LWD 2010WK39 – Do You Prefer Your Science Hard- or Soft-boiled?

About ‘Leadership Weekly Digest’ (LWD): The goal of this weekly newsletter is to highlight quality articles from the past week –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those we follow on Twitter, and members of the Employee Engagement Network.

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Physics, psychology, and ‘management science’, pretty much cover the full spectrum from the ‘hard’ to the ‘soft’ sciences. Engineering usually tries to find application for the ‘hard’ sciences, but this engineer isn’t a hard-science bigot, I use what works! I mean, who can ignore a study that finds “Men without money desire heavier women than are desired by wealthy men”; someone has to find a practical application for this research! Now seriously…

The Biology of Business: Homo Administrans @ The Economist

I am not sure why The Economist doesn’t identify their authors. It may be to avoid losing their best writers to the competition, or that they want to be seen as some kind of all-knowing borg; I think it is the latter.

What hard science can be found within the often foggy field of ‘management science’? This article highlights the work of several biologists that are applying hard science to delve into things that you might care about:

If you want happier employees, you might want to start off by hiring happier people.
People with low levels of the hormone cortisol will be less interested in deferred compensation.
Oxytocin, a neurotransmitter, plays a role in building trust.
There are genetic predispositions to the fields we choose, particularly within the creative arts and physical sciences [ironically 'soft' and 'hard' -ed.]
The greater the mismatch between testosterone and status, the less effectively a group’s members co-operate.
Around 40% of the variation between people’s incomes is attributable to genetics.
The role that testosterone can play in the sales process.

Before you ask us for a blood sample kit to put this new knowledge to use, consider that this is pretty new stuff, and there are already laws that ban the use of genetic information in job recruitment. Researchers cited also admit that they are dealing in averages and trends, which is hard to apply to individuals.

I recommend this very well-researched and interesting article, which provides hope for those who want to see a more rigorous ‘hard science’ approach to topics important to managers. Thanks to Phil for passing this along.

Revenge of the Introvert by Laurie Helgoe

We often make the mistake of associating shyness with introversion. Shy extroverts exist, as do ‘outgoing’ introverts, and this article helps us better understand this dynamic. Probably my favourite part was a ‘sub-article’, that very accurately portrayed the internal monolog that occurs when you ask an introvert the apparently rhetorical question ‘How are you?’. As an ‘outgoing introvert’ I found this portrayal both accurate and funny:

Good? That’s not quite right. I really have had a pretty crummy day, but there isn’t a quick way to explain that… I hate that we so often just say ‘good’ because that’s the convention. The other person doesn’t really want to know… While the introvert is evaluating the question on at least two levels (how she is feeling and what she thinks about the question, perhaps also what this says about our society), the speaker is already moving on to sharing something about his day. [Been there! -ed.]

When physicists do hard science, their instrument of choice is the super-collider, for those studying human psychology they defer to twin studies, or more recently, the brain scan.

In our very extroversion-oriented western society, introverted behaviour is often marginalized because those behaviours get misconstrued as ’antisocial’, passive, or not ‘team-oriented’. Scans of the electrical behaviour and blood flow in the brain show increased activity in the introvert’s frontal cortex and Broca’s area. These areas are used to perform remembering, planning, decision making, problem solving, and speech production. These areas were more active in introverts than in extroverts, both during challenging cognitive tasks and at rest. Researchers observing this trend propose that introverts limit input from the environment in order to maintain an optimal level of arousal. Extraverts, on the other hand, seek out external stimulation to get their brain juices flowing. So while western society frowns on the introverts tendency to withdraw, the introvert does not do this to limit their contribution, but to increase its effectiveness; keep this in mind the next time you hold a brainstorming session.

If you are also an introvert, I recommend this article to get to know yourself better. For managers, this is a must read to understand the introverts in our midst (especially if you are an extrovert)!

A selection of our recent posts:

Taming the Stubborn Elephant

I’ve never ridden an elephant, not even one of those little pygmy ones you see at fairs (probably because I don’t go to fairs, since they are depressing and a bit creepy). Even without this firsthand experience, I can imagine that if I were to ride an elephant, and that elephant and I were to have a difference of opinion, I would end up on the losing end.

Chip & Dan Heath, brothers and co-authors of one of my favourite books “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”, borrow this metaphor of an elephant and its rider to represent our emotional side, and our rational side respectively. To illustrate this simply: the rider makes the decision that they want to lose 10 pounds, the elephant eats that 20 oz. steak anyway. Change efforts often boil down to short-term payoffs trumping long-term goals, with the elephant playing the role of villain.

The focus of this book, and why it is such an important read, is how to successfully implement change when you don’t have a lot of will power, authority, and/or many resources at your disposal.

Most –if not all– of the time we want to implement change, this is the very situation we are in. On a personal level, we have our own elephants that can help or hinder us, and when dealing with others, many more elephants.

While I would characterize ‘Made to Stick’ as ‘a marketing degree with a psychology minor in a book’, ‘Switch’ would be ‘a degree in organizational behaviour with a side of economics’. It drives home the fundamental concept that behaviour can’t simply be understood by looking at rational self-interest, rather, it is a complex combination of self-interest, perceived identity, social cues, your environment, and emotions thrown in just to make things interesting. Out of this complexity, they derive a clear methodology for implementing change, and illustrate this approach using a wide range of real-world examples:

Conservation: Saving the St. Lucia Parrot
Health Care: Reducing the intern work week from a patient-killing 120-hour works to 80
Public Safety: Creating ‘designated drivers’ 5-seconds at a time
Customer Service: How Rackspace went from bottom to top by getting rid of voicemail
Corporate Culture: Getting paper pushing bureaucrats to care about the customer
Amoung many others…

Fundamental to all these change initiatives is that the vast majority of people would do the right thing given the right context, environment and motivation. Before I close with a brief outline their methodology, I want to recommend that if there is one change-related book you read this year make it this one!

“Switch” methodology:

Direct the Rider
1. Look for existing bright spots and building from what is already working
2. Identify the destination clearly
3. Provide crystal clear black & white behaviours that lead to change
Motivate the Elephant
1. Make your audience feel bigger
2. Make your problem seem smaller
3. Leverage emotion to advance your goals
Shape the Path
1. Change the environment to make the change easier
2. Encourage habits that fit with the change
3. People instinctively want to fit in, use this to assist change