Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Are You Taking Advantage of Microfeedback?

A few months ago, I attended an employee engagement workshop. The facilitator suggested that millennials require performance feedback more than once a year. “Maybe once a quarter,” she said.

More like once a day!” I couldn’t resist calling out.

I wasn’t kidding. For the 80 million millennials who now make up a majority of the workforce, no news is bad news. If they don’t hear from their managers frequently, they think they’re doing something wrong and quickly grow disillusioned.

Nevertheless, an open door policy in which employees are invited to stop by a manager’s office for extended feedback sessions multiple times a day simply isn’t practical. So what’s the solution?

The innovative concept of microfeedback originated in the consumer space and consisted of collecting a small amount of information from customers at key moments in their shopping experience. The goal was to gather relevant customer feedback for a more accurate assessment of their satisfaction.

Think about this, though. Why can’t the idea of microfeedback be extended to performance management? We certainly have the technology. Intra-company messaging systems like Yammer, Skype for business, and Slack are growing exponentially and with some groups (like millennials), are even  more popular than email.

Imagine that your direct report gives a status update in the departmental meeting for the first time. You think she did an exceptional job, but instead of noting it in her file to be reviewed in six months (or worse, forgetting about it completely), you send her a “thumbs up” emoticon via Slack. The action takes you less than 30 seconds, and yet your employee has a piece of encouraging feedback that will make her day.

Check out the full article at the SilkRoad blog.

Is The Performance Deck Stacked Against Women?

I recently conducted some research on gender differences in the workplace and learned that the same behaviors that were praised in men were often criticized in women. In particular, women who were more assertive, or confident in expressing their views, were often perceived negatively. Assertive men, on the other hand, were viewed as strong and competent.

A colleague pointed me in the direction of this Fortune piece by Kieran Snyder, who had a linguist do some number-crunching to determine if gender plays a role in the type of feedback an employee receives at review time.

Snyder asked men and women in the technology field if they would be willing to share their performance reviews for a study. Assuming that only strong performers would be willing to share, Snyder was most interested in looking at the critical feedback that these strong performers had received and whether the review tone or content differed based on employee gender.

Snyder collected 248 reviews from 180 people, 105 men and 75 women at 28 large, mid-size, and small companies.  About 71 percent of the reviews contained critical feedback. However, critical feedback was not distributed evenly by gender.

When breaking the reviews down by gender of the person evaluated, 59 percent of the reviews received by men contained critical feedback, but 88 percent of the reviews received by women did. The men were given constructive suggestions. The women were also given constructive suggestions – and told to pipe down.

The critical feedback men received was heavily geared towards suggestions for additional skills to develop. A few examples:

“Constructive feedback on your performance as a feature crew tester can be summed up by saying that you still have some skills to continue to develop.”

“Hone your strategies for guiding your team and developing their skills. It is important to set proper guidance around priorities and to help as needed in designs and product decisions.”

Women receive this kind of constructive feedback too. But, according to Snyder, the women’s reviews included a sharper element that was absent from the men’s:

“You can come across as abrasive sometimes. I know you don’t mean to, but you need to pay attention to your tone.”

“Your peers feel that you don’t leave them enough room. Sometimes you need to step back to let others shine.”

For the rest of the piece, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Telepresence Robots Coming to an Office Near You

Using telepresence robotics technology by Double Robotics and others, organizations are virtually sending their employees on client meetings and speaking engagements every day. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Telepresence is one of the few commercial applications of robotics technology that I’ve been genuinely excited about. Now that remote work is significantly on the rise, I view telepresence as a terrific means for professionals to virtually project themselves into an engaging human office environment.

Since I don’t have a telepresence robot myself yet, I checked out some opinions from those who have used them. Do the currentmachines live up to the hype, and are they a nightmare for IT staff to manage and secure?

In theory

Over at TechCrunch, Peter Hirst wrote about his colleague at MIT Sloan Executive Education, Paul McDonagh-Smith. Paul’s based in London, but his telepresence robot from Double Robotics allows him to present at a conference in Singapore first thing in the morning, then have a business meeting in Cape Town, South Africa and later that afternoon, meet with team members on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“In our office, telepresence robots are no longer a novelty, but an everyday tool we’ve been using to enable our remote team members to be more engaged,” said Hirst. “Double’s robot units are available regularly for team meetings or one-on-one visits. We all enjoy the ability to be truly present in our interactions with colleagues and clients — an experience that feels much more natural and personal than a phone call or a videoconference.”

In practice

Emily Dreyfuss is a remote worker at Wired. She lives in Boston, but most of her colleagues are in an office in San Francisco, and she was feeling left out. Her boss bought her Double Robotics’ creatively named Double, which sells for around $2500. The telepresence robot was Dreyfuss’ physical embodiment at headquarters. Instead of legs, she moved on gyroscopically stabilized wheels. Instead of a face, she had an iPad screen. Instead of eyes, a camera with no peripheral vision. Instead of a mouth, a speaker. And instead of ears, a tinny microphone.

At first, Dreyfuss was enamored with the experience. “It’s thrilling. I am in the office! There is the kitchen! There is Sam! Hi, everyone! I am here!” she exclaimed. Her robot, nicknamed Embot, attended meetings. “Plunked at the end of the conference table, my iPad head tracked the conversation, listening.”

Although Embot put Dreyfuss physically in the office, her co-workers could only see her face and not her body, and therefore were not constantly reminded how pregnant she was. “The visual reminder of my changed condition was not in their faces,” she said. “I have worked at places before where women start getting treated differently when their bellies show.

Dreyfuss realized, however, that current telepresence technology has its limitations. For one thing, people were always touching her robotic body without asking, either to help her move if she got stuck or just because they felt it. It was awkward for her – and her colleagues too. As one reported: “You know, when Joe lifted you up and carried you – with your face on the screen, it looked really inappropriate. Like he was cradling you in his arms.”

Embot was also a little rough around the edges technology wise. Dreyfuss couldn’t hear meetings very well. Robots, of course, live off power and and Wi-Fi, and signal strength proved to be a big problem.

For the rest of the article, check out QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

Microfeedback: The Future of Management

A few months ago, I attended an employee engagement workshop. The facilitator suggested that millennials require performance feedback more than once a year. “Maybe once a quarter,” she said.

More like once a day!” I couldn’t resist calling out.

I wasn’t kidding. For the 80 million millennials who now make up a majority of the workforce, no news is bad news. If they don’t hear from their managers frequently, they think they’re doing something wrong and quickly grow disillusioned.

Nevertheless, an open door policy in which employees are invited to stop by a manager’s office for extended feedback sessions multiple times a day simply isn’t practical. So what’s the solution?

The innovative concept of microfeedback originated in the consumer space and consisted of collecting a small amount of information from customers at key moments in their shopping experience. The goal was to gather relevant customer feedback for a more accurate assessment of their satisfaction.

Think about this, though. Why can’t the idea of microfeedback be extended to performance management? We certainly have the technology. Intra-company messaging systems like Yammer, Skype for business, and Slack are growing exponentially and with some groups (like millennials), are even  more popular than email.

Imagine that your direct report gives a status update in the departmental meeting for the first time. You think she did an exceptional job, but instead of noting it in her file to be reviewed in six months (or worse, forgetting about it completely), you send her a “thumbs up” emoticon via Slack. The action takes you less than 30 seconds, and yet your employee has a piece of encouraging feedback that will make her day.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Build a Team of Business Olympians

With the summer Olympics saturating every social media site, news outlet and water cooler conversation, there’s one thing every business leader is wondering: “How do we create Olympic-level teams in our company?” Andrew Neitlich, the founder and director of the Center for Executive Coaching and author of the new book, Coach! The Crucial, Deceptively Simple Leadership Skill for Breakaway Performance, offers these eight strategies for leaders:

Understand the type of team that’s right for you

Many leaders talk in vague terms about teams, when sometimes they don’t want a team at all. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith’s book The Wisdom of Teams notes the huge differences between a working group and a team. In a working group, people come to work, do their jobs, and go home. They don’t go out of their way for their colleagues, and basically want to get the job done and be left alone.

A team can increase performance exponentially compared to a working group, but it takes a lot more time, commitment, and effort to become a true team. In a team, people care about each other, go the extra mile, and figure out how to work closely together to perform at the highest levels. Many leaders set up incentives and structures for people to come together as working groups, yet they talk as if they really have a team.

At the same time, there are many different types of teams. In a symphony, everyone works together in perfect synchronicity, following the exact score. Contrast this to a jazz band, which encourages improvisation and creativity and sometimes creates the music on the spot. Getting back to the sports analogy, a winning basketball team has specialized roles for each player, and works fluidly to find openings, pass the ball, and make baskets.

At the other end of the spectrum in terms of coordination, there is the swim team or track team, in which players compete more or less individually in order to help the overall team win. If you don’t define what kind of team you expect, and support people to create that type of team, you won’t get the kinds of results you need.

Ask yourself: “What changes do we need to make in order to attract Olympic-level talent?”

Olympic-level teams have Olympic-level talent. If you want to attract Olympic-level talent to your organization, you need to be the type of organization – and have the type of leaders — where Olympic-level talent would want to work. For instance, hospitals strive towards the designation of Nurse Magnet by putting in place systems and structures that attract the best nursing talent. Every year certain companies make the ‘Best Companies to Work For’ list – and some of them make the list every single year without fail. Whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a smaller business, you can put in place the kinds of incentives, career paths, management team, and culture that encourage people to do their best and also tell others about how great it is to work with you.

For the rest of the post, check out QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

"Let's Grab Coffee and Chat:" The Kiss of Death?

In the Observer, writer Isaac Morehouse made a provocative proposition: the habit of grabbing coffee with colleagues or partners “just to chat” is killing our productivity.

“Let’s grab coffee and chat.”

According to Isaac Morehouse, those five words can be damning. Morehouse’s opinion is that when you become known for doing interesting things, like starting a business or writing intriguing articles, lots of people want to have coffee with you. Most of the time, he says, it’s a bad idea.

Morehouse continues:

“Face to face meetings can be valuable. There’s an energy that you don’t get any other way. But the cost is very high, and it’s rare to gain that energy with a stranger. Unless you know from interactions over email, social media, or phone that you and this person have mutual interests and will both be spurred to beneficial action by a coffee meeting, avoid it.”

“It’s not that coffee isn’t fun. That’s the problem. It is fun. But what’s scarce is conversation that leads directly to productivity. You get a quick high from talking about big ideas with cool people over hot drinks. Hammering out the next steps and taking them is not as much fun.”

“It’s flattering to be asked to coffee by someone who thinks your stuff is great. But it almost always eats away a huge chunk of your time and energy with very little in the way of a tangible outcome. You can feel like you’re doing something because your calendar is booked with coffee and conversation and you don’t have time for stuff. But busyness is not business.”

Oh man, he is so right.

Coffee costs more money than a Starbucks vente

Actually, when new contacts ask me to have coffee – or worse – ask to “pick my brain” (am I the only one who hates that phrase?), I hesitate. I know that these meet-ups are a drain on my productivity. For one thing, they usually take place in downtown Chicago – about a half hour subway ride from where I live and work. So, if you factor in at least an hour for coffee and an hour and half travel time to get to and from the coffee, you’ve probably eaten up half your work day.

And when you work for yourself, the saying “time is money” has a lot of significance.

I also have to admit that 90 percent of the time, grabbing coffee isn’t worth it from a business perspective. This is because generally speaking, people want to get information out of me and take advantage of my knowledge. They aren’t doing it maliciously, they simply haven’t thought about how the meeting can be mutually beneficial.

And therein lies my advice for people who wish to use coffee (and similar types of one-on-ones) as a productivity enhancer rather than a productivity drain.

First and foremost, take Morehouse’s point about action seriously. When you set up coffee with someone, communicate clearly what you intend to talk about, and what actions will take place immediately following the conversation. Brainstorms are fine, but take the next step and use the time with the other person to get your plan of attack off and running. In saving you a second meeting and numerous back-and-forth emails, you will have actually used the coffee date to drive productivity instead of detract from it.

Project Managers: Are You A Dreaded Presence in Town?

I have a good friend who’s an experienced data architect. Since I write about IT project management all the time, I recently asked him if he’d ever consider a PM job. To this he replied: “No way.”

I probed further about his rationale, and we came up with these five reasons why he dislikes project management and project managers and tries to steer clear of the profession whenever possible.

Project Managers are too structured

While every IT project team can benefit from some structure, my friend feels that PMs in general err on the side of micromanagement. They create cost and hourly estimates for tasks and then hold employees to them even when the scope of the project or the needs of the client change. “A lot of PMs act like it’s all about them and their process,” my friend says. “But we are the ones closer to the work and what actually needs to be done, so sometimes they just need to back off.

Project Managers are always justifying their existence

Remember last year’s post based on a LinkedIn discussion questioning whether PM was an actual title/legitimate job? My friend says that the majority of his interactions with PMs involve creating useless frameworks around work that’s already being done fairly seamlessly. “PMs always seem to be doing busywork,” he says. “There are loads of reports, documents, and charts that don’t do anything except show that the PM is working.”

Project Managers are meeting happy

PMs call too many meetings and spend too much time tasking every aspect of every project. “Here’s the thing,” my friend says. “We data architects are generally assigned six hours a day for development, and get to spend the remaining two hours doing meetings, phone calls, emails, and admin. But PMs’ meetings are so frequent and long that they are always cutting into development time. Of course, then they complain that we didn’t finish our tasks in the allotted hours.”

Project Managers don’t communicate openly

Have you ever heard the stereotype about teachers that says: “those who can’t do, teach.” The same is said to be true about PMs. Some assume that people become PMs because they weren’t skilled enough to be developers and as a result are insecure. They guard their power carefully and hold their cards close to the vest when threatened or stressed. “A lot of PMs won’t share the big picture with the team, so we might finish a task and be sitting there with no idea what to do next,” my friend tells me.

For the rest of the post, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

How NOT to do Change Management

Change management is difficult, especially when it involves a complex structure like an organization. But some techniques are better than others, and here are a few you’ll want to avoid next time around.

Driving from the bottom instead of the top

Any successful change strategy requires the enthusiastic involvement of managers and employees on the ground, and bottom-up goal setting is terrific for innovation and morale. However, unless you work in an organization with no hierarchy whatsoever, your proposed change won’t go anywhere without executive buy-in and ongoing support. So get it and get it early.

Assuming everyone shares your opinion

It’s a mistake to believe that the majority perspective mirrors yours, even if a certain point of view seems obvious. For example, it’s tempting to think that everyone would naturally support a flexwork or citizen development initiative, but without polling and/or focus groups with groups in all functions and roles across the organization, you really can’t be sure of anything. Even if you’re inhigh-growth mode and are under pressure to take action, do your due diligence before pulling the trigger.

Relying exclusively on logic

It’s necessary to build a bulletproof business case full of rational and objective arguments for your strategy, but don’t forget passion, fire, and story. Unless people can feel the problem you are trying to solve, they won’t be motivated to help you. There’s a happy medium here, though. You have to be able to create a sense of urgency without coming across as over the top.

Force-fitting a strategy that’s at odds with the culture

Corporate culture is an unseen, but tremendously powerful force. In any organization, so much goes on behind the scenes of organizational charts, mission statements, and annual reports. Gaining an in-depth understanding of what drives your culture is a critical step in undertaking any change strategy, even those that aren’t technically “culture” initiatives.

For more ways NOT to do change management, check out the full post on the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Characteristics of the Best Digital Transformation Leaders

In its 2015 research, executive recruiting firm RRA uncovered 21 attributes of the best digital transformation leaders. The analysis revealed that digital transformation leaders are defined by their ability to serve as productive disruptors: leaders who transform companies not by simply generating bold strategies but also by engaging people in the hard work of transformation. These leaders are more disruptive and innovative than other executives.

But, equally important, they are more socially adept than other executives – as well as bolder and more determined in translating ideas into action. They recognize that ideas without execution are hallucinations, and they understand that execution hinges on an ability to marshal the energies of the broader organization.

These leaders don’t simply aim to disrupt – they leverage their interpersonal skills to productively disrupt. They not only see the future and understand how to get there, they energize their colleagues to take the journey with them. Here are their five core characteristics in a bit more detail:

Innovative

The top digital transformation leaders excel in innovation. As Tanya Cordrey, Chief Digital Officer of Guardian News and Media told RRA: “My primary role when I’m meeting with my fellow C-level executives is to be looking toward the future, but you should not make the future feel like science fiction. You achieve this by painting a picture of an ambitious, bold future that feels possible but is also realistic. You have to be innovative within the bounds of what is possible.”

Top digital transformation leaders also highlight the importance of relentlessly linking innovation to clear business outcomes. They recognize that their capability to sell untested ideas hinges on the ability to establish a clear line of sight to revenue growth or cost reduction goals. ​

Disruptive

Successful digital transformation leaders bring an entrepreneurial spirit to their work, have little tolerance for the way things always have been done in a company, and are comfortable managing ambiguity and uncertainty.

The most dramatic difference between digital transformation leaders and other senior executives is the inclination to cut through bureaucracy. Large companies need some bureaucracy to manage risk and reap the benefits of scale, but top digital transformation leaders are adept at removing the clutter of unnecessary processes and turning decisions into action.

Bold

The best digital transformation leaders may be more comfortable with uncertainty than their peers, but that doesn’t stop them from being more decisive as well. RRA’s research revealed that it is that comfort with ambiguity that allows transformation leaders to set direction without fear.

When digital transformation leaders take initiative, they do so publicly. The data showed that these leaders are 21 percent more likely to lead from the front than the broader population of senior executives.

For the rest of the post, head over to QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

Micromanagement is Bad for the Brain

Historically, leaders have controlled employees rather than connecting with them. According to neuroscientist and educator Dalton Kehoe, author of Mindful Management, this approach has had a negative impact on the conscious, neural needs that motivate people to work productively. Here’s why.

Inside the human brain, things get complicated when someone has the legitimate right to tell us what to do. One part of the brain knows that the situation requires attention, but the mirror neuron system suggests that another’s dominance is actually a low-level threat. We are fearful and we want get away from the person.

Dominant Doctors Are Perceived Negatively

The subtlety and power of this situation is reflected in the work of psychologist Nalini Ambady. She asked research study participants to listen to short recordings of surgeons talking to patients. The exchanges were filtered to preserve the intonation, rhythm and pitch of the surgeons’ voices, but they eliminated content.

Ambady then asked participants whether the doctor had ever been sued for malpractice. If the surgeon’s voice was judged to sound dominant, participants guessed that he or she had been sued. If the voice sounded less dominant and more concerned, the surgeon was put into the non-sued group.

Follow-up studies have shown that people don’t trust doctors who show dominance without concern. Patients who can’t emotionally connect to a doctor don’t do as they are told, but when they get sick again, they blame the physician.

Dominant Managers Breed Willful Employees

Similarly, if a manager speaks in a dismissive and controlling way, employees automatically resist what they’re saying. As John Zenger and Amy Cuddy have shown in their research, most managers unthinkingly emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials at work, which doesn’t emotionally engage their staff.

To feel engaged, our mirror neurons must mimic the emotions of connection and positive anticipation (optimism) while our manager is talking to us, rather than feelings of distance, aggressiveness or contempt. Dominance triggers low-level threat and our emotional energy turns inward for protection.

For the rest of the article, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.