Tips for leading people at a distance

strategy+business, June 23, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Urbancow

It seems less and less likely that the pandemic will be the impetus for a permanent, wholesale shift to remote work. Sure, employee sentiment polls find that most people like working from home, and anecdotal evidence suggests a few of them will refuse to return to the office if and when their leaders summon them. But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 16.6% of employed persons teleworked or worked at home because of the coronavirus in May 2021, down from 18.3% in April. Moreover, few CEOs of major companies are wholeheartedly embracing remote work: some, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, are rejecting it altogether, and many, including Tim Cook of Apple, are offering some form of hybrid work instead.

This suggests that the title of Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley’s new book, Remote Work Revolution, is something of an overstatement. Indeed, in the book’s introduction, Neeley reports that JPMorgan “is considering a permanently remote workforce”—which isn’t happening. But that doesn’t mean leaders shouldn’t read the book. It is, after all, more and more likely that leaders will be called upon to manage people who are working remotely some of the time. That is, if they aren’t already responsible for distributed teams, salespeople, and other employees whose work takes them on the road, or mixed teams of full-time employees and external contractors. And they will need to be prepared.

“For workers and leaders around the world,” explains Neeley, “untrained remote work isn’t a panacea. In fact, you may have experienced some or all of the many challenges that are inherent in virtual arrangements.” The challenges for leaders include keeping people connected when they aren’t in the same place, building trust and alignment without in-person contact, avoiding Zoom fatigue and other technological pitfalls, creating viable boundaries between work and private lives, and transferring highly coordinated work to distributed settings. Read the rest here.

How noisy is your company?

strategy+business, May 19, 2021

by Theodore Kinni



Illustration by SI photography

Companies live and die by the ability of the people who work within them to make sound judgments. Their judgments determine what strategy to follow, where to invest R&D funds, how to set prices, who to hire and promote, and a myriad of other decisions. Some of the decisions are one-offs; others are made repeatedly. There’s just one problem, assert Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein: “Wherever there is judgment, there is noise — and more of it than we think.”

Noise is the major source of variability in judgment and, thus, a major cause of decisions that miss their mark, according to the professorial supergroup (henceforth, KSS). Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work as a behavioral economist; Sibony is an expert on decision-making who teaches at HEC Paris and Oxford’s Saïd Business School; and Sunstein is the Harvard prof whose work on nudges has been influential in public policy.

Noise is also the title of the trio’s new book, a 400-page tome that should leave executives who take the time to wade through it more than a little unsettled. Their uneasiness should stem from the likelihood that they have been underestimating the negative effects of noise on decision-making in their organizations. When KSS asked 828 senior executives in a variety of industries how much variation they expected to find in expert judgments, their median answer was 10 percent.

In reality, the variation in expert judgments can be four to five times that. When two members of KSS ran a noise audit for an insurance company, they discovered that the median difference in the pricing determined by its underwriters for identical policies was 55 percent, and the median difference in the payouts determined by its claims adjusters for identical claims was 43 percent. “One senior executive estimated that the company’s annual cost of noise in underwriting — counting both the loss of business from excessive quotes and the losses incurred on underpriced contracts — was in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” they write. Read the rest here.

All the Feels: Why It Pays to Notice Emotions in the Workplace

Insights by Stanford Business, May 13, 2012

by Theodore Kinni


iStock/shapecharge

Alisa Yu first became intrigued with emotional acknowledgment while interviewing nurses working in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. The nurses told her that verbally acknowledging their young patients’ fears and stress created trust, which enabled them to do their jobs more effectively. “From then on, I began to see emotional acknowledgment everywhere,” recalls Yu, a PhD candidate in organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

This realization prompted Yu to team up with Justin Berg, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford GSB, and Julian Zlatev, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, to conduct a series of studies exploring the effects of emotional acknowledgment in the workplace. Their findings, published in May in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, illuminate a straightforward yet powerful technique leaders can use to build trust with their employees.

Emotional acknowledgment is the simple act of noticing a nonverbal emotional cue — like a frown or grin — and mentioning it. This mention can be a question or a statement such as “You look upset,” or “You seem excited.”

The authors borrow from costly signaling theory, a concept proposed by evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi in the 1970s, to suggest that this small act can have a powerful effect because it is read as a sign of genuine intentions. As an example, Zahavi argued that when peacocks fan out their tails to attract mates, it is an “honest signal” of their reproductive fitness. That’s because the colorful display also attracts predators, a potentially fatal risk for weaker peacocks.

Similarly, Yu and her coauthors argue that in a work environment, a supervisor who shows concern for others’ emotional state is signaling a willingness to get involved in a potentially messy situation. “A leader could very easily see someone in distress and choose to ignore it,” Yu says. “But only a leader who truly is benevolent and cares about employees would risk getting involved by voluntarily acknowledging the distressed employee. Thus, employees might take this as a signal that this leader is someone who can be trusted with their well-being.” Read the rest here.

Leader, know thyself

strategy+business, April 22, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Thomas Barwick

Twenty-five hundred years ago, someone inscribed Know thyself on a column at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, where the Pythian priestesses famously uttered their prophecies. Socrates, whom one priestess pegged as the wisest man in the ancient world, discussed the maxim with his pupils Xenophon and Plato, creating the foundation for its modern meaning as an exhortation to be self-aware (versus an admonition to subordinate ourselves to the gods). And today, self-awareness — or metacognition, as psychologists and neuroscientists call it — is just as relevant, especially for leaders.

Metacognition, explains Stephen M. Fleming, principal investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, and author of Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness, is “our mind’s ability to reflect on, think about, and know things about itself, including how it remembers, perceives, decides, thinks, and feels.” Literally, it is your ability to think about your own thinking.

This ability is built into the circuitry of our brains and based on two processes — one that is often unconscious and estimates uncertainty and another that is usually conscious and monitors our internal state and actions. Fleming likens the way this implicit and explicit metacognition work together to the interaction of the autopilot system and the pilot on a plane. The autopilot monitors and adjusts the actions of the plane, and the pilot monitors and adjusts the actions of the autopilot, he explains, “except now the interaction is all taking place within a single brain.”

Oddly, although our brains are equipped for metacognition, we are not particularly good at being self-aware. “There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in the 1750 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. If it were easier, the Wikipedia page that lists nearly 200 cognitive biases might be considerably shorter, and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman might not have needed to issue this warning in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” Read the rest here.

Expansionists, brokers, and conveners

strategy+business, March 31, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by John M Lund Photography Inc.

When David Rockefeller, grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1970s, liked something, he really liked it. He liked collecting beetles, and left a horde of 150,000 specimens to Harvard on his death. He also liked collecting people. His Rolodex (remember those?) contained more than 100,000 contacts; laid out end to end, its cards would have stretched 16 miles.

In the terminology of personal networks, Rockefeller’s custom-made Rolodex is a good example of an “expansionist network,” according to Marissa King, a professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management. In her book Social Chemistry, a wide-ranging but rather unconnected exploration of how we connect with other people, King explains that expansionists “have extraordinarily large networks, are well-known, and have an uncanny ability to work a room.” Expansionists create value by connecting contacts to each other. They are collectors and manipulators of what sociologist Mark Granovetter identified as “weak ties.”

But size doesn’t really matter when it comes to networks, says King. Rockefeller, for example, had to overcome the inherent difficulties of maintaining and leveraging an expansionist network by recording detailed information about his contacts on his Rolodex cards. When the Wall Street Journal got a peek after Rockefeller died at age 101 in 2017, it reported that there were 35 cards documenting his meetings with Henry Kissinger dating back to 1955. What really matters is the quality of your contacts and the structure of your network...read the rest here

The Overlooked Partners That Can Build Your Talent Pipeline

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, March 29, 2021

by Nichola J. Lowe

Image courtesy of Stephanie Dalton Cowan/theispot.com

America has a skill problem. It’s not the result of inadequate educational systems letting down younger workers or a lack of aptitude among older workers, as some claim. The problem is the widespread failure of American companies to share responsibility for skill development. Many employers are simply unwilling — or unable — to invest sufficient resources, time, and energy into work-based learning and the creation of skill-rewarding career pathways that extend economic opportunity to workers on the lowest rungs of the labor market ladder.

This national skills crisis becomes clearest whenever unemployment rates are low. As late as February 2020, most industries in the U.S. showed persistent signs of skills shortages. In manufacturing, for instance, there were 522,000 unfilled job openings in late 2019. There were similar long-standing job vacancies in many other critical industries, including financial and business services, health care, and telecommunications, with executives noting increased skills gaps in data analytics, information technology, and web design, among other areas.

The skills shortage was less obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic, as companies shed millions of jobs, but it persists despite that temporary softening of the labor market. And as hiring picks up along with the economy, employers may increasingly develop workforce strategies that are based not only on skills requirements but on increased commitments to boosting diversity and inclusion.

A better and more enduring skills strategy must begin with the recognition that our national skills crisis rests on a deeply rooted but flawed assumption: namely, that skills are individually held. This view overlooks the collective and context-specific nature of skills — that is, the ways in which they are shared, reinforced, and reproduced through group interactions at work. It also creates a false justification for the bias and hoarding that often accompany employers’ approaches to talent management. That results in more educated workers benefiting from corporate investments in retention, leaving those workers with less formal education underserved and undervalued — a phenomenon that labor scholars call the “great training paradox.” Moreover, it leads to the mistaken categorization of entry-level workers as “unskilled.” This positions them as irrelevant and easy to replace, ignoring the fact that this segment of the workforce — so often women and people of color —not only executes strategy but also has the grounded insights needed to improve organizational processes and practices.

The core assumption that skill is individually held results in supply-side approaches that place the primary burden for skill development on educational institutions and on students within them. These approaches have not and cannot, in isolation, do the trick. Skill shortages are a problem of employment, not education...read the rest here

The Positive Side of Negative Emotions

Insights by Stanford Business, March 12, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


iStock/Deagreez

The benefits of “cognitive reappraisal” — the widely used self-help strategy of reframing distressing situations to move past the negative emotions they engender — are well established.

Studies have shown that when employees use reappraisal techniques, they are more satisfied with their jobs and are less susceptible to stress and burnout. The research also links reappraisal to higher employee performance.

Given these findings, it’s not surprising that many companies are teaching and encouraging employees to embrace the strategy. Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” training program is a notable example. The program, which includes reappraisal among other practical techniques for mindfulness, self-awareness, and self-management, was created by Chade-Meng Tan, one of the company’s engineers, in 2007. Demand for the program prompted Tan and others to found a nonprofit that went on to teach the techniques to employees in companies ranging from American Express to Volkswagen.

But what if the outcomes of cognitive reappraisal aren’t entirely beneficial? One team of researchers — Matthew Feinberg and Brett Ford at the University of Toronto, along with Francis J. Flynn at Stanford Graduate School of Business — suspected that might be the case.

“Cognitive reappraisal lessens negative emotions by reframing situations in positive terms, but negative emotions serve important social functions,” explains Feinberg, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford GSB and Stanford Medicine’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. “They help ensure that individuals behave in socially acceptable ways and encourage adherence to group norms.” Read the rest here.

Why So Many Data Science Projects Fail to Deliver

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, March 2, 2021

by Mayur P. Joshi, Ning Su, Robert D. Austin, and Anand K. Sundaram

Image courtesy of Jean Francois Podevin/theispot.com

More and more companies are embracing data science as a function and a capability. But many of them have not been able to consistently derive business value from their investments in big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Moreover, evidence suggests that the gap is widening between organizations successfully gaining value from data science and those struggling to do so.

To better understand the mistakes that companies make when implementing profitable data science projects, and discover how to avoid them, we conducted in-depth studies of the data science activities in three of India’s top 10 private-sector banks with well-established analytics departments. We identified five common mistakes, as exemplified by the following cases we encountered, and below we suggest corresponding solutions to address them. Read the rest here...

Supporting employees working from home

strategy+business, January 29, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Kathrin Ziegler

In mid-December, a light appeared at the end of a long, dark tunnel when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued emergency authorizations for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. A month later, that light wavered as the death toll in the U.S. reached 400,000 — having reached 300,000 just five weeks earlier — and the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the worst of the pandemic was yet to come. As Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Even as millions of people are getting vaccinated, many employees won’t be returning to the workplace for months to come. Instead, they will continue to work from home with all the distractions, stresses, and fears that they have experienced over the past year. This is not an insignificant problem: 25 percent of respondents to a PwC Workforce Pulse Survey conducted between January 11 and 13, 2021, said their physical and mental well-being deteriorated during the pandemic; more than 20 percent said their ability to disconnect, their work–life balance, and their workloads worsened. These results could be magnified in the weeks and months ahead by spikes in COVID case rates and deaths and continuing economic uncertainties, especially with regards to job security.

This makes one of the WFH (working from home) challenges that leaders face even more acute: How do you assess employee wellness when your only point of contact is a phone call or a computer screen? For answers, I talked to two experts... read the rest here.

Do you really want a CEO to be a role model?

strategy+business, January 12, 2021

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by RgStudio

When Fortune magazine named Elon Musk as the 2020 Businessperson of the Year, its CEO, Alan Murray, announced the news with palpable distaste: “I have never been a Musk fanboy; he is a mix of some of the worst characteristics of today’s leaders — more messianic than Adam Neumann, as allergic to rules and governance as Travis Kalanick, nearly as narcissistic as Donald Trump.” So why honor Musk? He has been extraordinarily successful at turning bold visions into successful companies. As a result, Tesla’s stock is up more than 1,000 percent since the summer of 2019, making its CEO and largest shareholder, with a nearly 20 percent stake, the second richest person in the world.

Musk is the latest in a long line of celebrated leaders who aren’t exactly paragons of good behavior. Steve Jobs was another notable example. In his acclaimed biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson documented his subject’s famously petulant and abusive interpersonal conduct. But then Isaacson spun it to support his conclusion that Apple’s cofounder and, later, savior was the “the greatest business executive of our era.”

Murray’s ambivalence to Musk and Isaacson’s efforts to excuse Jobs got me thinking about the role that CEOs and other senior leaders inhabit as behavioral exemplars. Programs for corporate or cultural transformation invariably require that senior executives model the behaviors they are trying to encourage in managers and workers. When Jon Katzenbach and his colleagues at the Katzenbach Center (PwC Strategy&’s global institute on organizational culture and leadership) formulated their 10 principles of organizational culture, they specifically called that dictate out. “The people at the top have to demonstrate the change they want to see,” they declared... read the rest here

Is the gig up?

strategy+business, December 17, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Brothers91

A decade ago, advocates touted the sharing economy as an alternative to corporate capitalism. Digital technology was opening vast, new peer-to-peer marketplaces: TaskRabbit and Airbnb were founded in 2008, Uber in 2009, RelayRides (now Turo) in 2010, Postmates in 2011, Lyft in 2012. These platforms promised that people would be able to make a good living while working when and how they wanted — selling their time and skills, and renting out their cars, spare bedrooms, and that dusty camping gear in the attic.

“You will know by now that things haven’t turned out exactly as expected,” Juliet Schor wryly notes in her new book, After the Gig. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College, and her team at the Connected Consumption project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, studied gig workers and platforms of the sharing economy from 2011 to 2017. The result is a more nuanced view than has been offered by previous books on this topic, which typically focus on either how companies can build their own platforms or how platform companies prosper by evading regulation and exploiting workers.

Among the insights: The less you actually need a gig job, the more likely it is that a gig job will work for you. “Workers’ experiences are not uniform, with variation in pay rates, job satisfaction, and how they do the work,” Schor explains. “As we saw these differences playing out at individual companies, we realized that they are explained by how dependent the worker is on income from the platform to pay basic living expenses.” Schor’s team found that supplemental workers — that is, workers who are not financially dependent on their platforms — make more money, have more autonomy, and are more satisfied with their gigs than platform-dependent workers. Moreover, the former group comprises 34 percent of the workers in the sample the team studied; the latter was only 22.5 percent. (The rest, nearly half of platform workers, fall between the two extremes.)

This finding partly contradicts the headlines of worker abuse that have generated a lot of political Sturm und Drang lately. At the same time, it is clear that the gig economy can’t really substitute for a full-time job. As Schor concludes: “With some exceptions, our data suggest that being dependent on a platform is not a viable way to make a living.” Read the rest here.

When Employees Speak Up, Companies Win

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, November 17, 2020

by Ethan Burris, Elizabeth McCune, and Dawn Klinghoffer





Business headlines suggest that employees are speaking up more than ever. Activist employees are calling out their companies over where and with whom they do business, burned-out employees are asking for more and more unique work-life accommodations, and concerned employees are raising questions about hiring practices and promotion decisions in light of institutional biases. Often, these instances of speaking up — called employee voice behaviors — result in an embarrassingly public airing of organizational issues.

Yet our research reveals that the headlines are not an accurate reflection of the current state of employee voice. We asked 6,000 employees of a Microsoft business unit to tell us how often they spoke up to their managers. In addition, we asked how many of 15 topics they spoke up about, such as their immediate job assignments, the culture of their teams, how employees are treated across the organization, the strategy of the company, and the work-life balance alternatives available to them. We found that relatively few employees consistently share their thoughts and opinions about a multitude of work issues with their managers: Just 13.6% of the surveyed employees said that they speak up on more than 10 of the topics. Slightly more are silent: In fact, 17.5% said they do not speak up at all. The largest group of employees — 47.1% — said they speak up on five or fewer topics, typically on issues related to their jobs.

If we assume that these findings reflect similar tendencies in other organizations, leaders should be concerned, because employee voice is not a voice of complaint or protest per se. It encompasses the willingness of employees to speak up about opportunities for improvement. These efforts are not a prescribed part of employees’ jobs; they are a voluntary communication of constructive ideas to leaders that enable learning and effective change in work groups of all sizes, from teams to entire organizations. Yet these efforts to tell the truth can involve confronting leaders, who can feel challenged or even threatened, especially when the proposed changes involve things that leaders have helped create or for which they are responsible.

More and more, companies are seeking to expand efforts to listen to their employees by inviting them to share their opinions and ideas in areas that are outside of their day-to-day tasks. For instance, in 2014, in the aftermath of a recall of 6 million vehicles for an ignition flaw linked to at least 13 deaths, General Motors launched its Speak Up for Safety program, which asked employees across the company to speak up about anything that might impact customer safety. The growing use of innovation platforms and ecosystems is another example. In addition, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen companies frequently survey employees on topics such as physical and mental health and their working conditions.

The effectiveness of all these efforts depends on employees’ willingness to use their voices. In this study, we sought to examine the benefits of a more expansive employee voice, the factors that determine voice behaviors, and the ways in which companies can encourage those behaviors. Read the rest here.

Best Business Books 2020: Management

strategy+business, November 9, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Illustration by Martin O’Neill; icon by Harry Campbell

This year, COVID-19 upended management-as-usual. Sure, managing is still a matter of getting things done in organizations — divvying up objectives into tasks, ensuring employees have the resources and skills to complete the tasks, overseeing their progress, and helping them when they get bogged down. But where and how people work has changed — radically and overnight in many companies and, in some, maybe permanently.

None of this year’s best business books on management were written for managers per se. But each focuses on capabilities that can help managers identify and cope with pandemic-related challenges.These developments have given rise to new needs and stresses that affect the people you are responsible for managing — needs such as going to work (or going back to work) safely, and stresses such as working while surrounded by kids instead of colleagues — and thus, they’ve also affected your performance as a manager.

In the year’s best business book on management, Tiny Habits, Stanford University professor B.J. Fogg shows how to change your behavior and help others change theirs, too — an essential skill at a time when we are all being called upon to develop new habits. In Acting with Power, Deborah Gruenfeld, also at Stanford, explains how an unconventional view of power can enable you to support people in ways that far exceed the limits of your positional authority. And in You’re Not Listening, journalist Kate Murphy offers an uncommonly insightful exploration of how to actually meet the dictates of an exhortation we’ve all heard before: “Listen!” Read the rest here.

The Six Dysfunctions of Collaborative Work

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Connected Commons, June 2020

by Rob Cross and Inga Carboni


Beth was excited when the CEO asked her to take over a high-profile commercialization project that had been struggling. The leader in charge of the effort—one expected to double the technology firm’s revenues in the coming decade—had recently accepted another job. Beth accepted the job on the spot.

In her first week, Beth dug in. She found the project fully funded and staffed by 64 carefully selected people from departments across the company, including engineering, marketing, finance, and quality assurance. The threeday, offsite visioning session held to launch the project had been attended by the entire team and was, by all accounts, a resounding success. Three concurrent work-streams—focusing on research, product development, and marketing and sales—were identified and a well-respected leader was appointed for each one.

Yet, ten months later, the project was badly behind schedule and bogged down. Everyone with whom Beth spoke was frustrated with the slow pace of progress. They were all pointing fingers, but in different directions. The CEO believed the problem was a failure of leadership. The departing project leader blamed team members for not devoting enough time to the project. One team member said the problem was poor meeting management; another said key decisions weren’t being made in a timely manner.

What should Beth do? Appoint new workstream leaders? Relaunch the project? Restructure the group or the work? Add more people to the project team? Schedule more meetings or provide an online work platform? ...read the rest here

What if every job seeker got a living-wage job?

strategy+business, August 19, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Katja Kircher

It’s usually eye-opening when the economic assumptions that underlie a society are questioned. In The Case for a Job Guarantee, by Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an associate professor of economics at Bard College and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, that assumption is embedded in the concept known as the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU).

NAIRU assumes that when the unemployment rate gets too low, it will force companies to raise wages and then prices, causing inflation. This leads economists to try to suss out the optimal rate of unemployment, and the Federal Reserve to try to slow investment and hiring whenever the ranks of the unemployed grow too thin — cold comfort when you are in those ranks.

“The idea that involuntary unemployment is an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence, and that there is an appropriate level of unemployment necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy, is among the great, unexamined myths of our time,” declares Tcherneva in this concise polemic. “It is also bad economics.”

The actual nature of the relationship between unemployment and inflation is an unsolved mystery, according to Tcherneva. Moreover, the Fed has no “reliable” theory of inflation — even though the Fed began to claim, starting in 2014, that the U.S. economy was at full employment. (Never mind the 3 to 4 million people who were unemployed and seeking work.)

The assumption that there is an optimal level of unemployment comes with harsh ramifications. Unemployed people are less healthy and suffer higher rates of suicide and mortality. Their lifetime earnings shrink, and they often must be supported by social welfare programs as they try to find to work. Chronic unemployment causes communities to decline and collapse. In macroeconomic terms, unemployment depresses GDP growth — Tcherneva cites an analysis by Australian economist Bill Mitchell, who calculated a decline of nearly US$10 billion in output per day caused by unemployment during the Great Recession in the U.S. (versus output if the “full” employment rate at 2.8 percent per annum average GDP growth of 2003–07 had held).

“What if we changed all that,” asks Tcherneva, “and made it a social and economic objective that no job seeker would be left without (at a minimum) decent living-wage work?” The solution she strongly advocates is a job guarantee: a commitment by the government to provide everyone who wants to work with a job. If a job is not available in the private sector, it will be provided in the public sector...read the rest here

Restoring craft to work

strategy+business, August 4, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by RubberBall Productions

You’ve probably heard these stories before. There’s the proud janitor at NASA who tells President Kennedy that he isn’t just sweeping up; he is helping put a man on the moon. And the gung-ho stonemason who tells architect Christopher Wren that he isn’t just hammering rock; he is building a cathedral to God’s glory. The stories are popular, even though they probably never happened. And they get told and retold to support the power of purpose. It’s the subtext that bothers me.

Invariably, the moral of these stories is that employers (a label that literally defines the rest of us as something to be used) need to provide employees with a purpose. This suggests that many jobs are, in and of themselves, meaningless. It also implies that people don’t care about the work they do — that they are wastrels.

I don’t know if the relationship between meaningless work and aimless wastrels is one of correlation or causation (or in which direction it might run). But a high-flown and inevitably vague corporate purpose — don’t be evil! — isn’t the solution to either problem. It’s more likely the solution lies in the concept of craft, which Richard Sennett, senior fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, described in his erudite and engaging 2008 book The Craftsman.

“Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake” [italics added], wrote Sennett. “Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all of these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself.”

Craft resonates for me in a way that corporate purpose never does. One reason is the fact that I’m a self-employed business writer and editor, who needs to be good at a craft to make a living. Another reason is plain orneriness: Why should I internalize a company’s purpose? Especially when I may only work there for a few years. That’s somebody else’s business (and profit), not mine. Read the rest here.

Fixing the Overload Problem at Work

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, April 27, 2020


by Erin L. Kelly and Phyllis Moen




Image courtesy of Neil Webb/theispot.com

The way that companies expect employees to work isn’t working. Despite growing awareness of widespread and chronic overload and its ill effects, companies often expect professionals and managers to be “on” well beyond traditional work hours — attending meetings at night, responding to requests on weekends and during vacations, and monitoring their phones, texts, and emails whenever they are awake. Many people become exhausted and burned out struggling to meet such expectations. The result is an overwhelming, demoralizing sense that the demands of work are unrealistic and cannot be met with the resources at hand.

Of course, overload is not restricted to salaried, white-collar workers. But we have found that they are acutely susceptible. In our survey of more than 1,000 of these workers in the IT division of TOMO, our pseudonym for a Fortune 500 company generally viewed as a good employer and a decent corporate citizen, 41% of the division’s professionals and 61% of its managers agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that there is “not enough time to get your job done.”

Escalating work demands and the exhaustion they produce surfaced repeatedly in the 400 interviews we conducted with TOMO employees from 2010 to 2014. For example, Vanessa, a director at the company, told us that she expects her direct reports to “be accessible 24-7, 365 days a year.” If they aren’t going to be available outside working hours, she said, “they need to let me know.”

Jonathon, a manager who reports to Vanessa, shared multiple stories of work encroaching on his home life and volunteer activities. He said he often takes late-night work calls, some of which wake his wife. Despite the success he has attained at work, Jonathon said he is steering his children away from professions like his that are prone to overload. He believes it is an unhealthy and unsustainable way to earn a living.

Evidence collected at TOMO and in a variety of other workplaces, including consulting companies and medical facilities, suggests that Jonathon is right. We heard story after story of health concerns tied to overload from the IT professionals and managers at TOMO. They told us about heart attacks and strokes, disrupted sleep and related forgetfulness, unexplained hives, and other ills. They also described an inability to muster the energy to exercise and to prepare healthy meals, and work pressures that prompted them to smoke and drink more than they considered wise. In fact, employees in our study who put in long hours reported significantly higher levels of burnout, stress, and psychological distress (feeling sad, nervous, restless, hopeless, worthless, and that everything is an effort) than employees who worked fewer hours.

Unpredictable schedules and always-on availability also contribute to employee overload and deteriorate their well-being. Specifically, employees who have variable schedules that they do not control report significantly higher levels of burnout, stress, and psychological distress, as well as lower levels of job satisfaction, than employees who have fixed schedules or feel more in control of when they work. Studies of all kinds of occupations are now documenting the negative health impacts of very long hours and limited control over work time.

Companies that push employees as hard as TOMO are hurting themselves, too. Talented people quit when they become overwhelmed by work or resentful of unrealistic demands — voting with their feet after being expected to do too much for too long. When they exit, their employers lose expertise, knowledge, and sometimes valuable customer relationships...Read the rest here.

Pride and the pandemic

strategy+business, April 23, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by svetikd

My sister-in-law texted two photos to our extended family on March 31. One was of a sign installed on the lawn of the Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center, a 183-bed not-for-profit hospital in Woodbridge, Va. It read “HEROES WORK HERE” in big, colorful letters. The other was of my nephew, wearing scrubs, gloves, and goggles, in the entrance to the hospital’s emergency room, where he’s been working 12-hour shifts. We’re all worried about him. We’re also damn proud of him.

The daily stream of reports detailing the brave work of medical professionals around the world these past few weeks has been a revelation. Facing a virus without a cure and often working despite critical shortages of personal protective equipment, many of these people have been risking their lives simply by walking into work.

They aren’t the only ones working far from the comparative safety of home in this pandemic. Delivery people, warehouse workers, postal employees, supermarket clerks, gas station attendants, and many others are choosing to go to work. Facing layoffs, union members at General Electric’s aviation plants pressured the company to put them to work making ventilators.

Are they doing it for the money? I hope so, at least in part. But there’s also something else at play here — pride.

“An intrinsic feeling of pride based on the relentless pursuit of worthwhile endeavors is a lasting and powerful motivating force,” wrote Jon Katzenbach in his 2003 book, Why Pride Matters More Than Money. Katzenbach, a managing director with PwC US and founder of the Katzenbach Center at Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting practice, explored the institution-building capacity of pride and concluded that it is the “most important motivational element in a company.” Read the rest here.

5 Musts for Next-Gen Leaders

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, April 22, 2020

by Amit S. Mukherjee




Image courtesy of Gordon Studer/theispot.com

Effective leadership isn’t ageless or immutable. Periodically, new technologies overturn established modes and sweep aside executives who don’t adapt.

For most of the 20th century, after transformative technologies made it possible to measure the minutiae of human work, leaders concentrated on maximizing productivity and efficiency, many taking a command-and-control approach. But this autocratic style failed disastrously when upstart Japanese companies used newer technologies — focused on quality — to enter Western markets. In the mid-1980s, unwilling to make the organizational and leadership changes required by this shift in competition, American companies went bankrupt at rates not seen since the Great Depression. Those that survived augmented their long-standing functional silos with teams that enabled cross-functional collaboration, while their leaders learned to empower employees to make decisions.

Today, business is being transformed again — this time by digital technologies. They render some elite skills obsolete and widely distribute others; make work more thought-driven than muscle-powered; shed light on unpredictable customer needs that create disproportionate value; reveal information regardless of the merits of concealment; and affect — and are affected by — environmental conditions near and far. They also connect companies and employees by distributing work across geography and over time.

Current and aspiring leaders must respond to this new wave of change in five key ways. Read the rest here.

Too much work, too little time

strategy+business, April 15, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by John Lamb


Someday soon, when the economic engines of the world are running again, leaders will reflect on what the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about the ways and means of work in their companies. As they do, they should read Overload, by Erin L. Kelly, a professor of work and organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota.

Overload details the results of a rigorous five-year study conducted within the IT division of TOMO, an alias for an unidentified Fortune 500 company. The randomized field experiment included nearly 1,000 tech professionals and managers in 56 teams — half of whom redesigned their work and half of whom served as a control group, and didn’t.

The impetus behind TOMO’s unusual openness to participating in this experiment was management’s recognition of a pervasive feeling of, as the authors frame it, overload among the division’s employees. Kelly and Moen, whose team operated under the auspices of Work, Family & Health Network, an interdisciplinary research group focused on workplace interventions, define overload as “the sense that work demands are unrealistic, given limited resources.” Their initial survey of the division’s employees revealed that 41 percent of workers and 61 percent of managers agreed or strongly agreed that there was not enough time to get their jobs done.

These are people, who, in addition to long days on the job, were routinely taking calls and working at home, at night, and on weekends. In fact, at least one of the managers had been demanding advance notification anytime the people she supervised weren’t going to be available outside of working hours. This supervisor told the authors that she expected her direct reports to “be accessible 24/7, 365 days a year.” The pernicious consequences of this work intensity? Repeated surveys and more than 400 individual interviews at TOMO revealed high levels of chronic stress and ill health, feelings of powerlessness, work–family conflict, and burnout — all of which negatively affect employee performance, of course. Read the rest here.