How to Be Mindful in an 'Unmanageable' World

by Tony Schwartz  |   2:00 PM February 27, 2013

“I believe this is a very special moment in history, a kind of perfect storm. There is a growing recognition — to borrow language from AA — that our world has become unmanageable.” Those words have been reverberating in my head ever since Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, said them over the weekend during the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco. She wasintroducing an iPhone app called “GPS for the Soul,” which is designed to measure heart rate variability as a window into your stress level at any given moment during the day.

It seemed fitting to me that Arianna described the challenges so many of us face in our work — and in our lives more broadly — by using the language of addiction. Her words rang especially true because I happen in the midst of reading a book by Bryan Robinson titled “Chained to the Desk: A Guidebook for Workaholics.”

The addiction of our times is digital connection, instant gratification, and the cheap adrenalin high of constant busyness. The heartening news is that more and more leaders in big companies are beginning to recognize the insidious costs of moving so relentlessly and at such high speeds.

Wisdom 2.0 focused on technology — a primary driver of the increasing unmanageability of our lives. The conference was launched three years ago as a meeting between people from the meditation community and the tech world in Silicon Valley to discuss how to use technology more wisely.

Paradoxically, the most important solution I heard is to use technology less frequently, and more intentionally. Or, as Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, put it in her talk: “There need to be places in our lives and in our organizations that are device-free zones.”

Just below the surface of our shared compulsion to do ever more, ever faster, is a deep hunger to do less, more slowly. I saw proof of that a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote an article for The New York Times titled “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive.” It focused on the growing scientific evidence that when we build in more time for sleep, naps, breaks, and vacations, we become not just healthier and happier, but also more productive. The piece prompted an avalanche of response, much of it poignantly describing the sense of overwhelm people are feeling at work.

The search to find ways to deal with these issues was evident at Wisdom 2.0. Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco, described in compelling detail the behaviors she’s built into her life to take her out of rapid-fire analytical, “doing” mode. She meditates for 20 minutes every day. On the weekends, she paints and takes photographs. Even when she tweets, she often does so in haikus — as a way to put herself in a more creative mode.

Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, talked about how compassion has become a centerpiece of his management style. More specifically, he described how compassion requires slowing down and taking the time to truly listen to others. It means understanding where they’re coming from, caring about the struggles they’re facing, and the baggage they’re carrying.

Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, talked about the harrowing experience he went through when Ford nearly declared bankruptcy several years ago. Taking time to meditate each day was critical. “The practice of mindfulness kept me going during the darkest days,” he said. He also took time each morning to “set an intention” to deal with whatever arose that day with a sense of compassion and kindness.

In my own life, I’ve found that both my productivity and my sense of well-being depend more than ever on building more time into the day to renew, reflect, and connect with others. Two such experiences at Wisdom 2.0 had to do with taking time to get away from the activity of the conference itself. The first was wandering over to a chill out room sponsored by Google, lying down on a mat next to several others doing the same thing, and taking a nap. When I got up 45 minutes later, I felt refreshed and able to fully reengage in the conference.

My second revelatory experience was a lunch I shared with two new friends who were also attending the conference. We ended up spending more than two hours together, free of digital interruptions, just talking, reflecting, laughing, and hanging out. How often do most of us take the time to truly connect with work colleagues — much less friends — and how much richer are we for it when we do return to our work?

Speed, distraction, and instant gratification are the enemies of nearly everything that matters most in our lives. Creating long-term value — for ourselves and for others — requires more authentic connection, reflection, and the courage to delay immediate gratification. That’s wisdom in action.

More blog posts by Tony Schwartz

More on: Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness, Stress

TONY SCHWARTZ

Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartz and Twitter.com/Energy_Project.

Stop Telling Your Employees What to Do

by Jordan Cohen  |   9:00 AM April 26, 2013

I will never forget the experiences of getting my first suit. I was 12 years old and my father took me to a department store on 18th street in New York City. I was very excited; this was the transition to feeling grown up. A real milestone. I would have a suit like all the grown men I knew.

At the store, we headed straight downstairs to the boys department and I tried on several cream-colored suits (very mid-1970s Saturday Night Fever). Once we found the right one, the tailor had me stand on a box in front of a mirror. He then went to work pinning and marking for the alteration. When he finished he stepped back, and he and my father looked at the suit pinned on me. In the mirror, I saw my father point to the back and shoulder of the jacket and sleeve and then shake his head no. The tailor went back to work, re-pinning and re-marking. Once again, my father shook his head no. So the tailor added padding under my shoulder. Still, my father shook his head. After about 30 minutes of back-and-forth, finally my father nodded and my cream colored, three-piece suit with bell bottom pants went off for alteration.

For me, the experience was long and boring and not as exciting as I anticipated. On the car ride home I asked my father why he didn’t just tell the tailor what to do (my father was a clothing manufacturer). He explained, “if I told the tailor what to do, he would have done exactly what I had requested — but then if the jacket didn’t fit properly, he would have said, ‘I did what you told me to do’. On the other hand, if I told him what we are trying to achieve (for the jacket to lay flat with no pulling in the back, shoulder, or sleeve) he could be responsible for the outcome I described.”

This lesson of trusting the skill and experience of the professional has stayed with me. In my experience, this idea of describing the outcome and letting a skilled professional determine how best to get there often results in a more committed worker, higher quality work, and a proud employee. This is also a very effective approach in getting the most out of knowledge workers. Describe the outcome you are trying to achieve, be clear on the requirements, and preserve the worker’s autonomy. If the worker needs help, she will ask for it.

It turns out there is a scientific reason why employees are less effective when tasks are dictated. Amy Arnsten, a neuroscience professor at Yale University, studies the importance of feeling in control. Her studies can be applied to employee autonomy in managing a team. In an interview at her Yale Laboratory, Arnsten explained that when people lose their sense of control, such as when tasks are dictated to them, the brain’s emotional response center can actually cause a decrease in cognitive functioning. This perception of not being in control, whether real or imagined, would presumably lead to a drop in productivity. If a manager describes the long-term outcome he wants, rather than dictating specific actions, the employee can decide how to arrive there and preserve his perceived sense of control, cognitive function, and ultimately improve his productivity.

This neuroscience behind leadership came to a head when I was working with an aggressive start-up operation. Like many start-ups, the founder was hard charging, charismatic, and had big aspirations and a compelling offering, which afforded him early success and an expansion in operations. In preparation for the expansion, the founder told his team that they needed to win more business. In turn, the team started accepting all types of requests from new and existing customers and ultimately overburdened the operation with a volume and types of requests they could not fulfill. Some team members were starting to get frustrated if a customer they had personally said “yes” to didn’t get their request fulfilled. When this happened, other team members did not understand the issue — they had been told to win more business and they were delivering on what was asked of them.

What the leader failed to realize is that he was working with skilled and experienced professionals. The team did not need to be told what to do, but merely shown the organization’s direction. To resolve this issue, the team jointly developed a mission and vision statement that identified what requests were in scope and which were not. By showing the team the purpose of the organization they were able to effectively execute the expansion of the operation resulting in increased volumes, satisfied customers and stronger financial performance.

The knee-jerk reaction of many managers to a performance challenge is to “tighten the screws” and get involved in how and when a task is done. Both practical experience and now scientific evidence tell us often a better approach is to protect the autonomy of the worker and provide high level direction.

More blog posts by Jordan Cohen

More on: Managing people

JORDAN COHEN

Jordan Cohen is a productivity expert and the recipient of the 2010 grand prize from the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) for his previous work at Pfizer.

4 Ways to Retain Gen Xers

by Sylvia Ann Hewlett  |   10:00 AM September 24, 2014

The economy’s slow but steady improvement should be good news. But employers may find a cloud lurking behind the sunny forecast: They are at risk of losing some of their most valuable talent — and they may not even realize it.

These aren’t the usual suspects. Instead of the 50-something Baby Boomers and the Millennials in their late 20s and early 30s, I’m talking about Generation X, demography’s long-neglected “middle child.” Numbering just 46 million in the United States, Gen X is small compared to the 78 million Boomers and 70 million Millennials. Yet proportionate to their size, Generation X may be the cohort with the most clout.

Now in their late 30s and 40s, Xers make up the bench strength for management. They are the skill bearers and knowledge experts corporations will rely on to gain competitive advantage in the coming decades. Approaching or already in the prime of their lives and careers, they are prepared and poised for leadership.

Yet their career progress has been blocked by Boomers who are postponing retirement and threatened by impatient Millennials eager to leapfrog them. They’re frustrated – and, having played it safe during the years of economic uncertainty, are now facing what may be their last chance to grab for the golden ring.

A 2011 survey from the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) showed that 37% of Gen Xers have “one foot out the door” and were looking to leave their current employers within three years. Ding, ding, ding. The clock is ticking. The U.S. Labor Department’s August Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, popularly known as “the quit rate” because it measures the number of people voluntarily leaving their jobs, is the highest since June 2008, when the economy was in recession.

What can employers do to retain their talented Gen Xers? Here are four options:

• Give Xers the chance to be in charge. CTI research found that nearly three-quarters of Gen Xers (70%) prefer to work independently. Among those who like being their own boss, over 80% say the reason is that they value having control over their work. Highly self-reliant, Xers are individual players who “work well in situations where conditions are not well defined, or are constantly changing,” according to a generational report from the Society of Human Resource Management. Placing Xers in charge of high-visibility projects is a way to spotlight their abilities.
• Show them the route to the top. Mentoring and sponsorship programs that match mid-level managers with senior-level executives not only provides opportunities to enrich Xers’ career experience; such relationships help pave the path to top leadership positions.
• Encourage entrepreneurial instincts. Following in the footsteps of generation-mates like Dell computer founder Michael Dell, chief Googlers Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Sara Blakeley, who created the multimillion-dollar Spanx empire, nearly 39% of Gen X men and 28% of Gen X women aspire to be an entrepreneur. Why not let them test their wings with a company-sponsored venture than risk having them fly the coop?
• Offer flexibility. Extreme jobs — characterized by workweeks of 60-plus hours, unpredictable workloads, tight deadlines, and 24/7 availability — are the norm for Gen X, with nearly a third (31%) of Xers making over $75,000 a year slogging through schedules that never stop. Flexible work arrangements, including reduced schedules, are checked off as “very important” for 66% of Gen X women and, significantly, 55% of Gen X men. Even childless employees yearn for better work-life balance to pursue their own interests.

Generation X may feel they’re the “wrong place, wrong time” generation, caught in a chronological squeeze between the Boomers and the Millennials. For smart employers, though, Gen X is in exactly the right place at the right time — seasoned skill bearers and experienced knowledge experts endowed with a work ethic that gives wings to their soaring ambition.

Employers can retain restless Xers by responding directly to their concerns: offering them a chance to test their leadership potential through work-sponsored entrepreneurial opportunities, a safety valve to alleviate the pressures of their extreme lives, and a way to celebrate the varied passions and commitments that make this talented cohort so valuable.

More blog posts by Sylvia Ann Hewlett

More on: Generational issues, Talent management

SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is Chairman and CEO of the Center for Talent Innovation. She is the author of 11 books, including Executive Presence. Follow her on Twitter at @sahewlett.

How to Invent the Future

by Nilofer Merchant  |   9:00 AM October 17, 2014

We need more than big ideas, or pithy words, or an ultra-clear vision to invent the future.

Odd as it may seem for discussing innovation and management, I’m reminded of a sociology experiment done in the 1960s. Five monkeys were placed in a cage, with a batch of bananas hung from the ceiling and a ladder placed right underneath it. It took only a few seconds for one of the monkeys to race up the ladder to grab the bananas.

But the next day, whenever any of the monkeys started up the ladder, the researchers sprayed all of the monkeys with ice-cold water. Soon, each of the monkeys learned to not go up the ladder, and if any of them started to, the others would hold them back by pulling on their tail. This was done repeatedly until each little monkey had learned the lesson: no one climbs the ladder. No banana is worth it.

Once all five monkeys were conditioned to avoid the ladder, the researchers substituted in a new monkey. And wouldn’t you know it – the New Guy monkey spots the beautiful yellow bananas and goes up the ladder. But the other four monkeys – knowing the drill – jump on New Guy, and beat him up.

One by one, the researchers replaced each monkey, until none of the monkeys in the cage had been sprayed by icy water. And yet none of these new monkeys would go up the ladder, either. The rules had been set, because, “That’s just the way we do things around here.”

You know where I’m going with this story, right?  Most of us are a lot like those monkeys. On the upside (and there is an upside) we learn from one another, we don’t let down our mates, and we get along. But on the downside, we don’t bother to examine the rules as they’ve been handed down.

And this downside – not examining the rules as they’ve been laid down – is not a minor thing; it has a huge cost. It stalls progress. It defeats those with fresh new ideas. It reinforces entrenched interests.

When a society accepts the practices, methods, and measures of the 20^th century to conceive the 21^st century, failure is inevitable. In order to consider new ideas, you have to be willing to let go of ones that no longer serve you.

The challenge, though, is not how to throw away the Old to embrace the New. That would be folly; the efficiency of the 20^th century is what allows (most of) us have clean water and plenty of relatively inexpensive food to eat and so on. Plus, let’s not forget that “new” ideologies can be misleading. I’m reminded of Enron’s “new metrics” once touted by big-name thinkers as reflecting the future of management. Only later did we all collectively learn it reflected criminal accounting practices. So “new” is not the end-all. Unlike the medicine in your bathroom drawer, ideas don’t come with pre-printed expiration dates. There are no clear signs for which ones to toss and when. The challenge is in knowing how to evaluate and build new ideas into reality.

And when management thinkers are confined together in our own enclosures – not cages, but conferences – we seem to do little more than pull on each other’s tails. We find flaws in each other’s arguments (and surely there are many, for they are nascent ideas). We largely advocate for our own idea and ours alone, because we want so desperately for it to be seen. And we show why any New Idea doesn’t prove out, often without sharing our fundamental assumptions. And like the monkeys, we find ways of signaling: “That’s not the way we do things around here.”

And this approach is definitely not the way to invent the future.

So I’ve been thinking about what we’re all facing: How to deal with Change. That’s change with a capital C. Your career, your company (if you have one), and your industry are all coping with change. And with it, comes an opportunity to question what new approaches to adopt, and what to do with existing frameworks and ideas. In this social era, when connected humans can now do what once only large organizations could, the fundamentals are shifted enough, a lot of what once worked, doesn’t.

So, I think we all need a better “how” for creating ideas. It’s not enough to have the best idea, or the phrase that makes an idea go viral. Instead, what we need is a way for ideas to become powerful enough to dent the world. And no one can do that acting alone.

To figure out a way forward, let’s explore how Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University, which runs programs designed to help build the skills of effective citizenship, works on his initiative.

First, any group that joins the program has to have a shared purpose that goes beyond their own private interests. Not common strategies, but a common shared purpose, with many possibly different, most likely opposing strategies to achieve that purpose. This is why Citizen University draws leaders from both MoveOn.org and the Tea Party. They choose to come together, because they’re both leaders and activists interested in revitalizing democracy with a bottom-up, inclusive approach.

Second, the individual participants agree to build on each other’s ideas. Not as a cheerleader or a critic, but what we might call being “loyal oppositionist”: someone able to say “Here’s what’s wrong, why I think so, and one possible way to make the idea better.” As Eric says, “We ask people to not just reflexively respond, but to help one another.” Explaining why you have doubts about an idea lets everyone understand if they have different working assumptions. And proposing a solution helps advances the idea. Eric has been convening the group for three years now, and he says that one sign of success is that people keep making the effort to come back and help one another in these private forums, because people learn best and take in new ideas when they’re not “on the spot.”

Third, and underlying both points above, the conveners are inclusive of who can participate in the conversation. To hear an up and coming idea, you’ve gotta hear from many types of people, from different histories and with different experiences, so you can be challenged by newness.

It’s hard to know if Eric and the Citizen University idea will accomplish what they set out to do – to revitalize citizenship in the United States. It’ll take years for that story to play itself out. But their approach matches what I’ve seen work for innovation teams across companies. It is the “new how”, a collaborative way that shapes ideas to be better, to be stronger, and ultimately become real. To invent the future, we don’t need more ideas, or better words, or directional visions to invent the future. Instead, we need challenge common beliefs and ingrained interests. We need to stop pulling each other down by the tail and instead build up our ideas together.

This post is part of a series leading up to the annual Global Drucker Forum, taking place November 13-14 2014 in Vienna, Austria. Read the rest of the series here.

More blog posts by Nilofer Merchant

More on: Collaboration, Communication, Innovation

NILOFER MERCHANT

Nilofer Merchant has personally launched 100 products amounting to $18B in revenue. Her blue-chip career includes Apple, Autodesk, GoLive/Adobe. She's served on both public and private boards. Today, she lectures at Stanford. She’s an expert on collaborative leadership and author of The New How and 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era.

The Real Revolution in Online Education Isn’t MOOCs

by Michelle Weise  |   10:00 AM October 17, 2014

Data is confirming what we already know: recruiting is an imprecise activity, and degrees don’t communicate much about a candidate’s potential and fit. Employers need to know what a studentknows and can do.

Something is clearly wrong when only 11% of business leaders — compared to 96% of chief academic officers — believe that graduates have the requisite skills for the workforce. It’s therefore unlikely that business leaders are following closely what’s going on in higher education. Even the latest hoopla around massive open online courses (MOOCs) amounts to more of the same: academics designing courses that correspond with their own interests rather than the needs of the workforce, but now doing it online.

But there is a new wave of online competency-based learning providers that has absolutely nothing to do with offering free, massive, or open courses. In fact, they’re not even building courses per se, but creating a whole new architecture of learning that has serious implications for businesses and organizations around the world.

It’s called online competency-based education, and it’s going to revolutionize the workforce.

Say a newly minted graduate with a degree in history realizes that in order to attain her dream job at Facebook, she needs some experience with social media marketing. Going back to school is not a desirable option, and many schools don’t even offer relevant courses in social media. Where is the affordable, accessible, targeted, and high-quality program that she needs to skill-up?

Online competency-based education is the key to filling in the skills gaps in the workforce. Broadly speaking, competency-based education identifies explicit learning outcomes when it comes to knowledge and the application of that knowledge. They include measurable learning objectives that empower students: this person can apply financial principles to solve business problems; this person can write memos by evaluating seemingly unrelated pieces of information; or this person can create and explain big data results using data mining skills and advanced modeling techniques.

Competencies themselves are nothing new. There are schools that have been delivering competency-based education offline for decades, but without a technological enabler, offline programs haven’t been able to take full advantage of what competencies have to offer.

A small but growing number of educational institutions such as College for America (CfA),Brandman, Capella, University of Wisconsin, Northern Arizona, and Western Governors are implementing online competency-based programs. Although many are still in nascent stages today, it is becoming clear that online competencies have the potential to create high-quality learning pathways that are affordable, scalable, and tailored to a wide variety of industries. It is likely they will only gain traction and proliferate over time.

But this isn’t vocational or career technical training nor is it the University of Phoenix. Nor is this merely about STEM-related knowledge. In fact, many of these competency-based programs have majors or a substantive core devoted to the liberal arts. And they go beyond bubble tests and machine-graded exercises. Final projects often include complex written assignments and oral presentations that demand feedback from instructors.

The key distinction is the modularization of learning. Nowhere else but in an online competency-based curriculum will you find this novel and flexible architecture. By breaking free of the constraints of the “course” as the educational unit, online competency-based providers can easily and cost-effectively stack together modules for various and emergent disciplines.

Here’s why business leaders should care: the resulting stackable credential reveals identifiable skillsets and dispositions that mean something to an employer. As opposed to the black box of the diploma, competencies lead to a more transparent system that highlights student-learning outcomes.

College transcripts reveal very little about what a student knows and can do. An employer never fully knows what it means if a student got a B+ in Social Anthropology or a C- in Geology. Most colleges measure learning in credit hours, meaning that they’re very good at telling you how long a student sat in a particular class — not what the student actually learned.

Competency-based learning flips this on its head and centers on mastery of a subject regardless of the time it takes to get there. A student cannot move on until demonstrating fluency in each competency. As a result, an employer can rest assured that when a student can use mathematical formulas to make financial decisions; the student has mastered that competency. Learning is fixed, and time is variable.

What’s more, many of these education providers are consulting with industry councils to understand better what employers are seeking. Businesses and organizations of all sizes can help build series of brief modules to skill up their existing workforce. The bundle of modules doesn’t even necessarily need to culminate in a credential or a degree because the company itself validates the learning process. Major companies like The Gap, Partners Healthcare, McDonald’s, FedEx, ConAgra Foods, Delta Dental, Kawasaki, Oakley, American Hyundai, and Blizzard are just a few of the growing number of companies diving into competencies by partnering with institutions such as Brandman, CfA, and Patten. By having built that specific learning pathway in collaboration with the education provider, the employer knows that the pipeline of students will most certainly have the requisite skills for the work ahead.

For working adults who are looking to skill-up, the advantages are obvious. These programs are already priced comparable to, or lower than, community colleges, and most offer simple subscription models so students can pay a flat rate and complete as many competencies as they wish in a set time period. Instead of having to sit for 16 weeks in a single course, a student could potentially accelerate through a year’s worth of learning in that same time. In fact, a student who was working full-time and enrolled at College for America earned an entire associate’s degree in less than 100 days. That means fewer opportunity costs and dramatic cost savings. For some, that entire degree can be covered by an employer’s tuition reimbursement program—a degree for less than $5,000. It is vital to underscore, however, that competency-based education is about mastery foremost—not speed. These pathways importantly assess and certify what a student knows and can do.

Over time, employers will be able to observe firsthand and validate whether the quality of work or outputs of their employees are markedly different with these new programs in place. Online competency-based education has the potential to provide learning experiences that drive down costs, accelerate degree completion, and produce a variety of convenient, customizable, and targeted programs for the emergent needs of our labor market.

A new world of learning lies ahead. Time to pay attention.

More blog posts by Michelle Weise

More on: Education

MICHELLE WEISE

Michelle R. Weise, Ph.D. is a senior research fellow in higher education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and co-author with Clayton M. Christensen of Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution.

It’s Your Job to Tell the Hard Truths

by Peter Bregman  |   12:00 PM October 17, 2014

Rashid,* the CEO of a high-tech company and a client of mine for nearly a decade, called to tell me we had a major issue with some of the newer members of his leadership team.

What comes to mind when you think of what might constitute a “major issue” with some senior leaders? Maybe they’re in a fight? Maybe they’re making poor strategic decisions? Perhaps they’re not following through on commitments they made about the business? Maybe they’re being abusive to their employees? Maybe they’re stealing?

I’ve seen all of those problems in the past at various companies. But none of that was happening at Rashid’s firm. The major issue he was talking about was far more subtle — and in most places even acceptable.

Rashid had heard, through the grapevine, that two new team members were quietly questioning whether they should be honest about the gaps they saw in the business.

Is that really such a big deal? How many of us would prefer to keep the peace and avoid being the naysayer? Or prioritize being seen as a team player over identifying problems that may lie in someone else’s department? Or downplay an issue of our own team, hoping we’ll be able to fix it before anyone notices?

The truth is that it’s hard to speak up about potentially sensitive issues. But Rashid’s company’s fast growth and strong results were based, more than anything, on one underlying requirement for anyone in a leadership role: courage.

Courage underlies all smart risk taking. And no company can grow without leaders who are willing to take risks. If we don’t speak the truth about what we see and what we think, then it’s unlikely that we’ll take the smart risks necessary to lead.

So, yes, it’s a major issue if direct reports to the CEO aren’t willing to say what they really think. In fact, I’d say that there’s little value to having senior leaders in an organization who don’t speak their minds.

It’s worth asking if Rashid is creating a safe enough environment for people to speak up. That’s a good thing to consider and, in part, it’s my job to help him do that.

It’s also worth asking if the leaders have the skills to talk about sensitive topics with care and competence. This is important because it does take tremendous skill to raise hard-to-talk-about issues in a way that convinces others to address them. But, I would argue, at this point in their careers, they should have that ability. And, if they don’t, it’s easily trainable.

Ultimately, those are not the most important questions. Rashid is not running a training program or a kindergarten. He’s running a company with highly compensated leaders who are running large and complicated businesses of their own, and it’s fair for him to expect them to be brave enough to tell him what they are thinking.

How could people who have been so successful in their careers not be courageous about communicating the problems they see in a business for which they are responsible? I think that the bar for leadership in most organizations is too low. We allow politics to supersede performance. And it’s hurting good organizations.

The biggest challenge we face as leaders is rarely about discovering the perfect strategy or developing a smarter product or figuring out the gaps in the business. It’s about being courageous enough and willing to take the risks necessary to talk about the difficult, sometimes scary truth and do something about it.

That’s been the secret to Rashid’s company’s growth and the success of his leadership team. Good leaders almost always know what needs to be done. Great leaders actually do it.

So, Rashid asked, what should I do?

You have to talk to them, I said. Be direct about how you believe they’re hurting the business. Lead by example — it’s the only way.

*I’ve changed his name to protect his privacy.

More blog posts by Peter Bregman

More on: Difficult conversations, Leadership

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

Stop People from Wasting Your Time

by Dorie Clark  |   9:00 AM October 20, 2014

We’re all too busy, spending our days in back-to-back meetings and our nights feverishly responding to emails. (Adam Grant, a famously responsive Wharton professor, told me that on an “average day” he’ll spend 3-4 hours answering messages.) That’s why people who waste our time have become the scourge of modern business life, hampering our productivity and annoying us in the process.

Sometimes it’s hard to escape, especially when the time-waster is your boss (one friend recalls a supervisor who “called meetings just to tell long, rambling stories about her college years” and would “chastise anyone who tried to leave and actually perform work”). But in many other situations, you can take steps to regain control of your time and your schedule. Here’s how.

State your preferred method of communication. For years, millennials have famously eschewed phone calls — but almost everyone has a communication preference of some sort. Regina Walton, a social media and community manager, told me that she, too, hates talking on the phone, a habit she developed after years of living abroad; email is almost always better for her, as “I can respond when I have time and usually am very fast to reply.” You can often limit aggravation (and harassment via multiple channels) by proactively informing colleagues about the best way to reach you, whether it’s via phone calls, texts, emails, or even tweets.

Require an agenda for meetings. Pointless or rambling meetings account for a disproportionate share of workplace time leakage. Here’s a solution: insist on seeing an agenda before you commit to attending any meeting, “to ensure I can contribute fully.” You can model the practice by writing an agenda for any meetings you chair, and offering to share the template with others. In fact, you could push to establish company norms that include best practices such as eliminating generic “updates” (which can usually be emailed in advance) and clearly indicating the decisions that need to be made as a result of the meeting. “Discuss expansion strategy” would be a murky and perhaps unproductive agenda item; “Decide whether to open a Tampa office” can guide the conversation much more clearly.

Police guest lists. Meetings are also dangerous when their list of invitees has been wantonly constructed, filled with irrelevant people and lacking decisionmakers with the authority to get things moving. If you’ve been invited, ask two critical questions. First, do I need to be there? Looking at the agenda (which you’ve insisted they provide), you can gauge whether your input would be valuable or if you can just find out details afterwards. Second, will the (other) right people be there? If you’re theoretically deciding on the Tampa expansion strategy and the executive in charge of Southeast operations isn’t in the room, it’s likely you’ll have to repeat the whole process again for her benefit. Make sure you understand who the real decisionmakers are, and don’t waste your time (or other people’s) until they can be present and participate.

Force others to prepare. We all hope and expect that others will prepare for meetings with us. Surprisingly often, they don’t. Even when they’re requesting the meeting, they may have done very little research and waste our time with extremely basic questions they could have Googled. Instead, we need to force others to prepare in advance. “Force” is a harsh word, and that’s intentional ­— because it’s not burdensome for people who would have prepared anyway, yet it effectively weeds out the uncommitted. Debbie Horovitch, a specialist in Google+ Hangouts, has long offered complimentary initial strategy sessions, but realized that some people were taking advantage with irrelevant discussions.

She’s adopted a new policy: “Everyone who wants a call/chat with me must fill in an application” with specific questions about what will be discussed. “Now that I’ve set my boundaries and expectations of the people I work with, it’s much easier to identify the time wasters.” Similarly, when people request informational interviews with me, I’ve begun sending them a document with links to articles I’ve written about their area of interest (becoming a consultant or speaker, reinventing their careers, etc.) and asking them to get back in touch after they’ve read them to see what questions they still have. Most never get back to me, which is just as well ­— I only want to speak with people who are interested and committed.

Will you face blow-back by toughening up and putting clear boundaries around your time? Inevitably. But you may also find that people start to respect you ­—and your time ­— a lot more. Most of us wish we could control our schedules better. If you’re willing to step up and argue for smarter policies (like requiring all meetings to have agendas), that benefits everyone. The key is to frame your advocacy not as purely self-interested (“I don’t have time for this nonsense”), but instead as a manifestation of your commitment to the company and your shared mission. “I want to make sure we’re all as productive as possible,” you could say, “and that’s why I think it’s important to make sure we’re respecting each other’s time.” In the end, that’s a hard message to resist.

More blog posts by Dorie Clark

More on: Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness, Productivity

DORIE CLARK

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and the forthcoming Stand Out. You can subscribe to her e-newsletter and follow her on Twitter.

Before You Respond to that Email, Pause

by Anthony K. Tjan  |   10:00 AM October 21, 2014

Someone sends you an email message or a text, and you’re unsure how to respond.  It’s about a complex negotiation, or a politically sensitive situation. Or maybe it’s just from a person who unnerves you.

For a moment, you pause. But for most of us, most of the time, that pause doesn’t last long. Instead we react, feeling the need to immediately craft a response. And often we then hit “send” without fully thinking. The result: an awkward or incomplete message that causes the recipient to pause, then react, often starting or continuing a cycle of miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Yes, people today expect and want an instantaneous reply to any message. We often accommodate them because delay feels like a violation of modern-day social norms.

But there are many times when we should not immediately reply.  And the truth is, we usually know them when they come. That’s what that initial pause is about. The key is to heed it.

There is a simple two-step method to making the pause work for you. First, buy yourself some time to think. Second, follow the four simple C’s of effective communication that help determine howbest to respond in terms of the context, content, channel, and contact.

Buying Time

There are a few practical ways to buy some time when you get a message where your gut tells you not to respond or where you are not sure how to respond.

• The non-response response – “Got your message.”  This is meant to serve as an acknowledgement but really is only filler. It may aggravate someone in the midst of a negotiation or other serious exchange.
• The expectation-setter – “Got it.  Lot on the plate today, I’ll get back to you tomorrow afternoon.”  This is often a good middle ground.  It provides an immediate response of acknowledgment and resets the timetable.
• The confident pause – Don’t respond. Really. Just don’t. Pausing for at least 24 hours is a pretty good rule of thumb. Not responding is its own kind of response, which can often work to your advantage.

Once you’ve bought yourself some time, you soak in the information from the message and think of what the best response might be. There are four C’s that have served as a useful checklist for me to use during that pause time before I respond to a difficult message: context, content, contact, and channel.

The Four C’s of Effective Communication

1. Context – Having the right situational context is key. Who are the relevant parties to the conversation or discussion thread? Are there relationships and inter-dependencies and previous conversations that I’m not aware of?  Do I fully understand what is at stake?  In the multi-party transactions in which we often get involved in venture capital, sending out a quick response to even a simple query can backfire if the timing is wrong or the information out of date. Sometimes you can even answer a specific question in a technically correct manner, but be practically incorrect because you’ve failed to appreciate the bigger picture.
2. Content – The message needs to be delivered in clear manner with the right tone and style for the occasion. Having the right content means checking facts and being consistent with past discussion threads. If there is one thing that I have seen kill a negotiation or productive progress in a discussion, it is inconsistency of message, which both confuses others and diminishes your credibility. Get the facts and your message points straight in your head, then focus on delivering them in the clearest, most understandable, most consistent manner possible.
3. Contact – Are you even the right person to respond? It happens often: we are asked something and fail to realize that we might not be the best person to respond. Consider if someone else might be more knowledgeable or better suited in style to respond, especially in a crisis (where it is usually best to have only a single point of contact). There is a reason why terrorist and hostage negotiations are not conducted over Google Docs. And even in an open and collaborative everyday work culture, there are many times when deferring to someone else is the right answer.  Also, consider if the person on the other side who is asking a question or provoking a discussion is the right contact person as well. And always — always! — be wary of “reply all” and judicious with the cc function.
4. Channel – Just because someone contacts you by email or text does not mean you have to respond by that channel. Email and text lend themselves to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. They are often likelier to prolong or inflame a debate than to resolve it. As I’ve written before, sometimes it’s much more effective and efficient just to pick up the phone or meet up in person. Email is great for transmitting factual information — a spreadsheet of a business model, for example, or a summary of a prior discussion. But when there are issues to resolve, talking usually works better.

As the pressure grows to respond quickly, the value of pausing and thinking is growing too. We all should work toward developing better, saner norms of communication amid the explosion of channels available to us. But that will take time and thought to get right.  In the interim, we just need to stop being so damned trigger-happy with that send button.

More blog posts by Anthony K. Tjan

More on: Communication, Disruptive innovation, Managing yourself

ANTHONY K. TJAN

Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball, vice chairman of the advisory firm Parthenon, and co-author of the New York Timesbestseller Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck (HBR Press, 2012).

Ignore Emotional Intelligence at Your Own Risk

by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz  |   8:00 AM October 22, 2014

Call it Grant vs. Goleman. Two academic heavyweights face off on a topic that every student of leadership and HR cares — or at least hears — a lot about: emotional intelligence. Wharton professor Adam Grant kicks it off with a LinkedIn blog post, “Emotional Intelligence Is Overrated,” arguing that “it’s a mistake to base hiring or promotion decisions on it” and that “even in emotionally demanding work, when it comes to job performance, cognitive ability still proves more consequential than emotional intelligence.” Daniel Goleman, the psychologist credited with coining the term EI (and, full disclosure, a friend), issues his rebuttal, “Let’s Not Underrate Emotional Intelligence,” questioning the specific assessment of EI used by Grant, and referring to the various studies conducted by “The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence.” And the comments fly.

I have huge respect for both men, and I’m not an academic. But as a privileged practitioner, who has helped companies around the world make sound hiring and promotion decisions for the past three decades, I thought I would offer my perspective to the debate. Working as an executive search consultant at Egon Zehnder, I’ve personally led more than 500 senior appointments and been involved in many more, interviewing more than 20,000 candidates. And, as the leader of our firm’s management appraisal practice, professional development, and intellectual capital creation, I’ve also carefully studied various assessment approaches and their performance impact.

My conclusion about emotional intelligence based on this experience? I can’t emphasize enough the crucial importance of EI-based competencies for success in leadership roles.

Back in the late 1990s I did my first quantitative analysis on the subject, using information on 250 managers I had personally hired or recommended for promotion to our clients, mostly in Latin America in those days. I analyzed the correlation of three main candidate variables (experience, IQ, and emotional intelligence) with the person’s performance once on the job and was amazed with the results. When the appointees excelled in experience and IQ but had low emotional intelligence, their failure rate was as high as 25%. However, those people with high emotional intelligence combined with at least one of the other two factors (experience or IQ) only failed in 3%-4% of the cases. In other words, emotional intelligence coupled with high IQ or very relevant experience was a very strong predictor of success. However, highly intelligent or experienced candidates who lacked emotional intelligence were more likely to flame out.

My colleagues soon replicated this analysis for many different geographies and highly diverse cultures, including Japan and Germany, and the results were similar everywhere. People are hired for IQ and experience and fired for failing to manage themselves and others well.

Since then, our firm has continued to use candidate assessment and performance data to develop our competency model, which guides us in our executive search and appraisal work across 69 offices. While some of the attributes and skills that have proven to be necessary for success at the top are indeed mainly cognitive, such as strategic orientation or market insight, most of them are based on emotional intelligence, including results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influencing, developing organizational capability, team leadership, and change leadership. In my teaching at Harvard’s graduate program on talent management, I’ve met hundreds of leaders from successful corporations all over the world and, without exception, the vast majority of the competencies they use to select and develop leaders are also based on emotional intelligence.

I agree with Adam that EI is no panacea. Neither is IQ, or any other variable. As I explain in my most recent book, the right candidates need to be clever in the traditional IQ sense, but also have the right values, the right conditions for portability, and the right competency fit for the job.

Potential for growth is also critical, as I emphasized in this June 2014 HBR article. Interestingly, however, the hallmarks of potential — the right motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination — are also heavily based on emotional intelligence. To adapt to changing circumstances, you’ll require much more than just IQ.

In sum, you can choose to ignore EI — but make sure you understand the risks.

More blog posts by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz

More on: Hiring, Human resources, Managing people, Managing yourself

CLAUDIO FERNÁNDEZ-ARÁOZ

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz is a senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and a former member of its global executive committee. He is the author of Great People Decisions (Wiley, 2007) and It's Not the How or the What but the Who:  Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

Design a Workspace that Gives Extroverts Privacy, Too

by Christine Congdon  |   11:00 AM October 22, 2014

Some of the most unlikely people have confessed to being introverts lately. One recent acquaintance–while chatting amiably during a pre-event networking session– leaned over to quietly tell me that she is actually an introvert. She felt she had to learn more extroverted behaviors to succeed in her career. And she’s not the only one.

It seems like everyone is talking about where they are on the introversion spectrum these days, and for good reason. Since Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking delivered her TED talk in 2012, the public has become more aware of this important aspect of our personalities, and how it impacts our behaviors, emotions and decisions. We now know that introverts aren’t shy, they simply respond to stimulation with greater sensitivity. They are thoughtful people who don’t dominate a conversation or command attention, but their preference for solitude leads to deep insights and creativity. Being an introvert is no longer a problem to be solved or covered up – it’s become kind of cool. And businesses are looking for ways to offer introverts the solitude they crave at work.

Extroverts, meanwhile, seem to be getting a little less attention. Because they love socializing and comfortably spend large chunks of their day interacting with others, working in open spaces seems ideal. In our workplaces at Steelcase it’s pretty easy to spot an extrovert. You can almost always find them in open, community spaces like our Work Café, which is a place that blends the vibe of a coffee shop with a range of work settings where people can collaborate, work individually, or chat with coworkers. It’s the hub of our campus and a great place to see or be seen — an extrovert’s paradise.

But even extroverts get worn out by the amount of stimulation everyone faces. We’re bombarded with information: according to The Happiness Advantage author Shawn Achor, people receive over 11 million bits of information every second, but the conscious brain can only effectively manage about 40 bits. Our technology allows work to follow us everywhere, even into places like the bedroom and bathroom that used to be non-work sanctuaries. We’re collaborating with teammates for longer stretches of time – sometimes the whole workday – requiring longer hours to handle our individual tasks. Even in countries like France and Germany that have long valued the separation of work and life, our jobs have seeped into nights and weekends. The pace of work has intensified everywhere. Which means that everyone – including extroverts – needs access to private places to get stuff done, or simply take a breather.

As humans we need privacy as much as we need human interaction. But too often our workplaces are designed with a strong bias toward collaboration and social connections, without adequate and varied spaces for concentration and rejuvenation. Distractions are troubling for all of us, but extroverts can find them irresistible. We found a number of design strategies to support extroverts’ need for privacy. Here are some ideas:

• Extroverts are drawn to social interactions. Create “quiet zones” for individual work that reduce the temptation to interact with others. Orient the furniture to avoid conversations and eye contact.
• Create private areas that have frosted glass or other treatments that allow light in, but manage distractions. Situate these in low-traffic areas that limit the temptation for extroverts to look up and engage with passers-by.
• Provide enclosed private areas with strong acoustic properties to keep noise out. Extroverts are enticed by conversations, so make sure there are sound seals that minimize or eliminate voices, allowing extroverts to stay focused.
• Schedule “quiet time” for everyone to focus on their individual work. The social convention of this practice will help extroverts allocate time that is “interaction-free.”
• Help extroverts shield themselves from visual distractions with opaque walls or movable screens.
• Extroverts need respite from the intensity of work. Create places with soothing textures, sounds and vistas, where they can seek solitude and rejuvenate.

For these ideas to work, organizations need to embrace the notion that seeking privacy is not anti-social, but part of an essential balance in our workday. Extroverts, as well as introverts, need permission to seek alone time when they need it to do their best work.

More blog posts by Christine Congdon

More on: Managing people, Managing yourself, Talent management, Transparency

CHRISTINE CONGDON

Christine Congdon is the director of research communications at Steelcase.