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

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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