Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1494

Seats Get Wider in Theaters and Stadiums, but Smaller on Planes

A number of businesses are accommodating consumers’ increasing size: The average seat width in performing-arts theaters has increased by 1 inch since 1990, and seats in the new Yankee Stadium in New York are 1 to 2 inches wider than in the old stadium, which was torn down in 2010. But airlines are moving in the opposite direction: For example, coach seats in American Airlines’ new Boeing 777-300s are about 1 inch narrower than those in its existing 777-200s, says the Wall Street Journal.

The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture

A company’s culture can have a powerful impact on its performance. Culture is the glue that binds an organization together and it’s the hardest thing for competitors to copy. As a result, it can be a lasting source of competitive advantage. Take these examples: 

Kent Thiry builds a values-focused culture at DaVita and transforms the company from a laggard to the world’s leading provider of kidney dialysis services


Alan Mulally creates a “working–together” spirit at Ford Motor Company that focuses and re-energizes the automaker, reversing a decades-long slide in market share


Herb Kelleher fosters a culture of employee empowerment and cost containment at Southwest, enabling the airline to become one of the world’s most admired and profitable carriers


Steve Jobs builds a challenging culture at Apple — one where ”reality is suspended” and ”anything is possible”’ — and the company becomes the most valuable on the planet 

But culture doesn’t always produce great results. In fact, when my colleagues at Bain & Company surveyed more than 400 senior executives from large, global companies last year, they found that fewer than one in four felt that culture was very effective in supporting business performance at their company. The majority felt that their organization’s culture was largely disconnected from what it took to win.

Why this disconnect? In our experience, too many companies think of culture as a way to make people feel good about where they work and not as a way to help employees — hence the organization — perform better. High-performing companies think about culture differently. They know that winning cultures aren’t just about affiliation; they are also unashamedly about results.

Our research suggests that winning cultures are comprised of two interrelated and reinforcing elements. First, every high-performing company has a unique identity — distinctive characteristics that set it apart from other organizations. These characteristics give employees a sense of meaning just from being part of the company. They also create passion for what the company does.

Southwest Airlines is the classic example. Under Herb Kelleher’s leadership, the company became known for its sense of humor, irreverence, and focus on the employee. This unique identity not only made flying Southwest fun for passengers, it made its labor force more productive. Flight attendants, not cleaning crews, cleaned aircraft between flights, reducing time at the gate and improving on-time performance. Maintenance workers routinely devised better ways to maintain Southwest’s fleet of 737 aircrafts, lowering costs and improving up-time. The company’s unique identity reinforced many of the elements that were critical to Southwest’s strategy, such as keeping costs low. As a result, Southwest is the world’s largest low-cost carrier and is consistently among the most profitable airlines in the world.

Culture is more than just a unique identity, however. The best performing companies typically display a set of performance attributes that align with the company’s strategy and reinforce the right employee behaviors.  Our research revealed seven of these:

Honest. There is high integrity in all interactions, with employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders;
Performance-focused. Rewards, development, and other talent-management practices are in sync with the underlying drivers of performance;
Accountable and owner-like. Roles, responsibilities, and authority all reinforce ownership over work and results;
Collaborative. There’s a recognition that the best ideas come from the exchange and sharing of ideas between individuals and teams;
Agile and adaptive. The organization is able to turn on a dime when necessary and adapt to changes in the external environment;
Innovative. Employees push the envelope in terms of new ways of thinking; and
Oriented toward winning. There is strong ambition focused on objective measures of success, either versus the competition or against some absolute standard of excellence.

Few organizations exhibit all seven of these attributes. But high-performing organizations typically spike on the three or four that are most critical to their success.

Take Ford Motor Company. When Alan Mulally became CEO at Ford in 2006, the company operated in regional silos. As a result, the Ford Focus in Europe was different from the Ford Focus in the Americas. The company had too many brands, too many platforms, too many disparate parts, too many suppliers, and so on. To turn the automaker around, Mulally focused on building One Ford — a leadership model based on collaboration, innovation, and a desire to win (again). With time, leaders at the automaker started working together to simplify and streamline the company globally. They rationalized brands, consolidated automotive platforms, made options and parts more common and designs more innovative. In just three years, Ford went from losing share and money to gaining share and making money.

Culture plays a vital role in performance. Winning cultures treat performance as an explicit output and foster an environment that is conducive to generating the best possible results — not just for employees, but for customers, suppliers, and, yes, even shareholders.

Culture That Drives Performance

An HBR Insight Center




There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround
The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture
Three Steps to a High-Performance Culture
If You’re Going to Change Your Culture, Do It Quickly

Make Sure Your Dream Company Can Find You

It used to be that if you wanted to work for a certain company, you went in for an informational interview or waited for a job opening and submitted your resume. These days, you may be better off liking the company on Facebook or joining their Google+ page. That’s because smart companies are no longer waiting for the right candidates to apply. They’re actively seeking them out on social media.

Managers acquiring talent have been using social media to research job applicants for several years now, but they’ve begun to source and engage potential job candidates from social networks as well. Given that over 1 billion people are connected to a social networking site, this is a clever move.

Here are three social media tools forward-looking companies are using to find you.

People Analytics  

New businesses are cropping up to reinvent the recruiting process, blending data from social media sites to create profiles of coders, programmers and software engineers so that companies hoping to hire can search for candidates that have the skills they desire. Companies such as Gild, TalentBin, and Entelo use people analytics to examine a candidate’s publicly available work to spot diamonds in the rough.

Take for example RackSpace, an open-source operating system for the cloud. The company, hoping to find potential recruits, partnered with Gild to scan open source networks such as Github and Twisted Matrix to identify candidates who meet certain criteria.  Gild created “social profiles” for candidates so that hiring managers at RackSpace could see the frequency with which other programmers adopt an individual’s code and the buzz the coders work generates in online forums.

This approach to recruitment is creating a new technical world order where job applicants are found and evaluated by their merits and contributions, rather than by how well they sell themselves in an interview. Using this approach, Rackspace has successfully identified a number of highly qualified engineers, many of whom were largely invisible on popular social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

While the focus on using people analytics is currently on hard-to-find technical talent such as programmers, coders, and software engineers, with a few tweaks this type of transparency in the recruiting process can be applied to finding candidates whose work is also publicly viewable such as graphic designers, customer call center operators, and perhaps even salespeople.

Mobile Recruiting Apps

Since early 2012, Sodexo, the 20th largest employer in the world, has turned its recruiting focus from job boards to mobile applications. The company wanted to be on the platforms that Millennials use every day so that younger candidates could easily find them. Given that a recent survey conducted by Glassdoor.com found that 43% of job candidates research their prospective employer and read the job description 15 minutes prior to the interview on their mobile devices, Sodexo also wanted to make it easy for applicants to quickly find the information they need.

Sodexo developed both a mobile-optimized career site and an app to pull together information about the company’s recruiting efforts into one easy-for-Millennials-to-access place. Job candidates can link from the mobile app to a landing page to search and apply for jobs, join a talent community, get job alerts, and get an insider’s view of what it’s like to work for Sodexo.

According to Arie Ball, the company’s vice president of talent acquisition, the app had 15,000 downloads in the first year and 17% of job traffic from potential new hires now comes from the mobile app versus just 2% in early 2012. Sodexo has identified over 2,000 new job candidates with 141 actual new hires, all while saving the company $300,000 in job board postings.

MOOCs  

Companies have been watching the rapid growth of MOOCs (massive open online courses) — two of the leading MOOC providers, Coursera and EdX, have tallied more than 7 million unique users since they launched in April 2012 and May 2012 respectively — and are now finding ways to offer their own free courses. Aquent, a global staffing firm that finds jobs for marketing, creative, and digital professionals is creating a MOOC to teach job candidates HTML5. So far, about 10,000 people have participated in the HTML5 MOOC and 300 of them then enlisted Aquent to help in their job search. Companies wanting to capitalize on the gamification movement are recruiting graduates of MakeGamesWith.us, an online MOOC that teaches aspiring game developers how to build an iPhone game. It will be only a matter of time before more companies get in on this and start launching MOOCs to recruit new hires and train them in skills needed for success at their company.

As companies move to actively seeking out prospective new hires, giving these targeted talent communities special access to webinars, announcements of new job openings, and email invitations to engage with the company, job seekers need to reciprocate.

We’ve all been warned about how our online behavior can negatively affect  job prospects, but now you also need to think about how to build your personal brand, publicize your skills, and connect with the companies you might want to work for.

The next time you’re on your favorite social networking site, seek out employers you hope to work for one day. Build an online relationship with them now so they can find you later. Visit the company blog, like its Facebook page, join its Google+ page, watch its videos on YouTube, and follow the firm on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Vine.

Make 2014 the year you become visible to your dream employer. After all, you may be just the person they’re looking for.

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




How an Auction Can Identify Your Best Talent
The American Way of Hiring Is Making Long-Term Unemployment Worse
We Can Now Automate Hiring. Is that Good?
Learn How to Spot Portable Talent

Seasonal Selling Strategies that Last All Year

‘Tis the season for seasonal SKUs! Consumers love and look forward to the plethora of pumpkin and eggnog everywhere. Retailers and manufacturers love the spike in sales and the extra buzz at the shelf. But usually when the holiday cheers and decorations disappear, so do the extra sales — and retailers and manufacturers are back at square one. But some are taking a different tack on seasonal strategies by leveraging holiday momentum to drive growth in ways that are both relevant for the holidays but also have year-round potential.

The beauty of the holidays is that for a little while, nearly every consumer becomes a highly engaged, heavy shopper – even if they usually avoid shopping. This gives retailers an opportunity to introduce more consumers to new products. And all of us usually give ourselves permission to indulge a bit more than usual, which increases our willingness to try something new.

There are at least three strategies to extend the benefits of the holiday season, which is key given this holiday season is particularly short.

First is helping consumers explore new varieties. Music is a great example. Our kids were eager to set up the Christmas tree and my wife wanted a playlist of Christmas music in the background. As I bought a bunch of holiday music, I found I was exposed to many new artists from all kinds of genres who had released their own version of holiday music. I ended up buying a lot more music beyond holiday tunes. I also ended up buying a video game that allows our family to use the xBox as a karaoke machine. Food is another example. Farmland Foods, an up and coming mega-brand in pork, is using holiday advertising to showcase its full line of fresh pork and bacon products, as consumers run out to buy holiday hams.

Second, the holidays are also a great opportunity to sell subscriptions. Often these have a barrier to trial—be it an upfront investment or the worry of starting a subscription and forgetting to cancel it. Gifting is a great way to overcome this hurdle. I gifted a year of Netflix to my brother in law over a decade ago for Christmas and he’s been a loyal customer ever since. The same logic holds for “blades and razors”-type bundles, which is why you see so many shaving ads during the holiday season; buy him the new razor now, and he’ll be purchasing the blades for years to come.

Finally, it’s a great window for brands to emotionally connect with consumers. Budweiser is famous for their Clydesdale commercials at the holidays, which put a healthy deposit into the emotional bank with consumers that has helped the brand maintain its pricing power. Many brands also do quite a bit of charity work (e.g., Avon and breast cancer), yet aren’t usually able to talk much about it for fear of coming across inappropriately. The holidays provide a pass to talk about the big investments brands make in issues like sustainability, education or poverty. Panera’s CEO recently did a wonderful public experiment where he did relied on a food stamp budget challenge for 7 days—trying to live on a food allowance of just $4.50 a day. His blog was amazing, as he talked about how his worldview completely changed as he realized he could not afford to eat in his own restaurants. He did this in September, but it would have probably gotten more attention for the cause if he had done it during the holidays when people are already thinking about charitable donations and helping others.

So don’t only look at holiday shopping as a time to sell candy canes and tinsel. Think about how you can create a deeper engagement with new shoppers, sell products that will bring in revenue all-year long, and draw attention to the issues you care about to forge a connection with consumers who share your values. Turn the seasonal shopping surge into growth that lasts all year long.

Use Your Data to Get a Holistic View of the Customer

A few years ago, at LiveNation Entertainment we were accumulating a lot of data from consumers but weren’t doing much with it—and we weren’t sure what could be done with it (a pretty common situation for companies these days).

After thinking about the data strategically, we figured out ways to put it to good use. Today, consumer information helps us benefit our clients and serves as an important differentiator in a competitive market.

The key to getting to this point was adding a new dimension to our concept of the company: We began treating data as an integral part of our live entertainment business, as important as the events we produce and promote.

The new approach to data began with a merger between LiveNation and Ticketmaster. We are now both a B2C and a B2B company: We own concert venues and are the leading promoter of live events in the world. Ticketmaster has B2B relationships with sports teams and producers of a variety of events across sports, concerts, family acts, and arts and theater. But like Live Nation, Ticketmaster has a B2C component as well, in that we sell tickets to consumers.

We saw that ideally, the data that had been collected from consumers could help us provide a holistic view of the music or sports fan for our business clients. We have transactional data about what consumers are buying, and we can enrich that with demographics and psychographics. We can also add web data—What are people looking at online?—and information from e-mail campaigns. This a tremendous amount of data.

We could provide a professional sports team, for example, with a rich view of its fan base, showing which fans buy tickets months ahead, which buy at the last minute, which pay for premium seats, and which are looking for discounts. That kind of information could help teams shape their communication to fans.

But there was a lot of work to be done. Because the information lived in disparate systems, an IT investment would be required in order to make sense of it and standardize it. Those six people with similar names in the combined databases—were they the same person? That all had to be sorted out. We’d have to make sure that everything was spelled and annotated the same way.

But this was not to be just another IT initiative: Analytics was given a clear charter to go above and beyond business as usual. We brought in experts who really understood the plumbing of the data. Then we hired statisticians and modelers to think about what was in the data and how it could be analyzed. And of course we needed businesspeople providing guidance on the business problems that the analytics group is trying to solve.

Now we’re able to deploy data in an ever-increasing number of ways. For example, a football team might ask us for advice on which artist it should bring in for a performance before an event, given the likes and dislikes of its season-ticket holders. We can do that.

We can also help clients find the best prospects for packages of season tickets or subscriptions to shows, and we can assist them in coming up with marketing messages that will resonate with these prospects.

We’ve found that it’s very helpful to have our statisticians and modelers speak directly with clients. That allows the clients to better understand the data, and it gives the statisticians a clear view of the clients’ needs.

The world of data is changing rapidly. In the next year, our big push is going to be figuring out what to do with the rising level of mobile activity. What’s the best way to collect data, and how can we best use it?

And then there’s social media—potentially a valuable means of communicating with consumers. But it’s a challenge to link Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts with basic customer-relationship-management data such as email addresses. Social is the pot of gold that no one has yet found.

One final word: It’s critical to treat consumers and their data with respect. If you’re going to use their data, you have to do it right. If consumers see that their data is going to third parties that aren’t relevant to them, you’ll lose their trust, and they’ll be quick to hit the “unsubscribe” button. Consumers’ information should be deployed to provide offerings that are relevant to them; if you do that, they’ll show their appreciation by continuing to allow you to use their data.

The Peer Economy Will Transform Work (or at Least How We Think of It)

You can’t avoid peer-to-peer marketplaces. For transportation and housing, look no further than Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. Skillshare and TaskRabbit are tackling education and task completion. Etsy and Shapeways have created handmade and fabrication marketplaces. They all facilitate integration into the economy without the need to secure employment from a large company.

Instead, the growing peer economy enables people to monetize skills and assets they already have. Vendors and providers on these platforms choose when to work, what to do and where to do it, sidestepping traditional constraints of geography and scheduling. Investors, advocacy groups and companies tout its apparent advantages, including a greater sense of solidarity through peer-to-peer commerce and reduction in carbon footprint through access to products and services instead of ownership.

Dandy! Especially in light of our anemic economic recovery. So why is the peer economy causing such a stir? Critics ask whether micropreneurs get back enough economic security in exchange for their labor. These suppliers are hamsters in a wheel, they assert; if pay comes gig by gig, how can peer economy suppliers ever do more than just keep up?

Embedded in this concern are assumptions as to what constitutes a job: that it be full-time, offer benefits, and provide a livable income. These parameters make up a framework, one that is baked into our society. But this framework—which dominated 20th century work—has been on the decline since the late 1970s. IRS clarifications changed how companies approached benefits such as paid leave and retirement plans, transferring more risk to employees. And job losses have come in two forms: globalization that led to offshoring and technological displacement. Unemployment may have crested in 2008, but its roots are in the 1980s.

Though it may seem “timeless”, the 20th century framework for work is not the first such formulation and it will not be the last. There were other mainstream understandings before it—factory work, piece-meal work, craftsmanship and apprenticeship—and undergirding them were a mix of cultural and political factors. Regulations (or lack thereof) shaped industry structures, and existential quandaries about work played out in arts and media (think Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where the Little Tramp grapples with the dehumanization of mass production technology). And as the normative gender throughout history, these mainstream understandings of what work was followed men’s lives and patterns.

Today, safety nets are thin for everybody. People have little faith that corporate America cares about their needs or that government can address them before it is too late. Against this backdrop, the peer economy is well positioned to rival our popular understanding of work. The peer economy won’t take over where the framework of full-time employment once sat, but it does change our understanding of what “full work” could mean.

In fact, the peer economy is less new than it often appears. People have always made their own clothes, grown and preserved their own food, shared their houses and lent out their tools. At different points in different places, this was (and is) called “survival.” Trading is common, and helping out kin is natural. Peer economy platforms didn’t unearth a new type of commerce. These economic platforms further enable socio-economic activities that were always moving toward a more visible and centralized space—activities that have trickled up and are now given the market a face.

The real question is what it means and takes to achieve “full work,” the sort of work that enables one to exercise a greater range of independence. Just as many of the activities that make up the peer economy are not new, neither is this question.

Recently, nannies, cleaners, elder companions, members of a vulnerable work population known as domestic workers, testified at the Massachusetts state house to ask for a domestic workers’ bill of rights. As excluded laborers, domestic workers are the analog to peer economy workers in vulnerability: They are fragmented, with shifting workplaces and employers. They are not guaranteed minimum safety conditions in the workplace (38% of domestic workers suffered from work-related wrist, shoulder, elbow or hip pain in the past 12 months.). They aren’t protected from discrimination and cannot bargain collectively. Sound familiar?

American domestic work has a 200-year history and has always drawn its forces from the margins of society: women, minorities, immigrants, and now undocumented workers. This workforce has been denied every improvement to labor rights legislation, beginning with the 1934 Fair Labor Standards Act. There has been a string of failed organizing attempts throughout the 20th century, and domestic workers have remained invisible in society. In the 1990s, things began to change. Domestic workers came together under the lead of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. With new organizing tactics, they have collectively won domestic workers bills of rights in New York, California, Hawaii.

Peer economy providers are also vulnerable but with a crucial factor that makes all the difference: They are a visible workforce, able to make these collective interests heard.

The economy of the future will not be the economy as it is now. The challenge before us is to reimagine what full work means, not based simply on how we’re used to conceiving of it, but based on a consideration of what we deem most valuable (independence, security, connectedness, etc.).  Thanks to similar movements—from unions to vulnerable workers to urban and rural cooperatives—the threads for that conversation are already there. Let’s make something of it.

To Make Virtual Teams Succeed, Pick the Right Players

Setting up small, high-performing virtual teams has enormous potential for companies to increase sales, penetrate new markets, improve business processes and come up with the next generation of disruptive innovations. But putting together a great team is tricky.

Part of the problem is that teams—both the virtual and co-located types—are often thrown together without much thought or planning.

At a large, multinational manufacturing company Ferrazzi Greenlight recently worked with, a virtual team was formed to deal with the company’s complex interdependent businesses. The goal was to optimize decision-making all along the value chain and boost earnings by tens of millions of dollars.

But when we looked under the covers it was clear not enough thought had gone into selecting members. The team was huge—more than 30 people—with a mixture of business, manufacturing, and commercial leaders, some of whom reported to each other. Many who were selected (seemingly because of seniority) lacked the deep technical knowledge vital for optimization decisions. By the time we were asked to help, members openly acknowledged that the team was in disarray and its decisions had failed to boost earnings as expected.

As the manufacturer discovered, getting team composition right is critical. That’s especially true for virtual teams, which are more autonomous than co-located teams. Leaders of virtual teams must work harder to develop trust and rapport among team members who lack the frequent informal exchanges and visual and body language cues of co-located teams—vital feedback mechanisms that help keep team members’ efforts aligned.

The manufacturing company is not alone. In many companies, teams seem to come together out of nowhere, grabbing any available resource, operating without adequate planning, and then fail to gel. Months or even years later, senior executives have to face the unpalatable truth: the virtual team that was put together to slash costs is not only dysfunctional, it was a drain on your bottom line.

These problems generally originate at the beginning of the process, when the team is put together. That’s why it’s important to focus on team composition—the size and structure of the team, as well as the skills members bring to the team, including interpersonal skills. These attributes are among the most important predictors of team success.

Small is Beautiful: In my experience working with everything from iconic multinational companies to tiny start-ups, the best virtual team is a small one—under 10 people. Four or five is ideal.

Small is better in part because relatively minor coordination and communication challenges grow exponentially as a virtual team grows. Do the interpersonal math! Inevitably, someone (or a subgroup) feels left out of the loop. Few things erode trust faster than being left out of important communication.

Where input from a wide range of people with expertise in different areas is needed, there’s a strong temptation to put together a virtual team that’s too large. Keeping the core team small while advisory groups gave input on an as-needed basis was more likely to be successful.

Don’t make the mistake of including honorary team members. And team membership shouldn’t be voluntary or outside the normal job. It is the job. Teams with a lot of members who have no real stake in the team’s success almost invariably fail.

Get the Structure Right: When virtual teams come together from a range of functions —say, finance, operations, HR and IT to work on a cost-management initiative—problems tend to arise from a lack of accountability. Leaders may lack formal authority over all members of such a matrixed team, making it difficult to hold them accountable.

I see this a lot, especially in large firms. Virtual teams members are frequently not evaluated on their contributions to the team or on successful collaboration, but rather on their performance within the line of business they represent. This sets up an automatic disincentive to collaborate and has the potential to derail important and innovative virtual team initiatives.

The important takeaway is that leaders of a cross-functional virtual team need to establish clear lines of accountability and uniform performance measures at the outset.

Virtual Work Isn’t for Everyone: Red Giant, a company that develops video special effects software, has gone from being two guys with an idea 10 years ago to a leader in its field by adopting a “no backup plan” mentality. They define the goals for each project, put together small virtual teams and—here’s the big one—give them the responsibility for the success of the project. Each team member shares a piece of that responsibility. “There is no Plan B,” says Micah Sharp, GM of Red Giant, “It’s us.”

Despite the company’s rapid growth, they don’t make team staffing decisions quickly. “We like to date a lot first,” says Sharp, of the 50-person company, 36 of whom work virtually. Micah recognizes that not everybody is suited to virtual work. He says it takes entrepreneurial spirit and initiative as well as technical skills to thrive as a remote worker.

What does it take to succeed as a virtual worker?

Research by OnPoint Consulting confirms that successful virtual employees need to be more self-sufficient than co-located counterparts who can more easily turn to others. Successful virtual team members also tolerate ambiguity better than other employees—everything from that terse email from the boss that might be taken negatively to not knowing project details as quickly as co-located workers.

Virtual workers need to have is excellent communication skills. They have to express themselves well and update project documents quickly and consistently. Distance and time lags are an inevitable downside of working remotely. Virtual employees need to be hyper-vigilant about communicating with everyone else on the team. There’s no room for personality conflicts or information hoarding.

Virtual team workers also need to be more resilient than the average employee. But leaders can’t forget that they have the same need as other employees to feel a sense of purpose in the work they do, and to feel connected to others within the organization. Interestingly, Gallup’s work says a strong predictor of an employee’s productivity is whether they have a best friend at work. Carefully chosen, small teams of self-directed people who engage with each other deeply are the keys to creating high-performing virtual teams.

The Eight Archetypes of Leadership

Although the ghost of the Great Man still haunts leadership studies, most of us have recognized by now that successful organizations are the product of distributive, collective, and complementary leadership. The first step in putting together such a team is to identify each member of the team’s personality makeup and leadership style, so that strengths and competences can be matched to particular roles and challenges. Getting this match wrong can bring misery to all concerned and cause considerable damage.

I was once asked to facilitate in a group coaching intervention for the leadership team at the subsidiary of a large chemical company. A year before Kate (not her real name, the head of the subsidiary) had been moved from head office to take charge. At head office she had always been viewed as a person extremely insightful about personnel decisions. Given her talents in HR, she was seen a good candidate to sort out the mess in that particular subsidiary. It was a big leap in terms of promotion but Kate was given a chance.

Unfortunately, I quickly realized that her tenure had been a disaster. She may have been a good coach but didn’t have what it takes to create greater strategic focus and execute a turnaround. A great amount of money had been spent on consultants and on training a workforce that had no clearer idea at the end of 12 months what they were doing or why. What had dazzled the people at head office had been Kate’s coaching and communication skills. She was at sea, however, in a more operational role.

What can be done to prevent a situation like the one with Kate? There are a number of serious leadership questionnaires that are worlds away from the enneagrams and compatibility tests that litter the coaching circuit. Some of these try to identify certain recurring behavior patterns considered more or less effective in a leadership context. We have also tests to discover whether executives are people or task oriented, autocratic or democratic, transactional or transformational, and variations on all of these. These sorts of questionnaire may be a bit simplistic, but they can help point someone in the right direction on a career or organizational path.

My own approach to leadership assessment is based on observational studies of real leaders, mostly at the strategic apex of their organizations. My aim is to help them see and understand that their attitudes and interactions with people are the result of a complex confluence of their inner theater (including relationships with authority figures early in life), significant life experiences, examples set by other executives, and formal leadership training.

As these influences play out over time, one typically sees a number of recurring patterns of behavior that influence an individual’s effectiveness within an organization.  I think of these patterns as leadership “archetypes,” reflecting the various roles executives can play in organizations and it is a lack of fit between a leader’s archetype and the context in which he or she operates is a main cause of team and organizational dysfunctionality and executive failure.   The eight archetypes I have found to be most prominent are:

The strategist: leadership as a game of chess. These people are good at dealing with developments in the organization’s environment. They provide vision, strategic direction and outside-the-box thinking to create new organizational forms and generate future growth.
The change-catalyst: leadership as a turnaround activity. These executives love messy situations. They are masters at re-engineering and creating new organizational ‘‘blueprints.’’
The transactor: leadership as deal making. These executives are great dealmakers. Skilled at identifying and tackling new opportunities, they thrive on negotiations.
The builder: leadership as an entrepreneurial activity. These executives dream of creating something and have the talent and determination to make their dream come true.
The innovator: leadership as creative idea generation. These people are focused on the new. They possess a great capacity to solve extremely difficult problems.
The processor: leadership as an exercise in efficiency. These executives like organizations to be smoothly running, well-oiled machines. They are very effective at setting up the structures and systems needed to support an organization’s objectives.
The coach: leadership as a form of people development. These executives know how to get the best out of people, thus creating high performance cultures.
The communicator: leadership as stage management. These executives are great influencers, and have a considerable impact on their surroundings.

Working out which types of leaders you have on your team can work wonders for your effectiveness as a group.  It helps you to recognize how you and your colleagues can individually make their best contributions. This will in turn create a culture of mutual support and trust, reduce team stress and conflict, and make for more creative problem solving. It also informs your search for new additions to the team: what kinds of personality and skills are you missing?

Kate’s story had a happy ending. The group coaching session made it clear that the problem was not so much Kate’s lack of ability but rather that team lacked specific leadership qualities.  If the team incorporated an executive with a strategic outlook and who had turnaround skills and experience then Kate’s skills as a communicator and coach would be more effectively leveraged to resolve the subsidiary’s crisis. After talking to the head of talent management at head office we were able to identify exactly such a person, creating a more rounded team and helping Kate to fulfill her mandate.

Raise a Glass to Economic Growth. No, Wait…

Beer drinking appears to have a negative impact on economic growth: A 1 gallon increase in per-capita beer consumption is associated with a 0.48 percentage point decrease in per-capita personal-income growth, according to a study of more than 30 years of data by Resul Cesur of the University of Connecticut and Inas Rashad Kelly of the City University of New York. Taxes on alcohol help pay for the costs that drinking imposes on society, such as lost productivity and increased disability; approximately doubling taxes on beer would potentially increase personal-income growth by 0.43 percentage points, the researchers say.

There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround

Company culture changes very slowly, so efforts to do an about-face are inevitably a waste of time and energy: Organizations either declare victory prematurely or, in frustration, abandon the attempt.

You’re better off thinking of your cultural situation as an underpinning you’ll have to work with over time. It will evolve, but more slowly than other elements of your enterprise, such as a new operating model. You can shape your culture, however—and you can make better use of it by altering or adopting a few key behaviors.

That’s what one client of ours, a large industrial manufacturer, did to accelerate its recovery from severe financial distress during the recession. This example from the past is particularly instructive because we now have the distance to see how a few behavioral changes not only improved performance right away but also are having a longer-term impact on the company’s culture.

At the height of its troubles, this manufacturer was hamstrung by a risk-averse, slow-moving culture. At the time, the interim CEO assumed he wouldn’t be there long enough to “turn around” the culture—and in a sense, he was right. But we worked with his senior team to better understand the existing culture and to foster three key behaviors that would improve performance.

First, the management team started making significant, visible decisions—for instance, canceling a major product line expansion—in a matter of weeks instead of years. Next, several senior executives conducted small-group discussions with informal leaders in the organization about which cultural traits needed attention—something they’d rarely done in the past for fear of either wasting time or meddling outside their formal jurisdictions. They also put more in-house people in direct contact with customers more of the time.

Those adjustments have helped the company cultivate three traits—speed, risk-taking, and accountability to customers—deemed essential to its success.

All leaders can learn from this example: Target a few behaviors that will immediately energize the elements of your culture that are critical to moving your business forward. It is surprising how rapidly you can revitalize existing cultural traits if you concentrate on the right behaviors. Though it takes a bit of time and patience, viral spreading among informal leaders is a lot faster than programmatic spreading through redesign. Here’s what you do: 

1. Find a theme. Summarize, at a very high level, what you’re trying to accomplish. This is important because the critical behaviors manifest themselves differently, and you need coherence across groups and levels in the organization. In our example, the unifying theme for behavioral change was customer-centricity and responsiveness.

2. Don’t claim victory too soon. Because culture is always slowly evolving to fit strategic and operating priorities, it’s not an endpoint. Rather, what you’re ultimately aiming for is better business performance. And existing cultural forces can fuel the behaviors you’re trying to adopt in your organization. For example, legacy pride, engineering excellence, and design elegance helped energize and sustain newly identified key behaviors in the case of the industrial manufacturer. In other words, your organization’s culture is a fundamental source of energy that will help secure an emotional commitment from your employees, which is essential to making behavioral changes take root.

3. Enlist the help of informal leaders. Seek out the “influencers” in your organization, and ask them how they persuade, inspire, and mobilize their colleagues. They can tell you what works—and what doesn’t. They’ve learned through experience how to work with, not against, the underlying culture to garner support and make things happen. Business unit heads and HR can help you identify these informal leaders, but they aren’t very hard to spot. You’re looking for people who get things done in the organization. Learn from them; they know a lot more about the existing culture than you do, and more than any survey could uncover. Note that they aren’t necessarily your high potentials. They are authentic informal leaders who connect with people emotionally as well as rationally. In our example, what began as a smaller band of informal leaders became several groups of pride builders at the company. By treating these influencers as cultural advisers and tapping them for guidance, senior managers found ways to get more people across the company in direct contact with customers. As a result, customer satisfaction and sales numbers have improved.

4. Remember that cultural forces don’t go away. You can rekindle elements of a previous culture that produce feelings of pride, commitment, and collaboration, but you can’t kill an existing culture. And you shouldn’t try to. Just about every culture contains some elements you don’t want to lose.  Instead, work with your influencers to think about which behaviors you need, to articulate them, and to persuade people to embrace them.

5. Start now. Leaders often say they have other things to do first—then they’ll get to culture. Or they want to wait for new leadership, or a new governance structure. Do not wait. The time to understand your cultural situation is now. It will influence everything else you’re doing.

Culture That Drives Performance

An HBR Insight Center




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Three Steps to a High-Performance Culture
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As a Leader, Create a Culture of Sponsorship