Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 774

How to Decide Whether to Relocate for a Job

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Sometimes the perfect job isn’t down the street, but rather thousands of miles — or perhaps even an ocean — away. If you’re offered a job in a different location, how do you know if it’s worth relocating? Who should help you make the decision? And, how do you weigh the potential upsides like money and opportunity against costs like the impact on your family or the loss of your existing network?

What the Experts Say

Whether or not to relocate for a new role is a big decision both professionally and personally. “There are so many factors to consider, says Jennifer Petriglieri, an assistant professor at INSEAD and the author of “Talent Management and the Two Career Couple.” “What’s the opportunity? What’s the longevity [of the job]? And what’s the family situation?” Indeed, the decision is especially complicated if you have a partner and children, says Matthew Bidwell, an associate professor at Wharton whose research focuses on patterns of work and employment. “It’s not just, what does this mean for your career, but what does this mean for our family?” he says. Relocating for a job can often be “great for your personal and professional development,” but it’s also “a risk and a leap into the unknown.” Here are some ideas to help you think through whether the move is right for you.

Think holistically

When you’re wrestling with a big decision, “there’s a temptation to get out an Excel spreadsheet and weigh the pros and cons,” says Petriglieri. But this is an instance where Excel comes up short. “When you’re choosing one life over another, it becomes an identity choice: Who do I want to become? What kind of family will we be?” The job is only one piece of the puzzle. Consider your “holistic happiness and satisfaction.” Think about the lifestyle that the new location affords or lacks. Are you suited for small town life? Or do you prefer a big city? Do you want to spend your weekends traveling? Or do you want to feel rooted in a community? The answers to these questions will help you uncover what this “move means for you, your partner, and your children,” she says. “When it’s a difficult choice, it means that no option is clearly better than the other.” Try to think beyond the immediate move,” suggests Bidwell. “Ask: What is best for us in the long-term?”

Talk through the move with your partner a lot…

The most important person in this equation is your partner, says Bidwell. “The big issue is what does this move do to your partner’s career?” Will he or she be able to find meaningful work in the new place? If not, how big of a setback will it be? “There’s quite a lot of research showing that people suffer from putting their career on hold,” he says. If your partner won’t have a new job in the new location, “the move brings up other issues because you’re taking them away from their support network.” He points to a certain unhappiness known as trailing spouse syndrome. “You have a new job, new office, and all sorts of new people to meet; your spouse has been dropped in the middle of nowhere and knows no one.” Petriglieri notes that trailing spouses often bear the brunt of move-related household tasks. “It’s tough,” she says. “Whenever you move, for the first six months, you are in the trenches.” And it takes a huge toll. “Research on why relocations fail always points to the unhappiness of the trailing spouse,” she says.

…And talk to your kids a little

“It’s possible to move at any time with kids, but certain ages are more difficult than others,” says Petriglieri. Many people, for instance, are reluctant to move when their kids are teenagers; when kids are younger than eight, the prospect of uprooting them is much less daunting. Petriglieri says that while obviously you need to speak with your children about a potential move, she cautions, “there is a danger of consulting them too much because it brings up a lot of anxiety unnecessarily.” Children, she says, “have a harder time imagining what their life will be like” in a new place. They might become resistant to move, which will make things much harder on you. Bidwell concurs: “The kids may complain, but they will adjust.” Keep your eyes on the prize. The relocation “is a potentially enriching and stimulating experience.”

Consider your development

Moving to a new job in a new city is a surefire way to help “round out” your skills and experience, says Bidwell. “You’ll get to know people from different parts of the company; you’ll be exposed to new ideas; you’ll be able to build a broader network.” And if you’re relocating overseas, you’ll gain an “understanding of a different culture.” Indeed, in many organizations, “some form of international experience is necessary to get that top job.” But you must recognize that the relocation poses “long- and short-term trade-offs” to your development. For instance, “the new cultural context you’re learning comes at the expense of your loss of network back home.” To keep that from happening, you need to “make sure you’re on the radar screen” with your home office “having conversations with all the right people on a regular basis,” Bidwell says.

Find out what’s next…

You must also think about the opportunity within the context of your long-term professional path. “Most companies are not likely to offer you a relocation unless there’s something pretty big in it for you, meaning a significant promotion and raise,” Petriglieri says. But the question you need to ask is, “What’s the next move after this?” If, say, you’re an American considering a three-year stint in London or Paris, that question is less complicated. “It’s a no-brainer that you will probably return to the U.S.” But if you’re asked to “head up operations in Denver or Cleveland,” the calculation is a little trickier. And yet, while it’s important to think about next steps, you need to have reasonable expectations, says Bidwell. “There is a tension there,” he says. “On one hand you want to have a conversation about where do I go after this? But realistically, the company can’t give you a definitive answer.” And besides, “career paths tend to be haphazard for most of us.”

…And whether there’s an escape hatch

Worst-case scenario: you and your family are miserable. What then? “You need to think about an escape hatch if you don’t like it or if it doesn’t gel for your family,” says Petriglieri. It somewhat depends on the location itself. “When you are relocating to a hub city and it doesn’t work out, there are often other options, but if you’re moving somewhere more isolated, it’s harder.” The specifics of the role you’re considering are also key. Make sure you’re not professionally pigeonholing yourself “by taking on a specialist role,” she says. Another danger, says Bidwell, is “staying too long” in your adopted city. “There’s a risk that if you stay in a role for a long time you become a specialist for that region,” he says. This is why he recommends “talking with your partner beforehand about how long you’re going for and agree on an exit plan.”

Seek advice

It’s often helpful to solicit input from others — with one caveat, however. “You want to talk with people who are not too close to the issue,” says Petriglieri. Your boss, for instance, may try to convince you to go. After all, there’s presumably “a business need” and a reason you’ve been asked to move in the first place. And friends and family members have a vested interest in your choice. “No one is neutral and these conversations can become charged.” Ideally, she says, you should talk with “a group of trusted peers” who “have similar family issues and similar career aspirations.” These people can be “a good sounding board” as you evaluate your options. Bidwell agrees. He suggests seeking advice from colleagues who’ve done similar stints as well as others in your industry. “You need moderately unbiased views of what to expect.”

Request a try-out

If you’re uncertain, it may be worth asking your organization if you could do a temporary stint or job swap in the proposed location before making a big move, says Petriglieri. “Relocations are extremely costly,” she says. “Failed relocations are even worse.” She says companies are “increasingly willing to allow employees to do short-term relocations or secondments” to maximize the likelihood of success. In essence, your employer would be giving you a chance “to try before you buy.” Even if your organization does not offer this opportunity, “you can always ask,” says Bidwell.

Don’t overanalyze

Whether or not to relocate is a big decision — but beware of analysis paralysis, overthinking a situation so that a decision is never made, or one is made by default. Try to have perspective. “As you get older, there are very few decisions in life where you don’t feel some ambivalence,” says Petriglieri. “A career is long,” she adds.“We can all afford a few adventures, and we have plenty of time to experiment and explore.” However, don’t assume that this is your one chance at trying something new. Remember: Nothing is forever. If you’re miserable, you can course correct, says Bidwell. “You have to take risks in your career,” he says. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out, and so, you figure out what to do next.”

Principles to Remember

Do:

Think about the decision as an identity choice. Ask yourself: Who do you want to become? What kind of family do you want to be?
Make your partner’s happiness a priority.
Propose a temporary stint or job swap to test out the new location.

Don’t:

Only focus on the immediate consequences of the move. Consider how it will impact you, your partner, and your children in the long-term.
Ruminate all alone. Solicit advice from trusted peers.
Overthink the decision. If you go for it and you’re unhappy, you can come home. If you decide against it, have faith there will be another opportunity down the road.

Case Study #1: Think about the next phase of your career

Anne Chow spent the first 15 years of her career at AT&T, earning promotion after promotion, at the company’s headquarters in New Jersey. “It was very easy to move around the company without geographically moving my family,” she says.

In 2005, after AT&T was purchased by SBC, Anne was asked to move to Texas, where the new company was based. At the time, Anne had young children, and she was reluctant to move away from her parents. She was also hesitant about Texas itself. “I am a Jersey Girl and East Coast through and through,” she says.

She declined to move. But by 2014, her perspective had changed. Her career was going well; her kids were older — middle school and high school; and her husband was retired. “I was questioning what I wanted to do next and what I wanted the next phase of my career to look like,” she says.

She briefly considered outside opportunities, but after 24 years at AT&T, she wanted to “double down on [her] commitment to the company.” She broached the topic of moving with her family. “My husband was supportive and my children were in,” she recalls. “I declared myself mobile to move to Texas.”

Shortly thereafter, the CEO tapped her to take on a new job leading sales operations and solutions. Once the relocation became real, her children changed their minds. “When we told the kids, they said we should go without them,” she says.

She and her family had many long talks. “We talked about who we wanted to be,” she says. “My husband had 51% of the vote. I was worried about his social infrastructure because it was his life that would change the most. The kids would assimilate.”

After three years in Dallas, Anne has already had three different positions. Today she is the president of the national business.

Despite her career success, she admits that the first year was difficult for her spouse and kids. “It definitely made us a stronger family,” she says. “But I don’t know if we’ll ever call it home.”

Case Study #2: Seek advice and input from others

Oliver Cooke was only a couple of years into his job in London at Selby Jennings, the financial recruiter, when he was asked to relocate to New York.

“My manager was going over to lead the U.S. business, and he asked several of us to join him,” he says. “I’d always been interested in travel, and I’d always wanted to live and work abroad.”

But still, it was a big decision for Oliver, a native Londoner. He had spent only a handful of days in New York in his life, and although he was in his mid-20s at the time and unmarried, the move meant leaving behind his family and friends.

Oliver sought advice on what he ought to do. He spoke with friends and colleagues who’d done similar stints overseas. “I did my due diligence,” he says. “I wanted to get an idea of what this type of move would be like and what kinds of opportunities there were.”

Oliver says he didn’t necessarily think about where the job would lead, but he was confident that the opportunity was a good one.“It was a chance to do something entrepreneurial and to build a new business,” he says.

He also knew that he could leave if it didn’t work out. “I figured that, worst-case scenario, I could always come back and get a new job internally,” he says.

In the end, he decided to do it. “I thought I would go out there for a year or two, work hard, and see how it goes. I thought I’d take it year by year.”

Today, nearly six years later, Oliver is the executive director and the head of North America at the company. He says he has already laid down roots here and has no plans to return to the UK. Moving to New York, he says, “was the best decision” he ever made.

“My business is all about building relationships and networking,” he says. “I see myself as someone who’s carved out my own niche in this part of the world. At this point, I would find it very difficult to go back to London. I love it here.”

The Challenges GM Is Facing, and the Reasoning Behind Its Plant Closures

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General Motor’s announcement that it plans to idle five North American factories and cut 14,000 jobs has sparked much discussion in the media and outrage in Washington. While the job losses are a terrible blow to those workers and the families they support and the local economies where the factories are located, the decision could prevent the kind of crisis that resulted in it seeking bankruptcy protection in 2009 and a $50 billion bailout by the U.S. government. It is far better for GM to reallocate resources now, while it is healthy, than to wait until it is trouble. And the same applies to the affected workers: The tight labor market means there are opportunities for those who go through retraining.

GM has good immediate reasons for its decisions. Car sales in the U.S. had a boom period thanks to all individuals and businesses who deferred buying new vehicles during the Great Recession. But car sales are now probably past a cyclical peak, not only in the U.S. but in China as well, and there is too much global auto-assembly capacity chasing that demand. Another problem is demand for small and mid-size cars in the U.S. has plunged, and consumers haven’t been flocking to buy GM’s hybrid Chevy Volt.

All those factors have been taking a heavy toll on the plants in question. For example, the Lordstown, Ohio, factory that makes the Chevy Cruze is running one shift a day, down from three a few years ago, and last year produced 180,000 vehicles, down from 248,000 in 2013. Capital-intensive factories have a high-fixed-cost, low-variable-cost operating model. If you greatly reduce the production volume, the cars that do come out have to absorb more of the fixed costs, and that eventually sends the product into a profitability death spiral. Every day GM operates such factories, it expends more resources that could be redeployed elsewhere.

Another issue involves reallocating resources in the face of fundamental market shifts. When and how are the best ways to do it? These are questions that don’t get asked enough. It’s important because companies build assets and capabilities to deliver products and services to a market of consumers that values them at some point in time. But markets and tastes shift, and changing assets and company processes is hard. Given the shift in immediate U.S. demand from small and medium-size sedans to light trucks and SUVs and the long-term need for GM to make the transition to electric and self-driving cars, I think that GM is smart to act now while its cash flow can sustain the shutdown of these facilities and reinvestment in new products.

Then there is the question of how to reallocate assets. Many firms — and GM is a notable example — have used bankruptcy as a way to shed assets. When it initiated the process during the heights of the Great Recession, it eliminated the Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Saturn, and Hummer brands, along with countless other obsolete assets. GM also used bankruptcy as a way to get out of dealer agreements, renegotiate labor contracts, and sweep away decades of ways of working that were no longer in step with the market’s needs.

I believe a far-better path is to restructure the operations in question way before they threaten the company’s survival. That is what GM is trying to do. Another way to do this is to sell off pieces that no longer are sustainable to someone who has the political ability to restructure them. A major rationale for a great deal of outsourcing activity has been to put assets in the hands of somebody who can restructure them. The Detroit Big Three did this with a significant portion of their component operations.

A separate question that the GM announcement raises is who is responsible for retraining the displaced workers and helping them to find a new way to support their families? The tragedy in America is that there is no consensus among leaders in business and government. Should retraining be a public or a private good? Most employers no longer seem to take primary responsibility for this, and the debate at different levels of government tends to confound the question with the provision of “welfare.” As is the case with education, I think it is a public good. Both individuals and companies benefit, as do the communities around them.  A capable workforce with up-to-date skills makes a community or region attractive to prospective employers. What is gratifying is local leadership at the grassroots level is finding effective solutions for retraining — the topic of a recent article I coauthored.

So, all in all, it is better for both GM and the affected workers that it is acting now rather than waiting until the problem gets worse. Yes, the workers have a tough road ahead of them. But they should ask themselves whether they are better off holding on to an unsustainable job as long as possible or trying to change now? I learned from my jobs in industry that most problems don’t get better over time; this one almost certainly won’t.

Helping Remote Workers Avoid Loneliness and Burnout

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It’s a weekday and Jeff, the director of technology at Economical Insurance, kisses his daughter and waves goodbye as she enters the doors of her public school. Then, he either turns the car around and returns home for a day of remote work, or he continues on to his office, where his hours are flexible — he just needs to keep his boss in the loop.

In 1871, when Economical was founded, Jeff’s employer might not have imagined this scenario. Today, HR policies like these are less of a progressive perk but more of a standard practice. Actually, a new study interviewed 18,000 employees across 96 international companies and found that 70% of employees are working remotely once a week and 53% are spending half the week away from the office.

Flexible and remote work policies are becoming increasingly popular with employees. A study focused on flexibility and its impact on performance for working parents confirmed that flexibility at work increased gratitude significantly. It also increased job satisfaction and decreased stress, particularly for parents with children at home.

Employees appreciate remote work and flexible hours because they offer tangible benefits. It’s not just the time saved on commuting — there are real financial upsides. A study that looked at data from job boards and the U.S. Bureau of Labor found that the average remote worker saved $444 on gas, and spent roughly 50% less on lunches. Most parents can also save on childcare costs if they can arrange their schedules to be at home when their children are out of school.

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As more employees want to take advantage of flex and remote work options, organizations are accepting that this is how today’s talent wants to work. The 2018 Future Workforce Report by Upwork claims 63% of U.S. employers are offering some form of flex option. For example, PwC came up with “All Roles Flex” in an effort to reduce the stigma of those who use it. In a recent interview, Dorothy Hisgrove, the partner and Chief People Officer at PwC Australia, told me: “At PwC, 82% of our people use some form of flexibility. They’re most successful when they have the everyday flexibility they need to meet the demands of their professional life and accomplish the things they identify as priorities outside of their career.”

As more workers work flexibly or remotely, companies will need to change the way they operate. “It forces structural and systemic change to accommodate different ways of working and different ways of being ‘available’ and productive,” says Hisgrove. Remote and flex work also present new challenges for managers.  In particular, I call your attention to two: burnout and loneliness.

Burnout

One risk, perhaps unexpectedly, is burnout. People using flex or remote policies often do feel more grateful to their employers. That feeling of indebtedness can lead some remote employees to keep their foot on the gas until they run out of fuel. A research paper titled “Doing More with Less? Flexible Working Practices and the Intensification of Work” examines this unanticipated consequence of adopting flexible working practices. Using social exchange theory, researchers suggest, “employees respond to the ability to work flexibly by exerting additional effort, in order to return benefit to their employer.” Some of the intensification happens at the employee level (choices they make to “return the favor”) but frequently, it’s the employer intensifying the workload with requests that can’t be accomplished within certain timeframes.

To ensure employees experience gratitude rather than indebted servitude, check in. Go beyond project updates and work-related conversations. Leaders need to know what is going on with their people beyond just their work. For example, be sensitive to employees who travel extensively. Rather than booking them into scores of meetings on their return, give them some time to reconnect with family and recharge.

Rethink which attributes constitute going “above and beyond.” Working longer hours, answering emails late at night, putting time in on the weekend, coming in sick, piling up vacation days, not sleeping — those attributes are way too often considered “high-performing” traits. However, all it does is increase and reward the behaviors of burn out. Instead, lead by example and encourage  your virtual staff to slow down (even when they don’t want to) by supporting mental-health breaks, taking vacations, and spending time with family.

Remember, remote employees are tougher to diagnose with burnout because you can’t see changes in their personality on a day-to-day basis. Ensure there is a process of checking in and being aware of the signs.

Loneliness  

According to the 2018 State of Remote Work, loneliness is the biggest struggle to working remotely. Although being alone is not the only cause of loneliness, it can be a significant contributor. It’s also a dangerous and growing epidemic that scientists are taking seriously.

At the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad from Brigham Young University presented the results of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants. The study laid out the connection between loneliness and premature mortality. “There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators,” Holt-Lunstad shared.

What can managers do? One option would be to establish an “in-the-office” day, when remote employees are encouraged to come in. According to a Gallup poll of 9,917 employed U.S. adults, remote workers that come in to work at least once per week are the happiest. These “mostly” remote workers report a slightly higher rate of engagement, but more importantly, they were more likely than full-remote or full-office workers to say they had a best friend at work, and that their job included opportunities to learn and grow.

For further-flung members of the team who can’t come in weekly, make the investment to bring them to the office monthly or quarterly. Joe Granato, the Chief Supply Chain Officer at Mountain Equipment Co-op, told me that he believes it should be mandatory to find the budget to gather in person. “Face-to-face time builds quality relationships, thus enabling trust and speed in communications. Having opportunities to be together (in the same space, not virtually) is a quality investment.” Granato also advocates for a “working remotely code” to help level-set expectations and make everyone feel looped in to the strategy.

Today’s flexible and remote work arrangements are far more fluid than the rigid “flex plan” policies of yesteryear. Regardless of what HR policies may dictate, in a tight labor market, managers are going to do what keeps their people. Today, that likely includes more flexible work options, paired with a management style that helps remote workers flourish.

What a Toys “R” Us Comeback Could Look Like

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Toys “R” Us is being resurrected for the holiday season. After filing for bankruptcy protection from creditors in September 2017, it closed all its stores in the United States and United Kingdom earlier this year. But on November 13, 2018, Judge Keith Phillips of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Virginia, signed off on a bankruptcy plan that revealed that investors intended to use the company’s brands in various ways. An initial approach can be found inside 600 Kroger supermarkets, where there are pop-up toy stores called “Geoffrey’s Toy Box” after the company’s giraffe icon.

But the environment that caused the toy chain’s demise has not changed. It still must compete with Walmart, Target, and especially Amazon, a competition based on price and convenience that it could not win.

An HBR article that one of us (Joe) wrote a year ago made the case that retailers today face two choices: offer consumers time well saved or time well spent. Toys “R” Us failed at the former strategy in its first incarnation. In coming out of bankruptcy, the company must pursue a time-well-spent strategy, offering places where both parents and their kids enjoy great experiences. (The Kroger pop-up stores are not promising: They offer no experiences, just boxes of toys.)

Here’s what Toys “R” Us should do now that it is freed of the shackles of bankruptcy and has a blank slate:

The underlying issue that set up Toys “R” Us for its collapse into commoditization is that it lost sight of whom it served. Its efforts primarily centered on its vendor relationships and pushing more and more product onto the floors and shelves of its stores.

For the reborn company to have a chance, it must turn 180 degrees and embrace a parent- and kid-centric strategy. It must become a stager of toy-playing experiences — enticing consumers into its new places by offering experiences that both parents and kids value. (What child wants to go to a warehouse? What child doesn’t want to play?) It should strive to maximize the time consumers spend in its places, because the longer they are there, the more they will buy. This is the essence of a time-well-spent strategy.

Imagine venues designed not around stocking toy packages with never-ending red-tag sales but around toys themselves with never-ending play experiences — one with spots where children can play with LEGO sets and participate in gaming tournaments. Imagine a testing lab where vendors pay to have children play with their latest and greatest toys. Imagine a studio where kids can design and create toys. Imagine becoming THE place for children’s birthday parties. (Surely Toys “R” Us could stage a far better experience than, say, Chuck E. Cheese’s, an experience that actually involves parents rather than shunting them off to the side.) In such venues, the warehouse would be in the back, out of consumers’ sight.

The absolute best way of knowing you’re providing time well spent is to charge admission for gaining entry to at least parts of the store — as the old Toys “R” Us once did for the Ferris wheel in its former flagship store in Times Square in New York City. (The old company smartly didn’t just get consumers to pay for admission, it also got suppliers to pay for their brands to be painted on the Ferris wheel’s cars.

In addition, Toys “R” Us could create a toy club that parents would value so much they’d pay a membership fee. Not like Costco or Sam’s Club memberships that merely provide access to low prices and thereby teaches consumers to buy on price, price, price. Instead, it could be a club that helps parents assess their children’s styles of play, their proclivities for creativity, curiosity, socialization, and all the other factors that enable them to grow socially, mentally, and even physically. The club’s fees could include the ability to return toys past their useful life or age-appropriateness and upgrade them via customized recommendations based on each individual child. Imagine becoming partners with parents in enhancing their parenting skills, invested in the well-being of their customers’ children.

By changing its business model to offer — and charge for — time well spent, the new Toys “R” Us can carve out a lasting and valued role in the toy business for decades to come. It can become the enterprise where a kid can be a kid.

A Simple Way to Map Out Your Career Ambitions

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It’s easy to be confused about how to grow in your career. My experience with even the most successful global companies is that they’re between average and poor at developing future talent. They’re often not transparent about your real needs and vague about the most effective development options.

The challenge is that you’re competing against every individual in your industry who wants to be a high performer. If you grow more capabilities more quickly than they do, you’ll perform better today, earn opportunities to perform better in the future, and a virtuous cycle will take hold. Development matters. So how can you chart the shortest, surest path to success?

Grow Yourself Faster

The research is clear about how we grow most successfully: it’s a combination of on-the-job, social, and formal learning, also known as the 70-20-10 model. This research-derived mantra says that roughly 70% of your professional growth will come from the work experiences you have, 20% will come from your interactions with others, and 10% will come from formal education.

Think of growth as a cycle — successfully perform, get feedback, and perform again even better. Experiences power that growth cycle, so you’ll want to understand which experiences matter most and gain as many of them as quickly as possible. To begin, you want to be very clear about your starting point and desired destination on that development journey — an obvious item that’s often missing from a development plan.

Two key steps to grow faster are:

Determine your from/to.
Get the experiences and create a personal experience map.

Determine Your From/To

If you want driving directions from Google Maps, your app asks you for two pieces of information: your current location and your desired location. The more precisely you enter each coordinate, the more likely you’ll get where you want to go using the fastest possible route. Your growth process should follow the exact same path, clearly specifying where you are today and your preferred destination.

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The challenge for many of us is that we’re delusional about our actual origin and destination. We often think we’re starting far ahead of where we objectively are and that we’ve arrived when we’re still hundreds of miles from our goal. You can get to a more accurate assessment with a framework that my colleague Jim Shanley calls the “from/to.” The from/to is two brief statements — one describing where you are today and one describing your next big (not your ultimate) destination.

Examples of great from/to statements include:

From an individual contributor who adds value through technical expertise and closely follows others’ directions, to a people leader who creates a clear strategy and delivers results through a small team.
From a business strategist who can appear aloof and dismissive of those with less intellectual horsepower, to a general manager who aligns and inspires her region through personal connections and demonstrates genuine care for people.

The directness of those statements may surprise you. These from/to statements are real examples from successful executives who made tremendous progress once their needs were made this clear. Both of those leaders are now CEOs — one of a $10 billion retail chain and another of a specialty eyewear company.

To get an accurate from/to, you’ll need to check your ego at the door and ask some trusted superiors and colleagues for their extremely candid view of your origin and destination. Introduce the from/to concept to them, send them the from/to examples I gave earlier, and ask them to think about your from/to. Tell them to be brutally honest because their transparency will allow you to grow faster.

Use their input to create your final from/to. Which of their statements seem most direct and make you most uncomfortable? Is the “to” far enough away so that it will be a meaningful challenge to achieve? Whose opinion do you trust the most? With a clear from/to, you can now focus on accelerating your growth.

Create Your Personal Experience Map

Since the 70-20-10 ratio says that experiences best accelerate your development, you’ll want to understand which experiences will build your career and, more importantly, the few, most powerful experiences that can close your from/to gap. A regularly updated personal experience map will help you chart your path.

A personal experience map shows which experiences you want to acquire in the next two to five years to grow your career. It’s a practical planning document that describes how you will produce the highest-performing you.

There are two types of experiences that will accelerate your development — functional experiences and management experiences. Functional experiences help make you great at something, i.e. marketing, supply chain, R&D. They allow you to prove that you’re highly competent at what you do. Management experiences will help you prove that you can perform or manage in a variety of challenging situations. You’ve not only been a great marketer in one region, but proven that you can lead marketing when you have a new team, in a turnaround situation and in a different geography.

When you successfully achieve these challenging experiences, you prove to your company that you’re a versatile leader who deserves a chance for larger, more important roles. You can create your personal experience map after you:

Interview experts in your field.

The best and brightest in your field can help you understand which experiences will get you into the top 10% and become an expert. Interview those leaders to learn which experiences will build your functional excellence. The interviews will provide you with the raw material to create your personal experience map.

Identify experts inside and outside your company. Interview the best in your field, not just the best in your company. If you want to be a chief financial officer (CFO), identify five CFOs who you admire or who are well regarded in your industry. If your goal is to be great at early-stage pharma R&D, it’s the same process. Find the leaders on the industry “best” lists (best chief marketing officer, chief information officer, etc.), from their articles in trade magazines, on lists of speakers at relevant conferences, or from referrals of leaders in your company.
Request an interview. Email each leader, asking for an informal conversation in which they can help someone in their field develop.
Ask for insights. During your call, ask them, “What are the key functional experiences [not necessarily jobs] that you believe will produce the highest-quality [general manager, IT architect, finance director]? Or, “Describe what you would see on the résumé of someone who is outstanding at _______.” If you’re having trouble getting quality information, ask them about the most valuable experiences they’ve had in their own careers.

Build your map.

Review your interview notes and list the experiences that your interviewees described. Not everything you heard will be useful; some information will overlap or contradict what another interviewee said. Your goal is to sort through this information to find the few experiences that will most accelerate your career.

An experience should describe a meaningful business outcome — open a new production facility, lead a large team through a business turnaround, or close books for a business unit. It should be a significant building block of your functional or leadership capability; your accomplishment of it should mean something to others in your field.

The functional experiences you need to be a high performer will be unique to your profession, but the management experiences will be very similar across professions. Management experiences grow generic capabilities that are valuable to all managers, no matter their function. For simplicity, you can use these experiences when you create your map:

Life-cycle experiences: Lead in different parts of your company or product evolution: a turnaround situation, a startup, a steady-state environment, a developing market or a fully mature one.
Managing experiences: Upgrade a poor-quality team, lead a large team, manage a team where you have influence but not authority, lead in a matrixed environment, lead in a highly political environment.
Geographic experiences: Have experiences outside your home geography where the local language is not your native language.

Select four to seven functional experiences and three to four management experiences you believe will benefit you most and list them on your personal experience map. The map should be focused and realistic — a reference sheet that you’ll use regularly to plan your growth and assess your progress.

The personal experience map is now your guide to continuously grow your high-performing self. Creating it will be one of your best investments of time. Review the content of your map any time you switch jobs or companies and at least every six months to ensure that it remains a current, helpful guide.

Growing yourself faster isn’t easy but it’s made far simpler when you’re clear about your origin, your destination, and the fastest, experience-driven route between the two.

Personal Rebranding

Do you need a career makeover? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Dorie Clark, the author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. They talk through how to change your coworkers’ perception of you, transition to a role outside your area of expertise, or be seen as a leader.

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Listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe on the Dear HBR: page. Email your questions about your workplace dilemmas to Dan and Alison at dearhbr@hbr.org.

From Alison and Dan’s reading list for this episode:

HBR: Reinventing Your Personal Brand by Dorie Clark — “Especially in the internet era, traces of your old brand will never completely disappear—and as long as you’re thoughtful about what you’ve learned along the way, that’s OK. The challenge is to be strategic about identifying how you wish to be perceived, developing a compelling story that explains your evolution, and then spreading that message.”

HBR: Be Seen as a Leader by Adam Galinsky and Gavin Kilduff — “Research tells us there are certain ‘competence cues,’ such as speaking up, taking the initiative, and expressing confidence, that suggest leadership potential. These proactive behaviors can be good indications that a person has useful expertise and experience, or they might simply reflect deep-seated personality traits such as extroversion and dominance. However, there’s increasing evidence that people can propel themselves into proactivity by temporarily shifting their psychological frame of mind.”

HBR: A Second Chance to Make the Right Impression by Heidi Grant — “If you started off on the wrong foot and need to overcome a bad impression, the evidence will have to be plentiful and attention-getting in order to activate phase two thinking. Keep piling it on until your perceiver can no longer tune it out, and make sure that the information you’re presenting is clearly inconsistent with the existing ideas about you.”

HBR: Rebounding from Career Setbacks by Mitchell Lee Marks, Philip Mirvis, and Ron Ashkenas — “Admittedly, this can be a little frightening, especially if you’re venturing into unknown career territory. Reimagining your professional identity is one thing; bringing it to life is another. Remember, though, that you haven’t left your skills and experience behind with your last job, and you’ll also bring with you the lessons learned from the setback. You may also have productively revised your definition of success.”

How a U.S. Health Care System Uses 15-Minute Huddles to Keep 23 Hospitals Aligned

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A core challenge of management is to ensure that the organization’s priorities, strategies, and metrics are consistently embraced and that any impediments are identified and addressed quickly. At Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, ensuring the alignment of all these things to provide extraordinary care requires a constant regimented focus across our 23 hospitals, 170 clinics, and 850,000-member health insurance plan. To achieve that, we have implemented a model of daily huddles on an extensive scale. In this article, I’d like to share the insights we’ve gleaned from the model’s first full year of operation, which hopefully organizations in health care and many other industries will find useful.

The model has been used in other industries and has parallels to the “teams of teams” approach in the agile method of operating that has become so popular. But the scale at Intermountain Healthcare, where more than 2,500 huddles occur every morning, makes it especially illuminating and instructive.

At Intermountain, the 15-minute huddle is the key. It enables knowledge from activities throughout the organization in the previous 24 hours to escalate up to executive leadership — Tier VI in our model — and be addressed.

Using that 15 minutes effectively requires structure: Each huddle has a leader; the participants are designated, as is the recorder of the data; the huddle is scheduled; and the categories of reported information are captured on a prepared chart. We have four fundamentals of extraordinary care that are covered in our daily huddles: safety, quality, access, and stewardship of resources so they are used to provide the best possible care. Across those fundamentals, eight key topics are reported every day. They include potential serious safety events that could have harmed a patient, caregiver injuries, and reported downtimes (of equipment, elevators, systems or processes, for example).

The information that escalates up falls into two categories:

Issues that cannot be resolved at a given tier
Metrics that are reported daily, such as “units at capacity.”

Information flowing back down includes follow-up reports on previous action items.

Every action that emerges, including those at Tier VI, is tracked, and the outcome is communicated back through all tiers, so participants know what has transpired and understand the value of their input. After each Tier VI huddle, for instance, the recorder sends an e-mail to the person who owns each action and follows up to ensure that resulting outcomes are communicated. An item is not removed from the action register until follow-up is completed and conveyed. Interestingly, despite the number of huddles, the number of action items has never overwhelmed the system.

Beginning at 8:45 AM, care teams and managers in our hospitals and clinics gather in more than 1,500 Tier I huddles. At 9 AM, their reporting is considered in about 170 Tier II huddles, consisting primarily of directors of hospitals and clinics. By 9:15 AM, the reports of those directors are considered in Tier III huddles by hospital administrators and geographical clinic groups. Their findings and needs are, in turn, considered 15 minutes later in Tier IV huddles of affinity hospital groups such as trauma hospitals, rural hospitals, home care, and the Medical Group. Their reports escalate further to Tier V, consisting of major organizational areas such as all hospitals and community-based care. By 10 AM, vital information has risen to the executive leadership, which includes the CEO and his direct reports plus other assigned functional executives.

The entire process, which involved 652,080 huddles in the first year, is monitored by Intermountain Healthcare’s Continuous Improvement Team, and the categories of information collected are reviewed quarterly. The Continuous Improvement Team consists of about 50 caregivers who are spread geographically across the system. Team members have varied experience from industrial engineers to nurses and physicians, and a physician has responsibility for the team. Their focus is culture-based, not project-based, since we believe that real change and improvement come from a culture of continuous improvement aligned with strategy and a daily management system.

At every tier, needs that can be addressed at that level are resolved, while remaining ones, along with accumulating data, escalate up. The process provides three key qualities — clarity, alignment and accountability — for patients and caregivers alike.

The reporting lets executive leadership know precisely what is happening and unlocks frontline wisdom. It ensures alignment of goals, resources, and people. It pushes out responsibility and accountability to the frontline and enables executive leadership to intervene to remove barriers and release resources. It connects to the organization’s overall strategy and performance goals.

Throughout the first year of operation of this model, which began in full in April 2017, the range and breadth of issues addressed was extensive. At the Tier VI level alone, 365 unique issues were tackled, resulting in 22 systemwide safety alerts to our caregivers, organizational awareness of 15 pharmaceutical and supply shortages, rapid communication for potential formulary alternatives when supplies become limited, and better facilitation of patient transfers within the system. We also recognized and closed gaps in training on new equipment, replacement parts, new products, and instructional manuals, allowing the system to implement swift training for our caregivers.

An example of an important success of the escalation huddles is the ability to identify potential exposures to infectious diseases and quickly move to prevent the spread of diseases like pertussis, hepatitis, and chicken pox. Earlier this year, for instance, a community-wide outbreak of hepatitis b occurred. Our clinics reported the early development of the disease in huddles. That enabled Intermountain to prepare guidance for all clinics and ensure that staffing levels were appropriate and that increased dosages of needed drugs were on hand.

Another example is how the huddles allowed us to better track caregiver injuries and patient safety issues. These successes are vital within a health care system devoted to the safety and wellness of our patients and caregivers.

On the business side, the escalation process has provided improved visibility into operations. For instance, we have been able to track the increase in extended hours of access (beyond Monday to Friday; 8 AM to 5 PM) for our Medical Group clinics, including phone access and appointment availability, from 49% to 90% of clinics. We have pinpointed opportunities for improving staffing procedures and reducing interruption of services. On a national level, we have been able to work with two large vendors to improve their international shipping processes for replacement parts for imaging equipment, benefiting not only our organization but also many other customers of those companies.

Here are some lessons we have learned about how to make the huddles approach work.

It’s important to focus on trends and continually add and address issues being tracked. Every quarter we analyze what has escalated up and align it with key performance metrics. We often see significant quarterly differences — both because new needs arise and because previous efforts have improved metrics. We look at trends and how to address them, which may require adding new things to be tracked. In October, for instance, we added a new topic: errors in imaging, so that we can better understand any errors and how they occur. In reviewing trends, we have refined further the most vital metrics for executive leadership. We have also implemented a series of weekly reports in key system areas.

Accountability is vital to the efficiency of the process. Every action taken is tracked, a time frame assigned, and the resulting resolution reported back through the tiers. That accountability demonstrates the value of the process to all participants. It reveals rapid results. It shows that executive leadership is engaged daily in responding to frontline needs. Perhaps most importantly, it underscores, in practical daily terms, the organization’s commitment to continuous improvement, providing a constant reminder and tangible evidence that the commitment is real and ongoing at the highest level of management.

The entire process — from top to bottom — must be tied to the organization’s overall strategy and performance goals. That’s why Intermountain Healthcare’s four fundamentals of extraordinary care and eight key topics are covered in every day’s huddles. The eight topics are then tracked constantly and tie back to specific organizational goals.

Continuous improvement is a constant quest. Escalation huddles offer enormous potential and striking results in that pursuit — both in health care and beyond.

How to Be Creative When You’re Feeling Stressed

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More than just lightly toasted, your brain feels singed.

You’re burned out, and the cumulative stress makes it hard to decide what to eat for dinner, let alone come up with innovative ideas. But people are still expecting you to produce creative solutions despite your current mental state. What do you do?

If you find yourself in this situation, I can’t offer any guarantees that epiphanies will come to you. But I can offer ideas based on my experience as a time management coach and on the science of how our brains work that can give you the best possible odds of coming up with some decent new thoughts.

To start, you need to let go of trying to “make yourself” come up with something creative. If you’re already struggling with stress, threatening yourself can further trigger the fight-or-flight mode. This causes you to operate out of the primal, least creative part of your brain. So instead of saying to yourself, “I must be creative,” or “This has to happen now,” it’s better to tell yourself something like, “I’m going to see what happens,” “I’m going to explore this possibility,” or “I’m going to play around with some ideas.”

You want to create a sense of psychological safety so you don’t experience debilitating performance pressure.

Once you’ve created psychological safety, then experiment with activities that can trigger the “diffuse-thinking” state. This type of thinking is one in which your brain operates in a looser manner, searching to make connections between different parts of your brain versus operating in the established neuropaths followed in the “focused-thinking” state. Activities like walking, napping, eating, or taking other sorts of breaks naturally put you into the diffuse state and open your mind up to new possibilities.

To maximize the benefits of these in-between times, avoid multi-tasking and let your mind explore a particular idea. For example, you could feed your brain these kinds of prompts: What might be involved in making this promotion a success? Or what might happen if we approached our customers in a different way? An openness of mind and non-judgment toward the quality or quantity of your thoughts gives space for creativity to come forth.

In particular, I find that I am most creative when I not only am giving myself space from my computer but also positioning myself in a “happy place.” In the warmer months, that’s somewhere outside preferably along a lake. In the cooler months, it’s likely a coffee shop with a fireplace. Beautiful, peaceful surroundings lift my spirits and creative mental capacity. Some of my coaching clients have found their happy, creative spaces in historic libraries, art museums, or even browsing through boutique shops. Know which environments naturally give you pleasure and immerse yourself in them to allow positive thoughts to arise.

If you still feel stuck and just can’t come up with something new, then you may want to give your brain more material to work with. This could look like reading on the topic, taking a field trip to a place where you can see other people’s creative solutions to a similar problem, or talking to experts. Sometimes by seeing what other people have done, you can come up with new ways to approach your own situation.

And then to even further increase your opportunity for breakthrough moments, collaborate with others. Alternating between solo thinking and time in groups proves the most effective way to develop the most creative thoughts. Have a brainstorming meeting with colleagues, get together for coffee with a friend, or do problem solving with a consultant. Two or more brains can work better than one. The process of talking through ideas can stimulate new thoughts and challenge your thinking.

Finally, give yourself time. When your brain operates at full capacity, you may have the ability to come up with creative thoughts on the fly. But when you’re less than 100%, you’ll have a much better chance of success by giving your brain time to percolate on ideas for a few days.

When you’re mind feels blank and all you want to do is zone out, it’s more difficult but not impossible to experience your breakthrough. By putting yourself in the right mental state and environments, you can find your creativity.

How Women Manage the Gendered Norms of Leadership

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A wealth of research shows that female leaders, much more than their male counterparts, face the need to be warm and nice (what society traditionally expects from women), as well as competent or tough (what society traditionally expects from men and leaders). The problem is that these qualities are often seen as opposites. This creates a “catch-22” and “double bind” for women leaders. Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of HP, depicted it this way:  “In the chat rooms around Silicon Valley, from the time I arrived until long after I left HP, I was routinely referred to as either a “bimbo” or a “bitch”— too soft or too hard, and presumptuous, besides.”

To alleviate this double bind, societal expectations — for what it means to be a woman and what it takes to lead — must change. But until we get there, female executives still have to navigate these tensions. We wanted to know how successful women do it, day-to-day. So we conducted extensive interviews with 64 senior women leaders (all at the VP level or higher) from 51 different organizations in the United States: CEOs, general managers, and executives across functions, working in various industries. We found that there are four paradoxes, all stemming from the need to be both tough and nice, that these women confront. We also identified five strategies they use to manage them.

Four Balancing Acts

Paradox 1: Demanding yet caring. The female executives we studies told us they must demand high performance from others, while also demonstrating that they care about them. For example, Norma*, an HR executive in financial services, recalled how, in a past project, her perseverance led to successful project outcomes but also earned her some negative feedback: “I remember a program that I designed that everyone was doubting… and I truly just knew deep in my heart and… gut that it was going to work. So I kept pushing forward… and it was a huge, huge success… I’ve gotten feedback on being intimidating and that kind of stuff. Would I get the same feedback if I were a man?”

Paradox 2: Authoritative yet participative. This paradox lies between asserting one’s competence, and admitting one’s vulnerability and asking others to collaborate. On the one hand, women leaders learned to project authoritativeness, because without doing so, they risked being perceived as not credible, especially at the beginning of a new business engagement. They learned to “toughen up,” “speak louder,” and “act decisively.”

On the other hand, to prevent being perceived as arrogant, women leaders were also quick to acknowledge their own weaknesses and work with others. For example, Claire, a general manager in manufacturing, commented: “I’d learned about [my] tendencies of being directive. I’m having to manage and maybe take it down and go slower, go slow to go fast, to bring people along and to ensure that we have alignment.”

Paradox 3: Advocating for themselves yet serving others. The third paradox involves meeting one’s needs and goals as well as others’. Focusing too heavily on one side can cause serious trouble. For example, Cameron, a strategy executive in an accounting firm, told us how she would share her knowledge with others, only to later feel taken advantage of when they failed to reciprocate. By contrast, Meredith, a general manager in health services, was almost removed from a leadership team because she was seen as too aggressive in negotiating with internal stakeholders in order to promote her own goals.

Paradox 4: Maintaining distance yet being approachable. Our study subjects sometimes struggled to be seen as leaders, separate from colleagues and team members, while also developing close relationships. To generate respect, women leaders kept a distance from others, maintaining an impersonal “leadership presence” that was marked as “professional,” “objective,” and “serious.” At the same time, they noticed that they might then create impressions of being “stiff,” “ego-centric,” and “apathetic,” making it difficult to earn trust and commitment.

To bridge this, many explicitly and emphatically worked to convey the intimate human side of themselves, so they were instead seen as “accessible,” “warm,” “social,” “personable,” “friendly,” “informal,” and “easy to connect with.” Dawn, CEO of a nonprofit organization, explained how she did this through something as simple as clothing: “I try always to dress just ever so slightly more formal than employees, except on Fridays when I dress very informal to show that I’m also not stiff and unapproachable. Generally we have fun, but… there is a little bit of distancing that I try to maintain… I want people to see that I’m fair-minded and not playing favorites.”

Strategies for Managing the Tensions

Our findings suggest that to successfully navigate these paradoxes, women leaders first need to become aware of them, teasing out the different tensions rolled up into the central nice/tough double bind. Then, they can develop and customize a repertoire of strategies to manage, thereby enhancing their effectiveness and resilience. We identified five:

Adapt to the situation. Most of our study subjects told us that they demonstrate niceness and toughness in different situations, toward different audiences. For example, to signal both distance and approachability, Melissa, a general manager in a manufacturing firm, said: “I specifically don’t sit at the head of the table at certain times. [It] depends on the meeting and the environment. At certain times, I want to send the signal I’m just one of the team today, and other times I want to be very clear that I’m here to make a decision, and then I take a slightly different stance.”

Go in order. Another strategy is to be nice (or caring and collaborative) first, then tough (or demanding and directive). First, you build relationships, establish trust, and engage people, and then you follow up with harder behavior or language to challenge the status quo or achieve goals. For example, Marilyn, a general manager in a financial services firm, talked about her philosophy of working with others: “I think it’s just [building] that day-to-day relationship where people want to help you succeed. And so when you… advocate for something, people generally bend over backwards to figure out how to help you get it done.”

Similarly, Ruth, a new product development executive in manufacturing, talked about an incident in which she pushed to shut down a project that some of her peers considered their “babies.” She was able to do so without incurring resentment because she had first “invested a lot of time in developing strong collaborative relationships,” which was later helpful, since then, she said, “You can get past some of the politics… I’m not trying to make you look bad. I really do just want to work for the betterment of the business.”

Look for win-wins. Many women we talked to focused on identifying opportunities where niceness and toughness converge — what they sometimes called a “win-win” strategy. For example, Dorothy, a general manager in health services, described her mindset this way: “The most important thing is understanding what are the values, the traits, the goals of that person that you’re trying to influence… So, I’ve always tried to know what it is that I’m trying to achieve, tie that back to something that I know they want to achieve.”

Be tough on tasks and soft on people. With this strategy, women leaders focused on simultaneously being nice to people and tough on tasks. For example, Sally, a state legislator, shared her experience: “I learned that we could vehemently disagree on an issue, and when we walked out of the room, we were friends. I really came to see the importance of being able to separate [that] out.”

Denise, a strategy executive in a financial organization, shared another example: When a colleague presented an unsatisfactory proposal, she used a soft approach to deliver a hard message:  “I wanted to lay enough on the table to say, ‘Boy, this is very interesting…. Can we do some more research on this? Can we test this against some other organizations?’ That’s an example of where you can get an idea across without saying: ‘Hey listen, I think this is really dumb, and we’re not going to do it.’ I’m much more effective as a leader if I lead with a question.”

Reframe. We found that the leaders also tried to reframe what it meant to be nice and tough. They focused on connecting the two and reinforcing positive associations. This involved recasting behaviors that might be considered weaknesses as strengths. For example, women leaders described displays of vulnerability as reflecting inner confidence — feeling secure enough to comfortably reveal their own faults and weaknesses. Shannon, a president in a manufacturing company, explained, “I am very confident in saying ‘I don’t know the answer but I’m keen to find out’ or ‘I don’t know the answer but I know I have the ability to find out.’”

Another approach was to frame assertive behaviors that others might find threatening as originating from genuine care. For example, Lorraine, Jordan, and Norma described giving negative feedback or voicing disagreements as trying to help others.

In the long run, organizations and society must produce systematic change to alleviate conflicting expectations for women and additional hurdles for their leadership. But as long as female executives face the double bind, they will need to find ways to manage it.

*All names have been changed

Tackling Climate Change, and Making Sense of the Nissan-Renault Drama

Youngme Moon, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and Mihir Desai tackle climate change, discuss the Nissan-Renault soap opera, and share their After Hours picks for the week.

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For interested listeners:

The National Climate Assessment

Some recent picks:

The Man in the High Castle (Amazon Video)
The Ringer website
Janesville (Amy Goldstein)
Airtable (software)
Small Fry (Lisa Brennan-Jobs)
Educated (Tara Westover)
Burn After Reading (Netflix)
Janelle Monae
Company (Stephen Sondheim musical)

You can email your comments and ideas for future episodes to: harvardafterhours@gmail.com. You can also follow Youngme and Mihir on Twitter at: @YoungmeMoon and @DesaiMihirA.

HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.