Thursday, July 30, 2009

Confidence vs. Caution

Our Tendency to Believe Confident People Over Cautious People

People prefer advice from an expert who projects confidence over an expert who shows caution, according to a recent study. That's understandable -- after all, it makes sense to follow the opinion of someone who seems sure of what they're talking about instead of someone who hem, haws, and hedges. But the more surprising finding of the study was that people have a statistically significant tendency to prefer the advice of confident advisers even after those advisers demonstrate themselves to be unreliable.

The researcher, Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University, presented his findings at the Association for Psychological Science Convention in May, in a symposium with the delightful title of "Often in Error, Rarely in Doubt."

In the experiment, volunteers were asked to guess the weight of a person in a photograph. They were allowed to buy advice from volunteer "experts." Some of the experts offered answers as a spread of probabilities for different weight ranges. The more confident experts provided just one weight range. (See table here.) The guessers favored the advice of the confident advisers. After they learned that the confident advisers weren't as accurate as the more cautious advisers, they stopped buying their advice as much as before, but even so, the confident experts were called upon more frequently than they should have been, statistically speaking.

Another interesting finding of the study was that the less confident advisers eventually began to change their advice to be more like that given by the more confident advisers. They made their advice more precise, but not any more accurate.

Unfortunately, cable TV news seems to breed this kind of confident expert who delivers simplistic advice in sound bites. I'm reminded of the pundits who scoffed at Euro Pacific Capital president Peter Schiff when he warned in 2006 and 2007 that our economy was on the verge of collapse.

Here's a bit of expert advice: The next time you see a talking head on TV telling you he is certain about something that's not certain, change the channel.

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.

Taken from: http://www.creditbloggers.com

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

What makes work meaningful?

On a Mission
What makes work meaningful? If you think money or prestige, think again.

by Susan Ellingwood
Never before, perhaps, has work been imbued with such significance. Less than a week after the terrorist attacks on September 11, President Bush urged Americans to "go back to work." Since then, resuming one's routine has become an act of defiance, an expression of patriotism and, as a practical matter, America's best hope for averting a severe economic downturn.

Yet measured against the pain and efforts of the past few months, the tasks associated with our jobs can seem trivial. Which prompts a question, important in the days before September 11 but of greater consequence now: What makes work meaningful?

ESPRIT DE CORPS

Since 1996, The Gallup Organization has used a 12-question survey, Q12, to assess employee engagement, or the degree to which workers are involved in their jobs. One of the questions is: Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel like my job is important? (See "Item 8: My Company's Mission or Purpose" in the "See Also" area on this page.) By mission, Gallup means a company's core values and purpose, says Curt Coffman, global practice leader for Gallup's Workplace Management Practice. Mission does not imply strategy or financial outcomes, says Coffman. Rather, a company's mission statement describes "its spiritual DNA," helping to ensure that values drive goals and not vice versa.

What many executives don't realize, however, is that a company's mission statement can also be a management tool. But it is only useful to the extent that each employee links the mission to his or her job. "It's the second part of the question that's key," says Coffman, "the part that ascertains whether the individual feels that his or her job is an expression of the mission."

When employees make the job-mission connection, the result is a boost in morale and performance, says James K. Harter, senior research director at Gallup. "High scores on the Q12 mission question correlate positively to all desirable business outcomes," he says, but especially to productivity and profitability. That's because employees who share a mission tend to be engaged, and the more engaged employees there are in a company, the better the bottom line. In a recent Gallup sample of U.S. workers 18 and older, 60% of respondents who agreed that their company's mission made them feel their jobs were important were engaged, while none of the respondents who disagreed about the job-mission connection were engaged. A clear sense of mission also appears to enhance employee loyalty and pride: Among those who agree that the company mission made them feel their job was important, 82% planned to be with the company for at least another year, 63% would recommend the company as a place to work and 66% would recommend its products or services.

The sobering news for managers is that, of all the Q12 questions, low scores on the mission question are among the most difficult to improve. The reason: The ability to connect one's job to a larger mission is not primarily a matter of competence, work ethic or other such traits that good workers naturally possess. Instead, the job-mission connection comes about through communication that starts at the executive level and resonates throughout the ranks. For effective communication to occur, top management must first believe in the mission, a process that requires consensus and clarity. That, Gallup has found, occurs when companies include workers from throughout the company in their mission-statement development committees. The best statements, says Coffman, are "short, direct, and set a value system."

Once a mission statement is developed, it must be disseminated in employee manuals and reports, and reinforced by the company's officers in speeches and public pronouncements. A manager also needs to explain to employees how their duties fit with the mission. "It's not just one conversation with the boss," says Don Beck, a Gallup management consultant in Washington, D.C. The role of mission should also be a topic in discussions about performance, promotions and transfers, and even in informal conversations. Indeed, a perfect opportunity to forge the job-mission link is when a manager and an employee discuss the employee's career, says Beck. The manager can urge the employee to evaluate how his or her aims conform to or conflict with the mission. By so doing, the employee will make the job-mission connection, or realize that his or her goals are leading in a different direction. Either way, the exercise is essential for arriving at decisions that are best for the individual and the company.

Mission can also be reinforced when a manager recognizes good performance. At a chain of hospitals where Gallup consulted, for example, some employees said they did not feel that the mission made them feel their jobs were important. As one corrective measure, Adam Pressman, Gallup Q12 program leader in Lincoln, Neb., suggested that managers refer to the mission's emphasis on caring and respect for human life when acknowledging employees. "Thanking a receptionist for making a visitor feel cared for or praising a nurse for helping to save someone's life was a way to make the job-mission connection," says Pressman.

Managers should also be aware that even engaged employees benefit from a focus on mission. At Caterpillar Americas, a unit of Caterpillar Inc. that operates throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, a theme of the mission is "power of people." When the company underwent a Q12 evaluation in 1999, its score on the mission question placed it in the 61st percentile of all the companies in Gallup's database. The Caterpillar managers wanted to do better. So, during follow-up meetings with their workgroups, they discussed questions they had designed to probe elements of the "power of people" mission. For example, they asked whether employees agreed that the company "helps people improve" and whether employees "feel free to speak openly." By 2000 the mission score had risen to the 84th percentile. Don Elder, the Six Sigma champion for Caterpillar Americas, attributes the increase to the company's plans to improve engagement that followed these discussions. After all, by sharing a mission, employees understood not just where they were headed but why.

The Q12 items are protected by copyright of Gallup, Inc., 1993-1998. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

On Recognizing Talent

"There's something rare, something finer far, something much more scarce than ability. It's the ability to recognize ability."

-Elbert Hubbard-

Characteristics of Successful Leaders

Research performed by Kirkpatrick and Locke identified the following characteristics in the most successful leaders:

-Drive
-Honest
-Integrity
-Motivation
-High Cognitive Ability
-Knowledge of the Organization
-Flexibility
-Creativity

Monday, July 27, 2009

Nietzsche on Crisis

I believe we are in one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether we recover from it, whether we become masters of this crisis, is a question of our strength. It is possible...

- Nietzsche -

Friday, July 10, 2009

Executive Coaching

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (or "EQ", short for Emotional Intelligence Quotient) is a much-talked-about if seldom-understood topic. Simply put, EQ is the ability to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups. I like to think about it as applied empathy, the ability to not only put yourself in someone else's shoes, but to react appropriately given your empathic understanding of their situation. The Center for Creative Leadership conducted a study that yielded some interesting findings regarding the usefulness of EQ in the workplace. They found that higher levels of emotional intelligence are associated with better performance in the following areas:

Participative Management
Putting people at ease
Self-awareness
Work-life balance
Composure
Building and mending relationships
Decisiveness
Doing whatever it takes to achieve results
Confronting problem employees
Change management

On the flipside, low EQ was associated with significant career derailers such as difficulty changing and adapting and difficulty forming positive professional relationships. Once again, the research shows that "soft skills" have cold, hard business impact.