Some good practical advice to learn from other organisations to apply in different contexts

Authors: Daniel Morales, Elizabeth Ledet, Lauren Rebagliati

McKinsey & Co: September 17, 2024: Summary of the new book by the authors-The Journey of Leadership

The role of people leadership is not as straightforward as it seems. Particularly in these times, where business, social, and climate disruptions are compounding one another, effective leadership requires a multidimensional perspective on two factors:

• what the organisation needs
• what individuals need (including what leaders themselves need)

Four McKinsey senior partners offer ways for today’s leaders to better understand and adapt their leadership styles. The book emphasizes an inside-out mindset, in which leaders continually reflect on and reinvent their approaches to leading others. Among the findings is the need for leaders to adopt a human-centric approach to managing others, characterised by humility, empathy, and vulnerability.

Of course, such self-awareness can only develop in a psychologically safe environment and with continual monitoring and measurement of leadership development behaviours and outcomes within an organisation.

Without a deep understanding of who is excelling as a people leader and who is struggling (and in which specific areas), it becomes nearly impossible for any organisation to design and implement meaningful interventions.

At McKinsey, we tackled this challenge head-on. In a relatively short span of time, we designed, developed, and implemented a comprehensive people leadership measurement system, which is a collection of leadership metrics that take an abstract concept and make it measurable.

This system offers individual leaders a broad set of personalised people metrics, which helps them to identify their “blind spots,” clarify their leadership strengths, and highlight areas for development. By making these metrics more transparent within peer groups, we’ve seen a powerful impact. For example, leaders often say, “I thought I was well ahead of others in this area, but I actually have more work to do.”

To develop the people leadership measurement system, several critical technology elements needed to be in place:

• A strong data foundation. A robust foundation of curated people data, developed over time and paired with a world-class analytics team driven by a passion for innovation, forms the backbone of our approach. This includes filling in data gaps, where needed, with new, innovative measures and sources, such as our Mentorship Sponsorship Survey, which invites colleagues to recognise those who have significantly contributed to their development.
• Advanced technology development capabilities. We leverage rigorous analytics to identify and prioritise key metrics, combined with the ability to rapidly design and prototype new solutions.
• Alignment with our leadership development model. We’ve developed an analytics approach that aligns with our conceptual model of people leadership, seamlessly integrating it into our organization’s development and evaluation framework.

Just as important, several critical enablers supported the people leadership measurement system, which helped to ensure its practical application and impact across the firm:

• Leadership integration: Our efforts are championed by a wide range of senior leaders, whose support and sponsorship have been pivotal—especially during critical moments, such as the heightened focus on people leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their commitment has ensured that our initiatives are prioritized and fully integrated into our development and evaluation processes.
• Accountability: The use of the people leadership measurement system in measured, thoughtful ways as one part of our internal review and evaluation processes gives “teeth” to the system and signals the critical importance of people leadership in being successful at McKinsey.
• Public recognition: Finally, through highly visible communications and celebrations of top sponsors in each geography, we regularly recognize our standout people leaders who excel at supporting their colleagues.

Benefits of this approach to measuring people leadership 

The impact of this collection of leadership metrics has been transformative in several key areas. First, systematically measuring leadership markers has significantly galvanised support across the organisation, highlighting the importance of focused development. Individuals now have a clearer understanding of their personal-growth areas, enhancing their capacity to lead effectively. For instance, one leader discovered a notable gap between his team’s perception of his leadership and the regional average, which fell short of his expectations. To address this, he committed to being more present and available to support his teams daily.

Second, evaluation committees have found it easier to discuss people leadership with concrete, data-driven evidence, moving away from vague or anecdotal feedback. This shift has not only reinforced the importance of the people leadership dimension alongside client service but also fostered the development of more well-rounded leaders within the firm.

Additionally, we have gained valuable insights into leadership gaps across various geographies and practices, pinpointing areas where targeted intervention and support are needed, which can be proactively addressed through development, adjustments to leadership structures, and more. For example, the leader of one of our European offices analysed aggregate sponsorship scores across all partners and found that a small group of senior leaders was providing most of the support to junior colleagues. This discovery initiated a new effort to build sponsorship skills among all leaders in her office, ensuring everyone plays a part in supporting junior colleagues.

As experience makes clear, cultivating high-impact leaders is an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring, measurement, and adaptation.

The effort is worth it, however: organisations that invest in creating a culture of psychological safety, directly address leadership behaviours, and hold leaders accountable will be better positioned to thrive. Dynamic and responsible people leadership will continue to be a cornerstone of successful and healthy organisations.

Dr. Nicole Price

Forbes Books Author

Forbes Books

Before committing ourselves to empathizing with others, we must draw clear boundaries to prevent burnout.

Empathy comes in various forms, each with its challenges. Affective empathy involves deeply feeling others’ emotions, which can lead to overwhelming feelings, anxiety, or emotional fatigue.

This may raise questions about the value of empathy. However, it’s important to understand that empathy is crucial and shouldn’t be abandoned. Instead, we must set clear boundaries to maintain a healthy approach to empathy.

The Different Types of Empathy

One common issue is the confusion between different types of empathy. Affective empathy means experiencing someone else’s feelings and emotions, whereas cognitive empathy involves listening and understanding others’ feelings and beliefs without necessarily sharing those emotions or beliefs.

When practicing affective or cognitive empathy, it’s beneficial to keep your emotions separate from those of the person you’re empathizing with, allowing them space to express and be understood.

If you inadvertently take on their emotions as your own, your efforts to empathize can become counterproductive. In such cases, the focus may shift to relieving your distress, hindering the original aim of providing support. Understanding the distinction between affective and cognitive empathy is crucial when considering the vast number of people and situations that evoke empathy.

While everyone deserves empathy, it’s important to recognize that our capacity for affective empathy is limited when we deeply feel others’ emotions. It’s neither feasible nor healthy to fully engage affectively with every individual or situation we encounter or hear about in the news.

On the other hand, we have a much greater capacity for cognitive empathy, which involves understanding and acknowledging others’ feelings and perspectives without necessarily experiencing those emotions ourselves.

Capacity and the Practice of Empathy

Awareness of these different capacities is vital in establishing healthy boundaries in our empathy practice. Recognizing that we can cognitively empathize with many, but our ability to affectively empathize is naturally limited, helps us avoid emotional burnout.With this understanding, we can now explore how to effectively establish and maintain these boundaries in our empathy practice, ensuring that we engage empathetically in these four sustainable and balanced ways:

1. Think of Empathy as a Skill

We often associate empathy only with feeling. What happens if, instead, you consciously think of empathy as a skill—a muscle to be developed? This can be especially helpful for those in a helping profession requiring continual heavy emotional engagement.

If you think about and employ cognitive empathy in the way you do other skills like active listening or constructive feedback, what might that look like for you?

2. Believe in the Ability of Others

While we sometimes misinterpret empathy to mean solely taking on another person’s feelings and emotions, it can also be misinterpreted as the need “to fix” a situation for another. When someone simply asks us for understanding, we must limit ourselves to that.

In doing so, we respect their boundaries and ability to care for themselves and adjust their circumstances as needed. We are not saviors, and most people don’t need saving.

3. Establish Your Circle of Control

The first step in my empathy journey was paying attention to the opportunities to offer empathy throughout my day. It was not long before I became overwhelmed by trying to do the impossible. But through mentors and my practice, I learned that just because I couldn’t help everyone didn’t mean I couldn’t help someone. While there are many things I am concerned about, there are far fewer things that are within my personal circle of control.

When I find myself becoming overwhelmed, I write down the concerns that are swirling in my mind and put them into two distinct categories. First, I list my circle of concerns, which could be anything from a friend experiencing health issues to global warming.

Then, within that list, I break out what circumstances I can exert some level of control. I can control my schedule and make time to be with my friends. I can’t control global warming, but I can do my part, like driving an electric car and reducing, reusing, and recycling as much as possible. I could even decide to advocate for more intense regulations.

Acknowledging my concerns and identifying how/if I have control over them greatly reduces my stress and enables me to act with purpose rather than throw up my hands and give up.

4. Celebrate the Wins

As with any skill we attempt to develop, there will be days we fail at our empathy practice and days we just can’t seem to get it quite right. That’s okay. While it’s important to recognize when we fall short and work to do better, I would argue that it is more important to acknowledge when we get it right and build on the momentum of those moments.

The practice of empathy benefits the person receiving it, but it also benefits you—celebrate those benefits!

By Wouter Aghina, Christopher Handscomb, Jesper Ludolph, Dave West, and Abby Yip

This is  summary version of the article as everyone is busy…

What personality traits and values help agile teams bloom? Discover ways to identify these when recruiting and coaching your people.

How to Select and Develop Individuals for Successful Agile Teams is a practical guide developed through a collaboration between Scrum.org and McKinsey & Company in 2018. It explores the traits, behaviours, and values that contribute to building effective agile teams. The guide provides insights based on interviews and surveys with Scrum trainers and practitioners.

Key points include:

1. Critical Traits for Agile Success:

• Handling Ambiguity: Agile environments are unpredictable, so individuals must be comfortable with uncertainty, focus on goals, and be flexible.
• Agreeableness: Ranked surprisingly high, this trait fosters empathetic listening, teamwork, and the ability to reconcile differences. It’s crucial for both product owners and team members.
• Extroversion and Introversion: While extroverts tend to handle external communication well, introverts can excel in leading self-motivated teams due to their listening and empathy skills.
• Emotional Stability (Low Neuroticism): High levels of neuroticism are detrimental to agile environments, as they require calm and resilience under stress.

2. Work Values for Agile Teams:

• Pride in the Product: Agile teams prioritize delivering a valuable outcome over rigidly following processes.
• Customer-Centricity: Successful agile teams learn and adapt with their customers, ensuring their needs are met.
• Self-Direction: Individuals should be self-motivated, capable of working autonomously, and comfortable with minimal guidance.
• Openness to Change: A mindset that embraces innovation and adaptability is essential for thriving in agile settings.
• Avoiding Conservation: People who cling to tradition and resist change may struggle in agile environments, which require flexibility and a willingness to break rules if necessary.

3. Development and Recruitment Tips:

• The guide provides actionable suggestions for recruiting and developing agile team members by assessing their ability to handle ambiguity, engage in teamwork, maintain customer focus, and take pride in their work.
• Specific interview questions and assessment methods are provided to evaluate these traits and values.

In conclusion, the document highlights that successful agile teams are not just composed of technically proficient individuals but of people with the right personality traits, behaviours, and values. These can be innate or developed through coaching and mentorship.

By Joanna York (Source BBC ) 31st October 2022

Bosses have long said workers need a growth mindset. Now, this skill is more important than ever – and it’s possible to master it.

Among daily changes within the world of work, there’s never been a better time for employees to cultivate skills to help them better manage workplace challenges. This is where the idea of the ‘growth mindset’ comes roaring in – the belief that workers are capable of actively improving their abilities, rather than being innately able or unable to complete certain tasks.

Yet, this ‘can do’ mindset can be more difficult to harness than it seems. Doing so means getting comfortable with embracing hurdles, learning from criticism and persisting when things get difficult.

Even if we believe that such tenacity is worth developing, in practise, doubts and fears can dominate. “We’re wired to believe our emotions,” says Elaine Elliott-Moskwa, psychologist and author of The Growth Mindset Workbook, based in Princeton, New Jersey, US. “When a person says ‘I feel I’m not good enough’, that feeling is very powerful, even though that is a belief about their abilities.”

At the heart of the growth mindset is learning to overcome such feelings of inability or inadequacy in the face of obstacles, and instead recognise an opportunity to learn. And there can be profound benefits to cultivating this approach. Employees with a growth mindset can tap into a useful skillset to manage stress, build supportive relationships with colleagues, cope with failure and develop attributes to help further their careers.

What is growth mindset?

Growth mindset first emerged in 1988 as a theory relating to education. “It had to do with why smart kids fail in the face of difficulty despite their actual abilities,” says Elliott-Moskwa. The idea was that the students’ attitude towards taking on a challenge, rather than their innate ability, was a key determiner for success. In other words, our ideas about how able we are to do something can have a significant impact on the outcome of a task.

Approaching a challenge with a growth mindset over a fixed mindset is a choice anyone can take

Stanford professor and psychologist Carol Dweck narrowed this concept down to two approaches that can determine results: ‘fixed mindset’ and ‘growth mindset’. “Fixed mindset is the idea that your abilities are high or low, and there’s not too much you can do to change it,” says Elliott-Moskwa, “whereas the growth mindset is the view that your abilities are malleable or changeable.”

While some people may naturally lean more one way than the other, people don’t outright have either a fixed or growth mindset to all problems, full stop – instead, approaching a challenge with a growth mindset over a fixed mindset is a choice anyone can take.

For many people, though, moments of difficulty often spur fixed mindsets. For example, says Elliott-Moskwa, when people take in criticism from a boss, or struggle with a new task, they might feel a sense of inadequacy. In these situations, a fixed-mindset response might be “I’m not good enough”, or “I can’t do it”, she says.

By contrast, a growth mindset approach takes a different tack on the same situation. People with growth mindsets don’t interpret such moments as personal failings, but instead recognise a need to improve. Crucially, people working with a growth mindset believe they are capable of such improvement, and are able to break down challenges into achievable steps.

This means getting out of the comfort zone and accepting a certain level of risk, uncertainty and the potential for failure that comes with trying something new. “It feels a little bit uncomfortable, and also a little bit exciting,” says Isabella Venour, a London-based mindset coach, who helps professionals understand the role their beliefs, values and patterns of thinking play in the workplace. “You’ve got a bit of risk that it might go wrong, but you’ve also got the potential to learn something and to grow as an individual.”

A growth mindset means believing you can actively improve your abilities, rather than simply being ‘bad’ at some tasks.

Why is growth mindset important in the workplace right now?

A can-do approach is always a plus in the workplace – it demonstrates that workers are adaptable and willing to evolve within their jobs and organisations. But fostering a growth mindset plays an important role in helping workers navigate turbulence as well as improve resilience as they feel more confident and capable handling difficulties.

This is essential at a time when many employees are struggling with wellbeing in the wake of the pandemic. Gallup’s 2022 State of the Workforce Report showed that stress among global workers has risen consistently since the pandemic began in 2020. A similar global survey by the Wellbeing Project showed that in 2022 resilience is particularly low,  and the risk of burnout remains, especially among non-managers. “People are being pulled in all directions and stretched thin as pressures of work and life are spilling into one another,” says Venour. “Business leaders are noticing that their employees are struggling to cope with everyday challenges.”

Growth mindset not only provides a framework for dealing with challenges, but a way to break those challenges down in to manageable steps. “Often, if we’re feeling pressure when we’re not in a growth mindset, we tend to focus on what we can’t control,” says Venour. “It’s a lot more useful to focus on what we can influence.” This starts with workers identifying personal strengths that they can utilise, then making a plan to improve areas of weakness.

Taking a pragmatic approach can help cut through overwhelm and also help workers lay down boundaries – something many remote workers are struggling to do. For example, “if your boss gives you a task that you feel is unrealistic, it’s easier to say you’re not sure about the timing or you need an extra meeting to give you more clarity”, says Venour. “Because you are confident in your abilities and you don’t see weaknesses as something to beat yourself up about it. You’re able to say, I need some support here.”

[A growth mindset] encourages people to focus on feedback rather than failure – Isabella Venour

It is possible to practice growth mindset individually, but if a business encourages the whole workforce to adopt a growth mindset, the results can be even more powerful. “It encourages people to focus on feedback rather than failure,” says Venour. This can help motivate employees to tackle challenging projects, and create an in-built culture of learning. Studies suggest this is something that workers overwhelmingly want: in a 2022 McKinsey & Company study, 41% of workers said the foremost reason they would quit a job is lack of career development and advancement.

How can you improve growth mindset? 

The first step towards encouraging a growth mindset is personal awareness: the ability to identify fixed-mindset thinking when it occurs, which often manifests as feelings of discomfort or inadequacy in the face of a challenge.

First, Elliott-Moskwa advises recognising and accepting such feelings – instead of beating yourself up about them. “Then, mindfully make another choice to take an action step in keeping with what you would be doing if you had growth mindset – the belief that you could increase your abilities,” she says.

To help clients approach obstacles with a growth mindset, Venour often breaks down challenges that feel overwhelming into smaller pieces. For example, if a worker feels unable to give a presentation in front of colleagues, “how much of that is emotional and how much of that is factual?”, she asks. “Can they talk? Yes. Have they spoken in front of more than one person before? Yes. Have they done presentation slides before? Yes. So, if there are elements that they can do, [what] is the bit that they’re not comfortable with?”

Narrowing down an overwhelming challenge to a specific point of difficulty helps workers focus, and reduces the element of learning required to an achievable level.

Often, the learning itself requires asking for help. One of the key concepts of growth mindset is seeing others as inspiration rather than competition, an approach that can help foster collaborative teams. “If workers view others as resources and not as competitors, they’re open to sharing other people’s skills and abilities and learning from fellow employees,” says Elliott-Moskwa.

Over time, recognising fixed mindset and practicing a growth mindset can become easier, and the prospect of taking on challenges less daunting. “Growth mindset is an empowering attitude,” says Venour. “You can really develop and grow over time as a person.”

It is Better to Avoid a Toxic Employee than Hire a Superstar

By Nicole Torres

December 09, 2015

Superstar employees are the obsession of the corporate world. They’re highly sought after, given the most attention and the best opportunities, generously rewarded, and expressly reassured after setbacks. And while some question whether such special treatment is appropriate, it’s clear that this group has outsize influence: high-performers have been estimated to be four times as productive as average workers, and research has shown that they may generate 80% of a business’s profits and attract other star employees. They can comprise the top 3% to 20% of a company’s workforce.
But according to a recent working paper from Harvard Business School, there’s another group that can have an even greater effect on organizations: toxic workers. These are talented and productive people who engage in behavior that is harmful to an organization, say authors Dylan Minor, a visiting assistant professor at HBS, and Michael Housman, Chief Analytics Officer at Cornerstone OnDemand. They looked at otherwise skilled employees who ended up doing real damage — employees who had been fired for egregious company policy violations, such as sexual harassment, workplace violence, or fraud — and found that avoiding such people can save companies even more money than finding and retaining superstars.

The high cost of bad hires
Their data came from a company that sells job-testing software to large employers, and it combined three things: 1) job assessment scores that captured applicant traits like confidence in their skills, whether they care about others people’s needs more than their own, and their philosophy on following rules; 2) attrition data, which included hire dates, termination dates, reasons for termination, etc.; and 3) daily performance data. The dataset spanned 11 global
companies and 58,542 hourly workers. Minor and Housman found that roughly 1 in 20 workers was ultimately fired for toxic behavior.
They compared the cost of a toxic worker with the value of a superstar, which they define as a worker who is so productive that a firm would have to hire additional people or pay current employees more just to achieve the same output. They calculated that avoiding a toxic employee can save a company more than twice as much as bringing on a star performer – specifically, avoiding a toxic worker was worth about $12,500 in turnover costs, but even the top 1% of superstar employees only added about $5,300 to the bottom line.
The real difference could be even bigger, if you factor in other potential costs, such as litigation fees, regulatory fines, lower employee morale, and upset customers. One 2012 CareerBuilder survey found that 41% of the nearly 2,700 employers surveyed estimated that a bad hire could cost $25,000, while a quarter believed it was much higher—$50,000 or more.

Who is likely to be toxic?
The study also uncovered certain personality and behavioral traits predictive of such behavior.
Overconfident, self-centered, productive, and rule-following employees were more likely to be toxic workers. One standard deviation in skills confidence meant an approximately 15% greater chance of being fired for toxic behavior, while employees who were found to be more self-regarding (and less concerned about others’ needs) had a 22% greater likelihood. For workers who said that rules must always be followed, there was a 25% greater chance he or she would be terminated for actually breaking the rules. They also found that people exposed to other toxic workers on their teams had a 46% increased likelihood of similarly being fired for misconduct.
Overconfidence and narcissism have been associated with negative work outcomes before. What was more surprising was that people who believed rules should always be followed (compared to those who answered that you sometimes have to break the rules to accomplish something) were more likely to exhibit toxic behavior. The authors hypothesized that this may be due to applicants trying to tell recruiters what they want to hear. “It could be the case that those who claim the rules should be followed are more Machiavellian in nature, purporting to embrace whatever rules, characteristics, or beliefs that they believe are most likely to obtain them a job,” they wrote. “There is strong evidence that Machiavellianism leads to deviant behavior.”
The toxic employees in their sample were also more productive than the average worker, in that it took them less time to complete a task than it took their colleagues. The authors say this is consistent with other research that has found a potential trade-off when it comes to unethical workers — they may be corrupt, but they are high performers. And aside from performance, bad guys often win at work because they exhibit other valued traits, like charisma, curiosity, and high self-esteem. Still, they aren’t likely to help the organization in the long term. Minor and Housman note that although toxic workers may be faster than average employees, they don’t necessarily produce higher quality work.

Avoiding toxicity
“We often think of hiring and evaluation as one or two dimensions. We want someone who is highly productive in sales and has good customer service,” Minor told me over email. “However, there is a third dimension: the person’s corporate citizenship. If it is really poor, they are not going to be a good hire. Organizational productivity would likely even be greater if the manager hired the worker that was a bit less productive but had better corporate citizenship.”
The idea that a negative has a stronger impact than a positive has been established in fields like finance (losses have more of an impact than gains), psychology (people remember bad experiences more than good ones), and linguistics (we pay more attention to negative words than positive or neutral ones). If toxic workers have a stronger (corrosive) effect on a firm than even the highest performing non-toxic ones, then it seems fair to say that managers should give the former more thought.

https://hbr.org/2015/12/its-better-to-avoid-a-toxic-employee-than-hire-a-superstar