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Monday, February 15, 2010

What's the best way to believe in yourself?

According to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, working up to one's potential requires a growth mindset, i.e., the belief that one's abilities are malleable and can improve.

This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, i.e., the belief that one's abilities are inborn and fixed and, therefore, one is basically helpless in the face of skill deficits, such as poor public speaking or written communication.

(click to enlarge)

Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
(Nigel Holmes [pdf])
Fortunately, there is good evidence that it is quite realistic to believe that one can improve one's abilities. What's needed are challenging opportunities to acquire experience in specific fields, which, over time, develops into deep expertise.

Most of Dweck's work has been directed at school students. For example, she and a colleague, Lisa Blackwell, have recently launched Brainology, a computer-based training program for middle school and high school students aimed at producing better academic outcomes by imbuing students with a growth mindset.

Dweck's research has demonstrated that students with a growth mindset have higher motivation to learn. When this heightened motivation is coupled with plenty of good instruction and practice, the students show solid increases in achievement.

A corollary of Dweck's findings concerning the importance of a growth mindset is the idea that trying to build students' belief in themselves by telling them how smart they are is not helpful. Doing this can, in fact, lead to worsened performance. Students are demotivated to undertake learning tasks at which they may initially fail because they're afraid their "native" intelligence will be called into question.

A much better approach to building students' belief in themselves is helping those with a fixed mindset to convert to a growth mindset.

The Brainology program is an example of how to achieve this conversion. It consists of an introduction and four units. In sum (pdf), the four units cover:

Unit 1— basics of brain structure and function, particularly what is required to maintain readiness to learn.

Unit 2 — brain behavior, how it functions, effect of emotions (e.,g., performance anxiety), and strategies to manage emotions (e.g., strategies for handling tests calmly).

Unit 3 — how learning changes the brain, and what sort of activities promote learning. You can exercise your brain "by exploring new information, learning new concepts, and practicing skills. [P]ractice is the key to learning."

Unit 4 — how memory works, and study strategies to apply the Brainology lessons in real life. "[I]nformation moves from working memory to long-term memory through a process called encoding. In order for encoding to happen you must pay attention, attach new information to existing information that supports it, and repeat the information. [O]ther mnemonics (memory strategies) include connecting information together by chunking, visual images and acronyms."

Organizations that want to cultivate learning-oriented behavior among their employees are well-advised to encourage a growth mindset, accompanied by opportunities to build experience. In practice, this means that a company's performance management system should give heavy weight to skill development, with lesser weight placed on grading employees in order to make compensation and retention decisions.

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Labels: Cognition, Employee development, Employee performance management, Motivation

Friday, February 05, 2010

Board Evaluation of Management

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has created a guide for bank boards of directors that has much of relevance to the work of those serving on nonbank boards.

As a prime example of the useful guidance in Basics for Bank Directors, I offer the set of questions on pp. 59-60 of the current edition (the fifth) which boards can use to evaluate management:

Is the bank operated in a safe and sound matter?

Is the bank operated in compliance with laws and regulations?

Does the bank compare favorably with other banks in major performance areas such as capitalization, asset quality, earnings, liquidity, and sensitivity to market risk?

Does management respond quickly to address shortcomings identified in audits and supervisory examinations?

Does management keep the board informed and provide sufficient and timely information on the bank to enable the board to judge the bank's operational and financial status?

Are decisions made by management consistent with goals, plans, and policies set out for the bank?

Is management responsive to requests, directives, and questions from the board, including complying with board-approved policies?

Does management have the knowledge and expertise to supervise the affairs of the bank effectively, instill confidence, and demonstrate an ability to lead the bank?

Is management informed about the affairs of the bank and knowledgeable about events in the community that may affect the bank?

Are management's presentations and recommendations to the board done on a timely basis, of high quality, and accurate?

Has management put in place a corporate structure that establishes lines of authority and accountability; provides for delegation of authority and monitoring of delegated responsibilities; and permits open communication and free flow of information within the bank?

Has management seen to the staffing needs of the bank: established job descriptions, hired qualified staff, offered competitive compensation, provided training, and planned for management succession?

Has management established information systems to provide timely information on the status of the bank in order to identify evolving problems quickly?

Has management put in place sufficient procedures to direct the bank's operation and instituted sufficient internal controls to protect the bank's resources?

Does management plan for the bank and develop reasonable strategies for carrying out these plans?

Does management, in conjunction with the board, develop budgets for the bank and keep the board informed of the bank's progress in meeting budget goals?

Basics for Bank Directors was written by Forest E. Myers, who served as policy economist at the Kansas City Fed for over 30 years prior to his retirement in 2008.

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Labels: Business acumen, Employee performance management

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

"The Peter Principal Revisited"

The Peter Principle, whose fortieth anniversary arrived this year,¹ has diminished relevance in our era of flattened organizations.²

The Peter Principle, devised by Laurence Peter, an education professor at the University of Southern California, is geared to hierarchical organizations. It states that employees in such organizations are promoted until they reach a level at which they are unable to perform well. In flattened organizations, opportunities for upward career moves are, by definition, limited, so the scope for misquided promotions is also limited.

All the same, it would be interesting to know how to counteract the Peter Principle in an organization which still has numerous levels to which people can be promoted. Alessandro Pluchino (a professor in the physics and astronomy department of the University of Catania in Italy), Andrea Rapisarda (ditto), and Cesare Garofalo (a member of the Chaos And Complexity Theoretical University Study Group at Catania) have recently published a paper (pdf) that addresses this question. Its counterintuitive results have attracted considerable attention.³

The model the researchers use is illustrated in the graphic below.

(click to enlarge)

Pluchino, Rapisarda, and Garofalo's hierarchical organization model.

There are 160 positions, 81 at Level 6, 41 at Level 5, 21 at Level 4, 11 at Level 3, 5 at Level 2, and 1 at Level 1.

The numbers in the lefthand column are responsibility factors for the respective levels. The responsibility factors increase as one moves up the pyramid, meaning that an individual's impact — positive or negative — on the organization's efficiency increases as the individual rises through the ranks.

The Competence distribution at the upper right indicates that competence is distributed normally. Rising competence is represented by deepening color of the employee figures in the pyramid — from pink to dark red. Emply positions are yellow.

Pluchino, Rapisarda, and Garofalo (PRG) use an agent-based simulation to show that, if an organization promotes people to positions whose skill requirements are independent of the skill requirements in their previous positions (the "Peter hypothesis"), the organization should make a point of choosing the most incompetent person at a given level for promotion to the next level up.

Although PRG do not state this explicitly, the idea behind this "Worst" promotion strategy is that the organization moves someone out of a position where he/she is creating minimal value (what I call "value" PRG call "efficiency"), while retaining all those at the same level who are doing a better job. Over time, this strategy is optimal (again, assuming skill requirements of jobs at the various level are independent of each other), as shown in the graphic below.

(click to enlarge)

Organizational efficiency in the PRG simulation model.

Efficiency over time is plotted for each of six cases, three based on the "Common Sense hypothesis," in which a promoted employee is assumed to be roughly as competent in his/her new position as in his/her previous position; and three based on the "Peter hypothesis," in which a promoted employee's competence in the new position is independent of his/her competence in the previous position.

The three variants for each hypothesis are (1) the "Best" strategy for promotion, in which the most competent person is the one promoted to the next level; (2) the "Worst" strategy, in which the least competent person is the one promoted; and (3) the "Random" strategy, in which the choice of whom to promote is made randomly.

The greatest positive impact on efficiency occurs if the Peter hypothesis is correct and the Worst promotion strategy is adopted. Next, in descending order of impact on efficiency are: the combination of Common Sense hypothesis and Best strategy, the combination of Common Sense hypothesis and Random strategy; the combination of Peter hypothesis and Random strategy; the combination of Common Sense hypothesis and Worst strategy (negative impact); and the combination of Peter hypothesis and Best strategy (negative impact).

Note that if skills in the new position do reasonably closely match those in the previous position — the Common Sense hypothesis — the best promotion strategy, as you'd expect, is to pick the strongest performer, i.e., to adopt the "Best" promotion strategy.

I'd further note that if an organization follows the rational approach of promoting people whose skills match the requirements of the new position (with a plan to fill manageable gaps through appropriate training), they should realize their intended value creation more often than not.

And, as pointed out at the beginning of this post, in a flattened organization promotion is less of a focus than assembling teams with complementary skills. Effective organizations will plan individual employees' development so that people are assisted in filling new roles and responsibilties competently.

To follow PRG's suggestion of promoting randomly, or else alternating between promoting the best performers and the worst performers, would not only be unnecessarily defeatist, but would also generate disgruntlement that would have its own serious negative effects on value creation.

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¹ Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong (William Morrow, 1969).

² For an opposing view, see Robert Sutton, "A New Look at The Peter Principle," Business Week, March 31, 2009.

³ Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, "The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Vol. 389, No. 3 (Feb. 2010), pp. 467-472.

If you want run the PRG simulation yourself, you can do so here.

I was made aware of this article by an item in the "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas" feature published in the New York Times Magazine on December 13, 2009: "Random Promotions," by Clive Thompson. There is also a short write-up at Technology Review.

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Labels: Employee development, Employee performance management, Simulation

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Adam Smith Retrospective I

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.

[Source: www.adamsmith.org]

See also "Preach What Your Practice."

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Labels: Coaching, Cognition, Employee performance management

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Performance Appraisals - Yea or Nay?

I tend to agree with the views of Jeffrey Pfeffer on HR matters. However, I find myself departing from the strong position against formal performance appraisals that he takes in his column in the August 3 issue of Business Week.

Pfeffer argues that performance appraisals are generally inaccurate, citing a number of studies that have uncovered problems due to such factors as:

Bias, e.g., favoring employees you personally hired, favoring people who match you in gender and/or race, and "ingrained expectations about what types of people perform better."

Work that is difficult to evaluation objectively. For example:
- Work, such as R&D, whose desired outcome is not entirely clear.
- Work whose outcome arrives after a considerable passage of time.
- Work to which employees contribute in interdependent fashion, so individual contributions are obscured.
The upshot in the above situations is that "political skill — the ability to understand others and use that knowledge to influence them — helps individuals put a gloss on their performance that ensures a higher rating."¹

A tendency of employees to discount appraisals by their managers that say their performance is not as sterling as their own self-appraisal tells them it is.

Pfeffer's culminating point is that

By focusing ... on the presumed deficiencies or strengths of individuals, performance reviews divert attention from the systemic reasons, such as inferior technology, that may be behind poor results.

My quarrel with Pfeffer's position is that his rejection of performance appraisals is too sweeping. Indeed, the suggestions Pfeffer offers for maximizing the accuracy of appraisals indicate where and how they can be useful.

For example, Pfeffer recommends minimizing rater bias by making "evaluation criteria more explicit and objective" and involving "more people in each review." He advises encouraging "managers to have frequent, ongoing conversations with their staff about performance." Finally, he cautions against forced comparisons of employees. All of these practices are part and parcel of well-designed performance management systems in use at companies that see value in the individual accountability that these systems afford.

With respect to systemic deficiencies, I would note that forward-thinking companies have adopted tools like the balanced scorecard to ensure that their analysis of performance drivers is comprehensive.

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¹ For an example of research indicating the influence of interpersonal style on performance evaluation, see "The Effects of Positive Affect and Gender on the Influence Tactics-Job Performance Relationship," by Stephanie L. Castro, Ceasar Douglas, Wayne A. Hochwarter, Gerald R. Ferris, and Dwight D. Frink, Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 1-18.

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Labels: Employee performance management

Thursday, May 28, 2009

wikiHow

The wikiHow site is a trove of how-to articles on a wide range of subjects:

Arts & Entertainment

Cars & Other Vehicles

Computers & Electronics

Education & Communications

Family Life

Finance & Business

Food & Entertaining

Health

Hobbies & Crafts

Holidays & Traditions

Home & Garden

Personal Care & Style

Pets & Animals

Philosophy & Religion

Relationships

Sports & Fitness

Travel

Work World

wikiHow (e.g., how to contribute)

Youth

Other

I find wikiHow useful for browsing for ideas on how to handle various situations, such as preparing for a behavioral interview (one of the items cited below), and for advice that reflects "on the ground" experience.

The articles vary in quality, as you would expect, but they are also easy to scan, so you can quickly decide what you want to pay attention to, and what you want to ignore.

I've listed below some examples of articles I found useful, taken from the Education & Communication, Finance & Business, and Work World categories.

How to Help Your Boss Succeed

How to Facilitate Clarity in Outsourcing Companies: How English Can Be a Facilitator and Not a Barrier

How to Optimize Call Center Performance

How to Give a Performance Review of an Employee

How to Respond to a Job Performance Review

How to Prepare for a Behavioral Interview

How to Write a Status Report

How to Work Smart, Not Hard

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Labels: Communication, Employee performance management, Hiring and getting hired, Learning resources, Productivity, Upward influence, Web 2.0

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Oceaneering International's MIMIC Simulator

Prompted by an article by Bob Moschetta and Randy C. Consolo in the May 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, I've looked up some of the details of the training that Oceaneering International, a company that "provides engineered services and products primarily for the offshore oil and gas industry," offers its employees.¹ I was particularly interested in Oceaneering's use of simulators to train the technicians and operators who work with its remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

A screenshot from Oceaneering International's Modular Integrated Man-Machine Interaction & Control (MIMIC) simulator
(Oceaneering International, Inc.)
In addition to training, the simulators are used to plan equipment staging, develop procedures, validate equipment designs, and preview and assess projects. The simulators can "be configured to depict various levels of visibility, sonar noise, bottom type, surface action, and water current conditions." The scenarios used for training can also be designed at different levels of difficulty — "from novice oriented basic navigation to advanced skill oriented scenario rehearsal."

Oceaneering's training program includes a range of technical, operational, and supervisory courses in a curriculum that is aimed at steadily increasing productivity and efficiency at the company. Employees are directed to suitable courses be tracking their current skills — and skills gaps — in a talent management system acquired from LearnShare.

According to Frank Klein, Oceaneering's worldwide competency and development manager for the ROV Group, keeping individual employees' talent and learning profiles up-to-date enables the company to make informed team assignments and promotions, while also informing employees of what is expected of them, so they have "control of their destiny and a strategy for promotion."

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¹ Bob Moschetta is vice president of health, safety, and environment at Oceaneering International. Randy Consolo is vice president of business development at LearnShare, the company that supplied Oceaneering with its learning management and talent management systems.

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Labels: Competencies, Employee development, Employee performance management, Simulation

Sunday, May 03, 2009

David Dunning on Performance Assessment

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.

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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.

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Labels: Coaching, Employee performance management

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Goals Need Success Criteria

Universia-Knowledge@Wharton, the Spanish-Portuguese segment of Knowledge@Wharton, published an article today that seems overwrought in cautioning organizations about the pitfalls associated with making goal-setting central to performance management.

In "'Goals Gone Wild': How Goal Setting Can Lead to Disaster," we read about "the hazards of setting goals":

In pursuit of such mandates, employees will ignore sound business practices, risk the company's reputation and violate ethical standards.

I believe such unacceptable consequences of goal-setting are generally due to a falure to qualify goals by defining criteria that specify what successful achievement of each goal requires. Employees need to understand that how goals are achieved will be taken into account in assessing whether the goal achievement is truly successful. For instance, in the article's opening example, the story of the ill-designed Ford Pinto, whose fuel tank was vulnerable to catching fire in a rear-end collision, it seems that Ford neglected to require engineers to include proper attention to safety in the design criteria.

The Universia-Knowledge@Wharton article summarizes a paper (pdf) by Maurice Schweitzer (Wharton), Lisa D. Ordóñez (Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona), Adam D. Galinsky (Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University), and Max H. Bazerman (Harvard Business School) (SOGB).¹

In fairness, I must note that SOGB point to the need to monitor performance as employees pursue assigned goals, and that they base their reasoning in part on the fact that such monitoring is frequently quite difficult. Nonetheless, I would argue that SOGB overstate the degree of unmanageable risk in setting specific goals for employees to meet.

As summarized in the Universia-Knowledge@Wharton article, there are four problems SOGB emphasize as likely to accompany goal-setting:

"Goals that are too specific often lead employees to develop such a narrow focus that they fail to recognize obvious problems unrelated to the target." I say that there is no reason for management to let employees overlook problems related to other desiderata.

SOGB also discuss the problem of setting too many goals, so that employees pick and choose in a manner that does not match organizational priorities. The counterpoint here is that managers need to clarify priorities and coach employees on gauging their efforts to match priorities.

Time horizons for goals that are (1) too short, meaning long-term considerations are largely ignored, or (2) too long, meaning employees slack off if they manage to meet a goal in advance of the deadline they've been given. I say (1) success criteria should include optimizing the combination of short-term and long-term considerations, and (2) there is no reason not to plan for special rewards and recognition — and a revised goal/timeframe — to ensure employee productivity is maintained when the initial deadline for a goal proves longer than necessary. (I'd also note that the example of New York cab drivers electing to knock off early on rainy days — because they can meet their own, self-set goals for the daily total of fares earlier than on clear days — is not actually relevant to an analysis of employee response to goals set by management.²)

"Workers with highly specific and ambitious targets will engage in risky practices in order to meet them." Again, it seems evident that success criteria should include requirements for appropriate risk management.

"Unethical behavior is one of the more obvious pitfalls of overly ambitious goal setting ..." Success criteria requiring adherence to ethical standards, with compliance monitored, are a sine qua non in any respectable organization.

The last two items are aspects of the general issue of perverse incentives. Mitigating perverse incentives involves not only setting appropriate success criteria, but also directly adjusting the structure of incentives to reward desired behavior and not reward behavior that undercuts organizational values.

Where SOGB are on firm ground is their caution concerning undercutting employees' intrinsic motivation by overemphasizing financial rewards. Also well-taken are SOGB's observations that employees will "lose their focus on learning new skills in favor of using tried-and-true methods to meet their quotas," and that "[setting] targets for individual workers can create a culture of competition in which workers tend to shun teamwork in problem solving." But even here I'd say that astute definition of both the goals and the success criteria can mitigate the danger of perverse employee behavior.

In their paper, SOGB discuss two other problems they associate with overuse of goal-setting to motivate employees.

There is the issue of "goal-induced reductions in self-efficacy" that can occur when employees achieve a good result that nonetheless falls short of a stretch goal they were aiming for. This "can be highly dettrimental because perceptions of self-efficacy are a key predictor of task engagement, commitment, and effort." I say that effective leaders will take action in such a situation to acknowledge that employees have done a good job that has moved the organization forward; the stretch goal was overly ambitious, so no one is in trouble for falling short.

Another problem is the difficulty of tailoring goals to match individuals' particular strengths without creating perceptions of unfairness. Managing this issue is a matter of managerial judgment — that takes employee input into consideration — allied with persuasive communication. If an employee is still disgruntled after a manager has heard him/her out, responded with any goal adjustments that may be appropriate, and explained the rationale for the final determination of more or less disparate individual goals, it is fair to point out that the employee may need to find a position that better matches his/her job preferences.

For me the bottom line is that, while SOGB have done well in articulating the issues associated with making goal-setting a central element in performance management, especially in a complex setting, I believe, based on my own observation of companies intelligently implementing performance management systems, that attaching success criteria to all goal statements, providing constructive coaching, and exercising appropriate managerial oversight makes establishing goals for individual employees a crucial part of maximizing odds of mission accomplishment.

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¹ The link takes you to the working paper version of the Schweitzer et al. article. The published version is in Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2009).

² SOGB adopt the view, "If NYC taxi drivers used a longer time horizon (perhaps weekly or monthly), kept track of indicators of increased demand (e.g., rain or special events), and ignored their typical daily goal, they could increase their overall wages, decrease the overall time they spend working, and improve the welfare of drenched New Yorkers." True, and perhaps cab drivers should be reminded of this fact regularly to make sure it hasn't slipped their minds. All the same, we're talking about utility here so, ultimately, it's up to the cabbies themselves to decide how they want to spend their time.

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Labels: Employee performance management, Management practices, Motivation, Negotiation, Organizational culture, Quality, Rewards and recognition, Risk management, Systems thinking

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Organizational Citizenship Behaviors II

As a follow-on to yesterday's post, I'd like to cite a more recent survey of the literature on organization citizenship behaviors (OCB). The article (pdf) in question was published in 2007 by Brian Hoffman, Carrie Blair, John Meriac, and David Woehr (HBMW).¹

HBMW reach several conclusions from their meta-analysis of the OCB literature:

OCB can be measured as a single factor. I.e., the seven dimensions of OCB identified by Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, and Bachrach in their 2000 literature review² are highly correlated, meaning they are largely measuring the same thing — the degree to which an employee performs above and beyond formal job requirements.

There is indeed a measurable difference between discretionary and non-discretionary work performance. I.e., OCB "is empirically distinguishable from task performance" (the latter being the term organizational psychologists use to refer to specific job responsibilities).

Attitude variables are more strongly correlated with OCB than with task performance. I.e., the strength of an employee's discretionary effort is more tightly tied to his/her motivation than is non-discretionary effort. (The attitude variables HBMW use are job satisfaction, organizational commitment, procedural justice, distributive justice, and interactional justice.³)

The attitudinal variables explain a positive, though small, amount of the unique variance in OCB (the variance in OCB over and above what it shares with task performance). I.e., the unique variance in OCB across employees is to a small degree explained by differences in the employees' attitudes, as measured by the five attitude variables listed in the previous bullet.

From the point of view of training, the conclusions to be drawn are that promoting "good citizenship" on the job makes a difference for job performance, and that there is significant potential for promoting good citizenship by promoting job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational justice.

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¹ Brian J. Hoffman, Carrie A. Blair, John P. Meriac, and David J. Woehr, "Expanding the Criterion Domain? A Quantitative Review of the OCB Literature," Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 92, No. 2 (2007), pp. 555-566. Hoffman teaches applied psychology at the University of Georgia. Blair teaches management at the College of Charleston (SC). Meriac teaches psychology at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Woehr teaches management at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

² Philip M. Podsakoff, Scott B. MacKenzie, Julie Beth Paine, and Daniel B. Bachrach, "Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Critical Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature and Suggestions for Future Research," Journal of Management, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2000), pp. 513-563.

³ Procedural justice refers to "fair procedures, defined as those that are unbiased, based on accurate information, applied consistently, representative of all parties, correctable, and based on ethical standards." Distributive justice refers to fairness in "wage and other resource distributions." Interactional justice refers to "the perceived fairness of interpersonal treatment." See "The Distributive Side of Interactional Justice: The Effects of Interpersonal Treatment on Emotional Arousal, by Mary D. Stecher and Joseph G. Rosse, Journal of Managerial Issues, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 229-246.

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Labels: Competencies, Employee performance management, Motivation, Organizational culture, Rewards and recognition

Friday, February 27, 2009

Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

The concept of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is given considerable attention in the applied psychology literature though, as far as I know, it is never mentioned in articles on training. This is not to say that the behaviors in question get no attention in training specialists' discussions of skills that employers and employees should cultivate. Rather, the training literature places no specific focus on the OCB concept, defined by its originator, Dennis Organ, as

individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization. By discretionary, we mean that the behavior is not an enforceable requirement of the role or the job description, that is, the clearly specifiable terms of the person's employment contract with the organization; the behavior is rather a matter of personal choice, such that its omission is not generally understood as punishable.¹

In a review of the OCB literature published in 2000, Philip Podsakoff, Scott MacKenzie, Julie Beth Paine, and Daniel Bachrach identify seven dimensions of OCB:²

Helping behavior — voluntarily helping others with, or preventing the occurrence of, work-related problems.

Sportsmanship — refraining from complaining when inconvenienced by others, maintaining a positive attitude even when things to not go as one wants, not taking offense when others do not follow one's suggestions, being willing to sacrifice one personal interest for the good of the work group, and not taking rejection of one's ideas personally.

Organizational loyalty — promoting the organization to outsiders, protecting and defending it against external threats, and remaining committed to it even under adverse conditions.

Organizational compliance — adherence to the organization's rules, regulations, and procedures even when no one observes or monitors compliance.

Individual initiative — engaging in task-related behaviors at a level that is so far beyond minimally required or generally expected levels that it takes on a voluntary flavor. This includes voluntary acts of creativity and innovation designed to improve one's task or the organization's performance, persisting with extra enthusiasm and effort to accomplish one's job, volunteering to take on extra responsibilities, and encouraging others to do the same.

Civic virtue — willingness to participate actively in organization governance (e.g., engage in policy debates), to monitor its environment for threats and opportunities, and to look out for its best interests, even at considerable personal cost.

Self development — voluntarily taking steps to improve one's knowledge and skills.

The research on OCB tries to identify antecedents — conditions, such as effective leadership, that promote the behaviors — and consequences, such as improved organizational performance. What particularly interests me, and what I'll be watching for, is the outcome of research concerning the degree to which organizations seek to incorporate OCBs in the performance management objectives and success criteria that they set for employees — in effect, setting expectations for a certain minimal level of "good citizenship." In other words, I'm interested in seeing the degree to which organizations seek to shift some OCB from voluntary and vaguely rewarded, to expected and explicitly rewarded.

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¹ Dennis W. Organ, Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome (Lexington Books, 1988), p. 4. Organ is Professor Emeritus of Management at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University.

² Philip M. Podsakoff, Scott B. MacKenzie, Julie Beth Paine, and Daniel B. Bachrach, "Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Critical Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature and Suggestions for Future Research," Journal of Management, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2000), pp. 513-563. Podsakoff is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, and holder of the John F. Mee Chair of Management, at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Mackenzie is Professor of Marketing and holder of the Neal Gilliat Chair at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Paine is (was?) a doctoral student at the Kelley School of Business. Bachrach is an associate professor of management at the Culverhouse College of Commerce of the University of Alabama.

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Labels: Competencies, Employee performance management, Organizational culture, Rewards and recognition

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Misuse of Leadership Competency Models

The December 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review contains at least one example of the annoyingly shallow material that seems to take up more of its space nowadays than in the not-so-distant past, when more of the authors had strong academic credentials (and, BTW, were allowed to use footnotes).

I'm referring to a sidebar on page 66 which cautions about "The Dangers of Competency Modeling." The sidebar is in an article by Jeffrey Cohn, Jon Katzenbach, and Gus Vlak dealing with "Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators." Cohn is a consultant at Spencer Stuart; Katzenbach and Vlak are partners at Katzenbach Partners.

The sidebar tells us:

Leadership competency models can be found in virtually all major corporations. They seek to institutionalize managerial behaviors, knowledge, values, and motivations to produce steady, predictable results. They provide a common language to help supervisors and HR discuss emerging talent in the organization. These are worthy goals — but overdependence on competency models inevitably reinforces sameness rather than unity or cohesion, by eroding the conditions in which unique points of view and ultimately innovation itself can arise.

Training programs built on these models primarily teach participants how to manage within the organization as is and emphasize formal structures at the expense of informal ones. At the same time, they condition managers to minimize uncertainty and mitigate risk.

The organizational vetting process filters candidates for promotion according to well-known and widely communicated competencies that are ingrained in the company culture. As a result the field of rising stars narrows to those who most closely resemble their peers and bosses. Unique attributes and a willingness to deviate from the norm, take real risks, and embrace different points of view are not cultivated or integrated. Rather, they are slowly and methodically squeezed out of the system.

My complaints:

Companies do not necessarily adopt leadership competency models "to produce steady, predictable results." I believe companies effectively using such models intend for them to produce good results, defined in whatever manner a particular company considers meaningful.

"Overdependence on competency models inevitably reinforces sameness" is basically a truism. Smart management will not place excessive weight on how well rising talent seems to fit a particular competency model.

Effective training programs do not "primarily teach participants how to manage within the organization as is," nor do they "emphasize formal structures at the expense of informal ones." Obviously, a company designing leadership training should steer clear of such defective content. (For more on how companies are using social networking analysis to ensure that managers understand their companies' informal structures and intervene to optimiaze them, see here.)

Effective training programs do not "condition managers to minimize uncertainty and mitigate risk" in a way that defeats innovation. As indicated in my recent posts on enterprise risk management (e.g., here), the best companies are taking an increasingly sophisticated approach to risk management that identifies its purpose as helping the company achieve its goals, which presumably include innovation where appropriate.

As indicated in the second and fourth points above, smart companies indeed cultivate and integrate "unique attributes and a willingness to deviate from the norm, take real risks, and embrace different points of view."

In other words, Cohn, Katzenbach, and Vlak set up a strawman in their sidebar, something I dislike paying $119 a year to have access to.

[Previous posts dealing with competency models are here, here, here, here, and here.]

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Labels: Competencies, Employee development, Employee performance management, Innovation, Leadership, Networking, Risk management

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

CEO Says: Culture Counts

Two recent interviews, one with the CEO of the Brazilian company Mundivox Communications published on December 18, and the other with the CEO of the online shoe seller Zappos published on December 22, share an important theme.

Alberto Duran launched Mundivox in 2000, and is currently overseeing growth that is steaming along at 100% per year. The company's 1000 employees build networks and provide voice and data services, mostly to small and medium-sized businesses. (About 10% of revenue comes from residential work.)

Before getting to the aforementioned theme, just for a general sense of how Duran thinks, here is part of what he has to say in response to a question about the current volatility in the world's financial markets:

The question for me would be: Why is the [stock] market driving all this? The managers of a company and the board of directors are in charge of the long-run situation, [but] the health of a corporation is measured mostly by the stock market. That was supposed to be for the long-run growth of the company and to align [it] with the shareholders and their interests. In reality, what I have seen is companies taking short-term decisions to create short-term mini-bubbles or to please the expectations of bankers who often do not understand exactly what they are doing. I have seen it in my industry. I see the major telecom companies acting like banks. I do not see them acting like telecom companies. I benefit greatly from that. I do not know about society, but personally I could not be more pleased because I actually compete with banks instead of competing with telecom companies.

So, you see that Duran is a vigorous strategic thinker and quite articulate.

Now on to the theme I was struck by. When asked about his top priorities for the next couple of years, Duran says:

The first priority, believe it or not, it is creating new management in the company. I find the biggest problem is to create middle management. They are extremely smart; they are extremely capable in their field technically. But their view of the world and their view of what is right and what is wrong may be sometimes different. Diversity to me is not in race, it is in the way you think. And that is where the biggest focus and the biggest challenge lie, because without those managers we cannot grow to have 10,000 peple. I need more managers to move into different areas, to lead more people and to influence those people like I would.

Duran recounts how he asked Craig Barrett, currently chairman of the board at Intel, how Intel had grown successfully to the point of having thousands of employees. Barrett pointed to the importance of culture. Duran says:

That is when I started going back to my books and my management theories. ... I started paying more attention to the soft issues and to psychology, than the tools that I had learned to use at the beginning of my career.

Which brings us to Tony Hsieh of Zappos (discussed in a previous post). Asked why culture is so important for him and his company, Hsieh says:

Our whole belief is in today's world companies are becoming more transparent whether they like it or not. One disgruntled or happy employee can write something on a blog and have that read by millions. It's the same thing with a customer. Our belief is a company's culture and brand are two sides of the same coin. The brand may lack the culture but eventually it will catch up. You can't control evey touch point like you could 50 years ago. The only way to do it is instead of trying to "control the touch points" is to get the right people with the right attitude, build the right culture and the rest will take care of itself.

In part, Hsieh's view comes from trial-and-error. Asked about his biggest mistake, he responds:

With my first company it was not paying attention to the culture. We hired the right people with the right experience and skills sets, but we didn't know to look for a culture fit. By the time it was 100 people, I didn't want to go into the office anymore. That was a weird feeling. That's why we ended up selling the company.

Finally, in response to a question about how Zappos maintains its culture while rapidly adding employees, Hsieh says:

It comes down to whether employees view it as part of their job description. If they don't that's not going to scale. The only way it can is if every employee feels it's part of their responsibility. We make it a part of the hiring process and we actually fire people if they're not living up to the Zappos core values even if they're doing their job function. It's 50 percent of every performance review. That's the only way I think it can scale.

Any organization would be well-advised to examine their own degree of success in building a cohesive, productive culture and in recruiting new employees who are motivated to fit in and contribute to meeting shared goals.

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Labels: Branding, Employee performance management, Management practices, Organizational culture

Sunday, November 16, 2008

A Collection of Non-Profit Case Studies

The Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management (INOM) at the University of San Francisco has compiled several types of teaching resources, all freely downloadable as pdf files for use in training and development of nonprofits' managers:

Case studies — A searchable group of over 100 case studies. Though all of the cases date to the 1992-2000 period, the lack of recency is generally not a problem because the situations depicted are timeless (e.g., conflict between a music organization's board president and its artistic director).¹

Course syllabi — for both certificate and degree programs.

Curriculum materials developed by the Nonprofit Leadership and Democracy Project of the Union Institute Center for Public Policy.

I've spent some time looking through the case studies and offer the following as representative examples of what's available:

"New Stage Theatre" deals with "the special problems that nonprofit organizations have in developing budgets and devising management accounting systems." Teaching notes at the end offer suggested responses to the half dozen discussion questions that follow the case scenario.

"The Sports Medicine Program at St. Mary's Hospital" in just three pages of text provides a rich and realistic scenario for analysis. The situation presents both financial and HR issues.

"Where Loyalties Lie" raises fundamental questions about how a nonprofit should seek and use funds.

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¹ The case studies are sorted among the following categories (not mutually exclusive): Arts management, Ethics, Evaluation, Financial management, General management, Governance, Health administration, Human resources management, International, Marketing, Museum management, Organizational behavior, Public relations, Resource development, Strategic planning, and University administration.

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Labels: Arts, Business acumen, Critical thinking, Decision-making, Employee performance management, Learning resources, Management practices, Organizational culture, Professionalism, Strategy

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Leaders as Teachers

With good reason, much classroom training nowadays is led by facilitators rather than by teachers per se. The idea is that adult learners should generally direct their own learning as far as possible, and they should spend their training time as far as possible working on real issues and problems with a team of colleagues. The facilitator's role is to help with sharing of expertise, keeping discussions on track, and posing questions that get people to think more deeply.

Facilitators do, in fact, generally include periods of teaching in the flow of training, often to present concepts, to provide memorable examples of how to handle various situations, and to demonstrate techniques the training participants need to learn.

There is a type of more traditional teaching that organizations should provide on a regular basis. This is teaching done by the organization's leaders that is designed to pass along expertise and to reinforce internal messaging and branding.

In the November 2008 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, Michael Chavez and Gil McWilliam of Duke Corporate Education, and Sushanth Tharappan of the Infosys Leadership Institute, offer advice on how to optimize leaders' teaching. The article isn't as clearly written as it should be, but it's still worth perusing because it captures instructive details of several years' worth of experience with Unisys' "Leaders as Teachers" initiative.

The authors point to three reasons teaching by leaders is valuable:

It's a way of passing tacit knowledge along from senior experts to the rising generation of leaders.

What leaders have to say tends to get attention — "... bringing leaders to the forefront of the process of developing other leaders ... sends a powerful signal to the organization about the value of specific insights and the importance of the development process itself."

The Leaders as Teachers approach forges a productive alliance between the organization's learning and development professionals and top management.

Based on their experience with leaders teaching at Infosys, the authors offer five caveats:

Make sure that what the leaders teach is content making a specific contribution to achieving explicit learning goals.

Content likely to fit the bill includes material that helps employees understand why and how to change their focus or priorities, that helps institutionalize use of new tools or knowledge that the leader doing the teaching has had a direct hand in producing, or that affords the leader an opportunity to solidify his or her own command of concepts, frameworks, and practices by explaining them to learners.

In the latter case, the leader is also, in effect, acting as a champion of specific changes the organization is making in order to develop capabilities needed for executing its strategy.

Make sure the teacher uses techniques, such as posing stimulating questions, that involve the learners "in the creation of new meanings, in finding applications and examples and in stretching" everyone's imaginations.

Make sure a leader being considered for a teaching role is able to invest the necessary time "to work closely with internal learning and development professionals — and often outside consultants and educators — to build learning outcomes and design the content, refine the materials and design, and rehearse the delivery."

Use other training resources (i.e., not a leader) for the more basic portions of a training effort. Have the leader step in to teach how concepts already presented apply to company-specific situations.

Organize a cadre of teachers large enough to handle the number of sessions being scheduled. No one senior leader is going to have time to meet with more than a few groups. Note that it will probably be necessary to allocate time to train-the-trainer preparation.

In a sidebar to their article, the authors note that the actual content of the programs Infosys offers is selected

based on input from multiple listening mechanisms: a survey of high-potential leaders and their consolidated personal development plans; senior management performance reviews; and the opinions of business-enabling functions such as HR, corporate planning and quality.

To actually produce the content, Infosys uses a process that helps leaders "deconstruct their learning into teachable points of view," and then incorporates those POVs into an engaging training design.

To ensure the relevance of the content, Infosys:

Aligns the content to the company's leadership competency framework. Each session provides a "platform for illustrating or narrating examples of how leadership competencies actually play out at work."

Places great emphasis on debriefing — i.e., drawing lessons from the tales the leader tells about problems and dilemmas he/she has had to handle.

Encourages learners to approach their jobs with confidence. Unisys places strong focus on helping learners believe that, with diligent application of their enhanced skills and knowledge, they can achieve results comparable to those achieved by the leader doing the teaching.

You can read more about the Infosys approach to leadership development, including measurement of its impact, in a April 2008 interview with Girish G Vaidya, head of Infosys Leadership Institute.

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Labels: Branding, Classroom training, Competencies, Employee development, Employee performance management, India, Leadership, Learning organization, Strategy, Teaching

Monday, November 03, 2008

Employee Development in Manufacturing

Like most big pharma companies, in recent years Merck has embarked on resturcturing programs aimed at maintaining profits in the face of slowed revenue growth. Most recently, the company announced plans to reduce its global payroll by 7,200.

As far as I can tell, few, if any, of those layoffs will affect the Merck Manufacturing Division (MMD) plant in Australia, where, according to its website:

The plant has five manufacturing suites, nine compressing suites, four film-coating suites, and eleven packaging suites.

61 medicines are produced in over 1000 combinations for local and overseas markets; some of these are Merck products for which the plant is the sole global supplier.

About 53.6 million packages containing one billion tablets are manufactured annually.

The Australia plant, part of Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD), a Merck subsidiary, offers some useful lessons in human resource management.

Specifically, in 2004 the New South Wales Office of Industrial Relations published a case study detailing steps the Merck plant had undertaken to develop "a learning and teamwork culture based on the concepts of best practice in work-based training."

The Before situation at the plant:

Until about [1999] the company's work organisation operated on the traditional Taylorist model. According to Robert Justice, Manager, Human Resources at MSD, despite the company's desire to collaborate with employees and their representatives, MMD was "in the dark ages in the way (they) consulted with people". Management practices were inconsistent with future strategic direction.

Demarcation barriers and the mistrust between management and employees were identified as the biggest barriers to teamwork within the workplace. These barriers existed between management and shopfloor employees and also between employees of different classifications within the workplace. This contributed to a culture of departmental self-interest.

. . .

Prior to 1993 MMD had no developed culture of continuous learning and training. Training was informal, unplanned and based on a need-to-know basis, consisting of a "buddy system" in which an incumbent passed on skills to others whilst on-the-job. Operational instructions then, according to Debbie Samoley, Workplace Change Facilitator, were not user friendly. The result was a range of inconsistent performance levels from employees who did not have a clear understanding of the whole production process.

MMD decided it needed to "move away from an industrial focus and toward a focus on employees including an opening up of the channels of communication and information sharing." One key means of accomplishing this was formation of an Employee Development Committee.

Elected by popular vote, rather than by departmental representation, the Employee Development Committee comprises eight shopfloor representative and four representatives from senior management. It acts as a forum for general discussion between management and employee representatives on issues like training and development, employee initiatives and suggestions, and workplace change.

As a result of the reform efforts, the plant has an encouraging After situation:

Work-based training, based on best practice principles, now constitutes the main type of training at MMD. ...

. . .

A personal training plan is also established to ensure employees who wish to do so may have the opportunity to advance their skills. Training at the site is typically modular and self-paced.

A new plant employee classification structure was introduced with a basic platform of utilising a high level of introductory skills and the provision of training and development opportunities to allow employees to acquire and utilise further skills. Based on a "learning organisation" approach, the classification structure directly links training plans for departments and individuals.

Four skill levels are defined: Introductory, Competent, Mastery, and Expert.

The plant also offers training in interpersonal skills aimed at helping staff build and maintain good working relations. Results have been positive:

Departments now work more closely together. Free flowing communication, training and sharing of information between the manufacturing, packaging, planning and quality assurance departments has resulted in an improved work flow and consequent improvements in productivity and quality. For individuals there is a greater awareness and understanding of the whole production process. That, according to Barry Stevenson, has been "the greatest change of all".

"The level of accountability has changed" says Tony Pusic, Manufacturing Facilitator. There is a feeling of ownership over the process. ... The open communication and the sharing of information has also seen the removal of the "domino effect". Instead of shifting the blame or covering up costly mistakes employees are now aware of the outcome, learning from mistakes made in order to avoid them in future.

. . .

... the differences between management and the shopfloor have been significantly reduced. Greater technical knowledge and skilling up of operators has led to a shift in control over the production process from line management to the shopfloor.

Since not all supervisors and line managers were comfortable with the new environment, senior management took steps to formulate "a deliberate strategy to provide support for managers to involve them in the restructuring process."

As summed up in the case study, the benefits to MSD of its new approach to training, teamwork culture, and communication are:

Increased productivity and quality.

Increased worker flexibility.

Improved quality control and predictable work flow.

An improved occupational health and safety record.

Ability to use down time and idle time for training.

Better integration of training and HR systems.

Improved relevance of training.

The benefits specifically for employees include:

Recognition of increased skill acquisition, including problem solving skills.

Proof of competence.

Mobility between divisions.

Better opportunities for situation-specific learning.

A feeling of responsibility for the production process and ownership of the final product.

Increased job variety, e.g., the opportunity for operators to take on the role of trainer or performance assessor. (MSD has adopted a performance management system that includes formal assessment of competency — self-assessment and assessment by peers, team leaders, and an on-site accredited assessor.)

Use of state-of-the-art technology that is unavailable elsewhere.

Improved opportunities for self-development.

Job and financial security.

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Labels: Collaboration, Communication, Conflict management, Employee development, Employee performance management, Learning organization, Organizational culture

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Ram Charan on Combating Bureaucracy

In a nutshell Ram 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.

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Labels: Coaching, Decision-making, Employee performance management, Management practices, Organizational culture, Rewards and recognition

Thursday, August 28, 2008

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).

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Labels: Classroom training, Coaching, Employee development, Employee performance management, Evaluation of training, Learning organization, Management practices, Productivity

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Kauffman Foundation Report on Training in India

Last month the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City MO released a report examining how India has been able to upgrade its workforce in rapidly growing industries despite continuing pervasive deficiencies in the country's school system.¹

The full report, written by Vivek Wadhwa, Una Kim de Vitton, and Gary Gereffi (WVG), is 77 pages long. The Harvard International Review provides synopsis.

WVG's central conclusion is that Indian companies in IT and other sectors, such as business-process outsourcing, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, financial services, retail, hospitality, and education,

have adapted and perfected western practices in workforce training and development, and now take workers with poor education and weak technical skills and turn them into highly productive technical specialists and managers able to compete on the world stage.

... We conclude that out of necessity — because of educational weaknesses; skills shortages; competition for top talent; turnover; and rising salaries — leading businesses in India have developed highly advanced, innovative practices and that these are allowing industries in India to become globally competitive and grow rapidly.

The message to companies in the United States is "go thou and do likewise."

So what exactly have companies in India been doing to recruit and retain talent and to equip their workers to compete at an international level? WVG conclude that

India has learned and perfected the best practices of leading companies that have been outsourcing their computer systems and call centers.

... Indian industry ... has built innovative and comprehensive approaches to workforce training and management. The initial focus was on training new recruits and filling entry-level skill gaps. Now, these companies are investing in constantly improving the skills and management abilities of their workers and in providing incentives for them to stay and grow with the company. There is also widespread collaboration between industry players and academic institutions to accelerate the growth of needed talent pools.

WVG identified seven areas in which Indian companies are using innovative HR practices:

Employee recruitment

New-employee training

Continuing employee development

Managerial training and development

Performance management and appraisal

Workforce retention

Education upgrades

The specific innovations for which WVG give Indian companies credit are:

thorough integration of HR development efforts into day-to-day operations, employees' career advancement, and company reward systems.

application of technology to managing and integrating the processes listed in the previous bullet.

basing executive-level decision making on these processes.

Details concerning how the 24 Indian companies WVG studied most closely handle recruitment and retention, new-hire training, ongoing employee and manager training, and formal performance management are provided in the Harvard International Review synopsis. Numerous examples are provided in the full version of WVG's report.

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¹ If you have trouble accessing the pdf file of the report from the link on the Kauffman Foundation website, you can go to the Social Science Research Network to download the file.

² Vivek Wadhwa is an executive in residence/adjunct professor at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and a fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Una Kim de Vitton is a doctoral candidate in the organizational behavior department of Harvard Business School and the sociology department of Harvard University. Gary Gereffi is the director of the Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness at Duke and a professor in Duke's sociology department.

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Labels: Employee development, Employee performance management, Hiring and getting hired, India, Learning organization, Productivity, Rewards and recognition

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Getting Incentives Right

As a follow-on to my recent post on mechanism design, I'd call attention to a paper (pdf) by Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute published in the June 20 issue of Science magazine.

Bowles reviews research into the circumstances in which incentives that appeal to self-interest may be counterproductive because they "undermine the moral values that lead people to act altruistically or in other public-spirited ways." Bowles identifies four such circumstances, namely when economic incentives:

are taken as a signal that behaving selfishly is appropriate.

gradually train people to adopt more self-interested motivations.

degrade intrinsic motivation (discussed in these previous posts).

convey a message of distrust, disrespect, and unfair intent on the part of the person(s) establishing the incentives.

As Bowles explains,

Many of these unintended effects of incentives occur because people act not only to acquire economic goods and services but also to constitute themselves as dignified, autonomous, and moral individuals. Good organizational and institutional design can channel the material interests for the achievement of social goals while also enhancing the contribution of the moral sentiments to the same ends.

Bowles concludes with the thought that researchers "are well on their way to constructing an economic psychology of the interplay of self-regarding and other-regarding motivation that may eventually enlighten mechanism design and public policy."

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Labels: Employee performance management, Motivation, Organizational culture, Productivity, Respect, Rewards and recognition