Feedback Culture?

Before engaging in a feedback process like 360 degree feedback, it is important to know whether your organization is ready to engage in this kind of activity. Do you have a feedback culture? Are you prepared to foster one?

Maybe you've been looking and asking around. Maybe you've heard your competitors use feedback tools to improve performance and development. Yet, if you're thinking of engaging in a feedback process like 360 degree feedback just because your competitors use it, think twice. Organizations may choose to do a 360 degree feedback just because their competitors do. Or maybe to give the impression of openness and participation to employees, clients or recruits when, in fact, this is not a part of the organization's culture. Regardless, this amounts to using a tool or procedure for political purposes and is ultimately counter-productive.

If, on the other hand, your organization has a growing commitment to openness and feedback, then perhaps it's time. Just be sure you're going in for the right reasons.

Ability diversity or cognitive diversity: what yields the most accurate decision-making group?

According to a study published on the Information Science Journal, it was proven through unique empirical research that while ability diversity decreased group decision errors by approximately 4%, cognitive diversity was much more effective as team decision errors were reduced by approximately 13% thus putting into question the popular belief that reliance on using more capable members to create high performance homogeneous groups may lead to better team decisions. The final conclusion of the study was that a much better strategy is to create groups of members that ‘think differently’ and cooperate to produce a group decision

So, group composition really improves decision making? Certainly. Yet, the traditional approaches should be augmented. At a software tech firm, for example, forming coding teams that produce error free, innovative work would require more than just the lumping together of the brightest programmers and then setting them on a problem. It takes more diversity than that.

A good first step for our software firm would be to compose the group from, say, two bright computer programmers, two physicists, and two mathematicians. This would give you a group formed from members with diverse abilities. Yet, according to the new research, this would only reduce the team’s decision errors by about 4% because their cognitive abilities are still so similar.

What is needed is not only diversity of skills and high intelligence, but also diversity of thinking style. The most difficult trick of all turns out to be in identifying thinking styles. A good second step comes from the research of Professor Thomas Malone of MIT. Putting a few women on the team would improve the overall social sensitivity of the team thereby increasing its collective intelligence.

Questions to ponder:

• Is your organization postured to make savvy team decisions or is their effectiveness limited by lack of diversity (ability and cognitive)? 
• How does the composition of group membership differ between most accurate and least accurate decision-making groups? 
• Can you even identify your most and least accurate groups?

Here is an interesting and related video:

If you are struggling to find ways to identify thinking styles, one way is to examine management decisions.


The research article cited above: West, David, and Scott, Dellana. "Diversity of Ability and Cognitive Style for Group Decision Processes." Information Sciences 179 (2009): 542-58.33

Maybe the problem is not you … just your environment

Today we present an article by a new HR-Worldview Guest Author.

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This year at My Next Path, we have worked with a certain number of clients who started a coaching process because they felt uneasy with their current job. Some of them even got the unpleasant sensation they might have some sort of issue. When we started working together, they in fact quite quickly came to realize that they did not have any problem themselves: the source of their trouble was their environment! Therefore, instead of feeling bad, stuck, paralyzed or sometimes worst, what they had to do was actively take action and work their way out to another environment that would better fit them. Let us explain more below.

Mary*has been working for 8 years in the same company. She was a middle manager in the sales and marketing area. She had always been travelling a lot for her job and liked it. She liked her industry and was very knowledgeable about key factors of success, players, etc. But more recently, she had 3 different bosses in 2 years, an increasing pressure and despite good results in her region, little recognition. Her self confidence was eroded and she found herself drowned in micro-management tasks imposed by an insecure manager. When we started working together, Mary was really unsure about her own abilities.

After a few sessions of analyzing what she thought were her issues, she came to realize, she had lost her self confidence because of the environment (poor management, wrong cultural fit etc), not because she had problems herself! In fact, she was perceptive enough to take action, seek help, and finally take that healthy distance to realize that. A few months later, Mary landed a new job in a company more in line with her style and expectations. Although everyone around her told her to stick to her current job because of the tough economy, she overcame her initial fear, dedicated the appropriate time to look for the right opportunity and found one.

We have seen more than one case similar to Mary’s this year: Before feeling bad about yourself and jumping to conclusions, make sure you are able to analyze your situation with perspective. Actively take action to find a work environment that better fits you maybe the best decision you will ever make! This obviously could mean changing company but not necessarily. This could also mean changing job/department within a corporation: very often in big companies, people have been offered jobs that do not properly fit their profile; by changing to another job, area or department within the company, they suddenly feel better and everybody wins.

About our Guest Authors:

Myriam Le Cannellier and Catherine Bortolotti are Career Coaches who work with professionals who are experiencing a transition in their career, because of relocation, an unexpected situation in their current job or the will to make a significant change in their professional life. Learn more about them at www.mynextpath.com

Employee Relations: Survey

Many companies fail to properly account for the social relationships that form in the workplace as well as to account for the fact that these social relationships directly affect the performance and the psychological health of their employees which ultimately affects the performance of the company as a whole.

So, does your company take social relationships at work into account?

Please take 30 seconds to answer 5 multiple choice questions. We will post the results to this blog as well as e-mail them to those who would like them.

Click the Start Button to Take this Survey

Or just click here

Breaking the Rules

As part of our series of articles by exceptional HR professionals, today we present another article by our regular guest author, George Krafcisin.

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Working with people is frustrating - they don’t follow neat, logical rules. If you’re an analytical type, comfortable with flow charts and equations, but have to manage or work with people, you have to learn as much as you can about behavior and then make your best guess as to what to do. It would be nice to have an idea of what people factors most affect productivity and profit.

That’s why I was pleased to run across some usable data from the Gallup Organization – the pollsters.  Their book First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, gives statistically rigorous data correlating how people feel about their workplace and the profit performance of the companies they work for. The study found that worker’s positive answers to six questions were strongly statistically correlated with productivity, profitability, employee retention and customer satisfaction. The six questions are:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
   
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
   
3. Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
   
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
   
5. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?
   
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
   

Some of these seem obvious – if you don’t know what’s expected of you, how can you perform well? – but believe me, they can get lost in the fog of everyday struggles to meet schedules. And of course, it’s obvious that people need to feel cared about.  But are you doing your best to get Yes! answers to the six questions? Is your boss doing the same for you?

The book has a lot more information, including six more questions less strongly correlated with good performance, and some opinions on how to make the most of the information. I highly recommend it.

About Our Guest Author:

George Krafcisin is the President, coach and trainer of Mosaic Management, Inc. He writes regular installments on the topics of leadership and management here on HR-Worldview. 

His last article "Workplace Confessions" can be found here.

Social Interactions at work and Psychological Health: The Role of Leader – Member Exchange and Work Group Integration

July 2008 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Why should HR take an interest in the social interactions taking place at work?

The study found that stressors at work can be managed effectively by Social Resources in the work place. The availability of these social resources is determined by the quality of the relationships between an individual and their immediate superiors as well as co-workers.There are 2 main social relationships that exist at work. The first is the individual with his or her superior and the second is the individual with his or her co-workers.The first is called Leader Member Exchange (LMX)
The second is called Work Group Integration (WGI): This is the “perceived approval from coworkers and inclusion in their activities which can be a source of social support and assistance.

High WGI results in the following:

• a feeling of emotional support
• a sense of belonging
• a sense that others will help if needed
• a recognition of self-worth and value
• a high degree of stability in one's life situation

The extent to which a leader provides a psychologically secure environment, the resources necessary for workers to complete tasks and the authority for workers to make decisions, regulates how likely subordinates are to think of a situation as being under control and non-threatening. If a leader fails to foster a strong LMX, the result will be a feeling of isolation and a perceived lack of control in the subordinates.

The study proved the following:

• Low LMX = High stress, low organizational commitment, low job satisfaction
• High LMX = Low stress, high organizational commitment, high job satisfaction
• Low WGI = High stress, low organizational commitment, low job satisfaction
• High WGI = Low stress, high organizational commitment, high job satisfaction

Many companies fail to properly account for the social relationships that form in the workplace as well as to account for the fact that these social relationships directly affect the performance and the psychological health of their employees which ultimately affects the performance of the company as a whole.

Does your company take social relationships at work into account?
Please take 30 seconds to answer 5 quick questions. We will post the results to this blog as well as e-mail them to those who would like them.

Take this quick survey here

Article:
Rousseau ET AL. Social Interactions at Work and Psychological Health: The Role of Leader Member Exchange and Work Group Integration. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. July 2008, Vol. 38., Issue 7, p.1755-1777.