Tuesday, May 22, 2012 7:27 PM EDT
Are you your own worst enemy?
Positive Intelligence
By Shirzad Chamine
Greenleaf, 227 pages, $33.90
Are your saboteurs winning? Are you going through life with a negative frame of mind, casting negative judgments on the people and ideas before you? Are you a stickler, a pleaser, a hyper-achiever, or prone to play the victim? Do those tendencies keep you from total success?
Executive coach Shirzad Chamine suspects the answer to most of these questions is yes – you are your own worst enemy, or at least your mind is. And he has the test to prove it, a “positive intelligence” test that weighs the percentage of time that your mind is acting as your friend and the percentage as your enemy. Too often, for individuals and teams, the mind as enemy is winning.
“I rarely coach a team that is not constantly sabotaged by judgments team members make about one another. In some teams this is done in a blatantly open and confrontational way. In others, it is done in a more subversive and indirect way,” he writes in Positive Intelligence, labelling that saboteur The Judge.
“In either case, unless the team members explicitly learn greater mastery over their own Judges, the collection of Judges in the room can cause significant and ongoing friction that costs a great deal in lower trust, wasted energy, heightened stress, and reduced productivity.”
Mr. Chamine was in the grip of his judge when fellow students at Stanford University’s business school held the equivalent of an intervention, changing his life. He has combined notions from areas such as positive psychology, neurobiology, personality composites, and mindfulness/meditation into an approach that he uses with executives, companies, and even couples in distress.
It is based on studies showing the link between being positive and happiness or better performance. The research suggests a rule of thumb is to aim in communications or relationships for three positive expressions for every negative expression. His Positive Intelligence Quotient, or PQ, therefore indicates the percentage of the time positive rather than negative thoughts pass through your mind (he omits neutral thoughts from the score). He considers a PQ of 75 the tipping point: Above it, the mind’s internal dynamics uplift you. Below it you are being dragged down. Teams can be evaluated as well, again with 75 or more the preferred level.
To improve, you must weaken the saboteurs in your mind: Automatic and habitual mind patterns -- voices, beliefs, and assumptions – that work against our best interests. The master saboteur is The Judge, one we all suffer from. “It compels you to constantly find fault with yourself, others, and your conditions and circumstance. It generates much of your anxiety, stress, anger, disappointment, shame, and guilt. Its self-justifying lie is that without it, you or others would turn into lazy and unambitious beings who would not achieve much,” he writes.
But it’s not alone. The Judge usually has at least one accomplice saboteur, drawn from nine that Mr. Chamine catalogues: Stickler, pleaser, hyper-achiever, victim, hyper-rational, hyper-vigilant, restless, controller, and avoider. We view them as our allies, because they have a positive element, but don’t recognize the insidious damage they cause.
Weakening the saboteurs is the first strategy to improve your performance. This involves identifying the thoughts and emotional patterns that stem from your saboteurs, and naming them when they arise. “Ah, the judge is back telling me this report will be lousy,” for example. Or, “there’s the controller feeling anxious again.”
As well, you should strengthen what Mr. Chamine calls your sage – the deeper and wiser part of you, the positive side, which resists getting carried away by the negative impulses. The sage views any challenge you are facing as a gift or opportunity. Business going down the tubes? Look for how this might be the best thing that ever happened to the firm or you, and then focus your energies on what that analysis revealed.
The sage has five elements, if you access them. You should explore the possibilities of the situation with an open mind; empathize with yourself and others, and bring compassion and understanding to the situation; innovate to create new perspectives and out-of-the box solutions; navigate to choose a path ahead that aligns with your values and goals; and finally, take decisive action.
You can also work routinely to build up what he calls your “PQ Brain Muscles,” or your positive side. In a crunch, when you are feeling a saboteur in command, this could involve simply wiggling your toes or rubbing your fingers together for 10 seconds. Try it: The exercise takes the mind and body to a different place than the saboteur’s siren call. But throughout the day, he wants you to build up your PQ Brain fitness, shifting as much of your attention as you can to your body for 10 seconds – each of those intervals one “rep” in the quest for 100 reps a day. Experience with his clients suggests that helps them to boost their positivity.
A lot of that will seem familiar. But overall, it’s a practical approach to dealing with our minds, and in the book he offers examples to show how he turned around individuals, companies and a couple’s troubled relationship through getting PQ above 75.
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Postscript: When Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock took over the same duties for Canada’s 2010 Olympic team he wanted a credo that could hang on the dressing room wall and inspire his players. It began and ended with the words “Leave No Doubt,” and with its steadfast positive thinking would have drawn a 100 score on a positive intelligence test. It worked, even in the dressing room as they waited for the overtime period in the Gold Medal game against the Americans, where he insists everyone had no doubt, and he brings his memories of that team’s journey and his own philosophy together in Leave No Doubt (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 138 pages, $19.95), written with Rick Larsen. The story is enjoyable and the team and his philosophy winners, but the book is too windy for my tastes.
Link to this post
Friday, May 18, 2012 4:31 PM EDT
Melding two thoughts to find the best approach
Integrative thinking – in which executives synthesize two seemingly opposing ideas into a new business approach – is much lauded these days. But how exactly do we apply integrative thinking when faced with a business dilemma?
Jennifer Riel, associate director of the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School of Management, and Roger Martin, dean of the school, have examined stories of integration from various sectors, looking at similarities and difference. In Rotman Magazine , they distill those into three different types of integration:
Double down integration
As in Blackjack, when a player doubles his or her bet on strong set of cards, the thinker embraces one of the two opposing ideas and pushes it to the extreme. This so magnifies the attributes of that approach it begins to confer the benefits of the opposing approach.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is an example, when the company thought it had to choose between protecting the environment or protecting the bottom line. Under attack from sustainability critics, the retailer doubled down, using its strong influence on its supply chain to push suppliers into greater sustainability without raising its overall costs.
Double down integration typically occurs when a leader is faced with one approach with many positives but one huge drawback and another approach which has one vital positive but many drawbacks. The integration takes the benefits of the first approach to confer the one significant benefit of the alternative approach.
Integration by decomposition
Sometimes a decision maker is faced with two approaches that are attractive or two approaches he or she wishes could be implemented at the same time, but that doesn’t seem possible. An example might be the desire for the organizing benefits of centralization and the agility flowing from decentralization.
The solution, the authors say, is to think more deeply about the problem itself, breaking it down into its component parts. The idea is to then create more value by combining the discrete elements into a new approach.
Dr. Victoria Hale, of biotechnology firm Genentech, did that when she pondered treating diseases and disorders in the developing world. The Big Pharma approach is to put vast resources into developing treatments for people who can pay. The public health approach is that we have an obligation to provide care to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.
Dr. Hale developed the Institute For One World Health, which takes drugs developed and tested by the pharmaceutical company that never went to market and, as a non-profit, delivers them through a public health approach where ability to pay doesn’t matter.
Hidden gem integration
When you have two opposing models that have a balance of good and bad but don’t fit together, the solution is to take a core element of each approach that speaks to the heart of what you truly want to achieve. You build a new model around these hidden gems.
In South Africa, Taddy Blecher used that to create a new type of university, which combined gems from the traditional physical campus approach and distance learning. Students pay the equivalent of about $50 and come to the central campus for one year to create a community that will sustain them in later years of distance learning. They donate their time to run the university and keep costs low, and faculty is drawn from the corporate community, again reducing expenses as well as helping students to get jobs afterward.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter
Friday, May 18, 2012 4:34 PM EDT
How to measure workplace gender diversity
After studying 60 top corporations, all claiming gender diversity as a priority, McKinsey & Co. decided to develop metrics that can be used by the broader business community to measure success in promoting women. In a report, Joanna Barsh and Lareina Yee work back from the outcomes the companies sought to present these four measures:
- In entry-level professional positions, women should constitute at least 53 per cent of the staff or women should have the same odds of advancing to manager level as men. Thirty-one of the companies met or exceeded that cut-off.
- Women’s chances of advancing from manager to the director and vice-president level should be 85 per cent the chance of men. Twenty companies in the sample met or exceeded that goal.
- The executive committee should have at least 22 per cent female representation. Nineteen companies met that mark.
- Fifty-five per cent of women vice-presidents and senior vice-presidents should be in line positions, overseeing operating divisions with profit and loss statements of their own rather than in staff positions like human resources or legal where women have often been relegated. Twenty companies achieved that outcome.
Only 12 companies met three of the metrics. In some cases, that came from drawing in a remarkably high percentage of women, well exceeding 50 per cent, probably because they offered entry-level jobs women preferred, as in health care or retail management. In the other approach, companies had what the researchers call “steady pipes”: The firms take in a smaller percentage of women but keep the mix of men and women steady at higher levels in the firm, which is probably the more realistic approach for engineering and technical fields.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter
Friday, May 18, 2012 4:40 PM EDT
Priority rankings just don't work
The common advice for managing your day is to develop a list of priorities. But top productivity guru David Allen says that such “ABC priority codes” – A for your most important items, C for least important – don’t work.
“You’ll have a different priority set at 8:00 tonight than you will at 10:30 this morning. And sometimes the most strategic thing for you to do will be to water your plants. Like, when you’ve been in six meetings, felt beat up in five of them, and by 4:30 your brain is scrambled eggs, and you barely have the attention span of a gnat. That’s the time to water your plants and fill your stapler. Why? Because you can’t do anything else, and you’re going to have to water your plants sometime anyway,” he writes in his Productive Living newsletter.
Instead, at any given moment, he advises you to choose what you will do according to the following four criteria, listed in order of precedence:
- Context (what can you do where you are?)
- Time (how much time do you have until you are committed to something else?)
- Energy (how wasted or fresh are you?)
- Priority (what has the highest payoff for you?)
You don’t need a mathematical formula to determine payoff; he says it’s intuitive. At the same time, consider what is truly mission critical and what is essentially frivolous.
He stresses that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a list of what you would like to get done today: “Just remember that the best-laid plans of mice and men are temporary and often ephemeral tools.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter
Friday, May 18, 2012 6:19 PM EDT
Excuse my typos, I’m e-mailing on the run
Power Points
TECHNOLOGY
E-mail etiquette can excuse errors
Andrew Reid, founder of Vancouver-based market research firm Vision Critical, uses this closing line for e-mails on the run: “Sent from my mobile. Excuse any typos.” D’Arcy Rezac’s Positive Networking Tip Of the Week
TIME MANAGEMENT
Cut down on meetings to save time
If you need more time in your day, move a weekly meeting to every 10 days, advises consultant Jason Womack. That means three meetings a month instead of four. The Womack Report
PRODUCTIVITY
Bigger computer screens wave of future
Computer screens are getting bigger, so companies should focus on screens 1280 to 1600 pixels wide in their web usability studies, while running some tests on medium size screens and even larger screens. Expect average screen size to continue to grow, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen, because even screens considered huge today with 1900 pixels are too small for maximum knowledge worker productivity. Useit.com (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html)
TECH TIP
A real way to uninstall
· The un-install program in Windows often fails to completely erase the residue of programs. Geek Uninstaller (http://www.geekuninstaller.com/) is freeware that cleans out registry entries and other residue. www.addictivetips.com (http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/geek-uninstaller-lets-you-completely-wipe-off-an-application-from-pc/)
Friday, May 18, 2012 11:28 AM EDT
Finding the harmony between your job and your passion
Caitlin Hanford is an elementary school music teacher. Chris Rawlings is an apple farmer. Joanne Crabtree is a psychotherapist. Anne Walker is an English as second language instructor. They’re also all musicians, balancing their passion for their job and their passion for their music, fitting in gigs as often as they can while keeping up the real job that pays the bills.
It may be simplest for Joanne Crabtree. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, the 69-year-old Torontonian sees clients for her psychotherapy practice. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, she devotes to her music, writing songs, recording, performing before audiences with singing partner Paul Mills, and networking with the people she needs to connect with in order to win sufficient bookings. If the musical side of her life needs her on a psychotherapy day, she adjusts. “I can change the days I work. Everyone knows about my other life,” she says.
That’s actually different from earlier in her career, when she hid her psychotherapy from her musical colleagues and her musical career from her therapy clients. The fear was that knowing she had another interest would imply she wasn’t fully invested in each – an amateur, dabbling.
She still keeps the two worlds separate as much as possible. “There has never been a time in my office working on therapy when I have been interrupted by music and when I am doing my music I don’t think of therapy,” she says.
“Therapy work will kill you if you don’t put boundaries on it. When I put the key in the door to lock up, I leave therapy behind and turn my creative energies to music.”
Jazz-folk artist Chris Rawlings, 64, also has a structure to his life, but it’s not hermetically sealed like Ms. Crabtree’s. Fifteen years ago he took over the apple farm of his wife’s cousin in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. He also is part of the Mariposa in the Schools effort, which brings musicians into classrooms, which he considers a second job because of the money he receives but also is musically fulfilling. He also writes songs, records, and performs.
From March through May, he splits his time between his Toronto home and his Quebec farm. In June, he focuses on the farm until the harvest of 6,000 to 8,000 bushels of apples is completed, along with the acre of pumpkins and 1.5 acres of squash. But even while farming, he’ll weave in music, writing songs and recording demo CDs when the nights start getting darker earlier and he has to depart the fields sooner. He also hosts singing tours for Vermont schools, showing the farm and explaining how it operates through songs he has written. And when he is performing music, the farm he owns can intrude, with his farm helper calling a few minutes before the event to solicit a decision on a problem that’s cropped up.
“It feels really good most of the time. But sometimes I get stressed out, [such as] when we had an unexpected frost,” he noted in an interview in early May. “It’s a super integration of what I like to do. They dovetail very much with each other.”
Caitlin Hanford, 57, plays in two popular musical groups, Quartette which also features Sylvia Tyson, and The Marigolds. In each, the singers decided at the outset that they would only perform when everyone was available, something they knew would set limits because they all had solo careers. For the others, that solo career was performing. For Ms. Hanford, it was teaching music, these days for kindergarten to Grade 3 at Queen Victoria Public School in Toronto’s Parkdale district.
So during the week she teaches, although occasionally in an evening one of the groups will be practising to prepare for a performance. On some weekends, she will take part in “runouts,” performing with one of the groups in Southern Ontario locales where she can be back, and refreshed, for her classes on Monday morning. During March break and her summer vacation, she aims to fit in a lot of performances. “I see it as a balance. Music is my No. 1 passion. Even if there seems to not be enough hours in the day, I love what I am doing,” she says.
The toughest period is before Christmas, when the groups can be busy. “If you’re playing every weekend and teaching during the weeks there’s not a lot of time off. But the Christmas season is short and I love music so much it feeds my energies,” she says.
Singer-songwriter Anne Walker, 52, is an itinerant English as second language instructor in Pickering, Ont. Just as Mr. Rawlings writes songs about his apple farm to educate the student tours, she likes to write songs that can be used in the classroom to help students learn English.
Teaching hinders her music somewhat because she must be at school through the morning, keeping her from evening and late-night networking sessions to secure gigs or taking part in open stages where promoters listen to musicians. As well, she is limited to performing during the school year at places she can travel to and return on a weekend.
In 2007, she was diagnosed with cancer, and that brought her life into focus. It became clear that music was very important to her, and the many songs she had written but not recorded should see the light of day. She put out a CD, Labyrinth, which cost about $15,000, since she not only has to pay for studio time but also pay for musicians to accompany her. Then she needed to find more gigs to pay for it.
She’s the only one of the musicians interviewed who still has children at home, albeit now teenagers. When they were younger, she curtailed her singing career somewhat, and also looked for family-friendly settings where she could take her children. On some occasions, they would come on stage and sing with her, again blending elements of her life together into a workable balance.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter
Wednesday, May 16, 2012 10:53 AM EDT
At the table – or not – with executive decision makers
Who’s in the Room?
By Bob Frisch
(Jossey-Bass, 193 pages, $35.95)
******
For those in the middle or the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, there’s little doubt about who makes the big decisions: the senior management team.
But Boston-based consultant Bob Frisch, who works with many executive teams, has found that it isn’t so clear to those at the top.
Often, members of the senior executive feel that weighty decisions are made even before issues come to their agenda, and that they are expected merely to wave the initiative on through. Instead, decisions are made by a team with no name – one that doesn’t appear on any organization chart.
This informal group is what might be called the kitchen cabinet, a small core of intimate advisers to the chief executive, and perhaps a few people specially included because of their expertise about the issue at hand. These are people the CEO totally trusts; they are not seen as parochial, unlike members of the senior management team, who typically are ardent defenders of their own portfolio.
In Who’s In The Room? Mr. Frisch argues that senior management teams have many strengths and are in a unique position to take on tasks no other group in the organization can handle. But making big decisions isn’t one of their strong points.
“Although senior management teams are excellent forms for brainstorming, creativity, option development, information sharing, co-ordination, dependency management, and a host of other functions, they are often ill-suited to decision-making, even of the casual, consensus-seeking type that characterizes the deliberations of many senior teams,” he writes.
Senior managers tend to be torn between exercising the functional expertise that brought them to the top of the heap and the CEO’s desire that everyone on the team take an organization-wide perspective.
Although called a team, they really are more of a legislature, with each person representing a significant constituency – the people in his or her department. But confusion inevitably arises about representation and influence. Should finance, purchasing, marketing, human resources, and operations have equal weight in the team’s deliberations, or should some departments have more clout?
Mr. Frisch urges us to accept the reality that CEOs need different configurations of people – different people in the room – for various types of decisions and tasks. Chief executives need to create a portfolio of teams, and the senior management team must take responsibility for three conversations crucial to every company:
The common world view
The senior management team must agree on what is happening in the world that affects the company. Once these drivers of change are determined, the organization must be aligned around a shared set of assumptions about what flows from this.
This discussion must be carried out by the senior management team – not the strategic planning department or the marketing department – because its membership ensures broad input. He urges the team to figuratively walk the company’s boundaries, testing the supposedly immovable “walls” – the things you believe you should not do – to determine whether breakthroughs could happen if the boundaries changed.
Priorities
The senior management team should develop a list of all the major projects being undertaken within the organization – there are probably 80 to 120 in most large companies, he says – and then develop priorities. To do this, he suggests setting up a bull’s-eye target with two circles around it for every company objective , and then agreeing as a team where on (or off) the target the project should be placed.
Initiatives
When new opportunities are being assessed, the senior management team – thanks to its members’ instinctive parochialism – is ideal for evaluating what is involved in executing the idea and whether the company has the resources to get it done. They should commit the resources at the start, so the initiative doesn’t later bog down, or put on the brakes if it clearly won’t work.
Mr. Frisch ends by giving CEOs specific advice. “In thinking about the best structure to put into place for yourself, the goal is to ensure two things: That you’re getting the input you need to make decisions and that the executives around you have the opportunity to align their points of view and co-ordinate organizational activities effectively.”
Who’s in the Room? contains many fresh insights and practical techniques that will help senior executives – and anyone interested in organizational dynamics – to understand how to improve decision making and to execute decisions more effectively.
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POSTSCRIPT
Anthony Griffiths shares tales of his time on a slew of Canadian boards, watching management and mismanagement, in Corporate Catalyst (John Wiley, 338 pages, $36.95).
Vancouver-based consultant Bruna Martinuzzi offers practical tool and techniques for Presenting with Credibility (Six Seconds, 359 pages, $21.95)
In The Information Diet (O’Reilly, 150 pages, $24.99), software developer Clay Johnson shows you how to thrive in today’s information glut.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter
Friday, May 11, 2012 3:59 PM EDT
Five major mistakes leaders make
In her work with executives over the years, Atlanta-based leadership development consultant Beth Armknecht Miller has found five major mistakes that leaders make.
Interestingly, when managers work to improve on these leadership shortfalls, it has a positive impact on the effectiveness and profitability of the organization. On the Great Leadership blog, she highlights these five mistakes:
1. Focusing on the urgent
Like the White Rabbit in Alice’s in Wonderland, some managers rush about, pulling others down the rabbit hole with them, obsessed with the urgent rather than the important. Indeed, Ms. Miller notes that some leaders get their energy from working in crisis mode.
“The key is to set aside time on the calendar that is only for the important activities, and have the activities clearly prioritized so that when an urgent item is screaming at you, you can logically decide what important task can be set aside,” she writes.
If you are drawn into the urgent to deal with a crisis, don’t get stuck there.
Friday, May 11, 2012 4:01 PM EDT
Middle managers under the gun
No child ever dreams of growing up to be a middle manager, notes Tacy Byham, vice-president of executive development for Development Dimensions International. These days, with the downsizing of management, middle managers may see their situation as a nightmare.
In TCB Review, Ms. Byham notes that one manager she knows has 72 direct reports and is responsible for performance reviews for all of them, while another manager says being insanely busy is a “badge of honour” in her organization. Mid-level leaders who feel overworked and underappreciated may become disillusioned about their jobs, disengaged from their teams, and fail to do all the important things they are counted on to do.
Friday, May 11, 2012 4:02 PM EDT
The liability factor of being responsible
Proponents of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs argue that they build up a reservoir of good will that can help companies if they run into a problem that puts them in the spotlight in a negative way. But recent research shows that rather than acting as a form of insurance, a strong CSR record can be a liability.
Jiao Luo and Stephan Meier of Columbia Business School and Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School looked at the oil industry and found the news media far more likely to report accidents if they occur at a company with a strong CSR record. That could be because the accidents are more surprising and thus more newsworthy, and it’s possible – using the insurance hypothesis – that the media would be more sympathetic to the company.
The Manager Contributors
Harvey Schachter
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager for The Globe and Mail's T.G.I.M. page, management book reviews on Wednesdays and an online work-life balance column on Fridays. He has also written a series of articles for The Globe called The Leadership Guru Interviews, which can be found on the Globe Careers leadership advice page.
