-jail] culture can be seen in some of the principles that characterized the in-house version of RSVP: (1) redefining the male-role image of superiority; (2) holding oneself accountable rather than minimizing or blaming; (3) offering peer-directed guidance and having avenues for promotion; (4) verbalizing rather than acting out: (5) expressing emotions as needs; and (6) offering intimacy rather than offence. ... Finding violence to be not only an ineffectual but counterproductive means of gaining respect in [the] new culture, the inmates would quickly search for other means, which facilitated their compliance and adaptation.
I was particularly interested in the nature of the integrated pre- and post-release services provided to inmates to assist in their transition back into the community, services which bear a not surprising resemblance to those offered in various programs around the country directed at populations with employability barriers.5
The services include:
Core RSVP curriculum designed to change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors — includes male role re-education (using the Manalive curriculum), victim impact presentations, drug and alcohol recovery, theater, and release planning (further details below).6
A propos of the victim impact presentations, Gilligan and Lee comment that "we have been astonished by ... how little awareness most of these men had had as to how much power they had to hurt others, until they listened to ... victims describe their own reactions to being victimized by others." 7
Community meetings — held weekly in the RSVP dormitory to allow participants to discuss day-to-day issues they are coping with.
Loss of Innocence class — participants can explore and address trauma and victimization they experienced in childhood.
Fatherhood curriculum — a twelve-week program in which participants "discuss the father's role in a child's life, the importance of providing children with a consistent and supportive environment, and issues children face as they grow up in a single parent's home."
Young Adult class — inmates twenty-eight and under address their violence, drug dependency, and recidivism problems.
Creative writing — participants contribute to the dormitory's newsletter, with the aim of strengthening writing skills and exercising creativity.
Transfer planning — produces an exit plan spelling out the steps and tools the inmate will continue to employ in order to maintain a life free of violence and substance abuse.
The transfer planning includes plans for restoration of victims and the community. For details of RSVP's services for crime victims and survivors, see here. For services to communities, see here.
Post-release programs — designed to assist ex-offenders in maintaining behavior changes learned in the in-jail program. Include the Post-Release Education Program (PREP), which continues, at least for the first year, participation in Manalive discussion groups and weekly facilitated support groups. PREP also includes a Life Skills program with three components, the first dealing with job readiness, exploration of career opportunities, and apprenticeship programs; the second involving resume preparation and practice employment interviews; and the third covering tracking of ex-offenders' progress and ongoing support with work-related issues. Participants get counseling and support in such areass as substance abuse avoidance and parenting.
Internship Program — for select participants, a four- to six-month training program that prepares them for employment as peer counselors in the jail or at human services agencies.
Community advocacy programs — ex-offenders can give back to the community in such ways as leading Manalive groups, performing in theater programs for the public, counseling youth groups, and engaging in victim restitution programs.
I'll wrap up with a summary comment from Sunny Schwartz, et al. that indicates why emulation of RSVP elsewhere is important:
As an affirmative crime prevention tool that actively engages inmates, RSVP has been successful in giving participants, collaborators, and the community a greater understanding of the nature and dynamics of violence, including the spectrum of abusive behavior, the importance of gender-role training, the significance of learned behavior, the methods for unlearning violence, and the criminal implications and consequences of violence.8
__________ 1 Helen Epstein, "America's Prisons: Is There Hope?" The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56, No. 10 (June 11, 2009).
As an example of the spread of the RSVP program, see this report by Kate Stone Lombardi in the July 6, 2008 edition of the New York Times, which describes the introduction of the RSVP approach to Westchester County.
2Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime, Bazemore and Walgrave (eds.) (Criminal Justice Press, 1999).
3 James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project: Transforming an In-house Culture of Violence through a Jail-Based Programme," Journal of Public Health Vol. 27, No. 2 (June 2005b), pp. 149-155.
4 James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project: Reducing Violence in the Community through a Jail-Based Initiative," Journal of Public Health, Vol 27, No. 2 (June 2005a), pp. 143-148.
5 Some of these programs have been the subject of previous posts. See here, here, here, and here.
6Sunny Schwartz, Michael Hennessey, and Leslie Levitas, "Designing: Not Business as Usual," American Jails, Jan-Feb 2005, pp. 10.
From Part III, Chapter 2, of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, whose first edition Adam Smith published in 1759 . . . He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. Rather than see our own behaviour under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavour to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavour by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so.
So partial are the views of mankind with regard to the propriety of their own conduct, both at the time of action and after it; and so difficult is it for them to view it in the light in which any indifferent spectator would consider it. But if it was by a peculiar faculty, such as the moral sense is supposed to be, that they judged of their own conduct, if they were endued with a particular power of perception, which distinguished the beauty or deformity of passions and affections; as their own passions would be more immediately exposed to the view of this faculty, it would judge with more accuracy concerning them, than concerning those of other men, of which it had only a more distant prospect.
This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable.
The National Food Service Management Institute (NFSMI), based at the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, provides a variety of services and resources to child nutrition professionals.
Among the services NFSMI provides are continuing education courses, some of which are delivered via satellite and then archived at the NFSMI website for ongoing use.
Because I, like any training specialist, am interested in outcomes above all, I was particularly interested in a course dating from 2004 called "Coaching Employees: Will You Make a Difference?."
I can't say I endorse the USED (Understand, Show, Experience, Do) model taught in the course, since it's important for coaches to recognize that some situations are best handled by having the employee come up with his/her own approach.1
On the other hand, I am quite taken with the list of characteristics of effective coaches provided in the course materials. These characteristics (somewhat edited) are:
Establish a trusting relationship with all employees.
Listen more than talk.
Speak directly.
Value and model continuous learning.
Recognize your own limitations.
Make an effort not to overuse your strengths.
Offer employees chances to take risks.
Remain curious rather than defensive.
Model accountability and ownership.
Meet others where they are and help them move forward.
Keep an optimistic attitude about people. [Think Pygmalion Effect.]
Offer immediate positive recognition.
Help others view mistakes as learning opportunities.
Help employees work on a few skills at a time — generally, no more than three.
Meet individually with employees to identify ways to help them be more effective.
Use common courtesies, such as saying please and thank-you.
Apologize for mistakes.
Plan social events with co-workers.
Confront the issue, not the person.
Demonstrate friendly, positive, and upbeat behavior to others.
Smile.
The NFSMI list above can serve as a checklist for self-evaluation — along the same lines as the more general list of characteristics of an effective coach provided in this earlier post on the subject.
Note: If you would like to review the list of "Competencies, Knowledge and Skills of Effective District School Nutrition Directors/Supervisors" that guides NFSMI's training design and development, you can do so here.
__________ 1 Stated more fully, the four steps in the USED model are:
Understanding (the coach explains the task to the employee)
Showing (the coach demonstrates the proper way to accomplish the task)
Experiencing (the coach allows the employee to experience the task by practicing it)
Doing (the employee does the task while the coach observes/gives feedback)
An important element of 360-degree evaluations is having a person compare his/her self-assessment to the feedback received from peers, boss, and subordinates. More often than not, there are pronounced gaps between the self-assessment and the feedback provided by others; almost invariably, the individual's view of self is rosier than how the others, as a group, view his/her performance and behavior.
David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, has spent many years researching "accuracy and illusion in human judgment." His 2005 book, Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself, provides an extensive treatment of his findings — which elucidate why the aforementioned gaps in 360-degree results occur so consistently.
To get an idea of Dunning's thinking you can look at the 2008 essay he and grad student Travis Carter published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass titled "Faulty Self-Assessment: Why Evaluating One's Own Competence is An Intrinsically Difficult Task."1 The abstract for the essay provides this summary:
People's perception of their competence often diverges from their true level of competence. We argue that people have such erroneous view of their competence because self-evaluation is an intrinsically difficult task. People live in an information environment that does not contain all the data they need for accurate self-evaluation. The information environment is insufficient in two ways. First, when making self-judgments, people lack crucial categories of information necessary to reach accurate evaluations. Second, although people receive feedback over time that could correct faulty self-assessments, this feedback is often biased, difficult to recognize, or otherwise flawed. Because of the difficulty in making inferences based on such limited and misleading data, it is unreasonable to expect that people will prove accurate in judgments of their skills.
The feedback from the other 270 degrees of a 360-degree assessment can help a person see him/herself more accurately, with the caveat that one must weigh the degree to which others' feedback may itself be biased. The key is for an employee's manager to follow good practice in tying feedback to specific, representative, and relevant data concerning the employee's performance.
As they explain in their essay, one of the reasons Carter and Dunning believe self-assessment is inherently difficult is that the feedback people receive is so often deficient, i.e., the available feedback does not provide full information that the recipient can utilize in assessing his/her performance.
Note that Carter and Dunning include in their definition of "feedback" not only commentary provided by others concerning a person's performance and behavior, but also the outcomes of decisions and judgments the person makes.
The deficiencies in feedback take four forms:
Probabilistic feedback — In many situations, there is no guarantee that making a sound decision will lead to a positive outcome. For example, an employee might do a good job coding a piece of software, but the software might not achieve critical mass in a crowded marketplace and never gain significant market share. To the extent that this is a matter of bad luck, you don't want the employee searching for what he/she did wrong — and possibly coming up with a confabulated explanation of the disappointing outcome.
Ambiguous feedback — Sometimes it isn't clear whether an outcome is positive or negative. For example, an employee might decide to give a certain customer a discount and then receive a substantial order. Without some probing of the customer's thinking in placing the order, it isn't clear whether the full discount was necessary to close the deal.
Biased feedback — People often decide to "soften the blow" when delivering negative feedback and, as a result, the message comes across as more or less positive. For example, a co-worker might tell an employee, "Your idea is worth trying," when the co-worker's unbiased opinion is that the idea lacks novelty and should be replaced with something more creative.
Missing feedback — Carter and Dunning cite the all-too-common problem of managers withholding positive feedback because they think employees are simply doing the jobs they were hired to do. The upshot is that employees may not realize they're on the right track, and think that they need to veer off in a different — suboptimal — direction. There is also the problem of people looking only for evidence that confirms a decision or judgment, so that they overlook disconfirming evidence. And there is the issue of incomplete feedback, such as telling an employee that a first-draft spreadsheet analysis is useful, but not taking time to discuss how it could be improved.
Carter and Dunning conclude their article by noting the circumstances in which accurate self-assessment is most feasible and likely:
If the individual is competent [training helps here], can receive information about errors of omission, can get clear feedback, and is working on a well-defined task, self-judgment can be very accurate. One should not forget this other side of the coin — and also not forget that to the extent that one can create a world with these circumstances, one's sense of self will lie close to the truth.
You can learn more about David Dunning's research by visiting the website of the Self and Social Insight (SaSI) Lab, of which Dunning is the director.
__________ 1 "Faulty Self-Assessment: Why Evaluating One's Own Competence is an Intrinsically Difficult Task," Travis J. Carter and David Dunning, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008), pp. 346-360.
The reasons people procrastinate include personal proclivities (some people are especially prone to the problem) and distaste for certain types of tasks (e.g., completing administrative paperwork, writing performance appraisals). Now a quartet of psychologists have gathered evidence for another causative factor — the way in which a task is presented to the person being asked to carry it out.
Sean McCrea (University of Konstanz, Germany), Nira Liberman (Tel Aviv University), Yaacov Trope (New York University), and Steven Sherman (Indiana University Bloomington) report (pdf) the results of a suite of three studies that suggest people are less prone to procrastinate if a task they are given is represented in concrete terms rather than abstractly.1
For example, the first study the team carried out compared the degree of procrastination between two groups:
The first group was asked to write a couple of sentences about how one would go about engaging in ten specific activities, such as opening a bank account.
The second group was asked to write a couple of sentences about the traits of people who engage in the specified activities.
It turned out that the first group exhibited less procrastination than the second group.
This pattern was repeated in the other two studies. In sum, "the way the task is represented influences when individuals complete it."
An obvious implication of this research for business is that assignments given to individuals and teams should be defined as concretely as possible. On the other hand, the drive to describe assignments in concrete terms should not overwhelm the need to start out at a fairly high level of abstraction in some cases, such as when a business is investigating opportunities for innovation and is still at the divergent thinking stage of the process.
__________ 1 "Construal Level and Procrastination," by McCrea, Liberman, Trope, and Sherman, was published in Vol. 19, No. 12 (2008) of Psychological Science, pp. 1308-1314.
In the Fall 2008 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review, Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield of the consultancy VitalSmarts, and Andrew Shimberg of nGenera Talent, present a straightforward model of influence that can be quite helpful in situations where people need to be willing and able to change their behavior to fit new circumstances.
In "How to Have Influence," Grenny, Maxfield, and Shimberg (GMS) analyze a simple taxonomy of sources of influence in which the willingness (motivational) and ability components of influence each operate at three levels: the personal, the social, and the structural (non-human).
Thus, the GMS taxonomy consists of six sources of influence. GMS list questions to ask (here slightly edited) in assessing whether and how to tap each of these sources in particular situations:
Personal motivation to change — "link to mission and values," i.e., "help people see the broad implications of their actions and choices" and "help them connect the changes to their deeply held values." Ask:
In a room by themselves would people want to engage in the behavior?
Do they hate it or enjoy it?
Do they find meaning in it?
Does it fit into their sense of who they are or want to be?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "identified the aspects of the change that were boring, uncomfortable or painful and found ways to either eliminate them or make them more pleasant."
Personal ability to change — "a robust training initiative is at the heart of almost all successful influence strategies." Ask:
Do they have the knowledge, skills and strength to be able to do the right thing?
Can they handle the toughest challenges they will face?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "gave guided practice and immediate feedback until people were sure they could engage in the new bahaviors in the toughest of circumstances."
Social motivation to change — "harness peer pressure." Ask:
Are other people encouraging the right behavior or discouraging the wrong behavior?
Do people whom others respect model the right behaviors at the right time?
Do people have good relationships with those who are trying to influence them positively?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "identified people who would be most concerned about the changes, and made sure they were involved early."
Ability to exert social influence — "create social support." Ask:
Do others provide the help, information and resources required — particularly at critical times?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "created 'safe' ways for people to get help without feeling embarrasssed or being put on the spot."
Structural contributions to motivation to change — "align rewards and ensure accountability." GMS caution that it is generally best "to use incentives third, not first. Otherwise, you might acutally undermine people's intrinsicmotivation." Ask:
Are there rewards — pay, promotions, performance reviews or perks?
Do rewards encourage the right behaviors and costs discourage the wrong ones?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "adjusted the formal rewards system to make sure people had incentives to adopt the new behaviors."
Ability to apply structural influence — "change the environment." Ask:
Does the environment — tools, facilities, information, reports, proximity to others, policies, work processes — enable good behavior or bad?
Are there enough cues and reminders to help people stay on course?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "reorganized people's workplaces to remove obstacles and to make the change convenient and easy."
(Note that two earlierposts discuss an influence model that addresses situations in which one must exercise influence without authority.)
Most people involved with business training are more or less familiar with the Myers-Briggs model of personality. Based on Jungian theory, the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator assesses a person using four dichotomies:
Extroversion (E) – Introversion (I) Focus on the outer world vs. Focus on one's own inner world.
Sensing (S) – Intuition (N) Focus on the basic information one takes in vs. Focus on interpreting and adding meaning.
Thinking (T) – Feeling (F) When making decisions, first look at logic and consistency vs. First look at the people and special circumstances.
Judging (J) – Perceiving (P) In dealing with the outside world, aim to get things decided vs. Stay open to new information and options.
It is important to know that psychologists have been migrating to an alternate model of personality over the last twenty-five years or so. This "Five-Factor Model" (aka the "Big Five" model) assesses personality in terms of five research-based (as opposed to theory-based) dimensions (or traits):1
Extroversion Measures cheerfulness, initiative and communicativeness. Those who score high are companionable, sociable, and able to accomplish what they set out to do. Those who score low are introverted, reserved, and more submissive to authority. Facets: Warmth, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Activity, Excitement Seeking, and Positive Emotions
Agreeableness Describes how a person deals with others. Those who score high are friendly, empathetic, and warm. Those who score low tend to be shy, suspicious, and egocentric. Facets: Trust, Straightforwardness, Altruism, Compliance, Modesty, and Tendermindedness
Conscientiousness Measures a person's degree of organization. Those who score high are motivated, disciplined, and trustworthy. Those who score low tend to be irresponsible and easily distracted. Facets: Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement Striving, Self-Discipline, and Deliberation
Openness Measures a person's receptiveness to new information and experiences. Those who score high relish novelty and are generally creative. Those who score low are more conventional in their thinking, prefer routines, and have a pronounced sense of right and wrong. Facets: Fantasy, Aesthetics, Feelings, Actions, Ideas, and Values
Neuroticism Measures emotional stabiity. Those who score low are calm, confident, and contented. Those who score high are anxious, inhibited, moody, and less self-assured. Facets: Anxiety, Hostility, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Impulsiveness, and Vulnerability to Stress
Pierce and Jane Howard, business consultants, provide a business-oriented overview of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) that, among other things, outlines the differences between the Myers-Briggs model, which they used to use in their work, and the Five-Factor model, which they adopted in 1991. Drawing on a 1989 article by two of the developers of the Five-Factor model2 the Howards list these points concerning how the two models compare (presented here in edited form):
The Myers-Briggs Thinking vs. Feeling dimension is unstable because it does not separate Neuroticism from Agreeableness. The concept of thinking vs. feeling does not map precisely to the FFM; in order to measure the thinking/feeling trait, one would need to piece together several different facet scores from among the thirty facets of the FFM.
Because the distribution of scores is normal and not bimodal (binary), the practice of dichotomizing respondents is unjustified. For example, dealing with just the two categories Extrovert and Introvert is not appropriate; better to follow the FFM practice of measuring degrees of extroversion.
The Judging vs. Perceiving preference does not identify one's "primary function," i.e., does not identify the approach — sensing, intuiting, thinking, or feeling — that a person uses most often and most proficiently. One should be able to assume that a person's primary function would be the function with the highest score, but it turns out that the J/P preference picks the highest function score at a rate no better than chance.
The "type" concept is invalid. Assuming the integrity of the sixteen four-letter Myers-Briggs types, one would expect to find consistent correlations among the types and other behavioral measures, but this is not the case. Rather than reporting a five-letter type, the FFM simply reports five trait scores, while recognizing that many behaviors are explained by the combined effect of two or more FFM traits. For example, authoritarian behavior is generally associated with high Neuroticism, low Openness, and low Agreeableness.
Introspection, or reflection, is not associated with introversion, but rather with the trait called Intuition by the MBTI, and Openness by the FFM.
The Judgment/Perception scale does not measure one's decisiveness, but rather appears to measure one's need for structure.
The definitional problems with the Thinking/Feeling dimension are many, but they are resolved by adopting the two FFM dimensions, Neuroticism and Agreeableness. A preference for reason and logic belongs to the low end of the Neuroticism trait, while a preference for harmony belongs to the high end of the Agreeableness trait.
You can take a version of the FFM test here. A shorter version is available here.
__________ 1 The definitions given here are adapted from those in "Set in Our Ways: Why Change is So Hard," by Nikolas Westerhoff, Scientific American Mind, December 2008/January 2009, p. 48.
The facets for each dimension are taken from a summary published by the Association for Assessment in Counseling and Education.
2 "Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator From the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model of Personality," by Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa, Jr., Journal of Personality, Vol. 57, No. 1 (March 1989), pp. 17-40.
Those Who are Willing Can "Break the Prejudice Habit"
For almost twenty-five years, Patricia Devine, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been investigating how people with implicit and/or explicit prejudices can overcome those prejudices by applying values of fair-mindedness to their evaluations of and responses to others.
The key, as in just about any situation in which learning is involved, is that the individual must want to change. A person motivated to learn to act without prejudice will feel guilty when s/he behaves otherwise. This guilt is the person's cue to make a conscious effort to improve. The good news from Devine's research is that such conscious efforts pay off.
Devine explains:
[Prejudice] is the legacy of our socialization experiences. We all learn these stereotypes and have these biases at the ready whether we condone them or not, whether we think they are good or not, and as a result the immediate reaction is a biased one. If you are going to respond in nonbiased ways, you have to gain control or override the automatically activated stereotypic response and instead respond in these thoughtful deliberate ways that might represent your personal values.
In Devine's view, overcoming prejudice is akin to breaking a bad habit:
"[Eliminating prejudice] is a process. Making that decision is the first step, but then what you have to do is put some effort into it. Just making the decision doesn't mean you wake up one day, stretch and say "I'm not prejudiced," because you have got this whole socialization experience that you grew up with.
Devine found that people whose personal values and standards include being unbiased would try "to learn from mistakes, [try] to absorb material and at the next opportunity when prejudice was possible, they responded in a fair and unbiased way."
Devine also found that if people are responding to both internal motivation (personal values and standards) to act in an unprejudiced way, and to external motivation (social pressure), they will benefit from help in developing skills for acting in an unbiased way.
On the other hand, for people who are only responding to external motivation, the best way to help is not to up the ante by applying more pressure. Rather, a coach should try to facilitate development of internal motivation to break the prejudice habit.
The Producer Role in Managing a Hollywood-Style Project
I've discussed the "Hollywood model" for designing and carrying out projects in a couple of previousposts. Now I've come upon a valuable study of how such projects are managed by the person in the producer role.
The group Lingo and O'Mahony studied were country music producers in Nashville. These individuals play what Lingo and O'Mahony call a "nexus role" in the creative process: They are responsible for integrating the work of a variety of experts whose contributions are potentially competing in terms of aesthetic values, expected roles, and identification of what will be a hit in the market. Producers have to achieve this integration without direct authority over the various experts — notably, musicians and label personnel — contributing to a particular project.
(click to enlarge)
As indicated in the above graphic (Figure 1 from the paper), Lingo and O'Mahony found that there are three types of ambiguity1 inherent in creative projects, all of which producers must manage:
Ambiguity concerning how to measure quality/define success.
Ambiguity concerning the scope of each person's involvement in the project.
Ambiguity concerning the transformation process, i.e., the manner in which the individual contributions of the principal artist, label personnel, session musicians, recording engineers, and the artist's manager will be transformed into a coherent whole that will sell well. This is the infamous problem of there being no known formula for producing hits.
The key point that Lingo and O'Manhony make (with considerable redundancy in their paper) is that the "nexus work" producers do (see the "Nexus Work Practices" box in the graphic) involves:2
Managing the ambiguity concerning how to measure quality by using relational practices to create "a shared quality aesthetic that would guide what the group produced."
Managing the ambiguity about who does what when — the "potentially competing claims of control over individual performances, the choice of songs, and the overall direction of the creative product" — by using relational practices to articulate role boundaries.
Coping with the irreducible ambiguity of the transformation process by building creative capacity — talent, songs, and label support — in order to "generate options, be open to opportunities and handle problems [the producer] could not articulate or anticipate a priori." Notably, during the actual recording process, producers obsess "about creating the best possible conditions for 'magic' to occur"; they concentrate on creating "a positive working environment that [is] conducive to improvisation, experimentation and suggestion."
Lingo and O'Mahony summarize their findings as follows:
By showing specifically how those in the nexus role responded to this call for invention, we contribute a more refined understanding of network based projects — a critical postbureaucratic form of organizing ... By specifying the precise types of relational work practices that individuals in the nexus role use to reduce ambiguity and cultivate a creative contribution from those upon whom they depend, we also identify a more relational type of brokerage where individuals use their unique position to achieve mutual benefit as opposed to political advantage.
Finally, Lingo and O'Mahony note that further research is needed to determine whether their findings concerning the nexus work of music producers apply in other entrepreneurial settings.
__________ 1 Lingo and O'Mahony adopt as their definition of ambiguity, "multiple and potentially competing understandings of the same situation."
2 Definitions of music producers' nexus work practices are provided in Table 1 in the paper.
As Leonard and Swap explain in a 2005 interview,"deep smarts" is a term they coined
to express our belief that there's a certain subset of expertise that deserves to be identified by itself, because though it possesses many of the general characteristics of expertise it is also a very particular kind of expertise.
. . .
For one thing, it involves having an ability to recognize patterns based upon extensive experience, and so is very contextualized expertise. For example, someone who may have a lot of book learning but not a lot of real life experience won't be able to look at a new situation and say, "Aha, that reminds me of a time when I did X," and that memory suggests a way to act. So deep smarts are connected in a person's mind to rich context. There are a lot of tacit dimensions to this kind of practical wisdom, such as the person with deep smarts may not actually be able to recognize or to put into so many words where that knowledge came from — but is nonetheless able to react quickly and wisely.
One of the HBR article's exhibits provides an overview of Leonard and Swap's advice for helping a person develop deep smarts. The basic method guided experience, i.e., individual on-the-job coaching of the learner by someone who has already accumulated deep smarts. Leonard and Swap identify four particularly fruitful situations for such coaching:
The skills to be learned involve interpersonal relations, so there is no set of absolute steps but rather an array of possible responses to the actions and emotions of others. Examples: working with a board of directors, negotiating a merger or acquisition, handling a talented prima donna.
There are many tacit dimensions to the skills, so even an expert may not be able to make them all explicit. Examples: closing a sale, dissipating tension in a meeting, creating a new perfume or best-selling wine.
The knowledge is context-specific, so it's appropriate to be adaptive rather than apply formulas. Examples: managing in a foreign culture, manufacturing with proprietary, plant-specific equipment, handling sexual harassment cases.
The situation is new, so there is great uncertainty. Examples: launching a new service product in a new market, using a new mode of manufacturing.
The coach's job is to provide feedback as the learner is handling the above types of situations.
In the aforementioned interview, Leonard offers an example of a person with deep smarts who particularly resonated with me because he reminded me of one of my best teachers in graduate school:
In the [Deep Smarts] book, we tell a story about two missile companies competing in the 1980s for a government contract that if won would provide literally billions of dollars to the company over the subsequent 30 or 40 years. The two competitors sent up six prototype missiles but none of them was really up to the performance demanded. In one of these companies, a scientist who wasn't even on the project team — but who had 20 years of experience in building missiles — called the project team together in a large auditorium, because these are very big systems, requiring large development teams. Speaking without notes, the scientist proceeded to walk them through a complete redesign of the missiles from fore to aft, including software and hardware that he'd come up with on his own, working alone over the period of a week. And after they closed their mouths, because they were really in awe of his performance, the project team members realized that the implications of his redesign were that 400 people would have to work for a year and a half to make all the changes. Nevertheless, their faith in this guy was so strong and their understanding of the redesign and of everything that he'd proposed was so favorable that they went ahead. They won the contract and they still have it; so that's an example of how a person with deep smarts can save the day.
In Leonard and Swap's view, guided experience is actually a matter of having the learner recreate the knowledge in question (as opposed to transferring the knowledge in a "listen to me as I explain" fashion).
In a nutshellRam Charan, a respected strategy consultant, recommends five things to do to get around bureaucratic barriers in your organization:
To identify roadblocks, ask, "What do we need to do to allow us to move faster?"
[my personal favorite] Streamline — keep management layers to five or fewer.
Identify indecisive managers, and work with them to try to fix the problem. If they cannot move faster, let them go.
Make sure everyone has ready access to information they need for their decision-making, as opposed to letting managers get away with hoarding information.
Celebrate, reward monetarily, and promote people in your organization who get around bureaucratic barriers and achieve results expeditiously.
Charan has been urging these ideas at least since he published Execution in 2002.
Getting an Employee's Manager on Board with a Training Program
My latest find, as I keep a lookout for practical and credible advice that fellow training practitioners are offering, is an article by Jeffrey Berk, COO of KnowledgeAdvisors.
In the article, Berk concisely lays out ten best practices for managers whose employees are attending training programs. His list fits my own views, and I encourage taking a look.
To help with improving the results obtained from training, Berk also suggests a half dozen questions to ask when a learner comes back from a program:
What percent of learning actually was applied to the job?
When did the learner apply the learning (e.g., time-to-job impact)?
What are the major barriers to applying the learning on the job?
Did you set expectations with your manager before the learning event?
Were you provided adequate resources to optimally apply the learning?
Did you determine specific uses for the training after it took place?
This combination of best practices and evaluation questions from Berk both embodies useful guidance and illustrates how straightforwardly one can talk about training issues (i.e., no jargon is needed).
Yesterday's post is an example of how routinely assessment instruments come up in discussions of how to characterize the qualities and competencies of effective businesspeople. These references to assessment tools that include self-assessment beg the question, How well are people able to do a self-assessment?
Timothy Wilson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, has been investigating this question for many years, and his answer is cautionary. It seems that people often do not know themselves well and can only improve their self-knowledge by taking particular steps to uncover nonconscious traits and motives that play an important role in determining their decisions and actions.
As Wilson explains in his book, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, "Understanding the causes of our responses is crucial to avoiding unwanted influences on our feelings and behavior." Unfortunately, "much of what we want to know about ourselves resides outside of conscious awareness."
Wilson offers two approaches to achieving accurate self-knowledge. One is captured in the rationale that lies behind 360-degree evaluations: Learning what others think about your behavior and performance can be enlightening.
The other tack to improved self-knowledge is observing one's own behavior and the conditions under which it occurs, as opposed to trying through introspection to figure out why one does X rather than Y.
Developing and managing the mentoring relationship — Assess your readiness to act as a mentor and your interest in doing so. Assuming you decide mentoring is for you, link up with a mentee and get to know the person more deeply, including his/her career and personal goals. On an ongoing basis, you need to work on building trust, setting goals, and keeping the mentoring relationship productive and congenial.
Sponsoring — As needed, you open doors and advocate for your mentee to enable him/her "to develop new skills and gain meaningful visibility." Typical ways of sponsoring involve "seeking new opportunities for your mentee and connecting him or her with people in your network."
Guiding and counseling — To the degree it is helpful, you can be a confidant and sounding board for your mentee. "You may help your mentee explore and understand emotional reactions or personal conflict or explore ways to deal with problems." You should be ready to tactfully "warn your mentee about behavior that is a poor fit with organizational culture" or that is apt to elicit unwanted responses from others.
Protecting — Keep an eye out for potential threats to your mentee (e.g., problematic rumors) so that he/she can forestall them or prepare appropriate responses before problems have a chance to mushroom. "Protecting may also involve cutting red tape or helping your mentee avoid assignments that aren't a good fit."
Teaching — You transfer knowledge, share experiences, and use discovery techniques to help your mentee learn.
Modeling — Your mentee will learn from watching how you handle "ethics, values and standards; styles, beliefs and attitudes; methods and procedures." Keep in mind that your mentee will undoubtedly make adaptations that fit his/her position and personality.
Motivating and inspiring — You need to support and encourage your mentee, encouraging him/her to take on challenges, to learn, and to develop confidence. "When you help your mentees link their own goals, values and emotions to the larger organizational agenda, they become more engaged in their work and in their own development."
As you would expect, the CCL article makes a point of also listing the mentee's responsibilities. The most important of these are to be:
Honest and open.
Receptive to feedback and the mentor's insights.
Proactive about seeking information and feedback from the mentor and others.
Committed to following through, i.e., to pursuing goals, investing time in learning, and taking steps toward needed change.
Willing to give feedback to the mentor. "The mentee needs to be able to let the mentor know what is or isn't working well in the relationship. If there is a good feedback loop between both parties, the relationship will be more flexible, course corrections can be made, and the relationship will deepen."
You can read more about the value of mentoring in "Why Mentoring Matters in a Hypercompetitive World," an article by Thomas J. DeLong, John J. Gabarro, and Robert J. Lees that appeared in the January issue of the Harvard Business Review.
I've commented previously (starting with my very first post) on how vital it is for people to genuinely care about what they're doing if they are to perform with maximum effectiveness. Of course, this is not a novel thought, but it is one that doesn't always get the emphasis it should.
The question is how to get someone to recognize the need to adjust his/her self-perception in order to bring it into line with reality. A clear-eyed view of oneself is a pre-requisite for devising appropriate steps to address performance issues.
Dotlich and Cairo list several examples of situations in which individuals can be induced to de-skew their self-perceptions. These situations are based on Dotlich's and Cairo's own experience as coaches.
Via 360-degree feedback, having "not only your boss but your direct reports and customers tell you that what you believe to be your tolerant attitude is actually passive-aggressive behavior."
"Testing a new behavior in a work situation as part of an experiment and sharing your feelings about how others reacted to you with your coach."
Benchmarking through "[v]isiting another company and talking to someone who had to deal with the same difficult workplace changes that you're now going through."
"Being confronted by your coach and told that the situation has reached the point where if you don't learn to develop in a certain way you will no longer be on track for a leadership position."
"Receiving information from your coach about the CEO's vision for the company, revealing why certain policy changes have been made and the need for you to make dramatic changes in the way you manage."
Having established that it is essential for a coachee to to care enough about doing a better job that he/she sincerely internalizes an accurate self-perception, Dotlich and Cairo go on to detail their action coaching approach in the remaining chapters of their book.
Ever on the lookout for practical, plain English explanations of basic concepts relating to training and development, I was glad to come upon the description of a coach offered by the International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR).
Helps shift the world view of the client (the person being coached) in a way that opens up new possibilities for action.
Often draws on assessment data from the client and others to increase the client's awareness of areas for development and set goals and a plan for reaching them.
Assists the client in staying focused on an area of improvement or learning objective to achieve the desired outcome(s) or change.
Explores possibilities and potential resulting outcomes.
Helps the client identify values and passions and align them with professional goals.
Works with a client to discover the answers from within.
Listens, make inquiries, and observes/reflects.
Generally asks powerful, thought-provoking questions that tap the inherent wisdom and creativity of the client
Among the supplementary resources the IMPA-HR suggests, the coaching checklist offered by Health Science Center at Houston of the University of Texas is particularly useful.
