Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1547

Four Ways to Cultivate a Culture of Curiosity

HopeLab is a curious place.

The California-based nonprofit researches and designs video games and other technology products for kids. But they don’t create ones that involve sitting on a couch, staring at a screen, zapping warriors or aliens. Instead, HopeLab’s games help motivate players to take on healthy habits, to be more physically active (Zamzee) and even help fight cancer (Re-Mission 2).

The organization, a client of The Bridgespan Group, encourages the same sort of exploratory attitude in its employees. So it operates a bit differently than most. There are fun internal tools designed to prompt conversation and reflection. Meetings are positioned as problem-solving opportunities. People always take responsibility for their own actions and mistakes. And employees are given financial and moral support to pursue any kind of learning, from a cooking class to a photography cruise.

“We look at our culture as a product, just like Re-Mission and Zamzee are products,” says Pat Christen, president and CEO of HopeLab. “And we believe a culture of curiosity is key to innovation.”

HopeLab’s methods are replicable. Just consider these few principles:

Encourage Inquiry

HopeLab’s products are rooted in scientific inquiry and research, iteration and experimentation. People are told to explore new paths and to challenge their assumptions and themselves. To that end, the company has created tools including a deck of cards called “Questions for Curious Leaders” with 12 categories, including “beauty”, “candor”, “emotions” and “100% responsibility.” Cards can be found around the office, in conference rooms and at desks; people use them on their own and in meetings.  One “emotions” question reads:  “Am I fully acknowledging and experiencing my emotions, then letting them go?” Another in the “beauty” category is:  “Am I enduring, allowing or perpetuating, mediocrity, inelegance or ugliness?”

It can be hard to find time for reflection and conversation. But these tools help. Plus, “work is more rewarding when curiosity and discovery are embedded in it,” Christen says.

Write Agendas as Questions

Employees are more likely to engage in meetings when they know they can affect the outcome. So HopeLab’s agendas are always in the form of questions. For example, “How should we prioritize these projects?” or  “What models of engagement might we pursue? Why?”

“Everyone at the meeting is invited into the conversation to help us make sense of an issue, solve a problem or imagine a new area of opportunity,” Christen explains. “We expect people to speak up — to ask questions, share ideas and contribute.” As a result, HopeLab is known for productive, energizing, get-togethers. In fact, visitors from other organizations often ask for how-tos after experiencing a HopeLab meeting.

Avoid Blame

When an early prototype for the 2.0 version of Re-Mission, HopeLab’s free game to motivate kids with cancer to stick with their treatment regimen, strayed from the feedback provided by young patients, it could have been an opportunity for blame. The organization had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on development.  But instead of fault-finding, Christen assembled the team, took full responsibility and asked for ideas to save the project.

“There can be a ‘villain, victim, hero’ dynamic,” she explains. “But when you recognize you’re in that game, playing one of those roles, you have the choice to step off the triangle,” and instead focus on moving forward. The solution for Re-Mission 2 turned out to be shifting from one big computer game to several online mini-games and an app for mobile phones and tablets — an expensive fix, but far less costly to the mission than a flop.

Avoiding blame doesn’t mean avoiding consequences, however. When Christen found herself in a meeting on a very complicated personnel matter with the VP for staff development, she decided, perhaps not surprisingly, to ask the employee a question: What did he think should be done? “And the person went much farther than I was envisioning,” she says. Having taken accountability, he has since returned to being a highly productive and valuable member of the team.

Assume All Learning Is Good

Employees choose their paths in professional development (PD), too. At first, folks felt compelled to rationalize their requests for  PD resources by making them explicitly work-related.  But Christen told them, “I don’t need a rationale. Just keep learning things.” Now people feel free to request support for any kind of class they want, and the openness has paid off. The woman who requested funds to pay for a portion of her photography cruise is now the company’s de facto in-house photographer. “She discovered a new interest and genuine talent, and we saved tens of thousands of dollars on outside photographers by supporting that learning opportunity,” says Richard Tate, her boss and HopeLab’s VP of communications and marketing. “If you’re practicing curiosity, no matter what you’re learning, I believe it will benefit the organization.” Other employees have simply come to work more engaged and with more and better ideas.

Christen credits her board, which includes Pam Omidyar, HopeLab’s founder, for encouraging this culture of radical curiosity at the organization. “They recognize that how we show up to do the work we do is a manifestation of the values and the impact we hope to inspire in the world.”

Go Ahead: Ask Your Employees If They’re Happy

When was the last time you made the effort to see, really see, what the people you work with are thinking and how they’re feeling about their jobs? With Gallup’s latest State of the American Workplace survey showing that 70% of U.S. employees are not engaged at work, it seems that the majority of managers would greet that question with a blank stare. Those managers are missing key information needed to attract and retain talented staff — not to mention keep them actively engaged in turning out a superior product.

Despite the dismal statistics on workplace engagement, there are many enlightened leaders who do one simple thing: They ask their employees how they feel. When they do so, they receive priceless information that helps them retain their best employees and optimize their productivity.

Daniel Parent, director of field human resources at video game retailer GameStop, is one of those leaders.  He knows the power of checking in with his team. He has a recurring appointment on his schedule that says, “Ask employees how happy they are at work and what can I do to make them happier.” Daniel has learned over the years that simply asking those two questions indicates to his group that they have his support. Furthermore, he learns what their real issues are so he can provide them with meaningful direction.

By knowing what motivates his team, he can help boost their performance and their satisfaction on the job. His questioning also serves as an early warning system, allowing him to head off issues before they become intractable problems. Take Jennifer, for example. She so desperately wanted to be a good employee that she struggled in her new role as a working mother. Daniel recalled his conversation with her shortly after she returned to work from her maternity leave as one of the most poignant he’d ever had. When he asked Jennifer how happy she was at work, she confessed that trying to juggle both roles left her feeling like she wasn’t a good person.

Getting permission from her boss to spend time with her new baby was what made the difference for Jennifer. She and Daniel worked out an arrangement that met both of their needs. By communicating regularly, Daniel was able to reassure Jennifer that she was meeting all of his expectations and then some. That allowed her to turn her full attention to her child outside of work and really enjoy their time together. “I would never have known this was bothering her if I didn’t ask,” he says.

Daniel also recounts another instance in which an employee put what she perceived to be the needs of the company above her personal well-being. Heading into a meeting, she told him that she had a dentist appointment and would have to leave promptly at 4 when the meeting ended. At 4:10, the meeting was still in high gear with no sign of ending soon. Daniel leaned over to his colleague and whispered that she’d better leave in order to make her appointment.  With a grateful smile, she slipped out and took care of her teeth.

Daniel points out that people don’t work for a company, they work for their boss. He has had employees tell him that they stay at GameStop because of him. “These are talented people who could easily get another, better-paying job elsewhere.” The small investment of time he makes in asking his employees how happy they are has paid off many times over when he considers what it would cost to replace any member of his team.

Assuming your team is made up of high-performing, highly motivated individuals whom you want to retain, here’s an action plan for monitoring and improving their engagement:

Put a recurring appointment — monthly or quarterly — on your calendar and ask your employees whether they are happy at work and what you can do to make them happier.  Don’t wait for the annual review to have this conversation.
Maintain open lines of communication so that you can offer support and address issues before they become full-blown problems.
Help all team members manage their professional obligations so they can meet their personal needs, allowing them to be present and focused on their work when they are in the office.
Keep on questioning. Don’t assume that you have all the information you need if you’ve asked people once whether they’re happy. Circumstances inside and outside of the workplace change over time, and feelings can evolve accordingly.

Remember, relationships are built on a series of little moments that create big impact over time. Sending someone gratefully off to the dentist is not an earth-shattering event on its own. But it is an affirmation that someone’s personal needs are important and to be honored. Taken as a whole, many small actions can strengthen someone’s foundation or they can tear them down. The Gallup survey suggests that there is more erosion than building of the human spirit happening in the American workplace. Be someone who builds others up rather than tears them down.  Little things matter in a big way.

As Daniel says, checking in with his employees like this is all about retention. By communicating regularly with his employees, he knows what motivates them and the challenges they need to overcome in order to do their best work.  This knowledge helps him reward his most talented team members in ways that are meaningful to them, which can change over time, depending on what is happening in both their personal and professional lives. Daniel’s efforts have been rewarded in the form of a highly engaged, productive and, yes, happy team of employees.

Revenge of the HourlyNerds

Last week’s news that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban put $450K into the $750K seed round of consulting startup HourlyNerd should make traditional consultants nervous. Founded only last year by a team of current MBA students, HourlyNerd is a prime example of the disruption in consulting that my co-authors and I discuss in our new article, “Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption” in HBR.

HourlyNerd is an online marketplace that allows MBA students from the top 20 U.S. business schools and select international schools to bid on consulting projects that have been posted by prospective clients, mostly small business owners. The students charge as little as $10 per hour though participants with the loftiest consulting pedigrees can command upward of $100 per hour. HourlyNerd profits by taking a cut of the fees from both the client business and the student providing the service. Think of it as eLance for consultants instead of programmers, writers and designers, or as eBay for consulting problems.

HourlyNerd represents one of the newest business models in consulting, the facilitated network business, which is structured to enable the exchange of services between clients and freelance consultants. These businesses have powerful disruptive potential because they can provide consulting at a fraction of the cost of traditional models, largely because they do not need to carry expensive fixed costs like recruiting, training, consultant “beach” time, and expensive real estate. HourlyNerd, by encouraging students to bid against each other, likely drives down the hourly cost of projects even more.

Like so many disruptive businesses (think of the classic example of the steel minimills), HourlyNerd is entering at the basement door of the consulting industry by targeting small companies. These are clients for whom HourlyNerd is a godsend, because they want the consulting help but can’t afford hefty consulting fees of traditional firms. Even if they could afford the fees of say, a BCG or Bain, these small businesses are unlikely to garner the attention of consulting partners at these top firms. Those partners, incentivized to focus on the biggest clients, are more than happy to yield the small business segment to someone else. As such, HourlyNerd is essentially competing against non-consumption.  Even if MBA student-consultants can’t provide the same breadth and depth of analyses and counseling that a traditional, highly resourced consulting team might, it doesn’t matter because what HourlyNerd consultants are doing is “good enough” for a client whose alternative is often not getting the work done at all due to a lack of talent, time or combination of both. And you could argue that in some ways, HourlyNerd actually fits the job that those small business clients need done better than a traditional firm because of their flexibility and the easy-to-use online platform that demystifies and democratizes the process of hiring a consultant.

While HourlyNerd is making a lot of headlines today, it’s not necessarily a new idea. Eden McCallum, for example, is a U.K. based consulting firm started by a pair of McKinsey alumni. Their business assembles lean project teams consisting of pre-vetted freelance consultants (all alumni of top consulting firms) on an as-needed basis to serve large corporate clients. Business Talent Group is a similar business based in the U.S. that also incorporates former operating executives regularly in its project teams. Both firms have been very successful and are competing more and more with the incumbent consulting firms; Eden McCallum boasts a client list that includes the likes of Tesco, GSK and Lloyd’s.  Yet, when Eden McCallum was founded in 2000, it targeted start-ups and small business client just like HourlyNerd.

Over time will HourlyNerd, like many other disruptors across industries, want to move up-market to bigger and bigger clients, attracted by the greater profits those relationships promise? Will they have an extendable core that allows their disruptive business model to scale without replicating the cost structure of more traditional competitors?  Will they need to expand the schools they recruit MBA consultants from to keep up with growth and possibly dilute their brand and value proposition as a result? These are all important questions for the founders of HourlyNerd to consider, but for now, they probably want to celebrate their successful first round of financing (not to mention, get ready for the start of their second year at business school).

The Future Is Scary. Creative Thinking Can Help.

Thinking creatively about the future requires sensitivity to the complex, fast-moving world in front of you, the ability to anticipate unexpected disruptions, and a willingness to constantly reevaluate your most basic beliefs and assumptions. Done well, we believe thinking creatively about the future of organizations requires doing three things:

First, understand how people think.

The brain’s hard-wiring could be leading you and your colleagues to hold on to tired assumptions and misperceptions about your organization. People have a natural bias toward ideas and concepts that confirm, as opposed to contradict, ideas they already believe. Such biases can sabotage their capacity for fresh thinking.

A classic example: Henry Ford famously insisted that the all-black Model T would always remain desirable to consumers. Even as other automakers created new car models and colors, even when his colleagues urged him to consider pursuing new directions, Ford refused to budge. After years of fantastic innovations that helped bring the automobile to the masses, Ford fell prey to the “anchoring” bias that leads people to make (or fail to make) new decisions by referencing their prior experiences.

Free your mind to generate new ideas by noticing how these and other cognitive patterns may be shaping your key assumptions and holding you back from thinking in more creative ways.

When thinking about the future of your organization, you and your colleagues must feel encouraged to doubt whether “the way we do things here at X Corp.” is necessarily still relevant. Insist upon a culture that allows people to constantly challenge the most fundamental beliefs, hypotheses, and assumptions that they have about your organization, the industry in which it does business, and the world in which it operates.

Second, think creatively by developing new mental models; audit — and then question — your organization’s fundamental beliefs and assumptions.

To think creatively is to change the way you look at something, to update one or more of your mental models. To get started, drill down on some of the most important mental models that you and your colleagues are currently using. Consider conducting a “beliefs audit.” By interviewing or surveying your colleagues, you can probe their thoughts about your organization’s current situation:

What are some key assumptions inherent in your day-to-day activities? The established “rules” under which you or your organization generally operates? What core values are “given”?
What are some of your own personal beliefs about your organization and what makes it perform effectively at present? In what areas does your organization devote too much — or too little — time and resources?
What is your organization’s competitive space, and are there ways it might be redefined?
If you or your organization didn’t exist, what difference would it make to the world? What would be missing?

These are only sample questions — you should develop others based on the current needs of your organization.

Questioning your current situation can open up paths to creative thinking. For instance, Google’s original aspiration was to build the best search engine ever; arguably the organization achieved that. But in order to enter a new era of growth, Google leaders needed to perceive their company differently. Only when they challenged their long-held assumption that “We are a search engine company” could they then come up with the “We want to know everything” notion which sparked projects such as Google Earth, Google Book Search, and Google Labs, along with further improvements to their fabled search engine.

Third, think creatively about the future by using “prospective thinking” to consider key trends and disruptions.

Take an expansive, long-term view, open to all possibilities and fully aware of what’s happening both within and outside of your organization or your immediate environment.

Megatrends, large social, economic, political, environmental or technological changes likely to have major impact across a wide range of areas, can be a very useful tool to help spark new possibilities. Examples include the rise of alternative energy sources, rapidly-developing markets like Brazil and China, and increasing mobile connectivity. Megatrends will affect your company, your customers, your competition, as well as your family and community.

Develop a list of issues you believe will likely: play out over a relatively long period of time (five to ten years, say, though different industries could have longer or shorter timeframes); have a strong and wide-reaching impact; and open up a range of strategic responses on your part. Then, refine your list by asking: Which trends will be the key vectors for shaping my organization’s future? What are some of the seemingly irrelevant trends that could end up being surprisingly critical?

Ponder the many ways you could exploit these megatrends to create new opportunities for your organization. Stretch your thinking by considering which of these trends your organization would be the least ready to deal with. Are there trends right in front of you that you haven’t yet addressed?

Ask yourself how these potential trends could influence the new ideas you want to generate for the future. For example, a client we worked with several years ago, a major European department store chain, stated emphatically that its future was in China, based on trends outlining the increased purchasing power of the rising middle class there. But not a single person on the leadership team had heard of TaoBao, the closest Chinese analogy to Amazon.com, which was growing at double-digit rates, building new distribution centers across the country, and focusing on customer relationships and loyalty.

Thinking creatively about the future is not only about gathering the trend data but maintaining the atmosphere of doubt cultivated in the first step. This will enable you to look at data — whether trends, customer research, or competitive intelligence — in fresh ways, to be better prepared for an uncertain future. Indeed, thinking creatively about the future means embracing the uncertainty, rather than the more predictable response of trying to remove it.

Military Leadership Lessons for Training Doctors

Elite medical training programs proudly proclaim that they are preparing future healthcare leaders. But with their focus on clinical disease management and research, training programs actually offer little in the way of true leadership training – authentic experience that helps young doctors develop the leadership skills they will need.

To address this gap, the Vanderbilt Department of Otolaryngology developed a 4-year program that consists of selected Naval ROTC leadership topics, public speaking training, a micro-MBA course, and a capstone leadership project on community disease prevention that puts students into leadership roles.

When I describe this program I get a lot of questions about the military portion. Why reach out to the ROTC? Medicine and the military seem to reside in opposite worlds, the former devoted to saving lives and the latter, when called upon, to ending them. Yet, both are made up of large, complex organizations with clear leadership needs at many levels. The military is highly disciplined in its leadership training, understanding that leadership skills aren’t automatically endowed upon joining the organization. Medicine, contrastingly, assumes that its intelligent, industrious providers will somehow evolve into leaders as circumstances require, but without formal leadership training. So, we contacted the ROTC to see what we could learn from them.

Over the course of a year, we learned a lot about how the Navy trains leaders, and have incorporated many military training strategies into the leadership education for our young otolaryngology trainees. Several lessons have emerged from this experiment that are applicable in medical training and, indeed, throughout health care.

Lesson 1: Medicine must increase its focus on fundamental communication skills.

Young recruits entering the Navy are often unskilled in (or unaware of) the basic interpersonal social graces that enhance relationships. Sailors are taught to stand when someone enters the room, to shake hands and make eye contact, to use polite greetings like “sir” and “ma’am,” and to listen attentively. Young doctors typically receive little such training. Any patient can tell you that health care providers are uneven at best in their greeting and communication skills. Health care leaders, and indeed any provider, must communicate well both verbally and non-verbally. But these days harried providers often make more eye contact with a computer screen than with the patient and family. Providers also increasingly must communicate with groups ranging from internal stakeholders to large audiences at external meetings. Yet doctors rarely receive training in public speaking – and it shows.

What we do now:  To build skills in one-on-one communication, we train our residents using paid actors as simulated patients. To enhance presentation ability, we have added an eight-hour course in public speaking to our curriculum.

Lesson 2: Medicine needs to expand selection criteria for promotion and train individuals to take on the next responsibility.

When Navy personnel — having been evaluated frequently according to a standardized method — receive a promotion, they are considered unprepared to assume the new command. As one ROTC trainer explained,  “When you are promoted on a Friday afternoon, nothing magical happens over the weekend to make you smarter, richer, better looking – or a better leader — by Monday morning”.  For each promotion, the Navy sends the individual for additional training, customized for the new position, before he or she assumes the new role. Medicine’s promotion tracks are currently structured for success in research, educational and/or clinical skills; promotion is not based on pre-eminence in managerial or leadership skills.  Even a full professor typically remains ignorant of vital skills related to organizational behavior, operations management, finance and strategy. And no tailored management or leadership training is regularly offered for physicians who become departmental service chiefs, chairs or deans, or who assume hospital executive roles.

What we do now: We have added an 18-hour micro-MBA course for our resident trainees that exposes them to senior administrators from national healthcare organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, Partners HealthCare, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The coursecovers topics including healthcare policy, finance, and organizational culture as well as decision making (led by an Air Force colonel) and conflict resolution (led by a minister). Importantly, in each of the past 4 years one faculty or staff member has matriculated for a master’s degree in healthcare management.

Lesson 3: Medicine must embrace checklists and debriefings to improve safety.

In an earlier time, a persistent level of naval aviation accidental injury and death seemed inevitable.  Unwilling to accept its accident rate, the Navy introduced pre-flight checklists and post-flight debriefings for every flight – and accident rates have fallen. Although conscious efforts to improve quality and safety in medicine are under way, checklists in medicine are still novel; debriefings, regrettably, mainly occur only in response to poor outcomes.

What we do now:  To teach us about their method, our ROTC team entered the room in flight suits and reenacted the lengthy processes of checklist and debriefing as it would happen on an aircraft carrier. Knowing that surgeons only erratically conduct organized postoperative debriefings, we are creating a formal debriefing program and our faculty and trainees have already have begun impromptu post-operative performance conversations after most surgical procedures.

Lesson 4: Medicine needs to reflect on perpetuation.

Our ROTC collaborators advanced the surprising opinion that the sole role of the Navy was not the defense of the nation. Instead, they posited that the Navy’s equally important role is perpetuation of the organization so that the future national defense never will be in peril. Perpetuation requires training to be continually upgraded to anticipate future needs. Medicine largely trains using classroom educational models developed a century ago – a tired didactic methodology based mainly on the lecture format (plus our still-successful experiential methodology based on active participation in the clinics and operating rooms).

What we do now: Our Otolaryngology training program has revitalized the traditional didactic training program and uses educational methods pioneered in business schools to de-emphasize lectures and promote active team learning, using Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives as an intellectual platform.

Our program is a work in progress, but we have early indications of success.  For example, this year our residents have undertaken a capstone project that tests their leadership skills. Residents divide into teams and work with Vanderbilt undergraduates, primary care physicians, and others on population-health projects focused on preventing head and neck cancers.  They must define their goal, determine performance measures, find and engage allies, create budgets, and publicly report their results, using the tools they’ve acquired through the program. Our annual resident rankings on a standardized national survey reveal a 100% satisfaction with our training approach, compared to the national average of 74%. In an anonymous vote last year, the residents unanimously supported an acceleration and expansion of the changes we’ve begun – despite the increased workload they represent.

We are fortunate that our resident-level training efforts are aligned within our larger medical school culture since the wrong culture can eat the best strategy. Any group working to implement leadership training within a healthcare organization must be mindful of the broader organizational culture and be prepared to overcome inertia (and sometimes active resistance) in order to effect behavior change. That, after all, is what the best leaders do.

Follow the Leading Health Care Innovation insight center on Twitter @HBRhealth. E-mail us at healtheditors@hbr.org, and sign up to receive updates here.

Leading Health Care Innovation

From the Editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine




Leading Health Care Innovation: Editor’s Welcome
Why Health Care Is Stuck — And How to Fix It
Getting Real About Health Care Value
Understanding the Drivers of Patient Experience

Is It Ever OK to Break Into Your Colleague’s Computer?

Rick was looking for Kelly, one of the analysts who supported his consulting team. Kelly’s hours were a mystery, and Rick was confused and annoyed. He tried to check her calendar online, but, after struggling to locate it, he solicited help from an IT specialist. They found all sorts of surprising weekday appointments at the gym, lunch with friends, and even horseback riding — all fifteen miles outside the city. They went to the department head who authorized a review of Kelly’s entry and exit records from the lower level parking garage.  Kelly was a nuisance employee and maybe Rick had the goods on her now.

Steve, a portfolio manager for a major mutual fund company, understood that his company monitored internet use of all employees. The surveillance was even tighter for the traders, and an alert flashed on Steve’s PC when his trader, Eric, started surfing questionable sites. He warned Eric to cut it out, but the alert kept flashing. Eric was a great trader, but this posed a real difficulty for Steve — what should he do with the information he possessed?

I had been preparing a client presentation with several of my colleagues at our asset management firm. The night before the meeting, I reviewed the document on my laptop at home, noticing that several key pieces of information were missing. Early the next morning, I emailed the group to explain what we still needed, but one person was out and not easily accessible. We realized that the required data was only on his password protected computer. I didn’t know whether to unlock his computer or try to work around the problem.

The digital age offers us immense opportunities to hone our detective skills, to observe our colleagues in an entirely new, not necessarily flattering light, and also presents tremendous challenges in terms of how we use that information. Fingering the transgressor may be the most satisfying aspect to digital sleuthing, but managers must understand the negative impact of monitoring our co-workers. The more aggressive the data mining, the higher the risk of abuse, and the more supervisors must tread sensitively to re-establish any lost trust.

At large companies, employee handbooks warn us not to expect privacy protection for whatever content we write, read, watch, or send on corporate owned computing equipment, including our smartphones.

Electronic Performance Monitoring or EPM has become widespread at many corporations to track, count, and analyze employee keystrokes. An important paper by Laurel McNall and Sylvia Roch makes very clear that workers, justifiably, worry about being watched, particularly when they don’t know how their bosses are using information.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the act of observation alters that which is being observed. Observing your employees via careful digital sleuthing will similarly alter their behavior. On the negative side, it may create worker dissatisfaction, hurt morale, and erode trust. But it can also have a positive impact, if it promotes awareness of the public nature of our electronic presence and results in more thoughtful and responsible behavior. We need to learn how to harness the power of digital surveillance as a benign force.

George, the CEO of a technology company with over 150 employees, believes that you need to be careful when confronting someone with intelligence gained from data mining. Other than the case of an egregious act, the cultural destruction might well outweigh the benefit. Not only the accused but everyone else who hears about it will wonder, “What kind of company do I work for?”

Martha, who manages a staff of hundreds at a health care facility, says she uses a “root cause” analysis to decifer  digital errors and distinguish between a mistake caused by a systemic failure or individual oversight. In addition, she conducts substitute testing, which recreates the exact problem, to determine whether another person would have made the same error. She believes that her staff understands and accepts that management uses monitoring and digitally-sourced information to improve institution-wide performance rather than to assign blame. As Devasheesh Bhave described in his study of EPM, the feedback offered is essential.

In the case of Kelly, who was taking horseback riding lessons on company time, Rick made sure her boss saw her garage timestamps. She lost her job immediately. The record of her comings and goings in the parking garage painted a clear picture of abuse. The consequence of surveillance fit the crime and it still sends the right message to everyone who hears about it.

Steve couldn’t sit on Eric’s website transgressions; the trader was also fired. Eric sued the company, maintained that he did not receive sufficient warning, that he received email links to pornography from other traders inside and outside the firm which he did not open, and that the monitoring system unfairly targeted his computer. Steve is torn. Eric was a great trader, but he has not worked in two years and, with a lawsuit pending, he cannot get a job. Steve worries that he might have jumped to conclusions and wonders if he should have given Eric a harsher warning.

I couldn’t bear the idea of hacking into someone’s computer, having never done something like that before. We managed to pull together most of the missing data, and the client didn’t notice the difference. We then implemented some new processes for timelines and safeguards which probably should have existed in the first place. The incident forced us to consider important questions about intra-office transparency and the extent of privacy at our firm. I wonder, however, under what circumstances I might make the opposite decision — to unlock the computer.

The more we can sift through and massage the troves of data accumulating on our servers, the greater the need to understand how to use that output, the positive and negative implications, and how to craft and deliver the appropriate message to our colleagues.

A Heart-Shaped Bowl Makes You More Altruistic

46.3% of restaurant customers left tips when they were given heart-shaped dishes for their money, compared with just 31.2% and 26.2% when the tip dishes were round or square, respectively, says Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne Sud in France (the experiment was conducted in France, where tipping is not expected because a service charge is included in the bill). The findings suggest that a simple physical cue such as a heart-shaped bowl can induce thoughts of love, which activate altruism and helping behavior.

The Rise of Compassionate Management (Finally)

Don’t look now, but all of a sudden the topic of compassionate management is becoming trendy.

A growing number of business conferences are focusing in on the topic of compassion at work. There’s the International Working Group on Compassionate Organizations. There’s the Changing Culture in the Workplace Conference. Then there’s Wisdom 2.0, dedicated to “exploring living with greater awareness, wisdom and compassion in the modern age.” The speakers are no slouches: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Bill Ford (yes, that Bill Ford), Karen May (VP of Talent at Google), and Linked In CEO Jeff Weiner top the bill. At TED, Karen Armstrong’s talk about reviving the Golden Rule won the TED prize in 2009 and has given rise to a Charter for Compassion signed by nearly 100,000 people.

More evidence of this trend comes from the Conscious Capitalism movement, whose membership includes companies like Southwest Airlines, Google, the Container Store, Whole Foods Market, and Nordstrom. One of the cornerstones of the movement is to try to take care not just of your shareholders, but all stakeholders (investors, workers, customers, and so on). One member is Tata, the Indian conglomerate, who makes no bones about it: “Our purpose is to improve the quality of life of the communities we serve.”

While the importance of compassion at work has long been touted by scholars like Peter Senge, Fred Kofman, Jane Dutton and others as a foundational precept of good management, managers of the traditional, critical, efficiency-at-all-costs stripe have scoffed. This isn’t surprising: given the number of nasty managers still sitting at the top of organizations, it’s easy to assume that the compassionate ones don’t often get hired, let alone encouraged and promoted. In fact, a Notre Dame study found that nice guys really do finish last, with more agreeable people earning less than those who are willing to be disagreeable. And all too often, compassionate people lack boundaries, thus allowing themselves to be used and abused; they become “toxic handlers” who absorb the organizational pain without much personal gain.

But something in the zeitgeist is changing. At Wisdom 2.0, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner told the audience that he is on a personal mission to “expand the world’s collective wisdom and compassion,” and that he had made the practice of compassionate management a core value at the company. For example, he described a former colleague who was publicly disparaging someone on the team. Realizing that he’d made that mistake himself, Weiner took the fellow aside and said, “If you are going to do this, find a mirror and do it to yourself first. You’re projecting your perspective and assumptions onto that person.”

To manage compassionately, Weiner noted, doesn’t come naturally to most managers. It requires spending the time to walk in someone else’s shoes — to understand what kind of baggage that person is bringing to work; what kinds of stresses she’s under; what her strengths and weaknesses are. In high-pressure environments, such a time investment is anathema to most of us. But such an investment is analogous to the work of a carpenter who carefully measures a piece of wood three times before cutting once: spending such “compassion time” with an employee, Weiner insists, pays off in that person’s much greater efficiency, productivity and effectiveness (and obviates later regrets). It’s not just altruism: as it turns out, companies that practice conscious capitalism perform ten times better than companies that don’t.

Findings like this may be one reason for compassion’s rise in the workplace: perhaps years of research are finally making a dent. Over and over, it’s been shown that compassion concretely benefits the corporate bottom line. Marcus Buckingham’s work on employee engagement has shown that engagement is critical to organizational success. Plenty of others have shown that practicing compassion is good  for your business. Consider what happened when a call-center company called Appletree consciously set about increasing compassion among employees. The company set up the equivalent of a “Make A Wish” foundation to serve its adult employees, which it called “Dream On.” The CEO, John Ratliff, claimed that the gambit changed the culture of his company. (Call centers have a notoriously high turnover rate, largely because the employees listen to unhappy callers all day.) The Dream On program allowed employees to express compassion to each other on an everyday basis. As a result, the company’s turnover rate dropped from 97% to 33% within six months. (You can learn more about this story and much more about the effect of compassion in organizations here.)

The evidence also shows that compassion boosts employee well-being and health — another important contributor to the bottom line. And as my good friend Dr. Edward Hallowell shows in his book Connect: 12 Vital Ties that Open Your Heart, Lengthen Your Life and Deepen Your Soul, the more we compassionately connect, the better we feel, and the more others are there to support us when we need it, as even the most seemingly invulnerable of us someday, inevitably, will.

I also have a suspicion. It’s just a hunch, but I suspect most of us are experiencing cynicism fatigue. The overwhelmingly bad news springing from the news media leaves most people with two options: either they become cynics who drown themselves in their own pleasures, or they try to make a difference. Most of the smart people I know are little a bit of both, but they fight their cynical side. They try to work on something of worth at work and in the world. There is no better way to start doing this than to practice the golden rule on an hourly basis.

Of course, some of us are inherently more compassionate and empathetic than others. But the good news is that it’s possible to strengthen one’s compassion muscle — and so become a better manager. Researchers from the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconson-Madison’s Waisman Center found that engaging in compassion meditation — where you practice feeling compassion for different groups of people, including yourself — seemed to increase a sense of altruism.

To me, this is all great news.  The more compassion we can practice (starting right now), the better. And given that we spend so much of our lives at work, there is no better place to start than with the person in the next cubicle.

Great Teams Are a Mix of Old and New

The best teams, we tend to think, are like a band of brothers. They’ve been together for a long time. They know each other extremely well. And they are more successful as a result. It’s common sense, right? Well, it turns out that great teams — the most creative, the most innovative — are more temporary in nature that you’d think. Take Broadway. The best productions, researchers have found, are made up of rag-tag groups — a mix of old and new faces. The old faces bring knowledge of the best processes and the best working methods, and the new folks bring a fresh creative spirit to the table. The most innovative companies work in similar ways, too. Ad-hoc teams form around a given project, then disband. But it’s not so easy pull off — in order for this to work, the entire organization has to be diverse enough in order to make temporary teams a reality.

Personal Branding for Introverts

I had just finished a talk at a leading technology company when an engineer approached me. “I liked your ideas about personal branding, and I can see how they’d work,” he told me. “But most of them aren’t for me — I’m an introvert. Is there anything I can do?” What he didn’t realize is that (like an estimated one-third to one-half of the population) I’m one, too.

Despite the common misperception that all introverts are shy, and vice versa, they’re two very different phenomena. (Author and introversion expert Susan Cain defines shyness as “the fear of negative judgment,” while introversion is “a preference for quiet, minimally stimulating environments.”) I actually like giving talks to large groups (that day, there were 180 people in the room and another 325 watching online). I’m happy to mingle and answer questions afterward. But at a certain point, I’ve learned through experience, I have to get away and go somewhere by myself.

Conference organizers and attendees will often ask you to join them for dinner the evening before, or cocktails afterward. Rationally, it’s a win-win: they perceive more value because they get to interact with you personally, and you can make interesting business connections and learn tidbits about attendees that allow you to personalize your talk. For those good reasons, I’ll often say yes, but I’ve had to learn my limits: if I’ve been traveling too much, or had a frenzied schedule that day, or my social chops are hampered by lack of sleep, it’s far better to refuse. Like a car that requires periodic oil changes, I have to recharge with quiet, alone time.

It’s true that many of the best ways to establish your brand in the professional world are still weighted toward extroverts: taking leadership positions in professional associations, starting your own conference or networking group, or — indeed — embracing public speaking (all of which frequently entail extended social contact).

Over time, I’ve learned “when to say when” and graciously call it an evening. But for many introverts, it’s a tough balance. One executive at a large consulting firm once asked me how she could be truly authentic in her dealings with others, given how uncomfortable she was when it came to networking; she worried she’d have to put on a smiley, hypersocial façade. Yet I’m convinced it’s possible to be real about building connections and developing our personal brands, while still respecting our natural tendencies.

First, social media may actually be an area where introverts, who thrive on quiet contemplation, have an advantage. With a blog — one of the best techniques for demonstrating thought leadership — you can take your time, formulate your thoughts, and engage in real dialogue with others. Indeed, while extroverts desperate for their next fix are trading business cards at cocktail parties, you can build a global brand on the strength of your ideas.

Next, with a little strategy and effort, you can become a connector one person at a time. A friend of mine used to work at a large research hospital; it was a sprawling institution with countless divisions and initiatives. She made a simple commitment: each week, she’d ask a person from a different office or department to lunch. Often, she’d meet them initially at company meetings or through project work; if the suggestion to have lunch together didn’t arise naturally, she’d tell them about her project, and they were almost always intrigued enough to join her.

Within a few months, she had begun to build a robust network inside her organization — on her own, quiet terms (Susan Cain herself told HBR that we ought to “be figuring out ways where people can kind of pick and choose their environments, and then be at their best.”) My friend’s “lunch initiative” exemplifies the research of Ronald Burt at the University of Chicago, who urges workers to “bridge structural gaps” in their organizations. In other words, you can make yourself professionally indispensable if you develop connections that enable you to break through silos, and identify and surmount knowledge gaps.

Introverts can also use subtle cues to establish their personal brand. As well-known psychologist Robert Cialdini told me during an interview for my book Reinventing You, simply placing diplomas or awards on your office walls can help reinforce your expertise to others. (Cialdini saw this powerful effect in action at an Arizona hospital he advised; exercise compliance increased 32% almost immediately after the physical therapy unit started displaying their staff’s credentials.)

Finally, use your downtime strategically. You’re likely to need more “thinking time,” as introvert and former Campbell Soup Company CEO Doug Conant advised in an HBR post. So while the extroverts may be schmoozing with colleagues after work, you can ensure you’re being productive while you recharge by reading industry journals or thinking creatively about your company and your career. (Introverts often do their best thinking on their own, as Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino suggests, rather than amidst the scrum of an office brainstorming session.)

In popular imagination, personal branding is often equated with high-octane, flesh-pressing showmanship. But there are other, sometimes better, ways you can define yourself and your reputation. Taking the time to reflect and be thoughtful about how you’d like to be seen and then living that out through your writing and your interpersonal relationships (and even your décor) is a powerful way to ensure you’re seen as the leader you are.