by Charles Plant | May 2, 2013 | Leadership Development
Great word isn’t it? Nepotism. I thought it was from the greek god Nepo but Wikipedia says it’s from the Latin word nepos or nepotis for nephew. On the scale of playing favourites at work, it is one step up (or down depending on your point of view) from having a Teacher’s Pet. But is it all bad?
I got my first taste of what it means when my father was President of Consumer’s Distributing and got me a Christmas job in one of their stores. My job was literally to run back and forth from the stockroom to the order desk with merchandise. And run I did, off my feet. No breaks, short lunch.
I thought the working conditions were so bad I mentioned to a few co-workers that we should try to start a union. After that, no one talked to me. Not a good idea if you’re the boss’s son. Since then I’ve lost count of how many places I have worked where there was some sort of family element involved.
I have yet to decide whether nepotism is a good thing or a bad thing. Is it bad if you hire a family member for a summer job? How about a highly qualified family member for a real job? Or an obviously under-qualified jerk for a senior position?
I guess as in most things, it depends. It depends on whether you want to risk your own credibility and effectiveness as a leader. The penalty you’ll pay if it fails is the loss of respect of your team. And if the person is there forever, you’ve lost their respect for a long time.
by Charles Plant | May 1, 2013 | Leadership Development
I think I blundered accidentally into this issue of bias in the workplace when I wrote yesterday’s blog on Teacher’s Pet. I was sitting at the computer last night and Googled ‘Bias in the Workplace’ and got 3 bazillion hits on racial and gender bias.
This of course got me thinking because I wasn’t looking yesterday at negative biases but at positive ones. The thought struck me, what is worse for the workplace, positive biases or negative biases? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favour of either.
As a society though, we tend to frown heavily on negative biases (and rightly so.) Discrimination has no place in the workplace and it is extremely demotivating to those affected. But what about to everyone else? Do negative biases demotivate those who are not the target? I’m not sure I can answer that.
What I do know is that positive biases are de-motivating for everyone who is not the teacher’s pet. Favouritism has an insidious way of poisoning the entire environment in a way that I don’t think discrimination does. It may come down to empathy.
While you can empathize with an individual, it is much more difficult to empathize with a large group of individuals so discrimination to a whole class of individuals is not as strongly felt by someone who is not a subject of it. In the case of favouritism though, there is no need to empathize because every other person is affected.
by Charles Plant | Apr 30, 2013 | Leadership Development
An offhand comment by a friend of mine this weekend reminded me about being the teacher’s pet in grade 5. I don’t know why this teacher bestowed such an honour on me but it was not pleasant and I had little choice in the matter.
Unfortunately the errors of the schoolyard are often repeated at work as few managers can totally avoid bias in attitude or treatment of people. The problem is that it poisons an environment, subtly at first but in the longer run it can be cancerous.
Think of how you feel when your boss obviously enjoys the company of a co-worker over you, favours that person with better work, laxer rules, better pay. It can be totally innocent but that oh-so closer relationship can rankle.
I must admit that I have been guilty of this in the past. The problem as I see it is that it’s hard to avoid. You more naturally gravitate to some people rather than others. You want to be authentic but not too much so. You want to connect with people and some connections are deeper than others.
I think avoiding bias is one of those leadership requirements that can never be fully achieved if you’re also trying to be a caring boss and connect with people.
by Charles Plant | Apr 26, 2013 | Leadership Development
I’m now thoroughly confused. After a week of attacking employee engagement, I’m reaching the conclusion that it is just another one of the many factors to consider in workplace success. Hear me out.
- There are some people who will never be engaged. You should fire them.
- There are some people who are always engaged, no matter what you do to them. You should hire more people like this.
- That leaves the engage-able rump who can be engaged if you work at it.
- But if you’re doing really well, the chances are that they’ll be engaged already so you don’t need to do anything here.
- And if you’re doing really badly, I suggest that engagement isn’t the problem and you should fix some business basics first.
- Which leaves the one situation that warrants working on employee engagement. When things are going OK and there are some people who you can engage to better effect to improve results.
This last situation is where we are in the software industry. The report we released in March on Software Industry Productivity shows that while productivity in the industry is improving, the industry is just barely breaking even. This is the sweet spot when things are going OK, not terribly and not really well.
And boy are there things that can be done. The report on Employee Engagement in the Tech Industry that we released this month shows that employees, for the most part:
- Are not highly engaged;
- Aren’t highly supportive of their employer’s mission;
- Don’t get enough recognition; and
- Don’t get enough feedback.
When asked whether they would recommend their company as a good place to work to a friend or colleague, only 23% of Canadians and 29% of American tech employees would strongly agree.
This is something we can work on improving.
Many years ago, an IBM executive responsible for management training told me that they gave tons of leadership training to new managers just so they wouldn’t go and screw things up for all of their highly valuable direct reports and cause them to be disengaged and quit. IBM had invested too much in them for their managers to mess it up.
It looks like we need some remedial leadership development in the tech industry.
And it looks like I better get off my soap box and on to something more interesting next week. And to think that all of this was started by one little article in the Globe.
by Charles Plant | Apr 25, 2013 | Leadership Development
Sure, the stats from Gallup say that employee engagement causes results but instead:
- Maybe results cause engagement.
- Maybe there is only a correlation between the two because the real issue is hiring the right people.
- Maybe this only works for big corporations.
Right now all I’m prepared to say is that sometimes employees are engaged and sometimes companies get good results.
Take for instance the case of a startup that is really making great progress. Sales are booming and growing rapidly, profit is growing in leaps and bounds and the supposed valuation of the company must be going through the roof.
But if you ask people there about engagement, they might answer Gallup’s questions all wrong.
- It is likely that there are lots of times they don’t really know what they’re doing as these situations are frequently fraught with ambiguity.
- If they’re starved for cash, they likely don’t have the materials and equipment they really need.
- They are doing all sorts of jobs, but maybe not the ones they do best.
- The atmosphere may be tense and not filled with moments for praise.
- They might be too new to have formed a caring relationship with their manager or have a best friend at work.
- No one would have time to be concerned with their personal development, talk to them about progress or train them.
In answering no to most of the questions they would score low on engagement and yet the company would be showing great results. And maybe there is even a case to be made that they are really engaged but that these questions are unable to measure that engagement.
So maybe Gallup doesn’t have all the answers about employee engagement and we should treat their work with a bit of caution.
Me, I’m heading out to research more on the subject, trying to find out in the knowledge economy whether leadership practices are related in any way to engagement and whether engagement is related in any way to results.
If you want to be part of the research or know anyone who might, let me know as I am eager to meet new research participants.
By the way, the image is courtesy of http://www.peopleinsight.co.uk/ who were kind enough to let me use it.
