Archive for category: Cross-Cultural Management

When I worked for Citibank in the eighties as a young professional, I used to tell my friends that the corporate culture in Citibank taught me to be rude. In those days, Citibank was known to be aggressive and even arrogant, and one survived only by adapting to this rough-and-tumble environment.

Corporate cultures have become more genteel since then, with some exceptions (e.g., GE, Apple and the now-defunct Enron). The broader culture of the U.S. has also become more polite, except perhaps in some pockets of New York City. In many parts of corporate America, workplace civility has ruled, although the pendulum may have swung too far in this direction, with many individuals in organizations holding back on their criticism. Managers who undergo training on giving feedback are sometimes taught to use a sandwich approach; that is, make sure that any negative feedback they provide is sandwiched between two positive comments, one prior to the negative feedback and the other after delivering the negative feedback.

While executives at some organizations are encouraging more people to “speak up,” there are still far too many organizations where employees are afraid to do so for fear that they will be punished for their candor. And there continue to be bosses who are mean-spirited jerks, as Sutton (2007) has written about extensively.

A recent Wall Street Journal article has pointed out that candor may be making a comeback: “Companies from Deutsch Inc. to hedge fund Bridgewater Associates are pushing workers to drop the polite workplace veneer and speak frankly to each other no matter what. The practice is referred to at some companies as ‘radical candor,’ a ‘mokita’ or ‘front-stabbing.’ ”

Ironically, the explosion of social media has led to an outburst of vitriol, sarcasm and hostile comments especially from anonymous sources. Just read online comments on any political issue, on celebrities’ doings, and even book, movie or product reviews, and you immediately get the feeling that there is a parallel universe going on online where incivility seems to have few boundaries.

What is going on, and what can managers and organizations do about it? I believe that there are at least two mistaken assumptions that are made regarding the tension between candor or directness on the one hand, and politeness or workplace civility on the other. The first assumption is that being rude, uncivil or nasty is simply part of being candid or direct. American comedians like the late Joan Rivers and Don Rickles became popular with their vicious put-downs of others, including members of the audience. The Republican candidate for U.S. president Donald Trump reflects this with his continuous insults of his opponents.

Sue is a manager in a chemical plant who believes in “telling it like it is” to the point of berating her direct reports in front of others in the guise of being candid and direct. If she perceives that they are not getting the job done, she jumps on them like a drill sergeant and confronts them directly, letting them know in no uncertain terms what she thinks they are doing wrong. Fred, on the other hand, is a supervisor for a consumer products company who has just been promoted and manages seven direct reports who have been in the organization much longer than he has. He often hesitates to tell them what’s on his mind especially with regard to any performance problems he sees because he is afraid of hurting their feelings and demoralizing them.

Neither belief is helpful to the organization or to the individuals involved. Feedback is essential to the motivation, performance and productivity of individuals, teams and organizations. Withholding feedback for fear of offending others or hurting their feelings is not helpful. At the same time, giving feedback that so offends others is counterproductive. Over time, managers will most likely create a climate where individuals withhold information, lose respect for their managers, and become disengaged from the organization. According to a study by Porath and Pearson (2013), among workers who have been on the receiving end of incivility: 78% said that their commitment to the organization declined, 66% said that their performance declined, 48% intentionally decreased their work effort, and 38% intentionally decreased the quality of their work.

Steve Jobs was known not only for being direct, but also being extremely blunt. He was criticized by some for his withering and no-holds-barred comments as being too insensitive to others. In a story about his chief industrial designer at Apple Jonathan Ive (Parker 2015), Ive recalls that when he protested to Jobs, Steve replied: “Why would you be vague?” He actually argued that ambiguity (or indirectness) was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” (p. 126) Ive finally concluded that Jobs did not mean to be hurtful and just wanted to make sure he gave clear, unambiguous feedback. The assumption that Jobs had, like many in the Western world, is that the best way to communicate clearly is by being direct, and that being direct includes being blunt and at times nasty.

The second mistaken assumption is that being direct or candid is universally more effective than being indirect. However, there is a significant body of research in the cross-cultural management literature indicating otherwise. Some cultures such as Australia and Israel encourage managers to get straight to the point. Earley and Erez (1997), for example, state that “Israelis are most likely to tell each other directly, and very explicitly, what they have in mind, even when it may lead to a confrontation.” In other cultures such as in several East Asian countries, messages are more subtle and indirect. What is implied is more important than what is actually stated. People in these cultures place a great deal of emphasis on nonverbal communication. The anthropologist Edward Hall (2013) suggested that societies differ in their degree of context when communicating. He refers to context as “the nature of how meaning is constructed differently across cultures using different ratios of context and information.”

Luc Minguet, a French national who is head of Group Purchasing for Michelin, described his observations while he was in the U.S. as COO of Michelin’s truck business unit (Minguet 2014):

“In France, we focus on identifying what’s wrong with someone’s performance. It’s considered unnecessary to mention what’s right. What’s good is taken as given. A French employee knows this and reacts accordingly. But for a U.S. employee, as I discovered, it is devastating, because Americans tend to sugarcoat one negative with a lot of positives. French managers get their wires crossed. When they get what sounds like glowing feedback from an American boss, they think they’re superstars. Of course, when they don’t get the big pay raise they expected after the great review, they’re bitterly disappointed!”

Eduardo, a Brazilian expatriate working in Thailand, remembers a time when his project team was late on a key project milestone. He sent an e-mail to the team in what he thought was a polite message, reminding them that the project was at risk of falling behind schedule, and asking everyone to pay increased attention. He later learned that his e-mail was perceived as both “rude and pushy.” He learned to soften his approach, for example, by asking questions such as “Will you help me with …?”

When Julia, an American expatriate assigned to Germany, gave her first presentation to her German boss, he said to her very directly, “Don’t take it personal; this report isn’t organized well. Talk to me again when it’s ready.” In the U.S., according to her, she would have received very polite feedback, and would probably have heard something like this: “Here are the ten things that are good about this report; however, it would make me more comfortable if you added this.” The bluntness of the Germans, in contrast to the watered-down feedback from Americans, was a difficult adjustment for Julia to make.

Sanchez-Burks and his colleagues (2003) have suggested that this directness is related to “relational concerns,” and in a series of experiments, have shown cultural variations on this variable. They explain the relative absence of relational concerns (at least historically) in America to the influence of Calvinist theology, which tended to stress the importance of limiting social-emotional and interpersonal concerns at work. In one of their studies, they examined how Americans and East Asians interpreted indirect messages in a work setting. They found that Europeans and Americans tended to make more errors than East Asians in indirect cues.

According to Bill Bryson (1990), English has about 200,000 words in common use, while French has 100,000. Perhaps because Americans are relatively more direct (although not as much as the Germans) and low-context, they need a larger vocabulary to explain more clearly what they mean. Meyer (2014) points out that many French words have multiple meanings, and the listener has to make an effort to understand the intention of the speaker.

In other cultures, where loss of face is very important, effective managers have learned to be more indirect especially when giving feedback in order to preserve harmony. Comfort and Franklin (2014) refer to “blurring techniques” that managers can use to soften the harshness of providing negative feedback. For example, they suggest talking about a hypothetical case to direct the feedback receiver’s attention to the problem rather than confronting the individual directly.

Here are two important points to remember for managers and global leaders. First, you can be direct and candid without being nasty, uncivil or impolite. This does require you to be more mindful in what you say to others, and how you say it. It also means that you need to practice different approaches to communicating with others that does not require being direct and confrontational. Second, be aware of cultural norms especially when interacting with colleagues and customers from other countries, and adapt your communication style accordingly. In some cultures, you may in fact need to be even more direct than what you may be used to. Remember that your goal as a manager is to enhance the motivation and performance of your team, and the communication style you use needs to fit the particular situation.

 

Bryson, B. (1990). The Mother Tongue – and How It Got That Way. New York: William Morrow.

Comfort, J. and Franklin, P. (2014). The Mindful International Manager: How to Work Effectively Across Cultures. United Kingdom: Kogan Page.

Earley, C. and Erez, M. (1997). The Transplanted Executive. New York: Oxford University Press.

Feintzerg, R. (2015). When ‘Nice’ Is a Four-Letter Word, Wall Street Journal, December 31.

Meyer, E. (2014). The Culture Map. New York: Public Affairs.

Minguet, Luc. 2014. Creating a Culturally Sensitive Corporation. Harvard Business Review, 92 (9): 78.

Parker, I. (2015). Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple. The New Yorker, February 23, 2015.

Porath, C. and Pearson, C. (2013). The Price of Incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91 (1/2),114-119.

Sanchez-Burks, J., Lee, F., Choi, I., Nisbett, R., Zhao, S., and Koo, J. (2003). Conversing Across Cultures: East-West Communication Styles in Work and Nonwork Contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85 (2): 363–372.

Sutton, R. (2007). Building a Civilized Workplace. The McKinsey Quarterly, 47-55.

Recently, Goldman Sachs again made the headlines in the business news, but this time for something different than the usual financial news about the company. It has decided to move away from its 9-point system for performance evaluations to providing employees with more timely and frequent performance feedback. It will still keep its 360-degree feedback process as well as have managers rate employees as outstanding, good, or needs improvement. However, it will create an online platform whereby employees can get feedback at any time. Dozens of other companies, such as Apple, Netflix, Accenture and even GE, have been moving away from these annual evaluations and rankings in favor of providing more timely and more frequent feedback.

Over the years, there has been considerable research on performance management; despite all this research, managers and employees, as well as HR professionals, continue to be dissatisfied with its failure to achieve the goal of actually improving performance. I will not go into all the reasons why performance management is broken (see Pulakos and O’Leary, 2011 for a comprehensive review), but would like to focus on the specific issue of how to improve individual performance.

In organizations where I have been involved in revising and helping to implement new performance management systems, I continue to be surprised at the intense attention paid to the forms and the rating systems that will be used, despite the fact that one of the greatest pay-offs from performance reviews is with the coaching and feedback that the employee receives. Of course, I have to remind myself that since these ratings are often used to allocate rewards, such scrutiny is understandable.

Many critics of performance management systems identify organizational or managerial issues as root causes for their failures. For example, Pulakos et al. (2015), in their excellent review article, ask: what can organizations do or not do to fix performance management? In their earlier article they summarized research that indicates that the quality of the manager-employee relationship is a key driver for maximizing performance management. There is no doubt that managers’ behaviors, particularly their coaching and listening skills, are important.

But what I find missing in much of these discussions is the role of the appraisee, or the employee. To be fair, Pulakos and O’Leary do mention that “Depending on employees’ personalities, they will be more or less open to feedback and more or less willing to accept it.” (p. 158) I believe that most individuals working in organizations want to improve their performance, whether they are CEOs of the company or brand-new workers who have just joined the company. Even those who have many years of experience working in a discipline – such as a surgeon, a truck driver, a professional athlete, a musician, or a jeweler – recognize that they always have something more to learn (except for an arrogant few, of course).

So one could reframe this issue of fixing performance management by asking instead, what can individuals do to improve their performance? I am adapting a concept from Marshall Goldsmith who wrote, in his recent book Triggers, that companies tend to ask passive questions when addressing the issue of employee engagement. Here’s how Goldsmith describes this:

“When people are asked passive questions they almost invariably provide ‘environmental’ answers. Thus, if an employee answers ‘no’ when asked, ‘Do you have clear goals?’ the reasons are attributed to external factors such as ‘My manager can’t make up his mind’ or ‘The company changes strategy every month.’ The employee seldom looks within to take responsibility and say, ‘It’s my fault.’” (pp. 192-193)

Anders Ericsson is a professor who has done considerable research about what it takes to improve performance. Most of his research has been with surgeons, musicians, athletes, chess players, and other individuals who want to improve their specific skills (e.g., memorizing strings of digits). In his new book Peak (Ericsson and Pool, 2016), Professor Ericsson writes about three myths regarding performance improvement. One is a belief that our abilities are limited by our inherited or genetic characteristics. The second is that doing the same thing over and over will make us better. The third is if we try hard enough, we will get better. Ericsson and his colleagues have studied the differences between those who are the best in their field (e.g., musicians, chess players) and those who are good but not outstanding. One variable that was not a differentiator was the number of hours spent practicing. Gladwell (2008) has suggested the 10,000-hour rule – that for someone to be an expert, one has to practice for about 10,000 hours. There has been quite a bit of debate about the 10,000-hour rule and the role of aptitude or natural ability. There is no question that to be good or expert at something, you have to practice and put in the time. The 10,000-hour rule is an average so there will be some variability depending on a number of factors, including the natural ability of the person and the nature of the endeavor. Someone who already has an aptitude for math will more than likely spend fewer than 10,000 hours reaching a certain level than someone who does not have the same aptitude.

However, according to Ericsson, the key to improving performance lies in deliberate practice, which he and his colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993) refer to as “activities defined … for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” And an important element in deliberate practice is mental representation, which is “a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.” (p. 58). Ericsson claims that much of deliberate practice involves developing efficient mental representations. His examples include expert chess masters with their skill in seeing the board many moves ahead and surgeons who conceptualize complex contingency plans before going into surgery.

Here are three specific strategies that you can use to improve your performance. First, periodically conduct an in-depth self-assessment. This is not always easy for we have a tendency to hold a cognitive bias called the “better-than-average-effect.” For example, over 90 percent of drivers believe that they are in the top 50 percent in driving ability. In his workshops, management consultant Marshall Goldsmith (Goldsmith, 2007) sometimes asks people in the audience (most of whom are managers and executives) to raise their hands if they believe they are in the top 10 percent of performers in their company.  Typically, over 50 percent of the audience raises their hands (of course, it is possible that Goldsmith’s audience is not a random sample, and that it is likely that his audience may indeed be among the top performers in their organization). In a study of prisoners, even this population rated themselves better than the average inmate and better than the non-prison community on a number of traits, such as being moral, trustworthy, honest, and compassionate (Sedikides et al., 2014).

We need to acknowledge that we all have this tendency to view ourselves in a more favorable light than we should. While such a tendency may be good for our self-confidence it may prevent us from doing what we need to do to improve ourselves, especially if we start believing that we are better than average and therefore don’t really need to change. It is important therefore to seek feedback from others. You want to be able to approach someone who has your best interests at heart, and who does not have a personal agenda. According to Stone and Stone (2002), those who seek critical feedback tend to get higher performance ratings. They point to at least two reasons for this. One, when you’re getting feedback, you find out what you need to do better. You can ask questions that will help your understanding, and you can start to work on how to get better at something. Two, you send a message that you are not only interested in what others have to say but that you are humble enough to listen to critical feedback. This can influence others’ perceptions of you as someone who is open to change and willing to listen to others.  Goldsmith and Morgan’s (2004) research involving more than 11,000 leaders and 86,000 of their co-workers from eight major corporations concluded that leaders who ask, listen, learn and consistently follow up are seen as more effective leaders.

Second, and this is what Ericsson emphasizes, is to focus on a specific skill. He says that you have to be engaged and focused in what you are doing. Don’t just go through the motions; you have to concentrate, and this is hard work. “If your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.” (p. 151). Also, you try to do something you cannot do and practice it over and over. The author says: “As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve a skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration.” (p. 169) Newport (2012) describes this well: (Deliberate practice) is “… where you deliberately stretch your abilities beyond where you’re comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance.” (p. 101)

Many years ago, I visited the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago on a weekend after spending several days working with several Chilean executives. The museum had a special exhibit on Picasso’s works. One of his most famous paintings is Guernica, and it was indeed magnificent, seen close up. But what impressed me were the hundreds of small sketches alongside this enormous painting. They were sketches of different characters in the painting, and showed the hard work that Picasso did to perfect the final product. I had assumed that Picasso was a genius who could paint something from scratch without much effort. As Ericsson states: “… research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time.” (p. 205)

In an article about Serena Williams, the sportswriter Jason Gay (2016) watched her one hot afternoon in New York in 2015 as she hit serves for an hour and a half with her coach in a practice court. For a while, there were quite a few spectators, but they soon got bored. Serena kept hitting and hitting “… until she felt she’d gotten it right.” Gay has observed that the greatest athletes work the hardest, and that Serena has a reputation as being one of the hardest workers in the sport. He quotes her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou: “The number of hours is one thing, but (more) impressive is the effort.”

What about improving your performance as a manager? For example, Rosenzweig (2014) points out that deliberate practice may be more suited to some types of activities, like hitting a tennis ball with your forehand or playing a short musical piece on the piano. When the activity is of short duration, when feedback is immediate, when the order of the tasks in the activity is sequential (versus concurrent), and when performance is absolute (versus relative), then deliberate practice tends to be more useful than not. Rosenzweig gives the example of a cosmetics salesperson going door to door, where deliberate practice would help because these conditions are present.

On the surface, deliberate practice might not apply to improving your performance as a manager. After all, the duration is long, the feedback is slow, activities can be concurrent, and a manager’s performance is almost certainly always being compared to others’. Nonetheless, it is important to identify those specific leadership skills you want to improve, rather than simply having a goal to become a better leader. By breaking a manager’s tasks and activities and focusing on specific sets of activities, global managers could benefit from deliberate practice. Take Youseff, a global manager I was coaching who wanted to improve his ability to lead global meetings (an important set of tasks for global leaders).  We broke down his overall goal into specific sub-tasks, such as developing clear agendas and running meetings effectively. He identified the specific meetings where he wanted to practice his meeting skills, and solicited feedback from the team both during the meeting and after the meeting (in one-on-one discussions). We designed a short checklist of questions for him to ask team members about their satisfaction with the meetings, and so he was able to measure short-term performance. Over time, Youseff was able to pinpoint areas where he could improve, and through coaching and practice, was able to improve his meeting skills. While deliberate practice may have its limitations, setting aside the time to practice, along with getting feedback, will help you improve your global leadership.

Third, push yourself out of your comfort zone and try to do things that are not easy for you. Ericsson recommends getting a teacher. For managers, I would recommend getting a coach or a mentor (more on this in a subsequent blog post). Of course, the organizational context matters, as does your relationship with your manager. But there are things you can do independent of these factors that can make a difference to your own performance as a manager. As Ericsson has pointed out: “In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.” (p. 233)

 

Ericsson, A., Krampe, R. and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 100 (3): 363-406.

Ericsson, A. and Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Gay, J. (2016). She’s Got Game. WSJ, The Wall Street Journal Magazine. July/August.

Gladwell, Malcolm. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Hachette.

Goldsmith, Marshall. (2007). What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. New York: Profile Books.

Goldsmith, M. (2015). Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be. New York: Crown Business.

Goldsmith, Marshall, and Howard Morgan. (2004). Leadership Is a Contact Sport. Strategy + Business, 36: 70-79.

Newport, Cal. (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You. New York: Hachette Book Group.

Pulakos, E. and O’Leary, R. (2011). Why Is Performance Management Broken? Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 4 (2): 146-164.

Pulakos, E. et al. (2015). Performance Management Can Be Fixed: An On-the-Job Experiential Learning Approach for Complex Behavior Change. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 8 (1): 51-78.

Rosenzweig, Phil. (2014). Left Brain, Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions. New York: PublicAffairs.

Sedikides, Constantine, Rosie Meek, Mark D. Alicke, and Sarah Taylor (2014). Behind Bars but Above the Bar: Prisoners Consider Themselves More Prosocial Than Non-Prisoners. British Journal of Social Psychology, 53 (2): 396–403.

Stone-Romero, E., and Stone, D. (2002). Cross-cultural Differences in Responses to Feedback: Implications for Individual, Group, and Organizational Effectiveness. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 21: 275-332.

Although the term positive deviance has been around for at least twenty years, not many executives I know are familiar with this term, much less with using it as a tool to improve their organizations. And unlike other organizational change initiatives, there seem to be few examples of successful applications of positive deviance in the work place. The web site for the Positive Deviance Initiative (http://www.positivedeviance.org/) lists many examples from NGOs and communities around the world but no examples from business organizations.

To summarize briefly, positive deviance is part of a branch of psychology referred to as positive organizational scholarship. Pascale et al. (2010) describe it as follows:

Positive deviance (PD) is founded on the premise that at least one person in a community, working with the same resources as everyone else, has already licked the problem that confounds others. This individual is an outlier in the statistical sense … in most cases, this person does not know he or she is doing anything unusual. Yet once the unique solution is discovered and understood, it can be adopted by the wider community … community engagement is essential to discovering noteworthy variants in their midst and adapting their practices and strategies. (p. 3)

The classic example, provided by Pascale et al. in their book, is that of the problem of malnutrition in Vietnamese villages that the organization Save the Children faced. Rather than bringing in outside experts to analyze the situation and then provide food and use agricultural techniques (impossible anyway since financial resources were limited), the organization went to local villages where the problem was severe and had villagers identify those who had the best-nourished children. Then they asked the villagers to visit the mothers of these families to find out what they were doing differently. From there, the ideas they learned spread throughout the village, and malnutrition dropped 65 to 85 percent in two years.

The PD approach basically suggests that in every community, there are individuals or groups that are using a practice that is different or deviant from the norm that seems to be solving a problem that seems insurmountable. Typically, these individuals or groups are not using special resources to address the problem. By learning about what they are doing, and disseminating this approach in the community, the problem can then be addressed. One of the most important assumptions in PD is that the “answer” to the problem is already found in the community and not something that is brought from the outside.

So why has this concept not caught on in organizations, despite some early attempts (as described in the Pascale et al. book)? And are there any lessons learned that organizations can use when implementing an approach like this? In my mind, there are at least five barriers or issues. First, it might be argued that organizations simply do not have such positive deviant practices. Pascale et al. so much as suggest this when they mention in their book that positive deviance might be more suited to sales environments, where there is more variation in performance than, say, people in assembly lines or office cubicles. But wait a minute: organizations, especially global organizations with subsidiaries in different countries, are no longer such monolithic entities, if they ever were. While there may be standard operating procedures that any organization will have, implementing these procedures across countries (or even across regions within a country) will inevitably be different, leading to differences or variations in performance.

Some years ago, I learned about an organization that had decided to close several of its manufacturing plants in various locations in the United States. The plant managers were all told about 18 months in advance that their plants were to be closing. In the meantime, Corporate HQ continued to keep track of production, efficiency and other performance measures to make sure that these plants would continue to function efficiently. In all but one plant, performance measures began to decline. To management’s surprise, one plant stood as an outlier – if anything, productivity was better than it had been before the plant closing was announced. Intrigued, a couple of corporate Finance people flew down to visit the plant. In short, what they learned was that the plant manager was someone who did many of the right things that good leaders did. He communicated almost daily with his employees to give them updates on the situation, he asked his HR staff to help employees put their resumes together and train them on interviewing skills, and he reached out to local employers to help his plant employees with other job opportunities.

Second is the organizational barrier. Because of the command-and-control nature of many organizations, Pascale et al. argue, these organizations use top-down tools to control variations and create process standardization. The authors give an example of what happened at Genentech when it found that two salespeople out of a national force of 242 were selling twenty times more of a certain product than their peers. After finding out what these two salespeople were doing differently, the company decided to communicate these salespersons’ practices through a broadcast e-mail followed up by a conference call – without involving these two salespeople. The message got at best a lukewarm reception. Their argument is that PD works better with social systems (like villages and universities) that do not practice “corporate management tools” because such tools are top-down while PD is bottom-up. These tools are part of what the authors call the “standard model” in corporations that seems antithetical to PD. Yet many organizations today have moved away from this command-and-control model in an effort to engage employees and drive innovation. These approaches have ranged from Zappo’s embrace of holocracy, Toyota’s production system, to W. L. Gore’s practice of self-managing teams. Not only are organizations trying to be less hierarchical and bureaucratic these days, they are also creating more mechanisms to communicate with and get feedback from employees.

Third is the not-invented-here barrier. In the PD approach, the solutions are discovered by members of the community itself. Therefore, having a consultant or an outside expert recommend solutions is antithetical to the spirit of positive deviance. So is benchmarking, since this approach typically relies on identifying best practices from outside the organization. And “when identification of a superior method is imposed, not self-discovered, cries of ‘We’re not them’ or ‘It just won’t work here’ predictably limit acceptance.” (Pascale and Sternin, 2005). They also state that “some problems can be solved only by those in the trenches.” According to the authors, “… the PD process insists on the precondition that the community determine whether it wants to tackle the change in the first place. Members can opt in or opt out.” (p. 91)

I think we are getting closer here to a real barrier of PD in organizations. In my experience, executives will turn to outside consultants (especially those with prestigious credentials) or look at other organizations before considering best practices internally. Many years ago, while working for a Fortune 500 financial institution, I became part of a core team charged with implementing quality circles. After several meetings with the executive in charge of retail branches in the New York area, she became convinced that this was a good approach to try. In presenting the idea to her branch managers in the New York City area, a Branch Manager volunteered to pilot the program. In the branch, the pilot was wildly successful. Tellers and back-office employees participated in weekly sessions where they came up with excellent suggestions on how to improve efficiency and reduce costs. With the support of a facilitator, they learned new skills in problem-solving and working collaboratively. When they presented their ideas to branch management, they were immediately implemented, thus lowering branch costs as well as reducing turnover especially among the teller population. However, the pilot did not spread much beyond a few branches. Branch management in other geographic areas were skeptical of these changes; they came up with objections similar to what you might expect from similar change efforts, e.g., it won’t work here, we are different, we tried something like that before and it did not work. In my earlier example, when the practices of the one plant were shared with the other plants, management expressed skepticism at the results and doubted whether these practices would apply to them.

Fourth is the incentives barrier. Some time ago, I heard a talk by Steve Kerr, then GE’s Chief Learning Officer. He was describing a visit to a plant that Jack Welch and he were making. The plant manager made a presentation about some of the innovations he had implemented in his plant that had raised efficiency and performance. At the end of the presentation, Welch asked the manager if any other plant managers knew about these practices. The plant manager said that no one else had. Welch then told the manager that when he came back in six months, he expected the manager to have communicated what was done in the plant to his peers in other regions. Without incentives for sharing, and without a culture of collaboration, managers will find little motivation to spread their ideas especially if they are competing with others for scarce resources or bonuses.

Fifth is the culture and leadership barrier. According to Pascale et al., it helps if a group that is positively deviant is relatively isolated from upper management, where they “can’t successfully dictate’.” For the authors, senior managers “see little personal value in changing what they know and can succeed in—especially when challenged by ideas like positive deviance that are detached from the orthodoxies that undergird their historical success.” (p. 135) There is a mindset in senior management that is concerned about “protecting the operating system and cultural norms upon which a large, global enterprise was built.” (p. 135) Well, yes and no. It really depends on the beliefs of the executive team, and on the types of behaviors that senior leadership not only encourages, but also models. Note how successfully Alan Mullaly and his executive team turned around Ford Motor Company partially by role modeling the sharing of ideas and encouraging the spread of these ideas within the organization.

These are not unique barriers to PD; many organizational change efforts fail for some of the same reasons. Leading change experts such as Beer (2009), Conner (2006), Kotter (2002) and others have raised similar concerns about the challenges of effective organizational change. I believe there are some lessons learned from the vast research on organizational change that might help in implementing an approach like positive deviance. Here are three. One, rather than isolate a practice or approach from senior management, use the hierarchy; it can be your friend! This is of course assuming that senior management is at least open to new ideas and willing to listen to them. In my experience, engaging senior management and getting their commitment is still the most powerful way to help drive an initiative forward, and is the first step for successful and sustainable organizational change.

Two, build internal allies and alliances. Kotter writes about having a guiding coalition. Beer suggests creating a task force made up of members that are respected by senior management. Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies (an IT company based in India) describes his recruitment of “young sparks” to help with his company’s initiative of “employees first, customers second” (Nayar, 2010). As another example, Cheryl Bachelder, CEO of Popeyes, as she described this in a Harvard Business Review interview (October, 2016), created an advisory group of franchise owners while she was at Domino’s Pizza to find new ways to get franchise alignment and grow the business. Getting the buy-in of well-respected leaders and employees in the organization, and not just senior leadership, is key.

Three, use technology, social media and other organizational communication mechanisms to inform others of best practices. As we all know, many employees today are hyper connected. The younger generation of employees uses Facebook, LinkedIn, Snap Chat, and expect their organizations to have these social networking technologies. They are used to being on “weisure time” which is the blurring of work and leisure. According to Meister and Willyerd (2010), these employees are “uber-connected.” Their book gives examples of companies that are using social media not only to accelerate and disseminate new knowledge but also to engage employees in collaborating across the enterprise. For example, IBM’s internal social network is called Social Blue, and is designed to encourage its employees to share and discuss both professional and personal topics. Around 2010, there were approximately 60,000 out of IBM’s work force of 400,000 participating in Social Blue. As another example, Bell Canada’s tool is called ID-ah! and allows any employee to submit ideas and give other employees to chance to vote on these ideas.

Through all this, it is important to remember the most important lessons that positive deviance has taught us: that solutions may already be within the organization, and it is important to build mechanisms to make sure that these solutions are discovered and spread. In perhaps more cases than we would like to imagine, while the solution may not already be there, it will be your front-line employees, those “in the trenches” who will have some pretty good ideas of what’s not working and what might be done to solve the problem. From the Challenger disaster to the BP oil spill to the latest Wells Fargo scandal, note the number of employees who knew what was going on but who were either ignored, shut down or felt intimidated.

 

Beer, M. (2009). High Commitment High Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Conner, D. (2006). Managing at the Speed of Change. New York: Random House.

Kotter, J. (2002). The Heart of Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Meister, J. and K. Willyerd, K. (2010). The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today. New York: Harper Business.

Nayar, V. (2010). Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Pascale, R. et al. (2010). The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term” thin slicing”, and this is how he described it:

“(Thin-slicing)… is a central part of what it means to be human.  We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or reencounter a novel situation.  We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are … lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.”

I remember many years ago, when I was doing research on the interviewing process, about studies that indicated that interviewers in an employment setting generally make up their minds about a candidate during the first few minutes of an interview.  In a current human resources management textbook (Gomez-Mejia et al.), here is what the authors have to say about interviewers and first impressions:

“Perhaps the most consistent research finding is that interviewers tend to jump to conclusions – make snap judgments – about candidates during the first few minutes of the interview (or even before the interview starts, based on test scores or resume data).  One researcher estimates that in 85% of the cases, interviewers had made up their minds before the interview even began, based on first impressions the interviewers gleaned from candidates’ applications and personal appearance.”

At about the same time period when I was doing my research, a non-technical book with the self-explanatory title “The First Five Minutes” was published that also described the impact of first impressions.

So we do judge a book by its cover, I thought.  And nothing that I have read or experienced since (through numerous interviews with executives and managers) has contradicted this simple but powerful hypothesis about our human tendency.

Perhaps it’s a result of our hardwired behavior from the Pleistocene era, where our ancestors had to judge very quickly whether a person from another tribe was a friend or foe.  Over the past several years, I have worked with executives to help them identify and develop potential talent in their organizations, and if anything, I find that many executives not only make these judgments very quickly, but also seem to make them very confidently (not surprising for them, of course).  A manager who they may remember texting during a meeting, or another manager who made a less than stellar presentation – these are samples of behavior that executives generalize very quickly about, and can sometimes de-rail otherwise fine talent.  In addition, the research on interviewing shows that interviewers are more influenced by unfavorable than favorable information about candidates.  In my many years of working with executives on talent identification and succession planning, I would say that this is also true about executives who are making judgments about potential candidates for succession.

Ambady and Rosenthal actually coined the term “thin slicing” many years before Gladwell popularized it.   And more recent studies have simply reinforced the power of thin slicing.  For example, Todorov at al. did studies of people’s judgments.  They showed potential voters pairs of black-and-white headshots of candidate who were completely unfamiliar to them.  After exposing these shots for one second, the participants made judgments about the competence of the candidates that predicated pretty accurately the outcome of the elections – over 70% of the winning candidates in several U.S. senatorial seats, and about 68% of those sitting in Congress.  They have replicated this research in elections held in other countries (e.g., Mexico, Germany).

According to neuroscientists (Pinker, p. 241), the ability to pick up emotional cues evolved in the amygdala.   So the challenge for many managers working globally today is to beware of these thin slices when interacting with people who are members of different cultures.  People from different cultures not only look different, they talk differently (even when conversing in English), and interact differently, even in a business setting.  So the potential for creating unfavorable first impressions is significant.

In cross-cultural settings, I believe that there are at least two kinds of biases we may fall prey to.  First is the “lack of similarity” bias that is created when we meet people who are not like us.  The relevant dimensions of dissimilarity or difference may differ by situation.  For example, in the workplace setting, gender is sometimes not as relevant as functional background.  Marketing people tend to refer to those finance guys concerned only with numbers, while sales people tend to refer to those engineering guys who overdesign their products with little regard for consumer needs.   In cross-cultural situations, our unconscious bias favoring people who are like us, or not favoring those who are not like us, can kick into high gear very quickly.  The dimensions of similarity or dissimilarity might include physical appearance, body language (e.g., the way someone shakes your hand or expresses himself or herself) and thinking style.

The second type of bias is when we fix on superficial – and sometimes irrelevant – characteristics that lead us to jump to hasty conclusions.  One example that I have seen on many occasions is the bias executives hold with regard to the ability of non-native English speakers to speak English well.  In my experience, many executives visiting other countries will place undue emphasis on locals who speak English well, especially those who understand the nuances and idioms of the English language.  English verbal skills may have little to do with local managers’ performance or their competence, but it inevitably impresses many executives who should know better.  In their Harvard Business Review article, Neeley and Kaplan point to this as a blind spot by many executives, and I concur.

Here are three pieces of advices for avoiding these biases and withholding our first impressions (difficult as this may be) when interacting with a business colleague from another culture:

1. When you are about to engage with someone from another culture especially for the first time, step back for a moment and ask yourself what assumptions you might be making about that person or group.   For example, suppose that you are getting ready to meet with a Russian manager in Moscow.  From what you have read about Russian businesspeople and about the Russian culture, you will certainly have certain expectations about the person you are about to meet.  You expect to meet someone who is most probably an ethnic Russian, who is rather formal (both in terms of attire as well as interaction), who does not use much body language or non-verbal communication, and who prefers to get down to business almost immediately.   What information do you already have, or can you get, about this person to test these assumptions?
2. As you meet with and engage with the person (or group), refer to those assumptions and adjust them to see whether they are justified or not.  Some of your thinking and adjustments might be done “in the moment.”  For example, on meeting the Russian manager, you realize that he is younger than 30, and he informs you that he has only been in Russia for five years, having been raised in Ukraine.  Furthermore, he got his MBA at IMD Business School in Switzerland.  These are bits of information that you get to pick up as you interact with your Russian business partner, and it might change the approach you might take with him.  For example, you might then decide to take a somewhat less formal approach and engage in some informal topics to break the ice and establish rapport.3.
3. After the interaction, reflect on your behaviors.  How did you adjust your approach, and did you feel that it was effective?  What would you do differently next time around?  If appropriate, ask for feedback (not about yourself, but you could ask about how the meeting went for him, for example), although keep in mind that you might not necessarily get honest feedback, especially if you are in a position of higher authority than the person or group you are interacting with.

There is another approach that has worked for many, including myself.  And that is to take the time to explore commonalities between the two of you.  In some cases, this may be a love of sports, cars, certain movies or certain books or video games.  In other cases, this might be around common experiences or common values, for example, having children of about the same age, having parents who may not be well, etc.  Finding “common ground” is an effective way to reduce your unconscious bias and in many cases helps to establish an effective relationship with your colleague cross-culturally.

Ambady, N. and Rosenthal, R.  (1992).  Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences.  Psychological Bulletin, 111(2).

Gomez-Meija et al.  (2012).  Managing Human Resources (7^th edition).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Prentice-Hall.

Mitchell, M. with Corr, J.  (1998).  The First Five Minutes.  New York:  Wiley.

Neeley, T. and Kaplan, R.  What’s Your Language Strategy?  (2014).  Harvard Business Review, September, pp. 70-76.

Pinker, S.  (2014).  The Village Effect.  New York:  Spiegel and Grau.

Todorov, A. et al. (2005).  Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes.  Science, 308.