Minding Gaps

By the Numbers: The Tradeoff Between Income and Job Satisfaction

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a relevant statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Thus far, the data appearing in this feature have explored the explosion of information in the media, the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the nature of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine public opinion on tradeoff between income and satisfaction on the job.

According to research by Frank I. Luntz that appears in his new book, What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears, Americans overwhelmingly prefer job satisfaction to economic prosperity.

Some 84 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot less money” in a job they love to the converse. Only 16 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot more money” in a job they hate.

As you reflect on this, consider these questions:

• What correlation, if any, do you see between job satisfaction and the execution of a business strategy?

• How important do you believe job satisfaction is to customer satisfaction?

• In your position and role, what can you do now to leverage the importance of job satisfaction?

• What have you done recently?

• How has the economy compounded the difficulty of ensuring job satisfaction?

• What steps can you take to improve job satisfaction in spite of a lackluster economy?

To Be of Use

In observance of Labor Day in the United States, we offer this poem as a paean to work. Titled To Be of Use, it was written by Marge Piercy and first published in Lunch magazine in 1972.

 

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Toxic Cultures for Leadership

Not every company naturally warms to the art of cultivating the next generation of leaders. Indeed, some companies do an appalling job of it.

Take a look at this article in the September 3 issue of Business Week magazine. The article focuses on companies that headhunters actually avoid, because the managers who emerge from those cultures are said to lack the broad acumen for leadership to succeed elsewhere.

Moreover, the article dishes enough dirt on toxic corporate cultures to be powerfully instructive on leadership development in general.

I cannot vouch for the article’s assessments of any of the companies it cites. Nor can I knowledgeably dispute them. I simply present the article as it is and ask you to read it and think about it.

Here are some discussion questions:

• How would a headhunter—or any outsider, for that matter—describe your company’s leadership culture?

• How would employees characterize the company's leadership culture?

• How, if at all, do you distinguish between leadership and management? By level in the organization? By responsibility? By the purpose of the work that each entails? By their results? 

• What systems and processes do you have in place to develop new leaders?

• How do you measure leadership talent?

• Why does the work of leadership matter to you?

• Irrespective of your level in the organization, in what respects does your own work involve managing, and in what respects does it involve leading?

• To which do you devote more time, energy, and creative thinking?

As a Man Thinketh

There is a little book, first published more than a century ago, that you should read. It just may change the way you think and therefore who you are.

Written by James Allen, an Englishman who was perhaps the intellectual forebear of Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Earl Nightingale, As a Man Thinketh asserts that we are what we think. Our thoughts determine our character, for better or for worse.

In its whole, the book is just fifty-seven little pages, perhaps ten thousand words from cover to cover. By way of comparison, that is appreciably less than the posts in this blog for August alone. You can easily read it on an airplane flight. And yet, in such modest dimensions, Allen manages to capture wisdom of the ages.

He writes: “A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it will bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”

A little later, he builds on the theme: “Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results. This is but saying that nothing can come from corn but corn, nothing can come from nettles but nettles. Men understand this law in the natural world, and work with it, but few understand it in the mental and moral world.”

Viewed a century later, As a Man Thinketh is anachronistic in some respects: it applies “man” to everyone, and it has rhetorical flourishes that can seem as quaint as a grandmother’s embroidery. In the century since its publication, we now have the benefit of neurological science to call into empirical question such broad claims as Allen’s, too. Nevertheless, the little volume is a clarion call to chart and manage your own destiny, and that is a very good thing indeed.

After you read it, and you are reflecting on its message, ask yourself these questions:

• How might you apply Allen’s thesis to an organization?

• What conclusions can you reach about yourself as a leader? About your organization?

• What is the role of leaders is setting the intellectual boundaries of an organization?

• How might a leader go about that?

• What would be the value of that work? Would it justify itself?

 

Barnes & Noble, Inc., brought out a new version of As a Man Thinketh in 2007.

The price is just $10.00. The ISBN numbers are 978-1-4351-0037-4 and 1-4351-0037-9.

Why Is Genuine Leadership So Scarce?

Seth Godin, whose books and blog are a delight to read, has another winner. His new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, is just terrific.

Here’s a little excerpt from Tribes in which Godin explains why genuine leadership is so rare:

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. This scarcity makes leadership valuable. If everyone tries to lead all the time, not much happens. It’s discomfort that creates the leverage that makes leadership worthwhile.

In other words, if everyone could do it, they would, and it wouldn’t be worth much.

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.

It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.

It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.

It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

While I’m at it, I recommend you visit Godin’s web site at www.sethgodin.com. You’ll find lots of resources there.

By the Numbers: The Truth on Nonverbal Communication

Last week we introduced a new regular feature, By the Numbers, of the Minding Gaps blog. We’ll start each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Today, we present data on nonverbal communication that many otherwise intelligent people believe is true—but isn’t.

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

Just last week, in an interview on BBC Radio 4, “More or Less” host Tim Harford asked Mehrabian whether words accounted for only 7 percent of meaning. “Absolutely not!” Mehrabian replied emphatically. “Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe. . . . It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he told Harford. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

 

"You Are What You Think About"

Earl Nightingale died twenty years ago, and yet the wisdom of his message is as relevant and timely today as ever.

Nightingale created the art of motivational speaking and, in the golden years of radio, brought it to the masses. His commentary was broadcast regularly on WGN Radio, Chicago, whose signal was (and is) strong enough to reach two-thirds of the nation. Millions of people read his books, listened to his broadcasts, and took his advice.

Here is an excerpt from perhaps his most famous talk. Set aside eleven minutes and view it in its entirety. Then devote some more time to thinking rigorously about its message, and apply it to yourself. I am doing just that for myself.

Beware Thine Assumptions

I want to pass along a splendid article that reminds us to question our assumptions.

Often we take for granted what we think we know. Even more often, we take for granted the conventional wisdom that everyone else has acknoledged as true long ago. Neither is constructive or helpful.

In this article, one of the late Peter Drucker's early graduate students reminds us to be cautious. Bill Cohen, a retired Air Force general and the author of A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher, blogged this at www.humanresourcesiq.com.

Let me know what you think.

What Does It Take to Lead?

Exactly what does it take to lead people? And what do successful leaders do that unsuccessful leaders don't?

These two questions—simple in their phrasing but complex in their answers—are at the fault line of a discussion in the blogosphere this week.

The discussion focuses on CEOs, but the sum and substance of the discussion can apply to leaders everywhere. If you are attempting to bring about change through the discretionary effort of other people, in any organization anywhere, you will do yourself a favor by listening in.

After years of research on the real characteristics and abilities of CEOs, three business-school professors published their findings in an academic journal last summer. Perhaps someone, somewhere, was paying attention. But no one talked about it until Tuesday, when New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the treatise and several hundred readers quickly fulminated in response

In a nutshell, the professors asserted that successful CEOs were more likely to be coolly analytical than fervently emotional, more likely to be aggressive and hard-charging than social and collegial, more likely to be loners than team players, more likely to be self-absorbed than self-aware. Indeed, the authors come close to saying that the post-modern executive who looks and sounds like a cheerful politician is likely to be ineffective as a CEO.

 

President Coolidge, Meet Detective Callahan

Now this portrait of a cross between Calvin Coolidge and Harry Callahan in the corner office may hardly surprise you. But it flies in the face of two decades of important work by trail-blazing thinkers such as Jim Collins in Good to Great; John Kotter in Leading Change and The Heart of Change; Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence; Warren Bennis in On Becoming a Leader, and Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge, not to mention all those writers (most notably Robert K. Greenleaf and John C. Maxwell) who champion the magical power of servant leadership.

To one degree or another, all of them have found an emotional aspect of leadership, a common search for meaning, and an exploration of purpose and intentionality to be profoundly powerful. That is all the more true now, in a cynical age.

In his column, Brooks blithely ignored all these writers and unquestioningly endorsed the research as he summarized and presented it, which was scarcely the whole of it. Moreover, he then took liberties in a further interpretation that just wasn’t sustainable. Fortunately, many bloggers and even Thursday’s letters to the editor in the Times demonstrated that the public isn’t so easily cowed.

Beware Biases Clothed As Research 

On purchasing and downloading the entire study, I found it self-limiting in key respects, though duly decorated with pages of regressions and factor analysis. I have learned that academic studies often fall on the sword of their own design, which may well be flawed or small or both. 

First, as the study’s authors acknowledge but Brooks ignores, the research was confined to the CEOs of privately held companies with a recent infusion of venture capital or private equity. That probably biases the findings in favor of small-cap and mid-cap companies without well-defined cultures and typically with short time frames for hard returns to investors or at least positive trend lines.

Second, unless I missed something, there is no analysis of characteristics and abilities associated with poor performance. We are left to presume that the absence or opposite of the identified traits will necessarily lead to failure, but we have no data or explicit conclusions in that direction. A personal friend of mine was CEO of two high-tech companies, both of which went bust. She had the traits the authors describe in spades. Granted, that is merely singly experiential and anecdotal, but it raises a question of negative correlation.

Third, the definition of high performance presumably has only the one dimension of profitability. Nothing is said to the contrary, that I could see. It is axiomatic that every company must be profitable, but to judge a CEO's performance by that metric alone begs some pretty big questions. As Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton argue in The Balanced Scorecard, using profitability as your sole measure of success is a little like flying an airplane with only a single gauge—say, for air speed, and no indicators for fuel or altitude or location or air pressure.

Balancing the Scorecard

In the Twenty-first Century, to the chagrin of Milton Friedman and perhaps even the frustration of Peter Drucker, companies cannot focus on profitability to the neglect of everything else. Other financial metrics such as revenue growth, return on equity, inventory turns, debt ratios, and more are critical measures of performance.

Moreover, companies have many other stakeholders beyond equity investors. Apart from financial metrics, companies are judged by the quality of their products and by their treatment of employees, their service to customers, their compliance with the law, their respect for diversity and privacy, their engagement and retention of staff, their advertising and packaging, their lobbying and public policy, the safety and cleanliness of their facilities, their research and innovation, and ultimately their transparency and contribution to society. All that was true a decade or two ago, but it is especially true now.

Missing the bar on any of these metrics, and especially on several or more, is enough to send a CEO home for good, as many of them have learned over the last five or ten years. By extension, we can hypothesize that leaders must operate in multiple frames of reference.

Having watched and worked with senior leaders quite a bit, I can attest to the fact that the most successful among them are fully realized human beings. Those who aren't send powerful signals to stay away.

My guess is that the scholars who produced this research may be on the right track, but only as far as they looked. They just didn’t look very far, and they certainly didn’t think very deeply. As for the columnist, whose work I generally respect, he should have taken a little more time on this one.