Yael will be giving a webinar on resilient leadership for the Security Industry Institute Society. Participation is open to non-members as well. You are invited to sign up.

Date: April 11, 2013
Time: 12pm – 1pm EST

Current economic realities have meant that organizations are doing more with less, and many employees and leaders alike are overworked and at their personal and professional limits. Nonetheless, for an organization to stay vital and engaging, leaders must have the resilience required to weather difficult times. More than ever before, leaders must be as resilient as possible to manage daily stress and frustration. Becoming more resilient allows for leaders to continue the mighty task of inspiring their employees, but also allows that they, over time, continue to stay engaged in their leadership roles and avoid burnout.

The post Resilient Leadership – Webinar Announcement appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

But that’s not all there is. I find it fascinating to observe how an evidence-based approach to people management becomes ever more ubiquitous. If you haven’t read The Science of Building New Teams – to name just one of many examples of current organizational psychology research projects – I strongly suggest it.

But back to Google who keeps pushing the envelope on applying solid analytics to issues of organizational effectiveness. Here is a short list. (Thanks to Dr. John Sullivan and his post on TLNT.)

1. Leadership characteristics and the role of managers –ts “project oxygen” research analyzed reams of internal data and determined that great managers are essential for top performance and retention. It further identified the eight characteristics of great leaders. The data proved that rather than superior technical knowledge, periodic one-on-one coaching which included expressing interest in the employee and frequent personalized feedback ranked as the No. 1 key to being a successful leader. Managers are rated twice a year by their employees on their performance on the eight factors.
2. The PiLab — Google’s PiLab is a unique subgroup that no other firm has. It conducts applied experiments within Google to determine the most effective approaches for managing people and maintaining a productive environment (including the type of reward that makes employees the happiest). The lab even improved employee health by reducing the calorie intake of its employees at their eating facilities by relying on scientific data and experiments (by simply reducing the size of the plates).
3. A retention algorithm — Google developed a mathematical algorithm to proactively and successfully predict which employees are most likely to become a retention problem. This approach allows management to act before it’s too late and it further allows retention solutions to be personalized.
4. Predictive modeling – People management is forward looking at Google. As a result, it develops predictive models and use “what if” analysis to continually improve their forecasts of upcoming people management problems and opportunities. It also uses analytics to produce more effective workforce planning, which is essential in a rapidly growing and changing firm.
5. Improving diversity – Unlike most firms, analytics are used at Google to solve diversity problems. As a result, the people analytics team conducted analysis to identify the root causes of weak diversity recruiting, retention, and promotions (especially among women engineers). The results that it produced in hiring, retention, and promotion were dramatic and measurable.
6. An effective hiring algorithm – One of the few firms to approach recruiting scientifically, Google developed an algorithm for predicting which candidates had the highest probability of succeeding after they are hired. Its research also determined that little value was added beyond four interviews, dramatically shortening time to hire. Google is also unique in its strategic approach to hiring because its hiring decisions are made by a group in order to prevent individual hiring managers from hiring people for their own short-term needs. Under “Project Janus,” it developed an algorithm for each large job family that analyzed rejected resumes to identify any top candidates who they might have missed. They found that they had only a 1.5% miss rate, and as a result they hired some of the revisited candidates.
7. Calculating the value of top performers – Google executives have calculated the performance differential between an exceptional technologist and an average one (as much as 300 times higher). Proving the value of top performers convinces executives to provide the resources necessary to hire, retain, and develop extraordinary talent. Google’s best-kept secret is that people operations professionals make the best “business case” of any firm in any industry, which is the primary reason why they receive such extraordinary executive support.
8. Workplace design drives collaboration – Google has an extraordinary focus on increasing collaboration between employees from different functions. It has found that increased innovation comes from a combination of three factors: discovery (i.e. learning), collaboration, and fun. It consciously designs its workplaces to maximize learning, fun, and collaboration (it even tracks the time spent by employees in the café lines to maximize collaboration). Managing “fun” may seem superfluous to some, but the data indicates that it is a major factor in attraction, retention, and collaboration.
9. Increasing discovery and learning – Rather than focusing on traditional classroom learning, the emphasis is on hands-on learning (the vast majority of people learn through on the job learning). Google has increased discovery and learning through project rotations, learning from failures, and even through inviting people like Al Gore and Lady Gaga to speak to their employees. Clearly self-directed continuous learning and the ability to adapt are key employee competencies at Google.
10. It doesn’t dictate; it convinces with data — The final key to Google’s people analytics team’s success occurs not during the analysis phase, but instead when it present its final proposals to executives and managers. Rather than demanding or forcing managers to accept its approach, it instead acts as internal consultants and influences people to change based on the powerful data and the action recommendations that they present. Because its  audiences are highly analytical (as most executives are), it uses data to change preset opinions and to influence.

We have been recently delivering a class at the Wharton Business School on building collaborative teams – presenting some evidence we get from our team collaboration assessment (free to participate and view). Perhaps the most striking feature is that respondents in their vast majority describe functioning but somewhat lackluster teams. The lowest scored item we find is “not having time to reflect how work gets done”. This impedes organizational learning in regard to improving relationships, team dynamics, conflict resolution, approaches to problem-solving and decision-making.

It’s hard to “go from good to great” without…

The post Evidence-based People Management – Google Pushes On… appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

But is this about “supporting collaboration and creativity through increasing facetime and chance meetings” as the decision was initially sold by Yahoo? Let’s recall what happened:

• Yahoo announces Mayer’s decision to end “work@home” – some exceptions apply.
• The official spin is that measure is taken to support collaboration and creativity.
• Just a day later, “Ex-Yahoos Confess: Marissa Mayer Is Right To Ban Working From Home” – yes, there are slackers, and yes, some Yahoos work on their own startup while being clocked in on Yahoo. More interna are leaked.
• Next day we learn that Mayer was wondering about empty parking lots and poured over VPN logs in her data-driven quest to see what’s going on. A big gap was found between those claiming to work from home and the number of VPN connections and cloud accesses.

This whole story seems more like a PR disaster than a verdict on telework.

Why the dress-up? It’s no secret that Mayer was hired to bring back an ailing company. That may – and seems to – include lacking work morale. In a healthy organizational climate professionals want to be meaningful contributors. They have chosen to work there after all.

And that’s where I see the bigger story.

Banning telework hurts the motivated employees. Telework makes undoubtedly sense. Many companies demonstrate how this can be made to work. Many studies provide evidence of claims of increased productivity, work satisfaction, and workforce engagement.

Despite all the brouhaha Mayer’s move seems to have been less about serendipitous meetings and sparkling idea sessions at the water cooler. It has been a disciplinary move to help reignite a work culture where too many employees seem disengaged from their employer’s mission. It’s an employee engagement challenge – not a problem with telecommuting approach to collaborating in the 21st century .

Why not call it that?

The post Marissa Mayer – The Perils of Avoiding Straight Talk appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

Clearly, some do. Look at Fast Company’s current “The 50 most innovate companies” list to see impressive accomplishments in a wide range of B2B and consumer markets. Not one of these 50 examples is the result of one single mastermind. It’s teamwork.

In recent years, the evidence-based paradigm has also started to influence organizational research about what enables teams to be high-performing. Take Google’s Management Effectiveness Project, the work that has come out of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, or  ideas from MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory” about the science for building great teams.

I have been working with teams lucky enough to just magically get it right from the start – no conscious team-building effort required. But how often does that happen in your experience?

The time-to-market pressure puts teams in crisis-mode. They scramble to meet steep goals – and focus on what they need to get done. No time to talk “team guidelines” and “how to build a collaborative culture”. But it’s those conversations that will help most real-world teams build a collaborative capacity that might put them in the same game with those teams on Fast Company’s list.

Other than hope for the magic sparks of breakthrough thinking and off-the-chart-performance, there is really no magic bullet but to do it. You can start a conversation on your team. We developed a team assessment tool that takes recent evidence-based team effectiveness findings into account, benchmarks your team against others, and provides concrete recommendations that will make a difference.

The post Team Collaboration — Reloaded appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

Social scientists and marketing researcher have been studying forms of manipulation for quite some time now. There are some interesting findings you can use to “manipulate” yourself in sticking to your resolution. One is based on the concept of the shaken self. While the “think positive” paradigm has its place, looking at our shortcomings and unfulfilled goals can be more effective in helping us reach our goals.

Consider this:

• One person is asked to write a short essay highlighting his healthy life habits. He does so. Afterwards, he’s offered a choice of two small rewards for his work: an apple, or a pack of M&M’s. He makes his choice and leaves.
• After that, another person is asked to write a short essay highlighting her healthy life habits. As she’s about to begin, the sociologist asks her to write it with her non-dominant hand. After she does so, she is offered a choice between an apple or a pack of M&M’s.

The second person is significantly more likely to make the healthy choice. Why is that?

In this study from Stanford, social scientists explore the effects of a “shaken self”: At its core lies our need to bolster our self-confidence. The act of writing about one of your virtues with your non-dominant hand induces a temporary state of lower confidence in the trait you’re writing about. The test subjects who wrote with their non-dominant hand tended to choose rewards that would bolster their self-image with regard to the virtue they were writing about.

So how does this help you or your team to do better in pursuing aspirations? Here are some keys:

• You are more likely to make an extra positive effort when you are in shaken state.
• So shake yourself. Personally – or if you wish to bring this to your team – collectively. Take the proverbial “look in the mirror”, use 360 tools, invite external feedback. Anything that grounds you in a reality less tainted by wishful thinking but by the reality of what you bring to your life and the people in it.
• Once you are shaken – considers what really matters to you now or in the future. List some options that you see to take action.
• Pick the option of your choice with a commitment to pursue it for a week/month/quarter.
• After that period, take stock, shake yourself, and reconsider your options anew.
• Make a new commitment for a limited period of time…

Many cognitive biases make us prone to manipulation – but we can also use them to manipulate ourselves to reach more effectively goals of our own.

Reminding ourselves of our shortcomings or off-target goals is not necessarily a downer. It can very well be rocket fuel to build tenacity of purpose.

Happy exploring.

The post How Your “Shaken Self” Can Support New Year’s Resolutions appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

While factors such as stress, concerns about job security, having to do more with less are perhaps less surprising challenges to workforce engagement, the study also highlights the role of senior leadership as well as support from direct supervisors.

The feedback from respondents speaks for itself:

• Less than half of the respondents agree their organization’s senior leaders have a sincere interest in employee well-being.
• Also fewer than 50% have trust and confidence in the job their leaders are doing.

In line with several organizational effectiveness studies, the Towers Watson finds the key leadership competencies shown at the top of this post.

Most if not all of these competencies aren’t the result of a class or a one-week workshop but the result of bringing ongoing attention to personal growth that supports professional excellence – and executive coaching is proven to be an effective tool. In the light of these findings based on 32,000 responses across 29 markets I would like to suggest these “thoughts for the week”:

• What we want to cultivate in ourselves to grow with a world whose complexity has increased dramatically and where collaborative capacity becomes an ever more decisive competitive edge?
• And what changes it takes in our workplaces – the very arena of our professional challenges – to become also a crucial part of our support systems for this kind of growth…?

The post Competencies Required in Leaders of the Future appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

Perhaps not surprisingly, organizational psychologists found that increased engagement with an idea impacts how open to changing that idea we are. But there is a twist. We are pretty open to adding to our idea while being resistant to taking away from it. We treat ideas like possessions – to which we happily add but from which we only reluctantly strip away.

The implications are clear: If you wish to support creativity in the problem-solving cycle of your team, avoid detail for as long as possible. Many teams show an “operational bias” – pushing to settle details required to implement and execute. But it’s hard to go back from there.

Who does a good job with that? Architects, for one. The whole idea of prototyping is to test an idea while being ready to tear up your initial design. The crudeness of early models is deliberate. Says Jim Glymph from Gehry Partners:

If you freeze an idea too quickly, you fall in love with it. If you refine it too quickly, you become attached to it. It becomes very hard to keep exploring, to keep looking for the better.

Keeping it simple is hard work. I recently facilitated a strategy meeting and needed to ask the same question again and again: “Is this the right level of detail to discuss at this stage?” An easy question that supports team effectiveness. Be prepared to repeat it many times.

We have a particular – at times intense – relationships with our creations. A simple truth that we can easily forget.

The post Try Deliberate Crudeness for More Creativity appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

Inspired by seeing tremendously clarifying and poignant discussions emerge, we applied the same idea to team culture. High-performance teams make all the difference for organizations to stay ahead of their competition. But what defines the culture of high-performing teams? How do you get there?

Well, start with clarity. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss were researching patterns among organizations with highly effective service cultures. One of the crucial patterns they found was that in outperforming companies leaders knew exactly what kind of a culture they wanted to build, and the critical role it played in achieving their performance objectives.

Culture, says a popular vernacular, tells people what to do when no one tells them what to do. Culture, add Frei and Morriss, “guides discretionary effort”. As leaders, then, our job is to define culture. In my experience, few would disagree – fewer,though, even do the work.

Here is your challenge:

• Imagine defining culture as a set of specific guidelines for situations too vast and diverse to be defined. Your definition may differ depending on whether your frame of reference is the organization or a team.
• Try starting with 35 words or less. Can you say what culture is?
• Now use a 100 words, get more specific in a way that can guide behavior.

To the day, one of the benchmarks for defining culture well are Zappos Family Values:

• Deliver WOW Through Service
• Embrace and Drive Change
• Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
• Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
• Pursue Growth and Learning
• Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
• Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
• Do More With Less
• Be Passionate and Determined
• Be Humble

If you count the words you will get 57.

The post Can You Say What Your Culture Is? appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

Many times, our workplaces are just like that: Too much competes for our attention – deadlines, last minute request, surprises. A constant level of high urgency acts like noise. Fechner, a physicist born in eighteen hundreds, formulated a “psychophysical law”. What matters, he found, is the signal-to-noise ratio. If you want to get heard – you need not speak louder. You can turn down the music.

Many teams and leaders we coach are tempted to act with more effort – to yell louder. This takes the form, e.g., of working harder, sending more emails, scheduling more meetings. What’s your favorite? And what, on the contrary, would it look like to reduce the noise?

The radical idea is not to understand why this matters – the radical idea is to do it in the midst of an ever accelerating work environment.

Here are some “radical” suggestions – radical because doing them will challenge you and your team members:

• REVISIT IT
  Have you stopped addressing issues that you think really matter – because the discussion won’t go anywhere practical? What does it take to try again?
• DROP IT
  When was the last time you considered if all ongoing activities are really necessary? If you or your team had to start now – what essential activities would you take on now? What gets in the way of dropping ineffective or low-priority activities?
• QUIETEN IT
  What are major sources of noise – distracting, taking away, side-lining your vital few efforts? How can you cut the noise?
• SCHEDULE IT
  How often to you and your team schedule explicit time to talk about the HOW of your collaboration – team guidelines in regard to communication, feedback, dealing with disagreement, decision-making?
• IMAGINE IT
  Imagine for a moment (possibly together as a team) what would be possible if indeed you were to reduce the noise level… What is there to emerge when the static recedes?

Like acquiring any new habit, fighting noise is intentional. Seeing what that effort brings to teams, we think it’s more than worth it.

The post Improving Your Team’s “Signal to Noise” Ratio appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.

Anita Wooley and Thomas Malone were cautious to point out that this correlation has less to do with gender as such as with some kind of social sensitivity that is more likely to be found among women. That’s where another study published by the British Royal Society comes in: Its finding, in blunt terms, shows that testosterone makes women more egoistical. Researchers of the University College London asked women to take testosterone (or a placebo) and assessed their collaborative behaviors. The researchers found that women who received testosterone tended to insist on their opinion and showed less cooperative behaviors.

These findings aren’t a verdict on frequently observed gender patterns. Biological factors influence but don’t determine social behaviors. We have a choice – whether it is to collaborate with non-collaborators or to curb competitive group behaviors that impair group intelligence.

We are reminded of the job at hand to make a positive difference on the team’s ability to perform better than its members. Here are two concrete, actionable conclusions for your team:

• Distribute “airtime” equally – i.e. make sure no one dominates the discussion. (That’s, by the way, the second top factor for increased group intelligence Malone and Wooley found.)
• Cultivate social attunement – i.e. put yourself repeatedly into the shoes of your team members. Being emotionally connected mitigates egoistical decision-making and thus increases collective intelligence and team performance.

Collaboration, it turns out, is as much a predisposition as it is a habit of excellence.

The post Group Intelligence: Testosterone Disrupts Collaboration appeared first on Executive Coaching Leadership Development New York.