The Skills Most Entrepreneurs Lack

by Bill J. Bonnstetter  |   10:00 AM April 1, 2013

Entrepreneurs are a unique group of people, but they behave in patterns. In fact, as I recently wrote here on HBR, my firm’s research shows that most serial entrepreneurs display persuasion, leadership, personal accountability, goal orientation, and interpersonal skills. But in that same study, we also discovered a set of skills they do not possess.

To rehash our methods, we assessed subjects identified as serial entrepreneurs on what personal skills they possessed. Then they were compared to a control group of 17,000. As before, this group was assessed on their mastery of 23 practical, job-related skills. We measured whether skills were well developed, developed, moderately developed, or needed developing.

After analyzing the data, we found four distinct skills lacking in most serial entrepreneurs, three skills statistically significantly and one other also noticeably lacking. The statistical significance is derived by comparing the lowest ranking skills to the entrepreneurs’ top skills, as evaluated in the first study.

Empathy is one of the qualities serial entrepreneurs lack most. Entrepreneurs build things and solve problems for people, but according to this study they do this in hopes of a return on investment. Entrepreneurs may have high empathy on an intellectual level, in that they want to produce a product or service that will help someone. This is often, however, also tied to the entrepreneur receiving a return for their time and effort, which people with high empathy do not generally expect.

Entrepreneurial-minded people are not proficient in managing themselves and their time. In many jobs, managing personal day-to-day tasks might take away from accomplishing larger company goals, which are critical to entrepreneurs. Since entrepreneurs typically have many projects underway at one time, they simply do not have time to micromanage each. Often they need assistance managing everyday tasks and should hire or delegate them to someone who has mastered this skill.

This leads to another skill entrepreneurs lack: planning and organizing. Similar to self-management, if entrepreneurs spent time planning and organizing every task or meeting, they would never get anything else done. Once again, hiring someone to keep their calendar, organize meetings and events, keep the office de-cluttered, and help keep them on schedule can put them at an advantage.

Entrepreneurs also do not excel above the control group when it comes to analytical problem solving. They have high utilitarian motivators (potential future gains, monetary returns, new products or ideas), so their focus is often on making a quick decision. They have a sense of urgency in decision-making, and by nature they do not have time to collect and analyze the data. They see numbers as getting in their way, and they should – everyone who has told them an idea wouldn’t pan out has used data and logic to illustrate that point. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “I have a dream.” He did not say, “I have a plan and strategy.” Entrepreneurs have the vision, but need to employ people to create an executable strategy and carry it through.

Entrepreneurial-minded individuals possess a distinct set of skills that lead to great leadership and ideas. Perhaps the skills they have not mastered are equally important. With an understanding of those weaknesses, they can compensate for them by surrounding themselves with people who excel in these areas. As a leader, realizing other’s strengths and dovetailing them into your own weaknesses is key to developing a team that will carry out your grand vision and achieve goals.

More blog posts by Bill J. Bonnstetter

More on: Entrepreneurship, Managing yourself

BILL J. BONNSTETTER

Bill J. Bonnstetter is chairman of Target Training International, Ltd.

Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People

by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic  |   3:00 PM April 2, 2013

Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps — but you can’t just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best. Suppressed creativity is a malign organizational tumour. Although every organization claims to care about innovation, very few are willing to do what it takes to keep their creative people happy, or at least, productive. So what are the keys to engaging and retaining creative employees?

1. Spoil them and let them fail: Like parents who celebrate their children’s mess: show your creatives unconditional support and encourage them to do the absurd and fail. Innovation comes from uncertainty, risk, and experimentation — if you know it will work, it isn’t creative. Creative people are the natural experimenters, so let them try and test and play. Of course, there are costs associated with experimentation — but these are lower than the cost of NOT innovating.

2. Surround them by semi-boring people: The worst thing you can do to a creative employee is to force them to work with someone like them — they would compete for ideas, brainstorm eternally, or simply ignore each other. That said, you cannot surround creatives with really boring or conventional people — they would not understand them, and fall out. In line with this, recent research indicates that teams made up of diverse members who are open to taking each others’ perspective perform most creatively.

The solution, then, is to support your creatives with colleagues who are too conventional to challenge their ideas, but unconventional enough to collaborate with them. These colleagues will need to pay attention to details, mundane executional processes, and do the dirty work: Messi needs Busquets and Puyol; Ronaldo needs Alonso and Ramos.

3. Only involve them in meaningful work: Natural innovators tend to have more vision, research I’ve done indicates. They see the bigger picture and are able to understand why things matter (even if they cannot explain it). The downside to this is that they simply won’t engage in meaningless work. This all-or-nothing approach to work mirrors the bipolar temperament of creative artists, who perform well only when inspired — and inspiration is fueled by meaning. This rule can also be applied to other employees: everyone is more creative when driven by their genuine interests and a hungry mind.

As novelist John Irving said, “the reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me”. At the same time, in any organization there will be employees who are less interested in, well, doing interesting work; they are satisfied with simply clocking in and out, and are incentivized by external rewards. Companies should ensure that trivial or meaningless work is assigned to these employees.

4. Don’t pressure them: Creativity is usually enhanced by giving people more freedom and flexibility at work. If you like structure, order and predictability, you are probably not creative. However, we are all more likely to perform more creatively in spontaneous, unpredictable circumstances — because we cannot rely on our habits. Don’t constrain your creative employees; don’t force them to follow processes or structures. Let them work remotely and outside normal hours; don’t ask where they are, what they are doing or how they do it. This is the secret to managing Don Draper, and why he never went to work for a bigger competitor. This is also why so many top athletes fail to make the transition from a small to a big team, and why business founders are usually unhappy to remain in charge of their ventures once they are acquired by a bigger company.

5. Pay them poorlyDon’t overpay them: There is a longstanding debate about the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Over the past two decades, psychologists have provided compelling evidence for the so-called “over-justification” effect, namely the process whereby higher external rewards impair performance by depressing a person’s genuine or intrinsic interest. Most notably, two large-scale meta-analyses reported that, when tasks are inherently meaningful (and creative tasks are certainly in this condition), external rewards diminish engagement. This is true in both adults and children, especially when people are rewarded merely for performing a task. However, providing positive feedback (praises) does not harm intrinsic motivation, so long as the feedback is perceived as genuine. [Editor's note: This is clearly a controversial point; Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic has expanded on it in his new article, "Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research." In line with his comments in the thread below, we've also updated the header on this section to be more accurate.]

The moral of the story? The more you pay people to do what they love, the less they will love it. In the words of Czikszentmihalyi, “the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake.” More importantly, people with a talent for innovation are not driven by money. Data from our research archive, which includes over 50,000 managers from 20 different countries, indicates quite clearly that the more imaginative and inquisitive people are, the more they are driven by recognition and sheer scientific curiosity rather than commercial needs.

6. Surprise them: Few things are as aggravating to creatives as boredom. Indeed, creative people are prewired to seek constant change, even when it’s counterproductive. They take a different route to work every day, even if it gets them lost, and never repeat an order at a restaurant, even if they really liked it. Creativity is linked to higher tolerance of ambiguity. Creatives love complexity and enjoy making simple things complex rather than vice-versa. Instead of looking for the answer to a problem, they prefer to find a million answers or a million problems. It is therefore essential that you keep surprising your creative employees; failing that, you should at least let them create enough chaos to make their own lives less predictable.

7. Make them feel important: As T.S. Eliot noted, “most of the trouble in this world is caused by people wanting to be important”. And the reason is that others fail to recognize them. Fairness is not treating everyone the same, but like they deserve. Every organization has high and low potential employees, but only competent managers can identify them. If you fail to recognize your employees’ creative potential, they will go somewhere where they feel more valued.

A final caveat: even when you are able to manage your creative employees, it does not mean that you should let them manage others. In fact, natural innovators are rarely gifted with leadership skills. There is a profile for good leaders, and a profile for creative people — and they are rather different. Steve Jobs had better relationships with gadgets than people, and most Google engineers are utterly disinterested in management. One of the reasons for the rapid plateau of start-ups is that their founders tend to remain in charge. They should learn from Mark Zuckerberg who brought in Sheryl Sandberg to make up for his own leadership deficits. Research confirms the stereotypical view that corporate innovators — intrapreneurs — exhibit many of the psychopathic characteristics that prevent them from being effective leaders: they are rebellious, anti-social, self-centered and often too low in empathy to care about the welfare of others. But manage them well, and their inventions will delight us all.

Editor’s note: We updated the headline on this post April 10 to reflect that its intent is to discuss a small subset of people who happen to be both creative and difficult to work with; not to imply that all creative people are difficult. We regret the error.

More blog posts by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

More on: Creativity, Managing people

TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in personality profiling and psychometric testing. He is a Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL), Vice President of Research and Innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems, and has previously taught at the London School of Economics and New York University. He is co-founder of metaprofiling.com. His book is Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt.

Why President Kagame Runs Rwanda Like a Business

by Justin Fox  |   7:00 AM April 4, 2013

In Western business circles, Rwandan President Paul Kagame is widely regarded as a hero. The leader of the rebel army that put a halt to the massacre of the country’s Tutsi minority by its Hutu majority in 1994, Kagame has been the country’s president since 2000 (and was the vice president and de facto leader before then). He has presided over an economic and social rebirth, with Rwanda making dramatic gains in health and development indicators (watching its recent progress on Gapminder is a remarkable sight). And he has assembled a high-powered Western fan club consisting of, among others, Howard Schultz, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair.

In other circles, Kagame is not so popular. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both accuse him of heavy-handedly stifling political dissent. A United Nations report held him responsiblefor killings by a rebel group in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Britain andBelgium have cut back on aid. In a lengthy Newsweek article in January, former New York Timescorrespondent Howard French depicted Kagame as an out-of-control tyrant.

The best attempt I’ve seen at sorting out these opposed narratives was an article published last fallby Time‘s Alex Perry that weighs the scales at least modestly in Kagame’s favor. So when Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter invited HBR last month to attend a class where Kagame was the guest speaker, and talk to him and Kagame afterwards, I was curious but also a little worried about being enlisted as a Kagame salesman.

Porter is a member in good standing of the business-community Kagame fan club, and has just finished a new version of his case study (an earlier one is available here) on Rwanda’s economic transformation. It describes the country’s successful efforts to build what Porter long ago dubbed “clusters,” concentrations of industry and expertise that enable it to build competitive advantage. So far, Rwanda’s three big clusters are coffee, tea, and tourism, but Porter is convinced there are more to come.

The case study doesn’t hide the fact that Kagame has many critics, but it doesn’t dwell on political issues. Curiously, though, Kagame’s Q&A with Porter’s students ended up dwelling only on political issues. This was mostly Kagame’s fault — he was only asked two questions, one about the Congo and one about what will happen when his current (and, according to Rwanda’s constitution, last) presidential term ends in 2017, and gave such long, rambling, combative answers to both that there was no time for anything else. Kagame’s staff said I could quote anything he said in class, but it was just too much; to get a flavor of what it sounded like, see Alex Perry’s epic Q&A with Kagame from last year.

After witnessing that, I tried a different approach in my interview, mostly staying away from politics. The edited results are below:

Clearly you’ve been very interested in getting outside input from the business community. And yet you bristle at getting it from the multilateral community.

President Paul Kagame: If you want to learn anything about a country, I think you need to ask the one who wants to make investment in that country. The one who is thinking about the risks involved. They’re thinking about the return. If somebody comes to your country and says, “You know, this is a place to invest,” actually that is a good place. You see?

But if you send someone and say, “Go on, look and find for me something that is at fault,” in any place in this world somebody will come up with piles and piles to things to report about.

These human rights groups, they come with that kind of mindset. They’re critical. They even start being critical on issues that the people where they have gone don’t find a problem with.

That’s the difference between these two worlds. Therefore, we always want to ally ourselves with these ones [gestures at Porter] because that’s where the real life is. That’s where the people living in my country are going to find something to make a difference for their lives. When somebody’s coming to invest in Rwanda and finds it ripe for investment, it’s a good place. No matter what else you say about it.

This, for me, is the focus. People started asking in 2005, “Oh, President, are you going to leave when your term is up?” Then after that they say the same question. And I say, “What does it matter to you? You’re diverting me from the real issues of the day.”

[To Porter] How did you hook up with this guy? How did this partnership evolve?

Michael Porter: We met through Michael Fairbanks, who was at Monitor originally and then founded his own firm. It was more than a decade ago, probably closer to 15 years ago. The country was at a very interesting place on a very interesting track. So I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in the journey.

There’s a zillion countries that say they’re the next Silicon whatever, and then there’s lots of countries that do really basic resource exploitation. Rwanda seems to have picked interesting places in between, especially with coffee and figuring out that coffee washing was really important.

Was that something that came bottom up? Was that advice from people like Professor Porter? How did you focus on a strategy like that when so many countries struggle to focus?

Kagame: It is a combination of factors. We have seen in our country that good ideas and different initiatives, well, they come from where they come from. Sometimes they may be picked up by the leaders from the people on the ground.

For example, coffee. Rwanda used to grow coffee many years ago, and because they were getting nothing out of it they gave up on it. And we said, “You know what? We used to be good at coffee. Now the coffee has kind of disappeared, but we have an idea of how it can work for you.”

You start in one area. Then success leads to another, you know? It keeps going like that.

Porter: The principle that Rwanda illustrates so well is that building and diversifying an economy has to start with what you have. In these cases Rwanda had eroded assets, but there was a foundation and a proof point, a market test that these areas could be successful and they could be competitive.

Then the discussion was really about, “How do we move forward? How do we upgrade? How do we make things more sophisticated? What are the bottlenecks? What are the constraints?”

In the initial three areas of coffee, tea, and tourism, that effort has advanced quite far now. Rwanda is winning international awards and marketing globally, and tourism is booming.

The next areas of growth partly are ones that are connected to the first ones. I think it was very clear that Rwanda has to develop its logistics and its physical infrastructure. IT [information technology] was an area where I think the president and his team understood that this was not only good for citizens in general, and good to enable government and healthcare and education, but it also provided an area where Rwanda could build economic activity. There was no other place in the region that really had taken that space.

My biggest effort in Rwanda really has been on private sector development and organization and upgrading. Ultimately that’s what makes a country successful or unsuccessful. Government can’t do it. You have to have a vibrant private sector. It has to be competitive. It has to create good jobs. It has to be profitable.

Kagame: Right. And what people like Professor Porter brought to this situation is that critical thinking, that understanding of these global issues and how they interconnect. And for us it is also the readiness to actually test and implement. You start with one thing, it gives good results, and it becomes an incentive to keep trying.

So what do you want to be next big thing after coffee, tea, and tourism? Or are you going to wait and see how it develops?

Kagame: We are continuing with that and concentrating on the progress we’re making. But we’ve also discovered mining in Rwanda. We have more resources than we knew we had. So that’s an area that brings in money. And the services industry has been critical. In fact, it is among the leaders contributing to our GDP growth, with huge potential.

All of these need powering. We need energy. So we are doing everything 24 hours a day thinking about how to increase our energy capacity.

Of course, building human capacity is critical. We keep sending our people to institutions of higher learning in the sciences, engineering, and management. It’s the focus because we want our people to understand how the new world works.

Porter: I think the IT area and financial services have now risen to the point that they represent a genuine opportunity. Broadband access is really quite unique for a country at this stage of development. And IT is now starting to interface with healthcare and education, and is powering financial services.

Here’s a country where a critical part of the strategy was bringing the citizens together and giving them a sense that they are part of the solution, part of a nation, that they are Rwandans, not members of an ethnic group. Given the history, I think task number one was nation building and reconciliation.

Kagame: Sometimes direct and simple conversations make a difference. I go to these rural areas and meet people and ask them, “How many of you own small businesses? Or have shops?” Many of them put up their hands, and I ask, “When somebody walks into your shop and is looking for soap or sugar or whatever, do you first ask them whether they are Catholics or Hutus or Tutsis? What does it matter to you? You want a customer, and that’s all you want.”

People grasp it very quickly. They start valuing each other. They say, “Oh, I need him for what I don’t have and he needs me for what he doesn’t have.” That’s creating an awareness in society like never before: Yes, we need each other. We are more similar than different. It helps the society to move forward.

And it’s your sense that business and economic activity do that?

Kagame: I would rank it number one. The rest will follow. At the end of the day we’re just human beings. You want food and you want it for your family. Plus, you really need dignity, to be able to do something on your own and benefit from it. And there’s nothing that does that better than being able to do business.

Porter: Or have a good job. Or make your farm more productive. These basic truths have become more understood in Rwanda. I give the president and his team a lot of credit for creating that atmosphere.

I also think that Rwanda is unique, in my experience, in government being able to actually get things done. In most countries, things don’t get done. Roads don’t get built on time. Schools don’t get established. Teachers don’t get trained. Vocational training doesn’t work. And I think Rwanda, partly out of scarcity of resources and partly out of good leadership, has been able to actually implement and execute.

The government is very disciplined, very focused on plans. Very focused on accountability. There’s an annual kind of national retreat of all the leaders in the country who really think about where we are, where we’ve been, where we need to go.

It sounds like it’s run like a corporation.

Porter: It’s really run much more rationally than most governments. Again, I think that’s partly possible because of the history.

Kagame: Yes. It’s like you’re thrown in a swimming pool and you are trying to learn how to swim on the spot and get yourself out of trouble.

Again, it’s an issue of incentivizing the people to act in a certain way. Even by using some of the simple conversations I was talking about. For example, when aid has been suspended or cut, you have to explain what has happened, and how and why it has happened.

Then you also challenge them, saying, “But for how long are we really going to depend on handouts? When someone has decided to take it away, what happens to you? It is better to start focusing on what we can do for ourselves so we don’t always find ourselves stranded.”
And you know, you see people lighting up. That is the moment when you bring in ideas, initiatives, some of the things that can work on the ground. They just grab it so quickly.

We used to have people who would be fed by World Food Program and so on. That’s the situation we inherited. We said, “No, we need to feed ourselves. We can feed ourselves. This is how to do it because one day the World Food Program won’t show up.” In just three years from that time, we have had surpluses all the time.

Porter: There’s some just marvelous data now in terms of just how much progress has been made, in education and healthcare and FDI and all kinds of areas. It seemed impossible a decade ago, but it’s happening and it’s reinforcing itself.

And it’s all because of a certain pragmatic, forward-looking, we-have-to-figure-this-out mindset. That philosophy, that mindset really does have to come from the top but I think it’s going to sustain itself.

Kagame: Right. Leadership, combined with the sense people have of how they link up with the leadership. Working together for a common goal that is theirs.

Porter: It’s a very rich story about management and leadership and strategy and communication. And I think this is not a politics story. At the core is the private sector of economy — self-sufficiency, running a business well. It’s fascinating to see that play itself out.

Photo of Porter and Kagame by Jimmy Ushkurnis

More blog posts by Justin Fox

More on: Economy, Global business, Leadership

JUSTIN FOX

Justin Fox is Executive Editor, New York, of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of The Myth of the Rational Market. Follow him on Twitter @foxjust.

Don't Let Your Strengths Become Your Weaknesses

by Robert B. Kaiser and Robert E. Kaplan  |   12:00 PM April 4, 2013

Perhaps the biggest fad to sweep through management in the last decade was the strengths movement. Its message was that you should build on natural talent to maximize strengths rather than try to improve weaknesses. It was the brainchild of Donald Clifton, the late grandfather of Positive Psychology, but is associated in the popular culture with Marcus Buckingham, Clifton’s coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001).

Like any successful movement, the strengths movement drove a single issue and inevitably left out a lot. Although several important things got overlooked, we want to call attention to a very real danger:Strengths can become weaknesses when overused.

Our new book, Fear Your Strengths (2013), is a cautionary tale based on 50 years of combined experience assessing thousands of leaders and coaching hundreds of executives. We’ve seen virtually every strength taken too far: confidence to the point of hubris, and humility to the point of diminishing oneself. We’ve seen vision drift into aimless dreaming, and focus narrow down to tunnel vision. Show us a strength and we’ll give you an example where its overuse has compromised performance and probably even derailed a career.

We’ve studied the extent of the problem with an innovative assessment tool, the Leadership Versatility Index. The tool uses the 360 method of gathering ratings from bosses, peers, and subordinates, but instead of the typical five-point rating scale that assumes “more is better” it has a unique scale that ranges from “too little” to “the right amount” to “too much.” Coworkers can therefore indicate if a manager overdoes it on four dimensions of behavior: forceful, enabling, strategic, and operational. Most executives are rated “too much” on at least one of these dimensions [PDF].

Further, the more pronounced your natural talent and the stronger your strengths, the graver the risk of taking them to counterproductive extremes. In one study, we compared coworker ratings on the Leadership Versatility Index to leaders’ strengths as identified by the Clifton StrengthsFinder, a questionnaire that managers fill out themselves to identify their natural talent. There was a clear correlation between having talent in certain areas and overdoing behaviors associated with those talents. For instance, leaders whose StrengthsFinder results indicated such talents as “Achiever,” “Activator,” or “Command” were more often rated as doing “too much” forceful leadership. Similarly, those who had the talents “Developer,” “Harmony,” or “Includer” were more often rated as doing “too much” enabling leadership. Overall, leaders were five times more likely to overdo behaviors related to their areas of natural talent than areas in which they were less gifted.

Taking these strengths too far has consequences. Across thousands of managers ranging from middle management to CEOs and spanning the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, we find a curvilinear relationship between leader behavior and employee engagement, team productivity, and effectiveness. In every case, these outcomes are lower for managers rated “too little” on the leader behaviors, peak for those rated “the right amount,” and drop back down for those rated “too much.”Overdoing it is just as ineffective as underdoing it.

One of the more counterintuitive things we have discovered is that not only do many leaders not know what their strengths are, but they also downplay and deflect feedback about their strengths. It takes extra effort to get the strengths to sink in, but doing so is prerequisite to fine-tuning how you use them. Fine-tuning is an art that requires an exquisite blend of both self-awareness and situational awareness.

Be aware of yourself. To handle the challenges that come your way, you must be able to read and respond adeptly. This requires knowing your default tendencies — for instance if you are more achievement-oriented and commanding, then you may be biased to respond too forcefully. Self-awareness allows you to respond mindfully to the needs before you, rather than out of habit. As one executive exclaimed upon making the connection, “I don’t have to give up my fastball; I just don’t have to throw it all the time!”

Be aware of the situation. We find it helpful for leaders to think of adjusting their strengths like a volume control [PDF]. The trick is to get the setting just right for the situation — from soft music for a quiet, intimate exchange, to a louder and lively level for a dance party. Knowing how much passion to put in a speech, how seriously to stress a concern, how long to let a discussion go on, how deep to get into the details, how fast to drive a change initiative — all of this requires a deft touch, equal parts knowing your own strength and knowing your audience.

It is neglectful if not irresponsible to emphasize strengths without warning leaders that the stronger the strength, the greater the danger of taking it too far. Toning down overused strengths requires a different approach from the skill development needed to improve upon a weakness, where the challenge is adding to a repertoire with basic skill building. Getting a strength under control is about refining a skill you already have. It requires learning to be more selective about what situations call for that strength and calibrating how much is enough, versus too much.

More blog posts by Robert B. Kaiser and Robert E. Kaplan

More on: Leadership, Managing yourself

ROBERT B. KAISER AND ROBERT E. KAPLAN

Rob Kaiser is president of Kaiser Leadership Solutions. Bob Kaplan is founding partner of Kaplan DeVries Inc. They are the authors of HBR article Stop Overdoing Your Strengths.

You're Probably Wrong About How Others Really See You

by Dorie Clark  |   10:00 AM April 5, 2013

You may think you already know how others view you — as a skilled communicator, or an incisive numbers guy, or a manager who always brings out the best in her team. But then again, you might be surprised. One modest, self-deprecating executive was shocked to learn, after engaging an executive coach who examined his professional relationships, that his habit of interrupting people led his colleagues to perceive him as arrogant and haughty — almost the exactly opposite of the truth.

Particularly for high-ranking executives, it can be hard to recognize how you’re really viewed by others. For one thing, employees who don’t want to jeopardize their standing may conceal any negative perceptions and “put on a happy face”; for another, power has been shown to dramatically distort leaders’ self-awareness. “Studies of the effect of power on the power holder consistently find that power produces overconfidence and risk taking, insensitivity to others, stereotyping, and a tendency to see other people as a means to the power holder’s gratification,” Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in his book, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t.

Yet when it comes to your personal brand — your professional reputation — it’s not about how you view yourself. What matters is how the world sees you. “If three people tell you you’re a horse, buy a saddle,” says angel investor Judy Robinett. In other words, listen to what the outside world is telling you, because they’re probably right. So how can professionals get that honest feedback, especially if you don’t have access to an executive coach?

Seek out patterns in your paper trail. If you have access to copies of past performance reviews or recommendations letters that others have written for you, you can scour the written record for patterns. Of course everyone will have a slightly different take. But if you see multiple mentions of a particular skill set (“Lisa is a brilliant public speaker”) or shortcoming (“Martin has a hard time accepting feedback”), you should take heed.

Examine your online presence. Next, search for yourself online. What comes up first? Is it what you expected? Is it what you’d like to convey to the world? What would a person who didn’t know you think? If there are any damaging or erroneous links, it’s better to find out now (so you can take action), rather than having a potential client or employer discover them.

Conduct your own “360 interviews.” This is the first step most executive coaches would take — and if you don’t have a coach, you can do it for yourself. Invite trusted colleagues, your boss, and your employees out for coffee, tell them you’re working to raise the bar professionally, and ask for their honest feedback: What do you do well? Where could you grow? What three words would they use to describe you? Their perspective is likely to be revealing.

Hold your own focus group. In my book Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, I profile a woman named Mary Skelton Roberts who — searching for more clarity in her professional life — held a focus group with a mix of her friends and colleagues. Mary sat back and listened for several hours as the participants shared their thoughts about her strengths, abilities, and areas they’d like to see her explore (the session was moderated by a friend, and Mary wasn’t allowed to respond — only to ask clarifying questions). Other people “almost have a bird’s eye view, and they can see your life in ways you may not be able to, because you’re involved in day-to-day living,” she told me. The focus group “took me to the next level in terms of my professional development.”

We simply know too much about ourselves; we can’t separate the signal from the noise enough to grasp how the outside world really sees us. But by retracing the paper trail of what’s been written about us and asking our colleagues for their honest opinions, there’s a lot we can learn about how we’re viewed by others. And if what we discover doesn’t match up to how we’d like to be seen — like the executive whose habit of interrupting others was derailing his career — we can finally take action to fix it.

More blog posts by Dorie Clark

More on: Career planning, Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness

DORIE CLARK

Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant and speaker for clients such as Google, Yale University, Microsoft, and the World Bank. She is an Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. Follow her on Twitter at @dorieclark.

New Books from HBR Press for April

by Kevin Evers  |   2:00 PM April 16, 2013

Check out these new and forthcoming books from HBR Press:

Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future
by Dorie Clark

Are you where you want to be professionally? Whether you want to advance faster at your present company, change jobs, or make the jump to a new field entirely, the goal is clear: to build a career that thrives on your unique passions and talents. But to achieve this in today’s competitive job market, it’s almost certain that at some point you’ll need to reinvent yourself professionally.Reinventing You shows how to think big about your professional goals, take control of your career, build a reputation that opens doors for you, and finally live the life you want.

Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence
by Muriel Maignan Wilkins and Amy Jen Su

People are drawn to and influenced by leaders who communicate authentically, connect easily with people, and have immediate impact. So how do you become one of them? How can you learn to “own the room”? This book will help you develop your leadership presence. Filled with real-life stories and examples, Own the Room demystifies the concept of presence and gives you the tools you need to identify and embrace your unique leadership voice &#8212 and have a greater impact on the world around you.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Collaboration
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Communication
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing
HBR’s 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know. We’ve sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever-changing business environment.

Classic ideas, enduring advice, the best thinkers: HBR’s 10 Must Reads. Check out the newest books in the series.

More blog posts by Kevin Evers

KEVIN EVERS

Kevin Evers is an editorial coordinator at Harvard Business Review Press.

Good Conflict Makes a Good Board

by Solange Charas  |   1:00 PM May 7, 2013

Anyone who has served on a board of directors can appreciate that each board has its own characteristic rhythm, social rules and level of effectiveness. I’ve been advising boards and management teams for 25 years as a consultant and C-Suite executive, and have served on several corporate boards, and can attest that it’s long been a puzzle to me what exactly makes a board effective.

To try to answer the question, I went back to school. As part of my PhD research, I interviewed directors at 22 small- to medium-sized publicly traded companies about board practices and dynamics. Half the companies had received above-average rankings for governance quality fromGovernance Metrics International; half had received below-average rankings.

What I found was that there is something powerful about the way directors speak to one another, especially when they disagree. My interviews revealed two kinds of boardroom conflict — cognitive and affective — with very different implications for board performance.

• Cognitive conflict is task-oriented, with a focus on how to get things done to achieve optimal results. Cognitive conflict can sound like: “I don’t think your idea will work, maybe we need to look at it a different way…have you thought of this?” This kind of conflict is essential in creating value as it stimulates conversation around topics, addresses ideas or points of view with an opening for directors to offer something creative, innovative and positive.
• Affective conflict, conversely, is emotionally oriented and focused on personal differences or shortcomings between people. Affective conflict can sound like: “I don’t think you have good ideas and you don’t understand the issue.” This kind of conflict destroys any chance of creating value as it is a personal attack on the capabilities and perspective of the individual director, inhibiting individuals from participating in dialogue.

Boards that recognized affective conflict and addressed it quickly were associated with high governance quality, whereas boards that were less willing to address affective conflict or ignoring it altogether were associated with low governance quality. High governance ratings were also more common for boards that had engaged directors generating high levels of cognitive conflict.

Possibly associated with this are attrition rates — higher on boards that didn’t address affective conflict, at 24% attrition, compared with 13% attrition on boards that actively address affective conflict. Given that boards have infrequent face-to-face meetings, stability is critical for effective board dynamics.

Two distinct recruiting sources

There also appeared to be a relationship between board governance quality and prior personal relationships of directors. High-governance boards cast a wide net when recruiting directors, and often recruit people with whom the other directors did not have a prior relationship. The study showed close to 70% of high-governance-board directors were “strangers” when they joined their board, while only 25% of directors recruited to low-governance boards were unknown quantities.

These different recruiting approaches appeared to affect boardroom dynamics. When directors had a prior relationship with a newly-recruited director, they were driven by their desire to maintain a congenial relationship — to not “rock the boat” of their extra-board relationship by addressing affective conflict in the boardroom. Conversely, in high-governance-rated boards, where directors only have the boardroom as the context of their relationship, it became even more important to address affective conflict to make sure that the work environment be productive. Directors were not willing to sweep issues under the carpet for the sake of keeping peace when the health of the company was at stake, and tackled affective conflict head-on.

What does this teach us about creating good boards? Recruit the best people you can by casting a wide net beyond your personal network. Screen directors not just for professional capital, but also for behavioral characteristics and “fit” to your boardroom culture. Address affective conflict as soon as it arises — easier done if you don’t fear the consequence of damaging a prior relationship. Don’t be afraid of cognitive conflict — embrace it as a source of innovation and creativity in problem solving.

More blog posts by Solange Charas

More on: Boards, Communication, Conflict

SOLANGE CHARAS

Solange Charas, President of Charas Consulting, Inc., provides strategic HR advice to boards, C-suite executives and the M&A community.

Few Executives Are Self-Aware, But Women Have the Edge

by John Baldoni  |   9:00 AM May 9, 2013

So is the best man for the job a woman?

Research by Hay Group, culled from its 17,000-person behavioral competency database in 2012,finds that when it comes to empathy, influence, and the ability to manage conflicts in the executive level, women show more skill than men. Specifically, women are more likely to show empathy as a strength, demonstrate strong ability in conflict management, show skills in influence, and have a sense of self-awareness.

“Women often face barriers throughout their careers that require them to develop these skills to excel and advance in their organizations,” says Ruth Malloy, global managing director for leadership and talent at Hay Group. Malloy adds that the shift from hierarchy where individual achievement matters to matrix organizations where teamwork counts put a premium on the skills that women have mastered.

“Influence and conflict management are not necessarily inborn, these competencies more often are learned,” Malloy added in an email interview. Research by Hay Group found that “women scored higher on these matrix competencies compared to their male counterparts. My hypothesis is that these women who broke the glass ceiling as a population acquired and demonstrated more of these competencies to overcome obstacles to succeed.”

“I think women leaders do have to manage the female stereotype of being more relationship focused, softer or nicer,” says Malloy. “Behaviors associated with strong leadership tend to be more consistent with the masculine stereotype.”

“Women face the double-bind when taking on leadership positions. If their behavior is too feminine they are seen as too soft and incompetent, however if their behavior is too masculine they are perceived negatively.”

So why, despite these strengths, don’t we see more women in senior management? The reasons are complicated, even for ambitious, highly skilled women. One reason may be that successful women managers must demonstrate more leadership skills. According to Malloy, “Research the Hay Group conduced on outstanding women leaders found that they navigate this double-bind by using a combination of both stereotypically masculine leadership styles (e.g., being Authoritative or Visionary) and feminine leadership styles (e.g., being more Affiliative or Participative).” Men by contrast only need to demonstrate the “masculine” leadership styles.

Another challenge is how these top job openings are framed. When the role is framed less as an opportunity to demonstrate acquired expertise and more as a role that would give a high potential candidate a chance to grow and learn, “women and other diverse constituencies are more likely to be recognized” as suitable for promotion to senior positions. That’s assuming, though, that their skills and strengths have been recognized. And that’s the third obstacle: recognition for strong interpersonal skills is not straightforward. As Malloy says, “these [interpersonal] competencies are also more challenging to demonstrate.”

Finally, the single area where both female and male managers need to improve is in self-awareness. While women did outperform men on that metric, notice how low the rates for both genders are — under 20%. “If you think about most people in our day-to-day lives we tend to run on auto-pilot,” says Malloy. “We often are not mindful about our impact on others or how and where we spend our time. We can easily get caught up in the task or the day-to-day distractions” and pay less attention to ourselves and effect we may have on others.

“Improving self-awareness requires getting some source of credible feedback, and being open to that feedback,” she advises. “Find a trusted colleague or someone from your personal life who can give you constructive feedback in real-time.”

Malloy continues, “Developing self-awareness also requires reflection… Schedule time every week on your calendar to reflect on what went well, what did not, and how could you react differently in the future.”

Self-awareness is essential to effective leadership. A leader must know herself — her abilities, her shortcomings, and her opportunities for growth in order to be able to provide direction, guidance and inspiration to others.

Leadership demands strong interpersonal skills. And while research may show that women leaders have the edge in certain areas, the lesson I take from this study is that both men and women have work to do in order to become the leaders their followers need.

More blog posts by John Baldoni

More on: Gender, Leadership

JOHN BALDONI

John Baldoni is chair of the leadership development practice at N2Growth, a global leadership consultancy. His newest book is The Leader’s Pocket Guide: 101 Indispensable Tools, Tips and Techniques for Any Situation.

How and Why to Be a Leader (Not a Wannabe)

by Umair Haque  |   12:00 PM July 8, 2013

We need a new generation of leaders. And we need it now.

We’re in the midst of a Great Dereliction — a historic failure of leadership, precisely when we need it most. Hence it’s difficult, looking around, to even remember what leadership is. We’re surrounded by people who are expert at winning — elections, deals, titles, bonuses, bailouts, profit. And often, we’re told: they’re the ones we should look up to — because it’s the spoils and loot that really matter.

But you know and I know: mere winners are not true leaders — not just because gaming broken systems is nothing but an empty charade of living; but because life is not a game. It isn’t about what you have, and how much — but what you do, and why — if you’re to live a life that matters.

Leadership — true leadership —is a lost art. Leaders lead us not to a place — but to a different kind of destination: to our better, truer selves. It is an act of love in the face of an uncertain world.

Perhaps, then, that’s why there’s so little leadership around: because we’re afraid to even say the word love — let alone to feel it, weigh it, measure it, allow it, admit it, believe it, and so be transformed by it.

Wannabes — who I’ll contrast leaders with in this essay — are literally just that: wannabes. They want to be who leaders are, but cannot: they want the benefits of leadership, without the price; they want the respect, dignity, and title of leadership, without leading people to lives that matter; they want the love leaders earn, act by painful act, without, in return, having the courage, humility, and wisdom to love.

When you think about chiefs, presidents, and prime ministers that way, I’d suggest that most of our so-called leaders are wannabes: those who want to be seen as leaders, without leading us anywhere but into stagnation, decline, fracture, fear, apathy, and comfortable, cheap pleasures that numb us to it all. Leaders — true leaders, those worthy of the word — do the very opposite: they lead us to truth, worth, nobility, wonder, imagination, joy, heartbreak, challenge, rebellion, meaning. Through love, they lead us to lives that matter. Wannabes impoverish us. Leaders enrich us.

So here are my six ways to start being a (real) leader — and stop being just another wannabe.

Obey — or revolt? Are you responding to incentives — or reshaping them? Here’s the simplest difference between leaders and wannabes. Wannabes respond dully, predictably, neatly, to “incentives,” like good little rational robots. They do it for the money and end up stifled by the very lives they choose. Leaders play a very different role. They don’t just dully, robotically “respond” to “incentives” — their job is a tiny bit of revolution. And so they must reshape incentives, instead of merely responding to them. They have principles they hold dearer than next year’s bonus — and so they think bigger and truer than merely about what they’re “incentivized” to do. If you’re easily bought off from what you really hold dear with a slightly bigger bonus, here’s the plain fact: you’re not a true leader.

Conform — or rebel? Are you breaking the rules or following them? The rules are there for a reason: to stifle deviation, preserve the status quo, and bring the outliers right back down to the average. That’s a wonderful idea if you’re running a factory churning out widgets — but it’s a terrible notion if you’re trying to do anything else. And so leaders must shatter the status quo by breaking the rules, leading by example,= so that followers know the rules not just can, but must be broken. If you’re nail-bitingly following the rules, here’s the score: you’re not a true leader.

Value — or values? Why do people follow true leaders? Because leaders promise to take them on worthwhile journeys. The wannabe creates “value” for shareholders, for clients, for “consumers”. But the leader creates what’s more true, more enduring, more resonant: lives of real human worth. And they must do so by evoking in people values that matter, not merely “value” which is worthless. Which would you choose? In a heartbeat, most people choose the latter, because value without values is what reality TV is to a great book: empty, vacant, narrow, arid. If you’re creating value — without setting values — you’re not a leader: you’re just a wannabe.

Vision — or truth? The wannabe sets a vision. With grandiloquent gesture and magnificent panorama, the vision glitters. The leader has a harder task: to tell the truth, as plain as day, as obvious as dawn, as sure as sunrise, as inescapable as midnight. Vision is nice, and many think that a Grand Vision is what inspires people. They’re wrong. If you really want to inspire people, tell them the truth: there’s nothing that sets people free like the truth. The leader tells the truth because his fundamental task is that of elevation: to bring forth in people their better selves. And while we can climb towards a Grand Vision, it’s also true that the very act of perpetually climbing may be what imprisons us in lives we don’t really want (hi, Madison Ave, Wall St, and Silicon Valley). Truth is what elevates us; what opens us up to possibility; what produces in us the sense that we must become who were meant to be if we are to live worthy lives — and one of the surest tests of whether you’re a true leader is whether you’re merely (yawn, shrug, eyeroll) slickly selling a Grand Vision, or, instead, helping bring people a little closer to the truth. And if you have to ask what “truth” is (newsflash: climate change is real, the global economy is still borked, greed isn’t good, bankers shouldn’t earn a billion times what teachers do, CEOs shouldn’t get private jets for life for running companies into the ground, the sky really is blue) — guess what? You’re definitely not a leader.

Archery — or architecture? Wannabes are something like metric-maximizing robots. Given a set of numbers they must “hit,” they beaver away trying to hit them. The leader knows their job is very different: not merely to maximize existing metrics, which are often part of the problem (hi, GDP, shareholder value), but to reimagine them. The leader’s job is, fundamentally, not merely to “hit a target” — but to redesign the playing field. It’s architecture, not mere archery. If you’re hitting a target, you’re not a leader. You’re just another performer, in an increasingly meaningless game.

love — or Love. Many of us, it’s true, choose jobs we “love” over those we don’t, readily sacrificing a few bucks here and there in the process. But this isn’t love as much as it is enjoyment. Love — true love, the real thing, big-L Love — is every bit as much painful as it is pleasant. It transforms us. And that is the surest hallmark of a true leader. They have a thirst not merely for love — but to love; a thirst that cannot be slaked merely through accomplishments, prizes, or honors. It can only, only be slaked through transformation; and that is why true leaders must, despite the price, through the pain, into the heart of very heartbreak itself, lead.

And yet.

We’re afraid, you and I, of this word: love. Afraid of love because love is the most dangerously explosive substance the world has ever known, will ever know, and can ever know. Love is what frees the enslaved and enslaves the free. Because love, finally, is all: all we have, when we face our final moments, and come to know that life, at last, must have been greater than us if we are to feel as if it has mattered.

The old men say: children, you must never, ever believe in love. Love is heresy. Believe in our machines. Believe in operation and calculation. Place your faith in being their instruments. Our perfect machines will bring you perfection.

I believe lives as cold as steel will only yield a world as cruel as ice. I believe cool rationality and perfect calculation can take us only a tiny distance towards the heart of what is good, true, and timelessly noble about life. Because there is no calculus of love. There is no equation for greatness. There is no algorithm for imagination, virtue, and purpose.

Even a perfect machine is just a machine.

If we are to lead one another, we will need the heresy of love. We must shout at yesterday in the language of love if we are to lead one another. Not just to tomorrow, but to a worthier destination: that which we find in one another.

It’s often said that leaders “inspire”. But that’s only half the story. Leaders inspire us because they bring out the best in us. They evoke in us our fuller, better, truer, nobler selves. And that is why we love them — not merely because they paint portraits of a better lives, but because they impel us to be the creators of our own.

More blog posts by Umair Haque

More on: Leadership

UMAIR HAQUE

Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world's most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Follow him on twitter @umairh.