The Classic Traps Encountered by New Leaders

Michael Watkins wrote one of the best books on leadership transitions - The First 90 Days.  He's a friend and former colleague from HBS, and he now teaches at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. Through his research, Michael identified some of the classic traps experienced by new leaders in their early months in charge. Here are a couple of the traps that seem to me the most worrisome for new leaders:

Not engaging in social learning

Watkins argues that new leaders sometimes isolate themselves during the early months in charge.  They spend an inordinate amount of time reading reports, analyzing data, and meeting with a close circle of direct reports.  Unfortunately, they do so at the expense of engaging with a broader range of voices throughout the organization.  They forget that there is much more to learn from people than from data.  Watkins explains that you build a reputation very quickly of either being approachable or not.  It's hard to modify those first impressions if you isolate yourself at the start.  

Staying too long with the existing team

Sometimes, new leaders stick with the incumbent team because they want to give those people the benefit of the doubt, despite concerns from the board and others about their performance.  In other cases, they convince themselves that they must keep those people because of their institutional knowledge.  Certainly, wholesales changes simply for the sake of bringing in your own people can be hasty and even distastrous.  However, leaders should beware of failing to make changes when a broad swatch of the organization witnesses serious under-performance within the top team.  Failing to make needed changes will cause people to lose faith quickly in a new leader. 

Getting captured by the wrong people

Certain people will work hard to influence and persuade the new leader.  They will do so because they want to preserve or enhance their own power.  They may try to protect their priorities in the face of potential change.  Or, they may push agenda items that they could not persuade the previous leader to endorse.  New leaders have to be very careful about being "captured" by the wrong people.  Leaders may not only get bad advice. People throughout the organization are paying attention.  If they think that the leader is surrounding himself or herself with the wrong people, it will again diminish faith and trust in the new leader.  

Stimulating Creativity & Innovation While Working From Home

Source: Pixabay

S. Mitra Kalita wrote an interesting article for Fortune this week about unlocking creativity amidst the pandemic, with so many people working from home.   Kalita writes:

CEOs are nervous as they ponder how working from home affects output, innovation, and productivity in the long term, according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor. “Creativity is the biggest single issue,” he told the Financial Times. “New ideas and new customers and new segments and new business models [are] all the CEOs are concerned about.”

Kalita went to explain, "A Leesman survey of 145,000 workers globally found 28% of those working from home said they were unable to collaborate on creative work."  These numbers surely are troubling.  Yes, vaccination rollouts have picked up speed, and many of us have high hopes of a return to normalcy.  However, we surely will have many people working from home in the future, even when the pandemic hopefully subsides.  We have to conquer the challenge of creativity and innovation in a remote work environment.  Kalita interviewed Blythe Towal, a senior manager of engineering for Shield AI, for the article.  She offered the writer some good principles for how they keep employees innovative at Shield AI in these trying circumstances.  I've summarized and added some commentary below.  

Good ideas come from everywhere: Use virtual collaboration as a means of democratizing participation in meetings and projects.  That type of democratization may come in many forms virtually... chat, break-outs, polling, as well as normal conversation during meetings.  

Overcommunicate:  Encourage instant messaging and frequent check-ins, to make up for the fact that informal conversations don't just naturally happen while people pass one another in the hallway.  You might think certain messaging is being redundant, but put aside that fear.  You can't connect too much when working remotely.  As I've written elsewhere, you have to engineer serendipity to spark innovation in a remote work environment.  

Connect: Use "all-hands" type meetings not only to communicate, but to encourage the formation of bonds across units and teams.  Seek to build relationships and expand people's social networks.  Use these opportunities to also help new employees integrate and connect. 

Values matter: An emphasis on shared values helps people remain poised amidst the tendency to be fighting fires constantly during turbulent times.  It also helps insure alignment while people are dispersed geographically. 

Project positive energy: Watch out for negative energy.  Be realistic, but relentessly optimistic.  Don't get bogged down by small failures or hiccups. Focus on the big picture, and celebrate any and all triumphs together.  Small wins are crucial.  Don't just focus on the large projects and goals.  You need to build momentum and use small wins to persuade those who might be skeptical about innovative ideas and initiatives.

Leading in a Fog: Discomfort with the What-If Questions

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I recently read Adam Bryant's interview with Penny Herscher, veteran Silicon Valley board director and CEO.    He asked Herscher about lessons for leading "in a fog" - i.e., in a highly ambiguous, unpredictable environment.   Herscher argued that management teams need to consider the tough, uncomfortable "what-if" questions.  She explained:

My observation is that many leadership teams aren’t comfortable doing broad scenario what-ifs. It makes them uncomfortable. On one of my boards, I asked, “What if XYZ happens and you’re out of cash in October? What are you going to do?” Just asking the question is so powerful for the leadership team. If you don’t ask the question, they don’t go through all the logic of how it might happen, and then think about how to prevent it by managing to other priorities.

It’s as if you have to ask the leadership team, “Are you comfortable asking each other these scary questions?” Because once you can name them, they’re not quite so frightening. I find that more conservative leadership teams typically don’t want to look at the bad possible scenarios. It’s easier not to think about it. But if you’re facing a difficult, scary situation, thinking through the worst that can happen helps you prepare to prevent that worst thing from happening.

I agree wholeheartedly with Herscher.  I think many management teams want to avoid thinking about the worst.  They believe in the power of being relentlessly optimistic.  However, one can be bold and optimistic, and yet still be prepared for alternative scenarios.  Some management teams talk about the worst in private, but they always sugar coat any discussions with a broader set of employees.  They think that being too negative will hurt morale.  However, playing to "close to the vest" can backfire.  Employees can sense that the firm is operating in a very challenging and turbulent environment.  They can see the risks ahead, the icebergs ahead in the water.  If management only provides happy talk, then employees grow worried.  They wonder whether management is truly prepared for what the future may bring.  Employees may even lose faith in top management.  The best leaders confront reality and don't sugar coat the situation and gloss over an organization's weaknesses.  They name the problems and the challenges, but then make a persuasive case why the organization can and will overcome those obstacles.   

Could Repeated Practice Reduce Creativity?

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Columbia Professor Melanie S. Brucks and Stanford Professor Szu-chi Huang have published a thougght-provoking new paper titled, "Does Practice Make Perfect? The Contrasting Effects of Repeated Practice on Creativity." These scholars asked the question: "Could repeatedly 'exercising' the creativity muscle help build up creative performance over time?" Brucks and Huang conducted three studies with over 800 research subjects. Their results proved surprising. Here's an excerpt from a Stanford Business Insights article about the research:

According to recent research by Stanford Graduate School of Business alumna Melanie S. Brucks and associate professor of marketing Szu-chi Huang, regular brainstorming sessions are not likely to lead to an increase in unique ideas. In fact, the average novelty of your output — that is, the degree to which your inspirations depart from convention — actually might decrease over time.

“It was surprising,” says Brucks, who earned her PhD in marketing at Stanford in 2019 and now is an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia University. “People got worse at one type of idea generation, even as they thought they were getting better at it.”

Huang, who studies motivation, also admits she was taken aback by the results, which are detailed in an article, “Does Practice Make Perfect? The Contrasting Effects of Repeated Practice on Creativity,” recently published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. “In my field, practice is always good. It’s always about practice — do it every day and you will learn and improve your skills, or at least build good habits. But it turns out that to get better at creativity, you need to do some creative thinking about creative thinking.”

The authors found that the participants thought they were becoming more creative over time, but in fact, the number of novel ideas decreased. The scholars explain that the brain may become more inflexible as it concentrates on a particular activity repeatedly. That damages divergent thinking capabilities, unfortunately.

What can we do to maintain or boost our creative abilities while engaging in repeated brainstorming or other types of creative problem-solving activities? Change things up! Inject novelty into a team's approach to problem solving. Disrupt routines quite intentionally. Use a variety of exercises, rather than the same type of brainstorming or problem-solving process. Even change the time of day perhaps.  Huang concludes, "To practice creativity effectively, we have to change how we define practice... The structure needs to be more dynamic."  

Employee Performance Depends, in part, on Leader Mindset

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Katherine Muenks and her co-authors have published a fascinating article titled, "Does My Professor Think My Ability Can Change? Students’ Perceptions of Their STEM Professors’ Mindset Beliefs Predict Their Psychological Vulnerability, Engagement, and Performance in Class."  In my view, this paper about teaching and learning has very important implications for leadership, employee engagement, and employee productivity.   

The authors studied student perceptions about their professors' mindsets.  Did the instructor have a growth mindset (everyone can improve with the right effort, coaching, etc.) or a fixed mindset (individuals have a fixed level of ability in a particular discipline)?  Through a series of studies, the scholars show that student perceptions about the professor's mindset matters a great deal.  If students perceived that the faculty member believed in each person's ability to grow and develop his or her skills, then those students were more engaged. Moreover, they performed better in the class. The scholars go further though.  They write:

"Across all studies, we controlled for students’ personal mindset beliefs and found that, even while controlling for these personal beliefs, students’ perceptions of their professors’ mindset beliefs predicted their anticipated and experienced psychological vulnerability in class. In other words, students’ perceptions of what powerful people in the environment (e.g., their professors) believe about intelligence predict students’ psychological experiences and performance in that environment—regardless of what students themselves personally believe about intelligence...

Importantly, in Study 4, we were able to control for students’ general perceptions of how warm or competent their professor was. These analyses largely demonstrate that the associations of perceived professor mindset on students’ psychological experiences in class are not simply a function of how friendly or competent they perceive their professor to be."

In short, the professor's mindset mattered, even after controlling for the student's own mindset!  Moreover, the effect on student performance did not hinge on perceptions about the warmth or competence of the professor.  

What's the implication for business leaders?  I would argue that employees are also evaluating and judging their managers.  They are ascertaining whether that leader has a growth or a fixed mindset.  They will more engaged, more invested in their work and their own personal development, and more productive if their leaders display a growth mindset.   

Declare Your Unstated/Hidden Assumptions

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Managers many a number of crucial assumptions when they make strategic decisions or craft strategic plans.   No strategy rests simply on a body of facts or evidence.  Ambiguity and unpredictability about the future always reigns, and therefore, managers must build their plans based on certain assumptions. Of course, we often don't identify these assumptions explicitly.  They remain hidden.  Declaring your assumptions enables them to be discussed and debated.  They can be tested and probed critically.  Otherwise, managers may take certain assumptions for granted, treating them as truth, when they may actually be quite shaky.   Several years, Mark Hollingworth wrote a good article for Ivey Business Journal, in which he explained the six primary benefits of including a statement of your assumptions any strategic plan: 

1. Inclusion facilitates the analysis of any organization’s business plan by a financial institution, venture capitalist or angel investor. The risk of making a bad investment will be reduced if the investors understand and share the strategic assumptions of the organization’s management team.
2. Differences in points-of-view about strategic assumptions are the source of many of the conflicts that arise between investors and company management – and within a management team itself. Strategic assumptions represent the shared values, beliefs and vision of the management team. Demanding that they be included in a strategic plan will force management teams to hold the difficult internal conversations required and that allow them to uncover, challenge, and capture their shared assumptions.
3. Knowing they need to exit a strategic planning process with a complete, shared set of strategic assumptions forces a management team to use a much more rigorous strategic planning process.
4. Face-to-face, it is very difficult for most people to defend strategic assumptions which are ungrounded or that they do not believe or share.
5. Developing and debating strategic assumptions with groups of employees is an excellent way to gain buy-in and commitment to the organization. Having to declare and justify the assumptions upon which a plan is built means that it is difficult for a CEO to impose his or her views. With increased levels of employee buy-in, there is a greater probability that the strategic plan will actually be implemented.
6. By presenting strategic assumptions for rigorous debate and analysis, the probability is minimized that investors, employees, management and any other stakeholders will waste time, money and energy on trying to implement plans that have little chance of generating the promised results.

Super Bowl Coaches, The Curse of Expertise, and The Importance of Perspective Taking

Source: Sporting News

As we approach the Super Bowl this weekend, here's a quick look back at the history of NFL championship coaches.  The data are clear.  In football, championships are generally not won by coaches who were formerly superstar players.  33 coaches have won the 54 Super Bowls that have taken place. Several coaches have earned multiple championships, including Bill Belichick (6) and Chuck Noll (4). Of those coaches, only 1 man made the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player (Mike Ditka). Only 2 men earned Pro Bowl status as players (Mike Ditka and his mentor, Tom Landry, who made it to one Pro Bowl as a punter for the New York Giants in the 1950s). None of the other Super Bowl winning coaches earned Pro Bowl status as a player. 

Why might great players not thrive as coaches in the league?  Multiple potential explanations exist.  However, I'll focus here on something called the curse of expertise.   Put simply, experts sometimes have a difficult time teaching much less experienced and accomplished people.  Why?  They forget what's it like to be in the novice's shoes.  They can't predict the types of challenges and problems that the novice will face when mastering a new skill.   In many cases, the expert may not even be fully aware of the "how" behind certain highly effective results.  It comes so naturally to them that they don't have a complete understanding of the process that leads to those successful outcomes.   

Moreover, a study by Yale psychologists Matthew Fisher and Frank Keil shows that experts think they can teach and explain effectively.  In other words, they often don't recognize the curse of expertise.  Fisher and Keil conducted a series of experiments demonstrating that, "Highly educated individuals tend to overestimate their ability to explain their own areas of formal expertise."   In short, they argue that the experts' "confidence is unwarranted."  

Managers in business face the same curse of expertise as they lead teams and organizations.  They may not be able to recognize the problems and challenges that front-line or entry-level workers face as they try to master their job.  They may be overconfident in their ability to teach their team members.  To overcome the curse of expertise, managers need to get better at perspective taking.  They need to be able to step into their employees' shoes.  They must ask open-ended questions to learn about the challenges their team members are facing.  They have to reflect back and recall some of the early failures and stumbles in their career.   They need to check in with their employees and test for understanding after explaining something to them.  How did they interpret what I said?  Did they understand my rationale, my thinking, my logic?  Finally, managers need to invite questions.  What more would you like to know?  How can I clarify what I have explained?  The better managers become at perspective taking, the more likely they are to overcome the curse of expertise.  

Sharpening Your Active Listening Skills

The Center for Creative Leadership offers a concise description of six important active listening skills. Here's a quick summary:

1. Pay attention: Avoid distractions such as cell phones and laptops. Avoid interrupting the speaker. Maintain eye contact. Watch for body language that might signal your approval, disapproval, anger, etc. Take notes if necessary, but be sure not to bury your head in your notepad. Don't start thinking through your response while the other person is speaking.

 

2. Withold judgment: Try to put aside your own pre-conceived notions or positions on the issues at hand. Don't jump to conclusions until you've heard the entire explanation/argument. Identify some of your own assumptions, and be sure to acknowledge that these presumptions might not be valid. Treat your beliefs as testable hypotheses rather than settled truths.

3. Reflect: Paraphrase what you have heard periodically, and ask if you have understood the other party correctly.

4. Clarify: Ask questions to elicit further explanation. Start with open-ended questions. Follow up with clarifying and/or probing questions. Generally, you should avoid questions that simply require a yes/no answer. Refrain from posing the leading question. Seek to understand what the other party is feeling, not simply what they are thinking or saying (strive for empathy).

5. Summarize: Synthesize what you have heard periodically, and ask for confirmation of your understanding. Seek consensus on key points for future action or follow-up.

6. Share: Having sought to understand the other party, you can now try to share your own ideas and perspectives.

Why We Should Frame Feedback as Advice

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Jaewon Yoon, Hayley Blunden, Ariella Kristal and A.V. Whillans published a Harvard Business School working paper recently on the topic of seeking (and providing) constructive feedback.  They argue that we should request advice from colleagues and leaders, rather than asking for feedback.  Yoon and colleagues demonstrate through a series of experiments that, "People offer more critical and actionable input when they are asked to provide advice (versus feedback)—even when they are asked to provide comments on identical output."  

What's wrong with asking for feedback?  The scholars argue that feedback often is associated with evaluation in the workplace.  In other words, we almost always shift into evaluative mode, rather than developmental mode, when asked to provide feedback to someone else.  They point to past research showing that being in an "evaluative" mode tends to reduce the constructiveness of feedback.  When we are in evaluative mode, we tend to look backward, rather than focusing on suggestions for how to improve performance moving forward.  The scholars state that, "When focusing on an evaluation of past performance, input givers are less likely to consider how the recipient could perform better in the future."

Yoon and her colleagues summarize the findings from the experiments they conducted:  

Findings from four experiments suggest that asking for feedback may inadvertently prevent givers from delivering useful input. When asked to provide feedback across a variety of work-related tasks—whether they were asked to evaluate a stranger’s cover letter (Study 1A), a colleague’s work performance (Study 1B), or an instructor’s teaching (Study 2) — people provided less critical or actionable input than when they were asked to provide advice. Asking for feedback focused the givers’ attention on evaluation, which hindered constructive feedback delivery. In contrast, advice givers persisted in providing more constructive input even when they were prompted to focus on evaluating the recipient (Study 3). These results suggest that asking for advice could be a powerful way to solicit constructive comments, even in cases where evaluation must accompany input, such as during annual reviews that require performance-based ratings.

What Would My Replacement Do Differently?

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Jessica Stillman writes on Inc.com this week about Dave Girouard, co-founder of Upstart and former president of Enterprise at Google.   Stillman decribes how Girouard protects himself against complacency and over-confidence. She quotes Girouard: ""While I'm doing some things okay, I can be lulled into a place of feeling good about myself when I'm probably not doing some other things very well."  Therefore, Girouard imagines that board has chosen to fire him and replace him with a truly spectacular chief executive.  "What would she do differently than what I'm doing?" he asks himself.  Then after identifying key actions that new CEO might undertake, he poses the question, "Why the hell aren't you doing those things?"  

Girouard's mental exercise reminds me of the famous story about Andy Grove and Gordon Moore pondering the future of Intel's DRAM memory chip business in the early 1980s.  In his terrific book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove wrote,

“I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to Gordon, and I asked, ‘If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, ‘He would get us out of memory chips.’ I stared at him, numb, then said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?'”

Standing in the Shoes of Front-Line Employees

How can leaders understand the challenges, frustrations, and obstacles faced by front-line employees as they set out to perform key tasks and serve customers?  Simply surveying them, or speaking with them from time to time, may not be sufficient.  Management by walking around is effective, but perhaps only provides a glimpse of the true nature of front-line work.  Moreover, word spreads quickly that the boss is walking around, and people may change their behavior if they know management is heading their way.  When I worked at Staples, I can recall Tom Stemberg, founder and former CEO, telling us that word would spread like wildfire once he popped into a store unexpectedly.  All the other stores in the region learned very quickly that he was in the area.  Shockingly, the stores looked immaculate by the time he arrived later that day.  

So, what else can leaders do to understand the needs and challenges of front-line employees?  How can they learn what daily work is really like for those associates? Here's a quick story about Chris Nassetta, CEO of Hilton Hotels, excerpted from my book, Unlocking Creativity.   Leaders should follow his example.  

Leaders across all types of organizations should consider how they can empathize genuinely with their employees. Great new ideas may emerge from these efforts. Chris Nassetta took over as CEO of Hilton Hotels in 2007. He had to engineer a turnaround at the struggling chain. Nassetta decided that his executives needed to connect more closely with the associates on the front lines – to understand their concerns, identify their frustrations, and hear their ideas. He worried that the top management team had lost touch with those doing the real work. Nassetta remembered learning a great deal in his first job in the hotel business, cleaning toilets as an eighteen year old at the Capitol Holiday Inn in Washington, D.C. He decided that it was time to return to his roots. 

Nassetta directed his top managers to spend one week per year working at one of the Hilton hotels around the world. He did the same, thereby modeling the behavior he expected from his team members. They took on housekeeping tasks, helped the facilities and grounds crew perform maintenance, and greeted guests at the front desk.[i] Nassetta notes, "Their job is harder than your job. You get in there, and you pay them the respect."[ii] The management team learns a great deal from this “immersion” process each year, and new ideas emerge from the many conversations that take place between executives and front-line workers. 

[i] I first learned about this initiative during a conversation with Kimo Kippen, former Chief Learning Officer of Hilton Hotels, at a meeting of the Human Resources Leadership Forum in Arlington, Virginia in December 2012.

[ii] Scott Mayerowitz, “How Hilton's CEO Led the Company's Massive Turnaround,” Inc., July 30, 2014. https://www.inc.com/associated-press/how-hilton-ceo-turned-around-his-hotel-business.html Accessed March 3, 2018.

"Know Your Book" - Ellen Kullman on Self-Awareness

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Former DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman offered some terrific career advice in a recent interview with Kellogg Insight.   She explained that people build a "book" on you from day one in a company.  Good or bad, accurate or not, you need to know your book.  Understand the impression you have made, the track record you are establishing.  That type of self-awareness is crucial, she argues, as you advance in your career.  Here's an excerpt: 

Have a high “say-do ratio.” So if you say you’re going to do something, do it. And if you do it, do it well. I had a reputation for saying what I was going to do and getting it done. The other thing is, can people trust you? And it’s not, are you trustworthy or not? It’s, do they believe you are? Every company that you work for writes a book on you. And that book starts the day you walk through the door, and it doesn’t end when you leave. Know your book, right? Know what people say about you in the company.

And you’ll find there’ll be mentors, or sponsors, or people who will give you that kind of feedback. And you need to seek that out. Because the people that struggle the most are the ones that either didn’t know their book, or didn’t believe their book. And I think that comes down to self-awareness. Self-awareness is one of the traits that has helped me the most through my career: understanding the impact I have on people—good, bad, or indifferent.

Deliberately Foster Presence of Mind

Source: pixy.org

Amy Murphy, a director with PwC US, and Columbia Business School Professor William Duggan have penned a good article for Strategy+Business about cultivating presence of mind. They argue that this approach helps foster creative thinking. Here's an excert: 

How do you improve your presence of mind? It helps to realize you don’t always need it. If you’re working on a familiar task, go ahead and keep working until you finish it, even if it takes until midnight. With familiar tasks, you already know what to do: You don’t need a new idea, you don’t need presence of mind. But if it’s a task where you need a creative answer, don’t work until midnight. Instead, carve out time to give your mind the space to wander. 

When you need a new idea, throughout the workday try to take in as many examples from history as possible that might relate to your problem. Don’t work late: Spend the evening on something that gives your mind a rest. Go to the gym, have dinner with friends, take a long shower, and above all get a good night’s sleep. This greatly increases your chances of a flash of insight to solve your problem.   You can practice this discipline in smaller bits too, by scheduling time in your day for short walks, or making coffee, or some other activity that enables you to clear your mind, if only for 15 minutes. 

Don’t confuse this type of relief from excessive focus with distraction. Creative relaxation is deliberate: something you choose to do. Distraction is reactive and almost involuntary. Your mind flits from one activity to another. Some call it multitasking, but in reality you cannot do many things at once. Your brain needs time to shift from one thing to the other. When you’re distracted by each new task, there’s not enough time for presence of mind.

I agree wholeheartedly.   In my work, I talk about the need to combine focus + unfocus to achieve creative breakthroughs.  Immerse yourself in a challenging problem, but punctuate that focus with some deliberate attempts to distance yourself from the problem.   Adopt this strategy deliberately.  However, I argue that it's more than about taking a break.  It's about finding specific ways to step back and achieve social, temporal, physical, and cultural distance from a perplexing problem.   For instance, Amazon's "working backwards" technique is a fantastic way to achieve temporal distance and gain fresh perspective.  Read more about "working backwards" here.  

Favorite Podcasts of 2020

Earlier this week, I listed some of my favorite books from 2020.  Today, I turn my attention to podcasts.  Like many of you, I listen to some very popular ones about which most readers will be familiar (e.g., Freakonomics, How I Built This, Hidden Brain).  However, I thought that I would feature three original podcasts that truly proved thought-provoking this year, and perhaps may be unfamiliar to some of you.   

Cautionary Tales: One of my favorite authors, Tim Harford, has created this unique podcast. As he says, the series features stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, daring heists and hilarious fiascos. Sounds morbid, right? Well, as a student of failure, I find the episodes to be full of important lessons that we should all learn. Harford writes for the Financial Times, and he has authored several terrific books, including Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

WeCrashed: Here we learn about the incredible story of WeWork co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann. The podcast traces the remarkable rise and rather sudden collapse of WeWork.  The podcast doesn't simply identify the flaws in the firm's business model.  It examines the problematic characterisics of culture at the firm and explores the deficiencies in Neumann's leadership.  Some of the stories seem like pure fiction, except they are indeed true.  

Land of the Giants:  This podcast features two terrific seasons.   In the first season, the creators trace teh story of Amazon's rise and explore the key dimensions of the business model and culture.  In the second, even more entertaining and insightful season, the podcast dives into the strategy and culture at Netflix.  You hear directly from key players, and you learn about the key decisions that were made that shaped the evolution of both firms. 

My Favorite Books of 2020

As the tumultous year of 2020 comes to a close, I thought I would share a few of my favorite reads from the past year (note: a few of these books were actually published in 2019).   Here we go, in no particular order:  

The Splendid and the Vile, by Erik Larson

A riveting account of Winston Churchill's leadership during the early portion of World War II.   Larson combs a variety of primary sources to describe how Churchill, his family, and his inner circle navigated the Battle of Britain.   I've read many biographies of Churchill, but I found myself learning something new on many occasions as I read this book.  Churchill had many flaws, and Larson documents them.  However, we also learn so much about Churchill's brilliance as a wartime leader.   

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

Insead Professor Erin Meyer has teamed up with Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings to write a terrific book about the unique culture at the streaming giant.  The book left me (pleasantly) with as many questions as answers.  I'm not sure other firms can adopt elements of the Netflix culture successfully, nor am I certain that they should try.  However, it seems to have worked incredibly well at Netflix, and it does have many merits.  For me, the most interesting part focused on the "Netflix innovation cycle."  I appreciated the extensive discussion about building a culture of candor, particularly given my work.  Having said that, I do worry that other firms could encounter serious challenges trying to adopt the Netflix approach on candid conversations.  

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

I just devoured all the Heath brothers books in the past.  Here, Dan Heath strikes out on his own and provides us an illuminating book about how to prevent catastrophes, rather than spend our time constantly fighting fires.   Heath digs into serious problems in many different facets of society, and he blends the findings of rigorous research with his fine story-telling skills and inductive reasoning capabilities.  Heath's work is full of important insights about problem-finding and error detection.   The book could not be more timely too, given the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Super Pumped:  The Battle for Uber

Mike Isaac's book describes the rise and fall of Uber under founder and CEO Travis Kalanick.  Isaac offers a cautionary tale about a unique startup culture run amok and the devastating deleterious effects that emerged.   He explains the values that Kalanick championed, how they helped him build a high-growth company that attracted and delighted many customers.  Then, he demonstrates how those same values led managers to engage in a set of ill-advised behaviors, and how those actions harmed the company and many employees a great deal.  It's an easy read, and you find yourself wondering at times if it's a true story and a great work of fiction.  

Franklin and Washington: The Founding Partnership

Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Larson has written this fascinating dual biography of two central figures in the birth of the United States of America.   He brings to life, in vivid detail, the unique relationship between George Washington and Benjamin Franklin - perhaps the two most important and influential of our founding fathers.   In business, we often examine the interesting relationships between fascinating pairs that have shaped the founding and growth of successful companies (Moore & Grove, Jobs & Wozniak, Brin & Page, etc.).   Here we have a well-researched, engaging narrative about the partnership that helped launch a revolution and shaped a nation.  

The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company 

Bob Iger has written an insightful account of his career, culminating in his tenure as CEO of Disney.  He reflects on the many lessons he's learned, as he turned Disney around after the challenging final years of the Eisner era.  One of my favorite Iger lessons is this one:  It’s not good to have power for too long. You don’t realize the way your voice seems to boom louder than every other voice in the room. You get used to people withholding their opinions until they hear what you have to say. People are afraid to bring ideas to you, afraid to dissent, afraid to engage. This can happen even to the most well-intentioned leaders. You have to work consciously and actively to fend off its corrosive effects.

Leading Change: Focus on Desired Outcomes First, Not Activities

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MIT Senior Lecturer and management consultant Elsbeth Johnson has written an interesting article for Strategy+Business about why many strategic transformation efforts fail (though I'm not a fan of the article title).  She argues that we often blame middle managers for resisting change efforts and putting up various obstacles.  However, she finds fault with senior leaders when examining many failed organizational change initiatives.  Johnson argues that leaders aren't focusing on the right type of work when launching transformation efforts.  She argues that leaders jump into the planning and execution of activities too quickly, rather than stepping back and clearly articulating the desired outcomes first.  She explains: 

Be clear about what you want. A new strategy needs to specify a target outcome — i.e., the change leaders want to produce — and, ideally, that target outcome should have three features. It needs to be outcome-based, not activity-based; it needs to have a financial target (such as improving operating margin by 20 percent); and it needs to be ambitious enough, with a sufficient time frame, to create fundamental, not merely cosmetic, change.  A target outcome with these three components enables managers to identify the projects, initiatives, and work streams that should be tackled — at different levels and in different parts of the business — in order to deliver it.

Johnson argues that leaders default to working on activities because that work is easier and more enjoyable for many individuals than clarifying priorities, persuading others to change, and motivating people to work toward ambitious new goals.  

The trap leaders fall into is their desire to specify activities rather than the outcomes these activities will deliver. In my experience, they do this because they find this work is easier and more enjoyable. Their “laziness” here is that they prefer to default to this simple, enjoyable work — picking projects to work on — when they ought to be doing something very different: clarifying and selling the change.

For example, the senior leadership team of a midsized technology company whose growth was plateauing had agreed the firm needed a radically different strategy. They’d asked me to help them develop the new strategy — including agreeing on the critical outcomes it should deliver and then making some clear choices about target markets and segments. But before these decisions had been fully discussed, let alone agreed upon, this senior team jumped to activities. One of the team members remarked: “There is one acquisition I think we should look at again,” while another said, “We need to work out the details of that China joint venture before the end of this quarter.”

These individual activities might well have turned out to be important, but they were just that — activities. They represented the “how” of the strategy, rather than the “what” or “why.” And until the team had clarity on what the strategy should deliver — in this case, we decided on a target of 12 percent return on capital within four years — it was premature to make any decisions about how that outcome might be delivered. Before deciding on the China joint venture or a particular acquisition, the team needed the 12 percent outcome nailed down.

The problem here is how a lot of leaders define work. A member of this same team asked me at the end of one strategy session, “When are we going to decide what we’re actually going to do?” — by which he meant deciding on which activities to pursue. That is what too many senior leaders still consider to be “work” — when what they should be doing is the work of clarifying and articulating the outcomes a change will produce. If leaders are primarily using their time to choose activities, not only does that deny managers — the people closer to the operations and the customers — the opportunity to choose how the strategy will be delivered, it also invariably means that leaders don’t have the time to work on clarifying and selling the change, which is work that really only those executives can do.

It may sound simple and obvious, but my experience does suggest that many organizations suffer from a lack of alignment regarding goals, priorities, and expectations.  Leaders often overestimate how much alignment actually exists...and they overestimate by a wide margin in many instances.  

Developing People: Focusing on the What AND the How

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Adam Bryant recently posted a terrific interview with Matt Schuyler, Chief Administrative Officer at Hilton.  He asked Schuyler about a key leadership lesson learned during his career.    Schuyler offered this anecdote about his time at PWC: 

In a professional services firm like Price Waterhouse, it’s an up-or-out environment. Around year 11 or 12, you know it’s time for consideration for partnership, which is the pinnacle. In the spring of that twelfth year for me, I got a call from my boss who was based in London, and he said, “Can you fly over to London to see me tomorrow?”

I arrived early the next morning, and he said, “Let’s go grab a pint.” And sure enough, the pubs were open at 8:30 in the morning. So we sat down and he said, “I have some news for you. You didn’t make it.” This was devastating because I’d spent the better part of twelve years leading up to this moment, and in the previous year I had accomplished all my objectives.

But then he said, “The good news is that it’s a ‘not now,’ not a ‘no never, ever.’” And here’s the lesson he shared: “We were not measuring you on the ‘what.’ We were measuring you on the ‘how,’ and you got more done than we’ve ever seen anybody get done, so you’ve checked the ‘what’ box. On the ‘how,’ you created some waves along the journey because you were such a zealot in getting a lot done. So you have a do-over. Take this next year, focus on the how, not the what.” The next year I made partner and I try to remember that lesson every day when I come to work.

Two important lessons jump out at me from this story.  First, the partners did not evaluate Schuyler simply based on WHAT he achieved.  They cared about HOW he did it as well.  That's crucial.  Second, the partners didn't give up on Schuyler simply because he had stumbled on the HOW.  They offered him constructive feedback and gave him an opportunity to course correct.  He did and achieved further success at the organization.  Of course, some folks won't be able to internalize that type of feedback and make the necessary changes.  However, many people will be able to do so if they are offered the right feedback, coaching, and development.  

Should I Cater to Others or Stay Authentic?

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Imagine that you are headed to a job interview, pitching your business plan, or making a presentation to colleagues.  Should you try to align your words and actions to the other party's preferences and interests?  Or, should you simply remain authentic?   In other words, is catering to others the right strategy if you wish to persuade and influence others?   Scholars Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino, and Laura Huang asked those very questions to over 500 working adults.   Two-thirds of the respondents indicated they would cater to the other party, and over 70% thought that would an effective strategy.   Are they right?  

Sezer and her colleagues studied that question in a series of studies.  They published their results recently in a paper titled "“To be or not to be your authentic self? Catering to others’ preferences hinders performance.”    The Kenan-Flager School of Business at UNC-Chapel Hill recently profiled this research.  Here's an excerpt from their description: 

In one study, Sezer and her colleagues recruited 258 students and working adults and split them into two groups – some serving as interviewers for a fictional job, some as interviewees. They randomly assigned interviewees to one of two strategies: Either to try to cater to the interviewer’s perceived interests or be authentic.  The interviewees who were told to cater reported higher levels of anxiety. The interviewees who were told to act authentically, on the other hand, got higher performance ratings from the interviewers.

Perhaps most interesting, though, were the results of a real-world competition. Some 166 entrepreneurs participated in a fast-pitch competition at a private university in the Northeast, each striving to become one of 10 semifinalists. They presented their business ideas to a panel of three judges – experienced angel investors.

Afterward, the entrepreneurs completed a short questionnaire for Sezer and her colleagues. Likewise, the judges filled out short score cards for each pitch they heard.  The entrepreneurs who chose to cater to the judges rather than acting authentically had worse outcomes – based both on whether they ended up as semifinalists and the judges’ opinion about the viability of their ideas.

Of course, this research does not suggest that you should ignore the other party's interests and preferences completely.   You need to understand your audience, do your homework, and think very carefully about how they are most likely to be persuaded.   However, it is a careful balancing act.  It's one thing to know your audience, and it's quite another to think you can fool them about your own preferences, interests, and desires.  In sum, give your audience credit.  They are going to see through the B.S. in most cases.  Honesty is indeed the best policy.  

Beware the Gatekeeper

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Every leader has a gatekeeper or two amongst their team of closest advisers and confidantes.  These folks serve a useful role in many cases.  They manage the flow of information, so that the leader can use his or her time wisely.  They help synthesize data, frame the pros and cons of particular options, and help leaders assess complex situations.    They filter out issues that do not need to clog the leader's busy schedule.   Unfortunately, gatekeepers also sometimes filter out the bad news, even if unintentionally.  They also sometimes find themselves only telling the leader what they think the individual wants to hear.   For that reason, I wrote years ago about the merits of occasionally "circumventing the gatekeepers" on your team, to insure that critical data and perspectives are not being filtered out in a manner that could lead to disastrous results.  In the book, Know What You Don't Know, I wrote: 

If leaders hope to uncover key problems in their organizations before they mushroom into large-scale failures, then they must understand why subordinates may choose to filter out bad news. They must be wary of how their own behavior may cause their advisors to hold back dissonant information. Leaders clearly must create a climate where people feel comfortable coming forward with new data, even data that might go against the dominant view in the organization. To become effective and proactive problem-finders though, leaders must go one step further. From time to time, leaders must circumvent the filters, reaching out beyond their direct reports to look at raw data, speak directly with key constituents, and learn from those with completely different perspectives than their closest advisors. In short, leaders need to occasionally “open the funnel” that typically synthesizes, packages, and constricts the information flow up the hierarchy. They have to reach down and out, beyond the executive suite and even beyond the walls of the organization, to access new data directly. They have to find information that has not been massaged and packaged into a neat, slick Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. 

Later in the same chapter of the book, I profiled David Tacelli, CEO of LTX - a semiconductor test equipment company headquartered in Massacusetts.  In an interview during my research, Tacelli described how important it was to not rely solely on one or two voices. Instead, he advocated a systematic approach to seeking different voices over time.  Here's an excerpt: 

In 2005 David Tacelli became the CEO of LTX Corporation, a producer of semiconductor test equipment located in Norwood, Massachusetts. Tacelli has implemented a rigorous customer review system to review the company’s major accounts on a regular basis. He aims to “surface customer service problems early” through this routine evaluation process. He has learned, though, that the system can become stale if the same senior manager reports on a particular customer at each review meeting. As he says, “They tend to filter. They think that they can fix the problem. Therefore, they do not tell anyone until far too late.” Therefore, Tacelli makes sure that everyone involved with a particular client presents over time at these review meetings. He explains: 

“I rotate presenters very purposefully. If a problem surfaces at a particular meeting, I will go back to the person that presented at the previous meeting. I ask them if they were aware of the issue at the time of their presentation. If so, then I probe as to why they did not surface the issue sooner. The key is that I do not make that a blame game. I am simply trying to get them to understand that I want to hear about the issues sooner so that we can work together to fix them. Of course, I do look for patterns of mistakes. If someone repeatedly holds back on me, then I hold them accountable.” 

Tacelli asks his managers to limit the number of slides they present at these meetings. He says, “I want them to talk with me and one another, not to read off of slides.” He explains that his role is to “play Jeopardy with them… to use the Socratic method to find out what the key issues are, to see what we know about the causes of particular customer complaints.” 

How to Seek Constructive Feedback: 3 Questions to Ask

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We all appreciate praise and recognition.   Constructive criticism?  Not so much.   It's like spinach.  We know it's good for us, but we aren't eager to cook it for supper.   Of course, some managers aren't very effective at delivering feedback either.   Thus, have a particularly thorny problem: leaders who don't provide feedback in a constructive manner, and team members who don't seek it or are not willing to listen. In a recent Fast Company article, leadership expert Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic points out that many of us also falter when we do seek feedback.  Why?  He argues that we don't ask the right questions when soliciting feeback from others.  Here's an excerpt:

Since it’s often unkind to criticize others, especially when you care about them, you need to make it easier for people to do it. This means asking the right questions. Don’t ask people whether they liked what you did or how you do something, and don’t ask questions such as “Was this okay?” or “Did I do a good job?”  Instead, ask

• “What would you have done differently?”
• “What are the two things that they didn’t like so much?”
• “If you can change one thing about X going forward, what would that be?”

Tell them you won’t take it personally, and then don’t take it personally. Tell them you value their opinion and are struggling to find people who help you get better, so if they want to help you, they need to improve your ability to identify blind spots and key areas for improvement.

Then, be thankful. Feedback is always a gift, and there is no bigger gift than constructive critical feedback because it is daunting and risky to provide it. There is a higher cost to honest negative feedback than fake positive feedback, but the former makes you much better than the latter.   

The three questions suggested by Chamorro-Premuzic are right on the mark.  They provide an opportunity for concrete, actionable feedback.   They solicit input that is specific, not generic.   They look forward and focus on what needs to happen differently in the future, rather than only dissecting past conduct.  

Dangers of 'Yes' People

Please consider taking a look at this new article in Financial Management magazine titled, "How Leaders Can Avoid the Dangers of 'Yes' People" - Thank you to Hannah Pitstick for interviewing me during her research for the article, along with others such as Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor.

Should We Self-Promote or Hide Success?

We dislike self-promoters, right?   Is it better to hide our success than shamelessly self-promote?  Many people may think it's appropriate and effective to hide success.  We don't want to seem boastful or arrogant.  Well, perhaps the conventional wisdom may not be correct.  Annabelle Roberts, Emma Levin, and Ovul Sezer have published a fantastic new paper titled "Hiding Success" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  

The scholars point out that self-promotion is quite typical these days, yet in their research, they also find that many people hide their successes at times.  Why?  They worry about how others will perceive them if they self-promote too much, or in some inappropriate manner. 

Roberts and her colleagues show that hiding success may have harmful effects on our interpersonal relationships.  They write:

"Unlike hiding other information, hiding success signals that a communicator has paternalistic motives, which targets find insulting.  We find that hiding success has relational costs in public and private settings as well as in response to direct and indirect questions.  Additionally, the negative reactions to hiding success have behavioral consequences:  Targets are less trusting of, less willing to cooperate with, and less willing to devote financial resources to maintaining their relationship with communicators who hide their success." 

In sum, perhaps a lack of transparency can have some significant costs.  That doesn't mean we should be arrogant, or that we should boast repeatedly about our accomplishments.  However, we should take great care about intentionally shielding others from the truth.  Honesty, it appears, is indeed the best policy.  

Creativity Technique: Keep a Da Vinci Notebook

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In my book, Unlocking Creativity, I wrote that our schools sometimes exhibit a bias against creativity, much as our corporations do.  Much like many business executives, teachers and professors sometimes talk a good talk about creativity, but they fail to walk the walk.  They claim that they value creativity, when in fact, they desire compliance and control. Not all teachers though... I read recently about a wonderful technique employed by a number of teachers. 

Lauren Cassani Davis is a teacher at the Feynman School in Potomac, Maryland. In an article titled 

Creative Teaching And Teaching Creativity: How To Foster Creativity In The Classroom, Davis explains the power of encouraging students to keep Da Vinci notebooks.  

“Describe the tongue of a woodpecker,” wrote Leonardo Da Vinci on one of his to-do lists, next to sketching cadavers, designing elaborate machines, and stitching costumes. Da Vinci filled over 7,000 notebook pages with questions, doodles, observations, sketches, and calculations. He nurtured creativity as a habit and skill every day—and it paid off. Da Vinci’s work reshaped multiple disciplines, from science, to art, to engineering.

I was intrigued when my co-teacher suggested using “Da Vinci” notebooks in our 2nd grade classroom. The idea was simple: students keep notebooks, independent of any academic subject, where they can try creative exercises and explore personal passions. I ordered a stack of bound notebooks for the occasion.

Within a week, the results astounded me. Whenever a student’s thinking diverged from our lesson objectives, or their question glimmered with the spark of a potential new interest, we sent them to their Da Vinci notebook. “Write it down!”—a refrain chanted countless times a day. One day, we did a “100 questions challenge,” inspired by the book How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael Gelb. The goal: Write 100 questions, in one sitting, about anything. The 2nd graders asked questions like: How does your brain work? Why do we have music? Do tiny people live on atoms? Why am I not a tiger? How do keys open door locks? Why do things have to die? Why did Beethoven write an ode to joy if he was so grumpy? Why aren’t all cars electric?

By the end of the year, the Da Vinci notebooks were gloriously full. 

Interestingly, many great innovators throughout history kept journals:  Curie, Edison, Einstein, Darwin, and Twain - to name just a few.   Some of the most successful leaders take time to reflect each day.  I've written about former Baxter Healthcare CEO Harry Kraemer's daily reflection ritual.   HBS Professor Joe Badaracco recently wrote a book about self-reflective leaders.  Many scholars and consultants have written over the past few years about the benefits of keeping a journal.  

The broader lesson: asking great questions is at the heart of creativity and innovation.  Don't jump to solutions.  Observe the world around you.  Explore the unexpected. Look for points of friction.  Inquire as to how things work and how they might be improved.  Look for connections between seemingly unrelated issues.  Then write it down before you forget.