Managing Upwards

What comes to mind when you hear the the term "managing", is how to manage your subordinates. While, managing subordinates is the focus, most of the time, you should not ignore managing upwards. In the everchanging business environment and the re-organisations of management structures, managing yourself to work with your boss, is becoming even more critical. In the book "It Takes Two" Gene Boccialetti talks about three dimensions that make up a person's style.By knowing your style and your boss's style, you can manage yourself in the authority relationship. More important is to know the circumstances when your style works best, and when it is likely to fail you.

Boccialetti identifies three main factors that make up subordinate style: Deference, Distance and Divergence.

Deference asks the question: How important is it, that I hold onto a large share of power in relationship to my boss and try to exert influence in decision making?

Managers who are low in deference tend to push back, resist and counter argue everything that their bosses say. They want a large say in problem solving and decision making. They tend to be uncomfortable with implementing decisions that they did not have a hand in making, particularly where the reasoning behind the decision is unclear to them. They tend to thrust their own judgements and ideas at least, as much as they do the boss's. People with high educational credentials are generally associated with lower deference to authority. A common spectacle in the high technology R&D organisations. A common characteristic of low deference orientation is a discomfort with many of the customary trappings of authority, such as status symbols and other special privileges. In their view, deference means loss of dignity; the act of deference is equated with playing tactics and even so called kissing up.

Managers who are high in deference are content to let their bosses sort out priorities and solve problems. They may act as good soldiers and prefer to have their impact through action and implementation. They like the boss to be clear and provide structure and guidance.High deference managers are disproportionately represented in engineering, finance and accounting.



Distance asks the question: How important is it that I establish a person-to-person, not just a role-to-role, relationship with my bosses?

A manager who is oriented to a more personal relationship has a low-distance style.Such a manager believes that a boss and subordinate should establish more personal contact and engage in more personal disclosure in the course of business together. They argue that the such personal contact improves decision making, performance, and motivation. Having close relationship with the boss, gives them the feeling of confidence and security that the boss will be interested in their own development and advancement.People from human resources, sales and marketing are more oriented to personalizing relationships than those in accounting and engineering.



On the other hand, managers who prefer to maintain a more business-like or arm's-length approach to relationship, have a high-distance style. They believe that more work can be done because less time is consumed talking about things that are not immediately and obviously relevant, to the task at hand. They also feel less political vulnerability in this orientation, as there is less chance that personal information might be used against them.

Divergence asks the question: How important is it for me to protect myself? Should I assume our goals are aligned, our methods are alike, and my boss is my ally, not my competitor or even my adversary?

Subordinate managers with an orientation to low divergence assume there is a close alignment between themselves and their bosses over legitimate goals and the means for achieving those goals. The boss is seen as an ally who can be trusted.Many low-divergence subordinates see the big decisions being made at higher organisational levels and accept that their primary contributions are made by joining others to operationalise decisions.Government agencies, hospitals, military rank lowest in divergence.

Subordinate managers with an orientation to high divergence, on the other hand, tend to see the boss as a competitor or adversary and are likely to mistrust the boss.They see the relation to authority as one that is very likely to involve divergence over goals and over the means for achieving them. Rather than trying to directly influence the boss, high-divergence managers would generally chose other options like sabotaging thieir bosses' directives, independent action, finding allies and forming a coalition, leaving the organisation, or blowing the whistle.

Deference, Distance, and Divergence are the factors that make up subordinate style, but they do not occur in isolation. The varied degrees of each of these factors, combined in different ways, result in an individual style. You have to assess your style based on the above factors.



To be effective in managing upwards, you have to develop flexibility in your approach. You have to recognise the situation that would be better handled with a style, different from your usual and accustomed approach. If you are a person with low deference, you need to pay special attention to crisis situations. This is no time to push back and seek influence. It is time for action. Similarly, if you are a person with low distance style and realise confidences are not respected and you have clear data to support it, then be careful and selective in whom you confide.

Find out what your boss thinks of your effectiveness, as a pair. Find out how your boss judges this effectiveness. Find out how your boss sees you, on each of the three factors.Does your boss's view differ from your view of yourself? If so, find out why? Then, develop a plan to bring underused traits into play - if you lean towards accomodating the boss, then work at being more inner-directed - pushing for influence. Establish clear unambiguous behavioral indicators and monitor it.

Continually monitor, get feedback, adjust, evaluate and monitor again until new, variable patterns become reflexive and shifting your orientation becomes second nature.

Happy reading and good luck in identifying your style and managing upwards.

-Ram

The Effect of Expectation

For the past two weeks I was on travel and then celebrating Diwali, that I missed out on blogging. Having made decent progress on blogging this year, I feel an inherent pressure to continue blogging every week. BTW the visitor counter on my blog page rolled over 1000, a small milestone met. I imagine readers expecting more blogs. So what does expectation do to a person? How can expectation be used as a positive force? In this blog, I explore the effects of expectation. Yet again, I take a chapter from the book "Predictably Irrational" to emphasise this theme.


Expectation is a mighty power indeed—so much so that a doctor can take an inert pill and tell a patient that it is a powerful drug, and the patient will react as though the actual drug has been taken. This well-documented phenomenon is called the placebo effect. It might also be called the "expectation effect". Back in Hyderabad, we have a family doctor who has pills filled in different plastic bottles. All these bottles looked alike. Even the pills were white in color. Some of the bottles contained pills of different sizes. For any illness we report, we get some white pills from one of these bottles. Within a few days, we were cured. Sometimes, what I wonder is whether these pills actually cure our illness, or is it our expectation that the doctor is good and he can cure any illness. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that the placebo effect was playing a big role in our getting cured.



Whenever we start something believing that it would be good ,it generally is. When we think it will be bad, it will be bad. Dan Ariely in the book "Predictably Irrational" shares the experiment he and his colleagues carried out. They did a beer experiment. They told a set of MIT students the presence of vinegar in the beer before they tasted the brew. To the other set they told about the presence of vinegar after the brew was tasted. As it turned out, the students who found about the vinegar after drinking the beer liked the beer much better than those who were told about the vinegar up front.Telling the participants about the vinegar at the outset actually reshaped their sensory perceptions to align with this knowledge and accordingly influenced their expectations.

A profound and irrefutable law of life is that what is expected, tends to be realized. It happens all the time. The most famous experiment about this in education happened in the '60's in San Francisco and you can read about it in "Pygmalion in the Classroom." In that study, a normal distribution of students increased their IQ's by 15 to 30 points in one year simply because the teachers believed they were the best teachers and that they were given the best students (neither of which was true).Expectations drive so much of what happens around us.


Expectation can influence nearly every aspect of our life. The other evening at a team dinner,given by my boss,I was intrigued by the exotic description - mint with lemon and sprite, of a mocktail. I ordered it in anticipation of its taste and when it arrived, I thoroughly enjoyed it. My colleague who just repeated my order without reading, did not enjoy it. Now you know why most of the upscale resturants have fancy names on their menus and give detailed exotic descriptions. They can effectively influence the taste of the customers with this pre-knowledge.

Dan explains experiments done by neuroscientists to compare consumer's preference to Coke or Pepsi. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. It turned out that the brain activation of the participants was different depending on whether the name of the drink was revealed or not.The dorsolateral aspect of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, an area involved in higher human brain functions like higher-order cognitions and ideas, was also activated. This should be good news to any advertisement agency because it means that the bright red can, swirling script and myriad ad messages, that have come down over the years, are as much responsible for our love of Coke as the brown bubbly stuff itself.

Expectations also shape stereotypes. This is why we have the expectation that an elderly person will need help using computers, or a student in IIT will be intelligent, or a succesful businessman has to be a Gujarati, or the kirana stores are run only my marwadis etc. One can see these stereotypes, even at work. Consider, a team that is aggressive, innovative and delivering consistent results. The expectation is that, any person joining the group will already have the DNA of this group.



Sam Walton said "High expectations are the key to everything". When you lead a team, set high expectations for the team. The team will find ways to meet them. My new boss says that he never apologises for setting a high bar for his team. I found this statement very profound. The more successful the team becomes, the more they believe in themselves.They then become better at triggering the anticipated positive result of whatever event they are trying to bring about.Along with the team, as you grow into a better person, better begets better and you do indeed become better and better.



Karen Stephens on parenting exchange says :Clear expectations help kids behave. Be specific about expectations. Focus on what children can do, rather than what they can't do. Give children reasons for expectations. Communicate expectations, offer choices, and then move on without haggling. High expectations move children forward, even if they don't always succeed.

So never underestimate the power of your expectations—on the people around you—or on yourself! Raise the bar.

Michael Jordan quotes "You have to expect things of yourselves before you can do them".

Happy Reading

Mindsets - Nature vs Nurture

I am currently reading the book called “Mindset – The New Psychology of Success” by Carol Dweck. I was so influenced reading just the first few chapters, that I decided to share the learnings even before I completed the book. The author is a leading expert in motivation and personality psychology. Dweck has found that everyone has one of the two basic mindsets Fixed or Growth mindset. If you have the fixed mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone – either you have them or you don’t. You must prove yourself over and over again, trying to look smart and talented, at all costs. This is the path of stagnation. However if you have a growth mindset, you know that talents can be developed and that great abilities are built over time. This is the path of opportunity – and success.

People with fixed mindsets believe their qualities are carved in stone. This mindset unfolds as early as childhood. Sometimes this mindset is stamped in by teachers, in the middle school, who believed that the student’s IQ score told the whole story about them. These students were given the best of the chores thereby creating a mindset in which everyone in the class has one consuming goal – look smart, don’t’ look dumb. Every situation calls for confirmation of their intelligence, personality or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or loser?

There’s another mindset, in which the traits are not simply a hand that you’re dealt and have to live with, rather they are just the starting point for development. The growth mindset is based on the belief that, your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. People may start with different temperaments and aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take you the rest of the way. For people with growth mindset it is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.



People with fixed mindsets believe that they have to be smart to be successful. They always want to be seen as smart people. When a challenging opportunity arises they are afraid of not being smart enough for it. They reject the golden opportunity, of learning from the challenge. On the other hand, for people with growth mindset success is about stretching themselves and becoming better. They believe that intelligence is something you have to work for, it isn’t just given to you. Believing that success is about learning, the people with growth mindset seize the opportunities that come their way.

People with fixed mindset thrive when things are safely within their grasp. If things get too challenging – when they’re not feeling smart or talented- they lose interest. They want to avoid making mistakes and hence shy away from tougher challenges. People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch. They think: If you only go through life doing stuff that’s easy, shame on you.

For people with fixed mindset it’s not enough just to succeed. It’s not enough to be smart and talented. They have to be pretty flawless. They do not believe in learning as they think their abilities will keep them in good stead. They opt for success over growth. They want to prove that they’re special. Tennis star John McEnroe had a fixed mindset. He believed that talent was all. He did not thrive on challenge.When the going got rough, he often folded. As a result, by his own admission, he did not fulfill his potential. For people with growth mindset it is not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress. These people believe that “Becoming is better than being”. Michael Jordan – growth-minded athlete par excellence- is a man whose greatness is regularly proclaimed by the world. Only he knew how hard he had worked to develop his abilities. He was a person who had struggled and grown, not a person who was inherently better than others. The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they are the best.



With fixed mindset, people see failure not as an action – 'I failed'- but as an identity – 'I am a failure'. Failure means you lack competence or potential. Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define the person. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from. If you make a mistake, you have to make it right. You aren’t a failure until you start to blame. You will be still in the process of learning from your mistakes until you begin to deny them.

From the point of view of the fixed mindset, effort is only for people with deficiencies. In their view, effort is for those who don’t have the ability. They tell us, “If you have to work at something, you must not be good at it." In the growth mindset, it’s almost inconceivable to want something badly, to think you have a chance to achieve it, and then, do nothing about it. These people give their best effort for the things they value.

People with fixed mindset are more depressed than people with growth mind-set. The more depressed they felt, the more they let things go, the less action they took to solve their problems. With the growth mindset people, the more depressed people felt, the more they took action to confront their problems, and the more they kept up with their lives.

Mindsets are an important part of your personality. Mindsets are just beliefs. They are powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind. Just by knowing about the two mindsets, you can start thinking and reacting in new ways. Try to catch yourself when you are in the throes of the fixed mindset and try to switch into growth mindset. Believe that talents can be developed that allows to fulfill one’s potential. Value what you do more than getting fixated on the outcome. Remember failure is a better teacher than success is. It is an action not a trait. Be open to criticism and focus on learning and improving.

Mozart laboured for more than ten years before he produced any work that we admire today. Prior to that his compositions were not that original or interesting. Often they were patched-together chunks taken from other composers.

Happy Learning,

-Ram