Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1321

What HoloLens Has That Google Glass Didn’t

Courtesy of Microsoft

I admit that when Microsoft unveiled its holographic computing engine at its Windows 10 event last week, I didn’t pay much attention. Despite some positive press, it felt too much like Google Glass (and skepticism of that platform looks increasingly warranted) and reminded me of many past gee-whiz announcements from Microsoft. (This one comes to mind.)

James McQuivey, principal analyst and vice president at Forrester, suggested that executives should sit up and pay attention to HoloLens. I wasn’t convinced, but when he wrote to me that “holograms are coming fast and are here to stay; ignore them at your distinct, proximate peril” I reconsidered my dismissiveness.

McQuivey, the author of Digital Disruption, agreed to answer this skeptic’s questions about HoloLens, why it matters, and why executives should pay attention. The conversation follows:

HBR: Executives don’t have a lot of time to think about things that are just hype. Is there any reason for them to pay attention to HoloLens?

McQuivey: Yes. As an executive, you care about this because in Forrester’s Technographics survey data, there are 7.2 million adults in the US that have the ideal combination of attributes that makes them early candidates for HoloLens. They like technology, they have an Xbox, they have children, and they have an annual household income of more than $100,000. If Microsoft can persuade even half of them to jump in, that’s 3.6 million consumers, or 45% of the people who bought a Kinect at launch who will try a HoloLens by 2016. And going into 2017, just two years from now, the momentum they will have generated will force executives at your company to sidestep drones, self-driving cars, and robots to focus on this technology. They’ll see by then how it changes the way your customers interact with the products, services, and information that you provide them.

As one former digital agency executive told me after watching Microsoft’s event, “If I were managing a brand, I’d head right to my digital agency and say, ‘What is our plan for holograms?’” She said this even though she admitted she wouldn’t expect them to have an answer. But they would have to have a plan for generating an answer.

Skeptics will say this is Google Glass — largely regarded as a failure — just a couple of years later. What’s different?

Holographic interactions like what Microsoft is suggesting are where every other company from Oculus to Google were ultimately heading, but they haven’t gotten there. The endgame for enhancing our lives with digital visual tools is not virtual reality, it’s this mixed reality. If the glasses can help you accomplish tasks that matter to you, ones you already do, then it’s not just fun, it’s useful. By introducing the idea of holographic computing and baking it into every Windows 10 device from launch forward, Microsoft is offering developers, marketers, and ultimately consumers, completely new ways to do what they already want to do.

Isn’t that what Google promised with Glass, though? I’m not convinced.

Glass was a study in contradictions. On the one hand it was proposing a future where we would have ubiquitous computing on the go. Definitely a thing of the future. But on the other hand, the experience merely put a short list of functions that you can easily do on your phone in front of your face. The apps and functions were too limited, less powerful than your phone, certainly. That’s what made Google easy to ridicule. If you spend all that money to accomplish such a narrow list of tasks, and potentially look silly doing it, then you are not in the future, you’re not even in the present. You might as well be on a feature phone in 2005.

In order to introduce a new technology, you do have to start by helping people accomplish things that they already know they want, as Google was trying. But it has to make those things dramatically easier, more enjoyable, and more useful, which Glass did not. To get to the future from that point, you can then swiftly lead them on to do things they didn’t already know they wanted to do but now seem obvious. That’s precisely how holographic computing will rapidly infiltrate and then take over computing just as touch interfaces did starting with the iPhone.

Doesn’t this face the same ethics and social challenges as Glass? What’s the HoloLens equivalent of the Glasshole?

There is a subtlety here that executives should understand. Glass was only ever intended to be an on-the-go experience. Because Glass couldn’t actually “see” what you are doing, it can’t really be helpful except as a tool for grabbing information when you’re out and about. This is precisely what made Glass vulnerable to the ethical and social issues that dogged it. HoloLens, on the other hand, is not yet designed to be used outdoors. Instead, it’s a tool for doing what you need to do at home and work more effectively. It can only do that because it sees what you see, understands three-dimensional objects and surfaces, and can create virtual experiences for entertainment and productivity purposes in the places where you do most of those things. This opens up hours worth of opportunities for companies to serve customers in those places, privately, where other people won’t judge your eyewear or choices.

So what are some of the killer apps for this kind of holographic interface?

Retail, travel, automotive, financial services, all of these will be obvious fits. When Ikea builds a holographic catalog so that you can drop furniture into your bedroom and see what it would look like, even walk around it, you know you have a game changer. When Allrecipes.com can point to specific cupboards in your kitchen and tell you to retrieve the cocoa, and count out as you measure out tablespoons, you have another game changer. Even in the enterprise, where it’s likely HoloLens will be more useful more quickly, there will be holographic apps for technicians that do maintenance on jets on the tarmac, collaborative 3D design environments for architects, and special headsets for dentists that guide them through tricky extractions. But ultimately, I disagree with the premise of the question: Like the early web, this technology will not generate a killer app but will instead make smaller breakthroughs with existing applications throughout a wider range of industries and companies. Unlike the early web, it will not take a decade for that diffusion to occur.

Why won’t it take that long?

All the pieces are in place. Consumers are ready for new technology — Apple sold 80 million iPads in its first two years, compared to 1 million iPods in its first two years. Studying barriers to consumer adoption has been my passion since before my doctoral studies and I now find myself with very little to study given how rapidly the barriers are falling. But the technology itself is moving faster than before. Connectivity is ubiquitous; batteries are amazing; graphical processing units are powerful yet cheap;even the original technology Microsoft built just for HoloLens, the Holographic Processing Unit (HPU), could be built to higher levels of power at lower cost and in shorter time than such chips have ever been built before. In short, the world of technology has been digitally disrupted not just in one area, but in every area. Combine all of those innovations into a single area of focus, as Microsoft has done, and boom, you find yourself five years into the future.

I’m not sure I’d want to be the executive sticking his neck out saying this is the next big thing, given the relative failures with similar products.

This is why companies are constantly catching up. They were afraid to embrace social media and are still struggling to get up to speed on mobile. Think of it this way: A HoloLens video Microsoft posted on YouTube has been viewed more than 12 million times. Many of those viewers are the people below you in your company, and your customers. And then there are your executive peers and your board of directors. They carry around their iPads with some pride, but they are uncertain of where to put their attention next. All of these people will be looking for the executive that can stand up and offer a plan for preparing for a future of holographic computing.

So what’s that plan?

You’ll immediately face reasonable questions from inside the company like: Have we as a brand spent the time to understand what customers really need? Have we used the shift to web, social, and mobile to become experts in rapid product development techniques? The answer is likely no, not completely, or only somewhat. That’s why preparing for holographic computing isn’t really about building holograms, not in 2015, and for many not even in 2016. Instead, you will prepare for holographic computing by finally bringing your company culture, policies and practices into alignment with a customer-first strategy for innovation.

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How Doctors (or Anyone) Can Craft a More Persuasive Message

The recent measles outbreak starting in Disneyland, California, provides a sobering reminder to doctors that even when the message they’re delivering is a compelling one — backed by strong evidence — attempts to influence and persuade others can sometimes still come up short.

Over the past few years I’ve worked with Britain’s NHS on numerous programs designed to change people’s perceptions and behaviors in relation to health protection. Our work has uncovered some fundamental insights about persuasive messaging.

There are lots of reasons why well-crafted messages fail to persuade, but one of the most common is because the communicator focuses too much on constructing the content of the message rather than choosing the right messenger. The distinction between the messenger and the message is an important one. In today’s information-overloaded world, in which we’re exposed to lots of conflicting messages, people will often act more on the basis of who is communicating the message rather than the actual message itself.

So if the deliverer can be as important as the message itself, what are the characteristics of persuasive messengers? And what steps can doctors and other would-be persuaders take to increase the chances that their important messages land successfully?

Persuasion researchers have long known that the most effective messengers have three key attributes: expertise, trustworthiness, and similarity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Expertise. When people feel uncertain, they typically look to experts to guide their decisions. In one study, when subjects were asked to make a series of unfamiliar financial decisions they were much more likely to choose options that were accompanied by advice from a prominent economist. Brain scans showed that in the presence of expert advice, the areas of the participants’ brains linked to critical thinking and counter-arguing flat-lined. This runs counter to the traditional assumptions about expert advice: that people listen to advice, integrate it with their own information, and then come to a decision. If that were true, the researchers would have seen activity in brain regions that guide decisions. Instead they found that when people receive expert advice, that processing activity goes away.

A clear lesson emerges when structuring a persuasive message: Because people frequently disengage their critical thinking and counter-arguing powers in the presence of expert advice, communicators who can legitimately lay claim to relevant expertise should always make that expertise clear early on. This doesn’t require making boastful claims (factors that will likely disengage rather than engage one’s audience) but instead using “authority cues” that convey your expertise. For example, studies have shown patients were more receptive to messages from medical professionals who prominently displayed their medical diplomas in their offices or who wore a stethoscope when delivering a recommendation.

Messengers who see that their messages are falling on deaf ears should ask themselves whether they’re taking steps to credentialize themselves before delivering their message. For those who already do a good job of telegraphing their expertise, the following two points will also be important.

Trustworthiness. In ambiguous, uncertain, or controversial situations where multiple answers vie for believability, it can be tempting for a messenger to conceal any small doubts or uncertainties about their message by sweeping them under the carpet, believing they could be detrimental to success. However, evidence suggests that signaling small uncertainties or doubts immediately before the delivery of the strongest argument actually has valuable trust-raising qualities. Sequencing is the key lesson here. Start your message with a small weakness or drawback, then use the word “but” before delivering your strongest message. A doctor who says, “No vaccine in the world is without the occasional adverse event, but this vaccine is extremely safe and has been used to protect millions of children,” strengthens her trustworthiness and credibility. But notice how reaction to the message feels different if the weakness follows, rather than precedes, the strength.

Similarity. We’re more likely to believe people who are like us. So another way that a messenger can increase the persuasiveness of their message is to show how they share similarities with their audience. For example, a doctor who wishes to advocate vaccinating children with the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine might find it useful to point out that not only are they a medical professional, but they are also a parent. Sometimes, of course, it can be challenging to signal both expertise and similarity. In these instances, entirely different messengers may be required. African healthcare professionals leading a public health program designed to increase condom use to reduce the transmission of STDs and HIV quickly realized that while they possessed expertise, they had little in common with the audiences they were targeting. However, by recruiting local hairdressers to deliver their message through the “Get Braids Not AIDS” campaign, the impact of their message rose significantly.

There is a clear lesson here. Even though you may be the best qualified person to deliver your message, you may not be the most effective messenger.

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The Ideal Work Schedule, as Determined by Circadian Rhythms

Humans have a well-defined internal clock that shapes our energy levels throughout the day: our circadian process, which is often referred to as a circadian rhythm because it tends to be very regular. If you’ve ever had jetlag, then you know how persistent circadian rhythms can be. This natural — and hardwired — ebb and flow in our ability to feel alert or sleepy has important implications for you and your employees.

Although managers expect their employees to be at their best at all hours of the workday, it’s an unrealistic expectation. Employees may want to be their best at all hours, but their natural circadian rhythms will not always align with this desire. On average, after the workday begins, employees take a few hours to reach their peak levels of alertness and energy — and that peak does not last long. Not long after lunch, those levels begin to decline, hitting a low at around 3pm. We often blame this on lunch, but in reality this is just a natural part of the circadian process. After the 3pm dip, alertness tends to increase again until hitting a second peak at approximately 6pm. Following this, alertness tends to then decline for the rest of the evening and throughout the early morning hours until hitting the very lowest point at approximately 3:30am. After hitting that all-time low, alertness tends to increase for the rest of the morning until hitting the first peak shortly after noon the next day. A very large body of research highlights this pattern, although of course there is individual variability around that pattern, which I’ll discuss shortly.

Managers who want to maximize their employees’ performance should consider this circadian rhythm when setting assignments, deadlines, and expectations. This requires taking a realistic view of human energy regulation, and appreciating the fact that the same employee will be more effective at some times of the day than others. Similarly, employees should take their own circadian rhythms into account when planning their own day. The most important tasks should be conducted when people are at or near their peaks in alertness (within an hour or so of noon and 6pm). The least important tasks should be scheduled for times in which alertness is lower (very early in the morning, around 3pm, and late at night).

Naps can be a good way to regulate energy as well, providing some short-term recovery that can increase alertness. A large body of evidence links naps to increases in task performance. However, even tired and sleep-deprived employees may find it difficult to nap if they work against their circadian rhythms. Fortunately, there is a nice complementary fit; naps are best scheduled for the low point of alertness in the circadian rhythm. Thus, smart managers and employees will schedule naps around 3pm, when they are less useful for important tasks anyway, such that they will be even more alert later on during the natural high points in their circadian rhythm.

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Unfortunately, we often get this wrong. Many employees are flooded with writing and responding to emails throughout their entire morning, which takes them up through lunch. They return from lunch having already used up most of their first peak in alertness, and then begin important tasks requiring deep cognitive processing just as they start to move toward the 3pm dip in alertness and energy. We often put employees in a position where they must meet an end-of-workday deadline, so they persist in this important task throughout the 3pm dip. Then, as they are starting to approach the second peak of alertness, the typical workday ends. For workaholics, they may simply take a dinner break, which occupies some of their peak alertness time, and then work throughout the evening and night as their alertness and cognitive performance decline for the entire duration. And in the worst-case scenario, the employee burns the midnight oil and persists well into the worst circadian dip of the entire cycle, with bleary eyes straining just to stay awake while working on an important task at 3:30am. All of these examples represent common mismatches between an optimal strategy and what people actually do.

As I briefly noted above, there are of course individual differences in circadian rhythms. The typical pattern is indeed very common, and the general shape of the curve describes almost everyone. However, some people have a circadian rhythm that is shifted in one direction or the other. People referred to as “larks” (or morning people) tend to have peaks and troughs in alertness that are earlier than the average person, and “owls” (or night owls) are shifted in the opposite direction. Most people tend to experience such shifts across their lifetimes, such that they are larks as very young children, owls as adolescents, and then larks again as they become senior citizens. But beyond this pattern, people of any age can be larks or owls.

These differences in circadian rhythms (referred to as chronotypes) present some challenges and some benefits. The biggest challenge is matching patterns of activity to individual circadian rhythms. A lark working a late schedule or an owl working an early schedule is a chronotype mismatch that is difficult to deal with. Such employees suffer low alertness and energy, struggling to stay awake even if they really care about the task. Some of my own research indicates that circadian mismatches increase the prevalence of unethical behavior, simply because victims lack the energy to resist temptations. This is bad enough for an employee who is working alone. In the context of groups, finding a good time for a team composed of some larks and some owls to be at optimal effectiveness may be difficult. However, it does also provide opportunities. For organizations or tasks that require around-the-clock work, if managers can optimally match employees with different chronotypes to work different shifts, the work can be handed off among employees who are all working at or near their circadian peaks. This requires knowing the chronotype of each employee and using that information when developing work schedules.

Flextime provides an opportunity for employees to match their work schedules to their own circadian rhythms. However, managers often destroy this opportunity to capture value by punishing employees for using schedules that match an owl’s rhythm. In my own research, I found that supervisors tend to assume that employees who start and finish work late (versus early) are less conscientious and lower in performance, even if their behavior and performance is exactly the same as someone working an early riser’s schedule. Managers must see past their own biases if they want to optimize schedules in order to match the most important activities to the natural energy cycles of employees. Managers who do this will have energized, thriving employees rather than sleepy, droopy employees struggling to stay awake. Your most important tasks deserve employees who are working when they’re at their best.

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A Step-by-Step Plan to Improve CMO-COO Collaboration

A traveler arrives in a foreign country and attempts to use his credit card to make a purchase. It is the same card he used to buy the plane ticket and book the hotel. While this would seem sufficient to alert the bank to his impending trip abroad, “transaction denied” flashes across the terminal screen, leaving this longtime customer stranded, fuming, and no longer so loyal.

This all-too-familiar story illustrates the challenge facing companies — especially customer-facing companies. Customer journeys today are a complex series of interactions across multiple channels and platforms, where each point of contact has the potential to encourage the sale or derail it entirely. Coordinating the infrastructure, technology, and messaging in a way that appears seamless and fluid to the customer is, to be blunt, a logistical nightmare.

But getting it right pays off. Delivering great journeys can boost revenues 10 to 15 percent, lower service costs 10 to 20 percent, and increase employee engagement 20 to 30 percent. (For further convincing, see the HBR article, “The Truth About Customer Experience.”) Delivering a consistent experience on the most common customer journeys is an important predictor of overall customer experience and loyalty. We have also found that improving customer experience from average to “wow” is worth a 30 to 50 percent improvement in “likelihood to remain/renew” and “likelihood to buy another product.”

Despite these opportunities, companies have been slow to respond to the customer journey imperative in an organized way. Executives focus on optimizing discrete touchpoints rather than improving the complete customer experience. This is like treating a symptom without bothering to find the cure.

The CMO and COO are the natural partners for turning this around. As Jo Coombs, Managing Director at OgilvyOne, London, observes, “I don’t think it can just be one or the other. If it’s all about the operations then you lose sight of the customer. If it’s all about the customer, then you may not have the infrastructure and back-end to support what you’re trying to do.”

While the CMO and COO have a good track record of collaborating in certain areas, a certain tension has long defined the relationship. Here are our recommendations for how CMOs and COOs can develop a more collaborative working relationship:

1. Develop a shared vocabulary and shared metrics.

When CMOs and COOs talk about the customer decision journey, that language needs to be translated into metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that more accurately measure progress. For example, a call center may pride itself on completing X percentage of service calls within 30 seconds, but that’s not a valuable metric for determining overall customer satisfaction – or what the customer then does after that service interaction. The better metric would measure the percentage of calls that were made and required no additional follow up.

Rather than measuring marketing KPIs or operations KPIs, focus instead on the more customer-oriented journey KPIs, such as lifetime margin. On the operations side, metrics should not focus on how quickly the call center can address customer issues, but rather on how successful the call center is at eliminating follow-up calls or how successfully it isolates the root causes of customer complaints.

Once the drivers of the costs of the journey are understood, marketing can work with operations to address them. For instance, at a major bank, the operations group reviewed data on the cost to serve customers and found that certain types of customer acquisition efforts yielded less profitable customers. Based on this data, operations recommended marketing cease actively trying to acquire these customers. This required a change in the media buy metrics to focus on “likely margin” versus “likely sales.”

2. Build a structure for collaboration.

Moving towards a more collaborative approach represents a new way of doing things, which will at first feel strange. The CMO and COO can wield a lot of influence by setting up a regular call, for example, devoted to a specific customer journey, such as the onboarding process. They can also take deliberate actions to involve the other in processes where generally the “other function” has little to no involvement. The CMO can bring the COO into the marketing planning process early on, for example, to help ensure that the company can in fact deliver on the marketing promises it is making to its customers. This as approach helps both CMO and COO become invested in the successful implementation of the plan.

For any change to stick, the CMO and COO need to have joint accountability and create incentives that reward collaboration. Consider how Dutch energy company Essent is redesigning the customer experience. Marketing takes the lead on defining how best to serve customer needs and what sort of service this requires. They then set the initial minimum cost that operations can work with to deliver it. Operations and marketing meet, discuss, and iterate what the final budget will be and what the ultimate goal will be. What makes this process work is that they share both the responsibility and the rewards for meeting the targets. In fact, between 30 and 50 percent of their bonus compensation is based on reaching their joint targets.

3. Work together on a few customer journeys that matter.

Complex analytics can reveal often hundreds of opportunities to improve customer journeys, but the CMO and COO can help prioritize them based on impact. To do that, there is no substitute for a team of marketing and operations people physically walking through a specific journey.

That happened at a car rental company, which had identified the need to get their customers from the front desk to the front seat faster. When sales managers saw a rush of customers, they could put more people on the front desk. But the crews responsible for prepping the cars had no contact with the front desk. Whether it was slow or busy out front, it was always business as usual back in the garage. When the marketing/operations team walked through each of the stages of this particular journey, they quickly developed a greater appreciation for the entire process. They also were able to identify critical changes, one of which was to install a simple system — a light in the garage activated by a switch at the front desk that signaled surges in demand — so that prep crews could respond accordingly.

Importantly, fixing customer journeys is about a mentality rather than a one-off solution. And that means setting up processes to respond rapidly. The CMO and COO should work together to develop, in advance, processes and protocols for addressing negative feedback quickly. The insurance company E-surance, for example, uses a “control tower” system to monitor what is happening in real time. When looking at quote and bind ratios (i.e. the percentage of people who commit once they’ve received a rate quote), they could see those segments where the ratios were poor and immediately shut down the digital advertising in those markets. Operations set up the analytics and marketing was right there to act on what those analytics revealed.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this is more than a “marketing and operations” show. Delivering on journeys requires many different parts of the organization to come together, such as working with the CIO on the technology implications of developing journeys, and providing the CFO with hard ROI data on customer journey investments.

4. See the customer journey all the way through.

Marketing people are good at shaping emotions for customers, but operations folks, not so much. Yet that’s the department that typically takes over once marketing gets customers in the door. That post-purchase onboarding process, often designed to be low cost/high volume, has the potential to reinforce the connection with the product – or conversely, foster buyer’s remorse. Operations plays a key role in making sure those new customers stay loyal.

For example, one financial services company applies a marketing lens to its customer onboarding for many months after signing up a new customer. A personal welcome letter is sent with the goal of both deepening the relationship while still getting necessary paperwork completed. Similarly, bills and call center script guidelines reinforce the same personal tone that’s been established. This focus on solidifying a personal relationship with customers has become a key differentiator for the company and a great asset for marketing and sales.

At its most fundamental, mastering the customer journey is about doing what’s best for your customers, which includes being there whenever they happen to need you. Doing what is best for the customer, as it turns out, is also often what is best for the company. We recognize that the recommendations we are making here represent a real shift in the traditional roles and responsibilities of marketing and operations. But there is tremendous upside for those CMOs and COOs who pool their talents and resources to focus on the customer journey, adjusting systems, processes and, most importantly, mindset, to ensure that each and every customer journey is a rewarding one.

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Being Experienced Doesn’t Automatically Make You a Great Mentor

Coaching and mentoring is more popular than ever — and for good reason. As individuals progress in their jobs and careers, they’re constantly challenged to build their skills and act outside their comfort zones. Timid executives are called upon to learn to deliver motivational speeches; conflict-avoidant managers need to learn to deliver bad news; and mild-mannered job seekers need to pitch and promote themselves at networking events.

And mentoring doesn’t just happen in traditional corporate settings. It also abounds in educational, religious, athletic, and nonprofit worlds as well, where deeply experienced individuals become coaches and mentors to help others with less experience get on the fast track to success.

Or at least that’s the hope. The reality, I’m afraid, is much more of a mixed bag, as often coaching does more harm than good. The problem lies in trusting that experience alone can make you a good coach. What I’ve observed watching coaches and mentors — and even coaching young professionals and executives myself — is that there can actually be a liability of experience when it comes to coaching. As we take on the roles of coaches or mentors, we must be aware of how our experience can hold others back, or else it can lead to negative results and frustrating relationships.

The first liability of experience has to do with emotion. As coaches and mentors, we’re typically chosen for our experience — which is a good thing. But that experience can also be a liability when it means we’re far removed from the actual experience of learning challenging new skills. People can really struggle when trying to master new skills. They can feel anxious, self-conscious, embarrassed, and even frustrated and angry. It can take a delicate touch and keen insight to give the right advice, intervene in a timely manner, offer the right words of wisdom and encouragement, and really understand how to nurture a trainee’s sense of confidence. But if you haven’t been there in a while and you can’t empathize with your trainees’ experience, you can miss this emotional side of skill building, which is a critical part of the process.

Moreover, as a deeply experienced mentor, you can also fail on an emotional front by not being able or willing to express your own vulnerabilities around learning challenging new tasks. In a mentor or coaching relationship, individuals want their experienced counterpart to be able to empathize with their experiences. They want to hear that you have struggled — and that you understand what they’re going through. This helps build a connection between you and “normalize” the challenges they’re experiencing. But as a mentor, if you’re too fixated on expressing an image of expertise and not exposing your own vulnerabilities, you can miss a critical opportunity to connect with your clients.

In addition to these emotional barriers, experienced mentors and coaches often have unrealistic expectations about how learning typically occurs. Since they are so far removed from the experience of learning new skills, these individuals generally forget that success isn’t immediate. When learning a challenging new skill, people often have very uneven results. For example, someone I worked with from a different country learning to interview in the United States was very successful in her initial attempts, and as her mentor, I was extremely pleased — for her and, I have to admit, for myself! But as she inevitably struggled in subsequent attempts, I found myself frustrated, noting in my mind these next attempts as “failures” and wondering why she was now having issues when the early attempts had been so positive. I’m certain now that this frustration and disappointed “leaked” into my conversations; this didn’t help the person I was working with and created a tense relationship.

Although they may be fleeting, it’s critical to celebrate these early achievements when they happen. Many mentors (myself included) often focus on “what’s next” without stopping to actually celebrate and appreciate how much someone has accomplished, even if that accomplishment is a small step. This failure to celebrate small wins can cause mentors to miss a valuable opportunities to build their trainee’s self-confidence, which is often just as critical as the more traditional skill building process.

Finally, a last trap that experienced mentors can fall into is that of unfair comparisons. Who among us has not compared one employee to another, one student to another, or even one child to another? Comparisons are a temptation we often can’t avoid, but in the case of coaching, they can be damaging. When we compare one employee to another — or even to ourselves — we can end up missing evidence of actual progress, marking one person as a “failure” and another as a “success,” when the reality might be that the first person has actually made progress in other, more subtle ways. By falling in the trap of comparison, we are potentially missing important details in the experiences of the people we’re actually trying to help.

As mentors, we all want to use our deep experience and expertise to help the people we’re working with. And by paying attention to the potential downside of this experience and managing it appropriately, we can deliver on that promise.

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What We Know, Now, About the Internet’s Disruptive Power

In 1979, before a single IBM PC was ever sold, or the first cell phone network was created, or the digital HDTV standard was even conceived, Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell had no trouble foreseeing the convergence of computers, TV, and telephones into a single system that would allow the transmission of data and the interaction of people and computers in real time. In an HBR article that year entitled “Communications Technology—for Better or for Worse,” he easily envisioned a world in which people would buy cars online, or share them to commute rather than own their own; read the news, get the weather, check the classifieds, peruse catalogs, and access financial information on their TV screens; and work together from remote locations over digital connections.

A visionary thinker, Bell had already coined the term “the post-industrial society” a half-dozen years before in a famously influential book, which correctly predicted that such a convergence would shift the economies of developed nations from manufacturing to services and create new technical elites working for new science-based industries.

That wasn’t as magical as it might seem, he argued in the 1979 piece, since the required technologies already existed in some form or other. The question was not whether they’d be combined but in what order, at what rate, and at what scale.

As the dot-com bubble heated up in the early 1990s, a number of thinkers turned their attention to developing frameworks to help executives answer those questions in HBR, and their work forms a solid foundation for navigating the digital transformation that’s still playing out.

First among these were BCG executives Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster, writing some 18 years after Bell’s article in the seminal “Strategy and the New Economics of Information.” What was important about the Internet from a strategic point of view, they could already see in 1997 when the Web was barely three years old, was that it eliminated the trade-off between the amount of information that can be shared (its richness) and the number of people you can share it with (its reach) – a trade-off that had formed the basis of many companies’ competitive advantage.

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The implications of that insight were becoming obvious for companies that sold information, like newspapers and encyclopedias. But every business is an information business, they stressed. Supplier relationships, brand identity, process coordination, customer loyalty, and many switching costs were all forms of information. The more your competitive advantage depended on maintaining that trade-off between richness and reach, the more vulnerable it would be.

So where once a company might establish a competitive advantage by creating rich connections between a narrow group of select suppliers (that was the essence of just-in-time manufacturing in the 1980s), or thin connections between a large group of people (as Citibank did with currency traders), now they could do both at once, and so could anyone else. No need for an expensive direct sales force to choose just the right kind of car insurance for you when you can reach customers with customized sales pitches online. No need to create an expensive taxi fleet when you can gather, track, coordinate, and compensate a group of drivers willing to share their rides over the phone.

To work out how vulnerable your company’s competitive advantage is, Evans and Worster offered a still-useful list of diagnostic questions, which begins by identifying the information that holds your value chain together and where you are currently making trade-offs between richness and reach. It’s still worth a look now.

Amid the rubble of the dot-com bust in 2001, Michael Porter weighed in on the question of how to gauge which businesses “active on the internet,” as he put it, were real and which were destined to go the way of Pets.com when their venture funding dried up. The only reliable measure of economic value for a company, he argued eloquently in “Strategy and the Internet,” is not the size of its user base or its stock price or even its revenues but only sustained profitability. Prospects for profitability vary widely from industry to industry, according to the strength of the five forces that create each one’s specific structure. Nevertheless, Porter did venture to make some general conclusions about the Internet’s effect in one very useful chart entitled “How the Internet Influences Industry Structure,” in which he maps the effects of internet technologies on each force in turn.

In general, he confirms what most executives intuitively feel, that while some trends might help companies sustain or even increase their profitability (by increasing the size of markets, boosting efficiency, and dampening the power of suppliers by enabling direct contact between a company and its customers), mostly the Internet intensifies competition and decreases profit margins.

Fast forward a decade or so, and the Internet’s power to decrease profit margins has become the stuff of legend. Napster, Amazon, and the Apple store have annihilated Tower Records and Musicland; digital cameras replaced film and then smartphones upended camera makers. But the questions of timing and scale are still the minds of Clay Christensen and Maxwell Wessell in 2012.

In “Surviving Disruption,” they point out that disruption, digital and otherwise, is less a single event than a process that plays out over time — “sometimes quickly and completely, but other times slowly and incompletely. More than a century after the invention of air transport, cargo ships still crisscross the globe. More than 40 years after Southwest Airlines went public, tens of thousands of passengers fly daily with legacy carriers. A generation after the introduction of the VCR, box-office receipts are still an enormous component of film revenues.”  In other words, when a business will be disrupted is surely as important a question as whether, and in that article they offer a highly practical way to predict how vulnerable your business is, identifying five barriers than can slow disruptors down.

Then last year Michael Porter returned to apply the five forces framework to the next phase of the digital economy – the internet of things. And unlike the first round, which, Porter pointed out didn’t create new industries so much as digital versions of existing industries, this time the hardware, software, and networks that connect previously discrete objects together are creating products that cut across traditional industry boundaries — and enabling entirely new ways to create sustainable value. And so the answer to the question of “How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition,” can’t be easily summarized in a simple chart, and Porter takes us through the myriad possibilities for boosting and depressing profitability, step by step so once again you can map your business against the changing currents.

Back in 1979, Daniel Bell didn’t have much sympathy for people who felt helpless in the face of technological innovation. “In the last decade or more we have heard much of the acceleration of the pace of change,” he wrote 36 years ago. “It is a seductive yet in the end, a meaningless idea other than as a metaphor. For one has to ask, ‘Change of what?’ and ‘How does one measure the pace?’” After all, he points out, a man born in 1800 and who died in 1860 would have seen the coming of the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph. One born in 1860 who died in 1920 would have witnessed the birth of the telephone, electric light, the automobile, and motion pictures.

When we worry about the pace of change, Bell suggests, we’re focusing on the wrong variable. What is definite in not that the pace of change is accelerating but that “the scale on which changes have taken place has widened, and changes in scale, as physicists and organization theorists have long known, requires essentially a change in form.” The question we should be asking is not what utterly unpredictable new things will turn up to annihilate our businesses but what form of organization is appropriate to capitalize on them. A knotty question to be sure, but not an impossible one.

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4 Ways to Make Conference Calls Less Terrible

No one wants to sit on a boring conference call, especially when they have other work to do. But that’s the reality for a lot of people, at least according to recent InterCall research on the rise of mobile conference calls and employee conferencing behavior. With 82% of employees admitting to focusing on other work while on a call (along with other, less tasteful non-work distractions), disengagement — at least during virtual meetings — has started to become standard practice. While some may argue that these employees are still engaged in other work, it raises questions about the productivity and value of these meetings.

The good news is that companies can make their meetings more relevant and productive by making a few simple adjustments — even though many of them go against some familiar office habits.

Stop striving for inclusiveness. Time, not technology, accounts for the majority of associated meeting expenses. Unfortunately, online calendars, scheduling apps and email distribution lists have created a monstrous meeting invite reflex. It’s become too easy to send blanket, one-hour meeting invites to 10 people when only five are relevant to the agenda.

Businesses need to break free of the notion that all attendees should be on a conference call from start to finish. With a little upfront planning around which topics will be discussed at any given point in the meeting, managers can stagger invitations. If the marketing budget won’t be covered until the last half hour of an FY planning meeting, try inviting the marketing team to that 30-minute portion only.

Aside from facilitating more efficient meetings, it puts valuable time and flexibility back in your employees’ workdays. It also proves to your employees that you value their time just as much as your own. Oftentimes managers may worry that employees feel left out or that they are missing something if they are not invited to every meeting. But if you take the time to share relevant information, either through a quick chat in another meeting or via a recap email, you can build trust and save valuable work hours. Chances are, your employees will actually thank you for giving them some time back in their day.

Start using video. In 2014, for the first time ever, 50% of employees used live video and web cameras in more than a quarter of their conference calls, according to recent Wainhouse Research (WebMetrics: Meeting Characteristics and Feature Preferences, 2014). Despite this milestone, video conferencing remains a point of contention, and its adoption curve is a matter of psychological acceptance. The idea that everyone in a meeting can watch what you’re doing deters many workers, as does the dissonance between what we see in the mirror and what’s reflected on our laptop or tablet screens.

But as video becomes more pervasive in our personal lives, we will all have to get over this reluctance to adopt it in our business lives. Younger workers, with their penchant for selfies and inclination to social sharing, are also playing a large role in accelerating video’s acceptance among all members of the workforce. We can already see the impact of video conferencing among those who have adopted it. Wainhouse Research has found that of the employees who use video and web cams during meetings, 74% like the ability to see colleagues’ reactions to their ideas, and nearly 70% feel it increases connectedness between participants.

But don’t abandon the physical conference room just yet. Most organizations’ physical office conference spaces look nothing like they did 20, even 10 years ago. They’ve evolved beyond a long table and phone to include white boards, projectors, flat panel screens, web cameras, and surround sound. Participants may not use each accoutrement in every meeting, but the options for dynamic collaboration are there if they need them.

That said, it shouldn’t take 20 minutes for a presenter to figure out how to use a webcam; he or she shouldn’t have to restart an audio or web-based call in order to distribute multimedia content, either. Digital accessibility works when it’s inherent, intuitive and seamless. This only occurs when employees are trained and comfortable using all the features today’s conferencing solutions are capable of.

Understand technology use versus abuse. Technology is essential to innovating the conference call and boosting staff engagement. When applied incorrectly or misunderstood by end users, it can cripple both efforts. Managers have to use utmost discretion when implementing conferencing tools in a way that’s useful to employees, not abusive to their time or productivity.

In other words, just because you can video conference from your iPhone before boarding a flight doesn’t mean you should. Organizations should dictate a new form of meeting technology etiquette, one that respects staff flexibility, and their right to efficient, uninterrupted work time and collaboration. Part of this decorum includes redefining “full deployment.” Rather than give all employees the same basic conferencing tools, give them what they really need to fulfill their unique responsibilities. Mapping the technology to the user, not vice versa, increases the likelihood that staff will take advantage of these resources and deliver a higher return on investment.

Audio-only conference calls still permeate offices everywhere, but the status quo won’t hold for long. Changes in technology and workforce composition are happening too fast, forcing the rules of business communication to shift accordingly. Remember: Humans are multi-sensory creatures. Meetings aren’t one-dimensional either. In order to better engage your employees when you meet as a group, you might want to start by how you communicate with them.

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Case Study: Can a Work-at-Home Policy Hurt Morale?

Amrita Trivedi couldn’t help overhearing the heated argument outside her office door. As general manager of the Noida, India, office of KGDV, a global knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) company, she had always encouraged healthy debate on her team, but she was surprised that her head of human resources, Vijay Nayak, and her top project manager, Matt Parker, were going at it in the hallway.

“It’s a benefit they earned, Vijay!” Matt said. “And they’re hard workers. It’s not like we’re just picking our favorites and sending them home to watch TV and bake cookies.”

“But we’re creating a two-tier system,” Vijay responded. “The people left in the office are feeling demoralized. They want to work at home too. And they don’t see why they can’t.”

“They can when they earn it!” Matt practically shouted.

Amrita opened the door. “Vijay,” she said, “are you ready for our meeting?”

Matt sheepishly excused himself and walked away.

“What was that all about?” Amrita asked as she and Vijay sat down.

“Matt’s work-at-homers,” he replied.

(Editor’s note: This fictionalized case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you’d like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and e-mail address.)

 

With headquarters in New Jersey and another office in Manila, KGDV offered a range of services, including market and legal research, but its largest and fastest-growing business was for the publishing industry—converting, indexing, and abstracting journal articles, which its clients, mostly U.S.-based publishers­, then sold to libraries, research institutions, and individual subscribers. Like many KPO companies, it compensated employees on the basis of their output. The more they accomplished, the more they earned—and in the case of the library project Matt ran, the more likely it was they’d be permitted to work remotely.

But Vijay wasn’t happy with how things were going. “We’re facing a potentially disastrous situation,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Amrita asked. “Matt’s reports show huge jumps in productivity. He told me last week that he wants to get even more people in the program. And I’ve heard only good things about the work-at-home employees.”

“That’s the problem,” said Vijay. “You only hear positive things about them. Meanwhile, the hundreds of employees who work in the office feel at a disadvantage. Even if they stay late and work hard, they can’t seem to produce as much as their counterparts who work remotely. The productivity gap keeps widening, which means the compensation gap does too. I’m afraid we’re going to start to lose them. Maybe in droves.”

“Wait. Six months ago you and Matt both sat right here singing the praises of this program.”

This was true. A little over a year earlier, the library project had been growing so fast that the company was running out of office space for necessary new hires. Matt had convinced Vijay that they could accommodate more employees over the longr un if some people worked from home. A similar program had been successful in KGDV’s Philippines office, so Amrita felt comfortable approving a test run.

Matt had worked with Vijay to identify 20 willing candidates from the top 25% of performers on his team and set them up with the technology and support they needed to do their jobs remotely. There had been some hiccups at the beginning, mostly around tech issues, but they’d been resolved within the first month. By the two-month mark, the remote workers were generating almost double the normal output. So Amrita had agreed to let Matt move 25 more employees into the program. Four months later they’d increased the number to 75 and filled the vacated workstations with new hires, upping headcount without adding infrastructure costs. Now Matt had 100 people working from home.

“I was fully on board, but that was before I saw the side effects,” Vijay explained. “Every time a top performer is transferred into the program, the shoulders of those left behind slump a little lower. And my team is fielding lots of complaints.”

“You know headquarters expects us to grow the library project by 25% this fiscal year,” Amrita said. “The demand just keeps increasing.” In fact, she was scheduled to present the expansion plans at the quarterly meeting the following week. “We’re at 98% capacity in this building. To meet the numbers New Jersey is throwing around, we’d need to move at least another 200—maybe 300—employees to home offices and fill their seats here.”

“I know. But if morale continues to slip, we’re going to have a whole different set of empty seats to fill. Honestly, Amrita, Matt isn’t seeing the big picture. I really think we should take time to fully evaluate the program before we expand it again.”

“From what I heard through the door, Matt adamantly disagrees with that,” she replied.

“Of course he does,” Vijay said.

 

Will the Tide Turn?

Late that evening Amrita was headed down to the gym in the basement of the office when she ran into Matt.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said.

Matt’s face flushed. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“That’s OK. Do you have time to talk about it now?”

“Here?”

“Why not? I think we’re the last ones in the office.” They sat down on the steps.

“I know Vijay is concerned about retention, but I think he’s being too cautious,” Matt said. “You’ve seen how much more efficient it is to have employees at home. Our output is up and we’re saving money at the same time. And so far, it’s helped with attrition, not hurt. Our rate is down by 5%, which is outstanding. People see the opportunity to work from home as a huge benefit.”

“But Vijay thinks the tide is going to turn. If the people stuck at the office feel like second-class citizens who can’t ever reach the work-from-home goal, why wouldn’t they leave?”

“He’s giving a lot of weight to the comments of one or two disgruntled people—people, I don’t need to remind you, who aren’t top performers. If they can’t reach a level of productivity that qualifies them to work at home, then maybe they’re not suited for this.”

“You’re saying it’s OK if we lose some of your office-based people?” she asked, surprised.

“No, of course not. But honestly, I don’t see the widespread dissatisfaction that Vijay is describing. My job is to run this project profitably with high quality, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m meeting those objectives. What else can I do?”

Amrita thought about her upcoming presentation, the growth that the executive team was looking for. “Just show me that Vijay is wrong.”

 

From the Horse’s Mouth

Later that week Matt knocked on Amrita’s office door and asked to come in. He had Nisha and Amal, two library project team members, with him.

“I wanted you to meet a couple of my stars,” he said. He explained that Nisha had been in the first wave of employees to start working at home, and she loved it.

“I come into the office once or twice a month for meetings, but mostly I get to make my own hours,” Nisha told Amrita. “If I feel tired, I go for a walk. If I feel energetic at 3AM, I work then. This is the happiest I’ve been at a job in a long time.”

“Nisha’s been our top producer for the past six months,” Matt pointed out.

Then it was Amal’s turn. Matt explained that he’d been hired only two months earlier, so he wasn’t yet eligible to work at home, but he was trying hard to get his output up. “It’s a big part of why I came here,” Amal explained. “Most of the other jobs I considered were entirely office-based and involved a long commute. It takes me 45 minutes to get here, but at least I know I may not have to do that forever. I wanted more freedom.”

If Amrita hadn’t known Matt better, she would’ve thought he’d scripted their lines. But he was too straightforward for that.

“I really appreciate your coming in—especially you, Nisha,” she said.

“No problem—I was in for a training anyway,” Nisha replied.

After the two employees left, Matt asked Amrita what she thought. “I wanted you to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” he said.

“They were persuasive, but they’re just two of 500 employees, Matt. If unhappy employees were as willing to talk to the boss, I’m sure Vijay could get two of them in here too. Why don’t the three of us sit down and hash this out? I’m sick of hearing it from both sides, and I need to figure out what I’m going to say in that quarterly meeting next week.”

 

About Survival

They met that afternoon in a fourth-floor conference room that looked out on the city. Amrita reiterated that she would have to make a recommendation to the executive team; if its growth plans were at risk, she said, she needed to tell the team that.

Matt got right to the point. “This is about the India office surviving. Our customers have more work than we can handle right now, and if we turn them away—‘Sorry, we don’t have the capacity, the infrastructure, the people’—they’ll go to our competitors. There are too many KPO companies in Noida, in India—more every day—for us to be turning down work.”

“But we need to grow smartly,” Vijay said. “And this program has expanded very quickly. Maybe we should pause and take stock of where we are before we push it further.”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said?” Matt retorted. “The ship is leaving, Vijay, and KGDV needs to be on it. We’re turning money away right now, and we stand to lose some of our biggest clients.”

“What about adding more in-office employees 20 or so at a time? We could grow the project more slowly,” Vijay asked.

“Where are they going to sit? Should we start putting two to a desk? Assign half our people to the graveyard shift? Or spend a year and more than a million dollars building a new facility—and turning down business in the meantime?”

Amrita looked at Vijay and shrugged. “He’s got a point.”

“But this experiment is just a year old,” Vijay said. “If we double down on it now, before we know how it works over the long term, we’re taking a huge risk. The output increase and cost savings have been impressive, of course. But they’re short-term results. We don’t know yet whether those employees will continue to be as productive in the next year and beyond. And it’s hurting our employee development. We thought this program would create healthy competition, but it has created two classes. The good performers get even better, and the poor performers get worse.”

“You’re hearing more complaints?” Amrita asked.

“Yes.”

Amrita caught Matt rolling his eyes. “If they want to work at home so badly, let them,” he said. “I don’t see why more employees can’t take advantage of the program. Let’s lower the output threshold and free up even more desks. We’ve got the proof—not just in our own numbers, but in Manila’s, and in all the research out there. People are more productive at home. Period. This is the future, Vijay: the office-less company.”

Vijay shook his head. “That’s not realistic. Sure, many Indian companies are letting employees work from home, but just one or two days a week. The remote employees on the library project are almost never in the office. We have no connection to them. We don’t even know how they manage to complete so many projects in so little time.”

“You think they’re cheating?” Matt was getting angry again.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Vijay replied. “If we can’t see them, work side-by-side with them, then we don’t know what they’re doing so well. We can’t capture their best practices and share them with others. There’s a business benefit to having people together in the same building, and I fear we’re not reaping it. Instead we’re sending our best and brightest home to work in a vacuum. There’s no cohesion if everyone is spread out in his or her own corner of the city.”

Matt was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Amrita, you met Nisha the other day. She comes in for trainings and meetings. It’s not like she’s a faceless number. She’s a valuable employee.”

“But for every Nisha you bring in here, I can show you an employee who’s frustrated and increasingly disengaged by being stuck in the office,” Vijay countered. He turned to Amrita. “I strongly feel that we should slow this program down.”

Matt turned to her too. “Amrita, I respect Vijay’s feelings. But the numbers clearly say we should be moving full steam ahead.”

 

Question: Should the India office expand its work-at-home program?

(Please remember to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and e-mail address.)

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When Do Regulators Become More Important than Customers?

While working with a huge Russian hydrocarbon company in Texas last year, our innovation conversation quickly zeroed in on customers. Who was the energy giant’s most important customer? Which customer had the biggest impact on new value creation? What customer would matter most in five years?

The wide-ranging English/Russian debate raged for 20 minutes. Then one of the engineering executives, a fracking enthusiast and unconventional extraction technologies champion, spoke up. The answer, he declared, was now obvious. The company’s most important customer — by far — was Russia’s government. Strategic success required pleasing Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

The room went quiet. That single comment rebooted the entire discussion. No one disagreed. The innovation roadmap was hauled out and reviewed less in the spotlight of global opportunities than the cold reflection of domestic politics. State satisfaction mattered more than market disruption.

The unhappy innovation inference? Your most important customers may not be the people who buy your products but the ones who regulate your company and industry. With apologies to Ted Levitt, a new “Marketing Myopia 2.0” has emerged. Instead of rethinking “What Business Are We In?,” the better question may be “What Will Our Regulators Do?.” That’s not cynicism; that’s savvy risk management.

Uber didn’t hire former White House advisor David Plouffe by accident. The regulatory handwriting was on the wall and not just in the United States. The app-enabled car service faces resistance and even protests worldwide. But its miseries enjoy great and growing company. Wherever disruptive innovations have captured mind-or marketshare, regulators — not users and consumers — quickly become the customer most worthy of woo. Incumbents and competitors petition for relief and restraint. Twenty-first century market competition in disruptive business environments quickly becomes regulatory lawfare. Upstart innovators are seen as insurgents; they may not have to be crushed, but can’t be allowed to flourish. May the best lawyers and lobbyists win.

For an Uber, Airbnb, Weibo, Google, 23andMe and most strategically-situated post-industrial disruptors, managing regulatory combat quickly assumes primacy over managing either innovation investment or customer satisfaction. Their managements increasingly have to play the odds: What is more likely to get a better and safer return on investment — a really talented software development team in Bangalore, Bogata, or Cambridge? Or a really good lobbyist or ”fixer”—in Brussels, Beijing, or Washington D.C.?

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What successful companies are doing right

These questions, of course, aren’t hypothetical.

All companies — innovative or not — must respect and observe the rule of law wherever they compete. But that creates perverse incentives. The more important laws and regulations become, the more incentive there may be to create more of them. Finding innovative ways to change regulations may prove faster, better, and cheaper than innovatively improving products and services. This is the essence of the Nobel Prize-winning work in Public Choice economics — that lawmakers and regulators have incentives to preserve, protect, and extend their influence and reach. The late James Buchanan, the Nobelist father of Public Choice, described this as “politics without romance.”

George Stigler, another Nobel economist, identified and described the concept of regulatory capture — a sort of economics Stockholm Syndrome  where regulators supposedly empowered to protect the public good end up protecting the individuals and organizations they are supposed to regulate.

Needless to say, these behavioral pathologies lead directly to crony capitalism — where favors, waivers, and selective enforcement of the rules matter as much, or more, to marketplace success as innovative genius. These phenomena are global. And as disruptive innovators in fields from digital self-expression, health care, retail, tourism, and transportation seek to scale globally, they’ll find regulators scaling right along side them.

As a rule, innovators are interested in creative destruction; regulators are not. As a rule, regulators make the rules. The rise of disruptive innovation guarantees a rise of restrictive rules. Those rules assure that regulators become more important, not less. Will regulators become more important to innovators than customers? Follow the money: if legal and lobbying budgets are growing faster than innovation and research budgets, we’ll know the answer.

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What Kind of Leader Do You Want to Be?

It’s the question missing from so much of leadership development: “What kind of leader do you want to be?”

We facilitate and encourage self-awareness among up-and-coming leaders (what kind of leader you are), get them to map their journeys so far (what has made you the leader you are), share knowledge and ideas (what kind of leader you should be), and help them acquire new skills and adopt new behaviors (this is how you can become that kind of leader).

But we don’t focus strongly enough on arguably the most central components to successful leadership – leadership intent (the kind of leader you want to be) and impact (the legacy you want to leave). As a shorthand, I refer to these two components, combined, as your “leadership footprint.”

In my experience, many have thought about their leadership footprint at some point, but few have defined it clearly enough to guide their behavior and evaluate their “success.” Of those who have, fewer give it regular consideration – letting it guide their daily decisions – or share it with others, to get feedback and be held accountable.

Here’s an example of how this looks in action. Gail Kelly, CEO of the Westpac Group, one of Australia’s biggest banks and winner of the “Most Sustainable Company” award at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, has spoken openly and honestly about her personal leadership legacy goals. She’s described these goals as “generosity of spirit.” There are two key elements to generosity of spirit, according to Kelly. The first is believing in the power of people to make a difference (leadership intent). The second is creating an environment that empowers them to flourish to be the best they can be and thereby make that difference (leadership impact).

Kelly does also think about leadership tactics, but these act in service to the greater leadership footprint she’s defined. She defines leaders who have this generosity of spirit as having humility, listening to others, and demonstrating empathy. They are not selfish, intolerant, judgmental, quick to shoot the messenger or find scapegoats, and they don’t sit on the fence to see which way something works out before they decide if they’re going to support it. They deliver feedback honestly and in a timely manner – you don’t wait six or twelve months for your annual performance review. Poor performance is dealt with quickly. And perhaps most importantly, managers choose their assumptions. As Kelly puts it, “I choose to assume that you (my colleague) want the best for me personally and for others. I am generous in my assumptions of your underlying motivations and your intent towards me. Hard as it may be at times, I will assume good intent.”

This approach seems to be working for Westpac – in their internal engagement surveys, 97% of Westpac Group employees report that they can see how their work is linked to the purpose of the company.

I’m certainly not arguing that the one-stop shop for everyone’s leadership success is this idea of generosity of spirit. It works for Gail Kelly because it’s a footprint she has personally chosen and defined. She builds it into her leadership team and ties it directly to results she wants to see in the business.

We shouldn’t all have the same leadership success criteria. We have to define it ourselves. Leaders must give themselves space, time, and permission, and ask for help where they need it, in order to clearly define the culture of leadership they want to build around them. They must assess – both from their own observations and others’ feedback – how they are living up to it, and make the changes necessary to keep building it on a day-to-day basis.

Central to creating a leadership footprint is:

Defining the kind of leader you want to be.
Knowing clearly how that aligns with, and helps achieve, your organizational vision and purpose.
Fostering self-awareness, reflecting on your own behavior and encouraging others to give you feedback.
Recognizing differences that may arise between your intent and your impact.
Self-regulating. As Emma Soane of the LSE says, “The strength and the challenge of self-regulation is ensuring that you have coherence between your personality, your behavior, and your leadership goals.”
Choosing the assumptions about yourself and others that you need to rely on for your leadership footprint to be realistic and sustainable.

My challenge now to every client, whether established or new to their leadership journey, will be the same as the question I need to regularly ask myself: Do you know — and are you mindful on a daily basis of — what leadership footprint you want to make?

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