At a recent conference of industrial/organizational psychologists, I had the good fortune to sit in on a session about happiness at work. There were researchers from several countries, presenting studies on work-family crossover and spillover, the relationship between goal-setting and self-determination theory and other esoteric but immensely interesting (to a geeky organizational scientist like me at least!) research. The one I'll discuss today is on the crucial role that leaders play in ensuring their employees whistle at work.
]]> You may have heard of athletes, performers and hopefully even regular people like you and me sometimes express their feelings of being "in the zone" - where they feel energized, fully engaged and at the peak of their performance. This feeling, that comes from these short-term peak experiences, is termed "flow". Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's (pronounced Chik-sent-me-high-ee) book: "Flow: The psychology of optimal experience" is a great introduction to this idea. The study that struck me, looked at the effectiveness of flow across cultures. Past studies have established that flow, while interesting in itself, also has important effects on individual performance levels, improved customer service climate and exertion of vigor and effort - in other words, indicators of employee engagement. The current study took it further and looked at the impact of flow on career success of individuals across several cultures.It turns out that leaders have an important role to play here. For individuals who rated their relationship with their leaders to be poor, flow has a compensatory effect and impacts their perceived career success. For those who enjoy good relationships with their leaders/managers, they don't need as many flow experiences to enjoy even objective career success! In other words - if your work sucks and has low potential to engage you intrinsically, your leader can make a great deal of difference in ensuring your continued growth and success. If on the other hand, you're in a job that constantly allows you to get 'in the zone', the quality of your relationship with leaders isn't that critical in ensuring career success!
Take a look around you - with the global economy tanking, work getting commoditized and expertise and specialization becoming rarer, it is at least somewhat likely that many of your employees are not having 'flow' experiences every day. The implication is clear - they need you as their leader, to buffer them from some of these contextual challenges and facilitate their growth. You, dear leader, hold the key to your employees whistling at work!
David's reflections on the difference between a good and a great coach were just as quick to understand and easy to follow. One among his thoughts was what all us coaches need to do all the time and really well - help those we coach to hit the pause button and reflect. His four basic directions of reflection for us to ask questions to get the coachee to think on -
1. Look inward: What is most important to you? What values matter most and how are you manifesting them in what you are trying to achieve?
2. Look outward: What matters most to others? What expectations do they hold that you need to address in order to be successful at your endeavors? How do they perceive you?
3.Look back: What have you been trying to learn and what new things have you tried? What has worked well and what hasn't worked? What have you learned?
4.Look ahead: What will you do differently? What do you need to keep learning? Where are your opportunities to try new things?
If we commit these four to action, then they can spawn off several questions that will help us think every day, week, fortnight, month, quarter and year. I will leave you to discuss what follow-on questions make meaning to you and how often will you think about them. One that has worked for me on a quarterly basis is -
If I was to summarize my learning in the last 6 months into my CV, what would it look like?
In our pace of life, we think time has to be saved and not spent by admiring the bud that blossoms into a flower or the birds chirping. I think that's the wrong thing to do. It's taking a few milliseconds to enjoy such little pleasures that push us into the trap of being so overwhelmed with our current moment we have no time and effort to examine it in the context of the past and the future in terms of our personal and professional development.
What would your questions for yourself be? How often will you ask them and how much time will you give for yourself?
Reference -
Hernez-Broome, G., & Boyce, L. A. (Eds.). (2010). Advancing executive coaching: Setting the course for successful leadership coaching (pp. 83-101). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
]]>In our recently concluded strategic planning meeting (STRAP 2012), we had the privilege of listening to the CxO of one of our longest standing clients, Nordstrom. Coming from a very senior executive of a highly respected corporation, and one of our most steadfast clients, his insights on what made Infosys a trusted partner should be considered invaluable. He spoke about three "pillars" necessary for a strategic relationship.
The first pillar, according to him, was the values or what he called the 5Hs that differentiated Infosys from the others: hunger, humility, honor, heart and humanity. He described "hunger" as the strong urge to perform or succeed. He described the Infosys team as "intense and so focused that failure was not an option for them". Humility, according to him, was the humbleness he saw in our leaders. He termed honor, the conviction he saw in us towards keeping our commitments. Heart was what he called our passion for what we did. He described 'humanity' as our sense of service towards our community and country.
The second pillar, he said, was the ability to think big but act small that is, to be a big organization in size and scope but, to act like a small company with one's employees and clients.
And finally, the third pillar, according to him was about knowing who you are, and in his words, "knowing what you are great at and what you are not..."
The Nordstrom CxO's insights seem to generalize to all of business. For instance, Maister, Green, and Galford (2002), in their book, the Trusted Advisor, suggest four types of relationships: service-based, needs-based, relationship-based, and trust-based (in ascending order of hierarchy). In a service-based relationship the focus is on providing answers, expertise, and input. The client receives information, and the timeliness of the effort and the quality are indicators of success. In a needs-based relationship the focus is on the business problem. The client receives solutions and the indicators of success are the problems being solved. At a relationship-based level, the focus is on the client organization. Here the client receives ideas and the indicator of success is repeat business. Finally, in a trust-based relationship the focus is on the client as an individual. The client receives in us a "trusted advisor", someone to fall back on, to seek advice from or to use as a sounding board in times of urgency, situation of crisis, or a major change, success or failure. In this case, a creative pricing for the (trusted advisor's) services is an indicator of success. A "trust-based" relationship involves the deepest level of relationship and the broadest range of business issues.
In the case of Nordstrom, Infosys has achieved this highest level of trust-based relationship. Besides the growing revenue from this partnership, Nordstrom has reposed their trust in us by giving Infosys a seat on their strategy table. The coveted prize many companies strive for in our kind of business- being a trusted partner. While every business is different, there may be lessons from this case that we can apply to other engagements that need a relationship movement upward, towards a trust-based and strategic relationship.
Maister, D., Green, C., & Galford, R. (2002). The trusted advisor. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Ok, now that you've scratched your head raw, how about taking a step back and thinking about why this all really matters to leaders and leadership??
]]> Defining and measuring aspects of 'the self' in general, and one's personality, skills, knowledge and behaviors in particular, is critical for leadership. As leaders, understanding who we are is a pre-requisite to developing ourselves into who we want to be or who our organization, nation or society needs us to become.In psychological and organizational science, a long-established method of better understanding these aspects of the self has been using multi-source or 360-degree feedback. In such feedback, we solicit information about the 'target' person (the leader) using multiple sources - his/her supervisor(s), peers, subordinates, customers etc. in addition to himself/herself. Such multi-source feedback has gained popularity over the years, and shown to be effective in measuring leadership performance and behaviors (Smither & London, 2009). However, recent research (e.g. Oh, Wang, & Mount, 2011) which tests socioanalytic theory (Hogan, 1983), including our own at the Infosys Leadership Institute (Shyamsunder & Barney, 2012), has shown that even personality - long-assumed to be less 'obvious' to others compared to oneself - is better measured using multiple sources. Specifically, we find that having multiple sources provide information about a leader's personality and behaviors, bumps up the statistical relationships we are able to discern, compared to just using self-reported personality (as is more traditional).
Thus, although it seems counter-intuitive, others might be able to rate us on our personality (e.g. how conscientious, sociable, kind, emotionally stable or ambitious we are), in ways that improve the picture of who we 'really' are. They bring perspectives unknown to ourselves, even about something as internal as our own personality. To recount Cooley's ideas, maybe this is the first step in that complete understanding of the self - by learning about what others think we are, we can take concrete steps to influence that perception and reality of who we truly are.
As such, whether using an objective, standardized tool such as a 360-degree survey or assessment, or even just regularly checking in with key people in our lives about their perceptions of us, we can come to a better understanding of our complete and real selves.
References:
Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's.
Hogan, R. T. (1983). A socioanalytic theory of personality. In M.M. Page (Ed.), 1982 Nebraska symposium on motivation (pp. 55-89). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Oh, I.-S., Wang, G., & Mount, M.K. (2011). Validity of Observer Ratings of the Five-Factor Model of Personality Traits: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (4), 762-773.
Rosenberg, M. (1979). Conceiving the self. New York: Basic Books.
Smither, J.W., & London, M. (Editors). (2009). Performance management: Putting research into action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Shyamsunder, A. & Barney, M. (2012, August). Observer ratings of leader personality and performance: A test of socioanalytic theory. Paper to be presented at the Academy of Management 2012 Conference, Boston, Massachusetts.
]]>"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
- Plato
"An hour of play" is perhaps far-fetched! Yet the quote lets us know that play was appreciated even during the time of Plato.
Recently, I was discussing a Serious Game I'm building with a colleague who is also a good friend, and his questions stimulated a myriad of new ideas. As I spoke about how the gameplay follows the principle of scaffolding - meaning that it provides progressively difficult challenges- his interest seemed to grow. He was so intrigued that he asked me a few critically important questions:
1. What exactly is the difference between play, games and serious games?
2. Why do we need to use "scaffolding" and have different challenge levels instead of just one gameplay standard throughout?
And the most interesting question he asked me was:
3. What can we learn from the game world that can be applied in real world contexts?
A cornucopia of answers poured out of me, far more than the space in this blog provides. What follows are some snippets of my responses.
What is the difference between play and game? Can we say that when play gets structured and very organized it becomes a game?
For example, swimming, when undertaken for exercising or even relaxation is closer to play. As soon as certain rules or criteria such as time or space or specific goals, to name a few, come into the picture, swimming can be transformed into an "Olympic Game". How many of us have "gamed" our swimming adventures by giving ourselves the challenge of staying underwater for a duration longer than the previous one :-) !!
Similarly, when something like telling a joke is put into the context of a presentation and is used purposefully to engage the audience's attention to a specific aspect, it transforms into a task. Regarding Serious Games, Michael and Chen (2006) give the following definition: 'A serious game is a game in which education (in its various forms) is the primary goal, rather than entertainment'.
Salen and Zimmerman (2004), suggest that an excellently designed game yields "meaningful play". They define meaningful play as "what occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game." So, perhaps we can say that serious games by definition focus on learning outcomes and at the same time aspire to create an engaging experience by bringing in the aspect of playfulness. Or rather, Serious Games always need a "play-mode".
However, attempting to meet each player-learner's needs can be a daunting task. Can we design games that address the needs of individuals who are so varied in terms of their skill, talent and experiences? One of the ways games can be designed to align player needs and capability to challenge is by paying attention to aspect of multiple-intelligences. (Gardner (1983, 1993, 2000). Van Eck (2006) too dwells on the possibilities that exist in the game world of designing games that address individual player needs.
Thus, by paying attention to audio, visual, spatial, kinesthetic...aspects, a serious game design can address the challenge of "meaningful play". Linking this to workplace, is it not possible to design work in a way that abilities and challenges are closely aligned to provide "meaningful work"?
Vygotsky (1978) introduced the notion of a player-learner's "zone of proximal development" (ZPD). In essence it means that a player may achieve certain tasks alone, while others may be impossible to achieve in spite of support the game provides . Between these two polar opposites lies the zone where learning occurs. And this zone may be different for different people. Consequently, an effective game must incorporate such zones; include areas where the player achieves mastery before moving to the next challenge level. Great games also provide feedback mechanisms that give learners tips about what they need to learn in order to advance thorough the game. Hence, these work as scaffolds to further learning (Lepper, Aspinwall, Mumme, & Chabay, 1990).
Would your learning be more engaging and rewarding if you were to use concepts such as ZPD and scaffolding? As a leader, would you use these concepts from the game-world to create meaningful work and engaged teams?
References:
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic.
Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice. New York: Basic.
Gardner, H. (2000). Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st Century. New
York: Basic.
Lepper, M. R., Aspinwall, L. G., Mumme, D. L., & Chabay, R.W. (1990). Self-perception and social perception processes in tutoring: Subtle social control strategies of expert tutors. In J. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Self inference processes: The Sixth Ontario Symposium in Social Psychology (pp. 217-237). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Michael, D., & Chen, S. (2006).Serious games: Games that educate, train and inform.Thomson: Boston, MA.
Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2004). The rules of play. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Van Eck, R. (2006). Building intelligent learning games. In D. Gibson, C. Aldrich, & M. Prensky (Eds), Games and simulations in online learning research & development frameworks. Hershey, PA: Idea Group.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
How often have we mumbled in exasperation -"they just don't see it the way I do!" , we could have said this to other teams, colleagues, or peers. Much of this exasperation could be due to a difference in mental models. The deeply researched PDF is for the academically inclined, for a practitioner, here are the key thoughts as I see them
For many years, researchers have looked at a "group mind", a reference to how a group seems to think similarly to the members within the groups. While each of us think and act based on the perceptions , beliefs , thoughts and expectations, on occasion all of these could be common across a group and the group thinks and acts in a way that it has one mind. Researchers also differentiate between a group - collection of individuals whose tenure together and division of responsibilities may vary and a team which has many different members who are interdependent on one another. All teams are groups but all groups are not necessarily teams!
We need to understand team mental models by understanding individual mental models. Mental models of perceptions, beliefs, thoughts and expectations help us make sense of our surroundings, and thereby act and behave. It is therefore vital for leaders to understand the mental models of the team they lead as well as the individuals within it. It really doesn't matter which comes first since today, we frequently learn from our team members as well as our leader.
The authors do a long listing of research on studies that have listed how mental models of a team can affect the speed, flexibility, implementation of a decision. All of these can be affected since mental models could include knowledge about traditions, customs, and other aspects of culture, how people work, decide, and what are standards. Such models keep changing and therefore that makes it more confusing! They can therefore facilitate and foster success or become show stoppers.
The authors develop an interesting framework for explaining the role of Team Mental Models with an individual's potential, Team capacity, team process, team performance, resources available, leadership, team size and composition and of course, exiting mental models. Mental models are constantly verbalized and the authors underscore the need for such discussions to be taking place.
As leaders increasingly rely on teams below them, when things don't happen the way the leader wants it - in terms of speed or efficiency, exploring the mental model of their groups as well as that of the leaders and acting on the differences in perceptions , beliefs , thoughts and expectations will help in visions getting translated into reality.
Reference -
Klimoski, R., & Mohammed, S. (1994). Team mental model: construct or metaphor? Journal of Management, 20(2), 403-437. Elsevier. Retrieved from http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0149206394900213
The author looks at how when groups stifled the power of organized dissent within teams, they created horribly wrong errors. The Vietnam War and Pearl Harbor are two examples the authors go into great detail.
I suppose this ability to be comfortable with and dialogue with others who dissent from our thoughts must be very difficult. It certainly is easy for me to like people who agree with me all the time! It's even more tempting for me to work in teams of people like me all the time. This book however, shook me up on that.
I remembered a commentary on a famous debate that took place between two Hindu saints who were from different philosophical streams of thought. The commentator after discussing each sides arguments, reminded the reader on who the real victor in the debate was. It was the one who did not stick to his (or her) stand but amended one's own opinion to reflect shades of the other side as well so that the final solution had a greater appeal to a larger group.
This is easier said than done and I will be excited to hear your thoughts and experiences and of course you can disagree with me but do read the book!
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Various studies of women leaders comment on the 'communal' characteristics of strong interpersonal skills, inclusiveness, persuasiveness, concern for the welfare of others, ability to handle adversities, being honest and realistic, being collaborative as the desirable qualities that they get to the workplace leadership roles (which are otherwise replete with leadership styles that are more 'agentic' - assertive, controlling, ambition driven). Remember the concept of the Level 5 leader proposed by Jim Collins - characterized by above all, humility and fierce resolve? To say that women leaders embody all that may be a stretch, but studies show that they are certainly better candidates given the right environment.
So that makes it somewhat simple isn't it? If these desirable behaviors were suitably recognized and rewarded, there would naturally be a greater representation of such women leaders at the top! So what accounts for the less than 3% women CEOs and less than 12% women on boards of companies across the world? That these same qualities that organizations desire at the helm of affairs are what derail a woman's career somewhere mid-journey? That these same qualities render them unsuitable to the competitive corporate race for success? That organizations are not quite ready to dismantle the traditional scaffolds of management and leadership ways for newer ways of accommodating such styles?
Even the best of our women's initiatives crafted carefully to support the career woman, focus on readying the woman for the intensely competitive, visibility seeking, network driven, individualistic corporate world - telling us how to overcome the odds, to sail through the challenges, to have faith and to persist, showing us examples of women (the handful) who have done it, and exhorting us to live up to the challenge! Showing us ways in which to 'adapt' ourselves to the demands of the leadership challenge. The irony of it.
Are we shining the torch in the right direction then? What are we doing about preparing the workplace for a better tomorrow, which has balanced perspectives (not through the affirmative action type of initiatives) and is welcoming of greater diversity in the (selfish) interests of bettering ourselves?
I have often observed that whenever people talk about the indoor or outdoor games they have played in their childhood (or even as adults) they seem quite energized. Some of my friends say that the idea of "fair play" was ingrained in them due to all their game/play experiences. Personally, whenever the learning experiences (even the most mundane one) had elements of play and game, such as discovery and the possibility of winning... to name a few, I have felt deeply engaged and have moved towards mastery in that area. One simple example of making a game out of boring tasks is to turn it into a game where you try to beat one's own record for speed and quality. Perhaps play is the one experience that most human beings share. In his work "Homo Ludens," Huizinga (1955) highlighted the key role of play in building culture. His analysis of culture as a game suggested that play is central to culture - even as play influences and shapes culture, culture too influences play. In a lighter vein, would you say that cricket is central to the Indian culture? Given the importance of games and play, it's not surprising to me or any of my friends that everything is being turned into a game. There's even a new word for this process - "gamification". For example, the learners at Khan Academy get rewarded for solving problems and are also awarded special "Sun badges" as they make significant progress in learning. In essence, "gamification" refers to the creation of game mechanics to spur greater involvement in activities which are usually not categorized as games. Brands such as Xbox, Foursquare, Linkedin, etc. have demonstrated gamification successfully. Integrating play into business is an aspect that several other companies such as Learning Curve International (now TOMY), Google, Chicago Public Schools, Umpqua Bank, and Threadless, are also engaged in (Brown & Vaughan, 2009; Meyer, 2010). I'm excited about this trend of attempting to create an innovative, learning work environment that emits higher levels of dedication and involvement from employees and make them passionate about their workspace. In particular, companies such as IBM, Deloitte, and SAP too are using games for motivating employees. You might be interested to know that leadership development initiatives are also addressing play as a useful factor in leadership development (Petriglieri & Wood, 2005; Rafaeli, 2010). I have personally been involved in several development initiatives using nature as a background for learning and can appreciate the combination of play and learning in such initiatives. What is your view around the role play should "play" in your own development? Do you want an element of fun in your leadership development activities? Is fun and work an alien combination? References: Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. 2009. Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imaginations, and invigorates the soul. New York: Aevry Penguin Group. Huizinga, J. 1955. Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Meyer, P. 2010. From workplace to playspace: Innovation, learning, and changing through dynamic engagement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Petriglieri, G., & Wood, J. D. 2005. Beyond "fun and games": Outdoor activities for meaningful leadership development. In P. Strebel, & T. Keys (Eds.), Mastering executive education: How to combine content with context and emotion: 252-266. London: Financial Times-Prentice Hall Rafaeli, S. 2010. Games are a serious business. In T. Heroti (Ed.), Management leading the way. The Marker, 14 (October).
You have heard this before. Listening is important. Listening is necessary. People in your life, both personal and professional, have extolled the virtues of listening. In the event that you have heard them, you might have put listening in that "things to learn and develop" bucket for most of your lifetime. If you have not, it could be that you do not consider listening to be that important, or perhaps you do have the tools or resources to be a good listener.
So, is listening important? According to the International Listening Association (yes, there is such a body, giving more credence to the importance of listening), more than 35 business studies indicate that listening is a top skill needed for success in business.
Instead of spending a lot of space trying to convince you about the importance of listening perhaps I can provide you with some resources to become a better listener.
In order to comprehend spoken messages, listeners may need to integrate information from a range of resources: phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Achieving all this in real time as the message unfolds makes listening "complex, dynamic and fragile" (Celce-Murcia, 1995, p. 366)
So, how do you become a good active listener? Some things to keep in mind include:
Approach
Ideally, you should enter each interaction with an emphasis on listening. This will make your mind and body attuned to becoming a good listener and you will be able to get the best delivery of the message from the other person(s).
If your goal is to listen first and then challenge or respond, you will always end up better understanding what the speaker is trying to convey. If your mind immediately prepares for a response as soon as the other person speaks, true listening becomes a challenge.
Interaction
According to a study conducted by Camiel Buekeboom, the way a listener behaves makes a huge difference to the quality of information they receive from the speaker. In this study, a group of students watch a short film and then described it to a listener. Half the listeners had a 'positive' attitude - smiling, nodding and maintaining an open body position - while the others frowned and didn't smile. Speakers reporting to a positive listener used more abstractions, describing aspects of the film that couldn't be seen, such as a character's thoughts and emotions, and also included more of their own opinions. So, being a proactive listener will affect the person speaking considerably in delivering all the components of their message.
Some ways that you can be a proactive listener and ensure a healthy listening exchange include:
· Eye Contact - enables the speaker to gauge your focus. Facing the speaker, or leaning towards the speaker also helps with this purpose.
· Not Interrupting - helps the speaker to maintain momentum and complete their delivery of the message
· Questioning - at the end of the message, asking relevant questions helps the speaker gauge your level of understanding and interest
· Paraphrasing - re-wording the message in different words and using this as clarification ensures alignment with the speaker. However, too much of this may be ineffective as the speaker may start to question his own efficacy in delivering the message.
Ultimately, your goal is to have an effective understanding of what the other person is trying to convey. Being a better listener will enable this process greatly.
References:
Beukeboom, C. (2009). When words feel right: How affective expressions of listeners change a speaker's language use". European Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 747-756
Celce-Murcia, M. (1995). "Discourse analysis and the teaching of listening." In G. Cook and B. Seidlhofer, (Eds). Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics (pp.363-377). Oxford:Oxford University Press
Infinite loops are a sort of computer science purgatory for novice programmers. Also known as recursion, when code calls itself repeatedly, it chokes the program and the computer can grind to a halt.
Leaders can think of formal rules that they write as a type of business code. A code of ethics, policies, process maps, quality manuals and contracts create formal business rules. They shape the mental models of their employees (Day, Harrison & Halpern, 2009). Ethical cultures with conscientious employees are good at following these rules.
More important are the informal rules - the organization's culture, also created by leaders. These values - about what's appropriate are created by how leaders role model the informal, unwritten rules that others must follow. But sometimes the marketplace changes the rules of the profitability game. And as the competitive landscape changes, some rules need to evove.
My colleague, Professor Bruce Avolio suggests that authentic leaders create a climate where rules can be challenged (Avolio, 2011). I'm fortunate to work for Kris Gopalakrishnan, who in 2010 facilitated a senior leadership event for our top leaders where he encouraged leaders to challenge classic Infosys mental models, frameworks and paradigms. This helped our leaders recontextualize our business and helped refine our current business strategy and organizational design. We jointly reprogrammed the business strategy and structure into what we today call Infosys 3.0.
Lesser leaders might such avoid and fear such constructive confrontation. Another colleague, Professor James Detert and his colleagues highlight the importance of leaders like Kris enabling followers to have a "voice" (Detert, Burris & Harrison, 2011). Without voice, followers can follow rules, but like a lemming, have the business fall off of a cliff. With a leadership climate of "voice", issues are raised and fairly addressed without fears of retribution. Professor Bruce Avolio suggests that an ethos of leaders creating followers who take positive, proactive ownership for change is the ultimate leadership legacy (Avolio, 2011). Are your rules stuck in an infinite loop? Are you fully leveraging your voice?
References
Avolio, B.J. (2011). Full Range Leadership Development, Second Edition. Sage
Detert, J.R., Burris, E.R., & Harrison, D.A. (2010, June 8). What's Really Silencing Your Employees. Harvard Business Review Blog Network. Downloaded February 10, 2012 from http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/06/whats-really-silencing-your-em.html
]]>It was a VC for an hour and there were no ppts for folks like me to get glued on to the images. Whats more, the speaker was always seated and we never got to see his hands. All of this would have made me endlessly bored within minutes but i was completley glued to what he was saying. What he said made a big impact on me. More about that later but here were two simple presentation techniques I learnt -
try these out when you have to speak next time! I sure am going to and may even have my speach video recorded and check if I did do what i wanted to!
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So what are the ingredients of a good story? Dennehy identifies three key elements necessary to construct a good story: color, repetition, and structure. Color in a story is about using analogies to help your audience or followers conjure up an image. Followers are able to easily relate to the story in a way that makes them see themselves in the situation. For instance, most of us can relate to a story about an experience of going to a bad restaurant.
The second element, repetition, ensures that a key message is remembered by followers such that the key ideas spread throughout the organization with fidelity. At Infosys we have all heard and probably used the story of how our founding leaders started Infosys with an initial investment of just Rs10,000, in a make-shift office in Mr. Murthy's home. The story has been repeated several times to inspire new members understand the power of thinking big and being persistent in spite of hardships.
Dennehy's third element is the structure of the story. The first step is context setting. This includes the situation ("went to the restaurant with my family for dinner"), the time ("last summer"), and the players ("manager at the restaurant").
The next step is to build the plot. Creating a plot involves laying out a sequence of events that leads up to a climax. In the restaurant example, you might start building the plot by describing how your family had just finished your meal, paid the bill, and were getting up to leave when your knee hit the table and sends a few dishes crashing to the floor. The "dishes crashing" is the highpoint of the story and your narration of the sequence of events leading to the incident keeps the audience captivated in your story. You conclude by telling the audience what happened at the end: The manager was very kind and decided not to charge you for the broken dishes and invited you to come back again.
At the end of the story the audience learns - the "moral of the story". There is a great customer service lesson in our restaurant story - the manager's willingness to forego the cost of the dishes for continued patronage of a customer showed her commitment to customers. The moral of the story here is that a great gesture goes a long way in getting your customers to return. The restaurant manager's behavior would not only in all probability bring the concerned customer back but might also bring some of the other customers back who were witnessing the positive behavior.
For a story to be effective, the story has to have all the required elements - color, repetition, structure and the moral of the story. Having these elements greatly increase the chance of making your message stick with your followers.
So, the next time you want to communicate a message to your team or a large audience, use these tools to build an effective story into your speech or presentation. And if stories are already part of your communication tool kit, share your success "stories" with the rest of us in this forum!
Antonakis, J. (2012). Transformational and charismatic leadership. In Day, D. V, & Antonakis, J. (Eds.), The Nature of Leadership (pp. 256-288). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Dennehy, R.F. (1999). The executive as storyteller. Management Review, 88 (3), 40-43.
I am an occasional cook, and am very passionate about my cooking. One of my favorite dishes is butter chicken and I follow a fixed recipe when I cook it, with part of the cooking done in a microwave. Last evening my microwave suddenly stopped working and I found myself in the middle of a near disaster with respect to my butter chicken. I had to alter the recipe significantly, was very upset about the microwave not working but still managed to complete it and it came out better than usual. That's when I asked - since when did I become so risk averse? And this phrase came to my mind - is it better to be "Safe than Sorry" or be "Sorry than Safe". So I decided to break it down to 3 variables -
1. Risk taking and the associated outcome
2. Consequences of the outcome
3. What do you feel about the consequences
After doing a bit of soul searching, I created a theory. My theory is that the bigger you are, the more likely you are to go for the Safe than Sorry approach. It is because in your mind, the risk of failure is too high. Mind you, the real consequences have nothing to do with how you feel them in your mind. A child has no fear of failure because he/she does not give any thought to the cost of failure. So, the cost of failure for him/her is zero.
I think the same theory is extendable to organizations. You will see that the same companies that were founded a few years back by a bunch of risk takers suddenly become completely risk averse. The reason for this is the same - in their minds, failure is just not an option. They feel they are being watched by too many people, and they can't look to be losing any of their bets. They start associating too much cost to failure - probably more than it really deserves.
Look at what is happening to Sachin Tendulkar today. Fighting the demons within his mind has become a bigger challenge for him than getting the 100th century. Probably he is associating more value to it than it really deserves.
Closer home, I feel we are facing the same dilemma as a company. By thinking more about the need to be the market leader and the company to watch, we are making it harder for ourselves to take risks. We have to realize that we have become what we have by taking risks and not by playing safe. We have to get back to that entrepreneurial mindset that we had till a few years back and start associating lesser cost / consequences to failure. That, to me is the only way to nirvana. And there is no better time than NOW because if we don't do it now, we won't do it ever.
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