If a manager is good at one and not the other, becoming ambidextrous appears to pay off.The Interaction Effect

Why this happens contains some mystery. We know that correlation does not describe causation. That means we can speculate about why leaders who combine these abilities are perceived as being better performers with high potential, but cannot provide a definitive answer.

There is a strong circular effect between the positive relationships within a team and the results it produces.

1. Positive relationships lead to members of a team putting forth extra effort.  That discretionary effort readily translates into better results.
2. People who are generally happy in their work are more productive.  Positive relationships are a major contributing factor in being happy at work.
3. People generally are much happier when they’re playing on a winning team.  Producing good results together is a strong force in building good relationships.
4. Individuals who consistently contribute to a team’s success enjoy a higher sense of inclusion and respect than those who are not seen as positive contributors.

The Quest To Be Ambidextrous

Just as people select which hand they use the most, people sense which of these two qualities they tend to favor. The important takeaway is that you don’t need to be brilliant at both to achieve this positive impact. In our analysis, we put leaders into both groups when they were at or above the 75th percentile on both skills. Some people were at the 90th percentile on Results but only at the 75th percentile on Relationships, but still had that positive interaction effect. Rather than make the excuse, “I am not wired that way,” start telling yourself that you can do both skills well.  Pay special attention to the side that is your opportunity for growth. Set goals around making positive connections with others or completing tasks on time, and soon good habits will develop.

How would you describe the culture of your organization? Some might say, “It’s the smell of the place,” or, “It’s how things are done around here.” Research done on culture and organizational performance by Kotter and Heskett defines culture as “…gained knowledge, explanations, values, beliefs, communication and behaviors of large group of people, at the same time and same place.”  They concluded that differences in culture explains why one company succeeds where another fails within an industry. Consider Apple verses Blackberry, or Target verses Kmart. It wasn’t just the strategy that determined the success of the company, it was the culture.  The ultimate summary statement on the topic may have been Peter Drucker’s familiar saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

However, culture can’t remain stagnant.  As the economy and each industry changes, company culture needs to be constantly adapting.  Unfortunately, companies often wait too long to adjust their culture. Doing so may mean walking away from a current business model, which can be risky—or it may just be that enacting change is viewed as requiring more effort than it’s worth.

In a survey of executives from 91 companies, with revenue greater than $1 billion, across more than 20 industries, Innosight asked: "What is your organization's biggest obstacle to transform your culture in response to market change and disruption?" Forty percent of survey respondents blamed "day-to-day decisions that essentially pay the bill, but undermine our stated strategy to change." It was by far the most prevalent response. The next most popular answer, at 24%, was "lack of a coherent vision for the future."

The consequence of failure to adapt is illustrated by the Fortune 500 list. When initiated in 1955, the average time on the Fortune 500 list was 75 years.  Today it is 14.5. The S & P 500, with a century’s worth of data, shows that in 1958 firms stayed on the list for an average of 61 years.  By 1990 that plummeted to 20 years, and it is forecast to shrink to 14 years by 2026.  If the current trajectory continues, half of the S & P firms will be replaced within 10 years.

What are the options for changing company culture?

Several possibilities exist to change your company culture: hire a new senior executive; embark on a focused campaign, such as increasing innovation; restructure the organization. Into that discussion Jack Welch offered one more possibility, “If you want to change the culture of an organization change the way it develops its leaders.”

It is worth analyzing how changing leadership development could improve company culture. Our research at Zenger Folkman has shown the strong influence leaders have on every measurable business outcome: employee engagement, innovation, intention to stay, productivity, sales, performance, and customer satisfaction. If you use the metaphor of these leaders as the rudder of a large ship moving through the water, Welch’s argument becomes clearer.  Even though the leadership team is a relatively small part of an organization, they have enormous influence on its direction and in short, they shape the culture. Reshaping the rudder of the ship has a profound impact on how fast it turns and the stability of its direction.

Leadership development initiatives

It is not hard to find critics of company-sponsored leadership development.  The cynic argues, “After all the time and money we spend on leadership development, why don’t we have better leaders?”  Some argue that leadership development is often detached from corporate strategy.  Others say that the methods employed don’t have the power to truly change behavior. Still others observe that there is insufficient follow-through and managerial involvement.  Much of this criticism is justified! However, many organizations are working hard to eliminate these barriers to success.

Conversely, there are examples of success.  Some organizations see elevated 360-degree feedback scores for their executives over time.  Many firms have rising employee engagement scores.  Business outcomes, such as customer satisfaction scores, are improving. Such outcomes can be directly tracked back to deliberate leadership development initiatives.

Three ways to improve leadership development

 We strongly believe that leadership development can be significantly improved through the following methods:

• Increasing the involvement of managers in the entire development process.

• Improving the way development is delivered.

• Incorporating development into daily work.

• Ensuring that leadership development is reinforced and supported by all HR processes, including recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and compensation.

• Including a critical mass (one-third to one-half of the target population of leaders).

• Identifying specific outcomes being sought, such as innovation, customer focus, and/or profitability.

From the many possibilities, we’ll highlight three.

1. Involve Managers in the development process. When analyzing data from a study of 61 leaders in the finance industry, we noticed a significant trend. The leaders were asked to describe their manager’s level of support for their development plan, and were then placed into three groups:  unsupportive managers, somewhat supportive managers, and very supportive managers. We then asked these leaders to describe the amount of progress they had made on their development plans, utilizing the question, “I feel that I have moved forward on improving the specific issues on my development plan.” Those that answered “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” to the question were designated as “Improvers.” We found that leaders with very supportive managers were more than twice as likely to feel they had improved than leaders with unsupportive managers.

2. Build development into work. Many assume that there is a major distinction—and to some degree a barrier—between daily work and development. Conscientious employees almost always put their work first, and invariably defer their personal development until they “find time” or “have a break.” The result has been that development nearly always plays second fiddle to job performance.Jobs are a perfect classroom in which to practice and learn how to be a better leader. Daily work and development need to be brought together in closer alignment—they are not competing activities! Development enables us to be better members of the organization and to improve overall performance.

3. Build leadership development concepts, principles and nomenclature into all HR Systems. The competencies selected to be the bedrock for developing your leaders should not be confined to the classroom, or be seen as one-time events. They should be imbedded in the selection, on-boarding, performance management, and compensation of all employees.

Any student of physics knows that a body at rest requires an energetic force to get it moving. Culture is no different. Getting it to move requires a focused effort that must begin with the organization’s leaders

This article originally appeared on Forbes. 

You may know a leader who has a habit of taking credit for others’ accomplishments. Their motive typically is to make themselves look more effective, hardworking, or intelligent than others. The reality is that in most situations at work it’s difficult to accurately assign who deserves credit. Even in situations where a leader does all the work on a new initiative, often their direct reports had to take care of many other assignments to allow the leader the time to produce the new work.

But does taking credit for the work of others, as a strategy to get ahead, help or hinder the leader using that approach?  What is the impact of giving others all the credit?  To evaluate the impact, I gathered Zenger Folkman assessments from over 3,800 leaders and measured their effectiveness using 360-degree evaluations from managers, peers, direct reports, and others. Each person was assessed on their tendency to take credit from or give credit to others. Their effectiveness was also evaluated on 49 additional behaviors. An average of 10 raters evaluated each person’s effectiveness, with each leader receiving feedback from different perspectives.

The graph below demonstrates the impact of taking or giving others credit on a leader’s perceived overall effectiveness. Those leaders whose tendency was to take credit were rated as very ineffective leaders (13^th percentile), while those who tried hard to give the credit to others were rated as some of the most effective leaders (85^th percentile).  Overall leadership effectiveness measures the overall effectiveness of a leader on a broad set of behaviors.  This data demonstrates the dramatic negative effect of taking credit, along with the positive impact of giving credit to others.

Impact Of Taking Credit For Others Work

Very few people doubt the negative impact of taking credit for another person’s work.  The question then arises, are certain behaviors more affected by the taking—or giving—of credit? The graph below shows the effectiveness ratings for the top 10 behaviors most affected, for leaders who were rated the lowest in taking credit (bottom 10%) versus those who were rated the highest in giving credit (top 10%). As you read through the list of behaviors, the negative impact of taking credit for others’ work is clear.  However, the focus should be on the extraordinary value that comes from giving others all the credit. Many people underestimate the tremendous impact that comes from making an effort to give credit to others.

This graph clearly demonstrates the positive value created when all the credit is given to others. While those who assume that by taking credit for others’ work they are getting ahead at work may find that it creates a small temporary advantage for them, the negative impact it creates is like a tsunami wave—eventually it will come back and drown them.

Giving Others All The Credit Gives Back Tenfold

This data reflects the true impact of what happens when leaders work hard to give credit to others. The reality is, when a leader makes another person look good, it makes them look good too. The analysis on this data strongly suggests that by giving others credit a leader will be perceived in the following ways: more effective in their overall leadership effectiveness, fairer, committed to help others succeed, does what is best for the company, walks their talk, accepts responsibility, is trusted, lives their principles and core values, and values diversity.

If a leader sets a goal to recognize others for their accomplishments, and looks for opportunities to make others look good, their own effectives will improve. Your motto should be, “Don’t take credit for anything—give it all away.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes. 

At a recent event I asked the audience, “Which is easier, giving positive feedback or negative?” The majority indicated that it was much easier to deliver positive feedback. One participant commented, “It’s not difficult to tell someone they are doing a good job but it’s much harder to say, ‘You really messed up!’”

Using a series of psychometrically valid items, my colleague Jack Zenger and I created a self-assessment that measured a leader’s preference for giving or avoiding the two basic kinds of feedback. Positive feedback is defined as praise and reinforcement.  Negative feedback is corrective and points out errors or missed opportunities.

For this study we gathered a global sample of 8,671 leaders. The self-assessment reveals that 56% of the leaders had a stronger preference for giving negative feedback, 31% preferred giving positive feedback, and 12 were equal in their preference. These results stimulated the question, “Why do leaders prefer giving negative feedback despite describing it as more difficult to give than positive feedback?”

To take this assessment click HERE.

Attitudes And Assumptions

We then asked if the best managers are those who deliver more praise and recognition than negative feedback. Only 33% of leaders who preferred giving negative feedback agreed with the statement, compared to 77% of those that preferred giving positive feedback:

Many leaders assume that the most effective leaders are those that give people the tough, difficult feedback, while those who lavish praise and recognition are weak and ineffective leaders. This is like the assumption at universities that the best professors are those that give very few “A” grades and fail a high percentage of students.  Are those professors really the best teachers? Are managers who give more negative feedback than positive really the best managers?

To test this assumption, we combined the results from our self-assessment of feedback preferences with 360-degree evaluations from managers, peers, direct reports, and others around their perceptions of a leader’s effectiveness.  The outcome measure we looked at was the overall leadership effectiveness rating, which combines results from competencies that predict leadership success.

Combining the databases gave us 588 leaders where we had results for both assessments.  Leaders preferring to give negative feedback had an overall effectiveness rating at the 35th percentile, while those preferring to give positive feedback were at the 47th percentile. We performed a t-test and determined the difference between the two groups was highly statistically significant (t value = 3.395, Sig. 0.001). It turns out the best leaders are those that prefer to give positive feedback.

Why are managers who give more negative feedback rated so poorly?

The data I have collected with Zenger Folkman indicates that when leaders prefer giving negative feedback, it conveys a lack of confidence in their colleagues and a primary focus on what employees might do wrong. These managers are perceived as quick to criticize and very slow to praise. This impacts relationships, trust, and integrity, and indicates that the manager does not have others’ best interest at heart.

Why do some people find it difficult to give positive feedback?

Some leaders are uncomfortable receiving positive feedback, which can result in them not giving positive feedback to others. Many leaders, when given the choice between positive and negative feedback, feel that the negative feedback will be more helpful. However, 71% of people say that they appreciate recognition and praise for a job well done. Many leaders fail to recognize the power of positive feedback and its benefit in motivating others. One concern is that if a leader provides too much positive feedback, the negative feedback will be ignored when delivered. However, our research shows that leaders who have a strong preference for giving positive feedback are rated significantly higher on their ability to “Provide honest feedback in a helpful way.”

I’m not suggesting that managers avoid giving negative feedback, but when there is more positive feedback than negative, direct reports believe that a manager is trying to help them and they are more likely to accept and appreciate negative feedback. In fact, 93% of 8,542 respondents agree that “Negative feedback, if delivered appropriately, is effective at improving performance.

Factors that increase the amount of positive feedback

Looking at Zenger Folkman’s datasets, I discovered four behaviors that enabled leaders to provide more positive feedback.  Improvement on a few of these behaviors will help increase your ability to provide positive feedback.

1. Leaders who are interested in their own development tend to give more positive feedback to others. They have an improve mentality where they believe that because they can improve, others can as well. Leaders who are concerned about their own development tend to ask for feedback and are always open to ideas and suggestions.

2. Consideration for Others. There is a strong correlation between leaders who have a high concern for others and their effectiveness at giving positive feedback. When a leader is focused on negative feedback they are more likely to judge and evaluate others. Leaders who show consideration for others show they want the best for them.

3. Desire to Develop Others. Those who give more positive feedback believe that talent and skills are dynamic and are confident that people can grow and learn new skills. They look for and support development activities for others.

4. Strong Desire to Pull more than Push. Most leaders learn first about push motivation: to set deadlines, to help others be accountable, and to push others to accomplish difficult goals. Those who provide more positive feedback also know how to pull. They get others excited about goals and objectives, and inspire others to do more. They recognize others regularly, reward high performance, and are generous with their praise.

Bottom Line

Our data provides compelling evidence that when leaders give more positive feedback than negative, they are perceived as more effective leaders. If you think you have developed a habit of focusing on what people do wrong rather than what they do right, try keeping track. Continue to identify problems and illuminate weaknesses, but provide more honest praise when things go well, recognize effort, and thank others for contributions. If you can make this change, you will notice a positive difference in yourself and in others.

This article originally appeared on Forbes. 

How important is a leader’s commitment to creating a culture of inclusion?  How important is it that leader’s embrace and deliberately act to create a diverse organization?

In a recent Harvard Business Review article my colleague Joe Folkman and I shared our analysis of assessments from over 1.5 million raters describing 122,000 leaders from data collected over the last decade.  We were searching for new competencies that may have become more relevant and critical for leaders today than they had been in the past.  One of the most noteworthy competencies to emerge was the ability to value diversity and practice inclusive behavior.

Leaders were assessed on this capability through 360-degree feedback, collected from their manager, peers, direct reports and others with whom they worked.  Two of the items used to evaluate the effectiveness of leaders on this competency were:

• “Takes initiative to support and include people of different backgrounds and perspectives.”

• “Actively builds a climate of trust, appreciation and openness to differences in thoughts, styles and backgrounds.”

Note that the items evaluate a leader’s ability to create an inclusive environment.  The items take a broader view of diversity than merely  gender or race; and asked about diversity in background, perspectives, thoughts and styles.

(While our general conclusions come from our global database describing this competency, we  will  highlight results from one large global company.  The results shown below are based on data regarding over 4,000 leaders from that organization.)

Impact Of Valuing Diversity

We first sought to answer the question regarding the value and importance of this competency.  We can recall the time in years past when many saw this as just a “nice to have capability.” Is this now a critical competency that will impact the effectiveness and future success of a leader?  To answer that question objectively, we turned to the data.

In our first analysis, we conducted a “differentiation analysis” examining which behaviors would most effectively separate the best from the worst leaders.  We found that the two “diversity and inclusion” items were among the top 30 items.

We then analyzed the correlation between how a leader was rated on the diversity competency and their rating of their overall leadership effectiveness. The graph below shows the results.  Note that leaders who were rated very poorly on valuing diversity and inclusion were only rated at the 15^th percentile on their overall leadership effectiveness.  Those who were rated in the top 10% on those two items were on average rated at the 79^th percentile. This confirmed the strong correlation between a leader’s perceived overall effectiveness and their perceived inclusive behavior and actions that signaled that they valued diversity.

It appears that displaying inclusive behavior and being perceived as valuing diversity is a key factor in elevating a leader’s overall perceived effectiveness.

Differences By Management Level, Gender And Ethnicity

Since the impact of valuing diversity and practicing inclusion was so significant, we were interested in conducting a demographic analysis of the data to understand which groups were more effective in practicing inclusion and valuing diversity.  We had demographic data on 1,628 of the leaders.  (It should be noted that this organization had an excellent track record around their practice of valuing diversity and practicing inclusion.)

In the demographic analysis, we compared the executive population of the more senior leaders to managers and supervisors.  We further analyzed the data by gender.  Not surprisingly, we found  that the executives and senior leader were rated significantly higher on their ability to value diversity and practice inclusion than were the middle managers and supervisors.

There were also absolute differences between males and females, but those differences were not statistically significant.  Repeatedly we have seen how prejudicial behavior by a senior executive can have an extremely negative impact on the culture of an organization.  Ensuring that senior leaders are perceived as being effective at valuing diversity and inclusion is a key factor today in organizational success.V

In this third analysis, we analyzed ratings of practicing inclusion by management level and by ethnicity.  We do not believe that these results are representative of any global or national trends but the analysis did bring out three especially important points.

1. Because a leadership team is itself diverse does not necessarily mean that they will be effective at valuing diversity and practicing inclusion. Valuing diversity is an attitude and mindset.  Practicing inclusion involves a set of behaviors that can be developed in leaders.  They are not automatically inherited simply because their current group is diverse.One of the authors was coaching a leader who was responsible for building the Japanese division of a global company and making it extremely successful.  After looking at his rating on valuing diversity the author thought, “There must be some mistake in the data,” because of the very low ratings.  Inquiring if the leader thought that this was an error the leader responded by say, “Oh no, it’s perfectly accurate. I have spent the last 10 years forcing our organization to conform to the Japanese culture and approach. I have been very inflexible.”

2. Self-perceptions in this arena are not highly accurate. Many leaders, especially the less effective ones, assume they are better at valuing diversity and practicing inclusion than they truly are. Conversely, those who are among the most effective leaders rate themselves as being less effective than others rate them.  It could be argued that individual leaders may know best about what’s in their heart, but others are in a far better position to objectively evaluate whether and how they practice inclusion in their day-to-day work.

3. Ideally senior leaders serve as role models and lead the way. If their behavior fails to convey valuing diversity and advocating inclusion then their direct reports will often emulate their leader. They absorb their attitudes and mimic their behavior.

Valuing Diversity And Practicing Inclusion Are Critical

The most progressive organizations throughout the world recognize the importance of this competency in their leaders.  Global organizations know this is a strategic advantage. Leaders who are less ineffective at this create significant problems that will haunt them and their organizations.   Fortunately, awareness and honest feedback bring change.  Intolerance and prejudice are not set in concrete, but can be modified.  Inclusive behavior along with valuing diversity can be developed.

This article originally appeared on Forbes. 

Many organizations today are making concerted efforts to become not only more demographically diverse but also more inclusive and welcoming of difference. The latter is much harder to measure than the former. It’s not that hard to count the percentage of women or people of color in your organization, but how can you tell if leaders in your organization are genuinely welcoming? Do leaders know if they are as welcoming as they think they are?

To explore this question, we analyzed one large organization with an excellent track record of hiring and promoting diverse candidates and a reputation for inclusion. This organization had hired us to administer 360-degree feedback assessments for roughly 4,000 leaders, and agreed to let us use that data for this analysis.

Leaders Aren’t Great Judges of Their Own Inclusiveness

We focused on two items that have stood out to us in over 10 years of administering 360-degree assessments with over 1.5 million raters describing 122,000 leaders:

• “Takes initiative to support and include people of different backgrounds and perspectives”
• “Actively builds a climate of trust, appreciation, and openness to differences in thoughts, styles and backgrounds”

When we compared leaders’ self-ratings with their ratings by bosses, peers, and subordinates, what we found was that many leaders assume they are better at valuing diversity than they actually are.

The graph below shows the senior leaders’ self-ratings and their ratings by direct reports.

What is clear in this graph is that leaders who are the worst at valuing diversity are more likely to overrate their effectiveness, and leaders who are the most effective tend to underrate their effectiveness. The implications of this data are: leaders are not good judges of their own effectiveness on valuing diversity; and those leaders who are poorest fail to see the problem, while those who are the best don’t realize their skill and capability.

This phenomenon is not limited to inclusiveness — the Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, explains that unskilled people are particularly prone to thinking they are more skilled than they are. Conversely, our research has found that many of the most skilled leaders are too humble and modest in assessing their strengths.

Nonetheless, we find this result particularly disturbing when we see it in the context of inclusivity. While a person’s effectiveness with any skill always needs to be based on the evaluations of others, rather than self-perception, it seems especially true in this case. Inclusivity is particularly in the eye of the beholder. You might intend to be inclusive, and even think you are inclusive, but your impact on others might be very different.

Inclusiveness and Effectiveness Track Together

Some leaders might be tempted to brush aside inclusivity as “political correctness” or “touchy-feely stuff.” But those leaders should pay particular attention to our next finding: a strong correlation between perceptions of inclusivity and overall leadership effectiveness.

Leaders who were rated very poorly on valuing diversity and inclusion were rated in only the 15th percentile for their overall leadership effectiveness, while those who were rated in the top 10% of those two items were rated in the 79th percentile.

This result does not surprise us. Repeatedly, we have seen how prejudicial behavior by a senior executive can have an extremely negative impact on the culture of an organization. Leaders who are ineffective at this create significant problems that will haunt them.

Senior Leaders Are More Inclusive

Using demographic data on 1,628 of the leaders, we conducted an analysis to see whether senior leaders or junior managers are seen as more inclusive.

When we compared the executive population of the more senior leaders with middle managers and junior supervisors, we found that the executives and senior leaders were rated significantly higher on their ability to value diversity and practice inclusion.

This might come as a surprise to some — senior executives are often assumed to be older, stodgier, and less innovative than younger, more junior leaders — but it did not surprise us. In many of our other studies, we have found that senior executives have accumulated more leadership and managerial skill than junior managers. Since inclusivity is closely associated with overall effectiveness in our results, it does not surprise us to learn that the more experienced, higher-ranking leaders are more competent on both. Moreover, it’s worth remembering that this is an organization that explicitly values diversity and inclusion, so it’s not surprising that it would promote people who are skilled at fostering both.

When we looked at senior leaders and lower-level managers by gender, we found that women were slightly more inclusive than men, but these differences were not statistically significant.

Valuing diversity is an attitude and mindset. Practicing inclusion involves a set of behaviors that can be developed in leaders. Our research has shown that self-perceptions in this arena are not highly accurate. While it could be argued that individual leaders may best know what’s in their hearts, others are in a far better position to objectively evaluate whether and how they practice inclusion in their day-to-day work.