A Star Is Made - New York Times »

From the blog of the “Freakonomics” authors…

Amina Lula: Harvard Business - Please take notes people... »

Thee best practice guidelines mentioned in the article below are guidelines that can be applied not only in a corporate setting, but socially as well. You can share, teach and show everything to a co-worker and in turn, get nothing. Zero results, no improvement and sometimes not even a thank you….

smonteiro: Caregiving: an essential component of Leadership in organizations »

Yesterday I went to see a lecture by Una McCluskey, expert in organizational psychology, on “Caregiving: an essential component of Leadership in organizations”, which showed how leadership experiences (whether positive or negative) influence the performance of the employee at the organization…

The 6 Myths Of Creativity | Fast Company »

Based on research of Teresa Amabile of Harvard. I emailed with her about grad school back when I was applying - she seemed super-nice!

Male-on-Male Sexual Harassment on the Rise - Newsweek.com »

Rate still only increased from 8 to 16% between 1992 and 2008 (rate being percentage of sexual harassment charges filed with the EEOC by men about other men)…. but still very surprising.

A “Good” Job Scores Well Across 12 Features

Ms. CEO: A Rare Commodity : College Candy »

December 2, 2009 - 11:00 am By Melanie - Northeastern University

Working on Fifth Avenue at New York City is nothing short of glamorous. Every day, I walk to work on one of NYC’s most famous streets, cutting through Central park, walking by the Plaza, passing Saks and finally entering the headquarters of one of the largest beauty companies in the world to work on photoshoots and press kits while bumping into celebs (and their stylists) in the process.<

Finally being dropped into the “9-5” has me thinking a lot more about my future. What if I want to be the chief executive one day? How feasible is that? What would my income be?

Although it is possible for a woman to become a CEO, out of the “Fortune 500” (the USA’s 500 biggest publicly traded companies), only thirteen of those CEOs are female. That’s only 2.6%.

We’ve had our first female presidential and vice-presidential candidate in the past year and higher education for women is on the rise, yet women are still not holding top positions in companies. The cherry on top of all of this? Even the women who have managed to make their way to the top are still the worst paid out of all CEOs.

Aside from the incredible income disparities, the issue we should be focusing on is why women CEOs are such a rare commodity, not necessarily the size of the paychecks. In 2005, Sheila Wellington was interviewed by Anne Fisher (CNN Money) on this exact issue. Wellington was no stranger to gender discrimination; she was forced to sign an agreement when she accepted her first position after graduating from Radcliffe that stated that she must not get pregnant for at least her first two years.

Wellington went on to become the president of Catalyst, a non-profit research group and is now a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. When confronted with the question of the lack of female executives, Wellington stated, “I think we are in the midst of a cycle right now where there is a widespread perception that women aren’t fully committed to their careers. It tends to happen every time the spotlight is on a high-ranking woman who flames out, like [former Hewlett-Packard CEO] Carly Fiorina. You start hearing all kinds of people analyzing ‘what women are doing wrong.’”

Wellington goes on to say that the corporate perception of women must alter before women can reach high levels. She blames sexist perceptions such as, “women don’t like to travel” or “women don’t take risks” as platitudes that cloud judgment when hiring female executives. The antiquated mindset that females won’t succeed because of familial obligations, emotional reactions, high drama and lack of critical thinking hinders women from succeeding. Don’t think those perceptions are still out there? Just ask Neil French who resigned as WPP Group worldwide creative director after saying women in advertising “don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to.” This sentiment is common according to Wellington.

Does this mean that I can’t become a CEO one day? Working for a Fortune 500 has pushed my desire to do just that. But when I do get that position, do I have to give up my femininity, desire to have a family in the future, penchant for emotional outbursts once in a while, and indulging in guilty pleasures like Gossip Girl? I think not. The mentality around females in executive positions needs to be changed, not the female executives themselves.

Once the archaic stereotypes of women have left the workplace, then companies will realize that women are valuable assets in executive positions. It’s up to Gen Y to break those stereotypes, put much more than just cracks in the glass ceiling and finally finish construction on that bridge to somewhere.

Notes: My thesis was semi-inspired by some of these numbers and shocking realizations about the social context. While the salary and CEO numbers might be increasing, there are still VERY real and very different expectations about what women should do and the roles that a woman can take on (simultaneously and in order to do well in/at both). Basically, the numbers might support people who believe that gender is no longer an important issue worthy of study, but only if you ignore the psychological side and any statistics that really attempt to slice into the phenomena and explore where women are CEOs, how they got to those positions, and the so-called mommy track…

Interview Mistakes - Bad Job Interview Techniques - Cosmopolitan.com »

Did you know the decision to hire is made in 15 minutes or less? Scary, huh? With that in mind, Cosmo surveyed human-resource pros* to find out which job-hunting sins you may be making.

You Say, “This Is My Dream Job”Even if you mean it, 69% of recruiters will brush that off as an insincere cliché they’ve heard way too many times before. Ban the bogus phrases “I think outside the box” and “I’m a team player” from your vocab as well, and come up with your own way of describing how much you rock.

*Cosmo teamed up with the Society for Human Resource Management for this survey of 500 human resource executives.

(This is just the first of several tips… not that any are all that Earth-shattering, but people still make these mistakes.)

Why You Should Be Nice To People At Work »

A bit of unexpected wisdom from Miss J. Alexander, a runway model coach that is best known for his appearances on America’s Next Top Model, on why you should be nice to people on the job:

The worst habit a model could have is not being polite to the people that they’re working with, and not respecting them or the job.

Some girls come into the job and don’t have a nice attitude towards the people that they’re working with. When you create great harmony at work, everyone gets the job done. I think a model should be able to come in and feel comfortable and make people feel comfortable around her.

** HEADSLAP **

I have never once thought about trying to create great harmony at work. I’ve tried to be nice to balance my tendency to be scarily analytical, but the scope of my ambition was merely to put individuals at ease. A greater harmony, though, is what I think we all seek on the job, which is the precursor of the flow state where everything’s going great and humming along. Must reflect on this more.

Notes & Thoughts -

So I only recently figured out anything about “America’s Next Top Model” and unfortunately there isn’t a huge amount of information out there that really seems to back up the idea that being nice creates a more pleasant organizational culture and/or any sort of real increases in performance. (If you’re interested, “being nice” is probably most similar to the OCB or organizational citizenship behaviors literature in Industrial-Organizational Psychology - basically, doing nice things around the office that are NOT part of your formal job duties.)

Being a CEO Is No Cakewalk And Boards Need to Get CEO Search Right »

Released: 11/23/2009 10:00 AM EST 
Source: Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)

Newswise — Succession planning should be an ongoing process for boards of directors, not a periodic activity.

When Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis unexpectedly announced in September he was stepping down at the end of the year, the BofA board had to accelerate its process in finding a successor.

Naming a replacement is not a simple scenario, said Constance Dierickx , a senior consultant in the Atlanta office of RHR International, who works with companies on CEO succession issues. “The BofA board has changed considerably in the past year and it may not have had time to review the existing succession plan, or perhaps it did and did not think it was adequate,” she said.

In an RHR study, 95 percent of board directors agreed that CEO succession planning is an important business continuity issue but fewer than half felt they were prepared for it. In fact, 40 percent said the company was unprepared for a CEO’s sudden departure. Also, 57 percent said they did not know when the CEO planned to leave and half said they had not seen the company’s succession plan in the past year.

The BofA board is not alone. With CEOs exiting their jobs at a rapid pace (834 CEOs left their jobs between January and August of this year, according to global outplacement research firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas), numerous boards are faced with succession decisions.

Some boards are prepared but many are not, said Randall Cheloha of the Cheloha Consulting Group in Wynnewood, PA, who has been working with organizations on succession planning for more than 20 years.

“Not too many years ago, imperial CEOs were fairly common. The CEO told the board who the successor would be, not the other way around. He or she ran the succession process with an iron hand and the board usually went along,”

But all that has changed over the past 10 years. “Corporate scandals and executive indictments have led to new levels of board engagement. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 resulted in a sea change of increased expectations, accountability and transparency from boards,” said Cheloha.

Sarbanes-Oxley has led many companies to burden their corporate secretaries, chief financial officers and others with a major increase in their workloads to insure the company was in compliance and their boards were kept fully apprises, said Cheloha. Also, changes in the makeup of boards directly affect new CEO selections, he added. “There are more constituencies to satisfy. In addition to major shareholders, financial analysts, employees and former executives, some companies, particularly those that received large government bailouts, have directly or indirectly been asked to change directors and add new players to their boards to represent the new constituencies, including the federal government and unions.” 
According to a July Associated Press report, the federal government owns 61 percent of General Motors with the United Auto Workers holding a 17.5 percent share..

These new shareholders have a large say in how companies like General Motors, BofA, Chrysler, Citi and American International Group (AIG) operate and will play an important role in naming a CEO successor. 

In BofA’s case, government officials will have veto power over the board’s choice of a new CEO as well as approving his or her compensation package. 

One of the most important functions of a board is developing a succession plan, said Cheloha, “I am surprised at how many companies are still not fully prepared to replace their CEOs,” he said, pointing to a Mercer Delta study that found nearly 50 percent of major companies did not have a realistic succession plan.

“That’s not to say they do not have a plan,” said Dierickx. “Too often plans are written and then filed away to gather dust. Succession needs to be frequently revisited and should be a board priority, the same as finances and other business issues boards face.” 

Dierickx calls succession a planned process that begins with the board being fully aligned in the direction it wants the company to go and the strategy needed to get there. “It is important to focus leadership requirements around those expectations. The best results (in selecting a new CEO) come when the board has clear knowledge of the leadership traits the company needs to achieve its goals,” she said.

Once that has been determined, the board can then concentrate on selecting the person to be the next CEO. “The selection process goes much smoother when the board is aligned about the leadership qualities needed to achieve the organization’s goals,” she said. 

Both Dierickx and Cheloha say that organizations need to devote more time to developing their own candidates and that boards need to have much greater awareness about who is in the talent pipeline.

Companies should be recruiting top talent to assume key leadership positions and board members should be monitoring their development, said Dierickx.
And, she adds, a company should be grooming a cadre of potential leaders. “Situations can change rapidly and organizations should not be putting all their eggs into one basket. If a company is relying on one person to be the future CEO, that person could leave for another job or become sick or something else could happen and the board no longer has a top candidate,” she said.

While there are many well developed tools to assess potential leaders, Dierickx has found “deep interviews” to be effective. “To a trained person, nuances and comments during an extended conversation can reveal a lot about an individual,” she said.

Cheloha said traditionally boards heard only a report from the CEO about internal senior executives and their succession readiness without actually looking deeper into the organization. “It is critical for boards to get first-hand information about prospective CEO successors and top executives and get to know and work with them.”

It can make a difference. Dierickx has a client who the board did not know five years ago. He was given developmental attention more as courtesy because of his position within the company but was not considered a serious candidate for a top job. However, he excelled in his assignments and as the board got to know him, his stock rose and eventually was selected as the CEO and is doing quite well, she said.

Dierickx and Cheloha say that companies should look inside for their CEOs since studies show that leaders selected from outside the organization have a high failure rate.

Yet, boards often feel they have to look at outside candidates because they think the company needs to go in a different strategic direction and outsiders are not connected to any of the company’s current problems. So, they turn to someone who has had success at another company.

But past success is not predictive of the future, said Dierickx. Too often boards do not take into consideration corporate culture, which can disable a CEO from outside the organization.

Another danger is cronyism on the part of some board members. When faced with a CEO decision, board members often begin thinking immediately of “who?” rather than address the entire succession process. They will push for a former colleague, someone they know from another board, or someone they’ve met who they think is good and don’t always look at what the job will demand or consider the company’s current operating situation, noted Cheloha. Boards need to carefully look at the needs of the company and then match candidates to what’s best for the company.

Cheloha recalls a situation where a board brought in someone they thought to be capable. He immediately replaced the top management team with colleagues from his former company, upsetting the company culture, hurting morale and causing a number of high potential insiders to leave.

At the same time, an internal successor can lead to problems as well, especially affecting the morale of senior team members who were not selected. Also, there is always the risk that top executives may leave taking other key personnel with them.

But that doesn’t have to be an outcome of selecting an internal candidate, said Dierickx. “A thoughtful and methodical process will prevent an exodus of talent in most succession scenarios. It is often a lack of care that leads to the loss of talent; usually talent in which there has been a substantial investment,” she said.

So, for boards of directors, selecting a new CEO is never a sure thing and is almost always a tricky proposition.

However, creating a carefully planned succession process that matches talent with the organization’s strategic goals will make the extremely important task of selecting a new CEO more likely to be successful.

The time and investment in creating and applying a solid CEO succession plan is an investment that will pay dividends to the company for years to come, said Dierickx. “Selecting a CEO is not a one-time event. It’s a process that boards and top management must take seriously and treat as an ongoing situation.”

Not doing this can expose a company to significant risk.

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is an international group of more than 7,800 industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists whose members study and apply scientific principles concerning workplace productivity, motivation, leadership and engagement. SIOP’s mission is to enhance human well-being and performance in organizational and work settings by promoting the science, practice and teaching of I-O psychology. For more information about SIOP, including a Media Resources service that lists nearly 2,000 experts in more than 100 topic areas, visit www.siop.org.

SIOP’s 25th annual conference will be April 8-10 at the Hilton Hotel in Atlanta, GA.

More than 4,000 members will attend, including many of the world’s top workplace scientists. There will be hundreds of peer-reviewed sessions spanning a wide variety of interesting topics related to current workplace issues. For more information, contact Stephany Schings or Clif Boutelle at SIOP at 419-353-0032.

How the Navy Seals Increased Passing Rates | Psychology Today »

It was 10 PM, pitch black and I was in the middle of the woods in North Carolina. My job was simple. I had to erect a 30 foot antennae that would be used to gather radio transmissions so our artillery platoon could conduct fire missions. I had been dropped off from a Humvee along with another soldier in another platoon. We were all alone. He had the same mission but had to set up his antennae about 100 yards from mine.

It was one of many such missions my unit conducted as ‘practice’ in the Army. In the snow, in the rain, in the summer heat we practiced the science of artillery. At least half of the year, every year, we spent in the woods in 3 to 7 day chunks. I thought my stint as a Cannon Fire Direction Specialist (13-E) would be indoors in a command center like the one in the 1980s classic, War Games, starring Matthew Broderick. At least that is what my recruiter told me.

Not!

I was mere yards from the gun line, had to dig foxholes, pull guard duty, man the M-60 and listen to the artillery rounds fired up close and ‘personal’ throughout the day and night. Luckily, I never had to go to war. I served during a relative time of peace (1993-95).

So,- why did we spend so much time living in the woods, firing live rounds and going through the motions? Why were two twenty year olds trusted to set up communications for 2 platoons (100 men) and to guide them into their new base in the woods for the next few days?

Well, we had to do this under as realistic conditions as possible so if we were called to war we would be able to perform our jobs with confidence and without thinking about it. Many of my fellow soldiers had served in the first Iraq War and they continuously relayed how serious warfare was and how we needed to be prepared. Our training reflected that mentality. But the ‘practice makes perfect’ approach isn’t always enough.

Which brings me to the Navy Seals. I will admit that training to become a combat soldier is tough. But becoming an elite soldier such as a Navy Seal or Ranger is tougher. These guys are not only regular soldiers, they also go through further training to become masters of terrain and conditions and to handle situations in hostile territories as a small group or on their own. Their training has to be super intense in order to have soldiers who can actually carry out their missions.

Hence, they had an extremely low passing rate for trainees. According toThe Brain , a show featured on The History Channel, out of 140 recruits (average/each cycle) only 36 would make it. However, they noticed that they were losing good recruits, not because they couldn’t phsyically hack it, but because they had a mental block. It was in one key area; the water. The Navy Seals have a drill in a pool where recruits have to remain under water for 20 minutes. They are equipped with oxygen tanks for air. All they have to do is stay under water without coming up. Seems simple enough.

Well there’s a catch. The recruits are constantly harassed by their instructors who rip off their masks, tie their (air) lines in knots and conduct other general forms of harrassment. The recruit’s job is to notpanic; wait until the attack is over; calmly fix the problem while remaining under water and then wait for the next attack. At the end of the 20 minutes the recruit will be required to kiss the floor of the pool and then will be brought up by the drill instructor.

But the opposite often happens. Soldiers do panic and even with four chances to pass (at different times in the program) many never make it. So the Navy Seals turned to psychology. Using a four step process they increased the passage rates in their program. What did they do? They emphasized what psychologists and communication academics have been advocating for years:

Goal Setting - Mental Rehearsal - Self Talk - Arousal Control

With goal setting the recruits were taught to set goals in extremely short chunks. For instance, one former Navy Seal discussed how he set goals such as making it to lunch, then dinner. With mental rehearsal they were taught to visualize themselves succeeding in their activities and going through the motions. As far as self talk is concerned, the experts in TheBrain documentary made the claim that we say 300 to 1000 words to ourselves a minute. By instructing the recruits to speak positively to themselves they could learn how to “override fears” resulting from theamygdala, a primal part of the brain that helps us deal with anxiety. And finally, with arousal control the recruits were taught how to breathe to help mitigate the crippling emotions and fears that some of their tasks encouraged.

This very simple four step process increased their passing rates from 25 percent to 33 percent, which is excellent in a rigorous program as theirs. It demonstrates that achieving success doesn’t always have to be a complex process. A few minor additions and tweaks may be all that is needed.

Bakari Akil II, Ph.D. is the author of Super You! 101 Ways to Maximize your Potential! Check out his page on Twitter.

Working mothers perpetuating myth of 'the useless man' to feel more feminine »

studentloansforbeermoney:

“A scientific paper called The Female Breadwinner, to be published in the journal Sex Roles this week, details the feelings of 15,000 female career women.

The findings suggest the idea of men as slackers has been developed by women who feel “an overwhelming sense of guilt” at having a career rather than fulfilling their traditional gender role of wife and mother.”

I’m not sure how true this is, but the Masculinist revolutionary inside of me likes it.

Political correctness and Ft. Hood killings - CNN.com »

Editor’s note: Tom Kenniff is a legal analyst and a founding partner of Raiser & Kenniff P.C. in New York, where he defends those accused of committing criminal offenses. He is a veteran of the war in Iraq, where he served as a commissioned officer in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.

New York (CNN) — Just hours after the first reports of the tragedy at Fort Hood surfaced, a divisive dialogue was developing on the talk shows and in the Internet blogosphere.

On one side were those arguing that shooting suspect Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s apparent bloodlust was an unfortunate byproduct of an overtaxed military forced to fight a multifront war against an uncertain enemy.

Television doctors expounded on the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans, often without indicating that Hasan had not been to war or suffered any obvious trauma that could explain the gruesome manifestation of his “stress.”

Then there were those who said that the lack of any apparent motive other than mayhem — the early reports that there may have been a second shooter, that Hasan had been linked to suspicious Internet postings and yes, the fact that he had a Muslim name — at least warranted an investigation into whether he had acted out of adherence to a radical form of Islam. Those who took this position were called everything from irresponsible to racist.

The reluctance of some in the media to confront what so many viewed as obvious questions concerning the gunman’s real motives has caused many to question whether we have, as a culture, become too politically correct.

The real question is whether we have abandoned the true definition of political correctness in favor of willful mendacity and issue avoidance.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Fort Hood, we knew that an act of immense violence was committed on one of America’s largest military installations. The targets were unarmed soldiers and civilians. It involved considerable planning, as the perpetrator had multiple weapons and ample ammunition and chose a location where large crowds would be gathered. Moreover, there was no discernible motive other than death and destruction.

In a post-9/11 world, one would expect these facts alone to provoke concerns of terrorism. The preliminary reports indicating that Hasan had espoused radical Islamic views and that he was a Muslim did not form the basis for the suspicions of terrorism but rather added to them.

Read about the claims against Hasan

Over the past two decades, this nation has suffered multiple attacks at the hands of Islamic extremists, including the Army sergeant who killed two officers and injured 14 others in a premeditated grenade attack in 2003.

Given the first reports after the Fort Hood massacre, and the historical context in which the attack occurred, it would have been both disingenuous and dangerous not to consider whether Hasan allegedly was motivated by religious fanaticism.

Disingenuous because thoughtful people who claim not to have considered religion as a motivation are being dishonest with themselves. Dangerous because to ignore religious fanaticism as the potential motivation for such a senseless act only leaves us more exposed to future attacks.

The Army has been criticized for allowing Hasan to rise in the officer ranks, despite his having made little effort to hide his incendiary beliefs. The tragedy has also provoked some uncomfortable questions as to whether our cultural attitudes have allowed political correctness to stifle discussion of sensitive issues like religion and ethnicity.

Watch more on possible Fort Hood red flags

This is unfortunate because it implies that political correctness is, in and of itself, a bad thing. It is not. It was a politically correct military that allowed African-Americans to serve with valor in the Civil War. It was a politically correct military, and a heavily Southern one at that, that desegregated well before the rest of American society. And it is a politically correct military that is benefiting by the presence of so many brave young women on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today’s military is brilliantly diverse and includes thousands of Muslim soldiers who serve with honor. We do them and ourselves an injustice when we ignore the obvious warning signs of a madman because we are not comfortable enough with our own diversity to speak openly and honestly with each other.

We do those heroic service members who are suffering PTSD an even greater disservice when we use this very serious illness to explain the actions of a killer without a scintilla of evidence to suggest that he was in fact suffering from it.

What political correctness should stand for is an atmosphere of tolerance, as well as openness. Our desire to be inclusive should never cause us to abandon our common sense or lead us to shy away from raising legitimate questions out of fear of offending.

Our refusal to deal openly with the sensitive issues that confront us as we wage the fight against global terrorism only fosters an atmosphere of cultural suspicion and mistrust, the very ill that political correctness seeks to redress.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Tom Kenniff.

Bob Sutton: Testosterone Levels, Top Dogs, and Collective Group Confidence »

My favorite behavioral science website, BPS Research Digest, posted a summary of an amazingly weird and rather troubling psychological experiment.  The upshot is that people —- both men and women —- vary in testosterone levels and (no surprise), when people with high testosterone levels aren’t in leadership positions, “they can find it stressful and uncomfortable when denied the status that they crave.”  A bit more surprising is that the reverse is true as well, that “people low in testosterone find it uncomfortable to be placed in positions of authority.” The main finding from the research is that when groups suffer from “mismatch” between status and testosterone levels (where those with high testosterone levels are placed at the bottom of the pecking order, and those with low levels are placed at the top), the group has less confidence in its abilities get things done.  I quote from the BPS summary:

Michael Zyphur and colleagues assigned 92 groups of between 4 and 7 undergrads to an on-going task that involved meeting twice a week for 12 weeks, and included creating a professional management-training video. Six weeks into the project the researches measured the participants’ testosterone levels via saliva samples. They also asked all members in each group to vote on each others’ status. Then six weeks after that, at the end of the project, the researchers measured each group’s collective efficacy by summing members’ confidence in their group’s ability to succeed.

The key finding was that groups made up of members whose status was out of synch with their testosterone level tended to have the lowest collective efficacy. The researchers think that testosterone-status mismatch within a group probably has a detrimental effect on that group’s collective confidence. However, another possibility, which they acknowledge, is that a lack of group confidence leads to a mismatch between testosterone levels and status among group members.

The implication is fairly horrifying —- perhaps companies will start using testosterone levels to make decisions about whether or not to put people in leadership positions.  Even if it is “evidence-based” (although these results are preliminary), the thought makes me a bit sick.

Here is the reference:

Zyphur, M., Narayanan, J., Koh, G., & Koh, D. (2009). Testosterone–status mismatch lowers collective efficacy in groups: Evidence from a slope-as-predictor multilevel structural equation model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110 (2), 70-79.

I actually posted about this article before, but liked what Sutton says and how he wrote about it, so voila!