Although the Talent Theme of "Harmony" is strongly associated with the avoidance of conflict and the yearning for peace, it should not be misunderstood as simply and only this.
Harmony is about the desire to "see things run smoothly". This is why Harmony does not usually like conflict - it is a sign of things not running smoothly. But you might be surprised how Harmony could choose to engage with conflict exactly in order to restore the functionality that is causes disharmony.
Harmony could also be associated with a level of trust and confidence. I once coached someone with the Nr 1 Theme of Harmony. He shared with me how he is often invited to get involved in meetings where people cannot agree or come to a conclusion. Very often, he says, he sits in at the meetings without even having to say a word. It is as if the level of confidence and trust within the process of negotiation is lifted to a next level with the presence of harmony in the room. This to me, is exactly what the Harmony Theme does - it restores harmony through trust and confidence.
Do not undervalue your team members with a high Harmony Theme. Do not exclude them from conflict, even if they seem uncomfortable or if they are avoiding it. Having the Talent Theme of Harmony present could be exactly what is needed to get things to run smoothly again.
Next Topic: Misunderstanding "Empathy".
25 August 2010
18 August 2010
Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work
Our Series on “Mis-Understanding Talents” is briefly interrupted to place this great article by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, as posted in the Harvard Business Review this week.
The Red Queen was optimistic.
Nearly everybody in management is familiar with the Red Queen effect, taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: this is the notion that "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
It turns out the Red Queen represents an optimistic view of the world. Despite long-term increases in labor productivity, the average return on assets (ROA) of US companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965. We're running faster, but still losing ground.
There is no sign of this long-term erosion flattening out, much less turning around.
The conclusion is inescapable: our management practices and corporate institutions are fundamentally broken. The good news, if you can call it that, is that this isn't sustainable for much longer: the trend line on ROA approaches zero in 2020. If you believe that markets spur innovation, however, it does bring up a conundrum: Why haven't companies yet figured out how to compete more successfully? One reason is because...
Value ain't where it used to be.
Competition is not only intensifying, it's changing the source of value creation from stocks to flows of knowledge, and the means for value creation from push to pull. These changes require such fundamental shifts in mindset and approach that most executives are unable to make the leap from their current ways of seeing and doing. Thus their companies remain mired on the downward slope of performance.
Asia is the new global center of innovation.
But some companies and executives are figuring it out. The bad news for the US is that these leading-edge companies and executives tend to be in China and India. Westerners generally have a narrow view of innovation, limiting it to breakthrough technology and product innovations. We need to expand beyond product, process, and even the management innovation called for by Gary Hamel to a broader notion of institutional innovation, which redefines roles and relationships across large numbers of institutions.
Where is institutional innovation most advanced? In China's open production and design models and in India's open distribution models. We've written about both of them before. Unfortunately, the concept of institutional innovation — as yet anyway — is all but invisible to most Western executives.
The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve.
We may, for the first time, have an opportunity to turn diminishing returns performance improvement into increasing returns.
The BCG experience curve is one of the most enduring ideas in business. Unfortunately, it's characterized by diminishing returns: The more experience accumulated in a specific industry, the longer it takes to get the next increment of performance improvement. As competitive intensity rises, these diminishing returns are a serious obstacle to performance.
As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants — you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement accelerates.
The collaboration curve helps explain the rise of network-centric efforts ranging from open source software development to "crowd sourcing" to "creation spaces." In nearly all of these group efforts, rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. The evidence for the collaboration curve is still admittedly fragmentary, but one place to look for it is in the online game World of Warcraft.
The "Dilbert Paradox" holds the key.
Companies will not be able to fully harness the potential of collaboration curves until they resolve the Dilbert Paradox.
Here's the paradox. Ask CEOs about their top priorities and inevitably they will cite talent as one of their top priorities. If this is the case, how do we explain the enormous popularity of Dilbert and The Office, which so eloquently describe the stultifying effect of our work environments on talent?
In part, the paradox arises because executives tend to focus on talent acquisition and retention, but do not invest much time on talent development throughout the firm. When they think about talent development, they spend time designing training programs rather than re-thinking the work environment to accelerate talent development. If they took on-the-job talent development seriously, they would reassess all aspects of the firm - strategy, operations, organization and information technology platforms - to find ways to foster even more rapid talent development.
Passion is everything.
Management can only do so much. All of us are responsible at a personal level, too — for reintegrating our passion into our profession. What is passion? More than simple satisfaction, passion is when people discover the work that motivates them to achieve their potential by seeking extreme performance improvement. Their job becomes more than a mode of income.
Yet our survey in the 2009 Shift Index showed that passion levels are low across all US industries. In most of them there are fewer than 20 percent of employees that say they are passionate about their work--and no industries have more than 25% that say so. Furthermore, passion levels are inversely related to the size of the employer: the larger the company, the lower the passion levels.
Why is passion so important? Because it drives a questing disposition that is essential to employee performance as they react to the inevitable unexpected challenges today's work environment presents. It also drives more connection. Our Shift Index found that passionate workers participate much more actively in knowledge flows that are the new key to value creation. If you can help make your employees more passionate, you can create value in today's economy.
Book writing has many purposes, but surely among the most important is to spark conversation, and maybe even controversy. What did we get right? More importantly, where did we go wrong? What can we do to sharpen and refine these propositions?
Next time we continue our Series on "Mis-Understanding Talent"
The Red Queen was optimistic.
Nearly everybody in management is familiar with the Red Queen effect, taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: this is the notion that "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
It turns out the Red Queen represents an optimistic view of the world. Despite long-term increases in labor productivity, the average return on assets (ROA) of US companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965. We're running faster, but still losing ground.
There is no sign of this long-term erosion flattening out, much less turning around.
The conclusion is inescapable: our management practices and corporate institutions are fundamentally broken. The good news, if you can call it that, is that this isn't sustainable for much longer: the trend line on ROA approaches zero in 2020. If you believe that markets spur innovation, however, it does bring up a conundrum: Why haven't companies yet figured out how to compete more successfully? One reason is because...
Value ain't where it used to be.
Competition is not only intensifying, it's changing the source of value creation from stocks to flows of knowledge, and the means for value creation from push to pull. These changes require such fundamental shifts in mindset and approach that most executives are unable to make the leap from their current ways of seeing and doing. Thus their companies remain mired on the downward slope of performance.
Asia is the new global center of innovation.
But some companies and executives are figuring it out. The bad news for the US is that these leading-edge companies and executives tend to be in China and India. Westerners generally have a narrow view of innovation, limiting it to breakthrough technology and product innovations. We need to expand beyond product, process, and even the management innovation called for by Gary Hamel to a broader notion of institutional innovation, which redefines roles and relationships across large numbers of institutions.
Where is institutional innovation most advanced? In China's open production and design models and in India's open distribution models. We've written about both of them before. Unfortunately, the concept of institutional innovation — as yet anyway — is all but invisible to most Western executives.
The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve.
We may, for the first time, have an opportunity to turn diminishing returns performance improvement into increasing returns.
The BCG experience curve is one of the most enduring ideas in business. Unfortunately, it's characterized by diminishing returns: The more experience accumulated in a specific industry, the longer it takes to get the next increment of performance improvement. As competitive intensity rises, these diminishing returns are a serious obstacle to performance.
As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants — you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement accelerates.
The collaboration curve helps explain the rise of network-centric efforts ranging from open source software development to "crowd sourcing" to "creation spaces." In nearly all of these group efforts, rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. The evidence for the collaboration curve is still admittedly fragmentary, but one place to look for it is in the online game World of Warcraft.
The "Dilbert Paradox" holds the key.
Companies will not be able to fully harness the potential of collaboration curves until they resolve the Dilbert Paradox.
Here's the paradox. Ask CEOs about their top priorities and inevitably they will cite talent as one of their top priorities. If this is the case, how do we explain the enormous popularity of Dilbert and The Office, which so eloquently describe the stultifying effect of our work environments on talent?
In part, the paradox arises because executives tend to focus on talent acquisition and retention, but do not invest much time on talent development throughout the firm. When they think about talent development, they spend time designing training programs rather than re-thinking the work environment to accelerate talent development. If they took on-the-job talent development seriously, they would reassess all aspects of the firm - strategy, operations, organization and information technology platforms - to find ways to foster even more rapid talent development.
Passion is everything.
Management can only do so much. All of us are responsible at a personal level, too — for reintegrating our passion into our profession. What is passion? More than simple satisfaction, passion is when people discover the work that motivates them to achieve their potential by seeking extreme performance improvement. Their job becomes more than a mode of income.
Yet our survey in the 2009 Shift Index showed that passion levels are low across all US industries. In most of them there are fewer than 20 percent of employees that say they are passionate about their work--and no industries have more than 25% that say so. Furthermore, passion levels are inversely related to the size of the employer: the larger the company, the lower the passion levels.
Why is passion so important? Because it drives a questing disposition that is essential to employee performance as they react to the inevitable unexpected challenges today's work environment presents. It also drives more connection. Our Shift Index found that passionate workers participate much more actively in knowledge flows that are the new key to value creation. If you can help make your employees more passionate, you can create value in today's economy.
Book writing has many purposes, but surely among the most important is to spark conversation, and maybe even controversy. What did we get right? More importantly, where did we go wrong? What can we do to sharpen and refine these propositions?
Next time we continue our Series on "Mis-Understanding Talent"
Visit our Website at www.africanmosaic.com
12 August 2010
Misunderstanding Talents - "Responsibility"
Are you responsible? Most of us would like to think that we are. But, if you do not have the Talent Theme of "Responsibility" high in your talent mix, I can assure you that you do not understand what responsibility really means....The Talent Theme of "Responsibility" means that you have the natural tendency and inclination to take emotional, psychological and even physical ownership of a situation. To the high "Responsibility" people, it is much more than even a value of a virtue. It is something within their deepest core that just drives them to take responsibility of the outcome of a situation, task or project.
I have nearly never encountered someone with this theme high in their Talent Mix, that immediately fully embrace this theme. Most people with this talent will describe it as a "burden", a "challenge", and even a "curse".
Wow. This is especially true when this theme combines with other specific themes like discipline, belief or deliberative. Still, I am convinced that it is not the theme itself that is the burden - it is the management of that theme that is difficult, and therefor the feeling of strain under that theme comes from the mismanagement of the responsibility.
People with this talent has one specific thing in common: they find it very difficult to say the word "no". They will keep on piling up more responsibility, always making more time to get things done, and (even more so should they have something like "Achiever" in their mix) they will burn themselves on all ends in order to fulfill the expectations... expectations that is mostly set by themselves.
I always urge people with this theme to get their hands on the books by Henry Cloud and John Townsend in the "Boundaries" series. To work on the important skill of setting healthy boundaries, is an absolute must for people with the responsibility talent. They mus learn to stop holding the gun to their own heads. And they should not allow others to hold the gun either.
The beauty of responsibility is tremendous. They are timely, accurate, precise, hard working, and... well, responsible! But we must understand that this is an emotional responsibility. It is a driving force within them. This talent theme might well be the strongest of all the so called "Executing Themes", meaning that someone with this theme will simple GET THINGS DONE. But, it comes at a cost, if mismanaged.
Should you have this theme, or work / live with someone with this theme, be aware of the beauty of it, but also of the shadow side.
The key word here is "well managed".
Next time: Misunderstanding "Harmony"
02 August 2010
Misunderstanding Talents - "Deliberative"
"Why are you always so negative? You only seem to see the dark side of things. Why must you ask all these difficult questions?"To someone strong in the Talent Theme of "Deliberative", this feedback will sound all too familiar. Because the "deliberatives" are careful, always counting the cost so to speak, and very diligent in looking at things from all angles, they often see things that others miss.
A team without this Talent Theme in the mix, has some problems. I like to refer to people with this talent theme as the "brakes" on a race car. For any team speed and progress is a good thing, but, just like on a race car, when there is no brakes, the first bend in the road might well be the end of the road. People with the "deliberative" theme can see obstacles when most others miss it. That is the reason why they could be misunderstood as "negative" or "pessimistic". All too often the preciousness of this theme is missed.
The best way to take full advantage of someone with this theme, is to give them two things: time and opportunity. Giving them time to think is essential, because they need time to process through all the dark spots that they see ahead. The also need opportunity to give feedback and to respond.
When I work with teams, here is my advice regarding someone with Deliberative: go through all the strategic planning, the ideas and the vision for the future. But, when you are done, simply ask the "deliberative" in the room this simple question: "Okay, so what did we miss?" Also then allow them time to first think about it - so it might even be a good idea to let them start the next meeting with feedback on this.
Again: like any other Talent Theme, "deliberative" can also be mismanaged. Having brakes on a racing car is essential, but brakes that is stuck and never loosens, is of no use. So a note to "Deliberatives": sometime you will need to "let go" and take the chance.
Take good care of the Deliberatives in your team. And if you are one, do not feel guilty or burdened by what you see and what others miss. That is your gift that you must bring to the party. Or else you might utter the familiar words later: "I told you so..."
Next time: Misunderstanding "Responsibility".
Visit our Website at www.africanmosaic.com
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