
Leadership behaviors that nurture collaboration are the true drivers of change - raleighm
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-noble-purpose-alone-wont-transform-your-company/
======
Isamu
Title and subtitle speak of transformation and change, but the abstract only
mentions "employee engagement":

>It’s a common misconception, both in businesses and in management articles
and books, that a sense of purpose is what matters most when it comes to
engaging employees. Many leaders concerned with attracting and retaining top
talent believe that nothing motivates people as much as the larger good they
might be doing or the chance to change the world. Accordingly, they extol the
higher virtues of their companies’ missions and the meaning of the work they
offer.

>But our work with more than 300 companies over the past 20 years,
particularly our research using organizational network analysis (ONA) and our
interviews with executives, reveals that purpose is only one contributing
factor; the level and quality of interpersonal collaboration actually has the
greatest impact on employee engagement.

~~~
wccrawford
It always surprises me when managers think that they can focus on 1 single
aspect of the work experience and fix everything. People are complex, and
managing is necessarily also complex.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
An effective manager would step in when needed and stay out of the way when
not. They would communicate clearly in a high level in an inspiring manner and
a low enough level to act upon. They would have to anticipate the direction
and needs of the business as well as the employee. They would have to balance
the strengths, weaknesses and desires of wholly different individuals in a
productively meaningful way.

Would I be wrong in saying that almost all people cannot do two of these let
alone all at the same time?

~~~
beetwenty
A lot of the facets of leadership are created from the small details of how
the organization "automates" itself.

Consider meeting planning, for example. How frequent meetings are, how long
they are, how many people are involved, what the meeting venue is, and how the
agenda and format is set.

There are all sorts of knobs to turn just in saying "what a meeting should
look like" that will impact the flow of communication, and different teams in
the same organization will tend to have different meeting styles, but at a
high level, the planning has to include considerations around how to allow
different teams to interact effectively, since those are the bottlenecks where
the information tends to get siloed.

And then you can turn to hiring, assignments, training and promotions and
there's a similar kind of thing, where the same person in a slightly different
role may be hugely more or less effective, and defining the problem
differently changes the kinds of assignments and skills needed. Who creates
those definitions, and how? It's not necessarily the manager those employees
report to that's creating them.

In fact, there's a whole cascade of effects that come from the macro situation
that end up translating into differently defined roles: different legal and
regulatory requirements, education and training standards, minimum wages,
healthcare coverage, labor organization efforts, etc. The same people in a
different country may be happier and more effective.

So, while the manager is the biggest factor in the equation, it's not all on
them - it can't be. Some ways of doing business and types of company culture
will work in some scenarios and others will not, and the marketplace has an
evolutionary tendency to just make random permutations of management style
until it finds one that doesn't die, even if it creates a toxic environment.
In that light, "effective" management is a highly relative thing and can be
encouraged or discouraged by the broader shape of the economy.

------
jdsully
I'm not sure I agree collaboration makes change. Most of the major innovations
I've seen have been one or two people going off and doing something the rest
of the group said was impossible.

If they had tried to get consensus it never would have happened.

Coincidentally this article doesn't actually provide any proof that
collaboration increases innovation. Just that it improves "engagement".

~~~
jerome-jh
> Just that it improves "engagement".

That is the point the article makes. Example: I stayed 4 years in a company
doing shitty work but where we had good laughs and a sense of community during
shitty times.

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robsinatra
Going to MIT Sloan for an MBA won't transform your career but will put you
deeply in debt

~~~
oneepic
As advertised. You wanted a change, you got it. /s

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tzs
But will a noble spirit embiggen it?

~~~
hi41
I didn’t know that a word called embiggen existed. Thank you. I learnt one new
thing today. Now, I want to open up Outlook and use it in a business email
today. Just for the laughs.

~~~
arcticbull
"Embiggen" has been added to a US dictionary - a word first heard on The
Simpsons in 1996. It wasn't until recently haha.

~~~
almostjamboree
It's a perfectly cromulent word.

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duelingjello
Lotsa business wankery getting in the way simpler goals:

\- People > ideas > egos.

\- Avoid too many personal pronouns "I" and "you," use "we" and "us."

\- Beat on ideas, not people.

\- Give some public credit now and then, feedback usually give it privately.

\- Ask of something finished or unfinished: "How does this suck?" to get
feedback.

\- Organic, small meetings.

\- "One page" approach... get people taking turns scribbling on a whiteboard,
paper or electronic device.

\- Be the party... invite people.

------
nickpinkston
And focusing on profit alone won't make you a achieve a noble purpose.

And focusing on transformation alone may not lead to either.

Business quotes are fun :D

~~~
rumanator
It's like corporations are comprised of people, and each person has its own
personal motivations and will power to navigate the rules to get what they
want.

~~~
nickpinkston
They really need to start teaching this in whatever management 101 thing they
have people take.

Management isn't about managing everyone the same, but how they need to be
managed for their unique personality and circumstances.

People are like unique plants in a garden and each has certain
strengths/weaknesses and the best managers fill their gardens with
complimentary plants that will grow together to achieve the most, fertilizing,
pruning, and repotting along the way.

------
morganK
Ah! Sounds interesting and useful but behind a paywall :(

~~~
harikb
Based on this summary, it may not even be worth your time to signup

> our interviews with executives, reveals that purpose is only one
> contributing factor; the level and quality of interpersonal collaboration
> actually has the greatest impact on employee engagement.2 In this article,
> we’ll explore why collaboration has that effect and which behaviors you can
> adopt and practic

~~~
ignoramous
Similarly, Google trying to find out what successful teams did differently is
a great read:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399)

Some excerpts:

> ... Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the
> same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams,
> members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

> ... Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has
> perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done
> what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety
> faster, better and in more productive ways.

> Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize
> everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on
> experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and
> discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that
> can’t really be optimized.

~~~
duxup
I recall a study that found that the difference between good and bad teams
most of the time was ... if they have a bad member on the team or not.

It wasn't the quality of the members, it was if there was just one "bad"
member, or not. One bad member could sink a team no matter how good everyone
else was.

They did find a sort of magic outlier where if the team member had an
outstanding leader they could overcome the one bad member. However they
believed that those folks were so rare and you're unlikely to find them that
it's not something a team can strive to have.

~~~
Ozzie_osman
That's interesting. Do you have a link to the study? Also was "bad" here
incompetence? Or toxicity? I would imagine they have pretty different effects.

~~~
duxup
Sadly I do not. I heard about it on an NPR story ages ago and can't find
anything about it.

Their measurements as for "bad" was largely based on their observations of
teams meetings. Factors like simply being negative, insults (or close to
insults, what we probabbly call toxicity today), disruptive, disrespectful,
not being prepared (I found this one interesting as NOBODY seems prepared for
a meeting anymore), and things like simply trying to change direction on any
plans that were agreed to repeatedly.

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vorpalhex
Title doesn't appear to match the article. Should be: `Leadership behaviors
that nurture interpersonal collaboration are the true drivers of change.`

~~~
dang
Ok, we've changed to that, except shortened to fit HN's 80 char limit. I'm not
sure what kind of collaboration wouldn't be "interpersonal", so that was
handy.

------
quotemstr
After having seen the convulsions at Google, I think casting a company as
having a "noble purpose" in the first place is a mistake. This branding
attracts a certain sort of person who thinks that it's more important to do
"good" than it is to run an effective business.

The business of a company is profit. Period. If you want to do "good", join a
non-profit. Now, it's okay to say that good can happen as a _result_ of
profit-seeking. There's no need to be unethical about success. But you have to
make it crystal clear to people from day one that the company exists to _win_.

~~~
codingdave
Many leaders of corporations would put a finer point on that - the goal
certainly is to profit, but not to the detriment of the broader society in
which they operate, nor to their employees or partners:

[https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-
redef...](https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-
the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans)

