Management gemsFind here some gems from our monitoring of the best publications on leadership and management

Stress seems to be the ill of the century. And, especially since the Covid-19 crisis, burn-out is inviting itself onto every level of the corporate world, in an increasingly visible way.

In one of his posts on LinkedIn, physician and neuropsychologist Bernard Anselem mentions a study published in the journal Health Psychology that highlights the link between stress and mortality, carried out on 30,000 American adults over the course of eight years. According to this study, when they are subjected to high stress levels, people who believe that stress has a negative impact on their health do indeed suffer excess mortality, whereas the people who have a more neutral perception of the matter can withstand it without any significant impact on their health.

This is in line with other studies devoted to this phenomenon. For one thing, our interpretation of a situation influences our physiological reactions; thus, people who are sensitized to the utility of stress have less pronounced cardiovascular and mental reactions. For another, at the neurological level, the encoding of emotional and memory networks varies according to whether we perceive a situation as good or bad; if we relive the same experience, we will therefore be conditioned to once again perceive it as good or bad.

A scientific explanation of the virtues of a Stoic approach to stress.

Source: Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality, Abiola Keller, Kristin Litzelman, Lauren E. Wisk, Torsheika Maddox, Erika Rose Cheng, Paul D. Creswell, Whitney P. Witt, Health Psychology, September 2012.

If you employ software developers, cloud engineers, data scientists or SaaS administrators, you are very probably wondering how to attract them—and especially how to retain them.

Indeed, these key profiles receive multiple solicitations from recruiters every month and do not hesitate to change employers. Their unemployment rate borders on zero. And if they lose a job, they know they will find another in less than three months. In such conditions, which are extremely favorable to them, how can we hold on to them?

McKinsey undertook to decode their expectations in a survey conducted in the United States, but which reflects a global trend. It clearly appears that the main factor determining their loyalty to a position, like their choice of a new job, is career development and the potential for promotion—ahead of remuneration, the meaning of their missions and the working atmosphere.

But careful: by this they do not refer to a career in the traditional sense of hierarchical advancement. What is essential for them is to be able to choose between an “expert” career path and a “manager” one—both of these paths enjoying the same internal recognition—and to be able to move from one to the other without obstacles. Now you just have to provide them with such opportunities.

Source: Cracking the code on digital talent, Todd Horst, Kathryn Kuhn, Stephanie Madner, Charlotte Seiler, Paul Roche, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2023.

Do you want to promote feedback? Good call: in a study conducted by leadership development consultancy Zenger Folkman, 94% of the 2,700 respondents thought that well-presented corrective feedback improved their performance.

Do you also want to enhance the diversity within your teams? Indeed, that is the direction history is moving in. And the company has everything to gain by fostering a more varied mix of viewpoints.

But beware: combining these two ambitions raises some difficulties. A criticism or an advice expressed by a person from another culture often engenders defensive reactions. We feel less secure with someone whose codes we do not master. For example, the American culture seeks to preserve self-esteem, thus the emphasis placed on positivity. An American will therefore be easily rattled by criticism from a colleague hailing from a more direct culture, such as Germany or France—whereas Asian cultures, based on less explicit communication, will find “American-style” criticism brutal…

One solution consists in implementing structured feedback loops, in pairs—or, ideally, collectively, if the team members know one another well.  This positions feedback as a legitimate element of cooperation, and not as an aggression. What’s more, the reciprocity of exchanges helps everyone to better account for the culture of their interlocutors.

Source:  When Diversity Meets Feedback, Erin Meyer, Harvard Business Review, September-October 2023.

In 2008, Lego launched an open innovation pilot project. Fifteen years later, a community of 2.8 million customers is sharing and debating its product ideas. Customers whose ideas are retained earn 1% of the sales generated by that product. For some, such as the inventor of the best-selling “Medieval Blacksmith” model, this represents a small fortune.

How can you inspire yourself from this approach to build your own successes? In addition to the—important—sharing of value, this article reveals two lessons.

First, trust your customers to detect potential successes. Lego compared the predictions of its community to those of its employees and experts. The customers were incomparably better predictors, as long as their responses were sufficiently numerous. At Lego, ideas receiving 10,000 votes or more are the ones that are studied further.

Next, be sure to manage disappointments well. Out of 143 ideas receiving over 10,000 votes, only 23 have eventually seen the light of day. Lego observed that people whose ideas were rejected could become negative and harm the dynamic. The solution consisted in involving them in events allowing them to build personal relationships with other passionate customers, which compensated for the feeling of rejection.

Source: Lego Takes Customers’ Innovations Further, Michela Beretta, Linus Dahlander, Lars Frederiksen, Arne Thomas, MIT Sloan Management Review, September 2023.

“Managers are cracking”, states Gartner in publishing the results of its annual survey of 9,000 US employees and managers. The numbers are staggering. Less than one surveyed employee out of two believes that their manager is able to lead their team down the right track. And 54% of surveyed managers state that they suffer from their working conditions. Cause for concern, given that good managers multiply by 15 their team members’ chances of being highly effective, and by three their loyalty to the company.

What can be done? One enlightening finding of this study is that training only improves managerial performance by 4%. On the other hand, if managers believe they have the means to manage their missions over the long term, their performance improves by 21%.

Gartner identifies four levers to act on this dimension. It is beneficial to redefine expectations so that they are more realistic, to revisit management routines, to eliminate the obstacles that prevent the manager from truly playing their part; but the most impactful of these levers is to modify the process of acceding to the position of manager. When potential managers have been asked to indicate if they were tempted by this role, their performance in this new role is multiplied by 2.3.

Source: Managers Are Cracking—and More Training Won’t Help, Gartner, August 2023.