Individually we humans are the smartest creatures on earth. Or at least we like to think so. You notice I said individually. However, sometimes when working together we produce far-from-perfect results.

Throughout history, we have pulled off amazing feats as a result of our ability to collaborate and build upon our collective efforts.

As a species, when we coordinate and play to our higher purpose, we are pretty amazing. The launching of the Hubble telescope is a testament to what we can achieve with our collaborative efforts. Never has our ability to ‘pull together’ been more important or more challenged by the environment we live in.

Collaborative Intelligence (or CQ) exists in all groups, and is defined as the process of harnessing the intelligence and energy of networks of people.

The co-operative potential within corporations and teams is huge; tapping into their Collaborative Intelligence becomes a game everyone needs to play. Highly successful organizations are those with the most effective teams – this is no accident. The question is: “How can we tap into and build more collaborative intelligence?”

Here are 10 ways to harness greater quantities of collaborative intelligence:

1. Establish a ‘higher calling’ for the team.

This is a common purpose that represents a higher calling and brings context to the significance of the team’s existence. For example: Apple Computer stating that they ‘educate the world’. Providing a service to society is the simplest way that an organization can isolate a higher calling for its existence. This process must be entered into with full sincerity. A ‘true’ higher calling is reflective of the culture and intentions of the organization as a whole and therefore is core to what the organization is ‘for’ and how it plans to achieve that.

2 . Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity.

Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do. Rather than the practical results of any particular idea, the focus will be on the level of innovation, even those that don’t result in ’success’ in the conventional sense. History is piled high with examples of ‘mistakes’ that became innovations of great value. When we reward attempts at innovation we are stating that it is the intention that is important.

3. Plan to use all of the experience within the team.

Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience. That’s a lot of wisdom to tap into. Great team leaders and managers know how to harness and tap into those years of experience and wisdom.

4. Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions.

Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’. Supported by assumptions that go unchecked and unchallenged, teams can continue to run the same old routines for a long time without anyone noticing. If the same old routine is getting you and your team the results you need, then that’s a good thing. If not, maybe it is time to life the hood and have a peep into what’s driving the team’s behavior – at the assumptions.

5. Encourage team members to find out about each others roles.

The more they know about others perspectives, the more likely they will be able to empathize with them when the going gets tough. In the past, empathy has been considered a ’soft skill’ that has no place in the business arena. In reality empathy is an important business skill. The ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes helps us understand what others needs and motivations are.

6. Intention is the Keystone.

Just as a team’s attention is important – so is intention. Intentions have an eerie way of manifesting into reality. Setting intention causes our attention to notice specific aspects of our environment. Intention directs attention so we must plan that very carefully. Having the team form a positive intention around an objective is one of the best ways of doing this.

7. Celebrate successes along the way.

Celebration acts to reinforce the progress a team has made and emphasizes the importance of the team process in reaching desired objectives. The rituals observed in different cultures, such as Ramadan, Christmas, Hanukkah, and graduations are a testament to how important celebration is to us. Making celebration an integral part of the life of a team / organization helps the individual fell more deeply connected to it.

8. Invest resources in learning.

Continuous improvement is only possible when individual and the team as a whole are learning new things. By publicly demonstrating support for the learning process, leaders model the importance of building ‘learning organizations’. This serves everyone in the long run. Creating ‘learning teams’ is one of the core strategies for running an organization that is highly adaptive and responsive to change.

9. Provide opportunities for sharing ideas during the project-planning phase. People do not argue with their own material. That is, when everyone has taken an active part in the planning process then creating the ‘buy-in’ for the project is much simpler. Because it belongs to them. they are much more likely to give the project their full support.

10. Balance ‘top-down’ with ‘bottom-up’ processing.

This means that directives and guidance from the top must be balanced with feedback and ’street-level’ information. Swarm Intelligence is a very real factor in the functioning of any team / group. One of the reasons baboons are faster learners than chimps is that they congregate in larger numbers and are quicker at sharing large amounts of information. The reward for this distinction is that baboons have the nickname the ‘rats of Africa’ and the chimps last hope of survival is a wild life trust. Most organizations would benefit by facilitating more bottom-up processing.

Managers and leaders are realizing that more efficient collaboration is the key to their teams being more effective. Because human beings are involved, the solution is not going to be solely technological. Many companies have realized that everyone having a Blackberry has not solved more problems. With the high levels of employee stress reported, it appears that the human portion of the equation has not benefited much – we just have to run a little faster it seems. Helping teams tap into greater levels of collaborative intelligence @ work promises many things – lease of all making it possible for us to enjoy our work more, which has to be a good thing.

Stephen James Joyce author of Teaching an Anthill to Fetch

The search for a highly skilled electrical engineer to head product development had been long and time consuming. The high-tech firm had proceeded carefully, interviewing several candidates. While dozens applied for the job, only two or three met the full criteria.

The company was not about to gamble its future on the wrong choice. Management was resolved to expend whatever time and resources were necessary to find the right person. The position required a true visionary who could lead the company’s development efforts into the next century.

The person they selected was a superb technician, innovative and thoughtful, aware of both opportunities and pitfalls involved in marketing new products. He had a tremendous way with people, as well. The vice president of engineering was thrilled with the find. Now, 18 months later, just as the product development team was reaching the expected levels of innovation and effectiveness, the VP received the disappointing news. The director handed in his resignation, effective the end of the month. The company would have to begin the search process anew.

The VP’s frustration was palpable. What had gone wrong? Why was the director leaving so suddenly? All the time and care that had gone into the selection, and now this. He wondered what he could do to guard against a similar experience with the next hire.

Turnover Rates are Rising

Stories like this are common in Silicon Valley and other high-tech corridors. In industries such as software and entertainment, some companies experience turnover rates as high as 35 percent. Recent data suggest that turnover among professional, technical and managerial ranks is increasing in more traditional industries, as well.

Why? One possible reason is that the “psychological contract” between an individual and organization is weaker than ever. Good performance is no longer a guarantee of long-term employment and individual workers today are more aware of outside opportunities. With decreased loyalty, people perceive increased permeability in the boundaries between company and environment, making them better able, both practically and psychologically, to move from one organization to another.

Frequent movement by professional workers creates a turbulent environment that strains companies and their human resources departments.

Recruiting and retaining skilled employees has become a central focus for many organizations. Many high-tech companies find their HR budgets consumed by recruiting costs, often more than 50 percent of the total budget. Training costs also mount as a result of turnover. But the costs go beyond the monetary. Time lost to find and train replacements translates to a loss of business momentum. And with the fast pace of competition today, that can be a mortal blow to a company’s strategic plan.

The Changing Nature of Work

To fully comprehend the critical and increasing importance of retention, it is first necessary to acknowledge and understand just how much the work environment has changed in the last 15 years. Several significant trends impact today’s workplace:

• Increasing emphasis on cognitive rather than manual skills
• Highly complex organizational systems
• A lack of boundaries across jobs, departments and organizations
• Increasing competition and environmental uncertainty
• Advancements in technology that quicken the pace of information transfer
  and the speed of work itself
• Increasing diversity in the composition of the workforce
• Global interdependence.

The marketplace is more competitive and turbulent, characterized by increased attention to customer demands, shorter product life cycles and faster time-to-market. At the same time, organizations are eliminating layers of management and encouraging new forms of work, such as team-based operating. Technological innovation, telecommunications and other information technology advancements have impacted not only how work gets done, but also the organization’s staffing and training needs.

This combination of factors has created the need for highly skilled, professional workers that bring specialized abilities to an increasingly technical workplace where problem resolution is complex or unknown at the outset.

As work situations turn increasingly non-routine, it becomes more important for organizations to focus on the retention of employees who match organizational needs and who are able to adapt to these ambiguous and changing circumstances.

Predicting Turnover

Some aspects of turnover have been thoroughly studied within the behavioral sciences and are widely acknowledged. The typical “early departure” is young, educated, has low tenure with his or her current organization, and has another job offer in hand. Contrary to what some might believe, perceptions of favorable local job market conditions do not seem to play a role in either an individual’s thoughts of quitting or his or her job search behaviors. An employee is more likely to stay with an organization if he or she has a realistic sense of what day-to-day working conditions will be like.

However, despite thousands of studies on the subject, researchers’ ability to predict turnover behaviour remains surprisingly low.

Common sense, such as it is, assumes that poor employee attitudes about the work situation stimulate the quitting process. If the organization fails to meet the individual’s expectations, he or she becomes dissatisfied and is more likely to leave. But common sense does not help answer some very key questions: What are employees’ expectations? How can an organization best meet employee expectations, both individually and collectively?

Employees are most likely to stay put when they are both satisfied with their jobs and also committed to the organization. The question then becomes: What constitutes job satisfaction and how can one gauge organizational commitment?

Job satisfaction consists of three core dimensions: meaningfulness of the work, felt responsibility, and knowledge of the results of work efforts. These components are enhanced through attention to five areas: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback. Work is motivating when the employee perceives the enhancement of these job characteristics.

Likewise, five factors contribute to attitudes of organizational commitment. Decision latitude, coworker relations, compensation and benefits, organizational communication, and internal job mobility all are important to fostering a deep connection to the organization. Three factors play a significant role in shaping both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Decision latitude, coworker relations, and compensation and benefits are important to the existence of both attitudes.

Forming a Retention Strategy

Companies are wise to aggressively explore ways to increase employee retention. Those that do will ensure less waste in recruitment and training, greater continuity, and thus increased momentum toward the accomplishment of business objectives.
Enhancing retention is not as easy as simply raising salary levels, although that may be part of what is required. Building a strategy for retention requires identification and detailed analysis of key precursors to turnover in a particular organization and its specific context. Then it is necessary to devise a range of initiatives that address those issues and focus on enhancing both job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

A number of opportunities exist in the work environment for management to influence employee turnover intentions.

Following are some general strategies that companies can employ to help guard against the loss of key employees:

Provide ample decision latitude in job responsibilities

Employees want to have influence over how their work gets done and want to feel as though their employers have confidence in their thinking and actions. They want their opinions to be valued. They don’t want the boss looking over their shoulder. Authority to act autonomously contributes a great deal to how satisfied one is with the job, and consequently how committed one is to the organization.

Enhance satisfaction with compensation and benefits

While few employees today take or leave a job based solely on remuneration, it remains a critical component. Innovations such as pay-for-performance programs can help ensure that those who are central to the company’s success are rewarded accordingly. Companies that provide long-term incentives tied to performance over time find it easier to keep high-performing employees. Ensuring that raises and bonuses are based primarily on merit and having an equitable performance appraisal system are also crucial to employee’s feelings of fairness and worth.

Perhaps most importantly, employers should make sure that employees understand the reasoning behind the organization’s performance management and compensation and benefits systems. Additionally, offering more flexible benefits, such as telecommuting, flex-time, sabbatical leaves and childcare also contribute to higher levels of satisfaction. These conditions help ensure that key people maintain the appropriate levels of commitment.

Provide internal promotion and transfer opportunities

When there are avenues for participating more fully in the company through upward, as well as lateral moves, employees are better able to maintain heightened interest in their jobs and the organization. It also helps fulfill the need that high-performing workers have for increasing their knowledge and skill base. Outlining clear career paths gives employees a road map for their expectations of enhancing their position. These factors go a long way toward limiting turnover by providing satisfaction for today and hope for the future. Employees feel more vested in the organization, more committed and are less likely to think about quitting.

Provide education and training opportunities

The importance of internal job mobility also illustrates the importance of providing formal opportunities for advancement and training. High-performing employees crave exposure to leading-edge thinking. While job mobility helps broaden their knowledge, formal education and training opportunities provide focused learning and a chance to enhance their worth. This kind of job enrichment makes employees feel valued and appreciated and helps companies control turnover. You may worry that such initiatives increase employees? mobility and that is true. But not developing talented, ambitious employees will surely lead to their departure.

Actively promote positive relations among co-workers

Management training on conflict resolution, relationship development and team building gives employees a sense of confidence that the company cares about its people and their satisfaction. It also helps create a sense of community and a support network within the organization. Enhancing an employee’s sense of belonging and loyalty to this community reduces the likelihood that he or she will leave.

Provide formal and informal, vertical and horizontal channels of communication

There is a positive relationship between organizational communication and organizational commitment, which underscores the importance of effective communication practices within modern workplace conditions. From direct supervisory communication to formal communications programs such as newsletters, employees need and want to know what’s going on. And they want the opportunity to express their opinions. Among other things, they are interested in how their work impacts the company, what changes affect their jobs directly, and how management perceives their work.

A Step Forward

The volatile and competitive environment characterized by Silicon Valley companies is spreading throughout the business world. The loss of good people is a serious problem that impacts all industries. It has become imperative that companies of all types begin to devise strategies for increasing retention of valuable employees.

The tremendous costs of turnover dictate that employers pay attention to job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Flexibility and autonomy, social interactions, satisfactory rewards, good communication, and opportunities to grow are among the factors that are important to employees’ overall feelings of attachment to the company.

Organizations that attend to the issue of retention will stave off the inevitable negatives associated with the critical loss of key people and by doing so, ultimately enhance their own competitive position.

It consists of four fundamental capabilities: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skill. Each capability, in turn, is composed of specific sets of competencies.

Below is a list of the capabilities and their corresponding traits. Give yourself a score out of 10 for your perceived level of emotional development on each capability and then ask a key person in your work group to score you.

Self-Awareness

• Emotional self-awareness: the ability to read and understand your emotions as well as recognize their impact on work performance and relationships
• Accurate self-assessment: a realistic evaluation of your strengths and limitations
• Self-confidence: a strong and positive sense of self worth

Self-Management

• Self -control: the ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control
• Trustworthiness: a consistent display of honesty and integrity
• Conscientiousness: the ability to manage yourself and your responsibilities
• Adaptability: skill at adjusting to changing situations and overcoming obstacles
• Achievement orientation: the drive to meet an internal standard of excellence
• Initiative: a readiness to seize opportunities

Social Awareness

• Empathy: skill at sensing other people’s emotions, understanding their perspective and taking an active interest in their concerns
• Organizational awareness: the ability to read the currents of organizational life, build decision networks and navigate politics
• Service orientation: the ability to recognize and meet customers’ needs

Social Skill

• Visionary leadership: the ability to take charge & inspire with a compelling vision
• Influence: the ability to wield a range of persuasive tactics
• Developing others: the propensity to bolster the abilities of others through feedback and guidance
• Communication: skill at listening and sending clear, convincing messages
• Change catalyst: proficiency in initiating new ideas and leading people in a new direction
• Conflict management: the ability to de-escalate disagreements and orchestrate resolutions
• Building bonds: proficiency at cultivating and maintaining a web of relationships
• Teamwork and collaboration: competence at promoting cooperation and building teams

Growing Your Emotional Intelligence

Unlike IQ, which is largely genetic—the skills of emotional intelligence can be learned at any age. Growing your emotional intelligence takes practice and commitment, but the payoffs are well worth the investment.

Let’s use the case of a mythical marketing director for a division of a global food company. Jack, as we’ll call him, was a classic pacesetter: high energy, always striving to find better ways to get things done and too eager to step in and take over when someone seemed about to miss a deadline. Worse, Jack was prone to pounce on anyone who didn’t seem to meet his standards, flying off the handle if a person merely deviated from completing a job in the order Jack thought best.

Jack’s leadership style had a predictably disastrous impact on climate and business results. After two years of stagnant performance, Jack’s boss suggested he seek out a coach. Jack wasn’t pleased but, realizing his own job was on the line, he complied.

The coach began with a 360-degree evaluation of Jack. A diagnosis from multiple viewpoints is essential in improving emotional intelligence because those who need the most help usually have blind spots. In fact, recent research found that top-performing leaders overestimate their strengths on, at most, one emotional intelligence ability, whereas poor performers overrate themselves on four or more.

Jack was not that far off, but he did rate himself more glowingly than his direct reports, who gave him especially low grades on emotional self-control and empathy. Initially, Jack had some trouble accepting the feedback data, but when his coach showed him how those weaknesses were tied to his inability to display leadership styles dependent on those competencies—especially the authoritative, affiliative, and coaching styles—Jack realized he had to improve if he wanted to advance in the company.

Making such a connection is essential

The reason: improving emotional intelligence isn’t done in a weekend or during a seminar—it takes diligent practice on the job, over several months. If people do not see the value of the change, they will not make that effort. Once Jack zeroed in on areas for improvement and committed himself to making the effort, he and his coach worked up a plan to turn his day-to-day job into a learning laboratory.

For instance, Jack discovered he was empathetic when things were calm, but in a crisis, he tuned out others. This tendency hampered his ability to listen to what people were telling him in the very moments he most needed to do so. Jack’s plan required him to focus on his behaviour during tough situations. As soon as he felt himself tensing up, his job was to immediately step back, let the other person speak, and then ask clarifying questions. The point was to not act judgmentally
or hostile under pressure.

The change didn’t come easily, but with practice Jack learned to defuse his flare-ups by entering into a dialogue instead of launching a harangue. Although he didn’t always agree with them, at least he gave people a chance to make their case. At the same time, Jack also practiced giving his direct reports more positive feedback and reminding them of how their work contributed to the group’s mission and he restrained himself from micromanaging them.

Jack met with his coach every week or two to review his progress and get advice on specific problems. For instance, occasionally Jack would find himself falling back on his old pacesetting tactics by cutting people off, jumping in to take over and blowing up in a rage. Almost immediately, he would regret it, so he and his coach dissected those relapses to figure out what triggered the old ways and what to do the next time a similar moment arose.

Such “relapse prevention” measures inoculate people against future lapses or just giving up. Over a six-month period, Jack made real improvement. His own records showed he had reduced the number of flare-ups from one or more a day at the beginning to just one or two a month. The climate had improved sharply and the division’s numbers were starting to creep upward.

Why does improving an emotional intelligence competence take months rather than days? The emotional centres of the brain, not just the neocortex, are involved. The neocortex, the thinking brain that learns technical skills and purely cognitive abilities, gains knowledge very quickly, but the emotional brain does not.

To master a new behaviour, the emotional centres need repetition and practice. Improving your emotional intelligence, then, is akin to changing your habits. Brain circuits that carry leadership habits have to unlearn the old ones and replace them with the new. The more often a behavioural sequence is repeated, the stronger the underlying brain circuits become. At some point, the new neural pathways become the brain’s default option. When that happened, Jack was able to go through the paces of leadership effortlessly, using styles that worked for him and the whole company.

In the past, it was always the person with the best technical or operational skills who moved most quickly up an organization’s ladder of success. With increasing frequency in today’s workplace, strong technical expertise is no longer the sole key to success. Of equal or even more importance is a leader’s ability to effectively interact with people.

Current research demonstrates that various skills linked under the general title of “people skills” play an increasingly important role at the very highest levels of an organization. Differences in technical competencies are of negligible importance. The higher the rank of a person considered to be a star performer, the more people skills emerge as the reason for his or her effectiveness as a leader and as a strong performer.

According to Jordan-Evans, co-author of “Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay,” people don’t quit companies, they quit bosses. Generally, those bosses lack people skills. Employee drive and commitment are often directly linked to the individual’s relationship with management.

People Skills

In broad-brush terms, people skills are often described as:

• The ability to talk, to understand, and to empathize.
• The ability to advance the work of an organization by interacting with others in ways that develop respect, mutual understanding and productive working relations.
• The ability to interact with others in a manner that builds effective relationships of trust, so that they can succeed as a result of your impact on their lives.

Perhaps a more helpful way to describe this skill set is to note several of the typical characteristics of individuals who possess effective people skills:

• They understand themselves and how their behaviour impacts others.
• They control their responses; they try to be less impulsive and to think before acting.
• They have a sincere desire to assist others in the pursuit of goals.
• They are able to “tune in” accurately to the feelings and needs of others and then treat people accordingly.
• They work at managing relationships, building networks and finding common ground in order to minimize conflict and maximize rapport.
• They are consistently approachable.
• They create an environment of trust.

Developing People Skills In Employees

Critical to launching any program regarding development of people, is to understand that the program must have buy-in at the top. The leadership of an organization sets the tone for the organization’s culture. The “old dogs cannot learn new tricks” theory is merely an excuse for unwillingness to change behaviour. People skills are about behaviours and behaviours can be learned if someone is open to his or her blind spots and has the willingness to develop a plan for change.

Many of today’s successful organizations are investing in people-development programs that will reap returns over the long term. In addition to programs aimed at current management, these organizations are creating programs that help workers start developing people skills at much earlier stages of their careers. The organizations understand that these individuals will be better prepared to become tomorrow’s leaders by acquiring people skills early in their development. Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a program to develop people skills, the following outlines a program we have used successfully with several clients:

• Identify needs based on perceived culture (now and in the future), mission statement, vision statement and/or values statement
• Identify gaps between current and expected
• Establish goals
• Define the process
• Select an internal and/or external human resource development specialist
• Develop content of program (multi-rater feedback, self-assessments, skill development modules, application of skills, etc.)
• Select participants
• Set objectives
• Conduct development workshops and/or personal assessments
• Identify internal and external coaches to assist in learning new skills
• Measure results
• Evaluate process

There are a wide range of possible components of a people development program, far too many to be described in detail here. Several that are frequently used are coaching/mentoring programs; a 360-degree (multi-rater) feedback process (obtaining confidential, anonymous feedback from your boss, colleagues and direct-reports); one-on-one executive coaching; effective communication and feedback training; and self-assessment inventories.

Experience shows that effective people skills are the competitive advantage in any successful organization over the long haul. If competitive success is achieved through people, then doesn’t it follow that the people skills of those who lead and manage are critical?

An investment and commitment of time and resources today to develop these critical skills will result in a change to your organization’s culture that will have a positive impact on all areas of your business, including the bottom line.

The Business Review (Albany) – February 22, 2002 by Harriet Rifkin

Primary management practices

Strategy

• Whatever your strategy, whether it is low prices or innovative products, it will work if it is sharply defined, clearly communicated, and well understood by employees, customers, partners, and investors
• Build a strategy around a clear value proposition for the customer
• Develop strategy from the outside in, based on what your customers, partners, and investors have to say—and how they behave—not on gut feel or instinct
• Continually fine-tune your strategy based on changes in the marketplace—for example, a new technology, a social trend, a government regulation, or a competitor’s breakaway product
• Clearly communicate your strategy within the organization and to customers and other external stakeholders
• Keep focused. Grow your core business, and beware the unfamiliar

Execution

• Develop and maintain flawless operational execution. You might not always delight your customers, but make sure never to disappoint them
• Deliver products and services that consistently meet customers’ expectations
• Put decision-making authority close to the front lines so employees can react quickly to changing market conditions
• Constantly strive to eliminate all forms of excess and waste; improve productivity at a rate that is roughly twice the industry average

Culture

• Corporate culture advocates sometimes argue that if you can make the work fun, all else will follow. Our results suggest that holding high expectations about performance matters a lot more
• Inspire all managers and employees to do their best
• Empower employees and managers to make independent decisions and to find ways to improve operations—including their own
• Reward achievement with pay based on performance, but keep raising the performance bar
• Pay psychological rewards in addition to financial ones
• Create a challenging, satisfying work environment
• Establish and abide by clear company values

Structure

• Managers spend hours agonizing over how to structure their organizations (by product, geography, customer, and so on)
• Winners show that what really counts is whether structure reduces bureaucracy and simplifies work
• Simplify. Make your organization easy to work in and work with
• Promote cooperation and the exchange of information across the whole company
• Put your best people closest to the action
• Establish systems for the seamless sharing of knowledge

Secondary management practices

Talent

• Winners hold on to talented employees and develop more
• Fill mid- and high-level jobs with outstanding internal talent whenever possible
• Create and maintain top-of-the-line training and development programs
• Design jobs that will intrigue and challenge your best performers
• Keep senior management actively involved in the selection and development of people

Innovation

• An agile company turns out innovative products and services and anticipates disruptive events in an industry rather than reacting when it may already be too late
• Relentlessly pursue disruptive technologies to develop innovative new products and services
• Don’t hesitate to cannibalize existing products
• Apply new technologies to enhance all operating processes, not just those dedicated to designing new products and services

Leadership

• Choosing great chief executives can raise performance significantly. Closely link the leadership team’s pay to its performance
• Encourage management to strengthen its connections with people at all levels of the company
• Inspire management to hone its capacity to spot opportunities and problems early
• Appoint a board of directors whose members have a substantial stake in the company’s success

Mergers and Partnerships

• Internally generated growth is essential, but companies that can master mergers and acquisitions can also be winners
• Enter new businesses that leverage existing customer relationships and complement core strengths
• When partnering, move into new businesses that make the best use of both partners’ talents
• Develop a system for identifying, screening, and closing deals

If it doesn’t energize people and focus their work, watch for the following:

Dangling Dialogue

Confusion prevails. The meeting ends without a clear next step. People create their own self-serving interpretations of the meeting, and no one can be held accountable later when goals aren’t met. Give the meeting closure by ensuring that everyone knows who will do what, by when. Do it in writing if necessary, and be specific.

Information Clogs

Failure to get all the relevant information into the open. An important fact or opinion comes to light after a decision has been reached, which reopens the decision. This pattern happens repeatedly. Ensure that the right people are in attendance in the first place. When missing information is discovered, disseminate it immediately. Make the expectation for openness and candor explicit by asking, “What’s missing?” Use coaching and sanctions to correct information hoarding.

Piecemeal Perspectives

People stick to narrow views and self-interest and fail to acknowledge that others have valid interests. Draw people out until you’re sure all sides of the issue have been represented. Restate the common purpose repeatedly to keep everyone focused on the big picture. Generate alternatives. Use coaching to show people how their work contributes to the overall mission of the enterprise.

Free-for-All

By failing to direct the flow of the discussion, the leader allows negative behaviours to flourish. “Extortionists” hold the whole group for ransom until others see it their way; “side trackers” go off on tangents and recount history by saying “When I did this ten years ago…,” or delve into unnecessary detail; “silent liars” do not express their true opinions, or they agree to things they have no intention of doing; and “dividers” create breaches within the group by seeking support for their viewpoint outside the social operating mechanism or have parallel discussions during the meeting.

The leader must exercise inner strength by repeatedly signaling which behaviours are acceptable and by sanctioning those who persist in negative behaviour. If less severe sanctions fail, the leader must be willing to remove the offending player from the group.

Yvonne Bent Human Logistics Consultant

If your organization demands knowledge work from its people, then you undoubtedly appreciate the importance of sheer brainpower. You probably recruit high-intellect people and ensure they have access to good information. You probably also respect the power of incentives and use formal compensation systems to channel that intellectual energy down one path or another. But you might be overlooking another crucial driver of a knowledge worker’s performance—that person’s inner work life. People experience a constant stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they react to and make sense of the events of the workday. As people arrive at their workplaces they don’t check their hearts and minds at the door. Unfortunately, because inner work life is seldom openly expressed in modern organizations, it’s all too easy for managers to pretend that private thoughts and feelings don’t matter.

As psychologists, we became fascinated a decade ago with day-to-day work life. But our research into inner work life goes well beyond intellectual curiosity about the complex operations of emotions, perceptions, and motivations. It addresses the very pragmatic managerial question of how these dynamics affect work performance. To examine this question, we constructed a research project that would give us a window into the inner work lives of a broad population of knowledge workers.

Specifically, we recruited 238 professionals from 26 project teams and had them complete daily diary entries, in a standard format, for the duration of their projects. Nearly 12,000 diary entries later, we have discovered the dynamics of inner work life and the significant effect it can have on the performance of your people—and, by implication, your entire organization.
It may stun you, if you are a manager, to learn what power you hold. Your behavior as a manager dramatically shapes your employees’ inner work lives. But the key levers in your hands for driving motivation and performance may not be the ones you’d suspect.

More Than Meets the Eye

Think about your own most recent day at the office, and try to recall it in some detail. What would hidden observers have been able to learn had they been watching you go through that day? They might have read e-mails you composed, looked over the numbers you plugged into spreadsheets, reviewed the reports you prepared. They would have noted your interactions, in formal meetings or hallway encounters, with colleagues, subordinates, and superiors and listened in on a presentation you delivered. They would have heard your end of various telephone conversations, perhaps with customers, suppliers, or consultants. Maybe they would have watched you sitting quietly for a while, looking off into space, jotting down a few notes.

But would these observers really understand your inner work life that day? Of course not. In having those conversations and writing those reports, you were not only dealing with the task at hand. As events unfolded, you were also forming and adjusting perceptions about the people you work with, the organization you are part of, the work you do, and even yourself. You were experiencing emotions, maybe mild states of satisfaction or irritation, maybe intense feelings of pride or frustration. And these perceptions and emotions were intertwining to affect your work motivation from moment to moment—with consequences for your performance that day.

This is what we mean by inner work life: the dynamic interplay among personal perceptions, ranging from immediate impressions to more fully developed theories about what is happening and what it means; emotions, whether sharply defined reactions (such as elation over a particular success or anger over a particular obstacle) or more general feeling states, like good and bad moods; and motivation—your grasp of what needs to be done and your drive to do it at any given moment. Inner work life is crucial to a person’s experience of the workday but for the most part is imperceptible to others. Indeed, it goes largely unexamined even by the individual experiencing it.

In order to study inner work lives, we needed a level of access beyond that of an observer. Thus, we relied on the classic form of the personal diary. Every day, we sent a standard e-mail to every participant requesting a brief description, for our eyes only, of an event that stood out in his or her mind from that workday. (See the sidebar “How We Studied State of Mind” for more details on the study.) Their remarks tended to make clear what they thought of the event—what it said to them about their work, their team, their organization, or themselves—and how it made them feel. Beyond that, we had participants rate themselves and each of their teammates monthly along various dimensions (creativity, work quality, commitment to the work, and contributions to team cohesiveness). Because whole teams participated in the study, we were able to triangulate responses from colleagues, strengthening our understanding of notable events and their effects. Finally, rather than relying solely on a team’s diaries to assess its overall performance, we also included evaluations by knowledgeable people outside the team.

How We Studied State of Mind (Located at the end of this article)

We were immediately rewarded with evidence of the richness and intensity of people’s inner work lives and the proof that they were influenced strongly by the events of the day. What also emerged over time was evidence of the interplay among perceptions, emotions, and motivations—an inner work life system (See the exhibit “Processing Work Events: What Happens Inside.”) This discovery fits well with what is already known about the human brain. Recent research in neuroscience has found that emotion and cognition (which includes perception of events) are tightly intertwined. Areas of the brain associated with rational thought and decision making have direct connections to areas associated with feelings. They do not exist in separate psychological compartments, and they interact in complex ways. Like any system, the brain cannot be understood simply by looking at each individual component. Inner work life functions the same way: It is crucial to consider all components and their interactions.

When something happens at work—some workday event—it immediately triggers cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. People’s minds start “sensemaking”: They try to figure out why the event happened and what its implications are. These perceptions feed the emotions evoked by the event, and the emotions, in turn, feed the perceptions. Depending on what happens with these cognitive and emotional processes, motivation can shift, which, in turn, affects how people perform their work. We discerned these processes in the diaries of every team we studied and in most of the people who worked on those teams.

Consider how the dynamics played out with Infomap, a nine-person team of information technologists at DataBrook, a subsidiary of DreamSuite Hotels, that we tracked through various projects across a five-month period. (We have disguised all names and other identifying information about the people and their company.) One urgent project, dubbed the “BigDeal” project, came up suddenly in the fourth month of our study and had enormous financial implications. DreamSuite was being sued for more than $145 million, and its legal department required a great deal of analysis of financial records in order to defend the company. Infomap had eight days to complete the work.

Perception.

As the diary entries shown in the exhibit “The Reality Management Never Sees” reveal, the project had significant effects on the inner work lives of the team members. What first becomes clear in studying the diary entries is that people’s “events of the day” caused them to form perceptions. Clark’s diary entry for May 26, for example, describes the start of the project and the activity surrounding it. Clearly he is engaging in sensemaking, and he comes away with positive perceptions of the “extreme importance” of the work done in his office, the “problem-solving capability” of his team, and the “supportive” nature of management. We see the same kind of reflection by Chester as the project winds up on May 31. His sensemaking produces positive perceptions of the team’s coleader (Ellen), the team itself, other groups in the organization, and top management. These perceptions were triggered by specific events—for example, the extraordinary efforts of Ellen, who rolled up her sleeves and worked alongside the team.

The Reality Management Never Sees (Located at the end of this article)

Emotion.

We also see the impact of daily events on people’s emotions. Helen is inordinately pleased when an upper manager brings refreshments to the team. Marsha reacts to an example of outstanding teamwork with great pleasure. The work atmosphere on May 31 is “happy and light,” she notes—even though they were working on Memorial Day, which should have been a holiday for everyone. Chester’s upbeat emotions on May 31 are likewise unmistakable.

There is evidence, too, even in the span of these few diary entries, of interplay between perceptions and emotions. When a high-level executive delivers bottled water and pizza to the people working after hours, not only does the event cause happy surprise, it also sends a real signal to the workers. That seemingly trivial event caused people on the BigDeal project to perceive their work and themselves as important and valued, which evoked additional positive emotions. Similar emotions arose when other colleagues and teams offered to pitch in, reinforcing the positive perceptions that team members had formed of those people—and leading, over time, to even more positive emotions.

Motivation.

High levels of motivation are also on display in the BigDeal project diaries. The entry by Marsha on May 27, for example, reveals that she has just worked 15 hours straight. Yet she describes what she’s just endured as “one of the best days I’ve had in months!!” She notes, in that entry, that “our entire office worked like a real team” and referred to their work as the “big project.” Her previous diary entries allowed us to understand how her motivation on May 27 resulted from positive emotions and perceptions. We found, in those entries, that she often felt elated when the team worked closely together, and she perceived herself and her work as more valued when others in the organization signaled its importance.

These effects of emotion and perception on motivation make perfect sense. If people are sad or angry about their work, they won’t care about doing it well. If they are happy and excited about it, they will leap to the task and put great effort behind it. The same goes for perception. If people perceive the work, and themselves, as having high value, their motivation will be high. Just as important, if they perceive a clear path forward, with little ambiguity about what will constitute progress, motivation levels rise. The BigDeal project had all this going for it. People felt highly valued and certain about what needed to be accomplished. Ultimately, this translated to high performance on the project. Not only did the team get the work done on time, but its high quality made an immediate and measurable contribution to the company’s success.

The BigDeal project is all the more striking in comparison with the other projects we tracked for this team. In other periods, we were able to see the same inner work life system operating—but in much less positive ways. Despite the experiences during the BigDeal project, all was not rosy between the team and upper-level management. When, early in our study, an acquisition was announced, employees interpreted the event as a hostile takeover and reacted to it emotionally. Diary entries during that time used terms like “boneheaded” and “bigoted bunch of plantation owners” to describe top management.

When layoffs were announced after the acquisition, the entire team perceived the process as unfair. They expressed considerable fear and anger in their diaries and a markedly decreased level of motivation (“People are walking around scared and afraid for their jobs” and “What kills me is, after this, they will turn around and wonder why everyone doesn’t just throw themselves in front of a train for the company…what dopes”). In fact, during the entire time we studied the team—with the exception of the BigDeal project—the team members perceived their company’s executive leaders as aloof and oblivious to the team’s good work and reacted with varying levels of sadness, anger, and disgust.

Were managers aware of the team’s intensely positive perceptions, emotions, and motivations during the BigDeal project? Were they aware of its extremely negative inner work life at other times? Maybe. But when we met with the team, they made it clear that they generally displayed their emotions and described their perceptions only to each other or kept them entirely private. Our research suggests that most managers are not in tune with the inner work lives of their people; nor do they appreciate how pervasive the effects of inner work life can be on performance.

What Gets Done When People Have Good Days?

There is a long-standing debate among management scholars on the question of how work performance is influenced by people’s subjective experiences at work. One side says that people perform better when they are happier and internally motivated by love of the work. Others assert that people do their best work under pressure and when externally motivated by deadlines and competition with peers. There is research evidence to support each of these positions.

Having taken a microscope to this question, we believe strongly that performance is linked to inner work life and that the link is a positive one. People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work), and more favorable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders, and their organization. Moreover, these effects cannot be explained by people’s different personalities or backgrounds—which we did account for in our analyses. Put simply, every moment that they are performing their jobs, employees are “working under the influence” of their inner work lives.

So what do we mean by performance as it relates specifically to knowledge work? In settings where people must work collaboratively to solve vexing problems, high performance depends on four elements: creativity, productivity, commitment, and collegiality. We looked at each of these—using quantitative data from the monthly team ratings and the daily diary forms, as well as content analysis of the diary narratives—and mapped them against the three components of inner work life.

First, we traced the influence of positive emotion on people’s creativity—that is, their ability to come up with novel and useful ideas. Many previous studies, conducted as carefully controlled laboratory experiments, have demonstrated a causal relationship between emotion—also termed “affect” or “mood”—and creativity. Our diary study, which used real-world settings and a more naturalistic approach to measuring the effect of emotion on creativity, confirms that this is not merely a laboratory phenomenon. Positive emotion was tied to higher creativity, and negative emotion was tied to lower creativity. Across all 26 teams, people were over 50% more likely to have creative ideas on the days they reported the most positive moods than they were on other days. This finding is based not on people’s self-ratings of creativity but on evidence in the diary narrative that they actually did creative thinking that day.

There was even a surprising carry-over effect. The more positive a person’s mood on a given day, the more creative thinking he or she did the next day—and, to some extent, the day after that—even taking into account the person’s mood on those later days. This was clearly the experience of Marsha on the Infomap team. Of her 68 diary entries, 20 contained evidence of creative thinking. Fully 80% of those creative-thinking days followed days on which Marsha’s general mood was higher than average for her. Her negative emotions on the days preceding creative-thinking days were the mirror image. Her anger was below average on 75% of the preceding days, her fear was below average on 65%, and her sadness was below average on 60% of them.

Second, we looked at how people’s perceptions of their work context affected creativity. Again, our diary study adds more detailed evidence to previous research findings. People in our study were more creative when they interpreted the goings-on in their organizations in a positive light—that is, when they saw their organizations and leaders as collaborative, cooperative, open to new ideas, able to evaluate and develop new ideas fairly, clearly focused on an innovative vision, and willing to reward creative work. They were less creative when they perceived political infighting and internal competition or an aversion to new ideas or to risk taking.

Finally, we analyzed the impact of motivation, the third aspect of inner work life, on creativity. Over the past 30 years, we have garnered a great deal of research evidence supporting what we call the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity: People are more creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself—not by external pressures or rewards. Most of this evidence comes from laboratory experiments. When intrinsic motivation is lowered, creativity dips as well. Our diary data add to the evidence. Our study participants were more creative in their individual work on the days when they were more highly intrinsically motivated. What’s more, the projects distinguished by the greatest levels of creativity overall were the ones in which team members displayed the highest intrinsic motivation in their day-to-day work.

Our findings were quite similar when we shifted our focus from creativity to the other elements of performance: productivity, commitment to the work, and collegiality (specifically, contributions to team cohesiveness). People performed better on all these fronts when they were in a good mood and worse when they were in a bad mood. Productivity, commitment, and collegiality also increased when people held positive perceptions about their work context. At a “local” level, this meant perceiving that they were supported by their team leaders and colleagues, creatively challenged by their tasks, trusted to make decisions with reasonable autonomy, and given sufficient resources and time to complete assignments.

More broadly, it meant they perceived the organizational context as collaborative and open, not rife with political game playing or crippling conservatism. Finally, intrinsic motivation levels predicted performance levels across the board. People were more productive, committed, and collegial when they were more motivated—especially by the satisfactions of the work itself.

Clearly, inner work life matters to performance—how creatively people will think, how productive they will be, how much commitment they will show to their work, how collegial they will be. And many of the events that shape inner work life are caused, directly or indirectly, by managers.

What Good Management Does

When we ask people in business to guess which events caused by managers have the greatest influence on inner work life, they often think of interpersonal events—the kinds of person-to-person encounters where, for example, the manager praises a subordinate, works collaboratively with a subordinate as a peer, makes things more fun and relaxing, or provides emotional support. Or the opposite. These sorts of events do, indeed, have a real impact on people’s perceptions, emotions, and motivations. Recall what a difference they made to the BigDeal team.

But, interestingly, our research shows that the most important managerial behaviors don’t involve giving people daily pats on the back or attempting to inject lighthearted fun into the workplace. Rather, they involve two fundamental things: enabling people to move forward in their work and treating them decently as human beings.

Enable progress.

When we compared our study participants’ best days (when they were most happy, had the most positive perceptions of the workplace, and were most intrinsically motivated) with their worst days, we found that the single most important differentiator was a sense of being able to make progress in their work. Achieving a goal, accomplishing a task, or solving a problem often evoked great pleasure and sometimes elation. Even making good progress toward such goals could elicit the same reactions.

Sometimes the successes were clearly important for the project. For example, when Louise (an Infomap software engineer coding a new version of a major program) solved a problem to bring her within reach of the goal, she wrote, “I figured out why something was not working correctly. I felt relieved and happy because this was a minor milestone for me. I am 90% complete with this version of enhancements.” A few weeks later, she accomplished an important step on a different programming assignment: “Yippee! I think I completed part of a project that has been a pain in the butt! I am taking reports over to the user for their viewing pleasure.”

But even very mundane successes led to positive feelings. For instance, a diary entry by Tom, another Infomap programmer, said, “I smashed that bug that’s been frustrating me for almost a calendar week. That may not be an event to you, but I live a very drab life, so I’m all hyped.” This is the kind of joy that people feel when they can simply accomplish what they need to.

Not surprisingly, there is a flip side to this effect. Across our entire database, the worst days—the most frustrating, sad, and fearful days—were characterized by setbacks in the work. Again, the magnitude of the event is not important: Even seemingly small setbacks had a substantial impact on inner work life. On April 19, Tom’s failure to make measurable progress in his work cast a pall on his day: “No event today, just the continuing frustration of the week—trying to install a fairly simple change in code to an enormously complicated method of installation and production execution. Honest, you don’t want to hear the details.” On April 12, Louise reported being irritable about an obstacle she couldn’t get around. “I changed a program today and got a syntax error….I was angry with myself.”

It was clear from the diary data that being able to make progress in the work is a very big deal for inner work life. The next question, then, is which managerial behaviors affect employees’ ability to do so. Our research points to several: for example, providing direct help (versus hindrance), providing adequate resources and time (versus inadequate resources or unnecessary time pressure), and reacting to successes and failures with a learning orientation (versus a purely evaluative orientation). But one of the most important managerial behaviors turns out to be the setting of clear goals. People make more progress when managers clarify where the work is heading and why it matters. In our diary study, the teams that made greater progress had more events in which the project goals and the team members’ individual work goals were clear or were changed carefully and where people knew why their work mattered to the team, the organization, and the organization’s customers.

By contrast, teams that made less progress reported more events that muddied, confused, or haphazardly changed the goals. Sometimes those teams would be given a goal by management, only to be assigned several other tasks that conflicted with that goal. Often, those teams had a sense of futility about their work, because of uncertainty about how or even whether their efforts would make a difference.

The people on the Infomap team generally made good progress in their work—on the BigDeal project and others—and it was primarily because Ellen, the project manager and one of the team’s leaders, relentlessly sought clarity from the team’s clients about their needs and expectations. This clarity was sometimes hard to come by, and, in those instances, progress was impeded. Consider the following example, in which a client had requested a software development project with a firm deadline but with little more than a vague sense of what the final computer program was supposed to do. Repeatedly over several days, Ellen contacted the client manager to discuss specifics. Repeatedly, she was brushed off. Marsha, to whom Ellen had assigned the project, wrote in her April 6 diary:

We had a meeting to discuss the CRR project that I have been working on; the meeting was with just Ellen and Helen. The users have never given us written requirements for the project, and yet they just sent us a note asking if we will make the May 6 deadline. I am just forging ahead and coding like crazy…here’s hoping they like what they never have asked for. Ellen is trying very hard to get them to commit themselves.

Eventually, Ellen did manage to get specifications from the client team’s manager, and, with a Herculean effort, Marsha did succeed in getting the project done well and on time. But all of Marsha’s hard work before the specifications were nailed down was relatively directionless and based on supposition, which impeded both real progress and her own sense of accomplishment. By contrast, during the BigDeal project, the managers who needed the work done communicated in detail with Ellen from the outset to clarify the project goals, specify their needs, and explain to everyone involved why the project was so important. Although there were many technical problems to overcome, there was no ambiguity about the goal. The effects on progress were dazzling.

Managerial events facilitating or impeding progress may be so powerful because they have multiple direct and indirect effects on performance. The direct effects are fairly obvious. For example, when goals are not articulated clearly, work proceeds in wrong directions and performance suffers. Less directly, the frustration of spinning one’s wheels sours inner work life, leading to lower motivation; people facing seemingly random choices will be less inspired to act on any of them. And there is a further effect. When a manager’s actions impede progress, that behavior sends a strong signal. People trying to make sense of why higher-ups would not do more to facilitate progress draw their own conclusions—perhaps that their work is unimportant or that their bosses are either willfully undermining them or hopelessly incompetent.

Manage with a human touch

None of this emphasis on the managerial behavioUrs that influence progress diminishes the importance of the interpersonal managerial events that we mentioned earlier—events in which people are or are not treated decently as human beings. Although such events weren’t quite as important in distinguishing the best days from the worst days, they were a close second. We frequently observed interpersonal events working in tandem with progress events. Praise without real work progress, or at least solid efforts toward progress, had little positive impact on people’s inner work lives and could even arouse cynicism. On the other hand, good work progress without any recognition—or, worse, with criticism about trivial issues—could engender anger and sadness. Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and managers appropriately recognized that work.

• • •

Peter Drucker once wrote, “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work.” The truth of this has struck us as our ongoing analyses reveal more of the negative managerial behaviors that affect inner work life. But we have also been struck by the wealth of managerial opportunities for improving inner work life. Managers’ day-to-day (and moment-to-moment) behaviors matter not just because they directly facilitate or impede the work of the organization. They’re also important because they affect people’s inner work lives, creating ripple effects on organizational performance.

When people are blocked from doing good, constructive work day by day, for instance, they form negative impressions of the organization, their coworkers, their managers, their work, and themselves; they feel frustrated and unhappy; and they become demotivated in their work. Performance suffers in the short run, and in the longer run, too. But when managers facilitate progress, every aspect of people’s inner work lives are enhanced, which leads to even greater progress. This positive spiral benefits the individual workers—and the entire organization. Because every employee’s inner work life system is constantly operating, its effects are inescapable.

Discovering how inner work life affects organizational performance is clearly valuable. But as researchers we hope we have also made progress on another front. Inner work lives matter deeply to the people living them. Studies of the modern workweek show that knowledge workers today, as compared with workers of past eras, spend more time in the office and more time focused on work issues while outside the office. As the proportion of time that is claimed by work rises, inner work life becomes a bigger component of life itself. People deserve happiness. They deserve dignity and respect. When we act on that realization, it is not only good for business. It affirms our value as human beings.

How We Studied State of Mind

Ten years ago, we set out on a quest to understand what really happens at work. As psychologists, we were fascinated by the unexplored territory of day-to-day life inside organizations and, more specifically, inside the hearts and minds of the professionals working in those organizations. Our aim was to explore daily inner work life—the emotions, perceptions, and motivations that people experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workdays—and how it affects performance. Our questions were basic: What affects a person’s inner work life? Is there anything predictable about how it is shaped by specific events unfolding in the workday and by the organizational context? Does inner work life affect performance? We decided that the best way to get to the heart of these questions was to collect daily diaries from the people themselves.

Over a period of three years, we recruited 238 professionals from 26 project teams in seven companies and three industries to participate in our study. Over 80% of the participants were college educated, and all of the projects required complex, creative work for successful completion. Thus, the term “knowledge workers” fits our participants well. We e-mailed diary forms to the participants every day (Monday through Friday) during the entire course of their projects, asking them each to complete the forms privately at the end of the workday. The average project length was a bit over four months, but some were as long as eight or nine months. About 75% of the forms were returned to us completed and on time, yielding nearly 12,000 individual diary reports.

The diary form had several numerical questions, asking participants to rate their own perceptions of various aspects of the work environment, their mood, and their motivation that day, as well as their own work and the team’s work that day. There was also an open-ended question asking people to list the main work tasks they engaged in that day. The most important question was also open-ended; it asked people to briefly report one event that stood out in their minds from the workday.

Although this question simply asked for an event—a concrete description of something specific that happened and who was involved—we found that, very often, people didn’t stop there. They told us, sometimes in great detail, about their perceptions of the event and the thoughts that it engendered. They told us about how the event made them feel. And sometimes they told us how it affected their motivation and performance that day. These were the data that led to our primary discoveries of how constant and pervasive inner work life is and how it operates as a complex system. Together with the numerical data we collected on the diary forms and many other sources of data on the participants, the teams, the projects, and the companies, the daily diary narratives served as the basis for our conclusions about inner work life, what affects it, and how, in turn, inner work life affects performance.

The Reality Management Never Sees

Most managers are unclear about what is going on in their employees’ inner work lives and have even less of an idea of what events affect them. Consider these diary entries by the Infomap team at DataBrook, a subsidiary of DreamSuite Hotels. (We have disguised all names and company information. We’ve also edited the diary entries slightly for clarity and brevity.) This nine-person team of information technologists was tapped to work on an urgent assignment, dubbed “BigDeal,” that had enormous financial implications. DreamSuite was being sued for more than $145 million, and its legal department required a great deal of analysis of financial records in order to defend the company. Infomap members worked long hours throughout the eight days they had been given to complete the project, including over a holiday weekend. Yet their spirits were remarkably upbeat. What was causing such a positive outlook despite the burdensome workload and schedule?

DataBrook upper management, which generally paid little attention to Infomap, spent time in the Infomap work area, checked frequently on the project’s status, held back all other demands on the team’s time, and provided encouragement and support in a number of small ways. Other groups within the organization cheerfully pitched in as needed. Ellen, the project manager and team coleader—who was recovering from surgery—not only did a great deal of the actual work but also served as a liaison between the team, upper management, and the internal clients. At the project’s completion, although exhausted from the final five-day (and night) sprint, the team members were happy and pleased with the experience.

Clearly, management’s engagement and behavior—even seemingly trivial and routine actions—made the difference. The diary excerpts tell the tale in people’s own words.

Teresa M. Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, in Boston. Steven J. Kramer is an independent researcher and writer, based in Wayland, Massachusetts.

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Highly intelligent, confident, and successful, alpha males represent about 70% of all senior executives. As the label implies, they’re the people who aren’t happy unless they’re the top dogs—the ones calling the shots. Although there are plenty of successful female leaders with equally strong personalities, we’ve found top women rarely if ever match the complete alpha profile. (See the sidebar “What About Alpha Females?”) Alphas reach the top ranks in large organizations because they are natural leaders—comfortable with responsibility in a way nonalphas can never be. Most people feel stress when they have to make important decisions; alphas get stressed when tough decisions don’t rest in their capable hands. For them, being in charge delivers such a thrill, they willingly take on levels of responsibility most rational people would find overwhelming. In fact, it’s hard to imagine the modern corporation without alpha leaders.

What About Alpha Females? (Located at the end of this article)

Then why do so many of them need executive coaches?

As it turns out, alphas’ quintessential strengths are also what make them so challenging, and often frustrating, to work with. Independent and action oriented, alphas take extraordinarily high levels of performance for granted, both in themselves and in others. As one business journalist observed after meeting Jack Welch and Andy Grove in a single week, “Jeez, are they impressive and stimulating! But am I glad I don’t work for them.”

The alphas we’ve worked with think very fast, and this rapid processing can prevent them from listening to others—especially those who don’t communicate in alphaspeak. Their impatience can cause them to miss subtle but important details. Alphas, moreover, have opinions about everything, and they rarely admit that those opinions might be wrong or incomplete. Early in life, alphas realize that they are smarter than most people, smarter perhaps than even their parents and teachers; as adults they believe that their insights are unique and so put complete faith in their instincts.

Because their intuitions are so often proven right, alphas feel justified in focusing on the flaws in other people’s ideas or arguments. As a result, coworkers get intimidated, which makes learning from alphas difficult. The more pressure an alpha feels to perform, the more he tends to shift his leadership style from constructive and challenging to intimidating or even abusive. Organizations become dysfunctional when people avoid dealing with a difficult alpha and instead work around him or simply pay him lip service.

Unemotional and analytical in their cognitive style, alphas are eager to learn about business, technology, and “things” but have little or no natural curiosity about people or feelings. They rely on exhaustive data to reach business conclusions but often make snap judgments about other people, which they hold on to tenaciously. Because they believe that paying attention to feelings, even their own, detracts from getting the job done, they’re surprisingly oblivious to the effect they have on others. They’re judgmental of colleagues who can’t control emotions yet often fail to notice how they vent their own anger and frustration. Or they dismiss their own outbursts, arguing that the same rules shouldn’t apply to the top dog.

The more executive authority alphas achieve, the more pressure they feel and the more pronounced their faults can become. (See the exhibit “When Strengths Become Weaknesses.”) Alphas make perfect midlevel managers, where their primary role is to oversee processes. But as they approach CEO level, they’re expected to become inspirational people managers. Unfortunately, most organizations aren’t good at helping alphas make the required transition, which can be the greatest challenge of their careers.

Alphas require skilled coaches because it’s difficult for them to ask for help or even to acknowledge that they need it. They’re typically stubborn and resistant to feedback. After all, they haven’t gotten where they are by being self-reflective. As much as they love talking about accountability, they often fail to see that their own communication style, rather than someone else’s shortcomings, is what’s creating the roadblock. They’re uncomfortable showing vulnerability or taking a break from constant action. The coaching process can make them feel unproductive and out of control.

But effective executive coaching enhances individual capabilities; it doesn’t remake the alpha into an unrecognizable powder puff. The coach’s challenge is to preserve an alpha’s strengths while correcting his weaknesses. Coaches shouldn’t undermine the alpha’s focus on results; they should improve the process for achieving them. For the alpha, that distinction is of paramount importance.

In 2001, Dell embodied the corporate alpha archetype; its tough culture was all about getting results. But as the company matured and the tech industry faced its worst downturn, then CEO Michael Dell and president Kevin Rollins felt a need to change how the organization achieved its industry-leading results. They wanted to improve teamwork between the two of them and other senior executives, and they aimed to develop a more mature and welcoming corporate culture.

Michael and Kevin were respected throughout the organization for their intellectual acumen and superior judgment. But they were also considered demanding and, at times, intimidating. Not surprisingly, most general managers at Dell were cut from the same cloth and exhibited classic alpha leadership styles. Given their deeply analytic natures, Michael and Kevin began the change process by collecting data—inviting us in to conduct 360-degree interviews across the entire Dell executive team. This was not the first time that Dell had engaged us in executive coaching, but it was a more intense and focused process, driven by extraordinary commitment from the top.

Receiving critical feedback is never easy, but at Dell it has become an important part of the culture. Michael and Kevin set an example for other leaders by accepting difficult messages from their team and making visible commitments to the coaching and improvement process. The 360 feedback helped Kevin realize that his image as overly critical and opinionated was hindering his ability to inspire the organization. People thought he wasn’t listening because he jumped in so quickly with his own suggestions, instead of building on their ideas. In his efforts to help his general managers improve their business performance, he was making it difficult for them to appreciate his input.

Michael, for his part, came to see that his intense analytic focus at times made him seem remote and “transactional”—even to his most-valued colleagues. Through the 360 process, he learned that his people found him hard to read and craved more direct feedback. He was surprised to hear that his attitude of “celebrating for a nanosecond” had made people feel they were only as valuable as the last quarter’s results. Michael and Kevin also received feedback that tension between the two of them was causing anxiety in the executive team—something no one had been willing to tell them previously.

They resolved to improve their individual and joint leadership of Dell by agreeing to make only those major moves they both supported and to take their relationship from “good enough” to “great.” As a symbol of this commitment, they built adjoining offices separated by a glass door that’s always open. They now use humorous reminders to get each other’s attention. Michael gave Kevin a smiling toy bulldozer and asked Kevin to place it on his desk whenever he felt Michael was trying to plow over him. Kevin got a Curious George stuffed animal to remind himself to become more inquiring and open to other people’s ideas.

What started almost three years ago with a top-down personal commitment to change has subsequently enhanced organizational goals, modified the profile of the ideal Dell general manager, and launched a culture initiative called the “soul of Dell.” Michael and Kevin, along with all Dell senior executives, receive 360-degree feedback on a regular basis, ensuring that the data collected are as fresh and objective as possible.

Alpha Coaching Traps

Like most alphas, Michael and Kevin needed help to step outside the constraints of their style and see themselves as others do. But alphas require a certain kind of coaching. The executive coach best suited to alphas has lots of experience handling superstars and standing up to bullies. The coach doesn’t have to be an alpha, but it helps to share characteristics such as an analytic orientation and a direct style of communication. When executive coaches fail to help alphas and their organizations, it’s often because they fall into one of three traps—each of which can stop the process cold.

First, some coaches make the mistake of playing “loose and light”—that is, they come across as too passive, simply reacting anecdotally to the alpha by falling back on their own nonexecutive experience and perspective. Alphas aren’t loose and light people, and they won’t see the coach who acts this way as either credible or relevant. After all, thinks the alpha, the kind of person who becomes an executive coach is far too nice and touchy-feely to ever understand what it really takes to deliver results. If an alpha believes his coach plans to turn him into an oversensitive wimp (which he knows better than anyone is the last thing his organization needs!), he’ll never give the coach a chance.

A second trap coaches fall into is excessive secrecy. Coaches understandably want to maintain a high degree of confidentiality during their work. Some think that the way to get an alpha to open up is to reassure him that no one else in the organization will find out about his vulnerabilities. By attempting to protect the client, a coach can unwittingly create an organizational black hole: Much effort goes into it; nothing ever seems to come out. But it’s important not to operate in a vacuum. Only by seeking input from coworkers can the coach truly understand the issues surrounding the alpha’s behavior. And only by talking openly about his commitment to change can the alpha turn around the pervasive organizational distrust he has created.

Coworkers must be included in the coaching process because lasting improvement requires the entire system to evolve. In many companies, coworkers are advised to manage around the alpha’s behavior, which inadvertently enables and perpetuates the undesirable patterns. But as much as coworkers may have hated the behavior the alpha is learning to modify, at least it was predictable. When the alpha’s behavior begins to change as a result of coaching, he becomes unpredictable. This can be terribly unsettling to colleagues unless they are included in the coaching process.

Possessing both intimidating personalities and genuine power, alphas expect the world to show them appropriate deference. But coaches should avoid the third trap—kowtowing—at all costs. This can be the difference between establishing a constructive relationship or an irrelevant one. It was with George Allen, former deputy commander of the Defense Supply Center Philadelphia, a $10 billion business unit of the Defense Logistics Agency. George is a typical alpha male. At one of our first meetings, he charged into the room, ignoring our outstretched hands, and announced, “Let’s not waste my time and yours. I’ve been like this for 30 years, and it’s highly unlikely I’ll change.”

Instead of trying to politely persuade him to sit down and review the organizational feedback we’d brought with us, we said, “Fine. You’re busy, and we could certainly use the four hours to do other work. Let’s not waste your time or ours, if you don’t want to make any changes.” We started to close the big binder filled with brightly colored graphs mapping out his strengths and weaknesses. “Wait!” he commanded. “What’s that?” That shift in interest was our first step toward establishing an effective coaching process.

The Right Way to Coach

Any executive with interpersonal problems has probably gotten feedback about them many times before we come along—so either he’s never fully understood the problems or he just doesn’t see any advantage to changing. Over the past 14 years, we have refined the process of coaching alphas to account for their personality quirks and help them see why they need to change their behaviour.

Get his attention.

The best way to capture the alpha male’s attention is with data—copious, credible, consistent data. That’s why we always get 360-degree feedback on our clients. We interview all the alpha’s direct reports, a half-dozen high potentials reporting to his direct reports, all of his business unit peers, and anyone in the organization with whom he competes. Our goal is to provide undeniable proof that his behaviour (to which he is much attached) doesn’t work nearly as well as he thinks it does. We let the data shape our questions. If we’re told he is a poor communicator, for instance, we press for specifics: Does he interrupt people? Is he vague? Does he not listen? Does he fail to share information? Then we ask about the impact of his poor communication skills: How does his rapid-fire style affect your work?

A 360-degree assessment is a wake-up call for most alphas. They say, “Wow, these are people I deeply respect—strong performers—and they think that about me? I can’t believe they’re afraid to push back or that they think I’m stubborn and closed to their opinions.”

Demand his commitment.

Once we get the alpha’s attention in this way, we have the leverage we need to make him address unpleasant issues. Because he is both practical and driven, if you can show him an easier way to produce immediate results, he will typically embrace it. But before we go any further, we insist on the alpha’s full commitment to the change process. We clarify his intention with two simple questions: Do you want to change? and Are you willing to do whatever it takes, including allowing us to help you?

We wait until we get a clear yes or no, pointing out any nonverbal cues that imply he isn’t committed (like saying yes while shaking his head no). If the answer’s no, we don’t continue. Trying to work with a defensive leader who isn’t committed to change only wastes our time and his company’s money.

Speak his language.

Since alphas think in charts, graphs, and metrics, for maximum impact, we present our data that way—in alphaspeak. We turn the feedback collected from 360-degree interviews into metrics and then inundate the alpha with quantitative data to make sure he values the information enough to act on it. The exhibit “Communicating in Alphaspeak” summarizes in a bar chart verbatim responses to 360-degree feedback, illustrating in a powerfully visual way the risks inherent in one individual alpha’s style. He immediately can see his areas of strength highlighted in green and the areas requiring improvement in red.

Hit him hard enough to hurt.

After delivering the 360-degree feedback in graphical form, we review and discuss the verbatim comments from his coworkers, organized into competencies and themes. The alpha might be confronted with statements like, “He’s brilliant, but he doesn’t know a thing about people”; “We feel as though we’ve all been raked over the coals”; and “His need to engage in intellectual sparring and always prove he’s right alienates the team.” We deliberately preserve the emotionally loaded language we’ve heard to help the alpha realize the consequences of his behavior. Many alphas have been dishing out feedback with a two-by-four throughout their careers, and our process turns the tables on them.

Since they believe in “no pain, no gain,” they respond remarkably well to hard-hitting language. We regulate the level of pain, keeping it high enough to get their full attention but also presenting the changes as attainable. This is the point at which lip service frequently gives way to genuine understanding. One of our first alpha clients summed it up memorably: “It’s like I’ve got interpersonal B.O.! I just never understood until now how bad it was.”

Engage his curiosity and competitive instincts

Blunt feedback invariably triggers defensiveness. The alpha generally believes that everyone else gets defensive, whereas he simply speaks the truth. We point out signs of his own defensiveness and show him how this mind-set prevents him from learning. Another alpha metric tool, the Defensiveness-Openness Scale, has proven highly effective in engaging the competitive instincts of alpha leaders. (See the exhibit “How Defensive Are You?”) Defensive behaviours like delivering long-winded explanations, expressing subtle blame, or trying to figure out who made a particular comment all earn poor marks. Asking the alpha to monitor his own defensiveness motivates him to see how quickly he can catch himself and shift into a more open frame of mind.

Five Steps Toward Alpha Growth.

To change, the alpha must become more aware of his own motivations, more open to his peers’ contrary opinions, and more comfortable with public challenge. He also must learn to deliver feedback that’s useful rather than traumatic. When coaching an alpha client, we focus on five goals that will help him become a motivational leader of high-performing teams.

Admit vulnerability

In our experience, when an alpha admits he is afraid or asks for help, the impact on his team is profoundly positive. So it is a key milestone when an alpha expresses a fear or exposes a vulnerability.

Dell’s corporate culture began to change when Michael Dell and Kevin Rollins shared the results of their 360s with their executive team and, eventually, with thousands of Dell managers. Disclosing their imperfections was an uncomfortable stretch for them, but that action humanized them in the eyes of the team and made them more inspirational to the rest of the organization.

As one general manager recently commented: “Because Michael and Kevin have shared their feedback with us, we are all sharing our results with our own teams. We’ve all become more open, which builds camaraderie and trust. Knowing the changes my colleagues are attempting to make in their leadership styles also makes it easier for me to point out behaviors that irk me. After someone discloses that he periodically lobs grenades into meetings but intends to stop, we all have permission to call him on it. And we do.”

It’s natural for the alpha to want coaching and feedback to remain private. But the motivations of his colleagues can’t be ignored. Some people might want to settle the score, others may be expecting the alpha to finally acknowledge all their hard work, and some may even want the soap opera to continue. Public disclosure helps clear the air, enabling the entire organization to move forward.

When an alpha discloses the traits he’s working to improve, it helps convince his team that he’s serious about changing. Questions from the alpha like “How can I support you?,” “How can I connect better with you?,” or “How can I lead you more effectively?” address old grudges in new ways, opening a whole new dialogue across the organization. The stronger and more dominant the executive, the more powerful the impact of disclosure.

Accept accountability

Alphas tend to feel very accountable for their own performance, but they have difficulty accepting responsibility for their impact on other people’s performance. We’ve never found an alpha—or anyone else, for that matter—who doesn’t try to shift the blame for performance problems to someone else. The blame is often subtle, but as long as it remains under the surface, problems won’t get corrected. In fact, until the alpha accepts ownership for his share of a problem, it simply won’t go away.

When thinking about accountability, we suggest that alphas use the “rule of three”: If a problem occurs just once—for example, if someone on his team misses one significant deadline—it might very well be that another person is solely responsible. But if it happens three times—if, say, the same individual misses three deadlines or three different people miss significant deadlines—then the alpha must take some responsibility and ask himself what he should be doing differently.

Alphas frequently pin a pejorative label on a skill they don’t possess to sidestep accountability. One alpha client, for example, used “politics” as his excuse for not accomplishing certain goals. We helped him see that it wasn’t politics—the real problem was that he had only one tool to get what he wanted: the hammer. “Politics” was a smoke screen for not knowing how to persuade people to change their opinions.

Presentations that take too long to get to the point are a pet peeve of alphas, who often read ahead, assume they already understand the key points, and interrupt presenters before they can communicate their information adequately. Rather than sympathize with the alpha’s impatience, we point out that it is the leader’s job to teach his team how to present information appropriately. We help the alpha distinguish between blaming and claiming his share of the responsibility. If he finds himself complaining that meetings take too long and don’t stay on track, for instance, we ask him to look at how he is wasting time and have him consider what additional coaching or guidance he might give his organization to correct those problems.

If he feels frustrated that others don’t understand the gravity of a problem, we ask him if he has communicated in a way that mobilizes action. When he becomes angry because peers won’t modify a past decision even to avert a huge problem, we ask him if he has expressed his views in a way that makes people want to help him. When he feels the need to criticize an approach or process, we encourage him instead to contribute his own ideas. The most powerful step the alpha can take is to assume that whatever gets created “out there” is the direct result of something he has done (or failed to do) and is not simply somebody else’s fault.

Paradoxical as it may sound, when a leader admits he’s wrong and needs to change, he comes across as more confident and courageous than when he insists he’s right. That’s what U.S. Rear Admiral Dan McCarthy, head of the Naval Supply Systems Command, found when he asked us to help him improve communications flow in light of new challenges created by Operation Enduring Freedom. A big man with a forceful personality, the admiral initially responded to feedback delivered in a group meeting of 30 of his senior executives with a lengthy explanation and justification. But he caught himself and publicly acknowledged his defensiveness, taking full responsibility for the problem and the way his style contributed to it. Initially astonished, his team members quickly began to follow his example, identifying ways they each could improve communications.

Connect with underlying emotions

The alpha doesn’t like emotions because they cannot be controlled. He believes they impede logic and impair decision making. He will acknowledge that they play a role in motivating certain kinds of people in, say, a sales rally. But they don’t play much of a role in motivating him, which makes him distrust them. Ironically, though, the alpha is often teeming with unacknowledged emotions that in reality cloud his judgment. He tends to be out of touch with his feelings until they erupt in anger. And beneath that anger often lurk other emotions. Sometimes it’s fear that his company might take the wrong path; sometimes it’s disappointment that he hasn’t guided his team more effectively. Such subliminal fear and anxiety can be a real problem for alphas, because these feelings may be confused with intuition. (Is that flurry in the belly anxiety or a prescient intuition that something is off?) So it’s important for alphas to learn to distinguish intuition from anxiety.

Our coaching focuses on getting the alpha to recognize his underlying emotions while they are still at the niggling, flurry-in-the-gut level, long before the big eruption occurs. Tying emotions to physical sensations makes the process seem more concrete. If we can help the alpha feel an emotion more fully, it is less likely to burst out at inappropriate moments. If the alpha can tell when his feelings are beginning to intensify, he can channel them constructively and avoid a temper tantrum.

Balance positive with critical feedback

Alphas feel uncomfortable both giving and receiving praise, and they are adamant about not appearing soft. A strong manager, they say, is comfortable “telling it like it is.” As a result, about 80% of the conversations an alpha leader has with his team will contain critical comments.

Underlying the alpha’s reluctance to express appreciation is a self-perception that he does not require, or respond to, positive feedback. We help the alpha see that people reflexively react to criticism with defensiveness and resistance, whereas a balance of positive and negative feedback is more likely to motivate people to change. We don’t try to replace all of an alpha’s criticisms with validation; we want him to use both.

A brilliant alpha executive we recently coached has an uncanny ability to identify what’s missing in a business solution. This has led his teams to scores of technological breakthroughs, and yet it wasn’t enough to inspire individual performance or the commitment of his people. After many coaching sessions, we began to notice that, although he was generally open to our ideas and willing to take action, we weren’t having much fun working with him. His lack of feedback or acknowledgment was discouraging, even to us.

When we shared that insight with him, he was dumbfounded. “But I’m spending all this time with you. I wouldn’t be doing that if I didn’t think I was getting a lot out of it.” His words made sense, but what had seemed obvious to him was not obvious to us. He realized then that his tendency to criticize rather than validate was triggering self-doubt and fear in his most valuable team members. So he made a list of what he appreciated about each person on his team—not task-specific feedback but comments more reflective of each individual’s overall talents and contributions—and shared them publicly. His team now enjoys an esprit they’ve never had before.

Jim Gibbons, president and CEO of the National Industries for the Blind, is the rare alpha who easily expresses appreciation. In an off-site team-building exercise, he wanted his entire executive team to experience the power of praise. So we asked all present to note their energy levels before and after a 20-minute period in which each of them expressed appreciation to everyone in the room. Though dubious, the team complied. At the end of the exercise, to universal surprise, everyone reported higher levels of energy and optimism. Every team we work with reports similar results.

Since the alpha tends to think everyone else is just like him, he often worries that people will equate praise with manipulation. He fears that if he tells people they’re doing well, it will go to their heads, they’ll stop working so hard, and they might even want more money. We help the alpha identify his fears about showing appreciation by having him complete two sentences:

• When people give me appreciation, I often think that ____________________.
• If I gave someone appreciation, I would be afraid that ___________________.

Then we work with him to identify barriers he puts up against receiving appreciation. These can include discounting, deflecting, putting himself down, explaining, distracting, joking, and countering by returning a compliment. Finally, we help him learn to express appreciation effectively. An expanded version of “good job” usually isn’t enough to motivate people. We tell the client to list all the people on his team, as well as all the peers he depends on for his success. Then we ask him to write out what he values in each person. For maximum impact, such feedback must be genuine and specific. It must explain how the person’s performance helps the alpha and the business. The alpha then must express his positive feelings to the individual, restating his appreciation several times—with different wordings—so that the person really “gets it.”

Become aware of patterns

David was an inspiring and insightful CEO, but he also had a temper problem. He was usually warm and easy to connect with, but in tense meetings, he would invariably become angry and flushed and speak in a sharp, staccato tone that intimidated people, even though he never raised his voice. To help David become aware of this destructive behavior pattern, we looked for its roots. We asked him to recall the first time he ever reacted in this way, and he remembered being four years old and hitting his six-year-old brother over the head after his brother stole one of David’s toys for the hundredth time. And his brother never did it again. David roared with laughter when he realized he’d basically been using the same pattern ever since. He acknowledged that this approach was unlikely to motivate his senior executives.

People tend to slip into a whole set of dramatic, predictable roles that spring from the family and school dynamics in which they grew up. Many interpersonal problems in the workplace stem from people subconsciously gluing a family member’s image onto a coworker. The alpha may look like a demanding father to a junior manager or spark sibling rivalry in a peer. Almost no one is immune to these subtle family dynamics at work. They create the behind-the-scenes lobbying, venting, and complaining that characterize so many organizations.

We both see and are seen through our personas—through the roles we see ourselves playing or the roles others see us in. They act like distorted lenses and color the world according to their needs. The Rebel reflexively sees the world as full of people to be acted against. The Driver thinks the world needs supervision and discipline. The Jock views others as either winners or losers. Our projections intertwine with the projections of others, so authentic connection and communication become nearly impossible.

To get around this problem, we tell the alpha that any extreme behaviour or recurring pattern signifies that he’s fallen into one of his personas. By giving the personas names and revealing how they work, we can begin to make the alpha more conscious of his behaviour. Bulldozers, for instance, will plow through people if they think that’s what’s needed to get the right thing done. Some of their team members then become complaining Victims, who withhold good ideas because they don’t want to get run over by the Bulldozer.

Getting team members to give up these unproductive personas is a by-product of coaching the alpha. An executive team at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, which had been extensively coached on personas, was debating whether to go ahead with a new acquisition. As the intensity of the discussion escalated, the group split into polarized camps. The CEO and COO pushed hard for the acquisition, while more conservative executives held back. The room crackled with tension. Suddenly the CFO, a large, gruff man, commanded the attention of the room by waving his arms and bellowing, “Mr. Rant and Rave is about to show up, and I can’t stop him!”

Laughter instantly broke the tension. By naming one of his own dreaded personas, he masterfully stepped beyond it. His self-awareness cleared the way for the group to review facts with a cool head. As a result, the CEO abandoned his Wheeler-Dealer persona, and the CEO and COO conceded their original position, thus avoiding a risky acquisition. Had the unconscious version of Mr. Rant and Rave appeared, no one would have laughed. The other team members would have escalated the drama, tuned him out, or disappeared, and the meeting’s objectives would have been forgotten. Instead, his awareness and honesty spurred others to let go of their defenses and move toward a constructive resolution.

What to Expect from Coaching

Prospective clients routinely ask how long the coaching process takes and what kinds of interim results they can expect. The answer varies widely, depending on factors like how broad the organizational involvement is in the coaching process, how committed the individual is to it, and how fully the culture of the company accepts it. For some alphas, 360-degree feedback followed by a half day of coaching and a few phone calls are all that’s needed for noticeable change. Alphas who are less self-aware usually need a half day of coaching sessions a month for three to 12 months.

Changes in behaviour typically begin to show in three to six months, as the client harvests low-hanging fruit from our initial coaching efforts. Sustained changes take about a year. But the goal of coaching is to change the entire team dynamic, not simply to treat the alpha as an individual problem. After two years, an organization can be well on its way to transformation, with a dysfunctional and combative executive team turning into a collaborative and trusting one.

The alpha’s time and attention span are limited, and it’s not unusual for him at the beginning of the process to pay only lip service to the coaching objectives and avoid fully committing himself to the required behavioural changes. He needs to identify appropriate situations where he can begin to apply the new tools and approaches. Once an alpha gets to this point, you can count on him to follow through. As he begins to see the results of his behavioral changes, he initiates a powerful cycle that reverberates throughout the entire organization.

What About Alpha Females?

Ask people to identify alpha males in their workplace, and they’ll readily produce a list. But ask them if they work with any alpha females, and they’ll look confused. Are those the really smart women? The ones who are best at getting things done? Or are they the bossy ones? It’s easy to identify successful female leaders but often harder to categorize them. In our work with senior executives, we’ve encountered many women who possess some of the traits of the alpha male, but none who possess all of them.

Women can be just as data driven and opinionated as alpha males and can cope with stress equally well, but the vast majority of women place more value on interpersonal relationships and pay closer attention to people’s feelings. Women at the top are generally comfortable with control and being in charge, but they don’t seek to dominate people and situations as alpha males do. Although equally talented, ambitious, and hardheaded, they often rise to positions of authority by excelling at collaboration, and they are less inclined to resort to intimidation to get what they want. Female leaders are more likely to use a “velvet hammer,” tending to express orders as polite suggestions.

Like alpha males, some female leaders do have problems with anger and bullying, and they can be defensive and resistant to criticism. However, the corporate environment—and society as a whole—is much less tolerant of these characteristics in women than in men. So, far fewer women with these tendencies ever reach executive positions.

Top women can be just as challenging to coach as alpha males. Both have been extremely successful with their particular styles, which makes it difficult for them to see the need for change. But because women more readily understand the importance of positive motivation and the limitations of fear-driven cultures, they are less likely to avoid interpersonal issues. They may not enjoy delving into the touchy-feely zones any more than alpha males do, but they are more willing to because they understand that inspiring and motivating people are just as important as pursuing the right idea.

Like their male counterparts, most powerful women follow distinct behavioural patterns—but these patterns can be harder to recognize. When dealing with female leaders, you need to look for telling signs, just as you do with alpha males. Often stung by critical feedback early in their careers, many women avoid criticizing others in an effort to keep people’s spirits high. Coming across as more affirming and validating than male alphas, they can lull their direct reports into believing that all is well when it is not. Then their reports feel blindsided when they find out that their positions are in jeopardy and they hadn’t been given a chance to correct problems before it was too late.

Female leaders are less comfortable with conflict, while alpha males thrive on it. When the alpha male doesn’t like something, he states it loud and clear. A female leader can be less willing to force an issue publicly if she doesn’t anticipate quick assent. Being more interested in collaborating and finding win-win solutions, she’ll happily debate an idea until someone’s emotions are triggered, at which point she’ll back down rather than press toward resolution. This indirect style of communication is often misinterpreted by male peers; in fact, some of our female clients have been accused by peers of being political and having hidden agendas. A woman leader should be aware that her indirect style can engender distrust among certain kinds of men. What she calls diplomacy, he calls politics.

Kate Ludeman is the founder and CEO of Worth Ethic in Carpinteria, California. Eddie Erlandson is a senior vice president at Worth Ethic, and the former chief of staff at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together they have coached more than 1,000 senior executives. They are the authors of Radical Change, Radical Results (Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2003). They can be reached through their Web site, www.worthethic.com.

As each bird flaps its wings, it creates uplift for the bird following. By flying in a “V” formation, the whole flock adds 71 percent greater flying range than if one bird flew alone.

Lesson Learned

People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on the strength of one another.

Fact #2

Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front.

Lesson Learned

If we have as much sense as geese, we will stay in formation with those who are ahead of where we want to go and be willing to accept their help as well as give ours to others.

Fact #3

When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies at the point position.

Lesson Learned

It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership.

Fact #4

The geese in formation honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

Lesson Learned

We need to make sure our honking from behind is encouraging, and not something else.

Fact #5

When a goose gets sick or wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it is able to fly again, or dies. Then they launch out on their own, with another formation, or they catch up with their flock.

Lesson Learned

I

f we have as much sense as geese do, we too, will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.

Having spent many years working with smart people I’ve catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I’m a recovering smart person myself and I’ve defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you’ll get more than just entertainment value (“Look, Scott is more stupid than we thought!”) out of what I have to say on this topic.

Success at defending bad ideas

I’m not proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. Majoring in logic is not the kind of thing that makes people want to talk to you at parties, or read your essays. But one thing I did learn after years of studying advanced logic theory is that proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you’re arguing with aren’t as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren’t as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)

Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. “You don’t really think that do you?” or “Well if you knew the rule/law/corollary you wouldn’t say such things”), they’re never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessiveness about being right is strong enough, they’ll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).

Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate, remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.

For example, just because you can’t prove that I’m not the king of France reincarnated doesn’t make it so. So when someone tells you “My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail” know that there is a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn’t necessarily make it the best plan. It’s possible than plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to scrutinize the plan. As we’ll discuss later, diffusing bad thinking requires someone (probably you) to construct a healthier framework around the bad thinking that shows it for what it is.

Death by homogeny

The second stop on our tour of commonly defended bad ideas is the seemingly friendly notion of communal thinking. Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn’t mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. The power of peer pressure is that it works on our psychology, not our intellect. As social animals we are heavily influenced by how the people around us behave, and the quality of our own internal decision making varies widely depending on the environment we currently are in. (e.g. Try to write a haiku poem while standing in an elevator with 15 opera singers screaming 15 different operas, in 15 different languages, in falsetto, directly at you vs. sitting on a bench in a quiet stretch of open woods).

That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they’ll be capable of exploring.

Some teams of people look to focus groups, consultancies, and research methods to bring in outside ideas, but this rarely improves the quality of thinking in the group itself. Those outside ideas, however bold or original, are at the mercy of the diversity of thought within the group itself. If the group, as a collective, is only capable of approving B level work, it doesn’t matter how many A level ideas you bring to it. Focus groups or other outside sources of information cannot give a team, or its leaders, a soul. A bland homogeneous team of people has no real opinions, because it consists of people with same backgrounds, outlooks, and experiences who will only feel comfortable discussing the safe ideas that fit into those constraints.

If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds, weights, heights, races, facial hairstyles, colors, past-times, favourite items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use. It’s the only way to guarantee that the best ideas from your smartest people will be received openly by the people around them. On your own, avoid homogenous books, films, music, food, sex, media and people. Actually experience life by going to places you don’t usually go, spending time with people you don’t usually spend time with. Be in the moment and be open to it. Until recently in human history, life was much less predictable and we were forced to encounter things not always of our own choosing. We are capable of more interesting and creative lives than our modern cultures often provide for us. If you go out of your way to find diverse experiences it will become impossible for you to miss ideas simply because your homogenous outlook filtered them out.

Thinking at the wrong level

At any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level is the right one at a given time. For example, if you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it’s not the right time to discuss with your passengers where y’all would like to stop for dinner. But as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time.

People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve the greater good of whatever they’re trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, whereas the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where as the post enlightenment west, and perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes of intelligence).

In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don’t really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied. Other examples include people that always worry about money despite how much they have, people who struggle with relationships but invest their energy only in improving their appearance (instead of in therapy or other emotional exploration), or anyone that wants to solve problem X but only ever seems to do things that solve problem Y.

The primary point is that no amount of intelligence can help an individual who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Um, hey. The hole you’re digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you’re in the wrong yard.”

Killed in the long term by short term thinking

From what we know of evolution it’s clear that we are alive because of our inherited ability to think quickly and respond to change. The survival of living creatures, for most of the history of our planet, has been a short-term game. Only if you can out-run your predators, and catch your prey, do you have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow.

It follows then that we tend to be better at worrying about and solving short-term issues than long-term issues. Even when we recognize an important long term issue that we need to plan for, say protecting natural resources or saving for retirement, we’re all too easily distracted away from those deep thoughts by immediate things like dinner or sex (important things no doubt, but the driving needs in these pursuits, at least for this half of the species, are short term in nature). Once distracted, we rarely return to the long term issues we were drawn away from.

A common justification for abuse of short-term thinking is the fake perspective defense. The wise, but less confident guy says “Hey – are you sure we should be doing this?” And the smart, confident, but less wise guy says “Of course, we did this last time, and the time before that, so why shouldn’t we do this again?”. This is the fake perspective defense because there’s no reason to believe that 2 points of data (e.g. last time plus the time before that) is sufficient to make claims about the future. People say similar things all the time in defense of the free market economy, democracy, and mating strategies. “Well, it’s gotten us this far, and it’s the best system we have”. Well, maybe. But if you were in that broken down Winnebago up to your ankles in gasoline from a leaking tank, smoking a cigarette in each hand, you could say the same thing.

Put simply, the fact that you’re not dead yet doesn’t mean that the things you’ve done up until now shouldn’t have, by all that is fair in the universe, already killed you. You might just need a few more data points for the law of averages to catch up, and put a permanent end to your short-term thinking.

How many data points you need to feel comfortable continuing a behavior is entirely a matter of personal philosophy. The wise and skeptical know that even an infinite number of data points in the past may only have limited bearing on the future. The tricky thing about the future is that it’s different than the past. Our data from the past, no matter how big a pile of data it is, may very well be entirely irrelevant. Some find this lack of predictive ability of the future quite frustrating, while others see it as the primary reason to stick around for a few more years.

Anyway, my point is not that Winnebagos or free market economies are bad. Instead I’m saying that short-term bits of data are neither reliable nor a wise way to go about making important long-term decisions. Intelligent people do this all the time, and since it’s so commonly accepted as a rule of thumb (last time + the time before that), it’s often accepted in place of actual thinking. Always remember that humans, given our evolution, are very bad at seeing the cumulative effects of behavior, and underestimate how things like compound interest or that one cigarette a day, can in the long term, have surprisingly large impacts despite clearly low short term effects.

How to prevent smart people from defending bad ideas

I spent my freshman year at a small college in NJ called Drew University. I had a fun time, ingested many tasty alcoholic beverages, and went to lots of great parties (the result of which of course was that I basically failed out and had to move back to Queens with my parents. You see, the truth is that this essay is really a public service announcement paid for by my parents – I was a smart person that did some stupid things). But the reason I mention all this is because I learned a great bit of philosophy from many hours of playing pool in the college student center. The lesson is this: “Speed kills”. I was never very good at pool, but this one guy there was, and whenever we’d play, he’d watch me miss easy shots because I tried to force them in with authority. I chose speed and power over control, and I usually lost. So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.

The reason for this is simple. Smart people, or at least those whose brains have good first gears, use their speed in thought to overpower others. They’ll jump between assumptions quickly, throwing out jargon, bits of logic, or rules of thumb at a rate of fire fast enough to cause most people to become rattled, and give in. When that doesn’t work, the arrogant or the pompous will throw in some belittlement and use whatever snide or manipulative tactics they have at their disposal to further discourage you from dissecting their ideas.

So your best defense starts by breaking an argument down into pieces. When they say “It’s obvious we need to execute plan A now.” You say, “Hold on. You’re way ahead of me. For me to follow I need to break this down into pieces.” And without waiting for permission, you should go ahead and do so.

First, nothing is obvious. If it were obvious there would be no need to say so. So your first piece is to establish what isn’t so obvious. What are the assumptions the other guy is glossing over that are worth spending time on? There may be 3 or 4 different valid assumptions that need to be discussed one at a time before any kind of decision can be considered. Take each one in turn, and lay out the basic questions: what problem are we trying to solve? What alternatives to solving it are there? What are the tradeoffs in each alternative? By breaking it down and asking questions you expose more thinking to light, make it possible for others to ask questions, and make it more difficult for anyone to defend a bad idea.

No one can ever take away your right to think things over, especially if the decision at hand is important. If your mind works best in 3rd or 4th gear, find ways to give yourself the time needed to get there. If when you say “I need the afternoon to think this over”, they say “Tough. We’re deciding now”. Ask them if the decision is an important one. If they say yes, then you should be completely justified in asking for more time to think it over and ask questions.

Find a sane person people listen to

Some situations require outside help. Instead of taking a person on directly, get a third party that you both respect, and continue the discussion in their presence. This can be a superior, or simply someone smart enough that the other person might possibly concede points to them.

It follows that if your team manager is wise and reasonable, smart people who might ordinarily defend bad ideas will have a hard time doing so. But sadly if your team manager is neither wise nor reasonable, smart, arrogant people may convince others to follow their misguided ways more often than not.

And yet more reasons

I’m sure you have stories of your own follies dealing with smart people defending bad ideas, or where you, yourself, as a smart person, have spent time arguing for things you regretted later. Given the wondrous multitude of ways the universe has granted humans to be smart and dumb at the same time, there are many more reasons why smart people behave in stupid ways. For fun, and as fodder for the forums, here’s a few more.

• If you have some thoughts on this essay, or some more reasons to add, please head on over to the forums
• Smart people can follow stupid leaders (seeking praise or promotion)
• Smart people may follow their anger into stupid places
• They may be trained or educated into stupidity
• Smart people can inherit bad ideas from their parents under the guise of tradition
• They may simply want something to be true, that can never be