Become a Godfather Manager

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The most common obstruction to great marriages,
families, friendships and organizations is the timeless reluctance to be
truthful and honest when truth might cause conflict.

I have seen this both clinically and while
consulting with organizations.  For
example, I recently attended a meeting with 15 individuals in the room.  There was so much pent up disagreement among
the group, no one wanted to give their opinion on any issue brought to the table.  The group was locked-up and completely
paralyzed.

The-godfather Oct 23If you ever experienced a situation like this,
you know how frustrating and debilitating this can be for a team.  If you’re the manager for such a team, it is
near impossible to defuse such an impasse.

That’s why a recent article in the Harvard
Business Review caught my eye.  Rather
than giving advice on how to fix the mess, the authors give recommendations on
avoiding it in the first place.

The article was written by Ron Ashkenas and Lisa
Bodell and offers the following insights around conflict avoidance.

"Most people want to be liked: It’s one of the fundamental
tenets of human behavior.

Because of that motivation, many of us have an unconscious
desire to avoid conflict. We prefer to “get along,” “not make waves,” and “act
as a team player.” We all want to be known as a great person to work with.

The only problem with this mindset is that creative ideas and
better ways of getting things done often stem from constructive conflict. Organizations need
it to advance. And even in the day-to-day, workplace conflict is still
inevitable because organizations are full of bright, ambitious people with
different points of view, controversial ideas, and disparate values.

There’s no way that we can get along with everyone all the time.
Finding the right balance between the need to deal with conflict and the
instinct to avoid it is one of the toughest challenges that most managers
face."

They go on to offer the following tips (one quite humorous)
regarding creating a culture that invites constructive conflict. 

Quote The Godfather. In order to
foster more constructive conflict and feedback, remind your team and your
colleagues about Don Corleone’s admonition that ‘it’s not
personal, it’s business.’

Doing this will reinforce the notion that we can disagree about
ideas and strategies, but still respect and like each other — something
that is often forgotten in the heat of battle.

With this principle in mind, encourage team members to ask probing
questions and challenge assumptions. Eventually asking, ‘Have you thought about
this?’ should feel like a productive conversation, rather than a personal
attack.

Create challenge events. Rather than leave it to chance,
schedule time with your team to question norms and change the way things are
done. Make it clear to them that processes are expected to evolve over time
(even the ones you created) and that it’s OK to push back on them.

Doing this will create a “safe space” where they can assess
whether routine tasks are worth the
effort, and modify them if necessary. It also allows people who might hesitate
to raise issues by themselves feel more comfortable doing so in a group.

Recognize employees who question the status quo. When employees
take the risk of creating a productive disruption, give them positive
reinforcement. If someone pushes back or raises an uncomfortable question in a
meeting, back them up rather than shut them down. If possible, use it as a
teachable moment to encourage others to do the same.

Set ground rules for conflict. Since everyone
struggles with conflict to some degree, develop a few standards for how your
team can manage it constructively.

For example in one company’s review sessions, participants need
to begin with at least two positive comments before anyone is allowed to throw
in a criticism. Although it feels a little awkward at times, this practice
forces everyone to take a more balanced view of other people’s work, which
reduces the tension and allows for more productive discussions.

In another firm, every meeting ends with five minutes of what’s
called a “plus/delta” critique of the meeting – with quick comments about what
was good about it and what should be changed the next time. Again, this more
structured practice makes it easy and acceptable to openly and constructively
criticize.

In the short-term, it’s almost always easier to avoid conflict
and come across as being a “nice” manager. But more often than not, being a
little less nice might be the best thing for your people, your organization,
and you."

I could not agree more. What are the thoughts of our
readers?

DMPhotoWorkPuzzleEditor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Are Your Job Ads Too Classified?

Monday, October 21, 2013

Did you know that 90% of the job ads posted today persist in
describing the requirements of experience, skills, and education for each
position as the only criteria? This would seem
to be a logical system for attracting well-qualified candidates.

ClassifiedAds Oct. 21stHowever, I am personally aware of several cases of individuals
who have shied away from applying for those opportunities where the
prerequisites are so selectively detailed. These were extremely talented
candidates with many of the characteristics that would make them great
employees in any field.

So why didn’t these candidates apply? Because, based on the
ad content, they believed the company was more interested in experience and
skill level than talent, drive and desire.

There are multiple layers behind why the “traditional” way
doesn't work. You have probably heard me say that this method doesn't speak to
the person. For example, “skills” do not tap a person’s curiosity, awareness or
attentiveness or how they work in a group or leadership situation.

Finding more about who they are, what they are interested in, and how they view a beneficial working relationship will give you the relevant
information needed to identify the successful employee. 

 Lou Adler, a widely
read author in recruiting circles, recently wrote:

"Earlier this
year, I saw an ad for Facebook’s VP of Human Resources. It listed a bunch of
experience requirements interlaced with some generic responsibilities and
hyperbole.

To me this is backwards. It’s far better to define the job
before defining the person. If a person has successfully accomplished something
similar, he or she has exactly the level of skills, experience and academics
required.

The worked required to be done determines the skills needed,
the skills needed don't define the work required.  80-90% of the people who get promoted
internally into these same spots don’t have the experience, skills and
academics listed as required for someone hired from the outside.

What they do have
is something far better – a track record of performance that indicates they can
take on a bigger role in the company.

It seems obvious that if a company wants to
hire people who are both competent and motivated to do the work required, they
need to start by defining the work required.

Yet somehow this basic concept is lost when a
new job opens up. Instead of defining the job, managers focus on defining the
person. The end result is not a job description at all, but a person
description.

This limits the selection pool to a narrow
group of people just like the people the company has hired in the past. By
default, this precludes expanding the company’s diversity hiring program or
raising the company’s overall talent level.

For The
Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, I asked one of the top labor attorney’s
in the country, David Goldstein from Littler Mendelson, to review the idea of
using performance objectives to define the job, rather than skills. Here are a
few of his comments (you’ll find his full report in the book):

 ‘A properly prepared performance profile …and
focusing on “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria may open the door to more minority,
military, and disabled candidates who have a less “traditional” mix of
experiences, thereby supporting affirmative action or diversity efforts.’

Hiring a more diverse and talented workforce starts by
defining the work required for success, not the skills, experiences and
academics needed to do the work.

This is not rocket science, just commonsense, but apparently
commonsense is not one of the skills required for hiring people."

Lou’s
article and book are extremely valuable tools in today’s competitive hiring
environment. I am excited by the fact that most of our clients use this hiring
method and apply the philosophy it evokes.

Perhaps it
may be easier to practice these principles when it comes to independent contractors
such as real estate agents, but it is also the right thing to do. 

DMPhotoWorkPuzzleEditor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Cognitive Ease—The Secret to Great Interviewing—Part 2

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Earlier this week, I suggested that most people show up to
an interview experiencing “cognitive strain.” 
Unless you can help a person migrate to a place of cognitive ease, they’ll
have a difficult time hearing and engaging most of what you’re trying to
communicate.  If you didn't read the
first article in this discussion, you may want to catch up before trying to
digest today’s topic.

How do you get someone from a state of cognitive strain to a
place of cognitive ease?  Daniel Kahneman
spends several chapters in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow,
addressing this topic.

Part of the answer to the question can be summed up in this
diagram:

Cognitive Ease Oct 16
The items listed on the right side are the feelings we want
the candidate to have when they leave the interview.  These traits are the natural results of feeling cognitive ease.

Some of the causes
that produce cognitive ease are listed on the left side.  As you might suspect, if you can become proficient
at influencing the items on the left (by the way, this is not a complete
list—there are many more elements), candidates will start experiencing
something remarkable at your interviews.

As I mentioned earlier, Kahneman spends several chapters
explaining and citing research for these causes.  Not all of these would relate to interviewing
(although a surprising number do apply), so we’ll just explore “related
experience” today.  If you have an
interest in learning more, you can delve into this topic by picking up a copy
of his book.

Here is a simple question that Dr. Kahneman often asks his
audiences:

“How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?

The number of people who detect what was wrong with this question
is so small that it has been dubbed the Moses illusion.  Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did.

The idea of animals going into the ark sets up a biblical
context, and Moses is not abnormal in that context.  You did not positively expect him, but the
mention of his name is not surprising. It also helps that Moses and Noah have
the same vowel sound and number of syllables.

As with triads that produce cognitive ease, you
unconsciously detect associative coherence between Moses and ‘ark’ and so
quickly accept the question.”

By default, the human mind wants to maintain (or get to) a
state of System 1 thinking.  One of the
ways it maintains this state is to look for related experiences.  When you heard just a few words (animals and
ark), it quickly pulled a story from memory that allowed you to answer the
question without leaving a state of cognitive ease.

The error you made (and we all make) illustrates how quickly
the mind retrieves, depends upon, and desires related experiences. 

Let’s suppose I ask a different question:  How many chickens did Eric take to the
marina? 

Of course, you quickly get frozen with this question.  Who’s Eric? 
Why does he have chickens?  Is he
taking the chickens to a boat, or is there a restaurant near the marina? And,
so on.   Your mind does not even consider
the first part of the question—how many chickens are there?   

In the first question, none of the background mattered
because the “related experience” filled in the context.

Side note:  The relationship
between related experience and cognitive ease is leveraged frequently by
companies such as Geico during their marketing campaigns.  Next time you see or hear a Geico commercial,
see if you can detect it.

What does this have to do with interviewing?

A “related experience” is one of the best pathways to get a
candidate to a state of cognitive ease during an interview.

The point is not to deceive anyone in the interview process
(we make the assumption that you’re offering the person something that will be
advantageous for his or her career), but instead allow them to feel good about
you and your organization and trust the things you’re communicating.

How do you find related experiences?  Here are two sources you can use immediately:

Pop culture.  How many times have you been in a meeting and
someone says…"this is like the TV show Survivor.  Someone is going to get voted off the
island."  This is a related
experience.  Find two or three references
in pop culture that would relate to the points you commonly make during and interview.

The candidate’s own
experiences.  If you spend time (the
first 20 to 30 minutes of the interview) drawing out and listening to the
candidate’s story, you’ll have plenty of material to draw upon to find related
experiences.  Restating the candidate’s
own experiences and then relating it to the realities of working in your office
is very powerful.

If you can master the concepts of related experience
and cognitive ease, you will take your interview skills to a whole new
level.   You’ll not only reap the rewards
of hiring more agents, but you’ll also experience some cognitive ease for
yourself!

 

BenHessPic2011Editor'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. 

Cognitive Ease: The Secret to Great Interviewing

Monday, October 14, 2013

Think of yourself sitting in a canoe in a swift flowing
river.  You’re paddling desperately with the intention of making it 100 yards upstream. 

To get there, you’ll need to focus on the task, apply some paddling
skill, and consistently exert yourself.  
Because you’ll be fighting against the current, you’ll experience some frustration and
probably arrive out of breath and needing to rest.

CognitiveEaseIn a figurative sense, this is how most people feel when they
go to an interview.  The fast-flowing
current is called “cognitive strain,” and it’s a silent factor that works
against you in every interview.

In the next couple of WorkPuzzles, we’ll teach you how to
alleviate cognitive strain and start conducting your interviews in the calm
water of “cognitive ease.”

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to Daniel Kahneman, a
Nobel Prize winning psychologist who recently published his best selling
manifesto called Thinking, Fast and Slow.

If you didn’t catch the previous discussions on this topic,
I’d recommend reading the first blog in this series.  It will give you some background for
today’s WorkPuzzle.

In his book, Kahneman introduces his readers to the concept of “cognitive ease.”  In simple terms,
it is the natural desire a person has to make decisions and judgments using “System
1” thinking.

As you may remember, System 1 is the fast, intuitive, and
automatic way of making decisions and judgments.   System 2 is the slower way of thinking that
requires more conscious judgments and critical analysis.

Dr. Kahneman
defines cognitive ease in this way:

“Whenever you are conscious, and perhaps even when you are
not, multiple computations are going on in your brain, which maintain and
update current answers to some key questions:

Is anything new going on? Is there a threat? Are things
going well? Should my attention be redirected? Is more effort needed for this
task?

You can think of a cockpit, with a set of dials that
indicate the current values of each of these essential variables. The
assessments are carried out automatically by System 1 and one of their
functions is to determine whether extra effort is required from System 2.

One of the dials measures cognitive ease, and its range is
between “easy” and “strained.” 

Easy is a sign that things are going well—no threats, no
major news, no need to redirect attention or mobilize effort. 

Strained indicates that a problem exists, which will require
increased mobilization of System 2.

When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably
in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your
intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. 

When you feel cognitive strain, you are more likely to be
more vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel
less comfortable, and make few errors, but you also are less intuitive and less
creative than usual.”

With these definitions as a background, would you rather have someone be experiencing “cognitive ease” or “cognitive strain” during an interview?

Obviously, you’d want the person to be experiencing
cognitive ease.  If candidates are suspicious,
uncomfortable, and lacking the creativity to imagine themselves in a new
career, your interviews are not going to come to life.  It's very difficult to build a
relationship with individuals who remain in this state.

Here’s something you may not have considered:  Every candidate you interview (especially if
the person is a “new to real estate” candidate) is experiencing cognitive
strain when they arrive at your office.

There are very few exceptions to this rule.  Interviews are stressful.  Being in a new environment, meeting new
people, receiving a bunch of new information, and having the perception you’re
being evaluated puts people squarely in System 2 thinking. 

One of the secrets of successful interviewing is helping a
person migrate from a state of cognitive strain to a place of cognitive ease
during the 45 minutes you spend with the candidate. If the candidate remains in
a state of cognitive strain (and most people do), the person will not have the ability
to truly hear and engage most of what you’re trying to communicate.

How do you do this?  Daniel
Kahneman has some great insight on this topic based on the research that he and
others of have done.  It’s fascinating
stuff, and we’ll cover it during our next WorkPuzzle discussion.  

BenHessPic2011Editor'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. 

“Gallup-ing” Towards Success

Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Ten years ago I
had the unique experience of attending the annual Positive Psychology Summit
held at the Gallup, Inc, headquarters in Washington DC. If you aren't familiar
with Gallup, some of their most outstanding work has focused on researching
what makes companies successful. My visit left a lasting impression and I have
continued to follow their various studies, in particular that of job
fulfillment.      

Rowing460Dr. Gallup’s
early work, the topic of job satisfaction, has been studied and written about
in more than 10,000 articles and publications. Because most people spend a high
percentage of their waking hours at work, studies of the workplace are of great
interest for many professionals. The process of managing and improving the
workplace is crucial and presents great challenges to nearly every organization.

Since the 1950's Gallup has conducted
thousands of studies amid some of the world's most well known countries. They
have taken the analyses (called meta-analyses) of a multitude of questions and
responses and condensed it down to 12 simple yet powerful questions. This is now
known as the Gallup Workplace Audit or informally as the Q12® (questions included
below). The answers to these questions have been shown to have considerable
impact on an organization. In fact, the analyses
and further studies indicate that the answers to the Q12® and how a company responds to them, can largely define the
success of a company over time.

"The quality of an
organization’s human resources is perhaps the leading indicator of its growth
and sustainability. The attainment of a workplace with high-caliber employees
starts with the selection of the right people for the right jobs. Numerous
studies have documented the utility of valid selection instruments and systems
in the selection of the right people… After
employees are hired, they make decisions and take actions every day that can
affect the success of their organization."

(Schmidt, Hunter, McKenzie, &
Muldrow, 1979; Hunter & Schmidt, 1983; Huselid, 1995; Schmidt & Rader,
1999; Harter, Hayes, & Schmidt, 2004).

All this really says is, if your employees are engaged in their
job, the performance outcome is raised exponentially. And don't forget,
performance is directly related to the company objectives of customer ratings,
profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism
and quality.   Employment engagement and hiring the right
people matters. These are not just business clichés. Are you taking this as
seriously as it needs to be?

Take a look at the questions below. How do you
think your employees would answer the questions? Where are you "on
track" and where could you make improvements? How could your organization
benefit from knowing this information?

You could be a company who "Gallup's"
towards success!

The Q12® are:

Q00.
(Overall Satisfaction) On a 5-point scale, where “5” is extremely satisfied and
“1” is extremely dissatisfied, how satisfied are you with (your company)
as a place to work?

Q01. I know what is expected of me at work.

Q02. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my
work right.

Q03. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best
every day.

Q04. In the last seven days, I have received recognition
or praise for doing good work.

Q05. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care
about me as a person.

Q06. There is someone at work who encourages my development.

Q07. At work, my opinions seem to count.

Q08. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my
job is important.

Q09. My associates or fellow employees are committed to
doing quality work.

Q10. I have a best friend at work.

Q11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to
me about my progress.

Q12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to
learn and grow.

Q12®
META-ANALYSIS Copyright © 2006, 2009, 2013 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved. 

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DMPhotoWorkPuzzleEditor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Learning to Recruit on the White River

Monday, October 07, 2013

A few weeks ago, Ben and I had a trip planned to see a client in southern Missouri.  Since we were in the vicinity, we decided to tack on an extra day and fish the, always amazing, White River in Northern Arkansas.

We were joined by my father,
my brother-in-law, my brother, and his son. The day began in a section of the river
where everyone usually pursues their fishing, within a short distance of
where boats can be launched and rented.

In this section of river, one
can utilize just about any type of bait or tackle, and anglers are allowed to keep their
limit of fish. In this section of river, where
everyone fishes everyday, we did OK. Nothing to write home about, but OK.

After
about a half-hour in this section of the river, my Dad (who will turn 80 on his next birthday), turned to us
and said, "Pull in your rods boys.  We're moving".

My father knows this river
well enough to know that we had seen nothing yet. He turned the boat upstream and opened up the throttle taking
us two miles up river.  The destination was a one-mile stretch of river that was different from the downstream portion of the river.

Why? What was different about
this section of river?

First and most importantly,
it is a designated "catch-and-release" section. If you are unfamiliar
with this term, catch-and-release means exactly what is says: You cannot keep
any fish. Now, catch and release is common in Seattle, but in the Ozark's,
folks go fishing for sustenance, not necessarily solely for sport.

Secondly, it requires us to use modified lures
that make catching fish less injurious to the fish and theoretically more
difficult to catch fish.
 
WhiteRiverFishingFour hours later, the six of us had caught and
released 169 beautiful trout, primarily rainbows. Catching these trout was not
as easy as it may sound. We spent some time figuring out what they were going to
pursue.   Once we broke that code, my
brother-in-law (with his tackle box that resembles a magicians hat) pulled out
some red paint and modified other lures to resemble what they were attracted
to.
 
In the
real estate industry, there are a few well-known ways to recruit. In these
popular venues, your company is forced to compete for the same agents as
everyone else.

One of the ways to remain
ahead of your competitors is to find new ways to fish.  This often means fishing where no one else thinks of
fishing.

It’s no secret that HiringCenter
was designed to provide “access” to the section of the river where no one else
is fishing.  Working this section takes
more time, innovation, and discipline than remaining in the areas where
everyone else fishes.   It also requires
“cracking the code” of what attracts and engages these candidates.

The payoff is a steady flow
of productive agents who would have never been found downstream.

As many of you know, this is not a solo
effort.  We’ve enjoyed the help and
partnership of many great companies and recruiting leaders who have helped us “paint
the lures” that attract the fish and
learn new techniques to engage the next generation of real estate agents.  Thank you for being such great fishing
partners! 

Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

Engage in the WorkPuzzle discussion by joining the TMOC private social network.  Commenting on a public blog like WorkPuzzle can be a little intimidating, so why not join the discussion inside the privacy of the TMOC discussion group?  

By joining TMOC, you'll get to see who else is in the group and your comments will only be seen by those whom you trust.   Joining TMOC is quick, easy, and free (no kidding…this takes less than 2 minutes).   To get started, click here.

Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

DMPhotoWorkPuzzleEditor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.