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

Numbers often occupy a central place in presentations. Plots, pies and histograms fill slides to convince, mobilize, alert. But how to make sure that they actually produce the expected impact?

The usual practice consists in displaying all the numbers available to give the audience a global view of the situation, then to attract attention on such disbalance between columns or such evolution, whether positive or negative. Yet, laying out all our cards at the outset is counterproductive. Expert in communication Nancy Duarte recommends seeking inspiration from storytelling and provoking an emotional reaction that will more durably impact the audience. You can thus create some suspense by only displaying the first elements of your diagram, to then unveil progressively the other data by telling a story, like a narrator. For example, invite the audience to guess the evolution of a curve before letting the final result appear. The narrative tension thus created will facilitate the assimilation of the figures that are presented.

Source: The Simple Power of the Slow Reveal, Nancy Duarte, MIT Sloan Management Review, March 2023.

Kindness is an underestimated and underused lever of performance in the business world. Indeed, numerous surveys have shown that when employees show consideration for one another—a little compliment in passing, a thank you, some help, etc.—, the work atmosphere and the level of collaboration are greatly improved. Even better: a study conducted among more than 50,000 people in 3,500 departments has shown that the higher frequency of such behaviors was a sign suggesting greater productivity, as well as a lower staff turnover! And, cherry on top of the cake: there is no need to exert considerable efforts, especially since small gestures have as much impact as big ones.

So, don’t hesitate: lead by example! Far from being weak and insignificant, your little signs of care will help you reinforce the social bonds with your staff and within your team. This is a particularly appreciable advantage in our hybrid working environments, which should have a rapid snowball effect on both the work atmosphere and the results, to everyone’s profit!

Source: Don’t Underestimate the Power of Kindness at Work, Ovul Sezer, Kelly Nault, Nadav Klein, Harvard Business Review, May 2021.

Leaders and managers are often advised to scrutinize their market and customer data to spot possible “weak signals”—these micro-changes or these burgeoning expectations that prefigure future megatrends. But how can we determine if a given anomaly in the data is a weak signal, or simply a value that diverges from the average? The processing of important masses of data necessarily involves the presence of numerous anomalies, which does not however mean they are all significant.

To make a judgment, experts in strategy advise that we evaluate each anomaly according to three dimensions:

- Its dynamic: is the anomaly persisting over time? Is it rapidly growing? Do the pioneers in your sector appear to show close interest in it?

- Its robustness: does the anomaly appear in several sets of data? Is it coherent with other changes in your environment?

- Its impact: does the anomaly reveal a dead angle which is not covered by current offerings? What would be the consequences if it became widespread?

A simple analysis framework, to experiment in your next strategic thinking sessions.

Source: The Power of Anomaly, Martin Reeves, Bob Goodson, Kevin Whitaker, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2021. 

Faced with a question that catches us unawares, who has never dreamed of immediately formulating a striking response?

In these situations, our desire to bring the best response is paradoxically our worst enemy, as it impairs our attention. Did you never find yourself thinking of your response before your counterpart even finished their sentence? This desire to mentally prepare is natural: in a dialogue, our brain permanently seeks to elaborate stocks of “good answers” to be ready when the time comes. This presents two disadvantages: we respond more to what we think we have understood of our counterparts’ statements than to what they have actually told us; and if, in addition, the topic is sensitive, our brain focuses its responses on the key words that put us in alert, which leads us to answer in an exaggeratedly defensive manner.

The priority thus consists in slowing down our thinking. Forcing yourselves to actively listen, until the end, enables more targeted responses and reduces the risk of an irrelevant answer. Finally, we will gain by reformulating the situation, not as a challenge or a threat, but as an opportunity to clarify our point of view, to nuance it or to bring a complementary light, which considerably influences the tone of our responses.

Source: Think Fast, Talk Smart: Communication Techniques, Matt Abrahams, Stanford Graduate School of Business, December 2014.

We sometimes associate the rise to power with negative personal characteristics such as aggressiveness, selfishness, manipulation. What about in the corporate world? Do unpleasant personalities, who dominate others and put their personal interests above those of the collective, have a greater chance to reach positions of power?

That is the thorny question that Berkeley researchers tackled in conducting two studies with hundreds of master’s degree and MBA students. They gave them a personality test to assess their tendency to be “disagreeable” (aggressive, selfish, manipulative). They then evaluated their level of power within their respective companies fourteen years later. Their conclusion: there is no correlation between a selfish or aggressive personality and an elevated level of power. And this remains true whether the organization is characterized by a competitive or cooperative culture.

Indeed, these toxic personalities generally underperform on other strategies that are equally important for rising within an organization, notably altruistic behaviors—which show others that we are driven by the general interest rather than by self-interest. Reassuring news for our social regulation mechanisms, but which does not absolve us from the responsibility to monitor and sanction unacceptable behavior.

Source: People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work, Cameron Anderson, Daron L. Sharps, Christopher J. Soto, Oliver P. John, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), August 2020