Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Entitled to Overtime?

Of course, not everyone is entitled to overtime.  Under "white-collar exemptions" to the law, employers don't have to pay extra to various executives and professionals.  These exemptions, labor historians say, are rooted in decades-old thinking about a workforce that bears little resemblance to today's.  A clear distinction between professional and production classes used to be assumed.

About 115 million employees--86% of the workforce--are covered by federal overtime rules, according to the U.S. Labor Dept.  The rules apply to salaried and hourly workers alike.

Today, there are two basic categories of overtime claims.  One arises because a company has misclassified employees as exempt from the wage and hour laws, and thus improperly failed to pay overtime.  The second is a so-called off-the-clock claim, in which employees allege that some of the work they do is not recorded by the company, sometimes as an intentional way to keep them from accruing overtime.

In overtime cases, Depression-era laws aimed at factories and textile mills are being applied in a 21st century economy, raising fundamental questions about the rules of the modern workplace.  Generally, workers with jobs that require independent judgment have not been entitled to overtime pay.  But with businesses embracing efficiency and quality-control initiatives, more and more tasks, even in offices, are becoming standardized, tightly choreographed routines.  That's just one of several factors blurring the traditional blue-collar/white-collar divide.  Then there's technology: In an always-on, telecommuting world, when does the workday begin and end?  The ambiguity now surrounding these questions is tripping up companies and enriching lawyers.

Even defense attorneys acknowledge that vast numbers of companies are violating the law.  "Industries long steeped in tradition as to who is exempt and who is not exempt...are not necessarily compliant with the letter of the regulations," says Kirby C. Wilcox, a partner at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker in San Francisco.

Lawyers sue companies for violating "wage and hour" rules, typically claiming they have failed to pay overtime to workers who deserve it.  Since the beginning of this decade, this litigation has exploded nationwide.  Because wage and hour laws have been so widely violated, undetonated legal mines remain buried in countless companies, according to defense and plaintiff's lawyers alike.  No one tracks precise figures, but lawyers on both sides estimate that over the last few years companies have collectively paid out more than $1 billion annually to resolve these claims, which are usually brought on behalf of large groups of employees.

"This is the biggest problem for companies out there in the employment area by far," says J. Nelson Thomas, a Rochester, NY attorney who switched from defense to plaintiffs' work.  "I can hit a company with a hundred sexual harassment lawsuits, and it will not inflict anywhere near the damage that [a wage and hour suit] will."

Source: BusinessWeek, October 1, 2007

A Leader's Brain

"We're coming up with the genome--the brain map--of the leader," says Pierre Balthazard, an Arizona State University management professor.

Mr. Balthazard is among a growing number of researchers looking inside the brain for business insights.  The surge in interest among researchers is fueled by more powerful diagnostic tools and an improved understanding of how the brain influences character, personality and behavior.

Executive coaches and researchers are increasingly tapping neuroscience tidbits to bolster their management theories.  Scientists at Gallup Organization, for example, say brain research helps managers understand why praise works: it boosts levels of dopamine, a chemical linked to joy.

Advances in electroencephalogram (EEG) technology make it easier to "map" a brain's electrical activity.  But it isn't clear that leaders exhibit defined brain-wave patterns, or that changing such patterns automatically alters behavior.  Not all brains function the same way, neuroscientists say.  Nor do people with similar brain patterns necessarily act in similar ways.

Robert Thatcher, a neuroscientist who's worked on EEGs and behavior for 35 years, says preliminary analysis of 50 brain maps shows some big differences in activity between managers who rate high on a psychological test of visionary leadership, and those who rate low.  The visionary leaders had more efficient left brains, which deal with logic and reasoning, and better connected right brains, which are responsible for social skills.

Mr. Thatcher hopes to find more patterns as more brains are scanned.  The patterns could indicate brain activity associated with specific qualities like charisma, or something common to all good leaders.  The patterns could just reflect "faster brains--more processing, more power," he says, adding that once the patterns are found, "you can move people" to them.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2007

Social Networking Sites

Social networking is a better fit for some companies than for others.

Brands that don't create excitement in traditional media will have to get creative to make it in social networking.  "Business-only" social networking sites, with groups of professionals, can help bolster your personal bottom line.

Forrester Research senior analyst Brian Haven estimates that at best, LinkedIn (generally considered the leader in professional-oriented social networking) is visited weekly by one in every 20 adult Internet users to select community contacts for insight, advice, or potential job candidates to fill open slots.  Personally, I have 67 direct LinkedIn connections, 6,800+ two-degrees (friends of friends) and 918,700+ three-degree (their friends). 

Consider that your orbit of contacts can speak volumes to a potential employer or business partner, both good and bad.  "I talk to a lot of recruiters who use these tools, and they are being used for reference checking very seriously, considering the cost of a bad hire today," says Jim Dickie, managing partner of CSO Insights and a long-time LinkedIn user.

Consumer-oriented sites like MySpace and Facebook can also provide business value.  According to Forrester, more than half of the 27 to 40-year-olds using social networking sites use MySpace, although not necessarily exclusively.  "To me, and to a lot of people, it makes sense to have a profile on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  They all serve different purposes," says Haven.

Facebook began as a hangout for high school and college students and last year allowed anyone to join.  Eight months later, Facebook did something MySpace still hasn't done: It opened up its network to developers and made it easy for them to make money from their applications.  Facebook began allowing programmers to build as many apps for Facebook's 32 million users as they could dream up--and pocket whatever money they made doing it.

To incentivize developers, Facebook is also breaking ranks with rivals by sharing crucial data--such as a user's age, interests and friends--that enables more sophisticated applications.  Just about any Facebook app can get into the ad game, but only those with the biggest audiences will earn serious money.  Several easy-to-use ad networks are already delivering the ads for a cut of overall sales.  Apps currently generate less than $1 for every 1,000 pageviews.

Whether the community is there in support of a brand or a common interest, gathering information on participants not only helps organizations better understand enthusiasts, but also helps to build loyalty through the law of attraction.

Sources: 1to1 magazine, September 2007 and Business 2.0, September 2007

Learning Partners

Executive education programs grew fast during the 1990s, but companies cut back sharply in the 2001 recession.  Since then, spending for executive development has gradually rebounded, but now the prime target market of 35 to 45-year-old managers is shrinking as the Baby Boomers age.

"The days of easy growth are over," says Stephen Burnett, associate dean of executive education at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.  "To be successful, you have to be far more strategic, smarter and devote more resources to the business."  Schools are competing in this crowded market by offering more courses on timely topics like managing the new work force and understanding Asia.  They're also targeting certain niches, such as women reentering the workplace.

"In the past, companies were less worried about the ROI on the learning dollar, but now they're much more concerned about bang for the buck," says Eric Weber, associate dean of IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain.

"We're becoming learning partners with companies and taking on almost a quasi-consulting role," says Anant Sundaram, faculty director for executive education at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.   "With projects, a company ends up with something very actionable.  We also can do individual coaching to maximize leadership development and conduct follow-up work with the talent-development folks at companies."

Source: The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2007

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The smartest employers are starting to deal with a new generation that expects a very different workplace from the one of their parents.

The desire to hire young graduates is prompted by the retirement of Baby Boomers.  Many employers are trying to appeal to Gen Y by making themselves more transparent, flexible, responsive, even nurturing.

So who are these people?

Officially, this generation comprises 1982 and 2000 who began entering the workforce three years ago.  They are supposed to be the hothouse kids: praised and coddled from infancy and watched over by their parents well into adulthood.  As employees, they are said to have high expectations and demand meaningful work, constructive feedback, and positions of influence within their organizations.  In other words, they want a seat at the table, or they'll walk.

It has been said that Gen Y needs buckets of praise.  In fact, in many cases these folks are looking for honest appraisals of their work.  Andrea S. Hershatter, director of Emory University's undergraduate business program, says, "They don't feel entitled because they're special, they feel entitled to have others support them in their efforts to accomplish and achieve."  Twentysomethings want not just honest feedback but also routine conversations about their progress and their career paths.

Source: BusinessWeek, September 24, 2007

Related articles

Baby Boomers and Their Wheels

How Boomer Parents are Ruining Millennial Job Skills

Extreme Jobs

Extreme jobs are everywhere.  Customers expect systems to function perfectly all the time.  Business leaders expect problems to be resolved instantly.  These realities, along with intense competition for top jobs, have combined to create a workday with no real beginning or end.

Consultants Carolyn Buck Luce and Sylvia Ann Hewlett put extreme jobs on the map last year when they unveiled a study of some of today's toughest and most consuming careers.  The research consisted of two surveys: one of high earners across various professions in the United States, the other of high-earning managers in multinational corporations.

Respondents qualified as extreme if they worked at least 60 hours per week, took home big salaries and held jobs that met at least five of the following 10 criteria:

1.  Unpredictable flow of work

2.  Fast-paced work under tight deadlines

3.  A scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job.

4.  Work-related events outside regular work hours.

5.  Availability to clients 24/7

6.  Responsibility for profit and loss

7.  Responsibility for mentoring and recruiting.

8.  Large amount of travel

9.  Large number of direct reports

10. Physical presence at workplace at least 10 hours a day

According to the study, the four characteristics thought to create the most intensity and pressure among survey respondents were unpredictability (cited by 91 percent), a fast pace with tight deadlines (86 percent), work-related events outside of business hours (66 percent) and 24/7 client demands (61 percent).

Source: CIO magazine, September 1, 2007, www.CIO.com

Instinct to Cooperate

Until recently, scientists weren't sure how niceness would survive from one generation to the next.  Now, some researchers believe that altruistic traits are passed on because cooperation helps entire groups combat enemies. 

The hardest things to contemplate in life are failure and age; and those are one and the same.  And so every failure becomes a reminder of death.  Yet, wait long enough, anything will realize its potential.  It's simply not given to us in one lifetime.

The idea that kindness evolved was initially suggested by Charles Darwin, who suspected that wars might create an evolutionary advantage for individuals who worked together over more individualistic foes.  Archeological evidence indicates that a period of almost constant war between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago ended with the emergence of super-cooperative groups.  The law of reciprocity and selflessness evolved with other genetic traits, such as a desire to conform to a group's norms.

Neuroscientists have found through brain scans that when people cooperate in games in which they share hypothetical money, the reward centers of their brains light up, reflecting a pleasurable experience. 

Researchers ran an experiment in which they created a two-person game. To start, player 1 got $10. If that player kept the money, player 2 also got $10 and the game ended. But if player 1 chose to let player 2 take a turn, then player 2 faced a choice: take home $40 and leave nothing for player 1, or take $25 and leave $15 for player 1.

About half the time, finds economist Kevin McCabe and colleagues at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, player 1 chooses to let player 2 into the game, forgoing a sure $10. In response, nearly three-quarters of the player 2s give up the $40, rewarding player 1's trust by splitting the money $25 to $15.

The functional magnetic resonance imaging ("fMRI") of the volunteers' brain shows that trust is marked by high activity in two brain regions, the researchers reported.  Area 10 seems to be involved in delaying gratification, which tends to increase one's final reward. Area 8 figures out what other minds are thinking, in this case registering that the other player is trying to maximize gain through reciprocity.  Some people, as the experiment shows, seem wired to delay gratification and act in a mutually beneficial way.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2007

Executive Women Customize Careers

Nearly 60 percent of all college graduates today are women, and they graduate with better grade point averages and more honors than men.

Men of all ages are spending more time with their children and running the household than in past decades.  Many have reached a point where preserving or increasing their personal time is more appealing than bigger jobs and more money.  Control over their work schedules is a high priority.

Only 17 percent of U.S. households today are traditional, with a husband who works outside of the home and a wife who does not, compared to 63 percent of traditional households in earlier generations.

A new book by two Deloitte executives takes a clear and cogent look at the changing workplace, by exploring what is no longer just a women's issue or a heated debate about work/life balance.  MASS CAREER CUSTOMIZATION: Aligning the Workplace with Today's Nontraditional Workforce by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg (Harvard Business School Press) examines the labor landscape and alerts Corporate America that now is time for a policy changes to be in alignment with the knowledge-driven labor force.

Today's career path is no longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder.  This book provides a structured approach to what is already going on in offices across the country.  There are numerous examples of employees who have dialed up and dialed down over the course of their career but have been unsuccessful as they were forced to change professions, employers or even opted out of the workforce entirely.  Employers would be wise to create a workplace that fits the new knowledge workers' needs.

New Women's Coaching Club begins in October 2007:  www.FemaleExecutiveClub.com

Visit www.ExecutiveTeleclasses.com for the Same Workplace, Different Realities teleclass series especially for women executives.

Evolution of Social Intelligence

Over the past decade, primatologists' work, studying social behavior in chimps, gorillas, macaques, bonobos and baboons, has led to a unifying theory that explains not only a huge range of behavior.  Also, why our brains are so big and what their most essential work is.

The theory, called the Machiavellian-intelligence or social-brain theory, holds that we rise from a lineage in which both individual and group success hinge on balancing the need to work with others with the need to hold our own amid the nested groups and subgroups we are part of.

About 15 to 20 million years ago, the theory goes, certain forest monkeys in Africa and Asia developed the ability to digest unripe fruit.  This left some of their forest-dwelling cousins--the ancestors of chimps, gorillas and humans--at a sharp disadvantage.  Suddenly a lot of fruit was going missing before it ripened.

To find food, some of the newly hungry primate species moved to the forest edge.  Their new habitat put more food in reach, but it also placed the primates within reach of big cats, canines, and other savanna predators.  This predation spurred two key evolutionary changes.  The primates became bigger, giving individuals more of a fighting chance, and they started living in bigger groups, which provided more eyes to keep watch and a strength of numbers in defense.

But the bigger groups imposed a new brain load: The members had to be smart enough to balance their individual needs with those of the pack.  This meant cooperating and exercising some individual restraint.  It also required understanding the behavior of other group members striving not only for safety and food but also for access to mates.  And it called for comprehending and managing one's place in an ever-shifting array of alliances that members formed in order not to be isolated within the bigger group.

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and social-brain theorist, and others have documented correlations between brain size and social-group size in many primate species.  According to Dunbar, no such strong correlation exists between neocortex size and tasks like hunting, navigating or creating shelter. 

Understanding one another, it seems, is our greatest cognitive challenge...

Source: "The Gregarious Brain" by David Dobbs, www.NYTimes.com July 8, 2007

Tough Performance Reviews

More than 70% of managers admit they have trouble giving a tough performance review to an underachieving employee, according to a survey by Sibson Consulting and WorldatWork.

Some leaders have a knack for giving the hardest news in a way that leaves employees feeling understood and good about the interaction.  One way to do that is by sharing a personal experience with the same sort of developmental challenge, rather than making the employee feel they're the only person in the world with this problem.

There's the awareness of what it's like to be on the receiving end of a poorly delivered performance review.  And since the toughest feedback usually touches on deeply ingrained behaviors and personality traits, there's a fear of the intimacy required when offering observations that hit so close to home.

Coaching Tips:

The trick is to deliver the message fully, candidly, and in a timely way while making it palatable and readily usable by the employee; by offering support and alternative behaviors along with the feedback.

Don't wait until the last possible moment to deliver feedback; make it a regular part of your one-on-one interactions with employees rather than an obligatory exchange prior to discussing next year's compensation.

Source: BusinessWeek, September 10, 2007