Manage By Walking Around

My most popular blog entry in 2010 was “The No Asshole Rule” which was inspired by a class I took from Professor Robert Sutton.  Sutton encourages companies to get rid of workplace assholes who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who are openly aggressive to others with less power.  While there’s an on-line self-assessment with 24 questions, I’ve found that the simple question ‘Do people feel more or less energized after talking to you?’ is a good proxy for your affect on others.

It turns out that I’m not the only one who thinks someone’s impact on others’ energy level is a good assessment of their style.  In the book “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter”, Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown analyzed data from 150 leaders and categorized them into Diminishers and Multipliers.   Diminishers drain energy from everyone around them, reducing commitment and focus. They need to be the smartest ones in the room, (inadvertently) killing off ideas and innovation.  Multipliers, on the other hand, amplify others’ intelligence and abilities. They inspire people to overcome obstacles, to generate new ideas, and to deliver results that surpass expectation.

Not surprisingly, Wiseman and McKeown found that Multipliers have a positive and profitable effect on organizations.  They get more done with less, they’re better at attracting people and developing talent, and their groups are viewed as more innovative.  Here’s a video from the authors talking more about the book:

When recruiting people, the book suggests two interview questions to help distinguish Diminishers from Multipliers:

1. Tell me about your current team?
A Diminisher might start by talking about their team, but the conversation will quickly shift back to themselves. A Multiplier will extol the contributions of the people on their team, often providing details on individual employees.

2. Who is at your current job because of you?
Multipliers have the reputation as “the boss to work for” and people follow them company to company. Multipliers recruit people out of their personal network, while Diminishers rely much more heavily on recruiters and job posts.

While I haven’t had a chance to try these out yet, I suspect that they will be quite effective.  And since we can’t use these questions to analyze our own behavior, the authors also provide a short quiz to determine whether we are an accidental diminisher.  I would encourage you to take the quiz; the results might surprise you.

Are you an accidental diminisher?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 9th, 2011 at 2:31 pm and is filed under "performance management", culture, leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.