Eva Rykr
Research on Knowledge Management Strategy
Over the past several years, there has been a rise in virtual working teams and a rise in fluid teams. A fluid team is one composed of individuals who work together to complete a project, but once finished, they disperse and go their separate ways to work on different projects, often with different people. This is in contrast to a fixed team, which works together often.
In such a dynamic working environment, knowledge management becomes crucial. To build high performing teams and maintain a high performing organization, it is important people have access to the existing knowledge about company processes. Clearly, recreating the wheel is inefficient. On top of that, learning from mistakes—ideally others’ mistakes—improves quality and saves time.
A bit of background info, knowledge management generally involves three processes: knowledge creation, knowledge retention, and knowledge transfer. Knowledge can be of three types: declarative (knowledge about something), procedural (how something occurs or is performed), and casual (why something happens).
Leadership Mistakes That Are Easy to Make
There are many great lists about how to be a great leader, what the essentials are for a high performance team, to-do lists for new managers, and books on management principles. But equally important is the What Not to Do list. Despite our best intentions, there are quite a few leadership mistakes that are surprisingly easy to make.
“You Are Doing Awesome (Not!)”
Give your team members tons of high fives, ‘great jobs,’ and praise—make them feel great about the work they are doing. If they do something wrong, don’t speak up, you want to protect your relationship with that person. Then, when you are filling out a 360 Assessment or their Annual Performance Report, let your honest opinion flow.
Treat Your Direct Reports like Delicate Flowers
Your direct reports aren’t smarter than you and they don’t know nearly as much as you do. Like a helicopter parent, shield them from projects where they have to assume any responsibility and prevent them from making any mistakes at all. Always provide extra structure than necessary, because you are unsure about their ability to create their own.
Become Aware of Your Leadership Style
Self-awareness is the first step to better leadership. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you cannot improve on your weaknesses. If you are unaware of your strengths, you won’t reach your potential. A lack of knowledge about who you are and how you operate can lead you to overemphasize your strengths, to the point where they become a weakness.
One problem is that as we get into positions of more responsibility or higher authority, we receive less and less feedback on our performance. We also become more comfortable—after all, we have been successful in the past. Compounding that, power has a strong effect on our behavior—making us more susceptible to being more self-centered, less empathetic, and more likely to not walk the talk.
So what can be done about this? First of all, don’t assume that you know yourself. We humans are dynamic, adapting to new situations, other people, and different environments quickly. Just because you were agreeable and timid twenty years ago, don’t assume that is the way people perceive you today.
Assess and re-assess often:
Communication Across Generations
A few months ago, I attended a Leadership Development Program with mostly Gen Xers and Boomers. I believe I was the sole Gen Y attendee there. On the third day of the five-day program, we practiced coaching behaviors. The woman I was paired with had a dilemma at work where there were communication issues with her direct report, who was a good decade or so younger than her. We role played this dilemma,with her assuming the role of the direct report and me serving as her, playing the coach.
At one point during the background preparation for the coaching process, she remarked:
“Here is an example of his poor communication: one Tuesday, he is missing from the office. I go all day wondering where he is, and by the end of the day, when I finally get to my email, I see that he had emailed me last night that he wasn’t going to be in. Why wouldn’t he have just popped in to the office and let me know about this in person?”
At first, I was very confused about the point she was trying to make. At my office, if someone will be out, they send an email; if we don’t realize we’ll be out until the day of, we’ll send a text message. Message is sent, message is received–no big deal. After some discussion, several people in the room, including the executive coach facilitating the session, came to an agreement that email is not communication. That email is a one-way memo that is devoid of tone, posture, and other nonverbals so it cannot be used as a method of communicating with another person.
The Invisible Gorilla: Q+A with Authors & Giveaway
We think we can multitask without negative consequences, but we are wrong. We trust that those who are confident about their skills have good reason to be. And we assume that we know more than we actually do. These illusions, as well as three others, are the subject of the new book, The Invisible Gorilla, by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. The book came about after a very popular experiment during which half the participants failed to see a giant gorilla that was in plain sight. The book is different since it is written by the subject matter experts who conducted the original research from which it is based.
Chris and Dan sent me a copy of the book and offered to do an exclusive Q+A for this site. I would like to pay it forward and give my copy away now that I’ve read it. Here is the Q+A: I asked the questions, they provided the answers, and all the links in this article were added by me simply for convenience to the readers.
What inspired you to write The Invisible Gorilla? How long did it take and what was your writing process like?
Dealing with Downsizing
When downsizing must happen, the emotional toll is heavy on everyone in the company as well as everyone close to it. Layoff survivors, those who are left after a round of layoffs, are in a stressful situation. In fact, those who still have their jobs experience similar anxiety and decline in well-being to those who have been laid off, but that negativity is more persistent and prolonged.
This negativity occurs thanks to emotional contagion – which is the tendency for an emotion to spread. Of course, emotional contagion can be good during profitable times, but it is especially dangerous when there is cynicism throughout the organization. Imagine the impact on not only satisfaction and company culture but also on performance and collaboration!
To deal with the issue, the negative emotions that are being experienced must be addressed:
Making a Team Decision
Making good decisions is considered a crucial centerpiece of excellent leadership. Just as productivity advice can vary with situations, so can decision-making. We are often tempted to include our entire team so we can tap the full variety of the technical knowledge and make everyone feel like their expertise is appreciated. But is that efficient? Getting consensus is time-consuming and often unnecessary.
What if the impact of the decision affects the entire team?
Assembling a High-Performance Team
A team doesn’t just happen. An effective team is designed, built, and managed. Carefully designed teams have a sense of unity and identification… team spirit, if you will. The best time to ensure a project’s success is before you even get started. Especially if you are the leader. Consider these seven guidelines before you even think about communicating the project to your team, and your management work as the leader will be minimized.
Set a clear goal
Giving a vague assignment is a sure way to failure. The objective for the project needs to be clear. How does your team know if it has achieved what it set out to do? There should be no question about what success looks like.
Unify the team
Even with a clear goal, there will be confusion. As your project gets underway, each team member will get their own vision of how that objective is manifested. So also plan on getting agreement on the vision up front. With a common vision, your team will set aside their own agendas and ideologies for the sake of achieving this collective goal. Then later, when the team comes to a fork in the road in making a decision, they will be able to easily and unanimously agree to take the route that will lead to the best outcome for the entire team. So get unified commitment via a shared vision at the beginning. After all, your team is not just a collection of individuals. It is an entity of its own.
Getting Student Loans Under Control
An American education is expensive. I went to out-of-state public schools, not even private schools, and it left me with six figures of debt. As soon as I graduated, I got many letters that outlined how much my monthly payment would be. I panicked when I saw those numbers. It was more than I could possibly earn in one month and then still pay for rent and food. But then I calmed down, did a ton of research, and got it under control. In this post, I’ll outline what I did.
First, get organized.
As tempting as it is to burn all those letters and pretend they don’t exist, I highly recommend against that. Put them all in one pile or folder until you are emotionally ready to deal with it. If you are upset or angry, trying to work it out rationally won’t work, it’ll only make you more upset and/or angry. Wait until you have accepted the situation, and are ready to take action. When you are ready, find out how many lenders you have, what type of lenders they are, how much you owe to each, and most importantly, what the interest rate is per loan.
My breakdown looked something like this:
Just-in-time Talent
Technology has made it so that I can email you much more easily than I can call you. We can communicate virtually just as well as we can connect face-to-face. With the recession cut-backs, many companies have taken advantage of that. Workers have been treated as disposable. Cost-containment is important. It’s the most important part, in fact, if your business is struggling financially. But what is creating disposable workers doing to your company?
Temps, freelancers, contractors, and interim executives are easy to get rid of. What kind of culture is having temporary workers creating? First, the bright side…
You get better talent.
The more ’stable’ jobs are the ones that are sought after by high potentials seeking the executive track. Since there are fewer of these positions available, competition is increased, and you can be more selective. Yet, the temps, the contractors and consultants feel the competition as well, because you are their ‘client.’ You can hire experts when experts are needed and generalists where generalists are needed. Consequentially, the bar is increased and you have your pick.
10 Reasons for Executive Failure
A derailed executive is an previously-named high-potential employee who has reached the middle management level, only to find that there is little chance of future advancement (as previously thought) due to a misfit between job requirements and personal skills. Thus, the executive either plateaus or leaves the organization altogether. That is the original CCL studies definition. Sometimes the term also refers to leaders who experience big failures after reaching the executive spot and, more recently, those involved in ethical scandals.
Whatever your definition of a bad leader is, most have several of the following 10 leadership shortcomings:
Lack of energy/enthusiasm: OK so some people are less visibly enthusiastic than others, thanks to a personality trait called introversion. But there’s an effort to be made, no matter what your personality style, to covey and inspire energy and enthusiasm in your team. And there is NEVER an excuse for complaining. Either do it, change it, or leave it.
I Can Read Your Mind …. and Other I-O Psych Misconceptions
I have had this post in draft for a while but a recent article claiming it is disingenuous and irresponsible to use psychology at work made the completion of it urgent. Because I am convinced of exactly the opposite. I am convinced it is irresponsible to disregard a large and growing body of knowledge that can help your organization be better at business, operations, sales, marketing, and especially management. Not only that but employees are beneficiaries of the application of such research as well.
I can’t really blame the logic behind the post though. You see it in nearly every profession; the jerks that can’t do their job well give the rest a bad name. With respect to the intersection of business and psychology, I can tell the difference between the latter and the former within a few seconds. But I shouldn’t expect everyone else to do the same. Just like I don’t know the difference between an authentic car mechanic and a crook (true story).
The Executive Selection Mystery
Advice to Grad Students
Psychology of Change
When hearing about change, the concept of inertia comes to mind. Imagine a hockey puck and the level of force it takes to make it move initially. Then imagine the level of force it takes to stop one that’s coming fast. Contrast both of those scenarios to the effort it takes to keep a puck moving or to keep it still. Therein lies the difficulty of change. Well, human behavior is not too much different.
