Friday, September 6, 2013
Monday, August 19, 2013
Thursday, August 15, 2013
People must take responsibility for managing their careers: Robert Steven Kaplan
As a vice-chairman-of-the-Goldman-Sachs- Group turned-Harvard-Business-School-professor, Robert Steven Kaplan often has graduating students dropping into his officefor career advice.
A typical case might go like this: the student applied for a high paying job in the financial services sector, but now that the offer has actually come though, he's not sure it's what he wants. He feels guilty about his ambivalence since it's a job everyone else covets and rejecting it seems selfish and self-indulgent. Maybe he should put his misgivings aside and do what his family and friends expect?
"Many of us motor through our young adult years trying to rack up one achievement after another - being 'successful'," says Kaplan, who has recently authored a book titled What You're Really Meant to Do: a road map for reaching your unique potential.
"I advise students to beware of conventional wisdom and focus on the difficult task of understanding who they are and where their interests lie. You can't be a bystander in your own life. Managing your career is 100% your responsibility." The problem is not limited to b-school campuses. Kaplan narrates numerous cases of accomplished individuals who find they no longer enjoy what they are doing. "They don't feel successful, though everyone around them thinks they are," says Kaplan.
"In mid-career executives it manifests itself in a feeling of confusion about where to turn and a concern that they have painted themselves into a corner. In older executives and professionals, it's sometimes reflected in feelings of bitterness and regret."
Whatever stage in their careers they may be at, Kaplan advises his readers to go through a process of heightening their self-awareness. The first step here is to assess one's strengths and weakness, not in terms of vague character traits, but in terms of skills.
These might include skills in written communication, presentation, quanitative analysis, negoatiation, interpersonal skills and ability to confront others constructively. The importance of these skills varies according to the job and the level of responsibility, so this analysis is an ongoing process. A skills mismatch is one of the common reasons people find themselves unhappy in a job to which they have been promoted.
In some cases, it is the reason they are not promoted. Kaplan advises everyone to make a habit out of introspecting on their skills so they may pro-actively manage their capabilities. This doesn't mean trying to develop a skill you are inherently weak at.
On the contrary, it might be best managed by delegating that part of the job to someone who is truly good at it. Kaplan presents an example from the financial sector, where a junior executive had excellent market knowledge and client skills, but lacked the quanitative skills required for financial modeling, an important part of stock picking.
She was set to quit her job when her seniors suggested she might be able to offset her weakness by teaming up with others on her client teams. She stayed on and moved up to more senior positions where her job required less modeling and ultimately emerged as one of the top professionals in her firm. "This is a lesson I learned in my own career: the capabilities of my assembled team needed to fit with my own skills and deficiencies," says Kaplan.
Is There Still a Role for Judgment in Decision-Making?
In the last several years, a veritable tsunami of advice on how to make decisions has hit the Internet and what few shelves remain in our local bookstores. The advice is a distant relative of early ideas about decision theory in which we were advised to construct decision trees , mapping outcomes, attaching values to each one, and estimating probabilities that various combinations of outcomes might occur. Judgment entered into the construction of the resulting "decision trees," but the process itself was a way of injecting a certain amount of objectivity and analysis into the decision to be made.
In recent years, we have been advised to make certain decisions in a "blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, to "think twice" by Michael Mauboussin, and to think "fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman. The replacement of customs and biases with data, "big" or "small," has been intended, at least in part, to drive out such things as tradition, habit, and even superstition in endeavors ranging from child rearing to professional sports. After all, wasn't the book and film, Moneyball, at least in part a glorification of the triumph of statistics and probabilities over intuition and managerial judgment in professional baseball?
Two recent books add to the genre of advice on decision-making. One advises us how to make better decisions. The other helps us ensure that we don't allow our decisions to get sidetracked (or sidetrack them ourselves).
In their book Decisive, the Heath brothers cite four major reasons—all linked to common human traits—why we make poor choices and how to avoid doing it. They are: (1) the "narrow framing" of problems that makes us miss options; (2) the "confirmation bias" that leads us to give undue credence to information confirming a decision while ignoring other information; (3) the injection of "short-term emotion" into the decision process; and (4) overconfidence that we naturally display about the future (something that may be peculiar to only certain of the world's cultures, by the way).
They advise us to do such things as: (1) widen our options by emphasizing the "and" over the "or" in formulating them; (2) reality-test assumptions by reviewing them with more objective associates or making small tests; (3) seek ways of attaining distance by looking at a decision through someone else's eyes or focusing on the long-term impact of the decision; and (4) prepare to be wrong by setting limits on outcomes (similar to a "stop loss" order in stock trading).
Harvard Business School's Francesca Gino cites findings from her own research studies and those of her colleagues in her book Sidetracked, to warn us of three types of forces that derail our decisions: forces coming from within, from our relationships, and from the outside. Among those that emanate from within are an inaccurate and often inflated view of ourselves that leads us to treat advice inappropriately at the wrong times, "infectious emotion," and a tendency to adopt an overly narrow focus. To cope with these she suggests ways of achieving greater self-awareness (mitigating our biases by soliciting expensive advice, which we are more likely to take seriously, for example), taking our emotional temperature (determining when our feelings regarding a decision "were triggered by an event unrelated to the decision at hand"), and "zooming out" for broader perspective (for example, by asking "What information am I missing?").
I didn't Google the texts of these books, but there is no mention of the word "judgment" in their tables of contents or indexes, and I don't recall the use of the word in the texts. In fact, if there is a sense that one gets from all of this work, it is that we are our own worst enemies when it comes to making and implementing good decisions. We need tools to correct the errors and biases of our own judgment. This is puzzling, because we are frequently reminded that the ability to exercise judgment is what sets humans apart from other forms of life. (Perhaps judgment is what leads us to adopt recommendations such as those of these authors.) Is there still a role for judgment in decision-making? What do you think?
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