Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1361

Why Your Brain Hates Performance Reviews

Your Brain Will Thank You Kill Your Performance Ratingsstrategy+business

No one likes performance reviews, and one reason is that we've seemingly locked ourselves into a doctrine of numerical rankings. Your company might not be as extreme as Jack Welch’s GE, which famously relied on forced rankings to cull weaker managers (a system still in use by more than half of Fortune 500 firms as of 2012), but chances are your company has given you a number that puts you in a specific spot on the employee continuum. There must be a better way, and strategy+business turns to neuroscience to figure out what that is.



In general, there are two explanations for why PM doesn't work: One, merely being ranked provokes a "fight or flight” response, which gets in the way of "thoughtful, reflective conversations" (but is great for when you're being chased by wild animals, which probably isn't exactly what your manager is going for). Two, a ranking assumes that people are fixed — either good at something or not — and incapable of change, though we know that's not true. The article's authors say we should start with the opposite assumption: that we all can grow and change. Then we should get rid of the numerical rankings. After all, "only one person typically feels neurologically rewarded by the PM exercise. It’s not the high performer, but the senior executive who oversees the ranking system."

Shoot the MoonMedicine's Manhattan Project: Can The World's Richest Doctor Fix Health Care?Forbes

I have truly had my fill of let’s-use-technology-to-fix-U.S.-health-care stories, but Matthew Herper’s opinionated, cranky piece about a super-wealthy physician with gigantic ambitions to do just that was the one more article on the subject that I did have room for. I admit I have a weakness for stories about larger-than-life characters, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, inventor of a cancer drug, has a compelling bio as a scientist and businessman. I can’t do it justice here, but he earned a phenomenal amount of money making bold moves and annoying a lot of people.



Over the past few years, Soon-Shiong has been putting together a company that he hopes will be positioned to take us into health care’s tech-heavy future, with computers sequencing genomes, helping doctors monitor hundreds of patients at a time, and providing up-to-date information on which treatments are best. Although the potential effectiveness of this patchwork company with its byzantine structure and visionary but exasperating leader is still unclear, Soon-Shiong shouldn’t be underestimated, Herper writes. “It seems very likely, based on a review of his claims, plans, and investments, that he will succeed at something.” —Andy O’Connell

No LimitsThe Trans-Everything CEONew York Magazine

The highest-paid female CEO in America, earning $38 million last year, is Martine Rothblatt, the founder of United Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company. Previously, Rothblatt founded Sirius Satellite Radio, but back then, Rothblatt lived as a man. She had sex-reassignment surgery in 1994 and, soon after, published a "slim manifesto that insisted on an overhaul of ‘dimorphic’ (her word) gender categories." Rothblatt's gender both doesn't matter at all and matters entirely to everything she does. Her ambitions are inextricably tied to what's closest to her as well as the seemingly impossible. United Therapeutics, which was founded after her daughter was diagnosed with a rare disease, aims to do nothing less than use “blue-sky technology to extend life.” Rothblatt is also into artificial intelligence and has created a robot version of her wife. In the end, New York Magazine's Lisa Miller provides us with a CEO profile unlike any other, but not necessarily one to gawk at. Instead, it's a success story that has no limits when it comes to work-life balance, business savvy, ambition, and, bottom line, what it means to be human.

Not Snow White, but Close The Awful Reign of the Red DeliciousThe Atlantic

Curse you, Red Delicious apples. You are not delicious, as your name would suggest. You're mealy and mushy, and you have terrible-tasting skin. And I'm not the only one who feels this way: It's thought of as the "largest compost-maker in the U.S.," and, in the near future, between 60% and 65% of Washington State's Red Delicious crop will be shipped overseas. So how did the apple become the most frequently produced in the U.S. despite its general terribleness? Sarah Yager tells the fascinating little tale of the fruit, which she describes as uniquely American: the "confident intrusion on inhabited soil, opportunity won in a contest of merit, success achieved through hard work, integrity pulverized in the machinery of capitalism." Essentially, a few astute farmers created the apple, it was heavily marketed as the epitome of what an apple should be, people bought it, and then it was genetically altered to the point where it was stunning to look at but miserable to eat. So now the U.S. is shipping them primarily to Southeast Asia, where "success of the Red Delicious relies on targeting shoppers in places where the fruit is unfamiliar." I would like to apologize on behalf of my country, Southeast Asia.

A Golden AgeZoe Quinn’s Depression QuestThe New Yorker

Zoe Quinn suffers from depression, but fortunately she found her passion: inventing video games. Not long ago, she collaborated on a game that was designed to “get at the nasty heart” of what it’s like to live with depression. This seemed “a powerful use of the medium,” she says. A few users have responded positively, but most of her mail is hate mail. Some users think depression is an inappropriate video-game subject; others contend that the game’s quality is poor. Recently she was “doxed,” meaning that her personal details were made public. Afterward, the abusive e-mails and tweets so intensified that she stopped living at home. Yeah, there’s an ex-boyfriend mixed up in this somewhere, and it’s a little hard to tell from Simon Parkin’s New Yorker account what’s real and what isn’t, but the moral of the story, once again, seems to be that the internet has brought forth upon our world a Golden Age of hate. —Andy O’Connell

BONUS BITSAbout That Apple Event...

How Apple Just Reset Your Privacy (Medium)
Seeing Through the Illusion: Understanding Apple’s Mastery of the Media (9to5Mac)
How Apple Pushes Entire Industries Forward (HBR)

To Close a Deal, Find a Champion

In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman who guides souls across the river Styx to the underworld. Those who do not employ his services are forced to wander the shores—lost for a hundred years.

Dealmakers who try to “go it alone” can expect to suffer a similar fate. Closing a major deal with a Fortune 2000 company is seldom straightforward. Large organizations are so complicated and diffuse that frequently even the people working there are unclear about what is required to make something of consequence happen. Without a guide, time and effort are squandered and the deal goes nowhere.

In a previous article, I wrote about the triangle of players involved in getting a major project green-lighted: Champions, Blockers, and Decision Makers. Here, I will show how to identify and win over a suitable champion—the crucial sponsor who can help you navigate the labyrinth of opinion, prestige, and politics between you and the approval of your project.

Although champions are not the ultimate decision makers, and they rarely have substantial power within their organization, they have four things that make them irreplaceable in developing and closing the deal: credibility, connections, company intelligence, and motivation.

These were all true of Charlie, a champion I met in 2004 just as the tech world was beginning to show signs of life after the dot com implosion. At the time, Charlie was an internet security specialist at IBM, and I was running business development .

Zone Labs was an upstart internet security software developer aspiring to disrupt established giants such as Symantec, McAfee, Check Point Software, and Cisco. It had a free consumer product that was downloaded by millions of users as well as a modestly successful premium product that sold online for $49. These assets resulted in roughly $2 million in annual revenue—not bad for a young enterprise. Yet, the real money in the space was being made selling to large IT organizations with significant security concerns. Zone Labs needed a name-brand customer.

Charlie came into our line of sight following a routine product inquiry from IBM. After a few meetings, it was clear that he was a champion who could bring Zone Labs and IBM together. He had credibility—he was a well-respected staffer and a 25-year veteran at IBM. He had connections—he had a deep understanding of how IBM functioned and he knew scores of people in the organization. He also had company intelligence. We learned through Charlie that there was a major undertaking underway at IBM to determine which security-related products they would invest in for the following year. The existing short list was comprised exclusively of large, well-established companies and their marquee products.

Credibility, connections, and company intelligence are the table stakes—they are the attributes that all suitable champions possess. So, how does a dealmaker align with someone in command of these assets and capture their interest? That’s where the fourth element comes in: motivation.

Zone needed a major name to establish its credibility in the marketplace and set it up as a viable alternative to the usual suspects. But what did Charlie need? Figuring out a champion’s motivation can be difficult, but the exercise is compulsory. Why? Because understanding human nature is a primary part of doing the deal. In many cases, it is more closely linked to getting the green light than even financing and business fundamentals.

The champions that I have known, Charlie and numerous others, have been motivated by various (but often overlapping) objectives that can be boiled down to five key words:

Innovation. Some champions are visionary types with deep domain focus. They want to explore, experiment, and break new ground. I call these champions “the dreamers” because they are motivated by progress and exploration.
Advantage. Other champions hope to use the deal to improve their company’s competitive position within an industry. These champions are “the lions,” because they are motivated by a desire to advance their company’s competitive position and aggressively dominate an emerging trend or market.
Advancement. These champions strive to improve their own career prospects. As “the climbers,” they are motivated by opportunities to solidify their position within an organization or gain a lead over a rival individual or business unit.
Respect. Many champions are seasoned professionals who feel underutilized by their organization. I call these individuals “the loyalists” because they are the heart of every company—valued for their know-how but universally under-celebrated. These champions are motivated by status: they want someone to pay attention to them and value their experience and input.
Order. Many, many other champions simply want the numbers to work. Deeply rigorous, “the Vulcans” are motivated by logic, evidence, and proof of concept.

Like most champions, Charlie had a mix of motivations. During his lengthy career at IBM he had been consistently passed over for the big jobs (making him a loyalist). Although he knew his potential for advancement was limited, he had a deep desire to gain prestige. Charlie also cared deeply about his work and was looking to bring in new business that would offer IBM something above and beyond what the bigger security players had in-hand. He wanted to help create a competitive advantage (like a lion).

Understanding his underlying motivations, and knowing that he could help us navigate the mammoth IBM organization, we embraced Charlie as our champion. He got us on the short list (ostensibly to use us as a lever against the more established players). He identified the decision-makers and told us who the deal-blockers would be and why. And he was our inside man—delivering the details about what our competitors were doing. With his help we put together a solid story about why this little company, Zone Labs, was the future and could be trusted with a mission-critical component of a 300,000-person organization.

In this particular case, the decision-makers were a small group of IT professionals headed by Chris Matthews, the then-CIO of IBM. Matthews personally hosted regular visits from the CEOs of Cisco, Symantec, and others who lobbied for IBM’s business. We knew that, if Zone Labs prevailed, its product would need to sit on the computer of every employee next to the products of these competitors and would require additional support effort above and beyond what they were already managing.

In the end, Zone Labs beat out all the usual suspects and got a $1 million+ purchase order, plus a follow-on order for another $1 million for the next-generation of the product which, at the time, hadn’t yet been released. The company also made a strong connection with the service side of IBM, which became a major distributor of its product. Charlie earned lasting prestige within IBM and was credited with finding an unlikely yet extremely high-potential data security solution.

Champions are only one, crucial side of the deal triangle —you also have to align the deal’s blockers and the decision makers. All three must be managed with an understanding that people make decisions based on personal and professional motivations that are often hidden to the rest of the world. But once you get a champion in your corner, you’ve made a major breakthrough. You’re ready to enter the ring.

Get Your Team to Stop Second-Guessing Decisions

Not long ago, the division head of a multinational manufacturing company had a problem. After receiving an aggressive 12% annual growth target, she met with her team, and after a lot of research, meetings, and debates, they built a strategic plan around 17 key initiatives ranging from the overhaul of a production facility in Nebraska to fully integrating a new distributor in Nigeria. Everyone on the team was on board with the plan, and they were optimistic about its outcome. But just a weeks before the start of the fiscal year, they began to doubt their abilities to execute so many initiatives at once and they started second-guessing their overall direction.

What happened? Was it a case of performance anxiety? Was the plan truly flawed? Was the team just being lazy or disloyal?

None of the above. The team lost commitment because they suffered from a very common problem called planner’s remorse.

Just like the buyer’s remorse people feel after buying a car or a house, planner’s remorse is the natural sense of regret we sometimes feel after buying into a plan. It is the same psychological phenomenon that gives fiancés cold feet and causes negotiators to back out of deals during the cooling-off period. Immediately after deciding to pursue a course of action, we often experience a kind of euphoria because switching gears from contemplation to action activates a different part of our brains. But the bliss is fleeting. After a few days, our brains very predictably return to normal and euphoria gives way to remorse.

The big difference between buyer’s remorse and planner’s remorse is that the performance of a car or a house doesn’t change based on how we feel after we buy it. But the performance of a plan does change based on the attitude of the people implementing it. If a management team is wishy-washy about a strategic plan, they can rob themselves of the psychological commitment they’ll need to execute effectively, as well as the enthusiasm they’ll need to get everyone else onboard.

It turns out, however, that our brains are wired in a way that allows us to transform planner’s remorse into planner’s resolve.

A series of experiments (PDF) by Gergana Nenkov and Peter Gollwitzer showed that deliberation has very different effects on our minds depending on whether it happens before a decision or after a decision. On the positive side, all those discussions about the benefits and costs of pursuing different alternatives in the planning stages help us to arrive at more rational decisions. But deliberation can also erode our commitment to the eventual plan we decided on by planting seeds of doubt that blossom into planner’s remorse later on.

Thankfully, there is a way to avoid the negative effects of extensive planning. Nenkov and Gollwitzer found that if you take part in the same debates after creating the initial plan, you can actually increase your commitment. After you’ve decided on a course of action, discussing pros and cons forces our minds to defend the decision. Believe it or not, our defensiveness helps us achieve our goals by fostering grit and perseverance.

This phenomenon explains why I find myself so often facilitating what can only be described as post-planning planning sessions. On the surface they seem totally redundant. After all, the team has already held a strategic planning session, so what’s the point of another session? But what Nenkov and Gollwitzer show us is that the timing of that post-session session is as crucial as the content. When it happens shortly before we need to execute on the plan, it can provide an adrenaline shot to the team’s commitment.

Of course there is always the risk of succumbing to the irrational bias of “escalation of commitment.” What if that defensiveness makes the team too committed to the plan? Focusing the post-planning planning session on the first 90 days instead of the entire year helps minimize that risk because it forces the team to recheck their assumptions in another three months. But escalation of commitment is still a possibility.

On the other hand, would it really be all that bad if your biggest concern this year was too much commitment from your team?

How Business Schools Can Help Reduce Inequality

No institution is more responsible for educating the CEOs of American corporations than Harvard Business School – inculcating in them a set of ideas and principles that have resulted in a pay gap between CEOs and ordinary workers that’s gone from 20-to-1 fifty years ago to almost 300-to-1 today.

A survey, released on September 6, of 1,947 Harvard Business School alumni showed them far more hopeful about the future competitiveness of American firms than about the future of American workers. But, as the authors of the survey conclude, such a divergence is unsustainable. Without a large and growing middle class, Americans won’t have the purchasing power to keep U.S. corporations profitable, and global demand won’t fill the gap. Moreover, the widening gap eventually will lead to political and social instability. As the authors put it, “any leader with a long view understands that business has a profound stake in the prosperity of the average American.”

Unfortunately, the authors neglected to include a discussion about how Harvard Business School should change what it teaches future CEOs with regard to this “profound stake.” Now, I realize that HBS has made some changes over the years in response to earlier crises, but they have not gone far enough with courses that critically examine the goals of the modern corporation and the role that top executives play in achieving them.

A half-century ago, CEOs typically managed companies for the benefit of all their stakeholders – not just shareholders, but also their employees, communities, and the nation as a whole. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized as theirs.” This view was a common view among chief executives of the time.

Fortune magazine urged CEOs to become “industrial statesmen.” And to a large extent, that’s what they became. For thirty years after World War II, as American corporations prospered, so did the American middle class. Wages rose and benefits increased. American companies and American citizens achieved a virtuous cycle of higher profits accompanied by more and better jobs.

But starting in the late 1970s, a new vision of the corporation and the role of CEOs emerged – prodded by corporate “raiders,” hostile takeovers, junk bonds, and leveraged buyouts. Shareholders began to predominate over other stakeholders. And CEOs began to view their primary role as driving up share prices. To do this, they had to cut costs – especially payrolls, which constituted their largest expense. Corporate statesmen were replaced by something more like corporate butchers, with their nearly exclusive focus being to “cut out the fat” and “cut to the bone.”

In consequence, the compensation packages of CEOs and other top executives soared, as did share prices. But ordinary workers lost jobs and wages, and many communities were abandoned. Almost all the gains from growth went to the top.

The results were touted as being “efficient,” because resources were theoretically shifted to “higher and better uses,” to use the dry language of economics. But the human costs of this transformation have been substantial, and the efficiency benefits have not been widely shared. Most workers today are no better off than they were thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. Most are less economically secure.

So it would seem worthwhile for the faculty and students of Harvard Business School, as well as those at every other major business school in America, to assess this transformation, and ask whether maximizing shareholder value – a convenient goal now that so many CEOs are paid with stock options – continues to be the proper goal for the modern corporation. Can an enterprise be truly successful in a society becoming ever more divided between a few highly successful people at the top and a far larger number who are not thriving?

For years, some of the nation’s most talented young people have flocked to Harvard Business School and other elite graduate schools of business in order to take up positions at the top rungs of American corporations, or on Wall Street, or management consulting. Their educations represent a substantial social investment; and their intellectual and creative capacities, a precious national and global resource.

But given that so few in our society – or even in other advanced nations – have shared in the benefits of what our largest corporations and Wall Street entities have achieved, it must be asked whether the social return on such an investment has been worth it, and whether these graduates are making the most of their capacities in terms of their potential for improving human well-being. These questions also merit careful examination at Harvard and other elite universities. If the answer is not a resounding yes, perhaps we should ask whether these investments and talents should be directed toward “higher and better” uses.

The Economic Advantages of an Independent Scotland

If its voters choose independence next week, Scotland will join the ranks of the world’s small, affluent countries. Over the past couple of decades, that’s been a good club to belong to. As Gideon Rachman put it in the FT in 2007:

This is the age of the small state. Look at almost any league table of national welfare and small countries dominate.

Things have gotten a little more complicated since then. (Rachman in 2009: “Big is beautiful again.”) Several small nations suffered brutally from the financial crisis and subsequent Euro mess: Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal.

Still, several of the emerging bigs (Brazil, India, Russia) have since run into economic headwinds too. And small countries remain overrepresented near the top of lists of the world’s most affluent, most competitive, healthiest, and smartest nations.

So it’s not crazy to think that Scotland, which on its own would be a country of 5.3 million people with a GDP per capita ranking between Finland’s and Belgium’s (that’s counting offshore oil revenue), could be an economic success. But it’s not guaranteed, either.

What has made small countries so economically successful over the past few decades is less their smallness than the ways they’ve taken advantage of it. David Skilling, a former New Zealand government official and McKinsey consultant who now advises small-country governments and companies from a base in Singapore, has spent as much time thinking and writing about the strengths and weaknesses of small states as anybody. In a 2012 paper that should be required reading in Scotland, he lists two main characteristics of successful small states:

They’re cohesive, and thus able to make policy decisions quickly and stick with them.
They tend to make good policy decisions, in part because they’re very aware of the world around them and what it takes to compete in it.

In polls, Scotland appears evenly split on whether to leave the United Kingdom. That doesn’t look very cohesive. But one of the forces that’s been driving Scotland toward possible separation has been the divergence between Scottish political priorities and those of the rest of the UK. The ruling Conservatives hold only one of the 59 Scottish seats in the British parliament; two leftist parties, Labour and the Scottish National Party, dominate Scottish politics. If the question of independence were settled, it seems like the Scots would be able to find lots of other things to agree on.

Would they agree on the right things? A generous welfare state and economic success aren’t incompatible for small nations — there are several examples of this just across the North Sea from Scotland. But since a stretch of tough economic times in the early 1990s, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have combined their generosity with remarkable efficiency and economic savvy (Norway, with its vast oil riches, hasn’t had to make quite as many hard choices). They and other successful small states tend to balance their budgets, export more than they import, and invest heavily and smartly in infrastructure and R&D. As Skilling tells it, they have designed their economies to be globally competitive.

“Being a small country offers a lot of in-principle upside, brings with it significant risks, and is what you make it — but it’s only for serious countries,” Skilling replied when I emailed him about Scotland.

So is Scotland serious? Skilling thinks it is, but the leaders of the “Yes” movement don’t seem to be quite there yet. They assume that they can continue in a currency union with London when officials in London say that won’t work, for one thing. What’s more, Scotland today has giant government deficits, a fast-aging population, and not much in the way of exports apart from oil, The Economist argued this summer. That, and it has spent the past three centuries becoming ever more economically intertwined with the rest of Britain. Set loose alone on the rough seas of the global economy, it seems likely to founder at first.

After that, the question is whether the small-state effect would kick in. Would the Scots be able to get their act together and rally around things like fiscal discipline and smart tax policies and R&D investment? This is the land that spawned such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and — what the heck — John Law. Surely the Scots could figure it out eventually. And once they did, it is entirely possible that an independent Scotland with a clear economic identity would be a more vibrant, cosmopolitan, thriving land than the sometimes-neglected northern appendage of a populous country that it is now.

The big question — which neither I nor anybody else outside Scotland can really answer — is whether it would be worth the pain it will probably take to get there.

Your Well-Being Declines When Others Are Unemployed, and Not Because of Empathy

A 1 percentage point increase in local unemployment depresses still-working people’s well-being to a degree that’s roughly equivalent to a 4% decline in household income, according to John F. Helliwell of the University of British Columbia and Haifang Huang of the University of Alberta, both in Canada. The apparent reason has nothing to do with workers’ feeling badly for the unemployed; instead, rising unemployment leads people to fear they’ll lose their own jobs, the researchers say.

How Being Filmed Changes Employee Behavior

Since Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, more than 154,000 people have signed a “We the People” petition to the White House to “require all state, county, and local police to wear a camera” to curb misconduct. The Ferguson police force was recently given about 50 cameras, following a national trend toward tech-enabled transparency.

The public may expect cameras to remove bias from interpretation of police behavior. If we can just see what happened, the thinking goes, we’ll know who was in the wrong.

But that’s not what the research shows. Video (particularly one-way footage) is not an all-seeing, neutral observer, as Florida International University law professor Howard Wasserman has repeatedly pointed out. The most significant impact of bodycams, taxicams, and the like is not reliving the past but, rather, changing behavior in the present. We act differently when we know we’re on camera.

That can certainly be a good thing, as researchers found in a field experiment with California’s Rialto Police Department. In that study, incidents occurring during shifts without cameras were twice as likely to result in the use of force. Indeed, when officers wore cameras, every physical contact was initiated by a member of the public, while 24% of physical contact was initiated by officers when they weren’t wearing the cameras.

You’ll see similar results — with an interesting twist — in a study by Washington University’s Lamar Pierce and his coauthors, who looked at employee behavior at almost 400 U.S. restaurants. Bodycams reduced restaurant employee theft by 22%, or about $24 per week. (The effect grew over time, with theft dropping $7 a week the first month and $48 a week by the third month.) But the cameras actually had a much larger impact on productivity and sales: On average, total check revenue increased by 7% ($2,975 per week), and total drink revenue by 10.5% ($927 per week). Tips went up, too, by 0.3%.

When increased monitoring made it harder for workers to steal money, the researchers observed, people redirected their efforts toward “increasing sales and customer service in order to regain some of that loss.” The positive responses to the cameras — performance improvements that benefitted employees as well as their employers — were more substantial than the negative behaviors they prevented.

So perhaps the real upside of surveillance is the potential to spot and reward good work, not to deter bad conduct. Other research suggests that, as well. A food-service study, for example, found that dining hall customers perceived greater employee effort and valued the service more when they could watch workers doing their jobs (through video-conferencing software on iPads). The effect was mutual: Employees felt more appreciated and, in turn, exerted greater effort when they had a clear view of customers. They completed orders much faster, and customers reported higher food quality. The reciprocal transparency created a positive feedback loop, generating value for both groups.

But transparency can also have an unintended negative consequence: Knowing that their managers and others will closely evaluate and penalize any questionable recorded behavior, workers are likely to do only what is expected of them, slavishly adhering to even the most picayune protocols. That’s what has happened in factory production work, where excessive transparency has thwarted both creativity and productivity. Assembly line workers hide fruitful time-saving and cross-training experiments to avoid having to explain them to anyone who might be watching. (See my recent HBR article about such tradeoffs.)

If too much transparency kills innovative behavior, how can police departments improve officers’ track record on profiling without sacrificing the kind of educated risk-taking and problem solving that’s often needed to save lives?

I would argue that the answer lies in focusing on developing good judgment and supporting justice, rather than on enforcing police protocol. Police in Ferguson and elsewhere can learn from companies that use cameras for coaching and development instead of evaluation and punishment. For example, a U.S. trucking company has installed a DriveCam in each of its tractor cabs — recording what’s happening both on the road and in the driver’s seat — to improve fleet safety. Coaches review the footage with the individual drivers, who are receptive to the feedback because they know the videos won’t be used against them. (The footage is only shown to managers in situations where drivers willfully break the law.)  Even at UPS, which has sensors in its trucks to track workers’ every move and reduce delivery times, the master agreement with the Teamsters prohibits management from using the data to discharge employees.

More organizations — including police departments — should explore ways of making employee surveillance constructive rather than punitive. Part of the challenge here, of course, is that law enforcement and government agencies are required (for good reason) to be transparent to the public. A certain amount of transparency ensures accountability. But unless it’s mitigated with zones of privacy — areas where workers can receive developmental coaching, as the truck drivers do, without getting dinged for mistakes that generate learning — it may actually be counterproductive. If every choice, every little misstep, is recorded for all to see and to second-guess, people will quickly learn to play it safe in the worst sense. There aren’t many individuals who could work productively under the magnifying glass of an entire country of arbiters — the Hunger Games version of policing.

That said, in a country where smartphone penetration is now over 70%, and almost every smartphone has a video camera, another question is: how much police work is on video already?

Another Reason to Take More Breaks

Working long hours, while taking only short breaks or no breaks at all, can have negative consequences. Take medical workers. Researchers have found that staff members wash their hands less frequently at the end of their shifts than at the start. And they’re even more neglectful if they’ve been engaged in intense tasks. This is a big problem, especially in hospitals, where germs and bacteria can lead to infections, but it’s not unique to doctors and nurses. Workers of all stripes — meaning you and me — suffer from the same problem. When we’re tired and overworked, we tend to neglect secondary duties and responsibilities. But there is some good news: taking a long break from work can make us more diligent.

What New Team Leaders Should Do First

Getting people to work together isn’t easy, and unfortunately many leaders skip over the basics of team building in a rush to start achieving goals. But your actions in the first few weeks and months can have a major impact on whether your team ultimately delivers results. What steps should you take to set your team up for success? How do you form group norms, establish clear goals, and create an environment where everyone feels comfortable and motivated to contribute?

What the Experts Say

Whether you’re taking over an existing team or starting a new one, it’s critical to devote time and energy to establishing how you want your team to work, not just what you want them to achieve. The first few weeks are critical. “People form opinions pretty quickly, and these opinions tend to be sticky,” says Michael Watkins, the cofounder of Genesis Advisers and author of the updated The First 90 Days. “If you don’t take time upfront to figure out how to get the team working well, problems are always going to come up,” says Mary Shapiro, who teaches organizational behavior at Simmons College and is the author of the HBR Guide to Leading Teams. “You either pay upfront or you pay later.” Here’s how to start your team off on the right foot.

Get to know each other

“One of your first priorities should be to get to know your team members and to encourage them to get to better know one another,” says Shapiro. To that end, “resist the urge to immediately start talking about the work and the task outcome,” and focus instead on fostering camaraderie. In practice, this may mean holding a retreat or beginning meetings with team-building exercises. For virtual teams, it might mean starting calls by getting updates on how each person is doing or hosting virtual happy hours or coffee breaks. One particularly effective exercise is to have people share their best and worst team experiences, says Shapiro. Discussing those good and bad dynamics will help everyone get on the same page about what behavior they want to encourage — and avoid — going forward.

Show what you stand for

Use your initial interactions with team members as an opportunity to showcase your values. Explain what’s behind each of your decisions, what your priorities are, and how you will evaluate the team’s performance, individually and collectively. Walk them through what metrics you might use to gauge progress, so that they understand how they’ll be evaluated and what’s expected of them. “Team members will want to know how you define success,” says Shapiro. By communicating your vision and values, you will show your team that you’re committed to a healthy degree of transparency, says Watkins, and “create positive momentum around yourself in the new role.”

Explain how you want the team to work

You also need to explain in detail how you want the team to work. When you have newer team members coming on board, don’t assume that veteran team members will explain to the new recruits how meetings are supposed to be run or the best ways to ask for help; it’s your job as a leader to set expectations and explain processes. If you don’t make those norms clear for everyone, you risk creating an environment where people feel excluded, uncertain, or unwilling to contribute.

Set or clarify goals

One of your most important tasks as a team leader is to set ambitious but achievable goals with your team’s input. Make clear what the team is working toward and how you expect it to get there. By setting these goals early on, the group’s decision making will be clearer and more efficient, and you’ll lay the framework of holding team members accountable. Many managers inherit their teams, which often means they aren’t creating new goals, but clarifying existing ones. “It’s actually rare that someone gets to come in and redefine the goals for the group in a profound way,” says Watkins. In those instances, your challenge as a manager is to reorganize roles or rethink strategies to best achieve the goals at hand.

Keep your door open

If there’s one thing that new managers need to remember, it’s that over-communicating in the early days is preferable to the alternative. “It’s always better to start with more structure, more touch points, more check-ins at the beginning,” says Shapiro. How you do that — via big meetings, one-on-ones, email, or shared progress reports — will vary from team to team and manager to manager, but whatever the communication method, “do as much as you can,” says Shapiro. Watkins agrees: “I’ve never encountered a situation where a team member says, ‘Gosh, I wish the boss would stop communicating with me. I’m so sick of hearing from her.’ You just never hear that.”

Score an “early win”

Identifying and solving a business problem that has a quick and dramatic impact early on shows that you can listen and get things done, says Watkins. Perhaps there is a longstanding employee frustration or an outdated work process. Maybe there is a project that you can easily fund or prioritize. Taking swift action demonstrates that “you are connecting and learning.” But most importantly, achieving an “early win” builds team momentum. “It motivates people,” says Shapiro, “and can win you goodwill you might need later if the going gets tough.”

Principles to Remember

Do:

Be clear about what goes into your decision making and how you’ll evaluate the team’s progress
Encourage team members to connect — better communication early on will help avoid misunderstandings and poor results later
Look for roadblocks or grievances you can fix — it will earn you capital and inspire the team

Don’t:

Jump into trying to accomplish the work without building relationships with the team
Assume that new team members understand how you or others work ­— take the time to explain processes and expectations.
Be afraid to communicate often early on — you can always pull back when the team is working well

Case study #1: When in doubt, over-communicate

Czarina Walker, the founder and CEO of InfiniEDGE Software, had a crisis on her hands. She had recently taken over the leadership of a combined team of engineers and creative employees for a new project. With a deep well of experience leading technical teams, she assumed that the minimalist management approach that had worked for her for years would also work with this hybrid team. “I figured the non-techies had some understanding of our technical team’s processes, and knew how we worked by virtue of shared office osmosis,” Czarina says.

But the team dynamics floundered from the beginning. “My technical team didn’t have a problem getting in a room and talking about what was going well and what wasn’t,” says Czarina. But this standard tactic of identifying improvement areas with her engineers felt like a blame game to the new creative members. “They felt thrown into this process; it was like being invited to a firing squad.” Resentments festered, and soon she was having difficulty getting everyone to attend the weekly status meetings. “As a result, the project started off the exact way you hope it never does — with a lot of frustration and animosity,” she says.

Czarina recognized that her failure to establish communication norms was partly to blame. She hadn’t made the purpose of the status meetings clear, and hadn’t explained that her agenda was not aimed at criticizing, but at getting everyone on the same page. “So I had to do something I never had to do before: over-communicate,” Czarina says. She sat down with both groups to go over the purpose of the meetings, and how she expected them to be run, while addressing each groups’ concerns.

The extra work paid off. The project was completed on deadline, and the creative team members reported that they felt the process had been a valuable learning experience. “Even though I had to over-communicate,” Czarina says, “it was well worth it, because the next project is going to go so much smoother.”

Case study #2: Build connections outside the office

For the past decade, Nate Riggs, the founder of marketing firm NR Media Group, has run a virtual office, with employees scattered across the country. But this year, after realizing the company needed a brick-and-mortar base to grow its video production unit, Nate transitioned the firm to the new Columbus, Ohio, headquarters.

Because some employees still worked remotely and others reported to the office each day, Nate recognized that challenges and miscommunications could arise among the group, some of whom were new employees. So he held a team retreat in Columbus, a combination of strategy sessions, client meet-and-greets, and after-hours social events. “The team cohesiveness that was developed on that retreat has been amazing,” says Nate.

The team-building efforts had immediate benefits. “We left with a lot of momentum. Our first week back, we were meeting deliverables in about half the time that it took us before the retreat,” says Nate.

In order to maintain the energy, the team now gathers each week in a virtual Google Hangout with a set agenda. Nate also has regular one-on-one meetings with each team member to get status updates and reassess goals. “We try to keep high-frequency touches with the team, but not so much that it interferes with getting work done,” he says.

He has also encouraged the team to maintain the social connections they established at the retreat. To mimic the banter that might have happened around the office water cooler, employees have recently launched a group texting thread, regularly sharing jokes, interesting news, and funny stories with coworkers. “To me, that’s the indicator of a team culture, right?” says Nate. “We all have something that we can laugh at together.”

Track Customer Attitudes to Predict Their Behaviors

CRM is typically all about customer behavior: you track customers’ behavior in terms of where, when and in what context they interacted with your company. But the increasing ease with which you can track behavior and the ability to build and maintain extensive behavioral databases has encouraged many marketers to de-emphasize the collection and interpretation of “soft” attitudinal information: that is, data around customer satisfaction, attitudes towards brands, products, and sales persons, and purchase intentions.

The argument is that in-depth behavioral data already encapsulates underlying attitudes, and because decision makers are mainly concerned with customer behavior, there is not much need (any more) to worry about underlying attitudes. There’s a similar assumption underlying much of the discussion around how to measure the return on marketing investment, where it seems to be tacitly accepted that attitudinal insights are insufficient at senior decision-making levels, and behavioral insights represent today’s benchmarks.

But downplaying attitudinal data seems rather too convenient. After all, it’s hard work to capture attitudes. Purchases, customer inquiries, or mailing contacts are collected by firms continuously for all customers through CRM software systems, but attitudinal information rests in the hearts and minds of customers, who have to be explicitly prompted and polled for that information through customer surveys and textual analysis of customer reviews and online chatter. What’s more, some customers might not want to give that information, even if firms wanted to collect it.

Bottom line, you can maybe hope to get strong attitudinal information about a few customers, but it is unrealistic that you can get it about a lot of them — and you certainly can’t be polling everyone all that often just to get information from a possibly unrepresentative subset. Much easier, therefore, to pretend that attitudes are just not that important.

This is actually a cop-out. In fact, respectable analytic techniques exist that allow to you impute attitudes from a small group about which you have complete information (attitudes, behavior, demographics) to a larger group where the attitudinal information is missing, and then test whether the imputation of those attitudes produces better predictions of the larger group’s subsequent behavior (which you are tracking all the time).

Basically, what you do is analyze the relationships between attitudes, behavior, and demographics for customers in the small group so that you can express attitude as a derivative of the other observable factors: a male customer who is X years old and does Y will have Z attitude. You assign customers in the larger group with the attitudes that their behavior and demographics imply, using the relationships derived from the small group analysis. You then make predictions about their future behavior, which you can compare to the predictions you make on the basis of demographics and past behavior only.

We tested the approach with a company in the pharma industry. Our large dataset included the prescription history of more than six thousand physicians for a leading cardiovascular drug over 45 contiguous months. Physicians were surveyed on their attitudes toward the main drugs in the relevant therapeutic category, as well as their attitudes towards the firm’s salespeople. The survey asked the doctors, for example, to rate the product’s performance and to assess to what level they agreed or disagreed with statements made by the firm’s salespeople during sales calls in light of their experience with the drug. Our goal was to explore how the pharmaceutical firm’s customer lifetime value (CLV), customer retention, and sales were affected by the physicians’ experience of the drug coupled with their attitude regarding the salespeoples’ credibility and knowledge.

The results were startling. We found that for this company, a $1 million investment in collecting customer attitudes would deliver projected annual returns of more than 300% from providing more accurate behavioral predictions. It also revealed that attitude information for mid-tier customers (in terms of future profit potential) would produce the highest relative benefit. In other words, incorporating attitudes provides a forward-looking measure that helps to discriminate between the customers that will likely contribute to increasing profitability and those whose profitability will likely decline. In this case, it appeared that the firm was overspending on top-tier customers with regard to their CRM campaigns and that it could improve the ROI from CRM by rebalancing resources across top-tier and mid-tier customers.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the inclusion of customer attitude information in predictive CRM modeling will always yield returns. But our findings do make a very strong case that firms should explore avenues for tracking customer attitudes and to assess their predictive potential in order to adjust CRM strategies accordingly.