Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1553

Yes, Marketers, You Should Pay Your Influencers

A consumer advocate can be your brand's best friend. They spend 13% more than the average buyer and refer business that equals 45% of the money they spend, according to Satmetrix. The rise of these brand influencers has spawned quite a bit of buzz in recent months for companies thinking this could enhance their marketing campaigns. Some have even started paying influencers for their time to boost some initial success. After all, if the influencer loves the brand and the fans love the influencer, then the fans will love the brand, right?

In reality, it's quite challenging. Our agency recently ran a study that shows brands are having some trouble translating their influencers' authentic love for their products into mutually rewarding relationships. We defined an influencer as someone who: a) has a social media following of 2,500 or more, b) considers themselves to have an influence on their audience, and c) has received or desires to receive compensation from a brand. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research (a survey targeting 780 adults and a survey targeting fans with a sample of 1,093 adults), we found that 39% of brand influencers say they have had a bad experience with a company, primarily because the brand didn't follow through with the deal they made (33%) or because they were bad at communicating (23.5%).

Before launching into a discussion about how to better engage your influencers, you may be asking yourself, "How do I find them?" Start by researching who is talking about your company online. You can do this by using social influence identification tools such as SocMetrics or working with third-party influencers or blogger networks. You can also invite influencers to self-identify, or even take it upon yourself to sift through your customer databases to find high-value consumers who might want to influence on your behalf.

Once you've identified your influencers, the next step is establishing a symbiotic relationship with them — a challenge few brands seem able to meet. To better understand the complex nature of the brand-influencer-fan relationship, we derived these guidelines from our research and experience:

Don't underestimate an influencer's power. Recently, Alishan Hopping, a blogger who has been loyal to Kate Spade for years, had a terrible in-store experience. When she reached out to the company via Twitter and their "Contact Us" website feature, she received no response. So she blogged about her experience instead. Within an hour, her followers re-blogged her post, tweeted at Kate Spade, and wrote on the Kate Spade Facebook page about the issue. It was only after receiving this deluge of vicarious consternation that Kate Spade grasped the impact of Alishan's influencer status and tried to make good. Brands can avoid a similar predicament by actively recognizing and engaging with the influencers who reach out to them (for whatever reason, good or bad).

Look for influencers who actually like and use your products. One influencer we interviewed shared a story of what equated to brand stalking: She received a random box of products — stuff she would never use — from an unfamiliar brand, and was then harassed by repeated phone calls and emails haranguing her for not doing her job. Situations such as this happen frequently and unnecessarily. When you identify a potential social influencer for your brand, get to know them first. Explore the purchasing behaviors and lifestyle needs reflected in their blogs, Facebook postings and tweets. If your brand doesn't fit, don't force it. As influencer Morgan Cogswell shares, "The products that I love ... I'll write a diatribe about. They don't have to twist my arm to do it. I just really love it and want other people to love it, too."

Don't fake it. When news broke that Nestlé was using child labor around the world in 2010, their brand advocates came to their rescue, swaying their followers to focus on the good Nestlé was doing with their worldwide formula initiatives. Nestlé then sought to amplify their influencers' success by sponsoring a blog conference. They invited numerous brand ambassadors to attend with the logical (yet misguided) assumption that it would generate a positive dialogue. The effort failed. Since Nestlé had sponsored the conference, it was seen as a manipulative and disingenuous public relations move. To be effective, influencers need to be perceived as independent, authentic fans of the brand. Learning from this experience, Nestlé now remains behind the scenes, personally rewarding — versus publicly sponsoring — their influencers to advocate on their behalf. Using this approach, Nestlé has since gone on to have many successful paid influencer marketing campaigns.

Compensate them. Really. Our study shows that 53% of influencers expect money and 20% expect free products. Overall, they expect their efforts to be rewarded by something of equivalent value, although that isn't necessarily money. It can be a prelaunch product sample or full sponsorship to attend a conference (We've found great success with both) — just as long as it is a fair value exchange. Kelby Carr, a self-proclaimed type-A parent who founded a blog bearing the same title, wrote a Facebook post that sums up responders' feelings: "I am not sure I can express how little interest I have in sharing a company's giveaway in exchange for... Oh right, in exchange for nothing." The post was met with 73 likes and cheers of agreement from other influencers.

Our research explores the different ways influencers are being rewarded and how they want to be rewarded. Whatever compensation you choose — money, free products, discounts, etc. — should align with your objectives, make good business sense and meet your influencers' stated expectations. For example, if you want to run a simple sampling campaign for a new product, prelaunch access is typically all you need. Your influencer receives the product before anyone else along with a request from you that he/she test and review it. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're seeking a production-quality video from an influencer with great reach and resonance, you can work with third parties like BlogHer or Sway Group (and many more) who have established pre-negotiated rates with "famous" influencers.

There are, of course, other factors that weigh into the balance of your company's relationship with brand advocates. The key thing to remember: When properly aligned, these factors set the foundation for a win for your brand (awareness, brand perception, sales), a win for your influencer (credibility, increased engagement, increased fan base) and a win for the rest of your customers (a product, service or point of view never considered before). So get to know them — well — and you'll soon be on your way to building a strong, authentic brand-influencer-consumer relationship.

What's a Working Dad to Do?

I was on a radio show last Father's Day to discuss the struggles men face in trying to balance work and family demands.

During the interview, the co-host, John Aberman, told a quick anecdote about a run-in he had when he was a rising corporate lawyer at a prestigious NYC firm. He was divorced and his ex-wife and his kids lived in London, so he flew there to see his kids every other weekend. After two monster weeks of work, he was heading out of the office to go to JFK one late Thursday afternoon when a more senior partner confronted him. "Where are you going?"

John explained that he'd bulked up the past two weeks to finish his work for his very satisfied client and that he was catching his flight to Heathrow to see his kids. The partner angrily responded, "Bullshit. You see your kids more than I do, and I live with mine. Besides I need you here tonight — and over the weekend." John pushed back and caught his flight, but shortly thereafter decided to give up his career as a lawyer. Life was just too short.

This is an extreme example, but many working fathers face similar pressures to conform to a traditional gender role that insists they be "all in" for work, regardless of achievement level and regardless of family responsibilities. And this is the case despite the facts that:

Dual-income, shared-care families are far more the norm than families with a single-earner and an at-home spouse.

Today's fathers spend three times as much time with their children and twice as much time on housework than dads did a generation ago, and

Men aspire to be even more involved in their families than they are.

As a result, it has been reported that dads experience at least as much work-family conflict as mothers, and that in some ways, men are facing a funhouse-mirror version of women's struggles to attain success at both work and at home.

The Flexibility Stigma Working Group at The Center for WorkLife Law at the UC Hastings College of the Law, consisting of researchers from over a dozen universities, just published a series of research studies in the excellent new issue of the Journal of Social Issues. About half of their articles focus on barriers men face in the workplace as they try to balance work and family demands. Among their findings:



While men value work flexibility, they are reluctant to seek out flexible work arrangements because of fears of being seen as uncommitted and unmanly, and expectations of potential career consequences. These fears, unfortunately, prove to be well-founded.

Fathers who engage in higher than average levels of childcare are subject to more workplace harassment (e.g., picked on for "not being man enough") and more general mistreatment (e.g., garden variety workplace aggression) as compared to their low-caregiving or childless counterparts.

Men requesting family leave are perceived as uncommitted to work and less masculine; these perceptions are linked to lower performance evaluations, increased risks of being demoted or downsized, and reduced pay and rewards.

Finally, men who interrupt their employment for family reasons earn significantly less after returning to work.

All in all, that's a pretty stark set of findings. What's a working father to do?

To me, the first step towards healthier workplace culture is to bring the issue of fathers' work-family out of the shadows and to make it a topic for discussion. Employers won't change if dads assume that employer hostility towards family demands is set in stone, and that they can only resort to working through holes in the system, using only informal arrangements or "invisible" accommodations.

If my generation of busy involved dads doesn't start making change happen, company cultures will remain unchallenged, and more and more dads will have to struggle seemingly alone. But change is possible, and there are many prominent examples of workplace cultures that are supportive of work-family.

So how can we start making changes? As Gandhi said, "we need to be the change we wish to see." If you have the security, flexibility, courage, and inclination (I recognize some may have more ability to do this at work than others), here are four things we working dads can do in our workplaces to make it easier for all of us to discuss and address our work-family concerns.

While at work, talk about your family and ask other men about theirs.

Reach out to some male work friends and start an informal group to discuss your lives outside of work. Have lunch together or grab a drink after work and talk.

Occasionally use work flexibility and let your male colleagues see you do so (e.g., tell people you are leaving early for a school event but are taking work home).

If and when your child is born, take paternity leave instead of just cobbling together a week of accumulated personal days. Many companies have an unused policy collecting dust on the shelf. Someone may as well be the pioneer.

Overall, we need to make it more normal for working fathers to discuss and address family issues. I know it is not easy to stand out. But these small steps can lay the groundwork for building more supportive workplace cultures.

Work-family is not a woman's issue. And it's not a man's issue. It's a family issue that affects us all. It's time we started talking about it.

Yes, Managing IT Is Your Job

In order to see the future more clearly, it's almost always helpful to look back — and this certainly goes for IT and its ever-increasing impact on operations, and ultimately on competitive advantage.

"Information Technology Changes the Way You Compete" was a trailblazing HBR article by Warren McFarlan back in the early 1980s. It told how American Airlines and others had introduced systems to help their customers choose their products and services. These "channel" systems helped steer business to American Airlines. Their strategic use of information technology (IT) presaged the dot.com boom of the 1990s when the Internet made this kind of online ordering commonplace. IT went from being a potential source of competitive advantage to being a necessity for competitive parity.

Similar waves of innovative applications of technology (e.g., ERP systems, RFID, knowledge management, business intelligence) have washed over organizations. As with American Airlines, each competitive advantage with IT is temporary. Competitors copy or suppliers commoditize to erase these advantages. The only competitive advantage comes though agility, keeping ahead of the competition, moving on to the next technology wave.

Yet with each wave, the criticality of IT to basic operations and delivery of service to customers continues to escalate. And the new waves of technology keep on coming: social, mobile, cloud, and Big Data promise to raise organizations' competitive capabilities and dependency on IT further. Every organization in every industry is becoming digital, and IT management is core to these organizations' delivery of services: bringing new functions and services to market faster; taking advantage of information, increasing transparency; reducing costs and increasing consistency and reliability by making processes faster, cheaper or less error-prone through automation; and increasing collaboration within the organization and with the entire value chain of partners, both forward to customers and backward to suppliers.

This trend toward ever more critical reliance on IT is not only transforming the idea and practice of corporate IT, but has disruptive operational implications for every manager. In a previous post, I described the shift in roles as ING, the Netherlands bank, moves from a traditional method of developing new systems in major steps — with design documents and functional specifications thrown over the wall — to making quick, small changes to systems (using "Agile Scrum"). Managers can no longer take months to develop requirements, then wait for IT, then tell IT that wasn't what they wanted. Now, instead, at ING they say, "Here's your team. You need to be in every daily or weekly Scrum cycle or sprint to decide if the work is meeting your needs." ING's change is less a paradigm shift in development (many companies have tried similar approaches such as prototyping in the 1980s and rapid application development in the 1990s), and more of a shift in responsibility for IT — from the IT organization to the core business.

Of course, the trend toward mission-critical reliance on IT is indeed shifting the actual role of the IT organization. In the old days (the 1980s and 1990s), the IT organization was all about managing the technology itself: choosing which vendor's product to buy, then cobbling the products together. In this earlier mode, the IT organization was opaque, inside its silo, taking orders, and controlling costs and risks. But the reality for most organizations today is much different: they are using IT to enable differentiated customer value, so the IT organization must be transparent, collaborative, and accountable for business results and service, with a higher tolerance for risk. And in most organizations, IT commodity services have been placed out of the company, so that the IT organization has been transformed from owning IT resources to procuring IT services and managing IT vendors.

So, where is managing IT for competitive advantage going next?

I believe that IT will become a more integrated operational component of delivering business results, as at ING. Instead of thinking about driving value from the perspective of IT, or HR, finance, sales, or operations, leadership teams will think about a problem they want to solve or a process they want to change, and then align the full breadth of services (IT, HR, operations) needed to accomplish it. Paul Dachsteiner, the Vice President of IS at ice hockey equipment maker Bauer Performance Sports, told me, "Instead of being called IT, I'd rather be lumped into a pool of resources called Business Support or Operations and not differentiate between departments. Just consume resources that help you drive to the desired business value." The IT organization's role will be to manage the delivery and servicing processes, and to assure that the jigsaw pieces that the local fiefdoms in the business develop can fit together.

This will mean that business executives will need to continue to build their comfort with managing IT more directly, instead of relegating it to a "black box" or separate organizational silo, and throwing requirements over the wall. My friend Craig Bickel, Principal at IT strategy consultancy WGroup told me that: "While functional responsibilities will remain specialized, innovation, implementation, and value realization must be shared between the business and IT." And IT will need to continuously reduce its spending on "keeping the lights on" to free up resources and mindshare for innovation and problem solving.

To sum up, how "IT Changes the Way You Compete" is the same in many ways today as it was 30 years ago, as new waves of innovative technology wash over organizations. What's different today is that these successive waves of tech applications have left every organization with a critical core of digital capabilities. Now that IT is essential to the execution of nearly every job, as we move into the future, managing IT will be an even bigger part of your job.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





A Board Director's Perspective on What IT Has to Get Right
IT Doesn't Matter (to CEOs)
The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer
Google's CIO on How to Make Your IT Department Great

Setting Up a Crowdsourcing Effort? Read This First.

Since Jeff Howe first coined the term in a 2006 Wired article, "crowdsourcing" has garnered extensive media buzz and investment dollars. It has earned praise from those who view it as a digital version of the industrial revolution, criticism from some who fear it will cheapen or commoditize their craft and skepticism from those who don't fully understand the mechanics. Frankly, all of these viewpoints have merit.

I've spent the better part of a decade in crowdsourcing — five years as CEO of uTest, an angel investor in crowdsourced CAD firm, GrabCAD — and have consulted for several crowd-driven firms and reviewed dozens of crowd-based business plans for VCs. During that experience, I've developed my own views and insights into what makes crowdsourcing work best. And of course, our uTest experience has honed those views. And so, as we celebrate uTest's 5th birthday, we felt it was a good opportunity to reflect on some of those hard-earned crowdsourcing lessons:

1. Find the right fit: Whether you're considering launching a crowdsourcing business or finding a way to implement crowdsourcing into your existing organization, it's critically important to consider the best way to structure your crowd to achieve the best results. There are various factors that must be examined: Is your crowd performing on-site vs. remote work? Will your crowd compete in single-winner contests vs. multi-winner projects? Are the projects one-off contests or recurring in nature? What incentives can be put in place to ensure engagement and success from the community?

In my experience, spaces that enable multiple winners to perform remote work on a recurring basis are a better fit for building high-growth, sustainable crowdsourcing businesses. Going remote eliminates geographic restrictions, thus opening up the community to anyone with internet access. But why is it important that the community work on a recurring basis? And why should there be multiple winners? Let me put it this way: Imagine recruiting and training a team at your own company for a long-term engagement. Now imagine telling them that only one of them would get paid. Do you think this would help with retention? Do you think your clients would be happy with a new team for every project? Probably not.

2. Crowdsourcing is not enough: Tell a prospect or potential customer that you're a crowdsourcing company and — if you're lucky — you might capture their interest (or perhaps just a polite "ah, cool"). Most of the time, this is the point at which they tune you out. Why? Because your prospective customers don't care how you do something; they care about what you're doing and, more importantly, how it will benefit them.

So never lose sight of what matters to your customers — it's about what crowdsourcing enables them to achieve. In our case, our crowd enables customers to test their web and mobile apps under real world conditions (devices, OSes, browsers, languages), just like their end users will experience. In short, no one will write you a check for being a crowdsourcing company (well, maybe some VCs will) — they care about how it enables them to solve their problems.

3. Engaging a community: Treat the crowd as customers. Appreciate them. Understand that you have two sets of "customers" — your clients and your community. You must provide service above and beyond to both sets of constituents. Properly training and communicating is one thing (and a necessary step). But proactively delighting your community is as important as delighting your customers. Proactively providing our community of testers with opportunities to grow — including networking events, free training, games, awards and career advice — is vital to the overall nurturing of the community.

4. Incentivizing a community: Members of a community care primarily about three forms of currency: money, reputation and increasing their skill set (usually in that order). If you want the best workers in your space to join your community and stay, you must create a path for their growth in these areas. Higher pay is important but what about enabling them to share their knowledge with the rest of the community as a mentor? The one thing you cannot afford is for your valuable members to outgrow you — which happens to a shockingly high percentage of crowdsourcing firms. That doesn't mean stifling their growth, it means empowering them in their professional journey and growing with them.

5. Supply follows demand: While vetting, building and serving a vibrant community is critically important, these things cannot be done instead of building an effective demand generation engine — whether through sales, marketing and/or reseller strategy. At uTest, we like to remind ourselves that, sometimes, the best thing we can do to create opportunities for our tester community is to win our next big customer.

Ultimately, this balance between creating new effectiveness or efficiencies for customers while celebrating and improving the lives of your community is the only way to create lasting, defensible value for all stakeholders. It's harder than most entrepreneurs think, but for those who crack the code in their space, the rewards are great.

Help Your Intern Get a Full-Time Job

Alex, a summer intern in public relations, found herself facing the end of a successful summer internship without the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Alex was smart, talented and well regarded by her colleagues. Her agency, however, simply didn't have a full time job to offer her at the end of her internship.

So Alex's manager took it upon herself to help Alex find a full-time job. Unfortunately, she's the exception, not the rule. Only 37% of students say internships are a good job search resource.

What can you do to help your intern find a job? Here are four options to keep in mind as summer comes to a close:

Open your Rolodex. The first thing Alex's manager did was give Alex a short list of high-quality names of friends and colleagues in the business. She encouraged her to reach out directly and use her name as a reference. One of those names, the president of another PR agency in Chicago, passed along Alex's resume to an employee, who invited Alex in for an interview. She wowed in her interview and the rest is history.

Make introductions. Perhaps you're willing to take it a few steps further. If you've got a stellar intern, why not reach out directly to colleagues or clients who you think might benefit from a bright and motivated new grad? Or invite your intern along for a working lunch or business meeting — and sing her praises on the spot. You can play matchmaker in the moment and give your intern an opportunity to interact with a potential new boss right then and there.

Write a stellar recommendation. Before you get caught up in life-after-interns, take time to sit down and document the great work your intern has done. Take note of both her individual accomplishments and her contributions to the team. You can also weigh in on her future potential — why will she be an outstanding member of any team going forward? What does she bring to the table that you don't typically see in young twenty-somethings? And while you're at it, feel free to post a snippet of that recommendation on LinkedIn for the whole world to see.

Act as a mentor. Rena, a student at UCLA, spent her summer internship with a boutique financial services firm on the East Coast. She excelled in every way possible, but by the end of the summer she realized finance wasn't for her. Her boss Ken took the news in stride. He offered to stay in touch and told her to keep him in mind once she realized what she did want to do — he'd be happy to help in any way possible. Three years later, Rena counts on Ken as one of her most trusted advisors. He has counseled her through career ups and downs, provided referrals and introductions, and continued to support her as she moves through the ranks of the fashion industry.

Remember, there's more at the end of the rainbow than just a full-time offer. If you don't have a job to give, think instead about sharing your network, endorsing your candidate or acting as a mentor — all of which could prove equally or more beneficial over the long-term.

Previously: Hiring an Intern? What to Do Before the Summer Starts and Your Summer Intern Is Here. Now What?

How To Build a High-Performing Digital Team

Digital skills are in high demand and short supply. But first things first — how do you define a digital team when nearly everything is digital?

Digital teams are responsible for developing, testing, and implementing a strategy to reach and engage target audiences through digital channels like web, mobile, and social. While other groups may draft the messaging, a digital team works hand-in-hand with marketing and product leaders to curate and create digital-first content strategy. Most often reporting through the CEO or CMO, digital teams may also be responsible for implementing cross-channel analytics, surfacing relevant emerging trends, and providing comprehensive guidelines. As institutions have weathered the seismic communications shift from managed brand broadcast to real-time community interaction, digital teams have stepped in to manage listening platforms and identify opportunities for engagement. Finally a successful digital team will build a strong partnership with IT, who owns critical technology infrastructure and associated services.

Now that we've defined the team, how the hell do you hire for it? Your general hiring practices still apply: intelligence, energy, and above all integrity. In my 15+ years building digital capabilities in startups, agencies, and the enterprise, and most recently as the Chief Digital Officer at Harvard University, I've seen some consistent traits emerge. Here are six attributes to consider when sourcing talent for a high-performing digital team:

1. People who are omnivores, not vegans. Digital is part technology, part content strategy, part marketing art — and science. People who very strongly identify with only one piece of the equation will struggle on a high-performing digital team. Over the past decade skills within digital teams have merged even further. For example, years ago there was a tidy division between the wireframe creators and front-end developers. As development has become quicker and less costly, more prototyping occurs in code. People who are used to throwing their deliverable over the transom and clocking out — a familiar paradigm in print production — may have trouble tolerating the shifting sands of digital.

2. People who understand a website launch is only the beginning. Focusing solely on a website launch is a bit like planning for your wedding more than your marriage. Smart project managers and content strategists will force you to create personas and walk through use-case scenarios that test workflow and resource assumptions. "Who updates that feature? How? Where does that video clip come from?" Team members should all be aware of desired analytics results like increased sales or reduced transaction steps that will be measured at intervals post launch. Here's a test: if the job candidate can speak compellingly about the launch collateral but less than fluently about the digital product's six-month analytics proof points, beware.

3. People who recognize that design is a differentiator. A unique idea for a digital product or service is surprisingly rare, and design excellence is often the differentiator. Understanding of design is not only a belief in the value of a strong initial concept, but also adherence to the belief that multiple small design decisions add up to a significant user experience impact. This requires a level of attention to detail, and a belief in the value of microinteractions. Everyone on your digital team — not just the designers — should be able to wax effusive about a digital product design they love, and point to the specific attributes that make the design work.

4. People who are comfortable with uncertainty and can act with agility. Everyone who claims to have a five year digital strategy is lying. You aren't shopping for team members who can predict the future — you are looking for people who can make smart decisions based on limited information, and cut their losses when they fail. Changes can start from the technology, like Google releasing Penguin or Twitter changing its API. Or change can originate from the product team, who sees a usage pattern shift and needs to change course. In any event, a bias toward smart-step action rather than becoming mired in analysis is vital for a digital team.

5. People who eat the dog food, willingly and visibly. Digital team members do digital stuff. They put their band's recordings online. They write and share online book reviews. They participate in social networks from Spotify to LinkedIn. Skeptics take note: it takes less time to write a tweet than to tie a Windsor knot. Of course, the greater the level of responsibility in the workplace, the less time people have to create content and engage online. And gender and culture matter in the level and kinds of participation. But you'll find that the best candidates make some time for their digital lives, to see firsthand the benefit and the costs.

6. People who bring varied perspectives, earned from experience. Digital's new compared to print, but it's been around long enough for strong candidates to have work experience that's varied in both role and organization. Look for people with experience delivering software product, toiling on the agency side, and juggling on the client side. Software team experience will give them a thick skin and an always-be-shipping mindset; agency dynamics will teach flexibility and how to handle a crunch; and client roles will provide organizational, stakeholder, and vendor management skills. Varied experience can lead to a kind of multilingualism, making team members able to view problems from others' perspectives and find creative solutions.

Hiring is hard. Building a team is harder. Each addition is a potential win for the culture, or a proverbial bad apple. I've found that using your hiring best practices, and zeroing in on the attributes above results in a digital team that delivers.

A History of the World in Three Sentences

A study of 12 countries from 950 to 1850 shows that although Europe at first lagged well behind India and China in numerous technologies, such as cotton processing and textile spinning, its economic development leapt ahead because of 3 factors. Elites were legally blocked from expropriating property; contracts could be enforced; and the West developed cultural emphases on independent thinking, secularism, and saving money, fostering the growth of technology and human capital, say Jakob B. Madsen of Monash University in Australia and Eric Yan of National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Meanwhile, India's technological growth was hampered by its caste system and China's by its civil-service examinations, which selected candidates for administrative positions but, in the view of some scholars, supported the emperor's power and led to a rigidity in the country's intellectual life.

Educate Everyone About Second-Generation Gender Bias

More than 25 years ago the social psychologist Faye Crosby stumbled on a surprising phenomenon: Most women are unaware of having personally been victims of gender discrimination and deny it even when it is objectively true and they see that women in general experience it.

Many women have worked hard to take gender out of the equation — to simply be recognized for their skills and talents. Moreover, the existence of gender bias in organizational policies and practices may suggest that they have no power to determine their own success. When asked what might be holding women back in their organizations, they say:

"It's nothing overt. I just feel less of a connection, either positive or negative, with the guys I work with. So sometimes I seem to have difficulty getting traction for my ideas."

"I look around and see that my male colleagues have P&L responsibility and most of us are in staff roles. I was advised to make the move to a staff role after the birth of my second child. It would be easier, I was told. But now I recognize that there is no path back to the line."

"My firm has the very best intentions when it comes to women. But it seems every time a leadership role opens up, women are not on the slate. The claim is made that they just can't find women with the right skill set and experience."

These statements belie the notion that gender bias is absent from these women's work lives. Second-generation bias does not require an intent to exclude; nor does it necessarily produce direct, immediate harm to any individual. Rather, it creates a context — akin to "something in the water" — in which women fail to thrive or reach their full potential. Feeling less connected to one's male colleagues, being advised to take a staff role to accommodate family, finding oneself excluded from consideration for key positions — all these situations reflect work structures and practices that put women at a disadvantage.

Without an understanding of second-generation bias, people are left with stereotypes to explain why women as a group have failed to achieve parity with men: If they can't reach the top, it is because they "don't ask," are "too nice," or simply "opt out." These messages tell women who have managed to succeed that they are exceptions and women who have experienced setbacks that it is their own fault for failing to be sufficiently aggressive or committed to the job.

We find that when women recognize the subtle and pervasive effects of second-generation bias, they feel empowered, not victimized, because they can take action to counter those effects. They can put themselves forward for leadership roles when they are qualified but have been overlooked. They can seek out sponsors and others to support and develop them in those roles. They can negotiate for work arrangements that fit both their lives and their organizations' performance requirements. Such understanding makes it easier for women to "lean in."

Second-generation bias is embedded in stereotypes and organizational practices that can be hard to detect, but when people are made aware of it, they see possibilities for change. In our work with leadership development programs, we focus on a "small wins" approach to change. In one manufacturing company, a task force learned that leaders tended to hire and promote people, mainly men, whose backgrounds and careers resembled their own. They had good reasons for this behavior: Experienced engineers were hard to find, and time constraints pressured leaders to fill roles quickly.

But after recognizing some of the hidden costs of this practice — high turnover, difficulty attracting women to the company, and a lack of diversity to match that of customers — the company began to experiment with small wins. For example, some executives made a commitment to review the job criteria for leadership roles. One male leader said, "We write the job descriptions — the list of capabilities — for our ideal candidates. We know that the men will nominate themselves even if they don't meet all the requirements; the women would hold back. Now we look for the capabilities that are needed in the role, not some unrealistic ideal. We have hired more women in these roles, and our quality has not suffered in the least."

In another case, participants in a leadership development program noticed that men seemed to be given more strategic roles, whereas women were assigned more operational ones, signaling that they had lower potential. The participants proposed that the company provide clear criteria for developmental assignments, be transparent about how high potential was evaluated, and give direction as to what experiences best increased a person's potential. Those actions put more women in leadership roles.

This is an excerpt from the September HBR article "Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers."

Women in Leadership
An HBR Insight Center





Women: Let's Stop Allowing Race and Age to Divide Us
Tell Me Something I Don't Know About Women in the Workplace
A Fairer Way to Make Hiring and Promotion Decisions
"Feminine" Values Can Give Tomorrow's Leaders an Edge

Solving the Law Firm Gender Gap Problem

Decades of studies have demonstrated that male law firm partners earn considerably more than their female colleagues. Even when data is controlled for such variables as billable hours, origination, seniority, and law firm size, the gender gap persists. And yet women have been 40-50% of law school students for decades. This is not a pipeline problem; this is a discrimination problem.

The Gender Equity Task Force of the American Bar Association (of which I am a member) was created to recommend ways to eliminate gender bias in the legal profession, with a particular focus on the disparity in compensation between men and women partners. This month, we released several publications to help eliminate this gap, including one that is directed to law firm leaders, Closing the Gap: A Road Map for Achieving Gender Pay Equity in Law Firm Partner Compensation, of which I was the principal author.

As the report details, the roots of pay inequity run deep. The easy answer — that women earn less on a comparative basis because of the impact of their family responsibilities — is simply wrong. Women earn less because of the complex interplay between compensation system factors and the effects of unconscious bias in that process.

Moreover, the axiom that "compensation drives behavior" permeates the ways in which partners seek credit for business generation, a key factor in most law firm compensation systems. Often, that behavior includes active efforts to exclude their colleagues from sharing in that credit. Compensation committees are generally reluctant to use their authority as a tool to combat this problem and create a more level playing field. This allows unconscious biases to thrive.

Closing the Gap proposes recommendations that can be incorporated into any existing compensation system to eliminate the barriers that stand in the way of equal pay for female partners. Moreover, adopting these measures would not just help women — it would result in a fairer and more transparent compensation process for all. Some of these recommendations include:

Ensure there is a critical mass of diverse members on the compensation committee. Research demonstrates that the presence of only one or two women on a decision-making body can lead to marginalization of the minority participants. Further inducement for this recommendation can be found in studies that show companies with more women in key leadership roles and board positions out-perform their competitors.
Develop systems to promote fair and accurate allocation of billing and origination credit. To quote from the report: "The current 'underground' system for the allocation of credit for various roles in client origination, service, and retention that exists in so many firms today is a major impediment to achieving compensation equality." Equitable compensation cannot be achieved without systems that discourage client hoarding, promote cross-marketing among practice groups, and incentivize partners to share credit fairly among those who help attract and retain clients.
Implement formal client succession protocols. Women partners in law firms are frequently excluded from the inheritance of client work from senior partners who retire and pass their client relationships to younger male colleagues. Client management in a sophisticated business should not be subject to individual lawyers making decisions about client credit and succession. This practice is also not in the best interests of clients who should have a role in deciding which lawyers will have this important — and financially rewarding — role in the future.
Develop a process to resolve allocation disputes promptly and equitably. Research demonstrates that female partners are frequently excluded from credit allocation, and have even reported being bullied and intimidated. Firms should create a diverse oversight committee to review and resolve credit disputes, ensuring transparency and accountability in the process.
Implement training for all involved in the evaluation and compensation process. Unconscious bias can skew our judgments of others. Training can help individuals recognize their own biases and can help organizations put in place systems to help override the effects of these biases.
Engage the client in gender equity. Clients have a tremendous opportunity to use their economic power to ensure diversity on their matters and the fair allocation of credit for their work. Law firms should welcome their involvement as part of a client retention strategy that can also help close the gender gap.

Law firms will better survive the difficult economic climate by ensuring a culture where economic growth and inclusive opportunities are linked through engaged leadership and transparent systems. Then we will see the equal opportunities that women have long sought in the profession.

Women in Leadership
An HBR Insight Center











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The Danger of Wellness Programs: Don't Become the Next Penn State

Penn State University's wellness program has become every human resources director's worst nightmare: national news. Partly this is because two of the school's professors — Matthew Woessner and Brian Curran — did a much better job organizing their colleagues in opposition to the wellness program than, for example, CVS employees did when they were subject to a similarly intrusive program.

But also partly this was because Woessner and Curran struck a chord with millions of employees everywhere who have started posting similar stories of invasion of privacy, misinterpreted lab values, unnecessary test expenses, and even loss of low-cost insurance. As these disempowered employees see it, wellness has become another tool to bludgeon them into toeing the corporate line.

Wellness is supposed to "empower" employees but instead did just the opposite at Penn State. Ironically, the only thing that has empowered Penn State employees has been fighting back against this misdirected wellness tyranny. Instead of creating what one of Penn State's health care suppliers called a "culture of wellness," Penn State has created a culture of resentment.

This whole slow-motion debacle would have been completely avoidable at many points in the last week or two... if only Penn State's administration had had access to a search engine and a calculator.

The search engine would have told it that even the major academic proponents of conventional wellness programs don't think they save money, that vendors make up savings numbers, that the screens they insisted upon can't even theoretically save money and a whole body of research opposes them, and that all the extra preventive doctor visits they required were useless. (The search engine also would have told the school's administrators that this scheme was highly unpopular among their employees.)

The calculator would have told them that their 43,000 covered lives probably incurred a total of only about 100 wellness-sensitive medical inpatient events, like heart attacks, of which a few might have taken place in people who were not previously diagnosed and were therefore at least theoretically avoidable, saving the tiniest fraction of their healthcare spending. But we'll never know because they embarked on a prevention jihad against their employees without knowing the value of what they were trying to prevent.

Ironically the worst thing that could have happened to Penn State financially would have been if all the employees did exactly what Penn State wanted them do to — go to the doctor and get more preventive medical care, leading to more diagnoses, testing, and procedures.

How to Avoid Penn State's Mistakes

Here are two clip-and-save questions that, if answered and addressed correctly, will keep your wellness program off the front page:



If you're a general, would you rather have troops with high morale or low cholesterol?

Should wellness be something you do TO your employees or FOR your employees?

If not already self-evident, the answer to the second question becomes obvious in the context of the answer to the first. As an HR department head, don't be distracted by your benefits consultants or wellness vendors, who advocate more medical activity, yielding them more profits by making your department the center of attention. Your job is to enhance performance, not to interfere with it. Sure, sometimes you should interfere — when there is a major issue or major money on the line. This is exactly the opposite situation: There is no upside in playing doctor with your employees.

With these two questions in mind, catalog everything you are doing in the name of wellness. Are these initiatives being done "to" or "for" your employees? Your initiatives should be offers, not threats. Subsidizing healthy cafeteria choices, matching personal fitness expenditures, and sponsoring company sports teams are offers. Making people complete intrusive forms and line up to get blood drawn to be diagnosed by non-physicians are threats.

This wellness mania now affecting most companies suggests that HR departments need more C-suite supervision. The C-suite would never undertake any initiative without an internet search, a calculator, or concern about the impact on employee morale. It's time that HR departments operated the same way.