Getting Past a Career Setback: An Example and a Test

by Ron Ashkenas, Mitchell Marks and Phil Mirvis  |   1:00 PM September 22, 2014

Managers often think about their careers in terms of winning and losing. Winners ascend the corporate ladder and get the praise, recognition, bonuses, and top jobs. But what about those whose careers are sidetracked or derailed when passed over for a key assignment or big promotion? Or those who find themselves on the short end in the latest reorganization or merger selection? Are these “losers” out of the running for career advancement, or can they regain their footing, refocus their sights, and continue to rise?

Very few managerial careers proceed upward in a straight line. So, the real challenge for career success is not just how to “win” the next promotion, but also how to rebound from the next defeat, as we explain in our article in this month’s HBR.

Here’s a case example. With a background in both strategy and finance, Sheila was an up-and-coming manager at a well-known consumer products company. When her firm decided to invest in start-ups, she was asked to put together a team to make it happen. Over the next year, she recruited a small group of professionals, targeted a number of sectors that would make a difference for the company, created a process for sourcing and managing minority investments, and began to make deals.

Eventually her team ended up with a portfolio of investments that caught the attention of the CFO and CEO because some were bringing new technologies into the company’s supply chain, and others were hinting at new business models for engaging with customers. Soon she was meeting regularly with the senior executive team about deals and overall strategy. Unfortunately, her success made her direct supervisor and the head of corporate strategy jealous – and they engineered a reorganization that moved the innovation team under the strategy office and left Sheila as an individual contributor.

Naturally, Sheila was upset. She went through the emotional stages of loss, anger, and bargaining. She made her case for regaining the team to the CEO and several other executives, but soon discovered that while all were happy with her work, no one wanted to intervene or offer her a different role.

Through this process, Sheila realized that while her boss and others had probably acted poorly, she was partly at fault for not managing the relationships and politics more effectively. While she was basking in the glow of attention from the C-suite, she had not helped her supervisor or other peers receive enough credit. This insight helped distance her from the problem, so she could stop blaming others and start thinking about what to do next.

After several months of emotional churning, Sheila decided to focus on Plan B –figuring out what she really wanted to do instead of trying to overturn an “injustice.” Through discussions with a number of trusted advisors, she realized that her work of the past several years had given her fantastic contacts, experience, and credibility in the innovation world. This led her to think about launching her own start-up by combining a couple of struggling new ventures with some additional funding.

At the same time, a few discrete inquiries revealed that a private equity firm was very interested in having her roll up some consumer-based start-ups into a new business. And an innovative manufacturing company offered her a job as head of “strategic partnerships.” Of course, Sheila still had her job – and could even pursue other roles – in the consumer products company if she wanted to stay.

As she examined herself and her environment, she realized she had more opportunities than she could possibly pursue. Eventually she chose the strategic partnerships role with the manufacturing company – not only because it was an interesting challenge, but also because it would give her an opportunity to pay more attention to relationships and politics. She could leverage her past experience and use it as a springboard to continue her development.

The key to Sheila’s eventual rebound is that she used her setback as an opportunity to learn, reflect, and regroup. This allowed her to treat the situation not as a frustrating failure, but as an act of liberation – to get off of the path she was on and to consciously choose whether to continue it or select an alternative.

The lesson here is that careers aren’t just about “winning.” In fact, for most people, success requires an ability to turn inevitable losses around. And that takes time. Note that Sheila did not rush, give in to anger, or rashly jump ship. She used the setback as a chance to rethink her career, collect feedback from others, and wait for the right opportunities to present themselves.

How well do you rebound from career setbacks? Take our assessment to see whether you could improve.

More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas, Mitchell Marks and Phil Mirvis

More on: Career planning

RON ASHKENAS

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

MITCHELL MARKS

Mitchell Lee Marks is Professor of Management at San Francisco State University and President of the consultancy JoiningForces.org.  He is the author of eight books, including "Charging Back Up the Hill: Workplace Recovery after Mergers, Acquisitions and Downsizings" and scores of scholarly and practitioner articles.

PHIL MIRVIS

Philip Mirvis is an organizational psychologist whose studies and private practice concerns large-scale organizational change, the character of the workforce and workplace, and business leadership in society. An advisor to businesses and NGOs on five continents, he has authored twelve books on his studies including Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship.

To Build Influence, Master How You Enter a Room

by Nick Morgan  |   1:00 PM September 23, 2014

An airline industry executive has been promoted regularly for more than two decades because he’s good in a crisis.  He’s cool, competent, and authoritative when the rest of the team is panicking.  But now he finds himself in charge of a huge swath of the company — and a large number of employees.  And the board is asking for something different from him:  he needs to motivate people.  For that, he has to emote — to show people he cares — something he’s hidden for over twenty years. Where to start? How can you wield influence while being empathic? It begins with how you enter a room.

Be aware of your unconscious cues. When you stand, are you taking up all of your space, or do you shrink into corners?  When you move, do you move confidently, or do you slink? When you’re sitting alone, do you slouch or sit straight? When I began working with that airline executive, I noted that his tendency was to walk into a room as invisibly as possible.  His shoulders were slumped, his eyes were down.  In discussion, it turned out he had been bullied as a young teen for about five years.  His body had borne the trace of that misery ever since.  And he wasn’t even aware of the price paid in his posture — and in his day-to-day work.  He couldn’t connect with others because he was afraid.  In a crisis, however, he put aside his fears and focused on the job at hand.

There are two essential points here.  The first is that you’re always signaling about your intentions and feelings, and so is everyone else.  The second point is that most of the time you don’t pay conscious attention to all those signals — either the ones you’re putting out or the ones others are sending to you.  Your unconscious mind handles all that. It determines an extraordinary amount of the relationships you have with other people and your influence upon them. Thus it’s essential to get a handle on these unconscious cues.  Once you’ve formed a picture of yourself and have either embraced what you see or resolved to improve it, then you’re ready for the next step.

Focus on a key emotion. Think about the charisma of an actor like Kevin Spacey. How does he achieve it?  Most people think of charisma as something you’re born with, but in fact we all have our charismatic moments.  Think of a time when you’ve walked into a meeting, or come home to your significant other, and been asked without preamble, “What happened?”  You’ve been brimming over with some news  —  either good or bad.  You’re excited, or in despair, or triumphant, or whatever the case is. That’s charisma. It’s really about focus.

You need to focus your emotions before any meeting, conversation, or presentation.  Most of us go through our days with lots on our minds — what Buddhists call “monkey mind” — and we think of one thing and then another like the random movements of a pinball in one of those old fashioned machines. That’s not charismatic.  It’s just a to-do list.  And it doesn’t compel attention.  But the people who are able to free their minds of the usual daily detritus and focus on one emotion find that they compel attention. We are hard-wired to notice strong emotions in others.  We have mirror neurons that fire (without us being conscious of them) when we see someone else in a state of great excitement, or anger, or delight.  They leak their emotions to us; we are infected with them.  That’s how they take over a room.

And finally, have something interesting to say.  If you’re going to wield influence, you need to know what you want to be influential about.  And you’d better have done your homework because once all eyes are upon you, everyone will expect you to have something worthwhile for them.

That’s how you build influence. Take inventory of how you habitually position yourself in front of the world and repair if necessary.  Then, focus on a key emotion for any important meeting. And third, the place where most leaders mistakenly start, be prepared with something interesting and relevant to say.  Leaders often start with content because it’s the natural job of the conscious mind.  But connection, or its lack, begins in the unconscious mind.

More blog posts by Nick Morgan

More on: Leadership, Managing yourself, Presentations

NICK MORGAN

Nick Morgan is the president and founder of Public Words, a communications consulting firm, and the author of Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others and Maximizing Your Personal Impact.

Being Authentic Can Feel Inauthentic

by Charalambos Vlachoutsicos  |   1:00 PM January 15, 2013

Being authentic requires that you know who you are. This is, of course, easier said than done. All too often our self-image is hopelessly idealized. At other times it can be punishingly severe. And decisions that are driven by aspirations and insecurities inevitably lead to inconsistent and inauthentic behavior, reflecting the divide between reality and self-image.

To get around this problem, it helps to anchor your self-image in the set of core values: the qualities, standards, or principles that you embrace and use to guide decision-making in ambiguous situations. This, however, is not enough by itself to ensure authentic behavior because many of the values we would put on our list get questioned very little. Who would argue with the merits of bravery, generosity, openness, honesty, fairness, commitment, excellence, family, fun, harmony, health, love, prestige, respect, service, and spirituality?

But the meanings of these terms don’t stay the same. They develop as you yourself develop: what seems brave at 18 is likely to seem foolhardy at 40. In other words, to meaningfully ground one’s self-image in values a person has to spend time reflecting on what defines those values and how they relate to any given context. Since many of the concepts get imprinted at a young age, I expect that many people have not seriously confronted what they mean by the values they claim to espouse.

That’s just the first problem. The second is even harder to do: managing yourself in situations in which your values conflict, which they inevitably will. Two of my most important personal values are fairness and effectiveness. But being fair and being effective can pull you in two different directions. How you resolve this tension determines how authentic people perceive you to be.

Often the solutions you come up with may feel uncomfortable, even inauthentic, to yourself. Let me offer this small anecdote as an illustration. When I was managing my family’s company, salesmen were refunded monthly for their expenses in calling on clients — particularly their gas bills. At one point, our auditors noticed that gas expenses were going up even when sales were not. Looking more closely into it, we found that some of our salesmen were padding their gas bills to collect some extra money.

So, in the name of fairness, I devised a way to calculate the gasoline allowance for each salesman, each month taking into account the distance he had to drive, the frequency of calls, and the amount of sales to each client. This new system was rigorously fair to each salesman. But it was also complex, time-consuming, costly, and counterproductive. It forced me into “bargaining” with a number of salesman and actually lowered the morale of the whole group because it seemed obvious to them that management no longer trusted them.

Wasting everyone’s time and bringing down everyone’s morale certainly was not authentic managerial behavior on my part. I finally had to abandon my “fair” system and adopt the simple but “less fair” system of reimbursing each salesman by the amount of sales he had made that month, regardless of how much driving and gas it had taken to accomplish that. The strange thing is that, while I felt inauthentic applying this somewhat illogical system, it seemed fair to the salesmen!

The lesson I learned is that, even though you might think that one’s authenticity ought to be entirely one’s own, it actually belongs to other people as well. In other words, how I resolved my conflict between fairness and effectiveness required paying some attention to how my actions touched the values and self images of the people I was managing. The salesmen didn’t see me as less authentic because of my U-turn, because they felt I was being both fair to them and effective.

Of course, there is a balance to be struck. You cannot allow other people to dictate your values and at times you have to make a stand for your own beliefs where there is a real conflict. But real life is seldom clear-cut and it is a your job to navigate ambiguity. You will do so more effectively if you think through more carefully and more rationally your values, the contexts in which you apply them, and the concerns and priorities of the people you deal with. Taking a position and firmly never budging can make you look like an unrealistic idealogue rather than an authentic manager.

Bottom line, actually being authentic can sometimes feel inauthentic.

More blog posts by Charalambos Vlachoutsicos

More on: Managing yourself

CHARALAMBOS VLACHOUTSICOS

A former businessman and consultant, Charalambos A. Vlachoutsicos is an Adjunct Professor at Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece.

What If You Could Truly Be Yourself at Work?

by Tony Schwartz  |   10:00 AM January 23, 2013

For two years now, we have been holding regular “community” meetings at our office to give team members an opportunity to check in about how they’re doing, not just professionally but also personally. Each person answers several questions beginning with a deceptively simple one: “How are you feeling today?”* The rest of us simply listen.

It was only when we faced a sudden crisis that I finally understood why these meetings had been so important. On a weekend last October, the 23-year-old son of one of our team members died unexpectedly and tragically. On Monday morning, I called our team together in our conference room.

The feelings that surfaced that morning were raw — grief, bewilderment, fear, an acute awareness of the fragility of life and the preciousness of our own loved ones, and empathy for our grieving colleague.

The emotions ran even higher at a community meeting on the first day our colleague returned to work several weeks later. Painful as it was for all of us, we were able to create a container for our colleague’s heartbreak. Sharing our feelings also made them feel less burdensome. We held her, and holding her held us. It was cathartic, and that helped each of us to go back at the end of the meeting and focus again on the work at hand.

It dawned on me that day how powerful and liberating it is to say exactly what you’re feeling, and to feel truly listened to without judgment.

The impetus to hold community meetings came to us from something called “the Sanctuary Model,” developed by a psychiatrist named Sandra Bloom as a way to help people deal with chronically stressful and overwhelming circumstances — mostly in the world of mental health.

Increasingly, however, the everyday experience of corporate life can be overwhelming in and of itself.

In addition to whatever stresses we bring from home, including not getting sufficient sleep, we’re deluged with email, running from meeting to meeting, skipping meals, and working longer and more continuous hours than ever. Is it any surprise we’re struggling? Worse yet, in most workplaces the unspoken expectation is that we will check any strong emotions we’re feeling at the door.

You know the drill. You put on your game face when you walk into work. “How are you?” a colleague asks, by rote and without real interest. “Fine,” you respond, automatically, regardless of how you’re actually feeling.

“How many of us,” Bloom writes, “have ever felt truly safe in a social setting … [meaning] cared for, trusted, free to express our deepest thoughts and feelings without censure, unafraid of being abandoned or misjudged, unfettered by the constant pressure of impersonal competition, and yet stimulated to be thoughtful, creative, spontaneous and solve problems?”

To the contrary, as demand grows, we feel more anxious, more isolated, and more vulnerable.

Each of us has a tipping point — a moment when we feel so depleted that we fall into survival mode. We’re often unaware of it, but when we move from feeling calm and secure to anxious and under siege, we literally become different people.

Our fight or flight physiology kicks in. In turn, our focus automatically narrows to protecting ourselves. We lose the ability to think clearly and creatively, respond to others with care and consideration, or consider the long-term consequences of our choices. Instead, we do whatever we think we need to do to survive in the moment.

Community, I’ve come to deeply believe, is the cure. It does indeed have the power to serve as a sanctuary — to protect, ground and encourage us, not just in extreme circumstances, but also in the face of countless everyday challenges. Support in a community can also give us the strength to forego immediate gratification in favor of choices that uphold shared values, serve the collective good, and generate long-term value.

I’m convinced that it’s the strength of our community at The Energy Project which has allowed us to become a truly high-performing team. The safety and trust we feel with one another has freed us to focus our efforts on our mission. We have a small full-time staff — 14 of us, along with another dozen working part-time — but we’ve been able to work at senior levels in some of the world’s largest companies. One reason is that we squander almost no energy on internal politics. We’re in this together, including when one or another of us is struggling and needs help.

I’ve always thought of our core team as a living laboratory for the practices we teach our clients — whether it’s the power of renewal, or focusing on one thing at a time, or learning to deal more skillfully with conflict. What I now realize is that I’ve been overlooking one of the most powerful elements of our work.

Each of us is far less likely to succeed by forever pushing to stand out from the pack than by building communities of care and trust committed to raising the bar for everyone.

Transformation takes a village. None of us can truly do it alone.

* The other questions we ask at community meetings include “What’s the most important thing you learned last week?” “What’s your goal for this week?” and “What are you feeling most grateful for?”

More blog posts by Tony Schwartz

More on: Communication, Managing people

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.

Your Brain Is Hooked on Being Right

by Judith E. Glaser  |   10:00 AM February 28, 2013

I’m sure it’s happened to you: You’re in a tense team meeting trying to defend your position on a big project and start to feel yourself losing ground. Your voice gets louder. You talk over one of your colleagues and correct his point of view. He pushes back, so you go into overdrive to convince everyone you’re right. It feels like an out of body experience — and in many ways it is. In terms of its neurochemistry, your brain has been hijacked.

In situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself — in this case from the shame and loss of power associated with being wrong — and as a result is unable to regulate its emotions or handle the gaps between expectations and reality. So we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him).

All are harmful because they prevent the honest and productive sharing of information and opinion. But, as a consultant who has spent decades working with executives on their communication skills, I can tell you that the fight response is by far the most damaging to work relationships. It is also, unfortunately, the most common.

That’s partly due to another neurochemical process. When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.

I’ve coached dozens of incredibly successful leaders who suffer from this addiction. They are extremely good at fighting for their point of view (which is indeed often right) yet they are completely unaware of the dampening impact that behavior has on the people around them. If one person is getting high off his or her dominance, others are being drummed into submission, experiencing the fight, flight, freeze or appease response I described before, which diminishes their collaborative impulses.

Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (at least in the context of communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Here are a few exercises for you to do at work to help your (and others’) addiction to being right:

Set rules of engagement. If you’re heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement. Have everyone suggest ways to make it a productive, inclusive conversation and write the ideas down for everyone to see. For example, you might agree to give people extra time to explain their ideas and to listen without judgment. These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider see how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.

Listen with empathy. In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other peoples’ perspectives, the more likely you are to feel empathy for them. And when you do that for others, they’ll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.

Plan who speaks. In situations when you know one person is likely to dominate a group, create an opportunity for everyone to speak. Ask all parties to identify who in the room has important information, perspectives, or ideas to share. List them and the areas they should speak about on a flip chart and use that as your agenda, opening the floor to different speakers, asking open-ended questions and taking notes.

Connecting and bonding with others trumps conflict. I’ve found that even the best fighters — the proverbial smartest guys in the room — can break their addiction to being right by getting hooked on oxytocin-inducing behavior instead.

More blog posts by Judith E. Glaser

More on: Collaboration, Communication, Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness

JUDITH E. GLASER

Judith E. Glaser is the CEO of Benchmark Communications and the chairman of The Creating WE Institute. She is the author of six books, including Creating WE (Platinum Press, 2005) and Conversational Intelligence (BiblioMotion, 2013), and a consultant to Fortune 500 companies.

How to Preserve Institutional Knowledge

by Ron Ashkenas  |   10:00 AM March 5, 2013

I was recently perplexed when I received a request to speak to a group of senior managers aboutreducing complexity — mostly because I had worked with their company fifteen years earlier on the same subject; and they had since developed a reputation for being good at simplification. Why did they want to revisit what was already a core competence?

Once I met with the senior management team, the answer became very clear: Whatever institutional knowledge about simplification that had once resided in the company was now lost. Over the years, despite a number of well-meaning efforts, the focus of senior managers had shifted, the original training had been forgotten, and many of the messages on the subject had become empty rhetoric. In fact, astoundingly I was one of the main repositories of institutional memory about how to master simplification — an external consultant who had not worked with the firm for a number of years!

Although this is an extreme example, it’s not unique. Organizations spend a lot of time and resources developing knowledge and capability. While some of it gets translated into procedures and policies, most of it resides in the heads, hands, and hearts of individual managers and functional experts. Over time, much of this institutional knowledge moves away as people take on new jobs, relocate, or retire. Knowledge also degrades when a new senior executive or CEO introduces a different agenda that doesn’t build on earlier knowledge, or contradicts what was done previously. And knowledge disappears even more rapidly when a firm reorganizes or merges with another and there is a subsequent reshuffling of the cast of characters.

Most large organizations today regularly experience these dynamics. The result is that the informal, people-based institutional knowledge that is so critical to organizational effectiveness seems to have a shorter and shorter shelf life. As one colleague commented after visiting a long-time client that had gone through three mergers and multiple CEOs: “It feels like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ The names of the department are all the same, but the people act differently.”

So what can you do to overcome the rapidly accelerating loss of institutional knowledge?

First, build an explicit strategy for maintaining institutional memory, even in your own team. Don’t assume that it will happen by itself. On the contrary, if you don’t pay attention, the knowledge base of your team or business unit will potentially atrophy.

Second, as part of your strategy, identify the few key things that you want every member of your team to know or be able to do — and figure out how to turn this from an implicit assumption to an explicit expectation. You might for example, build the mastery of this core knowledge into the onboarding process for new team members, and have refresher sessions as part of your off sites or leadership meetings.

Finally, use technology to create a process by which your team continually captures and curates institutional knowledge — to make it a living and evolving body of useful information that is accessible to people as they come into the organization. Intel for example has an internal wiki (calledIntelpedia), which gives employees a way of both capturing and accessing important terms, procedures, historical incidents, and more.

In this day and age of Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia, everyone knows that an individual’s memory is fragile. What we often don’t recognize is that organizational memory is much the same — and if we don’t actively preserve it, we put ourselves at risk.

More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas

More on: Execution, Organizational culture

RON ASHKENAS

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

The Arguments Your Company Needs

by Michael Schrage  |   10:00 AM March 13, 2013

Asked several years ago to describe the most important argument taking place at Walmart, then-CEO Lee Scott immediately replied, “The size of our stores.” The world’s largest retailer was debating just how small its footprints and formats could be while still serving customer needs and its own brand equity promise. That conversation, Scott said, provoked a lot of new thinking and analysis.

The most important argument at a fast-growing Web 2.0 services provider revolved around its“freemium” offer. Should the firm aggressively test multiple ways to hybridize its free and fee services? Or would prizing and positioning simplicity above all make the most sense? For a prestigious publisher, the essential — and vociferous — disagreement cut to its entrepreneurial core: Should its popular conferences reinforce the firm’s “countercultural” vibe? Or should they comfortably embrace the world’s biggest, richest, and most established firms, as well?

All firms have strategies and cultures. But sometimes the quickest and surest way to gain valuable insight into their fundamentals is by asking, “What’s the most important argument your organization is having right now?”

The more polite or politically correct might prefer “strategic conversation” over “argument.” But I’ve found the more aggressive framing most helpful in identifying the disagreements that matter most. Of course, there’s frequently more than one “most important argument.” And arguments about which arguments are most important are — sorry — important, as well. (If people insist there are no “most important arguments,” the organization clearly has even bigger unresolved issues.)

The real organizational and cultural insights — and payoffs — come not just from careful listening but recognizing that, as always, actions speak louder than words. What role is leadership playing here? How is the CEO listening to, leading, or facilitating the argument? Is disagreement viewed as dissent? Or is it treated as an opportunity to push for greater clarity and analytical rigor?

Sentiment is as important as situational awareness. Some arguments stir organizational emotions in ways others do not. Similarly, some disagreements energize the enterprise just as surely as others drain the life out of people. Having the same most important argument for years tends to be a very bad sign.

Responses to most important arguments typically fall into one of three rough interrelated categories: strategy, values, or people. Strategic arguments tend to be the most straightforward: Do we compete in this space or not? Are we going to be a leader or not? On the other hand, values arguments are understandably more complex: Does attempting to serve a new customer base compromise who we (think) we are? Do we want to make ourselves even more data-and-analytics-driven in our decision making? Does our intense customer focus risk violating their privacy? Values arguments, even more than strategic disagreements, tend to engage a greater portion of the firm. Healthy arguments around conflicting values demand smart facilitative leaders and leadership at all levels.

Intriguingly, the worst most important arguments I hear usually revolve around people. The CEO or a particularly intrapreneurial business unit leader exhibits behaviors or makes comments that polarize. What did the CEO mean by that? Can you believe the company lets that manager get away with that? What might be called gossip in some organizations mutates into strategic or values arguments. Values and strategic arguments are played out through people and personalities. Corporate characters are alternately heroes, knaves, wizards, and fools. There’s often a fine line between strong and powerful leaders and personality cults. If you think the most important arguments going on in your organization revolve around particular individuals and their unusual mix of style and substance, watch out.

But that affirms one of the great virtues of the question: Are you having the kind of most important argument you want your organization to have? Are you having the right kind of arguments in general? Are your arguments illuminating the path forward or providing the organizations with even better rationalizations and excuses for inaction?

And if you’re not having the right kind of important arguments, then just how much is consensus and alignment really worth?

More blog posts by Michael Schrage

More on: Decision making, Organizational culture, Strategy

MICHAEL SCHRAGE

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

Purpose is Good. Shared Purpose is Better

by Mark Bonchek  |   12:00 PM March 14, 2013

Companies are turning to “purpose” and “authenticity” as a way to engage consumers and employees. But it’s hard enough to find a purpose in life if you’re an individual, let alone an entire company. And being authentic is a bit like being cool — sometimes the harder you try, the less you are.

So what’s a leader to do?

The first step is to recognize that there are different kinds of purpose. Sometimes purpose is about values — who you are and what you stand for. Other times it is about value — what you do and how it benefits others.

The ultimate goal would seem to be having your values and value aligned: have what you do reflect who you are, have what you stand for guide what you make, and have your value to the community enhance your value to customers and shareholders.

This goal is of aligning values and value is espoused by many eminent leaders, from Jim Stengel toBill George. It’s a core tenet in the field of corporate social responsibility.

But in a social age, this kind of purpose isn’t enough. The problem comes down to a simple preposition. Most leaders think of purpose as a purpose for. But what is needed is a purpose with.

Customers are no longer just consumers; they’re co-creators. They aren’t just passive members of an audience; they are active members of a community. They want to be a part of something; to belong; to influence; to engage. It’s not enough that they feel good about your purpose. They want it to be their purpose too. They don’t want to be at the other end of your for. They want to be right there with you. Purpose needs to be shared.

To understand the power of shared purpose, it’s useful to look at the mission statements of leading companies. To be clear, I’m not equating mission statements with company purpose. But they illustrate the point, and in fact are remarkably representative of the differences between the companies. So with that caveat, let’s look at our first mission statements from Adidas and Nike:

Adidas: The adidas Group strives to be the global leader in the sporting goods industry with brands built on a passion for sports and a sporting lifestyle.

Nike: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.

*”If you have a body, you are an athlete.”

Notice how you respond to each statement. Which one do you feel more a part of, regardless of whether you are a customer or shareholder? Adidas puts the emphasis on value and values. But Nike goes further, addressing not only people’s interests but their sense of who they are. Adidas isfor, while Nike is with.

Let’s look at another example, this time between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts.

Dunkin Donuts: Make and serve the freshest, most delicious coffee and donuts quickly and courteously in modern, well-merchandised stores.

Starbucks: Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

Dunkin Donuts’ purpose is clearly for customers, and it delivers on this purpose exceedingly well. But there is something different about Starbucks’ purpose. It is a purpose that is achieved with its customers.

Again, mission statements don’t always reflect a company’s true purpose. But in these cases, I think you would agree that they are fairly accurate representations of the company’s approach to the market, its engagement with customers, and its perception as an “authentic” brand.

The relationship of shared purpose to corporate social responsibility is worth exploring a bit further, this time by comparing Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Under the label “Performance with Purpose,” Pepsi has declared both a mission and a vision.

Mission: Our mission is to be the world’s premier consumer products company focused on convenient foods and beverages.

Vision: PepsiCo’s responsibility is to continually improve all aspects of the world in which we operate — environment, social, economic — creating a better tomorrow than today.

This is a perfect example of a “Values and Value” approach to purpose. The vision covers values, and the mission covers value. But something is missing. There is no shared purpose here. Nothing for people to participate in, belong to, engage with, co-create, or share with others that aligns the commercial side of the business with social responsibility.

By contrast, Coca-Cola has declared as its mission:

To refresh the world…
To inspire moments of optimism and happiness…
To create value and make a difference.

While the third line is a bit generic, the first two lay a stronger foundation for a shared purpose. It is perhaps no coincidence that Nike, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola all feature the word inspiration in their mission statements. You can’t inspire someone without their participation and engagement.

How can you create your own shared purpose? It’s simple, but not easy. The essential question is:

What is the shared purpose that …

a) We and our customers can work on together?
b) Is a natural expression of who we are and what we stand for?
c) Connects how we make money with how we contribute to the world?

When you apply this lens to the brand we have covered here, you can see how Nike, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola pass the test. Nike to inspire the athlete in all of us. Starbucks to nurture the human spirit. And Coca-Cola to refresh the world with moments of optimism and happiness
.
As you formulate your shared purpose, don’t go for what you think it should be. Look for who you already are. How you already connect with your customers. What your fans already say about you.

Remember, this is not something you are going to do to them, or for them, but with them. It’s a journey you will be on together, hopefully for a very long time.

More blog posts by Mark Bonchek

More on: Customers, Leadership, Starbucks

MARK BONCHEK

Mark Bonchek is Chief Catalyst of thinkORBIT, helping companies create engagement strategies based on pull instead of push, and the founder of SHIFT Academy. Follow him on Twitter at @MarkBonchek.

The Most Effective Strategies for Success

by Heidi Grant Halvorson  |   12:00 PM March 25, 2013

For years, I’ve been trying to convince people that success is not about who you are, but about what you do.

Roughly two years ago, I wrote about the “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently,” which became HBR’s most-read piece of content over that time span. It was a list of strategies, based on decades of scientific research, proven effective for setting and reaching challenging goals. I later expanded that post into a short e-book, explaining how you can make each one a habit. But how would readers know if they were doing enough of each “Thing”? (After all, we’re terrible judges of ourselves.) To help answer that question, last spring I created something I called the Nine Things Diagnostics — it’s a free, online set of questionnaires designed to measure your own use of each of the nine things in pursuit of your personal and professional goals.

I now have responses from over 30,000 people who’ve logged on and completed one or more of the Nine Things Diagnostics. The results are fascinating, and a bit surprising even to me. First, each of the Nine Things had a significant impact on success. (That actually didn’t surprise me, for obvious reasons.).

But which packed the biggest punch? To find out, I recently took a look at the responses of about 7,000 people who had completed every Nine Things Diagnostic, along with a brief measure of how successful they felt they had been in reaching their own goals in the past.

In order of effect magnitude, the most impactful strategies were:

1. Have Grit — Persistence over the long haul is key
2. Know Exactly How Far You Have Left to Go — Monitor your progress
3. Get Specific — Have a crystal-clear idea of exactly what success will look like
4. Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals — Know in advance what you will do, and when and where you will do it
5. Focus on What You Will Do, Not What You Won’t Do — Instead of focusing on bad habits, it’s more effective to replace them with better ones.
6. Build your Willpower Muscle — If you don’t have enough willpower, you can get more using it.
7. Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good — Think about your goals as opportunities to improve, rather than to prove yourself
8. Be a Realistic Optimist — Visualize how you will make success happen by overcoming obstacles
9. Don’t Tempt Fate — No one has willpower all the time, so don’t push your luck

Notice how persistence is at the very top of the list? While we marvel at people who’ve shown incredible perseverance — Earnest Shackleton, Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony — I wonder how many people have ever thought to blame their own failures on “not hanging in there long enough”? In my experience, very few. Instead, we assume we lack the ability to succeed. We decide that we don’t have what it takes — whatever that is — to meet the challenge. And we really couldn’t be more wrong. Grit is not an innate gift. Persisting is something we learn to do, when (and if) we realize how well it pays off.

Or take “knowing how far you have left to go.” Even someone with a healthy amount of grit will probably find his or her motivation flagging if they don’t have a clear sense of where they are now and where they want to end up. How much weight would a contestant on The Biggest Loser lose if he only weighed himself at the beginning and the end, instead of once a week? How well would an Olympic-level athlete perform if she only timed her official races, and never her practices? We can see how essential monitoring is for others’ performance, and yet somehow miss its importance for our own.

But does that mean that the items further down the list aren’t as important? Not quite. For instance, #7, “focusing on getting better, rather than being good,” actually predicted using each of the other eight things! People who focused on “being good,” on the other hand, were less likely to use the other tactics on the list. In fact, if you do a lot of “be good” thinking, you are less likely to be gritty or have willpower, and you are more likely to tempt fate. You’re also, not surprisingly, less likely to reach your goals.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding, however, was the extent to which people weren’t using these tactics.

Respondents answered each of the diagnostic questions on 1-5 scale, with 1 being “not at all true of me,” 3 being “somewhat true of me,” and 5 being “very true of me.”

If your average score for a particular tactic falls between Not at all and Somewhat, then you really aren’t doing what you need to do to be effective. Here’s how the percentages break down:

Margaret Thatcher, Fighter

by David Champion  |   11:17 AM April 8, 2013

Margaret Thatcher is dead. For most Britons of my generation she was the dominant political figure. People either loved her or hated her and she seemed, if anything, to thrive on that conflict. Her consensus-minded opposite numbers in Europe (mostly male) certainly regarded her with disapproval. She was too strident, an iron lady, not for turning, all the stereotypes applied to strong-minded women in power.

Part of her crime, perhaps, was to be a conservative. It would have been far more convenient for most women’s rights and civil rights activists to be able to point to a socialist as a female role model. Thatcher was towards the hard right of the conservative party, someone who wanted to reverse the socialist experiment of Britain’s post-war years. But the socially progressive were very much wedded to that model. For these people, Shirley Williams of Britain’s Labour Party was a far more agreeable role model for women.

So why was Britain’s first woman Prime minister a true-blue Tory? After all, Labour politicians were, on the face of it, much more supportive of women in politics.

Part of the answer, perhaps, was plain old cynical politics. Conservatives got to look progressive because they had a woman as leader, and a reasonable number of non-conservatives might vote also for her party because she was a woman. In a first past the post system, that would be good electoral math.

Having a woman front the economic policies of the conservatives might also perhaps have made their platform seem a little more palatable. Conservatives were generally seen as representing the interests of the privileged establishment. Conservative politicians were often the product of Britain’s elite public schools and they mostly sounded as if they had a silver spoon in their mouths. You would not say that about a grocer’s daughter from Grantham (even if she did affect a “posh accent” and had been to Oxford).

Branding and packaging considerations aside, it’s clear that Thatcher was driven, highly motivated, and astute. She could play hardball politics with the best of them, an ability that many men found hard to resist, if you are to believe the riotously popular diaries of Alan Clark (a maverick conservative and notorious womanizer who formed part of Thatcher’s coterie).

Psychologists might make something also of the fact that she was very much encouraged in her ambitions by the men in her life. Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a stalwart of local politics in Thatcher’s hometown of Grantham, a local alderman and sometime mayor, and encouraged her to aim high. Her rather older than she husband Denis (whose apocryphal letters in Private Eye caused merriment to a generation of readers) provided the financial security that allowed her to pursue a career in politics.

Any and perhaps all of the above could be advanced to explain Thatcher’s success. But at the end of the day, perhaps none of those reflections matter as much as the fact that Thatcher represented a set of ideas whose time had come.

By the 1970s, Labour had arguably run out of steam. After decades of leading a progressive social agenda it had created an economy in which organized labor held a disproportionate share of power. Britain was over-regulated, overtaxed, and under-productive. With an economic model severely challenged by the oil-price shocks of the 1970s and with the massive oil reserves in the North Sea yet to come on line, British voters were receptive to Thatcher’s idea that Britain needed to get back to work the old-fashioned way.

Her formula reshaped Britain’s economic orthodoxy and became for two decades and more the dominant logic of politics. And if the financial crisis caused some to question that logic, it remains largely intact. Arguably, it was her very success in realizing her ideas that undid her. As long as she represented a work in progress, much could be forgiven. But once she had achieved her big goals, the sound and fury sounded increasingly shrill. It was a pity, perhaps, that she was so brutally cast aside (in, essentially, a palace coup), but it may have been inevitable.

Fighters like Thatcher are almost doomed not to recognize when their time is up; it’s what makes them so good at achieving their goals.

More blog posts by David Champion

More on: Government, Leadership

DAVID CHAMPION

David Champion is a senior editor of HBR.