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Attention Span & Productivity – Book Recommendation

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, ADHD, Book Recommendations, Creative Thinking, Leadership, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Resources, tools, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development, Stress Management
Two goldfish in a bowl, one of them reading a thick book. The other one asks: "You’re reading a book called “Attention Span”? Is this some kind of joke?"

“You’re reading a book called Attention Span? Is this some kind of joke?”

In her book “Attention Span“, Gloria Mark explores the impacts of today’s fast-paced technology on our attention spans, productivity, and happiness. She presents a lot of research done both by her own and other teams. Based on that, she offers advice, not only on how to gain more control over our attention, but also on finding balance between productivity and happiness.

Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark (2023). [1]

Here are just a few of the findings and insights I found helpful.

Fun facts about attention and productivity

Have our attention spans really decreased?

Maybe you are feeling it yourself? Or maybe you’ve heard humans’ attention spans compared unfavorably to those of goldfish? Well that was a bit unfair. But is it true it that we are switching our attention more often these days than we used to? As it turns out, indeed we are.

Mark reports dramatic findings from her own as well as other people’s research [1], spanning from the early 2000’s to now. In the early years they shadowed people with stop watches. Later, they used computer logging methods to record precisely how long people’s attention remained on one screen, and when they switched their screens, apps, or websites. The measured average time people spent before switching went down steadily from about two and a half minutes in their earliest studies in 2004, to less than fifty seconds in 2021.

Another change that happened along with attention spans shortening is that people were spending more time at their desks and less time in formal and informal meetings. With that, people were becoming more sedentary during their work hours. (That decline already happened pre-pandemic, when most meetings were in person.)

The three high costs of rapid attention switching

Multitasking has rightfully earned a bad rap. Because our attention cannot be divided into more than one focus, we cannot truly to two things in parallel, unless one or both of the activities require little or no attentional resources. For example, listening to an audiobook while cooking is possible if I cook something that requires minimal thinking. If I’m trying to read and follow a new recipe, I’m quickly going to lose the plot in the audiobook. Similarly, I may be able to speak on the phone while painting, but not while responding to incoming texts or emails. Even if it feels like I’m doing both things at the same time, what I am really doing is switching my attention rapidly between them.

There are three problems with rapid attention switching. All three have been well documented over decades of research:

  1. We make more errors. Whether the switching is voluntary or not, our performance on each task is worse when we switch between them, compared to when we first complete one and then the other.
  2. It takes us longer to complete both tasks (again compared to first completing one, then the other).
  3. It increases stress. Diastolic and systolic blood pressure rises, and heart rate variability increases. Those physical markers are consistent with people’s subjective experience. The faster the switching, the more stressed people report feeling.

How can we improve our attention span and productivity?

What NOT to do:

1. Don’t try to focus as long as possible

Mark aims to dispel several myths in her book. The first myth is that we should try to focus as long as possible in order to be most productive.

It turns out that focusing for lengthy periods of time, especially without breaks, is not natural for most people. Just as we are not able to lift weights all day, we can’t stay focused for long stretches throughout the day without breaks. Sustained focus is associated with stress and can only be maintained for a limited time before our performance begins to decline.

There is a physiological basis in the brain that underlies this. When we focus our attention, the regions of the brain that are involved in that task use more oxygen, and accordingly the carbon dioxide content in the blood increases. This causes blood vessels to dilate to remove that waste from the activated part of the brain. Over time, blood velocity decreases as a consequence. When that happens, and the person remains in that sustained focused state, their performance declines. This change in performance that accompanies decreased blood velocity suggests that cognitive resources are not being replenished fast enough while the task continues. [1]

In other words, our brains hit a physical, metabolic limit, and we need breaks. This leads to another recommendation:

2. Don’t try to eliminate all rote, mindless activities

In line with this, Mark challenges the myth that rote, mindless activities have no value. There is no need to cut out all mindless activity like playing silly puzzle games, browsing the web, watching movies, or other easy and non-productive things.

Mark on the contrary suggests that since our attention is limited, it makes sense to pull away when we feel that we have exhausted our cognitive resources. Letting our minds wander while taking breaks with easy tasks, both online and in the physical world, helps us replenish our scarce cognitive resources. With more resources, we are better able to then focus again and be productive.

3. Don’t feel bad if you can’t get into a flow state at work

Another myth that Mark challenges is that we should all be able to get into “flow states” at work.

Flow, a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is that optimal state of attention where we are so caught up in an experience that we lose touch with the outside world and are unaware that time has passed. We feel joy and excitement, and are at our utmost creative peak. [1]

While people often have flow experiences with creative pursuits such as art, music, craft, design, or also in problem-solving tasks such as coding, Mark and her collaborators found that it rarely occurs in the knowledge workplace. Much of the nature of knowledge work is just not conducive to this kind of creative experience. This doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong.

What can we do instead to improve our attention span, productivity, and happiness? 

Instead of falling for these myths, Mark suggests we aim for balance and well-being by finding a good rhythm for our attention and productivity.

1. Designing your day:

Design your day based on your own rhythm of attention, knowing that you have peak times for focus. Take advantage of these. Most people have peak focus times around 11 a.m. and midafternoon, but your own peak focus may differ from that. Save your hardest tasks for your peak hours.

When designing your day, recognize the value of “negative space”. In art, negative space refers to the area around a figure and is recognized as an essential part of the art work. In Japanese, the term “yohaku no bi” refers to the beauty of empty space. Design your day to include negative space, which is just as important as the work itself because it helps you achieve a sustainable balance.

2. Coping with external interruptions

Having control over interruptions helps people be more productive.

A good time to intentionally redirect your attention is when you reach a break point in a task, such as finishing writing a chapter or completing a budget—natural places to pause.

It that’s not possible and you do need to interrupt a task: externalize your memory of that unfinished task. For example, write a note about your most important unfinished tasks and a plan for the next step. Mark cites a study by Michael Scullin and colleagues, who found that people who wrote down their unfinished tasks fell asleep significantly faster than the other group. In fact, the more detailed their notes, the faster people fell asleep. [1] This finding can be explained by the Zeigarnik effect: as people lay in bed, unfinished tasks agitated around and around in their minds, stirring up tension.

3. Coping with internal interruptions

It is important to acknowledge that interruptions to our attention can be external as well as internal. We tend to self-interrupt, even when there are no outside triggers that would prompt us to switch attention.

Practice meta-awareness (awareness of your awareness). This means being conscious of what you are experiencing while it is unfolding, for example of the moment you choose to switch screens from work to opening your news browser.

Once you have that awareness, you can ask yourself: what value will I gain by interrupting my work and checking the news? If you’re already on the news site by the time you reach that meta-awareness, you can ask: How much time have I spent here already? Am I gaining any value by staying here? When you have meta-awareness, you can switch your frame of mind from being a passive to an active user of your attention.

Developing the ability to use meta-awareness takes practice. The better able you are to gain a meta-awareness of your behavior, the more intentional you can be in your actions.

Practice forethought by imagining how your current actions might affect your future. For example, before you go on social media or play an online game, spend a moment to think ahead and imagine what your end of the morning might look like if you indulge. The more detailed your visualization is, the easier it is to take an action to course-correct if you need to.

Increase friction: make it harder for your attention to switch. For example, if you know that you like to play a certain game, hide the app in a folder so that it’s harder to get to. Having to search for it will make you pause and increase the chances you’ll become aware and get the chance to make a conscious choice.

Best practices for organizations: increasing employees’ attention spans and productivity

Finally, some changes can only be accomplished on an organizational level. Two recommendations stood out to me in particular:

  • Reducing email
  • Designating quiet time, where responses are not expected

It took Gloria Mark six years to find a company that was willing to cut off email for a full work week as an experiment. When email was cut off, heart rate monitors revealed significantly less stress by the end of the week, and more enjoyment of social interactions. What’s more, people’s attention spans were significantly longer while working on their computers. In other words, they switched their attention less frequently. With the caveat that this was a quasi-experiment in the field, rather than a randomized controlled study, this finding nonetheless offers plausible evidence that email may cause attention spans to decline.

Based on her findings, Mark suggests cutting off email as a no-brainer. However, individuals alone cannot solve the email problem by simply cutting off from it. Email is a problem that needs to be tackled at the organizational and even societal level.

Disappointingly (and surprisingly to me) Mark found that batching email does not help. People who read email in batches showed no difference in stress levels compared to people who checked their email continually. In fact, batching even led to more stress, rather than less, for highly neurotic people. However, simply decreasing quantity helped. People who spent less time daily on email were less stressed—even after controlling for their job demands and job autonomy.

Final note

What I presented here is not meant to be a book summary. I selected only a few insights I gained from the book, and gave my notes a different structure than the book did. I hope you find some of it memorable and applicable.

If you would like to discuss how you or your organization could put some of these suggestions into practice, please let me know.

"Get in Touch" Button to Schedule a phone call or coaching session with Ursina Teuscher

 

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

 

Picture Credits:

Image created with the assistance of OpenAI DALL-E and Microsoft Designer

 

Reference:

[1] Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press.

Note: Gloria Mark cites many studies in her book, some of which I mentioned here. I have not read those original studies and am therefore not listing them as direct references for this post.

 


Bias and Noise in Hiring Decisions

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Leadership, Risk and Uncertainty, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
How can companies reduce not only bias, but also noise, in their hiring and other decisions?

The problem of bias in corporate decisions, such as hiring, promotion and salary decisions, is well-known. However, there is another type of error that has not been talked about as much – perhaps because it is harder to see, and harder to fit into a narrative: noise.

What is noise in corporate decisions, and how is it different from bias?

Noise is a random error in our decisions. Research has confirmed that in many tasks, experts’ decisions are highly variable. Professionals often make decisions that deviate significantly from those of their peers, from their own prior decisions, and from rules that they themselves claim to follow. This is the case even when the stakes of those judgments are high, such as when appraising real estate, valuing stocks, or sentencing criminals.

In hiring decisions, noise would be, for example, a variability in who gets hired, based on who is making the decision, what mood they’re in, or what time of the day it is when that decision is made. In other words, influences that shouldn’t play a part do play a part. What differentiates noise from bias is that the error does not always go in the same direction, as is the case with biases.

Bias and Noise in Hiring Decisions

 

The target-analogy in the figure illustrates this difference. The shots on Target A are accurate. There is no bias and very little noise. The shots on Target B are biased, but not very noisy at all. They are systematically off in one direction – down to the right from the bullseye. Target C on the other hand shows noise, but no bias: the imprecisions in relation to the bullseye cancel each other out. Target D has both bias and noise.

 

Daniel Kahneman’s take on noise:

In his latest book “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment“, Daniel Kahneman makes a strong case that we should indeed care about noise, not only about bias. Noise is more difficult to appreciate than bias. However, it is no less real, no less costly, and no less unfair.

How can companies reduce not only bias, but also noise in their decision processes?

Trying to fix a known bias is a bit like curing a known disease. Knowing what the symptoms are, we try to work in the opposite direction. Fighting noise, on the other hand, must be preventative in nature, because we don’t know in what direction we are going to make mistakes. With that analogy, Kahneman recommends “Decision Hygiene”. Just as physical hygiene prevents all kinds of diseases, including ones we don’t fully understand yet, decision hygiene prevents all kinds of errors – noise as well as bias.

A few practical ways to apply decision hygiene, and thereby reduce noise in your hiring and other decisions:
  • Whenever possible, get several independent judgments and calculate their average. Averaging judgments gets rid of noise. (Averaging judgments does not reduce bias. However, it may still be an important step in fighting bias, because it makes any bias more visible. You can see this effect in the target shot illustration above. The bias is much more striking in Target B than Target D. Anyone looking at Target B would advise the shooter to aim “up and left”. For Target D, this conclusion would be much less obvious, even though there is no less bias.)
  • According to Kahneman, rank orders (= comparative judgments) contain less noise than ratings (= absolute judgments). Therefore, make judgments comparative instead of absolute. In other words: create a rank order of your options by comparing them, instead of rating each option separately on a scale.
  • Break problems into subproblems that you evaluate independently. For example, in a hiring decision, create selection criteria that you evaluate separately. Then apply those in the same way to every candidate. (This values clarification exercise may help with creating criteria.) The next point is related to this one:
  • Postpone your intuition. Structure the process to prevent “premature closure” driven by first impressions. In other words, don’t let your gut feelings call ALL the shots by coming to a conclusion too early. This does not mean that you shouldn’t listen to your (or your colleague’s) gut feelings, but give those feelings a place in the process. For example, in a hiring decision, make the “like-ability” of a candidate one of your official criteria. You’ll need to acknowledge that this criterion might be fraught with bias, because we tend to like people who are similar to us. However, when this is made explicit, you can decide consciously how much weight you want to give that criterion. Is it more important than the skills and experience? Does weigh in with it 10% of the total, 20%, or 80%? This kind of transparency and thoughtfulness will again not directly eliminate bias, but will make it more apparent.

As companies these days are more concerned about biases than they used to, they are hopefully also getting more attuned to the general importance of making good decisions, and to the risk of making bad decisions. That effort should naturally lead them to also tackle noise. Thankfully, many of the remedies that improve decisions will reduce both bias and noise.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

“When something happens, you immediately have a story and an explanation. You have that sense that you learned something and that you won’t make that mistake again.
These conclusions are usually wrong.
What you should learn is that you were surprised again. You should learn that the world is more uncertain than you think.”

Daniel Kahneman

 


Heuristics and Biases in Early Responses to Pandemic Uncertainties

Posted on by by Posted in Health Decisions, Leadership, Risk and Uncertainty

Decisions under uncertainties are driven to a large extent by heuristics and biases. How can policymakers take advantage of this knowledge in order to communicate more effectively?

I’m happy to share the publication of a new commentary article by Raffaella Misuraca’s team that addressed this question in depth. It’s been a pleasure to be included in this collaboration:

Heuristics and biases in early responses to pandemic uncertainties

Can We Do Better Next Time? Italians’ Response to the COVID-19 Emergency through a Heuristics and Biases Lens
by Raffaella Misuraca *, Ursina Teuscher, Costanza Scaffidi Abbate, Francesco Ceresia, Michele Roccella, Lucia Parisi, Luigi Vetri, and Silvana Miceli
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

ABSTRACT:
During the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy, people often failed to adopt behaviors that could have stopped, or at least slowed down, the spread of the disease. We offer cognitive explanations for these decisions, based on some of the most common heuristics and biases that are known to influence human judgment and decision-making, especially under conditions of high uncertainty. Our analysis concludes with recommendations: policymakers can and should take advantage of this established science, in order to communicate more effectively and increase the likelihood that people choose responsible actions in a public health crisis. View Full-Text

Keywords: heuristics; biases; COVID-19; decision-making
Behavioral Sciences. 2022, 12(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs12020039
View Full-Text Download PDF


Summer Reading List 2021: Five Books that Changed my Mind

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Creative Thinking, Intuition, Leadership, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

This past year gave me a fair amount of time to read and listen to audiobooks. Here are five books I found truly impactful, in that they managed to change some of my fundamental previous assumptions and opinions.

Steven Pinker (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker presents a passionate and persuasive defense of reason, science and progress. He shows with an abundance of data how a commitment to humanitarian values has kept winning – in the long run – dramatically and consistently over the destruction and chaos that would be the easier and more natural course. It is an uplifting as well as urgent perspective that challenges lazy dogmas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

To get a first impression and hear his own voice, here’s Steven Pinker in an interview with Shankar Vedantam on the “Hidden Brain” podcast:

Beyond Doomscrolling

Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, & Ola Rosling (2018).  Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. 

You may know Hans Rosling from his classic and widely shared 2006 TED talk:

This book offers explanations of why people – including highly educated people – are shockingly and systematically wrong about global trends and facts. Our instincts dramatically distort our perspective: from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them; e.g., poor vs rich etc) to the way we consume media (where fear rules), to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

The two books above share a similar perspective, but they are different enough (and counterintuitive enough!) that I found it very worthwhile to read both. In fact, I suspect I should read them both again in the near future, lest I forget.

Malcolm Gladwell (2019). Talking to Strangers. 

I’ve often found Malcolm Gladwells’s books worth reading, but hard to summarize. This one is no exception. If I had to summarize my take-home, it would be: “stop assuming”. I might be very wrong about other people, no matter how great I think my intuition is. (This past year I’ve listen to both “Talking to Strangers” and his older “David and Goliath” as audiobooks in short succession, and found them both similarly entertaining, informative, relevant for race politics, and thought-provoking, but only half satisfying.)

Sharna Fabiano (2021). Lead and Follow. 

Much has been written about leadership, but very little about followership in organizations (in fact, my spellchecker doesn’t even recognize “followership” as a word). As an internationally recognized dance artist and teacher, Sharna Fabiano has a deep understanding of the complementary nature of those roles in Argentine tango.

In her words: “To a dancer, improvisation does not mean “winging it” or making it up as you go along. Rather, it implies a highly refined system of communication built through specific methods of training. Improvisation for dancers is a synergy between leading and following actions that is greater than the sum of its parts. We already know a lot about leading at work, but not many of us understand how to follow with intelligence, power, and grace, as dancers do. It’s time we learned.”

Sharna Fabiano presents a coaching model that helps us think about those roles and the skills they require through three phases of increasing sophistication: 1. Connection, 2. Collaboration, and 3. Co-creation. It’s a very practical and well written book. As a reader, you don’t need to know anything about tango to understand the metaphors and their applicability to specific challenges in the workplace.

Steve Dalton (2020). The 2-Hour Job Search. 

What I liked least about this book was its title. I took me a while to figure out what exactly the two hours refer to, and I found the best explanation – and indeed the best book summary – here. The book’s focus is on how to get you interviews as efficiently and quickly as possible, without all the emotional investment that comes with a lot of other career advice. One reason I’ve already recommended it to several clients is that it has very useful templates and easy-to-follow guidelines for requesting and conducting informational interviews.

Steven Dalton’ approach circumvents the online job application process altogether. His approach takes into account the fact that many smaller companies never post their jobs online at all (and did you know that almost 99% of US employers have fewer than 100 employees?*), as well as that the odds for online applications are quite terrible, especially for people without very clearly defined and sought-after skills.

* According to 2016 data from the Census Bureau, firms with fewer than 500 workers accounted for 99.7 percent of businesses, and firms with fewer than 100 workers accounted for 98.2 percent.

Ursina reading an entirely different book from the ones on her Summer Reading List

What have you all read or listened to recently? As always, please let me know your favorites! Contrary to what this post might suggest, I also enjoy fiction, escapism, and otherwise simply pleasurable entertainment. Would love to hear your recommendations!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Who Should Make Which Decisions in Your Team?

Posted on by by Posted in Coaching Practice, Group/Interactive Decisions, Conflict Resolution, Leadership, Resources, tools

A practical tool and downloadable template to help determine decision authority.

For the most part, my work focuses on helping people figure out HOW to make good decisions. However, in an organization (or family! or any other group of people), the more urgent and conflict-prone question is often WHO should make which types of decisions, rather than how they should make them.

During a conversation with a client lately, I realized that this, too, is a decision that we can approach with the same frameworks and questions that are helpful for other decisions. In this case, the “alternatives” are people within the organization. In other words, each potential decision-maker is one option, and the main challenge is to define which criteria the decision-maker should fulfill in order to bear that responsibility. Once you have defined those criteria, it becomes much more straightforward to assign the right person the responsibility for any type of decision.

Who should decide? How to determine decision authority in your team

I’ve created a template to illustrate and support this process. You can download it here. The spreadsheet as it is here may be too sophisticated for many situations, but you can adapt that general idea, and use it in any way you choose to guide this process within your team. (You should also adapt the set of criteria and their importance weights as you see fit, but the example may help you get started. It was among others inspired by this article.)

 

Who should decide? How to determine decision authority in your team

 

Things to consider when you use this approach to determine who gets to make which decisions in your team:

If there are no trade-offs (i.e., some people score higher than others on all criteria), the decision authority can simply go to the person with the highest total score (Column G). However, if there are trade-offs (as in the example), don’t look only at the totals. Trade-offs between criteria often suggest a way to share the decision.

For this example, given these particular criteria:

  • People with high expertise, but who are not affected by the decision (Team Member 2 in this example) could be advisors to the decision-maker.
  • People who are not affected by the decision in their regular work, if all goes well, but who might be affected by fallout of negative consequences (Team Member 3 in the example), could get a veto role. In other words, the person higher in the chain of command/responsibility might want to let someone else, who is closer to the decision, develop and propose a solution, but they might want to reserve the right to approve it before it is implemented. Criterion 3 here would justify this kind of overseeing role for Team Member 3 for this particular decision (clearly distinguishing this case from a micro-managing leadership style in general).

A possible practical solution for this example:
Team Member 1 could create a proposal, advised by Team Member 2. Team Member 3 would have to approve the proposed solution before it is implemented.

If you have faced the question of “who should make which decisions” in your team, please let me know what you think about this process. I’d love to hear about your experience!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Should You Become an Intrapreneur?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Career Development, Creative Thinking, Leadership, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

Could you make your job better by becoming an intrapreneur? Intrapreneurship means to think and work like entrepreneur, even though you are still a part of a large organization.

For example, you might have an idea of how to improve a product, and suggest those changes to your boss. Or, you might look for ways to make a specific service more profitable for your company. Maybe you discover a new opportunity to market a product or a service. You might find ways to communicate better within your team, and with that, speed up the workflow. Or you might go the extra mile to increase customer satisfaction. In other words: whatever your role within the organization, you actively drive innovation and keep looking for opportunities to improve your company.

Good employers realize how valuable intrapreneurs are to their organization, and a lot of research is being done in the attempt to understand how different leadership styles and company cultures can encourage intrapreneurship among employees.
Improving your Job Satisfaction by becoming an Intrapreneur
Now, we all know that not every employer encourages innovation. Maybe the company you work for does not foster intrapreneurs at all. Nonetheless, the good news is that being an intrapreneur also benefits you, as an employee. Namely, it seems to start a positive cycle of growth for yourself that gives you more personal resources, which in turn gets you more engaged and even more motivated to make a difference at your workplace.

So how can you do it?

Five tips on how you can become an intrapreneur and thereby increase your work satisfaction:
  1. Think like a boss or owner. Which improvements would add to the value of the organization as a whole, rather than just make your own life better?
  2. Find ways to make improvements yourself. Even if you think big, it’s often best to start with small changes that you can take on yourself. Eventually, when you need help from others to accomplish bigger things, they can see that you’ve already put in your work, and they’ll trust you to match their effort with yours.
  3. Find allies. Search through the organization for people who are passionate about accomplishing something and team up with them. Look for ways to make their job easier and better.
  4. Take risks. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and recognize that it is often necessary to explore many different paths in order to produce innovative breakthroughs. Some of those paths will fail, but recognize this as part of the process.
  5. Stop making excuses. Your boss might not support of all your new ideas, or you might be limited in your efforts by your workload or your environment. Nonetheless, within your realistic limits, keep searching actively for opportunities to make a difference wherever you can.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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Ask Three Questions to Refine Your Career Decisions

Posted on by by Posted in Career Development, Leadership, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development

[Guest post by Bruce Hazen.]

Whether a career transition is one of your own choosing or one that is done to you, beware of a premature rush to job search tactics. For most people this premature rush means updating their resume and starting to patrol the internet job sites. If they’re a bit more extraverted, they may start to network with colleagues, friends and acquaintances. But this is when they start to realize something strategic is missing.
No, it’s not the fact that they haven’t defined the bulls-eye that they’re targeting, although this step is going to be crucial. With a defined target they can move to the next critical step in a well designed search – the personal marketing plan. But it’s not yet time for that either.

There are three career questions that must be addressed first. They cause you to answer profound and fundamental questions about where you are now in your career trajectory. If you don’t know your current location along that trajectory, you may be trying to solve the wrong problem.
Let’s take a look at The Three Questions. They are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive in framing your career:

  1. When is it time to move up?
    This doesn’t just mean promotion. It asks if it’s time to progress in your role, team, company or the profession itself. (You need a development emphasis in your search for new work)
  2. When is it time to move out?
    This doesn’t necessarily mean leave your employer. It could also mean move out of a role, a level of responsibility, a team or maybe even move out of a profession or industry altogether. (This calls for a transition strategy, commonly also known as a search strategy)
  3. When is it time to adapt your style for greater success?
    You may like the work and the people and enterprise you work for, but you’re not getting the success you want. You know you need to adapt and change something, but you may not be sure what or how. (This calls for a coaching strategy.)

Example: Julie was a skilled researcher who had Peter-principled her way into a leadership position running a research department within a high-tech company. She came to our first consultation convinced that she needed to move out of the company due to frustrations with managing her team. When I explain The Three Career Questions to anyone, I ask them to first talk about the two questions that they didn’t choose before we discuss the one they feel is most compelling. She described her frustrations as well as her distinct lack of training or coaching to take on her leadership role. I diplomatically suggested that she had a leadership style issue as a new leader and targeting a management role at a new company would simply relocate the struggle/problem to a new address without adapting her style for greater success. Our work switched to management coaching and she decided to turn her current position into a learning laboratory and more of a success before moving out.

Good questions embody values and insights that cause you to think and iterate your ideas and decisions to design even better ones. Use The Three Career Questions to refine your career decision-making and strategy early in the process.
Oh, there’s a fourth question too: When is it time to stay the course when the answer to all three question is: “not now”? Answer: Enjoy that ride when you can.

Bruce Hazen: Three Questions to Refine Your Career DecisionsAbout the author: Bruce Hazen is a career and management coach in Portland, Oregon. He has lead Three Questions Consulting for 20 years and is the co-author of the chapter on career coaching in the Sage publication, The Complete Handbook of Coaching (2018). 


How To Make Better Decisions by Asking an Open Question

Posted on by by Posted in Leadership

This or That? To Make Better Decisions, Ask a More Open QuestionOur most natural – and laziest – way to think about decisions is to see them as “either/or” questions:

“Should I do this, or that?”

In other words, we act as if we were in a game show, with only two doors to choose from. In fact, we often only recognize a decision once we see a specific new option, either as an opportunity, or as a solution to a problem. We then simply compare this new option to doing nothing.

That’s a very limiting perspective. If you want to think about your decision more creatively and find the best solution possible, you’ll want to open up your question.

How can we make better decisions by asking a more open question?

Try starting your question with:

  • “What would be the best thing I could do … (in order to achieve x, to avoid y, and to maximize z)?”
  • “How could I … (achieve x, y, and z)?”

This allows you to list and evaluate more possible courses of action, and will encourage you to look for more creative solutions. It also encourages you to think about what you actually want to achieve with your decision – again, surprisingly, not something we tend to do naturally.

The doors aren't real. To make better decisions, ask a more open question.

The doors aren’t real! Knock ’em down and open up your view.

To Make Better Decisions, Ask a More Open Question

 

Here’s an example of what this can look like in a career decision:

Initial question:
“Should I invest into this new training opportunity to get XY credentials?”

An open question instead could be:
“How can I improve my chances of getting promoted in this company?”

Or even more open:
“What steps can I take to increase my chances of a more fulfilling and better compensated career?”

A real example of a very different kind of decision comes from one of my students. This is what she shared with me:

Initial question:
“Should I terminate (or limit) my interaction with my mother?”
I should explain: when I was fourteen, my mother developed an opiate habit, making me the primary caretaker of her life (and my siblings) and kicked me out right after I turned sixteen. She then got clean, and we have since resumed a relationship; however, my role returned to that of caretaker, and her role has gone back to that of a dependent, while introducing a new level of acrimony. Though the question may sound harsh, questioning whether I need to terminate (or limit) my interaction with my mother for mental health reasons has been present with me for several years. However, it has been flawed. Rather than assuming I needed to either entirely eliminate my mother from my life, or accept our relationship as it is, I could reformat the question to allow for a broader range of solutions.

New open question:
“How can I reduce taking the role of the parent when dealing with my mother?”
The restructuring allowed me to realize which part of the relationship bothered me the most and what I wanted the question to help answer. It wasn’t simply about ‘fixing the relationship’: the main issue was the parent role on my shoulders that I wanted to eliminate.

This student’s example and her reflections show beautifully how helpful this simple thinking practice can be, even for very personal and emotional decisions.

Give it a try for your own next decision and let me know how it works out!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

 


How to Make Smart Group Decisions – Video

Posted on by by Posted in Coaching Practice, Group/Interactive Decisions, Conflict Resolution, Leadership

How to Make Better Decisions in Imperfect Communities
By Ursina Teuscher, PhD

Keynote talk presented at XII° Convegno Nazionale S.I.P.CO Palermo, June 7-9, 2018: Communita Imperfette – Dalle Dinamiche Disgregative al Decision Making Comunitario.

Summary

In communities that consist of diverse interest groups, it can be challenging to make decisions that are actively supported or at least accepted by all critical parties, despite their differing interests. Top-down decisions may face unexpected opposition, resulting in costs or delays.
This talk presents a process framework and practical tools to facilitate participatory decision processes. The suggested process is designed after a value-focused (Keeney, 1996) and multi-attribute model of decision making (e.g., Winterfeldt and Edwards, 1986, Anderson, Hahn, and Teuscher, 2013).
As a practical but broadly applicable model for interventions, the suggested process is structured into three stages. The first step is to determine the stakeholders and clarify what their interests are, and to involve the stakeholders in defining a measurable set of criteria. The second step is a search for innovative solutions that fulfill these criteria best. Unless the decision requires topic experts to draw up solutions, this stage may involve stakeholders and community members in a bid for innovative proposals. In the third and final step, the proposed solutions are evaluated along all criteria in a weighted multi-criteria decision analysis. An example of public involvement in a decision process in Oregon (facilitated by my colleague Sam Imperati) illustrates how to design a voting ballot in the form of a weighted decision table. In this case, the decision table served at the same time to inform the voters about the estimated facts associated with each option along all criteria. The example demonstrates that it is possible to evaluate even complex and controversial decisions in a democratic process, and that a democratic process can be quite different from a simple yes-or-no vote between unpopular options. Instead, it suggests a richer, yet efficient participatory process that is optimized for innovation, while being perceived as fair and transparent.
While the practical application shown here is a recent examples of a real public decision, rather than a research study, many previous case studies (reviews e.g., by Winterfeldt and Edwards, 1986; Anderson et al., 2013) show that participatory decision processes of this kind – following a value-focused and multi-attribute model – can lead to surprising amounts of innovation and agreement in challenging community decisions.

References:
Anderson, B., Hahn, D., & Teuscher, U. (2013). Heart and Mind: Mastering the Art of Decision Making. CreateSpace Publishing.
Keeney, R. L. (1996). Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decision Making. Harvard University Press.
Winterfeldt, D. von, & Edwards, W. (1986). Decision Analysis and Behavioral Research. Cambridge University Press.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Employee Coaching ROI: Is It Worth It?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Leadership, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development

What is the return on investment (ROI) of employee coaching for an organization?

Offering coaching for employees – especially at the executive level – has become a widespread management tool. Companies often hire coaches with the goal to improve performance and develop talents, but also to keep high-performing people within an organization.

However, coaching is an expensive intervention: aside from the fees of the coach, there’s also the opportunity cost of the employee’s time spent with the coach during working hours. Therefore, companies who are paying for coaching for their employees will want to know whether it is a good investment. Does it improve the company’s bottom line enough to be worth the cost?

A look at the evidence

What effects does coaching have? I put together a selection of research articles investigating this question, including all the meta-analyses I could find that have been conducted in the past two decades. You’ll find the full list of references below, and here’s my very brief, non-systematic, summary:

Despite using different measures, each of the meta-analyses found that overall, coaching is a very effective intervention. It affects goal achievement, performance and skills directly, but also other work-relevant variables, such as employee’s well-being, work attitudes, and self-regulation.

A few random fun facts:

  • Novice coaches are as effective as the more experienced coaches.
  • The background of the coach matters: coaches with a mix of psychology and non-psychology background were more effective than coaches solely with a psychology or non-psychology background.
  • Coaching outcomes were more improved in undergraduate coaching clients than in either executive or non-academic, non-executive coaching clients. (But the explanation might be as simple as that students had the most immediate opportunities to prove performance, such as in exams).
  • Coaching has the strongest effect on behavioral changes, as opposed to attitude changes.

But: how can an organization assess their own coaching ROI and effectiveness?

Despite these robust findings of the effectiveness of coaching, several studies point out that it is not only very difficult, but probably impossible, for any one organization to measure the true ROI of their own coaching interventions accurately, because links between coaching and monetary changes within an organization are so complex. However, any one organization can make use of more established knowledge when interpreting their outcomes of coaching:

For instance, coaching may increase an employee’s self-efficacy, and we already know from a considerable amount of research that self-efficacy is related to better performance in the work place. As another example, if coaching increases employees’ well-being and resilience, we can assume that this will also benefit the employer, because we already know from a multitude of other studies that well-being and resilience are linked to desirable employee attitudes, behaviors and performance. Similarly, goal achievement has been established as a reliable outcome of coaching interventions, and higher or continued goal attainment leads to greater satisfaction on an individual level, as well as to increased productivity, performance and organizational profitability.

Beyond ROI

In other words, while most coaching studies have focused on the benefits of coaching to the individual, rather than the organization, we already know from a large body of research how these individual benefits extend to the team and organizational level. There is therefore no need to get discouraged by the elusiveness of ROI as an outcome measure. Organizations can assess the effectiveness of their coaching in many other ways, and rely on earlier research when interpreting these outcomes.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


References:
Avey, J. B., Reichard, R. J., Luthans, F., & Mhatre, K. H. (2011). Meta-analysis of the impact of positive psychological capital on employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance. Human Resource Development Quartely, 22, 127–152.
Burt, D., & Talati, Z. (2017). The unsolved value of executive coaching: A meta-analysis of outcomes using randomised control trial studies. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 15, (2), 17-24.
Grover, S., & Furnham, A. (2016). Coaching as a Developmental Intervention in Organisations: A Systematic Review of Its Effectiveness and the Mechanisms Underlying It. PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0159137.
Hodgkinson, G. P., & Ford, J. K. (2010). International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2010. John Wiley & Sons.
McGovern, J., Lindemann, M., Vergara, M., Murphy, S., Barker, L., & Warrenfeltz, R. (2001). Maximizing the impact of executive coaching. The Manchester Review, 6(1), 1–9.
Meuse, K. P. D., Dai, G., & Lee, R. J. (2009). Evaluating the effectiveness of executive coaching: beyond ROI? Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 2(2), 117–134.
Passmore, J., & Fillery-Travis, A. (2011). A critical review of executive coaching research: a decade of progress and what’s to come. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 4(2), 70–88.
Passmore, J., & Gibbes, C. (2007). The state of executive coaching research: What does the current literature tell us and what’s next for coaching research? Coaching Psychology Review, 2(2), 116.
Robertson, I. T., Birch, A. J., & Cooper, C. L. (2012). Job and work attitudes, engagement and employee performance: Where does psychological well-being fit in? Leadership and Organizational Developmet Journal, 33, 224–232.
Sonesh, S. C., Coultas, C. W., Lacerenza, C. N., Marlow, S. L., Benishek, L. E., & Salas, E. (2015). The power of coaching: a meta-analytic investigation. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 8(2), 73–95.
Stajkovic, A. D., & Luthans, F. (1998). Self-efficacy and work-related performance: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 240–261.
Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & Vianen, A. E. M. van. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1–18.
Wright, T. A., & Cropanzano, R. (2000). Psychological well-being and job satisfaction as predictors of job performance. Journal of Occupational Health Psycholology, 5, 84–94.


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