Tag: business coaching

  • Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature

    By Jeffrey Pfeffer

    View original publication on McKinsey.com

    Management books and commentaries often oversimplify, seldom providing useful guidance about the skills and behavior needed to get things done. Here’s a better reading list for leaders.

    The almost insatiable demand for leadership studies is a natural outgrowth of the all-too-frequent leadership failures in government, business, and nonprofits. Few people trust their leaders, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer surveys, among others.1 Gallup data show low levels of employee engagement worldwide, while the Conference Board finds job satisfaction at a low ebb and executive tenures decreasing.2 Other research consistently indicates that companies give their own leadership-development efforts low marks. Leaders aren’t doing a good job for themselves or their workplaces, and things don’t seem to be improving.

    This consuming interest in leadership and how to make it better has spawned a plethora of books, blogs, TED talks, and commentary. Unfortunately, these materials are often wonderfully disconnected from organizational reality and, as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement. Maybe that’s one reason the enormous resources invested in leadership development have produced so few results. Estimates of the amount spent on it range from $14 billion to $50 billion a year in the United States alone.3

    The limits of morality tales

    Despite the many shortcomings of leadership instruction, some books and articles do provide fruitful guidance on how to be a better, more effective leader. And there’s scattered information about what skills and behavior are needed to get things done and how to develop them. Sadly, and for a number of reasons, there’s a scarcity of useful material. Here’s why.

    The first and maybe most pernicious problem is that thinking on leadership has become a sort of morality tale. There are writers who advocate authenticity, attention to employees’ well-being, telling the truth, building trust, being agreeable, and so forth. A smaller number of empirical researchers, contrarily, report evidence on the positive effects of traits and behavior such as narcissism, self-promotion, rule breaking, lying, and shrewd maneuvering on salaries, getting jobs, accelerating career advancement, and projecting an aura of power. Part of this discrepancy—between the prescriptions of the vast leadership industry and the data on what actually produces career success—stems from the oft-unacknowledged tendency to confuse what people believe ought to be true with what actually is. And underlying that is an associated confirmation bias: the tendency to see, and remember, what you’re motivated to believe.

    Second, this moral framing of leadership substantially oversimplifies the real complexity of the dilemmas and choices leaders confront. An essay on the 500th anniversary of the writing of Machiavelli’s The Prince noted that it is sometimes necessary to do bad things to achieve good results.4 Not surprisingly, then, some of the most successful and admired leaders—for example, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy—were above all pragmatists, willing to do what was necessary to achieve important objectives.

    As such, each of them (and many other renowned leaders) changed their positions on decisions and issues and behaved inconsistently. They dissembled and engaged in strategic misrepresentation, not always disclosing their full agendas and plans, in part to avoid provoking opposition. At times, they acted in ways inconsistent with their authentic feelings. Human beings are complex and multidimensional, so not only do bad people do good things and vice versa but the whole idea of good and bad can also be problematic when you consider the knotty dilemmas leaders face deciding whether the ends justify the means.

    Finally, the division of leaders and their actions into good and bad seriously oversimplifies a much more complex reality and continues to reinforce a problematic, trait-based, and personality-centric view of human behavior. As social-psychological research has made clear for decades, people are not only shaped by their enduring traits but also profoundly influenced by cues and constraints that vary by situation. So they adopt different types of behavior and even personas, depending on the circumstances and the various roles they play. Leaders may behave differently within their families and religious institutions than they do at work, to take one example. When individuals are promoted to management, their perspectives change and so too does their behavior. McKinsey research also suggests that the effectiveness of various types of leadership behavior varies with the health of the organization in which they are practiced (see “Leadership in context”).

    Characterizing leaders’ behavior as somehow dependent on inherent traits provides an easy excuse for avoiding the sort of behavior and strategies that may be required to get things done. To take a simple example, people sometimes tell me that they are not networkers, as a way of explaining their reluctance to build the social relationships so necessary for success. I remind them that they were not born walking or using the toilet either. Networking behavior and skills, like all such behavior and skills, can be learned, as University of Chicago sociologist Ronald Burt has nicely demonstrated.

     

     

  • Putting an End to Leaders Self-Serving Behavior

    by Morela Hernandez

    View original publication on MITSloan

    Although we might hope that leaders in business environments will embrace their decision-making responsibilities with a clear head and an open heart, empirical research has shown otherwise. Instead, business leaders are often selfish. Access to resources in many organizations is a moving target, leaving many managers feeling protective of what’s theirs. And when they take more than their fair share — extra resources for themselves at the expense of others — they often do it because they honestly think they are entitled to these resources and believe they have earned the right to take more.

    Where does this kind of entitlement come from?

    As I’ve tried to reconcile current political events — such as the European Union’s reaction to Brexit, the continuing global refugee crisis, and the ongoing debates in the United States about tax and health care reform — with scholarly work on ambiguity and decision-making, I’ve come to think that feeling entitled to a larger share of a resource might come not from objective assessments of reality but rather from what social scientists call motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning occurs when people “selectively notice, encode, and retain information that is consistent with their desires.” People use this kind of reasoning to reach conclusions that help them support their self-serving beliefs. After all, reasoning, it has been said, “was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

    Understanding the effects of self-serving beliefs is a tricky business. In the last decade of research in behavioral ethics, for instance, scholars have moved away from a “bad apples” approach in which only people with poor moral characteristics are deemed likely to behave unethically. Instead, researchers have examined how people can engage in self-serving behaviors while convinced of the rightness and fairness of doing so. Few studies, however, have explored the circumstances in which this type of selfishness — one that comes with a sense of entitlement and justification — is likely to arise.

    Working alongside my colleague Laura Noval of the Imperial College Business School in London, we sought to understand how organizations enable self-serving behavior. Specifically, we investigated how certain contextual and individual characteristics can facilitate motivated reasoning aimed at justifying self-serving decisions.

    We explored this issue through two experimental studies, one using a hypothetical business decision-making scenario (in which 395 people participated, 52% women) and the other using a behavioral task in the laboratory (in which 239 people participated, 52% women). In both studies, we assigned participants to conditions in which they received either identical performance information with respect to another party (strong, unambiguous context), or in which they and the other party were favored by different performance criteria (weak, ambiguous context). In the latter case, participants could use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their own performance criterion was more relevant for the task at hand, thereby convincing themselves that they deserved larger shares of the resource.

  • 19 Traits of Bad Bosses

     

  • The Confidence Trick

    By Jules Goddard

    View original publication on London Business School

    Some of the saddest words that a human being can utter are these: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Yet, according to Bronnie Ware, a palliative nurse, this is precisely the sentiment that, more than any other, sums up the main regret of people nearing the end of their lives.

    Confidence is the antidote to this kind of regret; it is the surest defence against the abdication of our sense of our own agency. When we give up authorship of our own lives, or resign ourselves to living through the eyes of others, we are effectively surrendering our personhood. It is a reflection of the notion that people are the product of their circumstances rather than the decisions they make.

    Avoid becoming a slave

    There are many forces in today’s world that are encouraging this kind of “second-hand living” to which Nietzsche gave the name “slave mentality”. For example, ideologues, whether of the left or right, have tended to view people as means to a utopian end and have therefore had a vested interest in encouraging people to think of themselves as subjects or victims, and to place their fate in the hands of others. A confident society is one that is immune to these dangers. Indeed, the late Lord (Kenneth)Clark, the art historian, defined civilization in a single word: confidence.

    “The most beautiful thing you can wear is confidence”

    David Bowie

    Confidence is more than self-assurance. It is a form of licence. It is the right that we grant ourselves to become the person of our own choosing. At root, confidence is the conviction that we are of most value to the world when we are true to ourselves.

    Confidence is the right that we grant ourselves to become the person of our own choosing

     

    David Bowie was the archetype of a confident person. In his 69 years, he exemplified what it is to be a truly autonomous individual. His versatility was prodigious. He excelled as a singer, composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, painter and actor. “I feel confident imposing change on myself,” he said. He didn’t believe there was a self to discover, only a persona to be endlessly re-invented. It was as though he imagined himself to be a work of art on which he never ceased working.

    But Bowie’s confidence did not come easily: “As an adolescent, I was painfully shy and withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.” Ziggy Stardust was perhaps his most famous disguise, but it was only one of many. He learned the art of confidence by treating it – at least to start with – as a façade behind which he could play at being confident.

    But Bowie’s confidence did not come easily: “As an adolescent, I was painfully shy and withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.” Ziggy Stardust was perhaps his most famous disguise, but it was only one of many. He learned the art of confidence by treating it – at least to start with – as a façade behind which he could play at being confident.

    Imagine yourself courageous

    This recalls Aristotle’s theory that if a particular virtue such as courage or confidence does not come naturally, then the solution may be to stop worrying about how it might be acquired. Instead, the individual should imagine what a courageous or confident person would actually do in the circumstances – and then do exactly that. In other words, act your way into becoming confident. No one is born confident. We acquire confidence as we mimic those whom we observe to be exemplars of this particular trait.

    This mimetic theory of learning – becoming a person we are not by imitating a person who is – was brilliantly applied by Bowie. He did not believe his mastery of artistic skills was an expression of innate talent; he preferred to believe that it was an act of will, a kind of continuously imaginative self-reinvention: “Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life”

    Bowie chose to see himself as the sole author of his own life. He recognized early on the dangers of living his life through the eyes and expectations of others: “I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.”

    Act your way into becoming confident

    He said: “All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get selfish about it”. This chimes with one of Bronnie Ware’s epithets: “Self-love is essential to truly serve others well.” This is a powerful (and provocative) version of the oblique principle: namely, that society is stronger when individuals feel free to put their own needs first. It is a message that sits uncomfortably in today’s world of ideological posturing, virtue signaling, and other forms of what Barbara Oakley has called “pathological altruism”. Bowie was his own person: “Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do.”

    Leaders liberate

    Leadership, a close ally of confidence, is not about creating followership or compliance or passivity. Quite the contrary. The leader liberates others to invent or re-invent themselves. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “the only person you are destined to be is the person you decide to be”. Leaders encourage those they work with to make self-defining decisions.

    Thoughts on the life and personality of David Bowie – and the lessons that flow from them – sit uncomfortably alongside theories of confidence found in much social science research literature. Here are some of those findings, expressed as key factors in building self-confidence:

     

      • The company we keep: we are creatures of the expectations that others place upon us; therefore, we should surround ourselves with people who believe in us, and keep our distance from those who undermine our self-belief.

     

      • The effort we exert: in the pursuit of mastery, effort counts for more than innate talent; therefore, to strengthen self-confidence, we should measure ourselves by effort invested rather than result achieved.

     

      • The placebo we trust: lucky charms work. We ought not be so rational as to dismiss all sources of irrational assistance.

     

      • The wave we surf: success is rarely a solo achievement. It depends, at least in part, on being with the right people in the right place at the right time. Quoting Shakespeare, “there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” We should take note of the tide.

     

      • The rituals we adopt: certain things “get us into the zone” and boost our confidence before, for example, giving a speech or taking an exam. So we need to invent habits that settle our nerves and enhance our performance.

     

      • The opportunities we seize: business is a numbers game, as Tom Peters used to say. The “more times at bat”, the greater the chance of getting lucky and stumbling into success.

     

      • The setbacks we experience: if we see mistakes as lessons in life, our confidence will be benefit. We should think of failure as intrinsic to a life of achievement.

     

      • The emotions we draw upon: to overcome fear when faced by a threatening challenge, getting excited works better than trying to calm ourselves down.

     

      • The expectations we form: we can adopt one of two quite distinct strategies for managing our anxieties once we’ve settled on a risky course of action: “strategic optimism” or “defensive pessimism”; strategic optimists allay their fears by hoping for the best and setting aside negative thoughts; defensive pessimists choose instead to confront their fears by envisaging worst-case scenarios and thinking through the ramifications.

     

    • Research suggests that when we’re fearful, the unknown is more frightening than the negative. Therefore we should adopt the strategy of the defensive pessimist.

     

    The trouble with rules of success – and all self-help manuals – is that they invite us to treat our own life instrumentally. We objectify ourselves, reducing our own behaviour to a set of responses to a mix of self-imposed conditions. In effect, we become the victims of the science we choose to believe in. For example, we may manage our level of confidence by purposefully associating with different kinds of people, wearing a lucky charm, cultivating a pessimistic philosophy and so on. In this way, we cast ourselves in the role of inert material on which different causes will have different effects. Life becomes a process of choosing those inputs whose effects we most desire.

    Take control

    The anthropologist Mary Douglas has made a distinction between passive and active voice theories of human behaviour . As an illustration of this distinction, she draws upon Roy Schafer’s interpretation of Freudian theory to imagine an exchange between a psychoanalyst and his patient. The analyst may say to the patient, “Your chronic sense of worthlessness comes from the condemning voice of your mother”. This is a quintessential case of passive voice theorising. The patient is seen not as an active agent with beliefs, intentions and will, but as a passive canvas on which external forces make their imprint. An active voice reconstruction of this diagnosis could be: “You regularly imagine your mother’s voice condemning you, and you, agreeing with it, regard yourself as being essentially worthless.” This approach uses the less deterministic, more explanatory concepts of agency, meaning, and purpose. Active voice theorising places individual responsibility where it truly belongs – in this case, with the patient.

    Society is stronger when individuals feel free to put their own needs first

    Whenever psychology reverts to the language of physics and explains human behaviour in terms of causes, determinants and effects, it risks erasing the subject matter of its own inquiry: the human agent. The practice of management should not allow social sciences to dehumanize the true object of its interest: individual human beings.

    Bowie had no need for self-help manuals or textbooks on creativity. He experimented. He didn’t try to predict outcomes or worry about possible reactions. He acted on the world and, noticing the result, he formed a theory. To borrow an insight from Matthew Parris: “How little we know of ourselves until we notice what we do.”

    In business practice, we typically operate the other way round. Before actually doing anything, we feel we first need a theory from which to act, or a goal around which to organize, or a plan on which to deliver, or some rules by which to conform. The social science of confidence, by adopting an essentially passive voice approach, provides us with many rules of success but in so doing subtly undermines the Bowie-like confidence that we need to become the invention of our own imagination and courage.

  • How an Executive Coach became a Trusted Leadership Advisor from the perspective of both the Coach and the Executive

    Karol M. Wasylyshyn

    Leadership Development Forum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    An in-depth case study is used to illustrate the transition senior consultants can make from the role of executive coach to a role conceptualized by the author as trusted leadership advisor (TLA) in long-term engagements with senior business executives. In this engage- ment, spanning several years, the client ultimately became CEO of a global entity. Factors addressed in the case include the client’s development issues, his progress, and the challenge of his simultaneously making developmental progress while managing a difficult boss and understanding how the company culture in some ways exacerbated his leadership issues. A number of key practice factors are specified as potential guidance for practitioners already working or aspiring to work with CEOs and other senior business leaders. These factors, embedded in the application of an integrated practice model, include how the TLA guided and conceptualized the engagement, useful tools including written summaries and construc- tive triangulation, and the management of multiple roles.

    Read more…

  • How swapping life stories can make you a better leader

    Professor Nigel Nicholson on why executives should explore their own timeline and take interest in other people’s experiences
    By Nigel Nicholson

    View original publication on London Business School

    Did you ever tell someone your life story? If so, it was most likely when you were in the first warm flush of a new romance, with you and your beloved bonding by swapping narratives. Over the years, you’ve no doubt given friends and family edited highlights of the steps in your life journey. But it’s less likely that you’ll have told one or two attentive listeners whom you scarcely know the full story: the what, why and how of your journey to now. What would it feel like to do this? Why would your audience possibly be interested?

    You might be surprised on two counts. First, by the emotions you experience when doing this exercise. Second, by the positive impact your narrative has on your listeners, no matter how “ordinary” you think your story is. I see these effects regularly on the Biography Workshops I run for executives; the experience turns out to be remarkably powerful for both teller and listener.

    Let’s begin with the teller. Before you start talking, you’ll have drawn a Life-Line that maps out your key dates, events, relationships, roles and feelings over time. The mere act of doing this can be startling – you begin to recall sequences of events half forgotten. You see the drama, the highs and the disappointments with fresh eyes and are struck by how much has changed, including feelings that seemed indelible at the time. You’re also struck by how good eventually came out of what seemed like a disastrous situation, or how you slipped into negativity while scarcely aware of what you were doing.

    The landscape of your life is not proportional – some big things seem very distant while others continue to loom over you. Doing this exercise gives you a remarkable new perspective; part helicopter view and part re-immersion into the tangle of your past. The new perspective comes from the now and from your view of the future. It raises questions and clarifies choices.

    Some of these questions are important reflections for now and the future. You may find yourself asking, ‘Have I been making the same kind of mistakes repeatedly? What big decisions did I take too carelessly? What have life’s troubles taught me? How might I have undervalued these people or those processes? What might I have overvalued? What have I neglected that will help me in future? What have been the constant factors – visions, driving beliefs and reliable relationships – that have helped steer my course? What choices have come from the best part of me?’ These are important questions. The Life-Line exercise gives you an unparalleled opportunity to reflect and generate new plans and purposes for the next chapters of your story. In many cases, it’s a tool for thinking anew about legacy, an issue that looms larger as the years pass.

    Second, the listener. What effect does it have on them to hear your story? Far from being bored, judging you or failing to understand, you find people are drawn into your perspective, especially if they have similar backgrounds and experiences. This is a real eye-opener for cross-cultural insights. We often judge others and make snap judgements about their motives in ways that make us feel good about ourselves, without taking the time understand them. This exercise makes that kind of mental laziness difficult. It’s hard to judge when drawn into someone else’s narrative. You’ll more likely feel sympathy for the hard things that happened, understand their emotions and wonder how they coped with life’s challenges.

    Being a listener in this context is a gift as it allows us to do one of the things that self-centred humans find so hard: ‘decentring’. Self-centredness is the inevitable consequence of our strong sense of personal identity and the limitation of our vision. Yet, I find time again when coaching and consulting that we can transcend that limitation using our minds. Empathy – sharing someone else’s feelings – is easy with people we love but harder with those we don’t. It’s especially difficult with people who we have nothing in common with. They may come from a completely different background or culture; or we may not trust or like them much. Decentring – seeing the world from another person’s perspective – is unlike empathy. It’s more analytical, allowing us to understand the inner and outer forces that bear down on others. It’s almost easier to decentre with strangers and enemies. We can take friends and family for granted but tend to be more cautious with strangers and enemies.

    Empathy is easier with people we like or respect, as we find them. Decentring really helps as a “cooler” analytical process on the left side, but comes into its own as a really special technique on the right side of the line. It’s not easy, but there are various exercises I use that can help people decentre. The Life Line exercise is a superhighway to decentring. It is a vivid demonstration that it almost impossible for you not to develop a deeper understanding of how others really think, feel and act if you decentre.

    Deep insight into other is not just therapeutic. It is essential in management and leadership. It’s a powerful tool for negotiation, alliances, managing difficult people and outmanoeuvring those who might be obstructing us. With enemies, it can replace fear and anger with a more dispassionate intelligence, making it a tool for smart and humane Machiavellianism – know thine enemy!

    In summary, the Life Line provides us with two powerful benefits. One is to give us a fresh perspective on the relationship between the past and the future, and find renewal of purpose in the present. The second opens an escape hatch from our self-centred vision, giving us a deeper understanding of what it means to be another, different and remarkable human being.