Rodd Wagner's Blog, page 5

Plummeting Sheep and the Tortoise Mind: John Cleese on ‘Liberating’ Creativity

In some respects, John Cleese has been teaching about business his entire career.

One would be hard pressed to find better portrayals of customer indignation and company face-saving than the Monty Python Cheese Shop and Dead Parrot sketches, a better parody of inside deals and misunderstanding client goals than the Architects Sketch, a better send-up of personality profiles than the Vocational Guidance Counselor Sketch, or a better representation of the anxieties of a job interview than the Silly Job Interview Sketch.

These days, the legendary comedian’s business insights are served relatively straight-up and focused on creativity at work, a topic about which he is simultaneously funny, insightful, and critical.

“The people who don’t have it, don’t recognize it,” he told an audience Friday night at the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. “Creativity doesn’t have to be taught; it has to be liberated.”

My Forbes column about Cleese’s insights on creativity can be found here.

The 12 Ingredients of Working Happier (and Better)

Forget profitability for a moment. Forget sales. Forget the deadline breathing down your neck, the client with an emergency request, your high-maintenance colleague, the demands of the new project, and the hundreds of other urgencies that clutter your mind. Forget it all and ask yourself one simple question.

How happy are you at work?

If the answer to that question is solidly positive, all the daily struggles are worth it. If the answer is negative, none of the subordinate successes really matters much, because they are failing to deliver the ultimate goal of work and of life – to improve your happiness.

My latest piece for Forbes describes the 12 ingredients you should be seeking in a job that will make you both happier and more effective. The column can be found here.

Your Boss May Be Spying on You (And You Might Welcome It)

Largely unnoticed by their targets, the human resources departments of large corporations are beginning to gather spy-agency-quality intelligence on their current and future employees. The hottest topic in human resources is “predictive analytics,” synthesizing a worker’s traits and behaviors to estimate how he or she will perform in the future.

No one knows exactly where unleashing “big data” on workers will take us.  As the technology gets ahead of the ethical questions, chances are that in the early going, digital surveillance of employees will be both creepy and cool.

My full column on the issue for USA Today can be read here.

Seven Steps For Gathering Job Intelligence Through Opaque Glassdoor

Glassdoor created a buzz over the last week when it released its latest “Best Places to Work” rankings. Lists are catnip to the business media and their readers.

AirBnB topped the Glassdoor rankings this year, followed by Bain & Company, Guidewire, Hubspot, Facebook, LinkedIn, Boston Consulting Group, Google, Nestlé Purina PetCare, and Zillow. These are probably all good places to work for a large proportion of their employees.

But the rankings? They’re wrong.

To find out why, and for important cautions about using Glassdoor, read my latest column for Forbes. You can find it here.

Would Being Compared to a Rodent Make You Candid on a Survey?

The fake pirate flag flown by some weekend boaters is an apt motto for what has become of many employee engagement surveys.

“The beatings will continue,” it says, “until morale improves.”

The disparagement of poorly managed employees continues unabated, despite the fact that the problem has been well publicized (and well mocked) and the pressure to inflate scores is an open secret in the worst offending firms. This malpractice, which threatens the whole concept of employee engagement, should have ended by now.

The latest offender is Sean Graber, CEO of a firm called Virtuali, writing last week on the Harvard Business Review site. Of his “9 Employee Engagement Archetypes,” seven are personal insults. Fail to be perfectly chipper on his tests of morale and motivation and he will brand you variously a “brat,” “under-achiever,” “delinquent,” “drifter,” “saboteur,” “cynic,” or “martyr.” One firm labels its clients’ employees “hamsters.”

My new column on the mud-slinging problem is available on Forbes.com.

Why Your Caveman Boss Struggles to Say ‘Thank You’

My latest Forbes column takes on the issue of why so many managers fail to do the fairly simple task of consistently recognizing their employees. It’s not that they don’t get it. The problem is that through tens of thousands of years of evolution, the human brain became far better wired for negative events than for positive ones.

You can read the column, plus a little advice about what to do about your boss’s “negativity bias,” here.

Why Meaningful Work Trumps Money

Most of us are drawn to work we already find meaningful, but companies that aren’t careful can dilute or destroy that connection. It’s the reason the Seventh Rule is “Don’t Kill the Meaning.” An excerpt from that chapter of Widgets was published this morning on FastCompany.com. You can find it here.

 

Why the Procurement Mindset Backfires with Employees

Chief financial officers and procurement managers are supposed to get things for the lowest price. In buying resources, that’s imperative. A great deal on a piece of land. Optioning oil at a three-year low. Locking in high-quality, exotic coffee beans when supply is high and demand is low. A volume deal on laptops. It’s just smart business.

The land certainly is not insulted that it was bought on the cheap. The oil does not burn cooler because it was acquired with a well-timed call option. The coffee is just as aromatic at the lower wholesale price. The laptops don’t operate any differently.

But when a chief financial officer or some other leader applies the resource procurement strategy to people, it quickly disintegrates. People are not just another category of resources that happens to be human. They expect fairness. They appreciate generosity. Their value to the company varies greatly depending on how they believe they are being treated. Positively and negatively, they reciprocate the intentions of their employers.

Fast Company today excerpts a key section of Widgets about the psychology of pay. You can find it here.

Widgets Named One of the Top Business Books of the Year

We’re delighted to pass along the news that Widgets was named this morning one of the year’s top five leadership and management books by CEO Read. The news release can be found here.

CEO Read Editorial Director Dylan Schleicher made the following observations about this year’s trend in business books:

Looking up and down this year’s list, we see a continuing trend of books at the intersection of digital technology and business. And though a few extoll the benefits, more and more begin questioning technology as panacea for business. And it is not just the books that actively question its effect, like The Rise of the Robots, Geek Heresy, and Reclaiming Conversation, but books that remind us that so much of the work left to be done is inherently and entirely human — Unfinished Business, Everybody Matters, Widgets, and Boss Life, among others. There are more books this year about workplace culture, human psychology, action and interaction, our behavior in the marketplace, and how we make a better world and business world together.

It’s his point – “that so much of the work left to be done is inherently and entirely human” – that motivated the Widgets team to do the research behind the book and to keep going.

That said, it’s also really fun when our hard work gets recognized. You might say it magnifies our success.

Praise and Trout: What I Learned Fly-Fishing with Charlie

What I most needed to know about recognition I learned on a trout stream with Charlie.

I’ve been researching employee motivation for as long as Charlie has been alive. I’ve charted the patterns from millions of employee survey responses and their performance data. I’ve interviewed everyone from military commanders to front-line retail workers about it. I’ve written book chapters and guest columns on the psychological phenomena.

But to see the underlying simple facts of human motivation – to appreciate why a person perseveres in a difficult task or gives up – nothing beats coaching a kid so he succeeds at fly-fishing.

My Forbes column on the lessons to be learned from trout and a kid pursuing them can be found here.