Laura Wolfe Coaching LLC

Supporting the Evolution of Careers, Leaders,

& Climate Consciousness

Tortoise or Hare?

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photo (1)A business owner recently expressed frustration to me about his efforts to build his brand and the uncertainty over whether or not it’s working. He’s doing all the right things but seems to him to be taking forever.

Because it’s a great source for lessons about organizational behavior, Survivor came to mind. I have watched every episode of every season since the beginning except for two (missed one when moving from Atlanta to Baton Rouge and one when Hurricane Lili knocked our power out). And, as a student of organizational behavior, I absolutely love the show and seeing leadership, conflict, diversity, teamwork, negotiation, communication, power, strategy, and more happen in a microcosm.

Interestingly, the winner of Survivor usually plays below the radar for a good part of the season. They are building their foundation, planting seeds, establishing their brand and we the viewers don’t really know too much about them until late in the game. Very often, players that come out of the gate blowing and going, crash and burn early (e.g., Brad Culpepper this season!).

In the business world, a lucky few do have overnight success. But for the rest it requires showing up everyday, doing good work, treating others with respect, and creating those conditions to support future prosperity.

Steady like the tortoise.

Would love to know your thoughts on what it takes to see success.

Ethics Anyone?

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Florham_Park_NJ_Little_Red_SchoolhouseIs ethical behavior of employees an important issue for your organization? How exactly are you managing this one? Some companies offer ethics training; another option is to address it in the pre-employment phase using integrity testing and/or background checks.

Yet, another approach is to consider the environment from which you recruit – specifically, the educational institution and its culture re: ethics. Are there consequences for academic dishonesty? People you can ask include career services folks, faculty members, and students or former students. You can ask administrators but they are typically either unaware or at the heart of the problem.

Behavior modeling is one of the most fundamental ways humans learn. If students observe others engaging in academic dishonesty with no consequences, guess what the lesson is? If you want recruits who understand wrongdoing will not be tolerated, make sure that is the message they get while in school.

Don’t believe cheating in school is much of a problem or that there is a relationship to out-of-school behavior? Check out this interesting research from a few years ago.

Would love to know your thoughts on building an ethical workforce.

Scary Managers

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red with angerIt may be Halloween but you don’t have to be a scary manager. You can grab my book Performance Pearls: Information for Improving Workforce Performance FREE for kindle on Amazon.com between 12:01am October 30 and midnight October 31 (PST).

 

Performance Pearls was written for supervisors, managers, and leaders who want to do the right thing but aren’t exactly sure how to be a better performance manager. Plus, the content is designed to be consumed in small bites because few working managers have large chunks of time to read.

 

Underlying it all is the belief that better managers really do make the world a better place: for the employee, for the family, for the company, and for the community.

Would love to hear what you do to be an un-scary manager.

 

Consuming Research

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Seems that academic research is more readily available, in forms more easily consumed. Its theories, models and formulas are also used more often in an attempt to explain and understand both common and uncommon events. What a great thing.

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of sources I consider to be good explainers and occasionally synthesizers of information:

Some of the above have been a target for criticism, especially by critics who question the interpretation, randomness, and dubiousness of the statistics reported and discussed. My response to this – the world is incredibly complex; consume as much available information from as many sources as possible. Be open to how others interpret the situation. Then make your own determination of what is or is not happening.

What got me thinking about research is that I am currently reviewing submissions for the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychologists (SIOP) 2014 annual conference. Four of out the five submissions I have to evaluate are posters.

Poster submissions are full-on, detailed descriptions of research written in academese. Flashback to grad school where I spent seven years reading academic journal articles. I loved the learning but man, am I glad for alternative sources. I do miss the grad school class environment though, where everyone (supposedly) had read the research and it was discussed. Hearing what others thought it all meant was cool.

One big lesson from grad school: Doing good social science research is very difficult. My hat is off to all who do.

Would love to know your go-to sources for cutting edge research.