Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
How To Undermine Your Employees
What’s the best way to motivate employees? According to Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, it’s progress. In a recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly, Amabile and Kramer write that a sense of progress on meaningful objectives is fundamental to motivation. If your employees feel they’re doing something meaningful and making progress on it, they’re motivated. If they feel they’re doing something that’s not meaningful — or don’t understand why it’s meaningful — then motivation wanes. If they don’t sense that they’re making progress, motivation dies.
Amabile and Kramer go on to say that executives often commit four errors that undermine employee motivation. Here they are:
Mediocrity signals — your mission statement may include soaring language with emotionally appealing overtones. However, what you say to your employees day-to-day may say the opposite. Amabile and Kramer give the example of a company that claimed to be dedicated to innovation driven by autonomous teams. It’s quite possible that they believed their own rhetoric. In their day-to-day activities, however, they emphasized cost savings and undermined team autonomy by dictating cost reduction measures. Ultimately, employees came to perceive the rhetoric as hypocritical and lost their enthusiasm. Moral: what you say should be consistent with what you do.
Strategic attention deficit disorder — I once worked for a CEO who travelled a lot. After every trip, he’d come back with a new idea derived from an airline magazine article. We all braced for a YAGI — yet another great idea. Actually, some of them probably were great ideas. But there were too many of them. We were just getting started on one when another one superseded it. Amabile and Kramer give the example of a company led by a CEO with a short attention span and a “…desire to embrace the latest management trends. … If you blinked, you could miss the next strategic shift.” Moral: consistency over time is not boring, it’s motivational.
Corporate Keystone Kops — the Keystone Kops were famous for being uncoordinated. They literally couldn’t get out of each other’s way. Amabile and Kramer say the same phenomenon occurs far too often in the corporate world. Their examples include complex matrix organizations that make it difficult to know who’s in charge of what and a failure to hold departments and individuals accountable for meeting their commitments. If one team meets its commitments and another team doesn’t, the lack of coordination can spoil it for everybody. Moral: Keep it simple and keep it coordinated.
Misbegotten big hairy audacious goals — management gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras suggest that organizations should develop BHAGS — visionary goals that stir the emotions. The most cited example is probably John Kennedy’s challenge to NASA to put a man on the moon. It’s a great example but hard to emulate. Amabile and Kramer write that corporate BHAGs are often “… grandiose and [contain] little relevance or meaning to the people in the trenches. They can be so extreme as to seem unattainable and so vague as to seem empty. The result is a meaning vacuum. Cynicism rises and drive plummets.” The authors cite a chemical company whose BHAG was that all projects had to yield $100 million in annual revenue within five years of launch. “This goal did not infuse the work with meaning, because it had little to do with the day-to-day activities of people in the organization. … worst of all, it did not connect with anything the employees valued. Most of them wanted to provide something of value to their customers; an aggressive revenue target told them only about the value to the organization, not to the customer.” Moral: BHAGs are OK but make them meaningful to the people you’re trying to motivate. Keep them focused on customers and simple enough that the “people in the trenches” can get a sense of progress.
You can find Amabile and Kramer’s article, “How leaders kill meaning at work” by clicking here. You can also find their book, The Progress Prinicple, by clicking here.
More Thumb Thinking
Us versus them.
Remember heuristics? They’re the rules of thumb that allow us to make snap judgments, using System 1, our fast, automatic, and ever-on thinking system. They can also lead us into errors. Last time I wrote about heuristics (click here), we looked at three of the 17 different error categories: satisficing, temporizing, and availability. Let’s look at four more today.
Affect — what’s your first response? What’s your initial impression? What does your gut tell you? These are all questions about your affect heuristic — more commonly known as gut feel. System 1 usually has the first word on a decision. If you let System 1 also have the last word on the decision, you’re making an affect-based decision. It may be a good decision — or maybe not. If you want to double check the accuracy of your affect, you need to fire up System 2. People with “poor impulse control” often stick with System 1 only and don’t engage System 2.
Simulation — if it’s easy to imagine a given outcome, then it’s more likely that outcome will occur, right? Not necessarily. At least in part, it depends on how good your imagination is. Salespeople can use simulation to very good effect: “Imagine how you would feel in this new suit.” “Don’t you think it would be great to drive a car like this?” “Imagine what other people will think of you when they see you on this motorcycle!” Simulation simply invokes your imagination. If it’s easy to imagine something, you may convince yourself that it’s actually going to happen. You could be right or you could be a victim of wishful thinking. Before you make a big decision, engage System 2.
Representation — “She looks like my ex-girlfriend. Therefore, she probably acts like my ex-girlfriend.” You notice that there’s a similarity between X and Y on one dimension. Therefore, you conclude that X and Y are similar on other dimensions as well. You’re letting one dimension represent other dimensions. This is essentially a poor analogy. The similarity in one dimension has nothing to do with similarities in other dimensions. Generally, the more profound a similarity is, the more likely it is to affect other dimensions. Physical appearance is not very profound. In fact, it’s apparently only skin deep.
Us versus Them — “The Republicans like this idea. Therefore, we have to hate it.” Unfortunately, we saw a lot of this in our recent elections. In fact, politics lends itself to the us versus them heuristic — because politics often boils down to a binary choice. Politics is also about belonging. I belong to this group and, therefore, I’m opposed to that group. This is often referred to as identity politics and is driven by demonstrative (as opposed to deliberative) speeches. In warfare, the us versus them heuristic may be good leadership. After all, you have to motivate your troops against a determined enemy. In politics, on the other hand, it smacks of manipulation. Time to fire up System 2. (For my article on demonstrative and deliberative speeches, click here).
Do you see yourself in any of these heuristics? Of course you do. All of us use heuristics and we use them pretty much every day. It’s how we manage “reality”. Unfortunately, they can also trick us into mistakes in logic and judgment. As you become more aware of these heuristics, you may want to engage System 2 more frequently.
To prepare this article, I drew primarily on Peter Facione’s Think Critically. (Click here)
Six Ways to Be a Bad Listener
I don’t need your opinions. I have my own.
Bernard Ferrari, who has written a lot about listening skills, has identified six “archetypes” of bad listeners. As I read through the descriptions, I realize that I make some of these mistakes all too often. In fact, for one of these — I won’t say which — I thought, “Boy, that sounds exactly like me. Could it be that I’ve been a bad listener for all these years?” I hope you’re a better listener than I am. However, you may spot yourself in some of the following descriptions. If you do, you’ve still got plenty of time to take corrective action.
The Opinionator — may appear to be listening closely but is really just trying to judge whether what you’re saying conforms to his existing opinions. If it does, you’re OK. If not, the Opinionator is ready to squelch your ideas. Not a good person for helping you develop innovative but fragile ideas.
The Grouch — doesn’t like other people’s opinions and doesn’t want to waste her time listening to them. Through body language and via the things she says (and doesn’t say) she’ll let you know that she thinks you’re a fool. A hard person to get through to.
The Preambler — long-winded, prone to giving “stealth speeches” that are disguised as questions or introductions. May use slanted questions (or other rhetorical devices) designed to steer the discussion and get the answer he wants. Interrupting him may be your only defense.
The Perseverator — talks much, says little. What she says doesn’t advance the conversation but it does take time. By filling the time, she leaves you with less time to advance your cause. She may also simply talk past you — not acknowledging or responding to your points.
The Answer Man — always has an answer to everything, even before the question has been fully formed (or agreed to). Providing an answer before the question is asked suggests that he doesn’t really care what you have to say. He’s so eager to impress, that he’ll jump ahead of you. The Opinionator needs to be right; the Answer Man needs to impress.
The Pretender — appear to be engaged and listening actively but, really, they’ve already made their minds up. It’s hard to spot a Pretender during a conversation — they’re good at pretending. It’s only afterwards, when they do the opposite of what you expected (or do nothing at all), that you realize that they were just pretending.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these? If you do, you might try Ferrari’s 80/20 rule — a good listener speaks about 20% of the time and listens about 80% of the time. I find that hard to do; I’m always tempted to jump in with opinions and solutions. But when I do succeed in listening more and speaking less, I make better decisions and fewer mistakes.
This article is adapted from Bernard Ferrari’s, “The Executive’s Guide to Better Listening”, McKinsey Quarterly, February 2012. Click here for the full article.
What Makes You Happy?
Are you happy? Would that be “affective happiness” or “evaluative happiness”?
Affective happiness has to do with day-to-day life and emotions. It can go up or down quickly depending on how your day is going. Evaluative happiness is your overall evaluation of your life. How happy are you with your place in society? Think of it as overall life satisfaction.
So what makes people happy? I’m glad you asked since I’ve been reading the World Happiness Report. (For my earlier article on Gross National Happiness, click here. For the full Report, click here.) The Report summarizes surveys and statistics from around the world and develops some surprising conclusions about what contributes to evaluative happiness. Here’s a look at a few of the variables.
Income — you might think that richer people are happier. To a degree, you’re right — but income works in strange ways. First, richer people are generally happier than poorer people but the quest for higher income can reduce happiness. Second, as countries grow richer, they don’t necessarily grow happier. GNP per capita has risen threefold in the U.S since 1960, yet we’re not happier. That’s partially because happiness is tied more to relative income rather than absolute income. If we all get richer at more or less the same rate, then our relative positions don’t change — nor does our happiness. Third, there seems to be an income limit. Up to a certain level, income seems to increase happiness. Beyond that level, more income does not yield more happiness. Ultimately, differences in income explain about 1% of the variance in evaluative happiness.
Marriage – “Marriage is one of the unambiguous, universally positive and statistically significant correlates of life satisfaction.” But what’s the cause and what’s the effect? Does marriage make people happy or do happy people get married? It seems to be a bit of both. People who are happier when they’re young are more likely to get married. But marriage then gives a happiness boost — over and above the “normal” rate of happiness.
Age — as you get older, your body starts to break down physically and mentally. So you should be less happy, right? Not quite. There’s a big U-turn when you relate age to happiness. Other things being equal, we’re happier when we’re young and then happiness declines until we reach our 40s. Then things brighten up again and our life satisfaction rises. Could it be the wisdom of maturity? Maybe. Or maybe we can just afford better wine.
Gender — “In most advanced countries women report higher satisfaction and happiness than men.” This is less true in poorer countries but seems to be universally true in richer, more advanced countries.
Education — the evidence is mixed. More education doesn’t correlate directly with greater happiness. But it does contribute indirectly in that more education generally results in higher income which can create greater happiness.
Children — “Surprisingly, the presence of children in the household appears not to be associated with higher life satisfaction.”
Television — “Many studies have shown that watching TV is associated with lower happiness, other things equal. An early study exploited the fact that one Canadian town gained access to TV some years later than other towns. The result was a relative fall in social life and increased aggression.” Additionally, TV watchers see many rich people on the tube and tend to underestimate their own relative income. As we saw earlier, your perception of your income relative to others is what counts in happiness.
There’s much more to it — including mental health, freedom, corruption, equality, and community — but I think I’ll stop here for the moment. Does that make you happy?
Bring Your Husband To Heel
It’s not so difficult.
Some years ago, Suellen and I were vacationing in England when we came across a tempest in a teapot in the local newspapers. It seems that a woman who was widely regarded as the best dog trainer in the country had written a book about husband training. Titled Bring Your Husband to Heel, the book suggested that training a husband was really not that different from training a dog. (Disclosure: I may have misremembered the book’s title. I can’t find it on the web.)
Letters to the editor in the local papers fell into three categories. The first group lamented, “This is terrible. It’s an insult to husbands.” The second group wrote, “This is terrible. It’s an insult to dogs.” The third group, which was composed only of women, wrote, “This is terrible. How dare she divulge our secrets?”
So what were the secrets? The essential advice was: Ignore bad behavior. Reward good behavior. As the author pointed out, dogs don’t really understand what they’ve done wrong, even if you tell them in a very loud voice. On the other hand, they do understand what it means to get a treat. If they need to behave a certain way to get a treat, then they’ll do it.
The secret to ignoring bad behavior is to not take it personally. With a dog, that’s easy. We usually don’t conclude that Fido is angry and vengeful just because he knocked over a lamp with a wagging tail. With a spouse, however, it’s harder. We may conclude that he or she is taking it out on us.
The author’s advice: get over it. Criticizing gets you nowhere. Telling a husband he’s messy doesn’t change the behavior. Besides, he probably already knew that. Telling him repeatedly doesn’t change the equation. So, ignore it and focus on rewarding the behaviors that you like. As “good” behaviors accumulate, they start to crowd out “bad” behaviors.
I was reminded of the book by one of David Brooks’ recent columns in the New York Times. Brooks tells the story of another Briton, Nick Crews, who wrote a letter telling his three grown children that they were “bitter disappointments” and he was sick and tired of them. The letter went viral (it’s known as the Crews Missile) and many parents, apparently, wished they had written it. As Brooks’ points out, however, “…no matter how emotionally satisfying these tirades may be, they don’t really work…. There’s a trove of research suggesting that it’s best to tackle negative behaviors obliquely, by redirecting attention toward different, positive ones.”
So the dog trainer apparently had it right. Want a better-behaved husband? Easy. Just give him treats.
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