Rob's Insights

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Changing how people are managed is perhaps the easiest way to boost productivity within organisations. Did you know that worldwide, the cost of poor management and lost productivity from not engaged or actively disengaged employees is a staggering $8/8 trillion, or 9% of global GDP? 

Unfortunately, learning how to manage better is not made easy. In the US, less than half of employees (42%) report having the opportunity to formally provide feedback to their manager, and fewer than one in four (24%) have formally rated their manager’s performance. 

And only about a third (36%) of managers say they receive feedback from their peers as part of a formal feedback process.

Gallup conducted a study comparing how managers think they are currently leading their team versus how employees say they are being managed, using a nationally representative US sample of 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors.

Ratings were divided into strengths, known weaknesses, blind spots and unrecognised strengths.

This is a lengthy article worthy of a full read, but here are three high points for you.

1. The strongest driver of employee engagement and the lowest rated behaviour is weekly meaningful feedback, making it the most important opportunity for improvement among managers.
2. Meaningful feedback, motivation, removing barriers to performance and discussing strengths are known weaknesses for managers, and very highly correlated with employee engagement.
3. Recognition isn’t happening as often as managers think, and it’s not being delivered in a memorable way for employees.

How well do you think your managers are fully, actively engaging with their respective teams? Are any particular alarm bells ringing for you after reading the above? What are the blind spots hiding from your team… and what practices do your senior leaders need to start modelling?

Read on

I've found a useful ‘Nano Tool’ from Wharton Executive Education, to help you get more from your data. 

Whilst we advocate that data is heavily applied as a decision making tool, conventional data often falls short due to errors from executive decision-makers.

Many leaders heavily rely on existing data, whether it addresses the issue at hand or not, potentially passing the decision making role on to data scientists who don’t really understand the dilemma or context. And some will only find the data that backs up their preferred decision.

Decision driven analytics resolves the mismatch between analytics and business decisions, by working backwards. This approach starts with the decision that needs to be made, then finding the data to prove it - and means leaders need to shift their focus from getting answers to asking questions.

Here are some suggested action steps to follow a decision driven approach.                                                                                            

1.        Determine the decision

Focus on options within your control. Most decision makers gravitate to familiar options, so broaden yours with diverse perspectives and choice sets including options both feasible and impactful. Work backwards towards the data.

2.        Ask factual questions to seek a prediction

When you know the facts, you can develop a strategy in a proactive way. For example, in a retail environment, if you can identify the exact cost of dealing with returns, you can adjust pricing, consider ways to reduce returns or decide against offering particular products at all. 

3.        Ask a ‘counterfactual’ question

This type of question compares outcomes with or without particular intervention, including hypothetical scenarios and causal inference, making counterfactual questions more intricate than factual questions.

How do you make decisions right now (experience, gut feel, written policy/process, data, team debate)? If you’re struggling with a decision right now, consider this – are you starting with the question, or the data… or do you notice something else guiding things? When your next decision bobs up, what could you do to enhance it?

Read on

If you have a mentor, you already know the benefits. But if you are still to secure this most valuable of relationships, some new research from Brian Uzzi, professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, might hurry this along.

Uzzi’s research has shown that it’s the unwritten, intuitive pieces of knowledge passed on from a mentor that are the most valuable. Analysis of the careers of more than 37,000 scientist mentors suggests that passing on tacit knowledge from previous work experience produces much better results, creating people who are more likely to become superstars.

To make his point, Uzzi wanted to find a way to see how mentees stood out from the crowd, and discovered it in the ability to produce research that goes on to win scientific prizes. He called it the mentor passing on their ‘special sauce’.

Research found that students who studied under a future prize winner were almost six times more likely to become superstars in their field than equally talented students of non-prize winners.

Mentoring is also most successful when people in different fields work together. Now that's a new way to think about mentorship.

“People almost always think of the mentor as the really active element, with the mentee as the passive element, absorbing the mentor’s knowledge.

“But it’s really not one-way. It’s incumbent upon the mentee to branch out, take their mentor’s tacit knowledge, and do something that breaks new ground. The mentee has a big responsibility for their own success,” said Uzzi.

Are you a mentor, or a mentee (even unofficially)? Could you take on the role of a mentor, share your knowledge and benefit from a two-way exchange? If you are a mentee, what is the special sauce your mentor delivers, and have you already seen the impact in your career… or should you more actively mine this gold out?

Read on

Order my book Propelling Performance here to find out why your business is stalling - and what you can do about it!