Flawed Managers that Flourish

In 1990, psychologists Robert Hogan, Robert Raskin, and Dan Fazzini wrote a brilliant essay called “The Dark Side of Charisma.” It argued that flawed managers fall into three types:

• the High Likability Floater, who rises effortlessly in an organization because he never takes any difficult decisions or makes any enemies.
• the Homme de Ressentiment, who seethes below the surface and plots against his enemies.
• the Narcissist, the most interesting of the three, whose energy and self-confidence and charm lead him inexorably up the corporate ladder.

Narcissists are terrible managers. They resist accepting suggestions, thinking it will make them appear weak, and they don’t believe that others have anything useful to tell them. “Narcissists are biased to take more credit for success than is legitimate,” Hogan et al. write, and “biased to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their failures and shortcomings for the same reasons that they claim more success than is their due.” Moreover:

Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people . . . and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition, narcissists tend to “self-nominate”; consequently, when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.

Vote for the type of managers that flourish in your organisation by clicking on the relevant check box in the column to your left.

Why the Mighty Fall

In his latest book How The Mighty Fall, Jim Collins describes the five stages through which a proud and thriving company passes on its way to becoming a basket case:
- hubris born of success
- undisciplined pursuit of more
- denial of risk and peril
- grasping for salvation
- capitulation to irrelevance or death

Toyota's president Akio Toyoda, who took over in June 2009, believes his company, world's largest carmaker since it surpassed GM in June 2008, is in the fourth stage. He surprised business journalists and his own company by making this announcement at a press conference in October 2009.

Collins elaborates that companies in the fourth stage 'react frantically to their plight in the belief that salvation lies in revolutionary change usually hastening their demise'. Such companies 'need calmness, focus, and deliberate action'.

Mr Akio Toyoda is the grandson of the founder of Toyota. His approach is not visionary. It is simple, incremental and requires painstaking attention to what the customers want. That, experts believe, is its virtue.

We are what we are - the Lake Wobegon Effect

The Lake Wobegon effect(1) is the human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others. It is named after the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from the radio series A Prairie Home Companion, where, according to Garrison Keillor, "all the women are beautiful, all the men strong, and all the children intelligent"(2). Keillor’s 1985 novel Lake Wobegon Days describes life in the fictional town situated in the US state of Minnesota. According to Keillor, Lake Wobegon is the seat of Mist County, Minnesota(3), a tiny county near the geographic center of Minnesota that supposedly does not appear on maps because of the "incompetence of surveyors who mapped out the state in the 19th century". The town's slogan is Gateway to Central Minnesota(4). The town’s motto is mentioned on its crest – sumos quud sumos – we are what we are(5).

In a similar way, a large majority of people claim to be above average; this phenomenon has been observed by researchers among drivers, CEOs, stock market analysts, college students, and state education officials, among others. Experiments and surveys have repeatedly shown that most people believe that they possess attributes that are better or more desirable than average.

Surveying drivers, Ole Svenson(6) found that 80% of respondents rated themselves in the top 30% of all drivers. Asking college students about their popularity, Zuckerman and Jost(7)showed that most students judged themselves to be "more popular than average".

In 1987, John Cannell(8) completed a study later popularized as the Lake Woebegone effect. He reported the statistically impossible finding that all the US states claimed average student test scores above the national norm. In addition to teaching for the test, he concluded that some teachers encouraged low-ability students to be absent on test days, helped students take the test and allowed outright cheating.

The effect has been found repeatedly by many other studies for other traits, including fairness, virtuosity, luck, and investing ability, to name a few. Don’t we all claim to be always right? Let’s introspect.

References:
1. http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Lake_Wobegon_effect
2. Devangshu Datta, Looking good in comparison, VIEWPOINT, Business
Standard,Kolkata, November 7, 2009, page 15
3. Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, Viking Penguin Inc.,1985,pg.8.
4. Garrison Keillor, In Search of Lake Wobegon, National Geographic
Magazine, December 2000.
5. Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, Viking Penguin Inc.,1985,pg. 6.
6. Svenson, O. (1981), Are we all less risky and more skillful than our
fellow drivers?, Acta Psychologica, 47, 143-48.
7. Zuckerman, E. W., & Jost, J. T. (2001), What Makes You Think You're So
Popular? Self Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the
Friendship Paradox, Social Psychology Quarterly, 64(3), 207-223.
8. Sheila C. McCowan, Using standardized test scores to compare schools is
unfair, Buffalo News, July 21, 1999.

Use your brain effectively

A bewildering blizzard of email, phone calls, yet more email, meetings, projects, proposals and plans. This must be familiar territory — your average day at work.


David Rock, a consultant and leadership coach who advises corporations around the world, has collaborated with world-renowned neuroscientists to find answers to the following:
– Why do our brains feel so taxed;
– How do we maximise our mental resources;
– Why is it so hard to focus;
– How do we manage distractions better;
– How do we keep our cool in difficult situations;
– How do we collaborate more effectively than others; and
– How do we get more effective at changing other people’s behaviour?

In his new book Your Brain at Work, Rock travels inside the brains of the two main characters as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they’re presented with and figure out how to prioritise, organise and act on them.

Rock says while the brain is exquisitely powerful, it has some surprising performance limitations as well. And even the brain of a Harvard graduate can be turned into that of an eight-year old by being simply made to do two things at once. The idea then is to develop more brain-smart approaches to everyday challenges.


Making decisions and solving problems rely heavily on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. It’s the part of your brain central to the thought process. But it’s important to remember that prefrontal cortex doesn’t have infinite capacity, so each time you use it, you need to allocate it to something important. For, you can’t keep on making brilliant decisions all day long in the same manner a truck driver can drive all day and night, his ability to keep going limited only by his need for sleep.


Always-on people are poor decision-makers
Companies often mistake brilliance for the person’s multi-tasking abilities. But the reality is different. A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduce mental capability by an average of 10 points in an IQ test. The irony is despite research findings that ‘always on’ may not be the most productive way to work, managers continue to stretch themselves to do more at the same time even though the benefits they receive may be minimal.


Rock says if you push yourself, in the short term, being ‘always on’ can seem as if you are being productive. The cost on the brain, however, can be significant. Your brain may be ‘parallel processing’ — taking in multiple streams of data, but not doing much with it. Result: Whenever you multi-task, and more than one task requires any amount of attention, accuracy goes down. Besides doing only one thing at a time (which most people who show off the fact that they receive 200 email a day will simply scoff at), what’s the other solution?


Allocate tasks to different parts of the brain and different time slots
Rock says the idea is to use another part of the brain called the basal ganglia which takes care of routine activities that don’t require much mental attention. For example, driving a truck doesn’t require much use of the prefrontal cortex, unless you are a new driver, in a new truck, or on a new route.


But using the basal ganglia, which is highly efficient at executing patterns, involves guidance and quite a bit of mental training. Your Brain at Work helps you in doing this. One way of keeping your prefrontal cortex energised enough is to experiment with different timings. One technique, Rock says, is to break work up into blocks of time based on type of brain use, rather than topic.
For example, if you have to do some creative writing in several different projects, which requires a clear and a fresh mind, you might do all your creative writing on a Monday. People don’t tend to do this — they tend either to work on one project at a time, or to respond to issues as they rise, sometimes thinking at a high abstract level, sometimes at a more detailed level, and then sometimes multi-tasking and switching around a lot.


Instead, you could divide a day into blocks of time when you can indulge in various activities: One block for thinking and creative writing, other blocks for having meetings, and other blocks for routine tasks such as responding to emails. The bottomline is: Your ability to make great decisions is a limited resource and it’s hard to be in a zone of peak performance continuously. So conserve this resource at every opportunity.


Ref: New Age Brain-Drain by Shyamal Majumdar in his column THE HUMAN FACTOR, Business Standard, October 15, 2009.

Entrepreneurs - a breed apart

IN 1995 Captain G.R. Gopinath, a retired military officer, had a chance encounter with an unemployed helicopter pilot that got him started on setting up India’s first helicopter company. He spent three years lobbying government bureaucrats to obtain the necessary licences and sold all his possessions and mortgaged his house to raise capital.

Even in his darkest years he never had any doubt that he was destined for success. “I knew this could not go wrong. I knew the money would come,” he says. And sure enough his business eventually took off. That allowed him to pursue a new vision—cheap flights. Why should Indians travel the length and breadth of their huge country on trains when Americans got on planes? He established India’s first low-cost airline, Air Deccan, pushing the government to relax regulations.

Entrepreneurs operate in all kinds of ways. Some see a market opportunity and draw up a business plan to take advantage of it. Others are more like the captain, driven by an inner force to start a business and unwilling to take “no” for an answer.

A growing body of evidence suggests that entrepreneurs have certain distinctive psychological traits. Noam Wasserman, of HBS, suggests that many entrepreneurs are unusually, sometimes excessively, confident. They are convinced that, against all the odds, they will be able to turn their dream into reality. This sometimes allows them to do something at which most people fail, but it also means they hardly ever hit the forecasts in their business plans.

According to Mr Wasserman, entrepreneurs are strongly attached to their companies. They habitually talk about “their babies”. This motivates them to give their all to their companies, whether they make money or not. But it can also be their Achilles heel. Once they get started, they hate giving up control of their companies, even if they are no good at management.

Entrepreneurs are also highly tolerant of risk. A group of scientists at Cambridge University studied the brains of 16 entrepreneurs, chosen because they had started at least two high-tech companies, as well as 17 regular managers. They found that when making rational decisions, the two groups produced the same results. But when making “hot” or risky decisions, entrepreneurs were consistently bolder.

Entrepreneurs also share some more surprising psychological traits. Julie Logan, of the Cass Business School in London, found in separate surveys in 2001 and 2007 that 20% of the British entrepreneurs and 35% of the American entrepreneurs she studied were dyslexic. (By contrast, only 1% of corporate managers are similarly afflicted.) Famous dyslexic businessmen include Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, Ted Turner, John Chambers and Henry Ford. Two possible explanations are that dyslexics learn early in life to delegate certain tasks to trustworthy people, and that they do well in business to make up for doing badly at school.