Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1445

Helping a Bipolar Leader

I think we all know somebody like John (not his real name), a talented executive I once coached. He had extraordinary drive and charisma. The people reporting to him all agreed that he had provided outstanding leadership in the company’s last crisis; his refusal to bow to adversity and his ability to rally people behind him had been truly remarkable. 

But they also agreed he could go over the top. There were the e-mails sent at 2 AM, and it was sometimes hard to follow exactly what he was saying. He would jump suddenly from one idea to another and some of his plans seemed unrealistic, even grandiose. And whenever anyone tried to slow him down, John wouldn’t hear of it. His sense of invincibility made him feel that he could do anything. Once he had made up his mind, it was almost impossible to change it. His inability to listen coupled with his lack of judgment eventually resulted in his making a number of seriously bad decisions, plunging his unit into the red. The board had considered firing him, but decided to give him another chance and called me in to coach.

I am a psychologist as well as a coach, so I realized that John suffered from a mood disorder called bipolar dysfunction, previously known as manic depression, a condition that haunts approximately 4% of the population. People suffering from this condition report periodically experiencing an overactive mind and often seem to get by on little or no sleep. They often feel a heightening of the senses, which may trigger increased sexual activity, and are highly prone to bouts of extravagant behavior. Their moods swing wildly from this state of exuberance to the polar opposite, and they suddenly can become withdrawn and inert, shunning the company of others. When that’s the case (far from surviving on no sleep), they struggle to get out of bed.

It’s a condition often associated with highly creative people. William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Von Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Vincent Van Gogh, and Ernest Hemingway all reported going through similar cycles of mania and depression. So do many of our most famous leaders, notably Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and General Patton.

As history shows, manic-depressive leaders like these are great in a crisis, refusing to bow to adversity. They rush in where others feared to tread and can inspire others to follow. The downside is that due to their extreme sense of empowerment, energy and optimism, their thinking and judgment can be flawed. Caught up in their grandiosity, they overestimate their capabilities and try to do more than they can handle. The problems are often aggravated by an inability to recognize that their behavior is dysfunctional. While “high,” they rarely have insight into their condition. They like the sense of invulnerability that comes with the “high,” and are reluctant to give that up.

When the inevitable setbacks and disasters happen, they fall into a tailspin of depression. This had just happened to John, who had gone so far as to check himself into a hospital psychiatric ward for a brief stay. Adding to his woes, his wife asked for a trial separation. Apparently John had been reckless with his personal finances and had been involved in numerous affairs.

Despite the challenges, people like John can be helped and put on a more even keel. When they’re manic, there’s little you can do, but when they are depressed they can be receptive to counseling. The key to getting them to a better place is to help them build more structure in their lives, both personal and professional. In relatively mild cases of bipolar dysfunction, this may be sufficient to stabilize the person in question. In more extreme cases, sufferers will eventually need psychotherapy and medication. But the initial step of building some structure will at least make them more amenable to considering these options.

Counseling bipolar people can be problematic for people without psychological experience because it may involve crossing a few boundaries. As I explain in in my HBR article, to help truly extreme cases I believe in creating alliances with the other important people in their lives. In John’s case, I insisted on having number of conversations with John’s wife, both alone and also with John. While unorthodox, my goal in these conversations was to help John figure out how she saw their futures and whether their futures lay together. We explored various scenarios. By getting some clarity around what future John wanted and whom he wanted in it provided him with some psychological anchors and gave him an incentive to do something about his condition.

Discussing his future, it began to dawn on John (reflecting on his strengths and weaknesses), what his best fit was in the organization. He came to realize that getting involved in too many details of the business created too many distractions. What he really seemed to be good at was cutting big deals with important clients. It became also clearer to John that he needed a work structure that allowed him to focus his energy at work and give him emotional space for his family.

At this stage, John, the board, and I agreed that his job needed to be defined in a way that allowed him to focus on the big deals, leaving the day-to-day work to others. Since John moved into this new role, his 360-degree feedback has improved steadily; while he remains volatile, he seems better able to moderate himself. It also looks like his relationship with his wife has improved. He takes medication regularly and sees a therapist. The company has benefited from its willingness to help John with his condition by retaining his talents and drive. I think many companies are too quick to punish executives for the consequences of their bad decisions. A better approach is to find ways to fix the (often quite manageable) psychological dynamic that so often lies behind those decisions.

Making the Gradual Retirement of a Co-Founder Work

Most people look forward to retirement. They can’t wait to play more golf with their pals, travel, hang out with the grandchildren, perhaps spend more time on non-profits, and generally pursue a more relaxed lifestyle. But some of us don’t really want to retire. Like my partner, with whom I co-founded our finance services company.

David is in a very slow process of retiring. It was inevitable that he would leave the company before me: he is 20 years older. This age difference is among the reasons that our pairing has been so successful; we have drawn clients from different generations, and David’s age enhances his aura of statesmanlike wisdom.

Slow retirements of senior executives present some of the same challenges to organizations as typical departures, and certain unique ones. For example, years in advance of his leaving, we addressed the critical, often financially painful, and sometimes insurmountable matter of redeeming our partner’s ownership stake. However, as difficult as the financial buy-out element is, the more complex problems relate to how to fill the slowly expanding void created by a gradual departure.

The slow retirement poses risks and challenges if handled poorly but can be a rewarding experience for the executive involved and his colleagues if managed carefully. Here are the principles we’ve been using to guide us; they may also be applicable at your firm:

Work out the financial ramifications quickly. In a financial firm like ours, holding growth aside, the pressure comes from two sources; the purchase of the partner’s shares by existing or new partners, and compensation needed to bring in new talent. In any firm, unless the departing executive makes concessions, the company will have to balance the outgoing executive’s existing salary (and any retirement package) with the cost of bringing in a replacement. When David passed his CEO title over to me, becoming Chairman, we explained his ongoing specific job functions to everyone and the fact that his compensation would  reflect those changes. This removed ambiguity and the likelihood of misconception about opportunities for others within the firm.

Think through the cultural ramifications. According to research by Langowitz and Allen, (link here) the success of new ventures is inextricably connected with the style and leadership of their founders, so companies need to be careful about maintaining cultural integrity when one of those founders leaves. Having a co-founder leave slowly will have a more muted effect than a sudden exit, but the benefit can disintegrate if  he is there but not engaged in what suits his interests and the enterprise needs. In our case, this culture includes our relationships with clients. Clients adore David and he loves working with them, so these relationships will be the last element of his job to transition. We have informed all clients of the process and always have two partners assigned to each account. However, we need to both include a third member to each client team and establish the chronology for handover. I know this will be the toughest aspect to his retirement and I am not anxious for its arrival.

Design a hover-limited environment. No one will want to step up to a position if the gradually retiring executive will be either hovering or reassuming that assignment. If you won’t own the job, why take it? Think of Warren Buffet or of Pimco, both of whom have hired and then lost their apparent successors, who either grew impatient waiting or annoyed with the meddling. Reassure your veteran colleague that he or she is helpful and respected but be honest about responsibilities and limits. The lifeblood of any investment company is making investment decisions and David has made many since we started our firm nine years ago. Over time, we have successfully added personnel to our investment professional ranks. While David is still passionate about helping craft our strategy and implementing these moves, this is the area where we can least afford limited  capacity. Like a fishing boat cruising through a barren stretch of sea, we can’t be fooled by a lull in activity, but need staffing to discover, analyze, and invest in opportunities that might suddenly emerge from price changes.

For example, each quarter David has traditionally written a topical investment piece, which we send to all clients. We have encouraged other team members to broach themes about which, after colorful group discussions, they write themselves and we send to all our constituents. This introduces other colleagues to our clients on a new dimension, increases their confidence in promoting ideas, and raises their profile internally.

Know your own strengths and weaknesses. Finally, if you are the CEO, but have had the benefit of a close partner with whom you shared responsibilities for building and overseeing a company, be grateful for that relationship, determine what you do well, what your partner did better, and envision the firm’s future with that in mind. We’ve considered the different operating lines of our company, with an eye toward transferring or reimagining responsibilities in an orderly progression as David pulls back from his involvement. Marketing and client development transitioned naturally from David to me and other partners because he had done so much in the early years of our enterprise that there were very few untapped contacts years later. To maintain our momentum and supplement our steady growth, we added an experienced executive who could direct both marketing and compliance, which has become an increasingly complex responsibility that I could no longer assume.

The trickiest aspect of the slow transition is, by definition, the lack of speed, which suggests that managing timelines and expectations are a key to success. We value David’s knowledge and input, but the next phase of our business growth involves younger people charged with independent decision making on which they will be judged. By the time I retire (maybe, but no promises), twenty years from now, when we are a much larger but still comfortably sized company, we will be experts at building  experience and competence in a whole new generation of  co-workers.

Don’t Let Patent Law Hold Back Interaction Design

Patent law is a powerful tool for encouraging innovation, but it’s also temperamental. As recent efforts to discourage patent trolls have shown, it’s not enough to simply enforce the rules; they must also be updated and fine-tuned to respond to the technology and economy around them. This is why the current state of patent law in interaction design is so alarming. What we have at the moment is a legal environment that hasn’t yet caught up to current technology, and the much-discussed “pinch-to-zoom” lawsuit makes it clear that this disconnect is starting to be a drag on innovation.

To be effective, patent law must carefully distinguish between two things: the unique combination of information, cues, and actions that define a specific innovation (the embodiment) and the underlying building blocks that make it possible (the elements). It makes sense, in other words, to protect a book or a painting from being reproduced without permission, but it would be absurd to copyright an element such as the word “next” or the color blue, and we wouldn’t even try. In choosing to protect the specific embodiment (article, photograph, song, etc.) but not the individual elements (words, colors, notes), our laws generally do a good job of protecting creative work without inhibiting others from following suit.

One glaring exception to this balance, for designers and entrepreneurs at least, is the arena of digital interaction. The law simply doesn’t match reality when it comes to the ways we interact with our digital devices, and this is having a real impact on innovation. In the case of Apple versus Samsung, what’s been successfully patented isn’t a technological advancement, or even a branded visual identity, but a human gesture that’s as fundamental as rotating a knob to adjust volume, or giving a thumbs-up to express approval. Gestures, I would argue, are universal elements of interaction, as basic to the creation of new experiences as words are to poetry.

Patenting gestures and basic workflows is destructive because they aren’t just arbitrary actions dreamed up by one company or another, but ways of manipulating the world, hardwired into human brains by evolution and cultural conditioning. Interaction design is a younger discipline than graphic or industrial design, and much of its practice is still in the realm of basic discovery: finding the most efficient process for listing and choosing among ten options on a small screen, for example, or the most intuitive way to build and re-sort a playlist. These aren’t just aesthetic or emotional decisions, but deeply functional ones. No amount of clever coding or artful visual treatment can make up for their absence.

But the relative newness of interaction design also brings confusion, as the patent system struggles to figure out how to best regulate it. In the resulting debate, the loudest voices belong to large tech companies with deep pockets, ample legal resources, and strong motivation to discourage competition. This is why basic actions that any designer could tell you are part of the foundational language of human/device interaction – pinching to zoom, rotating a screen to change orientation, swiping to unlock a device – are repeatedly claimed as proprietary technology, and sometimes even upheld.

From inside the design studio or the startup office, this legal landscape presents a dismal view. So much of what makes or breaks a new digital venture – especially on a mobile device – is the experience of using it, and increasingly, the obvious path to the best experience is fraught with legal danger. There are hundreds of “right” ways to pick the color palette for a new product line or the shape of a mobile device, but a digital interaction often has a single best solution, because it’s essentially responding to the way your brain works. It’s not uncommon, in fact, for multiple designers working independently to arrive at the same solution to an interactive problem, despite having no contact with each other. When patent law awards protection to whoever discovered this solution first (or more likely, whoever had the legal resources to get it filed first), it does a very good job of scaring other designers and entrepreneurs away from using it. In my experience, it can even scare them away from expending the time and effort to try and find it.

That’s not what patent law is for, and I doubt it’s what lawmakers intended it to do. But by continuing to indulge lawsuits over fundamental action patents, US courts are actively discouraging innovation. As someone who has worked hard over the past 30 years to obtain dozens of patents, I deeply appreciate the value they have for business and for consumers. But unless we revise these laws to treat interaction design as sensibly as other creative fields, the future of technology will be a dim shadow of its true potential.

Algorithms Can Save Networking from Being Business Card Roulette

Networking can be something of a crapshoot. Though there may be someone in the room you really should meet — someone whose acquaintance might help you out professionally — it’s often impossible to determine who precisely that is. And so we go to industry conferences and share business cards like shotgun spray, hoping that with a little luck we’ll make a useful connection. In large organizations, the same thing goes for networking at company functions; surely there’s someone in another department it would be useful to know, but when scanning the room at the holiday party it’s not always clear who that is.

If this seems like a trivial issue, it’s actually anything but. Innovation, a critical component to success for today’s companies, is about coming up with new ideas. And generating new ideas involves recombining old ones in new and interesting ways. In practice, that means mixing people together, so that the information they share can be recombined into something new. That’s why companies go to great lengths to design offices that encourage spontaneous encounters, and why dense cities, where people can bump into one another on the street, are more innovative than sparser suburbs.

It’s also, at a theoretical level, why networking matters, and why a new academic paper on networking at conferences is so interesting. Researchers from the UK, Japan, and Italy set out to improve how networking happened at a scientific conference they were organizing. They asked all attendees to share which of the other attendees they knew, their own area of expertise, and subject areas or methods they were interested in learning. With this information, the researchers ran two rounds of “speed-dating” using algorithms designed to maximize the formation of new relationships. In the first round, participants met with others who were “far” from them in the conference social network, as well as “far” in terms of expertise. In the second, they looked for those who were “far” from each other in the network and who had expertise that the other was interested in learning.

This algorithmic speed dating ensured that the scientists were recombined in new ways, strengthening ties in the network that wouldn’t have existed and increasing the odds that each participant would make useful connections. It’s too early to tell if this approach yields quantifiable benefits, but the post-conference survey response was extremely positive. Notably, more than half the respondents indicated that “potential new collaborations were emerging from discussions at the meeting.”

“Of course, we have no objective baseline,” said Rafael Carazo Salas of University of Cambridge, one of the authors. But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one in the future. When I spoke with Carazo Salas he mentioned using Twitter or LinkedIn to quantify how the algorithmic matching compares to traditional networking in creating new connections. “In the case of science,” he continued, “you could go to grants co-submitted [or] patent applications filed,” to measure not just the effects on the network but the eventual impact on collaboration.

If such a measure of success could be found, it’s likely that this algorithmic approach to meeting people could transform networking both between and within businesses, much like it has for the online dating world. When you sign up for an Eventbrite event, an algorithm could suggest the people you’d most benefit from meeting there. Something similar could happen inside companies, with algorithms scanning email, intranets, and project management tools to suggest collaborators who might improve a project before it even gets off the ground.

No doubt some people will react negatively to the idea of algorithms deciding whom we should meet and collaborate with — not least the business development professionals whose networking acumen would potentially be less valuable. But society has grown used to it in the dating realm, and the conference goers in Carazo Salas’ experiment actually reacted more enthusiastically when they were told their pairings were the result of computation. Moreover, this kind of algorithmic matching already shapes the way we connect in the online world.

It’s still early days for this algorithmic approach to matching people, at least face-to-face and for the purposes of business and scientific productivity. But Carazo Salas and his colleagues are exploring the commercial applications of their experiment. “It’s all about innovation,” he told me. “By mixing things that are different, probably new things are going to come out.”

The Daily Routines of Geniuses

Juan Ponce de León spent his life searching for the fountain of youth. I have spent mine searching for the ideal daily routine. But as years of color-coded paper calendars have given way to cloud-based scheduling apps, routine has continued to elude me; each day is a new day, as unpredictable as a ride on a rodeo bull and over seemingly as quickly.

Naturally, I was fascinated by the recent book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Author Mason Curry examines the schedules of 161 painters, writers, and composers, as well as philosophers, scientists, and other exceptional thinkers.

As I read, I became convinced that for these geniuses, a routine was more than a luxury — it was essential to their work. As Currey puts it, “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.” And although the book itself is a delightful hodgepodge of trivia, not a how-to manual, I began to notice several common elements in the lives of the healthier geniuses (the ones who relied more on discipline than on, say, booze and Benzedrine) that allowed them to pursue the luxury of a productivity-enhancing routine:

A workspace with minimal distractions. Jane Austen asked that a certain squeaky hinge never be oiled, so that she always had a warning when someone was approaching the room where she wrote. William Faulkner, lacking a lock on his study door, just detached the doorknob and brought it into the room with him — something of which today’s cubicle worker can only dream.  Mark Twain’s family knew better than to breach his study door — if they needed him, they’d blow a horn to draw him out. Graham Greene went even further, renting a secret office; only his wife knew the address or telephone number. Distracted more by the view out his window than interruptions, if N.C. Wyeth was having trouble focusing, he’d tape a piece of cardboard to his glasses as a sort of blinder.

A daily walk. For many, a regular daily walk was essential to brain functioning. Soren Kierkegaard found his constitutionals so inspiring that he would often rush back to his desk and resume writing, still wearing his hat and carrying his walking stick or umbrella. Charles Dickens famously took three-hour walks every afternoon — and what he observed on them fed directly into his writing. Tchaikovsky made do with a two-hour walk, but wouldn’t return a moment early, convinced that cheating himself of the full 120 minutes would make him ill. Beethoven took lengthy strolls after lunch, carrying a pencil and paper with him in case inspiration struck. Erik Satie did the same on his long strolls from Paris to the working class suburb where he lived, stopping under streetlamps to jot down notions that arose on his journey; it’s rumored that when those lamps were turned off during the war years, his productivity declined too.

Accountability metrics. Anthony Trollope only wrote for three hours a day, but he required of himself a rate of 250 words per 15 minutes, and if he finished the novel he was working on before his three hours were up, he’d immediately start a new book as soon as the previous one was finished. Ernest Hemingway also tracked his daily word output on a chart “so as not to kid myself.” BF Skinner started and stopped his writing sessions by setting a timer, “and he carefully plotted the number of hours he wrote and the words he produced on a graph.”

A clear dividing line between important work and busywork. Before there was email, there were letters. It amazed (and humbled) me to see the amount of time each person allocated simply to answering letters. Many would divide the day into real work (such as composing or painting in the morning) and busywork (answering letters in the afternoon). Others would turn to the busywork when the real work wasn’t going well. But if the amount of correspondence was similar to today’s, these historical geniuses did have one advantage: the post would arrive at regular intervals, not constantly as email does.

A habit of stopping when they’re on a roll, not when they’re stuck. Hemingway puts it thus: “You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.” Arthur Miller said, “I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.” With the exception of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — who rose at 6, spent the day in a flurry of music lessons, concerts, and social engagements and often didn’t get to bed until 1 am — many would write in the morning, stop for lunch and a stroll, spend an hour or two answering letters, and knock off work by 2 or 3. “I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool,” wrote Carl Jung. Or, well, a Mozart.

A supportive partner. Martha Freud, wife of Sigmund, “laid out his clothes, chose his handkerchiefs, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush,” notes Currey. Gertrude Stein preferred to write outdoors, looking at rocks and cows — and so on their trips to the French countryside, Gertrude would find a place to sit while Alice B. Toklas would shoo a few cows into the writer’s line of vision. Gustav Mahler’s wife bribed the neighbors with opera tickets to keep their dogs quiet while he was composing — even though she was bitterly disappointed when he forced her to give up her own promising musical career. The unmarried artists had help, too: Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, took over most of the domestic duties so that Jane had time to write — “Composition seems impossible to me with a head full of joints of mutton & doses of rhubarb,” as Jane once wrote. And Andy Warhol called friend and collaborator Pat Hackett every morning, recounting the previous day’s activities in detail. “Doing the diary,” as they called it, could last two full hours — with Hackett dutifully jotting down notes and typing them up, every weekday morning from 1976 until Warhol’s death in 1987.

Limited social lives. One of Simone de Beauvoir’s lovers put it this way: “there were no parties, no receptions, no bourgeois values… it was an uncluttered kind of life, a simplicity deliberately constructed so that she could do her work.” Marcel Proust “made a conscious decision in 1910 to withdraw from society,” writes Currey. Pablo Picasso and his girlfriend Fernande Olivier borrowed the idea of Sunday as an “at-home day” from Stein and Toklas — so that they could “dispose of the obligations of friendship in a single afternoon.”

This last habit — relative isolation — sounds much less appealing to me than some of the others. And yet I still find the routines of these thinkers strangely compelling, perhaps they are so unattainable, so extreme. Even the very idea that you can organize your time as you like is out of reach for most of us — so I’ll close with a toast to all those who did their best work within the constraints of someone else’s routine. Like Francine Prose, who began writing when the school bus picked up her children and stopped when it brought them back; or T.S. Eliot, who found it much easier to write once he had a day job in a bank than as a starving poet; and even F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early writing was crammed in around the strict schedule he followed as a young military officer. Those days were not as fabled as the gin-soaked nights in Paris that came later, but they were much more productive — and no doubt easier on his liver. Being forced to follow the ruts of someone else’s routine may grate, but they do make it easier to stay on the path.

And that of course is what a routine really is — the path we take through our day. Whether we break that trail yourself or follow the path blazed by our constraints, perhaps what’s most important is that we keep walking.

The Seven Skills You Need to Thrive in the C-Suite

What executive skills are most prized by companies today? How has that array of skills changed in the last decade, and how is it likely to change in the next ten years? To find out, I surveyed senior consultants in 2010 at a top-five global executive-search firm. Experienced search consultants typically interview hundreds (in many cases thousands) of senior executives; they assess those executives’ skills, track them over time, and in some cases place the same executive in a series of jobs. They also observe how executives negotiate, what matters most to them in their contracts, and how they decide whether to change companies. (For more on how executives set their work-life priorities, see this.)

Here are the seven C-level skills and traits companies prize most:

Leadership. The skills cited as most indispensable for C-level executives—not just CEOs—are those that jointly constitute leadership. One consultant described the search for a chief information officer in these terms: “Whereas technical expertise was previously paramount, these competencies [being sought today] are more about leadership skills than technical ones.” The consultants differed on the type of leadership most highly in demand, mentioning “inspirational leadership,” “leadership in a non-authoritarian manner that works with today’s executive talent,” “take-charge” leadership, “leadership balanced with authenticity, respect for others, and trust building,” and “strategic leadership.” Ethical leadership was also mentioned. Some consultants observed that the type of leadership sought depends on a company’s specific needs. “Visionary leadership is frequently mentioned when a company is on a new path, adopting a new strategy, or at a tipping point in its growth,” one respondent noted. Another said, “Driving an organization or function to a higher level of performance, efficiency, or growth requires a ‘take-charge’ leadership.” One consultant predicted that firms in 2020 will seek the “same [attributes as in 2010] but with an even greater appreciation for the intangibles of leadership and [for experience] having led a business through tough times.”


Strategic thinking and execution. “Strategic foresight”— the ability to think strategically, often on a global basis—was also frequently cited. One consultant stressed the ability to “set the strategic direction” for the organization; another equated strategic thinking with “integrative leadership.”  Others emphasized that strategic thinking also calls for the ability to execute a vision, which one respondent called “operating savvy” and another defined as “a high standard in execution.” One consultant pointed out that strategic thinking is a relatively new requirement for many functional C-level executives, and another noted that the surge in attention to strategic thinking occurred in the decade 2000–2010. [BA1]


Technical and technology skills. The third most frequently cited requirement for C-level executives was technical skills—specifically, deep familiarity with the particular body of knowledge under their auspices, such as law, financials, or technology. Many respondents stressed technology skills and technical literacy. “A C-level executive needs to understand how technology is impacting their organization and how to exploit technology,” one respondent asserted. Others stressed financial acumen and “industry-specific content knowledge.” In contrast to popular wisdom, many technical skills are not declining but increasing in importance.


Team- and relationship-building. Many consultants emphasized team-related skills: building and leading teams and working collegially. “A world-class leader must be able to hire and develop an exceptionally strong leadership team—he/she cannot succeed as a brilliant one-person player,” one asserted. Another said that today’s executive must be “more interested and skilled in developing his/her team, less self-oriented.” Executives no longer sit behind closed doors,” one consultant said; instead they must be “team-oriented, capable of multitasking continuously, leading without rank, resisting stress, ensuring that subordinates do not suffer burnout—and do all of this with a big smile in an open-plan office.” One consultant characterized the entire company as a team and described the executive’s job as “leading and developing the company’s team, from the leadership down to the ‘troops.’”


Communication and presentation. Collectively, the consultants said the ideal C-suite candidate possesses the power of persuasion and excellent presentation skills—which one consultant called “the intellectual capability to interact with a wide variety of stakeholders.” This is a tall order because there are many more stakeholders now than before. Speaking convincingly to the concerns of varied audiences— knowledgeable and unsophisticated, internal and external, friendly and skeptical—calls for mental deftness and stylistic versatility. Some consultants emphasized that a strong candidate should be “board-ready”; others emphasized the ability to “influence the direction of a business and the front office” and to achieve “organizational buy-in.” And C-level executives must also be adept at communicating externally. “Presentation skills have become key to success,” one consultant said, “and will continue to be of increasing importance in the future, as the media, governments, employees, shareholders and regulators take an ever-increasing interest in what occurs in big business.” Another warned that executives need to be “good at making presentations in front of a ‘tough audience.’” Finally, C-level executives must be adept in receiving and synthesizing information.


Change-management. Virtually unacknowledged and underappreciated until quite recently, change-management skills are in growing demand. Consultants noted rising demand for an executive who is a “change driver,” able to “lead a transformation/change agenda” and capable of “driving transformational change.”One thoughtful consultant said that, as a job specification, change management typically has less to do with driving drastic firm-wide change than with being at ease with constant flux. “This requires a ‘change-agent’ executive,” he noted, “motivated by a continuous-improvement mindset, a sense of always upgrading organizations, building better processes and systems, improving commercial relationships, increasing market share, and developing leadership.” Another consultant noted that a firm seeking an executive who can engineer change often opts for an external candidate on the grounds that an external hire can bring “a new skill set that can lead to significant change and growth.”


Integrity. Although not skills per se, integrity and a reputation for ethical conduct are highly valued, according to the consultants we surveyed. One said that hiring companies want “unquestioned ethics.” Another remarked that ethical conduct was not explicitly sought in the past but would be front and center going forward: “Personal integrity and ethical behavior . . . are far more important now because of the speed of communication.” Another said that “organizations are more attuned to the ‘acceptability’ of senior hires, be it to regulators, investors or governments.”

We also asked the executive-search consultants how the most highly prized C-level skills have changed over time and what further change they foresee. The first clear theme that emerged is the importance of a global outlook and meaningful international experience. Already the foremost emerging skill over the past decade, a global orientation is apt to become even more dominant going forward.

Another striking theme was the demise of the star culture. Being a team player—working well with others—matters more and is expected to grow in importance. Team skills and change-management skills tied for second place among those considered crucial today but largely ignored ten years ago.  One consultant shared a telling anecdote: “Recently I was called to find the new CEO of a local branch of an international company. The former CEO was fired because his management team decided he was too bossy and did not allow them opportunities for growth. They brought these concerns to the top level of the company, and the decision was to replace him.”

Many consultants said that technical skills—once the prime goal of executive searches—are still important but have become merely a baseline requirement.  Because the repertoire of obligatory executive skills has grown in scope, some said, both hard and soft requirements have expanded accordingly. Executives who neglect their technical skills might be passed over. In fast changing global economy, dated technical skills can hamper resource-allocation and strategic decisions.

What skills do you think executives need to be successful now and what skills will they need in 2020? What are you doing to be ready to be hired in ten years? We would love to hear; please share your ideas with us.

———————-

Methodology

To answer these questions, we surveyed several dozen top senior search consultants at a top global executive-placement firm in 2010.  As a group, they were 57% male and 43% female. They represented a wide range of industries, including industrial (28%), financial (19%), consumer (13%), technology (11%), corporate (6%), functional practice (6%), education/social enterprise (4%), and life sciences (4%). These senior search consultants worked in 19 different countries from every region of the world, including North American (34%), Europe (28%), Asia/India (26%), Australia/New Zealand (6%), Africa (4%) and South America (2%).

Thriving at the Top

An HBR Insight Center




Why Good Managers Are So Rare
Loose Ties Are Abundant, but Risky, at the Top
Developing Mindful Leaders for the C-Suite
Meet the Fastest Rising Executive in the Fortune 100

Family Business Owners Must Set the Agenda (Without Micromanaging)

“It’s our money.”

With those three little words, Charles changed the course of his family’s shipping business**, highlighting the role that owners can play in a family business. His father had founded the business in the 1960s and, after building it to $500 million in revenue, had passed ownership down to Charles and his four siblings, then stepped away from the executive suite and ultimately from the board.

This may seem like the perfect succession; in fact, it was a perfect set up. The five siblings couldn’t get real control over the business. The non-family CEO – selected by the father – had gotten used to running the company with minimal direction. Board seats, too, were filled by their father’s friends, some of whom doubted the business capabilities of the next generation. True, the siblings chose a new chairman and replaced some board members. But they still struggled to put their mark on the business.

Then something happened. At a priority-setting meeting of their Shareholder Council, Charles got fed up listening to all the talk about how to convince managers to do things the way that the owners wanted. He put a stake in the ground. “Why are we cow-towing to the managers?” he said. “It’s our legacy. It’s our money.”

The tectonic plates began to shift. The siblings clarified their hopes for the business in a vision statement. They pushed management to change the metrics they used for measuring success from a focus on gross earnings to an emphasis on returns on their invested capital. They began to take charge over some critical decisions and worked with the board to implement them. There were inevitably some squabbles, but ultimately management adjusted to the greater role that family members wanted to play in the business that they owned.

Don’t get us wrong. We’ve worked with businesses where the owners can sabotage the success of the enterprise. There’s even a famous Harvard Business School case – J. Perez Foods – on the subject. In it, a family owner named Mercedes starts interfering in HR decisions, firing the employees she doesn’t like. Ironically, while the case is written to point an accusatory finger at Mercedes, when we’ve taught the case to business families, class participants often blame Mercedes’s father, who failed to find an appropriate role for his daughter in the business. That’s what sent her down the path of looking for grossly inappropriate ways to exercise some power.

Our experience in the classroom brings us back to Charles and the question: “What is the appropriate role of the owners of family businesses?” Our view is that the most successful owners must make a small number of very important decisions. They are to:

Set the goals for the business. Many family business owners don’t focus solely on economic returns, but also on jobs for their families, liquidity for their lifestyles or outside investments, or contributions to the community. Owners need to spell out their objectives, knowing that otherwise the business may end up serving somebody else’s interests.
Define the metrics to measure the business’s success. Owners often receive too little or too much information. To get just what they need, they should develop a dashboard that allows them to monitor business performance – and then have a regular venue in which to discuss those results.
Hire the board. Though it’s often forgotten, the board’s primary job is to protect the owners’ interests. Therefore, the owners need to design and oversee the process by which board members are selected and evaluated. This process is complicated by the fact that owners themselves often sit on boards, and therefore need to be acutely conscious of, and conscientious in, separating their roles and responsibilities. This means very clearly establishing criteria for what gets discussed where.
Determine the dividend policy. The board generally makes the annual decision about dividend payouts, but owners should define the policy and share their preferences with the board about what portion of profits to reinvest rather than take out. This is important: in the absence of the rigor of the market place, dividend policy is a means of enforcing discipline on management through the constraint on resources that management can access for the business.

Beyond this, the best owners do not meddle: they delegate decision-making and let the board and management do the jobs they’ve been hired for.

So how is your ownership group doing? Here’s a quiz from our client work. Score your owner group on each question, “3” being doing extremely well to “1” being not at all.

Choosing your goals


Do you discuss and write down the specific objectives you want to accomplish together – e.g., growth, liquidity, family employment?
Have you established and communicated to the board and management clear guidelines about the goals they should pursue?


Tracking performance


Have you agreed on the top 3-5 measures of the company’s performance? Do you have a scorecard ready?
Does this scorecard compare performance with your company’s peer group?
Do you have a process for regularly discussing company performance where your views will be heard by the board/management?


Hiring the board


Do you actively choose board members – i.e., consider multiple candidates, set clear criteria, and hold discussions about candidates’ qualifications?
Does your board clearly represent the interests of owners rather than of management?
Have you clarified which decisions you will delegate to the board and to management and which ones you will stay involved with?


Setting distribution policy


Have the owners discussed, written down, and communicated to the board a distribution and/or dividend policy?
Do you have an annual conversation where you discuss among yourselves your preferences for receiving distributions/dividends vs. reinvesting in the business?

For our clients, we have found that a score of 25 or more means that they are well in control of their companies. A score of 15 to 24 indicates that they’ve not yet found the way to be effective owners. A score of 14 or lower suggests that they have lost control of their company or are at risk of doing so. If you had trouble with some of the survey questions because your board and owner group are one, you have uncovered a fundamental problem.

Where do you fall on the survey? Are you minding your own business?

**Some identifying details about this business have been changed to protect client confidentiality.

Which Women Are Rising to the Top?

It’s the responsibility of management to tackle gender diversity, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox recently wrote on this site. Stop blaming women for what they do or don’t do, she argues, and train leaders to manage and develop a more balanced workforce. She makes a great point. Any cultural shift goes much more smoothly with the active involvement of the CEO and his or her (usually his) team. And it’s not realistic or fair to expect half the workforce to simply adapt their behavior to suit the other half, just because the latter are in charge.

But the evidence suggests that our leaders aren’t doing a very good job of it, at least not yet. Women still represent less than 5% of CEOs around the globe, and they remain seriously underrepresented in other top management positions and on executive boards. So yes, by all means managers should step up, but meanwhile, there’s no reason for an ambitious woman to sit on the sidelines and wait for her boss to get with the program. That’s what my colleague Lauren Ready concluded from a study she did here at the International Consortium for Executive Development Research, in which she interviewed 60 top female executives from around the world to learn how they rose to the top. Her aim was to uncover some lessons for the next generation, and she found that while each woman followed her own path, they had all taken charge of their careers in similar ways.

For one, these executives take the time to explore what they want out of work and life.

One byproduct of this effort is that they pay special attention to how they might fit within a company’s culture. This finding is consistent with research from HBS professor Boris Groysberg, who’s found that while the performance of male stars falters when they switch companies, women continue to excel, in part because they’ve done their homework when it comes to fit. The women in Ready’s study also understand the limits of fit. They aren’t “one of the guys” and they don’t try to be.

Another quality these women share is that they take responsibility for their choices—including the sacrifices they’re willing to make. “Male or female, there are no shortcuts to becoming a senior executive,” Ready writes. “The hours are long. The travel is exhausting. The stress is high. Let’s face it: Most of us would rather spend our weekends with family, not at 38,000 feet, in transit to our next meeting.” You can fight for better work-life balance when you get to the top (here’s one leader who quit business travel altogether), but you have to pay some dues along the way. The women Ready met with don’t point to a workaholic culture as a barrier. They either bite the bullet or walk out of the office at 5:00 with their heads held high. Many of those who leave early log on again once the kids are in bed, but some went onto a slower track for a few years and later ramped up. A few actually stayed on with a part-time schedule, even as senior executives.

Owning choices can require women to be vocal about their ambitions, so that other people’s preconceptions don’t get in the way. Mothers in particular may face assumptions about how much they can take on—they may be overlooked for projects that require long hours, for instance, or extra travel. One woman told Ready that she raised her hand for travel opportunities right after she came back from maternity leave. Another pointed out that nobody would presume that a male employee would need to be home at 6:00 to feed the children, but it was a notion that she had to preempt if she wanted to get her hands on a juicy assignment.

A third quality Ready observed in high-achieving women is the urge to bring other women along with them. Exceptional women leaders consider themselves stewards of the next generation. In their own journeys to the top, women’s programs or senior female role models were scarce. Now, having climbed the ranks, they are committed to helping rising female stars navigate their way. As one put it, “Senior-level women can see what’s coming. I call it being the career machete—to break down some of the barriers and prevent some of the slips and guide the person a little bit more effectively.”

This is not just a nice thing to do, Ready argues. These women view their stewardship as a way to raise their companies’ market value, by boosting the presence of women in senior roles and in boardrooms. With more women running the show, we should see more ownership of gender diversity through the ranks.

Get Your Virtual Team Off to a Fast Start

Whether you’re a virtual team leader or team member, there’s no honeymoon period anymore. The pressure to be productive from Day 1 is enormous.

We can certainly do a better job of on-boarding people to teams, especially when teams are not co-located. Too often on-boarding plans consist of a dozen or more documents that team members are supposed to read and digest on their own.

What’s missing at so many companies I work with is the time for virtual team members to learn from and form relationships with the people who are most important to doing their job successfully. And certainly no one should have to make sense of an organization in a vacuum. As a Harvard research team led by J. Richard Hackman found, seemingly disconnected threads of information make sense only when people have an opportunity to interact with others who can help them to contextualize the information.

What’s Your Relationship Action Plan?

I recommend that clients shorten the learning curve by helping every new hire put together a Relationship Action Plan. In it, list the 10-15 internal people who are most important to doing their job well and direct your new team member to build a relationship with each one in their first two weeks. Overwhelmingly, those who create a RAP report that it was the most useful thing they ever did in their first weeks on a project team or job.

My friend Ritesh Idnani, founder and CEO of a healthcare start-up Seamless Health, puts it this way: “You need to get people off to a flying start.” Ritesh gives each new executive two weeks to talk to each person identified in the plan as “important to know,” interviewing them about all aspects of the company and the job. Then he checks up, and finds the full-bandwidth effort over the new hire’s first few weeks pays off handsomely.

“At the end of two weeks I ask the person to sit down with me and tell me what he/she learned—their observations,” says Idnani. Not only do they have a new connection into the team: you renew yours. “You end up learning a lot from someone coming from the outside with a fresh pair of eyes.”

Planning a Great Team Kick-off Event

Newly-formed teams require more than a project plan and set of work streams to be high-performing.

Yet so often I see managers launch a team with a demotivating statement of the challenges the company faces coupled with a driving sense of urgency. The key to kick-starting a team is not to galvanize people into action through fear, but to ignite their desire to achieve both their own goals and the company’s. Although people do not come to work every day purely for the good of the corporation, their purposes often align. Whether it’s doing work that’s challenging and stimulating, working synergistically with a tight-knit team, or being associated with a good job in a well-known company–help people to understand that unifying driver.

In our work with clients, planning a great kick-off meeting is critical to developing a high-performing team. My advice to leaders for the kickoff is: don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability and humanity.  It’s amazing how readily others respond when you allow people to see you with empathy. It opens employees’ porosity to the bigger message you’re trying to get across–the goals the team is trying to achieve.

Equally important is to structure a small-but-significant first challenge that will move everyone on the team toward the eventual goal. It has to be something that every team member can contribute to and has a hand in designing. And it needs to be something that can be achieved quickly, ideally within 60-90 days.

In our work with a major automaker, we quickly realized that the relationship between the company’s district managers (DMs) and its dealers was broken, limiting their ability to improve customer experience. So we challenged 300 DMs to choose a single dealer and turn the relationship around. The results exceeded even our expectations:

Highest JD Powers owner-satisfaction ratings of any American car company
Customer satisfaction index (CSI) scores more than doubled to 100% in eight out of 10 surveys
Market share shifts in pilot regions

Another important part of launching a new team is getting team members to do something together that unleashes collaboration and innovation. A number of successful executives I know swear by going with something that merely puts everyone at ease. For example, building the tallest tower possible using only stationary supplies (no fasteners). Even I have to admit it’s fun and inspiring when a virtual team takes on the tower-building task connected only by video software.

Keeping the Momentum Going

A great virtual team launch has the potential to motivate members to deliver their best, but more is required. A study by OnPoint Consulting showed that excellent communication from the leader is a strong predictor of team performance. Anthropological studies show we’re not the only primates that rely heavily on such communication: baboons, chimpanzees and gorillas glance at the dominant male every 20-30 seconds on average for cues.

Unfortunately, senior managers frequently assume that sending email updates and holding weekly conference calls is enough to sustain the momentum generated by a kickoff. It’s not. In the absence of visual and body language signals, misinterpretations and misunderstandings often arise. Team members feel disconnected and reduce the level of engagement and contribution to the project.

Here’s where leveraging technology can be a huge asset. I know of one company that uses an always-on, wall-sized video screen to stay in touch in with team members in Beijing, building relationships virtually and increasing the frequency of collaboration.

Another important way to keep a virtual team focused on its goals is to celebrate small wins along the way. Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, has shown that public recognition is far more important than financial incentives in the workplace.  Despite this, many managers do a poor job of recognizing their people. I’m sometimes amazed by how difficult it is to persuade some executives of the importance of publicly celebrating an employee who exemplifies the behaviors senior management wants to cascade throughout the organization.

Whether you’re on-boarding new executives or launching a newly-formed virtual team, people need the time and the permission to develop relationships. While it may sound more cost-effective to rely on collections of reading material and org charts to get people up to speed, their understanding both of the project and the company’s goals will suffer, decreasing their effectiveness.

Children’s Feelings About Brands Persist into Adulthood

Consumer-brand companies’ investments in child-oriented advertising provide brand benefits long after the audience has grown up, says a team led by Paul M. Connell of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. For example, people in the UK who had been exposed to the Kellogg’s Frosties character Tony the Tiger as children and the Cocoa Pops character Coco the Monkey as adults rated Frosties as more healthful than Cocoa Pops (3.84 versus 3.24 on a 7–point scale), suggesting that the participants retained warm feelings about Tony from childhood. The findings raise concerns about child-oriented ad campaigns for products with potentially adverse health consequences, the researchers say.