What Your Science Teacher Should Have Taught You About Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

In the spirit of the season, I thought it appropriate to share the research that relates the benefits we can expect from being grateful. We covered this topic last year, but this is something we all need to be reminded of occasionally.

Did you know that scienctists have something to say about gratitude? What your parents taught you about being thankful, has been shown to greatly impact the work environment.

Selfishness comes naturally to most people. Wishing for more, rather than being thankful for what we have is a theme portrayed in nearly every classic holiday film or tale. Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carole, George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, and the Grinch in The Grinch who Stole Christmas were all finally saved from their selfish ambition to recognize and savor the smallest treasures of what they had.

Gratitude can be simply defined as the acknowledgement and pleasure in having received. For centuries, the topic was ignored by serious scientists because most believed the concept should be left to the realm of philosophers and theologians.

More recently, as serious researchers began studying gratitude in earnest, they found some surprising benefits for both organizations and individuals.

Gratitude is responsible for significant enhancement of mood, and it increases prosocial behavior (i.e. being kind and doing things for others).

Researcher and professor, Dr. Robert A Emmons, writes in Positive Organizational Scholarship: The Foundations of a New Discipline:

“The cultivation of gratitude may be important in organizations not only because of the direct effects of improving organizational climate, but also because as a cognitive strategy, gratitude can improve individual well-being and lower toxic emotions in the workplace, such as resentment and envy.

…Studies have shown that employees’ happiness and well-being are associated positively with performance, morale, commitment, and can reduce absenteeism and staff turn-over. The techniques to improve gratitude, a key ingredient in positive emotion, could enhance individual and organizational well-being.”

If you’re coaching those on your team, or trying to recruit the right people for the future, focus part of your effort on the trait of gratitude. You’ll not only be thankful you did (from a performance and culture perspective), but you’ll also find yourself becoming a more appreciative person, yourself. That’s a win for everyone involved.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Lessons Learned In Moneyball

Monday, November 23, 2009

If you haven’t already, I would highly recommend reading the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael M. Lewis. This book details the true story of the Oakland Athletics baseball team and their General Manager, Billy Beane, who was the first GM to question long held biases in recruiting and use only objective analysis in picking undervalued talent to win ballgames.

Between 1997 and 2008, under Beane’s watch, the A’s compiled a 976-804 (.548) record, which was the third-best record in the American League, and fifth best in all of baseball during that time frame. In addition, the A’s won four American League West titles (2000, 2002-03, and 2006) and secured one AL Wild Card spot (2001). Over the last nine seasons, dating back to the 2000 campaign, the A’s have compiled an 815-641 (.560) record, which is the third-best record in the American League and fourth-best mark in the Majors.

How did Beane accomplish this? It wasn’t with large sums of money.

“The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th century view of the game and the statistics that were available at the time. The book argues that the Oakland A’s’ front office took advantage of more empirical gauges of player performance to field a team that could compete successfully against richer competitors in Major League Baseball.

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on-base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A’s became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.

By re-evaluating the strategies that produce wins on the field, the 2002 Athletics, with approximately $41 million in salary, are competitive with larger market teams such as the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, who spend over $100 million in payroll. Because of the team’s smaller revenues, Oakland is forced to find players undervalued by the market, and their system for finding value in undervalued players has proven itself thus far.” (Wikipedia: Moneyball)

That was in 2002. And the A’s record of wins didn’t really begin to falter until 2007, when at least ten other teams began to copy the A’s formula for successful recruiting.

And what is that formula? It boils down to this: The strategy is to find players who have the highest on-base percentage. They really don’t consider hitting percentage – They go as far to say, “We don’t care whether they even look like an athlete.” If they are good enough to play at the college or minor league level, get on base, and then know how to work the count to get a lot of walks…they want them.

This new way of analyzing baseball players is called: Sabermetrics (the analysis of baseball through objective evidence).

“Moneyball has made such an impact in professional baseball that the term itself has entered the lexicon of baseball. Teams which appear to value the concepts of sabermetrics are often said to be playing ‘Moneyball’. Baseball traditionalists, in particular some scouts and media members, decry the sabermetric revolution and have disparaged Moneyball for emphasizing concepts of sabermetrics over more traditional methods of player evaluation. Nevertheless, the impact of Moneyball upon major league front offices is undeniable. In its wake, teams such as the New York Mets, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox, Washington Nationals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians, and the Toronto Blue Jays have hired full-time Sabermetric analysts.” (Wikipedia: Moneyball)

The question for all of us is this: What subjective and flawed assumptions have we all accepted without questioning regarding sourcing, recruiting, coaching and agent performance?

Those brave enough to question the status quo through statistical analysis may find ways to succeed that were never previously discovered…

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

The Three Rules Of Scalable Recruiting – Part 2

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

As promised, here are the Three Primary Rules for developing a scalable new agent recruiting process:

Rule #1: There is no replacing a guaranteed, consistent, and large number of high quality candidates across the entire calendar year.

Rule #2: Because of this large influx of candidates, one must have a system that tracks and enables consistent contact with every candidate from- first interest- through interview- to hire, so as to minimize any candidates falling through the cracks or being lost to competitors.

Rule #3: Finding a manager who can consistently execute the above rules should be considered an anomaly. You can find managers who are good recruiters, but to replicate their methods is extraordinarily difficult because they’ve developed their own personal system. If you depend on the managers alone to do your recruiting, you’re running the risk of inconsistent recruiting. In our experience of directing large flows of candidates toward managers, we’ve found that they simply aren’t wired to complete the tasks required to contact each candidate at the frequency we’ve seen essential for good results. This is not an insult to managers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Good managers are wired to be good at interactions, leading, inspiring, coaching, and of course… their own, individual, idiosyncratic, style of recruiting. They are very good at sitting across the desk from a candidate and inspiring them to become an agent – Our numbers consistently show that most managers convert 25% of their interviews into new agents who are excited about joining their company. So… get them a lot of people to interview!

[Addendum to Rule #3: If you are executing on Rule #1 (having a consistent, large volume of candidates), then a central recruiting coordinator who is “wired” to handle the large number of tasks it takes to execute Rule #1 is essential.]

Because of the first two rules, companies must simultaneously execute two recruiting systems. One system should encourage the development and accountability of each manager recruiting through their own personal methods, and the other should include systems built with the first two rules bolted on the side. Remember, I am talking about a “scalable, repeatable recruiting system.” This must be a system that allows everyone to do their best work every day. It must not be a system that requires dependency on any one person, nor should it be difficult to replicate.

And most importantly, everyone involved must appreciate each other’s work across all parts of the process, for each piece takes an enormous amount of consistent work. Sourcing large numbers of candidates, funneling these contacts toward interviews, trying to convert these into hires, etc…all are pieces of an important puzzle and must be acknowledged.

When the above rules are followed, it will not only have a substantial impact on improving results, but will also reduce the level of frustration for everyone involved.

The Three Rules Of Scalable Recruiting

Monday, November 16, 2009

We’ve recently had the pleasure of presenting at the Realty Alliance Conference in New York City, during which time we touched base with many of our clients, in addition to meeting roughly forty other leaders in the real estate industry, whom we previously only knew by name.

Preparing for the presentation provided me with a good excuse to spend some time boiling down some of what we’ve learned over the past five years regarding recruiting. I initially came up with a very long and rather cumbersome and detailed list of rules, but soon whittled it down to a concise and potent list of Three Rules.

Before sharing these rules with you, allow me to briefly review some important principles around science and research design that has given us the ability to deduce these rules.

When one sets out to improve results of any kind, one must do more than analyze just the results. However, many business people do just this, especially where preconceived beliefs and biases have been in place for many years. Excuse the exaggeration, but what many people end up doing, is simply looking at the results exclusively, and demanding, “Give me better results today than I had yesterday,” or simply, “We need to get better results!”

What happens under these conditions is that a very wide variety of systems and methods become adopted by those who have been charged with the task of “delivering results.” These haphazard systems contain such personal and idiosyncratic twists that the methods are impossible to replicate across all territories or offices. When this occurs, the organization loses any ability to replicate any success, and instead becomes dependent on a few superstars who are the only ones who can pull off their own personal method of recruiting (or any other task for that matter).

The scientific method is a much different process than the above. The scientific method regarding any sort of improvement sets out to:

Determine all variables that might have a significant impact on the result.
Manipulate those variables until the results are significantly improved.

And then most importantly…

Assess if these same variables can be similarly manipulated and the results replicated in other environments (across offices, corporate cultures, territories, country, etc.).

In essence, this is what we, at Tidemark, set out to do five years ago – And we want to thank many of our clients who have allowed us to experiment in their backyard. Many of you are likely aware of several of our methods derived from the above process. (If you aren’t, please contact me.)

I’ll give you a couple of days to chew on the above information. See if you can guess what we’ve figured out to be the Three Simple Rules to Scalable Recruiting. I’ll include them later this week. Stay tuned…

The Case For Loyalty – Part 3: Contributing At Work

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

In the last couple of posts (1, 2), we’ve discussed loyalty from the perspective of personal relationships. Without the ability to be loyal to those around you and maintain relationships with people who are loyal to you, it is difficult to find happiness and maintain a sense of well-being.

Today, we’ll turn our focus to workplace relationships and performance. Does loyalty have an impact on how you’ll perform as an employee and a leader? More than you might imagine…

The authors of Why Loyalty Matters site an extensive study conducted at Harvard Business School (Heskett, Sasser, Schlesinger), that boils down the critical elements of employee performance. This study is unique because it focuses specifically on the factors that must be present for an employee to provide outstanding customer service (i.e. meet the needs of a customer).

Here is what the researchers learned:

Capability: Capable employees can deliver high-value service to customers. This implies that employees have the training, tools, procedures, and rules to deliver good service.
Satisfaction: Satisfied employees treat customers better than their dissatisfied counterparts.
Loyalty: Loyal employees are more willing to suppress short-term demands for the long-term benefit of the organization. As such, they may, themselves, place a priority on good customer service. Loyal employees also stay with their organizations longer, reducing the cost of turnover and its negative effect on service quality.
Productivity: Productive employees have the potential to raise the value of a firm’s offerings to its customers. Greater productivity can lower costs of operations, which can mean lower prices for customers.

Doesn’t it seem that loyalty is out of place on this list? I understand that a person must be capable, productive, and generally happy to provide good customer service. But loyal? Although it may seem odd, the research strongly demonstrates this connection.

If you are responsible for recruiting and coaching those on your team, this information should have an impact on how you perform these functions. Can you expect an agent or an employee to consistently satisfy your customers if they do not feel loyal to you and your organization? Don’t bet on it. Does it make sense to hire new agents and employees who have demonstrated high performance, but have a pattern of disloyal behavior? Again, this is not a formula for long-term success.

But, how can we reconcile the necessity and benefits of loyalty when we work for companies, who through no fault of their own, must participate (at times) in disloyal behaviors towards their employees? I thought the authors did a great job of addressing this point:

“So the belief by some that employee loyalty is dead is absolutely, without a doubt, wrong [based on the research sited above]. Loyalty is critical both to a company’s long-term success, and to our own happiness [see the second posting in this series]. As famed management expert Tom Peters once observed:

‘I think loyalty is much more important than it ever was in the past. Today loyalty is the only thing that matters. But it isn’t blind loyalty to the company. It’s loyalty to your colleagues, loyalty to your team, loyalty to your project, loyalty to your customers, and loyalty to yourself. I see it as a much deeper sense of loyalty than mindless loyalty to the Company Z logo.’

We spend far too much of our lives working not to derive some pleasure from it. But doing so requires that we build strong connections with others. And strong connections are build on loyality.”

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

The Case For Loyalty – Part 2: Predicting Happiness

Monday, November 09, 2009

If you were to collect all available research on happiness, you’d quickly notice a depressing principle staring you in the face: Human beings are terrible at predicting what makes them happy!

It isn’t that we don’t want to be happy. Even Thomas Jefferson realized that the “pursuit of happiness” was basic to the fabric of all human beings when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Rather, the problem has always been finding a reliable path to get there.

For many years, people assumed that improving one’s economic conditions would improve their level of happiness. On a macro level, this has been proven false. For example, in the United States, our economic conditions have steadily improved over the last 50 years. However, our measured level of happiness has remained unchanged between 1946 and 2006 (Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Additionally, this same trend was demonstrated in 11 other industrialized countries around the world.

The same principle repeats itself among individuals: Yes, poverty brings misery – But, once a person economically rises above poverty, the connection between additional money and increased happiness, dissipates.

Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert puts it they way:

“What I’ve learned from data is that I don’t chase dollars now that I have enough of them, because I know that it will take a very large amount of money to increase happiness by a small amount.”

If money and prosperity are not the answer, what is? The authors of Why Loyalty Matters make the case that strong, healthy, and loyal relationships are among the most important factors in the happiness equation:

“The economic engine that has saved us from the yoke of poverty has also taught us to trade our time and labor to get the things we want. The problem isn’t that we are exchanging our time for commodities, but instead that we are exchanging our family’s time, our friend’s time, our ideals’ time to get something.”

On the surface this way of living makes sense until we realize what the research reveals. From a happiness perspective, that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner…

“the most important factor that separates happy people from unhappy people is our relationships with others. It is more important than money, and even more important than our health. Yet we frequently trade our loyalties for things that will not make us happier, namely money.”

The authors demonstrate further that the key to developing and maintaining these essential relationships, is loyalty. In fact, if you dig into the data even further, the ability to give and demonstrate loyalty in personal relationships has one of the highest correlations with happiness of all other factors studied. In other words, if a person gives and receives loyalty in their relationships, the chances of them being happy are very high.

In the next WorkPuzzle blog, I’ll share how research is confirming that loyalty can also have a profound impact on your business. In the meantime, you may want to take some time to do some self-assessment…

Do you consider yourself a loyal person? Can those who are closest to you depend upon your loyalty? If those around you were to list your top five character traits, would loyalty even be on the list? These were tough questions for me to answer—maybe that’s why I learned so much from this book!