being human Archives - Leading Virtually

Goal Setting to Close the Knowing-Doing Gap

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 01:57:44 +0000

In my previous post, I referred you to articles about how to lead virtual teams. As educators, we often assume that people lack knowledge and once it is imparted it will be used. But there is often a big gap between knowledge and translating it into action. This knowing-doing gap exists in leadership development as well. The field of training transfer provides many suggestions to reduce the knowing-doing gap and these focus on trainee characteristics, training design, and the work environment to improve training transfer (see an example of such research). A simple intervention that works on a personal level is goal setting.

Goal setting involves creating a list of desirable leadership behaviors, setting targets for those behaviors (e.g., 5 times per week), and monitoring progress towards achieving those targets. When creating a list of desirable behaviors, make sure that the behaviors are specific, actionable behaviors rather than general behaviors. For instance, corresponding to the general behavior of showing energy and enthusiasm, some specific behaviors would be to ‘show willingness to take on additional responsibilities,’ ‘come in early to work,’ or ‘finish the work assigned to me before others remind me to.’

To set targets, monitor opportunities for displaying desirable behaviors during the first week or two. Make a note of their frequencies. As a first pass, the frequencies of opportunities you experience could be used as targets.You don’t have to get your targets right the first time. Give yourself the latitude to adjust the targets to make sure that you don’t exhaust yourself and have the energy to perform well.

The power of goal setting has also been shown in areas other than management. The example of goal setting in the Nike+ system comes to mind (see the related Wired magazine article). This system combined the sensor in a runner’s Nike shoe with an iPod and allowed the runner to enter the target for a run and track her/his performance. The runner’s goal and performance data were then uploaded to NikePlus.com. Analysis of this data revealed that if someone persisted and reached five runs, that person was likely to keep running and uploading data. If you are changing your leadership behaviors, the implication of this for you is to be patient, especially with yourself. Don’t give up in face of the effort that may be required upfront. Once you taste some success, it will feed on itself to motivate you even more to change your behavior.

There are a few things that you should keep in mind to increase your chances of success.

Build commitment through sharing. You will find it useful to share your list and targets with someone you trust (e.g., your peer or superior). Such sharing builds public commitment to your goals. To strengthen this commitment, also consider sharing how well you are achieving your targets with them.

Preventing relapse with reminders to yourself. There is always a danger of relapse to old behaviors. While there are elaborate relapse prevention programs (see example), I suggest that you first try something simpler: set up an alert system reminding you of the most important goals you have set for yourself as part of the goal-setting intervention. For instance, set up weekly or twice-weekly reminders on your smartphone about your most critical goals. Such reminders can be effective. In a study reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, participants signed up for a 16-week, individually tailored e-mail program to improve their health-related behaviors. When these individuals received weekly email reminders that alerted them about their goals (e.g., go for a walk during a coffee break), they were more likely to engage in healthy behaviors than individuals in the control group who did not sign up for the program.

Show yourself some compassion. There will be times when you don’t meet your targets or you find that you have relapsed to old behaviors. Don’t be hard on yourself. Show yourself some compassion. Research suggests that those who show self-compassion are more likely to be motivated to improve after failing or making a mistake.

Don’t delude yourself via self-enhancement tendencies. Research suggests that assessing how you are doing relative to your goals could easily become an evaluation of one’s self in addition to an evaluation of outcomes. Be on guard against the self-enhancement tendency, which is the desire to see oneself as a winner irrespective of actual performance. Such a tendency distorts one’s cognitive processes and is likely to be accentuated by low performance and perceived personal responsibility for that performance (these threaten one’s self-image). This may show up as revision of one’s targets in order to look good or excessive attribution of poor performance to outside influences.

Contrast a desired future with present reality. When you set goals and plan desirable actions and targets, consider the obstacles or challenges you are likely to encounter. Recent research indicates that when you don’t consider the challenges, your goals and related actions are likely to become mere fantasies. You are unlikely to create realistic plans that can increase your goal commitment and help you succeed. Such mental contrasting helps by stimulating process simulation and if-then planning.

We are often inspired by new knowledge we may receive to change our leadership behaviors. But we are challenged to translate our inspiration into action. I have outlined a set of steps to close the knowing-doing gap and become a more effective leader.

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Humans of New York: An Illustration of How IT is Affecting Leadership

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 20:11:00 +0000

My two decades of research on leadership and information technology (IT) has led me to believe that people think that leadership is not affected by IT and, consequently, the way in which leadership has worked in traditional and formal settings would work online too. Or they may believe otherwise but they lack specifics and wish to know more. Finding a good story that shows how IT can affect leadership and to which others can relate is challenging. A recent story makes this job a little easier. It is that of Humans of New York (HONY) and its author, Brandon Stanton. HONY appears on various social media including Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook. I am focusing on Facebook because that is where I most clearly see how leadership is impacted by technology.

Every day Mr. Stanton posts 3 to 4 pictures of individuals, young and old from different walks of life, whom he encounters when walking in the streets of New York. Each picture is accompanied by a brief story or quote. By his admission, Mr. Stanton has walked thousands of miles and stopped ten thousand people to photograph them. Last October, he published a New York Times bestseller with four hundred of his pictures. He hopes to continue taking and posting pictures for a long time. Mr. Stanton’s work has been described as beautiful, a celebration of individuality, and a tribute to the spirit of New York.

Mr. Stanton has amassed a huge following from all over the world. Though he did not set out to become a leader, he has become one — he is able to engage people and influence them in a way that appointed leaders would give anything for. What is really illustrative of Mr. Stanton’s leadership is the community he has enabled. When you view any HONY post, you see a healthy conversation in the form of an extremely large number of likes and comments. You find people sharing stories that illustrate the triumphs and travails in their own lives. Many other jump in to congratulate those succeeding and to support those facing challenges. It is not uncommon for those commenting to amass a large number of likes and comments themselves.

What makes Mr. Stanton a leader? What has helped him become one? Mr. Stanton’s leadership role can be seen in how he is helping others make better sense of the world around them and how they fit into it. He writes posts that others find as touching because they can identify with them. They see something about their own lives in the posts. It may be a personal triumph or challenge. HONY’s stories evoke basic human values of care and concern for others irrespective of their race, nationality, gender, and other characteristics. People feel good when the stories make them feel human. A post and the ensuing conversation may remind people of something that may be missing from their lives such as a relationship, the love of someone, or being with someone they love. By being validated and knowing that they are not alone in how they feel and what they experience, readers feel empowered.

Mr. Stanton has also become a leader by stimulating others to think differently, thereby disrupting existing patterns of thought and behavior. Recently, Mr. Stanton embarked on an eight country UN sponsored tour. As part of that, he visited and posted stories of Syrian refugees camped in Jordan. These stories are unlike those of the fighting in Syria and its victims, which usually evoke feelings of horror. Some readers say that by observing the stories of others, they have learned more about what being human means — more than what their school books have taught them. Others mentioned how the tragic stories were breaking their hearts. Many remarked how fortunate and grateful they are for what they have in their lives. Some noted the resiliency of the human spirit.

One can also see Mr. Stanton as a leader in the ‘swarm like’ emergent behavior he enables. After Mr. Stanton makes a post, his followers collectively address the post without any external coordinating mechanisms or any explicitly posted rules. Occasionally, you notice conflict when posters counter others’ interpretations. For most part these conversations remain respectful. But when some cross the limits of respectful behavior, others jump in to control the conversation and prevent it from going out of control.

So, what does HONY illustrate about IT’s effect on leadership? It illustrates that technology enables the emergence of unappointed, informal leaders who have a powerful influence over others. The networking, viral communication, and widespread reach enabled by technology makes it more likely for those with an appealing vision to be discovered by people from different corners of the world. These individuals are not ordered to follow the leader. They do so because they feel an emotional connection to the leader, the leader’s vision, and the leader’s work. The leader is passionate about her/his vision and is constantly modeling it through actions shared via technology. After stimulating action, the leader gets out of the way. The followers, with the help of technology, take it up upon themselves to share their thoughts, their interests, and become leaders in their own right. There is no top-down system through which leadership is exercised.

This effect of IT is not restricted to the non-corporate setting only. It can occur in and is relevant for all types of settings. In today’s highly complex and dynamic environment, leaders cannot take it all upon themselves to interface with the outside world or even those within their own organization. A leader cannot be at all the places demanding attention. Not only is the pace relentless but the variety of issues is too large for one supreme leader to be able to handle all events in a timely and competent fashion. An emergent, self-organizing system, such as one envisioned by the US Intelligence Agencies, is needed. Others will have to be empowered to rise, respond, and engage others to rise too. Smart leaders create conditions for others to emerge as leaders and then get out of the way. They create an emotionally engaging vision that others can relate to readily. They share their vision, model that vision, and stimulate a conversation among their followers. They don’t try to control the events. Instead, they become facilitators who remove the barriers and make it easy for others to make their contributions towards the leaders’ vision. The followers then take off. Some emerge as leaders themselves.

Technology, especially social media, plays a critical role in enabling this type of leadership. For how else will the leader be able to engage a multitude of people beyond her/his immediate span of control? Engaging a lot of people and that too from different domains and walks of life is critical because it is not possible to predict the situation one will be facing in the future and thus anticipate who might be ready to emerge as a leader or simply participate. Only technology can enable such an engagement. Though HONY has been around for a while, it was only after it moved to social media where others and their actions could not be controlled that it really took off!

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What a Father May Really Want for Father’s Day

Surinder Kahai — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:16:05 +0000

Though I have not been blogging actively, Leading Virtually continues to be popular among its readers. I thank all its readers for their interest and loyalty. While I mull over posts that focus on this blog’s theme, I thought I might share something that touches us all. Something that is more immediate. Tomorrow is father’s day. It’s a reminder that we are members of a family before anything else. It’s a reminder for us to give importance to our connections as human beings. I would argue that this suggestion is no different from what this blog suggests about how we lead virtually. Virtual no longer remains as such if we infuse humaneness in all that we do virtually. When something touches our hearts, it becomes real. With that in mind, and as a father, I would like to share my thoughts on what a father may really want for father’s day.

The other day I asked my daughter what she thought I wanted for father’s day. “A tie? sunglasses? a lawnmower? a breakfast that I make for you?” she quizzed me. I thought to myself that she had absolutely no clue about what would really make me happy. After a moment, I realized that I couldn’t possibly expect her to know what I really wanted. I had never told my children what would really make me happy on father’s day.

It would be the feeling I had when I held my children for the first time.

I have two children, Preet and Sahiba. Preet is the protective elder brother to Sahiba, who will always be his little sister. Even though the feelings I had when Preet and Sahiba were born were the same, the thoughts from Sahiba’s birth are more vivid because of their recency. Of course, I thought that she was the most beautiful thing in the world. I felt on the top of this world. Because I thought I was the most powerful person in this world. Here was someone tender who needed me. And I was going to take care of her. And give her the best things in life. I was the one who was going to protect her from any harm. I was the one who was going to give her unconditional love and, that too, without stopping for a moment. I was the one who would never put her down, no matter how tired I got. I was the happiest person in this world and no one could take this source of happiness away from me. Because it was all mine.

So you see, what caused this happiness was not some “thing” that this baby was going to do for me or give me. It was what I could do for her and give her. This baby needed me to survive, grow, and flourish and I was there to do all it takes to make that happen.

I would give anything to have that feeling again.

I don’t want a new tie, a new pair of sunglasses, or a new lawnmower. I don’t want someone to make anything for me. Instead, I want to feel that my children need my love and care. I want to feel that they need me to buffer them from the cruel challenges of life. I want to feel that I have in me what it takes to make them happy. I want to feel that I make a difference in my children’s lives like nobody can.

Your dad may very well be like me. To make him feel this way, don’t give or make anything for him. Instead, make him feel that he can still do for you and give you all that he wanted to when he held you for the first time. Show him that you are still vulnerable and you need him by your side to be the best that you can be. You will make him feel that he can take on anything in this world for your sake. That’s the best thing a father can ask for on father’s day.

Or on any other day, for that matter.

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