Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 778

How to Work for a Boss Who Has a New Idea Every 5 Minutes

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You walk down the hall, head spinning — unsure of how to stabilize yourself.

You went into your one-on-one thinking you had clarity on your current priorities. You just left it wondering how in the world you would squeeze in the five new ideas your boss just dreamed up. You cringe when you have the premonition that an email with the subject line “another thought” might be waiting for you once you reach your desk.

Visionary bosses can be exciting, fun, and innovative. They can also feel overwhelming when there’s no way that you can keep up with all of their creative ideas.

As a time management coach, I’ve coached many creative idea people and coached many people managed by creative idea people. Based on that experience, here are some helpful strategies for managing up when your boss gets distracted by too many creative ideas.

Foster Mutual Respect

If you find yourself overwhelmed by your boss’s creative ideas, most likely you are more of an action-oriented person. If you’re not careful, you can start to develop a judgmental attitude such as, “I’m the only one who gets anything done and contributes value around here.” And this attitude can cause you to lose respect for the insight that your boss brings.

Avoid that trap and instead choose to focus on mutual respect. It may be true that you’re better at executing on tasks, which is a strength that you bring to the table. It also may be true that your boss is better at helping determine what should be done and keeping the team from getting stale. Instead of seeing the differences as bad, it’s most helpful to look at them as complementary assets you both bring to the team.

Recognize Not All Ideas Require Action

If you’re a very action-focused person, you may automatically assume that when your boss shares an idea that she expects you to do something about it. But often that’s not the case. Individuals with creative minds can think of 100 new ideas before breakfast. There’s no possible way that they — or anyone — could keep up with them.

Some of my coaching clients have found the best solution is to keep an email folder or another “parking lot” of ideas that their bosses come up with that aren’t related to current projects and priorities. They might say something in a meeting like, “That’s a great idea,” or send an email reply saying, “I’ll take a look.” Then add the idea to the parking lot without feeling compelled to take any further action.

Often times your boss just wants to share something that’s on her mind and is satisfied with acknowledgement of the idea. The general rule in these situations is that you wait until the idea is brought up a few more times before doing anything, otherwise you can just let it sit. (Of note, this may not work in all situations so be aware of your boss’s expectations. If she expects every idea be pursued, you’ll need to use the expectation negotiation strategies below.) But this parking lot strategy does work in many cases without any substantial consequence.

Explain the Time Commitment

Individuals with a bent toward the creative often have difficulty estimating how long activities will take. If you find that your boss seriously wants to pursue a new idea but that it would take a substantial amount of hours, help her understand the cost. For example you could lay out that it will take 20 hours of staff time and 15 hours of contractor time to follow through on the idea. Is she comfortable with that allocation of hours and budget?

When you detail out the time commitment, at first your boss may be shocked because she assumed it took much less time. And then she’ll likely say, “Oh, never mind. It’s not that important.” By explaining the cost, it takes the pressure off of you to make things work and on to her to give the idea the resources it needs.

Come Back to the Plan

If your boss tends to get distracted with new ideas, she likely has difficulty setting priorities. Instead of shutting down an idea that she’s excited about implementing, re-direct your attention back to the team’s monthly or quarterly plan. Ask questions such as: How do you see this new idea fitting in with our current goals? If we take on this new initiative, we will need to drop or delay another, which one would you be willing to de-prioritize? Is this idea something that we need to implement now or could it be considered for next year?

By laying out how pursuing a new idea will have an impact on other priorities, you can help your boss assess what makes the most sense from a strategic perspective.

Working with a boss who has a constant flow of creative ideas can be stimulating — or debilitating. By using these four strategies, you can leverage your boss’s creative strengths while minimizing the stress and frustration of trying to keep up.

Dysfunctional Teams

Is your teamwork not working? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. They talk through what to do when your team isn’t communicating, doesn’t respect its leader, or has one employee who’s causing problems.

Download this podcast

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: The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture by Amy Edmondson — “When you join an unfamiliar team or start a challenging new project, self-protection is a natural ins tinct. It’s not possible to look good or be right all the time when collaborating on an endeavor with uncertain outcomes. But when you’re concerned about yourself, you tend to be less interested in others, less passionate about your shared cause, and unable to understand different points of view. So it takes conscious work to shift the culture.”

HBR: Too Much Team Harmony Can Kill Creativity by Darko Lovric and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic — “Consistent with these famous case studies, scientific research shows that creativity and innovation can be enhanced by reducing team harmony. For instance, a recent study of 100 product development teams found that two common disruptors of team harmony, namely diversity and task uncertainty, were positively associated with creative performance.”

HBR: Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams by Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson — “Our study showed that a number of skills were crucial: appreciating others, being able to engage in purposeful conversations, productively and creatively resolving conflicts, and program management. By training employees in those areas, a company’s human resources or corporate learning department can make an important difference in team performance.”

HBR: The Secrets of Great Teamwork by Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen — “Team assignments should be designed with equal care. Not every task has to be highly creative or inspiring; many require a certain amount of drudgery. But leaders can make any task more motivating by ensuring that the team is responsible for a significant piece of work from beginning to end, that the team members have a lot of autonomy in managing that work, and that the team receives performance feedback on it.”

Why Public Health Organizations Should Partner with Academic Institutes - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM QATAR FOUNDATION

In a recent article, The Guardian newspaper called for the National Health Service to turn to universities as a key resource, arguing that the research ecosystem in the UK is fragmented and more partnerships that align expertise with the goal of improving public health are needed.

The recommendation was echoed in a recent U.S. research study, which observed that 30–40 percent of patients in the United States “do not receive care complying with current research evidence.” It suggested that collaboration in research, education, and clinical practice too often remain unexplored in many developed countries across the world.

A case study for what such collaboration can look like is the healthcare sector in Qatar. In a decade, it has advanced from being ranked 27th in the world to 13th, and now stands as the highest in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Education Doesn’t End With Graduation

Higher education plays a key role in advancing national and regional public health in Qatar since the work of developing and personalizing cutting-edge treatment interventions is firmly implanted in academic institutions.

Qatar Foundation (QF), a non-profit organization supporting Qatar’s development, works to ensure that education lends itself to practice in ways that make it inseparable from the process of diagnosis and treatment. For instance, Sidra Medicine, the country’s premier hospital for women and children, benefits from the academic scholarship of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q), a medical university just across the street from its fellow QF entity, by having WCM-Q’s professors serve as physicians within its various departments. Sidra academicians, by the same token, hold faculty positions and professorships at WCM-Q, further boosting interprofessional training for medical students and professionals.

“Sidra is introducing innovative education and training programs for medical students, trainees, and physicians in various specialties, which has never been done in this region before,” said Dr. Muhammad Waqar Azeem, Chair of Psychiatry at Sidra and Professor of Psychiatry at WCM-Q. “Ultimately, our research is improving our interventions. It is not undertaken for the sake of research, but to improve people’s lives.”

Through such programs, QF ensures practicing doctors are equipped with the theoretical knowledge of academics that they might otherwise leave behind after their graduation.

 

Learning Environments Can Be Integrated

Sidra and WCM-Q are joined by specialized schools for children with autism and other learning challenges, all of which are part of a larger learning ecosystem built by QF—known as Education City— which features dozens of academic, research, and community centers. Located in a 3,000-acre campus, Education City benefits the national healthcare sector by ensuring that the results of research are swiftly translated into patient care.

Within this integrated learning environment, QF has also established the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), an initiative that gathers a global community of health experts, innovators, and policymakers to capture and transmit the best evidence-based ideas and practices in the health industry.

In 2016, WISH published a report titled ‘Autism: A Global Framework for Action’—compiled by 11 thought-leaders from five continents—that emerged through this unique ecosystem.



“One day, while having breakfast with the then-CEO of WISH, he asked me how we could address autism for the 2016 WISH summit,” said Dr. Azeem, who then organized a panel of specialists in this area to explore the possibilities of this project. The result of this association was an evidence-based report recommending best practices in autism services for developing and middle-income countries. “In less than one year, we were able to see an idea born out of a breakfast meeting come to life,” he said.

The example illustrates how cross-functional work between various health-related organizations ensures that innovation is not bogged down by the bureaucracies that often accompany formal partnerships. As Dr. Azeem’s experience shows, projects in Education City capable of setting local and international standards can begin with a simple meeting with an entity next door.

Stakeholders Can Help Address Industry Gaps

In a typical university-hospital association, one party takes the initiative and offers incentives to the other to enter into a mutually beneficial pact. In Qatar, however, QF acts as the driving force for bringing different organizations to the table, pushing them to use their expertise to fill existing gaps in the health system.

“Many countries take for granted the potential of having all stakeholders around the table, mainly because, for some, this can be very hard to do,” said Dr. Azeem. “Due to the size, resources, and commitment available in Qatar, what can be achieved in the US at the state level can be accomplished here at the national level.”

A key example of this is Qatar’s National Autism Plan. Since the Ministry of Public Health launched the plan in 2017, Dr. Azeem has been instrumental in foregrounding the benefits of involving stakeholders from the private and public sector.

“Qatar is the only country that has such a plan in the whole region,” he explains. “It was only possible due to the support shown by the country’s top leadership, the presence of stakeholders from across the country on the table, and the active participation of families. Everyone involved met for about two years to put the plan together successfully.”

Sidra may have only opened its main hospital building earlier this year, but the medical network through which it interacts with other educational and research entities within QF is already bearing fruit. In October, Sidra performed the country’s first separation surgery of conjoined twins, paving the way for complex pediatric surgeries and eliminating the local need to travel abroad for rare and complex conditions. Sidra also ushered in an era of medical tourism in Qatar when a prematurely-born baby was flown to Qatar from Kuwait for an emergency operation to correct a heart defect, at just 29 days old.

Such examples outline how connecting hospitals with universities, and research institutes with public health centers, has all the signs of being the most efficient way forward for revolutionizing ailing healthcare systems around the world.

To learn more about Qatar Foundation and its various initiatives, visit www.qf.org.qa.

Health Systems Need to Completely Reassess How They Manage Costs

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A recent Navigant survey found that U.S. hospitals and health systems experienced an average 39% reduction in their operating margins from 2015 to 2017. This was because their expenses grew faster than their revenues, despite cost-cutting initiatives. As I speak with industry executives, a common refrain is “I’ve done all the easy stuff.” Clearly, more is needed. Cost reduction requires an honest and thorough reassessment of everything the health system does and ultimately, a change in the organization’s operating culture.

When people talk about having done “the easy stuff,” they mean they haven’t filled vacant positions and have eliminated some corporate staff, frozen or cut travel and board education, frozen capital spending and consulting, postponed upgrades of their IT infrastructure, and, in some cases, launched buyouts for the older members of their workforces, hoping to reduce their benefits costs.

These actions certainly save money, but typically less than 5% of their total expense base. They also do not represent sustainable, long-term change. Here are some examples of what will be required to change the operating culture:

Contract rationalization. Contracted services account for significant fractions of all hospitals’ operating expenses. The sheer sprawl of these outsourced services is bewildering, even at medium-size organizations: housekeeping, food services, materials management, IT, and clinical staffing, including temporary nursing and also physician coverage for the ER, ICU and hospitalists. More recently, it has come in the form of the swarms of “apps” sold to individual departments to solve scheduling and care-coordination problems and to “bond” with “consumers.” There is great dispersion of responsibility for signing and supervising these contracts, and there is often an unmanaged gap between promise and performance.

An investor-owned hospital executive whose company had acquired major nonprofit health care enterprises compared the proliferation of contracts to the growth of barnacles on the bottom of a freighter. One of his company’s first transition actions after the closure of an acquisition is to put its new entity in “drydock” and scrape them off (i.e., cancel or rebid them). Contractors offer millions in concessions to keep the contracts, he said. Barnacle removal is a key element of serious cost control. For the contracts that remain, and also consulting contracts that are typically of shorter duration, there should be an explicit target return on investment, and the contractor should bear some financial risk for achieving that return. The clinical-services contracts for coverage of hospital units such as the ER and ICU are a special problem, which I’ll discuss below.

Eliminating layers of management. One thing that distinguishes the typical nonprofit from a comparably-sized investor-owned hospital is the number of layers of management. Investor-owned hospitals rarely have more than three or four layers of supervision between the nurse that touches patients and the CEO. In some larger nonprofit hospitals, there may be six. The middle layers spend their entire days in meetings or on conference calls, traveling to meetings outside the hospital, or negotiating contracts with vendors.

In large nonprofit multi-hospital systems, there is an additional problem: Which decisions should be made at the hospital, multi-facility regional, and corporate levels are poorly defined, and as a consequence, there is costly functional overlap. This results in “title bloat” (e.g., “CFOs” that don’t manage investments and negotiate payer or supply contracts but merely supervise revenue cycle activities, do budgeting, etc.). One large nonprofit system that has been struggling with its costs had a “president of strategy,” prima facie evidence of a serious culture problem!

Since direct caregivers are often alienated from corporate bureaucracy, reducing the number of layers that separate clinicians from leadership — reducing the ratio of meeting goers to caregivers — is not only a promising source of operating savings but also a way of letting some sunshine and senior-management attention reach the factory floor.

However, doing this with blanket eliminations of layers carries a risk: inadvertently pruning away the next generation of leadership talent. To avoid this danger requires a discerning talent-management capacity in the human resources department.

Pruning the portfolio of facilities and services. Many current health enterprises are combinations of individual facilities that, over time, found it convenient or essential to their survival to combine into multi-hospital systems. Roughly two-thirds of all hospitals are part of these systems. Yet whether economies of scale truly exist in hospital operations remains questionable. Modest reductions in the cost of borrowing and in supply costs achieved in mergers are often washed out by higher executive compensation, more layers of management, and information technology outlays, leading to higher, rather than lower, operating expenses.

A key question that must be addressed by a larger system is how many facilities that could not have survived on their own can it manage without damaging its financial position?  As the U.S. savings and loan industry crisis in the 1980s and 1990s showed us, enough marginal franchises added to a healthy portfolio can swamp the enterprise. In my view, this factor — a larger-than-sustainable number of marginal hospital franchises — may have contributed to the disproportionate negative operating performance of many multi-regional Catholic health systems from 2015 to 2017.

In addition to this problem, many regional systems comprised of multiple hospitals that serve overlapping geographies continue to support multiple, competing, and underutilized clinical programs (e.g., obstetrics, orthopedics, cardiac care) that could benefit from consolidation. In larger facilities, there is often an astonishing proliferation of special care units, ICUs, and quasi-ICUs that are expensive to staff and have high fixed cost profiles.

Rationalizing clinical service lines, reducing duplication, and consolidating special care units is another major cost-reduction opportunity, which, in turn, makes possible reductions in clinical and support personnel. The political costs and disruption involved in getting clinicians to collaborate successfully across facilities sometimes causes leaders to postpone addressing the duplication and results in sub-optimal performance.

Clinical staffing and variation. It is essential to address how the health system manages its clinicians, particularly physicians. This has been an area of explosive cost growth in the past 15 years as the number of physicians employed by hospitals has nearly doubled. In addition to paying physicians the salaries stipulated in their contracts, hospitals have been augmenting their compensation (e.g., by paying them extra for part-time administrative work and being on call after hours and by giving them dividends from joint ventures in areas such as imaging and outpatient surgery where the hospital bears most of the risk).

The growth of these costs rivals those of specialty pharmaceuticals and the maintenance and updating of electronic health record systems. Fixing this problem is politically challenging because it involves reducing physician numbers, physician incomes, or both. As physician employment contracts come up for renewal, health systems will have to ask the “why are we in this business” and “what can we legitimately afford to pay” questions about each one of them. Sustaining losses based on hazy visions of “integration” or unproven theories about employment leading to clinical discipline can no longer be justified.

But this is not the deepest layer of avoidable physician-related cost. As I discussed in this HBR article, hospitals’ losses from treating Medicare patients are soaring because the cost of treating Medicare patient admission is effectively uncontrolled while the Medicare DRG payment is fixed and not growing at the rate of inflation. The result: hospitals lost $49 billion in 2016 treating Medicare patients, a number that’s surely higher now.

The root cause of these losses is a failure to “blueprint,” or create protocols for, routine patient care decisions, resulting in absurd variations in the consumption of resources (operating room time; length of stay, particularly in the ICU; lab and imaging exams per admissions, etc.).

The fact that hospitals have outsourced the staffing of the crucial resource-consuming units such as the ICU and ER makes this task more difficult. Patients need to flow through them efficiently or the hospital loses money, often in large amounts. How many of those contracts obligate the contractual caregivers to take responsibility for managing down the delivered cost of the DRG and reward them for doing so? Is compensation in these contracts contingent on the profit (or loss avoidance) impact of their clinical supervision?

These are all difficult issues, but until they are addressed, many health systems will continue to have suboptimal operating results. While I am not arguing that health systems abandon efforts to grow, unless those efforts are executed with strategic and operational discipline, financial performance will continue to suffer.  A colleague once said to me that when he hears about someone having picked all the low-hanging fruit, it is really a comment on his or her height. Given the escalating operating challenges many health systems face, it may be past time for senior management to find a ladder.

Survey: Remote Workers Are More Disengaged and More Likely to Quit

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Employees around the world yearn for freedom and flexibility. The most common form of flexibility that companies offer is the ability to work remote. In a new study by my firm and Virgin Pulse, we found that a third of employees globally work remote always or very often. Compared to a decade ago, the number of remote workers has increased by 115%. I’ve personally worked from home for almost eight years and have benefitted from the independence, autonomy, and five-second commute time.

Despite these benefits, I often feel lonely, isolated, and less engaged with my team, since I rarely see them face-to-face and am confined to a 500-square-foot apartment. After interviewing over 2,000 employees and managers globally, our study discovered two-thirds of remote workers aren’t engaged and over a third never get any face-time with their team —  yet over 40% said it would help build deeper relationships.

The study also found that remote workers are much less likely to stay at their company long-term. Only 5% always or very often see themselves working at their company for their entire career, compared to almost a third that never work remotely. When you don’t see or hear your colleagues over a long period of time, you can become less committed to your team and organization — and start looking for your next opportunity — since no one is looking over your shoulder while you job search.

While the population of remote workers is growing, some companies are simultaneously rolling back their remote work programs and forcing their employees to be at the office everyday with no exceptions. Companies that have already mandated this include Yahoo!, Best Buy, HP, Reddit, IBM, and Honeywell. They agree that in-person collaboration fosters teamwork, idea-sharing and quicker decision making. They believe that it’s the best way to build a strong culture, increase engagement, and fuel work relationships.

Kiah Erlich, a senior director at Honeywell, told me: “When our company eliminated working from home several months ago, it was disappointing and not fun as a manager to explain to some of my permanently remote employees. But as a leader who craves human interaction, it has been one of the greatest things we’ve done. People are actually in the office now. What once was a painful conference call is now a collaborative white-boarding session. Instead of more emails, people get out of their chair and walk over to my office. It is a beautiful thing to see, and it has not only improved productivity but brought the team closer together.” Leaders want their employees to have a similar experience because it’s good for the culture and business.

Instead of saving money by promoting remote work, many companies are investing money in their office designs. A well-designed office, with an assortment of meeting spaces, gives employees the flexibility they desire but in a collaborative environment. Apple is spending about $5 billion for a 2.8 million square-foot office space that accommodates about 12,000 employees. Amazon will also spend $5 billion on their new headquarters to employ 50,000 people, and Zurich North America spent $333 million for a 783,000 square foot office for 3,000 employees. Clearly, design matters to these companies; they want a place where employees can freely interact to create breakthrough ideas.

These companies understand that employees’ proximity to each other matters. The closer we sit to our colleagues, the more likely we will interact with them and form the relationships that lead to long-term team commitment. Back in 1977, MIT Professor Thomas J. Allen studied the communication patterns among both scientists and engineers and found that the further apart their desks were, the less likely they were to communicate. If they were 30 meters or further from each other, the likelihood of regular communication was zero. Mike Maxwell, a senior category leader at Whirlpool, says: “Face-to-face meetings give you the proximity and presence that make collaboration more effective. I am also better able to read the room and pick up on the unsaid words. Reading the room is critical for knowing when things need further explaining or when to drop something that isn’t going over well.”

Aside from lacking proximity, there are often times a lag in communications with a remote workforce. Getting everyone on the same page, on the same call and in the same mindset is challenging when people aren’t located in the same place. “Whenever there’s a gap in communication across a remote and dispersed workforce, people fill that void with their own assumptions,” says Dr. Rajiv Kumar, president and chief medical officer at Virgin Pulse — assumptions that can result in work conflicts.

Although research shows that remote workers are more productive, and they’ll tell you that they enjoy the flexibility, they typically won’t reveal how isolated they are. Some companies have gone to extremes to either force everyone into the office or enable all employees to work remote, but very often, meeting in the middle is best. Give them the flexibility at the office, while an option to work remote part-time based on their position and needs. They need face-time even if they won’t admit it, and companies need an engaged workforce in order to retain talent and compete in the global economy.

How to Leave a Job You Love

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Maybe you fell head over heels. Maybe your feelings grew over time. All you know is that you have what everyone is looking for, but few seem to get: A job you love. And you are about to leave it. How do you even start explaining?

The work is great. So is the organization. It’s not them. It’s you. And it was not just a moment of temptation. You have been thinking about it for a while. Even if you might regret it, you must part now. It’s the right time.

After all, you keep telling yourself, you’d better leave while it is your choice. When you still have options. You are too young to get cozy and too good to be taken for granted. You have seen what happens to those who do. One day, they get dumped unceremoniously, and what for, new talent? Or their love slowly curdles into complacency, leaving them going through the motions. No, you won’t let that happen, and ruin the memory of a great modern love.

Because that’s what it is, admit it. Sigmund Freud is often quoted saying, a century ago, that to live a good life we need to be able to love and work. These days, it seems, we must be able to love to work. We no longer want just respect, security, or money from our jobs. We want passion, fulfillment, and surprise too. We want, in a word, romance.

Organizations take those wishes seriously, and do their best to win our hearts. They no longer attract talent with only the promise of material reward. Their recruitment pitches promise that you will find meaning. You will grow. You will be part of a community, and you will help change the world. If you are lucky, you might even get paid well. What’s not to love?

Scholars have spent decades studying what makes organizations win our hearts. It’s called identification. We fall for organizations that reward our efforts not only with good benefit packages, but also with a better version of our selves.

When we are “identified,” we become what we do. We come to think of our selves in ways that incorporate — literally, give our body to — the organization’s values. If my organization is open, rigorous, and entrepreneurial, I must be too. When our organization shines, then, we feel as if we shine. When it struggles, we struggle. Our jobs appear, like other romances, the healthiest and most sensible of addictions.

No wonder we can’t stop thinking about our jobs, and sometimes they make us lose our mind. That is just how romance works. It is demanding. It might consume you. But when it’s good, it makes you feel alive. While it lasts, that is.

I often meet people falling out with a job or an organization that they (used to) love. They often turn to executive courses as a couple’s therapy of sorts, looking for help sorting out their mixed feelings. I understand them well because I am one of them some days. I know the hesitation, the mild guilt, the fear. Am I just being impatient? Will I get over it? Will I find something better, or even just as good? And who will I become if I leave?

Sometimes those questions are signs that we are stuck in a dysfunctional romance with our jobs. Other times, that a fading romance with our job is transforming into a mature love with our work. Most often, it is a bit of both, but it is crucial to tell them apart. You must understand why you are leaving before you can think about how to leave well.

This is how to tell if you are in a dysfunctional romance. You give a lot, you don’t get what you need, and you are made to feel that it is your fault. Breaking up feels hard, even if abuse is involved. You feel captive, for economic and psychological reasons. You want to leave but feel that you can’t afford it and, to be honest, can’t even imagine it. Who would you be?

This is how to tell if your romance is transforming into enduring love. Your passion is turning into devotion, and you begin to discern what exactly is worth being devoted to. You are not sure if it is worth being devoted to a job. For all you might love it, a job will never love you back. But you love what you do, and who you have become, in that job. You love the work, and the people you touch through that work. Those deserve your devotion.

If you conclude that you’re in a dysfunctional romance, there is only one thing to do to leave well. Get out as soon as you can. Find what you need to support yourself — another job, a good group of friends — and make a clean cut. It will heal quicker than you can imagine. Even if only parts of your job are like that, draw a clear line between you and those. Once you realize that you are better off, it will free you up. Perhaps, even, to stay on different terms.

If you already have alternatives — an attractive offer, enough support around you — and you are still hesitating, however, you need to take a different tack. You may be shifting your love from your job to your work, and you need to honor the former and embrace the latter. So think twice before you leave. Once about what you need to let go of, and once about what you cannot leave behind. Then make sure you mourn the former, and take the latter with you.

Leaving a job that has made you who you are — even if it has shrunk, you have outgrown it, or both — cannot be quick and easy, and you should not try to make it so. It would be an insult, and a waste of learning. Take time to say goodbye to people and spaces, even to things. Acknowledge the last time you do a task, attend the all-hands meeting, or look out a certain window. If there is a party, make it full of stories. Let sadness be there alongside celebration. When people congratulate you, let them know that condolences might be in order. Feeling sad might make you wonder if you are making a mistake. It could be; you must consider that. But maybe it just means that you have been doing it right all along.

Let your job teach you one last thing: to savor loss. You will need it again. In the mobile workplace of our day and age, being able to move on is as important as being able to commit. We hardly seem talented if we can’t do both. It’s not enough to be able to love our jobs, then. We must also learn to leave them. And if loving well is hard, leaving well is harder still.

While you say your heartfelt goodbyes, remember that when you leave a beloved job there is no need to pack light. Take all you can with you, lest you leave yourself behind. Pay attention to the work that you will continue to do, even elsewhere, and make a mental note of how it might develop now that your job is no longer constraining it. Let the people you want to keep in your working life know that your relationship goes on, and might even develop in new ways. If you already know what those ways might be, it will make both you and them feel good to say it out loud. If you are the kind of person who enjoys making lists, by all means make one of the work and the people you are committed to taking with you.

Finally, turn to the organization. You might have chosen to leave it, but you can still keep the habits and values that you learned there. That is the beauty of identification — you do not have to give it back like your laptop and badge. Many people cherish their time at organizations that they left long ago, and remain loyal to them, because those places helped them discover who they were, what they could do, and where they could go next. Jennifer Petriglieri and I have coined the term “identity workspaces” for those organizations. The mobile talent of our day and age finds them attractive precisely because they make us feel portable. They stay with us long after we are gone.

Sometimes it is necessary to leave a job or an organization in order to love our work better. Because there is one thing that loving well requires that no job or organization can ever teach — the capacity to be alone. Once we can do that, love is no longer a necessity but a joy. We are more likely to set firm boundaries, which make it easier to get close to others and to our work without giving ourselves away. When we can be alone, we become less vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. We can really commit, because we are not captive.

I don’t think it’s worth loving a job, or an organization. Let me repeat it: they will not love you back. But if a job, or an organization, helps you find work and people worth loving, then it has been good, and it is worth honoring, both while you are there and after you are gone.

Communicating Your Succession Plan with Customers, Clients, and Shareholders

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“When are you thinking of retiring?” I am used to this question by now.  It usually comes up an hour into a meeting with a client prospect for our investment company, often after a shuffling of papers and downward glances. “And what is your plan for succession at the company?”

At first, I used to be surprised. Did I look that old? I’d reply that I had no near-term plans to retire and that we had a very strong team of younger executives, including the current president, whom I had designated as my eventual CEO replacement. Then I cycled through a range of reactions: annoyance with the inquiry; concern that women are still not considered as “committed” as men, even when we’re CEO; and wanting to better understand why people felt compelled to ask me about retirement.

It turns out that I am not the only one who’s wondered about this. I informally surveyed 280 business leaders, all over 55 years old, the majority of whom work for small to mid-sized firms in the U.S. I found that 30% had been asked about retirement, primarily by clients or prospects.  Both men and women were queried about retirement, generally starting by age 60, across all industry groups. Many said they believed the question was seeking reassurance.

The fact is that CEOs tend to be the face of their organizations, especially at small to mid-sized companies, where they may work with the most important clients, and when they are the founder. Prospects may have been drawn to the company specifically because they heard about the CEO. So it is entirely reasonable that customers planning their future with you would want to know about any upcoming retirement plans.

CEOs have to anticipate this concern and be proactive in addressing it. The growth of your business may depend on how well you can ensure clients that the company will be fine under your successor’s leadership. The further away you are from retirement, the longer you can handle that client’s needs; but the closer you are to departure, the more you need to convince them that your colleagues are as good, if not better, than you. (And if you’re nowhere near retirement, you should simply state that you love your job, have numerous initiatives underway, and look forward to fulfilling them in collaboration with colleagues and clients.)

Failing to communicate succession plans clearly with clients, workforce, and shareholders can result in internal chaos, loss of current and future business, and decline in stock value. As CEO, it’s your duty to be mindful about client concerns and carefully consider your tenure, transfer of responsibility, retirement timing, and appropriate communication. Failing to do this may put your firm and your ultimate successor at risk.

Here’s an action plan that may help:

If you are the CEO of a small to mid-sized company, you need to begin thinking about your own transition many years before retirement.  That includes deciding when you will retire and at what pace you will divest your current responsibilities.

From there, you can decide whom to move tasks to, whether you have the right people in place, and, if not, how to attract and train the next generation of leaders.  Only at that point can you begin to implement these reassignments.

With this plan in place, you’ll have a more thorough response to any questions about when you will retire and who will succeed you. When it comes to timeline, you can always offer a range (4-6 years from now, for example) or explain that you intend to be fully active for many more years than that.

What clients want to hear next is reassurance about the team you have in place to take on more of your responsibilities. Reinforce how much confidence you have in your people. Within a year of your retirement, introduce your core team to prospects and clients, and highlight their achievements with the firm. Many CEOs prefer gradual transitions, and this requires thoughtfully explaining which roles you will retain for the longest period of time. That way, your team fully understands and can articulate these plans to others. Since more than one person may be in contention for the CEO role, try to clarify that choice as soon as possible, to avoid internal stress and bitterness.

Client prospects care when you’re going to retire.  That’s a nod to your reputation. But it requires a careful and honest description of both how long you can provide your expertise and how well you have assembled, led, and nurtured a management team with even better skills than you could offer. You don’t have to wait for the question to come up before speaking to this.

Uber Prepares to Go Public, and China’s Social Credit System

Youngme Moon, Mihir Desai, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee discuss how much Uber is worth as it prepares to go public, before debating China’s controversial Social Credit system. They also share their After Hours picks for the week.

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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.

Convincing CEOs to Make Harassment Prevention a Priority

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It has been a year since the #MeToo movement went viral. Since then, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has experienced a 13.6% increase in the number of sexual harassment charges it has received. The EEOC’s counterpart state agencies have seen even greater increases. While some business leaders have seized this moment to make important changes in how they address harassment in their workplaces, others do not yet see the urgency in addressing the problem. In fact, in a meeting we had last month with a group of senior HR directors, some of the most urgent questions were: “How do I make my CEO pay attention to this issue?” and “How do I convince my CEO that we need to invest sufficient resources in preventing harassment?”

In June 2016, the EEOC issued a first-of-its-kind report on harassment in the workplace. The suggestions and tips in that report still stand, but the past year has shown us just how difficult it is for HR directors, general counsel, compliance officers, and D&I directors to make the business case for harassment prevention to their leadership. Many of the people in these roles know—as we do—that stopping and preventing workplace harassment is not only a moral imperative, it is also sound corporate strategy.

In the past fiscal year the filing of sexual harassment cases by the EEOC more than doubled, and monetary damages paid by employers increased from $47 million to $70 million in EEOC cases. These statistics do not include the costs of sexual harassment cases brought by private plaintiff attorneys or other forms of harassment investigated or litigated by the EEOC or private attorneys, such as harassment as a result of race, national origin, religion, disability, or age. Adding the costs of these cases further increases the financial liability for companies that fail to prevent harassment.

Damage awards and litigation costs are not the only financial consequences of corporate failure to stop and prevent workplace harassment, though. Employees who are harassed, as well as those who work with harassed employees, suffer adverse physical and mental health consequences, resulting in absenteeism and higher medical costs. Harassment reduces the productivity of both harassed employees and the unit in which the harassment occurs. Harassed employees may leave if they are able to, and employees who witness unchecked harassment may also leave. Because almost 70% of harassment incidents are never reported to the employer, talented and highly-skilled employees may leave without employers knowing that their business has suffered as a result of workplace harassment.

Reputational harm can also be devastating to an employer’s business. Companies in which it is known (even without media coverage) that harassment occurs in their workplaces are less likely to attract talented employees and may lose customers and clients. If workplace harassment becomes public, the harm to the company’s reputation may be significant and long lasting.

For example, numerous companies — from Wynn Resorts to Fox News to Mike Isabella’s restaurant conglomerate to Uber — have seen stock prices, advertising revenue, sales numbers, and consumer loyalty fall as a result of negative harassment-related publicity. Boards of directors have faced shareholder derivative suits for failing to investigate and correct allegations of harassment. Some businesses, like Fidelity, have taken critical steps to correct and prevent harassment as soon as they have learned about it. Our hope is that other organizations and companies will begin to take proactive steps, before they find themselves in the press.

Unfortunately, as we heard at the HR meeting, many employers have still failed to implement the best and most effective measures to prevent workplace harassment. Traditional training that is focused on legal definitions and prohibitions of unlawful conduct is necessary but insufficient to prevent large judgments against a company and to prevent future misconduct. Written policies are often overly legalistic, not disseminated effectively, and poorly implemented. Typical corporate reporting and investigative policies and procedures lack crucial components that would make them most effective. Harassers, especially “superstars” within an organization, are often protected rather than punished, and individuals who report the misconduct of those employees may suffer unlawful retaliation. As a result, employees may be afraid to come forward and corporate leaders are unaware of the full extent of harassment in their workplaces.

To stop harassment effectively and to prevent its recurrence, employers need to create a culture of respect and inclusivity, where people feel safe when reporting misconduct, and where there are clear and immediate consequences for having engaged in harassment. Managers need to be taught skills regarding how to respond to harassing behavior in its infancy, before it rises to the level of illegal conduct, and how to respond when an employee makes a complaint. Non-supervisory employees need to be told what behavior is unacceptable in the workplace, and they must be taught skills on how to intervene when they observe harassing behavior. Leaders need to clearly and repeatedly set forth their values and expectations and hold people accountable when they contravene those expectations.

In its report, the EEOC issued a roadmap for such a proactive harassment prevention program. Sixteen months — and thousands of sexual harassment claims later — it’s clear how desperately such a roadmap is needed. Walking down this road will not just keep employees safe. It will also help businesses avoid the financial and reputational damage that comes with ignoring harassment prevention.

How Our Careers Affect Our Children

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What working parent hasn’t felt guilty about missing soccer games and piano recitals? When there are last-minute schedule changes at work or required travel to a client site, it’s normal to worry that you’re somehow permanently scarring your little one.

But how does our work affect our children’s lives?  About two decades ago, in a study that surveyed approximately 900 business professionals ranging from 25 to 63 years old, across an array of industries, Drexel University’s Jeff Greenhaus and I explored the relationship between work and family life and described how these two aspects of life are both allies and enemies.  In light of the deservedly increased attention we’re now paying to mental health problems in our society, it’s worth taking a fresh look at some of our findings on how the emotional lives of children — the unseen stakeholders at work — are affected by their parents’ careers.  Our findings help explain what’s been observed since our original research about how children are negatively affected by their parents being digitally distracted, also known as “technoference,” and by the harmful effects of stress at work on family life.

Most of the research on the impact of parental employment on children looks at whether or not mothers work (but not, until very recently, fathers); whether parents work full- or part-time; the amount of time parents spend at work; and the timing of parental employment in the span of children’s lives. Our research went beyond matters of time, however, and looked, in addition, at the inner experience of work: parental values about the importance of career and family, the psychological interference of work on family life (that is, we are thinking about work when we are physically present at home with our family), the extent of emotional involvement in career, and discretion and control about the conditions of work.

All these aspects of parents’ careers, we found, correlate with the degree to which children display behavior problems, which are key indicators of their mental health.  We measured them with the Child Behavior Checklist, a standard in the child development research literature that has not been used in other research in organizational psychology. Unfortunately, to date, the specific effects of parents’ work experiences (not time spent at work) on children’s mental health has still not been a priority for research in this field.  It should be, for this is yet another means by which work can have important health consequences. Here are some of the highlights of what we observed.

For both mothers and fathers, we found that children’s emotional health was higher when parents believed that family should come first, regardless of the amount of time they spent working. We also found children were better off when parents cared about work as a source of challenge, creativity, and enjoyment, again, without regard to the time spent.  And, not surprisingly, we saw that children were better off when parents were able to be physically available to them.

Children were more likely to show behavioral problems if their fathers were overly involved psychologically in their careers, whether or not they worked long hours. And a father’s cognitive interference of work on family and relaxation time — that is, a father’s psychological availability, or presence, which is noticeably absent when he is on his digital device — was also linked with children having emotional and behavioral problems. On the other hand, to the extent that a father was performing well in and feeling satisfied with his job, his children were likely to demonstrate relatively few behavior problems, again, independent of how long he was working.

For mothers, on the other hand, having authority and discretion at work was associated with mentally healthier children. That is, we found that children benefit if their mothers have control over what happens to them when they are working.  Further, mothers spending time on themselves — on relaxation and self-care — and not so much on housework, was associated with positive outcomes for children. It’s not just a matter of mothers being at home versus at work, it’s what they do when they’re at home with their non-work time. If mothers were not with their children so they could take care of themselves, there was no ill effect on their children.  But to the extent that mothers were engaged in housework, children were more likely to be beset by behavior problems.

Traditional roles for fathers and mothers are surely changing since we conducted this research. But it’s still the case that women carry more of the psychological burden of parental responsibilities. Our research showed that taking time to care for themselves instead of on the additional labor of housework strengthens mothers’ capacities to care their children. And fathers are better able to provide healthy experiences for their children when they are psychologically present with them and when their sense of competence and their well-being are enhanced by their work.

The good news in this research is that these features of a parent’s working life are, at least to some degree, under their control and can be changed.   We were surprised to see in our study that parents’ time spent working and on child care — variables often much harder to do anything about, in light of economic and industry conditions — did not influence children’s mental health. So, if we care about how our careers are affecting our children’s mental health, we can and should focus on the value we place on our careers and experiment with creative ways to be available, physically and psychologically, to our children, though not necessarily in more hours with them. Quality time is real.