The Best of the December Issue

 

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December 10, 2013 By Best of the Issue Spotlight How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management David A. Garvin Google's early experiments with a manager-free organization lasted only a few months before its founders became convinced that managers were essential to communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, promoting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals. To convince its engineers, who in their hearts believed management was basically a distraction from their real work, Google's people-analytics team applied the same analytical rigor and tools that its engineers used in their own work to essentially reverse-engineer the elements that make for a great Google manager. And what were those? The best Google managers are good coaches, caring for their team members' well-being and career advancement. They do not micromanage. They are results oriented -- good at translating corporate strategy into team strategy. And they have the tech chops to keep up with their A-list staff. You can watch David Garvin explain how a team of only three high-powered statisticians could accomplish so much. Or hear Garvin interview Google engineer (and Great Manager Award-winner) Eric Clayberg, who recounts how following this process taught him to effectively manage his colleagues. We also put together an interactive look at one Google manager's feedback report. Feature The Focused Leader Daniel Goleman Back in 1998, discoveries in the then-new field of neuroscience led Dan Goleman in the HBR classic "What Makes a Leader" to the seminal insight that emotional intelligence was the attribute that makes the difference between the competent leader and the brilliant one. Fifteen years on, further advances in neuroscience now lead him to the factor that underpins emotional intelligence, as well as the more traditional skills of strategy making and innovation -- where and how leaders focus their attention. Great leaders tap into their emotional intelligence by knowing when to focus inward on the signals their bodies are sending them and how to focus outward on signals from their staff and their organization. Every leader needs to cultivate all three kinds of focus in abundance and in the proper balance. A failure to focus inward appropriately will leave you rudderless. The inability to focus on others effectively renders you clueless. And focusing on the wrong external signals will leave you blindsided. Watch Goleman explain what stops us from exercising these three kinds of focus. Managing Yourself Be Seen as a Leader Adam D. Galinsky and Gavin J. Kilduff You've been assigned to a new cross-divisional task force, and the first meeting is today. You would dearly love to become a star of the team. Before you go, take five minutes to write a paragraph describing what you aim to achieve in life. Or recall a time when you had power over another person. Or write about some moment when you were filled with joy. Why? Remarkably, the authors' experimental research convincingly shows that priming yourself in any of these ways to feel more goal oriented, more powerful, or especially happy will lead you to exhibit certain "competence cues," such as speaking up, taking the initiative, and expressing confidence, that will highlight your leadership potential to your new colleagues. While such effects are usually fleeting, their research shows that they last a lot longer in newly formed groups because these first impressions create reinforcing behavior patterns that lock them in. Defend Your Research Need Someone's Help? Ask the Person Who Just Turned You Down Daniel A. Newark You ask a guy to do you a favor, like, say, fill out a survey, and he says no. So you ask him to take a letter of yours to the post office. Will he? When this Stanford researcher and colleagues tried out that experiment, only 18% of the students they'd recruited to beg the favors thought that he would. And yet a whopping 43% of those they actually solicited who wouldn't fill out the survey did agree to mail the letter. Often when people fail to come through for you, Newark argues, it's not because they don't want to, but because for some reason they can't. That fills them with guilt, making them more willing to help you out if you give them another chance. Research has long confirmed the effectiveness of the foot-in-the-door approach—if you start small and get an initial yes, your target will keep saying yes to remain being helpful. Newark's finding suggest you can also succeed with a door-in-the-face technique: when you get an initial no, come back with a smaller request, and your target will be more likely to say yes because it will seem as though you've made a concession.

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