Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 795

Make Data a Cornerstone of Your Team

If you were entering the job market in the early 90s, most job descriptions included “Macintosh experience” or “excellent PC skills” in their preferred qualifications. This quickly became a requirement for even the most non-technical jobs, forcing people across every industry and age group to adapt with the changing times, or risk getting left behind.

Today, the bar for computer proficiency is set much higher. There’s an ever-increasing demand for people who can leverage software to analyze, understand, and make day-to-day business decisions based on data. Data Science is now a quickly growing discipline, giving people with any kind of data expertise a serious competitive edge.

Corporate leaders are becoming convinced of the impact that effective data collection and analysis can have on the bottom line, from tracking daily reports against Key Performance Indicators to make informed decisions on where to spend marketing dollars, to monitoring and evaluating customer communications to adjust product offerings. Many are investing heavily in hiring talent with data skills and building out data proficiency across the organization.

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Scaling Your Team’s Data Skills
Sponsored by Splunk

Help your employees be more data-savvy.

If you see this as an important step in the evolution of your business, there’s a lot you can do to improve data skills among existing employees without spending a ton of money on expensive consultants or full-time data experts. This all starts with thinking carefully about how employees are motivated, and how you can have the right reward systems in place to achieve your desired goal.

Five years ago, Jack Welch famously stated that there are three fundamental ways to motivate employees: financial rewards, recognition, and a clear mission. Unlike Welch’s 41-year tenure at GE, today’s employees are expected to hold an average of 10 jobs before the age of 40. Because of this, a fourth motivational principle must be added: personal growth and development.

How can each of these principles be applied to building data skills across teams?

To answer that question, we need to start with the basics. Creating any kind of cultural transformation requires a long-term commitment, and that expectation should be set from the start across the various stakeholders interested in bringing the organization into the data-driven era. With that said, if you take the right steps early on, you can set yourself up for success in the future, and this starts with:

Aligning the company towards the new mission

Since this is first and foremost the responsibility of leadership, early executive buy-in on becoming a more data-driven company is paramount. Getting teams and individual contributors to form new habits comes down to leading by example. As is so often the case, the smallest changes can have the biggest impact.

Take your weekly Monday morning all hands meeting — an opportunity to share important updates, clarify short-term goals, and motivate the team to keep pushing forward toward the main vision. This is the perfect chance to change the way you communicate to better highlight your changing strategy.

Has the company decided to pursue a new business vertical based on data collected by the sales team in the field? Take this opportunity to educate other teams in the organization by clarifying how the team was able to successfully leverage data to validate the demand in this new vertical — from setting up customer interviews, to tracking responses in a spreadsheet and reviewing them as a team.

Just taking this one step can motivate others in the company to start thinking about ways that they can do the same thing in their own roles — after all, the sales team must be doing something right to be singled out during the all hands meeting.

You can also encourage team leads and managers to be more deliberate about highlighting successful outcomes from using data.

If a sales manager has been tracking the performance of sales efforts against a new vertical, he should be able to quickly gather some valuable insights that the rest of the organization would benefit from understanding. A clear example of how using data is already starting to drive more revenue for the organization might be: “Over the last week, after selecting two of our leading sales reps to focus on pitching this new customer segment, we noticed that the time to close a new customer went down from five days to two days, with the average contract size increasing by $500.”

Highlighting wins like this does a few things. It builds trust from employees that can now clearly see that the company is deliberate in how it makes important decisions. It also motivates colleagues to emulate their peers to have an opportunity to be mentioned by leadership in the next all hands meeting.

Leadership should encourage various department heads to take a similar approach in their communication. Any meeting in front of the whole team can be used to share takeaways. Perhaps news recently came out about a competitor that was able to take advantage of a new tool to optimize their marketing funnel. Share these case studies with the team to encourage them to think about how a process change or new tool might be able to help with their job.

Another way to make data top of mind is to display it all over the office. Install a TV showing a few data dashboards. Is real-time web traffic an important metric for the team to keep an eye on? Load up a dashboard from Google Analytics and have it always running. People will start to notice trends, like when traffic spikes during the day or when social media activity is at its peak, and can then have impromptu brainstorming discussions around how things can be improved.

As people start to understand the importance of thinking through the lens of data, some employees will display a personal desire to learn new data skills. Growing as a professional, and learning new hard skills has been proven to lead to more job satisfaction, which is why one of the best ways to incentivize employees is to create opportunities for professional development.

Focusing on people’s personal growth

Google famously focused on employees’ personal growth with their 20% rule, where employees were allowed to spend 20% of their time working on personal projects. Similarly, you can work with your managers to create a culture across the organization where spending time on self-study around acquiring data skills is encouraged.

Ask people to consume relevant content about how data can be used in their roles, and use your internal chat app to share interesting and relevant articles that employees find throughout the week.

If someone takes an interest in diving deep into a particular solution, like Google Analytics or Mixpanel, give them time during the week to become certified in those tools. You can also give managers the freedom to approve inexpensive online seminars and courses for those who are interested, proving that the company truly cares about investing in its talent. If you want to go the extra mile, you can even offer to cover the cost for anyone interested in taking evening or weekend classes around topics like data science.

As expertise grows, certain team members will take more initiative and start to stand out from the rest. This is a perfect opportunity to allow employees to learn from each other.

If you see that someone excels at manipulating data to provide new insights, give them a platform to train their peers, encouraging knowledge sharing within teams and across departments. People will appreciate the ability to take on new responsibilities like this and feel positive about being seen as a domain expert.

Another powerful way to impact how employees feel and where they place extra effort is to offer individual recognition.

Private and public recognition

It’s important to embed a practice where people are consistently recognized for great work, and this is very simple to do through existing channels.

Train managers to focus on providing private recognition to exceptional employees. Many sales teams integrate weekly 1:1 meetings between managers and employees to identify challenges, and offer help. This could be a great time to spend the first few minutes of each meeting congratulating someone if they are particularly diligent with tracking data, or submitting critical reports on time.

Create a “Data Expert of the Week” award, where you share success stories from specific employees during a standing meeting, via email, or in your favorite chat app in front of the whole company. You can even offer a little financial incentive by asking people to nominate someone else on the team, offering a $200 gift card to the person that gets the most votes. This helps people feel appreciated by their peers, and provides a little extra monetary motivation.

If possible, you can also offer extra quarterly or annual bonuses for those who are truly transforming the way certain things are done. If your engineering team dedicated time to implement a new solution that tracks additional user metrics within your application, and this information becomes critical to your understanding of your customers, reward them by giving people on that team bonuses, signaling to employees on other teams to take similar initiative.

The use cases for leveraging data to build value are limitless, so it’s inevitable that data will continue become a bigger part of our day-to-day work. Jack Welch gave us a brilliant blueprint for motivating people to do great things. Incentivizing your team to become more data savvy is just one way you can achieve this greatness.

Research: Perspective-Taking Doesn’t Help You Understand What Others Want

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, realized that being a good leader required being a good mind reader. “I see my task as serving the majority of people,” he said in an interview to Forbes. “The question is, how do you find out what they want?”

For many business leaders who want to understand the minds of their employees, customers, or competitors, the answer seems obvious: Do some perspective-taking. That is, do your best to deliberately try to see things from the other person’s point of view, imagining that you were in his or her shoes.

In his classic best seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie describes a key principle: “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.” Carnegie suggested this was the most important principle in the entire book: “If out of reading this book you get just one thing — an increased tendency to think always in terms of other people’s point of view, and see things from their angle…it may easily prove to be one of the building blocks of your career.”

Social psychological research has demonstrated many benefits of perspective-taking — increased altruism, decreased stereotyping, and a stronger social bond with another person. But here’s the thing: Almost no research has investigated whether trying to take the perspective of another person actually increases your insight into what they truly think, feel, or want.

We recently explored this through a series of 25 experiments with a total of 2,816 people (undergrads, MBA students, Mechanical Turk workers, and other working adults) from the U.S. and Israel. We asked them to predict the thoughts, feelings, and preferences of other people, ranging from complete strangers to spouses. And we found that perspective-taking did not have the effect it’s often expected to.

Our first series of experiments assessed judgments of strangers. In some studies, participants viewed photos of other people and assessed their emotions based on their eyes, facial expressions, and body postures. In others, participants watched videos of people and judged whether their expressions were fake or genuine or whether their statements were true. In each of these experiments, one group of participants was asked to engage in perspective-taking — to “try to see things from that person’s point of view, as if you were that person.” Participants in the control group simply answered each question.

In contrast to the common intuition that perspective-taking increases understanding, we found that people in our perspective-taking condition were slightly less accurate in their judgments than people in the control condition. For example, in experiments in which participants viewed photos of people expressing different emotions, those encouraged to take the perspective of the people in the pictures guessed the emotions less accurately, on average, than those in the control condition. Perspective-taking did not help accuracy. If anything, it hurt it.

Of course, these were judgments of strangers. whose perspective might have been hard to assess. Perhaps perspective-taking is more helpful when you are considering someone whose perspective you know well, such as a friend or a spouse, or in a context where more is known about another’s point of view.

Our next series of experiments asked people to predict the opinions and preferences of either a stranger they had just met or their romantic partner. This included predicting whether the person liked particular activities, jokes, videos, or art, or whether they were likely to agree with certain opinions. Once again, participants who were asked to engage in perspective-taking did slightly worse than those given no specific instructions.

For example, in one experiment in which romantic partners predicted how much their partner liked or disliked activities (for example, “go out to a pub or bar,” “play tennis”), those encouraged to take the perspective of their partner guessed less correctly, on average, than those in the control condition. Perspective-taking may indeed work some wonders, but increasing insight into another’s mind does not seem to be among them.

If perspective-taking doesn’t help, what can you do to better understand others? Our research indicates that you gain understanding about someone only when you acquire new information from them. Instead of perspective-taking, you need to do some perspective-getting.

We tested this idea in a final experiment that included three types of conditions: control, perspective-taking, and perspective-getting. We asked 20 people in our perspective-getting condition to ask their romantic partners about their opinions on various topics (“I would like to spend a year in Paris or London,” “I have somewhat old-fashioned tastes and habits”) before they guessed how their partner rated those same topics themselves. We found that this perspective-getting significantly increased accuracy, as compared with those who engaged in perspective-taking and those in the control condition. If you want to know what another person thinks about an issue, perhaps the better strategy is simply asking them.

This may seem obvious in the abstract, but it was not so obvious to our participants in this experiment. Although asking one’s partner about their opinions increased accuracy dramatically, participants’ confidence in their judgments did not vary across conditions. Participants who interviewed their partners did not believe they guessed more questions right than participants in our other conditions. People didn’t seem to be aware of how effective their strategy was for understanding another person.

The power of perspective-getting to understand customers wasn’t lost on IKEA’s Ingvar Kamprad. In IKEA’s First :59 campaign, company representatives reached out to customers to ask them about challenges in their morning routine. They found out that 75% of their respondents said they did not have a regular morning routine, 49% of parents to young children said that getting the kids prepared for the day caused the most stress, and 72% said that a stressful morning affected the rest of their day. IKEA’s next step in the campaign was to offer expert advice to their customers, using IKEA products, to help find solutions to problems raised by the customers themselves. For example, a couple of tips to help you “master your mornings” included packing the children’s lunches the night before using IKEA lunch boxes, and using “get ready buckets” — a plastic caddy that includes hygiene essentials that the child can carry to the bathroom.

IKEA’s approach squares with the findings of our research. An attempt to understand the mind of another person, whether a stranger, your spouse, or your customer, is unlikely to benefit from imagining yourself in that person’s shoes and guessing what that person feels or wants. Accurately understanding other people requires getting perspective, not simply taking it. To understand the mind of another person, we need to rely on our ears more than our intuition.

When to Turn Down a Lucrative Opportunity

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Whether in corporate life or entrepreneurship, the recipe for success is clear: Win and execute lucrative projects. The reasons are obvious: Your business wouldn’t exist without money to run it, and the more, the better. But what’s less obvious is that at a certain point, not turning down lucrative engagements may actually thwart your future success.

After years of growing a business to the point where you’re in demand, it’s often excruciatingly hard to shift your priorities from gaining revenue and accepting every engagement to learning how and when to say no. Here’s how to determine when you should reject what would have been, in the past, tantalizing opportunities.

First, you can consider declining an engagement when your learning curve has flattened. In the early days of your business, a new type of project — especially a lucrative one — is incredibly exciting. It’s a growth opportunity that tests and expands the limits of your skills, perhaps enabling you to enter the much-vaunted “flow state.” But after a while, the novel becomes rote and you are, quite literally, doing it just for the money.

As Whitney Johnson and Juan Mendez note, “As we approach mastery, our learning rate decelerates, and while the ability to do something automatically implies competence, it also means our brains are now producing less of the feel-good neurotransmitters — the thrill ride is over.” That sense of ennui eventually leads to a lack of motivation and, in some cases, poor performance. If you can instead shift your attention to mastering new skills — aka “jumping the S-curve” — then you can continually stay engaged and make work much more enjoyable.

Second, you should think about saying no to the money when you’ve identified more-strategic ways to build your business. Michael Bungay Stanier began his career as an executive coach because he wanted to help leaders, but he recalls, in a rather unfortunate discovery, “At a certain point, I came to this insight that I actually didn’t enjoy coaching that much.” He was interested in helping people change behavior, but “it was too lonely, too isolated, the energy wasn’t right.” Even though he was finally making good money as a coach, he realized he needed to turn down that work in order to build a more scalable business model that better suited his personality. Today, he leads Box of Crayons, a company that trains managers in how to effectively coach their employees, leveraging his expertise and taking him out of the one-on-one coaching that he disliked.

Finally, once you’ve reached the threshold of your business being financially sustainable, you can begin to jettison work that you just don’t enjoy.

Jayson Gaignard, a Canadian entrepreneur whom I profile in my recent book Entrepreneurial You, had built a popular conference called Mastermind Talks. On the back of that success, it seemed like a no-brainer to start an even more exclusive, $25,000-per-year mastermind group featuring quarterly retreats with behind-the-scenes tours of companies like Cirque du Soleil, Apple, and the Aria Casino, followed by guest speakers and participants discussing their business challenges.

But Gaignard found that, in contrast to his Mastermind Talks conference — which was tiring yet exhilarating for him — facilitating the retreats was merely exhausting. “It just didn’t light me up. It actually drained me,” he says. “I thought I’d enjoy it, but I realized I didn’t.” Despite hundreds of thousands of dollars in forgone revenue, he shut the program down after two years. Sometimes, to preserve your happiness, you have to say no to the money.

Successful leaders got that way by prioritizing revenues, but you have to adapt your strategies to suit the circumstances. As you and your company grow, you can begin to weigh other matters in determining where to invest your time. Revenues are always important, but in some cases, other variables may be even more critical.

Why CEOs Devote So Much Time to Their Hobbies

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When Goldman Sachs named David Solomon its new CEO, the media didn’t just focus on his professional background and his rise through the ranks; it also covered his moonlighting as a bona fide DJ.

Solomon, aka DJ D-Sol, is known for his mantra of finding passion at, and outside of, work — and he’s not an isolated case. We have identified dozens of S&P 500 CEOs who have what we call “serious leisure” interests. These are hobbies and volunteering gigs that often start at a young age and that individuals continue to invest considerable time and energy into.

Does serious leisure make you a better leader? The few studies that have looked at the job performance of CEOs with strong hobbies show mixed results. For instance, CEOs who are also pilots lead more innovative companies, and CEOs who run marathons show better company performance — but excessive CEO golfing may actually harm shareholder value.

In our research, we set out to investigate why leaders make time for passionate leisure interests in their already impossibly busy schedules — and whether they feel it helps their job performance. We searched for public information on the hobbies of CEOs whose companies were in the S&P 500 index at the start of 2018. Our search yielded 56 CEOs for whom a serious leisure interest is known. For each of them, we scoured thousands of articles, videos, and social media posts about them and their interests. This helped us build a rich picture about how they and others connect their hobbies to their leadership.

To validate and enrich our findings from public sources, one of us (Emilia, a former CEO herself) conducted private interviews with 17 CEOs of S&P 500, Fortune 500, and similarly sized U.S. companies, asking about their hobbies — and if they had a serious leisure activity, what it meant to them and their ability to lead.

In public and in private, CEOs state that their leisure interests help them cope with the ever-increasing demands of the top job. They typically invest considerable time in their leisure, and even block off time far in advance to protect it from “life taking over,” as one interviewee said.

A few common themes stood out about how their passion helps them:

It provides detachment like nothing else can. Many CEOs opined that the complexity of the top job has increased dramatically, with diverse constituencies requiring their attention at any given time, and that they can never stop thinking about it, even in their free time. One of the CEOs we’ve interviewed sighed: “Sometimes work can really be…all-encompassing. You can never let go when sleeping and eating and being present with your friends and family.”

This does not help their performance, as research shows: Excessive stress impairs strategic thinking, and it leads to increased aggression and reduced ability to engage in positive leadership behaviors. Being able to occasionally switch off is essential for stopping that constant background mulling, and simply relaxing on the couch or even spending time with loved ones will not suffice.

Instead, research points to passionate, active leisure pursuits as the only ones that can offer full recovery. As Electronic Arts CEO Andy Wilson has said: “I train a lot of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and you know, when someone’s trying to take your head off, you pretty much can only think about that.”

But, as long as it is a true passion, you don’t need to go this far to truly disconnect: Tou can get completely absorbed by collecting stickers and hand-making elaborate cards, like Dentsply Sirona’s ex-CEO, Mark Thierer, or by playing guitar in a band, like Cardinal’s chairman George Barrett. As one of our interviewees, an amateur pilot, put it: “One of the things I like about flying is that, to fly safely, you really don’t have the luxury to think about anything else.”

It means constantly striving for your “best self.” A true nonwork passion will mean a continuous drive to improve yourself, to reach new levels of mastery. Many of the “serious leisurites” in our sample have conquered impressive heights by objective standards: Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, led his squash team to the gold medal in the Maccabiah games in his first year as CEO. Mike Gregoire, of CA, and Rick Wallace, of KLA Tencor, both avid cyclists, completed such fearsome races as the Leadville 100 and the “Death Ride.” Entergy’s Leo Denault has brought home four Ironman medals. Bill Demchak, CEO of PNC Bank, placed 36th in his age group at the 2016 USA Triathlon championship. AMG’s Sean Healey won the White Marlin Open by catching a 93.5-pound marlin after a protracted wrestling match that cost his boat an engine.

While competitiveness certainly comes up as a motivation, for most of these CEOs it is truly about reaching one’s highest potential, a lesson they’ve transferred to leading. One basketball-loving CEO we interviewed spoke compellingly about how his experience as a player came to the rescue during a very difficult time for the business: “I was taught never to give up. I was taught that you work as hard as you can, as fast as you can, until the coach takes you off the field. So I woke up every morning and thought, ‘The coach hasn’t taken me out yet. So I am going to go do the very best I can.’”

It can provide a welcome humility lesson. The higher the leaders, the more necessary the occasional reminder that they are still mere mortals. Evidence shows that humility at the top can translate into greater engagement all the way to the bottom of the organization and into improved overall performance. Several of the CEOs we spoke with touched on the importance of keeping hubris at bay. As one of them said: “I think it’s always good to do anything that keeps you humble.”

When it comes to their hobbies, corporate leaders don’t have to be the top dog. When Mike Gregoire participates in cycling competitions with his work colleagues, he is not the fastest; his role is that of a domestique (a biking term that means “servant” in French), the team member who helps the better riders succeed, even down to lending them his bike and getting out of the race, if needed. As CEO of American Electric Power Nick Akins said about playing drums at a charity event, “As a CEO you’re constantly…in the public eye, and in that event, we were just sort of the hired help!”

It offers a “full control” experience. CEOs used to be seen as all-powerful leaders who could singlehandedly change the direction and fate of their companies. But increasingly intricate governance systems, the stronger influence wielded by shareholders, and the rapid pace of change and disruption all conspire to make the CEO’s “control panel” wobblier than before. While feeling in control of one’s work is a basic psychological need, it may paradoxically be harder to achieve in the top job. This can take a serious toll on the top leaders’ emotional balance, especially as expectations, from themselves and others, are still that they be in full command. One CEO told us: “I got into [competitive cycling] right after the financial downturn. And a lot of it was, ‘I can control this; I can’t control the world, but I can control how I exercise. And I need some level of control over something.’”

It creates different, deeper connections with your followers. Most CEOs who have a serious leisure interest have found a way to connect it to their followers. Lip-Bu Tan of Cadence participates in an annual company basketball tournament; Dennis Muilenburg of Boeing and Arne Sorenson of Marriott engage in their favorite sports (cycling and running, respectively) with large teams of employees during their visits to company offices around the world.

These activities provide a precious opportunity to solicit honest feedback. Top leaders have a duty to know what is going on in their organizations and what the shared narratives are that shape their company’s cultures. However, they often struggle to do so, as information is filtered and embellished during its flow through established, hierarchical channels. Going for a run with employees or joining a company sports team is a great way to get in touch with people outside of one’s typical circle.

But the CEOs we interviewed did caution about maintaining independence. There is a thin line between communicating openly with a subset of one’s employees and turning them into a clique of favorites who have your ear.

It strengthens your authentic leadership. Authentic leaders develop and consolidate their leadership identity through constructing their life story — how they became who they are. For the vast majority of the S&P 500 CEOs we studied, their passionate interests originated in college or even earlier and are fully integrated into their life stories, because they provide not only a powerful expression of their values but also their strong identities (as Nick Akins has said: “I’m still a rock drummer at heart”).

It may simply make you a better leader. As two of our interviewed CEOs said, “How your mind works and clarity of thought all come along with it” and “It gives me great energy…. I think energy has a big correlation with results and enjoyment and impact.” PayPal’s Dan Schulman has credited practicing martial arts with a host of leadership lessons, from “never standing still” to keeping one’s calm in a crisis to avoiding unnecessary fights with competitors. He’s said, “I’ve learned more about leadership from martial arts than I have from my formal education.” Adena Friedman, CEO of Nasdaq, swears by tae kwon do’s ability to improve leadership skills. John Barrett, the chairman of Cardinal Health and a former professional musician, talks about how his passion for music has contributed to his authenticity as a leader and has shaped the way he leads today.

Wondering how you could possibly squeeze some room for serious leisure in between the solid blocks of your calendar? A recent HBR article showed that CEOs have, on average, about 2.1 hours a day for “downtime,” meaning everything from simply relaxing to active hobbies, and even this time is probably highly fragmented during the day. The beauty of a passionate nonwork interest is that, in the words of one CEO, “It will force you to find time for it.”

Keeping Human Stories at the Center of Health Care

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Caring for the health and well-being of our fellow humans has always been viewed as a combination of art and science. With all the recent advances in technology, there is no doubt the health care industry as a whole gets an “A” in science. The tradeoff, however, is that we’ve become so focused on using the technology (as this HBR article points out) that we spend far less time listening to individual human stories. The result: The industry’s letter grade for the art of healing is more like a “C-” or even a “D.” This disparity has contributed to staggering and demoralizing statistics about the absence of empathy and caring for patients, and burnout, fatigue, and depression among clinicians. It’s time for that to change.

Some dysfunction may always exist in our health care systems. But administrative and bureaucratic hassles that keep doctors and nurses away from the bedside can be readily solved. We need to build an intentional, human-centered culture and approach burnout and well-being comprehensively — aligning them with other organizational priorities. We need a metric for humanity to evaluate the human capacity and connection among caregivers and patients. We also need to give patients a voice in how health care is delivered. And we must define new standards for humane technologies and implementation practices — an ecosystem of healing on par with quality, safety, and performance-improvement initiatives.

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The Future of Health Care
Sponsored by Medtronic

Creating better outcomes at reduced cost.

A mentor told me early in my career that only 20% of healing involves the high-tech stuff. The remaining 80%, he said, is about the relationships we build with patients, the physical environments we create, and the resources we provide that enable patients to tap into whatever they need for spiritual sustenance. The longer I work in health care, the more I realize just how right he was.

How do we get back to the 80-20 rule? By placing the well-being of patients and care teams at the top of the list for every initiative we undertake and every technology we introduce. Rather than just introducing technology with no thought as to its impact on clinicians — as happened with many rollouts of electronic medical records (EMRs) — we need to establish a way to quantifiably measure whether a new technology actually improves a clinician’s workday and ability to deliver care or simply creates hassles and inefficiency. Let’s develop an up-front “technology ROI” that measures workflow impact, inefficiency, hassle and impact on physician and nurse well-being.

The National Taskforce for Humanity in Healthcare, of which I am a founding member, is piloting a system of metrics for well-being developed by J. Bryan Sexton of Duke University Medical Center. Instead of measuring burnout or how broken health care people are, Dr. Sexton’s metrics focus on emotional thriving and emotional resilience. (The former are how strongly people agree or disagree to these statements: “I have a chance to use my strengths every day at work,” “I feel like I am thriving at my job,” “I feel like I am making a meaningful difference at my job,” and “I often have something that I am very looking forward to at my job.” The latter are how strongly people agree or disagree to these statements: “I always bounce back quickly after difficulties,” ”I can adapt to events in my life that I cannot influence,” “My mood reliably recovers after frustrations and setbacks,” and “I can always regain a positive outlook despite what happens.”) This allows leaders to focus on their team members’ well-being and to measure the impact of new processes, technologies, and care models on the well-being of physicians, nurses, and staff.

Measuring staff well-being and clinician resilience before and after a new technology or process improvement is deployed is essential to eradicating burnout. Pre- and post-measurements let hospitals know if they are designing an ideal healing and working environment for patients, families, physicians and other care team members. They also enable them to make changes as-needed before fatigue and frustration are imbedded within a system’s operations and culture.

We must put science behind the human experience of care to accelerate change and truly transform health care. Had we done this before EMR implementations, we would have avoided the burnout of a generation of clinicians. When we do this, clinicians will once again be able to show up for patients the way they want — with passion, energy, enthusiasm, and empathy.

A focus on humanity will also get clinicians talking to each other instead of relying on hastily-typed notes in the EMR that may or may not be read. I had a conversation with a radiologist colleague recently. He described a time when he would routinely sit down with doctors to review specific patient images and discuss the differential diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Today, he rarely meets in person with doctors. Instead, they call or mostly text requests to just receive the written report of the imaging.

The story is a sad reminder that we’re missing the art of medicine that improves our ability to make accurate diagnoses and create the best care plans. A surgeon who stops by recovery and tells the nursing team, “Here’s what I did in the operating room, and here’s what I’m concerned about that I’d like you to watch for during the night” is going to do far more to produce a quality outcome because it allows real-time communication among care team members. And, it ensures that the patient’s story — the best diagnostic tool we have — is not lost in the technology but, rather, stays front and center in the patient’s treatment plan.

Doctors and nurses need to step up and lead this revolution instead of passively accepting technologies. We also need to rethink patient encounters and communication at every level to make the entire health care system — from pre-arrival to discharge to follow-up care — a more consistent human experience. If designed and deployed with input from patients, families and care teams, the right technology can actually help restore the patient narrative.

A good example of a high-tech, high-touch crossroad to healing is the Code Lavender program designed to help resuscitate emotional, physical and spiritual needs of clinicians, families and patients alike. (Disclosure: First launched as Patient Lavender at North Hawaii Community Hospital by Earl Bakken, Code Lavender has evolved and expanded. For the past 15 years, I have introduced and implemented the program in hospitals around the world with the help of colleagues at the Experience Innovation Network, part of Vocera.)

When a clinician (or a patient or family member) reaches an emotional limit, a care team member can call or broadcast on their mobile devices a Code Lavender to a distinct team comprised of wellness, nutrition, pastoral, and palliative experts. Upon receipt of the code, an integrative healing equivalent of a Code Blue, the multi-disciplinary team quickly responds, offering physical, spiritual and emotional support to those in need. After implementing Code Lavender programs, hospitals often experience improvements in staff morale and loyalty. One children’s hospital surveyed staff before and after implementing the program, found that the number of staff members reporting they “do not feel supported” by the institution dropped from 24% to less than 3%.

In another example, Ronald A. Paulus, president and CEO of Mission Health, a large health system based in Asheville, North Carolina, spearheads a program at his hospital called Project ReNew. It focuses on continuous improvement aimed at reducing hassles, improving efficiency and examining how the system operates by involving team members at every level. The goal is to restore a sense of joy to their work. Furthermore, Christine Sinsky, a physician who is vice president of professional satisfaction at the American Medical Association, works with policy-making bodies to reduce administrative burdens and with innovators to provide solutions to burnout through an AMA program called StepsForward.

These examples demonstrate a new breed of leaders among physicians and nurses bringing humanity back to medicine.

The National Taskforce for Humanity in Healthcare is actively working to rebalance our focus on technology and humanity in health care. It has three key areas in which it is taking action:

1. Change the dialog from one that sees burnout as a personal psychological failing to acknowledgement of a system in distress. In medical school and nursing school, clinicians are taught to “tough it out” and not show signs of weakness. Yet, we are all human. We need to acknowledge the stress our system creates and train the skill of well-being while we do the hard work of eliminating the preventable trauma of an unnecessarily complex system.

Discussions of burnout prevention and resolution typically focus on interventions at the individual level. Prevailing wisdom seems to hold that because burnout manifests in the individual, it is the individual’s responsibility to solve, with perhaps some growing acknowledgement that institutional support is necessary. We believe that burnout is the individual manifestation of a system and a cultural issue, which requires intervention at the system, team, and individual levels. Through this reframing, the aim is shifted from burnout prevention to creating a system that supports purpose, well-being and joy.

2. Develop metrics around technology deployments that are noted above.

3. Create a blueprint for change that supports a systematic shift in culture towards a human-centered care system. Change must occur at all levels within organizations and cascade across all decisions related to people, processes, and technology. This would include training patients to lead system design and innovation, rather than being passive participants, as patient-led technology decisions and designs are likely to yield far better decisions than are made today.

Patients must have a voice in the equation since they are ultimately at the center of everything we do. Several hospitals have already embedded patient design fellows as part of the team working to improve patient experience. The more input and leadership we seek from those “consumers” of our services, the more likely we are to bring the humanity, and the art, back to medicine.

Technology, when co-designed for the right reason and used in the right way, has tremendous value in health care. Human-centered technologies simplify processes and allow nurses and doctors to spend more time at the bedside, where they can listen to patient stories, build trusted relationships and deliver personalized care. So, rather than making technology the centerpiece of care, it’s time to start using it to restore human connections and return people to purpose. This crossroad of humanity and technology is where we will find an ideal future of caring.

How Men Get Penalized for Straying from Masculine Norms

When women behave in ways that don’t fit their gender stereotype — for example, by being assertive — they are viewed as less likable and ultimately less hirable. Does that same hold true for men? Are they similarly penalized for straying from the strong masculine stereotype?

The short answer is yes. Research demonstrates that men too face backlash when they don’t adhere to masculine gender stereotypes — when they show vulnerability, act nicer, display empathy, express sadness, exhibit modesty, and proclaim to be feminists. This is troubling not least because it discourages men from behaving in ways known to benefit their teams and their own careers. Let’s look at each of these behaviors:

Showing vulnerability. Men are socialized to not ask for help or be vulnerable — and they can be penalized when they challenge this notion. An informative set of studies from 2015 finds that when male (but not female) leaders ask for help, they are viewed as less competent, capable, and confident. And when men make themselves vulnerable by disclosing a weakness at work, they are perceived to have lower status. This is problematic, as not seeking help when you need it or admitting areas for improvement inevitably leads to mistakes and less development.

Being nicer. Given that many of us want more nice guys at work, we might assume that men would be celebrated for being calm and unassuming. Wrong. Research has found that men who are more communal and agreeable (e.g., warm, caring, supportive, sympathetic) made significantly less money than more stereotypically masculine men. More agreeable men across multiple industries made an average of 18% less in income and were evaluated as less likely to have management potential as compared to less agreeable men.

Similarly, “nice guys” were evaluated as less competent and less hirable for managerial roles. One experimental study found that male managers in consulting who tended to advocate more for their team than for themselves were judged to be lower in agency and competence and more likely to be considered for job dismissal. Unfortunately, given the costs — real and psychological — of being a nice guy at work, men may be less likely to engage in these behaviors that could help their own career and make them better colleagues.

Displaying empathy. Empathy is an important part of leadership. However, women are more likely to receive “credit” for it than men. A recent study found that female leaders who displayed empathy (as reported by their employees) were less likely to be in danger of career derailment — e.g., problems with interpersonal relationships, difficulty building and leading teams, difficulty changing and adapting, failure in meeting business goals and objectives, and having too narrow a functional orientation. Men did not get this boost — there was no relationship between male leaders’ empathy and their bosses’ assessment of potential career derailment. These findings are consequential because displaying empathy is critical for leading effectively.

Expressing sadness. U.S. men are socialized to be stoic. What happens when they show emotions other than anger? Research demonstrates that men who show sadness at work are thought of as less deserving of that emotion as compared to sad women. A study from 2017 found that men who cry at work are perceived as more emotional and less competent than women who cry. And when men cry in response to performance feedback, the feedback provider rates them as a lower performer, less likely to get promoted, and less capable, as compared to women who cry. While we don’t want men or women regularly crying at work, an authentic work environment has to allow all employees to experience the same emotions without penalty.

Exhibiting modesty. What happens when men display modesty? Research demonstrates that men who were more humble in expressing their qualifications were evaluated as less likeable, less agentic, and weaker than modest women. Similarly, men in the hiring process who were more self-effacing were evaluated by potential employers as lower in competence and less desirable to hire, as compared to self-effacing women. With the increasing awareness of the detrimental effects of narcissism at work, we should encourage men’s modesty rather than penalize it.

Being a feminist or feminine. As noted previously, a sizeable percentage of American men self-identify as being a feminist. However, research shows that feminist men are more likely to be the victims of sexual harassment — from being told inappropriate jokes to being the recipient of unwanted sexual advances. In addition, research shows that men are more likely to be harassed when they work in male-dominated jobs and are perceived as too feminine. Research finds that men who ask for family leave, something that was historically in the purview of women, are viewed as poorer workers and are less recommended for rewards, compared to female counterparts. We should be welcoming feminist men, rather than derogating them for not being “man enough.”

Can we stop penalizing good behavior from men?

Organizations have a stake in ensuring that men aren’t penalized for these behaviors — which not only help men’s own and their team’s performance, but also create a culture that supports gender equality. So what can leaders do?

Celebrate men who engage in positive behaviors. It is important for men who display these “nice guy” qualities to be well received by organizational leadership. For example, when negotiating pay, organizations should not give in to a man who is dominant, but instead try to make sure men are paid based on merit. In addition, given the many benefits of humility, organizations should create a culture where men who are humble are praised. Organizational leaders can champion men in the organization by telling stories about how their vulnerability helped the organization perform better.

Train more broadly about gender stereotypes. Diversity training often evokes skepticism from employees—especially men. One way to address this issue is to focus on how gender stereotypes about women and men impact expectations for how they should behave. Given that white men are more likely to feel defensive when organizations provide diversity training, highlighting how men and women are both victims of gender stereotypes can help invoke compassion from all trainees.

Do not “gender police.” Gender policing means imposing normative gender expressions in terms of behavior or appearance. Research shows that trying to make men adhere to gender norms, for example, in terms of attire, is detrimental in terms of allowing men to fully express themselves at work. Workplaces that allow for authentic expression in terms of dress and demeanor will be more attractive to employees, especially millennials.

It is an important time to encourage a more modern form of masculinity. Organizations can and should celebrate traditional aspects of masculinity such as responsibility, assertiveness, and competitiveness, as well as compassion, humility, and kindness. This is not only the right thing to do but also will create the type of environment in which men, women, and organizations will thrive.

10 Excel Functions Everyone Should Know

HBR Staff

The past 10 years have seen a wave of innovative big data software designed to analyze, manipulate, and visualize data. Yet for the regular knowledge worker, Microsoft Excel, 30 years on, remains the go-to product for people looking to make sense of data. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, maintains that Excel is still the one Microsoft product that stands above the rest — and 750 million knowledge workers worldwide support that claim every day.

We’ve been teaching and testing Microsoft Excel for a decade, and a survey of several hundred office staff we ran suggests we spend more than 10% of our working lives spreadsheeting, and for those working in research and development or finance, it’s more like 30%, or 2.5 hours a day.

Imagine, then, if this substantial proportion of the global workforce were a little better at using the application. Time would be saved, and productivity would improve.

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Last year we put together The Definitive 100 Most Useful Excel Tips, for which we consulted Excel experts and looked at tens of thousands of test results and course usage data. Though every Excel feature has a use case, no single person uses every Excel feature themselves. Cut through the 500+ functions, and you’re left with 100 or so truly useful functions and features for the majority of modern knowledge workers. We’ve selected ten from that list which are especially easy to learn (approximately 2 hours total) and which can make a material difference to productivity. These ten are listed in decreasing order of utility from our top 100 list. If, like many, you’re stuck on what to learn next in Excel, you might want to look at this 2×2 matrix, which factors in usefulness and time needed to learn a skill.

Paste Special (10 minutes to learn)

Copy and paste is one of the simplest and most used functions in Excel. But we often carry over a format we don’t want, or we copy a formula over, when instead we just want a value.

These little frustrations can take time to fix, which is why Paste Special is so… special. Paste Special enables you to pick which elements of the copied cell you bring over. After you’ve copied your cell (Ctr+C) hit Ctrl+Alt+V (or go to the Clipboard section of the Home ribbon, or Edit > Paste Special) to bring up Paste Special and make your selection. Alt+E+S+V is the shortcut to just paste values — probably the most common use of Paste Special.

Add Multiple Rows (2 minutes to learn)

We often need to add new rows between existing rows. The shortcut (Ctrl, shift, +) is pretty handy, especially as you can toggle the + to add multiple rows. Often, just highlighting the number of rows you want to add (say 5) and using right click, insert is quicker when adding in bulk as it will add the number of rows you’ve highlighted.

Flash Fill (30 minutes to learn)

Excel developed a mind of its own in 2013 with this feature. Flash Fill automatically fills your data when it senses a pattern.

Suppose you have a list of product numbers in the first ten cells of column A, e.g. ‘ABC-00001’ to ‘ABC-00010’ and you only need the numbers after the ‘-’. You can easily discard the ‘ABC’ using Flash Fill. Pre-2013 this was possible, but relied on a combination of functions (FIND, LEFT, &, etc). Now, this is much faster and will impress people.

Establish the pattern by typing ‘00001’ into the first blank cell. If Flash Fill is turned on (File Options, Advanced) just start to type the next product number in the cell below and Flash Fill will recognize the pattern and fill down the remaining product numbers for you. Just hit the Enter key to accept. Or, get it going manually by clicking Data > Flash Fill, or Ctrl+E.

Flash Fill is like magic, and can be used in many different scenarios. It’s a fantastic time saver when you need to input or change a lot of data quickly and accurately. Flash Fill is a jaw-dropping feature.

INDEX-MATCH (45 minutes to learn)

Aside from VLOOKUP (which looks up the value in one column and returns a corresponding value from another column), INDEX and MATCH are the most widely used and most powerful tools in Excel for performing lookups. Used separately, these functions are invaluable, but it’s when you combine them that their true power is unleashed. INDEX and MATCH used in combination help you extract the data you need from a large dataset efficiently and precisely. Mastering these functions will not only make you look like an Excel whiz to your colleagues and manager, but can make a tedious, mundane task quick and simple. Here’s how these functions work:

VLOOKUP is a great function, but it has its limitations. It can only look up values from left to right. The lookup value must be on the left in the lookup table. INDEX and MATCH allows you to look up a value anywhere in the lookup table regardless of its position.

Let’s say you have a spreadsheet with a list of products. You have columns titled “Product Number”, “Profit”, “Product Name”, and “Revenue”. On another spreadsheet, you have a list of the product names and you want to look up how much profit each product has generated. In this scenario, we are using the product name (our lookup value) to look up the profit. The product name sits to the right of the profit and so VLOOKUP would not work. This is the perfect scenario for INDEX and MATCH.

The syntax would be:

=INDEX(Profit column,MATCH(Lookup

 Value,Product Name column,0))

Here’s a good way to remember how it works:

=INDEX (Column I want a return value from, MATCH (My Lookup Value, Column I want to Lookup against, Enter “0” )) (Zero gives you an exact match, you can match against less than (-1) or greater than (1) as well.)

At first and even second glance, INDEX and MATCH looks complex. It certainly needs some practice, but it’s worth getting your head around as it is more flexible and more powerful than a VLOOKUP. It’s one of the most important uses of Excel, period.

SUM (2 minutes to learn)

This is one of the first functions you’re likely to learn in Excel — how to sum a row or column. But did you know you can select the cell at the end of a row or column and press Alt + to do this functions in seconds?

CTRL Z / CTRL Y (1 minutes to learn)

This is your Excel get-out-of-jail-free card. If you aren’t using Ctrl Z to undo mistakes in Excel, then you should be. What many people don’t know is that Ctrl Y does the opposite — redo. The two work in tandem very nicely, and you cycle through iterations of your work until you find the right one.

Remove Duplicates (10 minutes to learn)

This is so simple and quick to use. Remove Duplicates does exactly what you’d expect — it removes the duplicates in any given range of data. Our advice is to remove the values you want to dedupe and place them in another sheet. It’s found on the Data tab in the Data Tools section of the Ribbon.

If you just want to highlight duplicates, you can do this using Conditional Formatting. The shortcut to get you there is Alt H L. (Or find it on the Home ribbon under Styles).

Freeze Panes (15 minutes to learn)

Ever scroll down a large table of data only to forget which columns are which? Freeze Panes is the answer here. You can freeze just the top row, first column or any number of either, just highlight the rows/columns you want to freeze and go to the View tab and Freeze Panes in the Window section. Alt W F is the shortcut.

F4 (10 minutes to learn)

There are two especially satisfying ways to use F4 in Excel. The first is when creating an Absolute Reference: F4 toggles you through the various options. The second is one that few people know about, but could seriously improve your Excel productivity. F4 repeats your last action, where available. For example, if you’ve just applied a border to one cell, use F4 to apply it to others.

CTRL + Arrows (5 minutes to learn)

If you’ve found yourself scrolling through a dataset to reach the bottom of it, stop right now and start using Ctrl + the arrow keys! This simple shortcut takes you straight to the end of the data in a column or row you are using. Combine it with Ctrl, Shift to highlight/select large areas of data in seconds.

Warning: If you have gaps in your data this will just take you down to the first gap. So if you want to get to the bottom fast, choose a column of data which has no gaps.

Harness just a few of these ten items, and you can transform your typical work day. Whether you want to help justify data-driven business decisions at a high level, or simply get home to your family earlier, mastering the right Excel functions is a quick and easy way to maximize your productivity.

The Most Powerful Lesson My Cancer Taught Me About Life and Work

I was 34 when I heard my doctor say “stage-four Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” The news hit me like a punch to the face. I was stunned.

Then every two weeks for six months, I had to go the Lineberger Cancer Center to receive chemo. I had a hard time getting out of bed on those days. I loathed the nurses injecting poison into me. Once I was there, and the chemo slid into the port, making my chest cold and my mouth taste like metal, I fought back panic.

At the time, I was working on my first book, Change to Strange, and writing a book was a real bucket-list event for me. I could have devoted time to it, but I wasn’t able to — especially in that emotional state. I felt too much anxiety, fear, dread, and disgust about the venom in my veins to do much useful.

My doctor — and hero — Lee Berkowitz set me straight: Sure, chemo was technically poison but it is also a groundbreaking medicine and I should feel lucky to have it. If I had been diagnosed before 1980, when doctors discovered how to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma, I would have had to watch the life drain out of me. To put it bluntly, I would have died.

This shift in focus from poison to medicine had a big impact on me. Instead of focusing on the negative, I started thinking about how chemo was going to allow me to see my daughters grow up.

Chemo sessions still weren’t fun, of course, but the purpose of the sessions seemed different. My reactions to the chemo slid from resistance to commitment as my resilience and energy improved. I used the sessions to work on my book, which I was passionate about.

My chemo experience taught me something I’m trying not to forget: The stories that we generate and tell ourselves can have huge effects on our behaviors and the results that we create. If we can craft a better story about the meaning of our circumstances, then we can change the way we relate to those circumstances. The result? Better emotions and better outcomes.

Why It Works

When we believe in the why of our actions, we have greater resilience and stamina when the going gets tough. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” It’s all about the meaning that we assign to our actions.

Psychologists have a term for how we subjectively perceive the world around us, and it’s called construal. What’s important to understand is that there are different levels of construal, ranging from low to high, and whatever level we’re operating on has effects on our attitudes and actions. Low-level construal is when we think very concretely about the physical details of the present situation (chemo is poison and is being injected into my veins). High-level construal is when we don’t focus so much on the concrete details and think of the bigger picture (chemo will help me see my daughters grow up). This higher level is optimal because it makes us think of long-term objectives and gives us a greater sense of purpose.

Cancer changed my life by encouraging me to reexamine the stories I’d been telling myself, and to re-craft them with higher levels of construal.

My advice is don’t wait until you get cancer to improve your story of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

It doesn’t take much to craft a more meaningful story, and once you’ve developed one, you can leverage it to improve all aspects of your life and work — not just the big things. Here are a few ways to get started.

Identify the Stories You’ve Been Telling Yourself

We have stories running around in our brains about all our actions. Sometimes we start to believe in the things that people around us say, especially when extrinsic rewards like job offers and status are on the line.

Here is an exercise that can help you identify your existing stories (because they can be slippery and subconscious) and help you find a story that is truer and more inspirational to you.

The exercise is based on construal level theory by Antonia Freitas and her colleagues, and consists of considering each task or behavior of your job and then asking “Why?” four times. This exercise nudges us to (1) recognize what story we are telling ourselves about the why of our behavior, and (2) develop a higher-level and more meaningful way to interpret our activities.

First, figure out how you’re spending your time. Use your calendar to make this realistic. Take a week or two that is representative of your everyday life and write down your activities. There may be four to five “big” activities that devour 70%–80% of your time, and then lots of smaller activities that are less frequent and less consuming.

For each activity, ask four times why you do it. For example, one of your activities might be holding performance review discussions with employees. So, ask, “Why do I do this?” and then really listen to the answer that you hear running around in your head. You might hear back: “Because I have to…twice a year.” Or you might hear: “I want to let my people know where they stand.”

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Whatever the answer is, write it down and then ask “Why?” a second time: “Why do I have to?” or “Why do I want to let my people know where they stand?” The answers you hear might not be inspiring, such as “because it’s part of my job,” or “because HR withholds my raises unless I turn them in signed.” Or, the answers might start to sound inspiring to you: “so that people can know how they can reach their career goals.” And then a third time: “Why do you care if HR withholds your raises?” or “Why do you care if people know how to reach their career goals?” And so on, for one last iteration. Remember, this is for you only: You are not doing this to impress anybody. So really try to answer honestly based on the story you have in your mind.

What you are trying to do at this stage is figure out what story you have imported from your environment across time. It doesn’t mean that the story is “true” or that you can’t change it. But the sad thing is that many of us are not even aware of how we are construing our behavior. And we might not be very impressed by our stories when we reveal them.

Choose a Better Story

Next, choose a story that is most personal and useful for you. The same behaviors and activities take on very different meaning to us depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing. If we choose more-meaningful stories about our work based on personal values, perspectives, and experience, we can interpret our impact in better ways and light ourselves up.

The story that inspires you only has to be true to you. You do not need to “sell it” to anyone else for it to ignite your positive emotions and resilience.

Take Candice Billups, for example. She has worked for over 30 years as a janitor at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Michigan (you can watch Candice describe her work here). On the one hand, Billups could focus on the low level of construal — mopping floors and refilling soap dispensers. However, Billups interprets her work in a different way. She says: “I am basically there for the patients…. My relationship with the families is really important to me…. I see myself as a positive force at the Cancer Center.”

Billups focuses on the why of the work in a way that is meaningful to her (helping patients through a difficult time) rather than repetitive physical tasks. Of course, both are true — but we have latitude to focus on one story or the other. Which story energizes us more?

For me, instead of viewing teaching as secondary to research (as academics are incentivized to do), I decided after my cancer scare to use the platform of my teaching to show leaders how they could help employees get more living out of life. I experimented with this new story about teaching, and I found that it was not only more inspirational to me but also truer to my past and more consistent with what I had learned: Life is short, and we should get the most meaning that we can from it. Since we work most of our waking hours, leaders can have a big influence on the meaning that employees feel about their work.

Match Your Behaviors to Your Story

The final step is, after revealing and “re-purposing” what you do, is to change your behavior. Hopefully, you can seek out more activities and responsibilities that align with your passions.

For me, this step was simply a matter of talking with my classes more about the power of purpose, and sharing evidence-based ways of putting more living into life. This felt more true to me than teaching students “best HR practices” like planning SMART goals and annual incentives. I even wrote a new book about it, which I appropriately titled Alive at Work.

The research shows that when employees can find personalized ways to enhance their jobs, it ignites them. It builds their enthusiasm, engagement, and sense of purpose. As individuals change the boundaries of their jobs around their strengths and interests, it affects the way they define themselves as workers and as people.

What might be less obvious to us is that we can craft our jobs without waiting to be asked. It is so common to assume work is something that we must do because we need the money. Many of us forget about the possibility that we can do more without being asked or paid; we can do more for no other reason than it boosts our enthusiasm.

When thinking about what to bring to work, let your new story serves as your compass.

Your story about why you do what you do is not objective — you can’t see it or touch it — but it is very real in one sense: It affects how you act and how others respond to you. You will find that it is possible to change the story you tell about your work activities, and the evidence suggests that you will feel more inspired, energized, and resilient. Change your behaviors to match the best story you can believe in, and you are more likely to inspire others and make your work more meaningful.

Why Doctors Shouldn’t Dismiss the Apple Watch’s New ECG App

Apple recently announced a new feature to the Apple Watch: the latest version will be able to measure heart rhythms and notify patients about abnormal, and potentially harmful, patterns. Doctors, however, are skeptical. Their biggest concern is that the feature hasn’t been rigorously tested and could provide unreliable data, creating a false sense of risk among users and leading patients to ask for unnecessary tests.

While these concerns are valid, doctors shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the new feature, particularly as it appears amidst growing consumer enthusiasm for wearable devices that measure health behaviors.  The Apple Watch has the potential to provide valuable data that benefits the entire health care community.

Monitoring the heart

The ECG app, debuting later this year in the new Apple Watch Series 4, allows users to touch the digital crown to generate an ECG in 30 seconds. ECG stands for electrocardiogram, a recording of the electrical activity of the heart. While the ECG in the Apple Watch is much simpler than one performed in a doctor’s office, it can be used to detect certain abnormal heart rhythms. It’s currently being billed as primarily detecting atrial fibrillation—the most common arrhythmia that affects about 1% of Americans, mostly older adults, putting them at risk for complications such as stroke.

When initially developed, ECGs were exclusively interpreted by physicians, but advances in computing technology have made it possible for computers to interpret ECG data. Although computerized interpretations of ECG data aren’t perfect, they have now been a part of routine health care for decades. A 1991 study showed that computerized algorithms were almost as accurate as cardiologists (and in some cases, better) in detecting cardiac rhythm anomalies on ECGs, and ECG technology has only been improving over the last 30 years.

But atrial fibrillation has been historically difficult to accurately detect with computer algorithms, and the ECG app will be no exception. One study of the Apple Watch ECG showed that about one third of the ECG recordings it took were “noninterpretable” by the algorithm (i.e., the app couldn’t determine what type of heart rhythm was present), and when it was interpretable, the algorithm still made errors.

The FDA has “cleared” the app for commercial use (which is not the same as formally approving it for medical use), but says that it is not intended to provide a diagnosis. It has stated that patients will still need to see their doctor to determine whether they truly have atrial fibrillation, and if so, if they need treatment—a potentially difficult and costly task. The Apple Watch ECG will be wrong in many instances and incorrectly inform patients that they may have atrial fibrillation, which is why doctors are concerned about the stress that the ECG app’s false-positive tests could place on their patients, their practice, and the health care system.

The benefits of more data

While doctors are right to be concerned about a rise of false positive tests, the ECG app could still be hugely beneficial to the health care community. The sheer number of individuals who purchase Apple Watches – an estimated 18 million in 2017 – could generate unprecedented data.

The most obvious benefit is that the watch may detect atrial fibrillation in patients not known to have the disease, which could lead to earlier treatment and reduction of stroke risk. But there are other ways in which the ECG could ultimately be used. In theory, for patients with chest pain, emergency physicians could pull up an ECG taken by a patient before that patient arrived to the hospital, helping the physician make a better diagnosis and expediting treatment, perhaps by identifying specific heart rhythms that are seen in conditions like heart attacks. For patients with chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, and related conditions, such information could be valuable to physicians.

The data could also be useful in the case of sudden cardiac death – an important, often unheralded, and sometimes addressable cause of death among young adults, precisely the population likely to use the watch. If patients had recorded an ECG before they died, medical examiners could also review the data and gain more insight into the cause of death, including, for example, whether it was a heritable condition.

Aside from utility in single patient encounters, data could be aggregated across watch users, linked to clinical information, and analyzed to better understand how often abnormalities of the heart are the root cause of patient morbidity and mortality. For example, if ECG data and particular ECG abnormalities can be linked to adverse health outcomes, it’s possible that algorithms to detect these abnormal rhythms may be developed.  We already know that underlying heart rhythm abnormalities can signal downstream adverse health outcomes – like heart attacks, sudden cardiac death, mortality from lung clots, etc. – but if data on these outcomes can be linked to ECG data from the Apple Watch, it is possible that these adverse health outcomes could be predicted.

Collecting and sharing large amounts of health data can benefit everyone. We’ve seen this in other areas of health. In 2012, for example, The Global Lung Function Initiative, released results from a database of almost 100,000 normal breathing tests from patients of different age, sex, height, and ethnic background, allowing doctors to make better, more personalized diagnoses for patients with shortness of breath. The Apple Watch could record millions of ECGs to build a massive database spanning different populations, allowing for a future with highly personalized ECG interpretation.

Researchers could also use ECGs collected from Apple Watches to study changes in the heart’s electrical activity in large numbers of patients who have other non-cardiac diseases, who are taking specific medications, who live in certain areas, who eat certain diets, and so on—the possibilities are difficult to predict. New algorithms could detect new patterns or abnormalities that are too small or too subtle for human interpreters to see, but that can be picked up by a computer, allowing physicians to find early signs of disease they currently cannot detect.

The Apple Heart Study, which is ongoing at Stanford University and will end in 2019, will look at data collected from older models of the Apple Watch that detect heart rate but do not collect ECGs. Future studies that include ECG data from the newest Apple Watch could take years to perform but have the potential to provide useful information and ultimately improve patient care.

Mobile devices, apps, and other ways to measure health behaviors are growing rapidly. Doctors are going to have grapple not only with the Apple Watch’s ECG app, but with various other technologies that patients are using to monitor their health. As doctors reasonably question whether these technologies will lead to unnecessary doctor’s visits, testing, and patient anxiety, it’s important to recognize the opportunities and to push for the creation and sharing of the unique data that they generate.

Don’t Just Tell Employees Organizational Changes Are Coming — Explain Why

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Employees around the world are reporting that big organizational changes are affecting their jobs. From leadership transitions and restructurings, to mergers and acquisitions, to regulatory changes, there seems to be constant unrest in the workforce. But according to one survey of more than half a million U.S. employees, almost one-third don’t understand why these changes are happening.

This can be detrimental for any company trying to implement change. When employees don’t understand why changes are happening, it can be a barrier to driving ownership and commitment and can even result in resistance or push back. And employees’ resistance to change is a leading factor for why so many change transformations fail.

Executives and those responsible for leading change cannot assume that employees understand the reasoning behind them. You must spend time explaining the changes and why they are important. Based on my experience supporting organizational change initiatives, there are four key aspects to helping employees understand change, to drive commitment, and to ultimately contribute to your success.

Inspire people by presenting a compelling vision for the future. During times of uncertainty, people experiencing change want a clear view of the path ahead. It’s important to share what you know – including what’s changing, when, and how. But for most change initiatives, it is also helpful to start with a narrative or story that clearly articulates the “big picture” – why change is important and how it will positively affect the organization long-term. This should serve as the foundation for how you communicate about the change moving forward.

To be successful, your story needs to start with the company’s core mission and then offer a compelling and inspiring future vision. You want to answer: How are the changes you make today helping you achieve your vision for tomorrow?

For example, in 2017 our client FMC Corporation was preparing to acquire a significant part of DuPont’s Crop Protection business, which would transform FMC into the fifth-largest crop protection company in the world. As part of their change story, they developed a unifying internal communications campaign called the “Nature of Next” that articulated the reasoning and vision for the acquisition.

The campaign explained how FMC would gain a broader product portfolio, an expanded global footprint, and full-discovery R&D capabilities – all of which helps them achieve their aspirations of helping customers feed a growing population in a sustainable way. While the integration is still underway, the campaign generated excitement for the acquisition among employees, and is still used today to communicate the promise of the new FMC.

Change events are often uncertain, unstable, stressful, and risky. But having a clear meaning or purpose behind the change will strengthen your case. If you can clearly articulate this case, employees will also build a better understanding of the business strategy.

Keep employees informed by providing regular communications. Change communications is never a one-and-done event; keeping employees informed is something that you will have to do throughout every step of the change process. Studies have found that continual communication is a leading factor in a transformation’s success. When thinking about how to communicate, keep the following in mind:

Be clear and consistent: All of your communications should tie back to the narrative that you developed, reiterating the case for change and presenting a compelling future vision.

You will not have all the answers: Often times, you will not have all the answers employees are looking for, and that breeds anxiety and uncertainty. It’s important to focus on what you know, and be candid about what you don’t. If you do not have an answer, say so. When this occurs, it’s important to let employees know you are committed to communicating openly and transparently, and will follow-up as soon as you know more.

Don’t forget to articulate “What’s in it for me?”: One of the most important phrases you may come across in change communications is “what’s in it for me?” If your employees understand what’s in it for them personally, you’re more likely to see individuals commit to and own the change. Failing to articulate “what’s in it for me” will only hinder your efforts.

A few years ago, I supported change communications for the integration of two leading companies in animal health. A leader at one of the organizations was exceptionally good at communicating how individual employees would benefit from the merger. And it wasn’t just about new job opportunities or increased market share. He reinforced how it would carry out their shared passion for keeping animals healthy, and how together, the two organizations would be able to offer new solutions, products, and technologies to customers that would not have been possible before.

Empower leaders and managers to lead through change. Major changes or transformations often require asking employees to adopt specific behaviors or skillsets in order to be successful. And when senior leaders model the behavior changes, transformations are five times more likely to be successful.

Leaders not only need to be equipped with information and resources, but they need to feel confident leading through change. This can be especially challenging, as leaders encounter more pressure to provide better answers and to support their teams. But how your leadership reacts to change will trickle down and impact your managers, who then impact your employees and their engagement.

To empower leaders and managers, executives and change leads should help them understand the fundamentals of change, including how to be an effective leader during times of change, how individuals react to and navigate change, and how to address roadblocks or areas of resistance.

Recently, I attended an offsite meeting for a client that was undergoing a major transformation of their shared services organization. While a vast majority of the offsite was focused on why the organization was changing and what would be happening, they carved out specific time to train and upskill leaders, the individuals who would ultimately be responsible for driving the change.

Leaders could select from trainings on a range of topics, including how automation and artificial intelligence are changing their business, how to apply Design Thinking to solve business problems, and fundamentals of change management. For example, during Design Thinking sessions, leaders were asked to problem solve and develop solutions around real-life challenges employees may face during the transformation. As a result, leaders walked away better equipped to support how they would drive the transformation forward.

Find creative ways to involve employees in the change. When planning for major change events, it is important to solicit feedback and engage people in the process. This helps build ownership in the change, and makes employees more likely to support the change and even champion it.

In preparation for FMC’s crop protection transaction with DuPont, more than 150 FMC employees were nominated by leaders to be part of the Change Champion Network. The group was established to engage their peers, answer questions, and excite employees about the future of the company. The group was an essential resource for fellow employees, and served as a channel for two-way feedback for leadership.

Another way to engage employees and drive commitment is to recognize those individuals who are embracing the change and demonstrating desired behaviors. For instance, a recent client wanted to drive a culture shift that was more open and transparent, and engage employees around recently launched corporate values. As part of the rollout, the company introduced a new award that recognized employees who were living their corporate values both inside and outside of work. Employees could nominate their peers, and winners were voted on by the entire organization and revealed at an all-employee town hall. Not only did this reward those who were role models for change, but it allowed the entire organization to become engaged in the process.

Being able to effectively lead change within your organization is crucial – and impacts more your culture and your bottom line. Companies who are highly effective at change management are three and a half times more likely to significantly outperform industry peers.

Assuming employees understand the changes your company is going through will jeopardize your change initiative. So the next time you’re approaching a change project, be sure to think about how you can inspire, inform, empower, and engage your most powerful ambassadors – and successfully lead your company into the future.