I continually review new and legacy research on effective leadership. And I’ve noticed a pattern: The easy thing to do is almost never the best thing.
What a drag, right?
Not really. If leadership were easy, any lazy bum could do it.
Here are three examples of research-driven “aha’s” that could make us all better leaders, but only if we’re willing to work a little harder:
1. Employee engagement
The single factor that best engages people at work is the feeling that they’re making progress toward a goal. That’s the conclusion drawn from a massive research study reported in a book called The Progress Principle, by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.
What an “aha” for a manager! The concept is simple and recommends a series of actions that could have a big impact – set up clear goals, praise incremental progress, and celebrate achievement.
But when Amabile and Kramer presented their findings to a group of executives at a conference, they got a reaction that threw them. Initially, the group acknowledged that happy and engaged employees perform better. So far, so good. But when the authors asked what leaders needed to do to actually make employees happy and engaged, the group gave answers you’d expect from someone who wanted to achieve a great result with minimal effort. Pay people well. Give them bonuses. Create a recognition program (that is, have somebody else create it).
Their instinct was to automate engagement. When the authors suggested that maybe leaders have to actually get actively involved – i.e., expend effort – people looked puzzled. One said, “Of course daily progress in the work is motivating. But if you’ve hired the best people, and structured your organization well, it’s up to them to make progress in their work. You shouldn’t have to worry about ‘facilitating’ it every day.”
Yes, you should. In fact, you’ll fail if you don’t.
And most do fail. The authors said that of the seven companies they studied in their research, only one had top managers who consistently supported people in their progress. Think about that. This was a preselected group that agreed to participate in a time-consuming study. Presumably they were more interested than most in employee engagement, which they saw as correlated to high performance.
But almost none of them did what needed to be done.
Leadership is hard.
2. Getting people to hit deadlines
Strong managers hold people accountable for completing projects on schedule. Wouldn’t it be great if there were an easy way to do that?
The popular behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his colleague Klaus Wertenbroch conducted a study called “Procrastination, Deadlines and Performance” to figure out the best way for managers to get people to hit deadlines. Below are the three options they offered study participants. Which one do you think worked best?
- Group 1: The manager sets a single deadline.
- Group 2: The manager sets an overall deadline, but empowers participants to set their own interim deadlines.
- Group 3: The manager sets an overall deadline, but imposes interim deadlines.
Most people I’ve quizzed on this choose Group 2. I think the reason we want this to be the right answer is that empowered people are more autonomous. Yeah, that's good for them. But it's also good for us because they require less effort and oversight.
Group 3, where the manager intervenes and sets the interim deadlines, got 20% better results than the empowered group and 100% better than the single-deadline group.
Now, in all three groups the researchers intentionally didn’t have managers looking over people’s shoulders. So in the experiment, the added effort for managers in Group 3 was small. But in real life, to get the benefit of the “aha” in this study, you’d have to work harder. You’d need to set overall deadlines, dive into the details and set interim deadlines that make sense, communicate those deadlines and, yes, follow up to make sure they’ve been hit.
Building on The Progress Principle findings noted above, you’d also want to celebrate when people meet those interim deadlines. Which takes time, effort and mind share.
Leadership is hard.
3. Developing talent
Great leaders are great talent developers. They achieve the Multiplier Effect, which occurs when leaders replicate in others the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors that made them successful.
The easy way to develop talent is to treat learning as a single event. We need sales training, or leadership training, so let’s hire a consultant to come in and conduct the training in a day or two. Then everyone can get back to work.
But the easy way fails because people forget. Back in 1885, the father of memory research, Hermann Ebbinghaus, published a study showing how astonishingly fast we forget what we learned – 50% after a day, almost all after a week. If this is true, training people but providing no follow-up is almost always a complete waste of time and money.
And it is true. Ebbinghaus' studies on forgetting, and on a technique called “the spacing effect” to improve memory retention, have been replicated repeatedly. The spacing effect says that you can vastly increase knowledge retention if you revisit what you learned at spaced intervals after a learning event.
A paper published in 2006 called Spacing Learning Events Over Time: What the Research Says, explains the “why” of spaced learning: “Every piece of knowledge stored in memory is connected to other pieces of information in a web-like arrangement. The more connections a piece of information has, the more likely it will be retrieved when it is required. Thus, if a piece of information is learned in several different ways or at several different times, it is likely to have more connecting pathways than if it is learned under less diverse conditions.”
This is intuitive. In fact, it’s dead obvious. So why, then, do so many companies treat training as an event, not a process, thus guaranteeing that the training will fail?
Because managers are the only ones who can practically provide follow-up and make learning stick. And that takes time, effort and mind share.
Leadership is hard.
