Should Internships Be Fully Remote?

Is remote work diminishing the efficacy of the summer internship experience for thousands of young college students?  Emmy Lucas has written an article on summer internships for Forbes this week.  In that article, she examines how challenging it is this summer for many students to land internships, given the layoffs at many firms, particularly in the tech sector.  She also raises a question about how remote work has affected the ability of interns to learn, grow, and develop successfully.   Here's an excerpt from her article.  She begins with a comment by Jane Ashen Turkewitz, who administers internship placement for the University of Texas at Austin: 

Remote work has also put a damper on the intern experience. “I remember joining the workforce in my twenties and it being super fun,” Ashen Turkewitz says. “You would do your work, but there was camaraderie, there was brainstorming. There was an energy that I believe students and early career folks are missing out on, big time.”

On Glassdoor, negative mentions of remote work in reviews by interns grew by 548% between 2019 and 2021. “Clearly a lot of companies' internship programs are struggling to adapt to the new normal,” Glassdoor’s Terrazas says. “Big companies have been leading the charge in getting folks back into the office, so I'm really going to be curious to see if it has a measurable effect in terms of experience this summer.”

Salesforce’s head of global futureforce programs, Alex Murray, says its interns are back fully in person. “We’ve experimented with remote and hybrid programs over the past few years,” she said in an email. “But our interns told us they want to be in an office environment.”

Kate Feeney, who is interning a second summer at Raytheon Technologies, spent last summer fully remote, but is going to the office one or two days a week this summer. “It’s a lot more isolating [working] online,” she says of her experience last year. Now, “I get to ask more questions about [my co-workers’] job rather than it being so focused sitting on a Zoom listening to them talk.”

This article raises very important questions.  In my view, business leaders need to invest the time and effort to meet with their interns in person throughout a summer experience.  Apprenticeship, learning, and development will often (not always, but often) not take place as effectively in a fully remote manner.  One challenge is that many managers want the flexibility of working remotely often during the summer months.  However, if you hire an intern, you have a responsibility to make that experience meaningful and productive.  Managers should be paying it forward, offering the mentorship and guidance they once received at a young age.   

Investing in Your Own Development This Summer

Beyond spending time with family and friends this summer, we can all take the opportunity to invest in our own development as well.  Certainly, our organizations may offer workshops or leadership development programs in which we are asked to take part.   Or, we might be pursuing an advanced degree or certificate. However, we shouldn't simply wait for these opportunities to come to us, or simply focus on formal educational experiences.  We should find time to learn on our own.   I'm reminded of the famous Italian saying, "Ancora imparo."  I have a small plaque with this saying on my office bookshelf.  While some scholars have doubts about the usual origin story for this phrase, the common explanation is that the great Renaissance artist and sculptor Michelangelo uttered the saying at age 87.   The idea of Michelangelo exclaiming "Ancora imparo" at that ripe old age reminds us all of the power of always learning something new, no matter our age, experience, or knowledge.  

What can we do this summer to learn and develop as a leader?

• READ whole books!  Yes, blog posts 😉, web articles, and Twitter threads can be quite informative at times.  However, we should take the time to embark on a deep dive into a few important subjects this summer.   I don't mean just business or leadership books per se.  We can learn a great deal from reading history, about pressing problems of the past and the leaders, both successful and flawed, who tackled those issues.  For example, I just finished a terrific book titled "The Devils Will Get No Rest" by James B. Conroy.  The insightful book takes a close look at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, when British and American poltical and military leaders gathered to develop a gameplan to win World War II.   I learned so much about how these leaders navigated contentious issues, debated intensely, and found a way to reach agreement, all while maintaining and even enhancing their working relationships.  
• Find a great podcast.  I don't mean the latest true crime adventure, though they can be entertaining.  Find one that tells a great story about the rise or fall of an enterprise, or offers insights into organizational behavior.  I enjoy podcasts such as How I Built This, Freakonomics, Cautionary Tales, Land of the Giants, The Dropout, and Choiceology.  
• Meet with a mentor/mentee.  If you have been too busy to invest in a mentoring relationship, commit to spending time on it this summer.  Make sure it's a two-way street, in which both parties are benefiting to some degree.  Try to take the time to meet in person, if possible. Prepare for these meetings.  Come with good questions and with some issues on which you woud like some advice and guidance.  
• Select a new skill to master.  Perhaps you want to learn how to code, or maybe you would like to learn more about data visualization.  However, don't just focus on these types of "hard skills."  Think carefully about certain "soft skills" you might hone over the summer too.  Maybe you want to improve at public speaking or presenting, or you would like to get better at setting and achieving goals.  Having a gameplan to improve both hard and soft skills is critical as you embark on your leadership development journey. 
• Reflect systematically.   I've written previously about Kellogg Professor and former Baxter Healthcare CEO Harry Kraemer's recommended practices for self-reflection.  Find some time this summer to reflect.  Perhaps you might use Kraemer's questions, or you could conduct an "after-action review" regarding a project you led recently.   As you reflect, don't build a long laundry list of things to work on moving forward.  Be selective and prioritize a few action items for the coming year.  You are much more likely to make progress if you focus your improvement efforts. 

Why the Decline in Labor Productivity?

Jane Thier reported last week for Fortune on the decline in labor productivity in the American economy.  She notes that the United States has experienced productivity declines for the past five quarters.  That hasn't happened since World War II.  Thier examines George Mason economist Tyler Cowen's commentary regarding the potential causes of this significant decline.   She notes that Cowen attributes much of the problem to "a serious crisis of morale" in the workplace.   I think there's no question that many employees are disengaged, and even disgruntled.  Organizations have been grappling with low engagement for years, but it does seem that the problem has become worse since the pandemic began.

Thier also writes that some experts have begun to question whether remote and hybrid work might be driving declines in labor productivity.   Cowen argues that more data are needed to draw definitive conclusions about the impact of remote work.   Fellow economist Gregory Daco of EY Parthenon argues that comments from various clients suggests that remote work might be causing a decline in productivity.  

Many companies reported high productivity of their employees during those early months of the pandemic.  I wonder, though, whether unique circumstances contributed to that efficiency boost, and if productivity might be falling as those conditions no longer hold.  Many employees and organizations rallied in those early days of the pandemic, working extremely hard to ensure that their firms would survive amidst a preciptious economic downturn.   Moreover, we all were stuck in our homes.  We had very little else to do, and so perhaps many were quite productive in those circumstances.  

Things have changed though.   Now, perhaps, we are seeing some of the limitations of remote work, and it may be having a deleterious impact.  It's not the popular thing to say these days.  People who try to argue for return to office often get pummeled by the press, and they potentially scare off talented employees who insist on working remotely.  Yet, the national productivity data should trouble us greatly.  We have to dig deeper into these data, and more rigorous empirical work must be done to understand the complete ramifications of remote/hybrid work.  

When Layoffs Occur, Who Else Leaves?

Source: Moneycontrol.com

Lisa Ward of the Wall Street Journal reports today on a fascinating new study by Sima Sajjadiani, John D Kammeyer-Mueller, and Alan Benson.  Their research paper is titled "Who Is Leaving and Why? The Dynamics of High-Quality Human Capital Outflows." The scholars studied more than 1 million employee records from a two-year period at a major retailer with more than 1,600 stores.  

The scholars found that layoffs can trigger a loss of highly talented individuals.  They found that the attrition rate of high-performing employees increases after layoffs of underperforming peers. Ward writes:

Why? High-performing employees typically have more employment options, says Sima Sajjadiani, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s UBC Sauder School of Business and one of the paper’s co-authors. As a result, when layoffs are announced, these individuals might pre-emptively begin job searches to secure new roles rather than wait to see if they would be included in the layoff.

What about when an employee is dismissed for cause?  Interestingly, they again found a disparity in subsequent attrition rates.  Higher performing employees tended to stay, but low performers left in larger numbers after a peer was dismissed for cause.  Sajjadiani explains:

“High-performing employees may view the dismissal of a low-performing colleague as the organization maintaining standards, which can be seen as a positive sign about the organization’s commitment to performance,” Sajjadiani says. “On the other hand, low-performing employees might perceive the dismissal of a similar peer as a warning sign that they might be next, leading to an increase in voluntary turnover among this group.”

Finally, what about voluntary departures?   Well, high performers follow fellow high performers who leave.  Low performers follow fellow low performers.  However, high performers do not leave in greater numbers when low performers depart.  Instead, stars are more likely to stay.  Apparently, our judgements about our performance relative to peers matter a great deal when we decide whether to leave a job.  

Leadership Lessons from Chris Licht's Fall

Source: CNN

News has broken this morning that Chris Licht is out as CEO of CNN, just days after controversy erupted about a lengthy piece in The Atlantic about the cable news network's new leader.    I'm sure the list of mistakes he made is quite lengthy.  I'll just note three key lessons here in the immediate aftermath of his departure:

1.  Giving a journalist seemingly unfettered access during your early days as CEO, and then being so loose with commentary and language during that time together, was a colossal mistake.  It's hard to believe someone would not anticipate how such access could lead to massive fallout.   Leaders need to work with the press and shape their message through the media at times.  If you are a media CEO, you certainly can't seclude yourself.  Having said that, this type of access seems completely unnecessary.  I simply don't see any potential upside here.   

2.  Locating his office away from the newsroom appears to have been a major error.  It's simply too easy for executives to become isolated from their staff members.   You might make it even more likely that you will be detached from their concerns if you remove yourself physically from their workspaces.  The location also serves a symbolic purpose.  It signals many things about your priorities and your leadership approach, even if unintentionally.   

3.  Finally, Licht himself admitted to his employees, "As I read that article, I found myself thinking, CNN is not about me. I should not be in the news unless it's taking arrows for you. Your work is what should be written about."  Well, he's absolutely correct there.  The CEO is not the organization.  It's not his or her personal fiefdom.  CEOs need to view themselves as stewards.  The institution doesn't belong to the leader.  In particular, leaders must remind themselves that many employees will work there much longer than they will.  

Build Relationships & Trust by Tapping Into Others' Expertise

Source: Noam Galai
Copyright: 2015 Getty Images

Jennifer Hyman co-founded Rent The Runway and currently serves as the CEO. Recently, she spoke to Stanford University students about her experiences as an entrepreneur and leader. Hyman described a critical meeting when she was first beginning to conceive her idea for the business. She landed a meeting with fashion-giant Diane Von Furstenberg.   During that meeting, Hyman asked for feedback about her idea, and she tried to learn as much as possible about the fashion business.   She asked many questions and listened actively.   Hyman explains the lesson she takes away from that remarkable encounter: 

Now also in that meeting, I asked her, “Hey, could you introduce me to a few of your friends, and I’d love to meet with them and talk about this idea,” because every meeting has to get you to like three other meetings. And so never leave a meeting with someone without asking them for that introduction. Now those other meetings led us to other people in the fashion industry, some of which were designers, some of which were publicists, but people that actually could give us real feedback on this idea and people that could see that like we were interested in listening. It was helping to build trust in an industry where we had no experience, where you go in and you actually allow someone else to give you feedback, like “How does that work?”

What ends up happening in a situation where I sit with you and I ask you questions and I ask you for your advice, you end up walking out of that conversation feeling awesome. You end up liking me in that conversation. Like whenever you make someone else into the expert, like that builds a relationship right away. And we needed desperately at the beginning of the business to build trust so that anyone would actually trust us to like take their currencies and inventory and not cannibalize their business.

Hyman highlights two key lessons here. First, don't leave a meeting such as this one without soliciting an introduction to others who may be helpful to you.   Second, people love being put in the position of expert sharing wisdom with others.  They want to help, provided you demonstrate respect for their expertise, come extremely prepared, ask great questions, and listen actively.   Treating someone else as the expert sets the tone for a productive conversation.   You don't have to grovel or patronize others; you simply have to acknowledge what you do not know and point out how they can help.   Very often, others will find the time to share their wisdom with you, even if they have a very busy schedule.  I've certainly found that to be the case in my career as well.  

How Business Travel Spurs Innovation

Source: muratart/shutterstock

Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Do Yoon Kim and Wesley W. Koo have written a new working paper titled, "Innovation on Wings: Nonstop Flights and Firm Innovation in the Global Context."  The scholars collected data from over 5,000 airports around the world over a ten-year period (2005-2015).  They married flight data with other datasets that provided information about company patents.  The scholars found that, "a 10 percent increase in nonstop flights between two locations led to a 1.4 percent increase in new patents between firms in those places."   Choudhury explains the finding in a comment for a HBS Working Knowledge feature about the research: 

"We’re showing that business travel matters for innovation, but it only matters if two firms’ locations are either culturally or temporally far away from each other,” he says—that is, if the two firms possess different cultural norms or don’t have overlapping business hours, defined as 1.5 hours or less.

For instance, colleagues who speak different languages and possess unique cultural norms around meeting styles would benefit from in-person meetings, whereas people who speak the same language and operate meetings similarly won’t realize the same benefit.

Choudhury hopes business leaders consider the research when refining post-pandemic work policies. Because of the vast sample size of flights used in this paper, he believes the findings are generalizable for all business leaders.

The paper appears to be a strong endorsement for face-to-face interaction as a catalyst for innovation under certain circumstances.   One caveat - the study focused on data from the pre-pandemic period.  Companies clearly have adopted a range of improved communication technologies since 2020, and managers have become more adept at using these technologies.   Does face-to-face interaction matter as much today as it did during the 2005-2015 period?  Future research will help us answer that question.  For now, the study at least requires us to question whether we can achieve desired innovation results simply by relying on remote communication and collaboration. 

Delivering Negative Feedback

Source: Getty Images

In a recent article for Kellogg Insight, Professor Brooke Vuckovic offered some great tips on how to deliver negative feedback effectively.   Among the bits of advice, Vuckovic recommended trying to anticipate the types of new information that might emerge and challenge one's beliefs about the drivers of poor performance: "To prepare for this possibility, she suggests asking yourself a few prompts: What’s your story of the problem—and what story might this other person tell about the same problem?"  She advocates preparing for the possibility that you might not have a complete and accurate understanding of the situation.  You might ask yourself:  Under what circumstances might I change my mind about this employee's status?  Finally, Vuckovic argues that you also have to consider whether you did not articulate goals and expectations clearly.  What role did you perhaps play by not communicating clearly?

In the end, the employee may not be performing well, and you must deliver some feedback that might be difficult to hear.  Still, Vuckovic argues that you want to make sure to solicit the employee's perspective, listen actively, and play back what you have heard to insure you have understood clearly.   Finally, and most importantly, prepare an exit strategy for the conversation.  If things aren't going well, have a plan for how to bring the conversation to a close, perhaps with an invitation for further discussion once cooler heads have prevailed.  

What Causes Us to Regret Key Decisions?

Source: Getty Images

Do you find yourself often regretting the path not taken? What's causing those feelings?  Is it affecting your job satisfaction, or your commitment to a key plan of action at work?  Scholars Daniel Feiler and Johannes Müller-Trede have published a fascinating study about regret in the context of decision making.  Prior research had shown that "decision-makers both anticipate and experience greater regret when they can observe the consequences of unchosen options."   However, these two scholars found something slightly different in their study.  They discovered that, "Participants in our studies were more likely to experience regret when they did not observe the outcome of the forgone alternative than when it was revealed."  How could that be?  

Feiler and Müller-Trede discovered that the explanation as to do with our beliefs.  What do we believe is the value of a foregone alternative vs. what is the actual value of that option we dismissed?  They found that, "When there are many alternatives to choose from under uncertainty, the perceived attractiveness of the almost-chosen alternative tends to exceed its reality."  In short, we exhibit over-inflated beliefs about options we rejected.  This misguided beliefs cause feelings of regret.  

What All of Us Can Learn About Decision Making From Baseball's New Pitch Clock

Source:  Sports Illustrated

If you are a major league baseball fan, you probably are enjoying the new pitch clock implemented this year.  Over the past few decades, games have become longer and longer, typically exceeding 3 hours.  In the playoffs, many games have exceeded 4 hours.  The increasing length of games and the slow pace were turning away many fans, particularly younger ones.   Interestingly, a scholar of decision making under pressure has suggested that all of us can learn a bit from the addition of the pitch clock in baseball.  Dartmouth College President-Elect Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist, has argued that we might actually see better performance with the new time constraints for pitchers.  She extends that argument to many decision makers in an array of fields, arguing that situations without time bounds can actually increase decision fatigue and burnout, while yielding inferior choices.  We can spend so much time pondering and re-hashing our options that we become cognitively overwhelmed.  Here's an excerpt from a piece she wrote recently for Fast Company: 

My own research shows that we actually perform better under tight time constraints—especially when we’re doing something we’re good at. The performance of elite athletes is largely controlled by procedural memory and repetition rather than conscious thinking...  Too much time causes us to focus excessively on the minutiae of our performance, which can disrupt what we are doing. San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler had it right when he said that the greatest advantage of the pitch clock will be “taking all the thoughts out of your head.”

Parkinson’s law suggests that when people are given extra time to complete a task, we’ll generally take advantage of that time, even if we don’t really need it. In other words, we don’t lose out by trimming down deliberation time. All we gain is extra time for our thoughts to percolate—and disrupt our performance... In a world where we are all facing 35,000 daily decisions, it’s worth taking stock of how too much thinking time might be causing more harm than help. The “paradox of choice” tells us that having too many options actually makes us less happy—an experience anyone who’s spent a night scrolling through hundreds of Netflix titles only to declare “there’s nothing to watch” knows well. In many ways, the absence of a pitch clock in our own lives could be viewed as the culprit for decision fatigue and burnout, which over half of Americans are struggling with today.

Naturally, we have to consider the context.  The performance of an athlete performing the same task that they have performed millions of times since childhood is far different than a distinctive strategic decision that a CEO is facing and perhaps has never encountered previously.  Still, we should think carefully about what happens when we delay decisions repeatedly in hopes of benefiting from further deliberation and analysis.  There is a delicate cost/benefit calculus at play.  The benefits of delay don't always exceed the costs, and those costs are not only associated with the danger of falling behind more nimble competitors in the marketplace. 

A Leader's First 90 Hours

Source: https://www.nettl.com

As a new leader at any level, what will you do in your first 90 hours on the job?  Fascinating question.  A very important question in my view.  HBS Professor Emeritus John Quelch wrote a thought-provoking piece recently for HBS Working Knowledge on this topic.  He reminds us of the terrific book, First 90 Days, written two decades ago by Mike Watkins.  Quelch argues that the world is moving so quickly that new leaders need to focus on their first 90 hours; they simply can't wait to take certain actions given the pace of change.  Whatever you think about Quelch's arguments and recommendations, there's one piece of advice that resonated with me.  He advocates for careful consideration of actions during those first 90 hours that will signal your values as a leader.  I wholeheartedly agree.  

Think about how people throughout your team or organization will interpret your words and actions during those first few days.  They will be reading between the lines, chatting with their colleagues, and reflecting on the meaning behind your actions.   Through it all, they are trying to discern what is important to you, and what your priorities will be.  Who and what do you value?  

Therefore, consider carefully the way others will perceive those initial actions.  Who are you meeting with during those early days?   What are you emphasizing in your communications?  What small changes will you make to signal your values?  Are there any immediate investments you can make that suggest a new way of leading?  How open and transparent will you be in relation to what prior leaders have done?  Considering these questions carefully will be highly important as you set the tone in those first few days in a new role. 

Have You Become Too Reliant on Star Performers?

Source: NBA.com

Tom Taiyi Yan and Elad Sherf wrote a brief article this week in the Wall Street Journal describing their fascinating new research regarding team over-reliance on superstars.  They cite a terrific study of National Basketball Association players.  Here's an excerpt:

To investigate how team dynamics worked, we started by looking outside the world of business—at basketball. In our study, published in Organization Science, we examined competitive teams in the National Basketball Association across more than 60,000 games, spanning 34 years. Leveraging motion-tracking-camera data, we examined how teams’ passing patterns and shot distributions changed after wins and losses.

We found that after winning, teams became more reliant on their star players. Teams passed the ball about 6% more to the stars, and their shot distribution skewed 15% more toward the big performers. Although doubling down is intuitive (“We want to exploit what worked before"), it ended up decreasing teams’ chances of winning the next game. The increased reliance on the star players made teams more predictable to the next opponent and easier to defend—and therefore less likely to win the game.

This tendency to stick with stars doesn’t just hold true in competitive sports. All teams—particularly ones in the business world—tend to double down on what has worked. And it is often a bad idea.

Big Data AND Consumer Anthropology

We shouldn't be choosing between leveraging big data to make decisions vs. conducting in-depth qualitiative research about our customers.  We should be using both methodologies, as they are often quite complementary.  As market researcher and Kellogg Professor Gina Fong states, "“Big data’s having a real moment right now. Numbers don’t lie—and big numbers sometimes give people more confidence in the data. But they only give you the what. Consumer anthropology and qualitative research are there to address the why behind people’s choices.”

Qualitative research can be most effective when we study people in their natural environment - retail stores, homes, workplaces, public parks, mass transit stations, etc. The key is to see what they do, rather than relying simply on what they say. After all, as Margaret Mead once said, "What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”  Fong offers a wonderful example of how qualitative research can deepen our insights into consumer behavior and even prevent us from jumping to the wrong conclusions. Kellogg Insight describes her powerful example:

For example, a colleague of Fong’s loved eating avocados, but he had stopped purchasing them in the grocery store. Looking solely at patterns in the data, the store’s brand team might conclude that he and others like him didn’t like avocados anymore, or that avocados had become too expensive. Armed with this information, the team might react by discounting avocados or displaying them in another part of the store.  But his motivation for passing up avocados was more complicated.

“He really liked avocados, but he didn’t know how to pick one when it was perfectly ripe,” Fong says. “Either the avocado would ripen too fast and spoil, or it would take too long to ripen, and he would forget about it. This was frustrating to him, so he just punted the whole activity.”  On a recent store visit, he saw a display with avocados categorized in three groups: “ripe today,” “ripe in a couple of days,” and “ripe in four to five days.” This has led to him once again buying avocados.

How You Handle Low Performers Can Hurt Morale and Drive Away Your Best People

I recently re-read a post from The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) about a study conducting by Eagle Hill Consulting.  The post focuses on the highly detrimental impact of not acting to address low performers in your workplace. Here's an excerpt from the SHRM blog post:

These findings, drawn from a survey of more than 1,700 professionals from across the private, nonprofit and government sectors, are detailed in a research report by Arlington, Va.-based Eagle Hill Consulting, Are Low-Performers Destroying Your Culture and Driving Away Your Best Employees? The researchers found that:

• Low-performers hurt morale in the workplace and increase the workload for others. When asked to pick the greatest problems created by low-performers, the top concern was that they reduce overall workplace morale (cited by 68 percent of respondents). Forty-four percent said that low-performers increase the work burden on high-performers.
• Low-performers stifle innovation and contribute to a standard of mediocrity. Some 54 percent said that low-performers contribute to a lack of initiative and motivation, resulting in a work culture where mediocrity is accepted.

Addressing low performance does not mean you have to fire people.  It does mean you have try to understand WHY certain individuals are not performing to expectations.  What are the causes? Don't assume you know.   Then, you must provide concrete, actionable feedback to people who are not achieving their goals.  It means putting in place a specific plan for coaching and developing low performers.  Finally, it means having key milestones at which you can check in on the performance of these individuals, measure progress or lack thereof, and take additional steps to address performance below expectations.  Failing to have the hard conversations will not only harm the organization's effectiveness, it will lead to a deterioration in employee morale.  Ultimately, it might lead to the departure of your best employees, who become frustrated and upset with the situation. 

Why You Should Train as a Barista

The Wall Street Journal's Heather Haddon reported several days ago about the leadership transition at Starbucks. Laxman Narasimhan has taken over for Howard Schultz, who has completed his third stint at chief executive of the coffee chain.  I found one element of the transition particularly interesting.  Haddon notes that Narasimhan "spent 40 hours training to become a certified barista" and served coffee at cafes around the world.  He learned a great deal about challenges on the front lines.  Haddon described the new CEO's plans to stay engaged in the stores moving forward:

Mr. Narasimhan said he plans to regularly work alongside baristas in cafes to understand why it sometimes is so aggravating to get a customer a simple cup of coffee. He intends to work four hours in a different Starbucks store each month and expects his senior leaders to do the same.

To me, this type of direct engagement on the front lines is MUCH more effective than simply visiting restaurants, stores, or factories.   You can truly empathize with your employees if you actually do the work that they do, and if you engage in conversation while tackling tasks alongside them.   You learn a great deal about the obstacles they face each day that make their jobs much harder than they need to be.  Starbucks, as we all know, has had its labor relations challenges in recent years.   This type of engagement can be a step forward. 

Narasimhan's work here reminds me of when Chris Nassetta took over as CEO of Hilton Hotels.  The company was in rough shape.  Inc. magazine reported on the turnaround several years ago.  Nassetta said, "We had lost touch with the front line."  The article noted, that, "Nassetta and his senior executives started spending one week each year working at hotels--in housekeeping, engineering and the front desk. 'Their job is harder than your job,' Nassetta says. 'You get in there, and you pay them the respect.'"

What Do I NOT Know?

Often, when leaders encounter a challenging problem, they naturally begin by asking themselves: "What do I know about this issue?  What expertise and past experience can I bring to bear on solving this problem?"  That would seem like the appropriate place to start.  However, I've recently been challenging leaders to begin with a slightly different question.  I encourage them to pose the question: "What do I NOT know about this issue?  What do I need to learn to make a more informed and wise decision?  From whom can and should I learn, both on my team and beyond my team?"  

Why begin with this question?  Here's my logic.  If you start with what you know, you frame the problem for others on your team.  You might even exert undue influence on them as discussion ensues about the issue.  They might defer to you and your expertise and authority, and in so doing, you may not gain access to vital information and perspectives.  Perhaps you even make yourself particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias.   As Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson argues, effective leaders encourage people to speak up by acknowledging their own limits.   "I'd like to learn more about this specific issue.  I could you use your help to understand more about it." 

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, put it best when he argued that the "learn-it-all" leaders outperform the "know-it-all" leaders.  Becoming a "learn-it-all" leader begins with asking the question: "What do I NOT know about this issue, and how can I learn effectively and quickly so as to fill the gap in my expertise?"  

Persuading Others: "I'm one of you..."

Source: https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/

Recently, the renowned social influence scholar Robert Cialdini sat down for a chat with Matt Abrahams for his Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast.  Cialdini recapped a few major findings from his research on persuasion.   As he shared a few experimental findings, Cialdini emphasized how we can be more persuasive if we convince others that we are "one of them."   Here's one example:

There was a study done on a university campus, researchers took a young woman who was about college age, dressed like a college student, asked her to set up a table for the United Way on a heavily trafficked area of campus and request people who were walking by to donate to the United Way. And because she looked similar to them she was getting some contributions. But if she added one sentence to her request she got four and a half times as many contributions. So what was the sentence, it was I’m a student here too, I’m one of you.

Cialdini went on to offer another example. In this case, the "persuader" did not meet others in person. Instead, people were persuaded simply becaused they were informed that others "like them" had acted in a certain way. Here's an excerpt from the podcast in which Cialdini described an experiment at a hotel:

We had the cooperation of the managers and we went into hotel rooms and randomly assigned various kinds of cards that were the same except for the recommendation, please do this for, right, and the environment was one, please do this for future generations was another. But the one that made the most difference was “the majority of guests who stay in this hotel have reused their towels,” and that produced a significant increase in the willingness of people to reuse their towels.

But even more interesting we got a more significant effect if we said not just the majority of visitors to our hotel have reused their towels, the majority of visitors who’ve stayed in this room have reused their towels. We got significantly more now because the principle we’re talking about is the principle of social proof, that if a lot of other people are doing something it validates the behavior, it makes it more correct. But if those people are comparable to us, staying in the same room now that’s not unity, that’s just similarity here, they’re comparable they’re like us. Well, that makes their behavior even more diagnostic of what we should do.

For more of Cialdini's terrific work on persuasion, I highly recommend his groundbreaking book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.  

My Fast Company article about Ted Lasso

Today, Fast Company published my article titled, "Was Ted Lasso's Leadership to Blame for Nate's Betrayal?"  The article describes why "giving employees ownership of the win" is very important.  

Synchronized Scheduling Serves as Social Glue

While many people enjoy the flexiblity of collaborating virtually in today's hybrid work environment, they do still crave personal connection.   Many people will make personal sacrifices to insure that the opportunity for personal connection exists.  Franklin Shaddy, Peking University and Ayelet Fishbach have conducted a series of studies to examine the extent to which people will choose to synchronize their schedules with others as a means of connecting with them.  

In one of their experiments, research subjects had the opportunity to receive a box of cookies in either two weeks or two months.  The scholars told some of the research subjects that they could also select a free box of cookies for a friend.  Many of the participants chose to wait two months to receive their box if their friend also would be receiving their cookies in two months time.  Naturally, you would think that most people would want their cookies sooner rather than later, yet many chose to delay gratifications and to synchronize their positive experience with a friend.  

Here is an excerpt from an article about their research in the UCLA Anderson Review:

A core principle of psychology is that we typically want to experience pleasure sooner and delay painful or negative events as long as possible. Yet in experiments that studied the behavior of more than 3,000 participants, the researchers found that people were willing to delay pleasure and move up pain — paying a psychological cost — if it meant they could schedule an experience at the same time as a friend or someone they admire, even though they would not be in any physical proximity.

The choice to sync persisted even when experiment participants knew the other person wasn’t aware of the event. Syncing was also prioritized when it meant committing to an inconvenient time slot to “connect” with a friend. And as a bit of proof of concept, the researchers found that when experiment participants were primed to think about someone they didn’t like, they were not motivated to sync schedules.

“Synchronized scheduling acts as ‘social glue,’ increasing feelings of not only person-to-person social connection, but also solidarity, trust and cohesion within the group. As a result, it counteracts experienced and anticipated physical disconnection,” they write.

What's the implication for leaders in the workforce?  Having people experience something at the same time, even if they are physically apart, can have beneficial effects.   It can bind team members together more closely, something we ought to desire in workplaces where too many people are often disengaged and teams are less cohesive than we would like.  

Victim of Layoffs? Don't Burn Bridges, Focus on Development

Source: Flexjobs

Eleanor Pringle has written a good column for Fortune titled, "Do’s and don’ts of layoffs: These are the things you should never post on LinkedIn if you lose your job."   

Pringle has some sound advice.  Naturally, she appropriately recommends "leaving well" - that means no burning bridges, no calling out companies or colleagues who you believe may have mistreated you.  She stresses that posting while upset is a recipe for disaster. Pringle has some other sound recommendations, including advice about leaning into professional development opportunities, such as short courses.  She writes:

DON’T waste time while you’re not working.  Not got a job? Prove you’re proactive and post about it. Alistair Stirling, adviser at Stirling Careers Consultancy, said he always encourages his clients to do volunteer work and short courses while they’re on the hunt for their next role.  He explained that not only does it give people something to talk about –either on interviews or on platforms like LinkedIn– it shows you’re not just sitting around at home.

I agree with the recommendation regarding development.  I would stress, however, that everyone should be developing a plan for lifelong learning, if they do not have one.  It's not something that should wait for the unfortunate circumstance of a layoff.   Each person should be thinking about a stream of development activities, above and beyond the training provided by one's company.  Many of these development activities don't cost much money, if at all, these days.  Others do require an investment.  These opportunities should sometimes be about practical skill building ("I'm going to learn how to code...").  However, other opportunities should be just about stretching your perspective and stimulating your thinking on an important subject ("I'm going to read this book about motivation...")   

The Dangers of Self-Driving Cars: Is it the Technology or the Humans?

Source: Car and Driver

On Thursday, Tesla recalled more than 350,000 automobiles with its experimental self-driving software technology.  Apparently, the software may lead to accidents in intersections, and it can cause cars to move at excess speeds at times. 

Interestingly, Missy Cummings, a George Mason University engineering professor and former safety official at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, had warned about self-driving technology's potential problems and limitations in a New York Times article on Wednesday.  She argued that some drivers place too much trust in the self-driving technology, and thereby place themselves and others at risk.  

The Cummings interview emphasized a concept I've been writing about for several years:  compensatory behavior.  The idea is simple.  If we know about certain systems intended to assist us and potentially make us safer, we grow dependent on those systems and sometimes compensate by actually taking more risk.  I first explored the idea in the context of Everest expedition teams.  I once asked the great mountaineer, Ed Viesturs, why he often climbs without supplemental oxygen.  He replied, "I don't think oxygen necessarily makes you safer in the mountains.  It can give you a false sense of security."  As a result, climbers engage in reckless behavior, not realizing quite how much danger they are encountering because of the safety blanket that they think the oxygen has provided them.  Similar issues arose in my study of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Boeing 737 MAX design and subsequent crashes.  In the latter case, I also learned that pilots can grow dependent on automated systems, and their skills may erode over time as a result.  Think about driving a car again.  If you always use the backup camera and parking-assist features, you may not be as capable of parallel parking if suddenly those systems are not available to you.  

In sum, I'm not against technologies such as self-driving cars.  I do think, however, that we must become aware of the dangers and risks.  Those risks are not all simply about potential flaws in the technology.  Those flaws also have to do with how humans interact with that technology over time. 

Reducing Employee Turnover: Break Up Long Streaks of Difficult Work

Source: SHRM

We know that many employees find challenging work to be rewarding.  They want to feel that their work is meaningful, and that they are making an impact on others.  At the same time, we have watched employee turnover soar at many organizations in recent years.  Does that mean many employees are not being challenged sufficiently?  Do they find their work tedious and mundane?  Or, are they quitting becuase of burnout driven by other factors?  

Maurice Schweitzer, Polly Yang, and David Daniels have conducted a fascinating study that sheds light on one reason employees may be quitting their jobs.  In an ingenious research design, the scholars studied almost 2 million text conversations among over 14,000 volunteers at a crisis hotline.  These volunteers engaged in some very difficult and stressful conversations with callers seeking assistance.  However, not all calls posed an equal level of stress and challenge.  Some conversations were less tense and demanding than others.   The scholars found that the overall difficulty of the work did not affect turnover among the staff members.  However, the sequencing of the work mattered a great deal.  Here is a summary of their findings, as reported by Knowledge @ Wharton: 

While the content of the conversations influenced the quit rate of volunteers, the data revealed that the order of the conversations mattered even more. Volunteers who experienced long streaks of hard conversations were 22% to 110% more likely to quit. Conversely, breaking up these hard streaks by reassigning tasks to different volunteers would “reduce volunteer quitting rates by 22%, boosting prosocial behavior and likely saving lives,” the authors wrote in the paper.

The scholars go on to explain how long streaks need to be broken up by some simpler tasks to reduce employee burnout.  In short, "When people evaluate a sequence of past events, they disproportionately focus on “streaks” (long streaks of similar events in a row) and on “ends” (the most recent event)."  The scholars have a recommendation for leaders who tend to rely heavily on certain "stars" to constantly take on the most challenging work:

Schweitzer noted the natural tendency for managers to turn to the same reliable employees over and over again to get things done, especially on a deadline. But he urged those bosses to throw some lighter duties into the mix to prevent burnout and bitter feelings.  “Counterintuitively, adding a bit of extra work — specifically, adding easier assignments — can keep workers more motivated, by preventing streaks of hard tasks from being created,” he said.

What Happens When You Invite Questions From Your Team?

I'm reading University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham's new book, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.   The book offers terrific advice on learning strategies for students, as well as tips for teachers on how to help students learn more effectively.  In the book, Willingham writes, 

If your students consistently do not  ask questions, you should wonder about your relationship with them. They are not quiet because your explanations are so brilliant and clear.  They're quiet because they see asking a question as taking a risk.  Ask yourself why that is.  

What a terrific thought-provoking statement for teachers to ponder.  Now replace the word students in the first sentence with the words "team members" or "employees" and consider the implications for leaders at all levels.  If your people are not asking you questions, you have a problem.  Silence doesn't suggest that you have articulated your vision, goals, and strategies clearly and persuasively.  Silence suggests a problem with the climate you have created.  

Super Bowl Ads: Teaming Up is the New Trend

This year's Super Bowl will feature an interesting new trend.  Companies increasingly are partnering with other brands in their commercials.  For instance, several brands have partnered with Netflix to create Super Bowl ads.  Above, you will hear and see Will Ferrell appearing in a General Motors commercial in which he drives GM electric vehicles "through" several highly popular Netflix shows.  Michelob also will be running a Super Bowl ad in partnership with Netflix.  Molson Coors is teaming up with DraftKings in a Super Bowl promotion. 

These partnerships have several potential benefits. First, they spread the cost of very expensive Super Bowl ads across two or more firms.   Second, they help some older brands tap into younger audiences by teaming up with brands that have more Gen Y and Gen Z fans.  Third, they help these ads stand out among a sea of the usual Super Bowl ads that simply try to offer a quick laugh during the game.    

By the way, you might be wondering whether Super Bowl ads truly generate a positive return on investment.  Several years ago, scholars Wesley R. Hartmann and Daniel Klapper conducted a study showing that the ads do generate a positive return, unless a direct rival also runs an ad during the big game. 

Building Resilience

Source: NIH

On college campuses, many faculty members across the nation have been concerned about declining resilience among our students.   Similarly, I'm hearing many business leaders express concerns about a perceived drop in employee resilience in recent years.  

Resilience has been defined as the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties (Oxford dictionary). In a 2021 Harvard Business Review article, Rob Cross and his co-authors explained why we should care a great deal about resilience in our organizations. They wrote, "Resilience has been shown to positively influence work satisfaction and engagement, as well as overall well-being, and can lower depression levels. There is even evidence that resilience can help protect us from physical illness."

Cross and his colleagues make a very important point about resilience though.  They push back against the conventional wisdom which suggests that resilience is an internal trait.  According to this line of thinking, it's something deep down inside of you that can be drawn up to overcome challenges; if you lack resilience, you somehow are flawed.   Cross and his co-authors offer an alternative perspective:

We can nurture and build our resilience through a wide variety of interactions with people in our personal and professional lives. These interactions can help us to shift or push back on work demands and alter the magnitude of the challenge we’re facing. They can help crystalize the meaningful purpose in what we are doing or help us see a path forward to overcome a setback — these are the kinds of interactions that motivate us to persist. People in our support systems can provide empathy or simply help us laugh and bolster our resilience by shifting perspective and reminding us we are not alone in the fight. In short, resilience is not something we need to find deep down inside ourselves: we can actually become more resilient in the process of connecting with others in our most challenging times. (emphasis added) 

In short, our social networks matter a great deal.  Building and leveraging those networks can be incredibly helpful when we face setbacks and challenges.  Business leaders should take notice.  They need to help their employees connect with one another and with others outside the organization.  Simply asking people to return to the office is not sufficient, nor is holding a few "bonding" days at an off-site gathering.  Leaders need to assist their employees in building relationships with others who will provide critical support, resources, and coaching.  Moreover, they need to help their employees build relationships that will strengthen the sense of meaning that they find in their work, as well as in their lives outside of work.  

Expressing Gratitude May Promote Better Collaboration

In past blog posts, I have featured some excellent research on the benefits of expressing gratitude. Most of that work focused on the benefits to the person giving thanks. New research from UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Sara B. Algoe and her colleagues demonstrates an interesting ancillary benefit from thanking others. They call it the witness effect. Gratitude doesn't just benefit the individuals giving and receiving thanks; it also has a positive impact on third parties who witness this exchange.

In their experimental studies, the scholars found that the research subjects "who witnessed a 'thank you' in one line of text, expressed to someone who previously helped the grateful person, were themselves more helpful toward the grateful person." Moreover, in their studies, they found that witnesses "wanted to affiliate more with the grateful person and with the person toward whom gratitude was expressed." Algoe and her colleagues concluded that, "Gratitude may help build multiple relationships within a social network directly and simultaneously."

Here is an excerpt from the paper that Algoe and her colleagues published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Specifically, when Harry does something nice for Tom, it is the expression of gratitude that provides a rich signal about Harry. At a fundamental level, the witness learns that Harry voluntarily spent time or effort to do something on Tom’s behalf that Tom values. We proposed and found that witnesses would be more interested in affiliating with a person like Tom (Experiment 5). In addition, we proposed and tested the possibility that this signal would reveal Tom to be a morally good person; indeed, we found that benefactors who were more praised by grateful people were seen as more good which, in turn, predicted greater willingness to help them (Experiment 8). Although our evidence comes from one study, we believe this is a promising avenue for future research: prior research documents that people quickly judge others’ moral goodness (Lindeberg, Craig, & Lipp, 2018) and it carries greater weight than warmth or competence in some settings (Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014; Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworski, 1998).

In short, this research suggests that a workplace in which expressions of gratitude are commonplace may be fertile ground for more cooperation and effective collaboration.  Leaders should take notice.  

A Genuine Apology Goes a Long Way

Ben Cohen reports today in the Wall Street Journal about a remarkable apology email issued by Andrew Benin, chief executive of Graza, a startup that sells squeezable bottles of extra-virgin olive oil.  Unfortunately, the company did not cope effectively with high customer demand during the holidays.  Many people received their packages late, and some packages were damaged.  Customers complained of leaking olive oil bottles.  Cohen drafted a detailed apology and sent it to over 35,000 Graza customers.  Cohen described the rather unconventional email:

The mea culpa from a one-year-old company with the subject line “Learning from our mistakes” was just about the opposite of a typical corporate response. It explained in plain English and candid detail what went wrong and why. It took accountability for those errors and offered a discount on future orders. It was raw, transparent about uncertainty and messy with typos and misspellings. It was also oddly entertaining and strangely charming.

You can read the entire email for yourself if you view Cohen's article on the Wall Street Journal website.  Like Cohen, I found the apology very genuine and sincere, and it didn't feel as robotic as many corporate apology emails do (I could do without the spelling and grammatical errors though. I am a professor after all).  In Cohen's article, he cites author Marjorie Ingall's advice for issuing apologies.  

1. Say you’re sorry.

2. For what you did.

3. Show you understand why it was bad.

4. Only explain if you need to; don’t make excuses.

5. Say why it won’t happen again.

6. Offer to make up for it.

The six recommendations seems sensible.  However, the real reason for the effectiveness of the Graza email seems to be in the tone, not just the content itself.  You can do the six things above, and yet you may still write a robotic email that sounds inauthentic.  Did this email work? Well, 867 people actually replied to the email, many quite positively. One said, “Thanks for your honesty. I wish more businesses did the same.”

Does Pay Transparency Help or Hurt Workers?

Source: TechTarget

Conventional wisdom seems to suggest that increased transparency about compensation will help workers. For instance, a CNBC story about New York's new salary transparency law is titled, "How NYC’s pay transparency law could help millions across the U.S. earn more money." Naturally, researchers have not taken the conventional wisdom as a given. They have begun exploring the actual impact on employees. Some early research suggests that the impact might not be as positive as some transparency advocates believe.

The UCLA Anderson Review recently published a feature article titled, "Pay Transparency: Will It Help or Hurt Workers?" The article focused on the work of Harvard Business School Professor Zoe Cullen and Brown University Professor Bobak Pakzad-Hurson.  These scholars found that employers with non-unionized workforces might capitalize on the newly available data about salaries across a wide range of firms to drive a very hard bargain with job candidates.  As a result, the transparency laws might depress starting wages.  Here is an excerpt from the article: 

Cullen and Pakzad-Hurson analyzed all job postings, worker bids and other transactions from 2010 to 2014 on the TaskRabbit platform, where employers hire temporary workers for lower-skilled jobs. Online labor markets employ perhaps 7 percent of the U.S. workforce, or 14 million people. The short-term, constantly renegotiated nature of the gigs offers an accelerated look at how transparency works its way through a market. The findings aren’t necessarily applicable to traditional labor markets, but are certainly worth considering in the transparency debate.

The model, in addition to suggesting fierce negotiating by companies pre-employment, indicates workers looking to be hired would not be so tough. Knowing wages are transparent within the company, a worker would want to get hired and then, upon learning what others make, negotiate a raise. The combination of those factors depressed wages, Cullen and Pakzad-Hurson report.

“Our analysis of equilibrium wages, hiring rate and profits under greater pay transparency reveals consequences that are counterintuitive and economically large in a market for low-skill tasks,” Cullen and Pakzad-Hurson write.

More research clearly must be done, and this paper's conclusions from analysis of the TaskRabbit platform might not apply to the broader labor market.  Still, the study suggests that more attention must be paid to the actual impact of these new transparency laws, rather than simply assuming that they will benefit employees.