Do Signs of Privilege in Resumes Indicate Excellence or Entitlement?

Seven Steps to Improve Staff’s Time-Management Skills

By Daniel Butcher

Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of the George Washington University School of Business, one of the most influential management researchers, said that performance management—when organizations’ managers and leaders do it properly—is critical for organizations because it drives decisions about who gets a bonus, who gets promoted, who gets demoted, and who gets transferred or cut. He offered the following tips for business leaders to help build “time management-friendly” organizational cultures:

1. Follow through on lessons learned during employee training programs:

“Understand that training programs aimed at building time management skills, such as to-do lists, quiet time, and so forth, are only the first step. Employees need a role and work environment conducive to using these skills. If employees face structures and norms that make them waste time, the skills they learned will be useless and lost if they are not put to use,” Aguinis said.

2. Set a good example for rank-and-file employees and put them in a position to succeed:

“Leadership is critical in creating time structures and norms conducive to good time management. First, leaders need to manage their own time well. For example, running meetings efficiently and not letting people waste time at meetings. Also, leaders need to implement performance management and reward systems that discourage wasting time based on how well people manage their time and the results they obtain. Measure the time management performance of middle management. How many performance and rewards systems measure time management? Not many.”

3. Embrace flexibility and hybrid work schedules

“Use technology to minimize commuting time, allow flexible hours and telecommuting.”

4. Avoid and eliminate recurring meetings that aren’t likely to move the needle:

“Don’t create committees and task forces that study issues endlessly without taking action.”

5. Recruit candidates with strong time-management skills:

Use situational interviews to screen out candidates whose attitudes about time do not match those of the organization. For example, job applicants can be asked to choose an alternative among several available choices. Or, job applicants can beasked, ‘tell me about the last time when,’ and they are presented with a situation when they need to make decisions about how to manage their time.”

6. Analyze the implications of the cliché “time is money”:

“Benjamin Franklin wrote that ‘time is money.’ But time is more than money. It is the most fundamental resource that allows people and organizations to get other resources, such as financial, social, physical, and human resources. Without sufficient time, we cannot get any of these other resources that allow a firm to get ahead of the competition,” Aguinis said. “But time itself is often under the radar because ‘what is not measured does not exist.’ It is critical to raise awareness of time as a resource, measure it, and reward units and individuals who manage time well. Also, business leaders should identify and remove systems and norms that prevent people from managing their time well, such as bad bosses who force people in their departments to engage in time-wasting activities.”

7. Reimagine formal systems that can affect employees’ time-management effectiveness, including:

• Time structures: “Systems used to manage time, such as performance appraisal and reward systems that reward individuals for working long hours. For example, using punch- or time clocks or including a question on a performance appraisal form about how many hours a week employeesare at their desk.” Other time structures include project timelines, cleaning schedules, and holidays.
• Time norms: “Informal rules about how to do things right and wrong about time at work. They are based on values and are often implicit, but everyone knows them. For example, arriving at meetings late is not a big deal in many organizations or cultures.”

Performance Management Needs to Be Well-Defined

By Daniel Butcher

As crucial as performance management is to make sure that organizations’ decisions about compensation, promotions, hires, and cuts are aligned with organizational goals, it can be difficult to define. Leaders first must define performance before they can measure it and evaluate their organization’s performance-management processes and procedures.

That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of the George Washington University School of Business and author of Performance Management for Dummies, who said executives at various organizations have asked him about performance issues, complaining that their employees weren’t performing at the level they should have been. In response, when he asked them how they define performance, they typically fell silent.

“Sometimes leaders don’t do a good job of measuring performance because they don’t define performance well, so the first advice I would offer is to be able to make sure that you define performance in alignment with the strategic goals of the organization, the performance goals for individuals, units, teams, and departments all have to be aligned with the strategic goals of the organization,” Aguinis said.

Aguinis argued that performance evaluations shouldn’t be a once-a-year event. Organizations need to train supervisors on how to provide good feedback, measure performance in an unbiased way, have honest professional-developmental talks with employees regularly, and use performance management as a tool for spotting star performers, skills development, and performance improvement.

“If you’re a manager, your top responsibility is to manage the performance of the people in your unit, because if they do well, then the company does well, and you look good, so performance management should not be pushed by HR only; rather, it should be something that every manager and supervisor is doing,” Aguinis said. “Performance evaluations shouldn’t be just as a tool for punishing and rewarding past behavior, but also as a tool for motivating future outstanding performance.”

Performance Management Is Often Biased or Misused

By Daniel Butcher

Performance management is critical for all organizations because it drives major decisions about who gets a bonus, who gets promoted, who gets demoted, and who gets transferred or cut. Such decisions are most effective when they are fair and merit-based and made in ways that are consistent with the organizational goals.

That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of the George Washington University School of Business and author of Performance Management for Dummies, who said that performance management done correctly serves all of those important purposes. Unfortunately, he estimates that about 90% or more of companies don’t do performance management the right way.

“A lot of people hate performance management. Why? Because employee ratings are often biased, and some supervisors use performance management to punish people they don’t like,” Aguinis said. “For example, I have seen cases of supervisors giving employees a very high performance rating so that person can be transferred out of their unit, because they don’t like them.

“This is how perverse performance management can be sometimes,” he says. “Also, you tell me the name of a supervisor who likes to give negative feedback to employees or share negative or bad news with them—most don’t.”

At many organizations, performance reviews are annually or quarterly at most. It’s a task that HR pushes on managers, who typically do it as fast as possible without much attention to detail. For all these reasons, most supervisors and employees alike hate performance management, Aguinis noted.

Many companies, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, decided to halt performance management—a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

“The idea was we should stop providing ratings or performance feedback, because it causes a lot of damage when not done properly, and during the pandemic, managers were saying, ‘I don’t see my employees in person—I don’t interact with them on a daily basis, so I don’t know what’s going on, and thus let’s just do away with performance management,’” Aguinis said. “Obviously, it was a very bad idea, because managers don’t know who to promote, and when it’s time for bonuses and rewards, leaders don’t know how best to allocate resources, so people came back around.

“Many companies, including Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Deloitte, that had announced the end of performance ratings and performance management all, came back with a vengeance,” he said. “There were some tweaks, but it is still performance management.”

Prioritizing Social Missions Can Boost Profits

By Daniel Butcher

Social enterprises, companies started to achieve profits through social and environmental goals, offer companies an incubator in complex decision-making.

Corporate leaders experience ongoing tensions between the financial and social/environmental goals, framing these opposing pressures as an ongoing trade off. But Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware noted that such tradeoffs are “limited at best and detrimental at worst.” Her research on social enterprises offers an alternative. Leaders can draw on these tensions to enable strategic novelty, complexity, and creativity.

For example, Smith studied Digital Divide Data (DDD), a high-tech digitization company that seeks to stop the cycle of poverty through jobs and training. With offices in Cambodia, Laos, and Kenya, as well as across the United States, this successful 25-year-old company has improved the lives of more than 7,000 people.

“DDD continues to be a model social enterprise achieving a social mission through business means. They hire people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, train them, provide them with jobs and enable them to earn multiple times the national average,” Smith said. “When DDD started, they were so committed to their social mission that they almost went financially bankrupt.

“Their board of directors helped to bring them back; directors included people who had a real financial background as well as people with a development-aid background, so that they could lean into both and make sure they weren’t going too far out of bounds,” she said. “Some organizations err in saying, ‘We’re so committed to the social mission that we have no money,’ while others say, ‘We’re so committed to the financial bottom line that we’re not achieving our mission or we’re not helping enough people and making the positive social impact that we want to.’ Over time DDD learned to avoid that either/or trap.

“[Cofounder and CEO] Jeremy Hockenstein reframed their core strategic questions. Instead of asking whether they should focus on the social mission or the bottom line, they asked how they could achieve both goals.”

Doing so did require making difficult decisions. However, Smith notes that these decisions are micro-oscillations or what she calls being consistently inconsistent. Leaders make a commitment to achieve multiple, competing goals over time, yet make small tweaks to how they allocate their resources and organize their team.

For example, as Smith described, DDD leadership team would sometimes make decisions that were benefit their social mission, and sometimes making decisions that would benefit their financial bottom line, but they weren’t overextending to one extreme to the point that they would completely lose sight of the other.

“Such oscillating decision-making is like walking a tightrope,” Smith said. “The tightrope-walker is never fully balanced but rather constantly making small tweaks to balance over time.

“However, they are not falling too far to either side that they fall off the tightrope,” she said.

To avoid making decisions that went too far in either direction, Smith’s research found that DDD held clear guardrails. They had roles, goals, and external stakeholder relationships that ensured that they did not get too focused on either the bottom line or the social mission to the detriment of the other. DDD’s leadership practices offer insights for corporate leaders to navigate complex, competing strategies in their businesses.

“DDD leaders made strategic decisions, but with clear guardrails or boundaries so that they didn’t go too far out of bounds,” Smith said. “Having these guardrails in place help them to keep on track with both their social mission and their business goals to enable this kind of ongoing experimentation and change that they needed to be able to be paradoxical in their thinking—lean away from either/or decision making and into the both/and mindset.”

Technical AND Soft Skills Are What’s Needed Today

By Daniel Butcher

Some mentors and career counselors advise students and early-career professionals to focus on acquiring technical skills to make themselves desirable candidates for high-paying jobs. Other experts say that technical skills can always be learned on the job, so students and young professionals should focus on soft skills, since that’s what ultimately impresses hiring managers during the recruitment and interviewing processes. However, the reality is that most successful business leaders and managers excel in both areas.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware said that there’s debate over whether to prioritize social skills and emotional intelligence (EQ) or technical skills and intelligence quotient (IQ). If a person has tons of technical skills but no social skills, they call that the competent jerk, but if you have tons of social skills but don’t have the technical skills, you may be a lovely person who’s going to build the team, host barbecues, and charm clients but not really get the work done.

“There’s an underlying paradox, and the important piece here is figuring out how to do both—look, you’ve got to do both,” Smith said. “The big question is, ‘How does engaging the social skills enable you to learn the technical skills more effectively, and how are these interwoven with one another? How does engaging the technical skills using your IQ enable you to learn the social skills more effectively?

“If you are somebody with technical skills, then it opens up the possibility to have conversations with more confidence with other people with technical skills in your business and then develop a network of connections that allows you to then learn from and engage with other people,” she said. “If you are somebody who has the emotional intelligence to know how to build those networks and connections, then you’re the kind of person who’s not just stuck behind a computer on their own in the cubicle in the corner, but you’re someone who’s going to be able to learn from what’s going on and understand what’s required of you and gain more technical skills along the way.

“So it’s not just that these things sit side by side and we have to allocate resources between the two; it’s that—if done right—there is this interwoven, dynamic nature of hard and soft skills where they can help each other, and that’s an important insight of paradoxical thinking, or paradox theory.”

How Leaders Can Overcome Roadblocks to Creativity

By Daniel Butcher

Leaders need creativity to innovate, grow, and adapt to fast-paced changes in the business world spurred by rapidly evolving technologies such as AI. As scholars note, however, creativity embeds inherent tensions between introducing something radical and novel while also being useful and practical.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware notes that these tensions are oppositional but also interdependent. Focusing on usefulness can create constraints that inspire more novelty, while ensuring that more radical ideas can foster more divergent thinking that can ultimately result in something that will be more valuable to the organization and its stakeholders.

“Embracing the paradoxes of creativity inherently enables more creativity,” Smith said.

In the 1970s, psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg noted that geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Virginia Woolf all generated their greatest insights by juxtaposing oppositional ideas. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity emerged by exploring how an object could be both in motion and at rest at the same time. Rothenberg called this process Janusian thinking after the two-faced Roman God Janus who could look forward and backward at the same time.

“An important part of the creative Janusian process is changing the question,” Smith said. “If we point out that conflict and ask people to create something, they’ll try to maximize either the novelty or the usefulness.

“But if we say, ‘Those things are in conflict with each other, but they also reinforce each other,’ and ask the question, ‘How can you create something that is both novel and useful amid that conflict?’ people will be much more creative in what they develop and create over time by bringing them together,” she said.

“So situationally, just changing the question makes a huge difference in boosting creativity.”

As the business world becomes more complex, Smith noted that an essential leadership competency will depend on embracing the paradoxes of creativity.

“Leaders of tomorrow will need to embrace both novelty and usefulness, coming up with new approaches to respond to our greatest challenges,” she said.

Four Social Media Communication Strategies for Professionals

By Daniel Butcher

Given the reputational minefields of social media, it’s important for professionals to think carefully about their strategies for online connections.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said there are essentially four strategies that she and her colleagues identified in their research on this topic.

1. Being open, which is the letting-it-all-hang-out strategy. This yields higher rates of engagement, although TMI (too much information) may be a hazard if you’re not careful.

“The benefit of the open strategy is that it’s easy, and that you’re very authentic, and so that authenticity really comes through to your connections,” Rothbard said. “The risk is that you reveal something that is problematic in the eyes of one of the multiple audience members.

“This is really challenging, because there isn’t only one audience segment that you’re talking to when you’re on social media,” she said. “It’s a broad-based, non-tailored set of platforms.

“The default is to disclose the same information to a broad set of people, and so, if you’re open, whatever you’re saying is going to go to everybody, and some parts of your audience may love it, and some parts may hate it.”

2. Audience strategy, which refers to carefully curating who is in your audience, often deciding to have personal or professional connections (but not both). This includes making careful decisions about who to connect with and which requested followers to accept.

“This strategy means that you’re very open with all of your disclosures, but you’ve carefully vetted who sees it, and you’ve got a limited audience that you’ll reveal your thoughts and feelings to,” Rothbard said.

“The problem with that is that you don’t always control who your audience members will disclose your posts to, so your audience members could repost or like something that you’ve shared and that other people who are not in your audience could see, so there’s some risk there,” she said.

3. Content strategy, which is aiming for a big-tent audience of both personal and professional connections, but carefully curating content to disclose.

“You might be disclosing personal content online, but you’re disclosing a really carefully vetted set of curated content that is designed not to offend and to be disclosed to a broad set of audiences,” Rothbard said.

“It’s the one that I use personally, because you never know who’s going to see your online disclosures, but the risk there is that people could think of you as being too curated and not authentic,” she said.

4. Hybrid strategy, also referred to as custom strategy, is taking a customized approach of disclosing different information to different audiences.

“That strategy would be ideal, but it takes a ton of skill and time to do it well, so if you don’t have the skill and you don’t have the time, then it could backfire on you,” Rothbard said.

Showing Emotions at Work Shouldn’t Be Taboo

By Daniel Butcher

Many managers and leaders overlook how employees’ emotions can affect their on-the-job productivity. An underappreciated management skill is monitoring team members’ emotional responses to their roles and tasks, as well as significant personal life events unrelated to the organization, and adjusting their management tactics and leadership strategies appropriately.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said that—contrary to the old-school mentality that emotions don’t belong in business—it’s so important to accept that professionals feel a range of emotions at work.

“Emotions are a part of our everyday lives, and we have all sorts of emotional responses at work,” Rothbard said. “I did a study looking at the emotions that people brought with them into the workplace and how their emotions in response to customers and other types of interactions affected them throughout the day.

“This was an experience sampling study where I asked them multiple times a day, ‘How are you feeling?’ and I was able to really monitor what their productivity was and the various ways that they were able to engage both from a quantity and a quality perspective in their work,” she said. “What we found in this study was that emotions mattered a lot—the emotion that people brought to work affected them throughout the day.

“And when people experienced more negative emotion throughout the day, they were less productive, and they had to emotionally regulate themselves a lot more.”

On the flipside, when the workers Rothbard studied were more positive, they actually produced higher-quality work—especially their customer service.

“Managers really need to pay attention to the emotions that people bring with them as they start their workday, and they need to be aware that people vary from one day to the next,” Rothbard said. “Managers need to pay attention to those emotions, and give people the opportunity to regulate them, to help label them for them, to check in with them, and to recognize that they may need to take a little time in order to get in the right headspace to be able to do their jobs well.

“There’s actually other research that shows that managers and leaders who are able to read their employees’ emotions better are rated by their employees as being better managers,” she said. “Now, what’s interesting is that those managers don’t always realize that that’s part of their job, but in fact, it is a central part of their effectiveness as managers and leaders.”

Professionals Must Walk a Tightrope on Social Media

By Daniel Butcher

Professionals interact in complex ways with one another on social media that we’re living in. Technology is blurring the boundaries between work and home and changing the ways that peers establish relationship boundaries and how bosses communicate with colleagues.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said that something as simple as accessing Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn on their phones all day is affecting the ways interactions and connections with people happen during—and after—work. The pressure to connect with clients, members, colleagues, peers, and even bosses via social media, along with expectations that say something interesting, but nothing controversial or off-putting, can create a real bind.

“It’s really complicated, because on the one hand, it is a huge asset to be able to connect with these people in various ways—think about your social networks and how LinkedIn and other sorts of connection technologies make sure that you’re networking,” Rothbard said. “We’re taught that you have this low-level connection to lots of people—more people than you could ever connect with personally face-to-face, so there’s lots of positives to online social media and how that connects us to other people.

“But there are also real risks that are associated with the boundaries that become blurred in these contexts, for example, people at work learning something about you that you don’t want them to know, and they see you in a different light as a result, and you might worry about how that would reflect on you professionally,” she said.

“People are really uncomfortable with that across organizational hierarchy, but when they connect with people online through these technological platforms, they do expect some level of personal disclosure—they don’t like it when someone doesn’t ever post, because then they think that there’s something wrong or that person is spying on them, if they’re not disclosing anything personal about themselves.”

Counterintuitive Aspects of Workaholism

By Daniel Butcher

Most people see workaholism as hurting emotional and physical well-being and personal relationships. Continually working long hours can affect professionals’ health and lead to all sorts of other problems. But a passion for work can mitigate the consequences of workaholism and may even give some workaholics a sense of purpose.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said her research with colleagues revealed that there are actually two types of workaholism. The classic type of workaholism is significantly negative due to the detrimental effects it has on workaholics’ health, wellness, and long-term on-the-job engagement. But another set of workaholics are really passionate about their work.

“For the set of passionate workaholics who are really engaged and love their work, it turns out that the negative health implications were not there, and in fact, they had a lower risk of metabolic syndrome, which essentially means risk of cardiovascular disease,” Rothbard said.

“When we unpacked those findings to try to understand what was going on there, we found that people who are engaged workaholics have more social support, they have a better handle on their recovery activities, things like going to the gym and managing their health in real time,” she said. “They are workaholics; they’re very engaged in their work; they feel obsessive about their work, but they also love their work.

“And so, they’re not being drained in the same way over time and, despite working very long hours, had better work-life balance or more social support from their managers, peers, and family than what we call non-engaged workaholics.”
Managers can help to avoid some of the negative effects of non-engaged workaholism.

“There are ways to increase the engagement of your employees through providing them with a strong set of goals and vision,” Rothbard said. “All the great leadership types of activities that we that we know work are really important for increasing engagement.”