December 2008

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Are You a Competent Jerk or a Lovable Fool?

December 15, 2008 in BossaNova Recommends, Food for Thought, Trusted Advisor by Andrea | No comments

This post can also be found at the Trust Matters blog.

Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo wrote in “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks” in the Harvard Business Review (June 2005) about how people choose who they work with.

“In most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job…the other is likability.”

Arrayed on a two-by-two competency vs. likeability matrix, everyone prefers to affiliate with the lovable star–no one with the incompetent jerk. No surprise there.

But what happens when we are forced to choose from the last two quadrants–lovable fool and competent jerk? Place your bets, now.

Based on data from four diverse organizations and over 10,000 work relationships, Casciaro and Lobo discovered (drum roll…) –

Yep, you guessed it. We prefer the lovable fool – even though we may not readily admit it.

We say out loud that we prefer skills and expertise (it sounds unprofessional and illogical not to) and that being “nice” is a nice “bonus.” But in practice, their study showed that your personal feelings about your colleague play a more important role in forming work relationships than do your evaluations of their competence.

“In fact, feelings worked as a gating factor: If someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people don’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer.”

Feelings trump rational thought. Again.

Implication: our clients would rather we be lovable fools than competent jerks. Which means we’d be better off if we spent more time boosting our likability than our competence, despite what our clients say out loud.

There may be a better business case for charm school than for business school.

Learning that STICks

December 10, 2008 in BossaNova Recommends, Food for Thought, Tips of the Trade by Andrea | No comments

Next week we’ll be unveiling our new white paper called Learning that STICks – a practical guide to avoiding disappointing returns on soft skills training.

Learning that STICks is learning that is Sustainable, Transformational, Intelligent and Collaborative. STICky learning is flexible; it can expand or contract to fit time, budget, and resource constraints. But in every case, being STICky pays off.

To give you a taste of what Learning that STICks is all about, here are some examples of quick ways to implement STICky learning:

- Convene an action learning team with the specific goal of improving one or more real-life client relationships over a three-month period (Sustainable). Include time to define and debrief specific action steps as well as time for members to give each other feedback and reflect on what mindsets are in play (Transformational). Have participants complete a before and after self-assessment to identify their strengths and development areas in terms of thinking smarts, relating smarts, and being smarts (Intelligent). Invite managers to join the action learning team once a month to provide guidance and feedback (Collaborative).

- Have participants in a learning program work together to prepare a “brown bag” series (Sustainable) on “Emotionally Intelligent Consulting” (Intelligent). Make storytelling an integral part of the presentations (Transformational). Invite a client panel to participate to share their experiences and perspectives (Collaborative).

Here’s the key: learning that STICks addresses all of the essentials in some form or other. You might say the elements must be –um, “stuck”— together to be effective. For example, learning programs that are Sustainable but not Transformational may do a great job of reinforcing new skills but never crack open the limiting mindsets that impair a consultants’ ability to carry out those skills. Learning programs that are Intelligent but not Collaborative may create a cadre of well-rounded consultants but miss the “wow” that’s created when key stakeholders are focused on exceptional client service.

We’ll let you know when Learning that STICks is available on our website. No registration is required to download the paper, but if you’d like to receive automatic notification, please click here to register for our monthly BossaNews.