What motivates us at work? 7 fascinating studies that give insights

Reblogged from TED Blog:

“When we think about how people work, the naïve intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze,” says behavioral economist Dan Ariely in today’s talk, given at TEDxRiodelaPlata. “We really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like.”

When you look carefully at the way people work, he says, you find out there’s a lot more at play—and a lot more at stake—than money.

Read more… 1,223 more words

• The less motivated an employee is, the more money he is asking !

• If employees are not intrinsically motivated chances are very high that they are not creative as well. and won’t work hard enough as passionate people do.

• Being passionate is coming from the inside-out. You can break somebody’s motivation very easily but it is very hard for leaders to inspire people to give happily the best of what they have to offer if they don’t want to and don’t have trust in the management.

The Three ‘E’s of Engagement: Engage, Empower, Enable:

Engage

leaders must provide a clear view of the company’s future, connect the company values with the individual life purpose, identify individual contribution to a higher level than self . Employees who feel good about themselves and think they belong to a team get the intrinsic motivation to deliver performance.

Empower

Let people decide how to set goals, how to get the expected results. Increase their personal power in making decisions at all level of the organizations. The leaders’ role is to coach and mentor individuals and teams to remove self-limiting beliefs, provide immediate feedbacks and develop strengths while minimizing the impact of weaknesses

Enable

Provide highly personalized support and enough resources. Lead teams based on matching personal communication, behavior and management styles of each team member. Provide talent development programs.

Related articles

• Motivation: Why People Don’t Do What You Tell Them To Do ?
• Why Incentives Do Not Always Motivate Employees ?
• Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research (blogs.hbr.org)

De Bono Six Thinking Hats Method Summary

See on Scoop.it – Global Leaders

Quote from the book: “Six Thinking Hat can help you think better, make right decisions, explore new ideas. De Bono Unscrambles the thinking process”

Anne Egros‘s insight:

Excellent Method For Managing Brainstorming Group Sessions

See on www.slideshare.net

Are Sociability And Klout Scores Related To Innovation ?

See on Scoop.it – Global Leaders

In the past decade, the word “friend” became a verb, the word “like” became a noun, and “tweet” became more than a birdsong.

In the original article “Do You Hire For IQ Or Klout Score? I have extracted the following interesting questions related to the shift FROM a knowledge economy TO a social economy

-How do you currently evaluate and place prospective employees?

-Do you consider the social influence of new talent in your recruiting process?

-Do you have a process for evaluating which types of projects should be managed collaboratively (socially) versus individually?

-Where appropriate, how do you encourage and foster social networking across your organization?

-How do you encourage and foster external collaboration outside of your company and across sectors of industry?

-What incentives and performance management systems do you have in place to encourage “creative teaming” vs. “functional innovation”?

-What are you doing to help your leaders understand their role in transitioning from a knowledge economy to a social economy

Here my comments:

I think we should start by evaluating the skills and personality types needed for each function and working environment.

Being social is just one skill that alone can’t make someone  or an organization creative or foster innovation.

I think good analytical thinking and judgement is very much-needed in a social economy as we are totally overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge we can get for free from the internet.

Too often people forget the facts and favor sensationalism or sentimentalism, even journalists don’t check their sources they find on YouTube or other social networks.

This article does not convince me that we have enough proofs to conclude that being social and having a high Klout score is linked with creativity and innovation.

Are you ?

See more on www.fastcompany.com

Related articles

• Add Some Klout to Your Recruiting (edenchanges.wordpress.com)

Why White Men Can’t Lead ?

I have read an article “White Men Can’t Lead (everyone) from the  American Management Association  and I basically agree with the ideas:

• Today’s leadership models, although they may differ from person to person and method to method, generally have a common bias toward Western or European-influenced ways of thinking.

• We’re leading as if our companies are filled only with white men and, quite clearly, that’s no longer the case.

• Contemporary leadership theories exclude the enormous contributions, potential learning, and valuable insights that come from leaders in diverse communities.

• Multicultural leadership encourages an inclusive and adaptable style that cultivates the ability to bring out the best in our diverse workforce and to fashion a sense of community with people from many parts of the globe. (reference: www.techrepublic.com)

Although this article was written in 2007, nothing really changed. This “white men” leadership style is still highly prevalent in multinational western companies and how they manage their local affiliates.

In most headquarters in America and European countries, the “non-invented’ here syndrome makes management ignoring local consumer tastes and cultural values thinking that what works home works everywhere (ethnocentric management style).

Recently an article published in Forbes “ Sayonara Sony: How Industrial, MBA-Style Leadership Killed a Once Great Company. demonstrated that Sony, a market leader for 40 years with its strategy of innovating new markets, has now lost money for 4 year because they adopted the western industrial strategy based on volume and cost obsession.

After two years of study the Military Leadership Diversity Commission (in America) released its report in 2011 on efforts to create more diversity among the top military brass, in the article,  Are There Too Many White Guys Leading Our Military? , The report notes that 77 percent of active duty senior officers are white, 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women. Those numbers have to change in order for the military to reach its goals concluded the report.

In  previous post I introduced the concept of “Third Culture Teams” that has been used to describe  how to create  congruence of three cultures:

1-The Corporate culture: Company explicit and implicit rules and guidelines, leadership style, ethnocentric or diversity-centered, cultural traits of the country where the Headquarters are based

2-The local country culture: Language (verbal and non-verbal), religion, cultural values and  norms, communication style

3-Each individual team member’s own culture, values, beliefs, set of norms

The idea of third culture teams is based on the human need for belonging: People like to feel that they can relate to someone and those who share similar interests.

You can be a white man and a great global leader but you need to be a chameleon who is able to change its  color to reflect its environment. Effective multicultural team leader must create trust regardless of ethnicity or country of origin by actively listening to everybody’s ideas before making a decision concerning the introduction of a new product or service in a foreign market.

What skills Do You Think Are Most Important for Global Leaders ?

Related articles

• 6 Key Attributes of a Winning Business Culture (small-business.blognotions.com)

Increase performance through employee engagement

Read Increase performance through employee engagement via Scoop.it – Global Leaders

Employees who are engaged put their heart and soul into their job and have the energy and excitement to give more than is required of the job. Engaged employees are committed and loyal to the organization.Torben Rick

Related article: 

Can ‘Psychological Time’ Catalyze Productivity and Employee Engagement?  on the secret to boosting productivity and improving employee engagement: psychological time.  ”Time management tends to be about helping employees do things faster, or do fewer things,” Harvard Professor Michael Norton explained to Business Insider.

The group’s paper [PDF: "Giving Time Gives You Time" ] explains that the key to unlocking psychological time is to add tasks to employees’ schedules that require them to help other people.

The Titanic Failure, Technical or Leadership Flaws ?

On April 14, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic collided with a massive iceberg and sank in less than three hours. At the time, more than 2200 passengers and crew were aboard the Titanic for her maiden voyage to the United States. Only 705 survived. According to the builders of the Titanic, even in the worst possible accident at sea, the ship should have stayed afloat for two to three days. Read more about the technical flaws that lead to the tragedy in this report: Causes and Effects of the Rapid Sinking of the Titanic 

For the 100th Anniversary of the Titanic disaster, I invite you to think about the leadership lessons we can learn from famous failures.

Here another interesting case:  On January 28, 1986 the challenger space shuttle exploded about 1 minute after launch killing all 7 astronauts on board. The shuttle exploded because two rubber O-rings leaked after losing their resiliency because the shuttle was launched on a very cold day (less than 0 Celsius). On the day before the launch the engineers who designed the rockets were opposed to launching the challenger because they were concerned that the rings would not seal at such cold temperatures but their advises were ignored by their management. This was to be the EXACT cause of the accident.

In both the Titanic and the Challenger cases, I think ultimately it was due to a lack of good leadership.

If you are a leader, then you are going to experience failure. Some failures are due to miss-judgement and turn into tragedies,  others will break your reputation as you become the News headlines or you will be responsible for the loss of billions of dollars because of your arrogance.

Are you aware of your leadership flaws ? Here the most fatal flaws described by the leadership development company Zenger and Folkman  in their book  ”The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders.” :

1. Inability to learn from mistakes

2. Lack of core interpersonal skills and competencies

3. Arrogance or lack of openness to new or different ideas

4. Lack of accountability

5. Lack of initiative

To help you in your reflection you will find in this documents famous “Failures” and causes. Great tool to use for  a team building exercise.

Related articles

• Zenger Folkman Presents The Uninspiring Leader: 10 Fatal Flaws that Cripple a Leader’s Effectiveness Webinar (prweb.com)

Invent Your Future Job: Be Unique, Be Social, Be Global

The fast-paced changes of our societies have affected all industries and is changing the nature of work for the next 10 to 15 years. There are three major challenges for the workforce of the future increasing pressures on organizations to become innovation centered, highly productive and a magnet for global talent :

1-Shifting demographic patterns: Over the next 10 years, the world population is expected to rise from the current 6.83 billion to approximately 7.7 billion, with most of the growth in emerging markets generating  high economic growth. We already see an aging and declining population in developed countries with slow economic growth.  U.S. and European businesses are dealing with the challenges of a multi-generational workforce with three distinct generations Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y. Employers will need to develop highly individualized solutions to accommodate the career needs of each generation. We will not see long careers of 10 or more years in one company but maybe 6 years with either functional or geographic changes every 2 years. The youngest  generation  will probably have 15 to 20 jobs during their career and multiple jobs at the same time because that is what they want to do.

2-Rapid technology changes: From nanotechnologies to neuroscience discoveries, many new technologies will be developed and globalization will continue to drive the utilization of advanced mobile technologies reshaping the workforce with increased telecommuting,  virtual  teams and overall more work flexibility.

3-Economic globalization  In our information overloaded global work environment, knowledge is not a competitive advantage anymore as it goes out of date extremely fast and anybody on earth with an internet connection has access to it in real-time. The critical skills to be successful in the new working environment are vision and  foresight.to anticipate or respond to change very quickly, make wise decisions and take action now to create a better future.

More than a year ago,  I had the chance to listen to Seth Godin “live” in a promotional event in Antwerp about the launch of his book “Linchpin”. I collected about 10 very interesting new ideas from his speech that I posted on a blog : “TOP 10 Seth Godin’s Quotes Made in Antwerp, Belgium. April 1, 2010”

Seth Godin is the bestselling author of more than seven books. He writes about marketing, the spread of ideas and managing both customers and employees with respect. His idea about our current economy is that the current recession is a “forever recession” because it’s the end of the industrial age, which also means The end of the average worker (Read more : article )

Nobody will ever be the only one on the market AND people have an infinite ways to access information. Humans evolved from Hunters, Farmers, Workers and now they have to be Artists-Seth Godin

HOW DO YOU BECOME UNIQUE  ?

1-You don’t need to become somebody you are not. Your uniqueness has to be authentic, you need to know who you really are, what is your dominant character, talent, personality, skills, strengths, what motivates you, what’s your passions in life ? How is your  business acumen and leadership style ? Can you summarize all those information in a compelling story for potential employers or clients?

2-You need to remove blocks that prevent you to excel at being truly you: fears, unmet needs, negative self-talk, lack of training and anything that is holding you back.

3-You need a vision, a purpose and a road map: No matter how old you are, how life has treated you in the past, how much money you have or how many debts, you need to give permission to yourself to have dreams, explore your possibilities and identify your options. We all have choices but we need to use our imagination to see them. You need to let your right brain expresses emotional intelligence and free the artist in you. Once you know where you want to be, then put your strategic thinking at work to identify your goals strategy and action plan to get you there.

BE SOCIAL, BE GLOBAL !

You can’t stop globalization even if you close borders and build walls made with bricks and mortars ! The internet, and social media make the world smaller and smaller everyday. Maybe your company is based in the U.S. but  vendors might be in India, and customers in more than 40 countries. That’s why multinational companies need employees able to think globally but communicate locally with cultural sensitivity. I like to use the term “glocalization” to instill the idea that global products and services need to be designed in the early stages of research and development with cultural sensitivity too.

You cannot claim to be a global leader if you have visited many countries as a tourist. It is like learning swimming in a book, you need to get into the water and get wet .

If you are still in college, learn key languages maybe Mandarin, Spanish, Brazilian or Russian will be a good choice in today’s economy. Find an internship or a job abroad for minimum one year.

If you are already a manager employed in a multinational companies, become the first on the list to be picked-up for an international assignment by participating in global projects and working with multicultural teams.

Learning a new language should not depends on age, you don’t need to be fluent but it is important to understand how a language is structured to get some clues about cultural values and unspoken social rules or business etiquette. You can learn about the fundamental cultural dimensions from colleagues or local intercultural clubs and of course online through many specific forums and social media.

Continued learning in a large variety of topics every day will become mandatory.

Where do you see careers heading in 2012 and beyond ?

 Have you invented your future yet ?

Related articles:

• How Is Technology Impacting the Changes in the 21st Century Workplace?

• Can we find new love for an old job? (lisamtetzloff.wordpress.com)

Beyond Motivation: How to Engage Employees To Boost The Economy

According to the latest Gallup survey on American employee’s productivity conducted in 201,  only 29% of employees were engaged or involved and enthusiastic about their job. In contrast 71 % of full-time workers, were “not engaged” including 20% miserable or actively disengaged. These findings are really shocking  and very disheartening. Miserable employees are simply ignored, they are disconnected from the company’s goals, often scared to lose their job, taking sometimes additional workload from a colleague who has been laid-off.

Can sustainable organizations ignore employee’ s morale ?  Cutting costs has direct impact on the bottom line but not necessarily in the desired way:

“miserable employees create miserable customers” 

For the most part the recovery of the American economy is dependent on the innovation capacity of America Inc.  If employees are not intrinsically motivated chances are very high that they are not creative as well. and won’t work hard enough as passionate people do according to  Steve Jobs in a video about the rules for success.  I cannot agree more and I have observed the power of passion in people at any level and any function of organizations and across cultures.

Passion is putting you in a state of “flow” where you ignore fatigue or hunger because you are so engaged by what you do that you ignore the time you spend on a particular activity, you are intrinsically rewarded by what you do and truly happy. The concept of “flow” has been introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a psychologist making connections between satisfaction and daily activities in his book: ” Flow: The Psychology of the Optimal Experience“.

Being passionate is coming from the inside-out. You can break somebody’s motivation  very easily but it is very hard for leaders to inspire people to give happily the best of what they have to offer if they don’t want to and don’t have trust in the management.

High performance organizations know that engaged employees drive customer value and business performance. Good examples of such companies are Google or Zappos with its CEO’s vision of putting his people first.

HOW TO BOOST EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ?

Gallup measures employees’ engagement by collecting the answers of the following 12 survey items listed bellow.

If you want to engage people you need to provide what it takes for them to say YES to a maximum of the questions:

• 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 organization 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.

The Three ‘E’s of Engagement: Engage, Empower, Enable:

• Engage: leaders must provide a clear view of the company’s future, connect the company values with the individual life purpose,  identify individual contribution to a higher level than self .  Employees who feel good about themselves and think they belong to a team get the intrinsic motivation  to deliver performance.

• Empower: Let people decide how to set goals, how to  get the expected results.  Increase their personal power in making decisions at all level of the organizations. The leaders’ role  is  to coach and mentor individuals and teams to remove self-limiting beliefs, provide immediate feedbacks and develop strengths while minimizing the impact of weaknesses

• Enable: Provide highly personalized support and enough resources.  Lead  teams based on matching  personal communication, behavior and management styles of each team member. Provide talent development programs.

How Do You Measure Employee’s Engagement and Creativity ?

What Is You Recipe To Stimulate Creativity and Innovation In Your Company ?

Related Articles:

• Who-are-the-most-attractive-companies-for-a-global-career/
• Motivation-why-people-dont-do-what-you-tell-them-to-do/
• Engaged Employees Love Their Work, But Love Their Lives Even More (socialmediatoday.com)

What Skills To Look For Hiring Global Executives ?

The most difficult challenge for an expat executive like a country general manager is to be able to find congruence between various opposite interests in a highly complex environment (see picture above).

The expat executive must be able to deal with local issues such  as specific regulations and laws then explain clearly the specificity of local markets and “sell” his decisions vertically and horizontally. Be able to dismantle silos in a matrix-type organization, managing up with board members, making internal alliances with peers and encouraging bottom up initiatives from multicultural cross-functional teams.

As an expat and multicultural team leader who lived and worked for 20 years in more than 10 countries for various industries and different management functions, I have seen many successful expat executives sharing same characteristics that for me are key skills to look for when considering sending people to international assignments or hiring locals at senior management level :

1- Attitude: Look for people who are leading by influence, able to federate people across cultures, able to lead trans-functional and virtual teams worldwide. Suitable personalities have high EQ and are pragmatic, open, curious, learners, risk-takers, negotiators, diplomats.

2-Cultural Intelligence: Knowledge about local customs,cultural traits,norms,social and business etiquette. Basic “survival” language skill is enough in most cases as business is often conducted in English. Don’t make the mistake to hire a local manager because he can speak English, check his leadership and technical skills.

3-Mentoring and Coaching Skills Usually an expat is sent from the HQs to share some technical knowledge or implement global processes such as performance evaluation. In each case make sure the person is  able to “glocalize”  or adapt locally  the company’s global vision, mission, values and principles, One very good example of “glocalization” of corporate culture is Starbucks

The challenge for global companies is to be able to have the right process to assess people globally both for internal succession planning, talent management or hiring new managers. Three components should be considered:

1. Technical skills: operations, finance, markets, regulations, innovation, HR etc.
2.  Leadership style: Top-down, bottom-up, influence, networking, lobbying, foster creativity
3. Cultural intelligence: Group or individualistic cultures, knowledge of cultural dimensions, able to create a third culture team

Cross-Cultural Non Verbal Communication

Because we live in a shrinking global village, more and more people from different cultures are interacting with each other so  it is important to learn appropriate gestures and non verbal communication  to avoid conflicts or international  business negotiation failures.

Here two videos with great examples about Multicultural Manners in general and Multicultural Manners at Work

More than ever before,  multicultural companies and organizations need to be educated and trained to the subtleties of non verbal communication, including potentially powerful gestures and even silence. Nonverbal communication is determined by our sociocultural environment. Some cultural differences relate to body language, body space, body touch and paralanguage.

The 93%/7% rule

Many people affirm that human communication consists of 93 % of non-verbal behavior and paralanguage and only 7%  from words. I don’t say it is not true but most people who quote those numbers do not know where they come from.  It is Albert Mehrabian‘s work done in the 1960s that is the source of these statistics but he later stated that this is a misunderstanding of his findings ! It seems to me that more recent studies should be used as references in human communication in today’s trainings, presentations or articles.

In conclusion:

Although many people are aware of non verbal communication few scientific studies have been done in multicultural contexts. In many popular American shows, “experts” tell how to find signs that somebody is lying such as not looking straight in the eyes but what  might be valid in the US culture  may be considered very rude by people coming from other cultures.

In addition, with the global use of new technologies  like video cameras on PCs , SMS and  other mini blogging sites such as  Twitter,  research must be conducted on how those tools affect virtual  cross-cultural communication and what the impact of non face-to-face body language.

Related : Working across Cultures: the Challenges of Virtual Communication