Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1546

Why We Need More (Women) Leaders

There's been a lot of talk this past year about why more women don't become leaders. About what our society needs to change to produce more female leaders. There's even been some discussion about why women are better leaders than men in some arenas.

Often overlooked is this basic reality: what the world needs is more leaders, of whatever gender or any other characteristic. We need more leaders at every level in every kind of organization — businesses, government, schools, neighborhood and professional associations, unions, religious entities, and charitable institutions.

With change, crisis, and complexity coming at us faster and faster from all directions, we dare not depend on just a few to lead us and we dare not eliminate any group of people from the opportunity to lead others to a better future.



John Kotter defines leadership as "creating a vision of the future and strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision; aligning people around the vision; and motivating them to overcome barriers and produce the changes needed to achieve the vision."

How many people acting in these ways does the world need?

Millions.

And they need to come from everywhere.

In today's organizations, we need to unlock the leadership potential within so those who want to lead, get to. From the senior information technology official who knows that her department can be a better partner for the business, to the first-shift line worker really irritated that her shift can't seem to match the productivity of the third shift, we have seen that under the right circumstances, leaders will step forward to make a difference.

What are the right circumstances?

A culture where the vision for the future is clearly understood throughout the organization. A culture where people are invited to step forward to help advance the vision in small and big ways. A culture where good-faith efforts that don't work out are seen as bigger barriers to tackle, or a reason to re-examine the goals, rather than as a failure that must be punished. A culture where transparency is the norm, barriers to progress are shared, and people are asked to help knock down those barriers. A culture where wins, both large and small, are widely celebrated. A leadership culture, where one seldom hears the phrases, "That's not your job," or "That's not my job."

The key is that women (and men) in position to influence others — either by virtue of the title they hold in an organization or because they have gained the necessary skills, insight and confidence — create the conditions under which many more people can and will lead within their broadly-defined spheres of influence. They encourage, promote, lay the groundwork for, communicate the need, celebrate steps along the way and otherwise create the conditions under which many more people can and will lead within their own spheres:

The first-shift line worker who tells her boss she needs to watch the third shift to find out what they are doing differently is leading.

Her boss who says, "Great, let me know what you find out," is leading.

The plant supervisor is leading when he celebrates the line worker's initiative and acts on the information she found.

And the COO is leading when she inspires others to action by telling the whole story throughout the company.

So yes, we need more women leaders. And men, too.

How CEOs Are Succeeding in Africa

Jonathan Berman, author of Success in Africa, busts media myths about the continent.

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by September 13.

Make Your Knowledge Workers More Productive

With scarcely any help from management, knowledge workers can increase their productivity by 20%. When we interviewed 45 such people across 39 companies in 8 industries in the United States and Europe, we found that by identifying low-value tasks to either drop completely, delegate to someone else or outsource, the average worker gained back roughly one day a week they could use for more important tasks. (We detail this process in our HBR article, "Make Time for the Work That Matters.")

If that's what your team can achieve without you, just imagine what they might do with your support.

Yet here is the challenge you face as a senior executive: You cannot manage your knowledge workers in the traditional and intrusive way you might have done with manual workers. Knowledge workers own the means of production — their brains. So large-scale re-engineering programs, productivity drives, and changes to the incentive system are unlikely to work: they can easily be resisted, ignored or gamed. But just letting your knowledge workers figure things out for themselves isn't a good model either — it is an abrogation of your responsibilities as a manager, and it allows people to either shirk their duties or lose focus chasing too many priorities.

You need to find the middle ground: judicious interventions that allow knowledge workers to help themselves. Our research and work with companies suggest three broad approaches you can try, each with its own pros and cons:

Enact a sharp "decree" to force a specific change in behavior. In 2011, Thierry Andretta, the CEO of French fashion company Lanvin, announced an initiative called "no email Wednesdays" because he thought people had stopped actually talking to each other. Atomic Object, a software company in Michigan, put in place a standing-only rule in meetings, to keep them focused and short. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's CEO, ended the company's work-from-home policy to foster a more collaborative, innovative environment. Such decrees are risky; by forcing people out of their daily routine, you are bound to upset a few of them. For a decree to work, you need to be able to enforce it effectively, have a good reason to do it, and a thick skin. You should also position your decree as temporary — a way of forcing a change in behavior for a few months or a year, so that people can subsequently figure out for themselves if this new way of working is sensible.

Build smart support systems. Smarter support systems are intended to de-bureaucratize work and to help people prioritize more value-added work. While they take some time to work through, their benefits are likely to be felt for many years. There are two main approaches: building something new or taking something else away.



In terms of building something new, consider the notion of task-sourcing and hyperspecialization. This is where a knowledge worker farms out specific tasks to a low-cost provider, so she can focus on more value-added work. One of us (Jordan) had personal responsibility for setting up such a service in Pfizer - it became known as PfizerWorks, and its aim was simply to help employees be more effective in their jobs. Now whenever a PfizerWorks user decides she needs support, she simply pushes a button, describes her need in a pop-up window, and presses send. Users then report time and money saved after each task is completed. For example, a worker may want to understand which states in the US have similar drug substitution laws. This request would be routed to an analyst who would first locate, then download the individual state drug substitution law from each of the 50 states websites. The analyst would then review each law and group them by similar characteristic. The resulting deliverable could then be turned into a presentation or even a database for delivery back to the requester.

Possibly the biggest impact is the ease in which an employee can summon support and the increased motivation that results in getting back to doing what is interesting and impactful work.

In terms of taking something away, there are many management processes in large firms that are ripe for simplification. For example, a few years ago the top executive team at UBS Wealth Management realized that the biggest constraint on their future growth was their cumbersome and conservative budgeting process. By eliminating this top-down process, and pushing accountability for target-setting down to the individual heads of trading around the world, they enabled the business to grow more effectively and they got their knowledge workers — their client advisors — to take more responsibility than they had before. At a more micro-level, we saw a team at pharmaceutical company Roche recently experiment with a much simpler expense-claim processing system based around peer review rather than oversight, and again it was a useful way of getting rid of tedious and non-value-added activities.

Lead by example. A third approach is to follow Gandhi's dictum: be the change you wish to see in the world. Leading by example is about getting people to take responsibility for their own effectiveness. By pushing for significant changes in the balance of responsibility between your knowledge workers and the people who are nominally above them in the corporate hierarchy, you can help the knowledge workers to become more effective in their work.

Consider the case of Ross Smith, Director of testing for Microsoft Lync — the video conferencing and instant messaging service formerly known as Microsoft Office Communicator. Since taking the job four years ago, he has sought ways of giving greater responsibility to his 80-person division of software engineers. Last year, when Microsoft Lync 2010 was released, he was asked to reorganize his division so that the testing of the next generation product could begin. Rather than decide everything himself, he decide to let the reorg happen in a bottom-up way. He explained that individual contributors would select which of four teams they would like to be in. These 80 or so people became free agents looking for the position that was best for them. The team leaders could not offer more money, but they could offer employees opportunities to develop their careers, new technologies to work on, and new colleagues to work with.

The reorg — quickly dubbed a "WeOrg" — took longer than anticipated, as people really wanted to do the research to find the right fit and to interview their prospective bosses. There was some skepticism about whether it would work, but Smith had already built a sufficiently strong culture of trust for his people to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was also able to promise there would be no staff cuts because of the changes. The outcome was that 95 per cent of the team "liked" or "somewhat liked" the new method. But more broadly, the result was that Smith's 80-person team felt a much greater responsibility than usual for structuring their work in a way that was most effective for them and their colleagues.

While these three approaches are very different, all are forceful ways of pushing people out of their comfort zones to find more efficient ways of working. And who doesn't want more hours in the day?

Should Higher Education Be Free?

In the United States, our higher education system is broken. Since 1980, we've seen a 400% increase in the cost of higher education, after adjustment for inflation — a higher cost escalation than any other industry, even health care. We have recently passed the trillion dollar mark in student loan debt in the United States.

How long can a business model succeed that forces students to accumulate $200,000 or more in debt and cannot guarantee jobs — even years after graduation? We need transformational innovations to stop this train wreck. A new business model will only emerge through continuous discovery and experimentation and will be defined by market demands, start-ups, a Silicon Valley mindset, and young technology experts.

Neither the pedagogical model nor the value equation of traditional higher education have changed much in the past fifty years. Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are still considered the best schools in the world, but their cost is significantly higher today than two decades ago.

According to Rafael Reif, MIT's president, who spoke at the Davos conference this past January, there are three major buckets that make up the total annual expense (about $50,000) of attending a top-notch university such as MIT: student life, classroom instruction, and projects and lab activities.

There is a significant opportunity to help reduce the lecture portion of expenses using technology innovations.

According to the American Institute of Physics (PDF), as of 2010, there are about 9,400 physics teachers teaching undergraduates every September in the United States. Are all of these great teachers? No. If we had 10 of the very best teach physics online and employed the other 9,390 as mentors, would most students get a better quality of education? Wouldn't that lead to lower per unit cost per class?

Yes, you might argue the lack of "classroom experience" is missing. But when it comes to core classes which don't require labs or much in-person faculty interaction, does the current model justify the value-price equation?

What is traditional college education really worth?

In a recent interview, Laszlo Bock, SVP of people operations at Google, said, "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — there is no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation." Even more fascinating is his statement that "the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time," leading to some teams in which 14% have not gone to college. "After two or three years," Bock said, "your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different."

Mr. Bock's comments suggest that smart people can figure out how to pass college tests if they can master what the professor wants, resulting in great test scores — but this skill and knowledge has very little relevance to solving daunting business problems with no obvious answers.

Once leading companies embrace what Google is already doing, seismic shifts and breakthroughs will occur in college education. Maybe a two year college degree will be sufficient instead of four. Imagine a business model where you take two years of courses online with the world's best teachers, followed by two years in structured problem-solving environments. Driven by market forces, such new business models could emerge faster than we expect.

So what is happening now? Who are some of the new education providers experimenting with new business models?

Emerging new education models

There are three strong players with millions of students and thousands of course offerings, all for free and available to anyone in the world. Coursera, Udacity, and edX have over four million enrolled students in their Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

All three uniquely (and differently) replicate the classroom experience. Each uses top-notch professors and technologies in a creative manner — but not without challenges. One of the authors (Jatin Desai) enrolled in a few courses to test out the environments and found that, just like in the traditional classroom, courses vary greatly based on who is teaching. Some professors use the technology brilliantly and others use it as minimally as possible. (Access to higher bandwidth greatly enhances the experience.)

These three are not the only ones in the MOOC movement; many others
are quickly joining. In fact, the New York Times dubbed 2012 "The Year of the MOOC"
and Time magazine said that free MOOCs open the door to the "Ivy League for the Masses."

According to a recent Financial Times article, many employers are unsure of what to make of MOOC education — unsurprising, since many new technologies and business models go through multiple evolutions. The good news, according to the article, is that 80% of respondents surveyed would accept MOOC-like education for their internal employee development. We can extrapolate from this survey that the employer demand for online education exists — and, moreover, that it is only a matter of time until universities and well-funded venture capitalists will respond to this white space in the market very soon.

Georgia Tech, in fact, has already responded; in January, it will begin offering a master's degree in computer science, delivered through MOOCs, for $6,600. The courses that lead to the degree are available for free to anyone through Udacity, but students admitted to the degree program (and paying the fee) would receive extra services like tutoring and office hours, as well as proctored exams.

In the near future, higher education will cost nothing and will be available to anyone in the world. Degrees may not be free, but the cost of getting some core education will be. All a student needs is a computing device and internet access. Official credentialing from an on-ground university may cost more; in early 2012, MIT's MOOC, MITx, started to offer online courses with credentials, for "a small fee" available for successful students — and we're eager to see how Georgia Tech's MOOC degree will transform the education model.

What's next? How far are we away from new business models where MOOC-type pedagogy will dominate the first two years of college experience? When will most employers begin to accept non-traditionally credentialed MOOC-based education? And what will this mean for the education industry? With luck and ongoing innovation, perhaps the US's broken education system may be repaired.

Money's Other Purpose: Easing Our Fear of Death

In an experiment, people who had been counting money indicated a lower fear of death than people who had been counting slips of white paper -- about 5.3 versus 6.5 on a zero-to-12 scale, says a team led by Tomasz Zaleskiewicz of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Moreover, people's estimates of the sizes of coins were an average of 34% larger if they had been primed to think about mortality, presumably because thoughts of death intensify the subjective value attributed to money. People seem to desire money in part because it has the power to soothe fears of death, the researchers say.

Better Data Can Help Advertisers Avoid Cringe-Inducing Ad Placement

You're watching TV with the family and having a nice moment. Then all of a sudden a commercial comes on for an erectile dysfunction drug, or a preview for a horror flick. You interrupt your blissful reverie with a reflex reaction, knocking over the chip bowl in a mad dash to change the channel. And now you have to explain both the commercial and your crazed reaction to your children. Fun times with the family indeed.

Parents too often find themselves caught off guard during commercial breaks by advertising that is inappropriate for children. This is obviously bad for the parent, but it's bad for advertisers too, because they have failed to reach their consumer.

For marketers, there is an easy solution by thoughtfully matching product advertising with the compatible programming. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found marketers can increase ad effectiveness up to 30% by placing it in the right programming context, and that 10.7% of viewers changed their opinion about purchasing a product based on the programming context that the advertisement was displayed in.

This insight was a game changer for Crown Media Family Networks, home of Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel. By focusing the broad range of advertisers with a family friendly message, Crown Media has driven up sales by 20% and nearly tripled profitability since 2010. In turn, by advertising on Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel, these family-friendly brands are speaking directly to their priority audience and driving consumer sales, achieving a high ROI without additional spending.

But what about other non-family oriented brands and channels? This is where the palate concept comes in. Most traditionally think about palates in the context of food and beverage. We like to think of it as your sense of 'taste' broadly in many categories, including media. The premise is you can predetermine what you like or not like. And that we can create distinct groups of people with similar palates.

Paul Ekman, a noted American psychologist, pioneer in the study of emotions and the discoverer of the "micro-emotion" chronicled in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, found six universal expressions or emotions — anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. He also has a broader list of emotions that include amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure and shame.

Because both programmers and marketers aim to engage their audience through one or a variety of these emotions, the alignment of congruent programming and advertising content ensures that everybody wins, including the viewer. For example, Hallmark might be focused on happiness and sadness, the CSI series highlights anger, disgust, and fear, while reality TV might hit a wide variety of emotions. All brands also have their version of a brand architecture/pyramid which have 'emotional benefits' that aspire to provide or solve for one of the emotions above.

In a perfect world, media buyers would have access to an algorithm that would allow them to pinpoint the perfect programming environment for their product. Media spend would remain constant, while advertising effectiveness could increase by as much as 30%. This more precise approach would mark a significant improvement over the traditional demo-aligned media buying methodology.

The good news is that much of this information is increasingly available thanks to big data integration of what people buy and what people watch. Companies like Nielsen (parent company of my firm) and others are starting to offer these service. For instance, Nielsen Catalina Solutions has integrated data of what people are watching (via Nielsen's people meter television data) and what people are actually buying (via store membership card data) into a single-source database of households. Brands are not only finding interesting insights on what shows their buyers are watching, but they are using it to drive incremental sales without spending more on ads.

Deloitte noted that focused TV advertisements likely represent less than 0.1% of global TV advertising revenues — less than $200 million out of a $227 billion advertising market. Until the industry at large catches up, this signifies a tremendous opportunity for those marketers willing to shift their tactics to set a new bar and get a huge jump on their competition.

Research: To Reduce E-mail, Get Execs to Send Fewer Messages

You can ease an organization's overall e-mail burden by teaching top executives to send fewer, and clearer, e-mails, a team from consulting and academia has discovered. In a study at the headquarters of a large company, the team found that each executive e-mail begets a time-wasting flurry of other messages, especially if the original is confusing or ambiguous.

To see how dramatic the potential time savings can be, take a look at this interactive:

The figures in the exhibit assume that each staff member sends 40% fewer messages (on average) than each executive, that a message consumes 1.5 minutes of an employee's time, and that the staff's e-mail reduction rate is 1.185 times greater than the executives'. The researchers found this "contagion ratio" at the headquarters they studied.

The interactive is based on research by Chris Brown and Andrew Killick, practitioners at Modeuro Consulting, and Karen Renaud, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow. For more on their findings, read this article from our September issue.

Let Your Customers Streamline Your Business

This post was coauthored by Lisa Bodell.

Customers appreciate simplicity. In fact, a number of recent studies have shown that it's key to their loyalty and satisfaction. CEB reported in HBR last year that the most important factor in creating customer "stickiness" was "decision simplicity," i.e. the ease of getting credible information in the midst of marketing noise. Another CEB study found that loyalty is positively affected by reducing the amount of effort that customers need to invest in service issues. Along the same lines, Francis Frei and Anne Morriss, in their study of service businesses, have found that one of the most effective ways to keep customers is to simplify customer service jobs.



But how do you simplify in ways that will really make a difference for customers? Oftentimes, organizations rely on internal planning, process mapping, and brainstorming sessions to come up with new ways of satisfying customers. While this can be productive, more often than not it leads to ideas that barely change the status quo, because it's difficult for internal people to produce fresh perspective on longstanding policies and practices.

So rather than relying on internal perspectives alone, engage your customers in developing simplification ideas — the second of our seven strategies for simplifying your organization. Here are five best practices that will help you take an outside-in approach to making it easier for customers to do business with you.

Listen to your critics. Does your organization ask for customers' feedback about what it was like to do business with you? What about asking non-customers why they don't do business with you? Intentionally including people who dislike your product or service in a focus group can lead to more provocative conversations. Better yet, have naysayers sit in on internal planning meetings to share their thoughts on how product or service enhancements could affect how they perceive your company.

Roast your products and services. Comedy Central gained attention from its famous Roasts, where a celebrity gets torn to shreds with hilarious insults doled out by the audience. Try out this practice on your company's products or services. Do you sell something that's desperately in need of a makeover? Roast it. Do you have a product that doesn't work as well as it should? Roast it. The goal of this exercise is to see your products objectively like your customers do; flaws and all. Use customer service emails as fodder to get you started. This is an opportunity for your staff to say what everyone in the room and all of your customers have probably already been thinking. You'll get a good laugh, but more importantly, identify opportunities for improvement.

Turn pains into gains. Think about actively asking your customers about their pain points when it comes to working with your organization and its products or services. Once you identify the low points, you can start brainstorming how to make them selling points and key differentiators in the market. For example, if customers are consistently frustrated with the wait time for resolving complaints, make that your number one priority for change.

Figure out what your customers do all day. Think you know your target market? Not just their demographic, but what their life is actually like. What do they think about in the morning when they wake up? What are their high and low points throughout the day? What really makes them tick? Try giving your customers a diary for them to record what a day in their life is like, or have some of your managers spend a day shadowing a customer. This will help you understand unmet needs.

Learn from other industries. Sometimes businesspeople think their company has unique circumstances; that problem-solving strategies that have proven successful in other industries wouldn't work for them. This could not be further from the truth. Henry Ford got the idea for assembly line production from visiting slaughterhouses that used a similar technique. Cattle and cars don't seem to have much in common from the surface, but the strategy for efficiently delivering a final product to consumers is a great fit for both industries. Similarly, GE developed an approach to more rapidly solving customers' problems from talking with Walmart. What industries could provide radical change ideas for your company?

These five best practices of course are not meant to be all-inclusive; but they are all aimed at helping you to unlock a different way of thinking about simplification. If you want to make it easier for your customers to do business with you, make sure that you start with their perspective.

This post's coauthor, Lisa Bodell, is the founder and CEO of FutureThink and the author of Kill the Company.

The More Things Change, the More Our Objections to Change Stay the Same

One of the very first articles in the very first issue of Fast Company, a magazine I started 20 years ago with Alan Webber, is a smart and entertaining list compiled by E.F. Borisch, product manager at a long-established outfit called Milwaukee Gear Company. Borisch's article was titled, "50 Reasons Why We Cannot Change," and it offered a clever and entertaining collection of objections to and worries about the hard work of making real progress. Reason #1: "We've never done it before." Reason #4: "We tried it before." Reason #13: "Our competitors are not doing it." Reason #17: "Sales says it can't be done." Reason #18: "The service department won't like it." Reason #45: "We're doing all right as it is." Reason #50: "It's impossible."

Now here's the punch line: E.F. Borisch compiled his list back in 1959, and published it in an obscure journal called Product Engineering. What we found so amazing about the list when we reprinted it in 1993 — and what remains just as amazing 20 years later — is that most leaders in most organizations face precisely the same set of worries and pushbacks today.

The more things change, it seems, the more the objections to change remain the same.

So what have we learned in the twenty years since Fast Company was created, or the 54 years since E.F. Borisch compiled his list? Let me suggest five simple principles to change how we make change:

1. Most organizations in most fields suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, which makes it hard to envision a more positive future. That's why the first principle of change is originality — for leaders to see their organization and its problems as if they've never seen them before, and, with new eyes, they need to develop a distinctive point of view on how to solve them. All too often, especially in long-established companies, expertise gets in the way of innovation. That's why the most effective leaders I know aren't big fans of "benchmarking" — a commonplace exercise for inspiring change that often serves to reinforce the problem of tunnel vision. How enlightening is it, really, to learn from the "best in class" in your industry, especially if best in class isn't all that great? So why not learn from innovators outside your industry as a way to shake things up and leapfrog your rivals?

2. In troubled organizations rich with tradition and success, history can be a curse — and a blessing. That's why the second principle of change is to break from the past without disavowing it. Psychologist Jerome Bruner, in his collection of essays, In Search of Mind, has a pithy way to describe what happens when the best of the old informs the search for the new. The essence of creativity, he argues, is "figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think." The most effective leaders I've met don't turn their back on the past. They reinterpret what's come before to develop a line of sight into what comes next.

3. The job of the change agent is not just to surface high-minded ideas. It is to summon a sense of urgency inside and outside the organization, and to turn that urgency into action. It's one thing for leaders to use fresh eyes to devise a new line of sight into the future. It's quite another to muster the rank-and-file commitment to turn a compelling vision into a game-changing performance. My friend and Fast Company cofounder Alan Webber puts it well. Progress, he likes to say, is a math formula. It only happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change. That's why the third principle of change is for leaders to encourage a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo, to persuade their colleagues that business as usual is the ultimate risk, not a safe harbor from the storms of disruption.

4. It may be lonely at the top, but change is not a game best played by loners. These days, the most powerful contributions come from the most unexpected places — the "hidden genius" inside your company, the "collective genius" of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who surround your company. That's why the fourth principle of change requires a sense of "humbition" among leaders — enough ambition to address big problems, enough humility to know you don't have the answers. When it comes to change, nobody alone is as smart as everybody together.

5. Change is as much about consistency as it is about disruption. Pundits love to excoriate companies because they don't have the guts to change. In fact, the problem with many organizations is that all they do is change. They lurch from one consulting firm to the next, from the most recent management fad to the newest. But the more things change under these ever-changing conditions, the more they tend to stay the same. Jim Collins puts it this way: "The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency." And that speaks to the fifth principle of change: If, as a leader, you want to make deep-seated change, then your priorities and practices have to stay consistent in good times and bad times.

Here's wishing you well in the defining work of our time — the hard work of making deep-seated change in long-established companies. And here's hoping that twenty years from now, E.F. Borisch's list of "50 Reasons Why We Cannot Change" doesn't ring as true as it does today.

Your Nice Boss May Be Killing Your Career

Chris spent years working for a supportive, encouraging manager at a major technology company headquartered in Silicon Valley. In fact, his boss raved about him. His manager gave him top ratings in his performance evaluations, space to do his work, and had never been controlling. He was, according to Chris, terribly, unswervingly nice. Picture perfect boss, right? Wrong.

His manager had been in the company for 20 years. He had learned how to survive in the bureaucracy: don't make too many waves, don't cause problems. He played the political game well enough to still be there but not well enough to strengthen his reputation. He had slowly lost his political clout. As a result, his team had been winnowed away to a fraction of the size it used to be.

His own reputation bled over onto the members of his team. For Chris it had a powerful effect on his career: he had been passed up three times for a promotion he was repeatedly promised. It was not what his boss was doing that caused the problem. It was what his boss was not doing.

Over a twelve-month period I have gathered data from 1,000 managers about their experiences at over 100 companies including Apple, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novel, and Symantec. I wanted to understand the conditions under which people did the very best work of their careers. What I expected to find were examples of over managing, controlling, tyrannical managers. About half of the participants confirmed this assumption. The other half surprised me: what they described were managers who were nice but weak.

I once spent two days running a strategy session with just such an executive. He spoke with a soft, quiet voice. He never interrupted anyone when they were speaking. When he walked into the meeting he had a "nice" word for everyone. Every time the team became "positively frustrated" and ready to make the change necessary to get to the next level he would stand up and say sweetly, "Oh, I just wanted to remind you all of how far we have come." And after a few more sentences the spark of aspiration was gone from the room. He unintentionally signaled the status quo was plenty good enough. There was no need to try harder or change how things were going. He reminded me of what Jim Hacker (the fictional politician in the English cult classic "Yes, Minister") said to his bureaucratic colleague, "You really are a wet blanket, Humphrey, you just go around stirring up apathy."

Another executive I worked with had an almost voodoo ability to neutralize people's desire to take action. With an almost Jedi-like wave of the hand he seemed to say, "These are not the things you care about changing." People would be kicking and cussing before he walked into the room but a little later they would wonder what they had been frustrated about. That is a useful party trick to be sure but the result was career limiting for each member of his team. Everyone on the team was branded as average and in a reorganization the entire team were "let go."

These nice but somewhat absentee managers can continue to survive, unchecked for decades. At least a controlling boss who yells all the time gets noticed: they create acute pain and people complain. In contrast, the pain these nice "Neutralizers" produce is chronic. The pain is inflicted slowly, drip by drip. On any given day an employee can say, "Well, it's not so bad." They are, after all, nice. But the cumulative effect on your career can be dramatic.



This is a problem hidden in plain sight. The issue has been unintentionally camouflaged by leadership thinkers (I am guilty) who may have overemphasized overmanagment and underemphasized undermanagement. The majority of the leadership literature over the past 25 years has done this. But what happens if an undermanager reads an article, book or attends training of this kind? It may encourage them to continue in their hands-off, low control, absentee approach. They may say, "Yes, I don't like to smother my people or control them." They may speak about empowerment and enablement. All the while they allow their people's career prospect to decline slowly.

In the case of Chris, just naming the problem was liberating. Once he could see how toxic the situation was he took action. He met with his mentors. He visited with his connections. Within a few weeks he took a lateral move to get away from his "nice" manager. After another move a year later he is in a terrific position in a better company with far better prospects than he had before. Just developing a heightened awareness of the issue can be helpful. After all, we cannot solve a problem we do not see.

Some details have been changed to protect privacy.