Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 799

The Key to Career Growth: Surround Yourself with People Who Will Push You

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When thinking about how to develop in our careers, most of us tend to focus on promotions, projects, courses, certifications. We seek out expanded roles, more senior titles, extra money. We overlook one very key piece of the learning puzzle:  proactively surrounding ourselves with people who will push us to succeed in unexpected ways and, in so doing, build genuinely rich, purposeful lives of growth, excellence, and impact.

Back in the 1990s, when I was working full-time as a partner in our executive search firm, I pursued one such friend—a leading researcher and writer—and cultivated the relationship for several years. And then, in 1998, during a walk along the Charles River in Cambridge, he surprised me with a challenge. He suggested that, in addition to my client practice and internal leadership roles at Egon Zehnder, I could find even more meaning (and have a larger reach) by using my knowledge of and passion for talent-spotting and development to also become a writer, teacher, and public speaker.  I took his advice, and it has drastically changed my life, both professionally and personally.

We typically spend at least two decades in our formal education and, in developed countries, hundreds of thousands of dollars. We carefully choose our places of employment and invest significant time and effort in training within them.  However, few of us engage in a deliberate, determined search for those wise individuals who, through their inspiration and advice, can literally make us new.

Drucker Forum 2018

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme “Management. The human dimension” taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria.

My dynamic circle of advisers and confidantes has included, in addition to my wife María and my Charles River friend, several other academics in the United States, an undergraduate professor in Argentina, a McKinsey director in Spain, and colleagues working in Egon Zehnder offices across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.  They have, throughout my career, successively inspired me into different possibilities I would never had envisioned, from teaching statistics to applying for an MBA, from becoming a strategic consultant to spending three decades and taking on global leadership roles in executive search, from publishing books to teaching executives at Harvard.

They have been companions on my journey, offering honest feedback, helping me to discover new identities and pushing me to become a highly different yet significantly better version of myself.  How can you find a similar group? The following guidelines should help:

Think about the people who inspire you.  These can be teachers of certain disciplines; inventors; entrepreneurs; business, social, or public leaders.  I have always been moved and inspired by specific people, not just abstract professions.  I “met” them originally in many cases by reading their work or about them, but also via social media and at conferences.

Don’t be afraid to chase.  Conferences are a great place to get inspired, approach, and start a relationship with some of the people you’ve identified.  Likewise, contacting even top academics is usually much easier than you think. Other cases may require a much more determined investment. For example, I flew back and forth from Buenos Aires to a little town in Massachusetts just to meet my Charles River friend. While this double red-eye may sound excessive, think how little time commitment it was compared to what we invest in our education, or to the opportunity cost and frustration of a poor career choice or wrong job decision.

Aim for a mix of people inside and outside your organization.  Lots of healthy change can and should ideally happen within your own company.  However, external contacts can potentially have the benefit of greater independence, a broader perspective with radically new horizons, as well as potential connections across both worlds which will benefit everyone.

Be candid about the reason for your interest.  Most truly great people live their lives with genuine passion and want to expand their missions.  Most times, they will be delighted to both inspire you and help you see how to close the gap between dream and reality.

Ask them specifically about how to get started.  After suggesting my new potential persona, my Charles River friend gave me some invaluable advice about what I had to do.  He said to me: “You need three Cs:  capability, which you have; connectivity, which at least initially you can do through the global network of your firm; and credibility, which you don’t have yet.  In order to achieve it, you need to publish a great article in a credible magazine and ideally a book.”  He then put me in touch with a senior editor at HBR, with whom I worked to make that first article happen.

Proactively offer them help.  These great companions who lead us to greater lives deserve our very best.  I have always offered them that, with no strings attached.  That included becoming a pro bono assistant professor, conducting intensive research for a full year for someone’s new book, becoming the critical reader of a best-selling author, and much more.  And whenever I get a message from them, I drop everything I’m doing and respond right away.  I have constantly done this out of gratitude but, as always, I also gained in the form of more learning, opportunities, and deeper friendships.

Have crucial conversations in the right settings.  Meeting face-to-face with no distractions will help you reach a level of intimacy which simply can’t achieve remotely.  I would add that many of my life-changing moments have occurred while walking with my trusted friends in beautiful surroundings – whether by a river, in the countryside, on the beach, along a snow-covered mountain, or across peaceful villages.  One of my Egon Zehnder colleagues and I have done this in more than 30 different parts of the world.  The combination of exercise and nature makes me particularly energetic, enthusiastic and positive – and therefore more willing to consider new possibilities.

Don’t hesitate to ask the truly big questions. What shall I do with my life?  What really motivates me?  What am I doing that I really don’t like to do?  While pondering these questions, in addition to checking my capability, connectivity and credibility, I also engage my friends in conversation about three other Cs:  contemplation (Am I in touch with my inner compass?), compassion (Do I show it for myself and others?), and companions (Who else might inspire me to new growth?)

Proactively seeking out and cultivating those who will help us become better versions of ourselves is, by a wide margin, the key for living a truly happy and meaningful life. I sincerely hope these guidelines help you.

How One Company Got Employees to Speak Up and Ask for Help

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Fintona Financial (not the company’s real name) had a problem. Interviews with their financial advisors revealed something disturbing: When dealing with Fintona’s Customer Support, many advisors followed a three-call rule saying, “If you really need the right answer from Fintona, you have to call them three times [to ask the same question] and trust the first two operators who give you the same answer.” Yeah, ouch. The more calls they received, the more operators they needed, and the more their margins eroded.

At the root of the problem was Fintona’s own success — they’d grown so quickly that their call center had tripled in size over five years to serve their growing number of clients. They couldn’t recruit fast enough. Even when they found good people, many new service agents were pulled out of their two-month training program in as little as two weeks. Those newbies suffered from a common problem: They wanted to look good in front of their bosses. When they were asked a tricky question by a financial advisor or an assistant, all too often, they would give a right-sounding answer instead of saying, “I don’t know,” and asking someone for help. This not only triggered increased call volumes but also began to erode Fintona’s customer satisfaction scores. They had built their business on customer experience — so, poor NPS scores could be the death of their company. Here’s how they fixed it.

Start with Experiments

How could Fintona make their newbies feel comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out?” They began by experimenting on themselves. To start, the call center leaders told their teams that they were taking a four-week Experimentation Vacation. They would continue tracking their normal metrics but, for the next few weeks, these metrics wouldn’t impact teams’ compensation. The leaders gave their teams a clear mandate: Change whatever it takes to prevent clients from living by the three-call rule. Fintona held launch meetings with all 300 experimenters and handed each one a white lab coat to wear throughout the experiments. That sounds goofy, but 300 white lab coats sent a powerful signal that this was not business as usual.

Don’t Wait for Perfect Ideas

One of their most ridiculous ideas ended up becoming their best experiment: The “Bat signal.” One team observed that, when a newbie service agent didn’t know the answer to a question, they would reach out for help from anyone in their row of desks. The problem was, their neighbors were also on calls, so the chance that someone could help was always pretty low. So, the experiment team had the goofy idea: arm each newbie with a Bat signal — a flashing red police light that newbies could trigger any time they were stumped to summon help from across the call center.

The first day of the experiment, it was clear that the lights weren’t working. Newbies who were already uncomfortable saying, “I don’t know,” were even more uncomfortable turning on a flashing emergency light that screamed to the whole floor, “I DON’T KNOW!” The team also ran into a classic someone-else-will-handle-it problem: When other service agents saw a flashing light go off, they just assumed that someone else would jump in and help. The experiment failed.

Iterate Until It’s Great

The team had to come up with another solution. If making the lights public was a problem, and if no one helped because they didn’t feel responsible for helping, then maybe each Bat signal needed a Bat manager — a dedicated leader who could watch the lights and swoop in to save the day. So, the team moved the lights to the managers’ offices and asked them to be on the lookout.

But, that didn’t work either. Newbies still felt singled out and uncomfortable hitting the Help button, and the Bat managers weren’t at their desks often enough to act as a reliable safety net. In two days, the team learned that they needed a private way to call for help. Assuming that they still needed dedicated helpers, they changed the infrastructure again and created a private chat channel — the “Bat chat” — where newbies could connect directly with experts from Fintona’s specialized departments.

Again, the idea didn’t work. The experts didn’t answer any questions— they were either too busy to help or couldn’t be bothered. In fact, the only answers that newbies got on the Bat chat were from other newbies. That gave the team an idea.

If the experts were either scary, distant, or unavailable, then they would launch the Bat chat across the entire call center. They figured that veteran agents must know the answer to 80% of newbies’ questions, and they might be a safer resource than some stranger in another department.

Finally, success. The Bat chat took off like crazy. They clocked over 80 conversations on the first day alone. Most surprising, it wasn’t newbies who first started using the chat, but veteran service agents asking each other questions. As more veteran voices spoke up (or typed up), the newbies started asking their own questions and getting immediate answers. When they were each just another voice in a crowded room, they felt safe to ask questions. So, the key wasn’t in giving newbies special treatment, it was making them feel normal in saying, “I don’t know.” And a nice added benefit of the Bat chat? Those long transcripts became a searchable library of answers for future service agents.

The Bat chat was the perfect solution for this team. But, there was no special analysis that they could have done beforehand to figure that out. No market research or benchmarking data would have suggested it. They had to build, fail, iterate, and repeat to find the answer. And once they found it, it didn’t need careful change management to extend it to the rest of Customer Support. It spread by word of mouth, and became a source of pride because the team found their own solution.

Make It Safe to Ask for Help

What did it take to make employees feel safe asking for help? Fintona learned some remarkably similar lessons to what Harvard professor Teresa Amabile found in her two-year study of the culture of helping at IDEO: Newbies don’t need to be singled out. They don’t need special support. They need to see that even their most successful colleagues need help sometimes. As a leader, if you want to create an environment where it’s okay to ask for help, how can you show that even you need help from time to time? How can you publicly celebrate people giving and receiving help? If you want people to start asking for help, then they need to see everyone else doing it too.

How We Describe Male and Female Job Applicants Differently

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Words matter. And the words we use to describe men versus women differ in significant ways that can affect their careers.

This starts early on. Research finds that girls who are described as “bossy” are viewed negatively in ways that boys are not. This discrepancy continues into adulthood where the description of being “ambitious” is an insult for women but not for men.

Such words impact the identities that young girls and women form, pushing many of them to feel that they need to be “nice,” a pressure they carry into their careers. For instance, in a recent study of residents training to be physicians, almost half of the women described “apprehension in appearing ‘bossy’ when leading cardiopulmonary resuscitation drills,” whereas no male participants expressed this concern.

The impact words can have on career trajectories is accentuated in the workplace, where people are often asked to recommend, select, and endorse certain employees. This happens through word-of-mouth referrals, letters of recommendation, performance appraisals, and informal conversations about colleagues.

The problem is that the words and metrics to evaluate women differ from those used to evaluate men – and this reinforces gender stereotypes and stalls women’s advancement. For instance, previous research reveals that recommendation letters written for men tend to be longer than those written for women. Longer letters are perceived to reflect a better candidate than are shorter ones, even though in actuality the men are no more qualified than the women.

Similarly, people are more likely to use standout adjectives, such as “superb,” “outstanding,” “remarkable,” and “exceptional” to describe male than female job applicants. In recommending female job applicants, people not only used fewer superlatives but also used less specificity. Research has also found that, in other evaluative domains, like teacher evaluations, men are more often described as “brilliant” and “genius,” and called out for their ideas, while women tend to be acknowledged for their kind demeanor and execution.

A recent study that members of our own lab conducted further adds to gender differences in recommendations, showing that people recommend female versus male candidates in different ways. We analyzed the content of 624 letters of recommendation for job candidates who were applying for actual positions in an academic institution.

We found that people used more “doubt raisers” when they described female than male applicants, a finding that was not attributable to gender differences in quality or performance. Doubt raisers are short phrases that serve to (most often unintentionally) plant or raise some doubts in the minds of employers, and we examined three main types: negativity, faint praise, and hedges.

Negativity is the most flagrant type of doubt raiser and involves pointing out an overt weakness of a job applicant (e.g., “It’s true that she does not have much previous workplace experience”). The negativity is often couched in terms of addressing and overcoming a weakness, but the negativity is still addressed and potentially heightened. Faint praise is less negative but often perceived as a back-handed compliment (e.g., “She needs only minimal supervision”).  Such praise is backhanded because there is seemingly no need to bring up the topic that isn’t fully praiseworthy (e.g., she shouldn’t need any supervision). And hedging involves admitting uncertainty (e.g., “She might not be the best, but I think she will be good”).

Do these doubt raisers have an impact on the perceptions that others form? The short answer is yes. When our research team manipulated a letter of recommendation to either include the presence or absence of just one single doubt raiser, evaluators rated the quality of the applicant more negatively. And the finding wasn’t dependent on a particular type of doubt raiser. The presence of any one of them resulted in significantly increased negativity. In essence, these seemingly harmless words mattered.

In related research that we conducted, again looking at the content of real letters of recommendation written for academic job positions, we found that letter writers were more likely to use communal words to describe women than men. Communal words are words like “sensitive,” “caring,” “kind,” and “friendly” and involve concern about the welfare of others, helping, and maintaining relationships. The problem with describing women in these “nice” terms is that the “nice” candidate often doesn’t get hired.

We conducted a follow-up study and found that the number of communal words in a letter of recommendation were negatively related to the desire of an independent set of faculty members’ desire to hire the candidates.

Is the use of communal words to describe women always negative? Not necessarily. Although using such words in occupations that are more masculine stereotyped (e.g., politics, management) might be troublesome, their use might be advantageous in occupations that are feminine stereotyped (e.g., nursing, elementary education).

Who are these gatekeepers using such words? The gatekeepers aren’t just men; women are also using doubt raisers and choosing communal words to describe female job applicants. They are often well-intentioned people. Essentially, they are you and me. But importantly, these women (and men) may not even be aware of the words they are using and certainly the unintended consequences that occur.

These words are also those that we use to describe ourselves. Our ongoing work is finding that men and women use different sets of language to depict themselves on Indeed.com. Essentially, we gathered resumes of hundreds of men and women submitted for job openings of feminine (physician assistant, HR manager), masculine (paramedic, IT manager), or gender-neutral (pharmacist, marketing manager) positions.

We filtered these resumes so they each had 5-10 years of work experience, had completed their bachelor’s degree (and not more), and were all from the same region. Then, we examined each applicant’s resume for the extent to which they were likely to choose communal words to depict themselves. Plain and simple, women depicted themselves as more communal and less agentic than did men across every job type that we examined. Women are presenting themselves as nice.

We tried to examine why this difference emerged. Is it possible that women used more communal words because they were describing more communal occupations? To test this, we redacted any communal job occupations (which we defined as those where at least 75% of jobs are held by women, according to the U.S. Census Bureau) from each female and male applicant’s resume. Reanalysis of the data without the communal occupations revealed the same results – women still chose to use more communal words to describe themselves on their resumes than did men. Women seem to depict themselves as nice, over and beyond the previous workplace experiences they have had.

Our results tell us several different things. First, people (both men and women) choose to use different sets of words to describe male versus female applicants. Second, these word choices result in more negative evaluations of female than male applicants. Third, men and women not only describe others differently but also represent themselves, as job applicants, differently, and it is not solely attributable to the different experiences that they have had. Women simply seem to choose more communal words to describe themselves than do men. Unfortunately, though, these communal word choices often have negative implications.

What should we do about these workplace differences? One of the most important things we can do is keep ourselves in check and be vigilant about our own use and interpretation of certain words that we might unintentionally use to describe women versus men. If you are a woman, does a quick look at your own resume reveal an excess use of communal descriptors? If so, you might consider revising such words. Consider what skills, traits, and characteristics are required and/or optimal for the job that you are seeking, and try to use these sorts of descriptors instead.

Additionally, are you describing your co-workers and subordinates differently as a function of their gender? Take a quick perusal of your recent recommendation letters, email referrals, or appraisals to see whether you can find evidence that you, too, are engaging in different descriptions of male versus female employees. Identify patterns that you may not have noticed previously, and hold yourself accountable so that you, too, do not intentionally shortchange women and/or overprescribe their nice qualities. You should be vigilant not only about your own use, but also about how others use words differently. When you see such biases, don’t be afraid to call others out and tell them about the unintentional gatekeeping that their word choices may have.

And when reading recommendations, keep in mind that your differential feelings between male and female applicants should come from the applicants, not from the biased ways in which others and they, themselves, are describing themselves. Being fair means uncovering as many of the societal prejudices and biases that can pervade our selection systems.

In short, words do matter. It’s time for women to stop being “nice,” and, it’s certainly time to stop describing them as such.

Where Are the Male Allies in U.S. Politics?

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As the sexual assault allegations by Professor Christine Blasey Ford against Judge Brett Kavanaugh have played out, too few men — but especially male politicians — have publicly supported an open and respectful hearing of her assertions. This week, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI), her frustration boiling over at male congressmen who have questioned the integrity or mental status of Blasey Ford, or worse, remained conspicuously silent on the issue, spoke for many when she said, “I just want to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing, for a change.”

The problem of the silent — and therefore tacitly complicit — man festers at the root of America’s ubiquitous workplace sexual harassment and gender exclusion. Reasons for male silence are legion, but most often relate to lack of awareness about the experiences of women at work, ignorance concerning the rarity of false accusations from women about sexual assault, flat-out apathy, or cowardice about backlash from other men. Publicly supporting a woman in this situation can feel risky, particularly among men with a fragile sense of masculinity.

Where should we begin efforts to break the cycle of male silence and collusion in perpetuating harassment and dismissal of women? Start with a few good men. In the wake of the “Marines United” Facebook group photo scandal, Marine Corps leaders continue to face criticism for a culture that fuels harassment. Yet, there is a glimmer of hope. Marine Corps General Glenn Walters recently testified before the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services and observed, “What I’m encouraged by is that some of the [harassment] reports are being generated by male Marines who are seeing another [male] Marine doing something wrong.” He added: “It’s not a significant number. It’s probably in the 8% range. But that’s 8% that we didn’t have.”

True, 8% may seem like an insignificant number of guys who get it, men willing to put some skin in the inclusion game. Yet, we also recognize that this group of men is a critical component in creating seismic culture change, ultimately leading to elimination of sexual harassment and gender inequities in the workplace. These “8 percenters” must be empowered as messengers, or “tempered radicals,” male Marines who can become instrumental in influencing the behavior for the other 92%. Leaders looking to make real change must identify and leverage these men.

This small core group of men are deliberate male allies — men who actively promote gender fairness and equity in the workplace through supportive and collaborative personal relationships with women. They also demonstrate allyship through public acts of sponsorship and advocacy intended to drive systemic improvements in the workplace culture for women. Evidence suggests that these are men who have an awareness of how gender bias creates workplace inequities. This awareness is often motivated by personal experiences and a strong sense of fairness and justice. To be clear, these are men who don’t just talk a good game. They act with conviction and in the face of real social and political backlash.

When it comes to communicating the salience of male allyship in the workplace, it turns out that the source matters. There has been a groundswell of pressure for male leaders to advocate for gender equity initiatives and role model male ally behaviors. Consistent messaging from senior leaders is crucial. However, if men don’t easily relate to allyship messengers (leaders, diversity and inclusion experts, HR administrators), their message may not produce intended behavioral change — or even worse, backfire. There has been a growing list of examples where unconscious bias training, diversity training and sexual harassment training produced unintended consequences.

Male-to-male peer pressure is often a more powerful — and persistently neglected — source of influence for internalization of norms, pro-social behaviors and ally identity-confirming behavior. When a cohort of male allies call out sexist or harassing behaviors, both men and women are more likely to report sexual harassment or check sexist behavior. Women also report more self-confidence, higher self-esteem, and less sex stereotyping when male allies are present in the workplace. Deliberate role modeling by particularly influential peers can influence acceptance and expectation for ally behaviors—respectful attitudes and acts that make women feel included and fuel gender parity. Male allies call out sexism and create a work environment that emboldens other men to question and call out deviant behavior. Such lateral ally influence can redefine what it means to be a man in an organization in such a way that gender equity or partnership becomes regarded as a defining feature of the in-group (“who we are”) and its norms (“what we do”) in men’s everyday lived experiences.

Perhaps Congress can take a lesson from the Marine Corps’s “8 percenters.” Let’s identify the fledgling cohort of male allies on Capitol Hill, and recognize and honor these insiders who can leverage their understanding to redefine norms. Smart organizational leaders of all stripes should be looking for these guys, telling their success stories, and rewarding their advocacy and courage. This form of talent management has the potential to change the workplace landscape in ways that will increase performance, profits, and fairness that will have far-reaching effects in organizations and society.

Reminder: Customers Care How You Treat Your Employees

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Two news stories speak to how companies are facing criticism for the ways they shape their workforces.

First, former IBM employees have initiated a class action suit against the company for age discrimination. The suit accuses IBM of systematically laying off older employees in an effort to cultivate a younger, and presumably tech-savvier, workforce. A few months ago ProPublica reported that in the last five years IBM has laid off more than 20,000 U.S. workers age 40 or older.

Second, companies such as Nebraska Furniture Mart and JK Moving Services face a suit by the ACLU for using Facebook’s advertising tools to target employment ads exclusively at young men. The ACLU alleges that many of the jobs were in “well-paid, blue-collar fields from which women have traditionally been excluded,” such as tire salespersons, mechanics, truck drivers, and technicians. The suit also names Facebook as a defendant for its role in allowing companies to target specific demographics.

As companies pursue the talent they need for the future, and especially as the average age of U.S. workers continues to rise, it’s likely that more firms will engage in similar practices. And it’s understandable that companies seek certain types of employees to burnish their reputations. IBM may want to recast itself as a younger, forward-looking brand, for example, and actively cultivating a youthful workforce would certainly help that cause among employees and customers alike. But even ignoring the fundamental unfairness (and illegality) of biased employment practices, these practices pose significant risks to the companies that engage in them — not least of which is the high cost of lawsuits and settlements.

Companies are coming under increased scrutiny from media, customers, investors, and other stakeholders for organizational practices that used to be hidden from the public. People now have access to information including companies’ wages and benefits, sexual harassment policies, and involvement in political issues. Plus, social media gives consumers a voice with which to speak out against companies they believe are unfair or irresponsible — and they expect those companies to listen and respond. Especially prominent individuals, those with social media followers who number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, or even the millions, can have as much influence on companies as traditional media outlets have in the past. Meanwhile, companies are trying to use social media to engage customers in two-way, personal communication, so they must address the concerns people raise and the criticisms they wield.

Business leaders must recognize that a company’s employment practices can shape brand perceptions just as much as traditional marketing efforts. Public relations firm Weber Shandwick found that when consumers discuss companies, the top five topics include how they treat their employees and news about their involvement in scandals or wrongdoings. And Edelman reports that no single action by a company is more interconnected with its ability to build trust with the public than “treating employees well.” So in their pursuit of employees with desirable skills and profiles, companies must be sure they aren’t alienating customers and other stakeholders. After all, does any company really want a reputation as a firm that won’t employ older workers or women?

Bias in employment practices also presents another set of risks — those that arise within the organization. If all employees come from the same demographic, the lack of diversity may result in an insular workplace culture. The “bro” culture that has plagued Uber and other Silicon Valley companies is only one example of the dysfunction that can result from hiring practices that prioritize one demographic. A company that lacks diversity in its workforce also doesn’t perform as well on financial returns, reports McKinsey. Diversity has also been found to drive growth and innovation, so companies that hire only for a specific type of employee might actually fall behind its competitors.

In addition, screening employees to fit a certain demographic profile may cause a company to overlook the fit with their values. Employees who align with a company’s core values are more likely to intuitively know how they should think and act, to be more motivated to go the extra mile when needed, and to support the company’s operations and aspirations. Conversely, employees who don’t value the company’s culture may feel less affinity to the company, so the company may struggle to retain them, leading to costly turnover.

Furthermore, while employees of a certain age or gender might be more likely to have desirable skills, experience, and capabilities, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be high performers. And even if they are, high performers who don’t support the company’s values undermine its culture. As Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, and Suzy Welch write, a strong culture — and employees who align with it — is so important that “you have to hang — publicly — those in your midst who would destroy it.”

With so much at stake, companies need to tread carefully. Their talent practices aren’t just shaping the composition of their workforces — they’re also shaping their reputation, performance, and culture.

Research: When Employees Work on Multiple Teams, Good Bosses Can Have Ripple Effects

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If you’re like most people working in an organization today, you’re probably on multiple teams at the same time. Most employees have multiple assignments and projects that they must constantly juggle and prioritize. In fact, research estimates that between 81% and 95% of employees around the world actively serve on multiple teams simultaneously.

The problem with all of these teams is that there is some evidence that “multiple team memberships,” or MTMs for short, can increase employees’ stress and role overload, which makes it very difficult for employees to effectively fulfill all of their roles. MTM employees often rotate back and forth among their many projects during a typical workweek (and even in a single workday), hurting their ability to focus effectively on each project. With this in mind, we wanted to know what employers who use MTMs could do to make sure that employees are able to develop and contribute their talents, as well as coordinate and learn across their multiple team assignments. Moreover, given that leaders in most companies vary in how effective they are, what happens when the multiple team leaders that employees report to have very different leadership styles? What impact do these differences have on employees’ abilities to perform, take risks, and display initiative?

In an article that we recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology along with Professors Pengcheng Zhang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Jiing-Li Farh of China Europe International Business School, we sought to investigate how companies can best manage MTMs using three studies with employees and their team leaders from both the U.S. and China. We focused on how leaders in MTM settings motivate their employees to be proactive, such as volunteering ideas for improving work procedures. We examined these proactive behaviors because they are critical for team success as well as coordination and learning across teams.

Previous work suggests that employee empowerment — or having autonomy and confidence to know where and how to perform meaningful and impactful tasks — is crucial for motivating employees to be proactive. As a result, we wanted to know whether leaders’ behaviors toward team members in one team can “spillover” to affect the empowerment and proactive behaviors of those same team members in other teams led by different leaders. Importantly, we wanted to find out if highly positive leader behaviors in one team could compensate for less positive leader behaviors in other teams. Specifically, we examined whether one leader’s empowering leadership (marked by delegating authority, promoting autonomy, coaching supportively, sharing information openly, and asking for input on decisions) influenced whether MTM employees felt more empowered and were more proactive in another team led by a different leader, even if the other leader was less empowering.

We conducted the first study with working adults in the U.S. and China. Using a realistic workplace scenario experiment, we asked people to imagine working simultaneously on two different teams led by two different team leaders. We randomly assigned them to one of four scenarios in which the two different team leaders varied in 1) giving employees autonomy to make their own decisions and asking them for advice and input (i.e., high empowering leadership) or 2) micromanaging the employee and never asking for advice or input (i.e., low or no empowering leadership). Therefore, participants experienced empowering leadership in both of their teams, in only one of their teams, or in neither of their teams. Then, we asked how much the participants felt empowered in their jobs as a whole.

We imagined that there might be a “cancelling out” effect, where having a more controlling leader in one team would negate the positive effects of having a more empowering leader in the other team. The good news is that this was not the case. Instead, we found the opposite: that the more empowering leader actually “compensated” for the micromanaging leader, producing fairly high levels of overall empowerment and proactivity across the teams. The bottom line was that a good boss can compensate for a bad one for employees working on multiple teams, at least when it comes to employees feeling empowered and being proactive.

To test whether our experimental findings would hold in actual organizations and across different cultures, we conducted two more studies: one at a set of R&D companies in China and the second at EA Engineering, Science, and Technology Inc., an environmental consulting company headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. Work at EA is heavily team-based, and as an employee-owned public benefit corporation, the company needs collaboration and consensus to balance profits and stakeholder management. As a result, the average EA employee works on six distinct project teams at any given time.

We also wanted to see if our findings held when we asked how empowered employees felt in each of their unique teams, not just overall. For instance, would employees with one empowering team leader feel empowered and act proactively even in other teams led by less empowering leaders? As expected, we found that when a leader exhibited more empowering leadership in a specific team, employees felt more empowered and were more proactive in that same team. And, more importantly, we found that a leader’s empowering behaviors in one team did “spillover” across team boundaries to increase empowerment and proactivity in the other team. In fact, this happened even when the leader of the other team did not display any empowering leadership behaviors towards that employee.

Taken together, the best news is that even if employees have a bad experience with a disempowering team leader in one of their teams, all is not lost, as long as the employees belong to other teams that are led by more empowering leaders.

What should managers do based on our findings? The most straightforward — and perhaps obvious — advice is to help leaders learn the skills it takes to boost employee empowerment. Specifically, leaders should be trained to empower their followers by delegating authority to them on important tasks, giving them as much autonomy as possible, supportively coaching as employees take on more and more responsibilities, sharing as much strategic and important information as possible, and asking for input when making key decisions. Research consistently shows that when managers engage in these behaviors, employees react by taking initiative and behaving proactively.

But what if not all of your leaders have these skills? Worse, what if some of them tend to micromanage their direct reports? One possibility is to “spread the wealth” so that empowering leaders are strategically assigned to benefit employees in a variety of divisions, units, or areas throughout a company. Our research shows that it’s not a good idea to concentrate all of your empowering team leaders in one area of an organization. If that happens, MTM employees who are stuck with a bunch of disempowering leaders will be less empowered and less willing or able to be proactive for the good of the overall company. As a result, senior managers need to carefully assess their leaders and then strategically deploy highly empowering leaders throughout their organization.

Great Employees Want to Learn. Great Managers Know How to Teach.

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“I’d like to work for a manager I can learn from.” This phrase has come up again and again in interviews I’ve conducted for my team at the World Economic Forum and from more junior folks who I’ve met through various mentoring programs. These people aren’t looking for someone to lecture them, they’re looking for someone who can help them build knowledge and skills as they work toward a valuable goal. As workers get more used to a fluid workplace, where longevity in one firm isn’t the goal and developing a portfolio of skills is more important, managers who can offer learning opportunities will be in high demand.

Having started my working life as a high school teacher, I’ve continued to find success when I use my teaching style to lead teams. Reflecting on how I’ve managed cases and projects, there are three traits which all good teachers share and managers in any field can learn: how to define and communicate goals, how to identify and build necessary skills, and how to create opportunities for growth. Put into practice, these attributes can help to create a positive environment filled with motivated and creative people, inside a school, a business, or any organization that relies on people to be creative and dedicated to shared goals.

Define goals and communicate them clearly

Every year, a teacher has to develop a plan for where the class will be at the end of the year with concrete steps for how to get there. The goal might be to improve reading levels by at least one grade or to show understanding of theorems in geometry. The same is true for any organization — you need to have clearly articulated goals that serve a greater mission. And just as it is not motivating in a classroom to say, “We need to read Animal Farm because it’s on the district’s curriculum,” it is not enough to say “We have to write a report on cybersecurity threats because the firm needs something to sell.” It’s far better to say, “We will accomplish this task together because it is an important factor in achieving our shared goals” (whether the goal is to become a better reader or to become a leading threat analysis company).

Good communication about goals goes both ways. Just as it’s the manager’s responsibility to communicate organizational goals clearly, it’s also the boss’s obligation to listen to employee’s personal goals and, where they align with the overall mission, support them and help build the skills necessary to achieve those shared goals.

Identify and build your team’s skills

The ability to understand and build skills is the core of effective teaching and a key management responsibility. A manager can’t lead a team if she doesn’t know what skills are needed to accomplish a goal and if she doesn’t know what the team is good at.

For a teacher, it’s standard to conduct formal assessments over the course of a year to gauge skills and measure growth. Very few organizations are going to sit all employees down for a formal skills assessment, but for adults, you just have to ask and observe. It is vital to discuss the skills and knowledge necessary to achieve success with your team and to understand, through discussion or through past experience what skills team members have and what skills they need to develop.

It’s also important, if employees are looking to build their own portfolio of skills, to ensure that they have opportunities to take on assignments that allow for that kind of growth as well. An effective manager should be able to ensure that employees enjoy a good mix of tasks they can succeed at using current skills and stretch assignments that represent opportunities for growth.

Create opportunities for growth

When an employee says she is looking for a manager she can learn from, the employee is implicitly saying that she values opportunities for growth. No one wants to feel stagnant or like they’re not achieving anything. Good teachers, and effective leaders, help those under them grow by giving effective constructive feedback and by fostering a growth mindset.

Thinking like a teacher is invaluable here as well. When a manager understands that she is helping to grow skills and achieve shared goals, rather than just assessing performance, it’s far easier to give useful and constructive feedback. Likewise, creating a work environment that promotes growth and a mindset for growth helps not only employees, but ensures that the team can make new connections and develop novel ideas.

Helping employees grow has an additional benefit to the manager who does it well — the opportunity for personal professional growth. One of the best career tips I’ve received was from Jim Snabe, the former CEO of SAP and current Chairman of Maersk. He said that, in every organization, his first task was to begin training his replacement, so that when the opportunity came for his next step, there’d always be someone ready to fill his role and continue the team’s success. The teacher-leader, by continually growing and teaching her own team, paves the way for her own success.

Research: Women and Men Are Equally Bad at Multitasking

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According to popular stereotypes, women are better multitaskers. In fact, a quick Google search leads to many press articles claiming a female advantage. For example, women came out as better multitaskers when researchers used fMRI scans to measure brain activity, computer tests to measure response times, and an exercise in which people walking on a treadmill had to simultaneously complete a cognitive task.

From analyzing decades of studies of men and women in other cognitive skills, we know that men’s and women’s performance is usually quite similar. Yet there are a few tasks in which men and women consistently outperform each other — on average: For example, it is well-established that men typically fare better when imagining what complex 3-dimensional figures would look like if they were rotated. In turn, women reliably outperform men in certain verbal abilities such as remembering a list of words or other verbal content.

While women’s supposed superiority at multitasking has garnered headlines, the scientific findings regarding sex differences in multitasking abilities are rather inconsistent: some studies found no sex differences while others reported either a male or female advantage.

One reason for these inconsistent findings may be that, to date, the vast majority of studies have examined gender differences using artificial laboratory tasks that do not match with the complex and challenging multitasking activities of everyday life. Another possible culprit is that different researchers define multitasking differently.

To address these concerns, we developed a computerized task — The Meeting Preparation Task (CMPT) — that was designed to resemble everyday life activities and, at the same time, that was grounded in the most comprehensive theoretical model of multitasking activities. That would be the model of University College London professor Paul Burgess. He defines two types of multitasking — concurrent multitasking, in which you do two or more activities at the same time (talking on the phone while driving) and serial multitasking, in which you switch rapidly between tasks (preparing your next meeting and answering an email, being interrupted by a colleague, checking Twitter). It’s this latter type of multitasking that most of us do most often, and this type of multitasking we wanted to test.

In the CMPT, participants find themselves in a 3-dimensional space, consisting of three rooms: a kitchen, a storage room, and a main room with tables and a projection screen. They are required to prepare a room for a meeting, that is, they have to place objects such as the chairs, pencils, and drinks in the right location, while at the same time dealing with distractors such as a missing chair and a phone call, and to remember actions to be carried out in the future (e.g., give an object to an avatar, put the coffee on the meeting table at a certain time). This computerized simulation was originally created to  allow for placing all the participants in the exact same conditions which permits to easily compare their performance and to avoid variables that may affect it (e.g., amount of noise). Such tasks also allow for measuring many variables at the same time. Finally, the task was designed to place participants in an unfamiliar situation, that is, in a situation where most people do not have any previous experience that would help them in carrying out the task.

Our idea with the present study was simple yet rare in the scientific literature: to use a validated task to assess whether there are gender differences in multitasking abilities in an everyday scenario in the general population. In order to do so, we recruited 66 females and 82 males aged between 18 and 60 years old and we asked them to carry out the CMPT. Thereafter, we compared the performance of both groups on several variables from the CMPT: overall accuracy of task completion (e.g., have participants placed the required objects on the table?), total time taken to complete the task, total distance traveled in the virtual environment, whether participants forgot to carry out tasks, and whether they managed the interrupting events (such as the phone call) in an optimal manner. We found no differences between men and women in terms of serial multitasking abilities.

We cannot exclude the possibility that there are no sex differences in serial multitasking abilities, but if they do exist, such differences are likely to be very small. There is a need for other studies that replicate these findings, or that investigate concurrent multitasking. But we think it is fair to conclude that the evidence for the stereotype that women are better multitaskers is, so far, fairly weak.

A Hollywood Executive On Negotiation, Talent, and Risk

Mike Ovitz, a cofounder of Creative Artists Agency and former president of The Walt Disney Company, says there are many parallels between the movie and music industry of the 1970s and 1980s and Silicon Valley today. When it comes to managing creatives, he says you have to have patience and believe in the work. But to get that work made, you have to have shrewd negotiating skills. Ovitz says he now regrets some of the ways he approached business in his earlier years, and advises young entrepreneurs about what he’s learned along the way. He’s the author of the new memoir Who Is Mike Ovitz?

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How to Permanently Resolve Cross-Department Rivalries

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It can be challenging to synchronize complex tasks across multiple functions. Rather than cooperating, too many functions end up competing for power, influence, and limited resources. And such rivalry is more than a nuisance: It’s costly. One study reports that 85% of workers experience some regular form of conflict, with U.S. workers averaging 2.8 hours per week. That equates to $359 billion paid hours mired in conflict. It’s easy to blame these conflicts on personalities — think toxic bosses or big egos — but in my experience as an organizational consultant, the root cause is more often systemic. For example, this study examining the rivalry between sales and marketing showed that conflicts between managers from these historically warring functions were not driven by interpersonal issues. They were tied to the frequency of how they exchanged information, and the degree to which there were effective processes connecting their work.

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When cross-departmental rivalries get heated and conflicts arise, I’ve frequently seen companies turn to team-building events or motivational speakers who talk about trust. But often these solutions aren’t able to address the challenges these groups face because the organizational structure is encouraging these departments to dislike and distrust one another. For example, I worked with a global consumer products company in which the commercial organization — the set of departments responsible for developing new products and bringing them to market — was deeply fragmented. There were misunderstandings across the group about what one another did and sharp differences in how each subgroup defined a successfully commercialized product. R&D viewed operations as “the people who only know how to say no to opportunities,” while operations viewed R&D as “the time- and money-wasters.”

To better integrate and align rivaling functions, and therefore reduce friction and strengthen collaboration, leaders can address four critical questions that enable cross-functional teams to work together more coherently. These can happen over an extended working session, or a series of conversations.

What value do we create together? The seams that connect major functions are where a company’s greatest competitive distinctions lie. Discrete technical capabilities reside within functions, but when blended with the capabilities of adjacent functions, they combine into capabilities that drive performance. But that value is only realized when those functions understand their shared contributions for creating it. In my client example, the people in R&D and operations came to see one another differently, and work more collaboratively, because they realized that their combined expertise was necessary to get products to market faster. Neither alone controlled speed to market, but together they could significantly influence it. R&D needed to be disciplined in how they provided product specifications to manufacturing, and operations needed to be adaptable in order to accommodate new products they’d never had to make before. Marketing and R&D’s combined value could be creating innovations that prioritize the customer. By identifying which objectives in the organization’s strategy the functions mutually contribute to, they reduce the perception of conflicting goals. They also better manage the healthy, natural tensions between objectives like containing cost and investing in opportunities that may not materialize.

What capabilities do we need to deliver the value? Having anchored their relationship in creating value for the company together, groups can now focus on how best to achieve it. Functions should identify the four to five critical shared capabilities they must have. These may include the translation of market analytics into product opportunities, technical problem solving, or the fast and accurate exchange of information and learning as projects move through the development process. Identifying these requires an honest assessment of the organization to uncover any lagging or missing capabilities or processes that best integrate each function’s efforts. In the case of my client, we discovered there was no forum to bring together all of the commercial functions — regulatory, packaging, manufacturing, and marketing — to discuss potential problems with ongoing projects. As a result, information was slow to get to decision makers, and was often distorted by the time it did. The organization created a monthly meeting for these groups to come together to discuss challenges and solve problems with greater candor.

How will we resolve conflicts and make decisions while maintaining trust? Conflicts will inevitably come up when trying to better coordinate efforts. Answering this question together presents an opportunity to “rehearse” those conflicts in advance. Functions should identify the critical decisions they’ll need to make in pursuit of their co-created value and determine who gets to make the final call on those decisions. This requires acknowledging any historical baggage or unresolved distrust between the functions. Only when those concerns are fully aired can any biases people have toward one another’s department be removed. Empathy is key here, as is sharing information on what it’s like to interact with one another. I’ve often heard people express during this part of the conversation sentiments like, “I had no idea you guys had to do that! No wonder our requests drive you crazy!” The goal is to increase the respect the departments have for one another and build greater commitment to collective success.

What do we need from each other to succeed? This final question is about supporting one another’s work going forward. Groups must create detailed service-level agreements to one another, and negotiate things like timeliness of information sharing, quality standards, how far in advance notification is needed for changes, and how day-to-day work will be coordinated. The departments may need to share access to particular technology platforms or include people from other groups in certain meetings, so they get the information they need and provide input at the right time. Once the group agrees on which commitments they need to make, they must stick to them.

Organizations naturally fragment as they grow, pulling people apart into silos and creating functional borders that can set rivalry in motion. If you see fraying cross-functional relationships, don’t resort to superficial solutions like team building or conflict training. Dig deeper to understand what’s really causing those fractions and take steps together to set up your functions for mutual success.