Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1585

Does Using a Smartphone Make You Less Assertive?

In an experiment, people who had been using smartphone-sized iPod Touch devices were 47% less likely than desktop users to get up to try to find out why a researcher hadn't come back after leaving the room to fetch paperwork so that participants could be paid. And of those who did take action, the iPod Touch users took 44% longer than desktop users to get up and look for the researcher. The research suggests that your hunched posture as you use a smartphone-sized device for just a few minutes makes you less likely to engage in power-related behaviors than people who have been using desktop computers, say research fellow Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School.

The Faustian Bargain of Online Services

Three years after I wrote an article on the Athens 2004 wiretapping case, which involved Greek government officials, I found somebody snooping on my own email as I served the next Greek administration. (The concept of irony was, after all, invented by the Greeks.)

Guarding our privacy is becoming increasingly difficult (some say futile), even for a technically sophisticated and security-conscious person (and even if service providers don't hand out our personal data to governments on request). Yet the complexity of cloud-based technology also helped me catch the perpetrator.

In November 2009 I took leave from my academic position to serve as the Secretary General for Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. Six months later I found out that others were reading my email without my permission: the result of a combination of misplaced trust, a shared password, the cloud service provider's aggregation of services, and my misunderstanding of the working of the particular cloud-based email system.

The platform the perpetrator used to read my email was a cloud-based email provider corporate account. It was set up by the Minister's team for issuing ministry email addresses to his reports. As I was already using a different address in my department, I set up the ministry-wide account to "forward and delete" all incoming messages to my main account. I assumed this would have kept the ministry account empty. While busy fighting the Greek debt crisis, we were also issued smartphones so that we could respond to email on a 24/7 basis. At that time I decided to move the calendar that my assistant was then editing in a spreadsheet onto the cloud-based platform to interoperate with the smartphone. The correct approach would have been to set up an account for my assistant and give her full access to my calendar.

However, because we had run out of accounts, I gave her my ministry account's password. I reasoned that my assistant was unlikely to read my (transient, I thought) email, because it would require overtly changing the email's forwarding settings. This amounted to crossing the line between, say, browsing what was lying on my desk and rummaging through my drawers. Under the system I thought I had set up, all emails in the main account would be forwarded and deleted immediately so that my assistant wouldn't be able to read them, for I hadn't shared with her the password to the account the messages were being forwarded to.

On the night of May 14th, however, I got an email notifying me that I had used the link "Open as a document" to view an attachment, and that the provider had helpfully saved the attachment as a cloud-based document. I spent half an hour trying to understand what this message meant, until at last it dawned on me that somebody was reading my emails through my cloud-based account.

Instead of "deleting and forwarding," the service actually copied the forwarded emails to the Trash folder. Emails that the perpetrator had read appeared in grey; it was obvious she was reading the juicy stuff, ignoring boring messages like calendar notifications. I also found that all the email I had sent through the email provider's server was also copied in the Sent folder, a surprising behavior for such a service.

Identifying my nosy assistant was easier than expected. The email system provided details of the account's activity, which allowed me to pinpoint, through the so-called IP address, the snooper's locations on the internet: One within our organization, and another from a residential broadband connection. By sending a booby-trapped email to each suspect I obtained a matching location identifier and thereby the perpetrator's identity.

The incident reaffirmed my view that guarding your privacy and the confidentiality of your data on the cloud is nigh impossible. After a couple of months on my new job I disabled my profile on a social networking site after becoming inundated with "friend" requests from people in my department. Despite the fact I wasn't actively using the site to share private information, I didn't feel confident about what accepting a friend request meant for my privacy. For instance, was I sharing information about event invitations I accepted with all my friends? I didn't know, it wasn't easy to find out, and I therefore decided that the safest option would be to disable my profile.

Similarly, it turned out I had misunderstood how the email provider's "delete and forward" really worked. I can easily reason about the confidentiality of data on my computer's hard disk. Whole disk encryption and a carefully-selected password mean that it requires non-trivial effort to get at the data I store there, while sharing a file requires explicit action on my part, like emailing it or putting it on a USB stick. In contrast, with the cloud-based email offering, merely protecting information requires effort. It required me to order and pay for a separate account, correctly understand that the "delete and forward" option would copy my sent messages to a folder, accept the risks of having a common password protect both my email and my calendar, and perhaps even more.

For the convenience of using an online service that we don't have to manage, we trade our privacy and risk the confidentiality of our data. To me, this looks like a Faustian bargain.

Given the ubiquity and practicality of online services, what are our options? Here's my take. Those of us who are IT-savvy can adopt solutions that don't rely on the cloud. For instance, you can store your private email messages, contacts, calendar, and photos on your PC and use your home's network to synchronize your various devices. (Keep in mind that you're then responsible for securing your data by taking regular off-site backups and keeping your data always encrypted.) If messing around with computers isn't your cup of tea, limit the data you share through web services. Consider all data you upload to the web as something that will sooner-or-later become public. Don't bad-mouth anyone on an online forum, and if you have some photos of your wild youth hidden at the bottom of a drawer, just keep them there. This stance also allows you to relax regarding services where everything is open by default. I'm therefore perfectly happy to share my thoughts on Twitter or publish open-source projects on GitHub, because I've decided I've got nothing to hide there. Also, use social networking sites on your own terms. For instance, although I use LinkedIn as a way to keep up with the details of my contacts, I clarify on my profile that I don't read direct messages sent through it and I don't play the endorsements game.

For larger organizations the challenge is more difficult, because their interests are not aligned with those of their employees. IT departments want to keep data secure, while staff simply want to do their job in a convenient fashion. Educating users about the perils of web-based services can only work up to a point. It's more productive for an organization to actually offer secure attractive alternatives to the offerings it wants its employees to avoid. For instance, an IT department can deploy a private cloud using open-source software, such as ownCloud. As a counterexample, I recently heard an employee lamenting that people were sharing documents with sensitive data through a cloud-based service, because the IT department wasn't providing them with a common file storage area. Determined IT staff can also arrange to lock-out particularly risky web sites and services, but there are always way to circumvent such restrictions.

Service providers should also chip in. As embarrassing leaks from banks and spooks have amply demonstrated, keeping data secure isn't easy, even for dedicated pros. Yet there are some technical solutions that can make cloud-based offerings less vulnerable. One involves putting the user in control. If most user data is kept encrypted on the provider's premises and is only decrypted with your password on your device, it's much less likely for millions of juicy records to find their way to a crook's (or Big Brother's) hands. If a conversation or chat session is encrypted on your device and decrypted only when it reaches the person you're communicating with, it's difficult for someone to eavesdrop on your conversation on a whim. Also, those providers that need to look at your data to serve ads or recommend films and books, should aggressively anonymize data and segregate them from personal details. Finally, providers who thrive by letting you inform your friends on the color of the bra you're wearing should make as easy for you to verify and control exactly who sees what as you can do in the physical world.

So, there are ways to control our online data. Not all endings of Faust result in his eternal damnation, and neither should online service adoption necessarily condemn us to digital grief.

Make Time for Growth Assignments in Your Daily Work

Your job probably includes some responsibility for researching new trends or dreaming up innovative ideas. Lucky you! Alas, if you're like most people, you probably never feel like you have enough time to devote to those important projects. Often the activities with the most learning opportunity get squeezed out of the schedule by project meetings, administrative work, e-mail, and other day-to-day items.

Of course you need to set aside some time to simply do those tasks. But if you think more strategically about the way you tackle the creative growth assignments, you can find the time to work on them and increase your personal fulfillment — as well as your value to your firm. Here's how:

Step 1: Find the Growth Opportunities

Brainstorm the development opportunities that either currently fall within the scope of your role or could if you asked for them. To come up with possibilities, try these techniques:

Look over your job description for activities that you would love to pursue, but haven't gotten to yet.
Think about some of the dreams that you had for your current position before you started. What did you hope to accomplish?
Set up a lunch or coffee with people in similar positions, either at your company or at a different company, and ask how they invest in learning.
Survey your current area of influence and jot down opportunities for improvement.

Step 2: Look for the Greatest Value

Once you've determined what types of development you could pursue within your position, you'll need to decide where to focus. One of the best ways to do this is to look at the value created by additional investment. For example, you may find it interesting to research best practices on internal communication systems, but improving communication between external customers and internal staff may produce a much higher return on investment by increasing client retention and sales. Evaluate each of your ideas in terms of the value generated for your organization. Then, decide on one or two that have the most potential to stretch your skills and have a meaningful organizational impact. (This important step will not only help you to focus but also assist you in explaining your reasoning to your boss.)

Step 3: Clarify the Related Actions

Part of the fun — and challenge — of development projects is that you get to define the path to reach your end destination. But if you just have stretches of a couple of hours — or less — to make meaningful progress, you should always have a clear sense of the next few steps on your projects. I recommend jotting them down in a place you can find later.

For example, if you have the goal of researching other companies' website brand strategy in preparation for a redesign, give yourself these kind of directions:

Find the top five highest traffic websites in our niche using Alexa.com
Look at:

The structure of the pages
The overall design
The imagery
The color
The typography
The messaging
The opportunities for customer engagement
The advertisements
The checkout process.

Make note of anything that might work for our company and take some screen captures.
Present findings to our redesign team.

By writing out exactly which actions you need to take to move forward on the ultimate goal of a redesign, you make it much easier to use spare minutes effectively.

Step 4: Decide on Acceptable Minimums

For both myself and my time coaching clients, I've found that it's too easy to keep moving important, non-urgent activities from week-to-week, because even when you have them on your calendar, you know you can put them off without major short-term repercussions. To remedy this situation, "acceptable minimums" do wonders. Here's what that means: For the one or two key areas for development in your job, decide on the minimum amount of time you want to spend on the related actions each week. For example, you could decide that you spend at least two hours a week moving ahead on the website redesign project and one hour a week reading about trends in your industry. Then, either make these blocks of time recurring events or schedule them in each week. (Ideally these blocks of time fall early in the day and early in the week so they don't fall off the edges of your workday.) Although an hour or two may seem like too short a time to make real progress, you'll amaze yourself at how much you can get done when you invest your time consistently in these areas. Plus if you have more time certain weeks, you can always do more.

With the right strategies, your daily work can provide consistent opportunities for growth and development. Now's the perfect time to head over to your work calendar to book an appointment with personal growth.

If Your Company Is in Crisis, Escape by Going Forward

Good management often requires that you go against all your instincts because, according to my experience, what we call instincts are often unreliable and even dangerous.



Consider what happens when a company gets into trouble. Managers typically respond by reverting to doing what they feel most comfortable with. In nearly every situation, what they feel comfortable with is cutting costs. Therefore, they'll lay people off, cut benefits, and so on.



They understand that these actions impose harsh penalties on hard-working, willing employees who almost certainly bear no responsibility for the crisis. But, they argue, the company is in crisis mode and everybody needs to take their share of the burden. Besides, what else can they do?



The employees, for their part, fall into a similar trap. They freeze and revert to doing what they know best and feel most comfortable doing — more of the same, in other words.



If you look at almost any company in Greece today, where economic conditions are exceedingly harsh, you will see this dynamic in action.



And yet, if you were to ask people at these same companies, managers and employees alike would almost certainly agree that any solution to the company's problems involves doing something different. In Greek we call it "escape by going forward".



So what might that involve?



At one company I know a salesman managed to close a deal with an upmarket hotel chain in the Aegean that they were supplying with linen by accepting part payment in nights at the hotel. The company then offered the bartered nights to top performers in lieu of bonuses, including the salesman who thought of it. The company made a sale it would otherwise have failed to land, its people got to have an attractive perk, and the hotel got some occupancy.



Another company I worked with, a supplier of electric appliances, invested in retraining. Faced with empty showrooms they decided to get their store salesmen to go door to door with cheap offers in middle class districts. This is well known to be a hard way to land a sale and the sales force needed some coaching. So the company hired three experienced door-to-door salesmen to provide it by going out on the streets with the store salesmen.

The store salesman found it hard to adjust. One of them described to me to me how ashamed he felt when knocking on people's doors. But the coach was there to remind him about the empty showroom and to show how to make a pitch on someone's front doorstep. It took three days before the salesman was able to muster up the courage to go out by himself, and a week before his first solo sale but what a deep satisfaction it was!



Outreach also becomes important in a time of crisis. Another company I know organized an evening cocktail-and-lecture series for employees and their spouses on the economics of crisis in an effort to make people understood that the bad times would eventually come to an end.



Details also matter. Managers at this company would greet their subordinates by saying "better day" instead of "good day." There was a contest for the best joke of the week. Gallows humor, however, was strictly prohibited; the spirit of communication was not around adapting or living with the economic harshness but rather around identifying opportunity and reasons to celebrate. The company wanted to encourage innovation, change and cohesion rather than just survival. It also offered Spanish language lessons and, in a while, people were greeting each other in Spanish.



Obviously not all these gestures worked, and some were even rather silly. But overall, management actions of the kind I'm describing tend to increase solidarity within the organizations. The result is a lot more positive knowledge sharing and innovations that more than justify the relatively small financial commitments involved.

One Nation, Incentivized and Disincentivized

Having a baby in the United States, The New York Times reported this week, is more expensive than pretty much anywhere else on earth. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what Americans should want, as a public policy matter. It's going to take lots more babies growing up into productive, healthy adults to get us through the country's long-term Social Security and Medicare funding difficulties.

The high cost of childbirth in the U.S. is the product of a mix of private- and public-sector decisions, not a straight-out result of government policy. But it nonetheless got a few of my HBR colleagues and me thinking about what strange and not-so-strange economic incentives Americans face relative to citizens of other nations. So here is a mostly unscientific Independence Day list — compiled with lots of help from the databases of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a.k.a. the OECD, a.k.a. the rich nations' club — of what sort of behaviors we're collectively encouraging and discouraging.

1. We don't want our fellow citizens to have kids. It's not just the high cost of childbirth. In general, U.S. families get less help with the cost of child-rearing (in the form of tax breaks, government services, and cash handouts) than those in almost any other affluent nation. On the OECD's list, only Mexico and South Korea devote a smaller percentage of GDP to family benefits. The U.S. also has just about the least supportive parental-leave policies in the developed world. Of course, we still do have kids, and the fertility rate in the U.S. is above the OECD average. So either (a) financial incentives don't matter all that much or (b) for lots of societal and other reasons (we have more space, for example) Americans are inclined to have more kids, even though government policies discourage it. I think it's b, and the financial incentives are beginning to win — the U.S. fertility rate is now barely above the OECD average, and some surprising countries — Sweden, Norway, France, Great Britain — are now producing more babies per capita than we are.

2. We don't want our fellow citizens to go to college. Higher education costs students more in the U.S. than anywhere else in the OECD. We also have especially great universities, and lots of financial aid. But the general trend has one of skyrocketing tuition at both private and public institutions, and aid for students that, while rising, hasn't kept up. Sure enough, the level of educational attainment in the U.S., once the highest in the world, has slid toward the middle of the OECD pack.

3. We want our fellow citizens to drive a lot. Among OECD countries, only Mexico levies lower taxes on gasoline and diesel. Then again, only Mexico and South Korea levy lower taxes overall, but the disparity on fuel taxes is much sharper than on the rest of the tax code. And I would imagine the U.S. spends less on public transit than other wealthy countries, but I've been having trouble finding evidence for or against this. (Any help would appreciated.)

4. We want our fellow citizens to be charitable and religious. The U.S. offers relatively big tax breaks for gifts to non-profits and religious organizations, and sure enough, the U.S. has higher rates of charitable giving ("private social expenditures," in OECD lingo) and church attendance than other wealthy countries.

5. We want our corporations to keep their money outside the country. This one has been in the news enough lately that I'm not going to bother explaining it here. But it is pretty weird, no?

6. We want our fellow citizens to get their health care through their employers. The list of perverse incentives and disincentives relative to health care in the U.S. is so long and controversial (the tendency to favor health-care spending on the old over spending on the young and unborn, for example) that one could fill several lists with them alone. But this one is just so weird and pervasive that it deserves special mention. The country's single biggest "tax expenditure," by far, is the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. If your employer subsidizes your health insurance, all that spending is tax deductible (for your employer). If you pay for your own, the tax breaks are much more limited. The result is a subsidy that delivers the bulk of its benefits to high-paid workers, incentivizes high spending on health care, discourages self-employment, and encourages companies to get themselves into trouble (GM was the most dramatic example of this) by overpromising on health benefits.

7. We want our affluent fellow citizens to save a lot for retirement. Next up on the tax-expenditure list are the various breaks for retirement savings. Encouraging people to save for retirement seems like a good thing, and it is a good thing, but the current U.S. array of tax incentives for 401(k)s, IRAs, Roth IRAs and the like all share one characteristic — the higher your tax bracket, the clearer the benefits. Yes, there are income cutoffs for some of these tax breaks; in general these programs are designed to benefit the upper middle class, not the wealthy (who have enough other ways to shelter their savings from taxes). And for lower-paid workers, Social Security actually does a pretty good job of replacing income in retirement. But the focus of U.S. retirement-income policymaking over the past few decades has been on encouraging those who already save to save more, not building true retirement security for the middle class. (Sorry, I've long been kind of obsessed with this one.)

8. We want our fellow citizens to own homes. Tax expenditure No. 3 is the home mortgage interest deduction. The reasoning here, I guess, is that homeowners make better citizens. More to the point, they vote. But home ownership can be pushed too far, as we learned in the recent real estate meltdown and financial crisis. And even if we want to encourage home ownership, the current tax treatment of mortgage interest is a spectacularly inefficient way to do it, with most of the benefits going to the people with the most expensive homes.

9. We want our fellow citizens to be fat. Corn is the most heavily subsidized crop in the U.S. It's of limited nutritional value. It's used to fatten up cattle, in the process making their meat far less healthy to eat. And it's used to sweeten soft drinks, a big contributor to America's skyrocketing obesity rates. On the plus side, ethanol subsidies in recent years, whatever their other dubious effects, at least diverted some corn from our guts to our gas tanks. On the whole, though, U.S. farm policy is geared toward encouraging the production of grains, soybeans, cotton, meat, and dairy — not the fruits and vegetables we're supposed to be eating more of.

10. We want our fellow citizens to start businesses, sort of. The U.S. ranks fourth on the World Bank's "Ease of Doing Business" index, behind only Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. That's down from No. 1 when the index was launched almost a decade ago, which may or may not have any significance. But what definitely seems significant is that when you dig into the sub-rankings, the reasons the U.S. scores so high have entirely to do with its strong financial and legal systems. On factors that Congress or state lawmakers could easily affect, like how hard it is to get a construction permit, register property, or figure out your business taxes, the U.S. ranks much lower (17th, 25nd, and 69th, respectively).

Obviously, there are tons of other candidates for this list, and my selections owe much to my own biases and what happened to catch my attention one summer morning. Please feel encouraged to add yours in the comments. Happy 4th!

A New Use for MOOCs: Real-World Problem Solving

There's been no shortage of media coverage on Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the past year. Universities have touted the value of free on-line courses offered to millions of learners from all walks of life. Some MOOC critics have argued that the "MOOC revolution" has been characterized by the Gartner Hype Cycle and that 2012, the Year of the MOOC, has given way to a new trough of disillusionment. Recent criticisms by faculty at Amherst College and professors at San Jose State University have questioned the pedagogical value of these online courses.

However, directly comparing MOOCs to traditional classrooms may prevent us from realizing the true potential of global online education. Perhaps it's time we stop trying to fit MOOCs into old educational molds and start considering how we can harness their powers in new and exciting ways.

We can use MOOCs as platforms for real-world problem solving. This March, over 90,000 life-long learners from 143 countries enrolled in Foundations of Business Strategy, a MOOC offered through Coursera by the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. These learners enrolled to explore the frameworks and theories underlying successful business strategies. Some came from leading international organizations such as General Electric, Grameenphone, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung, and Walmart. Many others were intrepid entrepreneurs, small business operators, and social venture founders. With their unique backgrounds, the students wove a rich tapestry of ideas and creative insights.

To harness these students' talents, the course's final project invited them to help real organizations by performing a strategic analysis of an existing firm's business operations. In partnership with Coursolve, an initiative founded by two of us that connects organizations with courses to empower students to solve real-world problems, the course enabled a wide range of businesses to take advantage of the global student body's insights and creativity.

One hundred organizations joined the course and actively connected with learners. Organizations of all types participated, from resource-strapped small enterprises to established brick-and-mortar organizations, including one with close to 280,000 employees operating in over 30 countries.

The result: of those organizations that were in existence for 10 years or more and who completed the post-course survey, nearly 60% indicated that they would want to collaborate with students to address future business problems. But not just any problems: 72% of these organizations sought assistance on medium to very high priority challenges. The results were comparable across organizations of all ages, suggesting that new ventures and established initiatives alike can derive value from working with students.

In a knowledge economy, life-long learning is not confined to a canonical classroom, and students enrolling in MOOCs cannot be compared with those enrolling in traditional higher education settings. We need to rethink what constitutes "a student." Today's students are astute, have work experiences, and in many cases, have already developed a set of core competencies. Moreover, students in MOOCs offer unique international perspectives that would be the envy of any business school classroom.

In Foundations of Business Strategy, over 80% of students had at least an undergraduate degree and over 50% were industry professionals. Many of these students — consultants, managers, analysts and entrepreneurs — brought with them a well-developed ability to solve hard problems, which they exhibited through rich case study discussions and strategic advice that had a game-changing impact on some existing companies.

To make these MOOC experiences work both for organizations and students, some basic principles apply. Organizations must ask themselves not just what they want to get out of it, but why working on this problem will be meaningful to students, and how they will successfully work with students when they can only dedicate 2 hours a week over the course of six weeks.

However, despite the challenges, connecting with courses is a relatively simple way in which organizations can engage talented people from around the world, the future drivers of tomorrow's marketplace. For instance, Foundations of Business Strategy attracted students from all across the globe, including some of earth's fastest growing economies including Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, as well as from larger emerging market countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Who wouldn't want to tap into such pools of knowledge?

Men's Arm Strength Affects Their Political Views

Among men of high economic status, the greater the self-reported circumference of the flexed bicep, the greater the opposition (on average) to measures that would redistribute wealth to the poor. But among men with low economic status, bicep circumference is associated with greater support for such measures, says a team led by Michael Bang Petersen of Aarhus University in Denmark. Women's bicep size had no impact on their views. Men with greater upper-body strength tend to feel more entitled, reflecting a pattern in nature in which stronger males are more willing to assert their self-interest. The researchers studied more than a thousand people in three countries, disqualifying several males for reporting unrealistic bicep circumferences of 250 centimeters or more.

Employee Engagement Does More than Boost Productivity

Improving employee engagement is not simply about improving productivity — although organizations with a high level of engagement do report 22% higher productivity, according to a new meta-analysis of 1.4 million employees conducted by the Gallup Organization.

In addition, strong employee engagement promotes a variety of outcomes that are good for employees and customers. For instance, highly engaged organizations have double the rate of success of lower engaged organizations. Comparing top-quartile companies to bottom-quartile companies, the engagement factor becomes very noticeable. For example, top-quartile firms have lower absenteeism and turnover. Specifically, high-turnover organizations report 25% lower turnover, and low-turnover organizations report 65% lower turnover. Engagement also improves quality of work and health. For example, higher scoring business units report 48% fewer safety incidents; 41% fewer patient safety incidents; and41% fewer quality incidents (defects).

While people define engagement in various ways, I prefer a plain and simple definition: People want to come to work, understand their jobs, and know how their work contributes to the success of the organization.

Jim Harter Ph.D., a chief scientist at Gallup Research explained what engaged employees do differently in an email interview: "Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant. They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise, because they personally 'own' the result of their work and that of the organization."

Harter, who has co-authored over 1,000 articles on the topic as well as two bestsellers, also says engaged employees "continuously recreate jobs so that each person has a chance to do what they do best." Engaged employees "listen to the opinions of people close to the action (close to actual safety issues and quality or defect issues), and help people see the connection between their everyday work and the larger purpose or mission of the organization." When engaged employee do this they create a virtuous circle where communication and collaboration nurture engagement and vice versa.

Considering the benefits, why do companies still struggle to foster engagement? Harter writes, "Many organizations measure either the wrong things, or too many things, or don't make the data intuitively actionable. Many don't make engagement a part of their overall strategy, or clarify why employee engagement is important, or provide quality education to help managers know what to do with the results, and in what order."

So where do you begin if you're committed to improving engagement — but feel intimidated by that laundry list of pitfalls? One way to simplify it is to focus on purpose. Communicate the purpose of the organization, and how employees' individual purposes fit into that purpose. When employees "clearly know their role, have what they need to fulfill their role, and can see the connection between their role and the overall organizational purpose," says Harter, that's the recipe for creating greater levels of engagement.

Why Companies Should Support the DOMA Ruling

Last week's U.S. Supreme Court rulings regarding LGBT equality resounded throughout the business community, with major brands reacting across the Twitterverse and digital media landscape. Companies favoring the ruling cited many drivers for their support including core values (Mondelez International), diversity and inclusion (Nike), civil rights (Apple), and even a stronger American economy (Goldman Sachs).

Last year, we wrote for HBR that business is increasingly supporting gay rights, and with the DOMA and Prop 8 rulings that sentiment will only grow. In a marketplace where hundreds of leading companies have continued to advocate on behalf of more inclusive public policy, the dialogue continues regarding the business case for and implications regarding the state and federal treatment of the LGBT community. And in our opinion, it's just common sense for companies to come out in support of their equality, for a couple important reasons:

The Supreme Court ruling gives scores of Americans access to previously-denied benefits—making HR's job easier and cheaper. The 5-4 ruling paves the way for same-sex married couples legally married by the states to receive the hundreds of federal benefits (including taxes, insurance, social security, immigration) available to other married couples, which has positive implications for the concerns and costs articulated by the business community.

For example, a resulting benefit from the DOMA ruling concerns the employers who equalize health benefits for gay workers. Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, companies wanting to ensure equal benefits for LGBT employees paid a tax that LGBT employees have owed on the value of health insurance coverage for a same-sex partner (due to DOMA, the federal government didn't recognize same-sex partners as an economic unit). For leading companies (40 for-profit employers, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation), the DOMA ruling will literally add money back to their bottom lines.

In addition to financial benefits, hailing the Supreme Court decisions gives companies an edge among the influential millennial audience. At 80 million strong, millennials make up the largest generation in US history. And according to a recent PEW research report, 70% of this audience supports same-sex marriage—a remarkable 22% increase since 2008.

Companies battle every day to break through the noise and reach the elusive millennial generation, both from a marketing and recruitment standpoint. Using the Supreme Court rulings as an opportunity to publicly express support for marriage was a smart move for companies hoping to attract the millennial audience. From a marketing standpoint, millennials, more than any other age group, factor in cause and purpose to their purchasing decisions and expect companies to care about social issues. Equality and inclusion [PDF] in particular are central to their worldview.

Supporting marriage equality is smart from a recruitment standpoint as well, as millennials will be 75% of the workforce by 2025. Companies that promote acceptance and diversity will likely appeal to millennials' preference for open, dynamic cultures that exude a sense of purpose.

But the issue is far from resolved. Despite the business benefits of the rulings, there is still some confusion regarding precisely how some of the complexities will be resolved. Same-sex couples who get legally married in one state, but then move to a state where same-sex marriage is not legal, will be left in an ambiguous place from a business standpoint.

In addition, LGBT equality isn't limited to marriage and the variety of benefits afforded to legally married and federally recognized martial partnerships. It is still legal in 29 states to fire someone simply for being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and it is still legal in 34 states to fire someone for being transgender. Further, per The Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy [PDF], 15-43% of LGBT employees have experienced some form of discrimination on the job. Persistent harassment and discrimination (legal in the majority of states) undercuts not only companies' commitments to provide an equitable working environment, but also has potential implications for productivity and innovation.

Looking forward, there are still a number of issues yet to be resolved and companies will play a central role in establishing the status quo and identifying solutions. But one thing is clear. As the millennial generation, pop culture, and business continue to overwhelmingly support marriage equality policy, the question is not if, but rather how and when, these obstacles will be overcome.

Will Your Leadership Improvements Stick?

Debate rages about how much of what is taught in leadership courses actually transfers to leadership practice. Some have suggested that knowledge transfer is as low as 10%. Other studies show the number closer to 60%. We estimate that 20% to 30% of ideas learned in leadership training turn into practice. Whichever of these statistics you believe, it is clear that the investment in leadership training (as well as coaching, performance management, and individual development plans as well) is not having the impact it could, or should. And the failure comes with a significant cost: An estimated $60 to $80 billion is spent annually on training in the United States alone.



So, how do leaders sustain their desired improvements? Most if not all the leaders we work with know the importance of leadership for their organization's success. Most also want to be better leaders, and this leads them to adopt personal improvement goals, to participate in training and development activities, and to invest in leadership of others in their organization. In leadership workshops or coaching, we often start with three questions:

1. On a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high), how important is leadership either for your personal or organizational success? Most answer 8, 9, or 10.

2. What specific things do you need to do to be a more effective leader? Most can quickly write down two or three desired behaviors.

3. How long have you known you should improve these behaviors? Most meekly acknowledge that they have known what to improve for three, six, twelve months — or longer (decades for some).

These improvements may come from a stronger desire to lead better or from being able to upgrade the right skills. Unfortunately, none of the initiatives to improve leadership (training, performance management, coaching) sufficiently transfer to practice. Well-meaning leadership training, individual development plans, coaching, or 360-degree sessions tend to be energizing events, but the energy dissipates quickly. Today's biggest unmet challenge of leadership is not learning more about what to do, it is learning how to make sure that what is known is done.

To meet this challenge we began by gleaning lessons from a number of diverse fields that surround the concept clutter about this topic. We organize our findings into seven disciplines that spell the mnemonic START ME:

Simplicity
Time
Accountability
Resources
Tracking
Melioration
Emotion

We think this is apt because for each of us, sustainability starts with me. These seven disciplines turn hope into reality. Leaders who apply these seven disciplines go beyond the why and what of leadership to reach the how.

We are sure we have not captured everything that will increase leadership sustainability, but these seven disciplines inform both personal efforts to be a better leader and organizational investments in building better leadership. When leaders make commitments to change something in training, coaching, or performance management, the impact increases when participants attend to these seven disciplines as they anticipate how to turn learning into action.

We've created a simple free assessment test so you can see how you score against the seven disciplines and how likely it is that your efforts to improve your leadership capabilities will stick and rise above the paltry average success rate. Spend five minutes to take the assessment here and then jump into the comments here to tell us how you scored. We'll contribute to the comments here with further thoughts.

Note: Parts of this post were adapted from: Leadership Sustainability: Seven Disciplines to Achieve the Changes Great Leaders Know They Must Make