World Monitor Magazine, #5, Industry World Monitor Magazine, Industrial Overview | Page 55

EXPERT OPINION Management Is All in the Timing The most successful leaders are highly aware of their colleagues’ pace and sense of urgency — and continually adapt to them. The pace of business keeps picking up, as advanced technology hypercharges the speed at which data and business opportunities emerge, in addition to increasing the amount and accessibility of those things. Fundamental shifts in market structure have shortened the life cycles of innovation, products, and even executives. CEO tenure in the Fortune 500 has fallen from an average of 11 years in 2002 to six years today. The average life span of a company in the Fortune 500 has shrunk from 25 years in 1980 to just 15 today. The result is a pervasive sense of anxiety and overwhelming lack of time, as both companies and the executives within them struggle to keep up. physical energy throughout a day. In the absence of a clock or watch, what feels like a minute or an hour to a person can vary considerably, depending, for example, on how interesting the task at hand is, whether distractions are available, or even what the physical conditions surrounding the person are (e.g., time passes more slowly when a person is freezing cold or experiencing loud noises in the background). As Einstein is quoted as saying: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” Cultural anthropologists were the first to recognize that people tend to track time in two ways: clock time and social time. Edward T. Hall’s famous 1983 book, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (Anchor Press/Doubleday), first brought this distinction to light cross-culturally. Under clock time, punctuality and predictability are highly valued. Meetings start and end when people say they will. But speed and urgency, although People adhere strictly to deadlines necessary attributes of leadership, are not sufficient. In fact, our research and appointment times. Under social time, by contrast, conversational and suggests that the leaders who can relational smoothness and the ability tether an obsession with deadlines to complete a thought or interaction and time to an ability to sense without abruptness are valued. A the work and energy flow of their colleagues will have the most success. fluid sense of natural rhythm in conversations and interactions over time enhances relationship building. Even in the 21st-century fasttrack economy, the idea that each Research found that, traditionally, minute (or billable hour) of human southern European and Latin cultures activity has a constant value is at placed more emphasis on social time odds with the basic facts. Humans and Anglo-Saxon cultures placed more don’t experience time with linear emphasis on clock time. But these consistency. All of us feel an ebb cultural differences are beginning to and flow of cognitive alertness and 52 world monitor wane as more of the world moves to a global business culture driven by clock time. Still, within the same culture, research has long found significant differences in how people experience time. The Importance of Flow The most established psychological measure of differences in how people track time is known as time urgency. Highly time-urgent people monitor clocks and watches frequently and place an implicit value on efficient time usage. They adhere tightly to schedules, lists, and deadlines; they place a value on punctuality. But in our research over the last 10 years, we’ve been exploring the existence of a second dimension to how humans track time, inspired by the cultural differences in time perception that anthropologists have observed and work by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others on the concept of flow. We start with the idea that humans in groups like to experience a sense of social synchrony, which we define as alignment in how people perceive and adapt to create a sense of relational smoothness and flow in interaction. In a recent paper we published in Personnel Psychology, completed with coauthors Abbie Shipp and JohnGabriel Licht, we showed that even within cultures, people vary widely in the degree to which they notice synchrony in their interactions. What’s more, people vary in their willingness to adapt their own pace to better align with others’ pace. We call the willingness and proclivity to adapt the synchrony preference. The synchrony preference captures the degree to