Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1357

5 Tips for New Team Leaders

I’ve been a new manager five times in my career: once as a first-time manager at Google going from being a teammate to leading peers, three times as I was promoted within Google, and most recently as the new Chief Revenue Officer for UberConference, a teleconferencing startup in San Francisco. What I’ve found is that success out of the gate is normally tied to being truly open to learning, communicating openly and honestly, and ultimately being prepared to take action when you know where the team needs to head.

To that end, here are the key things I’ve learned along the way:

Over-communicate. When someone new joins a team, it generally creates some nervousness. Everyone wants to know what you’re going to change and where you’re going to take the direction of the team. Be as open and transparent about what you’re thinking as quickly as possible. You can start by outlining your 30-day plan. While you may not have any opinions specific to the business yet, you can tell people what you want to learn about and evaluate. Additionally, the more transparent you can be, the more comfortable people will feel being similarly candid with you. You may not know your strategy, but you can certainly talk about your values, priorities, and observations.

Ask questions. I make a rule that about 50 percent of the words coming out of my mouth should end with a question mark in the first 30 days. I’m also explicit with people that all I plan to do is ask questions in the first month (which helps me hold myself accountable to that!). When I first became a manager, I was introduced to the concept of being a “knower” versus a “learner.” A knower assumes she has the answers, whereas a learner will admit that she doesn’t — even if she has significant experience. Being genuinely excited about the opportunity to learn and understand what’s going on within the company builds credibility, and generally makes you more approachable.

Figure out what people really want to do. In one of my new roles at Google, I managed a woman who was in the sales organization as a Demand Management representative. After chatting with her about her career aspirations and what got her most excited to get out of bed in the morning, I realized that she had real untapped talent on both the creative and analytical fronts. I didn’t really have a role for her yet, but knew she was being underutilized. I shifted her to being my “analyst,” which basically meant someone who would work with me on whatever big project I was tackling. She ended up being one of the top performers in our organization, and now is part of a global SWAT team that helps fundamentally rethink key go-to-market tactics. You probably have a lot of people just like her in your organization. Meet with all of your direct reports for at least an hour within your first week. Ask them about what they really enjoy doing and what they aspire to be doing in the next 2–3 years. It’s often the case that the role the individual is in today isn’t necessarily fully utilizing their skills or motivating them to be their absolute best. Quick changes in role definition can turn a solid player into a rockstar.

Get your hands dirty. Spend time doing the work that your team actually does. Not only does this help establish you as someone who leads by example, but you also learn first-hand about all of the different challenges that people experience every day. At UberConference, we have every new member of the team spend a week as a guest member of our customer support team. As a result of those experiences, everyone is far more connected to our customers, and changes to the product, tools, and messaging are implemented immediately because that first-hand experience creates passion. If you can understand what it’s fundamentally like to be on the front lines, you have unique perspective when making larger strategic decisions and communicating them to your team.

Be decisive. Once you have a good lay of the land, explicitly lay out your vision and then plan to start moving toward it. People feel less unrest when they understand the bigger picture and can see where things are heading. In my experience, this is often the hardest thing to do when you’re new, and also the hardest to recover from if you don’t do it. At Google, I relocated to Australia to run our Asia Pacific sales organization. I got this opportunity despite knowing nothing about the region and never having been a sales representative — or having managed a sales team, for that matter. I immediately saw what I perceived to be workflow and sales skill issues. Rather than calling them out and putting a plan in place to address them, I kept trying to slowly mold things into a different state. I kept second-guessing myself and worrying that the sales team wouldn’t get behind the changes that I knew needed to happen. About six months into the job, a couple of the top reps came to me, pointed out that they knew what I really wanted, and told me they wished that I had just laid out the changes I wanted and asked people to up their game.

Being new is rarely easy, but if you’ve taken the time to be a learner and to get to know your team, chances are they will follow you when you step up and lead.

Map Out Cultural Conflicts on Your Team

When you’re on a global team, cultural differences can be complex and can often seem contradictory. The biggest challenge comes when differences are complex in surprising ways.

Here’s a letter I received from an executive at automotive supplier Valeo, a French company with big client bases in Germany and Japan, and a growing presence in China.

Hi Erin,

After attending your presentation at our annual conference last week, I’ve been thinking about the invisible cultural boundaries impacting the effectiveness of my global team.

When I moved to China, I thought the difficulty would be
 in bridging the cultural differences between Asians and Europeans. And it is true that the Asian members of my team are uncomfortable with the way our French and German members publicly disagree with them and give them negative feedback. I’ve coached the team members on how to moderate their approaches and reactions to work more effectively together.

But to my surprise, the most serious difficulties we have on the team are between the Chinese and the Japanese. The Chinese gripe that the Japanese are slow to make decisions, inflexible,
and unwilling to change. The Japanese complain that the
 Chinese don’t think things through, make rash decisions, and seem to thrive in chaos. Not only do these two Asian groups 
have difficulty working together, but also the Japanese in many ways behave more like the Germans than like the Chinese—something I never anticipated.

I’d appreciate any thoughts and suggestions you may have.  

Olivier

Olivier had attended my course at INSEAD on Culture Mapping. In this course we analyze the positions of various cultures on eight behavioral dimensions. The process and the eight dimensions are explained in the May 2014 HBR magazine article: Navigating the Cultural Minefield.

I love Olivier’s letter because it provides a perfect example of how the culture mapping process can help to move beyond sweeping assumptions and to instead tease out the specific cultural dynamics that impact effectiveness.   Here is my response:

Dear Olivier,

Start addressing your problem by creating a simple culture map using the eight scales. Plot out each culture on the eight dimensions and draw a line connecting all eight points. This line represents the overall pattern of that culture on the map. I’ve done that for you with the four cultures from your team.

Now check the lines for Japan and China. On several scales, they are close together. As you’ve experienced, both the Chinese and Japanese cultures are less comfortable with direct negative feedback and open disagreement than Europeans. Reflecting that fact, on scales 2 (Evaluating) and 6.(Disagreeing), the Europeans are 
on one side and the Asian cultures on the other. But in most cases, the Japanese perceive the Chinese as very direct — note the difference between these cultures on scale 2 (Evaluating). The French see the Germans in the same way.

Next, take a closer look at scales 4 (Deciding) and 7 (Scheduling), and you’ll see the likely source of the frustration on your team. Although in Japan, like China, there is a strong deference to authority (scale 3, Leading), Japan is a consensual society where decisions are often made by the group in a bottom-up manner. That means decisions take longer, as input from everyone is gathered and a collective decision is formed. By contrast, in China decisions are most often made by the boss in a top-down fashion (scale 4, Deciding). Once the decision is made, there is a great rush towards the finish line.

Furthermore, the Japanese have a linear-time culture (scale 7, Scheduling). They build plans carefully and stick to the plan. Being organized, structured, and on time are all values that
 the Japanese share with their linear-time German colleagues. Indeed, on both scales 4 (Deciding) and 7 (Scheduling), the Japanese are rather close to the German culture, far from France and quite far from China.

In comparison, the Chinese (especially younger Chinese in big cities working for public companies such as yours) tend to make decisions quickly and to change plans often and easily, valuing flexibility and adaptability over sticking to the plan. On these two scales, (Deciding and Scheduling), the Chinese are closer to the French than to the Japanese.

Given these differences, it’s understandable that your Japanese and Chinese team members are having difficulty working together. Can the problem be solved? Absolutely. The next step in improving these dynamics is to increase the awareness of your team members about how culture impacts their effectiveness.

All the best,

Erin

What about your own global teams?   What are the likely sources of cultural difficulties you’ll encounter with them?   Over the years I’ve built up quite a lot of data on cultural differences and I’ve drawn on that work to provide pair comparisons for a number of counties, which you may find useful in working that out.  You can see the comparisons on this interactive exercise:

Melanoma Incidence Is Much Higher for Flight Crews

Airline pilots’ and cabin crews’ incidence of the dangerous skin cancer melanoma is about twice that of the general population, and their death rate from the disease is 42% higher, according to a New York Times report of a scholarly analysis of 19 studies. The reason is unclear, but the researchers point out that exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet A radiation, a melanoma risk factor, is twice as great at 30,000 feet as at ground level, and airplane windows provide only minimal protection. The researchers suggest that crews wear sunscreen when they’re aloft.

The Salary Gap Between Stingy and Generous Companies Is Growing

What’s behind rising income inequality: the pay difference between janitors and CEOs, or the gap between how well different employers pay each position? Income inequality in the U.S. has historically more about the former. But a new NBER paper argues that the increase in inequality in recent years is actually driven largely by the latter.

Increasingly, the paper suggests, your income is driven by the company you work for, not just where you fall on the org chart.

The paper — by Erling Barth of the Institute for Social Research, James C. Davis of the Boston Census Research Data Center, Richard Freeman of NBER, and Alex Bryson of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research — looked at workers’ earnings*, as well as how much companies were paying in wages per worker. They discovered that from 1992 to 2007, the bulk of the increase in income inequality can be explained by a growing inequality in how well different firms pay.

The researchers considered the possibility that this finding reflected a sorting of talent. What if the top companies were attracting all the most skilled workers, and that’s why they were paying more? That dynamic is real, they discovered, but it explains only a small part of the trend. Instead, the majority of the growing gap between how well firms pay seems to be a difference in wages for similar roles.

“The road to understanding increasing inequality in the U.S. lies [in] the divergence of compensation for similar workers among establishments and firms,” wrote Freeman in an essay about the difference in how different hotels pay their workers, which he believes illustrates his research.

In some ways, though, hotel workers are not the typical case. While wage inequality between firms appears to be growing across geographies and without regard to worker productivity, it does vary by industry and pay grade.

The increasing inequality between companies is sharpest in finance, insurance, and real estate, followed by communications. And it is most pronounced for the highest paid workers. So rising inequality is less about every CEO getting paid more than it is about the top finance executives leaving their peers in the dust.

In his October HBR article on skyrocketing executive pay, Roger Martin relates a startling fact:

“The top 25 hedge fund managers in 2010 raked in four times the earnings of all the CEOs of the Fortune 500 combined.”

This squares with Freeman and his colleagues’ research. Making the top 0.1% isn’t just about making it to the top; you have to make it in the right industry and even then in the right firm. Financiers are leaving CEOs behind; hedge funders are putting bankers to shame.

We’re used to thinking about inequality as management vs. labor, but that is increasingly only one part of the picture. The growing divide between firms — and particularly how they pay their executives — deserves scrutiny as well.

*The compensation measure includes all labor compensation reported to the IRS, including bonuses and stock options.

Oracle: The Worst-Governed, Best-Run Company Around

After 37 years in charge, Larry Ellison finally stepped down as Oracle’s CEO on Thursday. Except that he’s not really stepping down. The 70-year-old will stay on as the software giant’s executive chairman and also its chief technology officer — the latter title a formalization of a role he was already playing. And the new co-CEOs, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, will continue to do the same things they did as co-presidents, the only difference being that they will now report to the board instead of just to Ellison. But Ellison is of course chairman of that board (long-time chairman Jeff Henley will stay on as vice chairman).

Basically, not much has changed at Oracle, except that the company’s governance structure has gotten more complicated. For this it will probably be subjected to criticism from watchdogs like ISS, Glass Lewis, and GMI Ratings. That won’t be anything new for Oracle, which has gotten used to being labeled a governance disaster.

Two years ago, for example, GMI Ratings gave the company a governance score of 9, “indicating higher accounting and governance risk than 91% of companies,” and an ESG (environmental, social, governance) grade of F. (I’ve asked GMI for up-to-date ratings, but haven’t gotten them yet.) Last fall, both ISS and Glass Lewis recommended that shareholders not only vote no on Oracle’s executive pay plan — which as has become customary showered Ellison with millions of new options to buy Oracle shares despite the fact that he already owns 25% of the company — but also reject the slate of directors nominated by the company. Shareholders did in fact say no on Ellison’s pay, with 57% voting against and Ellison himself accounting for most of the yes votes, but they didn’t throw out the directors.

Why not? Maybe, just maybe, because Oracle’s stock price has been rising for a decade, significantly outperforming the Nasdaq composite index and other tech giants over that stretch. On top of that, the company has a nice dividend payout, for a tech stock, of 1.2%. And while I’m certainly not the person to argue that short- or even medium-term shareholder returns are a perfect measure of corporate performance, I do think that what your stock does over 28 years has some meaning. And of the remarkable tech IPO class of 1986, which included Adobe, EMC, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, Oracle has been the best performer.

So, basically, Oracle is a horribly governed company, but it seems to be pretty well run. Which inevitably raises some questions about the true value of the standards and practices that go under the label of good governance. There are some who think all this stuff amounts to what Yale Law School’s Roberta Romano once called “quack governance” — a bunch of ideas peddled by “corporate governance entrepreneurs” (Romano’s phrase again) that don’t actually improve corporate performance. I wouldn’t go that far; I’m perfectly willing to believe that over the years the likes of ISS, Glass Lewis, and GMI have honed and improved their recommendations on the basis of real evidence on what drives performance and risk. But while corporations might on average be better off abiding by their governance recommendations, I actually think we should want some diversity in how companies are run. One size does not fit all.

Oracle, despite being a giant organization with 122,000 employees and a market value of $177 billion, remains very much the idiosyncratic creation of one man, Ellison. In that it’s pretty similar to the company co-founded and long run by Ellison’s best friend, the late Steve Jobs. Apple has also caught flak for shareholder-unfriendly governance practices and multiple other misdeeds. Jobs’s imperious behavior was often excused as the flipside of creative genius, and that’s one way to look at Ellison too.

Oracle’s products don’t inspire the sort of loving awe that even now greets Apple’s latest creations, but there is something about how Ellison runs his company that seems to work. Oracle attracts driven, talented people (some of whom head off to start their own very successful companies), it’s been pretty stable at and near the top for years, and it makes tons of money. It’s also worth noting that the company now has a female co-CEO and long had an African-American co-president (Charles Phillips, now the CEO of Infor) — not exactly customary in Silicon Valley.  Yes, Oracle has been a laggard in the switch to cloud computing, it doesn’t seem like the most pleasant place in the world to work, and its CEO-turned-executive-chairman presumably won’t be around forever. But it may be that Ellison’s seemingly ridiculous pay packages are keeping him involved and motivated (presumably by the chance to move up from No. 5 on the Forbes billionaires list), while his unconventional hiring practices (such as bringing in Hurd after he was ousted from HP amid a sexual-harassment scandal and plunking him in power-sharing arrangement with Catz that few thought would work) are actually helping the company prepare for the future.

It may be. I truly don’t know whether the optimistic or pessimistic view of Oracle is correct, and I feel really uncomfortable making even a sideways endorsement of those massive options grants Ellison gets. But it’s hard to get around the reality that, so far, the company’s frequent disdain of good-governance practices has gone hand in hand with spectacular, sustained success. It could be that Larry Ellison knows a few things that the governance watchdogs don’t.

Stop Searching for That Elusive Data Scientist

Based purely on the data, a really good data scientist will probably tell you the odds are poor that you’ll be able to find and hire really good data scientists. Surveys say there simply aren’t enough people with the unusual blend of software skills and statistical savvy to go around. Arguably even more important, high-impact data scientists bring collaborative temperaments and business acumen to data-driven initiatives. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of individuals with just enough statistical and software knowledge to be data-dangerous. For many organizations, a mediocre data scientist may be worse than none at all.

What to do? My immediate advice: Give up. Stop hunting for that data science unicorn and/or silver bullet. Chances are slim that your organization would even be able take full advantage of their talent. But the opportunities for data-science-enabled efficiencies and innovation are too important to defer or deny. Big organizations can afford — or think they can afford — to throw money at the problem by hiring laid-off Wall Street quants or hiring big-budget analytics boutiques. More frugal and prudent enterprises seem to be taking alternate approaches.

The smartest thing I’ve seen organizations start doing is seed-fund and empower small cross-functional data-oriented teams explicitly charged with delivering tangible and measurable data-driven benefits in relatively short periods of time. The accent is on the word team; the emphasis is on building greater data capability than better digital infrastructures. The goal is to make all of the organization — not just the geeks and quants — more conversant in how to align probability, statistics, technology and business value creation. No black boxes or centers of analytic excellence here; they want data science to be a cultural value, not just a functional expertise.

What I’ve typically observed are small teams not addressing big problems or grand challenges but an imperative to generate insights that could get the organization doing something interestingly valuable really fast. One team, for example, did something as simple as comparing a certain class of tweets from their best customers with their competitor’s customer’s tweets. The overlaps and differences immediately suggested ways to better target and take-away rivals’ customers beyond social media.

An industrial products company started monitoring blogs, boards, and other social media platforms around maintenance and service complaints and then mapping that data to internal client maintenance data. The resulting insights completely changed the internal dialogues between sales, customer support, maintenance engineering.

These were extensive, but not exhaustive, exercises in simple data science and analytics. The tools were crude and, frankly, the individual technical and statistical expertise of the teams was limited. Crudely put, the typical team was collectively less skilled and competent than a typical data scientist. But that collective team learned from each other and sent a message to the rest of the organization that even baby steps in analytics could yield large strides in outcome. Limited ambition did a better job attracting credibility and support than BHAGs.

Without exception, every team I ran across or worked with hired outside expertise. They knew when a technical challenge and/or statistical technique was beyond the capability. But, unsurprisingly, the outside advisors — in one case, an academic, in others, quants from digital consultancies — were better able to collaborate with teams that had really tried to get their minds around a design challenge. The relationship was less of an RFP box-ticking exercise than a shared space for experimental design.

For me, the big takeaway was the way existing software and databases were re-purposed and how cloud and analytics as a service offerings were brought in to address the issues. These teams had minimal experience in putting the disparate pieces together. That said, there was no shortage of vendors, advisors, and service providers who wanted to sell their capabilities into the enterprise.

So are these teams ultimately a short-term fix rather than a more sustainable solution to the data scientist shortage? Yes. But in the same way that the rise of mobile devices has changed how organizations communicate and collaborate internally and externally, the concurrent rise in Big Data and analytic opportunities means that smart organizations would be foolish to outsource this away from the very people who need to be more data-driven. You want to cultivate internal capability, not just hire it.

People don’t need to become data scientists, but they do need to understand and appreciate key principles and practices of data science. In other words, the temporary fix of data science teaming doesn’t solve the problem, but it creates the cultural and organizational context for the necessary hires to follow. Sometimes the data show that “buying time” the right way can be a terrific investment.

Coaching an Employee Who Doesn’t Want Help

Is there someone on your team who you’d like to coach, but resists your help? A high-performer who could reach further? A hard-worker who could grow faster?  The best managers know to coach their employees, but what if someone doesn’t want your help? How can you convince a hesitant employee that your advice is worthwhile?

What the Experts Say

“Resistance to coaching takes many forms,” says Amy Jen Su, managing partner of Isis Associates, an executive coaching and leadership development firm and coauthor of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence. The resistant employee may be passive, putting off your meetings or acting as if he’s open to coaching but never actually changing his behavior. Or she might be direct, making it clear she doesn’t want your help. While this may be frustrating, Ed Batista, an executive coach and contributor to the HBR Guide to Coaching Your Employees, says that you shouldn’t assume the employee is to blame. Often the manager is at least part of the problem. Here’s how to get to the bottom of what’s going on, so that you can help even the people least willing to be coached.

Know when coaching works — and when it doesn’t

First consider whether coaching is the right approach. “Good coaching is a fluid process that incorporates asking questions, challenging assumptions, reflecting back what’s heard, and, at times, providing a direct opinion or feedback,” says Batista. Does the employee or situation call for that investment? “Sometimes you really do need people to perform a task in a specific way,” Batista says, and in those cases, you’re better off giving directions. Or you may not want to dedicate the time and energy to helping a chronic underperformer. But if you feel coaching is warranted, and the employee isn’t accepting your help, the next step is to understand why.

Understand the resistance

It’s easy to assume the resistor is simply irrational or difficult. But “there is typically a logical, perfectly reasonable explanation for how the person is behaving,” says Batista. Perhaps, he doesn’t trust you well enough or feels like you don’t appreciate him. “Often coaching can take on a tone of ‘you’re not good enough,’” Su says. It could also be that the employee hasn’t had a good experience with coaching in the past. “She may be thinking: ‘Why bother? I still didn’t get a promotion after trying last time.’ Or ‘it’s never really stopped me before. I’m going to get promoted anyway,’” says Su. You might also see resistance if the person hasn’t bought into the process: “You have to agree on what the blind spot or development opportunity is,” says Su. Batista suggests you ask yourself: Could my actions be contributing to the problem?

Be curious

It’s not enough to contemplate the reasons. You should also ask your employee why she’s hesitant. “Start asking questions,” says Batista. But not yes-or-no ones — they don’t advance the dialogue. Instead start your inquiries with “how” or “what.” For example, you might ask, “How can we solve this problem together?” or “What do you feel is holding you back at this moment?”  You can mention the resistant behavior you’re observing so long as it’s in a non-critical way that sparks candid discussion. For example, you could say: “I noticed that you rescheduled our meeting several times. I’d really like to work with you on this so what can I do to help you make this a priority or make you more comfortable tackling this issue?”

Be transparent about your intentions

If you haven’t explained why you’re offering coaching, be explicit. Acknowledge what you’re trying to do and why. “I’m focusing on your performance because I want to help you meet your goals this year.” Or “I’d like to give you coaching about how to run meetings so that others see you as an effective leader.” This is  especially important if you’re coaching someone for the first time. “If you’ve been a more directive manager, and all of a sudden you’re asking, ‘Well, what do you think?’ it may freak your employees out a bit. You need to make explicit why you’re changing your behavior and what your intentions are or you’ll create a lot of unnecessary anxiety,” says Batista.

Show appreciation and build trust

To accept coaching is to make oneself vulnerable, so you need to show your employee that you’re worthy of trust. First acknowledge the person’s contributions. Coaching can feel like a punishment, especially for solid performers who think they’ve got it figured out, so state specifically what you value about her work and why. Emphasize confidentiality and keep your word. “If the employee finds out that you were talking about her performance in another setting, she’ll question the relationship,” says Su. And make sure you stay committed throughout the coaching process. “Don’t get all fired up about how you’re going to help and then get distracted.”  Another way to build trust is to show employees that you’ll accept reasonable mistakes. “Allow people to analyze setbacks and failures in a dispassionate way and learn from them,” Batista says.

Don’t force it

“When people are compelled into coaching, it’s not a recipe for success,” says Batista. Instead of improving the person’s performance, you may strain your relationship. So, if the employee continues to resist, don’t strong arm him. “Put the coaching on pause and address the issue at a later date,” Su says. But if the performance issue is critical or time-sensitive, you might consider bringing in an external consultant or someone from HR to help.

Principles to Remember

Do:

Ask open-ended questions about why the employee is resistant
Show that you appreciate the employee’s contributions
Accept that the employee will make mistakes — tolerance encourages risk-taking

Don’t:

Put all of the blame on the employee — it’s likely that she’s being resistant for a reason
Hide your reasons for trying to coach the person — be explicit about why and how you want to help
Force the employee into accepting your help — coercion doesn’t build trust

Case study#1: Own your part of the problem

Carla Torres* hired Susan*, a new HR manager as her direct report.  But, because Susan had more experience in the field, she rarely sought her new boss’s help and was resistant to feedback and coaching. “She saw me as her peer, not as someone who could teach her anything,” Carla explains. Things came to a head six months into Susan’s tenure during her first performance review. “Carla pointed out Susan’s failure to build relationships within the rest of the HR team, an important part of the job. “But it was a disaster for both of us. She ended up in tears and I felt terrible about the whole thing,” Carla says.

She realized that Susan would want to avoid her so decided to head off the problem. “I scheduled a follow-up meeting and we talked through the feedback,” Carla says. She apologized for her part in the problem: “I had moved too quickly to the coaching points without taking sufficient time to acknowledge her strong performance in the role. I reminded her that I was excited to have her on the team and that I fully supported her continued career growth and development. As such, I owed it to her to provide the feedback.”

Carla says this was a turning point for the relationship and Susan’s willingness to be coached. “We needed that human moment of connection and she needed to know that I would look out for her,” she says.

Case Study #2: Understand why

Russell Mathews* was in a bind. He was trying to transition into a new role and needed to train his colleague, Sam*, on how to take over some of his current job responsibilities, but Sam was unresponsive.

Russell thought he understood why. There weren’t many opportunities to move up in the small mortgage operations company office where they worked, and Sam, stuck in the same job for two years, was probably feeling stuck and discouraged. He started exercising with Sam to see if he would open up. “We would take breaks and walk up and down the stairs,” he says. Between sets, “he began chatting about his dissatisfaction with the company and I would just listen.”

At one point, Russell asked Sam, “Why are you here?” There were hundreds of similar firms, so why had he stayed at theirs? It’s a question Russell had used in other situations before. “When I identify their motives, I can find ways to coach them. Sam’s response was: “I love the culture, I’m just upset about the lack of opportunity.”

The conversation was a breakthrough because Russell had earned Sam’s trust. Eventually, he started coaching his junior colleague on ways to improve and advance as well as training him in the skills he would need to take over Russell ’s role. Sam was much more receptive and engaged. “It took some time, lots of stairs, and many small coaching sessions but he’s a great employee now and has completely turned his attitude around,” Russell says.

*Not their real names

Designing the Commute of the Future

By Testing. And Testing Again. How San Francisco Is Designing Its Metro Train of the FutureCityLab

The first San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (commonly known as BART) trains first appeared more than 40 years ago to great fanfare. They haven't really changed since. But as Nate Berg reports, the system is on the cusp of change, with between 775 and 1,000 new cars scheduled to begin service in 2017, at a cost of up to $3.3 billion. So how, exactly, do you go about such a massive redesign, which will have profound implications for commuters throughout the city? For one, collect data and survey riders. Over and over again. You test designs and materials, from the "big picture of the car itself to the minutiae of floor patterning and handrail grips," and consider how people behave, so that you can "subtly control rush-hour crowds and all those bicycles."



The details of the story are as interesting as the details of the new cars, which will include “more social, more lounge-like” spaces for commuters. So read the whole thing, keeping in mind a particularly memorable quote from Aaron Weinstein, BART's chief marketing officer: "We're planning on ordering up to a thousand of these cars. We can't really afford to be wrong."

Let Us Now Praise…Tim Cook Interview: The iPhone 6, the Apple Watch, and Remaking a Company's CultureBusinessweek

It's just about a week after the big Apple event, which means it's time for an exclusive with the company CEO. Businessweek's Brad Stone and Adam Satariano do a heck of a job exploring how Tim Cook, essentially assigned the role of filling Steve Jobs's impossibly big (and perfectly designed) shoes, fundamentally changed Apple’s inner workings. Without the changes, many of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch features wouldn't have been possible. Among Cook’s actions: firing one of Jobs's "most trusted lieutenants" in order to "break down walls" between hardware, software, and services.



To be sure, some say Apple doesn't have the same allure, and others chafe at Cook's discipline when it comes to finances and supply chains. But his management of the company – from organizational structure to smart acquisitions – has earned him praise. He's "the hallmark of a modern-day CEO," says IBM chief Ginni Rometty, whose company partners with Apple to sell iPhones and iPads to corporations. "It's all about the clarity of vision and knowing what to do and what not to do."

A Question for Our Time Does Not Checking Your Buddy’s Facebook Updates Make You a Bad Friend?Pacific Standard

True, social media gives us new ways to be friends, but it also continually creates new ways for us to make social blunders. Writer Paul Bisceglio discovered this when he was hiking with a friend he hadn’t seen for months and the friend complimented him on a few recent stories. “I began to panic,” Bisceglio says, because he hadn’t been following the friend’s posts or tweets.



As a reality check, Bisceglio asks a recent high-school graduate about the etiquette of following friends. The reply isn’t reassuring: Updates are intended to keep close acquaintances in the loop, so “it can almost be kind of an insult when a friend that you haven’t seen in a while doesn’t know what’s going on in your life because they aren’t looking at your profile or feed.” But is it Bisceglio’s duty to read his buddies’ social-media output? Maybe the expectation of being followed is the new boorish. Maybe “the person who insists you favorite their post about morning traffic or like an Instagram photo of their lunch is actually the one being a bad friend.” —Andy O'Connell

The Story of an Air Conditioner What Happens When Crowdsourcing Stops Being Polite and Starts Getting RealFast Company

Thanks to my very persistent significant other, I'm the proud owner of an Aros air conditioner. Invented by an IT consultant, shepherded by a start-up called Quirky, and manufactured and sold by GE, it is both nice to look at and incredibly efficient. But it turns out the magical story of my magical air conditioner isn't quite what I thought it was. While Quirky boasts a fairly democratic process that prioritizes crowdsourcing, there's a bit of controversy: Because of GE's production and sales needs, the air conditioner was pushed to market without group consensus. This has caused ire among Quirky's loyal community, and one member claims he came up with the invention first but was ignored. This all raises a question, says writer J.J. McCorvey: "Is there a point at which a helpful crowd gets in the way of success?"

ProbablyWill Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?New York Times Magazine

American cities are trying hard to lure college-educated young people, offering such amenities as tax breaks and cheap housing. But few communities can match the appeal of Portland, Oregon, which has been able to attract and retain that crowd at the second-highest rate in the nation, behind only Louisville, Kentucky. OK, but so what? Those smart young people aren’t exactly putting the Portland economy into overdrive.



Because there are so many of them, and because there isn’t much industry in Portland, a good number of the city’s young citizens aren’t working, and wages are relatively low. Those who are employed make 84 cents for every dollar earned in other cities. People seem willing to accept the lousy job market as the price of a beautiful coastline, mild winters, trendy restaurants, clean air, and urban planning so breathtakingly intelligent it makes the “heart sing.” But will this labor glut hang around now that the economy is heating up elsewhere? It remains to be seen whether Portland’s young and restless will move on to less-cool places where jobs are more plentiful and the pay is better. —Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITSHealth and Well-Being

Remember the CEO Who Quit to Be a Dad? He's Loving It. (The Wall Street Journal)
Professional Networking Can Make You Feel Physically Dirty (The Washington Post)
When You Can't Afford Sleep (The Atlantic)

Will Oracle’s Co-CEO Setup Work?

Larry Ellison announced yesterday that he was stepping down as CEO of Oracle, the company he co-founded in 1977. In his place, Oracle presidents Mark Hurd and Safra Catz will share the CEO role. Ellison will remain chairman of the board and will still serve as chief technology officer. Cue the Ellison retrospectives. But what about the company’s future? Can co-CEOs work?

While research has found that the market seems to like the co-CEO arrangement, there isn’t a clear-cut answer on its effectiveness. But a paper published earlier this month at least presents evidence on how to do it badly: the least successful co-CEO arrangements are those where the two executives are actually equally in control.

The paper, published this month in the Strategic Management Journal, looked at 71 public companies in the U.S. and collected data on executives’ salaries, tenure at the firm, stock ownership, and position on the board. Using a weighted average of these four metrics, they created a proxy for the power balance between co-CEOs — the bigger the gap in pay, tenure, stock, and board positions, the greater the imbalance between co-CEOs. They then compared firm performance, using return on equity, to that balance of power.

It turns out that the larger the power imbalance, the better the firm’s performance, even after accounting for several other variables like the company’s level of debt, number of employees, and the number of years that the two CEOs had worked together previously. While this analysis can’t technically speak to how co-CEO arrangements compare to just a single CEO, it isn’t encouraging for those sharing the role. Two equals running a company does not appear to be a strategy for success.

There is a caveat. Although the most successful firms in the sample had a significant power imbalance between co-CEOs, the relationship was curvilinear, meaning that firm performance dipped a bit at the very highest level of power imbalance. So while co-CEOs as equals seems like a bad strategy, an extremely large power imbalance between co-CEOs isn’t great either.

Last year we published a post on shared leadership by David Heenan, a Georgetown professor who wrote a book on the topic called Co-Leaders. As he put it:

What is evident is that sharing the role causes some confusion and inefficiency… The most productive relationships between No. 1 and No. 2 executives, we believe, are those of a leader and a chief ally. They may seem like buddies, even peers — but they remain committed to the principle of one-voice or single command. There has perhaps been no better example of this than the nearly five-decade partnership between Berkshire Hathaway’s legendary chairman Warren Buffett and his trusted sidekick, vice chairman Charlie Munger.

Perhaps the dip in performance for the very most unequal co-CEOs in the paper’s sample violated this principle, with the imbalance causing acrimony and undermining the executives’ relationship. It’s not hard to see how that could happen. Intentionally installing two CEOs with one more in control than the other — but not too much more in control — is a difficult needle to thread. All of which may make you wonder why Oracle went this way in the first place.

The elephant in the room here is Ellison’s ongoing role as chairman and CEO. Given those roles and his status as co-founder, it seems possible that there will be three top executives in the mix — it may even be Ellison who has the power imbalance over his new co-CEOs. If that’s the case, it might work after all.

To Change Employee or Customer Behavior, Start Small

Across industries, organizations can greatly benefit from making tiny changes in their processes to take into account how employees and customers really behave — including not liking being told what to do. Our research and that of others has discovered that even some small tweaks can have a big impact.

For example, consider what Google does in its cafeterias to encourage employees to adopt healthier eating habits. When “Googlers” reach for a plate, they encounter a sign informing them that people with bigger plates are inclined to eat more than those with smaller plates. The sign doesn’t tell them what to do, but it does guide them to move in a healthier direction. The result: Small-plate usage has doubled, to 32% of all plate traffic.

Google also switched the way dessert is offered to employees. Instead of having Googlers transfer dessert from the serving platter to a plate on their own, Google prepares plates with three-bite desserts. Those who want more dessert have to return to the line for a second plate, a structure that makes people think twice before over-indulging.

As Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write in their book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, there are many opportunities to “nudge” people’s behavior by making subtle adjustments to the decision-making context. This approach to improving outcomes is a central theme of behavioral economics, the discipline that combines lessons from the fields of psychology, judgment and decision making, and economics to generate insights into human behavior that are more accurate and robust than any one of those fields could provide on its own.

Behavioral economics teaches us that people, despite their best intentions, do not always make rational decisions, even when it is in their interest to do so because the circuitry that the human brain engages to reach decisions is hard wired and difficult to alter. While the suggestion to change an organizational process often evokes fears of a costly, drawn-out campaign requiring a deep level of support from a lot of different internal and external constituencies, it turns out that very simple interventions can produce powerful changes for individuals and organizations.

Consider the research that one of us (Francesca) conducted with her colleagues Dan Cable of the London Business School and Brad Staats of the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School on onboarding, integrating new hires into the organization. At many enterprises, new employees are told on the first day or week of work how members of the organization are expected to act and receive a lecture on the company’s history. Then, they typically learn about their particular jobs and are taught their scripts — the prescribed processes and behaviors they need to master to be successful on the job.

While this one-way, didactic approach encourages newcomers to be productive and controls what they will do in the short term,  Francesca’s and her colleagues’ research shows that it does not produce the most productive, innovative work environment in the long run. A better approach starts by asking newcomers a simple question: “Who are you when you are at your very best?” Behind this question lies a different philosophy of employment, one based on a psychological insight: People have a built-in drive to do what they do best naturally and to be recognized for it. This type of self-expression makes us feel authentic and alive. It also leads us to be more engaged at work, more productive, and more committed to the organization.

In a project conducted at Wipro, the business-process-outsourcing firm, Francesca and her colleagues designed a change to the onboarding process based on this psychological insight. They asked some of the newly-hired service representatives to reflect on their strengths, their uniqueness, and how they could bring those out in their new jobs. Rather than feeling alienated and anxious in their new work environment, new employees who engaged in this process felt they could be themselves at work. This difference led not only to lower employee turnover but also to higher performance as measured by customer satisfaction.

A large retail company wanted employees who were taking medications for chronic conditions to switch from picking up prescriptions at retail pharmacies to having prescriptions delivered to their homes by mail. Home delivery saves money for the company and for employees; it is more convenient; it offers superior safety; and it encourages high medication adherence.

When financial incentives for adopting home delivery caused only about 5% of these employees to switch, the company tried a different tack. People lead hectic lives, so they may not get around to taking up a program like home delivery even when the program is in their best interest. To combat this inertia, the company told employees that they had to make an “active choice”: They could choose to adopt home delivery or could choose to stick with retail pick-up, but they could not take advantage of the prescription benefit plan unless they actively indicated (over the phone, over the web, or by mail) which option they wanted. The result: About 40% of employees opted for home delivery, generating millions of dollars in savings per year, which were split roughly equally between the employees and the firm.

As these examples show, instead of trying to change the way people think, we should change the environment in which they are making decisions. These changes need not involve a lot of time and effort to implement; in fact, very simple adjustments can produce powerful benefits for individuals and organizations.