During the 1990s, Bell Labs teamed up with Robert Kelley, a Carnegie Mellon professor and organizational consultant to study what actually made their people productive. This book is the result of a 10-year long assessment.

While the focus of the work was on productivity, they studied those who were deemed "€œstars"€ at work by peers and superiors. At the time, it was assumed that some pre-determined trait such as intelligence or personality would determine who the stars were. This turned out not to be true, and a good thing because, as Kelley identifies, since the traits of stars are identifiable behaviors (he calls them strategies) then anyone can adopt them and anyone can be a star!

Here are the 9 strategies they identified, in order of importance:
Initiative: blazing trails in the organization'€™s white spaces.
Networking: knowing who knows by plugging into the knowledge network
Self-management: managing your whole life at work.
Perspective: getting the big picture.
Followership: checking your ego at the door to lead in assists.
Leadership: doing small-l leadership in a Big-L world.
Teamwork: Getting Real about Teams
Organizational Savvy: Using street smarts in the corporate power zone.
Show-and-tell: Persuading the Right Audience with the right message.

Kelley wants to distinguish between what most people perceive these strategies to be and the way that stars actually implement them. For example, with initiative he points out that while average performers think initiative means coming up with ideas to help them do their jobs better, stars view initiative as taking them into the white space beyond their job descriptions. (As a side note, I was struck that his number one characteristic of initiative seems very similar to Covey'€™s first habit "€œBe Proactive."€)

Still, I'€™m having trouble with the easy jump from "€œmost productive workers"€ to "€œstar."€ Is the objective to be better than your co-workers so that you get promoted (and they don'€™t) or is it to be more productive, as an individual and as an organization?

I'€™m not sure that it logically follows that those selected as "€œstars"€ were necessarily the most productive workers of the enterprise. For example, one of the attributes of the stars was that they tapped into and exploited the expert networks -€“ but without the experts there wouldn'€™t be much for the stars to do. One test for a strategy is to think "€œwhat if everyone did this"€ and here I'€™m not sure this particular trait holds up.

At the same time, if these are the traits of the most productive workers then we should be able to increase overall productivity by getting everyone to follow these behaviors.

Since the behaviors seem helpful, then what I’m interested in is how would we organize ourselves so that these behaviors are encouraged and naturally arise? Now that would be really interesting.

This is David Marquet from Practicum, Inc. We help organizations move from leader-follower structures to leader-leader structures. Visit our blog at http://leader-leader.org/, follow us on twitter @totheleadernyou, email: practicuminc@gmail.com to sign up for our monthly newsletter.

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