Leadership in your midst: tapping the hidden strengths of minority executives

All companies value leadership-some of them enough to invest dearly in cultivating it. But few management teams seem to value one engine of leadership development that is right under their noses, churning out the kind of talent they need most. It's the complicated, overburdened but very rich lives of their minority managers. Minority professionals-particularly women of color-are called upon inordinately to lend their skills and guidance to activities outside their jobs. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who heads the Center for Work-Life Policy, and her coauthors, Carolyn Buck Luce of Ernst & Young and Cornel West of Princeton, present new research on the extent to which minority professionals take on community service and other responsibilities outside the workplace and more than their share of recruiting, mentoring, and committee work within the workplace. These invisible lives, argue the authors, can be a source of competitive strength if companies can learn to recognize and further cultivate the cultural capital they represent. But it's hard to convince minority professionals that their employer respects and values their off-hours responsibilities. A lack of trust keeps many people from revealing much about their personal lives. The authors outline four ways companies can leverage hidden skills: Develop a new level of awareness of minority professionals' invisible lives; appreciate the outsize burdens these professionals carry and try to lighten them; build trust by putting teeth into diversity goals; and, to finish the job of leadership development, help minorities reflect on their off-hours experiences, extract and generalize the lessons, and apply what's been learned in other settings.     

Executive women and the myth of having it all

When it comes to having a high-powered career and a family, the painful truth is that women in the United States don't "have it all." At midlife, in fact, at least a third of the country's high-achieving women--a category that includes high wage earners across a variety of professions--do not have children. For many, this wasn't a conscious choice: Indeed, most yearn for motherhood. So finds economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who recently fielded a nationwide survey to explore the professional and private lives of highly educated and high-earning women. Other findings are similarly disturbing. Many of these women who are raising children have suffered insurmountable career setbacks. In addition, today's young women will likely experience even starker trade-offs. In general, Hewlett's data show that, for too many women, the demands of ambitious careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and the difficulties of conceiving later in life undermine the possibility of combining high-level work with family. By contrast, Hewlett's research reveals that high-achieving men continue to "have it all." Of the men she surveyed, 79% report wanting children, and 75% have them. Indeed, the more successful the man, the more likely he is to have a spouse and children. The opposite holds true for women, particularly the highest-achieving women in Hewlett's survey: At age 40, 49% of these ultra-achievers are childless, while 19% of their male peers are. The facts and figures are bleak but, the author contends, could be liberating if they spur action. Hewlett urges lawmakers and corporations to establish policies that support working parents. But recognizing that changes won't happen overnight, she exhorts young women to be more deliberate about their career and family choices.     

Perceptions of master of accountancy graduates concerning their job search and employment experiences with public accounting firms

The public accounting profession has been calling for a 150-hour education requirement for new entrants to the profession for over two decades. The rationale for increasing the entry-level education requirement is that since the business world is more dynamic and complex than ever before, new professionals need broader knowledge and skills to be able to cope. Graduates of master of accountancy (MSA) programs would appear to be the type of students that public accounting firms are seeking since they often have intellectual breadth gained through undergraduate degrees in areas other than accountancy, current technical competence in accountancy, and frequently have work experience. This paper reports the results of a study undertaken to determine the perceptions of MSA graduates concerning: (1) how recruiters from public accounting firms viewed their non-accounting academic backgrounds and work experience; (2) how well prepared they were for their first jobs in public accounting as compared to traditional undergraduate accounting majors; and (3) any bias they experienced during the hiring process. The results of this study indicate that although a majority of the respondents who desired careers in public accounting were able to secure jobs in the field, they believed it was harder for them to get jobs in public accounting than their peers with just undergraduate degrees. The majority did not feel that public accounting firms viewed their non-accounting academic backgrounds and work experience favorably. Although more than half believed that they were paid more than their peers who held only undergraduate degrees, less than half felt that they were given more responsibility. The results also indicate that older MSA graduates believed that they were subject to age bias during the interview process.     

Creativity under the gun

If you're like most managers, you've worked with people who swear they do their most creative work under tight deadlines. You may use pressure as a management technique, believing it will spur people on to great leaps of insight. You may even manage yourself this way. If so, are you right? Not necessarily, these researchers say. There are instances where ingenuity flourishes under extreme time pressure--for instance, a NASA team within hours comes up with a primitive but effective fix for the failing air filtration system aboard Apollo 13. But when creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed, the authors say. They recently took a close look at how people experience time pressure, collecting and analyzing more than 9,000 daily diary entries from individuals who were working on projects that required high levels of creativity and measuring their ability to innovate under varying levels of time pressure. The authors describe common characteristics of time pressure and outline four working environments under which creativity may or may not flourish. High-pressure days that still yield creativity are full of focus and meaningful urgency--people feel like they are on a mission. High-pressure days that yield no creativity lack such focus--people feel like they are on a treadmill, forced to switch gears often. On low-pressure days that yield creativity, people feel like they are on an expedition--exploring ideas rather than just identifying problems. And on low-pressure days that yield no creative thinking, people work on autopilot--doing their jobs without engaging too deeply. Managers should avoid extreme time pressure when possible; after all, complex cognitive processing takes time. For when they can't, the authors suggest ways to mollify its effects.     

Job sculpting: the art of retaining your best people

Hiring good people is tough, but keeping them can be even tougher. The professionals streaming out of today's MBA programs are so well educated and achievement oriented that they could do well in virtually any job. But will they stay? According to noted career experts Timothy Butler and James Waldroop, only if their jobs fit their deeply embedded life interests--that is, their long-held, emotionally driven passions. Butler and Waldroop identify the eight different life interests of people drawn to business careers and introduce the concept of job sculpting, the art of matching people to jobs that resonate with the activities that make them truly happy. Managers don't need special training to job sculpt, but they do need to listen more carefully when employees describe what they like and dislike about their jobs. Once managers and employees have discussed deeply embedded life interests--ideally, during employee performance reviews--they can work together to customize future work assignments. In some cases, that may mean simply adding another assignment to existing responsibilities. In other cases, it may require moving that employee to a new position altogether. Skills can be stretched in many directions, but if they are not going in the right direction--one that is congruent with deeply embedded life interests--employees are at risk of becoming dissatisfied and uncommitted. And in an economy where a company's most important asset is the knowledge, energy, and loyalty of its people, that's a large risk to take.     

Off-ramps and on-ramps: keeping talented women on the road to success

Most professional women step off the career fast track at some point. With children to raise, elderly parents to care for, and other pulls on their time, these women are confronted with one off-ramp after another. When they feel pushed at the same time by long hours and unsatisfying work, the decision to leave becomes even easier. But woe to the woman who intends for that exit to be temporary. The on-ramps for professional women to get back on track are few and far between, the authors confirm. Their new survey research reveals for the first time the extent of the problem--what percentage of highly qualified women leave work and for how long, what obstacles they face coming back, and what price they pay for their time-outs. And what are the implications for corporate America? One thing at least seems clear: As market and economic factors align in ways guaranteed to make talent constraints and skill shortages huge issues again, employers must learn to reverse this brain drain. Like it or not, large numbers of highly qualified, committed women need to take time out of the workplace. The trick is to help them maintain connections that will allow them to reenter the workforce without being marginalized for the rest of their lives. Strategies for building such connections include creating reduced-hour jobs, providing flexibility in the workday and in the arc of a career, removing the stigma of taking time off, refusing to burn bridges, offering outlets for altruism, and nurturing women's ambition.     

In praise of hierarchy

Hierarchy has not had its day. After 3,000 years as the preferred structure for large organizations, managerial hierarchy is still the most natural and effective organizational form that a big company can employ. Now, as in the past, the key to organizational success is individual accountability, and hierarchy preserves unambiguous accountability for getting work done. Unfortunately, hierarchy is widely misunderstood and abused. Pay grades are confused with real layers of responsibility, for example, and incompetent bosses abound. As a result, many experts now urge us to adopt group-oriented or "flat" structures. But groups are never held accountable as groups for what they do or fail to do, and groups don't have careers. The proper use of hierarchy derives from the nature of work. As organizational tasks range from simple to very complex, there are sharp jumps in the level of difficulty and responsibility. Surprisingly, people in hundreds of companies in dozens of countries agree on where these jumps take place. They are tied to an objective measure-the time span of the longest task or program assigned to each managerial role-and they occur at 3 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years. As the time span increases, so does the level of experience, knowledge, and mental stamina required to do the work. This increasing level of mental capacity lets companies put people in jobs they can do, it allows managers to add value to the work of their subordinates, it creates hierarchical layers acceptable to everyone in the organization, and it allows employees to be evaluated by people they accept as organizational superiors. Best of all, understanding hierarchy allows organizations to set up hierarchies with no more than seven layers-often fewer-and to know what the structure is good for and how it ought to perform.     

Selling the brand inside

When you think of marketing, chances are your mind goes right to your customers--how can you persuade more people to buy whatever it is you sell? But there's another "market" that's equally important: your employees. Author Colin Mitchell argues that executives by and large ignore this critical internal audience when developing and executing branding campaigns. As a result, employees end up undermining the expectations set by the company's advertising--either because they don't understand what the ads have promised or because they don't believe in the brand and feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward the company. Mitchell offers three principles for executing internal branding campaigns--techniques executives can use to make sure employees understand, embrace, and "live" the brand vision companies are selling to the public. First, he says, companies need to market to employees at times when the company is experiencing a fundamental challenge or change, times when employees are seeking direction and are relatively receptive to new initiatives. Second, companies must link their internal and external marketing campaigns; employees should hear the same messages that are being sent to the market-place. And third, internal branding campaigns should bring the brand alive for employees, creating an emotional connection to the company that transcends any one experience. Internal campaigns should introduce and explain the brand messages in new and attention-grabbing ways and then reinforce those messages by weaving them into the fabric of the company. It is a fact of business, writes Mitchell, that if employees do not care about or understand their company's brands, they will ultimately weaken their organizations. It's up to top executives, he says, to give them a reason to care.     

Healthcare professionals’ perceptions of risk in the context of genetic testing for the prediction of chronic disease: a qualitative metasynthesis

Advances in genomic technologies and a growing trend towards stratified and preventive approaches to medicine mean that increasing numbers of individuals may have access to information about their genetic makeup, and their risk of developing diseases. This is likely to impact on healthcare professionals involved in the delivery of genetic tests, or in supporting patients who are affected by a disease with a genetic risk factor. It is therefore important to understand healthcare professionals’ perceptions about providing these services, and how they feel about communicating information about genetic risk to patients. This paper provides a systematic review and metasynthesis of qualitative research exploring healthcare professionals’ perceptions of genetic risk in the context of predictive genetic testing for chronic disease. Healthcare professionals expressed a range of reservations about the utility of predictive testing in this context. Professionals judged patients’ understanding of risk information to be limited and subject to bias and a range of sociocultural influences. Concerns about the psychosocial impact of genetic risk information were frequently cited, both in relation to individual patients and the wider impact on their families and communities. The need for provision of multidisciplinary support was described. The concept of responsibility was also an important theme. Healthcare professionals recognized the responsibility that accompanies risk knowledge, and that ultimately this responsibility lies with the patient, not the provider. Our analysis suggests that professionals’ evaluation of the utility of predictive genetic testing is influenced not only by resource deficits, but may also be interpreted as a response to challenging ethical and social issues associated with genetic risk, that are not well aligned with current medical practice.     

Managing Middlescence

They make up more than half your workforce. They work longer hours than anyone else in your company. From their ranks come most of your top managers. They're your midcareer employees, the solid citizens between the ages of 35 and 55 whom you bank on for their loyalty and commitment. And they're not happy. In fact, they're burned out, bored, and bottlenecked, new research reveals. Only 33% of the 7700 workers the authors surveyed feel energized by their work; 36% say they're in dead-end jobs. One in three is not satisfied with his or her job. One in five is looking for another. Welcome to middlescence. Like adolescence, it can be a time of frustration, confusion, and alienation. But it can also be a time of self-discovery, new direction, and fresh beginnings. Today, millions of midcareer men and women are wrestling with middlescence-looking for ways to balance work, family, and leisure while hoping to find new meaning in theirjobs. The question is, Will they find it in your organization or elsewhere? Companies are ill prepared to manage middlescence because it is so pervasive, largely invisible, and culturally uncharted. That neglect is bad for business: Many companies risk losing some of their best people or-even worse-ending up with an army of disaffected people who stay. The best way to engage middlescents is to tap into their hunger for renewal and help them launch into more meaningful roles. Perhaps managers can't grant a promotion to everyone who merits one in today's flat organizations, but you may be able to offer new training, fresh assignments, mentoring opportunities, even sabbaticals or entirely new career paths within your own company. Millions of midcareer men and women would like nothing better than to convert their restlessness into fresh energy. They just need the occasion-and perhaps a little assistance-to unleash and channel all that potential.     

Presenteeism: at work--but out of it

Employers are beginning to realize that they face a nearly invisible but significant drain on productivity: presenteeism, the problem of workers' being on the job but, because of illness or other medical conditions, not fully functioning. By some estimates, the phenomenon costs U.S. companies over 150 billion dollars a year--much more than absenteeism does. Yet it's harder to identify. You know when someone doesn't show up for work, but you often can't tell when, or how much, poor health hurts on-the-job performance. Many of the health problems that result in presenteeism are relatively benign. Research in this emerging area of study focuses on such chronic or episodic ailments as seasonal allergies, asthma, headaches, depression, back pain, arthritis, and gastrointestinal disorders. The fact is, when people don't feel good, they simply don't perform at their best. Employees who suffer from depression may be fatigued and irritable--and, therefore, less able to work effectively with others. Those with migraine headaches who experience blurred vision and sensitivity to light, not to mention acute pain, probably have a hard time staring at a computer screen all day. A number of companies are making a serious effort to determine the prevalence of illnesses and other medical conditions that undermine job performance, calculate the related drop in productivity, and find cost-effective ways to combat that loss. Indeed, researchers have discovered that presenteeism-related declines in productivity sometimes can be more than offset by relatively small investments in screening, treatment, and education. So organizations may find that it pays to make targeted investments in employees' health care--by covering the cost of allergy medication, for instance, or therapy for depression.     

The virtue matrix. Calculating the return on corporate responsibility

Executives who want to make their organizations better corporate citizens face many obstacles: If they undertake costly initiatives that their rivals don't embrace, they risk eroding their company's competitive position. If they invite government oversight, they may be hampered by costly regulations. And if they adopt wage scales and working conditions that prevail in the wealthiest democracies, they may drive jobs to countries with less stringent standards. Such dilemmas call for clear, hard thinking. To aid in that undertaking, Roger Martin introduces the virtue matrix--a tool to help executives analyze corporate responsibility by viewing it as a product or service. The author uses real-life examples to explore the forms and degrees of corporate virtue. He cites Aaron Feuerstein, CEO of Malden Mills, a textile company whose plant was destroyed by fire in 1995. Rather than move operations to a lower-wage region, Feuerstein continued to pay his idled workforce and rebuilt the plant. Unlike the typical CEO of a publicly held corporation, who is accountable to hundreds or thousands of shareholders, Feuerstein was free to act so generously because he had only a few family members to answer to. But as Martin points out, corporations don't operate in a universe composed solely of shareholders. They can be subject to pressure from citizens, employees, and political authorities. The virtue matrix provides a way to assess these forces and how they interact. Martin uses it to examine why the public clamor for more responsible corporate conduct never seems to abate. Another issue the author confronts is anxiety over globalization. Finally, Martin applies the virtue matrix to two crucial questions: What are the barriers to increasing the supply of corporate virtue? And what can companies do to remove those barriers?     

Mind your pricing cues

For most of the items they buy, consumers don't have an accurate sense of what the price should be. Ask them to guess how much a four-pack of 35-mm film costs, and you'll get a variety of wrong answers: Most people will underestimate; many will only shrug. Research shows that consumers' knowledge of the market is so far from perfect that it hardly deserves to be called knowledge at all. Yet people happily buy film and other products every day. Is this because they don't care what kind of deal they're getting? No. Remarkably, it's because they rely on retailers to tell them whether they're getting a good price. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, retailers send signals to customers, telling them whether a given price is relatively high or low. In this article, the authors review several common pricing cues retailers use--"sale" signs, prices that end in 9, signpost items, and price-matching guarantees. They also offer some surprising facts about how--and how well--those cues work. For instance, the authors' tests with several mail-order catalogs reveal that including the word "sale" beside a price can increase demand by more than 50%. The practice of using a 9 at the end of a price to denote a bargain is so common, you'd think customers would be numb to it. Yet in a study the authors did involving a women's clothing catalog, they increased demand by a third just by changing the price of a dress from $34 to $39. Pricing cues are powerful tools for guiding customers' purchasing decisions, but they must be applied judiciously. Used inappropriately, the cues may breach customers' trust, reduce brand equity, and give rise to lawsuits.     

How Bell Labs creates star performers

How can managers increase the productivity of professionals when most of their work goes on inside their heads? Robert Kelley and Janet Caplan believe that defining the difference between star performers and average workers is the answer. Many managers assume that top performers are just smarter. But the authors' research at the Bell Laboratories Switching Systems Business Unit (SSBU) has revealed that the real difference between stars and average workers is not IQ but the ways top performers do their jobs. Their study has led to a training program based on the strategies of star performers. The SSBU training program, known as the Productivity Enhancement Group (PEG), uses an expert model to demystify productivity. The star engineers selected to develop the expert model identified and ranked nine work strategies, such as taking initiative, networking, and self-management. Middle performers were also asked what makes for top-quality work, but their definitions and ranking of the strategies differed significantly from those of the top performers. Taking initiative, for example, meant something very different to an average worker than it did to a star. And for the middle performers, the ability to give good presentations was a core strategy, while it was peripheral for the top engineers. Once PEG got underway, respected engineers ran the training sessions, which included case studies, work-related exercises, and frank discussion. The benefits of the program were striking: participants and managers reported substantial productivity increases in both star and average performers. The PEG program may not be a blueprint for other companies, but its message is clear: managers must focus on people, not on technology, to increase productivity in the knowledge economy.     

Ways women lead

Women managers are succeeding not by adopting the traditional command-and-control leadership style but by drawing on what is unique to their experience as women. According to a study the author conducted for the International Women's Forum, men and women in similar managerial jobs make the same amount of money and experience roughly the same degree of work-family conflict. But when they describe their leadership styles, vast differences arise. Men are much more likely than women to view leadership as a series of transactions with subordinates, and to use their position and control of resources to motivate their followers. Women, on the other hand, are far more likely than men to describe themselves as transforming subordinates' self-interest into concern for the whole organization and as using personal traits like charisma, work record, and interpersonal skills to motivate others. Women leaders practice what the author calls "interactive leadership"--trying to make every interaction with coworkers positive for all involved by encouraging participation, sharing power and information, making people feel important, and energizing them. In general, women have been expected to be supportive and cooperative, and they have not held long series of positions with formal authority. This may explain why women leaders today tend to be more interactive than men. But interactive leadership should not be linked directly to being female, since some men use that style and some women prefer the command-and-control style. Organizations that are open to leadership styles that play to individuals' strengths will increase their chances of surviving in a fast-changing environment.     

Five strategies of successful part-time work.

Nearly one in ten professionals now works part-time. But all too often, part-time work creates as many problems as it solves. At best, many part-timers work more hours than they intended. At worst, they see their importance to their organizations dwindle. Two generations have wrestled with such arrangements, and today some part-time professionals have found ways to overcome the challenges, with shining results. Drawing on two years of research investigating part-time engineers, financial analysts, IT specialists, and consultants, the authors present five strategies used by successful part-timers to make their unique position work for themselves and their companies. To begin with, successful part-time professionals take pains to make their work-life priorities, their schedules, and their plans for the future transparent to the organization. Second, they broadcast the business case for their arrangement, being careful to demonstrate that the arrangement has not disrupted the business and may even have a positive impact. Third, they establish routines to protect their time at work and rituals to protect their time at home. Fourth, they cultivate champions in senior management who protect them from skeptics and advocate for their arrangements up and down the ranks. And last, they gently but firmly remind their colleagues that, despite their part-time status, they're still major players in the organization who cannot be ignored. Taken together, these strategies not only help the part-timer deal with the organization but also make the organization itself more receptive to the possibilities of part-time work.     

Furloughing*

Over nine million jobs were furloughed in the United Kingdom during the coronavirus pandemic. Using real-time survey evidence from the UK in April and May 2020, we document which workers were most likely to be furloughed and we analyse variation in the terms on which they furloughed. We find that women were significantly more likely to be furloughed. Inequality in care responsibilities seems to have played a key role: mothers were 10 percentage points more likely than fathers to initiate the decision to be furloughed (as opposed to it being fully or mostly the employer's decision) but we find no such gender gap amongst childless workers. The prohibition of working whilst furloughed was routinely ignored, especially by men who can do a large percentage of their work tasks from home. Women were less likely to have their salary topped up beyond the 80 per cent subsidy paid for by the government. Considering the future, furloughed workers without employer-provided sick pay have a lower willingness to pay to return to work, as do those in sales and food preparation occupations. Compared with non-furloughed employees, furloughed workers are more pessimistic about keeping their job in the short to medium run and are more likely to be actively searching for a new job, even when controlling for detailed job characteristics. These results have important implications for the design of short-time work schemes and the strategy for effectively reopening the economy.     

Communicating the new benefits deal

Communication is critical to changing employees' attitudes toward increased responsibility for benefit decisions and health and wellness. As employers shift responsibility, they not only must provide the right decision-making tools; employers must also maintain a safety net for those who don't want the responsibility. This article discusses the experience of four organizations that implemented the "new deal" of increased employee responsibility while also balancing employee needs.     

When executives burn out

The military knows about burn-out--but calls it battle fatigue. To offset its devastating effects, the military routinely schedules its personnel for recreation and relaxation retreats, sends soldiers into combat in groups so they can support and help each other, and limits the number of flights that pilots fly. Managers are not soldiers but, according to this author and others who have researched the subject, they are prone to a similar exhaustion and sense of futility. Like other professionals, mental health workers, and policemen who work under severe pressure in people-oriented jobs for long periods of time--with little support and limited gains--managers are among the prime victims of burn-out. The author describes what burn-out is, discusses why he thinks that modern organizations are good breeding grounds for situations that lead to it, and offers some helpful ways top managers can combat it.     

Wall Street Occupations

Many finance jobs entail the risk of large losses, and hard‐to‐monitor effort. We analyze the equilibrium consequences of these features in a model with optimal dynamic contracting. We show that finance jobs feature high compensation, up‐or‐out promotion, and long work hours, and are more attractive than other jobs. Moral hazard problems are exacerbated in booms, even though pay increases. Employees whose talent would be more valuable elsewhere can be lured into finance jobs, while the most talented employees might be unable to land these jobs because they are “too hard to manage.”