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7/29/10: Top Talent Development Posts this Week

July 29, 2010 by Wally Bock

Every week, I review blogs that cover talent development to find you the pick of the lot for the week. In this post, you’ll find pointers to pieces about talent management semantics, teamwork or talent, senior leadership and talent development, another survey on innovation and job satisfaction, and gender-specific management training.

From The Employee Performance and Talent Management Blog: Talent Management Semantics

“A few recent blog posts have got me thinking lately about the language around talent management. This started a couple weeks ago with a post from Paul Hebert. He looked at the use of the word management versus the term supervision, with the point being that what we really want our managers to do, as the front line on talent management programs, is supervise.”

Wally’s Comment: What we call things certainly matters. And in recent decades we seem to have created a world of dueling definitions for many important terms. In the same period, we’ve exalted some terms (leadership) and devalued others (supervision). Sean Conrad draws on posts by Paul Hebert and Kris Dunn to make the point that we need to both examine our language and become more consistent with our definitions.

From Working Girl: Teamwork or Talent?

“Consider this: Although each of us can easily buy a computer mouse no one on Earth knows how to produce one. That’s right – lots of people know how to produce parts of the mouse, but not one of them could actually produce one on their own. Even a mouse designer (who probably only designs parts of the mouse rather than the whole mouse) would not be able to produce his own plastic and metal bits to make a mouse if push came to shove. The point is that combined ideas allow us to do extremely tricky things that none of us would be able to do – let alone understand – on our own.”

Wally’s Comment: Laura Schroeder starts with observations on the complexity of the current world. Then she leads us on a review of the relative values of individual talent and teamwork and how they interact. Laura also introduces us to Adam and Oz and the increasing complexity of the spear business way back in the day.

From Great Leadership: Leadership Development: Executive Self-Assessment

“What’s the #1 differentiator between companies that excel at succession planning and leadership development and those that simply go through the motions’?”

Wally’s Comment: Dan McCarthy writes about something that’s very important but often glossed over. We talk about the importance of a rigorous process of talent development a lot. We talk less about the importance of senior management as active participants. When that happens, it has two results. First, the process becomes more effective. Second, top management participation sends the message that talent development is important. If you’re a senior manager, take Dan’s self-assessment.

From the Talent Management Blog: Leadership Survey: Examining Innovation & Job Satisfaction

“Last week, Roslyn Courtney, an award-winning expert on leadership, business change and talent management, announced the results of her survey on leadership and careers in a business world that is radically changing. Courtney surveyed 320 leaders and managers and conducted in-depth interviews. The survey looked at the use of talent, innovation and more, with some interesting results.”

Wally’s Comment: Heather McCulligh reviews some recent research and shares her observations on the importance of company success in retaining top talent, the level of innovation at big companies, and the impact of Gen Y on the workplace. For some additional reading on innovation at work, read Mary Jo Asmus’ post: “Influencing Creativity and Innovation.”

From Dorothy Dalton: A case for gender related management training

“Let’s stop being trapped by political correctness. Do men and women need different types of management training? I think so.”

Wally’s Comment: Dorothy Dalton is one of my favorite bloggers on issues of women in the workplace. You may have read her posts on the way women negotiate for salary or her posts on women who are workplace bullies. Read this post to get Dorothy’s analysis of issues that should be addressed in management training.

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Does Your Net Work?

July 28, 2010 by Bill Bradley

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: How To Get Yourself Employed

Competency: self-development

Who benefits: job seekers (employed or unemployed)

Consultant Usage: must read article and book for career counselors

What’s it about? I am writing this post out of frustration.  Three different friends of mine, unknown to each other, are all seeking employment.  Two have been out of work for a long time.  One is employed but unhappy at work and says she is seeking to switch jobs and maybe careers.

All three have one thing in common.  They are going about their job search in the wrong way.

They are known in the “biz” as passive job seekers.  They look at the want ads in the newspapers and the Internet.  They post their (very average looking) resumes on job search sites.  That’s about it. 

And they get passive responses … that is, no responses.  For one of my friends this has been going on for over 2 years.  None of the three seems to want any advice and all three believe that the perfect job is out there and will somehow present itself, probably soon.  Except you and I know that “soon” probably won’t come and at some point at least the two unemployed friends will reach desperation and need to take the next employment opportunity that comes along.  And that opportunity is very likely to be low pay, out of their field of interest, and likely described as menial.  And the worst part of this is that while in the menial job they won’t have the time they need to do a proper job search.

Lordy I wish my friends would read Ariana Green’s Blog posting: “How to Make Your Network Work for You”.  It is short and to the point.  She acknowledges that most job seekers hate “networking”.  It just feels demeaning.  Ah, but not if you do it right, she says.  Make networking a positive experience for the other guy.  She has some tips on how to impress (my favorite, leave an after work message with some interesting tidbit on the other person’s phone). She also reminds us that no matter how many tips we follow, there is still no substitution for face-to-face contact.  Also included are two very short case studies that help make her point. 

If my friends can bring themselves to read a second short article, US News and World Report offers “How to Beat the Job-Search Blues”.  While not quite so well written as the Blog above, it too has some active job search actions including how to turn volunteerism into a job.

Finally, if my friends insist on sitting around all day (or night in the case of the employed friend) and wait for someone to contact them, then by all means they should invest some significant time in reading a new book called Networking Like a Pro: Turning Contacts into Connections.  This book has some “big names” endorsing it and it offers Networking Scorecard for measuring progress (or lack thereof). 

I would like to say a bit more but I have got to go meet some people now.  I don’t need anything, but the best network is the one that is in place when you need it.

Catch you later.

 

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Plus-Minus at Work

July 27, 2010 by Wally Bock

In hockey there’s a statistic called “plus-minus.” It calculates the goal difference for a player’s team when that player is on the ice. It’s a way to measure a player’s contribution to the team.

We need something like that at work. Most people who work in companies do most of their work in teams. We should have a way to judge who’s making a contribution to those teams.

It’s a way to identify the people we want to hang on to. That’s important today when we’re seeing more and more articles like the one from Portfolio, headlined: “Staring Down Defection.” Here’s the teaser quote:

“Now that the job market is thawing, some workers might be looking to move on to greener pastures.”

True high potential employees don’t just produce great work. They make everyone around them better. They help their team win.

If I were evaluating a worker’s contribution to the team, I’d start by finding out who the other members want to work with. Mark Harbeke at Winning Workplaces takes the position that “team building matters more than skills.”

I’m guessing that the people other people want to work with will exhibit some very specific behaviors. Here are some.

They will pitch in and carry their share of the load. But they won’t stop there. They’ll also be the ones who help others cross the finish line.

They’ll keep their commitments as a matter of honor and habit. Other team members will be able to depend on them.

They won’t play the blame game. They’ll look for solutions, not scapegoats.

They’ll be pleasant people. No one wants to work with a grouch, even a productive one.

If we’re identifying the high potentials we want to keep, we need to evaluate their plus-minus. We need to evaluate how much they really help the team win.

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The ROI of Building Interpersonal Competence

July 25, 2010 by Ken Nowack

“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

Carl W. Buechner

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Do nice people finish first or is it last?

Some recent research suggests that developing social skills and having accurate appraisal of our strengths and development areas might really pay off–really in dollars and cents.

Ten years after graduation, high-school students who had been rated as conscientious, collaborative and cooperative by their teachers were earning significantly more than classmates who had similar test scores but fewer social skills ($3,200 more yearly on average), according to Christy Lleras assistant professor of human and community development at the University of Illinois study1.

The study analyzed data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, which followed a diverse group of 11,000 tenth graders for 10 year.  The study tracked not only scores on standard achievement tests but teacher ratings on such qualities as the students’ work habits, their ability to relate well to peers (social skills), and their participation in extracurricular activities which indicates the ability to interact well with both students and adults. Indeed, social competence seems to help explain career success in these students.

Envisia Learning, Inc.  recently analyzed over 2,000 leaders who have taken our Emotional Intelligence View 360 (EIV360) that was designed to measure self-management, relationship management and communication skills. By comparing self to other ratings we can characterize leaders as being either accurate or inaccurate in seeing how others experience their interpersonal style and behavior.  In fact, we describe three styles: 1) Overestimators (they rate themselves higher than others); 2) Underestimators (they rate themselves lower than others) and 3) Accurate Assessors (either seeing themselves as largely competent or not but at least aligned with how others experience them).

In our analysis we found that 41.7% would be characterized as “over estimators” with 12% having extremely elevated views of themselves relative to how others rate them (maybe they are right but the differences are approximately one standard deviation above the average self-other difference).

We tested (using a statistical test called Analysis of Variance) whether the direct reports who live day and night with their bosses would rate their overall emotional intelligence higher if they had a more accurate view of their strengths and development areas.  So, we split the leaders into two groups based on the average self-manager differences: 1) Those who were “Overestimators” and 2) Those who were “Underestimators” and compared the ratings of EI by direct reports.

As expected, direct reports who worked for leaders who had self-enhanced views of their social skills rated them significantly lower (p = .03) compared to those who were more humble and realistic in their self-ratings. It would appear that the most emotionally intelligent leaders truly have a more realistic and accurate self-awareness and insight about their interpersonal competence.

It seems like people with social skills might actually have better capacity to navigate the interpersonal world…Maybe being nice really does pay off in the long run….Be well…

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  1. Lleras, C. (2008). Do skills and behaviors in high school matter? The contribution of noncognitive factors in explaining differences in educational attainment and earnings.  Social Science Research, 37, 888-902 [↩]

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7/22/10: Top Talent Development Posts this Week

July 22, 2010 by Wally Bock

Every week, I review blogs that cover talent development to find you the pick of the lot for the week. In this post, you’ll find pointers to pieces about barriers to building talent, program evaluation, hiring better, and appreciating your top performers. Plus, there’s a list of great articles on motivating top talent.

From TLNT: Four Barriers to Building Talent

“Through our corporate and consulting experience, we have identified four talent-building barriers that organizations create for themselves and then regularly stumble over. These barriers explain why line executives’ exhortations and HR’s actions to build talent are not translating into increased talent quality and depth.”

Wally’s Comment: Call it developing talent or building talent, it’s still the same challenge. You have plenty of problems without making new ones. Marc Effron and Miriam Ort outline four problems you might be creating for yourself. The first is my favorite: needless complexity.

From the Performance Improvement Blog: Seeing the Gorilla in Program Evaluation

“Organizations often evaluate their own programs, as well they should. But, in doing so they should be aware that they are probably failing to observe some very important factors. It’s the nature of human beings. We suffer from selective attention.”

Wally’s Comment: Writers are advised to “let someone else read your stuff” because we don’t see our own problems well. Stephen J. Gill points out that managers evaluating programs have the same problem, not because they’re bad people or ineffective managers, but because of pesky human nature.

From Winning Workplaces: Guitar Magazine Poll: Team Building Matters More Than Skills

“Back in March I wrote this post, which expanded on a point made by Marisa Keegan at Fistful of Talent to argue that employers should draw a line in the sand and hire for attitude and fit over skills. The justification for doing so is a greater tendency for your employees and teams to create customer evangelists who can increase your repeat business and referrals. This reasoning was reiterated in an unlikely place: a guitar magazine. Last week I picked up the September issue of Guitar Player at my local grocery store, and in it I found the following poll and results”

Wally’s Comment: What does your team have in common with a rock band? Mark Harbeke thinks it might be the kind of people you want to bring in.

From Great Leadership: Make Sure You “Hug” Your Top Performers During Times of Change

“A lot of managers make the mistake of thinking that during times of change, their top performers would be the least likely to need reassurance. That’s a major mistake, and could lead to turnover of your most valuable people when you need them the most.”

Wally’s Comment: Your top performers deserve some special attention. That’s true all the time, but it can be especially important in times of change.

From Online Masters Degree: Good, Better, Best: 40 Great Articles on How to Motivate Your Top Talent

“In an age of corporate downsizing, some employers make the mistake of assuming that their top employees are “safe,” that nobody would consider leaving their current job at a time like this. However, employers who make this assumption often find themselves holding the bag when those top employees choose to leave for greener pastures. In fact, the employees who have the most to offer a company are the ones who have a chance at any company. They’re more likely to leave in an economic downturn than the average employees. Therefore, the challenge for any company that wishes to maintain quality and plan for future growth is to discover ways to motivate these top employees, to understand what “makes them tick.” Everyone wants to feel appreciated, to feel as if they are contributing, and to experience professional growth. These are 40 excellent articles we have found from around the Web about strategies for motivating this crucial portion of your workforce.”

Wally’s Comment: Not all of the forty articles are about dealing with top performers. That’s OK, there are links to enough good stuff here to give you plenty to read and use.

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A Book And A Movie

July 21, 2010 by Bill Bradley

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: A Good Read and a Must See

Competencies: motivation, achievement, empowering others

Who benefits: There is something here for just about anyone

Consultant Usage: good background information for coaches, counselors, and trainers

What’s it about? How is your day going?  Need a little fun and educational pick-me-up?  If you have 11 minutes I guarantee you a smile and chuckle with Daniel Pink’s animated video Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.  If you are at all interested in a straight-forward explanation of what really motivates us at home and in the workplace, it is so simple just click on the link and sit back and enjoy.  He does a great job of starting with what we already know and adding some things we probably didn’t know.  And if you are watching at work, you still have four minutes left on your break.

Writing about motivation, here is what I am guessing is a good read.  It is just out, I haven’t had the opportunity to get my hands on a copy yet, but I will put it at the top of my summer reading list for a reason I will explain below.  

It’s the latest by the Brothers Brafman.  They of Sway fame.  These guys are good writers.  The short form title of the book is Click.  (They apparently like short titles like Brazilian soccer players like to go by a one word name.)

Click is about how we connect with others.  Or how we click with the situation we are in.  It is about those magic moments when we have peak experiences, when we are in the zone.  The book explores why “…we click in certain situations and with certain people, but not with others? Can this kind of magical connection be consciously encouraged?  Is there a way to create such peak experiences?”

I am way past curious to understand more about the details of how “clicks” happen.  I have had many good “clicks”, wondered why a couple more “clicks” didn’t happen and knew from the moment I met them that some people were not and never would be “clicks.”

I have been in situations where everything just seemed to come together almost seamlessly.  And I have been in situations where no matter what we did we ended up spinning our wheels.  Why is this so and can we knowingly do anything to improve the probabilities of “clicking”?  The book suggests we can.

My best friend and I met in an awkward and potentially conflicting business situation in 1986 and yet we clicked and are still going strong.

My closest friends can recount the story of how I met and became engaged to a woman in a single day.  And she spoke no English and I spoke no Portuguese.  And yes we married a few months later.

So I have a real personal interest in getting to know why these things happen. 

Catch you later.

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The Mary Gloster and Learning

July 20, 2010 by Wally Bock

I know this may reflect poorly on my sophistication, but I love the poems of Rudyard Kipling. One of my favorites is “The Mary Gloster.” It’s very long, but great for reading aloud. My daughters will remember it from when I read them poems before bedtime.

The poem is presented as the words of an old shipping tycoon, Sir Anthony Gloster. Sir Anthony is dying after a fabulously successful life and he offers advice to his ne’er-do-well son.

Sir Anthony sums up the reasons for his success with the following wonderful words.

“They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind,
And I left ‘em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.”

That’s good advice for us, today. You can’t stay ahead by just doing what others do well. You can only stay ahead with minds that the competition can’t copy. Here are some things you can do to make sure your people have minds like that.

Help people learn to scan broadly, spot important information, and drill down quickly. It’s the only way to get value from a variety of rushing steams of information.

Help people learn to evaluate information sources. Finding information gold is like finding real gold. Once you find a good vein, you can always go back for more.

Help people learn to use tools and sources that aren’t electronic. Your brain is a powerful source of information. So are the brains of other people. Learn to use conversation as an information mining tool.

Help people learn proven techniques of problem solving and innovation. The schools don’t teach this, so you have to.

Two decades ago, Peter Senge began telling us about learning organizations. But the fact is that organizations don’t learn unless people learn. And people sometimes need help learning to learn.

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Deliberate Practice is a Necessary but not Suffient Condition to Become Competent

July 18, 2010 by Ken Nowack

“It’s not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it’s what you put into the practice.”
Eric Lindos

I wrote earlier about how practice seems pretty essential for lasting behavior change.

There is, in fact, a big difference between “experts” and those “who are expert” in what they do.

In a 2006 book co-edited by Anders Ericcson called “The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance“, the authors conclude that great performance comes mostly from two things:

  • Regularly obtaining concrete and constructive feedback
  • Deliberate practice

Two authors in the Cambridge Handbook (Janice Deaking and Stephen Cobley) analyzed diaries of 24 elite figure skaters to determine what might explain some of their performance success. They found that the best skaters spent 68% of their practice doing really hard jumps and routines compared to those who were less successful (they spent about 48% of their time doing the same difficult things).

Having raw talent is wonderful but it’s what you do with it that really seems to matter. “Only dead fish go with the flow” is an old saying–if you don’t work to get better it just doesn’t happen naturally. Ericsson and others use the words “deliberate practice” to mean focused, structured, serious and detailed attempts to get better. That means it has to be challenging and difficult (i.e., practicing the most difficult tasks).

As it turns out, expert performance requires about ten years, or ten to twenty thousand hours of deliberate practice. Little evidence exists for expert performance before ten years of deliberate practice in any field1.

How Long Does it Take for New Habits to Form?

Research by Phillippa Lally and colleagues from the UK suggest that new behaviors can become automatic, on average, between 18 to 254 days but it depends on the complexity of what new behavior you are trying to put into place and your personality2.

They studied volunteers who chose to change an eating, drinking or exercise behavior and tracked them for success. They completed a self-report diary which they entered on a website log and were asked to try the new behavior each day for 84 days. For the habits, 27 chose an eating behavior, 31 a drinking behavior (e.g., drinking water), 34 an exercise behavior and 4 did something else (e.g., meditation).

Analysis of all of these behaviors indicated that it took 66 days, on average, for this new behavior to become automatic and a new “habit” that seemed pretty natural. The range was anywhere from 18 to 254 days. The mean number of days varied by the complexity of the habit:

  • Drinking / 59 days
  • Eating / 65 days
  • Exercise / 91 days

Although there are a lot of limitations in this study, it does suggest that it can take a large number of repetitions for a person for their new behaviors to become a habit. Therefore, creating new habits requires tremendous self-control to be maintained for a significant period of time before they become more “automatic” and performed without any real self-control. For most people, it takes about 3 months of constant practice before a more complicated new behavior gets “set” in our neural pathways as something we are comfortable with and seemingly automatic. So, adopting a new physical workout routine or learning to become more participative as a leader might take quite a while with or without coaching to truly become more natural.

Idiot Savants Excel Without Deliberate Practice

Some new research suggests that deliberate practice is necessary but not sufficient to explain individual differences in skills3. Across a wide range of piano-playing skill, deliberate practice accounted for nearly half the variance (45.1%) in sight-reading performance in the authors study. However, working memory capacity (which is highly stable and heritable) accounted for a significant proportion of the variance (7.4%), above and beyond deliberate practice. Working memory is our short term memory which is an ability to remember information over a short period of time.

Their results challenge the view, advocated by Ericsson as well as other researchers that basic capabilities and skills such as working memory capacity are unimportant for expert performance. Although it seems reasonable to predict that anyone who engages in thousands of hours of deliberate practice will develop a high level of skills in any field, it appears that our basic skills and abilities may actually limit the ultimate level of performance that can be attained.

Together, their research does indeed suggest that practice doesn’t always make “perfect” if you don’t have the minimal capabilities to begin with….Be well….

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  1. K. Anders Ericsson , ed., The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996, pp.10-11 [↩]
  2. Lally, P. et al. (2009). How are habits formed: Modeling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, DOI: 10.10002/ejsp.674 [↩]
  3. Meinz & Hambrick (2010). Deliberate Practice Is Necessary but Not Sufficient to Explain Individual Differences in Piano Sight-Reading Skill: The role of Working Memory Capacity. Psychological Science, 21 [↩]

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7/15/10: Top Talent Development Posts this Week

July 15, 2010 by Wally Bock

Every week, I review blogs that cover talent development to find you the pick of the lot for the week. In this post, you’ll find pointers to pieces about what you can learn (yes, there is something) from the Cleveland Cavaliers, executive derailment, managing the toxic high performer, distributing scarce rewards, and some thoughts on management practices for the 21st Century.

From the Fordyce Letter: What We Can Learn About Recruiting From the Cleveland Cavaliers

“There are several recruiting lessons to be learned from the bomb that LeBron James dropped on Cleveland late last night about his departure to the Miami Heat. Before we get into those lessons, let’s take a quick look at some of the highlights of LeBron’s NBA career with the Cavs.”

Wally’s Comment: Yes, yes, I know. There have been a gazillion posts on LeBron and Rantmeister Dan Gilbert. But this post is about the Cavaliers’ recruiting and what you can learn from it. It’s worth a look.

From DDI Talent Management: Executive Derailment – It Doesn’t Have to Happen

“Maybe you’ve noticed too – it seems that not a week goes by without a story on the front page or in the business section about a prominent and respected leader who has flamed out, derailed, driven his own bus off the cliff. That is, a smart, capable and seasoned executive in the private or public sector does or says something which puts an end to his/her career and embarrasses the organization. Their choice “derails” what had been theretofore a successful and high profile career. “

Wally’s Comment: The key point here is that most top talent or top executive career derailments have nothing to do with basic competence. Often, as Mike Hoban notes, the failures result from a strength becoming a weakness or overuse of a strength.

For some other takes on this same issue, check out Marshall Goldsmith’s excellent book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Dan McCarthy’s recent post, “Beware of the Dark Side of Leadership: 11 Tragic Flaw Behaviors.”

From Great Leadership: Managing the “Toxic High Performer”

“In a recent post, I was surprised by the number of SmartBrief leaders (11.74%) that chose “The high performer who is rapidly rising” as their most challenging team member to lead. My response was “really?!” Yes, it can be somewhat challenging to keep a high performer challenged and motivated, but come on, that’s the fun part of leadership. When you have an employee that handles every challenge you throw at them, is thirsty for development, and consistently exceeds your expectations, that’s leadership nirvana. I once heard these employees described as “self licking lollypops”. Give me a team of “A” players ANY day, and I’ll gladly accept those “challenges”. Yes, true “hipos” tend not to stay in one place for a long time – they get “pulled” into larger and better roles – but so be it. I’d rather have 1-2 years of outstanding performance from one of these “A” players than a team of average performers or slackers and no turnover.”

Wally’s Comment: Here’s another Dan McCarthy post. This one hits two of the big challenges of managing those high performers. You may not have them for long. And some of them are high performers on one scale but also self-serving and toxic.

From Compensation Cafe: Who Do You Love?

“A recent Harvard Business Review article ‘How to Keep Your Top Talent’ warns that 25% of your top talent plans to jump ship in the next year. The results for engagement and effort are even more alarming, since about a third of employees surveyed admit to phoning it in at work. That’s bad news if you believe that staying competitive relies on the passion, drive and creative energy of talented people. But perhaps these people have tuned out because one in five believe their personal goals are completely different from the company’s plans for them.”

Wally’s Comment: Here’s one more look at high potentials. This one’s from Laura Schroeder. She notes that “an estimated 70% of ‘high potentials’ are false positives” and suggests you review how you distribute scarce rewards. You may have to read this post more than once because it will spark lots of ideas.

From TLNT: Are Your Managers Prepared for the Seismic Shift in the Workplace?

“It’s not just that employers will soon have their recruiting world rocked by a growing labor shortage. It’s also the fact that managers are already having their world rocked by their Gen Y or Millennial employees. More specifically, they’re discovering that “old school” management practices and mediocre people skills no longer cut it, if you’re serious about attracting, retaining, and engaging Gen Y employees.”

Wally’s Comment: If Scott Fitzgerald was right and “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” then David Lee must have a really first-rate intelligence. He considers several forces affecting the working environment including a talent shortage, social trends, and management practices. Then he suggests nine leadership practices your company should be using.

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Harvard Is Revolting

July 14, 2010 by Bill Bradley

“I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.”  from The MBA Oath

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Culture, Ethics, Responsibility, Accountability and the Future – Part III

Competencies: visionary leadership, political leadership, engenders trust, ethics, employee involvement, empowering others

Who benefits: everyone

Consultant Usage: every consultant, trainer, and leader should be setting the tone and driving these core competencies through their organizations and with individual employees; no one should call him/herself an executive coach who has not read and committed her/himself to The MBA Oath (regardless of educational level)

What’s it about? “As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can build alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face difficult choices.”

So begins the most important book I have read in this century.  That paragraph is the lead into the Eight Promises that makes up The MBA Oath: Setting a Higher Standard for Business Leaders.  It is the Hippocratic Oath for business leaders at all levels.  (As opposed I cynically suggest to the existing Hypocritical Oath currently practiced by way-too-many.)

If I had my way, I would let no future manager or supervisor enter an organization or be promoted upward in an organization who could not at a minimum articulate the principles promoted in this extremely highly recommended book. 

Today’s post is the third in a three part series on ethics and business standards in the world of work, no matter what type of an organization or where in the world it is located.

This book is written by graduates of the MBA Class of 2009 at Harvard Business School.  They want to start a revolution.  They are disgusted with those who have boasted an MBA to promote their own self-interests.  They are ready to say “enough already” to Wall Street greed, Enron corruption, Madoff self-indulgence. 

The MBA Oath can be found at their website.  Go there.  Read it.  Sign on.

The book supporting the oath is divided into to two parts.  Part I discusses the profession.  It describes why the oath is needed and is filled with some pithy statements of (slightly edited) wisdom like:

• Could capitalists actually bring down capitalism?
• American’s trust in big business is down from 80% forty-five years ago to 10% today.
• Business schools are currently rank by journalists and their publications by a single metric: “How much a graduate makes on his/her first year out of school.”  Journalists therefore have “become complicit in the denial system that the MBA is about anything other than personal self-advancement.”
• Currently most schools treat ethics and even leadership as standalone disciplines rather than integrated into the whole of the curriculum. “The moral consequences of one’s business decisions should be a consistent theme visited daily in the business school’s curriculum.”  
• “Theodore Roosevelt stated that to educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
• “Perhaps more thought should be given to emphasizing ethics and character as requirements for admission to business schools.”

Part II is about the principles.  In the space I have here, it is easiest to list the chapter headings in hopes to entice you to get the book, read it, and look for applications in your own life: 

• The Purpose of a Manager
• Ethics and Integrity
• No Man is an Island
• Ambition and Good Faith
• The Letter and the Spirit of the Law
• Responsibility and Transparency
• Personal and Professional Growth
• Sustaining Prosperity and Living Well
• Accountability

If we are to prevent or soften future economic, political, moral and ecological crises, this Harvard led revolution must succeed.  Bravo to those who sign on.

Catch you later.

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