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Creating Debate to Improve Decision Making

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By Liz Wiseman

There is a growing belief that good leaders are made, not born. We now know that leadership skills can be taught – that management practices can and should be refined and improved upon as leadership styles and behaviors evolve.

We are all too familiar with the leader who drains intelligence and capability out of their teams. Who, because of their need to be the smartest, most capable person in the room, often shut down the smarts of others, ultimately stifling the flow of ideas. These leaders—who we call “Diminishers”—underutilize people and leave creativity and talent on the table.

Thankfully, we also know leaders who, as capable as they are, care less about flaunting their own IQs and more about fostering a culture of intelligence in their organizations. Under the leadership of these “Multipliers,” employees don’t just feel smarter, they become smarter.

The question to then ask is: when it comes to decision-making in your organization, are you a Multiplier or a Diminisher?

And why is this important?

How decisions are made can greatly impact an organization – either creating higher levels of engagement and execution or disengagement and dissatisfaction.

Think of some important organizational decisions made recently within your company. Were there any problems that came up after the fact – in whispered conversations in hallways and cubicles – as baffled teams tried to make sense of decisions that seemed abrupt and random? Diminishers create this unproductive dynamic because they tend to make decisions alone or with input from just a small inner circle of advisers. The result is an organization left reeling, instead of executing.

By contrast, Multipliers engage people in rigorous, upfront debates about the issues at hand. They give people a chance to weigh in and consider different possibilities—ultimately strengthening team members’ understanding of the issue and increasing the likelihood that they’ll be ready to carry out whatever actions are required.

In our research, we found that Multipliers did three specific things very differently from Diminishers when it came to decision-making.

While Diminishers raise issues, dominate discussions, and force decisions, Multipliers:

  1. Frame the Issue
    1. Define the question
    2. Form the team
    3. Assemble the data
    4. Frame the decision
  2. Spark the debate
    1. Create safety for best-thinking
    2. Demand rigor
  3. Drive a Sound Decision
    1. Re-clarify the decision-making process
    2. Make the decision
    3. Communicate the decision and rationale

To become a debate maker, make a debate with four asks: ask the hard questions, ask for evidence, ask everyone, and ask people to switch positions.

So the final question is: are you a Decision Maker or a Multiplier/Debate Maker?

Liz Wiseman, is one of the top 10 leadership thinkers in the world (Thinkers50TM), She is the former VP of Oracle Corporation, renowned speaker, executive advisor and bestselling author of Multipliers

Talent VS Organisation

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By Professor Dave Ulrich

In today’s rapidly changing business world, the challenge of building the right organisation complements and supersedes the talent challenge.  For the past 15 to 20 years, leaders have been encouraged by remarkable work captured in the “war for talent.” Many have built systems for bringing people into the organisation (sourcing, having a value proposition), moving them through the organisation (development, performance management, engagement), and removing them from the organisation (outsourcing). The war for talent was a great battle, but we now need to turn to victory through organisation.

Talent is not enough. Individuals may be champions, but teams win championships.

Click HERE to read the full article.

Professor Dave Ulrich is an internationally acclaimed best selling author, speaker, researcher and consultant to business leaders and the HR Professeion. He is also ranked as the #1 management guru by Business Week, profiled by Fast Company as one of the world’s top 10 creative people in business, recognised as a top 5 coach in Forbes and recognised again (for 8 years) in the top 30 business Thinkers50 annual rankings.

Neuroscience firms up companies’ efficiency

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By Lesley Stones

London-based neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart is helping several South African companies improve leadership skills by applying neuroscientific principles

Neuroscience — it sounds like an art best practiced by medics in a hospital, but it is coming out of wards into the workplace to influence practical ways of honing brain power in the canteen, boardroom and bedroom. The physical connection between the brain and the body means mental efficiency can be improved through sleep, nutrition, hydration and exercise. Planning to avoid wasting mental resources on unimportant issues also helps.

“If you do not have these things right, you cannot do brain agility, emotional intelligence and creativity and you will struggle with stress and resilience,” says neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart.

London-based Swart is helping several South African companies improve leadership skills by applying neuroscientific principles. In May, she will run a day-long Neuroscience for Leadership course in Johannesburg, teaching simple ways to boost brain power.

“It is particularly aimed at managers and leaders, but I strongly believe everybody is a leader,” Swart says.

People know the commonsense rules they should follow to look after themselves, but regularly fail to do so. By explaining the neuroscientific reasons for them, she hopes to ensure they are followed. Sleep and healthy eating are the big ones. Swart says the ability to think for the day is like a bucket of water, used up by various tasks until there is nothing left. “During the day, willpower and concentration become lower … even if you have had eight hours of high-quality sleep, you are using up that power,” she says.

“Eating, napping and going for a walk helps the bucket refill a little, but it is sleep that really fills it up every night.”

Research shows the brain takes seven to eight hours to clean out toxins that build up during the day. People who regularly fail to allow that cleansing process are putting themselves at higher risk of getting dementia, she warns.

“You might skimp on sleep to work on a deal, to work across time zones or because you don’t have enough hours in the day, but science says it is not okay to skimp on sleep,” Swart says.

About 30% of what is eaten is used to fuel the brain, so healthy eating is good. “People make food choices because they are on a diet or training for sport, but no one — not even someone who is paid to use his or her brain — wakes up and thinks, ‘What should I eat so I can make better decisions or think flexibly to solve complex problems?’”

The first rule is to eat regularly. Meals should not be skipped because brains cannot store nutrients and will slip into low-power mode. Recommended foods are salmon, avocado, eggs, nuts, olives and coconut oil.

Another hot topic is technology’s effect on the brain. Having calm time before bed is common sense, but the scientific reason makes it more compelling. “The blue light emitted from smartphones, tablets or laptops sends a message to your pineal gland that it is still daytime and it should not release the hormone melatonin that helps you fall asleep. So stop looking at those screens an hour before you want to fall asleep,” Swart says.

Another topic she will deal with is “imposter syndrome”, in which high-powered and successful people feel like frauds. When Swart began covering this in her talks, people would come up afterwards and confess that was how they felt.

“Successful people such as hedge-fund billionaires say they feel like they should not be in that position and they are afraid one day they will be found out as people realise they should not have risen this far,” she says. “It has nothing to do with skills. They are skilled and no one else is thinking they cannot do their job. It is the creeping thought at the back of their mind that one day they will be found out,” Swart says. The answer is to learn positive ways of overwriting those pathways in the brain and increasing people’s resilience and confidence by focusing on past successes.

That relates to her favourite topic of neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to rewire and build new pathways to relearn something or acquire new skills. Many people claim they are too old to learn new tricks or change their ways, but science has shown that is not true.

Neuroscience can also help people make better decisions before taking financial risks. Stress hormones and testosterone change when attempting something risky. Boosting testosterone brings extra confidence. A combination of certain foods and weight-bearing exercise can also achieve that. “Do some weights and eat cabbage afterwards, because there is a chemical compound in cabbage that has an effect on your testosterone levels,” Swart advises.

Stress people feel at work affects their mood, decision-making abilities and capacity to bounce back from adversity.

Because leaders’ skills are affected by their mental state, Swart believes changes must be driven by companies, not individuals. It is happening slowly. Office gyms are being supplemented by yoga or meditation rooms, canteens are serving brain food and water coolers are being installed so people can remain hydrated.

Swart has been visiting SA for almost 20 years, first as a medical student working with HIV-positive babies, then as a doctor and now as a neuroscience coach.

The companies she consults for are mostly in the financial services and legal sectors. She finds South Africans need this advice more than most, because the “boys don’t cry” attitude is so ingrained.

“The culture of organisations has to change. Having a culture of people doing exercise and eating healthily and being able to talk about stress is really important and it has to come from the leadership,” she says.

This article was originally published by BusinessDay.

A new framework for managing risk

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By Professor Robert Kaplan

Despite all the rhetoric and money invested in it, risk management is too often treated as a compliance issue that can be solved by drawing up lots of rules and making sure that all employees follow them.  Many such rules, of course, are sensible and do reduce some risks that could severely damage a company. But rules-based risk management will not diminish either the likelihood, or the impact, of a disaster, just as it did not prevent the failure of many financial institutions during the 2007-2008 credit crisis.

So which risks can be managed through a rules-based model and which require alternative approaches?

The first step in creating an effective risk-management system is to understand the qualitative distinctions among the types of risks that organisations face. According to our research, risks fall into one of three categories: preventable risks, strategy risks and external risks.

Preventable risks

Preventable risks are internal risks which are controllable and ought to be eliminated or avoided. Examples include employees’ or managers’ unauthorised, illegal, unethical, incorrect or inappropriate actions and the risks from breakdowns in routine operational process. While companies should have a zone of tolerance for defects or errors that would not cause severe damage and for which achieving complete avoidance would be too costly, in general, companies should seek to eliminate these risks as they get no strategic benefit from taking them on.

This risk category is best managed through active prevention: monitoring operational processes, guiding people’s behaviours and decisions toward desired norms, clear statements of codes of conduct, internal control systems, and a strong, independent internal audit department.

Strategy risks

A company voluntarily accepts some risk in order to generate superior returns from its strategy. A strategy with high expected returns generally requires the company to take on significant risks, and managing those risks is a key driver in capturing the potential gains.

Strategy risks cannot be managed through a rules-based control model. Instead, a risk-management system must be designed to reduce the probability that the assumed risks actually materialise and to improve the company’s ability to manage or contain the risks events should they occur. There are three distinct approaches to managing strategy risks: independent experts, facilitators, and embedded experts.

These risk-management approaches enable companies to take on higher-risk, higher-reward ventures than their competitors with less effective risk management.

External risks

Some risks arise from events outside the company and are beyond its influence or control. Sources of these risks include natural and political disasters and major macroeconomic shifts.

As external risks cannot be prevented, their management must focus on identification and mitigation. There are various tools which can be used by companies to identify their external risks, including stress tests, scenario planning and war-gaming.

Stress-testing helps companies to assess major changes in one or two specific variables whose effects would be major and immediate, although the exact timing is not forecastable.

Scenario planning is suited for long-range analysis – typically five to ten years out. Scenario analysis is a systematic process for defining the plausible boundaries of future states of the world. Participants examine political, economic, technological, social, regulatory and environmental forces, and select a number of drivers – typically four – that would have the biggest impact on the company.

War-gaming assesses a firm’s vulnerability to disruptive technologies or changes in competitors’ strategies. In a war-game, the company assigns three or four teams the task of devising plausible near-term strategies or actions that existing or potential competitors might adopt during the next one or two years – a shorter time horizon than that of scenario analysis.

While companies have no influence over the likelihood of risk events identified through these methods, managers can take specific actions to mitigate their impact. Since moral hazard does not arise for non-preventable events, companies can use insurance or hedging to mitigate some risks, or make investments now to avoid higher costs later.

Organisational biases

Identifying and managing strategy and external risks requires an approach based on open and explicit risk discussions. That, however, is easier said than done. Extensive behavioural and organisational research has shown that individuals have strong cognitive biases that discourage them from thinking about and discussing risk until it is too late.

Individually, people overestimate their ability to influence events and tend to be over-confident about the accuracy of their forecasts and risk assessments. As organisational biases also inhibit our ability to discuss risk and failure, these collective inclinations explain why so many companies overlook or misread ambiguous threats.

Risk management is non-intuitive; it runs counter to many individual and organisational biases. Active and cost-effective risk management requires managers to think systematically about the multiple categories of risks they face so that they can institute appropriate processes for each. These processes will neutralise their managerial bias of seeing the world as they would like it to be, rather than as it actually is or could possibly become.

Professor Robert Kaplan: Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development Emeritus at the Harvard Business School.

Honest ‘Conversations’ replace traditional Performance Management

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by Nicola Tyler 

Companies around the world are starting to question the efficacy of what we might term “traditional performance management”. Senior leaders report that they have abolished performance appraisal at their companies because it causes so many problems. It’s clear that performance management faces a substantial paradox.  On the one hand, employees and managers all acknowledge that it is often the most loathed HR practice; research suggests that most current performance appraisal systems do not work well.  On the other hand, accountability does matter.  Research shows that companies with performance evaluation systems have higher shareholder returns than firms without them.  Research also shows that, out of many HR practices, performance management and variable pay have the most significant impact on financial performance of organisations. Without accountability, employees don’t perform as well; they are unlikely to change and unlikely to perform better.

So, performance management faces a conundrum.  If we don’t do any performance management, accountability declines and performance lags.  Yet if we have complicated processes, employees become frustrated and again, performance lags. According to research by global HR guru Professor Dave Ulrich, the paradox of doing or not doing performance management can be (at least partially) resolved by focusing more on positive accountability through conversation more than process.  

Once we focus on dialogue, performance becomes much less about forms to fill out, procedures or policies, and much more about the conversation between a manager and an employee, or among employees on a team. Can a leader have a candid, thorough, positive, and specific performance conversation with their employees? This is where the key to effective performance accountability lies. Affirmative conversations of this type shouldn’t be occasional meetings in the diary but rather an ongoing process of regular interaction.  Over time, the employee gains a “growth mindset”, which means that the employee conversation emphasises learning – what can be improved more than focusing on what has gone wrong.  These conversations all focus on the future, not the past.  For example,

  • They tackle behavioural problems without judging the person.  
  • They validate the person and his or her potential more than casting suspicion.  
  • They focus on learning from both successes and failures rather than critiquing.
  • The conversation is not about the forms, tools, or processes, but about creating a positive relationship between leader and employee.  

Companies like Adobe and Accenture have successfully implemented positive performance accountability systems. At Adobe, employees are evaluated on the basis of what they achieved against their goals, rather than how they compare to their peers. At Accenture, employees focus less on their ranking and more on the value they create. When conversations matter more than processes, the focus is on value created rather than on chasing employees to complete HR forms. When these conversations focus on the positive and what is right, they build positive accountability. When employees take personal responsibility, they create more value.

A good business leader and manager will:

  • Focus more on what’s right than what is wrong.
  • Offer immediate and timely feedback and feed forward to employees.  
  • Help others feel better about themselves.   

In turn, employees who receive positive performance conversations recognise how their personal aspirations can be better realised by delivering organisational outcomes.  

It’s true that most employees do not like bureaucratic appraisal processes that monitor performance, belittle employees, and focus on what is wrong.  But accountability matters. Some trendsetters would go so far as to say that work teams should feel an obligation to act in line with company values, to be more deeply committed to outcomes. Without accountability people don’t improve, they lack a sense of purpose, and organisations miss their targets.  In South Africa we need to focus much less on performance appraisal as a bureaucratic, annual process. Instead, we must focus much more on performance accountability where leaders hold positive conversations with employees, mutually establish expectations, implement accountable reward systems, and follow up on performance. Perhaps we should replace the Performance Appraisal with a Commitment Contract or a Purpose Contract.

Nicola Tyler, is a highly respected strategic thinker. With over 20 years of experience in Strategy, Consulting, Leadership, Development and Coaching, she is an Associate of the Gordon Institute of Business, a Master Trainer in a full range of de Bono Thinking tools. Working both locally and internationally, she delivers her own “Strategic Conversation” methodology to senior teams committed to innovation and driving sustainable results. Nicola has shared the stage with world renowned thought leaders such as Tom Peters, Robert Kaplan, Ricardo Semler, Edward de Bono, Dave Ulrich, Martin Seligman, Richard Koch and Martin Lindstrom. 

 Build your HR teams into core business partners that drives your organisation to achieve strategic results. Click HERE to find out more or contact us at info@brg.co.za to book a needs assessment.

 

Leadership Lessons from Bill Campbell

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What makes you a leader? Is it your title, your ability to go through situations unscathed or leading by popular demand? Maybe it is the numerous certificates on your wall or collecting subordinate appreciation. Not quite what you had in mind? Dive into the leadership lessons from Bill Campbell, legendary mentor and executive coach to many of business luminaries.

1. Don’t assume your employees automatically respect you because you’re the boss
Campbell did not believe in positional authority “Your title makes you a manager. Your people will decide if you’re a leader, and it’s up to you to live up to that”  Campbell told managers a strong company culture was a better way to motivate employees. They should “create the environment where they can do the best work of their lives.”

2. Lean into hard problems
Campbell believed in “being brave”, particularly during tough times. You need to lean into hard problems because they don’t go away.

3. Do what’s right, even if it’s not in fashion
Bill Campbell was focused on diversity, especially gender diversity, before it was cool. Campbell sparked the idea to launch a women’s entrepreneurship conference series and funded the first one himself.

4. Lead people to opportunity
Campbell did not place much value on degrees or even IQs—he cared about courage and getting things done. “Bill loved people that had dirt under their fingernails, get-shit-done kind of people,” says Brad Smith, Chairman and CEO of Intuit. “That validated a lot of people. He gave people a shot.”

5. It’s not about you, it’s about the team
Campbell didn’t want attention for his work. Though he worked with a lot of celebrity CEOs, he didn’t like ego. “He believed in team. He lived the kind of values he taught,” said John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. “I don’t think you can be an effective coach and be on stage,” he added. “You gotta call the plays from the side.”