Years from now, the depiction of a star performer running over colleagues on their climb up the corporate ladder might seem as quaintly dated as Donald Draper pouring a stiff scotch at 11am in an episode of Mad Men.
The tide has changed, likely for good, away from the individual star corporate bully and toward the “network performer”. CEB research has identified a tectonic shift in how employees accomplish their jobs that puts the network performer in the driver’s seat of corporate performance.
The first trend is that, of key productivity measures, revenue per FTE is now far more important than revenue per COGS (cost of goods sold), or revenue per capital expenditure, in driving performance. In other words, people–and their effectiveness in working together–are the one productivity lever still available to the corporate world that will generate breakthrough performance.
The second trend represents possibly the most dramatic a shift in the business world since the information explosion: the rise of the network performer; that is, how any one person contributes to and effectively uses organizational networks.
CEB research shows that the importance of network performance has more than doubled over the past ten years. In 2002, the network component made up about 22% of the performance equation, but in 2012 that number rose to 49% or half of the total enterprise value of an employee.
Underneath this trend is a slow collapse of organizational hierarchies as the conduit of information and execution. The formal “org chart” at many companies is no more than a rough guide as more employees now work across teams, functions and levels. Collaboration across the enterprise is now a requirement at most companies and it’s only going to increase in importance in the future.
The New Performance Mathematics
What this all means is that the effectiveness of any one person is the sum of that person’s effectiveness at their own tasks and how effective they are at using the network and contributing to other’s work through the network.
These changes mean that the selfish star contributor will continue to suffer on multiple fronts. First, in the new environment, even traditional stars will need to support and nurture networks just to keep up their individual performance. CEB research identified four transformational competencies as the most important to network performance:
- Organizational prioritization
- Teamwork
- Organizational awareness
- Proactive problem solving
As one executive in our network put it, “There’s no ‘i’ in network but there is a ‘w’ and and ‘e’.”
Another critical part of the equation is that CEOs and heads of human resources are now recognizing the enormous performance drag selfish employees inflict on those above, below and to the sides of them. The result is that companies are devaluing such self-focused employees in favor of employees with a high network IQ. 78% of HR executives now say network performance has been more important than individual performance over the past three years. So to get ahead in the new work environment, workers will have to demonstrate network competence. In other words, bullies need not apply.
Finally, beyond organizational performance, organizational futures are at stake. Almost every company needs to continually adapt, and this makes the pain inflicted by corporate bullies even more acute. Neuroscience research from Dr. David Rock shows that environments that create threat states (where people are operating with fear and trepidation) actually shut down the thinking part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) and put people in a selfish “me-first” mode.
The threat state stifles innovation in three ways:
- Inhibiting the ability of the mind to produce new ideas.
- Inhibiting the likelihood that anyone will share and recognize new ideas if they do have them.
- Inhibiting the collaboration needed to translate innovative ideas into business strategy and execute on them.
With network performance and innovation now key drivers of corporate performance, few organizations will be able to justify the star bully performer based on individual performance alone and, in the end, the nice guys (and gals) who perform well both individually and in a networked environment, are likely to be the ones the old corporate bully calls “boss.”
By Scott Engler, from: http://www.executiveboard.com/blogs/the-death-of-the-corporate-bully/?business_line=human-resources
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