Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1428

3 Questions Executives Should Ask Front-Line Workers

The higher up you go in an organization, the harder it is to stay in touch with what’s really happening on the front lines.  And the bad news—if you hear it at all—is presented only in the best possible light.  How do you get the real truth about what’s happening out in the field?  How do you stay connected to all corners of your organization?  I have found that three simple questions, asked with the intent to learn, can help you stay in touch with reality and be a better leader:

Get out of your office and ask, “How can I help you?”

Doug Conant, while he was CEO of Campbell Soup Company, knew that if he was going to transform the company culture, he had to ask the simple question, “How can I help you?” He asked it continually of his employees, his suppliers, and his customers—and he demanded that each of his managers do the same too. Conant knew that as a leader he needed to show he cared about the employees’ and customers’ agendas if he wanted them to care about the company’s agenda. With this one question, people knew that Conant cared, had high expectations, and was committed to solving problems, adding resources, and removing barriers.  Through literally thousands of these connections with people, Conant was able to stay in touch, build confidence, motivate, and create urgency for transforming Campbell Soup.  He reversed precipitous declines in market value, employee engagement, financial results, and corporate responsibility.

Get out on the front lines and ask, “Why are we doing it this way?”

Mark McKenzie, the CEO of Senior Care Centers, a large skilled nursing company in Texas, often asks, “Why are we doing it this way?” He asks to learn, not to criticize. He knows that as the company grows, which it is doing rapidly, it will need new systems and new structures, and all of these need to be aligned with delivering outstanding patient care. McKenzie is building a culture of asking “why” and getting everyone engaged in the joy of being heard, seeing things change, and measuring progress.

Get out to your farthest perimeters and ask the question, “How are we doing in living out our values?”   

Stanley Bergman, the CEO of Henry Schein, a $10 billion global medical supply company, visits each company office at least once per year in every part of the globe. He meets with the country leaders and the product teams. Yes, he has great financial controls and excellent budget targets for each country and each product line but, as he says, the most important reason to visit is connecting with the people. In each office he visits, he makes sure he and his top people reach out to every person in the building. No one is left out. The questions he asks them are about values and how they are being demonstrated. He might ask a salesperson, “Are we living into our values as a company in ways that support you?” He wants the truth and he has established a reputation as someone who listens—and takes action based on what he hears. He continually relates the story of what Henry Schein is doing and will do, and he’s tireless in his commitment to show that each individual is a valued contributor to “Team Schein.” His entire message is, “I want to be certain you are getting everything you need to do your job well, and that we show you respect all along the way.”

Three questions, three stories. Each one puts you in closer touch with reality, builds trust, and inspires high performance.  Each time you ask these questions, you’re also acting as a role model for others in your organization.  Being present, asking the right questions, and listening to what your customers, employees, suppliers, and investors have to tell you creates an invaluable feedback loop for your performance as a leader and for the organization as a whole.  Do it consistently and others will follow with astounding results.

To Create a Real Connection, Show Vulnerability

The hardest part of my business failing was not the loss of the business. It was the loss of the identity that came with being a successful entrepreneur.

I had become so attached to this identity that when others asked how the non-existent business was doing, I said, “Great!” The chasm between the image of being financially set for life and owning a failed business was painful. I felt like a fraud.

When I finally got up the courage to start telling the truth, I could feel a weight lift off my shoulders. I had no idea how much stress I had been causing myself. To my huge surprise, instead of shunning me, people actually treated me with more respect and confided in me with their challenges. I wondered how had I been so wrong in judging other people’s reactions.

In his highly cited research, University of Georgia social psychology professor Abraham Tesser found that when someone close to us outperforms us in a task relevant to us, it often threatens our self-esteem. The more relevant the task is, the greater the threat we feel.

My personal experience matches the research. As much as I would like to be purely happy for my closest friends when they achieve something amazing, sometimes part of me feels diminished. I wonder why I haven’t been able to duplicate their successes, attributing it to advantages they had over me or their superior abilities.

In talking with Dr. Tesser, I learned that what I thought of as insecurity is actually part of being human: “In our studies, when we gave people information about someone else’s success who is close to them in an area they’re also trying to be good at, they say they feel proud and behave that way, but, in fact, they weren’t. When we surreptitiously video-recorded them you could see disappointment and negative affect in their face. Their behaviors did not reflect how they said they felt.”

While I had always looked at this mechanism as a negative force in society, Dr. Tesser’s belief is that people reconstructing their worldviews to constantly think about what they’re best at actually helps the divisions of labor in society. And yet I wondered if it was really necessary for us to try and hide our disappointment, as his study participants did. What if we shared our mixed feelings with others?

In 1997, Arthur Aron, a social psychologist and director of the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University, performed a groundbreaking study that answers this question.

He and his research team paired students who were strangers. The students were given 45 minutes to ask each other a series of questions. Half the pairs were given questions that were factual and shallow (e.g., a favorite holiday or TV show). The other half were given questions that started off as factual but gradually became deeper (e.g., the role of love in their lives, the last time they cried in front of someone else). The final question was, “Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find the most disturbing?”

After the 45 minutes, Aron’s team asked the participants to rate how close they felt to their partner. Pairs from the second group formed much deeper bonds. In fact, many of these participants started lasting friendships. In one longer version of the experiment, two participants even got engaged a few months after the study.

Aron’s team also surveyed a broad selection of students not involved with the experiment and asked them to rate how close they felt to the closest person in their life. Aron then compared these scores with the ratings of the study participants who had asked each other the deeper questions. Amazingly, the intensity of their bonds at the end of the experiment rated closer than the closest relationships in the lives of 30% of similar students. A 45-minute conversation created a connection that was perceived as closer than the closest connection with someone people known for years.

Only presenting an idealized version of ourselves separates us from others.

The mistaken assumption is that if people find out who we really are underneath, they’d remove themselves from our lives. The reality is that if we share the ups and downs of our human experience in the right way in the right context, we build deeper connections. In so doing, we can break down the roles we play (e.g., client/customer, boss/employee, fundraiser/philanthropist) and connect with each other as humans.

In a world where people compare their behind-the-scenes with others’ highlight reels, we can surprise ourselves, and put others at ease, by sharing our full humanity.

The Power of Reflection at Work

It Does Help to ThinkReflecting on Work Improves Job Performance Working Knowledge

Very few companies give their employees time for reflection, especially when competitive pressures are escalating. Usually the imperative is to double down and work harder – don't stop to think, just drive forward. But new research demonstrates the value of reflection in helping people do a better job. A working paper by Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School, Giada Di Stefano of HEC Paris, and Bradley Staats of the University of North Carolina shows that reflecting on what you've done teaches you to do it better next time. The researchers did a series of studies, all showing that reflection boosts performance. "Now more than ever we seem to be living lives where we're busy and overworked, and our research shows that if we'd take some time out for reflection, we might be better off," Gino tells Working Knowledge. –Andy O'Connell

Four Calculations Keep an Eye on the Wild Cards When Playing Alibaba's IPOFinancial Times

Unless you were hiding under a rock this week (or, in my case, deadlines), news of Alibaba's IPO filing likely filled your reading list and Twitter feed. One of my editors pointed me toward this long-view piece, in which Richard Waters analyzes the four calculations that will be vital for the company's continued growth. The first: managing the "deep – and increasing – seasonality in Alibaba's sales." Then the company will have to smartly deal with its "take rate" – how much money it keeps for itself with each transaction. Right now it's about 2.7%; eBay, in contrast, has a take rate of 8%. Third is the shift to mobile – while Alibaba's mobile-purchase numbers are up, they could be higher. Last is what Waters calls "the most important of all. Alibaba has become an almost pure-play bet on one of the world's big growth stories: Chinese consumer spending."

Computers Everywhere! The Future of Work Looks Like a UPS TruckPlanet Money

UPS "was a trucking company," says NPR producer Jacob Goldstein. "Today it's a technology company" where people and computers work collaboratively to deliver packages more efficiently. Among the things the company's "rolling computer" can pick up on: Where a truck is, how fast it's going, how the engine is performing, and whether there's a dog at a scheduled stop. According to Jack Levis, the company's head of data, one minute per driver per day is worth $14.5 million. While some pre-Big Data solutions were already in place before his tenure (people figured out, for example, that right-handed drivers should put their pens in their left pockets to access them quicker), Levis and his team are always drilling down to shave seconds off a route, which can often make the driver's life a little easier. When they realized, for example, how long it took to start the truck and open and close the back door, the company installed remote starters and door-openers to speed up the process.

Smart BugsHow Malaria Defeats Our Drugs Pacific Standard

A small region of Cambodia has been the source of parasitic mutations that have consistently rendered malaria drugs useless. In exploring why this should be, Ed Yong takes us on a trip along the roller-coaster course of malaria science, with its giddy highs and depressing lows. Each time there's a success, the single-celled parasite Plasmodium falciparum mutates to turn success into failure. Some think the reason so much of this mutation happens in one corner of Cambodia is the area’s unregulated use of antimalarial drugs. Others think the parasites there are particularly good at mutating, that they're like cancer cells – highly evolved to mutate successfully. Despite an influx of money and organizational know-how from groups like the Gates Foundation, there are many reasons why it may never be possible to eliminate the disease. One big challenge is compliance: getting local people to participate in anti-malaria programs. Do we face a global storm of malaria? If one arrives, the world will finally sit up and notice the emergency – but at that point, it may be too late to intervene. –Andy O'Connell

"Racial Realism"Only Minorities Need ApplyThe New York Times

When it comes to hiring and race today, John D. Skrentny writes that while "employers increasingly treat race not as a hindrance but as a qualification," they may be doing so in problematic ways. "Racial realism," as he calls it, consists of selecting and managing employees on the basis of race, not to encourage equal opportunity, but "to improve service and deliver profits for employers." Hospitals will "racially match physicians and patients to improve health care," for example, and police departments do the same to "reduce crime and police brutality." The problem, says Skrentny, is that "nonwhite employees who are promoted to fill racially defined roles have trouble leaving them." There can also be wage penalties – a 2008 suit against Walgreens resulted in the company paying $24 million to black managers "who objected to being placed in black neighborhoods, which typically had lower sales and thus lower compensation." Skrentny recommends that employers use evidence, not stereotypes, when they feel that race may be a job qualification. In such cases, there must be opt-outs and time limits.

BONUS BITSMall Madness

From Retail Palace to Zombie Mall: How Efficiency Killed the Department Stores (Collectors Weekly)
Big Retailers Find it Hard Shopping for a CEO (The Wall Street Journal)
Interactive: Ikea Store Openings (Mike-Barker.com)

Strategic Humor: Cartoons from the June 2014 Issue

Enjoy these cartoons from the June issue of HBR, and test your management wit in the HBR Cartoon Caption Contest at the bottom of this post. If we choose your caption as the winner, you will be featured in the next magazine issue and win a free Harvard Business Review Press book.

 

“Let’s hear it for technology!”

S. Gross

“I’m sorry—we require at least three fake references.”

Rolli

And congratulations to our June caption contest winner, Michael Robert Olson of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Here’s his winning caption: 

“Jerry never could truly grasp the concept of clickbait.”

Cartoonist: Crowden Satz

NEW CAPTION CONTEST

Enter your caption for this cartoon in the comments below—you could be featured in the next magazine issue and win a free book. To be considered for the prize, please submit your caption by May 21.

Cartoonist: Ken Krimstein

Emotions Are Data, Too

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t meet it, the struggle with emotions at work.

The misunderstood colleague, filled with frustration, attempting not to show it; the executive wondering how to confront her team’s lack of enthusiasm; the student hesitating to confess his affection to a classmate.

It has been two decades since emotional intelligence became a cornerstone of managers’ self-improvement projects. Meditation has broken into the C-suite. Alpha males and females extol the virtues of mindfulness. And still we remain unsure about what to do with emotions at work.

One moment we do not have enough emotion, the next we have too much.  We want work to ignite our passion but we don’t want our passions to affect our judgment. We want cool heads and warm hearts—as long as they remain apart.

The pursuit of passionate equanimity in the office might look like a valid remedy for the consuming pace of business in our day and age. I’d like to argue, however, that it might be a symptom as well—of a work culture that views emotions in ways that keep us struggling with them in the long run.

We have come to regard emotions as assets—precious or toxic as they may be—rather than as data. Therefore we focus on managing them, which often means trying to exploit, diffuse, or sanitize them, far more than staying with them long enough to discern their meaning. And when we do the latter, we usually interpret them as revealing something about their owners alone.

Treating emotions this way, as spillovers of our inner worlds, leaves us with acute, even obsessive awareness of them—and yet limited insight.

Not because we’re neglectful of our emotions, incompetent at managing them, or simply, hopelessly human. Not because emotions are neither always conscious nor easily named. Not just, at least.

It is because our emotions at work are more than echoes of our history, expressions of our virtues and neuroses, or shadows of our longings. While those always play a part, emotions are seldom ours alone.

What you and I feel at work has as much to do with what we are doing, and what others expect of people in our roles—and of someone who looks like us—as it does with our own inner lives.

We readily accept that work shapes how we act and how we see ourselves, that others’ expectations subtly corner us. We rarely think the same may be true of our emotions — even private ones — as well.

But if we play a part at work, more or less willingly, a part more or less fitting with the person we believe we are, why should we not feel that part as well?

What if emotions were another element in our role’s unwritten script, which our history merely prepares us for and our aspirations only make us more willing to perform? What if the assumption that emotions are ours—alone—to mind and tame made us more likely to torment ourselves than to question how that script casts us and who its authors and intended audience are?

Take an energetic executive who was wondering if he had become depressed when I met him, shortly after a big promotion. He had been asked to turn a division around, and had relished the challenge at first.

Months later, however, his reviled predecessor was thriving in another company while he himself was deeply dispirited. Despite his good progress, he could not exorcise a lingering fear of failure with the usual enthusiasm and determination, and worried that it might be catching up with him.

Reflective as he was, he could easily link his fear and shame to certain disappointments of his youth. What he found harder was to see that his feelings also spoke of something broader than his unresolved sense of inadequacy. They reflected the status of his division, whose problems were blamed for everything that threatened the company’s viability in the marketplace.

His well-disguised fears and old sensitivities made him a perfect match for the position, psychologically speaking. They made him more likely to carry the sense of inadequacy on behalf of other executives, who could thus feel blameless for the company’s difficulties, than to challenge the arrangements that evoked it.

Taking a more systemic (and less conformist) view of emotions, as sources of intelligence about the work and culture of our organizations, does not make us any less responsible for them. Quite the contrary, it calls for us to use the insight we gain for more than improving our effectiveness or achieving peace of mind.

How would we go about extracting systemic insight from our emotion? Here are three questions to get us started.

How do we show (which) emotions?

Stop asking whether you show enough emotions. Ask how you show them. We are always expressing emotions, even if we are not talking about them. Particularly when we are not talking about them. There are no emotions we express more than those we are trying to hide, especially from ourselves.

(It’s when we believe that we have no emotions that emotions can most easily have us.)

It is not always unpleasant emotions that we deny—or hide in plain sight. I know workplaces where aggression is acceptable while needs for comfort and recognition make people uncomfortable. So fighting, for all it is bemoaned, becomes a safer form of intimacy—a way to connect and show that one cares.

Silencing emotions breeds mistrust and loneliness. Acting them out without talking about them safeguards the status quo. Silence makes it harder to recognize, make sense of, and challenge the division of emotional labor, so to speak, that keeps us feeling the same way over and over again.

Who gets to feel what?

Emotions are seldom distributed equally. They are often bundled with certain roles.

Consider hope and despair, confidence and concern, pride and shame, poise and agitation, vocal outrage and silent contempt. The former in each pair is usually assigned to, and expected of, people in powerful and visible roles. The latter is consigned to those in less powerful and visible ones, to nurse on behalf of those who must avoid them.

“Be yourself” and “get a grip” are common ways we are nudged into those places, as both often translate into, “Feel and show more of what I expect you to.”

This runs counter to the common belief that our emotions are what funnel us into different roles, and that by managing those emotions we make ourselves more suitable for certain assignments.  In fact, our roles often elicit our emotions. And we don’t often realize that until, when we move on from one role to the next, the emotions we felt dissipate, only to capture our successors.

Needless to say, such divisions of labor, never explicit but respected by most, do not bode well for problem solving, mutual understanding, and collaboration.

What is the purpose of these emotions (and who benefits from them)?

Assume that which emotions are silenced and which are voiced, and who gets to feel and express what, is neither random nor affected by our character alone.

The heartless CEO, the guilty working mom, the ambitious middle manager, the frazzled assistant. Consider them assignments, albeit unconscious ones.

Then you have a lens to examine what purpose, and whose interests, those assignments may serve—what they enable, what they avert, who they protect—and what everyone, including you, gets out of them.

It may be safety, righteousness, approval, achievement, or relief. It may be the illusion that everyone gets what they deserve rather than what they can afford.

It may be the familiarity, if not comfort, of experiencing what we are used to—within and around us. A sense of knowing our place and what it feels like.

Interpreted that way—tied to ourselves in a role, in context, doing work—emotions can help us learn about and manage more than just ourselves. They give us hints about what keeps us in our place, how we may change places, and even what it might take to change the whole place.

When you find yourself thinking, “Here I go again,” because you sense that you are getting caught up in a familiar pattern, ask where in your past that pattern comes from, what it says about you, and how you may ease its grip. But don’t stop there. That’s only half the work. Ask also what evoked those emotions here, in these circumstances, now.

Unless we use our self-awareness to examine the system more dispassionately, reflection is just another form of withdrawal. Unless we turn our hard-earned equanimity into resolve to change our surroundings as much as ourselves, the struggle with emotions never ends. Any practice to manage them becomes at best a coping mechanism—at worst an instrument of the status quo.

We can’t be saner, or at least freer, until we stop sanitizing emotions. We can’t make workplaces fairer if we lock people into managing them alone.

Yes, emotions are personal. They are just not all about us.

 

When the Board Agrees with the CEO’s Politics, Oversight Suffers

Similarity of political views between CEOs and their boards strengthens directors’ empathy for chief executives and thus weakens their monitoring of CEO performance and compensation, says a team led by Jongsub Lee of the University of Florida. A study of thousands of U.S. firms shows that this political alignment, which is common, also reduces the quality of financial reporting: A small increase in board–CEO “political homophily” leads to a 3% increase in the marginal probability of a firm’s being involved in high-profile corporate fraud. The alignment effects are most pronounced for small boards that frequently interact with the top executive, the researchers say.

Why You Need a Resilience Strategy Now

This past winter was a rough one for big swaths of the United States, with both unusual cold snaps and disruptive snowstorms. General Mills’ CEO recently blamed the winter for less-than-expected earnings, saying that “severe winter weather…disrupted plant operations and logistics…We lost 62 days of production…which hasn’t happened in decades. That would be the result of people not being able to get into work safely or not having inputs arrive.”

It wasn’t just one company, though; the whole economy was slowed by the extremes and volatility we faced.

The disruption to operations and supply chains is real and costly, and all signs point to increasing threats as weather gets more volatile, driven in large part by climate change. The science is getting clearer that we’ll see more extreme hurricanes, droughts, floods, and even snowstorms – more moisture in the atmosphere means bigger downfalls of all kinds.

The latest report to confirm these issues are not some theoretical model to debate, but reality today, came on Tuesday from the quadrennial U.S. National Climate Assessment. The 840-page tome did not bury the lede and declared in the first sentence, “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.”

Of course, all weather isn’t necessarily tied directly to climate change – like with the recent tornadoes that swept through the American Midwest – but no matter what you believe the cause, extreme weather will play an increasing role in our lives and economies. Nobody can predict exactly what might go wrong, but we can say with near 100% confidence that something will.

So let’s consider what a company can do in a world that’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous – that’s “VUCA” for short, a military term that’s been adopted by business. Here’s a review of the five core components of resilient systems, which I pulled together for my new book, The Big Pivot, based in part on two other important works: Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder and Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy.

1. Diversity. A company is clearly more at risk if it has just one major product, service, technology, key supplier, or other core element. In the 2011 Thailand floods, both hard drive makers and auto giants realized that having a sole key component made in one place made for a fragile system (Toyota took a $1.5 billion hit to earnings). While companies don’t often share the details of their supply chain strategy publicly, you can bet these companies have built more diverse options for sourcing key inputs.

2. Redundancy and buffers. Taleb uses the natural world as a model for this principle: “Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems,” he writes, pointing out how many of our biological systems have doubles (like lungs) or backups. Our business systems need leeway for extremes as well. A few days ago, for example, the Obama Administration announced a plan to stockpile a million barrels of gasoline in the northeast specifically to avoid the shortages that plagued New England after Hurricane Sandy.

This is all smart strategy, but the challenge for business specifically is that companies don’t like keeping two of anything – that’s not lean or (seemingly) efficient. It’s a fine line for sure, but having multiple pathways to get key inputs, for example, might have saved General Mills –  and the hard drive and car companies –  lots of money. It might have actually generated increased revenue as well, if it meant operating while competitors couldn’t. As Taleb says, “redundancy seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens – usually.”

3. A love/hate relationship with risk. It’s a paradoxical idea, but one way to build resilience, or antifragility, is to keep the vast majority of the business as safe as possible, but then take big risks – ones that may pay off 10-fold or more – with a smaller part of the business.

Think of the famous idea from Clayton Christensen of trying to disrupt or cannibalize your own business before someone else does. Imagine setting up a skunk works to identify major risks to the business stemming from resource constraints or climate change – and then lean into those risks and come up with products and services that avoid them and challenge the core business (for example, a car company investing in car sharing programs which consumers use to save money, but also reduce material and energy use dramatically).

4. Fast feedback and failure. If you’re going to take some risks to, ironically, make us less risky, you need to drop what isn’t working quickly. To be more responsive, companies need better data on resource use and climate risks up and down the value chain. So invest in capturing information and building real-time systems.

5. Modular and distributed design. If some part of a system fails, it would be great if it didn’t bring down the rest of it. A tree branch hit a power line in Ohio in August 2003, causing cascading failures across a highly connected U.S. grid, and 50 million people in the northeast lost power (including me, my wife, and our 11 day-old child in Connecticut – we were not in a resilient mood).

These principles alone may not make for resilience in a hotter, scarcer, more open world, but they go a long way. And they point toward one key pathway for managing – and even thriving – in a VUCA world: renewables.

Companies (and homes) that generate their own onsite energy will be able to literally weather storms better than competitors. Not all the technologies we need to do this well are in place – like building-scale energy storage at a reasonable cost – but we’re getting there. And during the day, companies with their own solar panels can operate after the storm has passed, even if the grid is down.

Nobody can prepare for every possible outcome. Randomness, of course, is a prime element of our new business reality. But we can build systems that are better prepared than they are now. And, sure, it’s a challenge to value resilience: How much is your business damaged by a breakdown in your supply chain, or a threat to your ability to operate? How much will it cost all of us if we let the drivers of deep volatility, like climate change, go unchecked?

It’s not easy to say, but let’s avoid finding out.

Time Is a Company’s Most Valuable Resource

Michael Mankins, partner at Bain & Company, on how to get the most out of meetings. For more, read the article, Your Scarcest Resource.

Download this podcast

A Simple Nuance that Produces Great Strategy Discussions

All too often strategy meetings devolve into pitched battles over who is right and who is wrong about the company’s future direction. How can you reshape the discussion to produce collaboration rather than discord?

The key is to switch the fundamental question you consider from what is true to what would have to be true.

What is true provokes arguments, causes proponents of a possibility to dig in, and minimizes the collaborative exploration of ideas. Let’s imagine you put forward a possibility for a strategic direction and, upon hearing the idea, I focus on what I think is true. With this mindset, it is quite likely that I won’t be confident that your idea is valid and I’ll probably start by saying something like “I don’t think that will work,” words that will instantly turn the meeting into a battlefield. When I then raise an alternative strategic direction, you, smarting at my treatment of your idea, will be equally dismissive of me. And so on, back and forth.

If instead we can focus from the outset on what would have to be true, the conversation can head in the direction of collaboration and mutual exploration of ideas. How? If an idea or possibility strikes you as less than compelling, resist the urge to declare it “not true.” Instead, ask yourself, what would have to be true for me to feel that is a great option? If you identify the features that would have to be true, you can explore whether those really hold true and learn something about that possibility. The process of exploration may well help you modify and enhance the best idea currently in your head.

In addition, taking this approach will likely have the effect of convincing other members of the team to explore your option in similar fashion – and they will build on yours just as you have built on theirs. It does take two to tango in life and if you refuse to battle from the outset, it is likely that those around you will avoid that behavior too.

It is not as though no deaths occur in this process. But the ideas kill themselves rather than get killed by someone. When everybody comes to agreement as to what would have to be true for an option to be a great choice, the group can determine what tests it would have to conduct to determine whether those things hold true or not. Note that the tests are not any one person’s tests but rather those of the group as a whole.

When the group carries out those tests, they will either confirm the validity of the idea or the test results will show the option to be wanting. In the latter case, the option is killed by its own failure to hold up to the tests, not by the arguments of one member of the team. This is a productive process, one that builds group cohesion and collaboration — and keeps the battleground at bay.

How to Hire More Top Performers

How much is your top salesperson worth? Your star engineer? Your best marketer? Everyone knows that some people get better results than others. But the best aren’t just a little better than the rest — they’re typically a lot better. Bain & Company’s research, discussed here, suggests that top performers are roughly four times as productive as average performers. Sometimes the difference is far greater. For example, the best sales associate at Nordstrom sells at least eight times as much as the average sales associate at other department stores.

Given the sizable differences between the best and the rest, a company with a higher percentage of top performers will naturally tend to outdo its rivals. The reason is that it has higher human capital productivity (HCP), which we know correlates closely with financial results. Raw talent isn’t the only determinant of HCP, but if you don’t have the “A” performers you need, none of the other factors will make much difference. So improving your overall talent level is the first step toward higher HCP.

How can a company raise its skill level—and in particular, how can it increase its proportion of top talent? Our research and experience at Bain suggests three keys.

Assess your talent pool. You can’t know the magnitude of the task you’re facing until you know exactly where your human-capital strengths and weaknesses lie. AllianceBernstein (AB), a $3 billion asset management company based in Manhattan, rates each of its 3,700 employees every year on both performance and potential. The senior team at AB spends several days together each year cross-calibrating the two sets of ratings across the entire company, so it always knows where its top performers are. One caution: performance and potential both matter, but performance should count for a lot more. Performance is real; it can be measured objectively. Potential is always subjective, and may never be realized. So pay close attention to your high performers. If they’re a tiny fraction of your overall talent pool, you know you have a problem.

Control your pipeline. Whenever possible, avoid relying on executive search firms as the primary source of new talent. A company looking for more A players needs to know first-hand about the talent that is available, and it needs to do its own recruiting. One well-known Silicon Valley firm relied heavily on headhunters to find engineers for many years. The result? It got engineering candidates who couldn’t land jobs at Apple, Google, Facebook, and other A-list companies in the valley. Only the arrival of a new CEO led to a change in the policy — and an eventual uptick in the company’s talent base and performance.

Have only high-performers conduct the interviews. It’s a sad truth about human beings: B and C players can’t always identify top performers, and may feel threatened by them if they do. Average performers look for congeniality, the ability of an interviewee to fit in. They don’t always look for — and they may not favor — someone who seems likely to raise the bar or make them look bad. One other tip: involve as many line managers in the interviews you can. Many jobs these days are highly technical, from software development to running a copper mine. Interviewers from HR aren’t usually capable of judging someone’s technical skills.

A company, like a sports team or a symphony orchestra, has to do a lot of things right to reach the pinnacle of performance. But if it doesn’t have a healthy share of those exceptional individuals who do so much better than everybody else, then it’s out before the race even begins.