Perfectionism: A Barrier to Innovation

Source:  Best Buy

Take a look at this recent interview (start at 4:15) with Corie Barry, CEO of Best Buy.   In the interview she describes how Best Buy had been piloting curbside pick-up service in some of its stores prior to the COVID pandemic.  The introduction of curbside at some stores was part of a plan to introduce the service across the store network over the course of more than a year.  Then, in a matter of 48 hours, they decided to shift the entire nationwide store network to curbside pick-up ONLY because of the COVID quarantines and shutdowns.  48 hours.  The interview asks her why it had to take more than a year to introduce such a new service prior to COVID.  Why couldn't they innovate faster?  She offers a compelling explanation of the barriers to innovation at many large firms.  Barry explains,

"As a retailer, we are geared toward perfection around process... As a brick and mortar retailer, you are not as geared to just push out a new experience and iterate quickly on the process behind it.  We are geared at putting out there a perfect SOP (standard operating procedure), and then you just run it... It was not as much in our DNA to put out there something that might not be perfect." 

Barry highlights a key barrier to innovation at many large well-established firms.  They resist introducing new products and services until they feel as though the innovation is perfect.  They don't want any failures or mistakes.  They don't want any negative customer feedback.   Yet, the desire for perfection slows them down substantially.   Moreover, it deprives them of the vital learning-by-doing that comes with soliciting feedback from customers (and front-line employees) early and often.  Every brick-and-mortar retailer, and frankly every large firm, should consider this discussion about perfectionism and ask whether it's holding their organization back too.

Stop Relying on Heroes to Get the Job Done

Source: Pixabay

Sara Brown has written a good piece for the MIT Sloan Management Review. The title of the article is "4 ways to design employee experience in the remote work era."  Brown draws on an interview with research scientist Kristine Dery. In the article, Brown & Dery argue that organizations have to reduce their reliance on heroic behavior on the part of employees to get to the job done.  Here's an excerpt:  

Companies that deliver strong employee experiences deliberately move away from a culture of heroics, in which employees often have to go above and beyond to find ways to deliver for customers, becoming “heroes” in the organization, Dery said. 

Instead of depending on heroic employees, companies should focus on processes and systems that can deliver for customers consistently and solve more complex problems. “Let’s figure those things out, and then let’s embed those into our organization, either through technology or through behaviors or through new metrics. That connection is much more systemic,” she said.  Implementing systems includes:

-Integrating operations across silos to make it easier for employees to innovate and deliver on the customer experience.

-Allowing seamless access to data and information about customers, putting power into the hands of employees to do what technology can’t do.

-Digitizing work, which allows for employee mobility — especially important now — and employee self-help.

-Using employee platforms, which allow employees to search for information and ideas, easily share knowledge, and reduce duplication.

Companies should also consider a dedicated customer experience team. “That phase where different employee experiences across the company were creating all sorts of quite chaotic decisions and responses was managed much more effectively by companies that had a dedicated [employee experience] team, that were looking at that right across the organization, and able to create more systemic accountability measures,” Dery said. These companies were able to get technology into the hands of employees faster, and could anticipate speed bumps ahead of time, instead of reacting to them after the fact.

This notion of moving beyond "heroic behavior" reminds me of the research conducted by Anita Tucker, Amy Edmondson, and Steve Spear years ago on first order vs. second order problem solving.  First order problem solving often involves heroic behavior.  It involves corrective action by front-line employees who are often going above and beyond to get the job done.  However, the same problems keep emerging, and over time, heroes don't always emerge to stop bad things from happening. Tucker and her colleagues explain the distinction and its importance:

Research on problem solving makes a distinction between fixing problems (first-order solutions) and diagnosing and altering root causes to prevent recurrence (second-order solutions). First-order problem solving allows work to continue but does nothing to prevent a similar problem from occurring. Workers exhibit first-order problem solving when they do not expend any more energy on a problem after obtaining the missing input needed to complete a task. Second-order problem solving, in contrast, investigates and seeks to change underlying causes of a problem.

So, ask yourself:  Are we too reliant on heroes in our organization?  Do the same problems keep resurfacing?  Are we thinking systemically when we examine the reasons why problems occur?

Distinctive Strategic Positioning: Don't Panic and Just Abandon It Amidst the Pandemic

Source: Wikimedia

Suppose your firm has a distinctive strategic positioning and a powerful competitive advantage.  Then along comes COVID.   Some managers may panic and abandon key facets of the unique strategy in an effort to cope with difficult economic and social conditions.   Some firms, though, have prospered despite the pandemic, in part because they have capitalized on the fact that so many people are spending a great deal of time at home.   Stihl is an interesting example of a firm with an unorthodox strategy that has resisted the temptation to abandon distinctive elements of its business model over the years, including during the past six months.  They have demonstrated that personal relationships and interactions still matter to consumers, even in an age of increasing online transactions, curbside pick-up, and home delivery.  

Stihl is one of the world's leading chainsaw manufacturers, headquarted in Germany. A recent Bloomberg story is titled, "Stihl Still Sells Chainsaws the Old-Fashioned Way." The firm is still owned by the descendants of founder Andreas Stihl.  Here's how the article opens:

If a limb falls on your car or you suddenly need to carve a wildfire break around your house, Amazon.com will zip you a Husqvarna 120 Mark II chainsaw in a few days for $180.  It's not so easy with America's top-selling brand, though. On the Stihl website, no prices are shown, and once you select a product, you’ll have to click through to find a nearby dealer – typically a small hardware store – that may or may not offer delivery. It’s an anachronistic, clunky sales machine, seemingly ill-suited to shopping during a pandemic. It’s also working just fine thanks.  Stihl (pronounced 'steel') sales so far this year are up 20 percent over 2019 and in the U.S. it is on pace for the best year in its near century of business, both in terms of revenue and units sold.

The company doesn't sell through big box stores.  In fact, in the past, Stihl has boasted about not selling in these establishments.  They once runs ads saying that you wouldn't find their chainsaws in a box, not even a big box.   The ad referenced the fact that the dealer staff often assembled and taught you how to use the product before you left the small neighborhood store.  The article ends noting the loyalty of its customers:

The strategy might not make for as many transactions, but it makes for a stickier, more lucrative customer. The personal touch, apparently, still works in a digital, distanced world.

Reflecting on the Past Six Months: What's Permanent vs. Temporary?

Source: Wikimedia

In a recent Fortune article by Michal Lev-Ram, several chief human resource officers comment on lessons from the pandemic.   Here's an excerpt with a perspective shared by Grace Zuncic, CHRO at Chobani:

There are some silver linings to the current challenges facing HR officers: Being pushed to rethink the workplace, even when it happens for all the wrong reasons, can lead to fruitful results. “We were always wondering when that moment of disruption would arrive,” said Grace Zuncic, chief people officer at Chobani, and another participant at the recent event. “You never wish for it to come in the form of a pandemic, and yet, we have this opportunity to redefine how things will be done.”

Beyond just human resources, all areas of a business should be looking carefully at the changes and innovations introduced over the past six months.   Leaders need to be asking the question:  Which of these changes should stick (be permanent), and which is a temporary stopgap measure to get through the pandemic?   Some innovations clearly are delivering great value to customers, employees, and/or suppliers.  These new products, processes, and systems should stay.   Curbside pick-up at many retailers, for instance, should NEVER go away.  Customers are finding it incredibly useful and valuable.  Sorting through the changes that should stick will be crucial for many organizations.  Forced to innovate, many firms have come up with some ingenious solutions.  These should not be simply discarded if/when we return to normalcy.   We shouldn't wait for a vaccine to begin to ask questions about the permanence of new practices; that conversation should be ongoing, starting as soon as possible.  

Projecting Self-Confidence, not Self-Doubt

Source: Pixabay

Kellogg Insight recently featured some very useful advice on how to project self-confidence in the workplace by Ellen Taaffe, Clinical Assistant Professor of Leadership and Director of Women's Leadership Programs at the Kellogg School of Management.   Her focus on the language people use is very constructive.  Here's an excerpt: 

On a day-to-day level, Taaffe says, you can project self-confidence by recognizing and minimizing how often you use qualifying language.

“I was recently on a call where a more junior person was sharing some good work that she had developed,” Taaffe says. “As she shared her recommendation, no one was responding. She started to speed up, audibly losing confidence before asking ‘Am I making any sense?’ I thought, Ugh. The pressure, when one is intimidated or doubting themselves, is real. It is easy to get rattled and diminish our contributions and confidence with how we communicate.”

Taaffe recommends avoiding rhetorical questions or opening qualifiers, because every “Does that make sense?” or “This may be a bad idea but…” signals doubt and indicates to listeners that the statement is less worthy of consideration.  Instead, confirm that your audience is following along using far more confident-sounding open-ended questions, such as “What are your thoughts?” or “What questions do you have?”  Taaffe also advises couching your idea in a brainstorming frame such as “What could we learn if we did…?” This has the added benefit of starting a dialogue that engages others and asks them to contribute.

Afterwards, check in with mentors and colleagues for advice about the ways your performance can continue to adjust and adapt.“

When It Comes to Creativity, Face-to-Face Interaction Matters

Source:  Wikimedia

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many firms have extended their working from home policies indefinitely.   People may not be returning to the office for quite some time.  We all know many of the challenges of working from home, particularly if you have young children or kids trying to engage in remote learning.   Still, for many firms, they have found that employees have been remarkably productive while not coming to the office.  Many companies have talked openly about perhaps having a substantial chunk of the workforce never return to the office again, even after COVID subsides.  Geoff Colvin of Fortune wrote recently, though, about the potential costs and risks of remote work.  He argues that creativity and innovation will suffer if we lose opportunities for face-to-face interaction.  Colvin quotes Steve Jobs, from Isaacson's biography:   “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat.  That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.” Here's a more extended excerpt, in which Colvin discusses the research on this subject:

In one of the most revealing studies of creativity in the workplace to date, researchers from MIT, Northeastern University, University of Cologne, University of Bamberg, and Aalto University studied several teams working on projects involving computer science, economics, psychology, and other fields; their findings were published in the International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering in 2012. The subjects wore small badges called sociometers to record interactions within the teams, and the creativity and quality of the teams’ ideas were rated by peers on a scale of one to five. The results show strikingly what a deeply human experience it is to be creative in a group. The more that group members faced each other, the more creative was their output. The more they looked into each other’s eyes, the more creative they were. The more willing they were to confide in one another, the more creative they were. 

Facing each other, looking into the eyes, confiding—all those behaviors reflect and build trust. The researchers measured trust within the groups and found that it was crucial to the whole process. Their conclusion: “There is no substitute for face-to-face interaction to build up this trust.”

No Time for Ambiguous Leadership

Source: Psychology Today

Adam Bryant writes terrific articles on leadership based on his interviews with leaders in a variety of industries.  Bryant used to write for the New York Times; his most recent article was published by Strategy + Business.   It's titled, "Ambiguous Times are no time for Ambiguous Leadership."  In that piece, Bryant tells a terrific story about Tom Lawson, CEO of FM Global.  

The commercial property insurance company is headquartered near our Bryant University campus.   The firm has a unique competitive positioning in the insurance business.   Most firms rely heavily on actuaries to evaluate risk.  FM Global relies on engineering and science to develop an in-depth understanding of the risk of various practices and systems. Then they apply their knowledge to help mitigate their clients' risk. As Jenny Chao, senior research scientist at the firm, told the New York Times several years ago: "I blow things up to try to predict and prevent explosions. I also test products designed to prevent explosions and make recommendations on how clients can avoid risks."

In Bryant's article, he explains CEO Lawson's philosophy about clarity of communication.  Lawson argues that employees will fill any vacuum with speculation and assumption.  Sometimes, leaders aren't aware of the subtle signals being interpreted and misinterpreted by employees.   Here's an excerpt from Bryant's article:

Tom Lawson, the chair and CEO of FM Global, a property insurance company headquartered in Johnston, R.I., shared a similar story. “As I was moving up through the different management positions, I learned the hard way about how people can interpret a message,” he told me. “I was running our research group, where we have a lot of science Ph.D.s. One morning, it was rainy and horrible as I drove to work. I got to the parking lot, which was full, so I had to park far from the building and walk through the pouring rain without an umbrella. I was drenched and running late for a conference call.

“So, I walked right past the receptionist, didn’t talk to anybody, went into my office, and shut the door. I did my conference call and then forgot to open my door when it was over. About three hours later, our head of research knocks on the door. He said, ‘Can I talk to you? We’ve got a problem. Everyone’s saying that the company’s in financial trouble and that our research is going to get outsourced.’ I said, ‘What?’ Then he said, ‘You walked right into the building on the day we released our financials, and you didn’t talk to anybody. You shut your door and you locked yourself in.’”

Lawson added: “In fact, our financials were fine, and I told him the story of what happened, and he started laughing. I spent the rest of the day walking around, telling people that everything was fine. But it was a great example of how your actions can be misinterpreted. If you don’t communicate, people will make up narratives themselves, and those narratives may be negative.”

Making Decisions under Conditions of Extreme Uncertainty

Source: Pixabay

Harry Rutter, Miranda Wolpert and Trisha Greenhalgh are British professors in the areas of public health, mental health, and primary care health respectively.   They have written a blog post titled, "Managing Uncertainty in the COVID-19 Era."   The post appeared on the British Medical Journal website.  They offer five rules for coping with high degrees of uncertainty and making sound decisions in that context.  I think the rules are incredibly applicable in a wide array of settings, not simply in healthcare.  Here are the five rules:  

1. Most data will be flawed or incomplete. Be honest and transparent about this.
2. For some questions, certainty may never be reached. Consider carefully whether to wait for definitive evidence or act on the evidence you have.
3. Make sense of complex situations by acknowledging the complexity, admitting ignorance, exploring paradoxes and reflecting collectively.
4. Different people (and different stakeholder groups) interpret data differently. Deliberation among stakeholders may generate multifaceted solutions.
5. Pragmatic interventions, carefully observed and compared in real-world settings, can generate useful data to complement the findings of controlled trials and other forms of evidence.

Why Don't My Employees Trust Me?

Sourrce: Pixabay

Cara Brennan Allamano, senior vice president at Udemy, recently shared results from her firm's survey of 1,000 workers across the country.   She published the findings in Fast Company: 

• 63% believe their employers are using the COVID-19 pandemic and economic uncertainty as an excuse to trim down their organizations
• 61% believe their employers are using workplace downsizing during the pandemic to transition to a more automated workforce
• 52% believe their employers are leaning toward relocating their employees and organizations because of COVID-19

The numbers might shock you initially.  However, consider for a moment the abysmal employee engagement scores at many organizations before the COVID pandemic.  It's no wonder, then, that we see many employees with such perceptions about their employers' intentions during the crisis.   

Leaders need to ask themselves:  Why don't our employees trust me?  They have to be honest with themselves.  If they can't confront the truth, or don't seem to understand the reasons, leaders must find confidantes who will tell them the unvarnished truth.   Too often, I hear leaders make excuses.  They blame employees for holding misperceptions.  I think that's a misguided reaction, and frankly, one that is potentially very harmful to the organization in the long run.   Employees believe what they believe.  Perhaps their beliefs aren't true, but leaders must ask themselves:  WHY do they hold these beliefs?  Don't blame the employees.  Fix the situation.  Get to the root of why employees have come to be so skeptical and cynical about top leadership's intentions.  In my view, leaders should ask themselves three questions:

1. What did I do in the past that caused an erosion of trust in the organization?
2. When did my actions not match my words in the past?
3. Have I acted in ways that employees might perceive as unfair or unjust?  Why did they come to see my actions in that way?  

Understanding Your Employees' Aspirations

Source:  Needpix.com

In a recent interview published on the Knowledge@Wharton website, Dartmouth Professor Syd Finkelstein talked about lowering employee anxiety and communicating effectively with your employees during this time of remote work.   He explains what should be happening during one-on-one conversations with your team members. In particular, he describes how leaders should try to understand their employees' pain points and aspirations. 

The second thing is more of an individual idea, which is for each individual on your team to carve out some time to have that one-on-one conversation, not the big Zoom meeting or the BlueJeans meeting or whatever it is. One of the best ways you can signal that you really care about somebody – and this will help alleviate their anxiety – is if you try to understand what it is they need and what they want in their own careers at this point in time.

That could be starting to think about, “Well, within a year hopefully we’re on the other side and here’s what I’d like to do.” Or, “I have an aspiration to be a senior VP or a C-suite executive here” — to actually spend the time partnering, where you’re not only providing advice, but you’re actually helping them execute on this. For example, if somebody needs certain skills to get to the next stage, you help them figure out how they can get those skills. If that means a new assignment, a new opportunity, you do that.

That’s just good management of people. But when you do that, especially now, you’re demonstrating in a real way – not just with words, which are important – that you care about each individual person and you want them to succeed, and you want to understand what’s going on in their lives now, and work together to try to get them to the next stage, whatever that happens to be.

Creativity: More Ideas Leads to Better Ideas

Source:  Flickr

This week, I came across a terrific paper publishedy by clinical neuropsychologist Rex E. Jung and his colleagues in Frontiers of Psychology.  The paper is titled, "Quantity yields quality when it comes to creativity: a brain and behavioral test of the equal-odds rule." 

For years, design thinking advocates such as the practitioners at IDEO and instructors at the Stanford d.School have argued that creative problem-solving techniques should first focus on generating lots of ideas, while deferring judgement.  The notion is that you have the best chance of coming up with a truly great idea if you brainstorm as many ideas as possible. Some quote Linus Pauling who once said, "The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."  Is this true, though?  Does idea fluency (the number of ideas developed) relate positively to creativity and originality?    Jung and his colleagues examined that question using a multi-method research approach.  They not only collected data on a series of behavioral measures from a pool of 246 research subjects, but they conducted neuroimaging as well.   Here is what they sought to study, as described in the opening to their paper: 

There is a long history, within the creativity literature, noting an association between idea fluency (the number of ideas generated) and the associated quality, originality, and/or creativity of the ideas that are produced on divergent thinking tasks (Wallach and Kogan, 1965). This notion has since been conceptualized as the “equal-odds rule” by Simonton (1997), which states that “the relationship between the number of hits (i.e., creative successes) and the total number of works produced in a given time period is positive, linear, stochastic, and stable.” This principle has great appeal in that it conforms broadly to evolutionary principles (i.e., there is a variation/selection process; Campbell, 1960), it is parsimonious (Simonton, 1984b), and it conforms to excitatory and inhibitory neuronal processes familiar to the neurosciences (Logothetis, 2008).

At the opening of their discussion section, the authors summarize their findings: 

We found that quantity was associated with quality on measures of divergent thinking customarily associated with creative cognition. Subjects who produced more descriptions of abstract visual designs produced more creative descriptions of the designs as measured by judges who were blind to subject demographics. These results provide compelling support for the equal-odds rule which underlie BVSR theories of creative cognition, and which have been demonstrated repeatedly in Big C cohorts throughout history. Importantly, these results were obtained in a college sample ranging in creative achievement (0–144), and intellectual capacity (80–153), thus spanning the normal ranges of both creative and intellectual abilities. We found that fluency and creativity were highly related to one another when measured using a test of divergent thinking and the consensual assessment technique. Finally, we found that fronto-subcortical brain networks were implicated in performance of both fluency and creativity measures, with a common locus across both measures being the frontal pole.

The research confirms Pauling's observation:  "The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." 

Offering Predictability in Turbulent Times

In a recent article for McKinsey, Stanford Professors Robert I. Sutton and Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao offered some highly useful tips for leaders navigating the current tumultous environment.  They offer key insights regarding predictability and understanding.  Sutton and Rao argue that leaders must try to offer as much predictability as possible to their employees.  Moreover, they have to explain the rationale for their actions clearly and concisely.  Here's an excerpt:

The protective powers of predictability are a central theme in psychologist Martin Seligman’s classic research on learned helplessness. His “safety-signal hypothesis” was inspired by the air-raid sirens used in London during the Blitz, in 1940 and 1941, when German bombers attacked the city night after night. Because England’s warning system was so reliable, Londoners could go about their business without fear of being killed by German bombs so long as the sirens were silent. When the sirens wailed, they knew it was time to scurry underground to “the Tube” and other safe locations.

The upshot of Seligman’s work is that threats to well-being do less harm if reliable signals enable 

people to know when they are safe from the threat versus when it is imminent, fear is warranted, and it is time to take action to minimize risk. Conversely, if people never feel safe, their feelings of powerlessness cause them to suffer constant anxiety, despair, and, ultimately, physical and mental illness.

While predictability is about the potential for bad (or good) things to happen (or not), understanding is about the why. We humans have a burning need for explanations of important events in our lives. When events, especially distressing ones, are uncertain—and clear-cut answers aren’t forthcoming—people get anxious and generate plausible explanations. Once people invent, articulate, and spread such imagined explanations, they can have a hard time letting them go, no matter how incomplete, biased, or downright wrong they are, suggests research by Prashant Bordia and his colleagues.3

Dampening the anxiety that fuels distracting rumors requires explaining decisions in enough detail to convey that you, as a leader, are treating the people affected with nuance and care. Leaders also do well to rely heavily on simple headlines and repetition, because the anxiety provoked by crises can make it hard for people to process complex information.

Know-it-all vs. Learn-it-all Leaders

Listen to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speak about "know-it-all" vs. "learn-it-all" leaders and organizations.   Great way of applying growth mindset to organizational leadership and transformation.   He discusses this topic during the first portion of the video interview.

Shadow Boards of Younger Employees

Source: Needpix.com

My former student, Cassidy Forsley, recently shared an interesting article on LinkedIn. It's a Harvard Business Review article titled, "Why You Should Create a 'Shadow Board' of Younger Employees." I enjoyed reading the article, as I've encountered companies employing such practices over the years. Each time, I've been impressed with the results. The article authors, Jennifer Jordan and Michael Sorell, describe how Prada and Gucci have used shadow boards successfully.  They write: 

A lot of companies struggle with two apparently unrelated problems: disengaged younger workers and a weak response to changing market conditions. A few companies have tackled both problems at the same time by creating a “shadow board” — a group of non-executive employees that works with senior executives on strategic initiatives. The purpose? To leverage the younger groups’ insights and to diversify the perspectives that executives are exposed to.

I think one benefit of a shadow board is that executives sometimes hear perspectives that their direct subordinates and middle managers are fearful of sharing with those in the C-suite.   A lack of psychological safety limits the views and information flowing to the top.   However, as one CEO joked to me, "the young employees are just stupid enough to tell me the truth!"  In other words, they aren't worried as much at times about the negative career repurcussions of sharing the unvarnished truth with top executives.   The shadow boards also enable companies to tap into the insights of younger consumers as well as spot social and technological trends.  Furthermore, as the authors argue, it increases employee engagement, thereby helping with talent retention.  

Hiring: Ask Why, What, and How

Source: modernhealthcare.com

Kevin Lofton is CEO of Catholic Health Initiatives. He has served in that capacity since 2003. Catholic Health Initiatives is the country's third largest nonprofit healthcare system. It includes roughly 100 hospitals across 17 states. Several years ago, he participated in an interview with Adam Bryant, then of the New York Times. Here's Lofton on how he hires. I think the why/what/how progression is very helpful to consider as you interview. 

How do you hire?

I start with the “why” — why are you here, why would this role fit into your career path, and why are you interested in coming to our organization? I then focus on the “what” — what are the things that you’ve done that relate to what you might do here, and what are your ideas for how you can help us?

And then I move to the “how,” and that’s where character comes in. How do you do business? Somebody might be a cardiovascular surgeon who is going to put a lot of money on our bottom line, but if they yell at nurses in the operating room, then we don’t want them.

Reflecting on your Decision-Making Mistakes: Anne Mulcahy

Source:  CNBC

In this article for McKinsey, former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy reminds us that you need to analyze the decisions you didn't make, as well as the decisions you have made, when reflecting on your mistakes. The missed opportunity may be a bigger mistake than the poor decision that you made. 

Decisiveness is about timeliness. And timeliness trumps perfection. The most damaging decisions are the missed opportunities, the decisions that didn’t get made in time. If you’re creating a category of bad decisions you’ve made, you need to include with it all the decisions you didn’t get to make because you missed the window of time that existed to take advantage of an opportunity.

She also writes about the absolute necessity to cultivate internal critics on your team:

My own management style probably hasn’t changed much in 20 years, but I learned to compensate for this by building a team that could counter some of my own weaknesses. You need internal critics: people who know what impact you’re having and who have the courage to give you that feedback. I learned how to groom those critics early on, and that was really, really useful. This requires a certain comfort with confrontation, though, so it’s a skill that has to be developed.

I started making a point of saying, “All right, John-Noel, what are you thinking? I need to hear.” And this started to demonstrate that even if I did show my colors quickly, they could still take me on and I could still change my mind. The decisions that come out of allowing people to have different views—and treasuring the diversity of those views—are often harder to implement than what comes out of consensus decision making, but they’re also better.

The Essence of Excellent Mentorship

Source:  PxFuel

We've all heard the age-old advice: Find a terrific mentor.  Ask them good questions.  Learn from their successes and failures.  Gather feedback from them before making high-stakes decisions.  But what makes a terrific mentor?  Can we identify the "secret sauce" to excellent mentorship?

Brian Uzzi, Yifang Ma, and Satyam Mukherjee have conducted a fascinating large-scale study that may shed some important light on this question.  The scholars compiled a remarkable dataset of over 37,000 scientists and mentees.  They examined more than 1 million research papers produced by these scholars over a 57 year period.   Moreover, they looked at major prizes won by the researchers.  

They found something quite interesting.  The most successful protégés often make their make in subject areas distinct from those in which their mentors earned their stellar reputations.   Kellogg Insight described the research in a recent article as follows:

In some ways, this goes against conventional wisdom: students who are successful and carry on their mentors’ work are often perceived as rising stars. But in the long run, the most successful scientists are those who chart their own paths.

Uzzi and his colleagues try to identify what makes terrific mentors whose protégés soar.  They argue that the best mentors don't try to create a "mini-me" at all.   However, they do share a "secret sauce" with their mentees.  What is this secret sauce?   Again, here's an excerpt from the Kellogg Insight article about the research:

It’s clear that the best mentors pass on something that goes far beyond subject-matter expertise. (If that were the case, mini-me mentees would have been the most likely to succeed.)  Uzzi and his coauthors believe that what’s being passed between future prizewinners and protégés is tacit knowledge. Mentees aren’t just learning concrete skills from their mentors. They’re also picking up how their mentors come up with research questions, how they brainstorm, how they interact with collaborators, and so on—knowledge that is difficult to codify and often learned by doing.

That's the secret sauce.  Tacit knowledge.  In a mentoring relationship, focus on the critical skills that enabled the mentor to succeed, not just the subject matter expertise. 

Which Music Do We Prefer? Interesting New Research

https://freesvg.org/

We know that Spotify, Apple, and others have developed sophisticated algorithms to recommend music to listeners. While many customers know precisely what they would like to listen to, others are open to discovery. Spotify distinguishes between those listeners with a "closed" vs. "open" mindset. The algorithms are especially important for those with an open mindset. 

Now we have a new academic study that suggests an interesting way to predict the music we will enjoy. David Greenberg, Sandra Matz, Andrew Schwartz, and Kai Fricke have published a paper titled, "The Self-Congruity Effect of Music" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  They write: 

Across three studies we show that people prefer the music of artists who have publicly observable personalities (“personas”) similar to their own personality traits (the “self-congruity effect of music”)... Our findings are largely consistent across two methodological approaches to operationalizing an artist’s public personality: (a) the public personality as reported by the artist’s fans, and (b) the public personality as predicted by machine learning on the basis of the artist’s lyrics.

The scholars also show powerful evidence of a gender effect in music preferences.  They write:

The present article also provides the first evidence that listeners tend to prefer music from artists of the same sex, which had been previously theorized but not studied empirically (Hagen & Bryant, 2003). That is, the gender-fit between the listener and artist was found to be a significant predictor of musical preferences.

So, the next time you say yourself, "I love that artist's music."  Ask yourself, what do you know about that performer?  Why do you like that artist?   For companies, of course, the implications are profound.  Can they use this finding to refine their algorithms, without intruding on our personal privacy?  What if listeners were willing to disclose more about their personality in order to discover more music they would enjoy?   

Book of the Month

Thank you to Alex Urrea, Managing Partner at Eduscape, for selecting Unlocking Creativity as a book of the month selection and for his thoughtful review.  Urrea writes:

Unlocking Creativity, written by Michael Roberto, is a perfect read for all educational leaders and classroom teachers who want to generate comprehensive plans on how to approach this period in education. Mr. Roberto writes about the six mindsets that we must shift in order to think creatively and constructively; I believe that we must reflect on these mindsets so we don’t retreat to the usual comfort zones that have produced mediocre and factory-like results in education for decades.

Essential Summer Reading List

Source: Getty Images

Thank you to Jack McCullough, founder and president of the CFO Leadership Council, for including my book, Unlocking Creativity, on his list of essential summer reading.   McCullough's complete list may be found in this Forbes article published last week.  

Farming for Dissent at Netflix

Source:  Wikimedia

Yesterday, I listened to the first episode of the Recode by Vox podcast, Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect.  The episode focuses on Netflix's vaunted corporate culture.   Many of you have probably read a great deal about the Netflix culture and the famous slide deck describing its tenets and values that circulated widely on the internet for years.   This episode takes a comprehensive, balanced look at the culture, highlighting its strengths and limitations.  I found one particular aspect quite interesting, given my work on decision making.  Here's an excerpt from a description of the episode by Recode/Vox:

Another tenet — “farming for dissent” — came out of one of the company’s biggest failures. You might remember it as a punchline: Qwikster.  The short version: In 2011, Hastings wanted to move his company from its core DVD-by-mail service to online streaming, which was growing quickly but was still a smaller part of his business. So he tried splitting Netflix into a DVD business and a streaming business named Qwikster. Which meant that if his customers wanted the same services they were already getting before, they would have to subscribe to both and end up paying 60 percent more.  Netflix veterans still wince about the experience: The company was skewered on social media and by SNL. Its stock dropped 70 percent, and more than 700,000 people canceled their subscriptions.

Eventually, Hastings admitted that Qwikster’s name, the price hikes, and the way the company talked about it all had been a huge blunder. He rolled back the changes.  But in Hastings’s narrative, the failure was useful for Netflix’s culture. He thinks that many of his top employees could have told him he was wrong but were too afraid or at least too in awe of their CEO’s former successes to say anything.

“Everyone knows the tale of the self-absorbed, arrogant CEO who doesn’t listen. And there’s an element of that, because we have been so successful at so many things before that,” Hastings told us earlier this year at Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles. “But the more subtle one is that I had been so successful before that most of the executives thought ... ‘But Reed has been right on so many things. I’ll bet he’s right on this one. And I’m just not seeing it.’”

After the debacle, Hastings instituted “farming for dissent,” a formal practice where employees are supposed to run their big ideas by colleagues and have them tell you candidly — on a Google Doc that’s open for everyone to see — what’s wrong with it. It’s considered integral to the company that your coworkers tell you what they really think of your idea, even if — perhaps especially if — you’re their boss.

Lessons from a Poker Player: Counteracting Cognitive Biases

Microsoft vs. Apple: Vertical Integration

Source: CIO.com

In a matter of days, we saw two contrasting announcements by tech giants Apple and Microsoft.  First, Apple announces that it will be making its ARM-based processors for Mac laptops and desktop computers.   The firm will no longer be using Intel chips.   Second, Microsoft announces it will close all 83 of its retail stores.  What's happening here? Apple is deepening its vertical integration, while Microsoft is backing off.  

Both strategies make sense.  Vertical integration has always made more sense for Apple than for Microsoft.  Apple has used vertical integration, backward and forward, to control product quality, enhance brand experience and product differentiation, and stay close to its customers.  Microsoft has operated in the portion of the industry that has relied far less on vertical integration.  Microsoft made the operating system, Intel made the microprocessors, Dell, Lenovo, HP and others assembled the PCs, and a variety of players helped distribute and retail the computers.   

What, then, was Microsoft doing in the retail store business?  I'm not sure.  It never made as much sense as it did for Apple to operate stores.   The genius bar, product demonstrations, computer classes, and other activities that occur within an Apple store are all part of the rationale for vertical integration at the company.   These activities deepen Apple's relationship with its customers, enable it to collect valuable information directly from its most ardent fans, help the firm create a powerful brand experience, and provide an opportunity to enhance product differentiation.   Microsoft doesn't sell the same type of products, nor does it have the same type of image.  Moreover, its customers are different.  Microsoft has incredibly satisfied, loyal customers; Apple has fans.  Remember the word fan comes from the word fanatics.  Apple's customer base is just different, and it fits more with a vertical integration strategy.  

Vertical integration, of course, has many drawbacks.   I often discuss these limitations and risks at length in my strategy courses.  However, in some cases, it can make a great deal of sense.  Apple may be one of those cases; Zara may be another.  Microsoft's competitive positioning doesn't appear to be as conducive to vertical integration.  

Assessing Your Personal Brand

Dina Smith, a leadership development expert, has written a Fast Company article titled, "How do you overcome a bad job market? Groom a dynamite personal brand."   Smith argues that many people have misconceptions about the concept of cultivating a personal brand.  They think that focusing on your brand is unnecessary, since they deliver great outcomes for their organization.  Or, they shy away from the notion of engaging in excessive self-promotion.  However, Smith points out that we all have personal brands, whether we focus on them or not.   We should be aware of how others perceive us, and how it may help or hinder our ability to achieve our goals.   She offers three questiosn to help us understand and assess our personal brand:

To clarify your desired personal brand, ask yourself these straightforward, though not necessarily easy, questions:

• What do I want to be known for?
• What value or results do I want to deliver through my efforts?
• How do I want colleagues to describe me?

Scenario Planning: A Useful Tool in Today's Environment

In today's environment, companies need to rethink their approach to strategic planning.  Many firms continue to rely on very traditional planning exercises.  Frankly, most of these processes assume that managers can accurately predict the future.  Many plans are characterized by high amounts of false precision in forecasting and budgeting.  

Scenario planning represents a useful tool for reshaping the planning process given the turbulence and ambiguity in today's world.  This technique involves imagining different ways the future may unfold and challenging some of our most basic assumptions and tenets of conventional wisdom.   We envision multiple, differentiated scenarios and then build strategies to fit those environments.  Finally, and most importantly, we think about early warning signals or leading indicators that we should monitor becuase they may help us detect the emergence of one of these scenarios at an early stage.  For more on the usefulness of this technique, see this short video. 

Underestimating our Creativity

We are all generally familiar with the notion that people tend to exhibit overconfidence in their abilities across a variety of domains. However, some recent research suggests that we are not at all overconfident when it comes to assessing the originality of our own ideas during the early stages of the problem-solving process. We underestimate our own creativity. Ella Miron-Spektor of INSEAD writes,

"The results of three studies we conducted on this little-researched facet of creativity were striking. We found that people systematically underestimate their originality – a defining characteristic of creativity – throughout the ideation process. Such bias in the evaluation of our originality stems from the belief that other people think like us."

Professor Miron-Spektor notes that individuals become overconfident when they invest a great deal of time, effort, and energy into refining an idea that they selected from among many they may have considered initially.  However, early on in the process of generating ideas, we may actually underestimate how novel our possible solutions are.   What, then, should managers do with this finding?  How should it affect their behavior as they lead team members in a problem-solving process?   Miron-Spektor writes:

As a manager, make it a point to invite your team members to share their ideas which may otherwise never see the light of day because they assume their ideas are not innovative enough. By acknowledging their creativity, you can reduce their bias, at least to some extent.

 For more about my own research on creativity in organizations, see the short video clip below: 

Ensuring Your Team Feels Valued

Source: needpix.com 

Aytekin Tank, founder of JotForm, has crafted a useful column for Fast Company titled, "4 ways to ensure your team feels valued without in-person connections."  Tank acknowledges that it can be very challenging for leaders to make team members feel valued when so many are working remotely, resources are scarce, and the stress is very high.   The article notes that, "A recent Gallup report showed that only one in three U.S. workers 'strongly agreed' they received recognition for their work in the past seven days. Employees who don’t feel recognized are twice as likely to say they’ll quit in the next year."   Given this reality, Tank offers four strategies for ensuring that team members feel valued.  

GIVE YOUR TEAMS THE TOOLS THEY NEED:  What technology, supplies, and other resources do your employees need to work effectively in a remote mode?  Like a good coach, put your team members in the best position to thrive and win.  

MAKE TIME TO LISTEN AND CONNECT:  Keep up the informal check-ins with your employees.  Don't just inform them about what you are doing or what the organization is planning.  Make sure to listen to their concerns, questions, and needs.  Open up about yourself a bit; let them see a different side, perhaps a bit about your personal/family situation.  Letting them see you as human can be very important for connecting with them, and encouraging them to be candid with you.  

INCREASE TRANSPARENCY: Provide regular updates on key initiatives and metrics.  Be honest about the challenges facing the organization.   Let them know exactly where things stand.  If you don't have everything figured out in terms of plans for the coming months, that's ok.  Let them know your decision-making process, how their input will be incorporated, and the criteria you will use to make final choices.  

OFFER TANGIBLE REWARDS: You might not be able to offer bonuses or raises this year.  What can you do to reward your employees?  Tank suggests offering time off in the future (days that they can bank now for future use), or providing new professional development opportunities.  Other forms of recognition and reward might include supporting causes about which the employees care a great deal, or perhaps providing paid time for team members to volunteer in the community.  

Empathize & Challenge

Source: Flickr

Over the past few months, we have read a great deal about the importance of empathy as a crucial leadership competency.  Here's one take, by Ruth Gotian on Forbes.com:  

A pandemic brings out fears, frustrations and anxiety and many of us are feeling tired, unmotivated and incapable of focusing. As I previously reported for Forbes, this is the time to connect and empathize with our colleagues. One such way of doing so is with a ‘check in’ conversation. This chat is not about catching up on work related tasks, rather, to see how the members of your team are doing, really doing. The chats can be by any medium you have available including phone, text, Slack and Zoom. 

What is critical, AJ Duffy, Learning and Development Director, Corporate Groups at Microsoft explains, is to “Listen with intent. Don’t just ask ‘How are you doing?’ Ask and then hear them. Pause longer to allow all thoughts to come out. Sometimes people just want to be heard and not given advice.” Duffy encourages listening for specifics. “If a colleague or direct report says something specific about a family member or friend, next time you speak, check back in with them about that specific person.” Most importantly, Duffy explains is to model the behavior. If a manager or peers sees you doing this, it will get noticed and others will follow your lead.

I know some leaders struggle with the concept of empathy though.   They understand its value and would like to improve their skills in this area.  However, they also do not want to sacrifice their ability to challenge their people, hold them to high standards, and push them to achieve what they might not consider possible.   These conversations suggest to me that leaders often think that empathizing and setting a high bar are somehow mutually exclusive.   That view is misguided, in my opinion.  I think about what the best teachers do.  They clearly care a great deal about their students.  They seek to understand their interests, goals, perspectives, and struggles.  However, they also set a high bar, and they challenge students to achieve more than they ever could imagine.  One need not sacrifice one to achieve the other.  However, it is a delicate balancing act.  What I've found as a teacher, though, is that they will respond to your challenges if they know you care.  If they believe you have their best interests at heart, they will run through walls for you.  

Micromanaging in a Crisis (or not)

Source: CrystalLinks.com

I came across a very useful perspective on micromanagement during a time of crisis this week. Jeff Hyman is an adjunct lecturer of innovation & entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management. Hyman serves as the chief talent officer of the firm Recruit Rockstars Executive Search. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of a weight-management firm, Retrofit, that he also founded. Hyman explains his perspective on when to zoom in and when to step back in this brief excerpt of an article posted on the Kellogg Insight website. 

During this extraordinary time, there will be functions critical to the business that you will have to micromanage because, without your attention, there might not be a business to lead. At the same time, there are going to be some functions that you absolutely need to trust your team to execute on their own.

For example, under regular circumstances, a CEO would not spend time thinking about cash collections or accounts receivable. They have a CFO whose team handles that function. But if, say, half your revenue vanishes overnight, or your early stage company is not yet profitable, or the venture capital deal you had lined up falls through, cashflow takes on a new urgency.  So, micromanaging might include working with your accounts-receivable team to determine whether to negotiate creative, flexible deals that still keep cash flowing into your business, especially at a time when many of your suppliers may want to wait on paying you. “Cash is the oxygen of your business,” Hyman says. “If you’ve only got six- or three-months’ cash on hand, you may need to be way in the weeds on cash collections if your company is going to live to fight another day. You may require daily reviews with your accounts-receivable team to understand when you can expect payments from customers.” 

Just as you will have new roll-up-your-sleeves tasks, other projects may not demand much of your attention at all. That product that you had intended to launch next year, and on which you still want to keep moving forward, can be delegated to trusted team members.

“It’s very tempting in times of uncertainty to find this false sense of certainty by trying to micromanage everything,” Hyman says. “But you can’t micromanage virtual teams. So you have to trust that you’ve hired well. They may get things done almost the way that you would have done it. You have to be okay with that. It’s much more important right now to get the few things right and get them right enough versus getting them perfect.” Be clear with your team about who has responsibility for these new projects, as well as on how (or if) you would like to be involved in any decisions.  “You can let them know, ‘I’m letting you run it. Keep me posted. Let me know what you need from me,’” he says.

Asking for Help at Work

Source: Needpix.com

Many people refrain from asking for needed assistance at work.  Why?  They do not want to appear incompetent, or perhaps they do not want to admit failure.  Sometimes, we don't ask for help because we don't want to burden others.  Cornell Professor Vanessa K. Bohns wrote about the issue this week in Harvard Business Review.   She argues that many people hold beliefs that prevent them from asking for help, yet these beliefs turn out to be misguided.  Here are Bohns' three myths about asking for help.  In each case, she cites research demonstrating that these beliefs are indeed myths, not reality.  

Myth 1: Asking for Help Makes You Look Bad
Myth 2: If I Do Ask for Help, I’ll Be Rejected
Myth 3: Even if Someone Agrees to Help, They Won’t Enjoy Doing So

While I agree that people ought to reconsider the reasons why they might be hesitant to ask for help, I do think workers should contemplate HOW they ask for help as well.   Sometimes, reaching out can be done in a highly ineffective manner.   Here are a few tips.  First, be clear about what you are trying to accomplish and why.   Second, explain what you have already done.  What have you tried?  What's worked? What hasn't?   Third, describe how you think the person may be of assistance.  What expertise or skills do they have that might be helpful?  Finally, be sure to encourage them to identify others who might be better suited to assist.  Don't make them feel bad about acknowledging their own limitations.   Of course, be sure to thank them in advance for their help as well!  

Unforced Errors & Competiive Rivalry

Source: PGA

31 year old Rory McIlroy is a four-time winner of a golf major, and one of only three men to win four majors by the age of 25.   He was #1 in the world in the fall of 2015.  However, he hasn't won a major since the 2014 PGA Championship. Brook Koepka overtook him at the top of the golf world, coming on strong to win four majors from 2017-2019.  The rivalry has been intriguing. In the 2019, Koepka said, "I'm not looking at anyone behind me. I’m No. 1 in the world. I’ve got an open road in front of me – I’m not looking in the rearview mirror.”  However, in February 2020, McIlroy reclaimed the #1 spot in the golf rankings.  However, Koepka notes that McIroy still hasn't won a major since 2014.   What can we learn from these types of intense rivalries in sports, and how can they help us understand competitive dynamics in the world of business?

Niro Sivanathan, associate professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, recently wrote an article in the South China Morning Post about his research on "unforced errors."  He argues that this research may explain, in part, the type of actions taken at Boeing leading up to the Boeing 737 MAX crisis.   Sivanathan has studied tennis and chess players, and he's found something quite interesting about how competition affects their behavior.  Here's an excerpt from his article:

In a recent study of more than 117,000 professional tennis matches, we found professional tennis players, such as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, perform worse and commit more unforced errors when they compete against players who have recently risen in their rankings, compared to those with similar rankings but who lack the same momentum.  When we abandoned tennis courts and analysed more than 5 million games from online amateur chess platforms, we found that when competitors are evenly matched, chess players perform worse against opponents they know have been climbing in the rankings.

Drawing on this research, Sivanathan asks the question about the Boeing-Airbus rivalry: "Is this a classic case of a younger rival intimidating an older, better established competitor, resulting in the established player making mistakes and, in this particular instance, losing a long-held leadership position?"  Of course, there's much more to the Boeing story than this type of unforced error effect, but it is an interesting causal factor.   I'll have more to say about the Boeing case soon, as I have a new case study about the 737 MAX crisis under review at the moment.  Stay tuned.