Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1336

Companies Should Be Required to Disclose Their Gender Stats

The push for board quotas in the EU has been relatively successful. Ten countries have signed on, and the gender balance on these countries’ boards has improved significantly. However, much of the improvement has come from the addition of women as non-executive board members, the trickle down effect on executive teams has not been obvious, and the benefits remain hotly debated. Key countries, like the US and the UK, are unlikely to adopt similar measures. Still other countries have adopted voluntary targets, with mixed results. (Here’s a complete overview of the board situation.)

The challenge is that adding a few non-execs to your board is proving a lot easier than balancing your leadership teams. Recently Google has led Silicon Valley companies in a collective and public recognition that their gender balance is not satisfactory, and published some aggregate statistics. The corporate world is gradually responding to the pressure for greater transparency on their internal reality, which up to now has been jealously guarded. It would help to come clean, so that we can really compare companies and countries.

Rather than legislating quotas, why not require the publication of companies’ gender statistics beyond their highly visible boards? Such transparency would allow everyone from talented graduates to savvy investors to see which companies are truly – and sustainably – balancing their senior leadership ranks. And it would allow men and women who want to work for or invest in balanced companies to be able to identify them. What company will be credibly able to argue against transparency?

Google said it best: “It is hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.” We need better, more specific data – not just aggregate statistics on whether companies have any women in management, or a certain percentage of female employees. Such broad datasets obscure the important question of how many companies manage to balance their senior leadership teams, and by how much.

Let’s keep things simple. For our initial purpose, let’s focus on the top. To keep it easily comparable and implementable across companies, let’s stick to the top: publish, in the annual report, gender balance statistics for the top three levels: the CEO, the CEO’s team, and that team’s direct reports.

While some may argue that this is a limited view, we’d suggest it is far more representative than the board, and represents the reality of decades of corporate efforts (or lack thereof) to improve the balance of the sexes. Let’s also measure whether the leaders in question are in support functions or operational roles. And while we’re at it, why not make it a global metric? Why not get a few key names and institutions to align behind the idea and push it?

This would be enough to raise the pressure and the visibility of what companies have achieved with their efforts and initiatives. It would reward the best companies and employers with enhanced visibility and encourage the rest to balance. It would enable researchers everywhere to analyze what really works – and what doesn’t. It would allow the world’s best talent to choose to work in more progressive and balanced environments.

Although I’ve tried to keep this simple, I know how difficult it will be.

We have carried out research on executive teams for the past five years with our Global Gender Balance Scorecard. We know just how hard it is to come up with comparable results, even with our limited focus on the top two levels. So many companies hide the reality of their unbalanced top teams behind impossibly large “leadership teams.”

The UK and Australia have both been pushing for clearer reporting. The UK’s Think, Act, Report initiative is a good model, which some 200 companies have signed up to. The issue seems to be that they may not all be reporting exactly the same thing, or the key levels that we will be interested in: the top teams.

Australia has focused on analyzing just the top three levels of management (Key Management Positions or KMPs) in their newly introduced Gender Equality Scorecard and the results are very clear. “Women comprise 26.2% of the top three layers of management. Employers are failing to take a strategic whole of enterprise approach to gender equality; only 7.1% have a standalone overall gender equality strategy. And a third of companies have no female KMPs at all.”

The US has a variety of initiatives, like The Chicago Network’s survey of the city’s 50 listed companies. Since 1998, this analysis has tracked the gender balance on the board and among “top earners.” This year’s study reveals that more than 25% of top earners are female at only four companies. At two-thirds of the companies in the study, no top earners were female.

But none of these studies are sufficient to help women easily see which companies value them – and which don’t.

The simple metric I’ve proposed here could be a precursor to the spread of more detailed national reporting requirements. Such reporting should be voluntary at first. Start by inviting all the big publicly listed companies (Fortune 100, FTSE 100, CAC 40, DAX 30, and so on) in each key market to submit their data (we already report on their data on the level reporting in to the global CEO). Also publish the list of companies that have not provided their data. Once the survey gets established, propose it to governments as a legislative requirement in annual reporting. The objective is to create a very simple global index that will get CEOs competing on their gender ranking. That’s when CEOs will start getting serious about sex.

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A Better Way to Think About Risk

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Few people would question the value of risk assessment. Without it, we would plunge thoughtlessly into situations that could lead to considerable harm. But upon closer inspection, risk assessment is itself a dangerous double-edged sword.

There are numerous counterexamples where, at least in hindsight, even a simple assessment of risk would have killed a business idea that turned out later to be a huge success. The launch of Facebook, for example, might not have been justified when MySpace and Friendster were industry leaders.

So is there a better way to think about risk, especially in fast-changing environments? I suggest three: 1) understand how the brain processes risk; 2) remember that risk-taking can be a good thing; 3) learn to become an expert at bouncing back from failure, thus taking some of the sting out of risk-taking.

1. Understand how the brain processes risk. Recent evidence from brain science suggests that we need to reframe how we think about risk and that we need better tools for assessing it. While we all have biases that make us underestimate risk, and we need to take those into account, new research suggests that there is even more going on than we thought.

Risk-taking may be conscious or unconscious. When it is unconscious, you may not be aware of the risk or how you are framing it. In this case, doing a risk assessment limits your conclusions to conscious factors, thereby excluding the potential impact of unconscious biases.

Risk assessment may also be driven by feelings. Feelings can obscure important rational thinking or they can promote it. Even if we’re conscious of our feelings, how are we to know which effect they will have when we’re facing a big decision?

Furthermore, whether you take a risk or not may be entirely based on your personality. Research has shown that people who are sociable, impulsive sensation-seekers or aggressive may be especially likely to take risks. So assessing a situation and its risks are not enough. You also have to assess the final decision on your propensity to take risks based on your personality.

When I work with decision-making teams, I have used tools to uncover some of these biases. One is this checklist of the psychological traps and unconscious biases in decision making, and another is Gearshift, an app for dealing with obstructive emotions. MoodKit is a mobile app that also helps users understand cognitive distortions.

2. Remember that risk-taking can be a good thing. “Risk” often has inherently negative connotations, which may bias you against taking smart risks. So make a conscious effort to remember that risk-taking may be adaptive and may even lead to positive outcomes. In adolescence, for example, it may confer certain advantages because this is when we learn how to adapt to a rapidly changing world. If we consider the “college kids lacking business sense” who started Facebook versus the professional managers at NewsCorp who ran MySpace like a business, it is clear whose risk tolerance paid off. While this does not give high-risk strategies carte blanche, it does point out how risk mitigation can make you fall into a blinding prudence trap and how taking risks can lead to a big payoff. Steve Jobs taking a big risk to open up Apple retail stores despite physical storefronts being a risky business for computer manufacturers illustrates that a sober risk assessment is far from the be-all and end-all of decision making.

Here, I recommend the opportunity model of change, a tool helps leaders find opportunities in adversity. This HBR article also details some of the hidden dangers of being too risk-averse.

3. Learn to become an expert at bouncing back from failure. Many people who have failed due to taking risks have subsequently succeeded. The brain is rigged for error-based learning, so why shouldn’t we become better at experimenting rather than trying to avoid failure through risk assessment? Steve Blank, whose company Rocket Science Games was supposedly going to revolutionize the video games industry, lost $35 million in funding. Instead of quitting, he went on to start another company, E.piphany, which resulted in each of its investors making $1 billion.

Even though failure is a badge of honor in Silicon Valley, there are plenty of people who fail in launching new businesses and fade from the scene completely. What makes one person different from another? In large part, it’s resilience and openness.

Here, I have used a tool called Burnout Buster that measures how early- or mid-stage burnout can hurt resilience and recovery, and a tool called BEND, which helps leaders develop 16 resilience competencies. HBR has also published several seminal articles on improving your own resilience: “Building Resilience,” by Martin Seligman, “How Resilience Works” by Diane Coutu, and “How to Bounce Back from Adversity,” by Joshua Margolis and Paul Stoltz.

The message here is that in our rapidly changing world, our traditional way of thinking about risk assessment is inadequate for business strategy and decision-making. More than ever, learning new techniques and tools will help us achieve better outcomes in this era of dramatic and disorienting change.

Risk assessment can be a valuable way of collecting data and structuring reflection. But we need to expand our skills if we want to rise to the challenges and capture the opportunities in front of us.

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Retiring Boomers Should Consider Selling Their Companies to Millennials

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Four million privately-held businesses stand to change hands over the next two decades as baby boomers, the largest group of owners of these companies, continue to retire. For a reported 75% of these owners, an exit plan is not in place.

There’s one ownership transition few of these companies have thought about: finding a talented millennial, fresh out of business school, and putting him or her in charge. But believe it or not, this is an increasingly appealing option.

In truth, most millennials have never thought about it either. Those who aspire to run companies are more likely to found one than try to buy. But that may change, thanks to the success of ”search funds“.

First popularized amongst the Ivy League community, particularly Harvard and Stanford, search funds are propelling entrepreneurially spirited post-MBA and other young professionals into the helms of small and mid-sized private companies. Backed by institutional investors and “friends and family” capital, these young would-be managers (a.k.a searchers) conduct a one-time search to find, acquire, and then run a business. After spending months homing in on an industry and business they believe in to identify the right fit (“the search”), they make the acquisition, relocate to headquarters, and become the new owner-operator.

For sellers without an effective succession plan — perhaps they do not have a natural heir or want to avoid corporate or institutional buyout — selling to a search fund can offer the continuation of a business’s operations in a fairly uninterrupted manner. The incoming CEO steps right into the shoes of the departing one, supported by the existing management team. Searchers are also in it for the long haul — they typically remain in the company well beyond the typical five to seven year window of a private equity buyer. For investors, average returns of the search fund “asset class” have been north of 30%, mitigating early skepticism. And of course, for the searchers, the process offers a middle path between joining a large corporation and starting something from scratch.

More broadly, the search fund model seems uniquely fitted to our demographic moment. As the population ages and more and more owner-operators retire, search funds offer young professionals a chance to grow into the CEOs and corporate leaders of tomorrow.

What does this mean for the businesses these professionals acquire? Selling to a search fund doesn’t mean bowing to the whims of a millennial. Searchers come to the table equipped with mentors, either business school professors or investors from the private equity firms backing them. So businesses are getting the best of both worlds: the vigor of millennial leadership with the security and structure of mature backers.

While the companies that end up selling to search funds are typically ones characterized by strong financial profiles, loyal customer bases, and steady, consistent growth, that profile could expand. We are on the cusp of a major generational transition in leadership. One way or another, as boomers retire, more millennials will end up in charge.

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What to Do If Your Boss Is a Control Freak

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It may have seemed well-intended at first — your boss kept close tabs on your work and made sure you presented yourself well throughout the company. But now that you’re no longer learning your role, the tight leash feels downright oppressive and embarrassing. Your boss is not only micromanaging you, he’s smothering you. What’s going on?

Despite what you may think, the root of his micromanaging is probably not that your boss is a jerk or that he feels threatened by you. Rather, his actions might be explained by factors that have little to do with you, such as a poor understanding of his role as manager, micromanaging bosses of his own, a lack of motivation to question how he’s always done things, or personal insecurity.

That said, it can be hard to cut your boss some slack when he isn’t cutting you any. His harping about every small misstep you take can feel overwhelmingly personal. The good news is that you don’t have to resign yourself to being nit-picked to death. You may not be able to change your boss, says Carol Walker, a principal at Prepared to Lead, a leadership development consulting firm. But you do have some control. “You have more power to improve the situation than you probably realize,’” Walker says. You aren’t likely to turn things around with one great conversation or one burst of high performance. But you can, little by little, own and direct a process that will enable your boss to start trusting you more and monitoring you less. Here’s how.

1. Manage his insecurity

Form an educated guess about where your boss’s sensitivities lie. If you believe, for example, that he’s intimidated by his boss, think of ways you can alleviate that pressure, such as running reports to better prepare him for meetings with his manager. Or perhaps he’s afraid that people don’t perceive him as essential, and he’s on a tear to prove how much you and others need him. Dispel his fears, advises Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. Show him that you value his guidance. Bring him any news you hear, and take your ideas to him before sharing them with others. As your boss begins to trust that you’ll come to him without prompting, he may loosen his grip.

Once you get to know your boss better, you’ll gain more insight into the areas he’s touchy about. Looking at what’s set him off historically — budget surprises? schedule changes? — will help you find ways of putting him at ease now, says Clark. Then you can assemble a dashboard to keep your boss as informed as he wants to be. Agree on your key priorities and the metrics that will demonstrate progress, and ask him how often he’d like to receive updates. Then stick to that agreement.

Further Reading




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HBR Guide to Office Politics

Communication Book
Karen Dillon


19.95



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Your proactive, tailored-to-him system will reassure him. That’s important, since micromanaging often stems from a boss’s insecurity. “I call it ‘snoopervising,’” says Stu Tubbs, former Dean of the College of Business at Eastern Michigan University. Turn the behavior around by pre-empting it: Tell your boss you want him to feel he can count on you and your work. And use language that signals active listening. Tubbs recalls one young man who said “Consider it done” at the end of every meeting with his boss.

2. Don’t fight it

If you openly rebel against micromanagement, Clark cautions, your boss may clamp down even more. Leadership consultant Ron Ashkenas agrees. Instead of viewing it as a blow to your ego, he suggests, think about how you might actually benefit from it. Your boss may have your best interests in mind. Perhaps he wants to ensure you have a sound understanding of the company’s protocol or the most effective ways to work the system to get things done.

Regardless of the cause, says Ashkenas, accept that your boss may have something important to teach you. Just try to learn as much as you can, as quickly as you can — in case he doesn’t eventually let up and you decide you can’t take it anymore.

3. Scrutinize yourself

If your boss doesn’t appear to have faith in your ability to do your job, consider whether you’ve given him a reason to feel this way. Have you missed important deadlines? Delivered presentations that fell flat? Take a hard look at yourself — and look around. If your boss isn’t micromanaging other colleagues, his behavior could be a clue that you’re underperforming.

If you suspect that’s the case, have the courage to ask your boss about it, says Clark. Tell him you feel he’s monitoring you extra closely and you want to understand what’s behind it. In reality, some bosses are actually reluctant to be straight with employees about their short-comings because it’s hard to be critical of someone who might react badly. If an employee has the courage to come to the boss and say that he is genuinely interested in feedback on his weaknesses so he can improve them, that’s a great first step. Reassure your boss that you do genuinely want honest feedback, even if it’s hard to hear.

You might need to soothe your ego for a day or two, but the sooner you return to your boss with a proposed plan of action, the more likely he’ll be to trust that you genuinely do want to improve.

4. Look ahead

Focusing on your future may help you and your boss interact more productively in the present. So initiate a discussion about long-term goals. Set up a one-on-one meeting, or ask if you can use one of your scheduled check-ins to talk about your role. Explain that you want to start communicating more regularly — and explicitly — about your growth and about how else you could support the department. Give him some examples of the types of projects you’d like to work on and the future role you envision for yourself. And then ask if he’ll work with you to create a plan for acquiring the skills you’ll need to realize your vision.

Keep the conversation constructive and forward-looking. Complaining about the past won’t open your boss’s mind or make him want to support you, Walker says. Being positive and taking ownership will. Let him know that you appreciate his guidance, but you’re eager to spread your wings a little, too.

 

This post is adapted from The HBR Guide to Office Politics.

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How to Promote Yourself Without Looking Like a Jerk

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Self-promotion can be uncomfortable for many people. That’s certainly true for foreign professionals in America, who have to navigate different cultural mores in the most bullish nation on earth when it comes to personal branding. But even for many Americans, it’s a tricky prospect: how can you ensure that your talent is recognized without alienating your colleagues and looking like a jerk?

The first step is understanding the true value of self-promotion. Of course, you can get better job offers or assignments if you’re viewed as a star performer. But it’s not all about you – a helpful reminder for people who are turned off by the caricature of personal branding (like networking) as baldly transactional. Instead, when you promote yourself in the right way, it’s a win-win. Your colleagues and managers probably don’t have the time to fully understand your interests, talents, and skill set. If you can make it clear to them where you can contribute the most, you’re making their lives easier and helping the company overall.

The next step is to focus on facts, not interpretation. No one can argue if you say that you’re passionate about social media, or that you’ve been blogging for more than a decade, or that you have X number of Twitter followers. But they can argue plenty if you call yourself a “social media expert” (or, heaven help us, a “guru” or “ninja”). Whatever your field, it’s fine if other people want to christen you an expert – and in my own bio, I gladly cite several magazines that have given me the appellation. But it’s presumptuous to do it yourself, and you risk a great deal of blowback. (Well-known author Gary Vaynerchuk famously told TechCrunch, “99.5 percent of social media experts are clowns.”)

It’s important to demonstrate your expertise with stories, not words. Saying “I’m great at pitching investors” sounds pretty egotistical. But sharing a compelling tale of how you rounded up seed funding allows others to deduce your skill without having to make it explicit. Also, research has shown that when listeners are exposed to stories, many more sections of their brains light up; they’re literally immersed in the moment with you, making a far deeper impression. They may hear your words if you say you’re awesome, but telling them a story allows them to feel it for themselves.

You’ll also want to ensure that those stories are relevant. If you’re at a cocktail party and the talk turns to startups, it’s perfectly appropriate to mention that you’ve launched one and share the story of your successful pitch. But if you’re visibly straining to steer the conversation in your direction (“Speaking of basketball, have I told you about my new cloud computing venture?”), people will be turned off by the ham-handedness of the approach. Self-promotion works best when it’s natural and unforced; you want to contribute to the conversation organically, not hog the spotlight. (As I discuss in my book Reinventing You, it’s even better if you can recruit a like-minded wingman to interject on your behalf and mention your relevant accomplishments.)

Further Reading




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HBR Guide to Office Politics

Communication Book
Karen Dillon


19.95



Add to Cart





Save
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Finally, even when you’re promoting yourself, it’s essential to express humility. That doesn’t in any way mean hiding your abilities. However, it does require being sensitive to the fact that some accomplishments may make others feel jealous or inadequate, and you don’t want to appear glib or self-congratulatory. It’s also a great opportunity to give credit to others when it’s due. If you’ve been working in China, someone might ask about your language skills. You could certainly say, “I’m fluent in Mandarin” and leave it at that. But it’s a lot more gracious to provide context. “I’m really fortunate my high school offered classes in Mandarin,” you could say, “so I studied it for a number of years and was able to become fluent.” Your accomplishment is still impressive, but you’ve highlighted your skills without making the other person feel bad about themselves. It’s also important to remember that humility isn’t the same as self-deprecation. Downplaying your skills may be a good self-promotion strategy in a number of countries, especially in Asia. But in the U.S., you risk looking either incompetent (“if he says he’s not good at Mandarin, he’s probably not”) or disingenuous and patronizing. Instead, be humble, but be real.

Often, people shy away from self-promotion for fear that they’ll alienate their colleagues and develop a reputation as a braggart. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, personal branding can benefit you and your company by helping others understand where you excel, and ensuring that your talents are put to use in the best way possible.

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Overcoming the Peter Principle

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Management journals would not exist if managers were always perfect, so it’s no surprise that HBR has long been exploring the reasons behind manager incompetence and whose responsibility it is to compensate – the boss or the subordinate.

Nowhere was the problem stated more acutely, it could be argued, than in the wicked 1969 satire, The Peter Principle. Taking the form of a serious work of business research, complete with entirely fake examples, it purported to have discovered the root cause of manager incompetence: Everyone in an organization keeps on getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At that point they stop being promoted. So given enough time and enough promotion levels, every position in a firm will be occupied by someone who can’t do the job. The book struck a chord with the general public, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, and it’s still in print 45 years later.

HBR took it seriously enough to offer up two straight-faced contemporary responses, both of which were remarkably quick to accept the book’s premise.

The first, from 1973, “A Postscript to the Peter Principle,” suggested that certain groups of managers – notably women and minorities — were exempt from the insidious effect because they often weren’t promoted despite their competence and so didn’t get the chance to reach their level of incompetence. The second, from 1976, ”The Real Peter Principle: Promotion to Pain,” argued that what really happens is that managers are promoted, not to their level of immutable incompetence, but to their level of anxiety and depression, which overwhelms their ambition and desire to succeed.

These two pieces were squarely in line with HBR’s focus on improving the practice of management by focusing on the managers. It wasn’t until 1979 – a full decade later – that that HBR addressed the question of managerial incompetence from the subordinates’ point of view.

This seems surprising since of course every manager is a subordinate as well. And indeed in The Subordinate’s Predicaments, Case Western Reserve management professor Eric Neilsen and then-doctoral candidate Jan Gypen make that point explicitly. But, they observe, most managers address the bad boss problem by getting out of the subordinate role as quickly as possible and, by improving their own leadership skills, becoming a good boss. This, one might argue, is a sort of reverse Peter Principle, in which people learn to rise above their incompetencies (or at any rate other people’s) as they move up.

But the message here is still that incompetence is rife, and for Neilsen and Gypen subordinates inhabit a very dangerous world. The heart of their argument is this: In dealing with superiors, subordinates must navigate through a minefield of potential disasters by continually asking themselves six questions.

Is my boss interested in my welfare or does he see me as a competitor who needs to be neutralized?
Can I correctly work out what my boss wants or am I stuck second-guessing from what he’s actually saying?
Will my boss reward — or punish — me if I make improvement suggestions?
Am I capable of doing my job?
Do I want to emulate this boss, or should I distance myself from his poor example?
Should our relationship be friendly or strictly professional?

Guess wrong, and calamity may ensue, so subordinates spend a lot of energy in self-protection. The analysis resonates powerfully: Who’s never had to consider these questions in the course of their career? But what’s to be done? Recognizing the tensions is certainly the first step, but then Neilsen and Gypen do just what they say previous thinkers and managers always do – address their suggestions to the boss. Why? Because the boss is the one with the greater power to act.

You and Your Team





Managing Up




Best practices for interacting with your boss.

It is in this context, the next year, that HBS professor John Gabarro and a young associate professor, John Kotter, come up with what will become a powerfully enduring response that for the first time recognized that subordinates could do something to help themselves. Managing Your Boss, published first in 1980, remained fresh and relevant when it was reprinted in 1988, 1995, and 2005, and is still well worth a read now.

They too recognize that ultimately it’s the boss who has the power to change things. But they don’t accept the premise that the subordinate-boss relationship is at its heart adversarial. They start with an assumption of good will and argue that subordinates have a responsibility to help the boss help them. That starts with taking into account the boss’s goals, strengths, weaknesses, and organizational pressures. And it means falling in with the boss’s preferred style of working – Does he or she like to get information through memos or formal meetings? Does your boss thrive on conflict or try to minimize it?

But critically, the wise subordinate recognizes that the boss can’t magically know what he or she needs. It’s up to the employee, then, to speak up if expectations aren’t clear, to keep the boss informed, to fulfill commitments dependably, and to ask for help when needed. “It is not uncommon,” Gabarro and Kotter say wryly, “for a boss to need more information than the subordinate would naturally supply, or for the subordinate to think the boss knows more than he really does.”

Subsequent discussions begin to recognize that problematic bosses aren’t so much utterly incompetent as so good at something that their failings are overlooked. The ultimate expression of this idea is Michael Maccoby’s Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons, and the upside of their insight is extensively explored in Making Yourself Indispensable, which offers up a step-by-step guide to making the most of your strengths, so that your weaknesses don’t matter.

These kinds of analyses go a long way toward explaining why poor bosses persist, and they also put the onus of dealing with them squarely on their subordinates, since it’s not entirely in the organization’s interests to weed them out. And so to balance out the narcissistic leader we have the Toxic Handler: Organizational Hero and Casualty, a clear-eyed look at those people common to so many organizations who repair the damage a bad boss does by voluntarily shouldering “the sadness, frustration, bitterness, and anger that are endemic to organizational life.”

What underlies these later discussions is the assumption that if most leaders are also subordinates, most subordinates are also leaders, with power of their own that they can bring to bear on their bosses. This view was anticipated back in 1988, when in In Praise of Followers, Robert Kelley found that the traits of good followers are nearly the same as the traits of good leaders. They “manage themselves well; are committed to the organization and to a purpose, principle, or person outside themselves; build their competence and focus their efforts for maximum impact; and are courageous, honest, and credible.”  Of course if everyone were like that, the Peter Principle would probably never have been written.

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An Alternative to Health Care M&A

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One of the main justifications for the mergers and acquisitions sweeping the health care industry is greater integration between the physicians and teams that care for patients. But consolidation does not ensure integration. While M&A may improve the efficiency of shared services such as human resources and finance, it may actually make it more difficult to improve the coordination of care. The challenges of combining and managing the resources and operations of the different organizations and aligning their cultures may actually make the goal of integrated, patient-centered care much harder to achieve.

What’s the alternative? A high-quality clinical affiliation where providers share best practices and easily consult with each other about patients even if they are independent.

We at Mayo Clinic believe remaining independent and forging a clinical affiliation is a powerful alternative means for integrating care. It complements local expertise and helps ensure that a particular service is delivered at the place where its value is highest. It allows more patients to stay close to home with greater peace of mind and fosters collaboration between physicians and health care organizations to improve the delivery of care.

In 2011 Mayo elected to follow this course. We chose to support independent medical centers by creating the Mayo Clinic Care Network. We offer scalable and comprehensive services that help providers keep more care local, making it less fragmented and less costly for patients. In addition, this approach helps to stem the migration of patients to other providers.

As the Mayo Clinic Care Network was developed, we decided to include only those knowledge-sharing tools and clinical services that were tried and tested internally at Mayo Clinic. It was felt critical that Mayo Clinic caregivers be comfortable with the same tools extended to caregivers at member sites. When a request arose for a new service that was not operational within our own system (e.g., electronic tumor conferences), the service was developed and operationalized internally and then extended to members.

The challenge was to create delivery processes that would support the sharing of knowledge and expertise beyond our walls. The members of the network have helped us in this regard, and our model continues to evolve.

To date, clinical collaboration is delivered via information-sharing technology that includes:

eConsults to allow network physicians to connect electronically with Mayo specialists and subspecialists when they want additional input regarding a patient’s care. This formally documented consultation allows the network physician to bring that additional expertise to the patient within the current care continuum.
AskMayoExpert to provide point-of-care medical information compiled by Mayo physicians on disease management, care guidelines, treatment recommendations, and reference materials for a wide variety of medical conditions. The web-based information system can deliver Mayo’s clinical knowledge to desktop computers or mobile devices.
eTumor Board Conferences to allow physicians to connect via live videoconferences to present and discuss management of complex cancer cases with a Mayo Clinic multidisciplinary panel and other members of the network.

Members also have access to additional services through the network, including business and operational consulting and an extensive library of patient education materials developed by Mayo Clinic. Archived Grand Rounds allow network providers to view presentations by Mayo Clinic physicians and scientists from various internal medical conferences.

To be admitted to the Mayo Clinic Care Network, prospective members must be quality organizations that have a patient-centered culture, a desire to remain independent, and an interest in establishing a clinical collaboration. They go through rigorous due diligence — a formal, detailed review that includes a thorough assessment of the organization’s governance structure, clinical practice (including patient safety), quality and service, as well as an evaluation of business practices such as legal, compliance, finance, human resources, and information technology. Some network members have described this evaluation process as similar to the accreditation process of Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

At first, we believed members would be located near Mayo’s campuses in Minnesota, Arizona, and Florida. But we quickly discovered that there was an appetite for this type of collaboration across the country. The network currently has 31 members located across 18 U.S. states as well as Puerto Rico and Mexico.

To date, physician collaboration through the network is proving beneficial both to Mayo Clinic and network members. Network physicians are able to keep more care of their patients local while providing them additional peace of mind, and it has helped stem the migration of their patients to other providers for second opinions. The collaboration helps keep Mayo Clinic’s expertise relevant and allows it to be an option for patients needing specialty care not available in their communities. We also see the network as a source of revenues — both from the subscriptions paid by members and the patients they refer to us.

In 2014, network members have submitted nearly 2,000 eConsults, and the volume is rapidly increasing. Each request represents a physician who believes that collaboration will best serve the patient. Of these eConsults, less than 15% of those patients were referred to Mayo Clinic for additional assessment or specialty care. The remainder — the vast majority — have been able to receive high-quality, cost-effective care close to home.

Academic medical centers like Mayo Clinic can and should foster a collaborative environment that promotes integrated, patient-focused care. When care givers can address the needs of the patient and provide the right care at the right place and the right time, everyone benefits.

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The Year in Management, Told in 20 Charts

One of the great pleasures of my job is thinking about, creating, and publishing charts in partnership with our amazing designers. And you all seem to quite like them, too. So as is required among most all digital editors at the end of each calendar year, I’ve gone through the entirety of 2014’s charts, tables, and other visuals we’ve published for HBR.org – hundreds in all – to highlight 20 that tell particularly interesting stories.

What smart products do people actually want? Do employees like negative feedback? And what’s the strangest educational background for a member of the Fed (this is my favorite)?

Enjoy.

1. Sure, flextime is OK. But high performers would rather just get paid more.

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2. No one wants a smart, connected wine bottle.

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3.  Patent trolls really do stifle innovation.

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4. This is what phone calls look like today (though the world still isn’t all that flat).

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5. Men still aren’t into the idea of quotas for boards.

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6. Miscommunications abound!

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7. Yes, your employees want negative feedback (even though it’s hard to give).

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8. Companies aren’t exactly prepared for climate change risk (but at least most believe it’s real?).

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9. Respecting your employees can go a long way.

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10. Love math? Love people? Lucky you.

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11. Will your employees embrace data? It depends.

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12. It’s pretty important to have a conscientious spouse.

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13. CEOs get paid too much, according to pretty much everyone.

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14. We’re getting more control over when we take breaks at work, but job sharing and sabbaticals are out the window.

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15. Here’s how old Silicon Valley’s top founders really are.

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16. There’s a big difference in the composition of top management teams when a company has a non-native CEO.

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17. There was once a member of the Fed who had a master’s degree in dairy science.

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18. Men apply for jobs they don’t feel qualified for; women don’t.

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19. Here’s what leaders are made of.

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20. Absolutely no one knows if a robot will take your job.

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How to Keep Your Team Motivated

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As a manager, motivating employees is one of the most important things you do for your company. After all, engagement is linked to firm profitability, customer satisfaction, and employee retention. Yet garnering loyalty and commitment from employees can be a challenge.

Recently, HBR ran a series on engaging employees, asking different experts to weigh in on specific angles. These articles provide a good refresher on how to keep your team focused and motivated.

Where to start? First, you need to know what you’re working with. Develop a baseline understanding of how engaged your team members are. Many companies do that with an annual engagement survey asking employees to report their own satisfaction levels. But, the results don’t give you objective data on how engaged people actually are. Instead, you can use people analytics to understand what drives your employees, perhaps even better than employees understand themselves.

Then, consider whom you’re trying to engage. Of course, one size does not fit all when you’re coming up with an engagement strategy and what you do should depend on the specific group you’re working with, whether they’re older workers or younger ones, your star performers or your b-players. And some people can be tougher to motivate than others. Take government workers or middle managers, for example. Or people who have a lot of other opportunities available to them, like data scientists. Or consider the very real challenge of trying to motivate someone you don’t like. Tailor your approach to meet each team member’s needs.

Next, keep in mind what works and what doesn’t. Here are some of the things that have been shown to motivate people:

The freedom to choose when, where, and how they work
The ability to perform at the highest levels, even beyond their own expectations
Feeling connected to others
A well-designed workspace
Aspirational, but achievable, goals. Try this helpful trick: a range of goals (“land 4-6 new clients”) may be more motivating than a single one (“land 5 new clients”).

And here are a few that have the opposite effect, demotivating people:

Having to pretend they’re someone they’re not
Working for a micromanaging boss

Unfortunately, managers who are truly good at motivating are few and far between. This is partly because it isn’t something you can learn overnight. Rather, research shows that the most engaging leaders have had early stretch experiences that shaped them and have deeply-held beliefs about what it means to be a leader. You can’t go back and change your past but you can focus on doing some very basic things that make a big difference, such as listening, showing respect, and remembering that happiness matters, even at work.

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When a Private Message Ends Up in the Wrong Place

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When Alan* heard the email “ping” from his new boss’s nearby desk, his quiet laughter turned to a sinking feeling in his stomach. Was that a notification that she’d received the email he’d just sent, mocking how she’d criticized the mess left in the office kitchen? He swore he had hit “forward” before writing his scathing response… but it turned out he hit “reply” instead. And what he wrote, intended as a private joke between buddies, was not going to do him any favors with the boss.

Seeing that his boss was not at her desk, he hovered in panic over her keyboard to see if he could get into her computer and delete it. But the machine was locked. In desperation, he sprinted down two flights of stairs to the IT department — passing his boss, who was on her way up the stairs. He somehow managed to convince a sympathetic IT staffer to go into her email box and delete the offending missive. “Having made this horrible mistake,’’ Alan says now, “The best advice I can give someone else, is always make friends with the IT guys!” To this day, however, he’s not sure if she saw the email before it was deleted. Which was, in some ways, the worst possible outcome, because he lived in fear of reprisal, but didn’t have the courage to come clean in case she hadn’t seen it.

For most of us, undoing such a faux pas is not possible – as Sony and many members of the Hollywood elite have been painfully finding out with the seemingly unending exposure of embarrassing emails throughout December. (This wasn’t the worst part of the hack for Sony, but presumably it was a very big deal for the individuals involved.) And it’s a problem that many of us have faced, whether it’s accidentally hitting “reply” instead of “forward,” forwarding an email without thinking about what’s been written below, or toggling clumsily between including and excluding someone in a group email. A much-loved former boss accidentally revealed my pregnancy before I was planning to share the news, after he unwittingly forwarded an email exchange we’d had that had started with my telling him I’d be out of the office for a doctor’s appointment. Mark Zuckerberg’s early instant messages were revealed in 2010, in which he mocked early Facebook users for trusting him with their data.  Each of the experts I consulted for this article offered one of their own mistakes as an illustration.  ”No matter how many times we’re reminded that electronic communications stick around long after we’ve sent them and that they’re often not as secure as we think, many of us are still remarkable indiscreet in what we communicate via email, text, chat, and social media,’’ says Monique Valcour, a professor of management at EDHEC Business School in France.

So, having made the mistake, what now? There’s only one option. Own it. Approach the offended colleague quickly and directly, advises Jeanne Brett, Director of the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Kellogg School of Management. How do you word an apology when you’ve been a jerk? “I’m sorry I did it and even more sorry that I hurt/embarrassed/humiliated/showed disrespect for you,’’ Brett suggests. “I spoke/wrote without thinking and if I could take it back I would. I can only ask you to forgive me.’’

The last sentence, she points out, is particularly important because it turns the situation back on the other person and seeks forgiveness.  This assumes, of course, that your communication was merely offensive and inappropriate, as opposed to libelous or a violation of company policies. Legal experts often caution people not to apologize when there is risk of litigation, but even then, recent research indicates the potential power of a sincere mea culpa. For instance, research suggests that physicians have a significant opportunity to deflect medical malpractice suits if they offer sincere apologies, taking responsibility for their mistakes.

In any apology scenario, advises Valcour, avoid insincere language of the “mistakes were made’’ or “I’m sorry if somehow you were offended…’’ variety. Make the apology in person or by phone, especially considering that email leaves tone to the imagination of the reader. You don’t want to risk getting it wrong again.

“There’s a saying in politics that you only have three options about what to say when it comes to crisis communications,’’ advises Dorie Clark, who earned her stripes as a communication director for the Howard Dean presidential campaign. “One, you didn’t do it; two, you did it but you were justified; and three, you did it and you’re sorry.’’ For most leaked or forwarded emails, options one and two are out the window, Clark says. For instance, “It would look pretty foolish for Amy Pascal to defend her badinage about which black movie stars President Obama might like best.’’

As awful as you’ll feel having to make an apology, recognize that you may well have done real damage and an apology may not be enough. “You may need to take additional steps to show that you actually care about the issues at hand and are taking it seriously,’’ Clark advises. (For example, if Pascal manages to retain her job at Sony, she’ll probably need to make diversity a focus on subsequent hires.)

“And it goes without saying, you can’t be an idiot in the same way twice,’’ Clark says. If you’re lucky enough to get a reprieve, don’t make the same mistake again.

*Not his real name.

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