All posts by cwmathe

Microinequities and Management

I attended a Microinequity conference hosted by Stephen Young, the former Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at JPMorgan Chase, who managed the firm’s diversity strategy worldwide. If you are not aware what Microinequities are, the excerpt provided (from his website) summarizes it well. Being aware of, and controlling, Micro-messaging is just as important for a brand new manager as it is for a tenured one.  If after reading the description below, if you think that learning a little more about this would be beneficial, I have included links to three articles for you to gain a little more depth on the subject.

Research shows that words mean very little in terms of the real messages that we send and receive. The meaning of our messages is frequently delivered through subtle micromessages. These subtle, often subconscious signals represent the core of the messages we send, and can either demonstrate inclusion or exclusion.

Listening with your arms folded, losing eye contact with the person you are speaking with, ignoring a female colleague’s success while rewarding a male co-worker’s same accomplishments, are all examples of small yet powerful biases communicated in the workplace. Also known as, MicroInequities these often subconscious, negative messages and actions can affect company productivity and morale.

MicroInequities are cumulative, subtle messages that occur when these signals are negative or promote a negative bias. MicroInequities are not one-time events. They are cumulative, repeated behaviors that devalue, discourage, and impair performance in the workplace.

Research shows that words mean very little in terms of the real messages that we send and receive. The meaning of our messages is frequently delivered through subtle micromessages. These subtle, often subconscious signals represent the core of the messages we send, and can either demonstrate inclusion or exclusion.

Listening with your arms folded, losing eye contact with the person you are speaking with, ignoring a female colleague’s success while rewarding a male co-worker’s same accomplishments, are all examples of small yet powerful biases communicated in the workplace. Also known as, MicroInequities these often subconscious, negative messages and actions can affect company productivity and morale.

MicroInequities are cumulative, subtle messages that occur when these signals are negative or promote a negative bias. MicroInequities are not one-time events. They are cumulative, repeated behaviors that devalue, discourage, and impair performance in the workplace.

Harvard Management Article

Time Magazine Article

Star Ledger Article

Edward Tufte on PowerPoint

This is an interesting read on the pitfalls associated with PowerPoint presentations. One of the things that I am focusing on improving this semester is my presentation skills, and I found this article, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte, to be helpful with regards of how to present data in a meaningful way. While you may find some of his opinions to be extreme, I believe that he still has many valid points and that his arguments are logical.

Even if you do not read this entire article, at least see his demonstration of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address via PowerPoint presentation on page 12 along with the section on improving our Presentations on page 22. I’ve included some highlights of the article below:

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and
audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phruff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Extremely Low Resolution of PowerPoint 

Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when the relevant information is shown adjacent in space within our eyespan. This is especially the case for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.

Bullet Outlines Dilute Thought

By leaving out the narrative between the points, the bullet outline ignores and conceals the causal assumptions and analytic structure of the reasoning.

Bullet outlines might be useful in presentations now and then, but sentences with subjects and verbs are usually better. Instead of this type of soft, generic point found in many business plans.

Improving Our Presentations

Designer formats will not salvage weak content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

Never use PP templates for arraying words or numbers. Avoid elaborate hierarchies of bullet lists. Never read aloud from slides. Never use PP templates to format paper reports or web screens.

Paper handouts at a talk can effectively show text, numbers, data graphics, images. Printed materials, which should largely replace PP, bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspapers, magazines, books, and internet screens.