Where You Sit Determines What You See

What do you see in this picture?

Depending on how you look at it, you’ll see the silhouette of two faces or a vase. It’s a classic illusion that psychologists use to demonstrate that all of us have biases that influence how we interpret events. To some extent we see what we unconsciously want to see.

Understanding this kind of perceptual distortion is crucial for getting things done in organizations. Most projects or processes require collaborative work with people who come from other parts of the organization — different functions, levels, locations, or business units — and who see the world differently. If you assume that these people perceive the assignment or challenge in the same way that you do, you’ll be severely frustrated or disappointed. In fact, you’ll be on much firmer ground if you start with the assumption that each person comes to the table with a different spin on the situation.

The first thing to do in any cross-organizational assignment is to develop alignment and create a shared understanding of the problem, the situation, and the expectations. For example, one diversified technology company recently launched a project to improve the effectiveness of their sales force, involving collaboration between teams in the field (sales and sales support) and corporate. Team members from the field came in with the goal of reducing “bureaucratic distractions” from corporate functions. In contrast, the corporate representatives wanted the field folks to comply more quickly to data requests so that they could better target sales opportunities.

Given these different perceptions of “the problem” the team easily could have become trapped in unproductive blaming or hardened their positions. Fortunately, the team leader understood the different perceptions and encouraged everyone to listen, repeat, and appreciate each others’ starting points. Eventually each side realized that both positions were valid, which opened up the possibility of joint problem solving. So over the next few weeks, the team figured out which data requests provided the most value, and which could be streamlined or eliminated. Based on these insights, the team sparked a significant improvement in the sales numbers over the next six months.

Of course, overcoming perceptual bias is not a one-time exercise. Just because the people in our example learned how to work together on one project doesn’t mean that they won’t revert back to their earlier blinders when they reenter their regular environments. In fact, there is a Stockholm syndrome effect for most people in organizations, in which they take on the biases and attitudes of those around them. Not long ago I was talking with an executive who had recently been promoted from a business unit to the corporate center. She was complaining how the business managers all wanted to do things their own way and not comply with cross-company standards — and then sheepishly admitted that she was one of those non-compliant managers only weeks earlier.

One of the best ways to overcome ongoing perceptual distortion is to rotate between functions, levels, and locations. This doesn’t have to be as drastic as changing jobs or restacking cubes; it might mean regularly having lunch with someone from another part of the company or volunteering for a cross-functional project. This way, you’ll gradually gain a broader perspective and not get so locked into any one silo. But even if you do move between areas, don’t assume that others see things the way you do. All of us see the world in different ways — which may make alignment that much harder, but at least makes things a lot more interesting.

More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas

More on: Execution, Leading teams, Managing yourself

RON ASHKENAS

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting. He is a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

The Top Five Career Regrets

by Daniel Gulati  |   8:00 AM December 14, 2012

What do you regret most about your career?

I had just finished a guest lecture on business and innovation at Parsons School for Design, and a particularly attentive front-row audience member kicked off question time with the curliest one of the day. I answered quickly with the hope of getting back on target. But judging from the scores of follow-up questions and the volume of post-lecture emails I received, a talk on career regret would have been the real bull’s-eye.

Ever since that afternoon, I’ve been on a mission to categorically answer the awkward but significant question of exactly what we’d do if we could magically rewind our careers. The hope? That by exposing what others are most disappointed about in their professional lives, we’re maximizing our chances of minimizing regret in our own.

To this end, I sat down with 30 professionals between the ages of 28 and 58, and asked each what they regretted most about their careers to date. The group was diverse: I spoke with a 39-year-old managing director of a large investment bank, a failing self-employed photographer, a millionaire entrepreneur, and a Fortune 500 CEO. Disappointment doesn’t discriminate; no matter what industry the individual operated in, what role they had been given, or whether they were soaring successes or mired in failure, five dominant themes shone through. Importantly, the effects of bad career decisions and disconfirmed expectancies were felt equally across age groups.

Here were the group’s top five career regrets:

1. I wish I hadn’t taken the job for the money. By far the biggest regret of all came from those who opted into high-paying but ultimately dissatisfying careers. Classic research proves that compensation is a “hygiene” factor, not a true motivator. What was surprising, though, were the feelings of helplessness these individuals were facing. Lamented one investment banker, “I dream of quitting every day, but I have too many commitments.” Another consultant said, “I’d love to leave the stress behind, but I don’t think I’d be good at anything else.” Whoever called them golden handcuffs wasn’t joking.

2. I wish I had quit earlier. Almost uniformly, those who had actually quit their jobs to pursue their passions wished they had done so earlier. Variable reinforcement schedules prevalent in large corporations, the visibility of social media, and the desire to log incremental gains are three reasonsthat the 80% of people dissatisfied with their jobs don’t quit when they know they should. Said one sales executive, “Those years could have been spent working on problems that mattered to me. You can’t ever get those years back.”

3. I wish I had the confidence to start my own business. As their personal finances shored up, professionals I surveyed yearned for more control over their lives. The logical answer? To become an owner, not an employee in someone else’s company. But in the words of Artful Dodger, wanting it ain’t enough. A recent study found that 70% of workers wished their current job would help them with starting a business in the future, yet only 15% said they had what it takes to actually venture out on their own. Even Fortune 500 CEOs dream of entrepreneurial freedom. Admitted one: “My biggest regret is that I’m a ‘wantrepreneur.’ I never got to prove myself by starting something from scratch.”

4. I wish I had used my time at school more productively. Despite all the controversy currently surrounding student loans, roughly 86% of students still view college as a worthwhile investment. This is reflected in the growing popularity of college: In writing Passion & Purpose, my coauthors and I found that 54% of Millennials have college degrees, compared to 36% of Boomers. Although more students are attending college, many of the group’s participants wished they had thoughtfully parlayed their school years into a truly rewarding first job. A biology researcher recounted her college experience as being “in a ridiculous hurry to complete what in hindsight were the best and most delightfully unstructured years of my life.” After starting a family and signing up for a mortgage, many were unable to carve out the space to return to school for advanced study to reset their careers.

5. I wish I had acted on my career hunches. Several individuals recounted windows of opportunity in their careers, or as one professional described, “now-or-never moments.” In 2005, an investment banker was asked to lead a small team in (now) rapidly growing Latin America. Sensing that the move might be an upward step, he still declined. Crushingly, the individual brave enough to accept the offer was promoted shortly to division head, then to CEO. Recent theories of psychology articulate the importance of identifying these sometimes unpredictable but potentially rewardingmoments of change, and jumping on these opportunities to non-linearly advance your professional life.

Far from being suppressed, career regrets should hold a privileged place in your emotional repertoire. Research shows (PDF) that regret can be a powerful catalyst for change, far outweighing the short-term emotional downsides. As famed psychologist Dr. Neal Roese recently stated, “On average, regret is a helpful emotion.” It can even be an inspiring one. But it means that we must articulate and celebrate our disappointments, understanding that it’s our capacity to experience regret deeply, and learn from it constructively to ultimately frame our future success.

More blog posts by Daniel Gulati

More on: Career planning, Managing yourself

DANIEL GULATI

Daniel Gulati is a tech entrepreneur based in New York. He is a coauthor of the bookPassion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders and a contributor to the HBR Guide to Getting the Right Job. Follow him on Twitter at@danielgulati. To receive an email update when he posts, click here.

The Most Overlooked Leadership Skill

by Peter Bregman  |   12:00 PM May 24, 2013

Even before I released the disc, I knew it was a long shot. And, unfortunately, it was a clumsy one too.

We were playing Ultimate Frisbee, a game similar to U.S. football, and we were tied 14-14 with a time cap. The next point would win the game.

I watched the disc fly over the heads of both teams. Everyone but me ran down the field. I cringed, helplessly, as the disc wobbled and listed left. Still, I had hope it could go our way.

Sam was on my team.

Sam broke free from the other runners and bolted to the end zone. But the disc was too far ahead of him. He would never make it.

At the very last moment, he leapt. Completely horizontal, Sam moved through the air, his arms outstretched. Time slowed as he closed in on the disc.

The field was silent as he slid across the end zone, shrouded in a cloud of dust. A second later he rose, Frisbee in hand. Our team erupted in cheer.

Sam’s catch won us the tournament.

It also taught me a great lesson: Never underestimate the value of a talented receiver.

I was reminded of Sam’s catch recently after broaching a sensitive topic with Alba*, a client. The conversation was about some concerns I had about an upcoming meeting she was leading as well as my own insecurity about how I could help.

Before I spoke with her, I was hesitant and worried. Was I overstepping my bounds? Was I exposing myself? Would she reject my thoughts? Would she reject me?

I entered the conversation awkwardly, apologizing, and offering too much context. Even once I broached the issue, I felt tentative, unclear. I cringed as I felt my words hang in the air.

Thankfully, though, Alba turned out to be a Sam-level receiver.

Alba listened without a trace of annoyance. She asked questions — not to defend herself or refute my thoughts — but to understand my perspective more clearly. She was gracious, skilled, and accepting.

Her ability to receive me, and my opinions, led to a deep and valuable conversation about her performance, my role, and the needs of her team. A few weeks later, she showed up powerfully and led a remarkable meeting.

Typically, we choose our leaders for their skill at conveying messages clearly and powerfully. But, in my experience, it’s their ability to receive messages that distinguishes the best leaders from the rest.

That’s because the better you are at receiving, the more likely people will talk to you. And that’s precisely what every one of us needs: to be surrounded by people who are willing to speak the unspoken.

So how do you become a great receiver?

1. Be courageous. We often attribute courage to the speaker, but what about the receiver? 
I may have been scared broaching topics with Alba, but I had the advantage of time and preparation. I could control what I said and how I said it. I was able to think about it beforehand, write down a few notes, and test my thoughts with someone else. 
The receiver has no such advantage. Like Sam, he has to receive my throw, however, whenever, and wherever it lands. He has to be willing to listen to something that might make him feel afraid or insecure or defensive. And if he is a great receiver, he will take in the information or message thoughtfully, even if the delivery is awkward or the message jarring. That takes tremendous courage.


2. Don’t judge. Receiving is as much about what you don’t do as it is about what you do. 

Resist the temptation — blatantly or subtly — to be critical of the speaker or what the speaker is saying. Don’t argue with her, poke fun at her, shame her, act aggressively, turn on her, become defensive, or act cold toward her. 


3. Be open. In order to receive a pass in any sport — and at work and in life — you need to be free, open, and unguarded. 
Yet we often guard ourselves. Powerful feelings like fear, anger, sadness, and insecurity do their best to block our ability to receive a pass. If you want to be a talented receiver, your task is to feel your feelings without letting them block or control you or your response. Breathe. Acknowledge what you’re feeling to yourself — maybe even to the other person — without dwelling on it. 

Reiterate what you’re hearing, ask questions, be curious. Not curious in an “I-will-find-out-enough-information-so-I-can-prove-you-wrong” way. Curious to understand what the person is saying and to understand what’s underneath what they’re saying.

If you can be courageous, avoid judging, and stay open — even if the toss is awkward and the message unsettling — then, like Sam, like Alba, you’ll be able to catch pretty much anything.

And when you’re skilled at that, you’ll be a most valuable player of any team you’re on.

*Names and some details changed

More blog posts by Peter Bregman

More on: Communication, Managing yourself

PETER BREGMAN

Peter Bregman is deeply committed to developing emotionally courageous leaders through his programs, including the Bregman Leadership Intensive, and as an advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams. His latest book is 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. To receive an email when he posts, click here.

Good Leaders Don't Use Bad Words

by Michael Schrage  |   12:00 PM June 13, 2013

During a painfully dull futures workshop Down Under, a simple word change helped transform a stagnant discussion.

The facilitator, with a world-class flair for bafflegab and platitude, had asked the group to envision products customers might desire a decade hence. The conversation regurgitated cliché after customer-centric product cliché until the moment the team rejected and replaced the facilitator’s language.

Instead of brainstorming new “products,” the group instead collectively chose to imagine future “offers.” The word forced a different discipline of design thinking. “Offers” usefully blurred categorical and cultural distinctions between “product” and “service” innovation. Making an “offer” looked and felt different than selling a “product.” The more people talked, the clearer it became: “offers” was simply a better word and organizing principle for generating more innovative innovation scenarios. “Offers” liberated participants, where “products” constrained them.

Language matters. A lot. Amazon, for example, lists over 3000 publications about “product innovation” and roughly 800 for “service innovation.” According to its search engine, however, the world’s largest bookseller doesn’t have a single “offers innovation” title. Is that an opportunity?

As Mark Twain once observed, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

At Australia’s Amplify Festival, former IBM Chairman/Europe Hans-Ulrich Maerki observed that one of the most important organizational and cultural shifts that occurred in the aftermath of IBM’s $3.5 billion acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting over a decade ago was a subtle but profound shift in language. That acquisition signaled IBM’s global commitment to become more of a professional services firm. But the company’s internal and external vocabulary alike emphasized the computer giant’s “product” origins.

After the acquisition, says Maerki, IBM began emphasizing “clients” over “customers.” The PwC consultants relentlessly stressed that “customers” were about managing transactions but “clients” were about investing in relationships. IBM needed to redesign itself around serving clients, not selling customers. That was a distinction with an operational and organizational difference. (Maerki similarly observed that IBM soon stopped using “committee” in favor of “team” — another word-swap that ultimately had meaningful managerial impact.)

Changing important words helped change important behaviors.

Critics might argue that this emphasis on language is sophistry and wordplay. After all, actions speak louder than words and people pay — and invest — closer attention to incentives. This may be true. But the real question confronting leaderships is how much can language alter thoughts and influence behaviors? If the right words can cognitively and creatively reorient enterprise conversations, executives need to think twice about the vocabulary they outsource to their ad agencies and HR.

Too often, the default language of truisms, platitudes and clichés dominate communications. Perfectly good words like “innovation,” “quality” and “morale” get flensed of all useful and usable meaning. There’s a good word for that observed managerial behavior — laziness. Rather than invest real thought and effort into language that differentiates and adds value, executives — not unlike that facilitator — pick words that make it a little too easy to think a little too conventionally. Commodity words yield commodity outcomes.

In a truly global economy, ironically, opportunities for language-driven/language-enabled differentiation abound. Linguistics should be a source of design insight and competitive advantage. English may be — sorry — the “lingua franca” of global business but there’s a wealth of languages for innovators and entrepreneurs to draw upon in their efforts to get their people to “think different.”

While the nuances of “product” and “offer” or “customer” and “client” hold profound implications in English, truly understanding the meaning of, say, “kyosei” or “kaizen” in Japanese or “jeitinho” in Portuguese/Brazilian can also be sources of innovation inspiration. I am struck by how rarely global enterprises cultivate non-English words as “cultural software” to get their international employees — and customers/clients — engaged and aligned.

What are the Hindi, Tagalog and Mandarin words that should be redefining customer expectations and value creation over the next decade? How might “Spanglish” or Indonesian slang come to influence business vocabularies worldwide? Actions speak louder than words. But, inevitably and invariably, words describe actions and aspirations alike. The more global you are, the less lazy your organization needs to be about the words it chooses.

More blog posts by Michael Schrage

More on: Communication, Innovation, Leadership

MICHAEL SCHRAGE

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play, Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? (HBR Press), and The Innovator's Hypothesis (MIT Press).

How Companies Can Attract the Best College Talent

by Sanjeev Agrawal  |   8:00 AM March 17, 2014

Over the past year, my firm Collegefeed met with more than 300 companies to understand their college hiring strategies and tactics — from employers with large university hiring infrastructures to recently funded start-ups looking to hire fresh grads, interns, and young alum.

Not surprisingly, 84% understand that college hiring is important. Yet almost all agree that it’s really hard to attract good college talent. In fact, 92% believe they have a “brand problem” when it comes to their efforts; this problem is often expressed as the fact that “not everyone can be an employer like Facebook.” In other words, large, well-established companies feel they simply can’t be the newest thing out there generating buzz with Millennials.

To understand more about this underlying “brand problem,” and what employers can do about it, we polled 15,000 Millennials — 60 percent still in college and 40 percent recent graduates.* We asked them:

1. What are the top three companies you want to work for?
2. What are the top three things you look for when considering an employer?
3. How do you generally discover companies and create an impression about them (social media, product usage, campus events, other ways)?

Here’s how they responded:

Question 1:

Respondents had to type in and enter a name here, not select from a displayed list, which eliminates the pagination bias. That said, the top 10 in this list are not surprising at all: They are well-known brands that frequently appear in the “best places to work” lists.

But what’s noteworthy is the absence of well-known consumer brands such as Coca Cola. It’s also interesting that companies like Salesforce.com and Qualcomm, which most college students don’t use, appear so high.

Question 2:

Given the first chart, you might expect things like “company mission” or “market leadership” to be on top. However “people and culture fit” is number one, followed by “career potential.” We expected “compensation” to be within the top five, but were somewhat surprised that it was only ranked fourth.

This data leaves one key takeaway: It is imperative to focus on communicating your culture and career growth to potential employees. The two fundamental questions that young job seekers ask, and that companies need to answer are: “What is it like to work there?” and “What kind of growth can I expect?”

Question 3:

These results blew us away. Most companies (almost 100% of the large ones we spoke to) say that they have an on-campus recruiting plan and that is where they focus their sourcing and branding efforts. Many also have dedicated organizations to build relationships on campus. According to a 2013 NACE study, 98.1% of companies they polled believe that on-campus fairs are the number one avenue for them to brand themselves with students.

However, this may not be the case. “Friends” showed up as the number one way Millennials hear about companies, according to our research, followed by job boards. You might also expect to see “Use their products every day” among the top five, but it showed up sixth.

Clearly, branding — how a company is perceived year round, across media types — is more important than just being present on campus. If college students like something, they tell their friends on social media or face-to-face.

So whether you sell ads, insurance, food, or routers, building a brand among college grads is about getting your story out. Sure, some companies have the basic advantage of “being among the top products students use daily” or “building the next big mobile app,” but you can also attract great talent by telling your story right – using language that Millennials relate to at places they frequent.

Here are the four most critical things you should do to improve your brand and attract the best college talent:

1. Get Your Best People to Engage With Students

Even if you are a company whose products never really get used directly by end users (think Salesforce.com, Qualcomm, Ciena, Cisco) you can still show off your employees and organizational culture to send a simple but powerful message to students: “If you come work for us, you will get to work with awesome people like these.”

So if you go to campus, bring your best recent college hires along. Showcase the work interns, young alums, and others have done, and highlight the responsibilities they have been given. If scheduling the best people or alums is hard, or if you find the attendance of physical events is low, host virtual info sessions, another easy and scalable way to reach lots of great college talent.

In addition, some leading companies we spoke to set quarterly goals for managers to hire and spend time with potential hires from colleges, whether it’s attending career fairs or answering questions on Quora or blogging about their experiences. And this leads to another important thing you can do to attract college talent.

2. Go Where Students Are (and They’re Often Not at College Fairs)

Students are online all the time. Invest in a visually appealing, content rich site where students can go to and learn about your company. If you can, personalize the site to showcase the right alums, intern experiences, and the basic messages you want to deliver to potential hires. Done right, a good “brand page” can have the same effect as a great conversation at a career fair — it’s the story of your mission, your culture and why they should join you.

Next, use social media smartly. College students spend two to four hours daily on sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you can target them based on specific interests, who they follow, and what they are searching for or talking about, real-time engagement can be quite powerful. Depending on the type of talent you are targeting, sites like Quora and other more technical ones like Hacker News can be good places to establish your brand. Similarly, if targeting a broader audience, you can go far by using humor to engage students in entertainment properties like Reddit, BuzzFeed, and CollegeHumor — people share what they find funny.

One caveat across social media in general: most online communities don’t like being marketed to, so be authentic, add value to users, and be cautious of blatant self-promotion.

3. Make the Application Process Easy and Engaging

A complicated, multiple-page application form isn’t going to cut it anymore. For Millennials (and anyone else, really), the process should be easy and frictionless.

In addition, you can’t always wait for students to come to you. After connecting with a student at a career fair or online, it’s important to go back to them and encourage them to apply when they are ready.

Another engagement strategy leading companies have found is to pique student’s interests by holding online contests and activities that paint an interesting picture of their brand. Google,Microsoft and several other companies do this programmatically.

4. Prioritize Meaning Over Swag

Too many companies are focused on giving away swag, under the perception that free stuff gets eyeballs. But Millennials are more interested in identifying with your mission than they are in a free T-shirt. If you want their mindshare you have to go beyond swag, and that concept should extend beyond career fairs to everything they read and hear about you.

Are you securing people’s futures? Are you making the world green? Are you making life simpler for small and medium businesses? Whatever you do, you should be able to get the message out online — in a 20 or 30 second video. The U.S. Army’s age-old recruiting video is still a great example – it really makes you want to apply.

If you get meaning right, it won’t just be you doing the talking. Social referrals have incredible power in the college context, and we’re not talking about the “refer a friend, get $5” model. It comes down to whether a student genuinely likes who you are, what you do, and what you stand for.

*Of the responses received, 65 percent are in college and 35 percent recently graduated. 60 percent were male and 40 percent female. 50 percent were tech-oriented majors and 50 percent non-tech.

More blog posts by Sanjeev Agrawal

More on: Hiring

SANJEEV AGRAWAL

Sanjeev Agrawal is the CEO and co-founder of Collegefeed. Before Collegefeed, he ran product marketing for Google, was CEO of Aloqa, a mobile platform acquired by Motorola, and VP Product at Tellme Networks acquired by Microsoft. A former McKinsey consultant, Agrawal holds a BS and MS in EECS from MIT. He can be reached at sanjeev@collegefeed.com.

What It Will Take to Change the Culture of Wall Street

by Steven G. Mandis  |   8:00 AM October 24, 2014

William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, gave a speech Monday in which he used the word “culture” 45 times. Here’s how he defined it:

Culture relates to the implicit norms that guide behavior in the absence of regulations or compliance rules—and sometimes despite those explicit restraints. … Culture reflects the prevailing attitudes and behaviors within a firm.  It is how people react not only to black and white, but to all of the shades of grey. Like a gentle breeze, culture may be hard to see, but you can feel it. Culture relates to what “should” I do, and not to what “can” I do.

Dudley has a doctorate in economics, and spent a decade as chief economist at Goldman Sachs. But in his remarks he sounded more like a sociologist than an economist. His many mentions of “culture” could be significant. I’m hoping they mark the beginning of a change in how regulators think about reining in law-breaking and excessive risk-taking at banks. I’m also hoping that I had something to do with them.

I studied economics too, as an undergraduate. Then I went to work at Goldman Sachs, in mergers and acquisitions first, proprietary trading later. I spent a dozen years there — a tenure that overlapped with Dudley’s — went on to work at several other firms, and then, after the financial crisis, decided to go back to school. I now have a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University and teach at Columbia Business School.

Many people find it peculiar that a former proprietary trader with a background in economics would go back to school and study sociology. As I reflected upon my career at Goldman Sachs, though, what stood out was the importance of its organizational structure. That’s something sociologists pay a lot of attention to, while economists generally don’t.

So I studied sociology, and for my doctoral dissertation focused on the organizational culture of Goldman Sachs. The dissertation became a book, titled What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences (HBR Press, 2013). One of the changes I document in the book is how Goldman drifted from a focus on ethical standards of behavior to legal ones — from what one “should” do to what one “can” do.

After the book was published, Dudley got in touch. I met with him and his people, and discussed what I had learned in my study of sociology and, in particular, my in-depth study of Goldman. I made recommendations on how to improve regulation. Also, I sent him two pieces I wrote for HBR.org, one on the importance of focusing on organizational behavior and not just individuals, the other asserting that culture had more to do with the financial crisis than leverage ratios did.

One of the key conclusions I drew from my study was that to achieve sustained success and avoid firm-endangering risks, a firm like Goldman has to cultivate financial interdependence among its top employees. I wrote:

Financial interdependence is important as a self-regulator … leaders should disproportionately and jointly share in fines, settlements, and other negative consequences out of their compensation plan or their stock … meaningful restrictions on leaders’ ability to sell or hedge shares should be imposed, which can lead to better self-regulating and longer-term thinking.

Consider what actually happened at JP Morgan Chase after the gigantic “London whale” trading loss. The company’s board docked the pay of CEO Jamie Dimon by more than half, to $11.5 million from $23 million. The bank also went after the bonuses of the individuals involved. That’s something, but the bulk of the loss was of course borne by shareholders. And what happened to the compensation of the typical JP Morgan managing director? According to people that I interviewed, not much (other than losses on their JP Morgan stock, which in most cases represents only a fraction of their overall net worth). The main reason, I was told, is that JP Morgan must pay competitively or lose its most talented employees. The second reason was that most managing directors had nothing directly to do with the losses.

But these people were important parts of an organization that messed up. Plus, they’d gotten big bonuses in previous years based in part on profits they had nothing to do with. One banker that I interviewed suggested that if JP Morgan’s managing directors collectively had to pay a large portion of settlements or losses related to the misbehavior out of their bonus pool, perhaps they as a group would take stronger internal actions to prevent such behavior, reward those who acted responsibly, and kick out those who did not. Maybe they would hold their leaders to higher standards and question each other’s activities.

This in fact is how things generally worked at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms back when they were partnerships instead of publicly traded corporations. Each managing director was financially interdependent with every other. Typically, each received a fixed percentage of the overall annual bonus pool and was personally liable for other managing directors’ actions. At Goldman there was the added restriction that partners could not pull out their capital until after they retired (a far cry from the three-to-five-year vesting that bankers complain about today). The organizational regulation created by this structure was key to managing risk, and we should be thinking about ways to bring it back.

I am not suggesting the banks return to being private partnerships. But they should move away from today’s norm of discretionary annual bonuses for managing directors to, at least for a select group of top employees (at Goldman the elected “partner-managing directors” represent around 1.5 to 2% of total employees), a shared bonus pool with fixed percentages that would pay a large portion of settlements or losses related to misbehavior and have greater restrictions on selling stock. Managing directors would share in the firm’s successes, but also feel it when others incurred losses or when the firm got hit with fines. Giving bankers reason to hold each other accountable would cause them to pay much more attention to asking questions and managing risk and misbehavior. Restricting stock sales could push their thinking and actions in a more long-term direction.

In his speech Monday, New York Fed President Dudley urged some moves in this direction. Much of the compensation for high-level bank employees should be deferred for years, he said: “This would create a strong incentive for individuals to monitor the actions of their colleagues, and to call attention to any issues.” And when a bank is hit with a big fine, he argued — and this is something I don’t recall hearing before from a U.S. financial regulator — that some of the money be taken out of that deferred compensation pool:

Today, when a financial firm is assessed a large fine it is paid by the shareholders of the firm.  Although senior management may own equity in the firm, their combined ownership share is likely small, and so management bears only a small fraction of the fine. … Assume instead that a sizeable portion of the fine is now paid for out of the firm’s deferred … compensation, with only the remaining balance paid for by shareholders.  In other words, in the case of a large fine, the senior management and the material risk-takers would forfeit its performance bond.

This kind of interdependence has the potential to move the focus back to ethical standards of behavior instead of just legal ones. It might also drive away some talented employees. But if these people can’t take a longer-term approach and trust one another, should we trust them — and should they really be working at systemically important banks?

More blog posts by Steven G. Mandis

More on: Compensation, Ethics, Finance

STEVEN G. MANDIS

Steven G. Mandis is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, a recent Ph.D. graduate in sociology at Columbia, and a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, proprietary trader, and client. He is author of What Happened to Goldman Sachs (HBR Press, 2013).

Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams

by Andrew O’Connell  |   8:00 AM October 27, 2014

From the moment you start each workday, you’re subject to two basic human impulses: to excel and to conform.

If people in your immediate environment are amazing performers, you might be able to do both at once: By excelling, you fit the norm of your spectacular coworkers. But that’s rare. I’m pretty sure that in most work environments, as soon as you excel, you stop conforming. If you choose a high-performance path, you separate yourself from your coworkers. You’re not quite one of the bunch anymore. No matter how proud you are of your achievements, tell me it doesn’t hurt when you see your old group of friends coming back from a lunch that you somehow hadn’t known about.

I was thinking about this while reading research on the psychological and social effects not of being a high performer but of experiencing an extraordinary event, because the two situations share a few things in common. When something exciting and unusual happens to us, even if it’s random, we’ve excelled, in a way. We’re special. We no longer conform.

The research, by Gus Cooney and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, shows that after we go through an extraordinary experience, we assume that we’ll really enjoy telling the tale. But when we try, we often don’t feel so good about it. We feel separate. We sense that the group resents our excellent adventure. The study focused on experiences that are really only slightly extraordinary, such as watching an interesting video, but the results are pretty clear: A special experience distances us from other people, and the responses we see in our peers makes us feel excluded.

Jaclyn M. Jensen, an assistant professor in the Richard H. Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University, has put a different lens on what divides us from our coworkers and why. Along with Pankaj C. Patel of Ball State University and Jana L. Raver of Queen’s University in Canada, Jensen studied a large Midwestern field office of a U.S. financial services firm, using surveys to find out what was going on among coworkers — in the workrooms, during team meetings, in the lunchroom, and on email.

The researchers found that even in a collegial, well-behaved workplace, not only are you perceived as different if you’re a high performer; you’re also sometimes victimized. High-performing employees in this environment scored 3.37 on a 1-to-5 scale of victimization frequency, with 1 representing “never” and 5 representing “once a week or more.” They scored significantly higher on this measure of being victimized than average and poorly performing workers.

Mostly, the victimization was subtle, which is understandable, given the risks of being called out as a bully. So instead of being overtly nasty, people avoid you or withhold resources. Or they schedule important meetings when you happen to be out of town.

It probably goes without saying that there’s no rational logic to the victimization of high performers. After all, if you’re a high performer, by definition you have an outsized impact on the organization, and you help make the workgroup shine. Your victimizers’ incentive pay is probably even based (at least in part) on your achievements.

Still, what’s rational about human behavior? As Jensen pointed out to me, human beings have a pronounced tendency to punish those who violate unspoken norms. Average performers worry that you’re making them look bad. If they can bring you down a notch, they can alleviate (or at least theythink they can alleviate) their negative feelings by reminding you what an “acceptable” level of performance looks like.

But one of the more interesting aspects of Jensen’s research is that the covert victimization is spotty — it doesn’t apply to all high performers. Certain achievers are spared the worst of the victimization. These are what Jensen and her colleagues call “benevolent” high performers.

Benevolent high performers are sensitive to what’s fair for other people; they put others’ needs ahead of their own. They’re cooperative, even altruistic at times.

OK, no great news there. But the reality is that high performers too often slip into what Jensen would call “non-benevolence” without even realizing it. They start to feel entitled to their hard-won authority. Sometimes they step on or manipulate others, telling themselves that all’s fair in pursuit of the greater good. Pretty soon they’re consistently putting their own needs first. To measure this, the researchers used the surveys to place employees along a continuum of behavior, with “entitled” at one end and “benevolent” at the other. Here “entitled” means having “low equity sensitivity” — a poor sense of what’s fair to others. (As you can see from the chart, low achievers are victimized too, but the researchers found that there’s a different rationale: Weak performers are punished for jeopardizing their coworkers’ success. Benevolence doesn’t help them much.)

So if you’re a high performer who’s being excluded or cold-shouldered, maybe it’s not so much your excellence that your coworkers are reacting to but your creeping non-benevolence. If they’re not looping you into lunch invites, maybe it’s because they’re starting to sense that you’re putting your own needs ahead of theirs.

If that’s the case, you know what to do. Jensen’s research shows that practicing thoughtfulness and cooperativeness really does work to defuse your colleagues’ impulse to take you down.

Cooney et al frame the issue as black and white. They write that there’s a basic conflict between our desires to “do what other people have not yet done and to be just like everyone else,” so that if we satisfy our impulse to stand out, we can’t conform any longer, and failure to conform leads to feelings of exclusion.

Jensen’s view suggests a different way of looking at it: Even if your high performance puts you on another plane, separating you from your old bunch, that nonconformity doesn’t have to come with the punishments of rejection or sniping. If you make an effort to be altruistic, the group will reward you. If not with lunch invitations, then at least with acceptance —  a kind of benevolence of its own.

More blog posts by Andrew O’Connell

More on: Conflict, Managing yourself

ANDREW O’CONNELL

Andrew O'Connell, an editor with the Harvard Business Review Group, is the author ofStats and Curiosities from Harvard Business Review.

Stop Being So Positive

by Gabriele Oettingen  |   9:27 AM October 27, 2014

We’ve all heard a great deal about the power of positive thinking. Organizations encourage it among their employees in an effort to boost performance and engagement, and it’s a key tenet of “managing yourself” well; affirmative messages about perseverance, resilience, and vision adorn many an office wall. In the wake of the Great Recession, some businesses even hired happiness coaches to get their workers looking on the bright side. And an optimistic attitude is expected of leaders; politicians and corporate executives should always have that “think it-do it” spirit on display.

There’s just one problem, however. Research my colleagues and I have performed over the past two decades suggests that positive thinking doesn’t actually help us as much as we suppose. In fact, across dozens of peer-reviewed studies examining the effects of positive visions of the future on people pursuing various kinds of wishes — from health-related, such as losing weight, quitting smoking, or recovering quickly from surgery, to the improvement of professional or academic performance (for example, mid-level managers wishing to reduce job-related stress, graduate students looking for a job, or school children seeking to get good grades) — we’ve consistently found that people who positively fantasize make either the same or less progress in achieving attainable wishes than those who don’t.

This makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Dreaming about a successful outcome in the future is pleasurable, leaving you with a nice, warm feeling of satisfaction. But in a workplace setting, that’s counterproductive. You’re less motivated to buck up and make the strong, persistent effort that is usually required to realize challenging but feasible wishes. In some of our studies, we found that positive thinking produced measurably lower systolic blood pressure — a key measure of how energized someone is. In others, positive thinkers were as likely as participants in a control group to take easy steps toward a goal, but significantly less likely to take more cumbersome and difficult steps, such as donating meaningful amounts of their time or money.

“Okay,” you might say, “Forget positive thinking. I’m going to dwell on all the daunting challenges I face in my job.” But, unfortunately, dwelling on reality doesn’t help much either.

What does help is mental contrasting, an exercise that brings together our positive fantasy about the future with a visualization of the obstacle standing in the way. Even more beneficial is adding if-then planning that allows you to address the obstacle when it arises.

In our research, we’ve developed a mental contrasting tool called WOOP — Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Here’s how it works: Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed, switch off your devices, and close your eyes. Name a wish that is attainable or realistic for you — say, landing a new client. Then imagine for a few minutes what would happen if that wish came true, letting the images flow freely through your mind. Then change things up. Identify the main obstacle inside you that stands in the way, and imagine it for a few minutes. Now on to your plan: If faced with obstacle X, then you will take effective action Y in response.

WOOP is simple, easy, and inexpensive — so much so that you might not think it would work. After all, behavior change usually requires expensive  coaching or training programs, right? Our resultssuggest not. In a study of health care providers, we found that those who used WOOP were significantly more engaged with their work and less stressed than members of a control group. In studies of college students enrolled in a vocational business program, we found that it helped them manage their time better. And we’ve also used WOOP to help school children study more for the PSAT, do more homework, and get better grades.

Why does it work? Because the process either helps people understand their wishes are attainable, giving them energy and direction, heightening their engagement and prompting them to act; or it helps them realize their wishes are unrealistic, leading them to disengage  and freeing them up to pursue other, more promising endeavors.

Although positive thinking feels good in the moment,  it often bears a false promise. Only when it’s paired with a clear view of potential obstacles will it consistently produce desirable results.

More on positive thinking at work:

Be an Optimist Without Being a Fool

Emotional Agility

Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity

More blog posts by Gabriele Oettingen

More on: Human resources, Managing people, Managing yourself

GABRIELE OETTINGEN

Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg and the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation.