Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1431

If You Have a Bad Boss, These Are Your Options

A good boss provides encouragement, development, mentoring, and support, while also being fair, constructively critical, and helpful in integrating employees into high-performing teams. This is a boss you remember for years, one who has a lasting impact on your career.

But what happens when you end up with a really bad boss – someone who not only lacks these positive characteristics, but is also a negative force? Do you just grin and bear it, complain to higher authorities, look for an escape route, or do something else? Here are two quick (disguised) examples:

Sheila was an up-and-coming manager at a well-known manufacturing company. Several years ago, she was asked to build and run a small team that would invest in start-ups aimed at bringing new technology into the company’s supply chain. Since this was a minor operation, Sheila’s supervisor, the head of Supply Chain, paid her very little attention. Eventually, her team built a portfolio that caught the interest of the CFO and the CEO, and soon she was meeting regularly with them. Unfortunately, Sheila’s success with the C-suite was met with jealousy and anxiety from her boss. For the next year, the boss turned down requests for more resources, gave her poor performance reviews, and spread the word that Sheila was “difficult to manage.” Eventually he moved the team away from Sheila and left her as an individual contributor.

Howard was a high-potential manager at a large life sciences firm. For the past two years he had led a well-regarded team of analysts who provided performance reports to business units. When a new head of Financial Planning and Analysis was brought in from the outside, however, Howard suddenly couldn’t do anything right. His new boss criticized the way things were done, belittled members of Howard’s team, created discord with the business unit heads (their clients), and refused to listen to anyone’s input. And when Howard tried to spend time with this boss and develop a more personal relationship, he was castigated for being “high maintenance” and someone who “needs reassurance” to do his job.

Obviously both of these cases are somewhat extreme (although I have many similar ones to draw upon). But they do illustrate how a bad boss syndrome leaves subordinates feeling trapped and intimidated, with nowhere to go. If Sheila or Howard complain to the next highest level, it could make things worse and reinforce the claim that she or he is “difficult to manage” or “high maintenance.” If they go to HR or an executive with their concerns, they could be branded as troublemakers or difficult subordinates. But if they do nothing, they will be miserable and lose the respect of their direct reports. It’s a tough dilemma.

Luckily, there are a couple of alternatives. They come with no guarantees, but they may be worth considering.

The first is to wait it out. Bad bosses can be like bullies who eventually get tired of harassing people, particularly once they realize that it won’t get them anywhere. The key is to keep doing a good job, while making sure that people above and beyond your level know that you are still performing. Most of the time, a boss’s bad behavior is visible to others, so hanging in there, without complaining, will be viewed positively. And over time, a bad boss may even self-destruct and lose credibility. In fact, that’s what happened to Howard’s boss, who was eventually marginalized by his own peers. Howard ended up with a bigger job in a different part of the organization.

The second alternative is to seek other options, both inside and out. Use the situation as an opportunity to reassess your career, your work-life priorities, and how you define success. When there are no catalytic situations forcing us to think about our trajectories, we stick to a certain path because it’s comfortable — even though it may not be optimal. Having a bad boss can force you to think about what you really want. In Sheila’s case, the turmoil that her boss generated pushed her to think about getting into the start-up sphere, using the contacts she had built over the years. In the long run, the bad boss liberated her to pursue another direction.

Nobody likes having a bad boss. But if you do, there are ways to survive.

Decriminalizing Marijuana in UK Led to More Illness from Hard Drugs

A one-year experiment to decriminalize marijuana in a borough of London led to 40% to 100% increases in rates of hospitalization, mostly of young men, for illnesses related to use of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin, say Elaine Kelly and Imran Rasul of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK. The increased hospitalizations from the experiment, which removed possession of small quantities of cannabis from a list of prosecutable offenses, led to additional annual costs of about £80,000 per year. Past studies have suggested that cannabis use may lead users to consume harder drugs, the researchers say.

Stress Isn’t a Threat, It’s a Signal to Change

Is stress impairing your performance at work and compromising your relationships? Changing the way you think about stress can help you turn stress into an ally and use it to improve mental agility and work performance; a report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that physiological and cognitive benefits result from thinking of stress as “functional and adaptive” rather than a signifier of “threat.”

Turning stress to your advantage is no easy task. It requires mental discipline to pause when you’re in the grip of stress and to reframe it as potentially useful. In my executive coaching practice, I help clients transform their attitude about stress. There are many ways to do this, and the method needs to be individually tailored to each client’s unique situation. Here are three ways that clients in my practice have reappraised their stress and used it to propel positive changes:

Reconceive essential relationships. The third-generation CEO of a family business, my client experienced severe stress as his executive team (comprised of older family members) lambasted his every decision about how to run the company. Feeling defensive, he retreated from key CEO tasks such as strategic planning and securing a line of credit to keep the business afloat. Coaching focused on interpreting his stress as a signal to redefine his relationships with family members, whose support would be essential for survival of the company. Coaching empowered him to think of his family members as repositories of wisdom, people whose interests were aligned with his own. As he rethought these relationships, he transformed the monthly executive meetings from a battleground into a collaborative brainstorming session on opportunities for the company. With this newfound focus, the CEO harnessed the team’s knowledge and motivation to grow the company. Not only did he feel calmer and happier, but within four months he secured the line of credit and initiated critical discussions with potential outside investors. By reappraising his stress as a friendly message to heal valuable relationships, he protected the business and repositioned it for growth.

Develop strategic leadership skills. Another client was an attorney who was recently promoted to serving as his biotech firm’s general counsel, a position in which he was expected both to oversee the legal department and function as a strategic partner in the C-suite. He felt overwhelmed by the pressures of the two roles and the need to delegate tasks to associate attorneys. His stress mounted as he micromanaged their work and got “stuck in the weeds” of low-level tasks. We strove to reframe his stress as a signal that he should stretch beyond his comfort zone and embrace his new responsibilities as a strategic partner on the executive team. This reappraisal prompted him to begin placing more trust in his legal staff’s decision-making capabilities, to meet more often with key partners inside and outside the firm, and to embrace leadership roles that would position him more as a visionary leader than a worker bee. As he did so, his stress evaporated and he led the executive team to take a bold step toward expanding the business into a complex but potentially lucrative overseas market.

Apologize and express gratitude. Another client, the chief operating officer of an insurance company, was experiencing massive stress in the context of a work crisis. During a recent company event, she consumed an excessive amount of alcohol and embarrassed herself by making loud and rude comments to colleagues. Her behavior became so unruly that she was put in a taxi and sent home. She was terrified that she would lose her job. Part of the coaching focused on how to communicate with the CEO and executive team in the wake of this blunder. I was taken aback when she told me that she planned in an upcoming meeting with the CEO to complain that her year-end bonus was lower than she deserved based on performance metrics. My responsibility, I realized, was to respectfully confront her about how ill-conceived and potentially destructive this approach would be. After pointing out that her ongoing stress might be a signal that she was still uncomfortable with this course of action, we had a productive dialogue about alternative strategies. Ultimately, she concluded that it would be most prudent not to request a higher bonus, but instead to apologize for her behavior at the event and express thanks that she still had her job at all. This decision immediately reduced her stress level and served her well with the CEO and management team. She retained her position and continues to repair her reputation as a trustworthy leader in the firm.

These vignettes are real-world examples of what psychologists have been learning about stress management in well-controlled experiments.  If you can reappraise stress as a constructive hint that you should seriously reorient your thinking and behavior, then the stress can diminish and steer you toward a renewed sense of purpose and growth.

5 Dirty Secrets About the U.S. Economy

If there’s one thing I hate these days, it’s discussing the U.S. economy.

Will raising wages by seventeen cents destroy humanity? Will edible deodorant add 0.000007 percent to GDP? If we resurrected giant man-eating dinosaurs, could we use them to keep our warehouse pickers in line? Isn’t it awesome when the Dow hits a record high (but everything else flatlines or shrinks)?

I feel like I’m listening to a debate on the noble merits of true love between the Real Housewives and a bunch of broseph PUAs.

By my count, there are five dirty secrets about the economy we’re not supposed to know.

Number one. The biggest falsehood of all? That fixing it is something like teleporting to Jupiter: impossible! Beyond us! Science fiction!

Contrary to nearly everything you hear on the subject, my humble suggestion is this: fixing the U.S. economy isn’t impossible. It’s not even that difficult. It’s straightforward; about as complicated as tying your shoelaces if you’re wearing Velcro sneakers.

The US is a rich country that’s beginning to resemble, for the average person, a poor one. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its educational systems barely educate. Its healthcare is still nearly nonexistent. I can take a high-speed train across Europe in eight hours; I can barely get from DC to Boston in nine. Most troubling of all, it is poisoning its food and water supplies by continuing to pursue dirty energy, while the rest of the rich world is choosing renewable energy. The US has glaring deficits in all these public goods — education, healthcare, transport, energy, infrastructure — not to mention the other oft- unmentioned, but equally important ones: parks, community centers, social services.

So the US should invest in its common wealth. For a decade, and more. Legions of people should be employed in rebuilding its decrepit infrastructure, schools, colleges, hospitals, parks, trains. To a standard that is the envy of the world — not its laughingstock.

Why? If the US invests in the public goods it so desperately needs, the jobs that it so desperately needs will be created — and they will be jobs that (wait for it) actually create useful stuff. You know what’s useless? Designer diapers, reality TV, listicles, reverse-triple-remortgages, fast food, PowerPoint decks, and the other billion flavors of junk that we slave over only to impress people we secretly hate so we can live lives we don’t really want with money we don’t really have by doing work that sucks the joy out of our souls. You know what’s useful, to sane people? Hospitals, schools, trains, parks, classes, art, books, clean air, fresh water … purpose, meaning, dignity. If you can’t attain that stuff, what good are five hundred aisles, channels, or megamalls?

So: invest in public goods; employ armies to build them; create millions of jobs. And they won’t be the dead-end, abusive, toxic McJobs that have come to plague the economy; they will be decent, well-paid, meaningful jobs which people will be proud to have.

Dirty secret number two: This is a bogus recovery—and it’s going to poison society, unless we are wise enough to recover from the recovery. The rich are getting vastly richer, to the point that it’s absurd that anyone should be so rich. But the average household is getting poorer; and the poor are getting trampled. The US is becoming a caste society; and the divisions between the castes are widening. Investing in basic goods is the only way—the only way — to lift millions out of the ruins of imploded lives, and into prosperity again. Yes; the only way.

Selling doggy dating apps for billions while the average household can’t afford healthcare and education isn’t an economy — it’s a travesty. Too many of our growth industries produce low-paying service “jobs” that amount to essentially being being maids and butlers to the super-rich. Sound like a healthy economy to you? I didn’t think so. Hence: invest in the basic building blocks of society — if, that is, it’s a functioning society we wish to enjoy.

Where will the money come from? Dirty secret number three: It doesn’t matter. Print it. Borrow it. Tax it from the super-rich, in whose coffers it’s merely sitting idly. It does not matter one bit. It’s a second order question. If the U.S. doesn’t invest in public goods, it will not prosper; and if it doesn’t prosper, it cannot pay off the debts it already has. Conversely, if it does invest in public goods, and creates millions of decent jobs, the source of investment will matter little; for the economy will have grown and people will be prosperous. We can debate until kingdom come whether to borrow; print; tax; and we should. But we are having a fake “debate” if we pretend that we cannot invest in society first; and then wring our hands that society is falling apart.

Key word: pretend. Here’s dirty secret number four. The pundits don’t want you to know any of the above. They want you to believe that fixing the economy is unfeasible. It’s not. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. It’s obvious. It’s a problem whose solution is as plain as the sky on a perfect summer day.

So why don’t the pundits want you to know any of that? Duh. Because if you did, well, then they might be out of jobs. Here’s what they’re already out of: ideas, time, options, and most importantly, credibility.

Every quarter now, for more than half a decade, pundits and economists have dropped their jaws and proclaimed that they’re shocked. Shocked! That the economy’s still broken!

If every month for years, your doctor frowned, and said, “I’m shocked! The meds aren’t working!”… you’d probably find a new doctor. Maybe it’s time we did the same with pundits and economists.

Remember this old story: a Soviet citizen arrives in the US at the height of the cold war. On arriving, he’s taken to the grocery store. He looks around, eyes wide, and exclaims, bewildered: “But there are no bread lines! How can this be?”. You see, everything he’d been told about the US was a lie. It wasn’t a land of decadence and barbarism; but, at that time, a land of plenty, of opportunity.

Now, in a grand irony of history, the shoe’s on the other foot. Here’s my new version of the story above.

I live in Europe and the US. I tell my friends in the US that in Europe, if you’re disabled, or seriously ill, or just elderly, many national health services will send carers to your house. That’s right; your house. To … care for you. Like the Soviet citizen of yesterday, my American friends of today say, bewildered: “But how can this be?! That’s impossible.”

Wrong. It’s not impossible. It’s precisely how real prosperity happens.

And in that parable is the story of how economies grow into prosperity. A job is created; and not just a McJob; the carer earns an income; the sick are nurtured; the economy doesn’t just grow; but it creates real human prosperity.

An economy is not just a bunch of Very Serious and Highly Intelligent economists debating how many angels can dance on the head of pin — sorry, I meant another variable in an equation in a model. It is lives. Human lives.

So here’s dirty secret number five.

We don’t live the lives we were meant to by merrily shoving Artificially Fried Chicken Flavored Dorito Slurpees down our gullets while watching our societies crumble. We live them when we build things. Great things. Worthy things. Noble things. And the greatest, worthiest, and noblest of all things that mankind has ever built are not apps, drones, corporations, or profits. They are societies in which every life counts. In which every life is truly, fully lived.

So here’s my challenge to you. You know all the dirty secrets now. Live like they weren’t.

What Happens After You’re Forced to Resign

What Was Once There Resigned: The Fast Fall of a Washington CareerThe Washington Post

Their faces are plastered on TV sets and web pages in brief moments of public outrage; but what happens to the people forced out of their jobs by scandal, particularly if their resignations were more symbolic than indicative of any leadership failure? This is the story of one such person, Martha Johnson, who resigned two years ago as the head of the U.S. General Services Administration after a scandal involving an extravagant employee conference that involved lots of federal contract violations. Though she wasn't involved in the conference, she took the fall. Now, as the Washington Post's Lillian Cunningham writes, "time hasn't quite started up again." Johnson is now "just another 61-year-old without a job." Her losses – job, money, prestige, influence – are a poignant reminder of how important work can be, and why coping with its sudden disappearance is a much bigger challenge than going into the office every day, no matter how high-pressure the job may have been.

Becoming Invisible As Objects Go OnlineForeign Affairs

The future of the Internet of Things is bright, especially in areas such as energy, health care, weather, and making cities more livable. But in order to realize this future, we need to learn and employ the lessons from the architectural evolution of the internet, facilitating openness and distributed operations rather than the closed proprietary systems of individual manufacturers and service providers. A team at MIT is focused on developing "Internet 0," a slower, simpler system for bringing IP to the smallest devices. The hero of this system is the microcontroller, a simple processor with just a small amount of memory. As the technology becomes more integrated into everyday life, it will, paradoxically, become more invisible. –Jeff Kehoe

Sans Chic Making Wearable Tech More WearableThe New Yorker

Speaking of technology becoming invisible, let's face facts: Wearables are ugly. Indeed, Facebook's most recent acquisition, Oculus VR, "looks like a scuba mask with a metal plate bolted to the front of it," writes Amy Merrick. As former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts joins Apple this week, Merrick wonders whether she can solve one of tech's most vexing challenges: "how to create wearable technologies that people actually want to wear." To do this, she must address a couple of issues: 1) Engineers may "delight in advertising they're wearing the new device," but most other people don't want to look like a weirdo resembling "the character Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager"; and 2) People don't generally want to be reminded that they're constantly plugged in. One solution may be for Ahrendts to adhere to what's called "intimate computing," which "evokes a product that is sensual and tactile, personal and discreet." Or, in Trekkie parlance, "more Burberry, less Borg."

An Argumentative Evolution The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible ComebackBusiness Insider

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this long piece about Google's Larry Page is the way being argumentative evolved in both Page's mind and within Google's organizational culture. In the beginning, butting heads was the rule: It's how Page and cofounder Sergey Brin bonded in the first place and how they came to be seen as caring more about ideas than people's feelings. This worked, until spectacular growth, as well as a massive public firing of managers, led investors to demand a more seasoned CEO – someone to lead and, in part, babysit Page. So that’s what Eric Schmidt did.



Almost a decade later, here’s reinstated CEO Page telling senior staff members that Google "would never reach its goals if the people in that room did not stop fighting with one another." While it's tempting to see this shift as the ultimate redemption story, it actually kind of is, but not because Page is suddenly Mr. Rogers. It's because Page learned to recognize when fighting is useful for a company – and when it isn't. In essence, he learned how to manage it.

Vortex of Debt ScammedMatter

In poor communities, there's a vicious world of debt that's mostly invisible to middle-class folks. It starts with payday loans – money borrowed to close the spending gap before the paycheck arrives. Worse, borrowers fall victim to scammers who demand hefty payments, threatening legal action. That's what enrages Mike Davis, a computer-security expert and former hacker who takes a particular interest in internet con artists.



As Danny Bradbury writes in Matter, Davis has become a white hat amid uncountable black hats online, and his goal is to lure scammers so he can bust them. But over the course of this long and winding tale, his white hat starts to look dingy as he stealthily records phone calls, phishes for passwords, and generally gets his hacker on in pursuit of the crooks. The point of all this isn't Davis's lack of saintliness but a much larger issue that's rarely raised in discussions about computer security: that despite all the publicity about attacks on banks and big corporations, the reality is that on the internet, as elsewhere, crime disproportionately victimizes the poor, exploiting their fear and powerlessness. –Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITSDo You Want to Know?

Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis (The New York Times)
Is Your Job at Risk from Robot Labor? (Quartz)
The Origins of Office Speak (The Atlantic)

If You’re Feeling Unappreciated, Give Someone Else Credit

Harry is one of our most successful family business clients.  A high school graduate, his first job was pouring concrete.  Once he joined the family business, he showed a real gift for leadership.  Strategically brilliant, disarmingly funny, a driven worker, and still grounded in his deep values, Harry grew the firm at more than 15% per year.  He embodies much of what we all admire in leaders.

Yet something was amiss in the culture of the business Harry had created.  The co-owners, his sister and cousin, had gotten to a place where they were considering splitting up their successful business.  Their working relationships had ground to a halt as they pointed out faults in Harry’s leadership.  The more he was criticized, the more Harry agitated against their involvement in the business.  Core decisions were not being made, as one family member after another threw a monkey wrench into the works.

One day, at a particularly unproductive meeting, Harry exploded: “No one appreciates all the sacrifices I’ve made for this company.  The countless nights spent at industry conferences with people I don’t like; the weekends with bankers and lawyers to finish the deals; the sleepless nights worrying about missing bank covenants.  You all take this success for granted!”  In short, Harry felt under-appreciated, and it was affecting the company’s performance.

Appreciation is so fundamental to business success that in our work with family clients we hold “appreciations” sessions – a formal process where family members come together to openly express positive emotions about each other.  There are no “yes, buts” – this is not a venue for feedback but rather a way to communicate honest and sincere gratitude about what someone else has done for you and meant to you.

Of course, this is not rocket science, but there is sound theory that supports it.  After publishing his best-seller Getting to Yes, Harvard negotiations expert Roger Fisher paired up with psychologist Daniel Shapiro to write Beyond Reason, which moves beyond the first book in acknowledging the power of feelings to gum up even the most reasonable negotiations.  Significantly, Fisher and Shapiro say that to be a top negotiator, people must first learn to express appreciation to each other.  That’s number one on their list.  Appreciation generates the positive emotions that cultivate respect and tolerance for the other person’s beliefs and opinions and actions.

Psychologist John Gottman, well-known for his research on couples, has also shown through mathematical analysis that couples that show appreciation to one another have longer and happier marriages.  Indeed, a large body of recent research in the social sciences demonstrates that expressing appreciation is also beneficial for the giver, who feels more positive about him- or herself, and more satisfied with social relationships.

But appreciation has to be a two-way street; to create an appreciation culture, the leader has to get the ball rolling.  So, instead of feeding Harry’s painful plea for appreciation, in the meeting we flipped his request and said, “Harry, we hear you. But we are going to ask you to do something that is going to feel a bit uncomfortable.  Look your sister in the eyes, and tell her something that you appreciate about her.”

Harry was slow to overcome his skepticism to our request, but eventually he dredged up some heartfelt sentiment:  “Without you, we’d be nowhere,” he told his older sister.  “Actually, I’d be nowhere – still pouring concrete and spending all my time flying planes.  You recommended me for my first sales job when no one else saw any potential in me.  You’re sharp and you’ve guided our people decisions with real wisdom.  You’ve always been there for us, for me.  Thank you.”

Without any urging, Harry’s sister and cousin returned the appreciation, expressing previously unsaid but deeply felt gratitude.  They articulated how much they felt Harry had sacrificed for the company, for them.  They talked about the joy of being able to go on a good journey together.

The reality that people like and need to be appreciated seems so intuitively obvious that one can only scratch one’s head and wonder why is doesn’t happen more often.  It’s a fundamental human need to feel valued by people we esteem, especially by family members.  Yet we all feel under-appreciated at least some of the time, not least of all because we assume that other people are taking full credit for our successes.

We all often get trapped in what we call “the credit game.”  By this we mean that everyone focuses on what he or she did personally for the success of the business, denying the contributions of others.  The problem with the credit game is that it’s generally a zero-sum game.  For Jim to win, Jane has to lose.  Placing too much emphasis on individual accomplishments saps everyone’s willingness to sacrifice for a collective goal.  This is the cycle that Harry and his partners got themselves into – they were playing the credit game in their heads.  Speaking their appreciation aloud has helped them to break free.

While family businesses powerfully exemplify these dynamics, they exist in all relationships. Given the demands of many careers today – intellectual, physical, and emotional – and the difficulty of expressing appreciation, you may be particularly vulnerable to feeling under-appreciated at work.  But you can’t just yell:  “Hey! I’m working my tail off! Appreciate me!”  Appreciation, as Harry found, is like playing catch – you need to throw the ball to have it come back.

We’re aware that appreciations can sound hokey, even inauthentic.  But dozens of times we have seen it break through the bitterness corroding relationships.  Harry’s appreciation was not a silver bullet – there is no silver bullet.  But his heartfelt appreciation opened up a space for the real work to get started.  That’s what appreciations are all about.  Try it.  Show some appreciation to someone today and see what comes back.

Editor’s Note: Some identifying details such as names, identities, industries, and financial information have been changed to protect client confidentiality.

Are You Confusing Strategy with Planning?

Most people agree that the two strongest human urges are survival and procreation, but there is very little consensus on the next most powerful. I believe it’s the need to succeed. Humans hate to fail — hate it more than almost anything else.

But what about all the people in the world who apparently have no drive for success — for instance, kids who choose to be drug dealers rather than get an education and “succeed”? I see a different explanation for such behavior. If you hate failure, you have a wonderful way of ensuring that you don’t experience it: Play the game you know you can win.

Think about it. On one hand, you can tackle a difficult challenge and face the prospect of failing. On the other, you can strive for a manageable goal and pretty much guarantee that you’ll achieve it. I would argue that most people systematically choose the second course of action.

So it’s not that kids who drop out of high school and become drug dealers lack a desire to succeed. Quite the contrary. Their desire is so great, in fact, that they risk their lives and liberty to fulfill it. But they take care to do something they can succeed at, not something for which they feel set up to fail — namely, the path followed by more-privileged kids.

The drive to succeed affects behavior in the corporate world as well. Each year every company engages in an elaborate dance around the budget. The managers responsible for meeting budget goals argue to their bosses that the targets should be set lower — competition is tough, the economy is slowing, the distribution channel is turbulent, and so on. I interviewed Jack Welch several years ago, and he rather hilariously described the process at GE.

Setting yourself up to succeed is a good idea in some contexts. But it’s usually a bad idea in strategy making. Instead of doing the difficult work of making a coherent set of choices to position themselves to win, most companies default to writing a strategic plan that lists a bunch of initiatives with associated financial projections.

The decision to default to planning instead of strategy is often not explicit. Rather, it just feels comfortable to slide in that direction. So I’ve created a brief questionnaire for managers to gauge whether they’ve abdicated their responsibility in this way.

Take this assessment, and discover whether you’ve fallen into any of the “comfort traps” of strategic planning. I hope it helps you aspire to a better strategy. 

How Social Entrepreneurs Can Have the Most Impact

Social enterprise in the U.S. is a fast-growing, but fragmented, movement. Looking at a recent release of data from The Great Social Enterprise Census, only a fifth are larger than $2 million in budget, just 8% employ more than a 100 people, and 60% were founded in the past 8 years, when the movement really began to gain momentum.

What happened in 2006? And is this kind of rapid growth good news?

You can find the answer to the timing question nestled among the facts that David Bornstein lays out in the preface to his book, How to Change the World. That year, two global headlines raised the profile of social enterprise: Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace prize. And Bill Gates announced he was shifting his priorities from software development to social impact by moving full time to his foundation. In the broader U.S. population, two generations made clear that their interests, too, lay in helping society. Civic Ventures had recently released its first survey of baby boomers and found at least half were interested in “encore careers” helping others. Meanwhile, 19,000 high-scoring college graduates across the U.S. applied for Teach for America—including 10% of the graduating classes of Dartmouth and Yale. My organization, The Bridgespan Group, received 1,800 applications for 18 entry-level positions consulting to nonprofits and philanthropy.

Since then, TFA has become one of the largest employers of Ivy League graduates. Huge companies like IBM have created programs to train and transition retirees into social sector roles. Leading MBA programs have doubled the number of courses they offer that have social enterprise content. Elite undergraduate business schools like Babson College have changed their mission statements to explicitly include social value.  And the number of applications to social enterprise fellowships like Echoing Green has soared.

All to say, the sector is hot, which brings me to the second question: Are social entrepreneurs stoking the right kind of growth? With so many small start-ups, are social entrepreneurs at risk of creating well-intentioned, but fragmented efforts that won’t ultimately change much? This is indeed the risk, but they can avoid or offset this fragmentation by adopting three approaches that allow even the smallest social enterprise to have outsized impact:

Scale impact, not organizations.  My colleagues Jeff Bradach and Abe Grindle point out that even the most successful social enterprises are reaching only a fraction of the need. Take the issue of youth unemployment. The biggest success story in the U.S. is Year Up, an organization that mentors and trains disconnected youth into living-wage jobs. After a decade of persistence, the organization now reaches 2,000 kids per year, yet there are  6.7 million young people out of school and out of work.

Every social entrepreneur — with organizations large or small — will need to find a way to go beyond making progress to solving the problem. Instead of growing their organizations, they need to think about making the problems go away. Promising approaches include widely distributing solutions via technology like massive open online courses (MOOCs) that make education available globally or mobile apps that provide vital market and weather information to poor farmers around the world; or via existing national or global platforms (think: business, government, community colleges, YMCAs); or changing social norms, as we’ve seen with smoking cessation, designated driving, and consumer recycling and conservation. Scottish social entrepreneur Mick Jackson, founder of WildHearts in Action, is attempting to forge a generation that marries entrepreneurship to economic justice through microloan-based business competitions across British schools and universities that generate profits for microloans in developing countries.

Lead collaborations, not just organizations.  As the world shifts from creating value through repetition (building, growing, or serving more efficiently) to a world where change begets change, you need leaders who can make sense of a kaleidoscope of processes and relationships — beyond the four walls of their organization. Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka, points to the necessary skill of becoming a leader of teams of teams.Think about the pace of new cancer therapies — and how research center directors lead knowledge sharing between labs across continents and oceans. Or consider Kwabena Darko of Ghana, who helped found that country’s microfinance sector by forging a collaboration between global NGO Opportunity International, his national startup Sinapi Aba, and a myriad of village- and town-based trust groups.

Amplify the voices of the constituents you seek to serve.  Even far-flung or pint-sized choruses for change can wield great influence when they unite and come from a place of deep authenticity. Any social entrepreneur who wants to help a disadvantaged constituency help itself, needs first to give power to its voice, as my colleague Willa Selden advocates. The social entrepreneur needs to create ways for their constituents to have  influence and ownership over the solutions. Razia Jan, the founder of Zabuli Education Center in Afghanistan, for example, is empowering Afghan girls to speak up in their homes and communities by providing them with free education. In California, social innovator and MacArthur “Genius” Award winner Mauricio Lim Miller founded Family Independence Initiative, which helps low-income families forge their paths to economic mobility and then to guide others.

These are often baffling challenges and yet they are the real work of any entrepreneur. A Wendell Berry poem read at a memorial of the late founder of the academic field of social enterprise, Greg Dees, sums it up:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work,

And that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed

The impeded stream is the one that sings. 

Note: This post is adapted from my remarks at Babson College’s 2014 Lewis Institute Social Innovator Awards.

How to Screen for Motivated Workers Who Are Drawn to Your Social Mission: Offer Low Pay

Providing employees with a social “mission” in their jobs doesn’t increase their effort: In an experiment in which workers could generate donations to NGOs of their choice, people whose jobs had a mission made no more effort than purely self-interested workers, say Sebastian Fehrler of the University of Zurich and Michael Kosfeld of Goethe University Frankfurt. However, there’s a subgroup of workers who choose mission-oriented jobs, and these workers tend to be more motivated. If you’re a mission-driven company, you can screen for them by offering low salaries, the researchers say.

The Status Quo Is Risky, Too

Are you ever frustrated by teammates who cling to the past while you try to introduce novel ideas or new strategies? If your ideas are met with choruses of “that will never work,” “we can’t take that risk,” “let’s just stick with the plan,” your teammates are likely falling prey to a common decision making bias that former Rotman dean Roger Martin refers to as Underestimating the Risk of the Status Quo. If your team’s strategy can be summed up by the English wartime slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On,” you need some new approaches to tackle their resistance.

Martin describes how executive teams carefully explore the risk of different courses of action, but neglect to make a similar assessment of the risk of staying the course. Armed only with the risks of changing, it’s natural for the team to shy away from decisive action. Unfortunately, failing to assess the risk of the status quo does not mean the risks won’t materialize—it just means you won’t be adequately prepared when they do.

If you are a member of a leadership team facing a critical strategic decision, you have an obligation to address these biases before inaction leaves your business irrelevant. There are several strategies you can employ to combat the risk of underestimating the status quo.

Start by bringing the strategic planning conversations back to your current strategy. Frame the conversation in terms of changes in what customers need or want. If the customers haven’t changed much, point to changes in the competitive environment that make your strategy less sound today than it was when it was developed.  Mine societal, economic, political, regulatory, and technological trends to identify any external changes that necessitate a shift in your strategy.

Then develop a risk profile for your current strategy using the same framework you’re using to assess your new strategic options.  If you have assessed the risk of your strategic options in terms of brand risk, operational risk, market risk, and so on, do the same for the current strategy. An apples-to-apples comparison will allow the team to make a more balanced assessment of the best course of action.  If reputational risk is high in the proposed strategy, but equally high in the existing strategy, it’s not a legitimate criterion on which to make the decision. Focus the team on the incremental risk of the new options and highlight any places where the proposed strategy is actually less risky than the existing one.

If executives on your team are endlessly asking for more information, effectively stalling any decisions or progress, try getting the team to put some boundaries in place. You can use questions like, “How much do we need to know before we can make a good decision here?” or “What would it take for you to have 80% confidence in this path?” or  “What is our window for making this decision?” By calling attention to the indecisiveness and helping your teammates get more comfortable with acting in the absence of complete information, you are more likely to get traction to move beyond the status quo.

Finally, deal head-on with team dynamics that stem from turf issues or self-interest.  It is a delicate situation when new products risk cannibalizing existing businesses, but that’s the reality of innovation. If you’re seeing protectionist behavior on your team, invoke the best interests of the organization.  I use the curves laid out in Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma to show how continued incremental progress will leave the organization vulnerable to competitors who are actively trying to change the nature of the battle. Then you can say something like, “What are we doing about the coming war over wearable computing? It’s not here yet, but how do we ensure we’re not irrelevant when wearables really gain momentum?”

It’s now common practice to manage risk with heightened awareness, disciplined processes, and due diligence. Unfortunately, we are more likely to apply these tools to evaluate the risk of changing than to evaluate the risk of staying the same. If your teammates are anchoring your business in the past, it’s your responsibility to help them see the risk of the status quo.