Rotman Management Spring 2011

WHETHER YOU WORK FOR A BANK or a hospital, in the field of biotech or design, doing business is fundamentally about conversations – with colleagues, customers and the unknown future emerging around us. What gets talked about – and how it gets talked about – determines what will happen, and what won’t. Unfortunately, what doesn’t get talked about can be even more important than what does. Have you ever wondered why the real conversations often happen in the meeting after the meeting? We have all participated in conversations where we keep ideas, critical information or feelings to ourselves, for a wide variety of reasons. Welcome to the realm of the Undiscussable. Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Chris Argyris coined the term and has written extensively about how well-meaning, intelligent people create vicious…

The road has been rocky for business leaders of late, and it shows: in Gallup’s 2010 rating of the perceived ethical standards of people in different professions, executives polled just a few notches above car salesmen and beneath lawyers. Just 15 per cent of respondents rated their honesty and ethical standards as ‘high’ or ‘very high’. Of course, this hardly comes as a surprise. In the past decade we have witnessed three massive, blowout scandals: the accounting corruption that ensnared Enron, WorldComand others (2001–2002); the options backdating scandal that included scores of Silicon Valley firms (2005–2006) and the subprime mortgage scandal that devastated both Wall Street and Main Street (2008–2009). This ongoing display of illegal and unethical behaviour suggests that something is seriously out of whack in the corporate world. Of…

You believe that two things differentiate truly successful people from everyone else. What are they? I’ve led sessions where I have successful people talk about their lives, and five things tend to really matter to them: the first is health, which of course is critically important; the second is wealth, but that doesn’t matter as much as you might think. Studies show that after about $65,000 to $80,000 a year, there is zero correlation between wealth and happiness. Third is relationships; it’s very important to have positive relationships in your life with people that you love. So assuming that you’re healthy, you have a middle-class income and you have good personal relationships, what else differentiates successful people from others? Happiness and meaning. Truly successful people spend a great deal of their…

STOCKMARKET DROP TONE OF VOICE SPOKEN WORDS ACCOUNTING REPORTS E-MAIL MESSAGES WRITTEN MEMOS MARKETING RESULTS GESTURES STATISTICAL REPORTS While innovation, ingenuity and thinking ‘outside the box’ are often cited as hallmarks of successful organizations, in practice their occurrence is all-too-rare. More likely, the ‘way things are done around here’ involves a litany of missed deadlines, low morale, strained relationships and inept problem solving. It’s not as if people sit around saying, “Okay, here’s our plan for lowering morale,” or, “What can we do to run this project into the ground?” Most people want to foster creativity and competency and value the dignity of work. Yet we find ourselves being ineffective, settling for less, and caught in escalating cycles of unproductive behaviour towards each other. How does this happen? This article is intended to help sort out these puzzles of human behaviour.…

How do you define a ‘difficult conversation’? These tend to be conversations with high stakes – where there is money or emotional well-being or a relationship on the line. In business, common examples include giving negative feedback, managing a dysfunctional team, making tough decisions where the stakeholders have strongly divergent views, and giving bad news. These discussions can keep even the most experienced executive up at night, wondering how – or even whether – to have the conversation. However, getting really skilled at having these conversations gives a leader – and an organization – a huge competitive edge. You have found that difficult conversations are actually three conversations; please explain. Think for a moment about classical music or jazz. You can analyze it from the perspective of melody, but there is so much…

Every day we are bombarded by news media, commercials, billboards, books and magazines with new reasons to fear for our physical and psychological well-being. Some have even said that we exist in a ‘culture of fear’, studded with warnings about terrorism, international conflict, weakening economies, global warming, crime, infectious disease and other types of threats that sell consumer products and presidential candidates. Fear has shaped human behaviour for a very long time, and it continues to do so today. However, attention to fear in organizational life – how and why it is experienced, and to what effects – has received far less attention than it warrants. As a powerful, evolutionary-based emotion, fear encourages avoidance behaviour, a narrowed perceptual and cognitive focus on perceived threats, and pessimistic judgments about risks and future…