Shadow Work and Shadow Staffs in Organizations

I recently came across Craig Lambert’s book Shadow Work, in which he describes all those unpaid tasks we perform on behalf of businesses and organizations – from self-service ATMs, supermarkets, and gas stations, to shopping web sites. He places the blame with our sleep deprivation and our stress levels partially on these businesses, stating that part of our fatigue “… comes from performing extra jobs that were once done by someone else …” (p. 182)

Shadow work can sometimes save customers time or money (unless you live in New Jersey or Oregon, think about your experience with self-serve pumps at the gas station) and give customers a sense of control and autonomy, but it can also cost jobs and decrease human interaction (there are no more gas station attendants to exchange small talk with – not that this was the highlight of your day anyway).

While his definition of shadow work refers to tasks by businesses that are in a sense passed on to customers, there is another use of this term in organizational behavior. Shadow work in organizations refers to work that is conducted over and above (and at times in place of) the formal or official organizational structure. This is work that is done by shadow organizations or shadow staffs; while they are prevalent in IT (note the flap about Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, a good example of a shadow IT presence), they also exist in other functions, such as HR, marketing, and finance.

I first heard the term several years ago when a multinational I was familiar with embarked on a strategy to implement global support functions (like HR, Finance, and IT) that would provide “shared services” for its business units and subsidiaries around the world. As a first step, the company gathered headcount figures to identify the number of employees performing “duplicate functions” within different business units and subsidiaries. Such shadow staff added another 15-20% to total support staff head count. This is consistent with work that consultants at Booz & Co. found in their own analyses (Booz & Co., 2003). It turns out that certain business units and subsidiaries had created their own mini-support functions, in many cases duplicating and doing work that was sometimes not aligned with the global support functions’ direction.

Why have such shadow staffs? There seem to be five major reasons. First, business unit heads and subsidiaries want their functions to be able to perform certain tasks which they do not believe they can get from the corporate functions. Perhaps the subsidiary has a unique need such as a talent recruitment and development program for engineering graduates at certain local schools. Given their needs, this subsidiary knows that corporate would not really understand their situation, and so it would be more efficient simply to have its local HR function develop and implement this program without having to involve corporate. Second, business unit managers and local support staff may not feel that they are getting sufficient support from their corporate or global functions. In some cases, the corporate model may either be too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough in meeting their local needs. In other cases, the local business or subsidiary may not be high on corporate’s priority, where the focus (and resources) might be on other more strategic or more important business units or subsidiaries. Third, and this is related to the second reason, the business units may not feel that corporate truly understands their needs, or that they are responsive enough to their needs. One business manager executive I interviewed spoke about the bureaucracy in the global function, and his challenges in even getting the proper attention for and understanding of his marketing needs. Fourth, the business units might be operating under a legacy system that does not align with the global or corporate system, and the costs of conversion might be prohibitive for the subsidiary. This is true especially with IT; for example, the Gartner group predicted several years ago (Gartner press release, 2011) that:

“By 2015, 35 percent of enterprise IT expenditures for most organizations will be managed outside the IT department’s budget … These people are demanding control over the IT expenditure required to evolve the organization within the confines of their roles and responsibilities. CIOs will see some of their current budget simply reallocated to other areas of the business. In other cases, IT projects will be redefined as business projects with line-of-business managers in control.”

Fifth, the structure, governance mechanisms, and culture of the company encourage business units and subsidiaries to do what they have to do to succeed. In many cases, the rules of engagement have never been spelled out, or are not clear. There are no explicit guidelines or policies on various roles and responsibilities among corporate and regional or local staffs; in some organizations that are decentralized, in fact, subsidiaries have considerable latitude in determining their staffs and their activities. Besides, if they can get away with it and there are no adverse consequences but good upside potential, why not? The costs can be hidden or buried and if senior management does not really care, especially if the duplicate staff is not really that expensive (as is the case in many emerging markets), then local management will simply create a shadow staff. According to Korolov (2015), for example, only about 8 percent of companies know and can actually track their shadow IT. However, the local subsidiary might at times come up with interesting and innovative solutions that help drive its local business forward.

Despite these solid business reasons, however, there are unintended consequences to such shadow staffs. One, they may waste company resources and create inefficiencies – not only in terms of headcount duplication but also misalignment. For example, in one organization, a local subsidiary had developed its own competency model and performance management system that were quite at odds with the systems that the parent company had developed for the entire organization. Two, they perpetuate the schism between corporate or global and the business units and subsidiaries. The corporate or global functions can gradually become further removed from the subsidiaries and, without feedback mechanisms to learn from the subsidiaries, a vicious cycle is perpetuated.

Many years ago, Bartlett and Ghoshal (1992) wrote about the need for global leaders heading these global functions to be strategists, architects and coordinators; and for local leaders like country managers to act as sensors, builders and contributors. Their recommendations suggest close collaboration and cooperation between global and local leaders. Three, shadow work contributes to silo thinking and further erosion of collaboration and best-practice sharing between business units and across subsidiaries. Tett (2015), in her book The Silo Effect gives detailed examples of the negative impact of silos on innovation and profitability (her section on Sony’s failures due to its traditional silos is especially relevant).

The presence of shadow work and shadow staffs is more prevalent with large companies, especially those with subsidiaries in different countries, separated from headquarters by distance. However, eliminating shadow staffs may not always be the solution, especially if shadow work done in some subsidiaries is truly innovative and may be transferrable across the organization. Here are a few suggestions for addressing shadow staffs. One, create mechanisms to have global support functions better understand needs of different business units and subsidiaries. For example, corporate functions might have “account managers” who will be responsible for interfacing with internal customers to make sure that they have a good understanding of their customers’ needs. In some cases, these account managers are located closer to the customer geographically, but maintain a solid line or a dual reporting relationship to corporate.

Two, create centers of excellence or expertise in selected subsidiaries or business units. while giving them regional or global responsibility. It is very possible that there are pockets of deep expertise that a subsidiary or business unit has developed. If so, rather than dismantling this expertise, make them available to the entire organization. For example, in one organization, the finance function in its French subsidiary had managed to attract very talented financial professionals who had introduced some innovative finance practices. This French finance function eventually become a center of expertise for the organization’s European region, providing support and expertise to the other finance functions in the company’s European markets.

Three, make structural changes and create governance mechanisms (especially in reporting relationships) to break down the we-they mindset. Many multinationals have support functions in subsidiaries with dual reporting relationships – both to their local management as well as to regional or global management for that function. For example, the head of HR for a subsidiary would report to both his or her country general manager as well as to a regional head of HR.

If the strategic decision is made to reduce or eliminate shadow staff, then make sure to have the following in place: a transition period to allow the business unit or subsidiary to adjust; provisions to help ensure that the local business unit or subsidiary can continue any value-added work, for example, by assigning global or local staff to support this work; and retention plans in place for any talented local or global staff that may be affected by headcount reductions.

 

Bartlett, C. and Ghoshal, S. (1992). What Is a Global Manager? Harvard Business Review, 70 (5): 124-132.

Booz & Company (2003). Shining the Light on Shadow Staff. http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/uploads/ShiningtheLightonShadowStaff.pdf

Gartner Press Release (2011). http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1862714

Korolov, M. (2015). Only 8 Percent http://www.cio.com/article/2868113/it-organization/only-8-percent-of-companies-can-track-shadow-it.html

Lambert, C. (2015). Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

Tett, G. (2015). The Silo Effect: The Perils of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Nasty or Nice in the Workplace?

When I worked for Citibank in the eighties as a young professional, I used to tell my friends that the corporate culture in Citibank taught me to be rude. In those days, Citibank was known to be aggressive and even arrogant, and one survived only by adapting to this rough-and-tumble environment.

Corporate cultures have become more genteel since then, with some exceptions (e.g., GE, Apple and the now-defunct Enron). The broader culture of the U.S. has also become more polite, except perhaps in some pockets of New York City. In many parts of corporate America, workplace civility has ruled, although the pendulum may have swung too far in this direction, with many individuals in organizations holding back on their criticism. Managers who undergo training on giving feedback are sometimes taught to use a sandwich approach; that is, make sure that any negative feedback they provide is sandwiched between two positive comments, one prior to the negative feedback and the other after delivering the negative feedback.

While executives at some organizations are encouraging more people to “speak up,” there are still far too many organizations where employees are afraid to do so for fear that they will be punished for their candor. And there continue to be bosses who are mean-spirited jerks, as Sutton (2007) has written about extensively.

A recent Wall Street Journal article has pointed out that candor may be making a comeback: “Companies from Deutsch Inc. to hedge fund Bridgewater Associates are pushing workers to drop the polite workplace veneer and speak frankly to each other no matter what. The practice is referred to at some companies as ‘radical candor,’ a ‘mokita’ or ‘front-stabbing.’ ”

Ironically, the explosion of social media has led to an outburst of vitriol, sarcasm and hostile comments especially from anonymous sources. Just read online comments on any political issue, on celebrities’ doings, and even book, movie or product reviews, and you immediately get the feeling that there is a parallel universe going on online where incivility seems to have few boundaries.

What is going on, and what can managers and organizations do about it? I believe that there are at least two mistaken assumptions that are made regarding the tension between candor or directness on the one hand, and politeness or workplace civility on the other. The first assumption is that being rude, uncivil or nasty is simply part of being candid or direct. American comedians like the late Joan Rivers and Don Rickles became popular with their vicious put-downs of others, including members of the audience. The Republican candidate for U.S. president Donald Trump reflects this with his continuous insults of his opponents.

Sue is a manager in a chemical plant who believes in “telling it like it is” to the point of berating her direct reports in front of others in the guise of being candid and direct. If she perceives that they are not getting the job done, she jumps on them like a drill sergeant and confronts them directly, letting them know in no uncertain terms what she thinks they are doing wrong. Fred, on the other hand, is a supervisor for a consumer products company who has just been promoted and manages seven direct reports who have been in the organization much longer than he has. He often hesitates to tell them what’s on his mind especially with regard to any performance problems he sees because he is afraid of hurting their feelings and demoralizing them.

Neither belief is helpful to the organization or to the individuals involved. Feedback is essential to the motivation, performance and productivity of individuals, teams and organizations. Withholding feedback for fear of offending others or hurting their feelings is not helpful. At the same time, giving feedback that so offends others is counterproductive. Over time, managers will most likely create a climate where individuals withhold information, lose respect for their managers, and become disengaged from the organization. According to a study by Porath and Pearson (2013), among workers who have been on the receiving end of incivility: 78% said that their commitment to the organization declined, 66% said that their performance declined, 48% intentionally decreased their work effort, and 38% intentionally decreased the quality of their work.

Steve Jobs was known not only for being direct, but also being extremely blunt. He was criticized by some for his withering and no-holds-barred comments as being too insensitive to others. In a story about his chief industrial designer at Apple Jonathan Ive (Parker 2015), Ive recalls that when he protested to Jobs, Steve replied: “Why would you be vague?” He actually argued that ambiguity (or indirectness) was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” (p. 126) Ive finally concluded that Jobs did not mean to be hurtful and just wanted to make sure he gave clear, unambiguous feedback. The assumption that Jobs had, like many in the Western world, is that the best way to communicate clearly is by being direct, and that being direct includes being blunt and at times nasty.

The second mistaken assumption is that being direct or candid is universally more effective than being indirect. However, there is a significant body of research in the cross-cultural management literature indicating otherwise. Some cultures such as Australia and Israel encourage managers to get straight to the point. Earley and Erez (1997), for example, state that “Israelis are most likely to tell each other directly, and very explicitly, what they have in mind, even when it may lead to a confrontation.” In other cultures such as in several East Asian countries, messages are more subtle and indirect. What is implied is more important than what is actually stated. People in these cultures place a great deal of emphasis on nonverbal communication. The anthropologist Edward Hall (2013) suggested that societies differ in their degree of context when communicating. He refers to context as “the nature of how meaning is constructed differently across cultures using different ratios of context and information.”

Luc Minguet, a French national who is head of Group Purchasing for Michelin, described his observations while he was in the U.S. as COO of Michelin’s truck business unit (Minguet 2014):

“In France, we focus on identifying what’s wrong with someone’s performance. It’s considered unnecessary to mention what’s right. What’s good is taken as given. A French employee knows this and reacts accordingly. But for a U.S. employee, as I discovered, it is devastating, because Americans tend to sugarcoat one negative with a lot of positives. French managers get their wires crossed. When they get what sounds like glowing feedback from an American boss, they think they’re superstars. Of course, when they don’t get the big pay raise they expected after the great review, they’re bitterly disappointed!”

Eduardo, a Brazilian expatriate working in Thailand, remembers a time when his project team was late on a key project milestone. He sent an e-mail to the team in what he thought was a polite message, reminding them that the project was at risk of falling behind schedule, and asking everyone to pay increased attention. He later learned that his e-mail was perceived as both “rude and pushy.” He learned to soften his approach, for example, by asking questions such as “Will you help me with …?”

When Julia, an American expatriate assigned to Germany, gave her first presentation to her German boss, he said to her very directly, “Don’t take it personal; this report isn’t organized well. Talk to me again when it’s ready.” In the U.S., according to her, she would have received very polite feedback, and would probably have heard something like this: “Here are the ten things that are good about this report; however, it would make me more comfortable if you added this.” The bluntness of the Germans, in contrast to the watered-down feedback from Americans, was a difficult adjustment for Julia to make.

Sanchez-Burks and his colleagues (2003) have suggested that this directness is related to “relational concerns,” and in a series of experiments, have shown cultural variations on this variable. They explain the relative absence of relational concerns (at least historically) in America to the influence of Calvinist theology, which tended to stress the importance of limiting social-emotional and interpersonal concerns at work. In one of their studies, they examined how Americans and East Asians interpreted indirect messages in a work setting. They found that Europeans and Americans tended to make more errors than East Asians in indirect cues.

According to Bill Bryson (1990), English has about 200,000 words in common use, while French has 100,000. Perhaps because Americans are relatively more direct (although not as much as the Germans) and low-context, they need a larger vocabulary to explain more clearly what they mean. Meyer (2014) points out that many French words have multiple meanings, and the listener has to make an effort to understand the intention of the speaker.

In other cultures, where loss of face is very important, effective managers have learned to be more indirect especially when giving feedback in order to preserve harmony. Comfort and Franklin (2014) refer to “blurring techniques” that managers can use to soften the harshness of providing negative feedback. For example, they suggest talking about a hypothetical case to direct the feedback receiver’s attention to the problem rather than confronting the individual directly.

Here are two important points to remember for managers and global leaders. First, you can be direct and candid without being nasty, uncivil or impolite. This does require you to be more mindful in what you say to others, and how you say it. It also means that you need to practice different approaches to communicating with others that does not require being direct and confrontational. Second, be aware of cultural norms especially when interacting with colleagues and customers from other countries, and adapt your communication style accordingly. In some cultures, you may in fact need to be even more direct than what you may be used to. Remember that your goal as a manager is to enhance the motivation and performance of your team, and the communication style you use needs to fit the particular situation.

 

Bryson, B. (1990). The Mother Tongue – and How It Got That Way. New York: William Morrow.

Comfort, J. and Franklin, P. (2014). The Mindful International Manager: How to Work Effectively Across Cultures. United Kingdom: Kogan Page.

Earley, C. and Erez, M. (1997). The Transplanted Executive. New York: Oxford University Press.

Feintzerg, R. (2015). When ‘Nice’ Is a Four-Letter Word, Wall Street Journal, December 31.

Meyer, E. (2014). The Culture Map. New York: Public Affairs.

Minguet, Luc. 2014. Creating a Culturally Sensitive Corporation. Harvard Business Review, 92 (9): 78.

Parker, I. (2015). Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple. The New Yorker, February 23, 2015.

Porath, C. and Pearson, C. (2013). The Price of Incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91 (1/2),114-119.

Sanchez-Burks, J., Lee, F., Choi, I., Nisbett, R., Zhao, S., and Koo, J. (2003). Conversing Across Cultures: East-West Communication Styles in Work and Nonwork Contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85 (2): 363–372.

Sutton, R. (2007). Building a Civilized Workplace. The McKinsey Quarterly, 47-55.

In the Work Place, Is It Better to Receive Than to Give?

By now, students of organizational behavior are probably familiar with Professor Adam Grant’s research on givers and takers, which he has summarized in his book Give and Take (Grant, 2013). Grant has found that people have three general interaction styles: taking, giving and matching. Takers, according to Grant, like to get more than they give. They believe in a dog-eat-dog world, like to promote themselves, and make sure they get credit for their efforts. It’s a looking-out-for-me mentality. Givers on the other hand pay more attention to what other people need from them, sometimes helping others without expecting anything in return. Their focus is on acting in the interests of others. Matchers try to balance the two and believe in a fair exchange.

While people may shift their interaction style based on their different roles and relationships, Grant claims that everyone has a primary style. Most of us (about 55-60% by his estimate) are typically matchers in the workplace. However, what he has found is that givers tend to be more successful in their careers than either takers or matchers, although they are also the least successful. This is because there are two types of givers. The successful ones tend to be more selective on who to help, when to help and how to help. Those who are not may become doormats and spend too much of their time helping others and not getting their own work done.

Matchers (and they are the vast majority of us) don’t like takers because they violate a sense of justice and fairness. Furthermore, according to Grant (Dearlove, 2014): “… as the world shifts to become one that’s more about collaboration and service than it has been in the past, it’s going to be harder and harder for takers to succeed.”

Grant has done a number of studies with colleagues to validate his concepts, and a recent study by Keysar et al. (2014) also has supported his findings. They conducted a series of experiments in which they found that positive actions by subjects were reciprocated, but negative actions (in other words, subjects who were takers) not only were not reciprocated but led to even more selfish responses. Their conclusion was that there are different patterns of reciprocity: “… people reciprocated in like measure to apparently prosocial acts of giving but reciprocated more selfishly to apparently antisocial acts of taking.”

Grant points out that these interaction styles do not seem related to personality traits. In fact, he has found that the correlation between agreeableness (one of the so-called Big Five personality traits) and giving-taking is virtually zero. There are agreeable takers and disagreeable takers, just as there are agreeable givers and disagreeable givers. Interaction style is more about intentions and motives.

What about cultural differences, however? This concept of reciprocity and fair exchange is indeed fairly common in the Western workplace, which is dominated by what the behavioral economist Dan Ariely (2008) refers to as market norms. Many of our social exchanges in the work place are based on cost-benefit trade-offs. How does reciprocity work in other cultures, and do similar dynamics take place?

Interestingly enough, other cultures do have their own terms to describe these types of exchanges. Most of us have probably heard of the Chinese concept of guanxi, which is based on Confucian beliefs about hierarchy and relationships. Creating exchanges of favors builds relationships between parties and is considered as essential to doing business successfully in China.  These social connections built through guanxi generate loyalty, dedication and trust. In their meta-analysis of fifty-three empirical studies, Luo et al. (2012) found a linkage between guanxi and organizational performance; guanxi enhances organizational performance and confirms the value of guanxi networks on firm performance in greater China.

Smith et al. (2014) proposed that there are three related attributes that characterize a guanxi relationship between subordinates and their supervisors: strong affective attachment (an emotional connection to care for one another), inclusion of one’s personal life within the relationship (the degree to which supervisors and subordinates include each other in their private or family lives), and deference to the supervisor. They developed measures for each of these attributes and collected data from managers in eight nations (e.g., Brazil, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom) including two Chinese cultures. Their results indicate that both affective attachment and deference demonstrated “metric invariance” across the eight nations sampled, while the personal-life inclusion scale (as they predicted) did not. While guanxi is indigenous, aspects of it do indeed exist in other cultures.

In the Philippines, the concept of utang na loob also describes a web of reciprocity and exchange of favors. According to Hunt et al. (1963, p. 62):

“Every Filipino is expected to possess utang na loob; that is, he should be aware of his obligations to those from whom he receives favors and should repay them in an acceptable manner … One cannot measure the repayment but can attempt to make it, nevertheless, either believing that it supersedes the original service in quality of acknowledging that the reciprocal payment is partial and requires further payment.”

Here are two key take-aways for global managers. First, the good news. The concept of reciprocity seems to generalize across cultures, and universally everyone at least in the work place seems to understand and acknowledge the importance of fairness. For managers supervising others from different cultures, applying basic management principles such as treating people fairly and using a matching style of interaction would seem to work well. In addition, a taker style is not likely to win you many friends nor help you become successful, regardless of the culture where you are working.

I say this in spite of what Pfeffer (2015) recently wrote about the norm of reciprocity. In his book, Leadership BS, Pfeffer claims that “when people are in an organizational as contrasted with an interpersonal setting, they feel less obligation to repay favors and, in fact, are less likely to do so.” (p. 177) He cites a couple of studies he has conducted where people felt less likely to return favors when these favors were in the context of the work place. He concludes that in work settings people view others strictly in terms of whether they can be useful to them in the future. However, many do view work places as not simply a place where they can earn a living and where every day is a Darwinian, win-lose struggle. People do form strong bonds in the work place, not just with their peers and colleagues, but also with their bosses and with the companies they work for. In Japan and other non-Western cultures, especially, people’s identities are very much tied to their companies and the lines between transactional, market-driven norms and social norms do get blurred.

Second, at the same time, the basis for how such exchanges can lead to trust and effective working relationships with others seems to be influenced by culture. In particular, using Ariely’s distinction, non-Western cultures rely more on social norms while Western cultures rely more on market norms in these exchanges. While guanxiutang na loob and similar concepts imply a kind of matching, they are not based strictly on transactional terms. Ariely acknowledges that it is challenging when you mix social norms with market norms.

While a giver style might be preferable, global managers still need to understand the specific cultural context and cultural norms in the different cross-cultural settings in which they may find themselves. In particular, recognizing that in non-Western cultures the intention of these exchanges is to build relationships and not necessarily to get something back in return quickly is an important distinction that Western global managers need to be aware of in succeeding cross-culturally.

 

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper.

Dearlove, D. (2014). Give and Take: An Interview with Adam Grant. http://thinkers50.com/blog/give-take-interview-adam-grant/

Grant, A. (2013). Give and Take. New York: Viking.

Hunt, C. et al. (1963). Sociology in the Philippine Setting. Quezon City, Philippines: Phoenix Publishing House.

Keysar. B. et al. (2008). Reciprocity Is Not Give and Take. Psychological Science,19 (8), 1280-1286.

Luo, Y., Huang, Y. and Wang, S. (2012). Guanxi and Organizational Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Management and Organization Review, 8 (1), 139-172.

Pfeffer, J. (2015). Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. New York: Harper.

Smith, Peter B., et al. (2014). Are Guanxi-Type Supervisor–Subordinate Relationships Culture-General? An Eight-Nation Test of Measurement Invariance. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45 (6): 921-938.

Improving Your Performance: Through Performance Reviews or Deliberate Practice?

Recently, Goldman Sachs again made the headlines in the business news, but this time for something different than the usual financial news about the company. It has decided to move away from its 9-point system for performance evaluations to providing employees with more timely and frequent performance feedback. It will still keep its 360-degree feedback process as well as have managers rate employees as outstanding, good, or needs improvement. However, it will create an online platform whereby employees can get feedback at any time. Dozens of other companies, such as Apple, Netflix, Accenture and even GE, have been moving away from these annual evaluations and rankings in favor of providing more timely and more frequent feedback.

Over the years, there has been considerable research on performance management; despite all this research, managers and employees, as well as HR professionals, continue to be dissatisfied with its failure to achieve the goal of actually improving performance. I will not go into all the reasons why performance management is broken (see Pulakos and O’Leary, 2011 for a comprehensive review), but would like to focus on the specific issue of how to improve individual performance.

In organizations where I have been involved in revising and helping to implement new performance management systems, I continue to be surprised at the intense attention paid to the forms and the rating systems that will be used, despite the fact that one of the greatest pay-offs from performance reviews is with the coaching and feedback that the employee receives. Of course, I have to remind myself that since these ratings are often used to allocate rewards, such scrutiny is understandable.

Many critics of performance management systems identify organizational or managerial issues as root causes for their failures. For example, Pulakos et al. (2015), in their excellent review article, ask: what can organizations do or not do to fix performance management? In their earlier article they summarized research that indicates that the quality of the manager-employee relationship is a key driver for maximizing performance management. There is no doubt that managers’ behaviors, particularly their coaching and listening skills, are important.

But what I find missing in much of these discussions is the role of the appraisee, or the employee. To be fair, Pulakos and O’Leary do mention that “Depending on employees’ personalities, they will be more or less open to feedback and more or less willing to accept it.” (p. 158) I believe that most individuals working in organizations want to improve their performance, whether they are CEOs of the company or brand-new workers who have just joined the company. Even those who have many years of experience working in a discipline – such as a surgeon, a truck driver, a professional athlete, a musician, or a jeweler – recognize that they always have something more to learn (except for an arrogant few, of course).

So one could reframe this issue of fixing performance management by asking instead, what can individuals do to improve their performance? I am adapting a concept from Marshall Goldsmith who wrote, in his recent book Triggers, that companies tend to ask passive questions when addressing the issue of employee engagement. Here’s how Goldsmith describes this:

“When people are asked passive questions they almost invariably provide ‘environmental’ answers. Thus, if an employee answers ‘no’ when asked, ‘Do you have clear goals?’ the reasons are attributed to external factors such as ‘My manager can’t make up his mind’ or ‘The company changes strategy every month.’ The employee seldom looks within to take responsibility and say, ‘It’s my fault.’” (pp. 192-193)

Anders Ericsson is a professor who has done considerable research about what it takes to improve performance. Most of his research has been with surgeons, musicians, athletes, chess players, and other individuals who want to improve their specific skills (e.g., memorizing strings of digits). In his new book Peak (Ericsson and Pool, 2016), Professor Ericsson writes about three myths regarding performance improvement. One is a belief that our abilities are limited by our inherited or genetic characteristics. The second is that doing the same thing over and over will make us better. The third is if we try hard enough, we will get better. Ericsson and his colleagues have studied the differences between those who are the best in their field (e.g., musicians, chess players) and those who are good but not outstanding. One variable that was not a differentiator was the number of hours spent practicing. Gladwell (2008) has suggested the 10,000-hour rule – that for someone to be an expert, one has to practice for about 10,000 hours. There has been quite a bit of debate about the 10,000-hour rule and the role of aptitude or natural ability. There is no question that to be good or expert at something, you have to practice and put in the time. The 10,000-hour rule is an average so there will be some variability depending on a number of factors, including the natural ability of the person and the nature of the endeavor. Someone who already has an aptitude for math will more than likely spend fewer than 10,000 hours reaching a certain level than someone who does not have the same aptitude.

However, according to Ericsson, the key to improving performance lies in deliberate practice, which he and his colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993) refer to as “activities defined … for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” And an important element in deliberate practice is mental representation, which is “a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.” (p. 58). Ericsson claims that much of deliberate practice involves developing efficient mental representations. His examples include expert chess masters with their skill in seeing the board many moves ahead and surgeons who conceptualize complex contingency plans before going into surgery.

Here are three specific strategies that you can use to improve your performance. First, periodically conduct an in-depth self-assessment. This is not always easy for we have a tendency to hold a cognitive bias called the “better-than-average-effect.” For example, over 90 percent of drivers believe that they are in the top 50 percent in driving ability. In his workshops, management consultant Marshall Goldsmith (Goldsmith, 2007) sometimes asks people in the audience (most of whom are managers and executives) to raise their hands if they believe they are in the top 10 percent of performers in their company.  Typically, over 50 percent of the audience raises their hands (of course, it is possible that Goldsmith’s audience is not a random sample, and that it is likely that his audience may indeed be among the top performers in their organization). In a study of prisoners, even this population rated themselves better than the average inmate and better than the non-prison community on a number of traits, such as being moral, trustworthy, honest, and compassionate (Sedikides et al., 2014).

We need to acknowledge that we all have this tendency to view ourselves in a more favorable light than we should. While such a tendency may be good for our self-confidence it may prevent us from doing what we need to do to improve ourselves, especially if we start believing that we are better than average and therefore don’t really need to change. It is important therefore to seek feedback from others. You want to be able to approach someone who has your best interests at heart, and who does not have a personal agenda. According to Stone and Stone (2002), those who seek critical feedback tend to get higher performance ratings. They point to at least two reasons for this. One, when you’re getting feedback, you find out what you need to do better. You can ask questions that will help your understanding, and you can start to work on how to get better at something. Two, you send a message that you are not only interested in what others have to say but that you are humble enough to listen to critical feedback. This can influence others’ perceptions of you as someone who is open to change and willing to listen to others.  Goldsmith and Morgan’s (2004) research involving more than 11,000 leaders and 86,000 of their co-workers from eight major corporations concluded that leaders who ask, listen, learn and consistently follow up are seen as more effective leaders.

Second, and this is what Ericsson emphasizes, is to focus on a specific skill. He says that you have to be engaged and focused in what you are doing. Don’t just go through the motions; you have to concentrate, and this is hard work. “If your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.” (p. 151). Also, you try to do something you cannot do and practice it over and over. The author says: “As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve a skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration.” (p. 169) Newport (2012) describes this well: (Deliberate practice) is “… where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance.” (p. 101)

Many years ago, I visited the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago on a weekend after spending several days working with several Chilean executives. The museum had a special exhibit on Picasso’s works. One of his most famous paintings is Guernica, and it was indeed magnificent, seen close up. But what impressed me were the hundreds of small sketches alongside this enormous painting. They were sketches of different characters in the painting, and showed the hard work that Picasso did to perfect the final product. I had assumed that Picasso was a genius who could paint something from scratch without much effort. As Ericsson states: “… research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time.” (p. 205)

In an article about Serena Williams, the sportswriter Jason Gay (2016) watched her one hot afternoon in New York in 2015 as she hit serves for an hour and a half with her coach in a practice court. For a while, there were quite a few spectators, but they soon got bored. Serena kept hitting and hitting “… until she felt she’d gotten it right.” Gay has observed that the greatest athletes work the hardest, and that Serena has a reputation as being one of the hardest workers in the sport. He quotes her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou: “The number of hours is one thing, but (more) impressive is the effort.”

What about improving your performance as a manager? For example, Rosenzweig (2014) points out that deliberate practice may be more suited to some types of activities, like hitting a tennis ball with your forehand or playing a short musical piece on the piano. When the activity is of short duration, when feedback is immediate, when the order of the tasks in the activity is sequential (versus concurrent), and when performance is absolute (versus relative), then deliberate practice tends to be more useful than not. Rosenzweig gives the example of a cosmetics salesperson going door to door, where deliberate practice would help because these conditions are present.

On the surface, deliberate practice might not apply to improving your performance as a manager. After all, the duration is long, the feedback is slow, activities can be concurrent, and a manager’s performance is almost certainly always being compared to others’. Nonetheless, it is important to identify those specific leadership skills you want to improve, rather than simply having a goal to become a better leader. By breaking a manager’s tasks and activities and focusing on specific sets of activities, global managers could benefit from deliberate practice. Take Youseff, a global manager I was coaching who wanted to improve his ability to lead global meetings (an important set of tasks for global leaders).  We broke down his overall goal into specific sub-tasks, such as developing clear agendas and running meetings effectively. He identified the specific meetings where he wanted to practice his meeting skills, and solicited feedback from the team both during the meeting and after the meeting (in one-on-one discussions). We designed a short checklist of questions for him to ask team members about their satisfaction with the meetings, and so he was able to measure short-term performance. Over time, Youseff was able to pinpoint areas where he could improve, and through coaching and practice, was able to improve his meeting skills. While deliberate practice may have its limitations, setting aside the time to practice, along with getting feedback, will help you improve your global leadership.

Third, push yourself out of your comfort zone and try to do things that are not easy for you. Ericsson recommends getting a teacher. For managers, I would recommend getting a coach or a mentor (more on this in a subsequent blog post). Of course, the organizational context matters, as does your relationship with your manager. But there are things you can do independent of these factors that can make a difference to your own performance as a manager. As Ericsson has pointed out: “In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.” (p. 233)

 

Ericsson, A., Krampe, R. and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 100 (3): 363-406.

Ericsson, A. and Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Gay, J. (2016). She’s Got Game. WSJ, The Wall Street Journal Magazine. July/August.

Gladwell, Malcolm. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Hachette.

Goldsmith, Marshall. (2007). What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. New York: Profile Books.

Goldsmith, M. (2015). Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be. New York: Crown Business.

Goldsmith, Marshall, and Howard Morgan. (2004). Leadership Is a Contact Sport. Strategy + Business, 36: 70-79.

Newport, Cal. (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You. New York: Hachette Book Group.

Pulakos, E. and O’Leary, R. (2011). Why Is Performance Management Broken? Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 4 (2): 146-164.

Pulakos, E. et al. (2015). Performance Management Can Be Fixed: An On-the-Job Experiential Learning Approach for Complex Behavior Change. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 8 (1): 51-78.

Rosenzweig, Phil. (2014). Left Brain, Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions. New York: PublicAffairs.

Sedikides, Constantine, Rosie Meek, Mark D. Alicke, and Sarah Taylor (2014). Behind Bars but Above the Bar: Prisoners Consider Themselves More Prosocial Than Non-Prisoners. British Journal of Social Psychology, 53 (2): 396–403.

Stone-Romero, E., and Stone, D. (2002). Cross-cultural Differences in Responses to Feedback: Implications for Individual, Group, and Organizational Effectiveness. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 21: 275-332.

Mastering Change Fatigue

During a strategy update with the top 100 executives of a Fortune 500 corporation, the CEO discussed each of the thirteen “strategy initiatives” that the company had recently launched. They ranged from changing the sales model, introducing new product categories, expanding to new markets overseas, partnering with other firms in alliances and joint ventures, and restructuring the staff functions. He stated that rather than shirking from these challenges as other companies might have, he was proud to be leading a company with such dedicated people who embraced these changes. A year later, the CEO had retired, many of the changes had stalled, and the company’s stock price had dropped by a few points. Have you heard this story before?

As we all know, the scale and pace of changes in business are accelerating. Long-term trends, such as changing demographics (e.g., the rise of the middle class and the growing population of those sixty-five and over) and the rise of emerging markets, are impacting organizations in dramatic ways. In addition, there have been unexpected short-term events, such as the recent Brexit vote and the concerns about unfettered globalization, that have significant implications for organizations.  And in a few organizations where new CEOs have been brought in to make their mark, they are expected to make changes quickly. The average tenure of CEOs has been declining, and many CEOs have perhaps two or three opportunities to increase shareholder value within a short time frame.

As a result, many executives have initiated change efforts and programs in their organizations. Some of these change efforts are truly revolutionary, such as transforming an entire business model (e.g., Amazon’s move to cloud services), acquiring or divesting (e.g., GE’s getting rid of GE Capital), or expanding to new customer segments (e.g., Hyundai’s move with the Genesis and Equus to compete with luxury brands). There is extensive research to demonstrate that the majority of change initiatives do not succeed.

I’d like to focus on one aspect or barrier for their lack of success, and that is “change fatigue.” Change fatigue is different from resistance to change; the former suggests that organizational members are worn down due to the intensity, frequency, scale and volume of changes with which they have had to cope. Under these conditions, efficiency and performance begin to suffer and employees lose their enthusiasm and begin to shut down, start making poor decisions, and in some cases decide to leave the organization. Resistance to change suggests a lack of willingness or commitment to go along with the change; in change fatigue, the willingness and commitment may still be there. To put a twist on an old saying, the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak.

There has been a lot of research on what happens to individuals who become fatigued. In their now quasi-famous study, Danziger et al. (2011) examined 1,112 judicial rulings made by eight Jewish-Israeli judges over a 10-month period. The judges presided over parole requests by prisoners convicted of all sorts of crimes. While 64% of prisoner requests were rejected overall, they found that favorable rulings (that is, when a parole request is accepted) tended to happen at the beginning of the work day or after a food break – even after controlling for all kinds of variables. The severity of the prisoner’s crime and prison time served, sex and ethnicity were not predictive of the favorability of the rulings. Why was this? For the authors, rejecting requests is an easier decision when judges are mentally depleted. Favorable rulings take much longer to discuss than unfavorable rulings, and written verdicts of these rulings are much longer than written verdicts of unfavorable rulings. This depletion can be restored somewhat by short rests or increasing glucose levels in the body. Other research on consumer behavior has shown that those who are ego-depleted (e.g., under stress, had a tough day, coping with many problems and crises) tend to spend more money and purchase more impulsively than those who are not.

The underlying theory here is that of self-regulation. Our executive function is the agent that makes decisions, initiates and maintains actions, and regulates the self. The research suggests that many of the self’s activities require a common resource, similar to energy or strength. In other words, since we are drawing on the same resource, this resource can be depleted. Baumeister (2002), who has been studying self-control failures for years, particularly as they relate to consumer behavior, states that “when people are emotionally upset … restraints break down, so that people become more likely to eat unhealthy foods, procrastinate, seek immediate gratification, and engage in aggression.” (p. 672). Furthermore (and there has been a lot of additional research to support this), performing any act of self-control “depletes” one’s resources, which operate like some kind of energy or strength.

Fatigue or depletion can also lead to stress, which as we know from research, also causes unfavorable outcomes both for the individual and the organization. At the individual level, there has been considerable research that chronic psychosocial stress at work is highly correlated with elevated risks of depression (Siegrist, 2008), especially when the following conditions are present: when the work is demanding, when there is a lack of reciprocity between efforts and rewards, when there is a lack of control or autonomy, and when there is is a lack of social support especially at work. In a study of 109 business executives, Teixeira et al. (2014) measured their chronic stress levels and performance on various cognitive tasks, and found stress levels to be associated with performance on these tasks. Other research has also shown that coping with stress requires self-regulation and making some tough choices – both of which are ego-depleting.

Some management theorists have argued for assessing an organization’s readiness to change. For example, Conner (2004) categorizes change readiness into three areas: change history (employees’ experiences with previous changes), capacity and demand (the amount of resources available versus the requirements for the change), and the people risk involved (the extent to which the human impact of the change is being addressed). Weiner (2009) describes readiness for change at the individual level, and views its two aspects as change commitment (employees’ willingness to make the change) and change efficacy (their belief in their collective capability to implement change).

Here are four strategies that organizations can use to address the challenge of change fatigue. First, communicate an exciting vision of the future, and how the change efforts are aligned to achieving these objectives. As the motivational speaker Simon Sinek has articulated so eloquently, start with the why. Organizational members need to rally around a purpose that will inspire them, and having this sense of purpose will help combat change fatigue. Furthermore, organizational leaders need to help employees connect the dots among all the different change initiatives. What I am advocating is not necessarily to reduce the number of change initiatives, but to help organizational members understand the synergy and relationships across these initiatives as a starting point.

Second, monitor the balance between capacity and demand. It is possible that objectively the resources in place (capacity) may not be sufficient for the requirements (demand). When I ask managers and students, how many of them are doing more with less in their organizations, about 9 out of 10 respond that they are. In many companies, employees who leave are not being replaced, and hiring freezes have been implemented. Yet, as many managers have told me, the work does not go away. The solution may not necessarily be to provide more resources, for at least three reasons. First, often this sense of an imbalance between capacity and demand is a perception, and not necessarily an objective reality. Second, managers can help by prioritizing and streamlining the work so that unnecessary work is removed from these requirements. And third, we know that many employees are not fully engaged in their work. If managers could increase levels of engagement, imagine what this would do to improve the balance!

This brings us to the third strategy, which is to engage and involve employees in the change. As Grant (2016) has argued, getting people excited versus asking them to calm down actually helps performance. However, are there unintended consequences for organizations that ask employees for their involvement and input, and seek to increase their autonomy? Will this tend to increase ego depletion and therefore contribute to change fatigue? For the answer to this, we turn to research by Deci and his colleagues, who have shown that on the contrary, the experience of autonomy increases intrinsic motivation and energetic behavior. The reason for why others have found opposite results, according to these researchers, is that those studies involved controlled regulation while Deci’s studies focused on autonomous regulation. When people have a sense of autonomy with making choices, especially when the choices they are being asked to make are important, relevant and meaningful to them (autonomous regulation), then they do not necessarily experience ego depletion. In fact, they will feel energized. For Moller et al. (2006): “… autonomous choice is accompanied by the experience of volition, whereas controlled choice, which involves selecting an option under pressure, is accompanied by the experience of control. In other words, choices that are accompanied by demands or obligations involve a very difficult phenomenological experience from those that simply offer opportunities.” (p. 1034) These studies suggest that change fatigue may be dissipated at least partially by involving employees and having them participate in the process of change. Such empowerment, rather than being ego-depleting, can in fact be quite energizing.

Fourth, perhaps as important as the other recommendations, is that individuals need to pay better attention to their health, and organizations can play an important role here. A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly (van Dam and van der Helm, 2016) for example argued that sleep deprivation and mismanagement are linked to adverse effects on our mental capacities, such as our attention, concentration, learning, and emotional reactions. Many of us believe that we have to work in a 24/7 world, and adopt a macho attitude towards our work lives. Fortunately, some organizations are recognizing the toll this takes. For example, the Boston Consulting Group has a strict time-off mechanism policy, where everyone on a project team has to take a full day or night each week away from work (Perlow and Porter, 2009). The McKinsey article provides other examples: blackout times on work emails, staying out of the office from 9 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday, and mandatory work-free vacations. Other companies such as Google have been experimenting with mindfulness training. Those of you who have ever tried running a long-distance race know that pacing yourself is crucial. Sprint too fast at the beginning, and you will end up regretting this. In a recent article in Sports Illustrated (June 27, 2016), the writer describes total energy (power multiplied by time) as critical in a bicycle road race: “Whoever can conserve the most energy over the duration of the race or stage will finish first.” A stage in a race might have a series of short climbs, then a 10-mile climb with a 7% gradient. If a rider did not conserve his energy during the first part of the stage, he or she would not be able to push for that climb. This analogy holds for many other endeavors, and certainly is appropriate for organizations going through change.

These strategies will help improve organizational resilience. The dictionary has two meanings for resilience: the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens, and the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, pressed, bent, etc. There has been relatively little research on the impact of resilience on organizational change. In my experience, organizational resilience refers to the capability that the organization has to adapt (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2010). It is the responsibility of leaders to build this culture and to lay the groundwork so that, as Hamel and Valikangas (2003) argue, resilience becomes like an autonomic process. They point out that organizations should build strategic resilience, and not just operational resilience. This requires that an organization be adaptive, and constantly in a learning mode, becoming more organic and nimbler. In a prescient article, they state that “an accelerating pace of change demands an accelerating pace of strategic evolution, which can be achieved only if a company cares as much about resilience as it does about optimization.”

How to do this? Research suggests that resilient individuals have three common characteristics: a firm acceptance of reality, a conviction that life has meaning, and an ability to work with what they have (Coutu, 2002). Ramo (2009), in looking at resilient eco-systems, points to four elements: an ability to constantly reconceptualize problems, to generate a diversity of ideas, to communicate with everyone, and to encourage novelty (instead of waiting for a big, unanticipated collapse). Engaging employees in change will lead to leaders having a firm acceptance of reality, communicating an exciting vision will help give employees more meaning, and balancing capacity and demand will help with employees working with what they have.

Since the pace of business life and change is unlikely to decelerate for many, having an effective strategy in place to proactively deal with change fatigue is imperative for companies today.

 

Baumeister, R. (2002). Yielding to Temptation: Self-Control Failure, Impulsive Purchasing, and Consumer Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 670-676.

Conner, D. (2004). Developing Resilient Teams for Managing Change. Unpublished manuscript, Conner Partners.

Coutu, D. (2002). How Resilience Works. Harvard Business Review, May, 80 (5): 46-55.

Danziger, S. et al. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. https://en-coller.tau.ac.il/sites/nihul_en.tau.ac.il/files/RP_190_Danziger.pdf

Denhardt, J. and Denhardt, R. (2010). Building Organizational Resilience and Adaptive Management. In J. Reich et al. (eds.), Handbook of Adult Resistance. New York: The Gilford Press. 333-349.

Grant, A. (2016). Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking.

Moller, A., Deci, E. and Ryan, R. (2006). Choice and Ego-Depletion: The Moderating Role of Autonomy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32 (8): 1024-1036.

Perlow, L. and Porter, J. (2009). Making Time Off Predictable – and Required. Harvard Business Review, October, 87 (10): 102-109.

Ramo, J. (2009). The Age of the Unthinkable. New Yok: Little, Brown.

Reineck, C. (2007). Models of Change. The Journal of Nursing Administration, 37 (9): 388-391.

Siegrist, J. (2008). Chronic Psychosocial Stress at Work and Risk of Depression: Evidence from Prospective Studies. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 258 (5): 115-119.

Teixeira, R. et al. (2015). Chronic Stress Induces a Hyporeactivity of the Autonomic Nervous System in Response to Acute Mental Stressor and Impairs Cognitive Performance in Business Executives. PLoS One. 2015 Mar 25;10(3):e0119025. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0119025. eCollection 2015.

Van Dam, N. and van der Helm, E. (2016). The Organizational Cost of Insufficient Sleep. McKinsey Quarterly, February, http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organizational-cost-of-insufficient-sleep

Weiner, B. (2009). A Theory of Organizational Readiness for Change. Implementation Science, 4 (1): 1-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-4-67

Making Positive Deviance Work in Organizations

Although the term positive deviance has been around for at least twenty years, not many executives I know are familiar with this term, much less with using it as a tool to improve their organizations. And unlike other organizational change initiatives, there seem to be few examples of successful applications of positive deviance in the work place. The web site for the Positive Deviance Initiative (http://www.positivedeviance.org/) lists many examples from NGOs and communities around the world but no examples from business organizations.

To summarize briefly, positive deviance is part of a branch of psychology referred to as positive organizational scholarship. Pascale et al. (2010) describe it as follows:

Positive deviance (PD) is founded on the premise that at least one person in a community, working with the same resources as everyone else, has already licked the problem that confounds others. This individual is an outlier in the statistical sense … in most cases, this person does not know he or she is doing anything unusual. Yet once the unique solution is discovered and understood, it can be adopted by the wider community … community engagement is essential to discovering noteworthy variants in their midst and adapting their practices and strategies. (p. 3)

The classic example, provided by Pascale et al. in their book, is that of the problem of malnutrition in Vietnamese villages that the organization Save the Children faced. Rather than bringing in outside experts to analyze the situation and then provide food and use agricultural techniques (impossible anyway since financial resources were limited), the organization went to local villages where the problem was severe and had villagers identify those who had the best-nourished children. Then they asked the villagers to visit the mothers of these families to find out what they were doing differently. From there, the ideas they learned spread throughout the village, and malnutrition dropped 65 to 85 percent in two years.

The PD approach basically suggests that in every community, there are individuals or groups that are using a practice that is different or deviant from the norm that seems to be solving a problem that seems insurmountable. Typically, these individuals or groups are not using special resources to address the problem. By learning about what they are doing, and disseminating this approach in the community, the problem can then be addressed. One of the most important assumptions in PD is that the “answer” to the problem is already found in the community and not something that is brought from the outside.

So why has this concept not caught on in organizations, despite some early attempts (as described in the Pascale et al. book)? And are there any lessons learned that organizations can use when implementing an approach like this? In my mind, there are at least five barriers or issues. First, it might be argued that organizations simply do not have such positive deviant practices. Pascale et al. so much as suggest this when they mention in their book that positive deviance might be more suited to sales environments, where there is more variation in performance than, say, people in assembly lines or office cubicles. But wait a minute: organizations, especially global organizations with subsidiaries in different countries, are no longer such monolithic entities, if they ever were. While there may be standard operating procedures that any organization will have, implementing these procedures across countries (or even across regions within a country) will inevitably be different, leading to differences or variations in performance.

Some years ago, I learned about an organization that had decided to close several of its manufacturing plants in various locations in the United States. The plant managers were all told about 18 months in advance that their plants were to be closing. In the meantime, Corporate HQ continued to keep track of production, efficiency and other performance measures to make sure that these plants would continue to function efficiently. In all but one plant, performance measures began to decline. To management’s surprise, one plant stood as an outlier – if anything, productivity was better than it had been before the plant closing was announced. Intrigued, a couple of corporate Finance people flew down to visit the plant. In short, what they learned was that the plant manager was someone who did many of the right things that good leaders did. He communicated almost daily with his employees to give them updates on the situation, he asked his HR staff to help employees put their resumes together and train them on interviewing skills, and he reached out to local employers to help his plant employees with other job opportunities.

Second is the organizational barrier. Because of the command-and-control nature of many organizations, Pascale et al. argue, these organizations use top-down tools to control variations and create process standardization. The authors give an example of what happened at Genentech when it found that two salespeople out of a national force of 242 were selling twenty times more of a certain product than their peers. After finding out what these two salespeople were doing differently, the company decided to communicate these salespersons’ practices through a broadcast e-mail followed up by a conference call – without involving these two salespeople. The message got at best a lukewarm reception. Their argument is that PD works better with social systems (like villages and universities) that do not practice “corporate management tools” because such tools are top-down while PD is bottom-up. These tools are part of what the authors call the “standard model” in corporations that seems antithetical to PD. Yet many organizations today have moved away from this command-and-control model in an effort to engage employees and drive innovation. These approaches have ranged from Zappo’s embrace of holocracy, Toyota’s production system, to W. L. Gore’s practice of self-managing teams. Not only are organizations trying to be less hierarchical and bureaucratic these days, they are also creating more mechanisms to communicate with and get feedback from employees.

Third is the not-invented-here barrier. In the PD approach, the solutions are discovered by members of the community itself. Therefore, having a consultant or an outside expert recommend solutions is antithetical to the spirit of positive deviance. So is benchmarking, since this approach typically relies on identifying best practices from outside the organization. And “when identification of a superior method is imposed, not self-discovered, cries of ‘We’re not them’ or ‘It just won’t work here’ predictably limit acceptance.” (Pascale and Sternin, 2005). They also state that “some problems can be solved only by those in the trenches.” According to the authors, “… the PD process insists on the precondition that the community determine whether it wants to tackle the change in the first place. Members can opt in or opt out.” (p. 91)

I think we are getting closer here to a real barrier of PD in organizations. In my experience, executives will turn to outside consultants (especially those with prestigious credentials) or look at other organizations before considering best practices internally. Many years ago, while working for a Fortune 500 financial institution, I became part of a core team charged with implementing quality circles. After several meetings with the executive in charge of retail branches in the New York area, she became convinced that this was a good approach to try. In presenting the idea to her branch managers in the New York City area, a Branch Manager volunteered to pilot the program. In the branch, the pilot was wildly successful. Tellers and back-office employees participated in weekly sessions where they came up with excellent suggestions on how to improve efficiency and reduce costs. With the support of a facilitator, they learned new skills in problem-solving and working collaboratively. When they presented their ideas to branch management, they were immediately implemented, thus lowering branch costs as well as reducing turnover especially among the teller population. However, the pilot did not spread much beyond a few branches. Branch management in other geographic areas were skeptical of these changes; they came up with objections similar to what you might expect from similar change efforts, e.g., it won’t work here, we are different, we tried something like that before and it did not work. In my earlier example, when the practices of the one plant were shared with the other plants, management expressed skepticism at the results and doubted whether these practices would apply to them.

Fourth is the incentives barrier. Some time ago, I heard a talk by Steve Kerr, then GE’s Chief Learning Officer. He was describing a visit to a plant that Jack Welch and he were making. The plant manager made a presentation about some of the innovations he had implemented in his plant that had raised efficiency and performance. At the end of the presentation, Welch asked the manager if any other plant managers knew about these practices. The plant manager said that no one else had. Welch then told the manager that when he came back in six months, he expected the manager to have communicated what was done in the plant to his peers in other regions. Without incentives for sharing, and without a culture of collaboration, managers will find little motivation to spread their ideas especially if they are competing with others for scarce resources or bonuses.

Fifth is the culture and leadership barrier. According to Pascale et al., it helps if a group that is positively deviant is relatively isolated from upper management, where they “can’t successfully dictate’.” For the authors, senior managers “see little personal value in changing what they know and can succeed in—especially when challenged by ideas like positive deviance that are detached from the orthodoxies that undergird their historical success.” (p. 135) There is a mindset in senior management that is concerned about “protecting the operating system and cultural norms upon which a large, global enterprise was built.” (p. 135) Well, yes and no. It really depends on the beliefs of the executive team, and on the types of behaviors that senior leadership not only encourages, but also models. Note how successfully Alan Mullaly and his executive team turned around Ford Motor Company partially by role modeling the sharing of ideas and encouraging the spread of these ideas within the organization.

These are not unique barriers to PD; many organizational change efforts fail for some of the same reasons. Leading change experts such as Beer (2009), Conner (2006), Kotter (2002) and others have raised similar concerns about the challenges of effective organizational change. I believe there are some lessons learned from the vast research on organizational change that might help in implementing an approach like positive deviance. Here are three. One, rather than isolate a practice or approach from senior management, use the hierarchy; it can be your friend! This is of course assuming that senior management is at least open to new ideas and willing to listen to them. In my experience, engaging senior management and getting their commitment is still the most powerful way to help drive an initiative forward, and is the first step for successful and sustainable organizational change.

Two, build internal allies and alliances. Kotter writes about having a guiding coalition. Beer suggests creating a task force made up of members that are respected by senior management. Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies (an IT company based in India) describes his recruitment of “young sparks” to help with his company’s initiative of “employees first, customers second” (Nayar, 2010). As another example, Cheryl Bachelder, CEO of Popeyes, as she described this in a Harvard Business Review interview (October, 2016), created an advisory group of franchise owners while she was at Domino’s Pizza to find new ways to get franchise alignment and grow the business. Getting the buy-in of well-respected leaders and employees in the organization, and not just senior leadership, is key.

Three, use technology, social media and other organizational communication mechanisms to inform others of best practices. As we all know, many employees today are hyper connected. The younger generation of employees uses Facebook, LinkedIn, Snap Chat, and expect their organizations to have these social networking technologies. They are used to being on “weisure time” which is the blurring of work and leisure. According to Meister and Willyerd (2010), these employees are “uber-connected.” Their book gives examples of companies that are using social media not only to accelerate and disseminate new knowledge but also to engage employees in collaborating across the enterprise. For example, IBM’s internal social network is called Social Blue, and is designed to encourage its employees to share and discuss both professional and personal topics. Around 2010, there were approximately 60,000 out of IBM’s work force of 400,000 participating in Social Blue. As another example, Bell Canada’s tool is called ID-ah! and allows any employee to submit ideas and give other employees to chance to vote on these ideas.

Through all this, it is important to remember the most important lessons that positive deviance has taught us: that solutions may already be within the organization, and it is important to build mechanisms to make sure that these solutions are discovered and spread. In perhaps more cases than we would like to imagine, while the solution may not already be there, it will be your front-line employees, those “in the trenches” who will have some pretty good ideas of what’s not working and what might be done to solve the problem. From the Challenger disaster to the BP oil spill to the latest Wells Fargo scandal, note the number of employees who knew what was going on but who were either ignored, shut down or felt intimidated.

 

Beer, M. (2009). High Commitment High Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Conner, D. (2006). Managing at the Speed of Change. New York: Random House.

Kotter, J. (2002). The Heart of Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Meister, J. and K. Willyerd, K. (2010). The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today. New York: Harper Business.

Nayar, V. (2010). Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Pascale, R. et al. (2010). The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

How Much Does Cultural Fit Matter?

Cultural fit matters to senior executives. Several years ago, the CEO of a major consumer products company decided to hire an executive from GE to a senior level position, partly to help drive change in the company’s culture. GE’s culture, at least during the Jack Welch era when this event took place, was characterized by bluntness and an in-your-face and confrontational approach to interactions. This company’s culture on the other hand, was quite genteel. Individuals who were promoted were considered to be “nice” and conflicts were often avoided or handled very discreetly. Even the CEO himself was a product of this culture, and disdained having to confront others. The culture fit between the GE transplant and his new company’s culture was stark, and within a year, he left the company. The resistance to his style was stiff, and he could not get the full support of the CEO for the changes he wanted to make, not just to the business strategy but also to the company’s practices and processes.

Take Ron Browett, who lasted six months as head of Apple’s retail operations because, according to CEO Time Cook, he was not a cultural fit. Many search firms believe that at least half of CEOs and senior executives who fail to “make the grade” do so because of a lack of alignment with the company’s corporate culture. The Wall Street Journal (October 12, 2016) reported that in a recent survey by Millennial Branding and Beyond.com, human-resources staff, when assessing college hires, ranked cultural fit above a candidate’s referrals, coursework and grades. A consulting company called RoundPegg claims that it has helped companies reduce turnover by assessing candidates on their culture fit with their hiring companies.

Cultural fit matters not just at the CEO level but down the line as well. Companies from Goldman Sachs to Zappos claim that cultural fit is important and they try to hire workers who somehow will fit into the company culture. The rationale here is that such employees will not only be happier but also more productive in the long run if they work in an environment that matches their preferences.

Fit also matters when working across borders. Carl was an expatriate manager who was assigned to work in the Japanese subsidiary of his firm. Introverted, unfailingly polite and deferential, he was a very popular gaijin with his Japanese colleagues. In meetings, he would often not speak out and offer his opinions until everyone else had, and was very respectful of the other executives in the local subsidiary. Carl’s job performance was outstanding. After three years in Japan, Carl’s company sent him to Sydney to help fix the marketing function in that company’s Australian subsidiary. After six months, the local general manager asked his regional boss to have Carl transferred elsewhere. Carl just did not fit in well with the Australian culture. The local CEO reflected on how Carl was perceived there: “No one could get along with him. Everyone felt he could not be trusted, because we never knew what he was thinking. It was as if he was always holding something close to the vest. He was so quiet that we didn’t really get to find out what he knew or what he could contribute.”

Fit even matters when considering individuals’ beliefs and societal beliefs and values. For example, Lu (2006) did a study of 412 Chinese university students in Taiwan and mainland China and found strong correlations between the degree of fit between individuals’ beliefs and societal beliefs with subjective well-being for these Taiwanese and mainland Chinese students.

So what exactly does cultural fit mean? Fit suggests there are pieces that need to be joined together, and cultural fit suggests some sort of congruence between the organization’s culture and the individual. But what specifically is it about the organization and its culture? Since culture is so broad, we need to define what aspects of the culture are important and that need to be considered when assessing an individual’s cultural fit. Professor Edgar Schein (Schein, 2013) has described culture as made up of tacit assumptions and their manifestations through such artifacts as language, behaviors, processes and architecture. It is not always easy to unearth these tacit assumptions because they often differ from a culture’s espoused values. For example, organizations have espoused values as reflected in their mission statements and speeches by company executives. Yet, when we consider these organizations’ processes and the behaviors of their leaders, the tacit assumptions will often differ from these espoused values. Consider the recent Wells Fargo case, where the espoused value was to take care of the customer, yet the reality was far different. As reported in the October 12, 2016 edition of the New York Times, Wells Fargo employees had been complaining for years about what they had seen: “employees opening sham accounts, forging customer signatures and sending out unsolicited credit cards.” This was despite a sales quality manual that reminded employees that they needed to obtain a customer’s consent before opening an account. Employees’ complaints were either ignored, or in some cases, the employees themselves were fired for insubordination. John Stumpf, Wells Fargo CEO who himself was recently fired, kept blaming the bank’s employees, not the culture, for this mess.

In interviews with recruiters and business executives, it seems that there are several interpretations of cultural fit, some of which are more problematic than others. The first is on fit around demographics, especially race and gender. Overt discrimination based on race and gender is illegal but there are still subtle signs of it around. Many companies these days profess to value diversity, and in fact have Chief Diversity Officers in senior roles. While there continue to be some exceptions in the business world (for example, the lack of gender diversity in Silicon Valley), there has indeed been progress in diversity based on race and gender. Very few companies would openly advocate cultural fit based on racial or gender similarity.

The second interpretation of fit is on congruence with day-to-day behaviors. An organization I knew of was known to have a very friendly, extroverted culture. It was not uncommon for employees at all levels to greet each other very warmly at the beginning of the work day. One manager very much resented having to put on a happy face in the morning. He did not want to engage in small talk nor even to smile before he had gone to his office, turned on his desktop, checked his e-mails and had his first cup of coffee. The buzz quickly spread around home office that this was a person who would never fit in to the company’s culture. He did not; he left after two years for another opportunity.

The third interpretation is around congruence with attitudes and interests. For some organizations, this is especially important at a micro level when individuals are being asked to join teams. In her study, Rivera (2012) found that assessors were interested in the candidates’ play styles and how they conducted themselves outside their office, rather than their work styles. She attributes the importance of this to the firm’s demands on employees working in the office or on the road, and the desire to make those days more enjoyable by having colleagues who could be playmates or friends. Rivera conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork in one elite professional services firm and found, among other things, that “…similarity was the most common mechanism employers use to assess applicants at the job interview stage. Similarities in extracurricular /leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles were most commonly used.” (p. 1006). One executive recruiter I spoke with mentioned an executive client who was looking for candidates who he felt he could get along well with if they were sitting side by side on a plane for ten hours.

A fourth interpretation is on congruence regarding values and beliefs. Let’s take an example from the Hogan Values Inventory, an instrument which some of my colleagues and I have used in the past with various clients. This inventory measures ten values, including Altruistic, Commercial, Hedonism, and Power. For example, here is what the Hogan inventory advises to a person who scores low in Power values: You don’t need to prove yourself to others and may prefer to work in organizations that value teamwork and collaboration more than individual achievement. Being in an organization that trusts, respects, and supports you may be more important than having lots of opportunities for upward career mobility.

I D

Kristol-Brown et al. (2005) did a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies examining various kinds of “fit,” i.e., person-job fit, person-group, person-organization, and person-supervisor fit. In looking at person-environment fit, which is the closest to the concept of culture fit, they concluded this type of fit correlated strongly with job satisfaction, organizational attraction, applicant job acceptance, and organizational commitment, but had low correlations with job and task performance.

Cultural fit does lead to a propensity for liking and greater cooperation, and possibly efficiency with which tasks get accomplished. After all, most of us feel more comfortable if we are among people who are like us; in fact, we tend to be more accepting of their ideas as a result of this “perceived similarity” bias. However, there is no hard evidence that cultural fit defined broadly leads to desired organizational outcomes, such as innovation, creativity, and productivity. A tight cultural fit might in fact lead, at a minimum, to a lack of diversity, and at worst, to discrimination and worse. As Thau et al. (2015) have shown through several field and laboratory studies, people who are at a high risk for being excluded from their group are more prone to engage in unethical behavior, especially if they have a strong need for inclusion. Their findings are a bit disturbing, for they show the extent to which individuals could go to in order to “fit in.”

In his book Originals, Adam Grant (2016) states: “If you hire people who fit your culture, you’ll end up with people who reinforce rather than challenge one another’s perspectives.” (p. 190) He suggests hiring on cultural contribution, not on cultural fit. By this, he means that organizations should be looking for people who can enrich the culture and hiring those who have qualities that are missing from the current culture. In fact, in the same October 12 Wall Street Journal article reported earlier, the reporter cited Facebook as one company that “… discourages its managers from using culture fit as a criteria (sic) in hiring, pointing out that term is a ‘bias trap.’” A senior attorney-advisor in the office of legal counsel at the EEOC said that culture fit is a “vague, amorphous term that potentially could lead companies to exclude specific groups.”

What this suggests is that cultural fit should be based on congruence between the organization and the individual on beliefs and values, not on superficial aspects such as the way someone looks, dresses, or what sports teams they support. Based on extensive research by cultural anthropologists, the most important of these beliefs and values are around the following dimensions (these are discussed in greater depth in my recent book, Successful Global Leadership):

  1. authority and power versus egalitarianism
  2. independence and individualism versus interdependence and collaboration
  3. assertiveness and competitiveness versus harmony and consensus
  4. tradition versus adaptability and openness
  5. expressiveness and looseness versus order and structure.

Here are three recommendations for managers seeking to hire for cultural fit. First, focus cultural fit on those values that are most important to the organization. For example, how much does the organization value assertiveness and competitiveness over harmony and consensus? Make sure to go beyond those espoused values by reflecting and observing what behaviors gets rewarded, who gets ahead, and the actions of senior leaders. By focusing on these five sets of values, rather than looking at fit based on how people look, how they dress, or what their hobbies or interests are, organizations can avoid the unintended consequences that too much of a focus on cultural fit can lead to.

Second, learn how to assess candidates’ values by focusing on their behaviors, listening, and observing non-verbal cues. For example, many candidates will say that they are team players and that they take initiative. By asking behavioral questions and probing, you will be able to infer their preferences and values more accurately. Using an assessment tool such as the Hogan inventory or a simulation also helps. Third, consciously hire some cultural misfits to “hire for the future” (as Henon and Thompson suggest), especially when the organization is attempting to change some of its own cultural values to align better with its strategic direction. For example, for an organization with a culture that discourages speaking up and empowering employees, this means hiring those individuals and leaders who value speaking up and empowering others, and who have demonstrated these behaviors. These individuals may be cultural misfits but will be important change agents for your organization.

In summary, cultural fit still matters, but with two important caveats. One, be careful about focusing cultural fit too tightly on superficial attributes. Two, there are times when organizations need to hire some cultural misfits.

 

Kristof-Brown, A. et al. (2005). Consequences of Individuals’ Fit at Work: A Meta-Analysis of Person-Job, Person-Organization, Person-Group and Person-Supervisor Fit. Personnel Psychology, 58, 281-342.

Lu, L. (2006). “Cultural Fit”: Individual and Societal Discrepancies in Values, Beliefs, and Subjective Well-Being. Journal of Social Psychology, 146 (2): 206-221.

Henon, T. and Thompson, L. (February 15, 2016). How to Hire Without Getting Fooled by First

Impressions. Harvard Business Review Digital Article.

Rivera, L. (2012) Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms. American Sociological Review, 77 (6): 999-1022.

Schein, E. (2013). Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Thin Slicing Across Cultures

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term” thin slicing”, and this is how he described it:

“(Thin-slicing)… is a central part of what it means to be human.  We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or reencounter a novel situation.  We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are … lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.”

I remember many years ago, when I was doing research on the interviewing process, about studies that indicated that interviewers in an employment setting generally make up their minds about a candidate during the first few minutes of an interview.  In a current human resources management textbook (Gomez-Mejia et al.), here is what the authors have to say about interviewers and first impressions:

“Perhaps the most consistent research finding is that interviewers tend to jump to conclusions – make snap judgments – about candidates during the first few minutes of the interview (or even before the interview starts, based on test scores or resume data).  One researcher estimates that in 85% of the cases, interviewers had made up their minds before the interview even began, based on first impressions the interviewers gleaned from candidates’ applications and personal appearance.”

At about the same time period when I was doing my research, a non-technical book with the self-explanatory title “The First Five Minutes” was published that also described the impact of first impressions.

So we do judge a book by its cover, I thought.  And nothing that I have read or experienced since (through numerous interviews with executives and managers) has contradicted this simple but powerful hypothesis about our human tendency.

Perhaps it’s a result of our hardwired behavior from the Pleistocene era, where our ancestors had to judge very quickly whether a person from another tribe was a friend or foe.  Over the past several years, I have worked with executives to help them identify and develop potential talent in their organizations, and if anything, I find that many executives not only make these judgments very quickly, but also seem to make them very confidently (not surprising for them, of course).  A manager who they may remember texting during a meeting, or another manager who made a less than stellar presentation – these are samples of behavior that executives generalize very quickly about, and can sometimes de-rail otherwise fine talent.  In addition, the research on interviewing shows that interviewers are more influenced by unfavorable than favorable information about candidates.  In my many years of working with executives on talent identification and succession planning, I would say that this is also true about executives who are making judgments about potential candidates for succession.

Ambady and Rosenthal actually coined the term “thin slicing” many years before Gladwell popularized it.   And more recent studies have simply reinforced the power of thin slicing.  For example, Todorov at al. did studies of people’s judgments.  They showed potential voters pairs of black-and-white headshots of candidate who were completely unfamiliar to them.  After exposing these shots for one second, the participants made judgments about the competence of the candidates that predicated pretty accurately the outcome of the elections – over 70% of the winning candidates in several U.S. senatorial seats, and about 68% of those sitting in Congress.  They have replicated this research in elections held in other countries (e.g., Mexico, Germany).

According to neuroscientists (Pinker, p. 241), the ability to pick up emotional cues evolved in the amygdala.   So the challenge for many managers working globally today is to beware of these thin slices when interacting with people who are members of different cultures.  People from different cultures not only look different, they talk differently (even when conversing in English), and interact differently, even in a business setting.  So the potential for creating unfavorable first impressions is significant.

In cross-cultural settings, I believe that there are at least two kinds of biases we may fall prey to.  First is the “lack of similarity” bias that is created when we meet people who are not like us.  The relevant dimensions of dissimilarity or difference may differ by situation.  For example, in the workplace setting, gender is sometimes not as relevant as functional background.  Marketing people tend to refer to those finance guys concerned only with numbers, while sales people tend to refer to those engineering guys who overdesign their products with little regard for consumer needs.   In cross-cultural situations, our unconscious bias favoring people who are like us, or not favoring those who are not like us, can kick into high gear very quickly.  The dimensions of similarity or dissimilarity might include physical appearance, body language (e.g., the way someone shakes your hand or expresses himself or herself) and thinking style.

The second type of bias is when we fix on superficial – and sometimes irrelevant – characteristics that lead us to jump to hasty conclusions.  One example that I have seen on many occasions is the bias executives hold with regard to the ability of non-native English speakers to speak English well.  In my experience, many executives visiting other countries will place undue emphasis on locals who speak English well, especially those who understand the nuances and idioms of the English language.  English verbal skills may have little to do with local managers’ performance or their competence, but it inevitably impresses many executives who should know better.  In their Harvard Business Review article, Neeley and Kaplan point to this as a blind spot by many executives, and I concur.

Here are three pieces of advices for avoiding these biases and withholding our first impressions (difficult as this may be) when interacting with a business colleague from another culture:

  1. When you are about to engage with someone from another culture especially for the first time, step back for a moment and ask yourself what assumptions you might be making about that person or group.   For example, suppose that you are getting ready to meet with a Russian manager in Moscow.  From what you have read about Russian businesspeople and about the Russian culture, you will certainly have certain expectations about the person you are about to meet.  You expect to meet someone who is most probably an ethnic Russian, who is rather formal (both in terms of attire as well as interaction), who does not use much body language or non-verbal communication, and who prefers to get down to business almost immediately.   What information do you already have, or can you get, about this person to test these assumptions?
  2. As you meet with and engage with the person (or group), refer to those assumptions and adjust them to see whether they are justified or not.  Some of your thinking and adjustments might be done “in the moment.”  For example, on meeting the Russian manager, you realize that he is younger than 30, and he informs you that he has only been in Russia for five years, having been raised in Ukraine.  Furthermore, he got his MBA at IMD Business School in Switzerland.  These are bits of information that you get to pick up as you interact with your Russian business partner, and it might change the approach you might take with him.  For example, you might then decide to take a somewhat less formal approach and engage in some informal topics to break the ice and establish rapport.3.
  3. After the interaction, reflect on your behaviors.  How did you adjust your approach, and did you feel that it was effective?  What would you do differently next time around?  If appropriate, ask for feedback (not about yourself, but you could ask about how the meeting went for him, for example), although keep in mind that you might not necessarily get honest feedback, especially if you are in a position of higher authority than the person or group you are interacting with.

There is another approach that has worked for many, including myself.  And that is to take the time to explore commonalities between the two of you.  In some cases, this may be a love of sports, cars, certain movies or certain books or video games.  In other cases, this might be around common experiences or common values, for example, having children of about the same age, having parents who may not be well, etc.  Finding “common ground” is an effective way to reduce your unconscious bias and in many cases helps to establish an effective relationship with your colleague cross-culturally.

Ambady, N. and Rosenthal, R.  (1992).  Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences.  Psychological Bulletin, 111(2).

Gomez-Meija et al.  (2012).  Managing Human Resources (7th edition).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Prentice-Hall.

Mitchell, M. with Corr, J.  (1998).  The First Five Minutes.  New York:  Wiley.

Neeley, T. and Kaplan, R.  What’s Your Language Strategy?  (2014).  Harvard Business Review, September, pp. 70-76.

Pinker, S.  (2014).  The Village Effect.  New York:  Spiegel and Grau.

Todorov, A. et al. (2005).  Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes.  Science, 308.

Mental Models of Cultural Adaptation

Kanji Nagano was a Japanese manager for a global financial services company in Tokyo.  Although well educated, having gone to one of Japan’s exclusive universities, he had never been out of the country and had always worked for Japanese companies.  He showed strong leadership qualities even when he was in school, where he was elected to many leadership positions.  In his fifteen years with different Japanese companies, his superiors recognized his leadership abilities by promoting him to bigger and bigger jobs.

When he joined a German-based financial services company in Tokyo, Nagano-san inherited a team of 15 direct reports.  He quickly established rapport with his team by holding frequent group meetings, and built strong interpersonal relationships with his team members.  When he learned that he was being sent to Germany for a six-month assignment, Nagano-san was a bit apprehensive at first.  He knew that the German team he was to lead would have different expectations.  Yet he was not quite sure whether to change, or how to change, his leadership style.  Nagano-san’s leadership in Germany was not a success.  The German team members who reported to him felt that he wasted too much time trying to get consensus.  They felt frustrated at the way he ran meetings, where he expected everyone to agree to his decisions.

By contrast, Jack Ellis was a marketing manager for a global consumer products company who was sent to the Philippines for a two-year assignment.  Jack was born and raised in the East coast, and graduated from an Ivy League school, where he spent his junior year in Thailand.  Jack relished the opportunity to work overseas, and he quickly embraced the Philippine work culture.  Recognizing the more authoritarian style of leadership in the Philippines, Jack decided that he needed to adapt his leadership style so that he could become more effective in managing his team of Filipino subordinates.  At times, Jack felt uncomfortable at how directive he was becoming, but he felt that this was the price he had to pay in order to become an effective leader in this setting.  Jack started taking language lessons so he could understand and speak to his staff in their native language.  He even learned how to curse in Filipino, and some of his team members commented that he was more Filipino than some of the local bosses.  Jack felt at times that he was compromising his values (especially when he was confronted with situations where bribery was involved), but he rationalized it all by remembering that “when in Rome …”.

In my experience, many managers in in cross-cultural settings use one of these two mental models in leading people from different cultures.  The first mental model is based on the assumption that to change your style is to be inauthentic, to not be true to yourself.  This then leads many managers to insist that they should not change, regardless of whether or not their style is appropriate for a given culture. In some cases, such as Nagano-san’s, the leader may believe that he may have to change, but does not know how.  In either case, leaders tend to use the same leadership style they used in their home culture when they lead people in other cultures.

The second mental model is based on the assumption that leaders have to be “cultural chameleons.”  When in a different culture, some managers believe the most effective strategy is to adjust your behavior and your style to what is expected and appropriate in that culture.  In Jack’s case, he decided early on that he would do whatever it took to fit into the local culture, even if by doing so he may be going against some of his deeply held beliefs and values.

Neither mental model is effective for managers leading across cultures.  However, I have found that you can be yourself and be an effective cross-cultural leader at the same time.  Here are three pieces of advice for how you might reconcile these seemingly contradictory positions:

  1. Separate your values from your behavior.
  2. Learn and/or practice different behaviors through practice and coaching.
  3. Integrate cultural differences by considering different aspects of yourself.

Let’s take as a third example Emil, who was a fast rising star for a global pharmaceutical company that had a subsidiary in Canada.  He had an aptitude for science, and had a warm, appealing way of establishing rapport with people.  Starting as a sales rep in Montreal, where he delivered outstanding results year after year, he was eventually promoted to become the head of sales for the subsidiary.  Recognizing his potential, senior management recommended him for a position in the U.S. headquarters of the company to head a marketing team.  Once again, he shone in his role.  Emil showed many of the qualities of leadership admired within the company.  He not only believed passionately in the mission of the company, he also had outstanding communication skills (even though as a French-Canadian, he did not learn to speak English until he was in his teens) and consistently exceeded objectives.  He had a reputation for building high-performing teams, and his 360-degree feedback results showed that Emil was a leader who involved and empowered his team, was a good listener, treated others with respect, maintained high standards, and had integrity.

For his next assignment Emil was sent to Mexico to head the company’s subsidiary there.  Even though Emile did not speak any Spanish, senior management felt that Emil was a good choice since the subsidiary needed an effective leader who would be able to build on the subsidiary’s success and introduce some needed changes.  It was an organizational situation that Michael Watkins (2009) describes as “realignment,” where a previously successful organization is now faced with some new challenges.  The Mexican subsidiary was certainly not a start-up, nor was it a turnaround situation.

Having established success using his participative, empowering style, Emil went down to Mexico excited at building his new management team, all of whom were Mexicans who had been with the company for many years.  Although he had done his homework on the business issues facing the subsidiary, Emil had not really put it much thought to how he would do things differently in Mexico.  After all, he had been successful in Canada and in the U.S. with a particular leadership style that he believed in strongly.  Why should he change?  Although he did not have an MBA, Emil was an avid reader and learner, and he realized that the command-and-control style of management was an antiquated way of leading people.

Emil’s first month in his new role was a near disaster.  As he told me years later, the Mexicans in his team were used to being ordered by their “jefe.”  They expected him to tell them what to do and to follow orders.  After all, he was the “hot shot” from headquarters who was selected to make the subsidiary successful.  Where were his ideas?  Why was he asking them what they thought?  Didn’t he have the answers already?  To the Mexicans, Emil seemed indecisive and unsure.

Fortunately, Emil had the emotional intelligence to recover quickly.  He realized that Mexican work culture favors strong leaders who appear authoritarian.  Yet he also believed strongly in his leadership values.  So how did he reconcile these conflicting practices?  Emil knew he could not make changes overnight.

Using the three suggestions above, here’s what Emil did.  First, he learned how to behave differently while still believing in the value of participation and empowerment.  During team meetings, he made sure he was in control of the agenda at all times and ran a very tight ship.  He started off the meeting by reviewing the decisions from the last session and by providing his team with information and updates from corporate.  This was his way of conveying that he was in charge and that he had access to senior management.  He ran the meeting but he also made it a point to make sure he invited participation.  While this may have been a subtle shift, it made an impression on his Mexican team.  In short, he changed some of his behaviors while still maintaining his values.

Second, Emil began to learn and practice some different and/or rarely used behaviors.  For example, rather than going to his subordinates’ offices to visit and discuss issues with them, he had them go to his office.  While this may seem like a small gesture, it was symbolic and conveyed to his subordinates that he was indeed the boss.  He began to seek advice from an American executive he met at a business forum in Mexico City.  The American had been in Mexico for over twenty years, and helped Emil gain a different perspective on managing in that culture.

Third, Emil surfaced aspects of himself and his behavior that tapped into his more authoritarian self.  For example, in previous assignments in Canada and the U.S. where he had to push his team against tight deadlines, he had to adopt a very tough, no-nonsense approach so the project could be complete on time and on schedule.  So he drew on these parts of himself when managing his Mexico team.  These were behaviors that were already part of his repertoire but seldom used.

Over time, as the Mexican team began to develop trust and respect for Emil as the boss, he began to shift his leadership towards a more participative and empowering style.  He asked for their input before implementing new initiatives from corporate.  He encouraged them to take initiative on some of their key responsibilities.  Emil became an effective leader in the subsidiary who also gained the admiration of the locals.  After a successful four years, Emile was promoted to head the Latin American region for his company.

Watkins, M.  (2009).  Picking the right transition strategy.  Harvard Business Review (January), pp. 47-53.