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.
by Charles Plant | Apr 24, 2013 | Leadership Development
Since yesterday’s disturbing revelation, I’ve been pondering more on the connection between employee engagement and corporate results.
I had an interesting chat yesterday on this subject with Mario Laudi of Red Canary fame about work he is doing to develop a new business called HireFully which he will be launching next month. Their proposition (if I have it right) is that the way people hire nowadays is just wrong.
Too many managers are looking for a very specific skill set and they are all looking for the very best people with that skill set. As you can imagine, we can’t all get the Chief Architect with 10 years of Java experience who has a PhD from MIT. Some of us will just have to settle for something less in terms of qualifications.
So then how do you figure out who to hire from among the unwashed masses? While popular, scoring and testing of potential hires doesn’t work and employees hate it. According to Mario, what you need to do is find a way to identify those people with integrity, character, self-motivation and a whole host of other behavioural characteristics that make them great performers in spite of the fact that they haven’t got the specific skill set that would be ideal. (This is the job that HireFully will be working to address through their secret sauce.)
Well this got me thinking again. Maybe firms with great results happen also to be good at hiring just because they’re good at business stuff in general. And maybe they happen to hire employees who care, who are naturally engaged.
Think about a few people you’ve worked with. No matter how down they get, no matter how many curve balls they face, they get back up and try to do their best job every day, just because they care, just because they are naturally engaged and nothing you can do as an employer can disengage them.
Maybe employee engagement is a function of who you hire, not what you do. Maybe results are created by people who care, who are naturally engaged anyway. Maybe employee engagement isn’t a function of leadership but of natural tendencies.
by Charles Plant | Apr 23, 2013 | Leadership Development
No big surprise but yesterday’s blog got me thinking. Really thinking. I was disturbed when I thought about Harvey Schachter’s article that said that research showed that the most engaged staff may be the worst performers.
Here I was blithely coaching away to the proposition that increased employee engagement leads to better results. In fact I’ve probably said it many times in blogs and done just a few pictographs and several white papers on the subject.
So this new research made me think. What if instead of high engagement leading to great results, the high engagement was a product of the great results.
Just think about it for a second. If your team is playing well, you’re over the moon happy, highly engaged, right there with them. If it isn’t doing well, you’re mildly put off, disgruntled, or ack….disengaged.
Yes, you’re engaged when your team is doing well, disengaged when it’s doing badly.
What if that is true in business as well? Perhaps companies with good results have engaged employees because it is fun to work there when things are going well and there is money to spend on employee perks. When your company isn’t doing well, it isn’t fun to work in a stressful environment where the company doesn’t have extra money to spend on perks.
Perhaps employee engagement comes from good results and not the other way around.
This for me was a terrifying realization. That I who very conceitedly prides himself on understanding the difference between correlation and causality could confuse one for the other and miss the potential of reverse causality just because Gallup had done so much research on the subject of employee engagement. Rookie move.
From here on I pledge myself to figuring out whether results and engagement are merely correlated or whether there is a causal factor at work and engaged employees cause better results or vice versa.
