Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness

Individual Assignment:
Google’s Project Oxygen – Do Managers Matter?

Here are some reflections on Project Oxygen — and why coaching holds strong as a top
attribute for any successful leader. The group that had the biggest problem with management
was the company’s engineers. Engineers may have lower tolerance for bad management. It's
a field that fosters creative individuals who have their own style and way of doing things.

When someone tries to micromanage this type of worker it results in conflicts and a loss of
interest. Laszlo Bock, author of Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will
Transform How You Live, explained: "Engineers generally think managers are at best a
necessary evil, but mainly they get in the way, create bureaucracy, and screw things up."

However, it’s not just engineer-driven companies that looking for some change from the
status quo when it comes to management. A survey by Virtuali found that  83% of
millennials want fewer layers of management. This means they want managers who are
easily approachable and willing to take their opinions into account. This became evident
in millennial-led or millennial-heavy organizations that favored open workspaces where
CEOs, managers, and employees worked alongside each other.  

In an environment where the conventional was often challenged, Google’s People

Innovation Lab started Project Oxygen with a goal of proving that manager quality does
not have an impact on performance. They hired a group of statisticians to evaluate the
differences between the highest and lowest rated managers. Data was collected using
past performance appraisals, employee engagement surveys, interviews, and other
sources of employee feedback.

8 findings about good managers from Google’s Project Oxygen

1. Is a good coach
2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage

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 3. Expresses interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-
being
4. Is productive and results-oriented
5. Is a good communicator—listens and shares information
6. Helps with career development
7. Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Has key technical skills that help him or her advise the team

While this list seems obvious, there were three reasons why it had such a big impact on
management at Google. First, it was based on people analytics. In a culture that valued
data and scientific evidence, using people analytics gave the project greater credibility.

The fact that it was based on employee feedback encouraged wider employee buy-in and
trust. Similarly, the hard data helped to convince managers why they needed to improve
their management style.

Second, the interesting thing is that technical skills came in last. While it’s important
that managers have the needed technical level to guide employees, soft skills such
as coaching and communication are absolutely essential. This proves what many
employees instinctively knew from their own experience:  being a great developer
doesn’t necessarily make you a great manager.

Third, it provided a checklist of management qualities. As Bock explained, whether or

not your manager is well versed in management 101 and every training course your
company offers, having a checklist makes a big difference as it actually reminds
managers to remember and implement these skills on a daily basis.

As a result, Google changed its feedback surveys to mirror these qualities. Instead of
simply measuring how much output a manager achieves, the surveys now focus on how
much time they spend coaching their team, whether or not they communicate a clear
vision, etc. They also developed new management training programs centered around
these skills.

Great employees don’t always make great managers

Though it may be common sense that a company of engineers would value technical
knowledge and ability in a manager, it is telling that this skill came in last place on
Google’s list.

Great employees don’t always make the best managers. Some engineers may prefer to
focus on their work. You have to have patience, great communication skills, and the
ability to see the big picture and create long-term goals.

The problem is that the traditional company is based on linking promotions with higher
levels of managerial responsibilities. It’s time for your company to rethink this strategy.

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Instead of putting people with great technical skills in management positions, put people
with great leadership skills in management positions. Some companies have instituted
dual tracks so that not everyone has to take the management path.

Become a great coach

Becoming a great coach, especially in the tech world, is essential. What engineers,
developers, and everyone under the sun really want is a manager who knows how to
distinguish the line between coaching and micromanaging.

To learn where this line lies, think about your employee. Are they an engineer with more
than five years of experience? Then what they probably need most is a manager who will
help them to set goals and then stand back and allow them to execute them in their own
way (as long as this gets results).

As a manager, one of your most important responsibilities is to guide your employees

towards goals that fall in line with your company’s objectives and long-term goals.

That being said, also allow some space for creativity. Google gained a lot of traction
with media and in-demand talent for its policy of letting employees devote 20% of their
time to passion projects. 20% time resulted in popular products such as Gmail and
AdSense. Other companies adopted similar policies. While this may not an official
policy for your company, as a manager, encouraging employees to dedicate some time to
working on innovative new ideas with colleagues can bring you great products and
loyalty from motivated employees.

New engineers on the other hand may need more coaching. Here the line may become
thinner but the best way to provide guidance while not encroaching on your employee's
freedom is through feedback.

Feedback culture

Being able to give feedback the right way is the strongest tool in your management
utility belt (think more Batman than Home Depot). Two-thirds of millennials believe it’s
their manager's responsibility to provide them with development opportunities.

Despite this, many managers are often hesitant to give constructive feedback  to their
employees, fearing their reaction. However, this is a major part of the development
process, so if your employees don’t know what they need to do to improve,
their professional development  could become stagnant.

Many leading HR and People Teams have recognized this risk, and are finding new ways
to support Managers to have more continuous conversations with their team to help fuel
performance as well as professional development.

Delivering well-balanced actionable feedback is the answer. When you have to deliver
constructive feedback, some managers balance it out by first explaining to their
employees what they’re doing well.

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Always make sure your feedback places emphasis on actions and completely avoids
personality traits. For example, “I noticed you talked over Mark in the meeting
yesterday” rather than “You’re overbearing in meetings.” Always provide advice on how
they can fix the situation and discuss the best solution. 

In return, it’s also important to millennials that managers are open to their feedback. This
generation does not like to see hierarchal barriers that prevent their ideas from being
heard. This means that managers also have to be good at not only receiving feedback but
acting upon it as well.

Finally don’t forget that positive feedback is also needed. When your employee reaches
an achievement a great coach always remembers to recognize them for their efforts.

Get to know your employees

This is important both at a professional and personal level. Getting to know your
employees’ strengths will help you give better feedback and show them you have a
genuine interest in their careers.

Managers who know their employees’ strengths are 71% more likely to have people who
are engaged and energized. Showing them you’re taking an interest in their career and
professional goals will help you gain a loyal workforce.

Give your managers the tools they need to lead the modern workforce

Managing teams today is a tough job, and they rarely get the support they need to
succeed. Just like your employees, offering regular trainings on key skills will keep
managers engaged and motivated to improve their management strategies. Here are a few
topics that every management training program should include:

 How to give and receive feedback as a manager

 How to run effective 1-on-1s
 How to engage employees
 Tackling unconscious bias

Beyond this, providing your managers with helpful tools to provide more actionable and
effective feedback will go a long way to helping them keep their teams engaged and
motivated.

Putting the many forms of attention into three broad categories, focusing on oneself, focusing
on others, and focusing on the larger world, sheds new light on a variety of leadership

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qualities. Understanding how a leaders focus on the larger world could boost their ability to
create, develop strategy, and manage organizations, understanding how they focus on the
larger world is essential. Leaders can enhance their emotional intelligence by focusing both
on themselves and on others.

While it is not difficult to identify leaders who can effectively focus on others, typically these
leaders are the ones who can establish common goals and shared values, whose ideas carry
the most weight, and with whom others desire to collaborate. It is however difficult to
identify leaders who are able to have the right balance between the ability to focus on oneself,
focus on others and the larger world. This can be achieved by having high level of emotional
intelligence.

Salovey and Mayer (1990) defined emotional intelligence as “the subset of social intelligence
that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feeling and emotions, to
discriminate among them and use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”. The
foundation of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Leaders with greater self-awareness
can access more resources to make better decisions and drive greater value.

 Self-awareness: To be self-aware, one must be attentive to internal physiological

signs. Focusing on present-moment sensory sensations is an important aspect of self-
awareness. The ability to see our genuine selves is a second factor. Being authentic
involves presenting yourself to others how you present yourself to yourself. This
requires paying attention to what others think of you and being receptive to feedback.

 Self-control: ‘Cognitive control’ is the scientific word for what many individuals refer
to as "willpower". This cognitive control permits leaders to pursue a goal despite
obstacles and diversions. Those who maintain their composure amid adversity and
recover demonstrate superior cognitive control.

Self-regulation of emotions is vital for a leader. Among the domains of emotional intelligence
and skills Goleman emphasizes the need of empathy, one of the social abilities. Social skills
are abilities that play a role in regulating our interpersonal relationships. One of the social
skills is empathy. According to Goleman et al. (2003), empathy is the capacity to experience,

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comprehend, and respect the emotions and perspectives of others, as well as the
responsiveness to them.

One of the key leadership styles highlighted in the case study is Transformational Leadership
that seeks to inspire and transform its followers for the better in order to achieve a higher
purpose. According to Gardner and Stough (2002), transformational leadership seeks to boost
the confidence of followers while fostering a growth-oriented environment that propels the
business toward its objectives (Pinos, Twigg, Parayitam, & Olson, 2013, p. 63).

Furthermore, Bass et al. (1995) stated that empathy is a crucial trait of transformational
leadership. Transformational leadership is founded on the perspective of followers;
consequently, the more followers perceive the leader to be transformational, the more
followers internalize the leader's vision, Pinos et al. (2013). When followers perceive that
their leaders have trust in them and empathy for them, they are more likely to strive toward
and achieve the organization's vision and goals.

It is also discussed by Wolff et al. (2002) that when leaders demonstrate empathy, they are
able to favorably influence the emotional states of their followers leading to increase in
performance. Additionally, empathy fosters respect between leaders and followers. It helps
maintain, build, and manage interpersonal relationships.

Empathy enables leaders to be "in tune" with their followers and makes them more
democratic and open-minded. Perspective-seeking is a democratic strategy, which means that
leaders seek and cherish the perspectives of their followers during decision-making and
problem-solving. This might make followers feel loved and understood. Often empathy is
referred to as a single attribute, however a closer look shows that there are three distinct kinds
which are significant for leader-member relationship effectiveness:

 Cognitive empathy: Which is the capacity to comprehend the viewpoint of another

one. It enables leaders to explain themselves in meaningful ways, which is essential
for maximizing the performance of their subordinates. This sort of empathy needs
leaders to consider rather than directly experience emotions.

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  Emotional empathy: It is the capacity to experience another's emotions. This is
essential for interpreting group dynamics, mentoring, and client management.

 Empathic concern: It is the capacity to perceive what another person needs from you.
This is directly tied to emotional empathy and enables you to perceive both how
others feel and what they require from you. A person must manage their own grief
without cutting oneself off to the suffering of others in order to demonstrate empathy.

A leader with high level of empathy can practically decipher and comprehend other
individual's nonverbal communication. The leader may also be aware of the impact he has on
others, as, for instance, a follower's nonverbal manifestations indicate the degree to which he
accepts him and his emotional manifestation in the situation. This is essential for leaders
because followers tend to agree with and praise the leaders despite sometime being in
disagreement according to Levenson – Ruef (1997). This increases the effectiveness of the
leader-member relationship.

Finally, the case study highlights the importance of a focused leader having the quality of
strong outward focus, and these leaders tend to be both good listeners and good questioners.
They are typically visionaries who can sense the repercussions of their judgments and foresee
how their current decisions will play out in the future. Leaders who are strong at outward
focus would be able to channel their focus towards the following three areas:

 Strategy: The two primary components of strategy are maximizing current advantage
and discovering new opportunities. Exploitation demands a focus on the current task,
whereas exploration necessitates an open mind to recognize opportunities.

 Innovation: Today, everyone has access to the same information; therefore, the ability
to combine ideas in novel and inventive ways generates new value.

 Systems Awareness: This skill in most prevalent in those excel at matrix

organizations, assembly lines or designing software. It had been suggested that in a
significant number of people, a strong systems awareness is linked to an empathy

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 deficit. As a result of this, although people who have a superior understanding of
systems are assets to an organization, they may not necessarily be effective leaders.

In conclusion, focused leaders are in tune with how they feel, understand how other people
see them, can manage their impulses, can tune out distractions and comprehend what other
people need from them. As a result, they have high level of empathy which is intrinsically
formed within each human being. It is the capacity and practice of putting oneself in the
shoes of another and underpinned by a strong foundation of emotional intelligence.

Although it may initially appear overly intimate or unprofessional, it has the potential for
enormous accomplishments and successes, especially for individuals in leadership roles. It
can bolster them toward transformative leadership; it can envelop a leader with trust,
intuition, resonance, creativity, democracy, ethics, and respect; it can assist them in locating
new solutions and gaining devoted, inspired followers. Leaders that aim to exemplify and
foster empathy can significantly improve and motivate the outcomes and efforts of their
followers.

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References:

Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, cognition and

personality, 9(3), 185-211.

Goleman, D. (2003). What makes a leader. Organizational influence processes, 82, 229-241.

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2001). Primal leadership: The hidden driver of
great performance.

Levenson, R. W., & Ruef, A. M. (1997). Physiological aspects of emotional knowledge and
rapport. Empathic accuracy, 8, 44-72.

Wolff, S. B., Pescosolido, A. T., & Druskat, V. U. (2002). Emotional intelligence as the basis
of leadership emergence in self-managing teams. The Leadership Quarterly, 13(5), 505-522.

Avolio, B. J., & Bass, B. M. (1995). Individual consideration viewed at multiple levels of
analysis: A multi-level framework for examining the diffusion of transformational
leadership. The leadership quarterly, 6(2), 199-218.

Pinos, V., Twigg, N. W., Parayitam, S., & Olson, B. J. (2006). Leadership in the 21st century:
The effect of emotional intelligence. Academy of Strategic Management Journal, 5, 61.

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