The Recruitment Bias that Undermines Meritocracy

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.”

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.

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.”

What Employees Can Do to Deal with a Broken Healthcare System

By Daniel Butcher

In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year, frustration with the costs, paperwork, and denial rates of U.S. heath insurers and third-party administrators (TPAs) has boiled over. In the absence of legal reform, often employees trying to get the healthcare services they need feel powerless, but employers can do much more to hold their health insurance and administration vendors accountable.

Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University said that rank-and-file employees who are struggling with denials of doctor-recommended healthcare procedures or labyrinthine administrative tasks should request a meeting with or write to their CEO, CFO, and the head of human resources (HR) and demand that they better manage the organization’s health insurance and TPAs.

“These are vendors, and just as you would manage, vet, and scrutinize a vendor or supplier of any raw material or electricity or software or computing power or whatever your vendors are, you ought to do a better job of overseeing your vendors and making sure that they are delivering what you want them to deliver in a cost-efficient manner,” Pfeffer said. “Stop putting up with all of this administrative complexity and overhead and the idea that you have to accept whatever pricing and administrative processes that the insurer or TPA offers and agree to live with denials.

“I interviewed a health insurance executive for one of my books, and he said, ‘Healthcare is not like any other service; it’s more complicated,’ but I don’t believe that at all,” he said. “You can find metrics of the percentage of our employees able to access care.”

Pfeffer urged executives and HR personnel to ask themselves:

• Are employees able to access care in a way that’s consistent with our diversity initiatives so that we’re not discriminating?
• Are employees able to get the care they need?
• Are they able to access mental-health benefits?

“‘What’s the health of your workforce?’ is a key question that’s interrelated with the success of your organization,” Pfeffer said. “This is not complicated, but we made it complicated.

“This is about delivering a service in a cost-efficient manner,” he said.

Building Power to Lead Change

By Daniel Butcher

To progress from a rank-and-file employee to a manager to a powerful leader requires a fundamental mindset shift letting go of the need to be perceived as likeable and authentic while cultivating professional relationships.

Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University offers some takeaways on the subject from his book 7 Rules of Power.

“Good performance by itself is not necessarily going to bring you the level of career success that you need,” Pfeffer said. “In addition, you need technical skills and political skill to have your boss recognize your good contributions.

“If you think about management, and leadership is managing through other people, you need to learn how to interact with other people across your organization in ways that build your influence and permit you to get the things done that you want to get done,” he said.

Pfeffer’s seven rules power are:

1) Get out of your own way: “Lose the self-descriptions and inhibitions that hold you back, for example, the idea that you have to be liked, because, as an executive, you’re hired to get things done, not necessarily to win a popularity contest. Lose this currently popular idea that you need to be quote-unquote ‘authentic,’ which is, of course, incorrect.”

2) Break the rules: “In strategy and organizational [leadership], if you do what everybody else does, you will probably not succeed—you need to differentiate yourself.”

3) Show up in powerful fashion: “Body language and how we communicate is obviously important.”

4) Create a powerful brand: “If you’re perceived as a powerful, effective, efficacious leader, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—good people want to work with you, invest with you, and buy from your company.”

5) Network relentlessly: “That’s something that people often don’t want to do, so they underinvest in networking because they feel dirty about it and don’t see it as the value-adding activity that it is.”

6) Use your power: “Not all use of power will be met with unalloyed approval, so leaders need to be willing to incur some level of social disapproval, but because most people are usually averse to conflict, it is surprising how much one can accomplish by seizing the initiative.”

7) Understand that once you have acquired power, what you did to get it will be forgiven, forgotten, or both: “Once you have power and status and success, no one will care how you got it, and people will people will accommodate themselves, because people like to be close to power.”

“Every person should understand and come to terms with the seven rules of power, and most of [my students and readers] will go through stages: first, denial—‘This doesn’t work in my organization’s culture’—then they will have anger, which will mostly be directed at me, which is fine,” Pfeffer said. “Then they will have sadness—‘I’m depressed by it’—and finally, they often come to acceptance that this is not only the way the world works, but they can build agency around this.”

Many Companies Fail to Prioritize Employee Well-Being

By Daniel Butcher

Organizations have profound effects on the mental and physical well-being of their employees, but far too many don’t prioritize meeting the needs of their personnel or even bother to track how they’re doing in those areas. Even companies that are successful in terms of short-term performance and profitability are hurting themselves over the long term by not taking employees’ perspectives into account and working to reduce their stress.

That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University, one of today’s most influential management professors and researchers. Pfeffer notes that the workplace is a prominent source of chronic stress and that a “time-is-money” culture exacerbates the problem. Experts have found that experiencing high cortisol levels due to long-term stress is linked to health problems, including anxiety, depression, headaches, heart disease, weight gain, and impaired concentration, which could hurt job performance.

“The problem is not that the workplace is killing people—which, by the way, it is—but that nobody in a leadership position seems to care about it,” Pfeffer says. “While some organizations have adopted an attitude of stewardship with respect to the physical environment, even many of them have done a much poorer job of understanding that they are stewards of the lives of their employees, who have entrusted both their physical and mental well-being to the organization that they’re working for, and some leaders have not done a very good job of understanding and exercising their stewardship responsibilities.”

In addition to policies and procedures that encourage employees to think about their time in terms of money, the threat of being laid off is an immense source of stress for workers. Well-paid employees with a sense of job security are more productive than their stressed-out counterparts, Pfeffer says, and layoffs often backfire on organizations who make headcount cuts to boot.

“Layoffs are always a short-sighted action, but of course, we live in a world in which employers are mostly short-sighted because they’re getting evaluated on the basis of quarterly results and nobody is actually evaluated based upon the mental health or physical health of their workforce,” Pfeffer says. “In evaluating the success of their organization, leaders should do a better job of worrying about a broader set of dependent variables than just productivity and financial performance.”

Do Signs of Privilege in Resumes Indicate Excellence or Entitlement?

By Daniel Butcher

Class cues in resumes have a huge impact on which candidates get called in for interviews and provide an advantage to privileged candidates during the recruitment process. That leads to organizations bringing in employees more likely to be—or perceived to be—entitled.

Academy of Management Scholar Sean Martin of the University of Virginia says leaders and hiring managers would do well to pay attention to “class signifiers” on resumes and in interviews through the lens of what kinds of employees would be most beneficial to the organization and contribute most to its success.

Examples of class signifiers include:

• Names associated with a particular race, ethnicity, region, or culture
• The level of prestige and cost of schools listed
• Types of extracurricular activities or interests listed
• The perceived competitiveness, political affiliations, or target demographics of past internships and employers

“Leaders who say they want to promote the ideals of most cultures around the globe and cultivate the kind of workplace where anybody can work hard and do well might want to hire people whose resumes show signs of upward mobility and growth from humble beginnings,” Martin said. “There’s evidence that that doesn’t happen very often right now.”

Research on levels of entitlement that Martin did with AOM Scholar Stéphane Côté of the University of Toronto found that people who had been upwardly mobile or always in a lower-social-class position did not express particularly high levels of entitlement. In every single case, the group that expressed the highest levels of entitlement were the folks who were born into privilege and had remained in privilege, Martin said.

“I find that interesting, because one of the things that I’ll hear from people who are hiring is, ‘Boy, this next generation just seems so entitled,’ and I find that funny, because my interpretation of the implications of the research we did on entitlement would be that, by just looking for a long track record of privilege, you’re selecting the people who are the most likely to be that thing you said you wanted to avoid—you’ll get the people who are most likely to have high levels of entitlement.”