Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1304

How Much Does Customer Social Media Angst Really Matter?

Motrin Moms. Dell “hell.” “United Breaks Guitars.” These case studies are legendary among marketers. They each show how consumer feedback delivered through social media slayed a popular brand.

For marketers in the digital age, negative customer feedback that takes on a life of its own is a nightmare. And for customers, the notion that any of us can talk back to big companies and have our claims addressed feels like a dream.

The sheer volume of online feedback means it’s almost impossible for companies to act on every complaint. Most brands are playing catch-up: in 2013 only 30% of brands had a dedicated customer service handle on Twitter, and only 10% of those brands with customer service handles reply to more than 70% of their mentions. Most brands do invest in “social listening” programs, from monitoring software to teams of analysts who scan the feeds in the hopes of muffling bad feedback and amplifying positive feedback. But what’s the real impact of such programs?

As a consultant in PR and social media, I thought I knew. But a recent experience made me question some of my assumptions about consumers, “influencers,” and the companies who can make a difference.

Just a few months ago, I was wrapping up a busy year of travel to wait out the last few weeks of my third pregnancy. I’m no road warrior, but I do clock an average of 100,000 miles a year, meaning I have some elite status on various airlines. Once I became too pregnant to fly, I decided to contact the airlines to make sure I could hold on to my miles despite the fact that most airlines have year-end deadlines for collection and rollover.

But the airlines flatly refused to accommodate my pregnancy or even allow me to purchase the miles necessary to maintain my status. Since this would have a real impact on my future travel costs and my small company’s bottom line I decided to post an article on Medium and enlist other working moms to provide their experiences as pregnant business travelers. I called out two specific airlines, using their Twitter handles when I tweeted the piece.

The piece went viral: it was one of Medium’s top 25 most passed along stories of the week; it was picked up by Yahoo! Travel, Inc., and Fortune Magazine. My Twitter feed exploded. An editor at the highly influential magazine Travel + Leisure picked up the cause, and helped me push it out to additional networks.

This all happened back in early December 2014. And what have I since heard from these companies?

Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Did the airlines just not see the story? Did they not care to respond? I called them for a comment, but never heard back.

The truth is, I assumed the scale of the response on social media plus my customer loyalty merited a response from the airlines. But maybe it just didn’t. Or maybe they never even really heard it at all.

There are a lot of sophisticated tools out there that do social listening, but those tools are still limited. As Jessica Randazza, Head of Marketing for Danone-Nutricia, told me, “Brands are told they need to do this social listening, but they aren’t always reading the data correctly.” Behind the curtain, the truth of most social media listening is akin to the infamous TPS reports in the classic movie Office Space. Reports – sometimes just spreadsheets of tweets — often get sent to a brand team where they sit on a desk, unread and piling up. I’ve been there myself. To be a great social media strategist you have to dive into the data, employ humans to listen, and most important, decide what to do next. The “Now What” is as important as the “Let’s take a closer look.” And those asking need to have the corporate decision making power to move a complaint forward and escalate change.

Take the challenge of the simple “sorry” tweet. Unmetric, a media analytics company, analyzed the number of apology tweets written by airlines between January and April of 2014. Of all of the company’s twitter replies, 64.22% of Southwest Airlines’ tweets were apologies with US Airways coming in second with 59.64%. At the other end of the spectrum, British Airways apologized zero times via Twitter during the same period.

But what are these apologies within the context of a company’s wider social media company strategy? Are these quick “we’ll look for your lost luggage” responses helping companies authentically connect with consumers? Are they canned responses? A more thoughtful connection offering suggestions or even an explanation of company policy? The simple dashboard can’t tell us.

Randazza highlights another hurdle. In regulated industries, she notes there may also be significant concern that customer fueled conversations could result in bigger problems than companies are ready to confront. Legal or regulatory departments might advise ignoring feedback rather than risking a deeper conflict.

Despite these hurdles, some companies do manage to change. Consider Makers Mark. When the company announced a change to their product, they told consumers that high demand and low supply would result in the lowering of alcohol content. Consumers were outraged and the brand quickly responded — showing loyalty and a willingness to listen. Maker’s issued an apology and reversal of the decision; that Facebook announcement received nearly 28,000 likes alone.

It’s crucial to be prepared for these moments and not only own them, but be legally enabled to transform them into good press and strong marketing opportunities.

Imagine if one of the airlines had reacted with this in mind. It could have opened up a larger conversation about women business travelers. In this “lean in” era, companies and individuals who are aware of equity issues are lauded and celebrated. Take a recent Fortune commentary by Katharine Zaleski. The start-up executive and new mom recently apologized to the mothers she disparaged while working at the Huffington Post and Washington Post. Her piece was shared widely across platforms and while she started an important conversation, she also raised awareness about her relevant new start-up “Power to Fly,” an online platform that matches women with technical skills to freelance projects. Best (free) press she could have ever received.

My experience with the airlines changed how I approach my work. First, for years, I have been instructing brands to religiously listen to their customers through online channels like Twitter. Public relations aside, why wouldn’t an organization take advantage of the world’s greatest free focus group? It was easy for me, as a consultant, to give this advice. I realize now that listening isn’t enough. The best brands don’t just listen – they use online customer feedback to evolve and they ensure digesting and understanding social media feedback is part of their strategy. That is when social listening becomes social learning.

I still believe, though, that ignoring social feedback is a missed learning opportunity for any company. When companies listen, consumers remember. Missteps and failure don’t damn a brand in the digital age. But failure to learn does.

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Reimagining the Boardroom for an Age of Virtual Reality and AI

Boards challenge their executives to get with the digital age — but many haven’t followed their own good advice.

They’re starting to use more digital tools to gather information, post questions and comments, connect individuals in remote locations, and present ideas more visually. (Examples include collaboration platforms such as MeetX, Virtualboardroom, Diligent, and Boardpad.) But there are plenty of other tools they could be using to do their jobs better — technologies that have proved useful in other contexts.

Through virtual-reality technology, for instance, boards could gain a deeper understanding of their companies and the value they create. In a gaming context, the idea is to put on a headset and enter a different world, try on a different perspective. (Some headsets really immerse you in the experience.) But business applications for VR are starting to take off, too. By using the technology to play the role of customer, investor, product developer, factory worker, and so on — making the kinds of choices they must make — board members could see the business (somewhat literally) from various stakeholders’ vantage points. It would be an antidote to the insularity that so many boards are criticized for, and a useful complement to the simulations and war-game tools that help with scenario planning and anticipating competitors’ moves.

While games and simulations are great for broadening our perspective and building analytic skills, we’re all still flawed, biased human beings who struggle to process floods of information. So why not incorporate artificial intelligence into boards’ decision making? Some companies are already doing this. Last year, Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong–based venture capital firm, appointed an algorithm called to its board, and IBM is developing a version of Watson (famous for beating contestants on Jeopardy) for the same purpose. AI has the capacity to collate and interpret far greater amounts of information than people can; it’s able to spot patterns and trends that are not immediately obvious to us. With its assistance, boards can make sense of all the market, customer, and competitor data at their disposal — both historical and current — and analyze it with greater rigor. AI tools free up valuable meeting time for discussions about the most important decisions and trade-offs. They allow humans to focus on what they do best — asking the right questions, using their judgment, inspiring others — while robots attend to the diagnostic and analytical tasks. That’s the case for now, at least. According to Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, robots won’t become more clever than humans until 2029.

Let’s also consider enterprise social-network tools and workflow management programs, like Yammer and Trello, which can facilitate more dynamic communication among board members and help them analyze their activities, interactions, voting patterns, and so on. With a central repository for communications, it’s easier to share presentations, budgets, quality reports, compliance reviews, and supporting analyses. The board of Communities in Schools, a U.S. nonprofit that coordinates community resources to help at-risk students stay in school, used Yammer to create a private “Sounding Board” so members can exchange and comment on ideas, reducing the number of emails (which are inefficient and harder to keep track of). Such platforms can be opened up to selected individuals outside the organization, too — for example, to expert advisers — so that they can more easily contribute ideas and respond to comments and questions in a safe, closed online environment.

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The pressure for boards to become more “digital” is coming from a number of sources. Outside stakeholders are beginning to demand greater visibility into boards’ operations, in light of the many well-publicized governance failings related to culture problems, poor risk management, and fraud. Increasingly, investors are expecting boards to match or surpass their own ability to collect and analyze information. Progressive chairs will soon start appointing more board members with digital backgrounds so they can use data and predictive analytic tools to more precisely gauge where and how the business can grow profitably. Companies’ top executives will grow frustrated if their own digital transformation efforts are not assessed by boards that are capable of both understanding and challenging them.

Of course, executives will also become more guarded as their boards begin to dip more easily into the organization, potentially blurring the boundaries of good governance. They may worry that more information in board members’ hands could lead to poorer decisions if it’s not being examined with the right set of lenses. So there will certainly be tension around boards’ becoming more digital. Roles will probably need to be redefined and recontracted. The chair’s job will inevitably change — it will involve presiding over all kinds of interactions, physical meetings being just one of many.

This won’t be a simple or smooth transition, but it’s one that needs to happen. Boards that embrace it will gain a clearer perspective on what’s really going on with their companies and the environment in which they’re competing. They’ll collaborate better; they’ll become more productive and more transparent to stakeholders. The growing pains are more than worthwhile.

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Differing Work Styles Can Help Team Performance

Most leaders now recognize that the best teams leverage diversity to achieve long-term success. But many think about it in pretty narrow terms: gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and/or age. Sometimes they also consider organizational attributes, like function or rank.

But there’s another kind of diversity that might be even more helpful:  differences in work style — or the way in which we think about, organize, and complete tasks.

In any office you will find four basic types of people:

Logical, analytical, and data-oriented
Organized, plan-focused, and detail-oriented
Supportive, expressive, and emotionally oriented
Strategic, integrative, and idea-oriented

When members of a team, or leaders of an organization, all have the same style, you’ll quickly run into trouble. For example, if everyone in your group has a big-picture, strategic, intuitive approach to work and chafes against the structure of project plans, you might frequently be over budget and behind schedule. Or, if everyone has a linear, analytical, and planned approach to work and dislikes disruption, innovative new product development would be impossible.

So how do you promote and leverage work-style diversity?

Observe your team members

In poker, they call them tells — betting patterns or unconscious behavior you can use to guess your opponent’s hand. The same rules apply to work style.

To evaluate a report or colleague, think about the following questions:

Does she consistently complete work early, in advance of deadlines or wait until the last minute?
Does he send emails with only a few words or write novels?
Does she gesture and use her hands while talking? Or is she more controlled and stoic in their movements?

These tells, both subtle and overt, will give you clues as to someone’s work style. You might also try to take this quick assessment from the perspective of each team member.

Because work styles are fairly ingrained, recruitment, not development, is the best way to build diversity in a group. If you find that one or two work styles are overrepresented, it’s probably time to add some fresh blood to your team.

Leverage everyone’s strengths

Your logical, analytical colleague is at her best when she is processing data and solving complex problems. She will focus like a laser on achieving any stated goal or outcome and will ensure that you stay on budget.

Your organized, detail oriented colleague’s strengths are in establishing order, structuring projects, and accurately completing tasks. He will ensure work is completed on time.

Your supportive, expressive colleague is most skilled at building relationships, facilitating team interaction, and persuading or selling ideas. She will keep all stakeholders up to date on work and effectively communicate ideas through the organization.

Your big-picture, integrative colleague can serve as a catalyst for change, brainstorming solutions to problems and synthesizing disparate thinking. He will drive innovation, ensure variety in both thought and execution and keep you moving forward.

Make sure that everyone understands the value each team member brings to the table and give people assignments in which they can use their skills to best effect.

Coach according to work style

To get the best from each person, consider using questions aligned to his or her respective work style.

For your logical, analytical colleague, ask:

What is your goal?
What are you seeking to achieve?
Where can you find data that will help you make that decision?

For your organized, detail oriented colleague, ask:

How can you make ________ work more effectively?
How will you decide which step to take next?
What has worked for you in the past?

For your supportive, expressive colleague, ask:

How is your behavior impacting others?
Who can support you in this?
Who else needs to be involved?

For your big-picture, integrative colleague, ask:

What would the ideal future state look like?
What ideas do you have for addressing ________?
If there was something else you could do, what would it be?

There is huge value to be gleaned when you leverage work style diversity by observing your team members, playing to their strengths, and giving them tailored coaching.

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What Popular Baby Names Teach Us About Data Analytics

A typical big data analysis goes like this: First, a data scientist finds some obscure data accumulating in a server. Next, he or she spends days or weeks slicing and dicing the numbers, eventually stumbling upon some unusual insights. Then, a meeting is organized to present the findings to business managers, after which, the scientist feels disgruntled or even disrespected while the managers wish they could take the time back.

When these meetings fail, the main points of contention usually include unclear purpose; analyses that are too narrowly focused; and over-confidence in the science, which turns off non-technical managers. If you’re facing this situation, you should read the FiveThirtyEight on mining the baby names dataset. When you’re done, send the article to your analytics team.

What FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and Allison McCann did with the baby names dataset sets an example for all data analysts: They imbued it with a relevant business problem, attached complementary data, made a bold, but acceptable, assumption to patch a hole in the data, and elaborated their conclusion with a margin of error. Their article represents the best of data journalism. It surpasses most examples of big data analytics, as we know it.

Curated by the Social Security Administration (SSA), the of the first names of all newborn Americans since 1880 is a star of big data. In the past few years, the baby names dataset has been mined to death (pardon the pun). Its fame can be traced to computer scientist Martin Wattenberg, who created the , a user-friendly interface for visualizing the baby names. The purpose of the Voyager is investigating what names were popular when. Since Wattenberg, a line of analysts has pursued numerous projects, such as the most names, the most names, and the most name by state.

All this slicing and dicing have produced insights that are little more than sound bites or click bait. And then, Silver and McCann entered the picture.

They imbued the data with a relevant business problem.

Instead of asking what names were popular (or poisoned or trendy or distinctive) in a given period of time, the two data journalists turned the question around and investigated whether someone’s first name provides sufficient information to guess when he or she was born.

This framing of the issue immediately reminds me of the real-world problems of guessing someone’s religion or languages spoken from his or her name, place of residence, and other factors. Many sophisticated businesses use such demographic data to develop customer segmentation. If your business purchases third-party data with those variables, you are already benefiting from the type of analysis Silver and McCann presented. (In practice, direct information on people’s age is more available than religion or languages.)

They attached complementary data.

It is rarely the case that one dataset contains all of the information needed to solve a business problem. The SSA data have information on births but not on deaths. A simple averaging of the birth dates of every Elizabeth ever born leads to a vastly over-stated average age because some of those people are no longer living. To perform the analysis properly, the data journalists incorporated actuarial life tables, which contain estimates of death rates.

They patched a hole in the data.

Actuaries, however, do not care about first names. The death rates can be split by gender, but not by name. The analyst could give up on the project at this stage, or make an assumption and trudge forward. Silver and McCann chose the latter route by assuming that death rates do not vary by first name. This is, without a doubt, a bold move, but one I’m comfortable with because it allows the analysis to reach a satisfactory state. Data analysts often face this type of decision in the course of any big data work. (You can see key analytical decisions in the footnotes of the article.)

They elaborated their conclusion with a margin of error.

The powerful graphics in the article clearly display the potential error sustained if one uses first names to predict a person’s age. Silver and McCann showed that the level of accuracy depends on gender and on the shape of the popularity trend. In some of the better examples, they can bracket someone’s age to within 10 years with 50% confidence. All too often, media reports of big data analyses omit any quantification of their accuracy, a harsh irony given the field’s trumpeting of the scientific method.

All the lessons described here apply easily to any business analytics team. Instead of generating sound bites with scant business relevance, data scientists should consult their business partners early and agree on an interesting business problem before digging into the data. As gigantic as many of today’s datasets are, they may still lack important variables, thus requiring augmentation. Big data analysis is highly valued because it can provide useful predictions, but analysts err when they fail to include a margin of error. Sound business decisions require understanding not only the most likely scenario, but also the range of possibilities. As the discipline of data science and analytics evolves, the process of generating business insights will improve, and there will be less all-around frustration when teams meet about data projects.

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Having Inside Information Leads to Worse Decisions

Tip-offs in business are surprisingly common (and, except for stock market insider trading, legal) and often make the person on the receiving end feel special—they now know something that others don’t and have an opportunity to be among the first to act on this new information. For example, your boss might reveal inside information about an upcoming organizational change, giving you a heads-up on how these changes might affect you. Or a client might mention a recent not-yet-public decision, one that has consequences for your company’s relationship with their firm. While this secret information may seem beneficial to us when we are part of the privileged minority that receives it, recent brain imaging research suggests otherwise.

In a recent paper, Rafael Huber and colleagues from the department of psychology at The University of Basel found that when people receive “private” information, their brains respond by overweighting this information when making decisions. Even when it may be optimal to follow other advice, private information will make the brain ignore it. In fact, the more we overweight private information, the more certain brain regions are turned on and others off, changing how we think, in ways that we are not even conscious of. In turn, this sets off a whole new information cascade in the brain—where we make a series of new assumptions based on the private information—without us necessarily being consciously aware that the brain is taking us on a wild goose chase. Private information turns “on” brain regions involved in the aversion to risk and the intolerance to uncertainty. It also interferes with brain regions that would ordinarily update beliefs, keeping the “mind’s eye” and brain resources on the risk instead. As a result, we lose the opportunity to integrate new information because the brain is so “taken” by the fact that it is private.

For example, someone who hears confidentially about impending changes in the company may prematurely start to look for a new job, inadvertently care less about their work, and start behaving as if they have already “checked out.” This behavior may result in their getting fired—even if the company’s original intent was to keep them. By overweighting the initial information about organizational changes and triggering unconscious thought processes, subsequent premature actions can actually have inadvertently negative consequences.

Another paper by Jennifer Louise Cook and colleagues from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in the Netherlands found that people who have dominant personality styles might be at further risk of distorted decision-making. However, there was a difference between leaders who were socially dominant (higher up in the pecking order and rated high on task leadership by peers) versus those who were aggressively dominant (rated poorly on social relationships and rated low on socioemotional leadership). Socially dominant people take in other social information when making decisions, whereas aggressively dominant people do not. This suggests that we can be further misled if we are prone to being aggressive (e.g. when the secret information makes us angry) because we may leave out important data when making decisions.

I saw this scenario play out with a senior executive client. He recently became enraged by a colleague who confessed that he had inadvertently undermined my client by justifying his own department’s recent budget redistributions to the CEO. Although he hadn’t meant to call my client’s judgment into question with the CEO, his explanation implied that my client’s budgets were probably too big. He went on to tell my client that he had only been trying to justify his own actions, and that he thought my client’s budgets were fine.

My client’s immediate reaction was anger, and then anxiety. These feelings escalated to the point where all he could think about was his standing with the CEO. Should he speak directly to the CEO? Should he “out” this undermining colleague? Because of his obsession with this issue (which he would never have known about had his colleague not “confessed”), he lost sight of his need to socialize his ideas about where he wanted to take his department in the future. He also lost sight of asking other people’s opinions on his decisions and, as a result, locked himself into a biased corner. When we talked about this, my client realized how the private information from his colleague was obscuring his course of action. It was only by delaying a hasty decision and incorporating the opinions of others, that my client was able to readjust, refocus, and make decisions that made more sense for the company.

This research and the examples above indicate that even though we may feel like “the chosen ones” when receiving insider information, being an insider may place us in the difficult position of unconsciously biasing the quality of information —because our brains are unable to distinguish between what is important and what is simply dramatic. The drama of secret information can be mistakenly coded as “important” information, triggering the unconscious responses described above. I call this “the shhh effect,” and this is one of the major unconscious biases in decision-making. So what should you do about legal private information?

First, before you act on the information, take a look at the data supporting it to circumvent the unconscious disaster of overweighting information. Consciously ask yourself or discuss with colleagues whether this information is relevant and accurate, and if so, how it fits within the context of other information. If, for example, you learn that there are “big changes ahead” in the company, rather than hastily jumping to conclusions, remember the biasing impact of “the shhh effect” on your brain. Then, write or talk openly about other information that you know, making it conscious and using it overtly to update your beliefs.

The point is that there is no need to reject this new secret information, but there is a reason to question it, examine it, turn it over on its head and discuss it. Remember that if you are inclined to be aggressive or if the information makes you angry (e.g. if there are supposedly a second round of impending cuts coming up), you may be even less inclined to discuss it, placing yourself in even more danger of overweighting the information you receive. In my work with leaders, I have seen this effect have important ramifications when people were considering a change of job. Secret information often propels them to make premature decisions that would have been much more effective if they had weighted the information consciously.

If you leave your brain to its own devices, it will change direction and lead to a cascade of other decisions that could distract you from getting things done or take your mind in an unproductive direction. In fact, this is usually what happens when “gossip” takes hold in an organization. So the second piece of advice here is to learn how to differentiate inside information from mere gossip. Organizations are full of gossip, which is distracting and depressing, and if you don’t manage it, you become paralyzed. A recent study showed that we are in fact endowed with the brain capacity to not get carried away by gossip if we deliberately adjust our responses to it. Simply put, the next time you hear offensive gossip, don’t give it a second thought. Train your brain to let go of it immediately.

Third, encourage transparency. Model it. Leaders should be transparent in order to encourage a culture of open communication and trust. Transparency in business communities thus has a positive effect, not just on business culture, but also on the brain, because it reduces the risk of overweighting private information.

Privileged information meant to help us can actually hurt us. By becoming more conscious of the brain’s exaggerated responses to information delivered secretively, we can avoid becoming victims of our own hyper-responsive brains.

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How to Overcome Burnout and Stay Motivated

Even if you love your job, it’s common to feel burnt out from time to time. Perhaps you just wrapped up a big project and are having trouble mustering motivation for the next one. It could be that your home life is taking up more of your energy than usual. Or maybe you’re just bored. What’s the best way to recharge? Are some forms of rejuvenation better than others? How do you know if what you’re feeling is ordinary burnout or something else, like chronic dissatisfaction?

What the Experts Say

Burnout — the mental and physical exhaustion you experience when the demands of your work consistently exceed the amount of energy you have available — has been called the epidemic of the modern workplace. “There’s no question that we’re at greater risk of burnout today than we were 10 years ago,” says Ron Friedman, the founder of ignite80, the consulting firm, and the author of the book, The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. “In large part, it’s because we’re surrounded by devices that are designed to grab our attention and make everything feel urgent.” Heidi Grant Halvorson, a social psychologist and the author of No One Understands You and What to Do About It, agrees. “There’s a lot of pressure in this 24/7 cycle,” she says. “It can lead you to feel lethargic, stressed, and depleted — literally spent.” So you need to find ways to “put gas back in your tank.” Here are some ideas for how to do that:

Take breaks during the workday

Burnout often stems from a “lack of understanding about what it takes to achieve peak workplace performance,” says Friedman. “We tend to assume that [it] requires trying harder or outworking others, [which] may get you short-term results but [is] physiologically unsustainable.” To perform at your best over the long term, you need regular “opportunities for restocking your mental energy,” says Friedman. Take a walk or go for a run. Have lunch away from your desk. “Stepping away from your computer gets you out of the weeds and prompts you to reexamine the big picture,” he advises. “It’s often in the intervals between thinking really hard about a problem and then stepping away that solutions becomes apparent.”  But take your breaks at the right time, Halvorson says. When your energy is highest – often in the morning – you should focus on work and maximize your productivity.  “Tackle your toughest challenges at those times,” she says. Then step away for a rest.

Put away your digital devices

Before the Blackberry era, leaving your work at the office was the default. “If you wanted to take work home with you, that required effort and planning,” says Friedman.  That’s no longer the case. “Today we’re all carrying around an office in our pocket in the form of a smartphone,” so we’re both psychologically and physiologically still attached. The remedy, he says, is to actively limit your use of digital devices after hours. Place your smartphone in a basket or drawer when you arrive home so you’re not tempted to pick it up and check your email; or you might devise a rule for yourself about turning it off past 8pm. “Put away your phone,” says Halvorson. “Whatever it is, it can wait until tomorrow.”

Do something interesting

Instead of concentrating on limiting or avoiding work in your off-hours, Friedman recommends scheduling “restorative experiences that you look forward to.” Making plans to play tennis with a friend or cook a meal with your spouse compels you to “focus on an approach goal — doing something pleasurable — instead of an avoidance goal — not checking email,” he says. “Research shows that approach goals are easier and more enjoyable to achieve.” Studies also indicate that doing an activity you find interesting — even if that activity is taxing — is better for you than simply relaxing. “What you do with your downtime matters,” says Halvorson. Sure, it’s appealing to laze on your couch with a tub of popcorn and a Netflix, but she recommends engaging in something more challenging — like a crossword or game of chess. “Even though it’s difficult, it will give you more energy.”

Take long weekends

Feeling mentally and physically exhausted may also be a sign that “you need to take some time off,” says Halvorson. The break need not be a two-week vacation; rather, she says, when it comes to stress-reduction, “you get a much greater benefit from regularly taking three- and four-day weekends.” While you’re away, though, don’t call the office or check your email. “You need to let go,” she says. “Each of us is a little less vital than we’d like to believe.”

Focus on meaning

If your job responsibilities preclude immediate time off, Halvorson suggests “focusing on why the work matters to you.” Connecting your current assignment to a larger personal goal — completing this project will help you score that next promotion, for instance — will “help you fight the temptation to slack off” and will provide a “jolt of energy that will give you what you need to barrel through that day or the next couple of days,” she says. Be aware, however, that this may provide only temporary relief. “If you’re burnt out from working too hard, you need to stop and take a real break.”

Make sure it’s really burnout

If none of these strategies work, you could be dealing with something more serious. If you’re listless and fatigued but still feel effective on the whole, then it’s probably just burnout. “But if you feel as though you’re not making progress and that the work you do doesn’t seem to matter,” it’s a different problem, Halvorson says. Is your manager giving you what you need to work at your best? If not, you may need a different position. Is the very nature of your work sapping your energy? If so, you may need to rethink your career.

Principles to Remember

Do

Set boundaries around your use of digital devices during off-hours
Incorporate regular breaks into your workday
Focus on why the work matters to you if professional obligations preclude a vacation

Don’t

Check your email when you’re taking a vacation or long weekend
Spend all your downtime vegging; engage in activities that challenge and interest you
Mistake constant fatigue and apathy for a temporary case of burnout; if you feel ineffective on a daily basis, it might be time to look for a new job

Case study #1: Reflect on why your work matters

As the co-founder, creative director, and CEO of Miss Jessie’s, the New York-based hair care line, Miko Branch has a busy and demanding job. The workday is a constant blur of team meetings and calls, appointments with clients, and product planning sessions. “When I am in town, people are in and out of my office all day long,” she says. “And when I’m travelling, I always check in by email at least every couple of hours.”

Her secret to avoiding burnout had always been daily nap breaks.  “Naps are just what I need to get my bearings,” she explains. “Sometimes they last only 10 minutes; other times it’s 30 minutes. Sometimes I use the couch in my office; other times I just lie on the floor with a blanket or jacket over me.” But recently her naps weren’t doing the trick. Facing multiple product launches and a looming deadline for a book about the genesis of Miss Jessie’s, she was feeling extremely stressed.  So she booked herself a three-day weekend in Miami to concentrate only on writing and editing. She was still working, of course, but she escaped the constant distractions of the office. And she inspired herself to keep at it by reminding herself why her business and this book meant so much to her both personally and professionally. “My sister and I created a business with no money,” she says. “We’re also female and we’re women of color.  I wanted to tell our story to inspire others and contribute in that way.”

She completed the draft and she was back at work on Monday. “I felt refreshed,” she says.

Case study #2: Be prepared to change careers if your burnout symptoms linger

Nicole Skogg, an optical engineer, felt tired and burnt out by her job at a small lighting manufacturer near Los Angeles. “I was doing a lot of mundane tasks — putting together a bunch of research data in a spreadsheet and organizing training sessions,” she recalls. “The tasks felt repetitive and unchallenging.” Even worse, a proposal she’d be working on — a business plan for an LED technology project the could drive long-term value for her company — had been rejected.

After the setback, her motivation flagged. Nicole, who had always been a go-getter found herself hitting the snooze button when her alarm went off each morning. She realized that she missed the strategic thinking she’d been doing on the new business plan. “It got me excited to come into work every day,” she says. “I realized how you should always want to feel about your job.” She was back to just “punching the clock.”

A couple of months later, she left her job and struck out on her own. Today, she is the founder and CEO of SpyderLynk, a mobile marketing and technology company based in in Denver. In retrospect, her case of burnout was a turning point. “I am really excited about what I’m doing and I’m so thankful that all those years ago, that manager told me no,” she says.

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Why Self Image Matters in B2B Sales

B2C marketers have long known that the key to a customers’ hearts and minds is to make the connection between the brand and customers’ sense of self. Powerful brands (think Apple and Nike) reinforce customers’ positive self-image. B2B marketers, on the other hand, have shied away from the idea, instead approaching selling as a rational, numbers-driven process where the best value proposition wins. Consequently, until recently they’ve paid little attention to the psychological needs of individual stakeholders in a purchasing organization. But that’s changing as suppliers have come to appreciate that companies don’t buy things, people do.

Our research shows that understanding the personal motivations – particularly around identity — of key people in a buyer organization are every bit as important to a sale as convincing them of the superiority of your solution.

This becomes even more important as the number of people involved in buying decisions has grown. Today, between five and six decision-makers typically have to agree on a purchase before it can happen. If a seller doesn’t have an advocate in the organization to help drive the consensus, a so-called “mobilizer” who is personally motivated to champion the deal, the sale can stall (see “Making the Consensus Sale” Harvard Business Review, March 2015).

To find out what might motivate a customer to take on this mobilizer role, CEB surveyed over 4,000 individual customer stakeholders involved in a B2B purchase. By evaluating over 70 different supplier attributes for their impact on customers’ perceptions of value, we found that customers perceive three distinct types of value provided by suppliers. We labeled these company value, professional value, and identity value.

Company value captures all ways in which your offering is perceived to help customers win at the company level — things like allowing the firm to achieve operational goals or increase customer loyalty.

Professional value is all about the ways an offering might improve the individual productivity of employees, for example by making an employee’s job easier or increasing her workflow or productivity.

And finally identity value describes the ways an offering might impact how employees perceive themselves by, for example, boosting their pride, helping them win respect, or strengthening their sense of community. This third category is distinct from the other two. It is less about “how the firm does” or “what I do” than “who I am.”

When we analyzed the relationship between which type of value customers perceived in a supplier (company, performance, or identity value) and their likelihood of advocating internally for the supplier, this is what we found: Offerings with a lot of company value (those that benefit the firm overall) don’t reliably inspire stakeholders in the company to advocate on a supplier’s behalf, becoming mobilizers who will help build the consensus needed to secure a purchase. Offerings that provide professional value (helping an employee do his or her job better), while encouraging mobilizers somewhat, don’t have a particularly powerful effect. But offerings that provide identity value, positively reinforcing a customer’s self image, had a powerful effect on turning these customers into mobilizers.

In short, the most effective way to create internal advocates or mobilizers for your offering is to make sure that – in addition to explaining the company and professional value it provides – you reinforce the ways it will deliver identity value — making them proud and respected, and strengthening their sense of community within the organization.

One of the best B2B campaigns of this is industrial supplier Grainger’s “Get it, got it, good” promotion —exemplified by their “Downtime is a Real Downer” video. Grainger identified production facility managers as their target — the individuals in the organization they hoped to turn into mobilizers who would help build consensus. The campaign connected the benefits of pride in work and having a sense of being king of one’s domain directly to the purchase and use of the Grainger solution. Grainger’s value proposition directly impacts the way the target mobilizer sees himself, building his confidence and willingness to act. Using Grainger’s offering doesn’t just make him feel better about Grainger, it makes him feel better about himself.

Communicating the spectrum of types of value your offering provides – from the company level to the individual level – is important, of course. Each value type has a role in helping to drive the needed purchase consensus. But if you fail to inspire individual customer stakeholders with the promise of identity value – qualities of your offering that enhance their sense of self – they may not step forward to advocate for you. And without them, it will be an uphill battle getting the consensus you need for a purchase.

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Advice from a Serial Life Reinventor

Most of us have some crazy dream living inside of us — start a company, write a book, move to Bali. Any of the above. All of the above. Maybe your dream is so crazy you haven’t told anyone about it. Or maybe it’s the thing you talk about every time you’ve had a bad day at the office. But what would it be like to actually chase down that dream? I wanted to know. So I called former CEO and regular HBR contributor Nilofer Merchant.

Last year, she fulfilled a dream when she packed up everything — house, husband, and kid — and moved to Paris, planning to stay for at least a year, maybe more. It’s not the first time she’s radically reinvented her life. For instance, she’s pivoted from being an executive in charge of billions in product at major tech companies like Apple and Autodesk to founding her own consulting firm — which she then shut down, at the peak of its success. Her HBR book was named a best business book of 2012 by Fast Company, she gave an acclaimed TED talk, and she was given the Thinkers50 “Future Thinker” award in 2013. And then… Paris. I asked her how she decided to blow up her life mid-career — again — and make the leap. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

HBR: What was the impetus for the move?

Merchant: It all started when my husband said something like, “Hey honey, do you realize we’ve accomplished all of our dreams?” And I’ve always thought, if you don’t have any dreams together then you don’t really have a reason to be together. That’s the reason it’s so hard when your kid leaves to go to college — that’s your shared dream, walking out the door. We realized we really should come up with new dreams.

What was the decision making process like?

It started with a glass of wine. We talked about “crazy dreams.” That night we probably generated 20 ideas, and I don’t remember any of them except the one that stuck, which is, “We should live a year abroad and give our son that experience.” That was five years ago, and then three years ago we asked ourselves, “Are we serious? Because if we are, we should start.” I would send him articles on Shanghai, or Delhi, and ask, “What about this? Or this?” In the end, choosing Paris was us coming to terms with the fact that it was going to be hard enough for all of us to relocate, but we thought it might not be quite as hard in Paris.

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We also had to decide, did our son get to vote? We’ve raised him to be involved in every decision. But we were also sure that if he had a vote, it would be a veto. We decided he would get to vote on where to live in the city, and which school he got to go to, but we told him he couldn’t vote on the fact we were doing it. Living abroad teaches you a bunch of skills and attributes you can’t find in a textbook. That’s the investment we’re making in our son’s life. We did it for him more than us. Divergent thinking and creativity come from making a new map in your mind, and when you go to a new country, you build new cognitive maps. Once you’ve learned to have a new and different map, you can make more of them; your ability to adjust to one situation teaches you how to adjust to others.

What did you end up doing about your jobs?

My husband really didn’t want to quit his job. So, he actually wrote a script, and he practiced the script ahead of time, went in to work a year out from the date we’d planned to move, and said, “My family would like to move abroad, is there any way I can move my job?” In the end, it took my husband’s company 9 months to say yes, to help us with the visa, but even towards the end, we were really starting to wonder what would happen.

As a keynote speaker and someone who travels a lot for work anyway, I would assume that your job was a lot more flexible and easy to move. Is that true?

Well… it wasn’t seamless. It’s costing me more in terms of time to travel [to speaking engagements] so I’m doing fewer. But I’ve been able to add a European speaker’s bureau, which is a positive.

But there have been other complications too. I passed up an opportunity to be on a Fortune 100 board, which was a plum opportunity. But based on the time zones, I would have had to be on conference calls at 2 am. And when I thought about it, I realized that this priority of our family bucket list overruled my individual, professional bucket list. I had to tell myself to have faith that opportunities do come back around.

How did the reality of moving to another country match up with your expectations?

I hated the first six months for a variety of reasons. My son was really sad. He’s in a foreign country, and can’t even do the homework assignment because he can’t understand what it even is. We didn’t insulate him by putting him in an American or international school but in a full-on French school. So, it was sad to watch him be so sad. My husband was traveling for work probably 70% of the time for the first 3-4 months. And I felt like an idiot in every social interaction because my French was so bad. I went from being an effective communicator and competent person to just feeling stupid. So I questioned the decision…[but] this is how you learn and grow. It’s not by having something be super easy.

Was there a turning point?

There’s no one moment, it’s more your shoulders come down from around your ears. I learned to laugh at myself a little more. My husband had to learn to say no a few more times at work. My son is now number two in his class in French when he is the only non-native speaker in his school. It’s a truth about change that everyone loves the idea of what change gets you, but no one actually likes to change. And of course, we know it’s a big privilege to do be in a position to do this at all.

What would you say to other people dreaming of changing countries mid-career?

Three things. First, it took five years for us to go from idea to reality. I think most people give themselves less runway and then wonder why it’s so impossible. I see this same dynamic play out all the time in companies trying to change or innovate — it’s like, “Let’s cram for it like an exam,”  instead of building a set of practices that lets you make any idea into a new reality. Give yourself more time than you think you’ll need.

I also think it was important that we said we would stay for at least a year. We’d heard enough stories from people who, in the first 3-6 months, just turned around and came home. But in our case, the commitment we made kept us working through the tough times.

Finally, we had to come to terms with the expense. Relocation is expensive anyway, and when we first moved, the dollar was $1.38 to the euro, and well, everything I bought I just wanted to cry. I finally said, this is just the expense of becoming more global. And that’s worth a certain amount. Even if it doesn’t financially make sense in terms of every single penny, it makes sense in terms of the bigger picture – in terms of what you’re getting in return.

This isn’t the first time you’ve radically changed your life or career. Does it get easier to embrace big, bold changes with practice?

This is the third major reinvention. And I will say that in each iteration, when you actually start, you feel like your success years are behind you. And then, 3 or 5 years later, you’re like, “This was brilliant!” Not because it was obvious it would work out. But because in chasing the dream you manifest this other thing — invention, reinvention, achievement — it is in the doing, you become.

But, as you begin that transformation process, you’re tearing down the house you know in order to build the new house. Sure, you’ll reuse some of the materials. But the tearing down process is so scary because a part of you thinks, “What if I can’t build it back up?” I think that’s why most people don’t do major change — because the tear-down feels scary, and vulnerable, and destabilizing.

So are the internal challenges actually more pressing, in a way, than the external ones?

They’re hard to separate. For instance, one day I went looking for index cards and five hours later I came back — without index cards — and lay on the couch and said, “I want to go home.” So first it’s thinking “What are index cards called?” and figuring that out. Then it’s going store-by-store through the neighborhood asking, in my terrible French, if they have this thing. And they don’t. At home, it’s just “Oh, I need index cards.” Go on Amazon. Click. And it’s there the next morning. In France, Amazon doesn’t quite work that way… stuff arrives when it wants to arrive. So after this five-hour hunt, I’m sprawled on the couch, defeated.

So some of that, clearly, is internal. But the external challenge was there. You’re learning a bunch of things, and you learn first by not knowing. So any major change involves you feeling inadequate.

Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

So there’s a saying, if someone really told you how hard it was to have a child, no one would ever do it. Every year or two, some article will say how expensive it is to have children. On the face of it, the number seems insurmountable. But I always think no one should ever look at things like that in aggregate. The same is true for a book, or any creative project. If you look at the blank page and think of the 85,000 words you have to write, you’d get overwhelmed. You can’t look at it that way. The way you make your dreams come true? By making them come true.

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High-Pressure Jobs and Mental Illness

In the wake of the tragic Germanwings crash, we are once again confronted with just how far away we are from understanding how to deal with mental illness in the workplace, especially in high-risk professions.

Should we allow pilots with a history of depression to fly passenger planes? Should managers on meds oversee delicate or complex operations? Should employees who seek out psychiatric care be promoted to senior levels? We stumble awkwardly in the dialogue around these questions, and yet the answers have enormous implications for how we run our businesses – and for whom and how we hire.

There are no simple answers for organizations. But as someone who has suffered, sometimes silently, from a mental illness for more than 30 years, I can speak personally about how it can be managed on the job. I have worked for world-class consulting firms and publishing companies, both in Europe and America. Life in a hard-driving corporation may not have the life-or-death responsibilities that commercial pilots must bear, but it can be just as stressful.

I am one of the fortunate few: according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, only 20% to 40% of people with mental illnesses are gainfully employed. So what sets that 20-40% apart? What enables us to function effectively in high-pressure jobs? Here is what my experience suggests.

Medication itself is not the problem. From professional associations to the man and woman on the street, people are saying that pilots on meds should not be allowed to fly jetliners. In fact, psychotropic drugs can save people from depression and other forms of mental illness, allowing us to lead ordinary lives. The problem isn’t that people perform poorly on meds, but rather that they often don’t stay on them. This backsliding is part of the illness for many people. Even brilliant individuals such as psychologist Kay Jamison and attorney Elyn Saks – each a winner of a MacArthur “genius grant” – have written compellingly of their inability to continue with psychotropic drugs early in their disease despite psychotic episodes.

That’s one reason therapy is so important. It gives people a better appreciation of the reality of mental illness, so they’re less likely to abandon their meds when they’re feeling good. Therapy also contributes to a greater understanding of what triggers episodes. Like many people with a mental illness, I don’t handle stress well. I started my career as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal Europe and TIME, but after many hours – years – of talk therapy, I exchanged that life for one as a director of client communications in a consulting firm. Do I miss the excitement of being a foreign correspondent? At times. Do I have regrets about some of the things I had to give up? Of course. Am I happier now? Absolutely. I never suffered so much as I did when I was in the throes of gut-wrenching depression brought on by extreme stress. Therapy has helped me to adjust my self-expectations; I matured in my psychiatrist’s office. I will always insist on doing high quality work – that’s just who I am – but now I work in an environment that is more flexible and where deadlines are less frequent. Given my vulnerabilities, this is the wiser choice, but I needed therapy to embrace this choice as something more than “necessary.”

Smart workplaces provide support. Therapy costs money. A lot of money. Critics who advise the mentally ill to just “fix it” by getting psychiatric help are in denial about how broken the health care system (at least in the U.S.) really is. Even with insurance, people don’t get the assistance they need. Many psychiatrists refuse to take health insurance because it doesn’t come close to matching their hourly rates. I have gold-plated health insurance, and I still pay out of pocket. Therapy in America often remains a luxury that only the rich can afford. For this reason, community must serve as a kind of prosthesis for the mentally ill. In an age when people are relying less and less on institutions such as families and churches, they are turning more and more to the work place to find structure and meaning.  Companies have to start getting this right. Here are a couple of specific suggestions.

First, start a conversation. Mental illness is a cloak and dagger affair in many organizations. Ask yourself this question: “How safe is it in your company for a direct report — or another manager — to let it be known that he or she is on meds for depression and/or visits a therapist?” Addressing the issue of mental illness in the workplace has to begin with an acknowledgement that it exists and needs to be discussed openly. Many companies actually have policies to accommodate employees with mental health issues, but employees are often unaware of them or feel inhibited from taking advantage of them.

Second, promote a culture of respect. Often the greatest help to mentally ill employees comes not from some kind of official accommodation but from peers or line bosses who are willing to listen. In my experience, none of us is immune from mental illness. If we are not affected, then it is our siblings, parents, children, close friends, or neighbors who suffer from a mental illness. Companies can do more to promote a sense that work colleagues belong on this list as well. We should not regard a colleague’s mental illness as “their” problem but as “our” problem. Creating an open dialogue will help promote this culture, but for it to take hold, the organization’s senior managers should take special care to model this kind of support when they can.

And finally, understand how risky self-disclosure is. In response to the Germanwings crash, there has been a public outcry demanding that employees be upfront with their employers about depression and other forms of mental illness. During my first interview with the CEO of my current firm, I did in fact tell him that I struggle with mental illness. He thanked me for my honesty, and we moved on. But the firm is unusually empathetic, and I also went into that interview with a grab bag of credentials. Most people just don’t have those prizes – or that luck – and it’s unrealistic to expect them to self-disclose. What’s more, when hiring and promoting, there is no point in asking about mental illness openly – this is not only illegal in some countries, but the very people who admit to having a mental illness in an interview are not likely to cause the big disasters. It’s the folks who don’t say anything that you might need to watch out for, and perversely, they are the ones who often get hired. My advice for recruiters, therefore, is to be sure that the star achiever has some humility. Let me explain what I mean by that. The decision not to fly a plane while suicidal is not just a question of sanity; it’s also a matter of modesty and self-knowledge. The best employees know how to color outside the lines, but they also know their limits.

The value of support cannot be overstated. The medications work for me, but I also collaborate closely with both a superb psycho-pharmacologist and an extraordinary psychotherapist. That’s like diving into the proverbial farmer’s haystack and finding two needles. I have had phenomenal employers, who have without exception stuck by me.

And somewhere along the line — whether it was in my family, in my friendships, from my religious background, or just from my reading — I developed the capacity to suffer. This has been my greatest luck of all. I have learned that there is meaning in suffering, and this belief has reduced the desperation and hopelessness that so often results in violence to self or, in extreme cases, to others.

My heart goes out to the passengers of the Germanwings crash, and to their families — as well as to the relatives of the co-pilot. In the days to come, much will be written on mental illness in the workplace, some of it understandably distorted by the misery, grief, and confusion of the last weeks. The losses that people are enduring now must seem insurmountable. And yet I hold open the dream that we can have a sober discussion about mental illness that proceeds compassionately and collaboratively. I’ve said it already, but it bears repeating – mental illness really is about “us” and not “them,” and recognizing this fact is where we need to begin these difficult conversations.

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Why Brainstorming Works Better Online

In the late 80’s, Peter Drucker predicted that in the near future technology would play a central role in increasing the effectiveness of teams. Although he was right, teams have yet to experience the full benefits of technology. Yes, there is a great deal of talk about virtual teams and collaborative tools, but our ability to leverage technology in a way that consistently and systematically boosts team performance is based mostly on intuition rather than science.

One exception is group brainstorming, a technique that is still widely used in organizations despite the lack of evidence that it works and compelling evidence that it actually leads to a productivity loss. The good news is that technology can make brainstorming more effective, by replacing physical and oral sessions with virtual and written ones – a technique also known as brainwriting or electronic brainstorming.

Indeed, studies comparing the performance of matched groups on physical and virtual sessions indicate that the latter generate more high quality ideas and have a higher average of creative ideas per person, as well as resulting in higher levels of satisfaction with the ideas. As shown in meta-analyses, virtual brainstorming enhances creative performance – versus in-person brainstorming sessions – by almost 50% of a standard deviation. This means that almost 70% of participants can be expected to perform worse in traditional than virtual brainstorming sessions.

The advantages of virtual brainstorming have been attributed to three main reasons.

First, the fact that virtual brainstorming eliminates production blocking, the process where dominant participants talk too much, taking over the session and eclipsing their colleagues. This leads to cognitive overload and hinders creative idea generation in more introverted participants. In virtual brainstorming there is a clear positive relationship between group size and performance, whereas in traditional, in-person brainstorming sessions, things tend to get messy with more than six participants. Online, there are no real limits to group size: the cost of having 5 or 50 participants is nearly the same, and you actually save costs by allowing to people to work remotely and in dispersed locations. Thus virtual brainstorming is much more scalable, and each person you add has the potential to contributing a new idea to the mix.

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Second, virtual brainstorming enables feelings of anonymity, since ideas cannot be attributed to a specific person. This reduces evaluation apprehension, particularly in less confident individuals who would underperform in traditional brainstorming sessions. Anonymity also means that ideas are judged more objectively. In traditional sessions, the process is as biased and political as in any other physical group interaction – the powerful people take over, and though democratic in theory, in fact decisions are driven by one or two powerful individuals. Conversely, when team members rate ideas anonymously and without knowledge of the author, politics are out of the way. An example of this is textsfromlastnight, a site that allows users to anonymously submit quirky text messages, which are then rated – good or bad – by other anonymous users. Organizations would do well to copy this process: have a live, real-time, virtual depository of ideas for new products, services, or processes, which can then be rated or evaluated by other employees, and perhaps even clients.

Third, if designed intelligently, virtual sessions can increase the diversity of ideas. In traditional brainstorming, being exposed to others’ ideas causes uniformity and regression to the mean: the most creative people will descend to the level of the group average. But by preventing participants from being exposed to each other’s ideas during the idea-generation phase, virtual brainstorming encourages participants to offer a wider variety of ideas. In line with this, studies have shown that individual brainstorming, where people write down a number of ideas on a piece of paper, often produces more and better ideas than group brainstorming. Virtual brainstorming preserves this mechanism while providing a searchable archive of ideas for the team to weigh in on later.

Thus virtual brainstorming retains the original postulate of traditional brainstorming – that teams can crowdsource creativity by curating the ideas they collectively produce in an informal, free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness, session – but overcoming the main, originally unforeseen, barriers.

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