2013 Best Summer Reads

David Burkus —  May 22, 2013 — 2 Comments

Summer is fast upon us. For many people, work life might just slow down enough to let summer reading pick up. Perhaps this year you’ve been extra busy, and need to catch up on some of 2013’s good new releases. Or maybe you’re looking out to what books are on the horizon. In either case, here are some of our picks for the best summer reading in leadership, innovation, and strategy.

Leadership

Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning. by Chip Bell and Marshall Goldsmith. Bell’s book on how leaders must take charge of their people’s development is a great read. So good, in fact, it’s been re-released as a third edition with even more content. It’s worth picking up a new copy and checking out what you might be missing.

Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence by Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins. Leaders need to connect with all of their people and communicate their vision. In this new book, Su and Wilkins reveal how to develop a voice that is both powerful and authentic.

Innovation

Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity by Keith Sawyer.  Innovation is rarely a linear process. Creativity moves and cycles through various stages as it zig zags from idea to innovation. Sawyer covers those stages and provides exercises for leveraging each one for maximum creativity.

Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration by Leigh Thompson. Despite all those pictures of solitary innovators like Tesla working alone on big ideas, innovation really happens in teams. Thompson takes a deep study of the most creative teams and shares some surprising findings about how innovation happens.

Strategy

The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business by Rita Gunter McGrath. The business landscape is changing, and odds are the strategy you’ve crafted needs to change as well. McGrath discusses why the best strategies are ones that can change with the landscape and outlines how to keep your strategy moving.

The Collaboration Economy: How to Meet Business, Social, and Environmental Needs and Gain Competitive Advantage by Eric Lowitt. Lowitt’s approach is less a strategy of how to position against your competitors and more a peak at the future of the economic landscape and how continued prosperity relies more on collaboration with other organizations than a single-minded focus on competition.

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In Praise of Middle Managers

David Burkus —  May 20, 2013 — 4 Comments

Middle managers don’t get a lot of attention or respect. Most business literature focuses on the actions of companies’ senior leaders. Most reorganization efforts try to squeeze the role out through “flattening” or “right-sizing.” Even most business satires are targeted squarely at middle managers, think Michael Scott or Bill Lumberg. But leadership happens at all levels. In most organizations, the impact of middle managers is just as important as that of senior leadership. In a recent study, that impact quantified and researchers found that a good middle manager was worth almost two team members.

In a working paper released last year titled “The Value of Bosses,” Stanford’s Edward Lazaer and Kathryn Shaw, as well as University of Utah’s Christopher Stanton examined the inner workings of a technology-based service firm and calculated the effectiveness of teams and bosses. Because the company used computers to measure the output of teams every hour, it was possible to gather productivity data for nearly 24,000 workers and almost 2,000 bosses for five years. In total, that’s about 6 million productivity measurements. On average, the service teams had nine members and employees changed supervisors four times a year, making it possible to isolate the effects of certain managers.

When they had calculated all of the comparisons, the research team found that adding a tenth worker to teams results in a productivity bump of around 11 percent. However, replacing a low-quality managers with a high-quality one bumped productivity by 12 percent, a significant increase. In their study, the average boss can add 1.75 times the productivity of adding a tenth team member. Clearly, middle managers add value that’s worth of a little recognition.

So what does it take to become a praise-worthy boss?

Teaching. The researchers found that the top-performing managers in the study were more likely to focus on teaching their team solid work skills or habits. They didn’t just supervise employees; they made them better. The results of this study are compelling, not just for middle managers but also for senior leaders. If you are a middle manager, start focusing on how you can better lead your team through teaching and coaching them to improve. If you’re a senior leader, give your middle managers a little praise…then teach them to teach others.

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0410 | Alexander Osterwalder

David Burkus —  May 17, 2013 — 4 Comments

Alexander Osterwalder is an entrepreneur, speaker, and business model innovator. In their book, Business Model Generation, he and Professor Yves Pigneur revealed the Business Model Canvas, a practical tool to visualize, challenge and re-invent business models. In this interview, we talk about the need for visual business tools, business model strategy, and why good leaders build a portfolio of business models in their organizations.

Business Model Canvas

Strategyzer

Listen below or subscribe via iTunes.

This podcast is supported by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook just for trying it at www.audibletrial.com/lead.

 

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Would You Pay $30,000 for a Gold Star?

David Burkus —  May 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

Motivation is a big industry. From incentive and recognition trade shows to compensation consultants, there are a host of industry experts ready to carefully craft the perfect program that keeps employees working happily and productively. Most of these experts adhere to the economic principle of agency theory, which says that individuals work for their own self-interest.

To best leverage this principle, these experts offer just the right trinket, or they design an elegant incentive compensation solution tailored to your needs. All of these offers assume that simply having financial incentives triggers people to work harder, which makes performance-based compensation almost a given.

Almost.

According to research from Ian Larkin, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, social comparison — our natural tendency to measure ourselves against our peers — may be the most powerful workplace motivator. So performance-based compensation might not matter as much as how that pay compares with peers in the organization.

Larkin’s research examined sales representatives at an enterprise software firm whose compensation was largely commission-based. Their commission structure also contained a “commission accelerator,” which offered salespeople higher bonuses as they made more sales in a given quarter. However, the company also maintained an annual “President’s Club” recognition program, which rewarded salespeople for being in the top 20% of all representatives.

The commission structure favored salespeople who could close many deals in one quarter, but the recognition program favored salespeople who spread their large sales out over an entire year. Representatives on the borderline of induction into President’s Club often faced a choice: Close the deal in the same quarter as other deals and be paid more, or wait until next quarter and boost their ranking compared to their peers.

Larkin discovered that salespeople who were on the borderline of club induction were willing to buy their way in by sacrificing their commissions. He was even able to calculate their “willingness-to-pay” — the amount a salesperson was willing to forgo in commission to be inducted into the club. The average salesperson was willing to pay $30,000 or 5% of their total compensation, just for the non-monetary recognition of President’s Club.

Organizational leaders need to consider the lessons of social comparison when designing motivational programs and compensation plans. When employees decide how much effort to exude, they don’t merely respond to their own pay but also to how their pay compares to that over their peers.

Strict pay for performance, then, might hold unintended consequences; employees on the borderline of top-level status may cheat or sabotage others to get there — likewise employees who are outside the cutoff may grow to resent their colleagues if they feel their own efforts are underpaid.

The implications of such research are that standardized salary scales and ancillary incentives may serve to better motivate the entire workforce and better encourage team collaboration. Whatever compensation plan is chosen, leaders need to realize the social comparison is a real factor and develop a plan that best leverages what really motivates.

[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared as "Social vs. monetary motivation in the workplace" on SmartBrief on Leadership.]

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Is A Commanding Leadership Right Style For You?”

Guest —  May 13, 2013 — 4 Comments

[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins are co-founders of Isis Associates, an executive coaching and leadership consulting firm.  They are also co-authors of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence.]

 

Think of a leader you know who has a commanding leadership style. Who comes to mind? Is it someone who drives to results, is decisive, and has a keen sense of urgency? Or is it someone who gets the job done but not without using his sharp elbows in the process? When it comes to those with a commanding style, you can’t help but wonder how much their presence contributes to moving the organization forward and how it also is what sometimes gets them and the organization in trouble.

Regardless of how you might feel about the person at an personal level, their approach begs the question: should we emulate their command and control leadership style or not?  Those leaders who veer too much on the commanding side of presence certainly achieve results but often at the expense of relationships and connectivity to their stakeholders. Vice versa, those who overly focus on the needs of others and have more of an accommodating presence may compromise being able to effectively drive to necessary outcomes. Whichever way you lean, neither presence is sustainable in the long run. And herein lies the key: exuding leadership presence is dynamic – - it is not stuck in being one way, the same way all of the time. Leadership presence requires you to be adaptable to any given situation by being both commanding and supportive not swinging the pendulum between the two, not choosing “either/or,”, but instead integrating both strength and compassion.

When we see command-and-control leaders achieve results at the expense of their stakeholders it leaves many of us wondering if that is their only path to success. This is especially consequential for women who ultimately face what researchers at Catalyst termed the “double bind”  – the quintessential “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” quandary as it relates to their presence when they are perceived in extreme ranges of either being too soft or too tough.

But rather than taking on the persona of leaders you see in the news or in your own office, your leadership presence has to start with what is unique to you. Too often, individuals will emulate the overly commanding style they see in others (especially in their bosses) thinking that is their only way to exude presence. By mimicking someone else, you will fail to build on your own strengths. Instead, focus on defining what your distinctive value proposition is to your role, your stakeholder and your organization. By keeping in mind what value you bring to the table and how others can benefit, you will be on your way to building a presence that is confident, engaging and authentic and resonates positively to those around you.

What attributes do you conjure up when you think about a leader that has effective presence? Authentic, engaging, trustworthy, visible, clear, decisive, listener? The fact of the matter is that an effective presence reflects all of those attributes. Having leadership presence requires an unfaltering ability to be authentic to yourself and your message while holding an awareness and attunement to others. In other words, leadership presence means having a voice for yourself, your vision and that of your organization while also giving a voice to others. This is the type of presence that ultimately engenders trust and followership.

One way or the other, a commanding leader’s impact will be etched in your mind one way or another. As you chart your own leadership course, you have the chance to exude your very own authentic presence that is aligned with the impact you ultimately want to make. What will it be?

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