Does Your Boss Know Your Strengths and Help You Pursue New Roles Based on Those Skills?

Source: https://www.skillscaravan.com

Has one of your former bosses identified your (perhaps previously undiscovered) strengths and helped you pursue new roles that were well-suited to those capabilities? If so, you are very fortunate. The benefits from having such a boss may be significant and long-lasting.

In today's Wall Street Journal, University of Chicago Professor Virginia Minni explains the findings from a well-designed study of managers at a large multinational company.  She identified "top managers" as those who were promoted much faster than their peers.  She explains her methodology and results:

Here is how it worked. Let’s say two different teams of comparable workers have a regular boss (in other words, not a top manager). Then the managers rotate, and one of those two teams gets a top-performing leader while the other team gets another lesser chief. Since the two teams are otherwise the same, the manager would be responsible for any changes in performance.

The results were striking. For one thing, employees who had contact with a high-quality manager were much more likely to make a lateral move within the firm—about 40% more likely than other workers, within seven years of being assigned to a top manager. These weren’t trivial moves, either: They often involved large changes, such as moving between completely different roles at the company.

That leads to the next striking difference in performance. The workers who served under a top manager and changed jobs were much better paid and much more productive than other workers. Within seven years of contact with a top manager, these people earned about 13% more than workers with lower-performing managers. And their performance metrics—like sales per capita—were 16% higher than other workers’ numbers.

Minni discovered that the effects endured, meaning that the workers did not just benefit while working for the highly effective boss.  They continued to excel in their career after shifting roles and working for different leaders.  She finds that these excellent bosses spent more time in one-on-one meetings with workers, which she argues helped these leaders match their employees with the right roles moving forward.  Moreover, they coached people to excel in those new roles.  

While the study may not offer earth-shattering (or even mildly surprising) results, it does document in a very rigorous way the impact of having an excellent boss who looks out for your interests.  What I would add is that some managers are not bad at leading their current teams, but they do hoard talent.  In other words, they are not always looking out for the interests of their team members.  They would rather hold on to talented individuals, rather than helping them find the next great role that could advance their career.  The best leaders create high-performing teams, but they also develop their people and help them secure great new opportunities.  Because they know how to identify and develop talent, these great leaders don't worry about losing that talent.  They are able to find new people who they can coach and develop to replace the people who have shifted to new roles.  

How You Think vs. What You Know

Philip Tetlock wrote a terrific book last year titled Superforecasters.  In that book, he describes the  decades of research he has conducted on expert predictions. Put simply, he has found that experts don't make great prognosticators, despite their vast knowledge and experience. Knowing a great deal does not enable you to see the future. In fact, it can be a handicap at times, because you may be tied down by conventional wisdom, long-held assumptions, and pre-existing beliefs. In Tetlock's research, he has found that a small set of people have an uncanny ability to make accurate predictions. These people are not experts in the domain in which they made those forecasts. What enables them to predict so effectively? Tetlock conclues that the key is HOW THEY THINK, not what they know. The best forecasters exhibit the following characteristics:

• They are open-minded, reflective, and intellectually curious. 
• They acknowledge what they do not know. 
• They gather information from a wide variety of sources and question the validity of each source. 
• They enjoy pondering a range of diverse views, and they update their conclusions as facts change. 
• They treat beliefs as testable hypotheses rather than hard truths.

In my view, the same might be said about the best leaders.  They often distinguish themselves by how they think, not what they know.   The best leaders are reflective and intellectually curious, question the conventional wisdom, do not become wedding to existiing beliefs, admit what they do not know, critique the validity of information sources, and gather diverse opinions before making key decisions.  

What Do Facebook's Best Managers Do?

Facebook's VP of People Lori Goler talked to Business Insider recently about an interesting study that the firm conducted. Facebook analyzed teams throughout the organization to determine the ones whose members reported the highest levels of employee engagement and satisfaction. They talked to members of these groups to find how what the team leaders were doing to create such high levels of engagement. Seven behaviors stood out. They should not shock you at all, but they do provide a nice summary of what good leaders do day after day as they work with their teams:

1. They care about their team members.

2. They provide opportunities for growth.

3. They set clear expectations and goals.

4. They give frequent, actionable feedback.

5. They provide helpful resources.

6. They hold their team accountable for success.

7. They recognize outstanding work.

When the Boss Craves Power, Look Out!

Kellogg Professor Jon Maner and doctoral student Charleen Case have conducted a fascinating new experiment about power.   They gave groups of students a task to perform, with prizes for the teams that performed the best. They created three experimental groups. In the control group, they did not assign a leader, and the members would share the prizes equally upon completion of the task.  In a second scenario, a student was assigned to the leader, and he or she was told that one member of the group was very highly skilled at the task.  The leaders were told that they should supervise the group members and choose how to allot the prizes among the members at the end.  In the third scenario, the leaders were told to supervise and to allot the prizes at the end, but they were told that the hierarchy was malleable (i.e. someone else could step up and become the leader during the course of the work).  What did they find?  According to Kellogg Insights, Maner and Case discovered the following:

Maner and collaborator Charleen Case, a doctoral student at the Kellogg School, found that leaders who were driven by a desire for power (or dominance motivated) were more likely to undermine a group’s communication and cohesion than those who were motivated by a desire for respect (or prestige motivated). Those power-hungry leaders were most inclined to behave this way when they were told that the power hierarchy in the group was unstable and they may lose their position at the top. And they were most likely to undermine group cohesion by isolating the one highly skilled member of the group.

Once again, we find that power corrupts.  Specifically, people who crave power tend to be threatened by the highly skilled subordinate.  They may go so far as to isolate that individual and break down the group's cohesion for the sake of maintaining power.   In so doing, they undermine the group's performance.