WorkPuzzle

Flow and Accountability

We all take for granted that when we step out into this round, rotating world we live on, that we won't go flying off.  We're held on by gravity.  The same gravity that can kill you if you jump off anything of any height.

This is a law..."The Law of Gravity."  As I have been preaching these last few months, there are laws that govern your work life, and laws that manage your happiness too...and they are connected.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (great name for a researching Psychologist) set out 40 years ago to determine what really gives people true and repeatable enjoyment.  What he found may surprise you.  It's actually work!  Not any kind of work, but work where you lose yourself in the activity.  I'm not just talking about enjoyable tasks, rather tasks that require accountability.

"What he found is that people of all ages, nationalities and interests in life report their involvement in activities in a similar way.  In a nutshell ‘flow’ happens when we become so absorbed in an activity that we lose ourselves and our sense of time is altered.  When we are engrossed we often have so little sense of ourselves that we do not feel happy – in fact we feel nothing.  (Or indeed we may even experience physical discomfort as may be case for a mountaineer or athelete.)  But afterwards we have such a strong sense of gratification that we construe the activity as enjoyable and satisfying and so such experiences contribute substantially to our feelings of happiness and well-being.

Activities which can induce flow are varied and numerous.  It could be reading a book, playing a sport or having an engrossing conversation with a friend.  Commonly it is something that we find challenging.  This is why many people experience flow easily in competitive sports where challenge and feedback are intrinsic to the activity.  If the talents of the players are mismatched – one is a beginner chess player, for example, and the other is a Grand Master then neither is likely to experience flow.  For one opponent there is no challenge and for the other it is too daunting and so not easy to lose oneself in the activity."

Want to duplicate this in your company?

Here are the eight ingredients of flow:

"1. The experience occurs usually when we are involved in tasks that we have a good chance of completing.
2. We are able to concentrate fully on the activity.
3. The task has clear goals.
4. The task is such that it gives us immediate feedback on how well we are doing.
5. Our involvement is ‘deep but effortless’ and this ‘removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life’.
6. There is a sense of exercising control over our actions.
7. Concern for the self disappears’ but paradoxically our ‘sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.’
8. We lose our normal sense of time – we can feel either that it has speeded up (and passed quickly) or slowed down."    (Centre for Confidence and Well-Being, 2006)

In other words, if you don't build systems and ways to measure and compare those systems, you can't experience flow.  This serves as yet another law...one that reinforces the justification and value of good management and better accountability. 

The Talent Sale - Part 2

Yesterday, I described the unusual situation that we are currently in, where top talent is available, marked down, and easy to dislodge.  If you are responsible for hiring, you owe it to yourself, and the company you work for, to spend some time imagining how this works. (Definitely begin be reviewing yesterday's blog.)

Let's say you're single, and you are looking to date someone.  Where's the best environment for this?  Is it among a group of happily married couples, or among a group of singles?  The answer is, of course, obvious.  This may sound like a ridiculous analogy, but it applies to recruiting more than you may think!

To take the analogy further... As far as talented people and their loyalty to their employers goes, we are now in a situation where there have been millions of "divorces" and many considering "divorce."  If you ever want "to date," NOW is the time.  Now is the time when the largest number of people are willing to "play the field."  Don't wait until everyone has already "dated" other industries and "found their match," because the majority of the workforce will likely stick with their new match through several economic cycles before they switch industries again.  This is the time to attract, date, and marry this extremely wide pool of very good prospects.

Continuing the analogy... Most hiring managers restrict their "dating" to only those who actively "flirt" with them.  And we all know, this limits your dating prospects to the most desperate individuals.  And if you limit yourself to those who actively flirt, you'll probably wind up with someone who will flirt with other companies once they're with you!

To win over the best date and best prospects, you must set a goal and not give up.  The most successful daters know that finding a great partner takes tenacity, patience, and a willingness to be rejected.  They know that finding the right person is a numbers game, and by increasing the number of rejections, they'll increase their chances of winning the heart of someone great.

The numbers have never been so much in your favor...  

Top Talent - On Sale NOW!

I'm sure you've all heard the saying "Buy Low/Sell High" when it comes to the stock market.  Isn't it easy to pull the trigger on a hot stock when it's up and everyone is buying it?  And how hard it is to force yourself to buy when a particular stock is low, and nobody wants anything to do with it?  Sadly, this is how most people operate, despite their knowledge that it is a losing strategy.

This same tendency applies to scouting talent:  Hiring Managers are more than willing to recruit and buy top talent at high prices when things are on a roll, but nobody is interested in this venture when the economy is down.  As you might know, we (Tidemark) have become convinced that looking for talent within other industries is always the best way to broaden your net for catching the next wave of talent.  The companies we work for are witnessing this first hand.

There has never been a more opportune time to take advantage of this strategy.  In fact, Dr. John Sullivan recently wrote an article on this very phenomenon titled, Countercyclical Hiring: The Greatest Recruiting Opportunity in the Last 25 Years.  Sullivan believes that timing plays a huge role in a company's potential for recruiting exceptional new talent.  He explains in detail why now is the time to cast that net:

"The Perfect Time for Recruiting

•Competitors are out of the market — almost no one is in the talent market right now.  Most firms have instituted a hiring and/or a budget freeze, which means the competition for talent is ridiculously low.

•High-quality talent is available — in some downturns, only low-quality talent is laid off by corporations.  However, during the current downturn, because of a large number of recent mergers, facility closings, and the complete elimination of some major firms, the amount of extremely high-quality unemployed or underemployed talent available around the world is at an all-time high.  60% of current fully employed top talent are open to new opportunities.

•Costs are low — the lack of competition and the down economy have forced the price of available talent in almost all positions back down to reasonable levels.  New referral approaches and internet and social networking recruiting tools have also reduced the cost of recruiting talent.

•Talent is amenable — the lack of available job opportunities has 'shifted the power' away from talent and toward corporations to the point where top talent will consider job opportunities and options today that they would have rejected as little as two years ago.

•The coming retirement wave — the dramatic reduction in stock prices and 401(k) values has temporarily postponed the upcoming wave of retirements.  Despite this delay, these retirements will come eventually and if the economy turns around suddenly, firms may very soon be faced with a tidal wave of retirements.  Because large-scale retirements may begin in as little as a year or two, now’s the perfect time to 'stockpile' and develop possible replacements for your most experienced managers and technical talent.

•The coming retention problem — if your organization is among the many that have undergone layoffs, frozen hiring, reduced budgets, and maybe even cut salaries through the use of furloughs, the odds are that your current employees are overworked and stressed.  This less-than-perfect treatment coupled with the fact that many of the 'new generation' of employees have little to no loyalty to a single firm will result in a dramatic increase in turnover as soon as more external opportunities begin appearing.  Obviously, you should begin retention efforts immediately but it may not be possible to remove the 'bad taste' that your current employees experienced.  Expand your recruiting efforts to find replacements and realize that new hires are likely to be more loyal than most employees because they are now seeking security and they would certainly remember the fact that you 'saved them' during a period when no one else would even look at their resume."

Those who wait for the economy to improve will, once again, wind up competing with everyone else for the best candidates.  At that point, as I have said before, most people will have already decided where they want to work and will be deeply entrenched, not even willing to consider other options.  At least the best of them will be...  

Positive Emotions, and Getting Out Alive!

Okay, the title is a little dramatic... I guess I need to stay out of the wilderness for a few weeks.  As I mentioned yesterday, last week my wife and I endured the wet climate in Banff.  Then, over the weekend, I managed to get lost on a hike with my 21 year-old daughter, Katelyn.

Perhaps I've seen too many episodes of Survivorman, but I actually began to ponder if I had wandered into a disastrous situation.  We were hiking a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail, which starts in Mexico and ends at the Canadian border.  On a side note:  We actually ran into a man and his horse who had started on the trek in Mexico, and were two weeks away from the Canadian border.

The mistake I made was going off-trail to find an alpine lake.  We ended up on a trail that dead-ended.  From there, we must have traveled in circles. One's natural tendency is to panic.

We were really never in any trouble, but still, I remembered what research psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, revealed about staying positive:

"Frederickson has found that while negative emotions narrow people’s perspective and keep them focused on the specific problem in hand (e.g. flight or fight), positive emotions ‘broaden’ people’s likely thoughts and actions as well as their behavior.  In other words, when we are experiencing positive emotions we have more ‘behavioral flexibility’ and this allows us to build ‘intellectual and psychological resources.’  So if we are feeling positive we are more likely to be curious, to learn, to explore and be creative than if we are negative."  (Center for Confidence and Well-Being, 2006)

If we had become panicked, we probably still could have found our way out, but it was more fun, and certainly burned less energy, to stay positive.  We eventually, (two miles or so further) got turned around, found the correct trail, and headed out.
 
Let this story serve as a reminder to keep your team broadening their internal resources of confidence and decisions, by staying positive and developing an atmosphere free from panic and pessimism.  The impact on the brain and it's capacity for creativity is well documented.

As for me... I'll stay in the neighborhood for the next few weeks...

A Lesson In Patience...

I just returned from a five day vacation, visiting both Banff and Calgary, Canada with my wife.  Our trip just happened to coincide with the wettest and coldest few days that this region has had since early May.

If you’ve ever seen pictures of Banff, you’ve caught a glimpse of some of the most spectacular scenery in North America.  We knew it was there, somewhere...but saw none of it during our first two days.  We humorously kept repeating, “I bet this sure is gorgeous”… or… “Wow, can you imagine how beautiful this is?”

Not all was lost those first two days.  I became an expert in converting Celsius to Farenheit, a skill most baristas and mountain guides have down pat (Double the Celsius and add 25...so 12 degrees Celsius is 12x2 = 24, plus 25 = 49 degrees Farenheit).  Yes, our summer vacation, where thongs (foot thongs not the other) were packed and sunscreen in hand, quickly changed to, “What can we see inside?”

On the morning of day three we were actually considering getting in our rental car and driving four hours to what appeared to be sun on the weather channel.  We casually mentioned this to a clerk at the local grocery store who urged us not to lose hope.  She said, “They never know what’s going to happen in the mountains.  Just stick it out, you may be surprised!”

So, feeling bold, we scheduled a climb into the Alpine Lakes area of “Sunshine (that’s right Sunshine) Ski Resort,” ready for any kind of weather the mountains threw at us.

Eventually, the weather mercifully cleared, and the temperature climbed to 23 degrees Celsius (you do the math).  When it did clear, we were standing at the continental divide, near Alpine Lakes, with miles of spectacular views.

So, what did I learn?  I’m constantly learning to be patient... For me this was just another lesson in the importance of the payoff of patience.  Had we driven that day to find “better weather,” we would not only have wasted valuable time chasing an unclear goal, but would also have missed out on one of highlights of the journey.

In managing people, you must have convictions about persistence, tenacity, and patience.  Without valuing these traits, you won’t be able to bring out the best in the talent that’s been entrusted to you.  As a company, do you spend too much time chasing things that don’t pay off, or do you stick to executing a plan? 

The clouds will clear eventually...

More About Grit: Predicting and Coaching for Success

In past articles, we’ve highlighted the works of both Dr. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychologist from Stanford University.  These women are two of the most influencial leaders on the topic of grit.  Both professionals have a passion for researching what, in fact, we should be measuring with regard to propensity for success.

Johan Lehrer puts it this way in his recent article in the Boston Globe:

“One of the main obstacles for scientists trying to document the influence of personality traits on achievement was that the standard definition of traits - attributes such as conscientiousness and extroversion - was rather vague.

Duckworth began wondering if more narrowly defined traits might prove to be more predictive.  She began by focusing on aspects of conscientiousness that have to do with ‘long-term stamina,’ such as maintaining a consistent set of interests, and downplayed aspects of the trait related to short-term self-control, such as staying on a diet.  In other words, a gritty person might occasionally eat too much chocolate cake, but they won’t change careers every year.  ‘Grit is very much about the big picture,’ Duckworth says.  ‘It’s about picking a specific goal off in the distant future and not swerving from it.’"

In essence, Duckworth is suggesting that, rather than IQ level, what we should be measuring is a person’s ability to narrow and maintain focus on a particular goal.  Research confirms that this is a better predictor of a person’s potential than their intelligence and well-rounded background. 

If you’re a hiring manager, think about how you interview candidates...  Would this be a trait that you could measure during an interview by changing the types of questions you ask?  If so, you’d probably be more successful at predicting your prospective employee's potential in your organization.

If you’re in a coaching role, you can also take advantage of the research in this area:

“While Duckworth and others are quick to point out that there is no secret recipe for increasing grit - 'We’ve only started to study this, so it’s too soon to begin planning interventions,' she cautions - there’s a growing consensus on what successful interventions might look like.

One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort.  Dweck refers to this as a 'growth mindset.'  She compares this view with the 'fixed mindset,' the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with.  'A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,' says Dweck.

Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit.  For much of the last decade, Dweck and her colleagues have tracked hundreds of fifth-graders in 12 different New York City schools.  The children were randomly assigned to two groups, both of which took an age-appropriate version of the IQ test.  After taking the test, one group was praised for their intelligence - 'You must be smart at this,' the researcher said - while the other group was praised for their effort and told they 'must have worked really hard.'

Dweck then gave the same fifth-graders another test.  This test was designed to be extremely difficult - it was an intelligence test for eighth-graders - but Dweck wanted to see how they would respond to the challenge.  The students who were initially praised for their effort worked hard at figuring out the puzzles.  Kids praised for their smarts, on the other hand, quickly became discouraged.

The final round of intelligence tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test.  The students who had been praised for their effort raised their score, on average, by 30 percent.  This result was even more impressive when compared to the students who had been praised for their intelligence:  their scores on the final test dropped by nearly 20 percent.  A big part of success, Dweck says, stems from our beliefs about what leads to success."

Could this change your perspective on how you coach those on your team?  It is so natural to praise those we coach for their natural abilities.  While this feels natural and right, the research shows it is counterproductive.

It may be better to just let the natural talents speak for themselves, and seek to praise someone for living out their values and displaying positive virtues.  Grit is one of these virtues, but there may be more.  It will be interesting to see what the research unveils in the future...

More on Grit: The Problem with Measuring Intelligence

Have you ever wondered why intelligence and academic achievement are so revered in our society?  My oldest son is 16 years old and entering his junior year in high school.  He is becoming increasingly aware that college is just around the corner, and is doing his best to prepare himself for it.  We’ve noticed that the college admissions process is mainly about grades and SAT scores, and little about his ability to work hard and follow-through on accomplishing his goals.

Interestingly, research shows that setting a specific, long-term goal, and doing whatever it takes until that goal has been reached ("grit"),will be more predictive of his success than his grades or academic achievement.  Most of us assume this must be a brand new revelation, but look what Jonah Lehrer points out in his recent article in the Boston Globe:

"In 1869, Francis Galton published 'Hereditary Genius,' his landmark investigation into the factors underlying achievement.  Galton’s method was straightforward:  he gathered as much information as possible on dozens of men with 'very high reputations,' including poets, politicians, and scientists.  That’s when Galton noticed something rather surprising:  success wasn’t simply a matter of intelligence or talent.  Instead, Galton concluded that eminent achievement was only possible when ‘ability combined with zeal and the capacity for hard labour.’

Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, came to a similar conclusion.  He spent decades following a large sample of 'gifted' students, searching for evidence that his measurement of intelligence was linked to real world success.  While the most accomplished men did have slightly higher scores, Terman also found that other traits, such as 'perseverance,' were much more pertinent.

Terman concluded that one of the most fundamental tasks of modern psychology was to figure out why intelligence is not a more important part of achievement:  'Why this is so, and what circumstances affect the fruition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent importance that they should be investigated by every method that promises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance.'

Unfortunately, in the decades following Terman’s declaration, little progress was made on the subject.  Because intelligence was so easy to measure - the IQ test could be given to schoolchildren, and often took less than an hour - it continued to dominate research on individual achievement.

The end result, says James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, is that 'there was a generation of social scientists who focused almost exclusively on trying to raise IQ and academic test scores.  The assumption was that intelligence is what mattered and what could be measured, and so everything else, all these non-cognitive traits like grit and self-control, shouldn’t be bothered with.' "

I find all of this a bit humorous.  It seems that much of our systems of higher learning are based on the premise that intelligence and academic achievement predict a person’s propensity for success.  But, ironically, they don’t really predict success very well at all...they’re just easy to measure.  Yikes!  This makes me even more concerned about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on my kids' educations!

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the transition that is evolving regarding the traits that are believed to actually precede success.  A group of very insightful researchers are performing the hard work of measuring and tracking what truly leads down the path to success... 

More on Grit: Sir Isaac Newton’s 22-year Epiphany

About six months ago, Dave wrote a couple of articles on the topic of “grit.”  We received a lot of feedback on this topic from our clients who are regular readers of WorkPuzzle.  It seems to be a topic that intrigues many of us.

Earlier this month, the topic also caught the attention of the Boston Globe.  Jonah Lehrer wrote a lengthy Sunday morning feature on the topic.  Over the next couple of days, I’m going to highlight a few ideas from Lehrer’s article to help us gain a better understanding of this important topic.

“It’s the single most famous story of scientific discovery:  In 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree.  The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force.  (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.)  This mundane observation led Newton to devise the concept of universal gravitation, which explained everything from the falling apple to the orbit of the moon.

There is something appealing about such narratives.  They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany:  There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius.  Everybody knows that things fall - it took Newton to explain why.

Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up.  Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it.  He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum.  (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.)  The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight - it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the ‘Principia.’

Although biographers have long celebrated Newton’s intellect - he also pioneered calculus - it’s clear that his achievements aren’t solely a byproduct of his piercing intelligence.  Newton also had an astonishing ability to persist in the face of obstacles, to stick with the same stubborn mystery - why did the apple fall, but the moon remain in the sky? - until he found the answer.”

Notice the time it took Newton to figure out the scientific Law of Gravity — 22 years!  Was Newton willing to work hard?  Of course he was.  But, grit isn’t simply about a willingness to work hard.  It’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached.  It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit keep going, despite the hardships and obstacles they encounter.

If you’re a hiring manager, this is an important topic to consider when interviewing.  Ask questions that help you learn if a person has displayed a Newtonian stick-to-itiveness in their past jobs or life experiences.  These are the people who are most likely to display the same traits on your team.

If you have the responsibility for coaching those in your group, consider using Newton’s story in an upcoming coaching session.  We all need inspiration to set goals and stick to them.  When we see that the most successful people in history used this formula, it renews our resolve to follow the same path. 

Why Can't I Shake Anyone Loose Right Now? - Part 2

Yesterday, we discussed the psychological response candidates experience when the economy is unstable.  As previously mentioned, if prospective candidates are in established job situations during a recession, there is a tendency for them to pull back and act conservatively.  This explains why our real estate client is having a difficult time “shaking people loose” from his competitors while the market is in such disarray.

This will remain the reality of recruiting until the economy starts to recover.  As the recovery starts, there will be signs of life that appear in the labor market.  Lou Adler offers further insight into this topic in his recent article:

“As hiring 'green shoots' appear, those who are the most fed up with their current jobs (the least satisfied) will begin to pursue other opportunities.  As these people leave, companies will fill these empty seats, most likely with others, currently fully employed.  Soon these trickles of churn will turn into significant streams of turnover that will be measured in the national labor statistics.  This spike in turnover is an early indicator of an economic recovery.”

There are two sides to the market recovery coin:  The first side is the advantage that can be gained from the renewed energy people will feel as the recession ends. This sense of hope will result in candidates, once again, willing to consider new opportunities.  For some candidates, there is also a sense of throwing off the weight of an organization that has not met their needs beyond stability.

The time to prepare for the upcoming churn is now.  Do you have systems in place to engage people who are willing to talk about new opportunities?  As a hiring manager, are you holding yourself accountable to completing the tasks that are known to produce results?  Are you able to articulate the benefits of being part of your team during a period of recovery?

The flip side of the recovery coin is retention-- the employment churn will run both ways.  If there is penned up angst in other organizations that will soon be released, it’s foolish to believe that there is not some penned up dissatisfaction in your own organization.
  
Now is the time to address these issues as well.  Have you spent time talking with your existing team about what frustrates them in their current situation?  While you may not be able to currently dedicate a lot of resources to solve some of the problems, do your employees know that you have identified the most important issues and have a plan for resolving these issues once resources start to flow again?
 
While we all want to take advantage of Maslow’s Principle of Self-Actualization, it can also be the force that causes your existing organization to suffer.  Don’t miss the opportunity to prepare for the changes that will be here sooner than you expect.

Recruiting With Social Networks (Grab Your Calculator!)

The last couple of days, we’ve spent some time talking about how the dynamics of Facebook are changing.  From a recruiting perspective, these changes may be difficult to leverage in your efforts to source candidates.

However, don’t throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water...  Social networks (both online and traditional networks), from a word-of-mouth perspective, can be a power component of a sourcing strategy.  More specifically, gaining access to the social networks of your existing employees multiplies your sourcing efforts.

 

EE = (1-N) X (R/P)

I want to point out an article written by Raghav Singh in the Electronic Recruiting Exchange last week.  Singh figured out a way to measure the effectiveness of a hiring manager’s social networking candidate sourcing efforts.

“Like prospectors during the gold rush, recruiters everywhere are flocking to social networks in search of hires.  But like the experience of many during the gold rush, getting results is not easy.  Reaping the benefits of social networking requires engaging with those networks.  There’s plenty being written about how to do so, but to know if what you’re doing is working, consider the following metric:

EE = (1-N) X (R/P)

Where:
EE = Effectiveness of Engagement, expressed as a percentage

Engagement, in this context, means getting ready access to employees’ networks, regardless of the mechanism for doing so.  Virtually 100% of employees have social networks and connect to them using different means (networking sites are not the only way to do so), but only a certain proportion of employees may be willing to give an employer access, by either making the contacts available or agreeing to forward job postings to them.

N = The proportion (%) of employee networks that an employer or recruiter has engaged with.
R = The average number of qualified referrals received per month per employee
P = The average number of postings accepted by employees to their networks per month

So if an employer is engaged with 10% (N) of employees’ social networks, and on average each employee accepts 3 (P) postings per month, and produces 2 (R) qualified referrals:

EE = (1-10%) X (2/3) = 60%

If the same results are achieved by engaging with 50% of employee networks, EE = 33%

Engagement is more effective the larger the number of qualified referrals received for the same proportion of employee networks an employer is engaged with.  However, this is not a bottomless pit.  Research shows that beyond a certain threshold of postings, the volume of qualified referrals starts to flatten out and even reduce.”

Before you gloss over this and nod off like you did in math class, take a minute to plug some of the numbers from your own organization into this formula.  It’s not as hard as it looks.

Try tracking the effectiveness of your engagement (the EE %) over a few months and see what happens.  If the resulting percentage is consistently low, then you are missing a major pool of the most qualified candidates available. 

It should cause you to ask yourself some questions:  Do your existing employees not trust you enough to give you referrals?  Are the job opportunities you’re pitching compelling enough that people would naturally want to share them with others in their network?  Are you afraid to ask your existing employees for their help?

Metrics help illuminate problems and find solutions that are not otherwise obvious.  Get your calculator out and give this a try!