How to Know If There Are Too Many People in Your Meeting

When setting up a meeting, the people you invite are just as important as what you need to get done. Including too many people — or too few — can be a waste of time for everyone involved. The following excerpt from the book Running Meetings will help you decide who should be in the room to make your meeting most effective.

It may be easy to default to inviting a crowd of people to a meeting — that way, you don’t really have to identify the most critical participants, you’ll avoid any ruf?ed feathers, you’ll have everyone involved on hand for a decision, and you won’t have to repeat your communications separately afterward. Or maybe your tendency is to want to keep things small: You may be tempted to invite just a small group of people whose opinions you most value.

But for a meeting to be useful, you have to have the right people — and only the right people — in the room. With too many attendees, you may have trouble focusing everyone’s time and attention and accomplishing anything; with too few, you might not have the right decision makers or information providers in the room.

As you plan your attendee list, consider who will help you to accomplish your meeting’s goal and those who will be most affected by its outcome. Most likely this is a combination of people who will offer a variety of perspectives. Take the time to methodically list the individuals in each of these categories to make sure you include the right people:

The key decision makers for the issues involvedThe ones with information and knowledge about the topics under discussionPeople who have a commitment to or a stake in the issuesThose who need to know about the information you have to report in order to do their jobsAnyone who will be required to implement any decisions made Managing People Book 12.95 Add to Cart

Feel free to consult with other stakeholders to make sure you’ve made the right list. Often another key stakeholder can remind you of a perspective you forgot to bring into the room.

Just because someone’s name is on your list, however, doesn’t mean he or she must be at the meeting. How many people should you actually invite? There are no hard and fast rules, but in principle, a small meeting is best to actually decide or accomplish something; a medium-sized meeting is ideal for brainstorming; and for communicating and rallying, you can go large. Some people use what’s known as the 8-18-1800 rule as a rough guideline:

If you have to solve a problem or make a decision, invite no more than 8 people. If you have more participants, you may receive so much con?icting input that it’s dif?cult to deal with the problem or make the decision at hand.If you want to brainstorm, then you can go as high as 18 people.If the purpose of the meeting is for you to provide updates, invite however many people need to receive the updates. However, if everyone attending the meeting will be providing updates, limit the number of participants to no more than 18.If the purpose of the meeting is for you to rally the troops, go for 1,800 — or more!

If you decide not to invite individuals you listed as likely to be affected by the meeting’s outcome, have a plan to communicate the substance of the meeting to them afterward.

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Leadership & Learning Executive

Leadership & Learning Executive London

Championing innovative approaches to leadership learning, you’ll help to ensure the future for British Airways is stronger than ever. Your remit will have a truly global scope. As one of the leading brands in aviation, we have 44,000 staff based in a range of countries. Their specialties range from customer service to IT and commerce. We’ll look to you to ensure everyone’s leaders benefit from excellent learning and development provision, so we can all fulfil our promise ‘To Fly. To Serve.’

You will work with closely with a wide range of people – from HR and Finance Business Partners, to subject matter experts and, of course, leadership and management learning delegates. Taking care to find out what our business needs, you will scope, design and deliver business-wide learning solutions. Building leadership capability and behaviours, you will help to power high performance worldwide. You’ll also enjoy the opportunity to help Global Learning Academy colleagues create brand new leadership initiatives. Benchmarking trends and supplier knowledge, you’ll make sure everything you do is cutting edge.

To join us, you’ll need to demonstrate a track record of managing end-to-end learning and development with proven ROI. Your expertise spans everything from partnering and consulting, through to design, delivery and evaluation. Ideally, you will be accredited and experienced in the use of psychometrics such as MBTI, SDI and Hogan’s. You’ll certainly be an innovative thinker and a creative problem solver, with impressive influencing and coaching skills and a naturally collaborative approach.

To apply, please click on the apply link to visit our website.

LocationLondonSalaryCompetitive salaryReferenceUKWTS572Contact NameRecruitment

Championing innovative approaches to leadership learning, you’ll help to ensure the future for British Airways is stronger than ever. Your remit will have a truly global scope. As one of the leading brands in aviation, we have 44,000 staff based in a range of countries. Their specialties range from customer service to IT and commerce. We’ll look to you to ensure everyone’s leaders benefit from excellent learning and development provision, so we can all fulfil our promise ‘To Fly. To Serve.’

You will work with closely with a wide range of people – from HR and Finance Business Partners, to subject matter experts and, of course, leadership and management learning delegates. Taking care to find out what our business needs, you will scope, design and deliver business-wide learning solutions. Building leadership capability and behaviours, you will help to power high performance worldwide. You’ll also enjoy the opportunity to help Global Learning Academy colleagues create brand new leadership initiatives. Benchmarking trends and supplier knowledge, you’ll make sure everything you do is cutting edge.

To join us, you’ll need to demonstrate a track record of managing end-to-end learning and development with proven ROI. Your expertise spans everything from partnering and consulting, through to design, delivery and evaluation. Ideally, you will be accredited and experienced in the use of psychometrics such as MBTI, SDI and Hogan’s. You’ll certainly be an innovative thinker and a creative problem solver, with impressive influencing and coaching skills and a naturally collaborative approach.

To apply, please click on the apply link to visit our website.

Apply now

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Investors Always Come Back … Even to Argentina

by Justin Fox  |   9:45 AM June 26, 2014

Argentina lost big to a group of American “vulture” hedge funds in court last week, when the Supreme Court declined to reconsider an appeals court decision that the funds had the right to demand that the country make good on a bunch of old bonds they owned even though it long ago renegotiated the terms of that debt with most creditors. (For explanations of the case, see Felix Salmon in Foreign Affairs and Matt Levine at Bloomberg View.) Short-term, this represents a crisis for Argentina, which has until June 30 to either pay out or default. Over the long run, though, it may be a step toward removing such cases from unsympathetic American courts and letting countries like Argentina battle it out with creditors on friendlier turf.

This is an outcome that Laura Alfaro, a professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy unit at Harvard Business School and the former Minister of National Planning and Economic Policy of Costa Rica, thinks would be healthy for all parties involved. In a piece published on HBS Working Knowledge in April, Alfaro argued that the U.S. Congress took a wrong turn in 1976 in passing the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), which allowed foreign governments to issue debt in accordance with U.S. law, and creditors to sue those governments in U.S. courts in the event of a default.

“One of the most damaging results of the FSIA,” Alfaro wrote, “is a false perception that foreign debt was made less risky than it is. The limited enforcement rights of investors means that sovereign debt remains risky, regardless of whether it is issued under foreign law.” It would be better, she concluded, to return to the pre-1976 practice in which each country issued sovereign debt under its own laws, a change that would “allow debtors and creditors alike to better understand and acknowledge the risk inherent in sovereign debt lending. If you lend to Argentina, you are dealing with Argentina.”

I caught up with Alfaro, who is currently in Brazil cheering on her country’s surprisingly successful soccer team, to ask a few questions by email. Here’s what she had to say:

You’ve been arguing that the sovereign debt of Argentina and other countries should in fact be treated as sovereign and thus not subject to U.S. laws. Last week’s Supreme Court decision was a pretty powerful statement that U.S. law does prevail, whatever the consequences for global debt markets. Does that pull us farther away from the outcome you want, or push us closer to it?

Alfaro: When bonds are issued under foreign law, creditors can sue a defaulting debtor in a foreign court and typically obtain a favorable judgment, since the sovereign debtor is in breach of contractual obligations.  However, the value of this judgment can be limited for two reasons.  First, the creditors generally cannot recover a sovereign debtor’s local assets since these are typically protected by domestic law.  Second, sovereign debtors benefit from foreign governments’ sovereign immunity laws, limiting creditors’ ability to seize sovereign assets held abroad.  For example, foreign assets held in a diplomatic capacity, such as military assets or an ambassador’s residence, are always protected in the United States.  We still need to see if Argentina chooses to pay everyone or default.  Sovereign debt continues to involve a risk. It is best if this is acknowledged explicitly by all the parties.

Does the U.S. need to amend/repeal the FSIA to get us to the sort of sovereign debt markets you’d like to see, or are there other solutions?

Perhaps the one positive effect of the ruling is that we may engage in a serious discussion of these issues (although sadly I still do not envision grand changes emerging).

Sovereign debtors can overcome collective action problems in restructurings by including ex-ante contractual provisions in the bond documentation that make it more difficult for dissenting creditors to hold out and litigate their claims, and using ex-post negotiating strategies that encourage collective action amongst creditors. The most widespread contractual mechanisms for dealing with these problems are collective action clauses that empower a qualified majority of creditors to bind dissenting creditors and thereby limit the potential threat of litigation from “holdout” creditors.

Another important issue is to change the pari passu clause, which limits the ability of debtors to privilege one group of creditors over another. Argentina’s bond offering featured the broadest version of the pari passu clause, providing for equal priority and equal payment of similarly situated creditors. In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that this prohibited it from paying one class of creditors while other creditors that are owed payment receive nothing.

In future bond offerings, sovereign debtors can avoid this interpretation by changing the wording of the clause or deleting language that provides for equal payment.  They also have the option of issuing bonds under their own law.  Bonds issued under local law typically limit the ability of creditors to litigate in foreign courts.

The question of why a sovereign debtor would ever choose not to insert such contractual provisions into its bond documents or issue under foreign jurisdiction remains. Sovereign debtors have an ex-ante incentive to commit to greater creditor enforcement rights in order to attract more favorable financing terms. But sovereign nations are sovereign nations.  Less creditworthy countries must therefore decide whether the premium for including contractual terms that limit creditor litigation rights is worth paying.

Is there a chance that this Supreme Court decision will damage New York’s standing as a financial center?

On the one hand the decision of the Supreme Court strengthens creditor rights. On the other hand, some sovereigns may prefer alternative laws to issue their debt. As mentioned, this is a tradeoff between most favorable terms ex-ante and limitations ex-post. The important point, however, is that this is an ex-ante bargain between the sovereign debtor and the creditor and is priced into the financial terms of the transaction.  Again, perhaps moving to a world where everyone explicitly acknowledges the risks would be better.

What do you think Argentina should do next?

They should start negotiating in good faith.  There are attempts also to move the debt to local jurisdiction. A payment is due June 30, so we will find out what they will do.  But again, showing good will matters.

With no protection in U.S. courts, would anybody outside Argentina buy Argentine debt?

History has shown that investors always come back … even to Argentina.

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Training & Competence Specialist

Training & Competence Specialist City of London

A leading, city based financial services firm has a new, urgent, requirement for a Training & Competence Consultant with experience of rolling out Senior Manager Regime training to join them on a long term contract basis. Reporting into the Head of Training, the role will focus on the following:

- Work with key stakeholders to ensure that the bank implements the FCA's new regulatory regime to a consistent standard including: Senior Manager's Regime, Certification Regime and Conduct Rules

- To assist the bank in implementing the new FCA Regulatory framework for Individuals in accordance with regulations.

- To help embed T&C procedures and establish appropriate training for relevant staff and in supervisory roles.

This is a 12 month contract, paying up to £70,000 with an immediate start. Candidates must have experience rolling out FCA competence training previously and ideally have experience specifically with Senior Manager's Regime, Certification Regime and Conduct Rules. To be considered, please apply with an updated CV as soon as possible.

SR Group is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.

LocationCity of LondonSalary£60000 - £70000 per annumDuration12 monthsReferenceKA/6070TCContact NameKunaal Arora

A leading, city based financial services firm has a new, urgent, requirement for a Training & Competence Consultant with experience of rolling out Senior Manager Regime training to join them on a long term contract basis. Reporting into the Head of Training, the role will focus on the following:

- Work with key stakeholders to ensure that the bank implements the FCA's new regulatory regime to a consistent standard including: Senior Manager's Regime, Certification Regime and Conduct Rules

- To assist the bank in implementing the new FCA Regulatory framework for Individuals in accordance with regulations.

- To help embed T&C procedures and establish appropriate training for relevant staff and in supervisory roles.

This is a 12 month contract, paying up to £70,000 with an immediate start. Candidates must have experience rolling out FCA competence training previously and ideally have experience specifically with Senior Manager's Regime, Certification Regime and Conduct Rules. To be considered, please apply with an updated CV as soon as possible.

SR Group is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.

Apply now

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How to Get Your Team to Coach Each Other

No one grows as a leader without the support of other people. Effective peer-to-peer coaching can offer the encouragement people need to overcome the fear of starting something new. Peer coaches, like professional coaches, can also hold their “clients” accountable for moving in a new direction.

Setting up a peer-to-peer coaching network on the team you manage can accelerate your team’s learning. I’ve been providing peer-to-peer coaching opportunities for decades, in my Wharton courses and in all kinds of organizations, and most recently in a MOOC (massive open online course) I teach on Coursera called Better Leader, Richer Life. In this piece, I’ll explain how to set up a non-directive coaching peer coaching network, in the Socratic tradition (in which the client discovers solutions to problems via dialogue), as opposed to instructional, evaluative, and directive feedback (in which an expert coach solves the client’s problem).  Through compassionate, caring inquiry, everyone can develop and improve their abilities through practice and reflection on what works (and what doesn’t).

Of course, it won’t absolve you of responsibility for making tough personnel decisions about pay and promotion and of everything else you must do with your authority. But there is a sense of camaraderie and good feeling that comes when you have positive impact as a coach on another person’s well-being, and peer coaches learn things about themselves both through the act of coaching others, and, of course, by receiving coaching themselves.

To construct a peer coaching network, start small. Set people up in trios or ask employees to find two other people so the three can take turns serving as both coach and client for each other: A coaches B, B coaches C, and C coaches A.  Suggest each person start by discussing their goals.  The more open we are about goals, the more we increase our commitment to them, and the more likely they’ll be realized.

It’s also useful to talk about how the triad will work together, establishing expectations, time to meet, and understanding each other’s interests, hopes, and fears. Clarify how each member will play the coach and client roles and suggest adjustments as needed.  Encourage each person to gain a preliminary understanding of each other’s key relationships at work, at home, and in the community. But the most important ground rule is this: “You choose what you want to disclose.” Respect privacy and preferences for how much information members are willing to disclose.

Provide your team with some basic guidelines followed by most coaches. Ask your team to follow to these guidelines to get the most out of their peer-to-peer coaching relationships:

Show you care about helping your clients achieve their goals.
Share your experiences only to help the client feel accepted, not to focus on you.Be as aware as possible of your own biases as a coach.Stay in touch with the reality your client is facing — listen well.Don’t hide your ignorance — ask questions, even ones you might think are dumb.Encourage your client to get more help when needed, from all sources.Try not to criticize your client’s ideas; usually it’s best to listen and offer alternatives.Don’t promise more than you can deliver; this will decrease your credibility.

The heart of non-directive, or developmental, peer-to-peer coaching is asking useful questions. Many people fear change because it forces them into unknown territory, where things are unpredictable and unfamiliar. And yet there are predictable stages people go through when they undertake intentional change. Coaches help others to see and feel the need to create meaningful, sustainable change. Here are the stages and some of the key questions peer coaches can ask in helping clients face the challenges associated with each:

What’s the problem?

Simply identifying the need for change can be difficult, as many of us ignore information that disconfirms our current perceptions or threatens the status quo. Coaches can help identify blind spots by encouraging self-reflection about things that aren’t obvious to their clients. Asking these basic questions increases awareness:

As you think about your goals, what’s not working well in your life?What are the consequences of this issue for you and the important people in your life?What is the source of the need to change — is it in you or is it external?Why bother?

Because we naturally tend towards continuing the status quo, if doing something new doesn’t feel urgent, it’s not likely to occur. Coaches can help raise urgency by asking questions such as these:

Looking ahead, what will happen if you don’t change?What will happen if you do change?What’s your decision?

The decision to change is a crucial moment because it marks the point when your mind shifts and you begin to see a different future. It is also a fragile point in planned change processes, fraught with temptations to revert to the way things have always been and with distractions away from the focused effort that’s required to do something new and make it stick. Coaches can help clients reach and move beyond this point by asking:

What have you decided to do differently and why?What is the ideal outcome?What are your new goals?

4: What steps exactly?

Good coaches ask clients to think out loud about what to do differently, how to overcome obstacles, and what skills or sources of support are needed. You can help your client discover specific ideas for how to better accomplish goals by asking:

What exactly will you do, and when will you do it?How will you measure progress?What stands in the way, and how will you overcome these barriers?How will you generate needed support?Are you really in?

Because commitment wanes without a sense of urgency, coaches should continually test for this. Coaches can ask:

What if this is harder than you think?What are the first steps — and the next steps — you will take?How will you maintain your sense of urgency?How will you sustain it?

Encouragement at every small step builds momentum. As a coach you should provide frequent reinforcement and celebrate your clients’ successes to bolster confidence and help them avoid backsliding. The key questions here are:

What impact has your new behavior had on you and others?What accomplishments are you proud of achieving?Is there a smarter step that might help you build momentum?How can I (as your coach) reinforce your commitment to action?

Getting good at both providing and receiving peer coaching requires some investment. Very few people are naturally gifted in this essential skill. But like any other skill, it can be learned – with practice. As the leader of your team, establishing a peer coaching network can empower your colleagues, expand their skill sets, enrich them personally and professionally, and ultimately help your organization. It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s rewarding.

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Storytelling Exercise: Make a Story with Three Images

Exercise Similarity Analysis helps you to find the training activities you are looking for quicker than ever before by letting you follow clusters of similar exercises. Our Similarity Algorithm can accurately spot exercises in the collection which are similar to the one you are currently reading. These are shown in order of similarity at the end of each training activity. Following clusters of exercises can inspire you to find better exercises suitable for your specific training needs.

We are constantly looking for ways to make it easier for you to find what you want. Please let us know about your views on this or other features.

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The True Cost of Hiring Yet Another Manager

by Michael C. Mankins  |   8:00 AM June 2, 2014

You can have terrific people working in the right teams and still not see the financial results you’re hoping for. Why? It could be that your organization’s structure is creating obstacles that compromise your workforce’s performance.

One common culprit is out-of-control tooth-to-tail ratios. In a war zone, some soldiers fight on the front lines. Others maintain supply chains, handle logistics, and otherwise support those front-line troops. Military commanders know they can’t let the tooth-to-tail (or combat-to-support) ratio get too low, or they’ll wind up with a force that costs too much and can’t win the battle.

It’s the same in a company. You have front-line employees who create what you sell or who deal directly with customers: software developers, sales reps, call-center staffers, and so on. You also have support staff, including the people in marketing, finance, HR, and other functions. When the tooth-to-tail ratio gets too low, front-line people find that they have to send every customer request or idea for improvement up through the bureaucracy and wait days or weeks for a response. That not only creates long delays for customers; it also makes front-line employees feel disempowered and demoralized. How can they serve the customer when they’re burdened with so much bureaucracy?

A second likely culprit: too many supervisory layers. Unnecessary supervisors create work and don’t increase efficiency, thus lowering an organization’s productivity. And companies often underestimate how expensive all those supervisors really are. Not long ago my colleagues and I studied the cost of adding a manager or executive, and we found a kind of multiplier effect (see the graphic below). When you hire a manager, he or she typically generates enough work to keep somebody else busy as well. Senior executives — SVPs and EVPs — are even more costly. These high-priced folks typically require support from a caravan of assistants and/or chiefs of staff. The support staff generates a lot more work for other people, too. The extra burden comes to 4.2 FTEs per hire, including the executive’s own time.

We’ve found three steps to be helpful in liberating your people from the organizational mire:

Manage your tooth-to-tail ratios closely. Appropriate ratios naturally vary from one industry to another. But a company can gauge its performance against benchmark levels and make adjustments as necessary. If you can create standard processes for handling queries and ideas from front-line people, that will help them make and execute good decisions faster. You may find that all those support personnel aren’t really necessary — that the tooth can be more effective with a much smaller tail.Trim your supervisory layers. Compare your managerial spans — the average number of direct reports per supervisor—with industry benchmarks, and adjust your structure accordingly. Take into account, however, that different jobs require different spans of control. The lawyers in your legal department probably do highly specialized work that needs close supervision, thus requiring a narrower span of control. The custodians who clean your facilities, by contrast, can operate under a supervisor with a much broader span of control. Selectively removing supervisors (sometimes referred to as “delayering”) can reduce workload and costs throughout your organization.Limit the caravans. It does little good to eliminate unnecessary supervisors if those who remain are as costly and inefficient as ever. In some companies, it’s common for senior VPs to have not just an assistant but a whole coterie of helpers, complete with a chief of staff. These caravans can generate just as much work as the executives themselves — again, a perverse multiplier effect. Limiting (or eliminating) these caravans reduces work and cost.

Some companies have begun to attack these organizational barriers. A large software company we worked with recently eliminated more than 40% of its supervisors, ensuring that the people who actually develop the product aren’t overburdened with managers and other functionaries. When Alan Mulally first became CEO of Ford, he did away with the CEO’s chief of staff position. It was a double-barreled message on Mulally’s part: not only wouldn’t he have a chief of staff; he wouldn’t have a staff at all. His decision precipitated similar moves elsewhere in the organization; no EVP wanted to have a chief of staff when the CEO didn’t.

Chances are that your top performers want to live up to their full potential. Don’t let organizational obstacles get in their way.

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Do You Really Want to Be Yourself at Work?

by Andrea Ovans  |   10:00 AM June 23, 2014

Would you love to work in a place where you could truly be yourself?  Where you didn’t have to spend a single moment of your time and energy making sure you put only your best self forward?

Most people would, according to research recently published by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in “Creating the Best Workplace on Earth.” For three years they went around the world, asking hundreds of executives to describe the attributes of their ideal workplace. Topping the list was an environment where people could be themselves and where the company invested in developing them (and everyone they worked with) to be the very best they could be.

Interestingly, during a comparable three-year period, Harvard education professor Robert Kegan was researching the other side of the equation, looking for companies that pursued competitive advantage by developing every person to his or her fullest potential. He and his colleagues Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, Matthew Miller, Claire Lee, and Inna Markus had put out the word among their extended networks in academia, consulting, HR, and corporate C-suites: Did anyone know of any organization, anywhere in the world, dedicated to developing every one of its people by weaving personal growth into day-to-day work?

The researchers found precious few companies that took that approach. In their initial pool of only 20 candidates, just two with 100 or more employees had been operating fully and successfully in that mode for at least five years. One was an East Coast investment firm called Bridgewater Associates, the other a West Coast real estate and movie theater management company called Decurion. The researchers spent hundreds of hours viewing the two firms’ practices and interviewing their people (and wrote about them in detail in “Making Business Personal”).

In these companies employees didn’t spend any time hiding their inadequacies or preserving their reputations. Rather, everyone — from the CEO on down — was expected to make mistakes and learn from them and grow. In fact, both organizations had elaborate systems designed to promote individuals into roles a bit beyond their comfort zones to ensure that they would inevitably learn from failure. In this way people became masters not of any particular skill but of learning to adjust to new situations, which produced organizations that were remarkably resilient.

Does that sound appealing? Before you answer, consider this anecdote, which Kegan also records in his article.

Not long ago, HBS professor Heidi Gardner presented a case she’d cowritten on Bridgewater to her class. “So how many of you would like to work at Bridgewater?” she inquired toward the end of the discussion. Fewer than five hands went up in a class of 80. “Why not?” she asked. One young woman who’d been an active and impressive contributor to the conversation answered: “I want people at work to think I’m better than I am; I don’t want them to see how I really am!”

And yet, how many people would disagree with Ted Mathas, the head of the mutual insurance company New York Life, who told Goffee and Jones: “When I was appointed CEO, my biggest concern was, would this [job] allow me to truly say what I think? I needed to be myself to do a good job. Everybody does.”

What to make of these two views? Are people being disingenuous (or perhaps naive) when they aspire to bring their true selves to work? Certainly one might want to work in a company that makes you the best you can be without widely advertising the missteps you make along the way. Kegan is quick to point out that there are other ways to realize people’s full potential. But he also suggests that some people think they’d prefer an embarrassment-free work zone because they cannot imagine how something so painful at work could lead to something expansive and life changing.

Before you decide which view you agree with, take this assessment that Kegan and his associates have developed, and see how well suited you are to traveling down the no-spin path to fulfilling your highest potential. 

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Design-Based Research: A Decade of Progress in Education Research?

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Terry Anderson1Julie Shattuck2

1Athabasca University, Centre for Distance Education, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

2Frederick Community College, Centre for Distributed Learning, Frederick, MD Design-based research (DBR) evolved near the beginning of the 21st century and was heralded as a practical research methodology that could effectively bridge the chasm between research and practice in formal education. In this article, the authors review the characteristics of DBR and analyze the five most cited DBR articles from each year of this past decade. They illustrate the context, publications, and most popular interventions utilized. They conclude that interest in DBR is increasing and that results provide limited evidence for guarded optimism that the methodology is meeting its promised benefits.

TERRY ANDERSON is a professor at Athabasca University, Centre for Distance Education, 10011 109th Street, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 3S8, Canada; terrya{at}athabascau.ca. His research focuses on social networking in distance education courses.

JULIE SHATTUCK is an instructional designer and assistant professor at Frederick Community College, Centre for Distributed Learning, 7932 Opossumtown Pike, Frederick, MD 21702; jshattuck{at}frederick.edu. She is a doctoral student at Athabasca University, and her research focuses on adjunct faculty training for online teaching.

Received July 7, 2011. Revision received September 20, 2011. Accepted September 26, 2011. © 2012 American Educational Research Association

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You’re More Likely to Reject Hierarchies if You Feel Unattractive

by Andrew O’Connell  |   8:30 AM June 23, 2014

Research participants who had been asked to write about an incident in which they felt physically attractive were about half as likely to donate their $50 compensation to the Occupy movement as people who had been primed to think of themselves as unattractive, say Peter Belmi and Margaret Neale of Stanford. When people believe they’re attractive, they see themselves as belonging to a higher social class, a perception that results in their taking a more-favorable view of inequality, the researchers say. People who feel unattractive, by contrast, are more likely to reject inequality and social hierarchies.

SOURCE:  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Thinking that one is attractive increases the tendency to support inequality

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Teach Someone to Prioritize Using Psychological Distance

You may be tempted to write off some team members as never being able to manage themselves. They may be great at execution, but the level of handholding they need about what actually has to get done is frustrating. It would be ideal if there were a way to get everyone on a work team to be thinking about the big picture. Ultimately, we want anyone on a team to be able to prioritize appropriately for the many inevitable moments and decisions when their managers simply can’t be around.

To coach these people to prioritize better, help them take a step back to see the bigger picture. Stepping back is more than just a turn of phrase, in this case. We want to create something called “psychological distance.”

Creating psychological distance can be accomplished in four ways. All four have the same consequences of elevating someone’s thinking to bigger picture, more abstract concerns. They all allow a person to get out of the weeds. You can create psychological distance by doing any of the following:

Imagine physical distanceImagine separation in timeImagine it is not you involved, but a strangerImagine the outcome is uncertain

Brain scientists have found that the more distance we imagine, the less activity we see in regions of the brain associated with thinking about ourselves, and the more activity we see in regions of the brain connected with abstract thinking and thinking about other people. From this, neuroscience supports what psychologists had theorized – that the more metaphoric forms of distance (e.g. social distance) may be just as important to the idea of psychological distance as the more tangible forms of distance (e.g. physical).

In practice, it might look something like this. Suppose you have a team member who coordinates marketing events. He may be great with the detail stuff, like printing a schedule, making sure materials and AV are ready, and that catering arrives. But he may routinely miss things like thinking about what key influencers or stakeholders might need to know about the event.   He might fail to anticipate some of the needs of the team because of not thinking about the big picture – where the event fits within the organization’s goals, and how it is relevant to different people in the organization.

Before the next event, coach him to imagine the event with one or more of the forms of psychological distance. For example, ask him to imagine the event were happening in another country, in a year’s time, that someone else he doesn’t know were coordinating it, or that it is only a proposed hypothetical event.

The coordinator should be more likely to see the abstract, bigger picture, issues when taking one or more of these perspectives. He is more likely to recognize that success would mean things like using the event to connect people in the organization with key influencers, to position the organization as an industry leader, to nurture the organization’s network, and so on.

He may, as a result, consider seating core team members near key influencers. He may reach out to more people internally who need to know about the event in order to prepare or get it on their schedules, and see how he can help. In short, his bigger picture focus, can actually help him keep things from falling through the cracks, because he is more likely to see what matters and thus be able to prioritize the right tasks.

Recognizing these aims for the event are critical to the event coordinator seeing what really needs prioritizing. Key to prioritizing is seeing the big picture aims in a situation and working accordingly. With psychological distance, the event coordinator is more likely to think about what will make the event a success for the organization and not just a success in terms of completing what was specifically asked of him.

Before you write people off as being incapable of seeing the forest for the trees, take advantage of these psychological tools to build a workforce with the ability to prioritize.

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Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting?

“Let’s schedule a meeting” has become the universal default response to most business issues. Not sure what to do on a project? Let’s schedule a meeting. Have a few ideas to share? Let’s schedule a meeting. Struggling with taking action? Let’s schedule a meeting.

Although scheduling a meeting can be the right solution in many instances, it’s not always the best answer. I’ve come up with a decision tree to help you quickly determine if a meeting makes the most sense.

Save or print out this decision tree to make deciding whether or not to hold a meeting as quick and easy as possible. As you go through it, here’s what you should consider at each step:

Have I thought through this situation? When you don’t have clarity about what you’re doing on a project, it’s tempting to schedule a meeting to give you the feeling of progress. But unless the meeting’s intent is to structure the project, at this point, scheduling a meeting is an inefficient use of your time — and your colleagues’. Instead, set aside some time with yourself to do some strategic thinking. During that time you can evaluate the scope of the project, the current status, the potential milestones, and lay out a plan of action for making meaningful progress. Once you’ve completed your own strategic thinking prep work, then you can move onto the next step of considering whether to hold a meeting.

Do I need outside input to make progress? You may be in the situation where you know what needs to be done, and you simply need to do the work. If you find yourself in this place, don’t schedule a meeting; update your to-do list and take action instead. However, if after clarifying what needs to be done to the best of your ability, you need outside input to answer questions or give feedback before you feel comfortable jumping into action, continue on.

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Does moving forward require a real-time conversation? If you need some answers to questions, but they don’t require a two-way conversation, e-mail can be an excellent option in lieu of a meeting. This is particularly true when you’re looking for feedback on your written plans or documents. It’s much more efficient for everyone involved if you send over items that they can look at on their own (while you’re not awkwardly watching them read during an in-person meeting) and then shoot you back feedback. If you feel your situation does require a real-time conversation, then examine different communication channels.

Does this necessitate a face-to-face meeting? When you need two-way communication but don’t necessarily need to see the person, you have a variety of options. An online chat can help you answer questions quickly, or for more in-depth conversations, scheduling a phone call or video conference can work well. This not only saves you transition time of going to and from a meeting place, but you will more easily able to get stuff done if someone is late, instead of having to sit and wait for them to show up.

If in the end, you decide that you need face-to-face, in-person communication, then schedule a meeting, and think through in advance how you can make it as efficient and effective as possible. That means considering your intent for the meeting, establishing your desired outcomes, and preparing any materials that you should review or send out in advance.

With the right decision-making process, you can radically reduce the number of meetings you attend and increase the amount of work that gets done.

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Is My Workplace at Risk of Violence?

Threat Assessment Specialist, Dr Kelly WattQ. I'm concerned about what seems to be increased violence in workplaces. What industries are most at risk of violence? And is there anything we can do organisationally?

Industries that are most at risk of violence are often those that involve emergency response and service customers in crisis. These include industries such as health care settings, social service settings, criminal justice settings (e.g. law enforcement), emergency response settings (e.g. fire fighters), educational settings, and transport industries (e.g. taxi drivers and bus drivers). Although they need to be extra vigilant, if they implement best practices related to preventing, triaging, assessing and managing violence risk much can be done to increase the safey of employees. 

Addressing problematic work practices is very important in preventing the risk of violence from ever occurring. By doing things like reducing the stress employees experience, creating a respectful and supportive workplace environment, addressing serious conflict in the workplace, and responding to conduct problems as they occur, a great deal can be done to support employees and prevent violence. Often when we are contacted to conduct a workplace violence risk assessment there has been months to years of conduct problems and workplace conflict that if addressed differently may have prevented the situation from escalating to this level.  

Triaging for the Risk of Violence 

Join me for a great opportunity to attend a 1-day violence triage workshop that is taking place in Australia on November 12 (Sydney), November 13 (Melbourne), and November 18 (Canberra), 2013.

Workplaces have a responsibility to triage for and respond to obvious signs of violence under common law, statutory law, and professional ethics. This workshop will teach participants about what primary warning signs you should look and what immediate actions you should take in response to violence risk. By using an evidence-based process to make these decisions you will be protecting employers from potential liability and protecting employees from future harm.

This workshop is relevant for all professionals interested in learning how to triage for violence risk in their workplace, such as administration, human resources, law enforcement, security, health care, and social services.

For more information or to register for the workshop, see the full workshop brochure and registration form here or online.

“All of our senior staff who have responsibilities for assessing and managing violence risk have completed the training with ProActive ReSolutions. We have found the training to be excellent and all of our participants have reported an increase in their confidence and skills when assessing students with a history of violence. As an organization we also made significant changes to the way we managed these risks which have greatly increased our rigour of assessment and so the level of safety for our students and staff has increased.”

Jo Sedgers, Director of Learning and Engagement, TAFE NSW Western Institute

Please note this is the only open workshop scheduled for 2013 so far and spaces are limited so register at your earliest convenience!

Price:

$450  - early bird fee of $375 if booked before October 11.

Questions?

Speak with one of our Client Care Specialists at +61.02.9221.0446 in Australia,  or or email your question to info@proactive-resolutions.com.

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Educating Language Minority Students and Affirming Their Equal Rights: Research and Practical Perspectives

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
This article describes one researcher’s journey as an experimental psycholinguist through changes in practice and policy in the education of English language learners in the United States from the 1970s to the present day. The development of key debates on issues such as bilingualism, language of instruction, and the inclusion of English language learners in reform movements are described from the perspective of a researcher, and future prospects for work are outlined.

KENJI HAKUTA is the Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University, School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-3096; hakuta{at}stanford.edu. His current research focuses on instructional, organizational, and systemic factors affecting the learning of language and content by English language learners.

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Research: We’re Not Very Self-Aware, Especially at Work

If you’ve participated in a training or development program in the past two decades, chances are you took an assessment designed to increase self-awareness. While you may have discovered your “type,” “profile,” or “style,” it probably did little to make you a more effective leader or team member.

Put simply, self-awareness is understanding who we are and how we are similar to or different from others. One key facet is self-knowledge – how we see our various personality traits, values, attitudes, and behaviors. But another aspect is being aware of how consistent (or inconsistent) our self-view is compared to an external appraisal – how other people see us or against objective data. The latter is essential for transforming self-knowledge beyond mere personal introspection into accurate self-awareness.

Yet in talent development practice, companies spend millions of dollars and countless hours every year on self-reported assessments that only target self-knowledge. The core problem is that we’re notoriously poor judges of our own capabilities. A 2014 study of 22 meta-analyses (containing over 357,000 people) found an average correlation of .29 between self-evaluations and objective assessments (a correlation of 1.0 would indicate total accuracy). And the correlation was even lower for work-related skills. So my self-reported profile may suggest that I see myself as a persuasive speaker – but tell that to the audience who just fell asleep.

The punch line is that with no external data, the results of self-knowledge assessments are presumed to be accurate, when instead they may reinforce inaccurate perceptions of ourselves. The net result can be harmful to development and performance and, as we observed, the effectiveness of teams.

For teams to perform effectively, each member must possess a combination of technical and interpersonal skills and constantly adjust their contributions to meet the team’s needs. Correctly understanding one’s capabilities relative to others is therefore paramount.

To illustrate, we recently collected data from an executive development program at a Fortune 10 company. With 58 teams and more than 300 leaders performing in a dynamic and competitive business simulation, we tested the extent to which accurate self-awareness was related to team effectiveness, which was evaluated across a number of business metrics like market share, ROA, customer awareness, productivity, and so forth. Levels of team coordination and conflict management were also assessed. And what we found was striking.

First, when individuals were less self-aware (i.e., there was a large gap between the assessments of their own behavioral contributions and the assessments of their team members), the teams substantially suffered. In fact, teams with less self-aware individuals made worse decisions, engaged in less coordination, and showed less conflict management. These findings held even when we controlled for teams’ overall levels of teamwork.

Second, the most damaging situation occurred when teams were comprised of significant over-raters (i.e., individuals who thought they were contributing more than their team members thought they were). Just being surrounded by teammates of low self-awareness (or a bunch of over-raters) cut the chances of team success in half.

It’s clear that talent development interventions need to go beyond self-knowledge to be effective. So what should leaders and talent development professionals do? We see three tactics that can help people build accurate self-awareness.

Use self-awareness tools that are linked to performance. It’s no secret that many of the most popular developmental assessments used for gaining self-knowledge, such as the MBTI, DiSC, The Birkman Method, and The Core Values Index, woefully lack evidence linking their results to actual learning or job performance. Whatever instrument, exercise, or intervention you use must capture and deliver results that truly predict something of value. Use external benchmarks: measure how someone’s self-view compares to others’ views and measure how assessments directly relate to outcomes like increased learning and job performance.

Create a line-of-sight between self-awareness and personal job success. A wealth of research shows that when individuals see learning as valuable to their careers, they’re more motivated to learn and apply new skills to their roles. This means that we must directly communicate why the capabilities on which individuals are receiving feedback are actually relevant. Don’t assume that individuals already recognize the need for accurate self-awareness: substantial research shows that those most in need of improvement are the most unaware.

Teach self-development skills in addition to self-awareness. Acquiring accurate self-awareness is only the beginning – true personal development builds the capacity to take action. Most talent development efforts unfortunately fall short of teaching self-development skills, leaving behind a “knowing-doing gap.”

Research shows that multiple strategies can be brought to bear. For example, self-management training can help people plan, apply, monitor, and adjust their newly learned competencies. And by reinforcing that mistakes are natural to any learning process, error management training encourages deeper learning and the transfer of that learning back to one’s job. At the very least, demonstrate how imperfect self-views block the way to real and lasting behavioral change.

Will Rogers rightly once quipped, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” It’s time for talent development professionals to focus their development resources on the forms of self-awareness that matter most.

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For Breakthrough Innovation, Focus on Possibility, Not Profitability

by Michelle Stacy  |   2:00 PM June 23, 2014

More than 15 years after its founding, Google remains a company that inspires profound admiration — and at times, a bit of confusion.

The company is currently investing in self-driving cars, a futuristic idea that some people believe will never be achieved. It’s also rolling out Google Glass, a wearable computing device that’s inspired skepticism and some mockery.

The derision is misplaced. As someone who’s been involved in marketing breakthrough innovations, I’m convinced Google’s approach is the right one. Google is focused on possibility rather than profitability — a mindset that’s necessary to create innovations that transform categories. Many breakthrough innovations I’ve led have suffered when I’ve let the profitability mindset creep in. Google should be admired for first setting out to answer the question: “Is this possible?”

Successful innovations programs create a balance between the probable/profitable short-term programs and the possibility programs that challenge the status quo. Unfortunately, most companies are organized and focused on the probable/profitable short term, and therefore miss the potential of breakthrough innovation that comes from being focused on the possible.  This is frequently how well-established category leaders miss opportunities that transform their categories.

Programs that transform take patience. Speed to market, probability of quick return, and profitability mindset have to take a backseat to truly delivering a product that delights the consumer in every aspect. My perspective on this comes from my own experience.

At Keurig, the pod-based coffee company where I worked as president for six years, sales grew at a 61% compound annual rate, propelling Keurig Green Mountain from $500 million to $4.5 billion in net sales from 2008-2013.  Keurig machines sit on the counter in more than 18 million households. Most people think that Keurig just recently appeared.  But in fact, Keurig was founded more than 15 years ago.  The first machines were sold in 2000.

Today, The brewers cost $100 or $150, still a significant premium to the standard drip coffee maker. But what many people forget is that in its early years, Keurig brewers cost $900 apiece. Early K-cups were made by hand. Keurig opted to  start out in the office coffee market, not the consumer market. That made the $900 price point competitive and acceptable. The whole approach to the office became a way to commercialize the design quicker and to gain consumer experience as the company drove the brewer down the cost curve. The wider diversity of coffee drinkers in an office (vs. a single consumer household) planted the seeds of the importance of having an eco-system of brands beyond our own. This led to the variety and partnering strategy that has been at the core of Keurig’s success. Today, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Folgers, Caribou, Peets, and Snapple, to name just a few, participate as partners in the system.  It’s the only brand of single serve that offers a wide variety of brands of coffee and roasts, along with other beverages.

If the company’s founders and early leaders had focused on profitability instead of possibility, I’m not sure the system would have been as successful. And they certainly wouldn’t have invited the competition to share in the system to maximize the variety. Variety accelerated the growth.  It was the vision of transforming the way consumers make coffee that took them on the decade long journey to success, growth and profitability.

Possibility sharply focuses the scope of the breakthrough innovation. If the only question is “Is it possible to make it?”, then that question defines who you bring onto the team both from a capability standpoint (can this person help us figure it out?) and from a character standpoint. (Specifically: Does this person bring an optimistic or pessimistic perspective?) People who make great leaders of breakthrough innovation programs always ask the “What if” question. It frees you to look for talent and resources beyond your company — who are the partners who will share your vision, who bring incremental talent and cross-category perspectives to make this work?

One of the key ingredients to the possibility mindset is the addition of truly understanding what the consumer wants.  The question isn’t just “Is it possible to make it?” but “Is it possible to make exactly what your specific target consumer wants?” In contrast, the profitability mindset shuts down ideas and shortcuts the process. It stifles creativity and likely limits the team to only those ideas, capabilities, business models, and resources already inside the company.

Once the original ‘is it possible’ question has been solved for, the trick is to apply the same optimistic, focused thinking to the commercialization process. Now that we know it is possible to make, is it possible to make smaller, faster, better, and more cost effectively?

The opportunity is to create a win-win:  Create something that is right for the consumer and by doing this, transform a category and create a long term sustainable growth opportunity for the company.

Google is looking at “possiblity’ with Glass and self-driving cars. Both may seem like strange or silly innovations today, but over time they could turn into true breakthroughs and gain wide acceptance.

When Innovation Is Strategy
An HBR Insight Center

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Morning People Are Less Ethical at Night

by Christopher M. Barnes, Brian Gunia and Sunita Sah  |   8:00 AM June 23, 2014

Employees face many temptations to behave unethically at work. Resisting those temptations requires energy and effort. But the energy that is essential to exert self-control waxes and wanes. And when that energy is low, people are more likely to behave unethically. This opens up the possibility that even within the same day, a given person could be ethical at one point in time and unethical at another point in time.

Over the past few years, management and psychology research has uncovered something interesting: both energy and ethics vary over time. In contrast to the assumption that good people typically do good things, and bad people do bad things, there is mounting evidence that good people can be unethical and bad people can be ethical, depending on the pressures of the moment.  For example, people who didn’t sleep well the previous night can often act unethically, even if they aren’t unethical people.

Our research started from this idea. Drawing from recent research indicating that people can become more unethical as the day wears on, we asked whether this plays out the same way for people who show different patterns of energy during the course of a day. Fatigue researchers have discovered that alertness and energy follow a predictable daily cycle that is aligned with the circadian process. However, different people may be shifted in their circadian rhythms. Some people are “larks” or “morning people” in that their circadian rhythm is shifted earlier in the day. They are most easily detected by their natural tendency to wake early in the morning. Others are “owls” or “evening people” and they are shifted in the opposite direction. Larks tend to get up early, and owls tend to stay up late.

Building from this research, we predicted that larks and owls would follow different patterns of ethical and unethical behavior over the course of a day. Because their energy levels should follow different patterns, and this energy is crucial for resisting temptation, we expected larks to be more unethical late at night than early in the morning, and owls to be more unethical early in the morning than late at night. To test this prediction, we conducted two laboratory studies.

In our first study, we focused only on behavior in the morning. We brought research participants into a laboratory, and gave them a simple matrix task in which we paid them additional money for each additional matrix that they said they solved. Participants believed that their work was anonymous, and could thus over-report to earn more money. But we were able to go back and determine how many they actually solved. In other words, we could determine who cheated by over-reporting the number of solved matrices. Consistent with our prediction, since these were morning sessions: night owls were more likely to cheat than larks.

In our second study, we tested the full prediction—that unethical behavior would depend on both circadian rhythms and the time of day. We randomly assigned a new set of research participants to a laboratory session either early in the morning (7-8:30am) or late at night (midnight-1:30am). Participants undertook a die rolling task previously established as a test for unethical behavior. In this task, they anonymously rolled a die and reported the number back to us, and we paid paying them based on the number they reported (higher amounts for higher rolls).

Although we didn’t know what numbers participants actually rolled, we did know that everyone should report an average of 3.5. So any systematic differences across conditions (morning people in the morning vs. evening people in the morning, for example), would indicate cheating. Consistent with our prediction, an interesting and statistically significant pattern emerged. Larks in the night session reported getting higher rolls (M=4.55) than larks in the morning sessions (M=3.86), and owls in the morning session reported higher rolls (M=4.23) than owls in the night sessions (3.80). This evidence is consistent with the idea that larks will be more unethical at night than in the morning, and that owls will be more unethical in the morning than at night. A more detailed description will be provided later this year in our forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science.

The important organizational takeaway from these findings is that individual may be more likely to act unethically when they are “mismatched” –that is, making a decision at the wrong time of day for their own chronotype. Managers should try to learn the chronotype (lark, owl, or in between) of their subordinates and make sure to respect it when deciding how to structure their work. Managers who ask a lark to make ethics-testing decisions at night, or an owl to make such decisions in the morning, run the risk of encouraging rather than discouraging unethical behavior.

Similarly, people who control their own work schedules should structure their work with their chronotype in mind. Many of us are tempted to squeeze in that extra hour of work. If we’re a morning person squeezing it in at night, though, we create a situation in which resisting temptation may be harder than ever. Larks who schedule extra hours for themselves early in the morning face the same issue.

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Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age: Web 2.0 and Classroom Research: What Path Should We Take Now?

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Christine GreenhowBeth RobeliaJoan E. Hughes

CHRISTINE GREENHOW is a postdoctoral associate in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, 125 Peik Hall, 159 Pillsbury Drive, Minneapolis, MN 55455; greenhow{at}umn.edu. Her research focuses on how people learn, teach, and collaborate using emerging social digital technologies (www.cgreenhow.org). She is currently leading a study of adolescent learners’ knowledge development, literacy, and community formation within and across two designed online social media spaces. She is the winner of the 2008 University of Minnesota Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar award.

BETH ROBELIA is the executive director of Kitchen Table Learning, a research and evaluation company, 1496 Arona Street, Saint Paul, MN 55108; brobelia{at}kitchentablelearning.com. Her work on informal learning has spanned youth development, tutoring, teaching, and shipboard environmental education programs. Her work addresses how learning technologies can be used to bridge gender differences in science. She is currently investigating how construction toys and 3-D software develop students’ spatial reasoning abilities.

JOAN E. HUGHES is an associate professor of instructional technology in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, 244M Sanchez Building, Austin, TX 78712; joanh{at}mail.utexas.edu. Her research examines preservice and in-service teachers’ development of knowledge and practice of technology integration in content areas. She is currently leading a longitudinal study with more than 7 years of data that examines the impact of 1:1 laptop computing in preservice teacher education. Since Windschitl first outlined a research agenda for the World Wide Web and classroom research, significant shifts have occurred in the nature of the Web and the conceptualization of classrooms. Such shifts have affected constructs of learning and instruction, and paths for future research. This article discusses the characteristics of Web 2.0 that differentiate it from the Web of the 1990s, describes the contextual conditions in which students use the Web today, and examines how Web 2.0’s unique capabilities and youth’s proclivities in using it influence learning and teaching. Two important themes, learner participation and creativity and online identity formation, emerged from this analysis and support a new wave of research questions. A stronger research focus on students’ everyday use of Web 2.0 technologies and their learning with Web 2.0 both in and outside of classrooms is needed. Finally, insights on how educational scholarship might be transformed with Web 2.0 in light of these themes are discussed.

Received November 2, 2008. Revision received March 11, 2009. Accepted March 24, 2009.

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Is the Sky Falling? Grade Inflation and the Signaling Power of Grades

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Grades are the fundamental currency of our educational system; they signal academic achievement and noncognitive skills to parents, employers, postsecondary gatekeepers, and students themselves. Grade inflation compromises the signaling value of grades and undermines their capacity to achieve the functions for which they are intended. We challenge the “increases in grade point average” definition of grade inflation and argue that grade inflation must be understood in terms of the signaling power of grades. Analyzing data from four nationally representative samples, we find that in the decades following 1972: (a) grades have risen at high schools and dropped at 4-year colleges, in general, and selective 4-year institutions, in particular; and (b) the signaling power of grades has attenuated little, if at all.

Received August 9, 2012. Revision received November 16, 2012. Accepted February 9, 2013.

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The Decline of the Rural American Hospital and How to Reverse It

There are two kinds of health-care innovation: more-for-more and more-for-less.

The American health-care system exemplifies the first kind, offering more and more value at higher and higher costs. If you have the money and can travel, the U.S. is the place to take advantage of the latest innovations such as proton-beam cancer-radiation therapy, for which the equipment and facilities cost about $1 billion.

Despite these high-cost innovations (American consumers spend more on health care than their counterparts anywhere else), U.S. life expectancy ranks 34th in the world, and infant mortality ranks 27th. It’s no wonder that patients, politicians, third-party payers, hospitals, and providers are calling for health-care models and technologies that deliver more for less.

In contrast, India is widely recognized for the second kind. Providers such as Aravind Eye Hospital, Narayana Health, and Apollo Hospitals offer high-quality outcomes at a tenth of U.S. prices to vast numbers of patients who would otherwise have no access to care. The driving forces for this, of course, are India’s economy, its scarcity of providers, and its large population of poor consumers; the U.S. just has not been desperate enough to foster Indian-style health-care innovation.

There are, however, isolated pockets of extreme need in rural U.S. communities, where conditions are ripe for more-for-less innovation. These communities are facing a health-care crisis because economic and regulatory pressures are pushing providers to cluster in urban centers. The consequences are dire. Last year, 13 rural hospitals closed, and a tidal wave of closures is expected over the next few years. These hospitals are caught in a vicious cycle: Rural patients with serious health problems are traveling to cities to seek care from medical specialists, causing revenue declines at rural hospitals and clinics, which respond by downsizing and offering fewer services, causing more patients to seek care in major urban centers.

To help break this cycle, some rural hospitals and clinics are adopting an innovation that allows them to access specialists virtually, for a lot less money. Consulting with specialists via video conferencing may not sound like a dramatic innovation, in comparison with proton-beam radiation therapy, but it is! It redistributes access and makes use of resources in new ways. Virtual consultations, supported by sophisticated diagnostic instruments, high-resolution imaging, and data security, are at the heart of a reconceptualization of rural hospitals (and eventually urban clinics and hospitals as well) because they provide access to higher-quality care at much lower costs. Our research — we’ve interviewed executives and care providers at numerous health-care organizations and written a case study on telemedicine — suggests that telemedicine promises to upend health-care markets where supply and demand are out of balance.

Adam (his name and other details have been changed for privacy), a long-term HIV patient in rural Arizona, illustrates the effect. Prior to the implementation of a virtual-consultation program serving his local clinic in Kingman, he had two unattractive options: see his local provider, who wasn’t an HIV specialist, or travel more than two hours to Flagstaff on one of the HIV clinic days offered in a facility there. Neither was compelling enough for him to seek treatment. He didn’t have reliable transportation, and he was uncomfortable sitting in a waiting room on HIV day, because doing so would publicly announce his health status. Consequently, Adam became one of the thousands of rural patients who have given up on the health-care system.

Then North Country HealthCare developed a telemedicine program that allowed him to visit his local clinic and connect virtually with an experienced HIV specialist in Flagstaff. The telemedicine station at his clinic, supported by an onsite technician, allows the specialist to check blood pressure, view skin lesions, check for mouth sores, conduct an ear exam, watch a live ultrasound exam if needed, and talk with Adam about his personal health practices. The specialist, a nurse practitioner, has been able to triple the number of patients she sees because telemedicine reduces the time she spends driving to satellite clinics. She strengthens her patient relationships through in-person visits every few months, but these are now supported by more frequent meetings and telemedicine exams.

Telemedicine is a win-win for Adam and the local clinic. Adam saves time and money because he doesn’t have to travel to Flagstaff, and the Kingman clinic keeps Adam as a patient (and the revenue he brings in). Most important: Adam, who had opted out of the system, is now receiving the care he would have missed.

This story is not unique. Because of its telemedicine partnerships, a 25-bed hospital in La Grande, Oregon (population 13,000), has virtual access to 19 specialties, including pulmonology, cardiology, dermatology, rheumatology, neurology, and oncology. The same is true for close to 300,000 rural veterans who tap into the extensive telemedicine network maintained by the VA. Mayo Clinic in Arizona, applying a hub-and-spokes telemedicine model to provide neurological consulting for emergency treatment of stroke patients at 16 rural hospitals in four states, has reduced the need for air and ground ambulance transfers and significantly improved patient outcomes.

Administrators at rural hospitals and clinics are discovering that virtual consultations have an enormous influence on their facilities’ reputations. Knowing they can access specialists without making long drives to urban centers, rural patients regain confidence in the ability of their local hospitals to offer high-quality, specialized care. This enhances the hospitals’ ability to retain patients (and revenue), curtailing what for many has been a death spiral. After Lincoln Hospital in Davenport, Washington, started its telemedicine program, admissions grew by 25% and transfers to urban hospitals decreased by 21%, and the increased patient load produced well over $1 million in additional annual revenue for the hospital.

A few barriers stand in the way of widespread implementation of telemedicine: In most states, virtual consultations can be reimbursed only for rural patients, which means telemedicine isn’t available for the urban poor. And U.S. patient-privacy laws require sophisticated data encryption that rules out some of the simpler applications used in other countries — in Australia, or example, a doctor can be reimbursed for a consultation over Skype.

In addition, some of the providers we interviewed complained about problems with the technology. In Phantom Ranch, a remote location in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, paramedics feel that fiddling around to get the right satellite link is low priority when they are attending to time-sensitive emergencies.

Perhaps the most important barrier is acceptance. Not all primary care physicians see a need for the kind of additional expert help telemedicine can provide. Patients, too, are sometimes resistant: Indian Health Services, one of the largest users of telemedicine in the United States, has had difficulties getting older individuals in the Navajo nation, for example, to use the service because of religious concerns regarding the taking of photographs.

Despite these barriers, the innovation will spread as it matures. We expect that many of the telemedicine services that patients in rural America find invaluable will soon be demanded by urbanites. Who wants to drive an hour across town to see a specialist in a large medical center? Why not have a virtual visit in your local clinic — or, better yet, from your own home?

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Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching

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How France Used Unemployment Benefits to Kickstart Entrepreneurship

France produces fewer start-ups than the average developed nation, and has historically had a higher rate of unemployment. Critics are quick to blame both on its generous welfare state. But in 2001, the nation’s policymakers were able to boost entrepreneurship, according to a recent paper. And they did it by making welfare policies even more generous.

Unemployment insurance had been a substantial deterrent to entrepreneurship in France, because individuals without jobs ceased to be eligible for it if they founded a business. So the French Ministry of Labor enacted a series of reforms which allowed founders to continue to draw unemployment benefits during the first three years of their business, subject to some restrictions, and to remain eligible for such benefits if the business subsequently failed.

The reforms appeared to have an almost immediate effect: the rate of new firms created rose by 25%. But researchers at MIT, Berkeley, and HEC Paris set out to determine whether the increase was actually caused by the policy change. They wondered whether some of the change could have had to do with the state of the economy, or whether the quality of the new businesses was lower as a result. They found that at least a large part of the increase was directly a result of the policy, and that the new businesses seemed at least as productive and sustainable as older ones. Moreover, they estimate that the change boosted the nation’s economy by €350 million per year, at a cost of only €100 million annually.

To measure all this, the researchers broke up the data (from 1999 to 2005) by industry. The idea was that it would be comparatively easier for the unemployed to start a business in an industry where small firms are already prevalent. (Starting a business in an industry made up of larger firms would require more capital than was provided by unemployment insurance.) If the increase in entrepreneurship was really caused by the reforms, it ought to be more dramatic in industries with more small firms. And that’s just what they found.

They used the same approach to measure the quality of the businesses. Start-ups founded after the reforms in industries with more small firms — the ones more likely to have been the direct result of the reforms — were just as likely to stay in business, to grow, and to hire as those in industries with more large firms. The entrepreneurs were equally as well-educated in both groups as well. Perhaps most importantly, the new firms were more productive and paid higher wages than the average incumbent.

“Our most conservative estimates suggest that about 12,000 additional firms are created every year thanks to the reform,” the authors conclude.

There is a narrow lesson here, and a broad one. The narrow one for policymakers is that welfare programs can in fact distort entrepreneurial incentives, but dismembering those programs isn’t the only or best option. This is consistent with previous research, which found that expanding government-sponsored health insurance encouraged more people to start businesses. And that leads to the broader lesson.

Because entrepreneurs inevitably take risks, we tend to think that people who aren’t comfortable with large amounts of risk wouldn’t make good entrepreneurs. The data doesn’t support that view. Research from the UK has shown that in fact, entrepreneurs are more cautious than the general population. “Higher risk-taking increases the propensity to launch a business, but does not correlate with greater start-up success,” wrote Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor at University College London, in a previous HBR article, citing a meta-analysis of several studies. “In fact, conscientious and prudent founders tend to do significantly better.” And in France’s case, the entrepreneurs who were enticed to start something once the financial risks were lessened were just as qualified and successful as those already in the game.

In that sense, this research is an argument about what entrepreneurship is and isn’t, and who’s qualified to do it. Entrepreneurs will always take some risks, particularly with their time and reputations. But starting a business is about more than that, and it shouldn’t include being forced to go broke in the process.

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4 Things You Thought Were True About Managing Millennials

by Amy Gallo  |   9:00 AM July 11, 2014

There seems to be an endless fascination with Millennials at work. There are studies, books, articles, blog posts, and white papers — all about what makes them so different from the generations that came before. And as they continue to enter and occupy the workforce, more and more is written about how they behave (or misbehave) at the office.

But are these cries actually true? Is managing them all that different from managing Gen Xers or Baby Boomers? Let’s look at some of the most common claims about Millennials.

They’re completely different from “us” at that age. False.

Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School, has studied the research done on Millennials and says it comes up short. “There is no real serious evidence that there’s a generational difference,” he says.

Sure, older generations look at Millennials and think they’re not like them. Those observations are based on cognitive bias, not actual differences. “It’s easy to assume young people are different in disposition because they seem different from you. But young people are always different than old people. For example, young people are much more interested in dating than those who are older and settled. And they don’t have obligations in the same way that older people do,” says Cappelli.

The only way to see if today’s 20- and 30-somethings are truly distinct from the 20- and 30-somethings who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s is to compare data. That’s what Jean Twenge, a professor of Psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me, and her fellow researchers did. They used a time-lag research method that compares people of the same age at different points in time. Twenge noticed some shifts between previous generations’ and Millennials’ attitudes toward work, but most were relatively small. And they’re not what you think.

Millennials want more purpose at work. False.

“There are some perceptions that many people have that simply aren’t true and this is one of them,” says Twenge. Her research comparing data from U.S. high school seniors in 1976, 1991, and 2006 shows that contrary to popular belief, Millennials don’t favor “altruistic work values (e.g., helping, societal worth)” more than previous generations. In fact, they place slightly less emphasis on “a job that gives you an opportunity to be directly helpful to others” than Boomers did at the same age.

All those companies offering pay to employees for their volunteer work? They aren’t responding to a need presented by Millennials. That’s a benefit that seems to have always been valued by U.S. workers; and it may be useful motivation for younger and older workers alike. “The same is true for emphasizing how the company benefits society; GenMe is no more or less likely to be interested in the social good than previous generations were,” her report says.

Additional research by Twenge shows that a concern for others is actually lower in this generation than previous ones. “Compared to Boomers, Millennials were less likely to have donated to charities, less likely to want a job worthwhile to society or that would help others, and less likely to agree they would eat differently if it meant more food for the starving. They were less likely to want to work in a social service organization or become a social worker, and were less likely to express empathy for outgroups,” she writes.

The perception that Millennials are more concerned with helping society has always been at odds with another perception: they are entitled and narcissistic. The latter turns out to be true if you look at Twenge’s research. While the shift is small, Millennials do rank higher when it comes to positive self-esteem. “In general, this generation has very high expectations when it comes to education and the jobs they think they can attain,” she says.

But, Cappelli points out what we need to remember. “If on average the age group is slightly different than a previous age group at another time, it doesn’t mean that each kid is slightly more entitled. You’re looking at a huge population,” he says. “And if young people are more narcissistic than old people, so what?”

They want more work-life balance. Somewhat true.

Looking at the data, Twenge did see a slight rise in how much Millennials value work-life balance. “Recent generations were progressively more likely to value leisure at work … GenX and GenMe placed a greater emphasis on leisure time than did their Boomer counterparts,” she writes. Almost twice as many young people in 2006 rated having a job with more than two weeks of vacation as “very important” than in 1976, and almost twice as many wanted a job at which they could work slowly. In 2006, nearly half wanted a job “which leaves a lot of time for other things in your life.”

But Cappelli points out that those changes are still pretty minor. Plus, he says, many managers overemphasize this difference, in part, because they forget what it was like to be young themselves. When you were 22, “you probably wanted to get out of the office in a hurry — you were interested in what was going on after work,” he said in this March 2014 New York Times piece.

Millennials need special treatment at work. False.

Cappelli has a strong opinion here: “That’s ridiculous. If you felt you were part of a special generation, did you get managed differently? Young people today will stand on their heads to get a job. Why do we think we have to manage them differently?” To him, managing people based solely on their age is biased. People have lots of qualities that make them distinct: race, gender, background. Don’t stereotype. Instead of assuming that the Millennials on your team need special treatment, get to know each person individually. “Keep an awareness in the back of your mind that some things are due to age, which is true for older workers too, but what you’re observing might have something to do with other things, like ethnic background,” he say.

Of course, it’s helpful to know how to manage people at different ages. He notes that this is where the cafeteria approach to benefits originated — the idea that people had different needs at various points in their lives. And in researching for his book, Managing the Older Worker, he learned that teams that incorporate different aged workers perform better. “It’s smart to have young people and older people work together. They don’t see each other as competition and are more likely to help each other,” he says.

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Reassess Millennials’ Social Sharing Habits

Millennials are often maligned for their constant technology use and obsession with the social approval signaled by likes, shares, and retweets. But organizations need to start recognizing the benefits of such behavior and harnessing it. This generational cohort will, by some estimates, account for nearly 75% of the workforce by 2025. And, according to a recent Deloitte survey of 7,800 people from 29 countries, only 28% of currently employed Millennials feel their companies are fully using their skills.

How can smart leaders better leverage the talents of these future leaders? As organizational consultants, we tell our clients to consider what makes them tick and to see the value in those interests. Two points are of particular note:

First, social sharing. Neuroscientists have shown that any kind of positive personal interaction lights up a part of the brain called the temporoparietal junction, which stimulates the production of oxytocin, “the feel-good hormone.” Millennials, who have grown up interacting online, are able to get that same high, more often, though technology, by posting, messaging, forwarding and favoriting multiple times a day. They crave that connection and are therefore natural team players.

Second, constant, complex data flow. Research tells us that multitasking is impossible: people can only do two things at once if one of those things is routine. Also, those who regularly use multiple forms of media are more prone to distraction than those who don’t. But, according to Nielson Neurofocus, EEG readings suggest that younger brains have higher multi-sensory processing capacity than older ones and are most stimulated – that its more engaged with and more likely to pay attention to and remember – dynamic messages. Millennials probably aren’t more effective multitaskers, in the strict sense of the world, but, in their current stage of brain development, they seem better able to tolerate and integrate multiple streams of information.

Angela Ahrendts, the former CEO of Burberry, recognized that she could turn these two hallmarks of Millennial behavior into an asset for the fashion brand. In 2006, she hired a large number of “digital natives,” as she called them, to do what they do best: socialize through technology. As she explains in this video, they created an expansive digital platform, which transformed the company’s image and dramatically accelerated its growth. One highlight was “Tweet Walk,” which turned Burberry’s traditional runway show into a live web broadcast.

While Baby Boomers might see phones, tablets, and other devices as distractions, Millennials use them to collaborate and innovate in real time. While Gen-Xers may view aggressive social sharing as an unhealthy mix of the personal and professional, Millennials see it as a way to gather input and learn from others. Millennials understand, embrace and are evolving with our exponentially expanding digital world. Instead of judging their behavior, we need to better leverage it.

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The Unique and Combined Effects of Homelessness and School Mobility on the Educational Outcomes of Young Children

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
This study examined the unique and combined associations of homelessness and school mobility with educational well-being indicators, as well as the mediating effect of absenteeism, for an entire cohort of third-grade students in Philadelphia. Using integrated archival administrative data from the public school district and the municipal Office of Supportive Housing, multilevel linear models were estimated to test these associations while adjusting for nesting of students within schools. Findings demonstrated that homelessness had a unique association with problems in classroom engagement, school mobility was uniquely related to both academic achievement and problems in classroom engagement, and experiencing both homelessness and school mobility was the most detrimental for both forms of educational well-being. Absenteeism was found to partially mediate the relations between homelessness, school mobility, and problems in task engagement. Results provide support for the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act and the need for educational policies for mobile children.

This research was supported in part by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the William Penn Foundation. Data were provided through the Kids Integrated Data System, a partnership between the City of Philadelphia and the School District of Philadelphia. The findings and discussion presented in this manuscript, however, represent the views of the authors and do not reflect those of the City or the School District of Philadelphia.

Received October 12, 2011. Revision received May 16, 2012. Revision received October 16, 2012. Accepted October 24, 2012.

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