Reading notes (2021, week 21 ): On what makes a person do their job effectively, hiring well, invisible leadership transitions, and the power of subtracting

What contributes to a person’s capacity to do their job most effectively

In a recent survey of 14,500 U.S. workers, employees report working to their full potential when:

  • They are clear about what they are expected to do.
  • They are willing to ask questions and feel safe doing so.
  • They are not overwhelmed with rules about how the work has to be done or with unproductive meetings.
  • Their organization supports creative problem solving (e.g., implementing employee suggestions for improvements) and provides rewards and recognition for jobs well done.
  • Supervisors notice and acknowledge employee feelings, understand how their decisions will impact employees, and help them manage their emotions.
  • They see purpose and meaning in their work and are committed to their organization. (HBR)

Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe

A high-octane post from Graham Duncan on hiring. Two samples:

The more I’ve done it, the more I realize that what most people think of as the hard parts of hiring—asking just the right question that catches the candidate off guard, defining the role correctly, assessing the person’s skills—are less important than a more basic task: how do you see someone, including yourself, clearly?

Seeing people clearly—or at least more clearly—matters not just when finding the “best” hire, but in identifying the best role for them.

Hiring can be an art form. When you see people clearly, you see the transcript of their conversation with reality up until that moment of your meeting, and you glimpse the horizon that stretches out ahead of them. And then sometimes you can help them overhear themselves and overhear what the world wants from them, whether or not that includes working in the role that you had initially imagined for them.

There are three parts to expanding your ability to see people more clearly: seeing your own reflection in the window, seeing the elephants in the room, and seeing the water.

Well worth reading… and pondering.

Some transitions are invisible

This is an important distinction that is too often overlooked. Any discussion about change should include this and all one-on-one performance conversations should address it.

Leadership transitions are either formal, with a change in job title and sphere of authority, or informal. Examples of formal leadership transitions include vertical transitions (promotions to a higher rank), lateral transitions (moving to a different part of the business), and geographic transitions (moving to a different country or market).

But managers often go through invisible leadership transitions, with additions to the nature or scope of their leadership roles without any changes in their official positions. This has been especially true during the COVID-19 crisis, with organizations under immense pressure to launch new business models and leaders taking on new tasks and obligations.

Job transitions have skyrocketed, and, for many, substantial role changes have taken place without changes in their job’s title, description, or authority. Transitions have become increasingly informal and invisible. (MIT)


We too often overlook subtracting

Leidy Klotz from his book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less:

In one study, recently published in Nature, we challenged participants to modify a sandwich-like structure made from Legos so that it was strong enough and high enough to hold a masonry brick above the head of a stormtrooper figurine. Each participant received a structure consisting of parallel horizontal Lego panels connected by a vertical column that narrowed to only one block wide where it connected to the top panel. We asked participants to: “Improve this project so that it can hold a brick above the storm trooper’s head without collapsing.”

And we offered an incentive: “You will earn one dollar if you successfully complete this task. Each piece you add costs ten cents.”

The best solution is to remove the single block forming the thin part of the column. The top panel can then be attached to the larger section of the column, which stabilizes the structure and still leaves enough clearance to avoid the storm trooper getting squashed by the masonry brick.

Subtracting one block was the fastest way to solve the problem. Plus, only subtracting allowed participants to earn the full dollar. And yet participants were still more likely to add than subtract. This was evidence that people add to their detriment—at least when trying to modify a Lego structure so that it can hold a brick safely above the head of a stormtrooper.

To try to override the greater accessibility of adding, we also gave some participants subtle reminders, or cues, that subtraction was an option. If those who received the cue subtracted more often, then that would indicate that those who didn’t receive the cue were overlooking subtraction.

The experimenter said to all participants, “You will earn one dollar if you successfully complete this task. Each piece that you add costs ten cents.” Participants randomly assigned to the cue condition heard one more instruction from the experimenter: “but removing pieces is free and costs nothing.”

In the no-cue group, 41 percent subtracted a block. In the cue group, 61 percent subtracted. Those who were cued took home an average of eighty-eight cents, 10 percent more than those who didn’t get the cue.

The simple and subtle eight-word cue showed people a profitable solution that they had otherwise been missing. It sure seemed like people who didn’t receive the cue were missing the subtractive option not by choice but because they couldn’t see it.

 

 

The medium is the massage: on doing the same expecting a different result

James Shelley on his blog:

Put a group of people in a room. Give them a whiteboard, pens, and markers. Ask them to develop an idea.

Put the same group of people in another room. Give them pipe cleaners, Play-Doh, a stage, a guitar, and LEGO. Ask them to develop an idea.

How different will the ideas be that emerge from the two different rooms?

In other words: How do the tools we use determine what we come up with?… or whether we engage at all.

It’s a question worth asking – in addition to location, time and venue.

Perhaps our people fail to come up with new solutions or ideas because we always ask them for those novel ideas in the same meeting, in the same place, in the same manner, and using the same tools.

More here.

p.s. The tile of the post is not a typo 🙂

Business schools and their inability to make you think

via The Management Myth

The best business schools will tell you that management education is mainly about building skills—one of the most important of which is the ability to think (or what the M.B.A.s call “problem solving”). But do they manage to teach such skills? (…)

What they don’t seem to teach you in business school is that “the five forces” and “the seven Cs” and every other generic framework for problem solving are heuristics: they can lead you to solutions, but they cannot make you think.

Case studies may provide an effective way to think business problems through, but the point is rather lost if students come away imagining that you can go home once you’ve put all of your eggs into a two-by-two growth-share matrix.