Category: Psychology

The GLOBE Study

Does your business operate internationally? Do you have teams and vendors in other countries? Does your work take you all around the globe?

If so, then hopefully you’ve heard of the GLOBE Study already. If not, here’s a quick primer.

The GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) Study is basically an analysis of the cultural, societal, organizational, and leadership differences between 62 different societies around the world. Conducted by the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, its team of 170 researchers are aiming:

To determine the extent to which the practices and values of business leadership are universal (i.e., are similar globally), and the extent to which they are specific to just a few societies.

The completed study is released as a thick 848 page hardcover book called Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies and sells for $130. It’s a hefty book at a hefty price, but it’s generally regarded as one of those “must-have” books for corporate executives in international businesses. (Thank goodness for expense accounts, huh?)

If you’re familiar with the personality tests such as Myers-Briggs and Keirsey, this study is similar—except on acid. The GLOBE Study breaks down the 62 societies into:

  • 9 Cultural Dimensions: performance orientation, uncertainty avoidance, humane orientation, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, assertiveness, gender egalitarianism, future orientation, and power distance.
  • 6 Culturally-endorsed Leadership Theory Dimensions: charismatic/value based, team oriented, self-protective, participative, humane oriented, and autonomous.
  • 21 Primary Leadership Dimensions: administratively competent, autocratic, autonomous, charismatic/visionary, charismatic/inspirational, charismatic/self-sacrificial, conflict inducer, decisive, diplomatic, face saver, humane orientation, integrity, malevolent, modesty, non-participative, performance oriented, procedural, self-centered, status consciousness, team collaborative, and team integrator.

A great free guide on how to read and understand the GLOBE Study is provided by Grovewell LLC. Their founder, Cornelius Grove, even provides this list of nine highlights:

  1. Thirty-five personal attributes of leaders are viewed in some societies as contributing to good leadership, and in other societies as inhibiting good leadership. Among the 35 are “cunning,” “provocateur,” and “sensitive.”
  2. Charismatic leadership is often said by businesspeople to be highly effective. The GLOBE research confirms that, worldwide, “Charismatic/Value-Based” leadership is indeed effective; it also specifies the attributes of such leadership.
  3. The United States emerges as the only culture in which participative leadership has a positive influence on employee performance.
  4. Most managers around the world wish that their companies and supervisors would focus more heavily on high performance than actually is the case.
  5. “Team Oriented” leadership is seen by business people in all cultures as moderately or highly desirable and as contributing to good leadership.
  6. Managers in the Middle East were less likely than managers anywhere else to view leadership that is “Charismatic/Value-Based,” “Team Oriented,” and “Participative” as substantially contributing to good leadership. On average, they viewed these three characteristics as having only a mildly positive effect.
  7. Concern for gender egalitarianism is positively associated with good leadership in the great majority of societies; this finding is notable because fully three-quarters of the 17,300 respondents worldwide were male.
  8. “In-Group Collectivism” is the degree to which people express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organizations. Contrary to the individualistic ethic of the U.S., American managers value (desire) In-Group Collectivism to the same extent as managers in Russia, Spain, Zambia, Turkey, and Thailand.
  9. Overall, the GLOBE findings suggest that leaders are seen as the embodiment of an ideal state of affairs, and thus as the society’s instruments for change.

How to Sell Your Ideas

Trying to sell your ideas within a corporation isn’t always easy. You have to contend with politics, egos, bureaucracy, and other assorted barriers.

With that in mind, I put together the following information a couple of years ago for my team. Some of it is influenced by Seth Godin’s book Free Prize Inside, which lists lots of great idea promotion techniques.

Introduction

  • This is not about how to come up with great ideas
  • This is about how to promote your ideas
  • Your job is to come up with great, viable, & successful ideas

Ideas Are Easy

  • There are a million great ideas out there
  • There are a million bad ideas out there too
  • Lots of websites give you free ideas almost every day
  • People at your company may be bursting with ideas already (maybe)
  • Your company’s problem isn’t generating ideas, it’s choosing which ones to implement
  • Your problem isn’t how to sell your idea, it’s getting your idea through the clutter of other ideas

Be an Idea Champion

Understand People & Politics

  • Understand the other person’s point of view of life, frame of mind
    • Consider the person’s background, culture, social standing, economic status, religion, family, ethnicity, etc.
    • Consider personality typing tools (Jung, Myers-Briggs, Keirsey)
    • Be aware of non-verbal communication & cues
  • Understand the other person’s goals & motivations
    • Be aware of what the pesson wants from life, from you, or from this particular deal. What matters to this person? Money, fame, reputation, a promotion, etc?
  • Find out who the true influencers are; these aren’t always the top executives (though usually they are); sometimes, it can also be a project manager or a low-level product manager, or even an administrative assistant
    • E.g. The executives of a major company wanted innovation. Unfortunately, below them were some senior managers who were afraid of upsetting the status quo and hurting their stock options because they were already making a fortune on them. They wouldn’t let any new ideas through if they hurt the status quo. These senior managers were the true influencers, not the top executives. A way to approach them is to understand their motivations and show that, by not embracing this idea, the status quo would be broken because competitors would do it better.

Convince Others That Your Idea is Great

  • Not just good, but great
  • Do some research and gather statistics to back-up the potential success of your idea
  • Show them your vision, describe the future where your idea is a reality
  • Tell them the emotional impact of your idea, get them energized about it
  • The goal is not to prove beyond a doubt that your idea will work; that may be impossible to prove. The goal is to go through the necessary steps for your colleagues to believe that your idea will work
  • Understand what motivates people (which ties into politics)
    • Some want a cool challenge
    • Some like the geek factor of new technology
    • Some like being the first-to-market
    • Some want to push the stock price up
    • Some like making their own jobs more secure
    • Some want to make the world a better place
    • Some want public recognition

Convince Others That You Can Make This Happen

  • Build your reputation as a leader, an Idea Champion
  • Start small (plan a small event, like a team lunch)
  • Increase your responsibilities (take on increasingly more difficult tasks)
  • Take ownership of difficult, complex problems (own them from identification to resolution)
  • Be proactive about problem-solving (if you notice a problem happening frequently that no one else has identified yet, step up to find a solution)
  • Consider volunteering to champion someone else’s idea (to help prove yourself and gain a political ally)
  • Consider learning about project management, marketing, engineering lifecycles, etc; (give yourself the right skills to see your idea through)

Good luck, champ!

The Spinning Dancer

Spinning Dancer Now for some Friday fun. Take a look at this right brain vs left brain test from PerthNow.

Which way does the dancer spin for you? Clockwise, or counter-clockwise?

For me, she spun counter-clockwise. Then I looked away, looked back, and holy good gravy Batman, she started spinning clockwise!

Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, wrote about this on Monday and asked his readers to provide the following information:

Just for fun, list your college major, your occupation, and which way the dancer spins for you. We’ll tally the data and see what we find.

A ton of people have already left their information. It’ll be interesting to see the results.

Don’t Be Afraid To Fail

A line that I try to live by:

I would rather try, and fail, than to walk away and regret never having tried at all.

You’ve no doubt heard the statistic that X number of new business fail in X years. Maybe you’ve heard that the number really isn’t that high, or maybe you’ve heard it’s actually very high. To clear the confusion, according to the US Small Business Administration site:

Starting a small business is always risky, and the chance of success is slim. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, roughly 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years.

The numbers vary by industry, of course. On the Web, they’re probably much higher—say 60-70% in the first year? (Five years in Web time is a lifetime and the barriers to entry are very low). But the conclusion is the same: You’re more likely to fail than to succeed (especially on the Web).

So my thinking is, if it’s inevitable, why fear it? Embrace it. And go forth with faith and gusto, as Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed, James Hong of Hotornot.com, and Robert Young of GigaOM all advise. In a nutshell: Failure is an option, have the balls to try, and bankruptcy gives you the opportunity to fail and start over again.

Young’s point about bankruptcy is actually a very significant one. “The ability for a U.S. entrepreneur to go bankrupt is actually the most important element of this country’s economic success and wealth,” he writes. How does bankruptcy do this exactly, you ask? According to Wikipedia, the purpose of bankruptcy is:

  1. To give an honest debtor a “fresh start” in life by relieving the debtor of most debts.
  2. To repay creditors in an orderly manner to the extent that the debtor has the means available for payment.

That means if you still have debt, but are out of money, those debts can be erased. This simple rule is part of what makes businesses thrive in the US. In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues that if a nation wants to improve its economy and increase the number of jobs, it needs:

…a regulatory environment that makes it easy to start a business, easy to adjust a business to changing market circumstances and opportunities, and easy to close a business that goes bankrupt, so that the capital can be freed up for more productive uses.

If you are starting your business in the US, you are in luck. You are in such an environment. Happy day!

However, this doesn’t mean you should go about your business in a haphazard fashion and take crazy risks. Failure may be inevitable, but at least be smart about it. Learn to build for it. Paul Hawken advises in his great book Growing a Business:

If you conceive and create a business where everything has to go right, one error, one mishap, can ruin a lot of good work. If you conceive a business where twenty serious mistakes could occur, and then you create safeguards to deal with some or most of these possibilities, you are creating a survivor. In the beginning, survival is more important than success. Survival is staying on the field, playing the game, learning the rules, and beginning to grow.

Another great book about managing and taking calculated risks is Anthony Iaquinto and Stephen Spinelli Jr’s Never Bet The Farm. It presents fifteen common-sense principles that can serve as helpful reminders in times of crisis, such as Principle #9: Don’t Spend a Dollar When a Dime Will Do, and Principle #11: Only Fools Fly Without a Net.

So there you have it. Don’t be afraid to fail. Embrace failure. Go forth with faith and gusto. But be smart about failure. Learn to build for it. And don’t walk away and regret never having tried at all.

Self-Marketing and Your Personal Brand

If you are an entrepreneur, your “personal brand” is very important.

What do I mean by your personal brand? BuildingBrands has a great definition of the word brand:

“A brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.”

A personal brand then is how people perceive you. It is the way they describe you to friends, the way they differentiate you from someone else, and the things they remember about you when you aren’t around.

Online Personal Brand

There are lots of ways to can tailor people’s perceptions of you. One way is through an online presence. Like a domain name! MikeLee.org is mine, obviously.

(True story: I used to introduce myself as “Michael Lee.” Then I got the domain name MikeLee.org and started introducing myself as “Mike Lee.” Yea, I know, I’m a geek.)

Here are some great articles on how to build your online personal brand:

If you create your own online personal brand, you will have more control over it. You can expect every recruiter to do a web search on you nowadays. I did this myself as a hiring manager. Don’t let the one search result of you be a photo on a friend’s web site—of you, drunk, nekkid, and puking all over yourself (I’m just sayin’). Let it be a brand that you created and tailored for your needs.

And if you have the time and energy, consider creating some content (e.g. blog articles, personal essays, free samples of your work, etc) and telling a story about yourself, as the above articles suggest.

Offline Personal Brand

Just as important as your online personal brand is your offline personal brand. Your personality and behaviors basically lay the foundation for this. And if you are an arrogant son of a motherless goat, well, then there isn’t much I can do for you. Anything you do online will be erased as soon as a recruiter meets you in person.

Self-marketing doesn’t mean you have to be slick and polished. As Entrepreneur Magazine’s article “Shut Up and Listen” writes: “entrepreneurs who practiced over-the-top self-promotion rarely captured the attention of others.” Sometimes it is best just to be yourself.

There are times when it is acceptable to be assertive about your offline personal brand. Like at networking events, conferences, etc. For those occasions, here are some great articles:

If you are nervous about meeting new people, the easiest thing to do is to smile and nod at another person standing alone. At any networking event, you are guaranteed to find a few people wandering around by themselves, eager to meet new people but unsure of how to break into an existing conversation. They are probably the easiest to approach.

As the above articles suggest, getting into a conversation is just part of your brand building. Your business card is an important part as well.

Also, if you promise to follow-up with someone, do so. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been impressed by people who remembered some tiny aspect of our conversation, then followed-up about it later. Those are the kinds of people you want to know. Those are the kinds of people who also have a strong offline personal brand.

Not For Your Blog

Seth Godin Are you one of those people who can’t resist blogging juicy conversations, chats, or emails? Raise your hand if you are. C’mon, admit it, raise your hand. Right there along with mine. (Heh, yea, I’m guilty…)

Seth Godin must have had one too many of his conversations, chats, and emails blogged. So he came up with “NFYB” (Not For Your Blog):

New times demand new conventions. In a world where twitter and facebook and blogs can spread an idea around the world in a few seconds, how do you have a conversation with someone in confidence?

Just say NFYB (“not for your blog.”)

Just like safe sex, it might not be romantic, but it’s something we need to talk about. So talk about it. The presumption is rapidly changing. It used to be that all emails or whispered hallway discussions were ‘off the record.’ Now, more and more, there is a bias to post/twit or share. “NFYB” clears the air.

When everyone is a journalist, most things are on the record.

You’re Not Your Job Title

“You’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your family, and you’re not who you tell yourself.”
– C. Palahniuk

Tired of being a peon? Looking to get a promotion or more responsibilities? Or something bigger and better in your career?

The first step is to realize that you are not your job title.

That’s right, you’re not. Don’t let it define you and what you can do.

So your title says you’re a “developer,” yet you really want to be a bigger part of your team? Then don’t just write code all day long. Offer product suggestions, marketing ideas, and UI design feedback.

But don’t just spew out any ole’ thing that comes to your mouth. Having a lot of poorly thought out suggestions doesn’t help anymore. “We should make the navigation blue.” “Why?” “Because I want to be a bigger part of the team, and I really like blue.”

Nope. You’ve got to offer helpful suggestions. The best way to do this is to learn more about the product and understand the business.

A product director once gave me this advice: “Think of yourself as the CEO.”

That’s good advice. You start to see things differently when you think of yourself as the top person in charge. Now you have to worry about your customers, your competitors, the market, your expenses, your balance sheet, your team dynamics, etc.

This helps frame your suggestions. It’s not about making the navigation blue anymore, it’s about doing what’s best for the customer, while weighed against the strengths of your company vs your competitors and the market trends.

It’s not easy to do this. There are all sorts of barriers, from insecure colleagues who’ll feel threatened by your initiative, to the fear of making big mistakes with decisions with which you have little experience.

It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible. Go ahead and take the initiative anyways. If others feel threatened by you and try to sabotage your progress, what’s the worst that could happen? They fire you? Then I’d argue that your team had the wrong dynamic for you anyways, and that you should have just quit.

Frightened? Think of your mistakes as learning lessons. They’ll be much more valuable than what you can get out of a book, you know. You can also hedge your bets by soaking up knowledge and advice from more experienced people that you admire, like role models.

But make sure you realize that not all of your suggestions will be taken. You’re thinking like the CEO, but you’re not the CEO. At the end of the day, the actual CEO is the person entrusted to make the right decisions for the business. You’re at the company because you trust the CEO to do that.

Decisions shouldn’t be made by consensus; there will be many decisions with which you don’t agree. And you’ll make many suggestions that which others will not agree. At the end of the day, it’s more important to make some decision and move forward all together. That’s part of thinking like a CEO.

If you don’t like it, quit and join another company. Or start your own!

Until then, remember: You are not your job title. Think of yourself as the CEO. And soon you’ll be moving on to bigger and better places in your career!