Four Groups

Thank you to Max Goldman’s blog for the title. We’ve also seen research by Ciampa and Watkins (1999) who claim that 64% of external hires ‘fail to make it in their new jobs’. Max writes;

Apparently, nearly 50% of employees fail in the first 18 months of their jobs. And we’re not just talking about individual contributors, either. Actually, the higher up you are, the more likely you are to fail…

Beyond that, bad managers, personality mismatches and lack of appropriate competencies are all good reasons for why new employees fail.

It’s always been a belief of mine that taking a job (or hiring someone) is like the beginning of a new relationship. There are all kinds of reasons why personal relationships fail. I’m sure we’re all familiar with many of them. Sometimes, even knowing our goals for the relationships is not enough to keep it alive when other parts are missing.

Anyway, on to the possible causes and solutions. We’re particularly passionate to understand why people’s relationships don’t always work out and equally, is it possible to predict them in advance of people joining a new employer or starting a new role? We’ve put together some of our thoughts and a possible solution around this aspect of recruitment strategy on our site.

Reference;
Ciampa, D. & Watkins, M. (1999). “Right from the Start: Common Traps for the New Leader.” Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

My friend Johnnie Moore has been spending some time at Reboot8. Here’s a quick extract that caught my eye from an update from Johnnie;

…here are a few soundbites from Doc Searls who is speaking at the moment. Not sure if they’ll make sense out of context, but it’s good stuff, trust me.

The real killer app is relationships

How applicable is this to many day to day business situations? I think this observation just runs and runs…

I’ve been doing some research into leadership theories and have found what I think is a useful matrix and approach for categorising much of what is already out there. The matrix is from the work of Arthur G. Jago and it looks at focus and approach.

Jago’s Framework of Leadership Theories:

The following is taken from the Leadership Theories page on About.com;

“Focus” refers to whether leadership is viewed as a set of traits or as a set of actions. Focus on Traits: Theories with such a focus see leaders as having certain innate or inherent personality traits that distinguish them from non-leaders. These personality traits are supposed to be relatively stable and enduring. Focus on Behavior: Theories with this type of focus see leadership as observable actions of the leader instead of personality traits.

“Approach” is concerned with whether a particular theory or model of leadership takes a universal or a contingent perspective. Universal Approach: This approach believes that there is a universal formula of the traits or behavior for an effective leader. In other words, the universal approach assumes that there is “one best way” to lead in all situations. Contingent Approach: Contrary to the universal approach, the contingent approach does not believe the “one best way” formula. It believes that effective leadership depends on the specific situation.

If we take each of these quadrants in turn, I would place the well known psychometrics into the Universal Traits box. This would include 4G, NEO, 16PF and MBTI amongst others. Universal Behaviours would link to the idea of competencies and is perhaps less empirical than traits. We wrote a piece which outlines these differences called “Character traits and their use“. I think Contingent Traits would hope to be picked up by 360 degree feedback and appraisals. Certainly, 360 degree feedback is reasonably objective and would often focus on specific ‘traits’. Finally, I would include things like NLP and Situational Leadership into the final quadrant, Contingent Behaviours. These seem to be very contextually driven and highly pragmatic in nature.

Anyway, I hope this breakdown is reasonably clear. Its certainly helped me to explore things in a little more depth.

People like good working relationships and actively seek them out! This idea has clear implications for team building and team effectiveness. By combining this with 4G and the ability to predict relationships, I think there are some interesting new ideas for those who are concerned with productivity and team performance.

Ken Thompson drew my attention to a piece of research published by the Harvard Business Review. ‘Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools and the formation of social networks‘ talks about 4 archetypes within business and people’s preference for working with each one of them. This paper has also been picked up by the Monster Blog, Friends at Work and Fair and Biased, Co-workers: Lovable fools or Competent Jerks? The four types are;

Lovable Star - Competent and Likeable!
Lovable Fool - Likeable but competency issues
Competent Jerk - Competent but likeability question
Incompetent Jerk - Neither Competent nor Likeable!

From the article, it was found that

If someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer.

This point raises two questions in my mind. Firstly, given people’s preference to work with those they enjoy, I firmly believe that the ability to empower individuals and teams with this information and to have them and the organisation work on them leads to significant improvements across the board. The following diagram from 4G provides a good case in point.

The team above highlights those who are likeable and those who are not. For example, encouraging Paulo and Susannah or Jim and Kate to foster a closer working relationship is to the benefit of themselves and the team. In the same vein, being able to predict the quality of these relationships then gives HR or management a clear basis for decision making and ensuring that people, where possible, work with those who they like. From a 4G standpoint, predicting relationships within teams is possible via the use of Social Relationships.

The second point is how do people react to those team members or employees who are both incompetent and likeable?

I stumbled across Ken Thompson’s blog which looks at Bioteams. This is a new idea to me, but I like the sound of self organising teams, developing some of the biological metaphors and applying them to organisations and teams.

Ken’s posted a glossary on bioteams which outlines some of the core ideas. The entry for Bioteams reads

A Bioteam is an organisational team which operates on the principles embodied by natures most successful teams including ants, bees, geese, cells. micro-organisms and termites. All these teams share common traits which have emerged through millions of years evolutionary experience and include self-organisation (autopoiesis), indirect communications (stigmergy) and emergent behavior….

I’m looking forward to learning more and to see how the Bioteams idea overlaps or connects with 4G, or not, as the case may be! If nothing else, it looks like a great metaphor though.