Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1329

For Leaders, Looking Healthy Matters More than Looking Smart

Every year around this time, people make resolutions to improve their lives and careers. The most common of these typically involve health-related goals such as quitting smoking or losing weight. The next most common might be career goals like finding a new job or getting a promotion. While we tend to separate out career goals from health/lifestyle goals in our minds, in reality there is a lot of overlap. If you’re looking to set some career goals, then you might think about getting healthier too. New evidence suggests that healthy-looking individuals are perceived as better leaders, even over intelligent-looking people.

The evidence comes from a study led by Brian Spisak at VU University of Amsterdam and published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The study asked participants to judge leadership potential by looking at faces. Why examine our reactions to faces? Because they lead us to make snap judgments about other people. To quote the paper, “Qualities such as facial femininity can have a significant impact on who followers endorse as a leader in different situations because these visual signals can serve as a proxy for latent behavioral potential.” Facial femininity, for example, can signal tendencies to befriend or collaborate. Likewise, perceived age can be used to estimate wisdom or experience. Baby-facedness is often, for better or for worse, associated with trust.

In this particular study, the researchers created a collection of simulated faces based on a composite of three undergraduate volunteers (so that no one would recognize a particular person). Four faces were created, all of them clean-shaven white men who were not wearing glasses or jewelry. The researchers then manipulated those faces to make their “person” appear more or less healthy and more or less intelligent, based on previous research on assumptions based on facial features. The researchers then showed pairs of these faces to 148 participants recruited online. For each pair, participants were given one of four fictional company scenarios and asked to choose the new CEO of the company. The four scenarios outlined the CEO’s primary responsibility, either engaging in an aggressive competition strategy, renegotiating a key partnership agreement with another company, leading a new entry into an unknown market, or supervising the continued exploitation of non-renewable resources.

When the researchers tallied the choices of all the participants, both healthy and intelligent-looking leaders were chosen more often. However, health cues were more clearly influential in choosing a leader than intelligence cues. In 69 percent of choices, participants favored more healthy-looking faces over less healthy-looking faces. The tendency to choose healthy faces was dominant regardless of the scenario presented. “Overall, our findings suggest that although intelligence may be important for leadership in certain circumstances,” the researchers write, “health […] appears to dominate decision making in all contexts of leadership.” Intelligent looking faces were only preferred over less intelligent looking faces in scenarios that called for diplomacy or original thinking: the renegotiation and the new market scenarios.

The implications of this study are twofold, covering both the organization and the individual. For organizations, the study suggests that a subtle bias may affect leadership succession planning and unnecessarily favor healthy individuals. According to the paper, “a relatively healthy-looking leader may have a better chance of gaining sufficient levels of followership investment to initiate change. On the other hand, a potential leader who looks relatively less healthy may be over-looked even if they are better suited for the job.”

For individuals, the implications are even more straightforward: get healthy.

Spisak suggests, “If you want to be chosen for a leadership position, looking intelligent is an optional extra” only applicable in certain contexts.  Looking healthy “appears to be important … across a variety of situations.” The researchers even suggest this is why modern politicians have put such care into their health and appearance.

If you use the New Year to set new resolutions and craft a development plan for hitting those goals, then resist the temptation to focus just on career or health goals or to separate out the two in your mind. Instead, think holistically. If you’re looking to get that promotion, your health matters just as much (if not more) than the experience and knowledge you plan to gain this year.

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Things to Stop Doing in 2015

Stop multitasking (it can be done).

Stop procrastinating, saving work for tomorrow, and waiting to be inspired to work.

At the same time, stop working at an unsustainable pace. It makes leading more difficult, and to do things better, you have to stop doing so much.

If that’s not possible, at least stop complaining about how busy you are. Everyone will thank you.

Stop feeling like you have to be authentic all the time. It could be holding you back.

Stop holding yourself back in these five other ways, too.

Stop being so positive — research shows it’s not all that helpful for achieving your goals.

Stop overdoing your strengths (lest they become weaknesses).

And when it comes to evaluating others, stop mistaking confidence for competence.

Stop giving negative feedback as a “sandwich.”

Stop overlooking the women in your organization. And stop relying on diversity training programs to fix the problem. They can’t solve it.

Speaking of things that don’t work: Stop ideating and brainstorming.

Stop trying to delight your customers all the time.

Stop searching for a silver bullet to your strategy dilemmas.

That said, stop using so many battle metaphors when you talk about strategy.

And please, stop using terrible PowerPoints and these equally terrible words in your business communications.

Stop sitting so much. Seriously.

Stop getting defensive. (Not that we’re accusing you.)

And if you can’t stop doing any of these things… stop believing that you have to be perfect.

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Choose the Right Innovation Method at the Right Time

In the industries plagued by the most uncertainty, how do companies hold on to their ability to innovate? And how do they achieve, and keep, an innovation premium in the market?

We found that managers who help their firms create and maintain an innovation premium use a different set of tools than their more traditional counterparts — tools honed in start-ups and specifically designed to manage uncertainty.

Although these tools come by many different names (e.g., lean startup, design thinking, discovery-driven planning, agile software, and so forth) they actually have a remarkable commonality. Where they differ is primarily with regard to the steps of the innovation process they emphasize. For example, design thinking emphasizes understanding customer problems, whereas lean emphasizes solution experiments. One other important difference: They tend to be tools that start-ups easily adopt, but that managers wrestling with day-to-day execution have struggled to incorporate.

In our research, summarized in The Innovator’s Method, we synthesize these perspectives into an end-to-end innovation process and show how successful corporate innovators have adapted these principles to increase their innovation premium:

Although the process may appear simple, even obvious on the surface, the billions of dollars wasted on failed innovation projects annually suggest that it is not so easy to implement. Naturally, innovation is a messy process and you may find that you start somewhere else on the figure (e.g., you already have a solution or business model innovation in mind), but the figure helps us remember that even in these cases, each element has to be addressed before you try to scale the business—or you are in grave danger of failure.

In the figure below, we summarize the key activities of each step.

Innovations always begin with an insight about a potential need, solution, or business model. These are the flashes of inspiration, the clues there is a problem, and the surprises that are lurking in the world around you. For example, as a sales representative at Baxter, Gary Crocker had a busy schedule, but he still spent as much time as possible observing the professionals he served, to understand them better, looking for surprises. As he watched cardiac surgeons work in the operating room, he noticed something obvious and yet completely overlooked: there was a lot of blood. Why? Of course, because it was a cardiac operation. But the blood was causing huge problems for the surgeons trying to work quickly and precisely. Crocker went on to found his first of several multi-million dollar companies, this one to create the “plumbing” that cardiac surgeons now use around the world to manage blood flow during cardiac operations. In our book, we discuss the observation behavior and several other behaviors that we saw innovators use to increase the chances of encountering a valuable surprise.

Once you have an insight, most innovators make the mistake of leaping to straight to solutions without first understanding the real problem, the job-to-be-done. For example, when managing the technology support function first became a major problem for software makers, most entrants into this market assumed the solution was to create a knowledge database for technicians. But Mike Maples Jr. and his team eschewed this approach, first spending weeks watching technicians, timing their calls, listening to the conversations, and mapping out the process. They discovered that only 25% of the call was spent actually addressing the problem with a knowledge database. The other 75% of the call was spent on simple administrative details, such as determining the operating system and the level of support needed. Maples and his team went on to build a multi-million dollar product based on a deep understanding of the problem that all their competitors missed.

After you know what problem you are solving, you need to find the fastest path to the solution. Everyone understands the value of prototypes and many have heard of the idea of a minimum viable product. What we found was that innovators used four types of prototypes: theoretical prototypes, virtual prototypes (or pretend-o-types), minimum viable products, and finally the minimum awesome product, in that order, to reduce their risks and quickly validate the solution. One of our favorite examples? Coin. The founders felt that most individuals hate carrying around multiple credit cards and had the idea to create a single digital credit card that contained the information to be used as multiple credit cards. They created a simple video describing the features of a product that didn’t exist yet and asked for pre-orders to validate demand. The video sold tens of thousands of units well over a year before they actually delivered the product to the market. Using little more than a video (a virtual prototype), they validated that customers wanted to purchase and were able to get details about what features they most valued.

Finally, although incremental innovations can leverage your existing business model, most new innovations require a new business model. You have to experiment to discover the right business model, particularly your go-to-market strategy, or the unique way that your customers find out about, evaluate, purchase, use, and connect to your product. This is a familiar concept. What’s different is the depth of customer engagement you need to discover the right go-to-market strategy unique to your innovation. Sometimes the changes are simple. Several years ago Merck launched a serotonin reuptake inhibitor that, despite having the same mechanism of action as Prozac, experienced dramatically low sales. Only after interviewing physicians and patients did they discover that customers associated these products with a label. Prozac owned the “depression” label, but the “anxiety” label was relatively uncontested. Merck re-launched around the new label and achieved billions in sales. After you have nailed these elements of your innovation, then you are ready to scale. Before that, scaling will kill your innovation because it obfuscates the real source of value and burns your precious resources.

Although the innovation process is messy and non-linear, every innovation we studied went through similar steps. If you are starting with a problem, work through the steps. If you already have a technology or product, go back to understand the problem you are solving. Avoid using surveys and market studies — really go deep and understand the hearts and minds of your customers during the process. Although you won’t eliminate the risk of innovation, you can dramatically reduce it and dramatically reduce the cost of failure, giving you multiple chances to launch a home run.

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Signs That You Lack Emotional Intelligence

In my ten years as an executive coach, I have never had someone raise his hand and declare that he needs to work on his emotional intelligence. Yet I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard from people that the one thing their colleague needs to work on is emotional intelligence. This is the problem: those who most need to develop it are the ones who least realize it. The data showing that emotional intelligence is a key differentiator between star performers and the rest of the pack is irrefutable. Nevertheless, there are some who never embrace the skill for themselves — or who wait until it’s too late.

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Take Craig (not his real name), a coaching client of mine, who showed tremendous potential and a strong ability to drive results for his company. The issue with Craig was the way in which he got those results. When asked to describe him, his colleagues would say things like: “he’s a bull in a china shop;” “he has sharp elbows;” and “he leaves dead bodies in his path.” His approach to executing projects was not sustainable as he wasn’t able to motivate, attract and retain good talent. His direct reports pointed out how frequently Craig seemed oblivious to how he demeaned others. His boss commented on Craig’s impatience and his propensity to lash out at his peers. When I shared this feedback with Craig, he seemed taken aback and was convinced that I had heard wrong. He didn’t have the self-awareness or empathy that are hallmarks of emotional intelligence.

Here are some of the telltale signs that you need to work on your emotional intelligence:

You often feel like others don’t get the point and it makes you impatient and frustrated.
You’re surprised when others are sensitive to your comments or jokes and you think they’re overreacting.
You think being liked at work is overrated.
You weigh in early with your assertions and defend them with rigor.
You hold others to the same high expectations you hold for yourself.
You find others are to blame for most of the issues on your team.
You find it annoying when others expect you to know how they feel.

So what do you do if you recognized yourself in this list? Here are four strategies:

1. Get feedback. You can’t work on a problem you don’t understand. A critical component of emotional intelligence is self-awareness — this is the ability to recognize and stay cognizant of behaviors in the moment. Whether you engage in a 360 assessment or simply ask a few people what they observe, this step is critical in heightening your sense of what you do or don’t do. And don’t just find excuses for your behavior. That defeats the purpose. Rather, listen to the feedback, try to understand it, and own it. When Craig initially heard what others thought of him, he quickly became defensive. But when he accepted the feedback, he moved to owning it and became determined to change.

2. Beware of the gap between intent and impact. Those with weak emotional intelligence often underestimate what a negative impact their words and actions have on others. They ignore the gap between what they mean to say and what others actually hear. Here are some common examples of what those with low emotional intelligence may say and how it’s actually heard:

What you say: “At the end of the day, it’s all about getting the work done.”

What others hear: “All I care about is the results and if some are offended along the way, so be it.”

What you say: “If I can understand it, anyone can.”

What others hear: “You’re not smart enough to get this.”

What you say: “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

What others hear: “I don’t really care how you feel.”

Regardless of what you intend to mean, think about how your words are going to impact others and whether that’s how you want to them to feel. Craig was notorious for saying things that made others bristle, but he began to consider the impact of his words. Before every meeting, he spent a few minutes asking himself: What is the impression I want to make? How do I want people to feel about me at the end? How do I need to frame my message to reach that objective?

3. Press the pause button: Having high emotional intelligence means making choices about how you respond to situations, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction. For example, Craig tended to interrupt and shoot down other people’s ideas before they could complete their thoughts. This behavior was a reaction to his fear of losing control of the discussion and wasting time. So he started to take pauses before reacting. There are two important pauses to take:

Pause to listen to yourself. When Craig was getting impatient and frustrated in discussions, he often felt his jaw clench and his chest tighten. By recognizing these physical signs, he was able to pause and remind himself that he feared losing control. As a result, Craig was better able to determine how he wanted to respond, rather than relying on his default of lashing out.

Pause to listen to others. Listening means helping others feel like you’ve understood them (even if you don’t agree with them). It’s not the same as not saying anything. It’s simply giving others a chance to convey their ideas before you jump in.

4. Wear both shoes. People often suggest you “put yourself in the other person’s shoes” to develop empathy, a key component of emotional intelligence, but you shouldn’t dismiss how you feel. You need to wear both shoes — understanding both your agenda and theirs and seeing any situation from both sides. Craig shifted his approach from “Here are my concerns” to “These are my issues, and I hear your concerns. Let’s determine a way forward that takes both into consideration.”

Strengthening your emotional intelligence takes commitment, discipline, and a genuine belief in its value. With time and practice, though, you’ll find that the results you achieve far outweigh the effort it took to get there.

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Who Provides Tech Support for the Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a funny phenomenon. While the phrase connotes “interconnectedness,” the truth is that these new gadgets, applications, interfaces, and systems aren’t nearly as interconnected as we expect them to be.

Think about it. Why do we have these “things”? We want our lives to be easier; we have connected “things” to gain control and convenience. “Things” allow us to do something, achieve multiple tasks and glean useful, actionable information. They allow us to shop, research, activate, change, transfer, call, watch, monitor, control, and so on, and we expect to be able to realize those tasks wherever and whenever we want – even remotely. Sure, the “things” we’re using to accomplish those tasks work well individually (for the most part), but how many of them work well together and do so consistently? Who can help us make that happen? Who will help when any or many are not inter-operating as expected?

Today, customer service and support for connected devices are primarily focused on the device or system purchased, solely supporting the product at hand by the brand that built or sold it. Tablet companies can push updates to a specific device and provide video chat support, but most can’t or won’t help connect that device to the smart thermostats in a customer’s home. A home security or smart lighting provider can assist with the use of its app on a smartphone, but can that same provider assist with the use of an aggregator solution that initiates a series of activities? For instance, if a smartphone app recognizes a consumer is pulling into the driveway, which activates the garage door, which triggers the lights and deactivates the security system, can that lighting provider help when the lights don’t go on?

Connected technology is impressive, but it leaves us wanting more from the products themselves, and the brands that make and sell them. The optimization and integration of devices remains cumbersome and disjointed, and as connected “things” venture further and further away from traditional technologies for which some level of support is already provided, toward products and packages like Internet-powered toothbrushes, crock-pots, and home security systems, the support gap will only grow. Simply put, this disconnectedness is a byproduct of impressive innovation without the service and support transformation necessary to underpin the real-world use of those interrelated applications.

Manufacturers and retailers are not to blame here. Supporting the IoT is no easy feat. In fact, according to Gartner, the IoT – excluding PCs, tablets and smartphones – will grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020. With far fewer IoT devices today (research suggests an average of five to nine devices and technology services in every U.S. home), there are already tens of thousands of different ways that these devices and services might connect and interact with one another in a single home or small business on any given day or week. That creates countless, unpredictable service points that represent a very complicated technical headache for end users. Just imagine the number of phone calls, chat sessions, text messages and self-help searches that will be necessary to reconcile consumers’ configuration, activation, integration, backup, and security needs across this diverse network of devices by 2020. Now imagine how difficult it could be to establish and maintain a positive customer experience among all that possibility, especially if the definition, scope, and delivery of technical assistance and support don’t change from the current parameters.

The necessary cross-brand integration presents both a huge challenge and a significant opportunity for companies in the IoT business. Tech support is no longer about individual manufacturers, retailers, telcos, and internet service providers’ product sets; it’s about a continuous service experience of the full connected environment to deliver on consumer expectations, while adding customer value to drive loyalty.

Which companies will be the first to remove their blinders and start thinking – and acting – beyond their own brands and their traditional scopes of service to help consumers experience the control, simplicity, and convenience the IoT has to offer?

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The Most Innovative Companies Have Long-Term Leadership

Call 2014 the year of innovation. A Gartner survey of almost 500 executives at global corporations revealed that growth is this year’s top priority. Google Trends reveals that interest in disruptive innovation crept up to peak levels this year. It seems that every time you hop on a quarterly earnings call, the CEO mentions innovation. The M&A markets are frothy, corporations are investing in Silicon Valley labs, and even PhDs looking for jobs in business schools are finding it tough to find homes without “innovation” somewhere in their background.

If innovation is the foundation to building the future, this focus should be reassuring. To overcome disruption and remain relevant into the future, companies need to build the businesses that will replace their legacy offerings.

The only problem: Being excited about a new corporate commitment to innovation assumes corporate investments aren’t the equivalent of cash flushed down the toilet.

And even with the best of intentions, most CEOs start off disadvantaged in building the next big thing. Many of the reasons for this are well documented. Executives have conflicting incentives, the wrong investment metrics, and enormous margin pressure. But sometimes, executives manage to overcome all of these structural challenges and push the right types of ideas regardless of the barriers. Companies like Apple, Amazon, General Electric, and IBM demonstrate the possibility for ongoing reinvention in pursuit of the next big idea.

But it’s more than simple disregard for the quarterly pressures of the public markets that powers these industry behemoths. They also share another quality uncommon among peers. All of their leaders have staying power. Regardless of swings in the public markets, Page, Bezos, Immelt, and Rometty expect to stay in their jobs for a while.

Staying power is vital for innovation. Consider the industry I call home, enterprise software. The typical enterprise software startup that IPOs is at least 7 years old (to say nothing of those that try and fail). Like most businesses, in the beginning it’s nothing more than an idea. But it’s an idea that demands attention, investment, and a long view of the market. Only with patience and perseverance will it flourish. And after these startups hit the public markets, they’re still generally too small for the average CEO of a Fortune 500 business to care about. In the year before Google IPO’d, it did about $962 million in revenue. The same year, Microsoft did $32.1 billion. Had Microsoft owned Google’s search engine at the time, it would have been an tiny piece of the revenue pie.

Just 10 years later – the revenue Google derived from its advertisements was larger than the largest Microsoft business. How times change, right? And that’s the point.

Tackling big audacious problems take time. It’s why venture investors and entrepreneurs tend to be committed for the long haul. Big ideas start small. Everything requires a foundation of results before it can expand. Sure, the distribution and brand that big companies bring to the mix can be useful in accelerating the pace of change, but innovation still requires long timelines. And the vast majority of public company executives don’t share those timelines.

The unfortunate truth is that most public company executives don’t last too long in their roles. Based on an annual survey conducted by the Conference Board, the average CEO departs her role with fewer than 9 years under her belt. If it takes a decade to build a big business, that’s already too short of a time to be the “executive sponsor” for the project. If it only takes 5 years inside a bigger machine, that still means the CEO only has 4 years to start the project if she wants to see it come to fruition. Everything else might die on the vine in transition.

And 9 years is just the average. Look at Hewlett Packard for a horror story. Since 1999, HP has seen 6 CEOs and interim CEOs. Given the constant turnover, even the best of intentions could be made irrelevant. With HPs projects running on annually approved operating budgets and constant executive turnover, many corporations simply can’t be trusted to invest in innovation over the long haul it requires.

Consider what it has taken to push General Electric into the software business. For more than a decade, GE has been adding sensors to its industrial devices and enabling central collection of that data. Slowly, the company built out proprietary software systems to allow its customers to get more out of its product. Today, GE is emerging as a leader solution provider in the “Internet of Things.” But if not for execution against a decade-long plan, it would all be for nothing.

People often like to reference Apple as an example of a company that figured out how to use innovation to drive growth. Certainly they did. But staying power was a key part of the recipe at Apple. Executives spent years plotting their takeover of the mobile computing world and executing. They focused on a few enormous projects and did them incredibly well. And they lasted. From 1997 to 2014, 9 of Apple’s 17 most senior executives lasted more than a decade in the executive team (with 5 of them lasting more than 15 years).

With that kind of dedication, companies can achieve great things. But that’s more than enthusiasm. That’s staying power.

The fact that 2014 is the year of Innovation in the corporation isn’t surprising. We’re in an up market and people are more excited about technology than ever before. But taking excitement and turning it into results requires more than investment. It requires staying power. Projects need to be funded, sponsored, and protected for the long haul.

 

In the second part of this series I will dive a little deeper into the economics of this process. In the third part of this series I will make some suggestions about how to pull it all off in a large organization.

 

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Your Elevator Pitch Needs an Elevator Pitch

Ah, the elevator pitch. A favorite tool of the networking masses. A rite of passage of sorts. You’ve heard the scenario: you step into an elevator and go up one floor. The elevator doors open and in walks the client of your dreams. They start some small talk and ask, “What do you do?” and you’ve got the rest of the elevator ride to respond. How do you answer that in 20 seconds in such a way that gets them interested? The answer is simple. You need an elevator pitch for your elevator pitch.

Today, you’re getting both my word-for-word elevator pitch, my elevator pitch’s elevator pitch, and the secrets behind what makes it all so effective. It all starts when someone asks me…

“What do you do?”

“You mean, in addition to being an international bodybuilding champion?” (I’m 5’10” and a buck thirty-five, soaking wet. When I step on ants, they live. It’s painfully obvious that I’m not an international bodybuilding champion.)

Usually, they laugh. Usually, I laugh too. Then I continue…

“Well, you know how email and texting and social media have pretty much taken over how we communicate?”

“Yes.”

“We’re more connected than ever, but yet…more disconnected than ever. So I teach managers the secrets of true connection in a way that gets immediate results.”

“How do you do that?” (or “What do you mean?” or “What kind of results?”)

“Well, here’s an example. A company hired me because their management staff wasn’t connecting with their employees. It wasn’t their fault, they’ve just never been taught the right way to do it, right? So I went to their management retreat, taught everyone my 4-part formula, and now morale is up and productivity is up 38%. That’s why I’m constantly on the lookout for managers who don’t know the formula. They’re easy enough to spot. They don’t feel like managers, they feel like babysitters. They say things like, ‘This job would be so easy if it weren’t for the people.’ And they don’t have enough time to deal with all that people stuff and get their own job done so they can make the kind of money they deserve and have the kind of time and lifestyle that they don’t even realize they’ve been missing out on. So when you ask me what I do, I give managers their lives back. Life is too short for two out of every three Americans to hate their jobs. I get the feeling you know people like that though, right?”

Now obviously, this elevator pitch is a lot longer than 20 seconds. But here’s why I don’t buy the “20 second” rule.

When people ask “What do you do?” they’re just making polite conversation. With rare exceptions, they don’t really care. If you can’t make them care, then 20 seconds of their attention is generous. But if you do pique their interest, they’ll hold the elevator door and listen to you all day long. So don’t try to cram everything into 20 seconds. Instead, the best use of that first grace period is to make a bid for an attention extension. Now that you’ve seen how I do it, here’s how it works:

Start with a verbal slap. First things first. You’ve got to break their expectations. Most people answer the “What do you do” question with a single, predictable sentence: “I am an architect.” But the human brain only pays attention to interesting things. If you want to be interesting, you need to stand out. Giving them a verbal slap in the face helps break the patterned thought process that made them ask the question in the first place. Patterns, by their very nature, don’t contain anything that stands out. Pattern thinking is why there is almost a zero chance they will remember you.

To “wake them up” you probably won’t be able to use my self-deprecating, bodybuilding joke. That’s the point. You’ve got to say something DIFFERENT – something authentic. Something so totally “you” that they are forced to realize that you are a unique human and not just another “normal” interaction that their robot brain can coast them through. I’d write this for you if I could, but I can’t. Nobody can.

Then ask a problem question. Once you’ve verbally shaken them awake, your next goal is to pose a problem that you suspect they will identify with. This must be spoken as a question. Questions have always been, and always will be, far more engaging than statements. The problem question from my elevator pitch is, “Do you know how email, texting, and social media have kind of taken over how we communicate?”

Some respond with a simple “yes” and some launch into a diatribe about how awful modern technology is. That’s okay, I let them talk. Either way, I’m aligning myself with them against a common enemy. This is one of the most powerful rapport-building strategies there is, besides maybe shared laughter. However, if there is any doubt that I’ve just made a new BFF, I throw in one last rapport builder…

Go to the noddable. A noddable is an inspirational or wise quote that is so catchy and agreeable, it gets just about everyone nodding. People will agree with these so strongly that they may even let an audible, “Mmm!” or an “Amen!” escape their lips. If you want to know if your statement is a noddable, post it as a text image or “meme” on Facebook and see if it produces a response on the like and share buttons, or if the comments below it end with “#truth”.

My noddable is: “We’re more connected than ever, but yet…more disconnected than ever.” (I know…deep.) For additional rapport points, try this advanced technique: pause after the word “yet.” This allows your listener’s own brain to fill in the punchline even before you say it. When they do that, they have ownership of the quote and a small part of them is convinced that they thought of it themselves. Then when you say aloud what they’re thinking, it creates a moment of “great minds think alike” bonding.

So at this point, I’ve already broken their expectations and built some strong rapport very quickly – and I still haven’t even answered their question. That’s coming next. Kind of.

Finish with the curiosity statement. This is where you pretend to answer the “what do you do?” question. However, your answer will only want to make them ask another question. Here’s the simple formula for a good curiosity statement:

“I help/teach ________ (ideal client) to ________ (feature) so they can _________ (benefit).”

Mine was, “I teach managers the secrets of true connection in a way that gets immediate results.” This is so much more powerful than “I’m a speaker and author.” Also, the intriguing vagueness of “secrets” and “results” almost forces them to ask some kind of follow-up question. The hard work is done. Now that rapport and curiosity have been built up, you can deliver your true elevator pitch and make it almost as long as you want.

What about that actual elevator pitch? Even though the heart of this article is really about the elevator pitch before the elevator pitch, below is included a brief overview of the thinking behind my actual pitch too. It’s not perfect, but it has served me very well.

The first thing you’ll notice is that mine is long. It’s at least twice as long as the 20 second so-called “limit.” It starts with a true, results-based story of an individual or company I was able to help in a measurable way. It’s peppered with persuasive language and what I call “hidden salesmanship.” Then it mentions exactly who I’m “on the lookout” for. “They’re usually easy enough to spot because…” then I insert three pain points that my target market will identify with. All the while I’m building my level of enthusiasm and using rhythm, tone, and body language to do the exact opposite of a “verbal slap” – I’m putting them back into patterned behavior. Only this time, it’s a pattern of agreement and not a pattern of resistance.

By the time it’s their turn to talk again, I’ve taught them exactly the type of referrals I’m looking for. In addition, if they’re in need of my services, they’ll be feeling just the right amount of pain that will likely motivate them to begin describing their situation. When they do, I’ll get a meeting by saying, “Hmm, that sounds important enough for us to maybe sit down and talk about.” Surprise, surprise. They agree.

But the last thing you want to do is to make them feel like they’re being pitched to. If you get the sense that it’s turning into a commercial instead of a conversation, then you’re doing it wrong. Stop pitching and ask another question. You should only be doing between 15-20% of the talking.

A final caveat: the number one rule with any communication is to be authentic. Feel free to model my pitch, but unless you make it fit your personality, it will come across as phony and manipulative. And nothing ruins a pitch faster.

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Working Too Hard Makes Leading More Difficult

In 2007, the same day Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone and the same year Twitter debuted at SXSW, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith published a book called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

In it, Goldsmith makes the case that many of the behaviors that initially propel high-achievers up the corporate ladder are paradoxically the same ones preventing them from reaching the very top. Habits like winning too much (the need to win every workplace disagreement, even when it doesn’t matter), adding too much value (adding your two cents to every discussion), and goal obsession (becoming so wrapped up in achieving short-term goals that you forget the larger mission).

Early in your career, these behaviors demonstrate that you are driven. But the moment you step into a position of leadership, they become counterproductive.

Since Goldsmith’s book first appeared in print, another double-edged workplace habit has cropped up—one that would have been difficult to foresee when he first conceived of his book.

Failing to disconnect.

Like many of the practices Goldsmith identifies in his book, it is surprisingly hard to recognize the damage working excessive hours inflicts both on leaders and their teams.

In part, it’s because when you’re first starting out, working evenings and weekends gets you noticed. It is what differentiates you from less motivated colleagues, yielding early recognition and promotions. In this way, hard work becomes ingrained as part of your identify.

While working long hours is often beneficial to early career advancement, as you rise to a position of leadership, maintaining this practice can damage your career prospects.

For one thing, it’s because of shifting job responsibilities.

Early in your career, the primary measure of your performance is how well you manage yourself. But the higher up you go, the more likely you are to have a job that involves managing others. No longer are technical abilities quite as important. Now, success hinges on interpersonal skill.

What happens to our interpersonal skills when we work ourselves to exhaustion? Studies indicate that when we’re low on energy, we tend to misread those around us, typically in a more negative fashion. Happy faces appear more neutral. Neutral face start to look like frowns. What’s more, when we’re fatigued we find it harder to resist lashing out at perceived slights. Not only to do we incorrectly perceive the world around us more negativity, we’re also more likely to act upon that information.

Weaker communication isn’t the only danger of failing to disconnect. So is impaired judgment.

The more senior you are in an organization, the more frequently you’re called upon to make complex decisions. And when it comes to navigating uncertainty and negotiating risk, the research is clear: Decision quality plummets when we’re tired. The more choices you face, the more critical it is for you to restock your energy. Overwork and the sleep deprivation it fosters prevent you from seeing problems clearly and identifying creative solutions.

But perhaps the biggest hazard of failing disconnect once you arrive in a senior position is that your actions make it harder for your team to stay engaged. Why? Because suddenly, your workplace habits are no longer a personal matter. As a leader, your behaviors communicate expectations.

A 2010 study looked at what happens when employees are unable to psychologically detach from work during off-hours. Hundreds of employees at a variety of organizations were surveyed twice—once at the beginning of the study and then again a year later.

The findings were unambiguous. Not only were employees lacking work-free time off less invested in their job a year later, they were more likely to report emotional exhaustion and physical symptoms, like headaches and stomach tenseness.

To be sure, working long hours isn’t always a path to disengagement. As anyone who has experienced sitting in an empty office on a Saturday morning can attest, freely choosing to work on the weekend is a completely different psychological experience than being expected to do so.

Which underscores yet another reason disconnecting from work is vital to leaders’ performance: when laboring non-stop becomes standard operating procedure, it’s difficult for employees to feel like working hard is their choice.

What can we all do to make disconnecting easier? Here, a recommendation Goldsmith noted in his book nearly a decade ago continues to have value: think small.

Find one thing you can change about your behavior and start there. Most attempts at behavior change—from trying to eat healthy to adopting a grueling new exercise regimen—fail for the same reason: they’re too ambitious.

Rather than attempting to modify all of your work habits, find one modest change that you feel comfortable implementing. For example, try leaving your smartphone in another room when you get home in the evening, so that you’re not tempted to check your work email every time your smartphone appears in your peripheral vision.

Or, spend a few minutes learning how to program the emails you send in the evening to arrive first thing in the morning, so that you’re not sucked into a back and forth with colleagues at all hours.

Just as useful: Stop “trying to disconnect” and find an enjoyable activity to fill your time outside the office. Ideally, identify something active you’d like to master: take up biking, join a sports league, sign up for baking lessons. Not only can activities like these refresh your thinking and offer you the perspective that comes with distance, they also enable you to reframe your time away from the office in terms of gain instead of loss.

Rather than chiding yourselves not to work after hours, you are better off proactively engaging in activities you can look forward to doing.

It’s what behavior change experts know: Breaking a bad habit takes more than trying to stop. It requires finding something more appealing you can do instead.

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The Ideas That Shaped Management in 2014

We look forward to the annual task of putting together an end-of-year reading list to keep you busy over the holidays. It gives us an opportunity to look back over all of the ideas and advice we published during the year and see what patterns emerge. We consider which ideas we think will have the best chance of really changing the way people and their organizations work. Which research best answered questions we hadn’t even thought to ask? Of all the ways the world changed in 2014 — economic, cultural, technological, all three — which will matter most to us in 2015? And which pieces of expert advice were most sensible, badly needed, and clearly explained?

So, here’s this year’s list: questions answered, helpful advice, and five themes that came up again and again. We hope you enjoy it.

Mysteries, Solved

The One Thing About Your Spouse’s Personality That Really Affects Your Career

The Real Reason New MBAs Want to Work for Goldman Sachs

Why Didn’t the Other Fukushima Reactor Melt Down?

How Old Are Silicon Valley’s Top Founders?

Would Body Cameras Change Police Behavior?

Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified

What People Are Really Doing When They’re on a Conference Call

Why Is Work Lonely?

Useful Advice on How to Do Many Things

Write a Cover Letter

Say “This Is Crap” in Different Cultures

Negotiate with Someone More Powerful Than You

Answer “What’s Your Greatest Weakness?”

Start a Conversation You’re Dreading

Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

Retail Is More Digital Than Ever, but the Physical Store Is Doing Just Fine

E-commerce Is Not Eating Retail

Why Websites Still Can’t Predict Exactly What You Want

How Data Visualization Answered One of Retail’s Most Vexing Questions

Mastering the Intermediaries

At Amazon, It’s All About Cash Flow

What Chinese Companies Can Teach Silicon Valley

What Airbnb, Uber, and Alibaba Have in Common

Xiaomi, Not Apple, Is Changing the Smartphone Industry

Alibaba Looks More like GE Than Google

Why Facebook Should Worry About Tencent

An Insider’s Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal

How the Precipitous Rise in Inequality Happened, and How It Is Putting Us All at Risk

Profits Without Prosperity

The Rise (and Likely Fall) of the Talent Economy

The Price of Wall Street’s Power

CEOs Get Paid Too Much According to Pretty Much Everyone in the World

Piketty’s Capital in a Lot Less than 696 Pages

Google Adds Benefits, Walmart Cuts Them; Oddly, the Logic Is the Same

The Internet Will Soon Be in Everything

How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition

Is HR As We Know It Over?

It’s Time to Split HR

Do Not Split HR

It’s Time to Retool HR, Not Split It

How Netflix Reinvented HR

How Google Manages Talent

In Hiring, Algorithms Beat Instinct

Hacking Tech’s Diversity Problem

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Why Sales Ops Is So Hard to Get Right

According to “Spin Selling” author Neil Rackham, when Xerox first established a sales operations group in the 1970s to take on activities such as sales planning, compensation, forecasting, and territory design, group leader J. Patrick Kelly described his responsibilities as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force.”

Forty years later, the concept of sales operations or “sales ops” has become widely accepted as essential for effective sales management. With growing demand for data analytics, sales ops capabilities have become an even more important ingredient in sales force success. Perhaps the biggest challenge for sales ops leaders is delivering a huge diversity of work, while operating in a constantly changing business and technology environment.

As an example, a recent job posting on the website of a global healthcare company seeks an individual for a sales operations leadership position who can do the following:

Strategy:

•Contribute to the 1- and 3-year business vision as a member of the executive leadership team.

•Evaluate sales force strategies, plans, goals, and objectives.

•Contribute expertise to optimize sales force and territory sizing, structuring, and alignment.

Operations:

•Oversee sales performance analyses and reporting, territory alignment, and customer profiling and targeting activities.

•Administer quarterly sales incentive compensation plans and the goal setting process.

•Manage sales force automation and CRM systems and processes.

•Provide data, analyses, modeling, and reporting to support sales force quarterly business reviews.

Can one person really handle all this? The diversity of this sales ops role cuts across two dimensions. First, they face many decisions. The job requires knowledge of a range of sales force decision areas, spanning across categories that include strategy, organization design, talent management, incentive compensation, and sales force automation. Second, they must be strategic and tactical. The job requirements span a spectrum from tactical/support tasks (e.g. provide data for quarterly business reviews) to strategic/design activities (contribute to 1- and 3-year business vision).

Consider the competencies required to deliver on some typical sales ops projects.

Strategy:

Responsibilities such as evaluating sales force strategies or optimizing sales force size and structure require a deep understanding of specific sales management issues. These activities are best performed by people who have analysis/design expertise – individuals with strong creative and problem-solving skills, and project management and collaborative abilities. Such individuals have credibility with top executives, and generally crave creativity and variety in their work.

Operations:

Tasks such as administering quarterly incentive compensation plans or managing sales force automation systems require specific technical knowledge. These tasks are best performed by people who possess process/detail expertise – individuals who have a strong operational mindset, are passionate about quality control and efficiency, are technically adept, and generally like structured work, even if it’s repetitive.

An individual who provides the steadiness required to be good at supporting operations is unlikely to possess the competencies, such as outside-the-box thinking, needed for designing strategy. At the same time, an individual who is good at strategy probably lacks the process discipline required to be good at operational work. Asking a process/detail expert to do the work of an analysis/design expert, or vice versa, is a recipe for disaster.

What does this mean for sales ops leaders? They must hire, develop, manage, and lead a team of people with diverse and specialized competencies who do fundamentally different jobs and likely have dissimilar career aspirations. The team must not only cover a broad range of sales force issue expertise; it must also include process/detail experts and analysis/design experts working together aligned around the goal of sales force success.

Strategies that use both internal and external (outsourced) resources enable sales ops leaders to build and manage these diverse capabilities cost-effectively.

Building a strong internal team requires defining roles and responsibilities, developing hiring profiles, acquiring talent with the right characteristics (including analysis/design and process/detail capability) and continuously developing and nurturing that talent. Companies such as GE use internal teams to oversee many sales ops projects. Team leaders have competencies in quality management and process improvement methods, giving them analysis/design expertise, along with an appreciation for processes and details. These leaders can structure problems, delegate work, and help process/detail people see the big picture so that everyone works toward a common goal. Many companies look for sales ops talent outside the immediate group by encouraging job rotations with other company departments, such as finance or marketing. Also, rotations between the sales force and sales ops can allow salespeople/managers to build on their sales experience while broadening their skill set. As salespeople become increasingly tech-savvy, more will possess the technical and analytic ability and interest needed for a sales ops role.

Companies can also use outsourced resources to deliver many sales ops capabilities. Some outsourcing partners excel at process/detail work; others bring analysis/design expertise. Onshore partners can provide functional and industry expertise, based on their experience working with many companies. Because of advancing technology, disappearing cultural barriers, and greater business expertise among offshore talent, many companies are using offshore partners for both types of work, allowing them to source the best expertise while reducing long-term costs.

The right person to lead sales operations is someone who respects both the analysis/design and the process/detail mindset, who can envision the business and technology future, and who can work with leaders across the organization, as well as with external partners, to enable ongoing sales force success.

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