Do Stereotypes Make Better Managers?

What with the Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley dust up, stereotypes have been on my mind lately. More specifically, I’ve become concerned with how and why we create them, and what they cost us, especially given the recent NYT interview with Carol Smith, entitled “No Doubts: Women are Better Managers.”

Now I have no bias toward the gender. In fact, some of my best friends are women, and even members of my own family are women. As neuroscientist John Medina has explained, there are fundamental differences between the brains of men and women that lead to different traits. I, for one, believe that there is also strong evidence that women are predisposed to acquire those skills that make them better at managing relationships.

Carol Smith may be a terrific manager. But given the errors our reasoning is prone to, her interview may drive readers to make the same kind of mental mistakes as Gates and Crowley. The best way I can illustrate the danger is by presenting the results of my own study on gender-based traits. I readily admit my sample is so small that the validity of my results is open to question. I used what I had at hand: my two daughters, ages nine and ten.

Ten-year-old Julia has an obsession with fashion. The pinnacle of self-actualization for her is a trip to the mall and her favorite clothing store. Everything else pales by comparison: her household chores, her homework, and even lectures from her father on proper deportment.An ancillary trait is a fondness for vampires and for a certain male actor that plays one in a popular movie. Julia is also an incredibly sweet girl, and even more so when a trip to the mall might be in the cards. 

Since I am a man with neither a fondness for the mall or vampires, I could reason that these traits are gender-based. But I’m a good enough scientist to recognize the need to test my hypothesis with another observation, in effect doubling my sample size. Emma, though well past the age when Julia’s obsession became manifest, has absolutely no interest in fashion. Instead, her wardrobe is just a means to state her self-affirming philosophy that “Life is Good.” The more infrequently her clothes are laundered, or even changed, the better. And no vampires for her; she prefers the Marx Brothers. Emma is also as sweet as can be, particularly when some tasty treat is in the offing. So I can’t conclude a gender-based predisposition for fashion or anti-fashion, vampires or Groucho.Based on a sample of one, it’s equally difficult to conclude that Carol Smith’s penchant for making lists, coming late to meetings when the small talk is over, or being willing to confront are gender-based.

Nor can one necessarily conclude that these traits are responsible for her being a better manager. When I doubled the sample size in my study, I did find one trait in common: a fondness for chocolate and an ability to consume enough in one sitting to plunge a horse into a diabetic coma. But it’s a stretch to conclude that’s why little girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice.”

Our ability to generalize is a valuable evolutionary adaptation. If we’ve had experience with one saber-tooth tiger, we don’t have to learn the hard way that the next one we encounter views us as lunch. But generalizations also lead to errors, such as the suspicion that a 5’7″ black man with a cane is so dangerous he needs to be handcuffed, or the conviction that a white police officer in the People’s Republic of Cambridge is a racist.

Stereotypes of minorities, police officers, women managers, or even bloggers, will highlight common denominators at the expense of the wide range of individual differences. My father was 6’4″ tall and mother 5’2″, but to conclude the average Jacobs parent is 5’9″ tall obscures the towering reality of my father and my mother’s need to perch on a phonebook while driving.

But generalization also haunts us when it comes to implementing the practices that make for good management. Smith advocates the use of a palliative–a positive statement–before she delivers hard feedback. While a boost to the ego makes it easier to accept criticism, palliatives come in all shapes and sizes. Complimenting me on my punctuation isn’t liable to reduce the sting of a follow on comment that my writing is as dull as dishwater.

Generalizing runs counter to fully appreciating the uniqueness of other people, along with their views, needs, and quirky social practices. While coming late to meetings may save time, for many men and women, small talk builds better working relationships and unhooks the mind from other concerns, making it easier to reach decisions on the critical business issues of the moment. Even if such chatter didn’t have benefits, I can only imagine how the male managers feel about Smith’s absence from such a waste of time.

There is a solid body of management research, with large enough sample sizes to be valid, to teach us what in general works or doesn’t. But because all of us are prisoners of our uniquely subjective views, our success in implementing good practices depends on our read of the people we manage. The more we use our mirror neurons and our theory of mind to move beyond stereotyping to empathizing with each individual, the better we’ll be at doing the right thing in the right way.

So what should an aspiring manager, male or female, do? Focus on developing the skills that research has established lead to improved performance, and trust in the plasticity of the brain to learn those skills, regardless of gender. Appreciate that the people you manage are individuals and step into their shoes before you determine how to act.

It’s a safe bet, given the way the mind works, few of us are as good as we would like to believe. So search for evidence not of the success of your actions, but of their failure. The more we accept our own fallibility, the more open we’ll be to all of the teachable moments that make management such a joy.

One last thing: never give an interview to the NYT on why you’re a good manager.

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Brain Science Can Lead Us Out of the Doldrums

Even the most cheerful optimists have got to be depressed by the economy. Every time we get data that suggests we’re finally coming out of the Great Recession, it’s followed by more that indicates we’re not, lately even in the same report. Perhaps we need to set aside the wishful thinking and just accept what we’ve got: an economy that isn’t falling off a cliff, but isn’t going to come roaring back any time soon.

It’s tough for the bipolar financial media to recognize that it is what it is, because there’s no news in a so-so status quo. It’s the really good or really bad that drives us to buy newspapers or visit websites. But it’s also tough for managers. Nobody gets rewarded or excited when earnings are flat, and most businesses have already cut all there is to cut to bump up their bottom line.

Part of the problem, we’re told, is that there’s no hot new technology like computers or the internet to help us dig out of the hole of debt we’ve created. But I think there is a hot new technology, not right in front of our noses, but behind them. Neuroscience’s incredible advances in understanding how the mind works have enormous potential to transform the way we run our businesses.

I’m not talking about pills that supposedly make us smarter, nor do I believe that using neuro-feedback to teach managers how to mimic the brain wave patterns of great leaders will make them great leaders. Such approaches are just too far out there for me or, I suspect, my clients. And while brain scans may help us understand what product features stimulate the release of the pleasure inducing dopamine, it’s still a long way from that knowledge to a product that will delight customers and make a profit. The real gains come from just factoring in how the mind works when we make business decisions.

A number of years ago, Ernst and Young came up with the tag line, “There’s not a business we can’t improve.” While a marketing campaign that insults the capability of potential clients is ill-considered, and evidence of not paying enough attention to the mind, the firm was correct in it’s assessment. Because our conventional way of thinking is flawed, according to neuroscience, it inevitably leads to flawed businesses.

I would bet anyone that has worked in the corporate world would agree that organizations are hugely inefficient and that much of what managers do is self-defeating. At the same time, there is a solid body of data on which organizational designs and management practices improve performance. The reason we don’t replace what doesn’t work with what does is exactly what the latest research in neuroscience teaches us.

Because the brain doesn’t record our experience of the world, as conventional wisdom asserts, but creates it, as neuroscience has established, we live in a world of our own making. But most of what we do as managers is based on the assumption that we all see things the same way. The feedback I give employees is objective and for their benefit, the rewards I dispense are generous, and this time I’m serious about change.

But employees don’t see things the same way as managers, so they don’t respond the way we expect. Our feedback comes across as punitive and is rejected, our rewards are so small they’re seen as insulting, and change is just more of the same. Worse yet, I see what I believe, so all I become aware of is evidence that what I do as a manager is effective. Given the self-deception our brains are capable of, we’re just not good judges of what works or doesn’t.

And much of what has been proven to work flies in the face of our common sense. Self-management improves performance and open organizations that give up the illusion of control outperform traditional ones. Engaging narratives are much more effective at changing minds than logical arguments, and inspirational visions trump measurable objectives in driving performance.

Because of the kind of thinking our culture has historically valued, we pay inadequate attention to the minds of those we interact with. In an objective world, there’s no reason to. But neuroscience teaches us that the world we live in isn’t objective, and if we take the lesson to heart, it dramatically changes how we manage.

Calculate the savings if managers no longer waste their time doing what doesn’t work, if we dispense with all of the organizational control systems people cleverly find ways to work around, and if we no longer spend money on change initiatives that don’t change anything. Now add in the increased productivity that comes from highly engaged people eagerly contributing their best thinking to further the success of the business. Factor in, as well, the increase in revenue that would come from designing and marketing products that leverage how and why customers make buying decisions, and the gain in market share that would come from strategies that confound the thinking of the competition.

The total would dwarf any savings coming from cost-cutting or the implementation of new information technology. This isn’t science fiction or some pipe dream of what the future will bring. We have the knowledge and the means to apply it today. In fact, there are companies already reaping the benefits of this new scientific approach, and not just in Silicon Valley but in the heartland as well.

No new technology indeed!

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Flattering Lies

My first corporate job was at the then cutting edge company, Digital Equipment Corporation. It’s founder and CEO was the legendary Ken Olsen. He was a strong advocate for employee empowerment, even before the term was coined, and was an iconic figure for the over eighty thousand people that worked for him at the time. One of his favorite maxims was that no one knows a job better than the person doing it, so they ought to decide how it should be done.

You can imagine how excited I was when after being with the company for about a year, I was invited to attend a strategic planning seminar with him. I was even more excited at dinner the first night when I realized that I would be sitting at his table. What an honor, and what an opportunity to learn from one of the most enlightened leaders of the time!

There were maybe eight other tables in the banquet hall, and I took my seat at Ken’s. After not too long, the conversation in the room grew animated as the wine began to flow. But not at our table. Ken was a Quaker and did not drink, so few of the senior managers at the table felt comfortable taking more than a sip or too.

As we started on our salads, Ken began a discussion with the manager of one of the company’s European subsidiaries. He opened with, “So why are your results off this quarter?” Another bite of salad and then another question, each becoming more and more intimidating.  By the end of the course, the manager’s salad was untouched and he was drenched in sweat. It was the most uncomfortable meal I had ever had.

When it was over, I joined the other managers at the bar and told them what I had just observed. All of them had worked closely with Ken for years and none were surprised by my tale. As one put it, “Ken has a way of stripping you naked and making you walk down main street.” For those of us at a remove, Ken represented everything right about the company. But when you got close, life could become a living hell.

As time when on, I learned more about Ken’s contradictory management style. One of my managers resigned for a lesser job elsewhere, unwilling to take any more.  My new manager, also a direct report, displayed all of the signs of excessive tranquilizer use.

Perhaps Ken’s odd style was displayed most famously when he gave an interview proclaiming that personal computers were idiotic and the company would never make them.  At the same time, over four hundred of the company’s engineers were busy designing a PC in a group code-named K.O. With poetic irony, Digital was eventually acquired by the low end PC manufacturer, Compaq, when the market for mini-computers started to shrink.

So Ken talked a good game, but didn’t practice what he preached. But I don’t believe that Ken was much different from most managers, or for that matter from myself.  We all fall victim to tricks of the mind.  We have a view of ourselves, our self-image, and we maintain it by ignoring or rationalizing away any information to the contrary. It’s called cognitive dissonance reduction.

I’ve argued that management based on the insights of brain science doesn’t demand learning any new complex algorithms. All it requires is that we hold the idea in our minds that we all create our own unique versions of reality, which will differ from those of others. And given the way the mind works, the idea will drive the appropriate behavior.

The problem is that our minds, through the process of cognitive dissonance reduction, deceive us into thinking we hold the idea in our minds when we don’t. We delude ourselves into believing that we’re highly empathetic and strong participative managers, and all we allow ourselves to become aware of is information that supports the belief.

Because of this penchant for self-deceit. there are fewer “enlightened” managers than one would expect, especially given the overwhelming data that links approaches like participative management to dramatic improvements in performance. Even worse, managers that believe they’re managing participatively, but aren’t, then see direct proof that such an approach fails.

Yes, keeping in mind a couple of the key insights that come out of brain science will lead to more effective management, but only when we also apply them to ourselves. Perhaps the best managers are the ones that think they’re the worst. It makes them question everything they do and never believe the flattering lies we all tell ourselves.

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