Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1334
December 19, 2014
Your Boss Won’t Say Yes If Emotions Are Running High
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Pitching an idea to higher-ups inevitably stirs emotions. You feel a sense of investment and urgency — it’s your baby, after all. By making a compelling case to redesign a key process or develop a promising new offering, for instance, you can have a big impact on productivity or revenue. (And if you fail to get buy-in, the organization might suffer — along with your career.) Further complicating matters, decision makers may balk if they think you’re being overly emotional, or they may feel defensive if you’re proposing a change to something they’ve done.
In our research on how middle managers sell their ideas up the chain of command (which we describe in the January-February 2015 issue of HBR), we’ve found that those who do so most successfully are the ones who manage emotions on both sides. Drawing on the experiences of the “issue sellers” we’ve studied, we’ve gleaned these guidelines.
Managing your own emotions: Conveying passion can improve your chances of gaining attention and triggering action. But there’s a fine line between intense passion and negative emotions, such as anger and frustration. Those can actually diminish your influence, because decision makers may perceive you as a complainer, not a change agent. It’s a vicious cycle. Suppose you’re voicing concerns because you’re fed up with existing conditions or behavior in your organization. As you encounter road blocks to your selling efforts, your frustrations are likely to intensify, and people may become even less receptive to your message.
By contrast, as research by Wharton’s Adam Grant shows, people who keep their emotions in check (or at least control what they display) feel more comfortable raising issues to others and receive higher performance evaluations. Our study supports that finding: Successful issue sellers pay significantly more attention to emotional regulation than those who fail. And the ones who fail often understand that runaway emotions are partly to blame.
For example, one mid-level manager who had argued for flexible work schedules explained how “the whole situation turned way worse” after she lost her cool. She was one of very few female managers at her project-management company, with 12 direct reports and about 50 indirect reports. The senior executives had asked her and a few colleagues to help improve the environment for working mothers. So she had felt confident in suggesting flexible schedules to reduce turnover and improve performance and job satisfaction.
You and Your Team
Managing Up
Best practices for interacting with your boss.
But in her pitch, she focused on her own situation, which she now realizes may have caused her to lose objectivity. A full-time employee and mother of two kids, she was studying for a master’s degree and going through a divorce. She wanted to work late a couple of days a week to make time for exercise in the morning, which helped her manage her stress and energy levels. Her boss didn’t think she should adjust her hours for the sake of exercise — she looked fine, he said, and she should change her personal habits instead to fit her work schedule.
“I got very upset,” she told us. “I told him that all this talk about ‘helping women and moms’ was just words.” She believed that, but she regretted how she handled the situation. “My relationship with my boss was never the same again. A year later, when layoffs were needed, he let me go. He gave other reasons, but I’m sure our altercation had a lot to do with it.”
Managing the decision maker’s emotions. As important as self-regulation is, it’s equally critical to understand and manage the decision maker’s emotions—they, too, can make or break your pitch. In our study, an engineering manager at an energy company did this especially well. He wanted to sell his boss, the GM, on a safer and cheaper gas-scrubbing technology. But his boss had selected the existing system just a year before. So the engineering manager was careful to preempt any defensiveness by pointing out in a presentation to senior executives that user reviews of the new technology hadn’t been available when that decision was made. As a result, the skeptical GM gave a fair hearing to a detailed comparison of the two systems and the data suggesting that the new one would remove contaminants more efficiently and reduce costs by $700,000.
The engineering manager made another smart move, as well: He brought in a bio-gas expert his boss trusted and respected to discuss the new system’s merits. That is, he didn’t just regulate the GM’s negative emotions — he also triggered positive emotions. That was an effective tactic for others in our research sample, too. Successful issue sellers reported doing this more often than those whose pitches fell flat.
So as you are trying to figure out how to gain attention and resources for your ideas, attend to emotional regulation as carefully as you do to tailoring your pitch, framing the problem, getting the timing right, and other proven tactics of persuasion. Know your own hot buttons and your audience’s, and think about how to generate a positive response.
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December 18, 2014
How to Prevent Experts from Hoarding Knowledge
Asked if he would be willing to share his hard-earned knowledge with others in the company before he retired, the engineer laughed. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “First off, I don’t owe this company anything more. I’ve given 35 years to this outfit, and I hope they miss me when I’m gone. Or,” he added with a bit of a twinkle, “hire me back at double pay as a consultant.”
There we had it in one concise capsule: a few of the reasons why retirees refuse to share their experience-based, business-critical knowledge — what we call deep smarts. By definition, those deep smarts are still valuable to the organization and underlie future as well as current success. They may be technical, as in the engineering example, but they can also be managerial, as when an experienced manager has hard-earned skills in problem identification and solution, crucial relationships with customers, or a detailed understanding of how to innovate.
If such knowledge leaves with retirees, it may be lost for good. In our research on knowledge transfer, we have seen companies greatly disadvantaged, if not crippled, by knowledge loss. Certainly, some expert knowledge may be outdated or irrelevant by the time its possessors are eligible for retirement, but not the skills, know-how, and capabilities that underlie critical operations — both routine and innovative. Organizations cannot afford to lose these deep smarts.
Lack of time or resources can, of course, constrain knowledge transfer. But one barrier to passing deep smarts along to the next generation that is often unaddressed is the expert’s inclination to hoard knowledge. Financial incentives, personal ego, and discontent or frustration with the company are three of the top reasons individuals choose to keep their expertise to themselves. But they’re also three issues that managers can actually change.
Let’s start with financial incentives. Many companies hire retirees back to do the same jobs they have always done but with double pay: consulting income tacked on to their pension. In the survey we conducted as part of our research for Critical Knowledge Transfer: Tools for Managing Your company’s Deep Smarts, 42% of respondents reported that kind of revolving door was a typical way of retaining knowledge. The moment that the time limit restricting rehiring retirees expires, the retiree clips his ID badge back on — and heads for the same door he’s been walking through for decades, again with little or no incentive for mentoring successors.
Hiring back retirees to run critical operations is shortsighted. Not only does it cost the company more financially, but it also doesn’t guarantee the successful transfer of knowledge. Eventually those deeply smart people will depart for good, leaving the same knowledge gap behind them. There are precedents for eliminating the financial motive to hoard. GE’s Global Research Centers, for example, now hire back pensioners almost exclusively to mentor and share their knowledge with more junior colleagues, not to return to operational positions. This was a relatively recent — and contentious — change. But it was essential to pass on to the next generation of scientists and engineers, those deep smarts that had led to thousands of patents underlying GE’s products and reputation. In addition, GEGRC put a knowledge transfer program in place for those still working within the company to institutionalize knowledge sharing.
Beyond financial incentives, experts may have personal reasons behind their impulses to hoard. Many experts are widely recognized as the “go-to” person in some capacity, and their deep smarts are strongly linked to their identity and their standing in the organization. It is satisfying to have colleagues seek them out to solve problems and offer solutions, and they fear that passing along their hard-won expertise to more junior colleagues would diminish their own stature. Why would they let that go?
As a manager, don’t wait until an individual has a monopoly on certain kinds of know-how — set systems in place to prevent it long before it’s time for an individual to retire. In some organizations, employees cannot be promoted until they can prove that they have mentored a successor. Personal reputation therefore depends not only on how skillfully people do their job, but how good they are at teaching others to do it. At other companies, such as Nucor Steel, compensation is based on how well the team is performing. That dependency breeds the necessity to help each other and for experienced operators to transfer their expertise to other team members. Strategies like these force knowledge sharing and interaction as part of the culture; in fact, hoarding invokes built-in penalties.
Possibly the toughest expert to convince to share knowledge is someone who’s dissatisfied with the company they’re leaving. The retiring aircraft engineer in the example above felt his work had never been valued. The lives of pilots and passengers depended on the skills and dedication of maintenance engineers, yet they were low on the totem pole. “We were invisible. No managers ever even knew what we did,” he declared. This bitter observation may have been based more in perception than reality, but it was no less powerful as a motive to refuse to pass along his own deep smarts.
Take notice of those who may be bearing resentment. Individual managers wield an inordinate amount of influence over whether or not experts feel their work is valued. Acknowledging good work is the first step. As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have demonstrated in their research, small acts such as providing frequent positive feedback, celebrating small wins, and removing obstacles to progress, pay huge, immediate dividends in productivity and creativity.
Such attention also offers long-term benefits. In a number of companies we have worked with to transfer deep smarts, experts spoke of “paying back” and “leaving a legacy.” They were more than willing to share what they had learned over the years. Of course, such willingness derives from personality as well as a supportive organizational environment, but much research (including our own) has shown that people who have been mentored themselves are much more likely to mentor others. In essence, a culture of mentoring becomes self-perpetuating.
The capability to transfer deep smarts from experts to their successors, as one manager we worked with recently observed, is not just “nice to have,” but an “absolute need to have.” Hoarding knowledge is a luxury that no organization can afford.
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Hospital Coalitions Save Money and Improve Care
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It used to be that hospitals and health systems operated as islands, selecting and purchasing medical supplies, devices and medications in isolation, and keeping their operational and leadership practices to themselves. Now, because of ever-increasing financial stress and clinical demands, hospitals are engaging in deep forms of collaboration to reduce costs and improve outcomes for patients. The result is enhanced performance for all involved.
Geographical purchasing coalitions began forming roughly 10 years ago in order to combine purchases of the most commonly used medical supplies such as exam gloves, syringes, and hospital gowns. Since that first foray into negotiating lower prices for commodity items, these coalitions have expanded their reach to include aggregation of supply purchases of items such as implantable medical devices, as well as drugs, capital purchases like CAT scan equipment and even electricity.
An example of this type of collaboration is VHA’s Upper Midwest Consolidated Services Center (USMCSC). The 42 members of this purchasing coalition formed in 2008 include Mayo Clinic, Swedish Covenant Hospital, and Sanford Health. This coalition has been able to consolidate the purchase of approximately $2 billion in medical devices, supplies, and pharmaceuticals each year, consistently saving 15% to 20% on contracted items year over year.
The power of the UMCSC underscores that while an individual hospital – or even a health system – may be the largest in its local market it may not have optimal buying power until it can partner with others. In looking at the average size of retail and healthcare companies they found that in the retail industry, typically a $7B supplier sells to a $118B retailer, but in non-profit healthcare it is more common to have a $16B supplier selling to a $1B hospital system. Those numbers yield a very different type of supplier/customer conversation. For a small community hospital, the ability to consolidate purchasing with other hospitals can shift the purchasing balance to be more in their favor. And when facing a manufacturer who has no incentive to lower the cost of their products, the collective power of a number of hospitals provides the leverage they need to negotiate a better contract.
AllSpire Health Partners is a newly formed consortium of seven health care systems (containing 25 hospitals) in New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania that is sharing clinical practices, intellectual assets, and economic capabilities to improve quality, population health management, and medical research, refine best practices, and reduce costs.
Large and small hospitals are also coming together to leverage each other’s knowledge and experience to improve pharmacy standardization that reduces costs and improves safety and patient outcomes. These groups are focusing on the top drugs and drug classes that make up the majority of their annual purchases, focusing on identifying the most cost effective drugs and finding ways to curtail overutilization.
Similar alliances are emerging nationwide, often in the form of accountable care organizations whose member providers share responsibility for a patient’s end to end care. Other alliances have formed that focus on improving negotiations with payers or standardizing shared electronic medical records platforms.
The effect of these deeper levels of collaboration among hospitals is two-fold; first, they help deliver better outcomes by reducing variation; and second, they increase the speed at which leading practices and innovation spread.
It’s encouraging to see the creative collaboration hospitals are undertaking to reduce costs and improve outcomes. While collaboration is always challenging, the health care benefits are by now clear. Hospitals that continue to operate in isolation, sharing neither buying power nor best practices and expertise, will find it increasingly difficult to compete with those that do.
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Setting the Record Straight on Managing Your Boss
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Everyone knows how helpful it is to have a positive relationship with your boss and that it’s up to you to make it work. But do you know how to best interact with your manager to get what you need, support her success, and excel at your job?
Chances are you’ve gotten some advice on this topic — from a well-meaning friend, a mentor, or even an article or book. But are you getting the right guidance? We asked readers (and our own editors) what advice they hear most often and then talked with two experts to get their perspectives on whether the conventional wisdom holds up in practice and against research.
1. “Always bring solutions — not problems — to your boss.”
“Problems don’t make anyone happy and bringing unsolved problems to your manager makes it look like you’re not doing your job,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t. So, yes, it’s a good idea to spend time thinking through an obstacle and coming up with at least a few potential solutions before sitting down with your manager.
You will build an even stronger relationship with your boss, says Pfeffer, if you take it a step further and make those solutions look like they were his idea. “We like our own ideas, our own names, our own birthdates,” says Pfeffer, citing the self-enhancement effect, which biases us toward things that relate to ourselves. Frame your proposed answer to the problem as consistent with what the boss has said in the past. You might say: “We can do x, which I know you’ve suggested before.”
There are limitations to the “bring solutions, not problems” rule, however, says Linda Hill, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and co-author of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation and Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader. Some people, afraid of not having the right solution in hand, don’t do anything. She points to a case at Flextronics where a manager waited too long before escalating an issue, and put the company’s largest account at risk. “If there’s a problem and you don’t have a solution, don’t just sit around doing nothing. Go ask your boss for help,” she says. It’s the role of the manager to think through possible remedies to problems that you can’t solve on your own. So Hill suggests an alternative interpretation of this advice: “Go to your boss with a few options if you have some but also feel safe to occasionally ask for help working out a solution.” Your boss is busy, so don’t do this all the time, but if you build trust she will know that you’re coming without a solution because you really need her help.
2. “Never cry in front of your boss.”
Pfeffer says that from a power perspective, crying is a bad move. “You definitely don’t want to show that you’re emotionally weak,” he says. He points to the work of Larissa Tiedens, which proves that anger is viewed as a much more powerful emotion. “Crying would demonstrate sadness, which gives away a lot of your power,” he says.
But, as Hill points out, sometimes you just can’t control your tears. “I’ve had people cry in my office and it’s usually because they’ve gotten bad news or something’s happened in their lives,” she explains. Hill says that she didn’t judge these people: “It was a time for me to show some compassion.” Women are physiologically more prone to crying, as this video from Anne Kreamer explains, so this advice may be something that women hear more than men.
You and Your Team
Managing Up
Best practices for interacting with your boss.
There are experts who disagree that crying doesn’t belong in the office. Some have even advocated for the appropriateness of tears at work. Still, both Pfeffer and Hill agree that if you think you won’t be able to control your emotions, you might want to put off the conversation with your boss. “Controlling your emotions is a sign of emotional intelligence,” says Hill. And if you do break down, don’t just let the tears fall. Explain yourself: “You shouldn’t assume that your boss will know what your tears mean. Explain how you’re feeling — sadness, frustration — so you don’t leave her guessing,” says Hill.
3. “Under-promise and over-deliver.”
Hill and Pfeffer both agree this is a good idea. Hill says that when she asks leaders why they’d chosen to mentor certain employees, they often said it had to do with the results they’d seen them deliver. One manager explained: “When I ask her to bring me a fish, she brings me back a whale.”
“What looks like good or bad performance depends on what the expectations are and if you give the boss more than you said you would, you’re going to come off looking good,” says Pfeffer. He says that you can think of this tactic as similar to anchoring in negotiations. Research shows that if you make the first offer in a negotiation, you’re likely to have a bargaining advantage. When you promise your boss that you’re going to convert five customers this week, that’s your anchor offer. If you actually convert seven, then you’ve smartly managed his expectation.
You need to be careful though. Hill says that she’s seen some people get into hot water by under-promising. “Sometimes you don’t get the resources that you need to deliver on the higher number.”
4. “Don’t be friends with your boss.”
This one can be sticky. Pfeffer points out that you want a strong relationship with your boss no matter what. “The more the boss likes you, the more she feels favorably towards you. The more the boss feels like she has a stake in your success, the better off you’ll be,” he says.
Hill warns, however, that you shouldn’t think of it like other friendships: “I think you can be friendly but don’t get confused. This isn’t like other relationships. If your boss has to choose between what’s best for you and what’s best for the enterprise, he’s likely to choose the latter.” She also points out that while a close relationship can be good for you, it may hurt the boss’s credibility if people think he’s playing favorites. “People will know that you’re friendly and your manager may need to distance from you to show that he’s not being partial,” she says.
Nor should you try to get close with your manager for purely political reasons. “A relationship that’s based on you making a power play isn’t likely to be a strong one, and you run a higher risk of it ending in disaster, especially if your boss senses that you’re getting close to her to advance your own career,” writes author Karen Dillon in “Can You Be Friends With Your Boss?”
5. “Let your work speak for itself.”
According to Pfeffer, this is malarkey. Yes, you need to do good work but your boss isn’t going to automatically notice. “You boss is busy and has his or her own biases,” he says. “It’s not like if you perform well, all will be fine.” Instead, you have to find ways to promote your work. “Visibility really matters,” agrees Hill. She suggests you consider what evidence your manager has for your accomplishments and competence and if you haven’t given her enough, you find ways to present your work or talk about the results you’ve delivered recently. “You are responsible for making your boss appreciate the good work that you do,” Pfeffer says.
Pfeffer says that most people know what they need to do when it comes to managing their bosses, “they just have trouble doing it.” This is in large part because many people struggle with hierarchical relationships. “They want to believe that it’s a just world and that the quality of your relationship with your boss shouldn’t matter, but it does.” So even if the idea of managing up makes you feel squeamish, it pays to respect this important part of your job.
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Strategic Humor: Cartoons from the January-February 2015 Issue
Enjoy these cartoons from the January–February issue of HBR, and test your management wit in the HBR Caption Contest. If we choose your caption as the winner, you will be featured in an upcoming magazine issue and win a free Harvard Business Review Press book.
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“All in favor, look up from your cell phones.”
Kaamran Hafeez
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“It’s OK. You’ll always remember him by your security question.”
David Quintanar
And congratulations to our January–February caption contest winner, Matthew Hunter Gillezeau of Vienna, Virginia. Here’s the winning caption:
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“I’m more and more convinced that the business is aligned along the wrong verticals.”
Cartoonist: Paula Pratt
NEW CAPTION CONTEST
Enter your caption for this cartoon in the comments below—you could be featured in an upcoming magazine issue and win a free book. To be considered for this month’s contest, please submit your caption by January 9.
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Cartoonist: Paula Pratt
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December 12, 2014
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