When Nagging Pays Off for Managing Teams

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Sean Silverthorne for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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The View from Harvard Business (April 18, 2011)

Is this your boss? She meets with you on a project, then follows up over the next few days with an e-mail, a hallway conversation, a quick phone call and maybe even a text message. Are you being nagged? Micromanaged?

Nope. Your boss is actually engaging in behavior, annoying as it may seem, that will get you working on the project more quickly, according to new research from Harvard Business School’s Tsedal B. Neeley and Northwestern University’s Paul M. Leonardi and Elizabeth M. Gerber.

The practice works particularly well for time-pressured leaders who have no actual authority over team members, such as when individuals are brought together from across the organization to work on a project. (Managers with authority tend to send, at most, one follow-up and assume it will get done.)

The researchers studied the communication patterns of 13 project managers in half-a-dozen firms across the computing, telecommunications, and health care industries. The team recorded every activity in the managers’ workday, collecting a total of 256 hours’ worth of observations.

The key finding: Managers who are deliberately redundant as communicators move their projects forward more quickly and smoothly than those who are not.

A story about the research by Kim Girard can be viewed here.

Or read an abstract of the paper, How Managers Use Multiple Media, Neeley has published other interesting work on the dynamics of teams. Her paper Walking Through Jelly: Language Proficiency, Emotions, and Disrupted Collaboration in Global Work looked at the common practice, especially by multinationals, of adopting a common business language (often English) for all of the firm. This practice can trigger a cycle of negative emotional responses that interfere with collaborative relationships on the teams, according to the research.

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Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. He has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at at Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily‘s first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

Cleopatra’s Three Can’t Miss Tips for Business Success

Sean Silverthorne

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET (March 25, 2011), The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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I’ve always wanted to write one of those cheesy books about what a great figure from history can teach us about modern day business management. Subjects revived from the dead to instruct us have included Genghis Kahn, Lincoln, Capt. Picard, Patton, Gandhi, Shakespeare, and  Sun Tzu.  Even Napoleon, whose decision to war on Russia in the middle of winter may be one of the worst tactical decisions ever made, gets a book on project management!

Well, I’m reading Stacy Schiff’s brilliant biography Cleopatra: A Life and I believe I am now able to impart to you the secrets of her incredible success. Unbelievably, I am doing this for free, and with this promise: If you can duplicate Cleopatra’s skills, you too can rule your empire like a god or goddess. Here is all you need to do:

Be Bewitching. By most accounts, Cleopatra was not only beautiful but funny, persuasive, seductive, a natural-born flatterer, and willing to spend massive amounts to throw unforgettable parties. The people loved their queen, and so did Julius Caesar and Marc Antony — the two most powerful men of the time. The Lesson: For business success develop a great personality, be rich, and be willing to kiss-up (literally) to anyone who is powerful enough to defeat you.

Be Ruthless. When her sister Arsinoe threatened to disrupt her reign, Cleopatra let her displeasure be known to Marc Anthony and the problem was, well, eradicated. No better fate befell Alexandrians she considered conspirators — Cleopatra sent the detached head of one of them to a strategic rival in order to curry favor. The Lesson: Dead men don’t tell tales, but they do make good marketing platforms.

Be Brilliant. She could build a fleet, beat down a revolt, and control the minutest details of the country’s currency. She was highly educated, fluent in nine languages and likely played a lovely lyre. She could converse eloquently on Homer with one breath, drop a ribald joke with the next. The Lesson: It doesn’t hurt to be the smartest person in the room, as well as the most beautiful and most compelling.

Here’s a bonus Cleopatra trait you’ll also want to cultivate.

Know how to make an entrance. When the Queen of the Nile visited Marc Anthony for the first time in his home city of Tarsus, Turkey, she had to make an impression to get the powerful warrior, and his followers, on her side. She arrived on a decorated barge, sailing under large purple sails and powered by 170 men with silver-painted oars. Here’s one account cited by Schiff:

“She herself reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy, dressed as Venus in a painting, while beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood at her side and fanned her. Her fairest maids were likewise dressed as sea nymphs and graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. Wondrous odors from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.” The Lesson: It’s better to be looked over than over looked.

And there you have it, Cleopatra’s solid gold tips for business success: Be beautiful, rich, ruthless, a flirt, smart and a party girl with a sense of the dramatic. (Oh, and it would have helped if Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P, played you in the movie.)

Time to get to work!

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Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001. Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily‘s first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

Michael Porter: Rethinking Capitalism the Next Major Business Transformation

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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The View from Harvard Business

Few people are as associated with modern capitalism as Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, whose theories on strategy and competitiveness have shaped the direction of countless corporations.

So his latest article in Harvard Business Review comes as a shocker. Porter, writing with coauthor Mark R. Kramer, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, argues that companies are locked in an “outdated” approach to creating value, focused on short-term profit while forgetting what they can do to benefit society–investments, by the way, that would pay off by ensuring long-term success.

One result: People have justifiably lost trust in business and are even questioning the very notion of capitalism.

Here is their bleak outlook on the short-term vision of modern business:

“How else could companies overlook the well-being of their customers, the depletion of natural resources vital to their businesses, the viability of key suppliers, or the economic distress of the communities in which they produce and sell? How else could companies think that simply shifting activities to locations with ever lower wages was a sustainable ’solution’ to competitive challenges? Government and civil society have often exacerbated the problem by attempting to address social weaknesses at the expense of business. The presumed trade-offs between economic efficiency and social progress have been institutionalized in decades of policy choices.”

The idea that business has sold its soul in the pursuit of quick profit is nothing new, of course. But Porter and Kramer bring to the party a wealth of knowledge on the mutual benefits derived from a linking of economic and social goals.

And they create a new vision of how to get it done, a framework they call the “principle of shared value.”

The solution “involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress. Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. It is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center. We believe that it can give rise to the next major transformation of business thinking.”

Some of the other highlights:

New skills required. Leaders and managers must develop skills and knowledge that give them a keen appreciation of societal needs, the ability to work across profit/nonprofit boundaries, and a deep understanding of how business productivity serves more than shareholders.

Government’s role re-conceived. Regulators must create policies, regulations and laws in ways that support shared value rather than work against it.

Broaden the role of capitalism. Companies have taken too narrow a definition of capitalism. We should be looking to business you do of the latter, the more strategic you are to the organization. Right?

Wrong. Of course wrong. Your HR department is not tied directly to P&L, yet the policies it creates, hiring it does, and staff development opportunities it pursues are all directed at bringing in the smartest people and tuning them to company culture so they can be most effective.

Still, the role of “support staff” is often perceived as not strategic, says Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati.

“Most organizations tend to underutilize these functions,” Gulati tells HBS Working Knowledge. “For years there have been arguments regarding whether they should be centralized or decentralized, but the larger issue is, how do you leverage these people to maximize their impact?”

• People who fill these roles can develop inferiority complexes that causes some crazy defensive behavior. For example, since they cannot fulfill a “profit” role, they try to prove their worth on the “loss” side by becoming extreme cost cutters.

• Rather than try to contribute ideas, Gulati says, these employees create “rules, regulations, and spreadsheets” that turns them into naysayers loathed by colleagues.

• Business managers and the P&L leaders themselves can turn this behavior around by creating an environment of cross-collaboration, where these employees can act as catalysts for new ideas and company growth.

Easy to do? Not hardly. Changing a deeply embedded culture is one of the most difficult things any organization can tackle. But business managers can at least start the process by tapping their HR, marketing, and finance support staff for ideas. Bring them to the table, and not just when it’s time to cut costs or consolidate.

Have you seen staff identity crisis where you work? Is there a way out of it?

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Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001. Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News.

The One Personal Goal You Need for 2011

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Goals. We all make them to start the new year. And forget them by Valentine’s Day.

So here’s your excuse to stop working on your Personal Goals for 2011 right this moment. The reason: They might make you a less effective leader.

The fact of the matter is that personal goals can come at the expense of something more important: making others around you better by making them your priority. That’s the word from Harvard Business School professors Robin Ely and Frances Frei, and Anne Morriss of Concire Leadership Institute.

“That doesn’t mean leaders are selfless. They have personal goals — to build status, a professional identity, and a retirement plan, among other things,” the authors write in the current Harvard Business Review. “But the narrow pursuit of those goals can lead to self-protection and self-promotion, neither of which fosters other people’s success.”

This may be one of the hardest things you will do as a leader. After all, self-protection is the ultimate brain hard-wire. So to downplay our own needs can feel dangerous, according to Ely, Frei and Morriss in their article, Stop Holding Yourself Back.

“But all breakthrough leaders find ways to tame their security impulses. Most are amazed by the energy and meaning they discover when they no longer define themselves by their personal needs and fears.”

OK, so you should have at least one personal goal this year: Make others better. Your commitment should be to make another person, or your entire team, better in some way. At problem solving, or prioritizing, or communicating with customers. Then get them the resources they need to get to work.

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Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001. Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News.

Why Middle Management Should Fear Social Media

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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The View from Harvard Business

Over the last six months I’ve detected a growing number of management gurus lauding the arrival of social media as a mainstream communications tool in the modern business organization. This technology, they agree, breaks down hierarchies and promotes direct communication from top to bottom, from country to country, and from company to customer.

Harvard Business School professor Bill George, a former CEO at Medtronic, calls social media in business the most powerful trend of 2010. But if you are a middle manager, social managing might not be such a great thing. As George writes in HBS Working Knowledge:

“The biggest threat presented by social networks is to middle managers, who may become obsolete when layers of managers are no longer needed to convey messages up and down the organization. The key to success in the social networking era is to empower the people who do the actual work — designing products, manufacturing them, creating marketing innovations, or selling services — to step up and lead without a hierarchy.”

If you are a middle manager, Bill George’s words must cause some soul searching. Is my main function really just as a go-between between upstairs and downstairs? If true, how must the role evolve over the next decade to create value for the company?

Worth Reading

Leadership in the “Culture of Sharing” Era (BNET)

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Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001. Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News.

The No. 1 Reason Why Good Managers Fail to Become Great

Sean Silverthorne

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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The View from Harvard Business

Most organizations have only a few great managers. This is a sad state of affairs since many more managers are smart, capable, and could be much better than they are now.

So what’s stopping this improvement?

The short answer: the managers themselves.

Good managers fail to work hard enough to improve themselves. They reach a certain level of proficiency — good — and stop there, according to Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill and her collaborator Kent Lineback.

“Managers rarely ask themselves, ‘How good am I?’ and ‘Do I need to be better?’ unless they’re shocked into it. When did you last ask those questions?” they ask in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review.

What are your first steps toward improvement? Start with a clear realization of what managers do, namely that they are responsible for the performance of a group of people. This work is achieved through exerting influence that “makes a difference not only in what they do but also in the thoughts and feelings that drive their actions,” write Hill and Lineback.

Once you understand what you do, the authors offer some great methods for managing yourself, your network and your team. I especially liked their section on what you can do right now (Prep, Do, Review) to improve performance. Read the full article Are You a Good Boss — or a Great One? on HBR.org. The authors also have a new book, Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader.

Are you stuck on good? What’s holding you back?

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Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001. He has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily‘s first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

Don’t Let Too Many Facts Cloud Your Argument

"What a waste of trees...."

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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When it’s time to make the Big Pitch for more resources, a better job title or to head a sexy new project, our first inclination is to load the supporting data into the PowerPoint canon for firing when needed. The more data, the better, of course. Nothing spells success like cold, hard facts.

Except that more data often means a less persuasive presentation. You know this is true: How many meetings have you slumbered through as the numbers piled up like spent shells that missed their mark? The key is to offer a message or story with clarity and simplicity, backed with key data points. Not all of them–you can always make the full information available later.

John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor emeritus and author of the new book Buy-In, agrees. The deluge-of-data problem often arises after the initial presentation, when the audience has a chance to challenge or question what they’ve just heard. Kotter sees problems when the presenter tries to overwhelm objections from the audience with even more information.

“They shoot at an attack sixteen times with bullets of data to make sure it is dead,” Kotter blogs on HBS.org. “But in so doing, they are arguing not on their own but on the naysayer’s territory, opening themselves up to counter-attacks with each piece of evidence they dispense–and simultaneously putting other listeners to sleep!”

Read his post for more details, but his advice comes down to this. When confronted by doubters, offer a “quick, direct, common sense answer that shows respect for the naysayer but moves the discussion along.” In other words, don’t rebut point-by-point, but rather acknowledge the points made while being brief in your answer.

How do you handle the data dilemma? How much is too much?

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Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Under pressure: Learning to be a “clutch” leader

Sean Silverthorne

Here is an article written by Sean Silverthorne for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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In the sports world, a “clutch” player performs best when the pressure is on, backs are to the wall, and all eyes turned their way. Think Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Martina Navratilova. When it was all on the line, they not only didn’t wilt, they got better.

Is there such a thing as a clutch leader? Do you know managers or CEOs who rise above when everything is on the line? A bigger question: Can you learn to be clutch?

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review is spun around the topic of military leadership, and there is an interesting blog post on HBR.org about how military cadets learn what it takes to be clutch.

New York Times business writer Paul Sullivan, author of  Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t recounts a talk he gave at West Point on the subject.

All clutch leaders display five traits, he said: focus, discipline, adaptability, being present, and fear and desire.

Read his post for more depth on each of these.

Sullivan’s good news for the rest of us is that organizations can train their performers to respond well to pressure.  Sullivan says there are three lessons business leaders can learn from cadets:

1. Focused on a goal. “When they graduate they will be deployed to lead a platoon, probably in Afghanistan or Iraq. They know the responsibilities and the risks. And everything they are doing is preparing them for that moment. Do you know what your primary mission is at work?”

2. Continuous improvement. “They work in an organization that is continually striving to be better. When a mistake happens, the Army tries not to let it happen a second time. Are you aligned with the right organization? Or if you’re leading that organization, are you prepared to change things that aren’t working, even if change could be hard or even a reversal of something you implemented?”

3. Practice for success. “These cadets are given the physical and mental training that will help them do their jobs at the highest level. They know you have to be able to perform a task perfectly under normal conditions before you can expect to do it in a stressful situation. Can you say the same thing? Are you able to do your job at a high level every day? If not, then you should not be surprised when you make the wrong decisions under pressure.”

Will following this advice make you the Michael Jordan of your business? Well, maybe not–some people are just hard-coded for success in tough situations. But working at focusing on the objective, adaptability to the environment and improvement of skills sure puts whatever natural abilities you have in the best position to succeed when the going gets tough.

Looking through history, who were the greatest clutch leaders? Churchill? Lincoln? Alexander the Great?

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I would add Elizabeth I, Nelson Mandela, and Harry Truman.

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001. Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily‘s first journalist based in Silicon Valley.