Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1308

Personality Tests Can Help Balance a Team

It’s just plain hard to get people working together the way you’d like. That’s because, left to our own devices, we are often too greedy and self-centered to collaborate, preferring instead to compete as individuals. Sigmund Freud made this point, comparing humans to hedgehogs in the winter: When hedgehogs get cold, they huddle together to warm up, but then things become unbearably prickly as they sting each other with their spines.

We are the most social species on earth — but also inherently selfish. Darwinian theories of organizational behavior support Freud’s view, highlighting the fundamental tension between “getting ahead” and “getting along” in the workplace.

Resolving that tension involves balancing individuals’ agendas and the goals of the group. To do that, it’s critical to select the right team members — people who are likely to gel, particularly when the pressure is on. Even the most successful leaders, such as Sir Russell Coutts, who led Oracle Team USA to win America’s Cup in boat racing, admit that this is “one of the hardest things to do.”

Many leaders choose team members purely on the basis of functional skill — treating them, essentially, as fungible assets or the individual components of a machine. Others, perhaps driven by their own narcissism, pick people who are like them, which kills diversity and breeds groupthink. Alternatively, they just assemble the smartest folks they can find.

None of these tactics work, because, as research shows, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships depend on individuals’ personalities, not on hard skills or expertise. You can put world-class talent together on a team, and it may still fail to perform as a cohesive unit. In fact, the only way to create a team that’s worth more than the sum of its individual contributors is to select members on the basis of personality, soft skills, and values.

To that end, a number of organizations are using personality profiling to build their teams. For example, Edmunds, a sort of TripAdvisor for cars, uses personality tests to identify the most promising candidates for its executive team. Buffer, a social media firm, uses them to create virtual teams and pilot novel organizational structures that eschew managers and formal roles.  The New Zealand Army, which of course does have formal roles, molds teams based on personality for its outdoor development races through the mountains.

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The science behind personality assessment has advanced well beyond the Myers-Briggs, a relatively poor and discredited psychological tool. Rigorous assessment tools reliably predict real-world behaviors and desirable business outcomes. Although many tools exist, they fall into three basic categories, because they evaluate three core elements of your personality: the bright side (how you behave when you are at your best), the dark side (how you behave when you are stressed or under pressure), and the inside (your needs, motives and preferences).

Importantly, assessment tools can be used to profile not just individual team members but also entire groups — and they can indicate whether the group is likely to bond or fracture by examining qualities that predict both success and failure.  For example, we know that teams with members who are open minded and emotionally intelligent leverage conflict to improve performance, whereas neurotic and closed-minded teams fall apart in the face of disagreement. A well-known example is the disintegration of the French national football team at the 2010 World Cup.

Although Deloitte recently complained that the field of people analytics is “stuck in neutral,” using the whole group as the unit of analysis is a real breakthrough, because it enables focused coaching for the team.  In our consulting work, we use a personality test to see whether teams have people playing five key roles necessary for performance: results, relationships, process, innovation, and pragmatism.  We are finding that typical top leadership teams are heavy on results and light on relationships and process.  As a consequence, they need to moderate the tendencies to compete internally, generate too many action plans, and leave follow-through to others.

Teams also perform better when their members share work values.  A long series of studies conducted in the British National Health Service has shown that teams whose values cohere identify more strongly as a group and display greater levels of innovation. Because values are a guide for behavioral choices, group members who share similar values are more likely to agree about group actions, and vice-versa.  In assessing the leadership team of a charity for maternal health, we found that it fell apart when it was unable to reconcile altruistic motives held by some members with new board members’ commercial imperatives.

Most leaders understand the benefits of collaboration — they’ve seen plenty of evidence that it increases firms’ competitiveness and solves thorny problems. But they’re straining against the fact that humans are naturally social animals within bounds — of geography, ethnicity, and loyalty. By building teams that can collaborate across those boundaries, they’ll be better equipped to deliver what their organizations need, even in this age of matrixed reporting and globally dispersed workforces.

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What Separates the Strongest Salespeople from the Weakest

What separates high-performing salespeople who exceed their quota from underperformers who miss their quotas by more than 25%?

I recently conducted a research project involving nearly 800 salespeople and sales leaders to better answer this question. In addition, I have had the privilege to interview well over 1,000 top salespeople who sell for some of the world’s best companies. The information from these two sources provides interesting insights about the attributes of high-performing top salespeople compared to their lesser successful counterparts.

Verbal acuity. This refers to a communication level where the meaning, nature, and importance of the words spoken by the salesperson are personally understood by the customer. For a salesperson to establish credibility requires that messages be conveyed at the recipient’s communication level, not too far below the level of the words that the customer uses. On average, high-performing salespeople communicate between the 11th and 13th grade level when scored by the Flesch-Kincaid test as opposed to the 8th and 9th grade level for underperforming salespeople.

Achievement oriented personality. Eighty-four percent of the top performers tested scored very high in achievement orientation. They are fixated on achieving goals and continuously measure their performance in comparison to their goals. Another interesting statistic is that over 85% of top salespeople played an individual or team sport in high school. As a result, they are well-equipped to function in competitive environments where self-discipline is a necessity. For example, 52% of high- performing salespeople indicated they were power users who take full advantage of their company’s CRM technology and internal systems compared to only 31% of underperforming salespeople.

Situational dominance. Situational dominance is a personal interaction strategy by which the customer accepts the salesperson’s recommendations and follows his advice. While dominance is commonly associated with brute force, this is not the case in sales. It’s simply how people judge others. People are continually sensing whether their position is superior to yours, relatively equal, or inferior in some way. In turn, this impacts what they say during conversations and how they behave.

A relaxed-dominant salesperson speaks freely and guides the conversation as he confidently shares his knowledge and opinions with the customer. An anxious-submissive salesperson is forced into reactive behavior and his tendency is to operate under the direction of the customer, never being in control of the account. Situational dominance test scores of high-performing salespeople averaged 20% higher than underperforming salespeople.

Inward Pessimism. Over 90% of high-performing and underperforming salespeople described themselves as optimists. However, upon further review nearly two-thirds of high-performing salespeople actually exhibit pessimistic personality tendencies. I theorize the explanation for this dichotomy is that salespeople always have to maintain a positive attitude and pleasant demeanor while in front of customers. However, inward pessimism drives a salesperson to question the viability of the deal and credibility of the buyer. Therefore, top salespeople are more naturally driven to ask the customer tougher qualifying questions and are more likely to seek out meetings with senior level decision makers who ultimately decide which vendor will be selected.

Sales management impact. Does a salesperson’s manager play a determining factor in achieving success? Study participants were asked, “Outside of setting my quota, my sales manager plays a key role in determining whether or not I make quota?” Surprisingly, the response from high and underperformers was identical. Forty-six percent agreed with the statement and 54% were neutral or disagreed with it. Moreover, 69% of high-performing salespeople rated their sales manager as excellent or above average compared to 49% of underperforming salespeople indicating there is a correlation.

Study participants were also asked to rank the different attributes of great sales managers. In order of priority the top three factors for high-performing salespeople were leadership and management skills, practical experience and sales intuition, and communication and coaching skills. The top three factors for underperforming salespeople were industry expertise and product knowledge, communication and coaching skills, and fights for the team. These results reveal how high and underperforming salespeople utilize their managers differently. Underperformers tend to use their managers to make up for the product and industry knowledge they lack.

Both high-performing and underperforming salespeople are in contact with their sales managers at about the same frequency. For example, 51% of high-performing salespeople and 55% of underperforming salespeople are in contact with their sales manager all the time during the day. Twenty-eight percent of high-performing salespeople and 20% of underperforming are in contact with their manager frequently during the week while 15% of high-performing and 17% of underperformers talk to their managers once or twice a week. However, the conversations sales leaders have with top salespeople are quite different than those with underperformers. They are collaborative in strategizing sessions about prospective deals while the conversations with underperformers consist of directional instructions and validating whether or not daily duties are being carried out.

Sales organization influence. The research suggests that sales organization morale influences individual sales success. Fifty three percent of high-performing sales rated their sales organization’s morale as being higher than most sales organizations. In comparison, only 37% of underperforming salespeople rated morale higher than most companies.

Sales organization accountability also influences individual quota achievement. Thirty-nine percent of high-performing salespeople strongly agreed that salespeople at their company are measured against their quota and held accountable compared to only 23% of underperforming salespeople. In comparison, 36% of underperforming salespeople either disagreed or were neutral about whether salespeople at their company were measured and held accountable compared to 21% of high-performing salespeople.

Finally, the study results indicate that individual sales success is not dependent upon the growth rate of the company the salesperson works for. The percentage of high-performing salespeople was consistent to the percentage of underperforming salespeople across high growth companies (over 20% annual growth), slower growth companies (5% to 20% growth rate), companies with flat revenues, and even companies with decreasing revenues. When taken into account with all the research above, sales performance is more likely dependent on the attributes of the individual and sales environment characteristics over company-related influences.

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Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely

Leaders are providing less explicit direction to their employees these days, and relying more on coaching as a leadership tool, as organizations become flatter and more dependent on knowledge work. But many people also manage teams that span locations and time zones, which means they must do at least some of their coaching virtually.

While most of my coaching with clients and MBA students at Stanford is conducted face-to-face in the Bay Area, over the last decade I’ve worked with people across the U.S. and internationally, from Brazil to London to South Africa. Here are some guidelines for virtual coaching that I’ve found useful.

Don’t dictate the medium. You may have a preference for phone or video, or your organization may rely on one more than the other. But for coaching conversations, it’s important that both parties choose what’s right for the situation, rather than have it dictated by you as the leader or by the organizational culture.

In my experience, both phone and video can work well for coaching. One isn’t better than the other, but they are different, and it’s important to get a sense of which medium will work best for each relationship (this may change from call to call). Video can provide helpful visual context, but it can also be a distraction, particularly if there’s a poor internet connection. Try experimenting with both phone and video to see what works best with different employees.

E-mail can play a useful role in virtual coaching, but I recommend using it to augment phone or video conversations. I often e-mail my clients and students follow-up questions and links to readings and other resources, but it’s much less useful for in-the-moment coaching. Text and chat provide a sense of immediate connection, but it’s difficult to use them to convey anything more complex than basic information.

Location still matters. The physical setting can have a significant impact on the success of a coaching conversation. When I’m coaching clients and students in person, we meet in a place that will allow for privacy and minimize distractions. This can take many forms, from a reserved conference room to a long walk around the placid Stanford campus.

Because it’s far more difficult to pick up interpersonal cues when working virtually, it’s even more important to ensure that both you and the other person are in a private, comfortable space where you won’t be interrupted.

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Focus, focus, focus. Effective coaching in any setting requires focused attention on the other person. That can be tough when we’re coaching virtually, because of the pervasiveness of multitasking. A virtual coaching conversation is a special kind of interaction — very different from a typical conference call or online meeting, where we can often just partly tune in and still get the gist. When we’re coaching, the most important details are easy to miss. If we allow ourselves to become distracted, we’ll be less likely to notice things like a subtle change in someone’s facial expression or tone of voice, or an unusual turn of phrase that may signify something more. We may also fail to monitor our own emotional responses and instincts, which are vital sources of data. Even worse, others can sense when our attention wanders, leaving them reluctant to discuss truly important issues.

Get the right equipment. Investing in better technical gear can dramatically improve the virtual coaching experience. One of the clients I work with via video is a CEO who leads a virtual financial services firm. Almost all of his employees are spread out across the country, and they do most of their collaboration online. His home office is equipped with high-quality webcams, monitors, and microphones that give him a vivid virtual presence. Our video coaching sessions aren’t quite as high-definition as real life, but they’re close.

Even small investments in equipment can go a long way. I worked with a CEO who had a slight speech impediment that made it difficult for me to understand him over the phone. We had no problems communicating when we met in person, but most of our work was going to be virtual, so I bought the kind of immersive headset that’s used used by video-gamers, which allowed me to understand him perfectly. I also have an external microphone and speakers so that when I’m working with clients via video I don’t have to rely on my laptop components.

Manage the time. In most meetings, including phone calls and video conferences, the discussion goes right up until the end of the allotted time, at which point we rapidly conclude and move on to the next meeting. This is another way in which coaching conversations are different: It’s part of your job, as the coach, to track time during the conversation — I usually set a timer to minimize distractions — and stop at a point you’ve agreed on in advance.

It’s hard to tell where coaching conversations will end up. They tend to be more wide-ranging than typical meetings, which makes them more meaningful and valuable. But this also means you’ll want to leave some time between the end of the session and the next event on the calendar. This enables both you and the person you’re coaching to reflect on the conversation and deepen the learning. Coaching conversations can also bring up strong emotions, and it’s essential to leave time to process those emotions. Even a few minutes can make a substantial difference, helping both you and the person you’re coaching get the most out of the experience.

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Positive Teams Are More Productive

All managers would like their teams to be more productive. Yet most companies are using the same old methods: strategic plans, goal-setting, streamlining operations, reducing inefficiency. Others are offering employee perks, such as on-site food, daycare, or gyms. Others are offering bigger bonuses or flexible schedules.

Kim Cameron and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, however, have discovered a way to improve performance that has nothing to do with dishing out benefits or deploying new processes. In a research article published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science Cameron and his coauthors found that a workplace characterized by positive and virtuous practices excels in a number of domains.

Positive and virtuous practices include:

Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.
Inspiring one another at work.
Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.
Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust & integrity.

Cameron and his colleagues explain that there are three reasons these practices benefit the company. Positive practices:

Increase positive emotions which broaden employees’ resources and abilities by improving people’s relationships with each other and amplifying their creativity and ability to think creatively.
Buffer against negative events like stress, improving employees ability to bounce back from challenges and difficulties.
Attract and bolster employees, making them more loyal and bringing out the best in them.

There are bottom-line benefits as well. Summarizing the findings, Cameron explains that: “When organizations institute positive, virtuous practices they achieve significantly higher levels of organizational effectiveness — including financial performance, customer satisfaction, and productivity … The more the virtuousness, the higher the performance in profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.”

So how do you implement positive practices in your company? The research team found four main ways:

 Leadership: Needless to say, it is difficult to implement positive practices without support from the top. A leader must stand by and exemplify the values he preaches. Steve Schroeder, founder and CEO of Creative Werks, a packaging company based in Chicago that has repeatedly appeared on Crain Chicago’s “50 Fastest Growing Companies” list, attributes much of his company’s success to a positive culture. In addition to providing the usual perks (bonuses and professional development opportunities), Steve makes sure his employees are happy. As a longtime student of the Dalai Lama, Steve often quotes the Dalai Lama’s saying that “everybody wants to be happy.” He ensures that his company’s culture is both positive and supportive. “Caring” is a quality he looks for when he interviews new employees. “Caring people never let their colleagues or the clients down,” says Schroeder. Creative Werks’ core values are not just client and product-focused. They also include also include “balance” referring to employee well-being and illustrating the importance of a positive and supportive workplace.


 Culture: Because culture trumps strategy in predicting performance, culture change initiatives are also important. Jim Mallozzi, CEO of Prudential Real Estate and Relocation, consulted with Cameron during a difficult merger of two companies and during a time when his company was undergoing severe financial loss. He found that implementing positive practices shifted the company culture and helped turn these challenging times into great successes. He mentions one exercise in particular: “Select three people, one at a time, and tell those people three things you value about them. In corporate America, and in most places in life, people usually tell you, ‘Here are the three things that you need to change.’ Rarely do they tell you, ‘Here are the three things that you’re fabulous at.’ When you do that, the energy just goes up. So that was the start. Okay, we’re off the beach. Nobody’s dying any more. The body parts have been buried. We’re now saying, ‘Okay, let’s start with what we have, because we have some fabulous attributes.'”


 Small steps: Small changes can produce large effects. Some firms that consulted Cameron have simply asked all employees to keep gratitude journals each day, or to positively embarrass someone each day, or spend 30 minutes per day making a contribution to someone in need. Within weeks and months, the companies have noticed visible improvements in performance.  Shubhra Bhatnagar is a former successful investment banker who became a social entrepreneur. She founded KarmaLize.Me, a health food distribution company which donates over 50% of profits to charities. In the intense field of investment banking, she had found that employee well-being was neglected. For this reason, despite the equivalent pressures of running a startup, she makes sure that her staff engage in well-being activities such as meditation: “We make sure that the stress of a startup business does not hamper the happiness quotient of our team or impacts our core business values. We use a meditation app (Sattva) to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and to create a more positive atmosphere in our office.”


Retreats and workshops: Changes and improvements can occur as a result of retreats, executive programs, or workshops where employees have a chance to think deeply and strategically about positive leadership and positive practices. Corporate workshops is what Audible’s Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Louis Gagnon, opted for. The two-day TLEX retreat in upstate New York started with an exercise where 18 of Gagnon’s leaders split into groups to define “what is leadership.” After collating the results, the group realized that 95% of all attributes referred to “soft,” not “hard” skills. Gagnon reports that this staff was pleased to hear that for 2-days, soft skills is exactly what they would be focusing on – no corporate goals, no strategy, no alignment – but mindfulness, personal mastery, connectedness and collective action. At the heart of the curriculum: breathing exercises. “Our team was engaged, opened and excited to have the rare luxury to focus on themselves as individuals — individuals as a conduit and lever to ourselves as a team. We all felt deeply rejuvenated and at peace with each other. That, ultimately, built trust – the ultimate ingredient to teamwork.“



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How to Know If There Are Too Many People in Your Meeting

When setting up a meeting, the people you invite are just as important as what you need to get done. Including too many people — or too few — can be a waste of time for everyone involved. The following excerpt from the book Running Meetings will help you decide who should be in the room to make your meeting most effective.

It may be easy to default to inviting a crowd of people to a meeting — that way, you don’t really have to identify the most critical participants, you’ll avoid any ruffled feathers, you’ll have everyone involved on hand for a decision, and you won’t have to repeat your communications separately afterward. Or maybe your tendency is to want to keep things small: You may be tempted to invite just a small group of people whose opinions you most value.

But for a meeting to be useful, you have to have the right people — and only the right people — in the room. With too many attendees, you may have trouble focusing everyone’s time and attention and accomplishing anything; with too few, you might not have the right decision makers or information providers in the room.

As you plan your attendee list, consider who will help you to accomplish your meeting’s goal and those who will be most affected by its outcome. Most likely this is a combination of people who will offer a variety of perspectives. Take the time to methodically list the individuals in each of these categories to make sure you include the right people:

The key decision makers for the issues involved
The ones with information and knowledge about the topics under discussion
People who have a commitment to or a stake in the issues
Those who need to know about the information you have to report in order to do their jobs
Anyone who will be required to implement any decisions made

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Feel free to consult with other stakeholders to make sure you’ve made the right list. Often another key stakeholder can remind you of a perspective you forgot to bring into the room.

Just because someone’s name is on your list, however, doesn’t mean he or she must be at the meeting. How many people should you actually invite? There are no hard and fast rules, but in principle, a small meeting is best to actually decide or accomplish something; a medium-sized meeting is ideal for brainstorming; and for communicating and rallying, you can go large. Some people use what’s known as the 8-18-1800 rule as a rough guideline:

If you have to solve a problem or make a decision, invite no more than 8 people. If you have more participants, you may receive so much conflicting input that it’s difficult to deal with the problem or make the decision at hand.
If you want to brainstorm, then you can go as high as 18 people.
If the purpose of the meeting is for you to provide updates, invite however many people need to receive the updates. However, if everyone attending the meeting will be providing updates, limit the number of participants to no more than 18.
If the purpose of the meeting is for you to rally the troops, go for 1,800 — or more!

If you decide not to invite individuals you listed as likely to be affected by the meeting’s outcome, have a plan to communicate the substance of the meeting to them afterward.

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Parental Leave Can’t Just Be for Mothers

Photo by Andrew Nguyen

Many companies and countries still seem to think that most children only have mothers. They talk about “maternity leave” and “flex time for mothers” and “on-ramping for new moms.” Other companies and countries have moved into an entirely new terrain, where parenthood has become a gender-neutral concept.

The example everybody knows is Sweden, where “parental leave” replaced “maternity leave” back in 1974, to “ensure that women and men enjoy the same opportunities, rights and obligations in all areas of life.” (Italics mine). So men and women are allowed to share the almost 70 weeks of paid leave. The kicker policy is that men are obliged to take at least 8 weeks of that, or lose the benefit. Or, in gender-neutral Swedish-speak: “Each parent is entitled to two months of non-transferable benefits.” In Norway, it’s 14 weeks. The head of one of the country’s biggest employers’ associations explains that the law “strengthens the man’s position in the family, and the woman’s in the workplace. Norway still needs it.”

But I know that referencing the Nordic countries is like ranting about some kind of unachievable dream for most of the rest of humanity. So it’s heartening that other places are beginning to follow suit. Germany and the UK have both now passed similar policies. Italy offers new dads three months of paid leave (although new moms get five). The governments of Luxembourg and the Czech Republic also offer subsidized leaves to both parents. South Korea allows partially paid leave for both parents for as much as year.

The exception – in fact, the complete outlier – on all these issues is the United States, where there are zero days of paid parental leave. There isn’t even any paid maternity leave. The only other countries on the planet not to have any paid leave at all are Lesotho, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea. (If many countries are guilty of assuming children only have mothers, is the assumption in these four countries that all children are entirely parentless?)

Given the lack of any kind of parental leave policy in the United States, the burden falls on individual companies to decide what to do. And their positions vary widely.

It’s in this context that Vodafone has just announced that it will offer 16 weeks of maternity leave to all its workers, including those in the U.S. More particularly, it has offered the additional innovation that for the first six months after returning from maternity leave, new mothers can work 30 hours a week at full pay. “We think it’s unique in its nature,” says Chuck Pol, Vodafone’s president of the Americas.

Vodafone has been widely praised for the move. And it is smart policy-making, since the ladies will be grateful, and companies that are flexible are usually rewarded with employees who work far harder than their fixed hours in the office. As many managers have told me over the years, the most efficient workers are mothers with kids.

The downside of this policy is that it is aimed (or at least communicated) at only women. The challenge for women is that this reinforces stereotypical gender roles: women are mothers, and men are workers. The growing challenge is that younger generations – including men – seem to be far more family-centric than their elders. They actually want to spend time with their children. And many women actually want to spend time at work (à la Marissa Mayer’s continuing to work immediately after the birth of her child).

This is hard for many of the older gentlemen running companies today to accept. That was not the model they grew up with. But it seems pretty obvious to the younger men running tech companies like Facebook, Reddit, or Instagram. They all offer 17 weeks off … to fathers.

And so it’s a little bit befuddling to see the outcry of excitement at Vodafone’s announcement. Vodafone only employs 500 people in the United States, and only 35% of its employees are female.

We should certainly applaud companies operating in America for finally giving their U.S. workers the same benefits the rest of the world has long taken for granted. But we should also recognize such mother-focused policies for what they are: cutting edge … by 1970s standards.

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To Form Successful Habits, Know What Motivates You

Have you ever been driven crazy by a coworker’s persistent questioning of what the team is doing, and why, and whether things could be done more efficiently—or have you been driven crazy by a colleague’s refusal to address those crucial questions?

Have you ever worked with someone who met deadlines and followed through for the team, but for some reason, couldn’t move forward on the goals they set for themselves? Or perhaps does that description fit you?

In researching and writing Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, I realized that all of us differ dramatically in our attitude towards habits, and our aptitude for forming them. From my observation, I began to realize that just about everyone falls into one of four distinct groups: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels.

The key question is: How do you respond to an expectation? We all face two kinds of expectations:

Outer expectations: meet a work deadline, observe traffic regulations
Inner expectations: stop snacking, start running

Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations. They’re self-directed and have little trouble meeting commit­ments, keeping resolutions, or meeting deadlines (in fact, they often finish early). They really want to understand and meet expectations—including their expectations of themselves. This creates a strong instinct for self-preservation, which serves as a counter-weight to others’ expectations.

However, Upholders may struggle in situations where expecta­tions aren’t clear. They may feel com­pelled to meet expectations, even ones that seem pointless. They may feel uneasy when they know they’re breaking the rules, even unnec­essary rules, unless they work out a powerful justification to do so. I know this tendency well; I’m an Upholder myself.

Questioners question all expectations, and will meet an expecta­tion only if they believe it’s justified—they’re motivated by reason, logic, and fairness. They decide for themselves whether a course of action is a good idea, and they resist doing anything that seems arbitrary or lacks sound purpose. Essentially, they turn all expectations into inner expectations.

Because Questioners like to make well-considered decisions and come to their own conclusions, they’re very intellectually engaged, and they’re often willing to do exhaustive research. If they decide there’s sufficient basis for an expectation, they’ll follow it; if not, they won’t.

However, the Questioner’s appetite for information and justifica­tion can become tiresome. Questioners themselves sometimes wish they could accept expec­tations without probing them so relentlessly. A Questioner told me ruefully, “I suffer from analysis paralysis. I always want to have one more piece of information.”

Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations. Obligers excel at meeting external demands and deadlines, so they make terrific colleagues, family members, and friends.

They don’t let others down, but they may let themselves down. Because Obligers resist inner expectations, it’s difficult for them to self-motivate—to work on a PhD thesis, say, or attend networking events. A journalist who has no trouble meeting his weekly deadlines, but can’t ever seem to find time to work on his own book, is a classic Obliger.

Obligers depend on external accountability, with consequences such as deadlines, late fees, or the fear of disappointing someone, in order to meet an expectation. This is worth repeating: If an Obliger is having trouble meeting an expectation, the solution is external accountability.

The weight of outer expectations can make Obligers susceptible to burn-out, because they have trouble telling people “no.” An Obliger explained, “I drop everything to proofread my colleagues’ reports, but I’m terrible about making time to work on my own priorities.”

Obligers, in fact, may reach a point of Obliger-rebellion, a striking pattern in which they abruptly refuse to meet an expectation. At a certain point, the weight of expectation becomes too great, and they suddenly “snap.”

Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They choose to act from a sense of choice, of freedom. They resist control, even self-control, and enjoy flouting rules and expectations.

Rebels work toward their own goals, in their own way, and while they refuse to do what they’re “supposed” to do, they can accomplish their own aims.

Rebels place a high value on authenticity and self-determination, and bring an unshackled spirit to what they do. At times, the Rebel resistance to authority is enormously valuable to society—but Rebels often frustrate others because they can’t be asked or told to do anything. They don’t care if “people are counting on you,” “you agreed to do it,” “it’s against the rules,” “this is the deadline,” or “it’s rude.”

In fact, asking or tell­ing Rebels to do something often makes them do just the opposite. People around Rebels must guard against accidentally ignit­ing their spirit of opposition. At the same time, Rebels are often strongly motivated by the idea “I’ll show you”. For instance, tell a Rebel, “I don’t think you can get that draft ready for review by Friday” and he may turn it in on Thursday just to prove you wrong.

Rebels sometimes frustrate even themselves, because they can’t tell themselves what to do.

Many people recognize themselves just from these descriptions, but if you’d like to learn your tendency, take this quiz.

These tendencies are hardwired, but with greater experience and wisdom, we can learn to counterbalance our tendency’s negative aspects. As an Upholder, for instance, I’ve learned to resist my inclination automatically to meet an expecta­tion, and to ask, “Why am I agreeing to this, anyway?”

And the fact is, when trying to persuade other people to act, you’ll have more success if you consider their tendency, whether you’re a boss trying to help an employee meet her deadlines; or a health-care provider trying to prod a patient to take his medication; or a consultant, coach, trainer, or therapist trying to help clients achieve their aims.

For example, a Questioner may present an Obliger with sound rea­sons for taking an action, but those logical arguments don’t matter nearly as much to an Obliger as external accountability. And telling a Rebel, “It’s the rule that you have to do this” might actually make the Rebel less likely to comply.

From what I’ve observed, most people, by a huge margin, are Questioners or Obligers. Very few are Rebels, and, to my astonishment, very few are Up­holders. Because Upholders and Rebels are such small populations, people who try to shape people’s behavior on a large scale—employers, device manufacturers, insurance companies, instructors—do better to focus on solutions that help Questioners, by providing sound reasons, and Obligers, by providing accountability.

The happiest and most successful people are those who have figured out ways to exploit their tendency to their benefit and, just as important, ways to offset its limitations. By understanding ourselves and others better, we help ourselves to build happier, healthier, and more productive lives.

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5 Basic Needs of Virtual Workforces

According to data from Global Workplace Analytics, the number of remote employees in the United States has gone up by 79.7 percent since 2005. In the U.S., around 3.3 million people work from home.

But these are not just freelancers. More organizations are adopting a fully remote work culture. Basecamp, Mozilla and Automattic are three well-known companies that fall under the 100-percent-distributed category. Automattic, owner of WordPress, has been able to scale up operations to nearly 300 people and more than 131M monthly website visitors — the 3rd highest on the Internet — with a purely distributed team.

Among other benefits, remote work saves considerable time for the entire organization, and allows employees far more flexibility. To shift to a remote model successfully, however, management practices have to adapt to remote work, even if only a few workers are remote. New technologies – and the proper use of old technologies – are a crucial part of this adaptation.

In our experience at VenturePact, telecommuters tend to be self-starters and quick learners. You don’t have to micromanage them, just provide clear, high-level direction. But there are some common pain points. In a 2014 Robert Half Technology survey of U.S.-based CIOs, 30% said communication was their greatest remote management challenge, followed by productivity (22%) and technology (22%). Focusing on a few principles can help address these challenges:

Insight Center



The Future of Collaboration
Sponsored by Accenture

How tools are changing the way we manage, learn, and get things done.

Convenience: This should go without saying, but it is important to give your virtual employees large monitors, great computers, and fast Internet. This will encourage them to work hard and stick with you for the long term. Bad tools hurt productivity. Scott Hanselman, who has been working with Microsoft remotely for the past 7 years, explains the challenges of being a remote worker: “Every week you’ll hit a site that doesn’t work unless you’re inside. You’ll be constantly prompted for passwords, you’ll be told certain scripts or installers don’t work as a remote worker. I have to drive into the office at least quarterly JUST for the purpose of dealing with issues like this.”  When you force your employees to use slow or inconvenient technology, the costs don’t show up on your balance sheet immediately. But they’re there all the same.

Transparency: To help make your team members’ private knowledge public to the group, invest in knowledge management tools that are accessible and searchable by everyone in the company. Any question a new employee has can be submitted to the system and should be visible to anyone in the company. This is a lot better than email, where the employee emails one person and the question is only answered once. If you use a knowledge management tool, the tag on the question will allow the next employee, who will probably have similar questions, to easily find and learn by searching through past questions. Tools like Slack and Sqwiggle can help with this.

Transparency tools are necessary even if only part of your team is remote. As David Fullerton, VP of Engineering at StackExchange, writes, “There’s no halfsies in a distributed team. If even one person on the team is remote, every single person has to start communicating online. The locus of control and decision making must be outside of the office: no more dropping in to someone’s office to chat, no more rounding people up to make a decision. All of that has to be done online even if the remote person isn’t around. Otherwise you’ll slowly choke off the remote person from any real input on decisions.”

Accountability: How do you keep track of what your colleagues are doing when you can’t see them? Define goals clearly and then have the remote team decide on the path to reach that goal. Rather than dictating each specific task, provide them a vision to work on. Let them hold each other accountable, and ask them to assign themselves daily goals and provide weekly reports. This level of responsibility helps remote workers learn on the job and stay motivated. To track progress, use project management tools like Asana, Basecamp or JIRA.

Importantly, don’t mention that a task needs to get done to a team of four people without holding one person accountable for ensuring that a task is complete by a specific deadline. Remember, to properly execute on task management, you need:

A task management tool
One person held accountable to complete a project
A deadline
Clear guidelines as to what the project entails.

Communication: Take time every week to have a candid conversation with remote employees. Make sure you include personal questions to get a sense of the employees’ interests and, if they’re in a different country, their culture.

Consider using an instant messaging tool for your team such as HipChat, IRC, Google Hangouts, or Skype. This way, people can easily reach out to everyone else in the firm regardless of location. Ideally, try to have all remote employees organize their hours such that each person has a 2-hour overlap in working hours with at least one other teammate. When you have remote teams that cross many time zones, this can become difficult, but it is critical.

Try to also have multiple calls a week (sometimes daily) to go over any challenges the team is facing. We like to use video calls, as it helps build a relationship and the visual cues allow for clearer communication. Whichever means you choose to communicate with your virtual employees, make sure you communicate regularly, openly and clearly.

Trust: Remote workers often miss the feeling of company culture, so management must make an extra effort to cultivate trust and involve remote team members.

There are many ways to do this. You can create inspiring videos that speak about company culture, like this one created by Zappos. You can involve remote employees in company events — small or big — and share the company’s future vision with them. At VenturePact, we communicate interesting startup stories at companywide events, which helps employees understand the values and vision of our startup, and at the same time feel part of the team. A common misconception is that remote or distributed teams never meet, but I recommend that teams meet once every quarter and the whole company, once a year. Since most people will travel, it is best to choose an amazing location with great weather to create a unique experience. These in-person interactions help build trust.

Another technique to build trust is professional and personal check-ins, a strategy Keith Ferrazzi mentions in his article on remote work: “A personal/professional check-in at the beginning of meetings makes people feel part of a team. It’s probably the easiest way to overcome the isolation that can creep in when people don’t work together physically,” he says.

Finally, one best practice we find effective is to encourage personal sharing with the whole team through Yammer, an enterprise social network that creates a Facebook-like environment where everyone on the team can share pictures from the weekend, their travel plans and any interesting articles they are reading.

Above all, the key to a successful remote engagement is a great hiring and management process. As Jason Fried puts it in Remote: Office Not Required: “If you let them, humans have an amazing power to live up to your high expectations of reasonableness and responsibility.”

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How to Finally Kill the Useless, Recurring Meeting

We’ve all been part of a bloated weekly meeting. You know the one, with 20-plus attendees that’s been happening every week for years; where everyone attends because they’re supposed to, but no one gets much value out of it; where everyone multitasks or wishes they were somewhere else (or both). The sheer amount of time invested in these low-value interactions is a high-cost impediment to getting things done. So how do you fix it?

Not with a sweeping gesture or an edict from a CEO. That’s because meetings tend to be reinforced by norms and network effects – if one person attempts to fix it by, say, declaring that they will no longer attend meetings on Wednesdays, the overall system tends to reject the change. In other words, their colleagues will just continue to schedule meetings on Wednesdays.

Popular tactics like removing conference room chairs, plastering the walls with meeting rules, or banishing PowerPoint presentations don’t work, either. They can be helpful, but aren’t sufficient to implement lasting cultural change.

The key is to engage all employees in a new way of thinking about time management and to encourage them to hold themselves and their colleagues accountable. To liberate victims from this seemingly inescapable vicious cycle, it’s necessary to kick-start a virtuous cycle in which everyone is empowered to say no, ask why, and identify strategies to allow everyone in an organization to be more effective on a day-to-day basis.

At VoloMetrix, we help companies quantify how much time goes into meetings and what effects they have on people. In the process, we have analyzed over 1 billion meetings across dozens of large businesses, so we have a rather unique perspective on both how widespread the problem is as well as how elusive the solutions are.

You and Your Team



Meetings


How to make them more productive.

Our experience with one Fortune 500 company in particular offers some useful lessons for any organization. The problems probably sound familiar. Senior executives felt like they sat in useless, regularly scheduled meetings day after day. In some cases, they didn’t even know the names of half of the other attendees, let alone why they were there. And while they knew the situation was bad for upper management, they feared it might be even worse for the more junior teams. Their primary concerns were cost and productivity – they believed that if they could free up time, they could redirect it to higher value activities like designing and building new products faster. So we started with a diagnostic phase to put some numbers around what was actually happening.

First, after some analysis, we learned that they were spending substantially more time in meetings compared with companies of a similar size. We also discovered that most of their meetings were coming at the behest of top executives themselves, and that the biggest driver of overall time spent in meetings was the result of too many attendees.

In order to change this meeting culture, the company’s leadership first and foremost acknowledged the problem and communicated to employees that they were committed to fixing it. It’s critical to note that the messaging made clear that this was not about micromanaging employees’ days, but rather asking them to be more conscious of the cost of their own and others’ time. Monthly dashboards were also provided to senior management, who could track a number of variables, including how much of others’ time people were consuming based on the meetings they initiated; the average number of attendees per meeting; suggestions for how managers might best reach established meeting-reduction targets; and quarterly scorecards that tracked progress across all functions. Transparent data was also shared with employees so they could see exactly what meeting norms existed across their departments and how they varied from external benchmarks.

Three principals were behind the design of this program:

Transparency. Sharing the data with all of the relevant people on a regular basis made people more comfortable with the program and more aware of how their personal behavior impacted company time.
Targets. Everyone needed a goal that they could work towards. Some groups targeted an overall reduction of the time spent in meetings (e.g., 30%), while some kept it more directional, but everyone had something to score themselves against.
Internal benchmarks. It’s one thing to see how you personally are doing against a target; it’s another to see how you are doing relative to your colleagues. Regular check-ins showed people how they compared, which motivated faster change and provided a catalyst for productive discussions about what the most successful people were doing differently.

It’s been a year since this initiative started, and the company has gained back an average of 5 hours per person per week. Having freed this time up from meetings, they’ve managed to save tens of thousands of hours per year that can be redirected to higher value activities, with a side bonus of improved employee engagement and morale. Some other interesting findings include:

The duration of meetings hasn’t changed, even though there are now fewer of them.
Lots of meetings have been cancelled or are no longer being scheduled, with various divisions seeing anywhere from 10%-30% decrease in the sheer number of meetings.
The biggest driver of time savings is a reduction in the average number of attendees. Most divisions were able to reduce average attendees by around 20%, which in some cases was the equivalent of up to 15 people.
One of the clearest changes is an approximately 40% reduction in total time spent in leadership meetings, defined as any meeting with the words “Leadership Team” somewhere in the subject line. Much of these gains were driven by reducing the attendee list to only include the actual leadership teams, whereas previously many attendees were also bringing several people from within their own teams. These additions were leading to bigger meetings, more time consumed, and less efficient interactions.
Culture is set from the top, so when leaders made clear and well communicated changes in their own behavior, those changes actually did ripple through the organization.

These seemingly big changes are not the result of one drastic “no more meetings!” order. Rather, the problem is being fixed by getting lots of people to make several, relatively painless decisions every day, like “I can get away with only 5 people in that meeting versus 10,” or “I’m going to ask that person if I really need to attend that meeting or if I can just get the minutes.”

These are decisions everyone at your company should be making, but not until leadership assesses the true drivers of meeting overload. If you’re a small company, you may be able to get at that with a few internal discussions. More likely, you’ll need data to understand what’s really happening. But regardless of which bucket you fall into, the first step is to declare meetings to be a real business problem, rather than how most of us commonly think of them: as an unsolvable annoyance.

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The 3 Things CEOs Worry About the Most

CEOs have a lot to worry about, but what are their greatest concerns? What keeps them awake at night? We interviewed 24 CEOs and asked them to name the biggest challenges facing their organizations. (Please note that titles used here reflect the positions the individuals held in 2013, when we conducted the interviews for a separate article). Their concerns fell into three broad categories: talent, operating in a global marketplace, and regulation and legislation. Given that CEOs set the tone and priorities for their organizations, it is important to understand what they interpret as the major challenges and opportunities.

Talent Management

Talent-related issues were the top concern, mentioned by 16 of the CEOs. They had a range of concerns, beginning with finding the right talent. This was especially daunting during periods of change or growth in which companies needed to hire in large numbers. AT&T, for example, had to switch its focus from traditional telecom services to wireless services, and this shift required employees with different skill sets. Randall Stephenson of AT&T explained, “We had 270,000 people we employed around the globe. The lion’s share of these people were out building and installing high-tech infrastructure and doing home installs that were suddenly far more complex than they’d ever been. We’d been hiring a number of people, and finding good, technical people to fill these jobs proved to be very difficult. If we wanted to hire somebody to go install IP services in a home, we interviewed eleven people to find one qualified candidate.”

Once companies hired new talent, new challenges arose, such as how these employees represented the company. Enrique Santacana of ABB North America, a power and automation-technology firm, voiced his concern this way: “An overarching issue was the exposure we had as a company,” Santacana explained, “For example, how information was being used or may be used in a way that was not conducive to good business practices. Having 150,000 employees around the world, once in a while we got a bad apple here and there, and we got problems. The speed at which those problems happened was exponentially increased because of the ability of people to communicate through social media.”

CEOs also worried about whether their high potential employees were being properly developed. One area that proved especially challenging was mobility. Ken Powell of U.S. food processor General Mills, noting that his company was quickly expanding internationally, said, “One of our challenges was how to develop a truly globally mobile culture. That didn’t mean that everybody in the company needed to have that kind of flexibility—it just became more and more important for us that we had a cadre or a group of employees who were willing to pull up their stakes and go to lots of different places.” The challenge then was to foster global mindsets and cultural competencies.

Talent pipelines were also a concern. Woods Staton of Arcos Dorados, the largest operator of McDonald’s restaurants in Latin America, explained, “The big challenge that we had was making sure that we had the right pipeline with good people, making sure that what had made us successful so far with our group of people was being reproduced down the line.” Other talent management concerns that were mentioned once include: motivating people through hard times, retention and development, and managing diversity and cultural differences.

Operating in a Global Marketplace

Eight of the CEOs pointed to the challenges of operating in a fast-paced global marketplace. For Paul Block of Merisant, which makes artificial sweeteners, one problem was currency. “We had currency issues because the global economies had been somewhat volatile. So, you had currencies going up and down, and we crossed currencies because we sold in over 90 countries and manufactured in over five or six countries. Currency really had a big effect.”

Staton identified the challenge of managing a global brand: “We had the McDonald’s brand, and in each country our market share and the product life cycle were in different stages. You had some countries in which we were mature or very, very strong and very, very good, like Brazil. Others, like Mexico, offered more of a challenge to us. We had more competition, be it from our own direct competitors or from street vendors and food stalls. So the challenge was to have the broad marketing strategies with local adaptations.”

Some CEOs worried about setting direction and tone for the company across regions. “I would say the biggest challenge that I faced was making sure the organization stayed very focused, thinking about the trends that were shaping the world and what we were going to need to do organizationally to win in the long-term,” said Jim Turley of accounting firm Ernst & Young. “It was very much about capital shifts and demographic shifts that were taking place in the world. We wanted to keep those two things in the forefront of our thinking and driving our strategy and execution. That was something that I spent a lot of time thinking about.”

Another challenge was to establish and maintain a consistent company culture across different regions. Tim Solso, of the engine manufacturer Cummins, spoke for many when he said, “I think an issue we had was that we were a good multinational company that was headquartered in the United States. We were not a global company yet. How did we make sure that our policies and processes reflected the world we lived in, not just where our headquarters were?”

Regulation and Legislation

Finally, five CEOs cited the challenges of leading a company amid shifting regulation and legislation. For example, David Thodey at Australian telecom Telstra explained, “The telecommunications industry was heavily regulated around the world and we had been going through a series of negotiations with the Australian government. The government was going to pass $11 billion to migrate customers off the copper network to a fiber network over seven to eight years. We were seeing just enormous change in how we needed to act, and behave, and how we needed to drive cost out of the business.”

Healthcare industry chiefs were particularly vexed by changes in legislation and regulation. Ken Frazier of the pharmaceutical firm Merck, put it this way: “The biggest challenges that we faced in our organization was that healthcare in general was undergoing huge, huge pivotal change. As a pharmaceutical company, we obviously were part of that whole ecosystem. Many of the established ways of creating value in this industry were no longer as viable as they used to be. The biggest challenge we faced as an organization was change.” Angela Braly of the managed-care firm Wellpoint spoke about how healthcare reform was changing the focus of her business: “We were really working to transform ourselves as an organization and to help transform healthcare in the United States from a system that had in many respects been business to business. Most of our customers historically were employers, and there was a big transition we were anticipating partly as a result of healthcare reform, but we thought it should be our driving force in any event, to be a truly consumer-focused company.”

Change and new challenges are inevitable, so CEOs must be skilled at taking on a wide range of both internal and external challenges facing their companies, including setting priorities and setting others up for success. As David Thodey put it, “Leadership was pretty important. People observed what I did and what I spent my time on. As a CEO, how you spent your time became more and more important as you went along.”

As a leader in your organization, what keeps you awake at night?

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