A first-person account of switching from engineer to manager

David Chua on Medium:

“Don’t do it if you consider it a promotion. (…)

Also don’t do it if you want to micromanage or control your team members, or want the authority to correct bad behaviour. There are other ways to solve that problem that don’t involve switching your day-to-day work entirely. (…)

However,

If removing blockers, helping others to grow, building alignment across cross-functional teams, and resolving conflict is more fulfilling than writing code and solving technical challenges, then the management track is something you might enjoy”.

“The mindset of improving how your team functions, rather than giving up and trying to do everything yourself, is a key trait of a leader and team player. Having a fancy job title doesn’t make you a leader, and being the manager can in some ways make it harder to lead as people tend to build some distance between themselves and their managers.”

View at Medium.com

10 things you don’t know about yourself

You probably do not understand yourself as well as you think you do.

Your perspective on yourself is distorted,
Your motives are often a complete mystery to you,
Outward appearances tell people a lot about you,
Gaining some distance can help you know yourself better,
We too often think we are better at something than we are,
People who tear themselves down experience setbacks more frequently,
You deceive yourself without realizing it,
The “true self” is good for you,
Insecure people tend to behave more morally,
If you think of yourself as flexible, you will do much better.

More here.

Indra Nooyi on how to get more women in the C-suite

Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, in the New York Times:

The issue is not women in the C-suite, it’s a leaky pipeline. The pipeline is leaking at the early stages. Because we get enough women coming into the work force in various stages. But by the time they get to Level 2 and Level 3, they just drop out of the work force for several reasons.

One that can be addressed quickly is this tremendous unconscious bias. On top of that, the time that they get to Level 2 in a company is when they will have families, and many companies are not mandated to give parental leave. People just drop out of the work force, and then we wonder why they don’t go up to the top. We can ill afford to be a country where women drop out of the work force.

More here.

What many bosses will not admit in public

They want machines to replace you as soon as possible.

“Few American executives will admit wanting to get rid of human workers, a taboo in today’s age of inequality. So they’ve come up with a long list of buzzwords and euphemisms to disguise their intent:

Workers aren’t being replaced by machines, they’re being “released” from onerous, repetitive tasks.

Companies aren’t laying off workers, they’re “undergoing digital transformation.”

A 2017 survey by Deloitte found that 53 percent of companies had already started to use machines to perform tasks previously done by humans. The figure is expected to climb to 72 percent by next year”.

Source

Your job might be killing you

There are 120,000 excess deaths per year attributed to ten workplace conditions and they cause approximately $190 billion in incremental health care costs. That makes the workplace the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. — higher than Alzheimer’s, higher than kidney disease.

Being unemployed sometimes as a result of a layoff.
Not having health insurance.
Working shifts and also working longer periods, e.g., ten or twelve-hours shifts.
Working long hours in a week (e.g., more than 40 hours per week).
Job insecurity (resulting from colleagues being laid off or fired).
Facing family-to-work and work-to-family spillover or conflict.
Having relatively low control over one’s job e.g., workload.
Facing high work demands such as pressure to increase productivity and to work quickly.
Being in a work environment that offers low levels of social support (e.g., not having close relationships with co-workers.
Working in a setting in which job- and employment-related decisions seem unfair.

Both articles report the findings published by Jeffrey Pfeffer in Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It.

I have not read the book yet, but I definitely will.

What does work flexibility look like?

A meta-analysis of the existing research on flexibility identified the fundamental components:

Where we work,
When we work, and
How predetermined our schedule is.

These component parts lead to six distinct types of flexibility:

Remote: “Work from anywhere” – Remote employees keep standard office hours but are location independent. Their office is wherever they are.
DeskPlus: “Partially office-based” – DeskPlus employees keep standard office hours and are partially location independent.
TravelLite: “Minimal travel requirements” – TravelLite employees have minimal to no travel, with a maximum limit of 10% travel annually.
TimeShift: “Standardly unconventional hours” – TimeShift employees reorder their working hours to create a set but unconventional schedule (outside of 9-5 conventions) that optimizes their productivity and performance.
MicroAgility: “Freedom to adapt” – MicroAgility employees have the autonomy to step away from their work 1-3 hours at a time to accommodate the unexpected.
PartTime: “Reduced workload” – PartTime employees serve in senior-level roles; they have the experience and skills to meet the company objectives on a reduced hours schedule.

A list of best practices will not make you a great company

… any more than finding a recipe will make you a great cook.

Bill Bennett reflects on the writings of Alfred North Whitehead on learning. He ends up dismissing the pursuit of “best practices” as secrets to success in favor of a culture of discovery:

Design your organization so that it develops new capabilities;
Make it your job, as a leader, to help your organization be better at learning;
Structure your organization so that your people must engage with important, unsolved problems.
Establish routines that allow for failure and reward those who try to discover;
Build a culture that values discovering over knowing, becoming over being;
Lead by design.

And don’t forget the secret: There is no secret1

Stop mulling over millennials

Millennials want the same things from their employers that Generation X and Baby Boomers do:

Challenging, meaningful work;
Opportunities for learning, development and advancement;
Support to successfully integrate work and personal life;
Fair treatment and
Competitive compensation.

And all three generations agree on the characteristics of an ideal leader: a person who

Leads by example, is accessible,
Acts as a coach and mentor,
Helps employees see how their roles contribute to the organization, and
Challenges others and holds them accountable.

Full article here.

New project: a monthly newsletter

When my friend Xavier took an interest in my master’s thesis –that was a few years ago ;)– he started suggesting books and journal articles that he thought might be useful to my research. Soon thereafter I started doing the same whenever I bumped into something I thought might be useful to his doctoral dissertation (and later to his research and classes).

I also began doing this to other friends and colleagues. It had been (and still is) a great experience for me and I wanted others to experience the same.

This has been going on for decades now. Of course, paper cuttings and photocopies have become emails with links and attachments.

I am thinking it is time to broaden the circle. And that is why I am creating a monthly newsletter.

The content of the newsletter will follow my consultancy practice and intellectual pursuits: leadership development and executive coaching, that is, people managing themselves, others, their team, and their organization.

My hope is that as a subscriber to the newsletter you will also become a contributor of material that might be interesting to other subscribers. Please send your suggestions by replying to the newsletter email you receive – subscribe here.

Happy reading!

UK CEO needs to work until 1pm on January 4th, 2019 to earn as much as what average employee earns in the entire year

Friday 4 January 2019 is “Fat Cat” Friday. In just three working days, the UK’s top bosses make more than a typical full-time worker will earn in the entire year, according to calculations from independent think tank the High Pay Centre and the CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development.

The average (median) full-time worker in the UK earns a gross annual salary of £29,574. “Fat Cat” Friday recognises that in 2019 the average FTSE 100 CEO, on an average (median) pay packet of £3.9 million, only needs to work until 1pm on Friday 4 January 2019 to earn the same amount. The £3.9 million figure was calculated by the CIPD and the High Pay Centre in their 2018 analysis of top pay and it marks an 11% increase on the £3.5 million figure reported in their 2017 analysis. The pay increase means that FTSE 100 CEOs, working an average 12-hour day, will only need to work for 29 hours in 2019 to earn the average worker’s annual salary, two hours fewer than in 2018.

The CIPD and High Pay Centre are highlighting the problem of rising executive pay in a new report launched today. The report, RemCo reform: Governing successful organisations that benefit everyone, identifies the shortcomings of the remuneration committees (RemCos) charged with setting executive pay and calls for them to be significantly reformed. In particular, it highlights:

the myth of ‘super talent’ as a factor that continues to drive excessive pay with one remuneration committee chair commenting: “It’s nuts… and nuts has become the benchmark”.
how there needs to be much greater diversity among those responsible for setting CEO pay, both in terms of their ethnicity and gender, for example, but also their professional backgrounds and expertise in order to combat ‘group think’.
how current pay mechanisms contribute to the problem of high pay. In response, the CIPD and High Pay Centre recommend replacing long-term incentive plans (LTIP’s) as the default model for executive remuneration with a less complex system based on a basic salary and a much smaller restricted share award. This would simplify the process of setting executive pay and ensure that pay is more closely aligned to executive performance.

The CIPD and High Pay Centre are calling for RemCos to ensure that CEO pay is aligned more appropriately to rewards across the wider workforce and that their contribution is measured on both financial and non-financial measures of performance.

Whole story here.