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by david on January 23rd, 2012 Comments Off

Book Review: StandOut

Marcus Buckingham is a soloist in the strengths movement choir. He has been a mouthpiece for the idea since seemingly the very beginning. Marcus is a gifted communicator with a talent for understanding the need for rigorous research. Which is why when he finally decided to create a market a self-assessment, StandOut, it should peak everyone’s interest. I’ll admit, I was actually a little confused at why Marcus had decided to create an assessment – I am a big fan of Go Put Your Strengths to Work and the accompanying Trombone Player Wanted film series. Both of these works rest on the idea that taking a test isn’t as useful as studying yourself at work.

So how good could this StandOut test be?

Good.

The book itself is a quick read, meant to introduce you to the test, have you take it, and then help you analyze your results. It’s how the test itself is structured that is really cool. The entire assessment uses behavior-based questions. Rather than ask you “Do you like ______ or ______ better?” it gives you situations and then asked you have you’d respond. Eventually, it locks in on the pattern behind your hypothetical behaviors – these are your strengths roles. When you complete the test, it generates a report that can be view online or download. The report explains your result and provides tips for how to make an immediate impact and how to craft a long-term strategy based on your position in an organization.

I’m inherently skeptical of self-assessments because the usually just ask you to describe yourself and then re-label your own description – sort of like stealing your watch and then telling you the time. That said, I believe StandOut has the potential to make a real impact in an organization because it deals with how you ACT in the world, not how you THINK you act. I’m especially looking forward to the release of the manager dashboard function, which will allow managers to access a website (or iPad app) that houses the results of their team and provides tips for interactions).

StandOut is the product StrengthsFinder 2.0 should have been.

by david on January 20th, 2012 3 Comments

Portable Guide to Leading Change

[The following is an excerpt from our latest ebook published through LeaderLab Papers entitled The Portable Guide to Change. If you like the blurb, download the ebook for free. If you don't, download it anyway and then take satisfaction in dragging it to your recycle bin.]

Most people view organizational change the same way they view a clown standing down the street from them.

It may be a positive experience, but we’d rather it be someone else’s positive experience.

Despite our best efforts, the world continues to change and grow. In order to remain competitive, organizations need change alongside their environment. Changing certain parts of an organization are easy, but changing people is hard.

Most people try to avoid the clown.

For over fifty years, organizations have looked for help in leading people through change. They relied on thought leaders and researchers for help making sense of the mental processes people use to understand and cope with their changing roles. These models can help people become more willing and able to embrace change. At any level in the organization, leaders will be involved in leading change.

So leaders must meet the clown.

[Click here to download the full ebook.]

by david on January 18th, 2012 Comments Off

A Team of Rival Perspectives

One element that fosters creativity is the ability to see an issue from multiple angles. When leaders build mechanisms that give them these various perspectives, they are more likely to see creative solutions.

One fascinating example is that of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the surprise winner of a hotly contested primary that included personal attacks and attempted coup d’etats. Once he had secured the nomination, and later the presidency of the United States, Lincoln assembled his cabinet primarily of the very men he quarreled with for the nomination. This “team of rivals” was able to provide a variety of perspectives and create a tension over the solutions that avoided the traditional, yes-man saturated groupthink sessions that marked so many other president’s cabinets.

What is important is for the leader of such diverse rivalries to sustain the right amount of creative friction, taking care to produce the tension needed to refine new ideas and challenge old assumptions while ensuring that the tension doesn’t get overbearing and melt the team. While there was a team of rivals in Lincoln’s cabinet, I suspect it was always certain who that needed leader was.

We tend to think of creatives as artists, musicians and writers. However, Lincoln’s deliberate attempt to leverage tension provided him with a style of creativity he found quite useful in navigating us through an equally tumultuous feud.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.

by david on January 16th, 2012 Comments Off

shorts.012 | Autonomy Enables the Helpful to Perform

If everyone in your organization only did what was written in their formal job descriptions, your business would be mediocre at best. For your business to excel, your workforce from top to bottom needs to be full of good organizational citizens. Good citizens at work go above and beyond their assigned duties to try to help fellow employees and the organization.

Employees help each other by offering advice, lending a hand, resolving conflicts, and celebrating each other’s achievements. Employees that receive trustworthy help from others feel an obligation to reciprocate, which strengthens work relationships. Good citizens in thriving work relationships will be motivated to find ways to perform their tasks more effectively and efficiently. Employees that help each other strengthen the bonds of trust with team members and supervisors, and we know trust has a strong effect on performance.

Unfortunately, good team relationships won’t matter much if employees aren’t given the latitude to improve their jobs. And good team relationships will struggle to develop when employees can’t help each other because they are constrained to “just worry about getting your job done.”

A study by Muammer Ozer recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (full citation below) showed how autonomy affected the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and job performance. This study of 266 employees, coworkers, and supervisors showed that citizenship behavior improved work team relationships, and work team relationships had a significant effect on job performance.

Those relationships between citizenship behavior, teamwork, and performance are expected. What’s new here is the importance of autonomy in enabling this virtuous chain of behaviors. The study found that the links to performance were enhanced for those with the most job autonomy. Highly autonomous workers were better citizens, had better team relationships, and were better at translating those team relationships into improved performance.

Because autonomy matters so much to most workers, it matters to your business. Constrain your employees’ ability to help each other and work together to improve their jobs and you will likely also constrain the growth of your business. Help yourself by helping your employees help each other.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Citation: Ozer, M. (2012). A Moderated Mediation Model of the Relationship Between Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Job Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology

Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. Bret blogs about leadership, followership, and social media at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find Bret onTwitter,Facebook, and Linkedin.

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by david on January 13th, 2012 Comments Off

Freedom to Fail

“The best way to get a good ideas is to get a lot of ideas.” – Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling is the only person to have one two unshared Nobel Prizes, so I’d imagine he knows a bit about good ideas. His idea is simple to generate lots of ideas and let most of them fail. The few that don’t might just be great ideas.

Modern popular press literature is starting to support this idea. In his new book, Peter Sims discusses how companies and leaders that produce breakthrough ideas often do so by placing many “little bets” and building off of small discoveries. Indeed, if the apocryphal story of Edison remarking, “I discovered 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb” is accurate, one suspects that creative leaders already knew this. It appears one of the most potent ways leaders can develop creativity in followers is by giving them freedom to fail. Within organizations, not often known for their tolerance of failure, leaders can act as human shields, protecting them from the potential negative impacts of their failure.

But most leaders are afraid to open the door up to failure. An objection I often hear is “how much failure is enough?” I’m not sure that question is all that important. A more important question is, “what types of failure it allowable?” Surely failure that stems from poor performance or a poor person-task fit cannot be tolerated and must be addressed. But failure that resulted from experimentation is different. The “little bets” are designed to push the creativity and innovation further (Sims, 2011). I’m not sure that setting a failure quota establishes that. Instead, leaders can build a culture where failure is welcomed, so long as it stems from the right kind of activity (experimentation) and, obviously, isn’t some moral or ethical failure.

I see this idea over and over again in my study of creativity in organizations. It’s such an elegant solution to the creativity problem, even if it relies on a messy process to creativity.

Sims, P. (2011). Little bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries. New York: Free Press.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.

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Book Review: StandOut

Portable Guide to Leading Change

A Team of Rival Perspectives

shorts.012 | Autonomy Enables the Helpful to Perform

Freedom to Fail

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