Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1339

Finding the Money in the Internet of Things

How to Spend the Last 10 Minutes of Your Day

How much sleep did you get last night? If the answer is “not enough” you’re hardly alone. According to Gallup’s estimates, almost half the people you’ll run into today are suffering from some level of sleep deprivation.

We often dismiss a little morning fatigue as an inconvenience, but here’s the reality. Missing sleep worsens your mood, weakens your memory, and harms your decision-making all day long. It scatters your focus, prevents you from thinking flexibly, and makes you more susceptible to anxiety. (Ever wonder why problems seem so much more overwhelming at 1:00am than in the first light of day? It’s because our brains amplify fear when we’re tired.)When we arrive at work sleepy, everything feels harder and takes longer. According to one study, we are no more effective working sleep-deprived than we are when we’re legally drunk.

It’s worth noting that no amount of caffeine can fully compensate for lack of sleep. While a double latte can make you more alert, it also elevates your stress level and puts you on edge, damaging your ability to connect with others. Coffee can also constrain creative thinking.

To perform at our best, our bodies require rest—plain and simple. Which underscores an important point: on days when we flourish, the seed has almost always been planted the night before.

Since most of us can’t sleep later in the morning than we currently do, the only option is to get to bed earlier. And yet we don’t. Why? The reason is twofold. First, we’re so busy during the day that the only time we have to ourselves is late in the evening – so we stay up late because it’s our only downtime. Second, we have less willpower when we’re tired, which makes it tougher to force ourselves into bed.

So, how do you get to bed earlier and get more sleep? Here are a few suggestions, based on goal-setting research.

Start by identifying an exact time when you want to be in bed. Be specific. Trying to go to bed “as early as possible” is hard to achieve because it doesn’t give you a clear idea of what success looks like. Instead, think about when you need to get up in the morning and work backwards. Try to give yourself 8 hours, meaning that if you’d like to be up by 6:45am, aim to be under the covers no later than 10:45pm.

Next, do a nighttime audit of how you spend your time after work. For one or two evenings, don’t try to change anything—simply log everything that happens from the moment you arrive home until you go to bed. What you may discover is that instead of eliminating activities that you enjoy and are keeping you up late (say, watching television between 10:30 and 11:00), you can start doing them earlier by cutting back on something unproductive that’s eating up your time earlier on (like mindlessly scanning Facebook between 8:30 and 9:00).

Once you’ve established a specific bedtime goal and found ways of rooting out time-sinks, turn your attention to creating a pre-sleep ritual that helps you relax and look forward to going to bed. A major impediment to getting to sleep on time is that when 11:00pm rolls around, the prospect of lying in bed is not as appealing as squeezing in a quick sitcom or scanning tomorrow’s newspaper headlines on your smartphone. Logically, we know we should be resting, but emotionally we’d prefer to be doing something else.

To counteract this preference, it’s useful to create an enjoyable routine; one that both entices you to wind down and enables you to go from a period of activity to a period of rest. The transition is vital. Being tired simply does not guarantee falling asleep quickly. First you need to feel relaxed. But what relaxes one person can exasperate another. So I’ll offer a menu of ideas to help you identify a bedtime ritual that’s right for you: 

Read something that makes you happy. Fiction, poetry, graphic novels. Whatever sustains your attention without much effort and puts you in a good mood. (Warning: Never read anything work-related in bed. Doing so will make it more difficult for you to associate your bed with a state of relaxation.)
Lower the temperature. Cooler temperatures help us fall asleep and make the prospect of lying under the covers more appealing. The National Sleep Foundation recommends keeping your thermostat between 60 and 67 degrees overnight.
Avoid blue light. Exposure to blue light – the kind emanating from our smartphones and computer screens – suppresses the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that makes us to feel sleepy. Studies show that reducing exposure to blue light, either by banishing screens before bedtime or by using blue light-blocking glasses, improves sleep quality.
Create a spa-like environment. Create a tranquil environment with minimal stimulation. Dim the lights, play soothing music, light a candle.
Handwrite a note. One of the most effective ways of boosting happiness is expressing gratitude. You can experience gratitude while writing a thank-you note to someone you care about, or privately, by listing a few of your day’s highlights in a diary.
Meditate. Studies show that practicing mindfulness lowers stress and elevates mood.
Take a quiet walk. If the weather’s right, an evening walk can be deeply relaxing.

Experts recommend giving yourself at least 30 minutes each night to wind down before attempting to sleep. You might also try setting an alarm on your smartphone letting you know when it’s time to begin, so that the process becomes automatic.

However you choose to use the time before bed, do your best to keep this time free of negative energy. Avoid raising delicate topics with your spouse, and don’t even set your morning alarm right before going to bed – it will just get your mind thinking about the stresses of the next day. (Instead, re-set your alarm for the following morning right when you wake up.)

And finally, keep a notepad and a light-up pen nearby. If you think of something you need to do the next day, jot it down instead of reaching for your smartphone. Do the same for any important thought that pops into your head as you are trying to fall asleep. Once you’ve written it down, you’ll find it’s a lot easier to let go.

Tactics for Asking Good Follow-Up Questions

Whether you are looking to hire someone, decide whether to trust someone, or enter a business partnership, the better you are at judging people, the better off you will be. Unfortunately, most people are just plain bad at reading others. Several decades of research among psychologists has indicated all sorts of blind spots, biases, and judgment errors we make in assessing people. Much of that research has focused on the mental processes we use to interpret what we see or hear. But errors also occur way before that – the problem can begin with the questions we ask to understand people in the first place.

When you want to get a read on someone, what questions do you ask? Most people have go-to questions. The ones I hear most often are open-ended questions like, “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” “What do you want to be doing in five years?” and “What motivates you?” Some savvier questioners ask behavior-based questions, like “Tell me about a time when you….”. Sounds great, right? Now, ask yourself if you have ever once actually learned the truth about someone by their responses to these questions. How many times have you relied on people’s responses to these questions only to see later that those responses meant nothing at all? Most people ask a question like this and then move onto another topic, seemingly satisfied that they heard what they needed to hear. In reality, they learned nothing about the other person.

In my experience conducting interview-based assessments for the last 12 years, I have found that this is because the first answer to one of these questions is only marginally helpful and may even be irrelevant. Yet most askers simply accept what they hear (good or bad) and, without asking any follow-ups, move on to the next topic on their list.

But the key to understanding people lies in the follow-up question. In my experience, there are two major reasons people don’t ask good (or any) follow-up questions. First, many interviewers aren’t actually paying close enough attention to ask detailed follow-up questions. To ask a good follow-up, you need to pay very close attention to how the interviewee responds to your initial question, and then build on his or her answer. The second reason most people are hesitant to probe is out of fear of offending the other person. But being polite isn’t the same thing as letting the other person off the hook.

Ask a follow-up that will help you really uncover what you are seeking to learn. Be curious, and you will be amazed what you uncover. Here are three types of follow-up questions that will enable you to understand more about a person:

1. Ask your original question again, slightly differently. Don’t be afraid to ask the same question twice. If I am interviewing someone and the person either deflects my first question or doesn’t give a real response, I will often say, “Let me ask you this another way…”. It is effective because you communicate that you are not letting the person off the hook, but you’re allowing them to save face by at least implying that maybe your initial question just wasn’t clear enough. It is a highly effective method of extracting a real response that will actually be predictive of behavior.

Caution: just make sure you change the way you phrase this second question, otherwise it can seem adversarial. The key is to ask the question another way, and declare that you are doing so.

2. Connect their answers to each other. One of my favorite strategies to understand people better is to link their responses to something they said earlier. I’m not talking about an attempt to catch someone in a lie, but instead connecting the dots between their answers. Good judges of character do this naturally – they listen intently, and tie what they hear to something said earlier in the conversation. Ask something like, “Oh, that’s like the time you…?” or, “Is that what you meant earlier when you said…?”. Beyond allowing you to understand the person better, it communicates that you are really listening, and actually provides meaningful insight to the person by pointing out a connection that he or she may have not even seen. It allows you to synthesize information rather than just hear it.

Caution: Overusing this can make you seem like a police detective seeking a “gotcha” moment. Avoid saying things like, “But that’s not what you said earlier…” What I am suggesting is to synthesize rather than interrogate.

3. Ask about the implications of their answer. When people answer a question without being particularly revealing, or by giving a very safe answer, what do you do? For instance, when asked about greatest weakness, someone says, “I’m a perfectionist” or “I work too hard.” Rather than accept answers like that at face value, seek to really understand the person by asking about the implications of their answers. With a self-proclaimed perfectionist, you might ask, “How does your perfectionism play out in the workplace?” or “What are the consequences of your detail orientation?” And don’t stop there – keep asking implication questions until you are satisfied you know what you need to know about the person.

Caution: When asking about implications, avoid being a litigator and turning them into leading questions. Instead, truly be curious about the behavior and what its effects are.

Coming up with a great list of questions is only the first step in conducting an in-depth interview. It’s the follow-up questions that will really tell you who you’re dealing with.

What Makes Someone an Engaging Leader

“How can we have the highest profitability in five years and still have gaps in employee engagement?” asks an executive at a large industrial products company. The reality is that the two don’t necessarily go together. This management team, like many others, has fought to increase profitability through business transformation, restructuring, and cost-cutting, without devoting much thought to keeping employees engaged and connected. As a result, the company may find it hard to sustain the gains, much less drive future growth. Organizational agility, innovation, and growth are really difficult without engaged employees.

The research team at AON Hewitt has made it a priority to understand what is going on in enterprises where both financial performance and employee engagement levels are soaring. Our ongoing study of the companies we’ve labeled Aon Hewitt Best Employers – firms that achieve both top quartile engagement levels and better business results than their peers – finds that they do have something in common. It’s the prevalence of a certain kind of leader, not just at the top, but throughout the ranks of the organization. These individuals – we call them engaging leaders – are distinguished by a certain set of characteristics.

What do these leaders of highly engaged teams have in common? Through extensive interviews we learned that they tend to have had early stretch experiences that shaped them; tend to share a set of beliefs about leading; and tend to exhibit certain behaviors that help to engage those around them.

Formative early experiences. Engaging leaders don’t just start out this way. “I started in the call center,” a CEO from a financial services business unit told us. “I know what it’s like and I still like to go sit with agents and listen.” We often heard in our interviews, as Warren Bennis and Bob Thomas did in their crucibles of leadership research, about early experiences that leaders felt had shaped them. They were not always of the unpleasant, mettle-testing sort; sometimes the person had a caring, attentive mentor; a stretch assignment that “chose the leader” instead of the leader’s choosing it; an assignment that required them to win over people who used to be their peers. The common thread is the reflection on the early experience that allows a leader to learn something, and gain self-confidence, humility, and empathy.

Guiding beliefs. Underneath an engaging leader’s behaviors are a powerful set of beliefs. They feel it is their responsibility to serve their followers, especially in times of crisis and change.  Many expressed core beliefs about the importance of personal connection. For example, a CEO of a beverage company, asked to name the most important responsibility of a leader, said it was “to create the emotional bond between our people and the organization.” Another CEO declared that “Leadership is a contact sport.” When we talked to a leader in an engineering department about why he thought he was regarded as an engaging leader, his thoughtfulness about human relationships came through. “People won’t remember what I did,” he said, “but they will remember how I made them feel.”

Engaging behaviors. We also noted a set of common behaviors, no doubt driven by the beliefs we’ve just been discussing, and clustering around five themes.  Engaging leaders step up, opting to proactively own solutions where others cannot or do not. They energize others, keeping people focused on purpose and vision with contagious positivity. They connect and stabilize groups by listening, staying calm, and unifying people. They serve and grow, by empowering, enabling, and developing others. And they stay grounded, remaining humble, open, candid, and authentic in their communication and behavior. These behaviors are continually validated in our leadership workshops, where we see people in action and hear about recent challenges they have worked to overcome.

These are the hallmarks, then, of engaging leaders – and almost every company has at least some of them. Few workforces, however, enjoy the general condition of having engaging leadership. That’s a systemic belief in the power of engagement that transcends the personal strengths and discretionary actions of individual managers. The organizations trying to make engaging leadership part of their culture are figuring out how to do four things on an ongoing basis:

Measure engagement levels. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The CEO needs to own the engagement survey and follow-through. Enough said.
Develop engaging leaders. Workshops and coaching are required to help leaders reflect on their early experiences, find their own beliefs and purpose, and make engaging behaviors more habitual. When the number of engaging leaders amounts to a critical mass, their energy and mutual support can change the engagement culture of the organization.
Assess and select engaging leaders. Filling a lot of high-impact roles with engaging leaders should be the objective. Now that we have a good understanding of the experiences, beliefs, and behaviors that typify engaging leaders, it should be possible to use personality instruments, structured interviews, and 360 instruments to predict whether someone is likely to be engaging or not in a leadership role.
Measure and reward engagement achieved. Tying incentives to engagement survey scores is tricky and can lead to unintended consequences. However, we are seeing more organizations get serious about recognizing leaders who are engaging and holding those who are not accountable.

Engagement is a leadership responsibility – but by and large, with only , leaders are failing in this regard. Our research suggests that, for most companies, the turnaround won’t happen quickly. The fact that the most engaging leaders are the products of early experiences and deeply held beliefs means that new ones can’t be minted overnight. It will never be a matter of running through some behavioral checklist. But there are steps that employers can take to give more teams the benefit of engaging leadership – and, over time, to reach the levels of innovation, quality, and productivity that can only come from highly engaged people.

5 Examples of Great Health Care Management

I may not be in touch with all my emotions, but there is one I know all too well — jealousy. I have worked my entire career in great health systems with fabulous people. And yet, when I go “outside,” I constantly see health care providers working brilliantly together in innovative ways that I had not even imagined. It makes my chest ache with envy. This type of jealousy is the deepest and most sincere expression of respect of which I am capable.

Here are just five examples of the dozens of innovations out there that make my head and my heart hurt. I hope they make you feel envious, too — and that you will send us your own examples so that we might  learn from them as well.

1. Transparency at University of Utah Health Care

In December, 2012, the University of Utah health care system started posting on its “Find-a-Doctor” sites all patient comments received after office visits. It wasn’t easy for Utah to reach this decision – its physicians had plenty of misgivings, but they were also irritated by the negative comments made by small numbers of patients on existing social media sites.

The logic was that trying to get data from all patients would lead to a much higher volume of comments, and they would paint a more accurate picture of the quality of care that the University of Utah offered. So, after a period of “internal transparency” during which only Utah personnel could see the data, Utah went public with all the ratings and comments – good, bad, and ugly.

As it turns out, the vast majority of comments have been extremely positive, the kind of praise that would make one’s mother blush. And the relatively few negative comments have had a profound impact on the physicians themselves. Physicians suddenly understand that every patient visit is a high stakes interaction, after which patients might write positive or negative comments.

The result has been so much more than a marketing ploy – it has changed the care being delivered. The Utah physicians with whom I have spoken all agree (some grudgingly) that the transparency has made them better and more compassionate caregivers.

2. Culture of shared responsibility at Mayo Clinic

When I visited the Mayo Clinic this spring I was amazed by how well everyone worked together to give patients first-rate, coordinated care. For example, if a patient is referred to a heart failure specialist because of shortness of breath, but the real problem turns out to be lung disease, the patient will be sent to a pulmonologist – but that initial heart failure specialist continues to play to role of doctor to the patient, making sure all the loose ends are tied up during and after the consultation. It’s wonderful for the patients, but not the way most specialists in U.S. health care work.

I asked some Mayo physicians why they were willing to do this “extra work” beyond their specialty expertise. One said, “Look, we think we are pretty good, but we know that these patients did not come here for us as individuals. They came because we’re the Mayo Clinic. So we all know that they are not really ‘my’ patients – they are ‘our’ patients.”

I thought of how most organizations attract patients using the “star” system – they market the superstar cardiologist or neurosurgeon, for example. But the schedules of those superstars are often booked for months in advance. Guess which model is more likely to accommodate growth? The “star” system or the group culture?

3. Teamwork at Northwestern’s Integrated Pelvic Health Program

At Chicago’s Northwestern Medicine, the Integrated Pelvic Health Program provides care for patients with problems like incontinence, uterine and vaginal prolapse, anal fissures and fistulas. The specialists with the expertise needed to address these difficult issues are all concentrated in one place – gynecology, urogynecology, and colorectal surgery. And in the middle are the physical therapists, who teach the patients exercises that strengthen the muscles to get their problems under control.

When I walked around this center and saw physical therapists talking with surgeons about shared patients, it suddenly dawned on me that I could not remember the last time I had actually talked to a physical therapist taking care of one of my patients. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I had ever talked to a physical therapist taking care of one of my primary care patients. There was no question that the care delivered by physicians and physical therapists who were really working like teammates was better than what I had been doing.

This is just one of dozens of examples I’ve seen of co-location leading to better teamwork. Hennepin County Medical Center moved dental next to the emergency department. University of Utah put case management right in the intensive care units. Teamwork is not just easy – it’s natural. These organizations understand how critical co-location is to real teamwork, and how important real teamwork is to patients.

4. Addressing socioeconomic issues at Contra Costa

At Contra Costa Health, a Bay Area safety-net provider, patients in waiting rooms were asked about their most important health concerns. The number one issue, named by 62% of patients, was having enough food. That was followed by housing (58%), then jobs and utilities. Not long after, Contra Costa began working with HeathLeads, which trains college-aged “advocates” to address socioeconomic issues like the ones named by Contra Costa’s patients, and places the advocates in emergency departments and practices. HealthLeads helps address problems that fall outside of what traditional health care can do, such as access to food subsidies.

Within weeks of the launch, Contra Costa physicians could see that some of their patients had better control of their chronic conditions because they had access to healthier food. In discussing one patient who had lost four pounds in eight weeks, one physician said, “I felt like I had finally been a good doctor to him and it wasn’t due to anything I learned in medical school.” Another doctor said, “This is the help I have needed for the past two decades to care for my patients. I now have something to offer my patients when I tell them to eat healthier and they can barely afford groceries.”

Contra Costa’s CEO told me that they know their job is producing health, not health care. They understand that to do so, they need to figure out who outside of traditional health care can help them make a real dent in their patients’ health problems. And that required developing a collaboration focused upon their patients’ socioeconomic issues — the core competency of HealthLeads.

5. Consolidating care with the London Stroke Initiative

In 2010, the city of London decided to consolidate the care of patients with strokes at just eight of its 34 hospitals. This meant that 26 hospitals, including some quite famous ones, had to close their stroke services, so that there was sufficient volume at the eight Hyperacute Stroke Centers to support care by special teams of physicians, nurses, and therapists who were completely focused upon stroke patients. As described in the HBR-NEJM insight center last year, the result was a decrease in mortality for stroke by 25%, and a reduction in total spending for stroke patients by about 6%, despite the greater number of stroke patients who survived.

Concentrating volume led to better care, better outcomes, and saved money. Most London hospitals (some kicking and screaming) gave up their ability to care for acute stroke patients in the interest of patients and society.

When I presented this case to a class at Harvard Business School last year, one student from the U.S. said, “This is phenomenal. We could never do it here.”

What makes these five examples so painful for me is that none of them required much in the way of capital investment. But all of them required (and continue to demand) expenditure of social capital, changing in the way people work together. The results are impressive.

There are going to be more examples of things that make me jealous during this eight week HBR/NEJM Insight Center. As those roll out, we would like to invite you to send your own — perhaps from your own organization, or from somewhere else. Maybe even from a competitor.

The more it hurts, the better.

What Economists Know That Managers Don’t (and Vice Versa)

Why did Jean Tirole win the Nobel Prize in Economics? Not for the highly-regarded work on competition between small numbers of firms with which his career began more than thirty years ago but for more recent work on how carefully structured regulation can improve performance relative to unbridled market forces. This is a reminder that serious students of market performance take market failures seriously.

But what many economists generally gloss over is a notion that I will argue is highly complementary to market failures: management failures. For policy-making purposes economists assume that all businesses act rationally in the pursuit of profits. The possibility that that might not be the case is generally ignored, or even when mentioned, quickly finessed.

Even Tirole betrays this bias. The section on the profit maximization hypothesis at the end of the introductory chapter of his classic 1988 textbook on industrial organization concludes by saying that even if a firm doesn’t maximize profits, it can be treated, for the purposes of many of its interactions with the outside world, as if it does. Partly because profit maximization is a bedrock assumption and partly because maximization is a basic mathematical tool, economists have trouble dealing with firms that are not maximizing profits.

In this worldview, disasters only happen because the rules of the game in which the businesses operate must be flawed. Economists disagree about the actual incidence of these market failures and the cost-effectiveness of governmental efforts to tackle them, but they broadly agree that the only factors that prejudice performance are external to businesses.

Businesses and management experts, in contrast, tend take the opposite position. Thus, Dominic Barton, among many others, traces capitalism’s current problems to capitalists who work with time horizons that are shorter than they ought to be. And Michael Porter and Mark Kramer point to a big pot of gold for businesses that properly internalize the social consequences of their decisions instead of incorrectly externalizing them. In this view, poor performance is (mostly) caused by management failures — specifically, miscalculations of various sorts — rather than inherent flaws in the workings of the marketplace. And specific prescriptions for practitioners are served up that are supposed to improve both private profits and public welfare.

Neither school of thought, though, has it quite right. In their efforts to characterize important failures as being (for one group) always market failures and (for the other group) management failures, the two groups end up missing out on each other’s insights.

For an example, reconsider the financial crisis. Some, arguably including the Fed Chairman who presided over its eruption, Alan Greenspan, were utopians who thought nothing could go wrong on either front: the rules of the game or managerial responses to them. But the financial sector was clearly subject to a number of the market failures that were well known to most economists.

To begin with, quite a few parts of it are heavily concentrated at a global level (the credit ratings business, for example, or global investment banking), and many more at the national level (just six financial institutions account for 46% of all U.S. banking assets and as such are “too big to fail”). This small-numbers problem invalidates Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” mechanism in which good performance is supposed to be ensured by large numbers of competitors, none controlling more than a sliver of the market and none, therefore, with the power to jack up prices.

Other aspects of the financial sector highlight some of the problems with markets that economists have added to their list since the time of Adam Smith. Because of informational imperfections (think subprime mortgages), segments within financial services have a history of provoking manias, panics, and crashes — volatility exacerbated by recent innovations such as exotic derivatives and high frequency trading. Since capital is like air to other markets, problems with the financial sector can have important effects on the rest of the economy, a version of the market failure referred to under the rubric of externalities.

But having run through those economic problems with financial market attributes, the meltdown probably shouldn’t be chalked up just to them: missteps on the part of key managers also contributed. Consider Lehman Brothers, whose collapse was the trigger for broader sectorial travails. In the aftermath of Dick Fuld’s refusal to agree with the terms proposed by the government to help bail it out, his net worth was estimated to have collapsed from close to $1 billion to about $100 million. Similar points could be made about Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns and many others.

Nor was the government — beyond Greenspan and the Fed — blameless in the run-up to the crisis. The push to expand home ownership swelled the subprime mortgages that ended up sinking large chunks of the financial sector. Bailouts — not just the ones after the crisis but also prior ones, such as that of Long Term Capital in 1998 — aggravated the problem of “moral hazard” that informational imperfections can engender. And the complexity of some of the post-crisis regulations seems, in a world of human rather than superhuman managers, to have slowed down recovery from it.

Given such realities — which could also be illustrated with other key sectors such as health care and education — the right response is to pay attention to both market and management failures. Doing so expands one’s sense of both the room to improve performance and the levers that might be pulled to do so. It also helps enhance credibility — another important consideration since recent surveys suggest that Americans, at least, are similarly dissatisfied with their government and with large corporations.

Finally and most importantly, considering both management failures and market failures helps spotlight the most serious problems because of an interaction effect: market failures expand the scope for management failures to matter a lot. For instance, poor decisions by managers at a company will be of more concern if the company is one of a few or, even worse, a monopoly. Choices about how high to set investment hurdles are more likely to be an issue in highly volatile market conditions. And managers are likely to be more confused about what they should internalize and what they should ignore when there are some externalities.

But to see these complementarities you have to take both market failures and management failures seriously — and not enough people are doing that as yet.

 

This post is part of a series leading up to the 2014 Global Drucker Forum, taking place November 13-14 in Vienna, Austria. See the rest of the series here.

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

Here’s something that’s obvious, but at the same time not: We’re all a lot more than we appear to be at work.

We have other dimensions that are invisible to our companies, supervisors, direct reports, and most of our colleagues, and those invisible dimensions have a deep impact on our work.

A couple of pieces of research got me thinking about this. One is a diary study of dual-earner couples showing that people put more time in at work when their intimate relationships are going well, because the absence of drama at home gives them greater emotional, cognitive, and physical vigor to bring to the workplace.

The other shows that spouses’ personalities affect employees’ work outcomes — incomes, promotions, and so on. Both studies are reminders that each individual bent over each task in the office is connected to, and the product of, a social and familial context that matters a lot, and we should all be paying more attention to those contexts.

Which I’ll get to in a second. But first, let me just say that I’m not advocating for more emotional sharing at the office. I really like the peaceful mutual ignorance of private matters that’s the norm at my work. It’s blissful. It’s one of the things that make work great, honestly.

But I do believe we could all benefit from a bigger awareness of the impact — the weight — of our outside lives on our work performance, and by “we” I mean the organizational we, too: The Powers That Be.

Both of the studies I mentioned are thought-provoking, but the second is truly remarkable. Brittany C. Solomon and Joshua J. Jackson of Washington University in St. Louis realized that a rich trove of data on thousands of Australian households would lend itself to an analysis of the effect of spouses’ personality characteristics on people’s employment outcomes, because the database included not only survey results indicating personality dimensions but also information on incomes, promotions, and job satisfaction.

The personality data covered what are known as the “big five” dimensions — extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness. The researchers found that the only spousal trait that was important to an employee’s work outcomes was conscientiousness, which turns out to predict employee income, number of promotions, and job satisfaction, regardless of gender.

Here you can see the relationships between spousal conscientiousness and income, promotions, and job satisfaction:

To put the income finding in dollar terms, with ​every 1-standard-deviation increase in a spouse’s conscientiousness, an individual is likely to earn approximately $4,000 more per year, averaging across all ages and occupations, according to Solomon. And one way to frame the promotion finding is that employees with extremely conscientious spouses (two standard deviations above the mean) are 50% more likely to get promoted than those with extremely unconscientious spouses (two standard deviations below the mean).

Even more remarkable is that the data allowed the researchers to figure out why spousal conscientiousness matters.

First, conscientious spouses handle a lot of household tasks, freeing employees to concentrate on work (“When you can depend on someone, it takes pressure off of you,” Solomon told me). Second, conscientious spouses make employees feel more satisfied in their marriages (which ties in to the first study I mentioned). Third, employees tend to emulate their conscientious spouses’ diligent habits.

This doesn’t mean your success depends on your being in a relationship. There are plenty of single people who shine at work, and there are plenty of effective business leaders who are unattached. In fact, research suggests that in certain circumstances, being single can help CEOs run their companies: firms led by unmarried chiefs invest more aggressively and take greater risks than other firms.

But as Solomon says, successful people often turn out to have strong marital relationships. “When you’re in a relationship, you’re no longer just two individuals; you’re this entity,” she says. The more solid the entity, the greater your advantage.

It’s obvious, of course, that our one-dimensional work lives don’t fully represent our multidimensional outside lives, that each of us is just the visible manifestation in cubeland of a sprawling existence that not only extends far and wide in the moment but has a whole history behind it. Although we may look like a collection of dots on a floor plan, each of those dots is like the intersection in space of a long line and a two-dimensional surface. The surface (the workplace) doesn’t see the lines; it sees only the points of intersection, the dots.

But what isn’t obvious is the extent to which so many people are parts of teams, in a sense — two-person teams that are based outside the office. Any particular colleague or boss or direct report might be supported by a truly conscientious spouse, someone who willingly — even joyfully — takes care of details that would otherwise become headaches and interfere with work. For that matter, any particular colleague or boss or report might be hampered by a spousal relationship that’s a couple of standard deviations below the mean, as they say.

We can’t and probably don’t want to know the details about these teams, but as Solomon points out, if organizations really understood the workplace effects of strong outside relationships, they might be more receptive to policies like flextime and telecommuting that make it easier for employees to spend time with their significant others.

Maybe you don’t agree that your company should get involved in trying to improve your spousal relationship. But there are things you can do on your own. You can support your spouse in supporting you. If you depend on his or her reliability, diligence, and goal orientation, don’t take those traits for granted. Maybe you’ve been standing heroically at the bow for so long that you’ve forgotten how much effort it takes to row. So sit down and row for a while.

And while you’re rowing, how about suggesting that your spouse get up and stand heroically in the bow for a change? Emulate his or her conscientious: Really put your back into it. You may find that your conscientious spouse has a compelling vision of his or her own that will take you into unexpected places.

Research: How Female CEOs Actually Get to the Top

Ambitious young women hoping to run a major business someday are often advised to take a particular career path: get an undergraduate degree from the most prestigious college you can, an MBA from a selective business school, then land a job at a top consulting firm or investment bank. From there, move between companies as you hopscotch your way into bigger roles and more responsibility.

That’s what we were told as undergraduates, and later on as students at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. It’s what Meg Whitman did, more or less, and it’s what Sally Blount, dean of the Kellogg School of Management and the only woman running a top-ten business school, recently recommended: “If we want our best and brightest young women to become great leaders…we have to convince more of them that … they should be going for the big jobs,” which for her meant “the most competitive business tracks, like investment banking and management consulting.”

We decided to put our expensively honed analytic skills to work testing that advice by looking at the career paths of the 24 women who head Fortune 500 companies. What we found surprised us.

Most women running Fortune 500 companies did not immediately hop on a “competitive business track.” Only three had a job at a consulting firm or bank right out of college. A larger share of the female CEOs—over 20%—took jobs right out of school at the companies they now run.  These weren’t glamorous jobs.  Mary Barra, now the CEO of General Motors, started out with the company as college co-op student.  Kathleen Mazzearella started out as a customer service representative at Greybar, the company she would eventually become the CEO of more than 30 years later. All told, over 70 percent of the 24 CEOs spent more than ten years at the company they now run, becoming long-term insiders before becoming CEO. This includes Heather Bresch at Mylan, Gracia Martore at Gannett, and Debra Reed at Sempra Energy.

Even those who weren’t promoted as long-term insiders often worked their way up a particular corporate ladder, advancing over decades at a single company and later making a lateral move into the CEO role at another company.  This was the experience of Patricia Woertz, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), who built her career over 29 years at Chevron.  And it was the experience of Sheri McCoy, who became CEO of Avon after being passed over for the CEO role at Johnson & Johnson, where she worked for 30 years.

The consistent theme in the data is that steady focus wins the day. The median long stint for these women CEOs is 23 years spent at a single company in one stretch before becoming the CEO. To understand whether this was the norm, we pulled a random sample of their male Fortune 500 CEO counterparts. For the men in the sample, the median long stint is 15 years. This means that for women, the long climb is over 50% longer than for their male peers. Moreover, 71% of the female CEOs were promoted as long-term insiders versus only 48% of the male CEOs. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for hopscotch early in women’s careers.

It is hard to parse what drives the long-tenure, insider path that so many of these women took or why their experiences differ from those of the men. Optimistic interpretations could include supportive organizations, strong mentors, or something intrinsic to the women themselves. On the flip side, differences between the long stints for women and men could also result from structures that treat women less favorably, from biases that delay promotions to penalties for taking maternity leave. Regardless of the root cause, it seems important to acknowledge that the long climb is the common path for female Fortune 500 CEOs.

An immediate implication of the long climb is that for ambitious young women, company culture matters a lot. If a common pattern is to spend multiple decades advancing in a single environment, that environment had better fuel female ambition rather than stifle it. A recent Bain survey shows that while women in entry-level jobs have ambition and confidence to reach top management in large companies that matches or exceeds that of men, at mid-career, men’s ambitions and confidence stay the same, while those of women drop dramatically. A company capable of maintaining the drive of its women as they progress in their careers is a better bet for a long stint than one that allows the more common diminishing trend to occur.

Let’s go back to that conventional career advice. What about the prestigious college? Does that matter? While Whitman’s high-prestige background may seem like it should be the norm, she is one of only two woman running a Fortune 500 company to have an undergraduate degree from an Ivy League institution. (This doesn’t appear to be a gendered issue. Only four percent of the men in our sample attended an Ivy League school.)

Early stints in consulting and banking also hardly seem to be a prerequisite for either gender: about three-quarters of the men and women do not have any reference in their publically available resumes to time spent in either industry, liberally defined, at any time. Prestigious MBA programs are also hardly a requirement; only 25% of the women and 16% of the men hold an MBA from a top-ten school. In short, for both male and female Fortune 500 CEOs, collecting a single conventional badge of prestige, let alone collecting a handful of them, may help, but is hardly a gating factor.

Of course, the world may have changed since the current CEOs made the choices that led them to the top seats in corporate America. The average age of the 24 female Fortune 500 CEOs is 56, leaving room for the tide to have shifted. Yet the youngest woman in the group, Heather Bresch of Mylan, 45, still follows the insider trajectory perfectly. Starting out typing drug labels at a Mylan plant in Morgantown, West Virginia, Bresch moved to roles of increasing responsibility over the next 20 years before becoming CEO.

It may be that the playbook for advising young women with their sights set on leading large companies needs to be revised. Just as important, there is something inspiring for young women in the stories of these female CEOs: the notion that regardless of background, you can commit to a company, work hard, prove yourself in multiple roles, and ultimately ascend to top leadership. These female CEOs didn’t have to go to the best schools or get the most prestigious jobs. But they did have to find a good place to climb.

Why IBM Gives Top Employees a Month to Do Service Abroad

“Eight out of 10 participants in the Corporate Service Corps program say it significantly increases the likelihood of them completing their career at IBM,” Stanley Litow, VP of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, told us.

Recognizing that corporate responsibility can offer a company a competitive advantage today, we became interested in IBM as a pioneer in establishing a skills-based volunteerism initiative that also influences its talent and professional development strategies. Several executives at the company offered to talk with us to figure out why the program has been so successful—not just as a philanthropic gesture, but as a talent development system. As Litow put it, “If participation in these programs increases our retention rate, recruits top talent, and builds skills in our workforce, then it’s addressing the critical issue of competitiveness.”

The IBM Corporate Service Corps, a hybrid of professional development and service, deploys 500 young leaders a year on team assignments in more than 30 countries in the developing world. Employees engage in two months of training while working full time, spend one month on the ground on a 6- to 12-member team tackling a social issue, and then mentor the next group for two months. So far, IBMers have completed over 1,000 projects.

The IBM Corporate Service Corps is an example of how IBM is incorporating service into leadership development as a result of the success of another IBM program, IBM’s On Demand Community, which was launched in 2003 as an online marketplace to connect nonprofits with employees and retirees, as well as a portal offering resources to nonprofits of all kinds. According to Litow, the objective was threefold: to support IBMers in their service engagements, to invest the intellectual capital of IBMers in tackling social issues around the world, and to develop the expertise and leadership of IBMers through volunteer opportunities that leverage their skills and abilities.

Argentinian software developer German Attanasio Ruiz, now part of IBM Watson Research, took advantage of On Demand Community and worked with a team of volunteers to produce a mobile application that helps children with special needs recognize emotions in everyday situations. It has now been translated into five languages. Ruiz volunteered significant hours over a six-month period and added mobile app development to his skill portfolio in the process. The volunteer team has since produced a second app, El Recetario, for more advanced students. They received the Volunteer Excellence Award in 2013 and developed a volunteer tool for On Demand Community called “Mobile Applications for Kids with Special Needs.”

Since the inception of On Demand Community, nearly 260,000 former and current employees from 120 countries have collectively logged more than 17 million hours of service. There’s a clear impact on employee engagement: “When I work for IBM,” says Ruiz, “my hands are bigger in terms of what I can do.”

Diane Statkus, an IBM project manager in Boston, echoes Ruiz’s sentiments. She’s volunteered at Girls Inc., the New England Center for Homeless Veterans, and has used her project management expertise to lead a job-skills assistance event with a team of volunteers each year. She’s startlingly honest in her assessment of how these experiences have affected her: “If I didn’t have the ability to be involved in this volunteer work, I’m not sure I’d still be there.”

So what makes the IBM programs so compelling? We noticed three key differentiators:

A multitude of options, so that everyone can find (or design) something they’re interested in. At the core of the Corporate Service Corps and On Demand Community are projects created by employees, retirees, and not-for-profit organizations. The thousands of IBMers who are engaged in service on a regular basis can select the projects they want to work on from the multitude available.

The On Demand Community portal is more than a marketplace; it’s a library. Volunteers can tap into ready-made presentations, videos, reference links, and software tools. (To expand its breadth of support for volunteerism, IBM made these free resources available to the public in 2011.) This library of tools helps employees get their projects off the ground, and ensures the quality of services that the organizations will receive.

Opportunities are actively pushed to interested employees, and can be used to satisfy professional requirements. Project listings are periodically emailed to employees who’ve filled out profiles with their locations, interests, and skills. Employees also can fulfill their professional development requirements through community service projects.

As a result, not only do IBM employees get to give back while developing their skills, but local communities get a great impression of IBM. One of the organizations that has benefited from IBM’s program is the Girls Scouts of Eastern Oklahoma (GSEOK). Among other efforts, IBMers have volunteered to teach classes and help develop an age-appropriate STEM curriculum. Says CEO Roberta Preston, “The real benefit for us as a not-for-profit is that we have world-class expertise at our fingertips that would otherwise be beyond our reach.”

When employees acquire new skills through volunteering, and enhance the company’s brand by giving back to their communities, there’s a clear benefit to Big Blue’s bottom line. “This is a very important attraction and retention vehicle for our company,” says Diane Melley, VP of IBM Global Citizenship Initiatives. “This brings value to our employees in terms of supporting them as well as acquiring the skills that they need to be successful as IBMers.”

3 Traps That Block Corporate Transformation

The need for transformation has never before been more keenly felt in the corporate world.  Digital-first companies, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are amassing market share and capitalization, but only a few brick-and-mortar corporations (think Apple, Nissan, and HCL Technologies) have been able to change fast enough to catch up with their rivals.  Why do companies that lose their relevance find it so tough to recover?

For decades, the success of a business depended on three key pillars: Innovative Ideas + Cheaper/Faster/Better Execution + Powerful Leadership. Ideas were critical, but execution was the source of competitive advantage even during the internet era for companies such as Toyota, GE, and Dell.  They made mediocre ideas look great because of their execution, and a tightfisted, centralized, command-and-control culture dominated such organizations.

But, with the digital era’s dawn, traditional sources of competitive advantage are fading — for three reasons.

One, digital technologies have shortened and simplified execution cycles, and compressed advantages built on physical reach. Two, with the emergence of specialized organizations that can handle manufacturing and logistics, customer support and after-sales services, and IT, entry barriers in many industries have fallen.  And three, the new technologies have made possible more consumer analytics, greater visibility, and scale, forcing a move away from standardization and towards personalized offerings and unique experiences.

As a result, the winning formula has become: Innovative Ideas + Delivering Unique Experiences + Enabling Leadership.  Uber’s rise, for instance, has been propelled by the novel concept of using mobile devices to hail cabs, and a cool customer experience that features seamless credit card payments and driver ratings.  Its managers are committed to transparency and allow employees to constantly scout for new business opportunities.  No wonder Uber, which was founded five years ago, is valued at around $17 billion today.

But what if you’re in an existing business rather than a start-up? Going by my experience at HCL Technologies, where I led the change effort, transformation for large companies involves breaking out of three traps:

The Logic Trap.  Companies often have to consider doing what others believe is impossible; they can’t change radically by thinking within the boundaries of reason.  Could Amazon have come up with the idea of delivery drones, for instance, by thinking within the box?

Smart companies identify gaps, focus on discontinuities, and force the creation of new markets.  Their leaders have to move away from incremental steps, such as cost cutting, and think of giant leaps that will put them on the path of transformation.  That’s what we did at HCL Technologies with the Employees First, Customers Second idea.  Being illogical can sometimes be a way of achieving the impossible.

The Continuity Trap.  A comet leaves behind a tail long after it has disappeared, but astronomers, knowing that the comet has gone, quickly re-calibrate their telescopes to search for the next one.  By contrast, many business leaders take comfort in the past — essentially staring at the long-gone comet’s tail — rather than getting excited about the uncertainty of the future.

Some argue that uncertainty demotivates employees, leading to increased attrition and corrosion of market value.  However, the opposite is also true; the best talent is usually motivated by challenges and how to tackle them.  An owner may wax eloquent about his beautiful home, but it’s the leak in the bath that excites the plumber.

HCL Technologies was proud of its leaky pipes, so to say, and laid bare those aspects of the organization that weren’t working.  That attracted transformers, who were drawn up by the challenge of fixing big problems.  HCL’s clock speed went up, and its talent and energy focused on tackling future discontinuities.  As a result, the company has seen revenues and market capitalization grow over seven-fold in the last nine years.

The Leadership Trap.  If the source of today’s competitive advantage lies in the interface between employees and customers, the leader’s role must change from being a commander to an enabler of bottom-up innovation.  Customer experience is supreme, so leaders must inspire employees to create and deliver unique experiences by tapping into their insights.

Howard Schultz and Jeff Bezos, the CEOs of Starbucks and Amazon, are proponents of the employee empowerment credo.  Their goal is to inspire employees to be personally accountable for the customer experience.  That’s how more leaders should try to think.

The impact of digital technologies on business and leadership models is the biggest issue facing corporations nowadays. It’s an opportunity for business leaders to stand up, be counted, and convert the threat into an opportunity for transformation without settling for incremental change.  Isn’t it stimulating to do what no one has done before you?

 

This post is part of a series leading up to the 2014 Global Drucker Forum, taking place November 13-14 in Vienna, Austria. See the rest of the series here.