Three Ways to Fit in at Work

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.”

Navigating Political Polarization

By Daniel Butcher

Numerous studies show that democracy has been in decline in many nations worldwide in recent years, and polarization exacerbates the difficulty of reforming political systems that many people are fed up with.

Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware said that a key challenge that citizens are confronting worldwide is that political systems work better if people across the ideological spectrum of beliefs can value and accommodate different value systems, perspectives, and approaches and set aside those differences to engage in more holistic, productive, solutions-oriented conversations.

“Our world has really big problems,” Smith said. “Effectively solving these problems requires engaging with multiple diverse voices; that is the value of civic discourse.

“Instead of solving the complex problems that the world faces, politicians and individual citizens are just pointing their fingers at one another, leading to polarization,” she said. “Social media only reinforces this polarization, which cyclically makes the problems worse.”

While civic discourse can solve problems, effectively connecting across diverse perspectives is challenging.

“People understand that shouting from different soapboxes across politically opposing perspectives is polarizing and detrimental,” Smith said. “Yet it remains challenging to sit down and respectfully listen to someone with a different point of view.”

Smith pointed out that leaders and individuals can learn both/and thinking skills that can more effectively enable such discourse.

“Solving our problems depends on bringing together multiple, diverse perspectives,” Smith said. “To do so, people need to learn how to embrace both/and thinking—valuing differences, listening to one another, and seeking integrative approaches.
“Our research shows that these are skills that people can learn over time.”

Pew Research Center found that the ideological gap between the political right wing and left wing is wider in the United State than in other countries on many issues, including abortion, climate change, and same-sex marriage. In a 2022 survey conducted by the nonpartisan fact tank, 88% of Americans said that there are strong conflicts in the country between people who support different political parties, indicating they’re keenly conscious of their internal divisions.

These days, what it takes to get into office is not what it takes to govern effectively. It takes expressing extreme positions to get elected, whereas it requires being in conversation across party lines to govern effectively. Citizens in democratic countries should consider looking themselves in the mirror before simply blaming politicians from political parties they don’t support for the systemic dysfunction. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

“We look to politicians, and we lay the blame on them, but we no longer have the townhall meetings, where people who could trust one another because they were neighbors and yet have different opinions and still be in conversation with one another,” Smith said. “Today, we’re shouting on social-media platforms, and as a result, the populace doesn’t have the competency to have these difficult conversations with people who disagree with them politically, and that’s problematic.

“It’s very idealized, but we need to find ways to use technology to connect with each other, not to sit behind our screens and no longer be in conversation, but to use it to be in deeper conversation with people that are different from us,” she said. “And that’s hard—it’s just hard.”

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.”

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.”

Organizational Hierarchy Complicates Work Friendships

By Daniel Butcher

Friendship at work is important for many professionals as a crucial source of connection, especially for people who spend a lot of time working.

Academy of Management Scholar Nancy Rothbard of the University of Pennsylvania said that her research highlighted that workplace friendships can be a little bit trickier than non-workplace friendships for a couple of reasons.

“One is that you don’t have the same level of voluntary choice in an organizational setting about who you interact with—sometimes you don’t get to choose who’s on your team,” Rothbard said. “And so, if you are or aren’t friends with people on the team, that can impact the way that you interact with them.

“You have to be careful about the boundaries of those friendships and how they play out, you also have to be careful, because sometimes you can really go in deep, and it can be very distracting for your own ability to do your work if you’re always trying to help a friend,” she said. “A third reason why friendship at work can be really challenging is that you can be seen as having a clique, or people can be envious of that friendship, or they can think about the friendship as something that they’re worried about, and so that can be really challenging.

“The last reason is, sometimes when you’re known to be friends with somebody, people might perceive the decision-making as less fair, whether it is fair or not, if you’re seen as making that decision with, or about, a friend, and so that’s another issue you have to be aware of, monitor, and manage when you are friends with others in the workplace.”

Research has also shown that workplace friendships are even more challenging when relationships cross hierarchical levels.

“These personal disclosures or issues are more awkward or can be seen by others in ways that make them seem problematic when it’s across these levels of hierarchy,” Rothbard said. “I have a AOM article titled “OMG! My Boss Just Friended Me: How Evaluations of Colleagues’ Disclosure, Gender, and Rank Shape Personal/Professional Boundary Blurring Online,” which looked at that exact issue of hierarchy and friendship, that is, personal disclosure across hierarchical boundaries.

“We found that that was quite uncomfortable for people being connected across hierarchical levels, much more so than being connected to peers,” she said. “If your boss sends a friend request, you feel pressured to accept it.

“People don’t want to accept it, but they often feel obligated to accept it, and so then it creates a whole host of other issues.”

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.”