Management Is All in the Timing
The most
successful leaders are highly aware of their colleagues’ pace and sense of
urgency — and continually adapt to them.
The
pace of business keeps hastening, as advanced technology hypercharges the speed
at which data and business opportunities emerge, in addition to increasing the
amount and accessibility of those things. Fundamental shifts in market
structure have shortened the life cycles of innovation, products, and even
executives. CEO tenure in the Fortune 500 has fallen from an average of 11
years in 2002 to six years today. The average
life span of a company (pdf) in the Fortune
500 has shrunk from 25 years in 1980 to just 15 today. The end result is a
pervasive sense of anxiety and time famine, as both companies and the
executives within them struggle to keep up.
But speed and urgency,
although necessary attributes of leadership, are not sufficient. In fact,
our research suggests that the leaders who can tether an obsession with
deadlines and time to an ability to sense the work and energy flow of their
colleagues will have the most success.
Even in the 21st-century fast-track economy,
the idea that each minute (or billable hour) of human activity has a constant
value is at odds with the basic facts. Humans don’t experience time with linear
consistency. All of us feel an ebb and flow of cognitive alertness and physical
energy throughout a day. In the absence of a clock or watch, what feels like a
minute or an hour to a person can vary considerably, depending, for example, on
how interesting the task at hand is, whether distractions are available, or
even what the physical conditions surrounding the person are (e.g., time passes
more slowly when a person is freezing cold or experiencing loud noises in the background).
As Einstein is quoted as saying, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute,
and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems
like a minute. That’s relativity.”
Cultural
anthropologists were the first to recognize that people tend to track time in
two ways: clock time and social time. Edward T. Hall’s famous 1983 book, The
Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (Anchor Press/Doubleday),
first brought this distinction to light cross-culturally. Under clock time,
punctuality and predictability are highly valued. Meetings start and end when
people say they will. People adhere strictly to deadlines and appointment
times. Under social time, by contrast, conversational and relational smoothness
and the ability to complete a thought or interaction without abruptness are
valued. A fluid sense of natural rhythm in conversations and interactions over
time enhances relationship building.
Research found that,
traditionally, southern European and Latin cultures placed more emphasis
on social time and Anglo-Saxon cultures placed more emphasis on clock
time. But these cultural differences are beginning to wane as more of the world
moves to a global business culture driven by clock time. Still, within the same
culture, research has long found significant differences in how people
experience time.
The Importance of Flow
The
most established psychological measure of differences in how people track time
is known as time urgency. Highly time-urgent people monitor clocks
and watches frequently and place an implicit value on efficient time usage.
They adhere tightly to schedules, lists, and deadlines; they place a value on
punctuality. But in our research over the last 10 years, we’ve been exploring
the existence of a second dimension to how humans track time, inspired by the
cultural differences in time perception that anthropologists have observed and
work by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and others on the concept of flow.
We
start with the idea that humans in groups like to experience a sense of social
synchrony, which we define as alignment in how people perceive and adapt to
create a sense of relational smoothness and flow in interaction. In a recent
paper we published in Personnel
Psychology, completed with coauthors Abbie Shipp and John-Gabriel Licht, we
showed that even within cultures, people vary widely in the degree to which
they notice synchrony in their interactions. What’s more, they vary in their
willingness to adapt their own pace in order to better align with others’ pace.
We call the willingness and proclivity to adapt the synchrony
preference. The synchrony preference captures the degree to which a person
tracks the pace of other people’s behavior and is willing to adapt his or her
own behavior to match it, in terms of both speeding up and slowing down.
To make this idea concrete, some examples of
the socio-temporal cues that people might use in conversation to indicate a
sense of aligned pace include the gentle nodding of one’s head and short
expressions of “yes” and “that’s right.” When one wants to speed up another
person, one may look at one’s watch, nod one’s head more rapidly in a way that
suggests moving things along, or express anxiety about taking up others’ time.
Similarly, to slow things down, one may say “let me stop you there for a
minute” or subtly put up one’s hand.
In general, we have found that people who
score high on synchrony preference are more likely to notice and incorporate
these types of cues into their own mental processing and behavior. By contrast,
people who rate low on synchrony preference place more value on maintaining
their own rhythm or pace in interaction and tend to ignore social cues that
might deter them. And when they do align on pace, it is often because they make
a point of filling their teams with people who have similar pacing preferences.
We see this, for example, in some professional services firms, where a sense of
time scarcity and adherence to clock time can become dominant cultural norms.
We have found repeatedly in our own and others’ research that people tend to
like coworkers with whom they feel naturally aligned on pace. Pace alignment is
often what people feel when they express feeling “flow” or smoothness in an
interaction.
In this study, for the first time, we have been able to
link the synchrony preference to improved work performance. We have found that
people who rate high on synchrony preference not only notice differences in pace
with others, but are able to adjust their own behaviors and, in turn,
collaborate more effectively with others in the process. This flexibility is
clearly important in a world where constant reinvention is required; where
getting things done depends on teamwork and collaboration; and where
management, more often than not, crosses countries and cultures.
The Synchronous Leader
People who score high on both synchrony
preference and time urgency tend to be better liked, and their contributions
are more valued in team settings. They are also more likely to hold leadership
positions within their teams. Further, controlling for national culture, we
found that executives with high synchrony scores tend to view and experience
themselves as interdependent with others, rather than independent, and are more
open to new information and experiences and more amenable to multitasking.
These findings show that although effective
leaders must be able to keep their teams on schedule and manage time
effectively in order to meet deadlines (something at which time-urgent
individuals excel), they also need to facilitate interpersonal interactions within
these schedules to help employees function as a team (something at which
individuals high on synchrony preference excel).
On the
basis of our findings, we have developed a framework for teaching executives
about the importance of temporal perception in management (see exhibit).
We’ve identified four temporal leadership types, depicting the degree to which
a leader is high or low on both the preference for timeliness (the time urgency
measure) and the preference for social synchrony. It also describes how
important adhering to self-pacing versus group pacing is considered by
different types of leaders.
We find that the most successful leaders fall
into the upper right quadrant (temporally agile leaders). Most striking,
perhaps, our research suggests that a high score on timeliness is no longer
enough to get to the C-suite. In fact, those who score high on timeliness but
low on synchrony will find themselves limited in both roles and advancement in
our high-speed culture. Those who are able to combine timeliness and synchrony
are more likely to affiliate with others and to help them effectively, and
less likely to show dominance, autonomy, and impulsivity. They can exhibit give
and take. And when a team is under stress, these leaders can pull back to allow
team members the kind of breathing room that will lead to long-term resilience.
by Sally Blount and Sophie Leroy
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/Management-Is-All-in-the-Timing?gko=8819b&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20161110&utm_campaign=respA
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