Candidates asked to send proof of "web presence" instead of résumés

Here is an excerpt from an article by RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN in today's Wall Street Journal, under the title No More Résumés, Say Some Firms.

Union Square Ventures recently posted an opening for an investment analyst.

Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their "Web presence," such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog. Applicants also had to submit short videos demonstrating their interest in the position.

Union Square says its process nets better-quality candidates —especially for a venture-capital operation that invests heavily in the Internet and social-media—and the firm plans to use it going forward to fill analyst positions and other jobs.

To read the rest of the article, see how other companies are by-passing résumes, and readers' comments please go to No More Résumés (paying article).

How to evaluate true intuitive experience

Managers and coaches often lay a great deal of store in the value of intuitive management.  I do too, but it depends on who the intuitive decision or advice is coming from and how much experience they have of their professional field. Below is an excerpt from today's Sunday New York Times Magazine article adapted from Daniel Kahneman's forthcoming book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow".

We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field (note from John Gaynard, based on an earlier part of the article, when Kahneman demonstrated how it was impossible to correctly evaluate who would be a good leader in the Israeli army based on a series of standard tests or levels of confidence shown in ad hoc groups), people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness. 

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes. 

Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

Read the whole article:
Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence - NYTimes.com

Only one in seven companies has managers that enable workers to progress

In today's New York Sunday Times Review, Teresa Amabile constructs an article around her own research, a Gallup Healthways ongoing poll and two books: The Limping Middle Class and One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities. Both books will be published tomorrow, September 4, 2011. The title of the article is: Do Happier People Work Harder?

Below is an excerpt:

As long as workers experience their labor as meaningful, progress is often followed by joy and excitement about the work. “This time it looks good! I feel more positive about this project and my work than I’ve felt in a long time,” one programmer wrote after she’d completed a small but difficult task. This kind of rich inner work life improves performance, which further supports inner work life — a positive spiral.

Unfortunately, many companies now keep head count and resources to a minimum and this makes progress a struggle for employees. Most managers don’t understand the negative consequences of this struggle. When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

This failure reflects a common experience inside organizations. Of the seven companies we studied, just one had managers who consistently supplied the catalysts — worker autonomy, sufficient resources and learning from problems — that enabled progress. Not coincidentally, that company was the only one to achieve a technological breakthrough in the months we studied it.

So what is the lesson for managers and coaches?  Create a climate in which you allow your staff or team members sufficient autonomy to do their jobs, give them the right resources and allow them to learn from problems.  Is that rocket science?

Read the whole article:

Do Happier People Work Harder? - NYTimes.com

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised Test for CEOs

In a July 21 article in Businessweek, Bryant Urstadt reviewed Jon Ronson's book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry.  The article is subtitled: "Why are so many CEOs jerks? Because they're psychopaths" and it goes on to show that many corporate leaders score way above average on a test known as the The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised test.  By following a link from the review you can take test yourself. Here is how the review begins:

The very first thing to know about psychopaths, at least according to Jon Ronson, is that they’re very charming. They’re also usually smart, easily bored, and ruthless power mongers who watch suffering with interest, have an inflated sense of self-worth, lie compulsively, and rarely take blame for their mistakes. For those reasons and others they tend to congregate in places such as London and New York. And a relatively high percentage end up running big companies. 

Ronson, the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, wrapsThe Psychopath Test around the research of Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who is the authority on psychopaths and co-author of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. Hare is also the author of the definitive psychopath test—Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)—which has become the SAT for diagnosing nutjob behavior. Throughout decades of research, he’s found that many corporate leaders score way above average. 

Actually, alarmingly high. While studies suggest that about 1 percent of the general population qualifies as genuinely psychopathic, Hare believes that about 4 percent of people with substantial decision-making power can be classified as such, and their influence is outsized. Hare even tells Ronson he wishes he’d spent less time studying psychopaths in prison and more time studying those who work in the markets. “Serial killers ruin families,” Hare says. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.” Although Ronson leans heavily on Hare’s research, he explains that other psychologists feel the same way. “The higher you go up the ladder,” says Martha Stout, a former Harvard Medical School professor and author of The Sociopath Next Door, “the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.” (Ronson uses the terms socio- and psychopath interchangeably.)

You can also find reviews of the book in the New York Times: Running Down a Sanity Checklist, or by following some of the links to: 

Related articles

• Book Review: The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (blogcritics.org)
• The Philosophical Significance of Psychopaths: Postmodernism, Morality, and God (tipggita32.wordpress.com)
• New book explores how to spot a psychopath (ctv.ca)
• 20 Signs That You Are A Psychopath (businessinsider.com)
• Psychopath Spotting (bigthink.com)
• The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, by Jon Ronson (theglobeandmail.com)
• Read Jon Ronson's "Psychopath Test" (1minionsopinion.wordpress.com)
• The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson: review (telegraph.co.uk)

The best way to kick off a new organisational change is to give the skeletons from previous changes a decent burial

I remember once talking to a marketing VP about a major organisational change that had gone wrong in his company. I asked him if he would call in a person with no experience of marketing to launch a major new product.  "Of course I wouldn't," he replied.

But, often, that is exactly what happens when a company decides to implement a major organisational change. It may never have implemented a change in the past, may never have laid off people, but it decides to confide the task to HR staff who have never had experience of change management.

That marketing VP was faced with implementing another major change.  He had learned from the company's past mistakes. That is why he was talking to me and why he asked me to advise him on better planning change, better comunicating change, and then managing the transitions provoked by change.  I use the methods, developed by William Bridges, to manage the organisational and individual transitions provoked by change.

One of the main lessons I learned from Bridges is that it is often necessary to begin a new change by going back to old changes and seeing what went wrong and how those things continue to pollute the organisational culture. It is necessary to show people how to take their skeletons out of the closet, so that they can give them a decent burial. Many managing directors don't want to hear of this. Sometimes they even get irritated when they hear a consultant advising them to repair the errors of the past.  All they want to talk to their staff about is a "bright new beginning", and to hell with whatever went wrong with the last change.  

By giving staff about to enter a new change, the time, even if it's only a couple of hours, to give their still clanking skeletons a decent burial, and to talk about their personal lessons learned, it allows them to come to terms with the past. It augments trust in management, and allows the new change to move forward more smoothly than it would have done if things had been kept under the carpet. 

I was reminded of this when I saw the latest edition of Strategy+Business, in an article that uses case a few real-life case studies to explain how a new change can be unsuccessful because of poor experience with change in the past. Here is an excerpt:  

The first study involved a property and development firm in the Philippines. Unable to meet the demands of a booming population and increasing competition, the company’s executives had decided to merge with another firm. At the time of the study, the organization had announced the merger to its employees and begun the transition — including the evaluation and redefinition of jobs.

In interviews with the human resources department, the researchers learned that the company had a poor history of change implementation: In the past, senior managers had created satellite offices and reassigned employees without consulting them, leading to resentment among those affected. With the help of HR, the researchers split employees into two groups — those who had reason to resent upper management for previous actions and those who didn’t.

Two months after the merger was announced, 155 employees at the firm completed surveys assessing previous change management projects, their perceptions of the current transition, and their level of trust in the organization. The results of this first study confirmed that employees who had had poor experiences with change in the past felt more cynicism about the current transition as well as less trust.

You can read the whole article at : Dealing with the ghosts of change management.