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To Grow Your Business Abroad, Partner with Local Influencers

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When companies expand into foreign markets, they need to gain the trust of local business partners and prospective customers in order to succeed. The most common ways of doing this are to send executives to build personal relationships with international business partners and to hire local distribution partners — or independent, third-party intermediaries — to represent their products or services overseas.

Both of these approaches, however, are time-intensive, requiring executives to spend weeks or months in foreign markets. And they can be very expensive — in addition to overseas business travel, local distribution partner relationships require significant up-front investment to get started and to manage effectively.

A New Type of Local Partner

The rise of social media has created a new type of local partner: local digital influencers. These people are local thought leaders on social media with loyal followings of online fans. They spend their days developing new content — videos, photos, blog posts, and podcasts — and engaging their followers. They build active communities both online (on different platforms) and offline (at events) around seemingly any topic imaginable — everything from beauty to AI to e-sports. Their audience turns to them for industry insights, new product information, and recommendations.

They already have the trust of thousands, if not millions, of your target customers. So why not weave your brand into their story, rather than telling yours from scratch?

This practice, called influencer marketing, is more than simply paying models and celebrities to promote a product on Instagram. Influencers are much more than the “Instafamous”: They are diverse individuals with established expertise, expansive platforms, and refined strategies of engaging target audiences and shaping their behavior. For example, consider Dez Blanchfield, whom I interviewed. He’s an emerging technology influencer based in Sydney who partners with global technology brands like Ericsson, Telstra, and Dimension Data to educate B2B buyers about their solutions, through conducting interviews with company executives, collaborating on customer webinars, and producing live social media broadcasts of corporate events.

Another example is Tao Liang, a Chinese influencer who produces content about handbags on popular local social media platforms WeChat and Weibo. Known as “Mr. Bags,” Liang previously collaborated with several foreign handbag makers, including Italy’s Tod’s, where his WeChat promotional posts generated 3.24 million RMB (nearly $500,000) in sales of a limited-edition handbag in just six minutes.

While business-to-consumer (B2C) firms in industries like fashion, beauty, toys, and consumer electronics have traditionally spent the most on influencer marketing, collaborating with a variety of different influencers across multiple campaigns, B2B firms are also increasingly turning to local influencers to engage their target customers.

Since high-priced technology solutions require multiple rounds of relationship-building, often prolonging sales cycles for B2B products, a community of relevant local influencers engaged over an extended period of time can add value by providing expert third-party content and leveraging their existing relationships of trust. For example, IBM manages a global network of “IBM Futurists” who are subject matter experts on emerging technologies, commerce, and marketing. IBM’s influencer relations team actively manages and builds its Futurist community, engaging influencers in different parts of the world to participate in events, coauthor educational white papers specific to the influencer’s expertise, and co-host webinars for local audiences.

It’s not just large multinational companies that are using the global rise of local influencers to accelerate their international growth. Today, small and medium-size companies — particularly in the e-commerce sector — are capitalizing on the trend as well. For example, one American online education company I spoke with, specializing in early childhood education, developed online relationships with Chinese childhood education influencers on the social media app WeChat.

After building relationships with targeted WeChat influencers, the company’s marketing team developed an affiliate sales model through which the influencers promoted their product licenses, and then both sides split the generated sales. It was the start of an extremely successful influencer relations program — in the first 24 hours alone, one of their WeChat influencers sold $100,000 worth of product licenses that retail for approximately $100 per year. The influencer relations program has become a core component of the company’s China market strategy — now the firm’s largest market outside the U.S. And they still do not even have a physical office there.

Building an Effective Influencer Strategy

Companies have three options when deciding how to develop their influencer marketing programs:

A local strategy with local implementation: Local marketing teams define how their local organization will work with influencers in their country, and then the local marketing team puts plans into action.
A global strategy with local implementation: Global marketing teams establish a framework and common standards for working with influencers; however, local teams in each country have autonomy to localize the approach in market.
A global strategy with global implementation: Global marketing teams establish a framework and common standards for working with influencers, and it is applied consistently in all countries where the influencer programs are deployed.

The experts I interviewed for my book — ranging from influencer relations executives to senior marketers to external agency leads — recommended global-local as the best of these three options. In this approach, headquarters establishes a strategy that is subsequently tailored for local markets. Headquarters has more resources to dedicate to developing best practices for identifying influencers, defining specific methods and goals for influencer collaborations, and tracking ROI. But a centrally managed global-global approach is less effective because some degree of localization is essential to incorporate country-specific nuances, such as local preferences around social media and local cultural norms. And a fully local approach would mean that local teams cannot benefit from experience gained from other markets or economies of scale.

Employing a global-local strategy enables companies to leverage cross-national experiences, while guaranteeing that a consistent strategy is applied in all markets. At the same time, local implementation ensures that people with the right understanding of the local market are able to translate global vision in a way that resonates locally.

Global Models Change, but Trusted Relationships Remain Constant

Trust has been and will remain essential to the success of international expansion initiatives. It is widely agreed that local connectors are a critical part of establishing this trust in foreign markets. What needs to be updated, however, is our understanding of who these local insiders are. The rapid growth of social media worldwide has created local digital influencers: thought leaders with subject matter expertise and loyal followings of online fans. These individuals can open new doors for foreign businesses by leveraging their existing relationships of trust and using their authentic voices to win new overseas customers.

Think about the influential voices in your industry. If you work in a tech firm, you may turn to the commentary and recommendations of a prominent local industry analyst known for her insights on emerging technologies like blockchain, cloud computing, or augmented reality. Or if you work in the cosmetics industry, you might identify a local content creator who produces video tutorials tailored for the unique local standards of beauty within your target foreign country.

At the end of the day, digital influence is an extension of the age-old practice of word of mouth — now via new virtual platforms to reach mass audiences in localities around the world. It’s time for marketing departments to recognize the potential of these new local voices and engage them to accelerate global expansion.

How to Get People to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

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Most professionals use email every day for business — in fact, it’d be hard not to, with 281 billion messages sent and received on a daily basis. But when it comes to marketing, much of the attention gets focused on social media, which — while popular and highly visible — has a conversion rate less than half that of email marketing (4.29% vs. 1.81%), according to a recent analysis. Indeed, one 2015 study revealed that email marketing had an average ROI of £38 (about $50 USD) for every dollar invested.

With returns like that, the question is clear: How can we build our email lists? I’ll share three strategies I’ve learned in the past four years, as I’ve worked to build my mailing list to nearly 50,000 people. But first, an important note: You should always let subscribers opt in. It’s both a violation of anti-spamming laws and a deep annoyance to your intended audience if you simply add people without their permission (this includes LinkedIn connections or people who have given you their business card). Additionally, if you’ll have subscribers in the European Union, you’ll need to be aware of new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) laws; most email marketing companies will offer a primer for their customers, including additional checkboxes and notifications you can trigger for European IP addresses.

First, it’s essential to develop a lead magnet — a free giveaway that people can download in exchange for sharing their email address. (Here’s an example of one of mine.) Yes, you could simply have a link to “sign up for my e-newsletter,” and some do. But they’re the exception.

Most professionals are so inundated with email newsletters these days, they’re reluctant to sign up for yet another. But if you can offer something that readers will perceive as valuable — an e-book, a link to a sought-after webinar, or access to otherwise-private video interviews, for instance — then they’ll likely be willing to at least give your email list a chance.

Second, you can ensure that a link to your lead magnet is featured prominently in any content you create, such as in the bio section of blog posts, and that you mention it during podcast interviews. These are extremely simple things to do, but they make a disproportionate difference. For instance, during the launch of my first book, Reinventing You, I didn’t have a lead magnet, and it didn’t occur to me to suggest during interviews that listeners visit my website. My email list grew only marginally.

Two years later, while promoting my next book, simply becoming more disciplined about mentioning the opportunity to “download my free, 42-page Stand Out self-assessment workbook” at the end of any podcast interviews enabled me to grow my list by more than 15,000 subscribers in only 10 months. In similar fashion, I began writing less for publications that didn’t allow me to include my lead magnet in the bio section of the article, and prioritized writing for those that did.

Third and finally, you can grow your email list via cross-promotions. As I describe in my latest book, Entrepreneurial You, if you have a good relationship with someone and your products and focus area are aligned, entering into a joint venture arrangement can be a great way to introduce each other to your respective audiences, increase the size of your mailing lists, and earn some revenue. Here’s how it works.

When I partnered with Dov Gordon, a consultant who runs a listserv for marketers interested in joint ventures, I sent an email to my list promoting a free teleseminar he was conducting about how to improve the marketing process. I explained my connection with him, my respect for his work, and why readers might be interested.

When any of my followers registered for his teleseminar, they were added to his email list (which they could choose to unsubscribe from at any point). And if they signed up for his consulting services, I would receive a share of the revenues. The net result? Hundreds of new email subscribers for him, and $3,500 in affiliate commissions for me. The key, of course, is ensuring that you choose your partners wisely, since their content and tactics reflect back on your brand.

There’s no shortage of pundits arguing that email is dead, or at least dying, soon to be replaced by Slack, WhatsApp, or some heretofore unknown communication channel. And yet — for better or worse — almost all of us still use email every single day. Letting someone into our inboxes is an act of profound trust in this oversaturated era. By following these strategies, you’re far more likely to earn your place and reap the rewards.

What Does It Mean to Be an Inclusive Leader? - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM DELOITTE DIGITAL

Diversity and inclusion are key factors attracting and engaging the kind of workforce that will build your company’s future. But research shows there can be a disconnect between what companies say they do and how people really experience inclusion in the workplace. Listen to Angelia Herrin, Editor for Special Projects and Research at HBR interview Dr. Terri Cooper, Principal and Chief Inclusion Officer of Deloitte Consulting, about the importance of building inclusive leaders throughout your organization.

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Angelia Herrin, HBR

Welcome to the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Quick Take. I’m Angelia Herrin, Editor for Special Projects and Research at HBR. And today, I’m talking with Dr. Terri Cooper, Deloitte’s Chief Inclusion Officer, about new research into the role that today’s leaders must play in building inclusion and diversity within their company. And leveraging it for competitive advantage. Terri thanks so much for joining us today.

Terri Cooper, Deloitte Consulting

Thanks Angelia it’s great to be here.

Angelia Herrin, HBR

Terri, diversity and inclusion have never been more relevant. As Deloitte’s Chief Inclusion Officer, what are your biggest priorities?

Terri Cooper, Deloitte Consulting

Well the needs of today’s workforce have really changed dramatically, so at Deloitte we continue to evolve our perspective. And it’s really important for us to realize that each of us is multidimensional with unique needs and expectations that merge at different points in our professional and personal lives. So we found today’s workforce wants to work for an organization that not only acknowledges, but also supports and celebrates that. To have that kind of environment where people can be their authentic self, you need to create an inclusive culture. And doing so is critical to our business and is central to who we are. We know that when people bring their full selves to work every day they are more readily able to fully realize their potential. And there are many ways that we do this. And I’d like to give three examples.

First, we offer people the chance to engage and connect in many different ways through our inclusion council, around common passions and interests, as well as based on community and cohorts. We bring people together from different functions, backgrounds and experiences to engage in conversations and events related to community impact, well-being, development and inclusion.

Second, we also believe everyone has a role to play in creating an inclusive culture. So we’ve identified six leadership traits that we embed in our teams every day.

And lastly, we continue to hone in on specific areas where we can make a real impact, like encouraging mentorship and supporting all of our people interested in ascent into leadership.

Something else that’s distinctive about our strategy here at Deloitte is that empowered well-being is also a core aspect of inclusion. And empowered well-being is our holistic approach to giving people the support and the flexibility they need to be energized, competent and aware. And we believe that inclusion is essential to well-being because we recognize that we all have different well-being needs and priorities.

Angelia Herrin, HBR

We know that inclusion has the potential to impact the bottom line, but what do today’s workers say about the impact on their work experiences?

Terri Cooper, Deloitte Consulting

So inclusion is often the key factor in attracting and engaging today’s workforce. From our research we know that 80 percent of respondents say inclusiveness is important when they’re actually choosing an employer, 39 percent of all respondents reported that they would leave their current organization for a more inclusive one, and 23 percent of respondents indicated that they have already left an organization for a more inclusive one.

For today’s workforce, an inclusive culture is truly grounded in their everyday experiences. So a little bit more data: 71 percent of respondents valued working for an organization with leadership that consistently demonstrates inclusive behaviors over one with mixed quantity and quality of inclusive initiatives offered; as opposed to working for an organization with high quality inclusion programming, but inconsistent inclusive leadership behaviors.

For many, an inclusive culture is a crucial component for a sense of advancement. And we know now that the top three accelerators respondents identified for their career growth were acceptance, advocacy and authenticity.

Angelia Herrin, HBR

Such an interesting point because Deloitte recently released research that found a disconnect between what companies say they do and how people really experience inclusion in the workplace. So what changes would companies make to make the most impact here? What needs to change?

Terri Cooper, Deloitte Consulting

So we believe that companies need to consider how inclusive leadership, as well as the broader principles of diversity and inclusion fit within the organization, innovation strategy and processes. Seventy-two percent of employers say we need to redefine leadership to fit the demands of today’s modern world. For example, ensure that leaders assemble teams that are diverse in their thinking and showcase how this encourages innovation and creativity.

Additionally, individuals need to experience inclusion in their every day and view it as a business imperative. Organizations can share actionable steps on ways people can be more inclusive and bring their authentic self to work. And often individuals want to know how they can contribute and to be part of inclusion, but to do so they need more guidance on what to say or do to become more inclusive. Organizations also need to showcase how everyone has a role to play in fostering an inclusive culture.

Angelia Herrin, HBR

So what are the traits of this new kind of leader? What’s the profile of an inclusive leader today?

Terri Cooper, Deloitte Consulting

We found that the most inclusive organizations embed inclusion into the very fabric of their organization. Respondents in our survey were clear that they are looking for leaders to be more transparent – 47 percent, authentic – 50 percent, and to recognize their own weaknesses – 53 percent. As a result of that, we’ve identified six leadership traits that we embed in our teams every day, and these behaviors are foundational to advance in Deloitte’s culture and I’ll highlight a few.

Courage, by that we mean engaging in tough conversations when necessary. And identify opportunities to be more inclusive, take ownership and engage others.

And the second that we consider to be critically important is cognizance of bias. Be aware of unconscious biases, so decisions can be made in a transparent, consistent and informed manner.

And the third is cultural intelligence. Be in a position where you can seek out opportunities to experience and learn about different cultures and be aware of other cultural context.

Angelia Herrin, HBR

So let’s take it back to your own experience at Deloitte. What does inclusive leadership mean at Deloitte, and do you find this is something that leaders can actually learn?

Terri Cooper, Deloitte Consulting

Yes, I truly believe that this is something that can be learned. One of the things we often say at Deloitte is that being a leader means being an inclusive leader. And that applies to leaders at all levels, whether you’re just starting your career or operating in the C suite. It’s fundamental to our culture. And each and every one of us needs to strive to make inclusive behavior part of our daily routine. We believe that the six inclusive character traits of commitment, collaboration, curiosity, cultural intelligence, courage and cognizance provide a useful framework for people looking to build inclusive behaviors. And perhaps more importantly inclusive mindset.

Angelia Herrin, HBR

Terri it’s fascinating research. Thanks so much for talking with us about it today.

Terri Cooper, Deloitte Consulting

My pleasure. Thank you.

If you want to learn more about the report, Shift/Forward: Redefining Leadership, go to www.deloitte.com/us/shift-forward.

The Social and Political Costs of the Financial Crisis, 10 Years Later

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It is hard to overstate the sheer economic cost of the 2008 financial crisis. The combination of increased expenditures and decreased revenues resulting from the crisis from 2008 to 2010 is likely to cost the United States government well over $2 trillion, more than twice the cost of the 17-year-long war in Afghanistan. Broader measures are even more damning. Measured by decrease in per capita United States GDP compared to the pre-crisis trend, by 2016 the crisis had cost the country 15% of GDP, or $4.6 trillion. Such numbers are too vast to be understood in any meaningful way, but one on a smaller scale may be even more powerful. A 2018 study by the Federal Reserve Board found that the crisis cost every single American approximately $70,000. Just in dollar terms, the crisis was arguably the most significant event of the 21st century so far, and the largest single economic downturn since the Great Depression. If the only effects of the financial crisis were economic, it would still be worth revisiting 10 years later.

But the most important effects of the financial crisis may be political and social, not economic. The years after the crisis saw sharp increases in political polarization and the rise of populist movements on both the left and right in Europe and the U.S., culminating in Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump here — by some measures the country’s most polarizing president ever. Such increases in political divides are a predictable response to financial crises across eras and countries. Even the economic recovery experienced by the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, Britain, is not enough to neutralize the long-term political and social effects of the collapse.

The severity of the crisis was such that probably no government response could have eliminated these political and social consequences; when the economy collapses, people will suffer, and they will blame the people in charge. In my opinion, the way that the Bush and Obama administrations chose to respond to the crisis greatly exacerbated the change in American political culture produced by the crisis.

Fundamentally, the American (and world) economy was crippled by the actions of the leaders of the American financial sector, and the U.S. government chose to “punish” those leaders by giving them enormous sums of money through bailouts. This may have been the right decision. It may have been necessary to prevent a second Great Depression. It might even have been economically optimal, in the sense that it prevented an even worse outcome at the lowest possible cost (I do not believe this, but let’s assume it is true for the sake of argument). It nonetheless strikes most Americans as fundamentally unjust.

Justice is generally conceived of in one of two ways. The first, and more common, one is that justice is fairness. In a fair world, good behavior is rewarded and bad acts (usually meaning acts that contravene generally accepted norms) are punished. Economists and people with significant training in economics, however, often conceive of justice as efficiency — that is, the just outcome is the one that maximizes welfare. Although this is how economists often see it, most people have a very different perspective. Psychology experiments show that most people — and even monkeys! — believe that justice is fairness, and believe it so strongly that they will pay significant costs to protest unfair outcomes. People given the chance to punish someone who has betrayed them in a game, for example, will generally take it even if doing so leaves them worse off. They explicitly choose fairness over efficiency.

The arguments in favor of the government’s response to the financial crisis — ranging from TARP, to the nationalization of AIG, to allowing bailed-out banks to continue to pay bonuses to their employees — all hinged on the logic of justice as the rescue of the American economy at the lowest possible financial cost. These arguments, however, entirely ignore the powerful and far more common belief that justice is fairness. Efficiency may have required rewarding people who had acted badly and punishing the blameless — but that did not make it fair.

One way to highlight the scale of this unfairness is to look at the contrast between how bailed-out banks and automotive companies were handled. When the government rescued major American banks, it did not fire even one of their CEOs. The bailouts did not prevent the banks from generously paying their executives, and paying dividends to shareholders, rather than retaining capital to increase stability. When the government bailed out AIG, it did not impose a single penny of loss on any of AIG’s creditors. If you were a player in the American financial system, the government did everything possible to make sure that you did not suffer consequences from the crash your industry had caused.

When GM and Chrysler were bailed out, on the other hand, their CEOs were fired and their unionized workforces were forced to accept substantial pay cuts, even though they had nothing to do with the causes of the crisis. Each individual decision may, in some sense, have been the right one when measured purely in terms of economic efficiency. In aggregate, however, they gave the appearance of a government willing to spare no expense to shelter Wall Street from the consequences of its own mistakes, while largely unwilling to make similar efforts for others.

Perhaps even worse was the extent to which the government focused its efforts on stabilizing the financial sector instead of directly aiding most Americans. This was best symbolized by former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s approach to the response to the financial crisis. He explained, for example, why the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which was meant to help Americans who were facing eviction because they were unable to pay their mortgages, had done little, because its real purpose was to “foam the runway” for banks that had made the loans — that is, he saw it as a program meant to help banks, not the customers to whom they had made loans, often under predatory terms.

Even if we accept the argument that focusing almost entirely on the health of the financial sector was the best way to handle the crisis, this approach creates a series of problems. It largely removes any pressure on the sector to permanently change the behaviors that led to the crisis. Even worse, though, it corroded the bonds of trust required for the functioning of democracy.

It’s entirely reasonable that many voters would lose trust in the governing elite. And when that trust is broken, democratic populations will turn to politicians who promise to overturn that elite, whether it’s Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, or Nigel Farage. Populist movements often turn to outsiders to lead them. The problem with voting for complete outsiders, however, is that they don’t have a track record. You don’t know what they really believe. And they don’t always know how to pull the levers of power. Once in office, they can turn on you and pursue policies very different from the ones they promised, they can be manipulated by insiders, or they can simply be ineffective in trying to enact their agenda. The result is either more of the same or a government that is so discombobulated that it cannot function.

We can see different versions of this unfolding now in both the U.S. and UK. In the UK, within days of winning the vote to leave the EU, leading Brexiters started walking back key campaign promises to redirect EU funding toward Britain’s national health services, cut immigration, and harden Britain’s borders. Now, two years after the vote, the government has been unable to cobble together a deal to actually leave the EU. The result has been a government frozen in inaction, constant threats to PM Teresa May’s authority, the resignation of key officials, and continued confusion about what to do next.

In the U.S., Donald Trump has been either unable or unwilling to aggressively pursue the populist policies he promised during the campaign, with the exception of cutting back on refugee admissions and, to some extent, imposing tariffs on foreign trade. During his campaign, Trump promised to raise taxes on the rich and repeatedly attacked Goldman Sachs (and attacked his opponent for giving paid speeches to them). Once in office, he has cut taxes on the wealthy, filled his administration with Goldman alums, and sought to limit the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — in essence, rewarding the financial elites whose failure helped lead to his election.

The task facing May’s and Trump’s successors is simple. He or she, Democrat or Republican, Labour or Tory, must break this cycle. He or she will have to have both the will and the skill to address major concerns about the economy, ranging from stagnating median income to increasing inequality to the fundamental economic insecurity of most people. Beyond that, however, the two successors must govern in a way that is seen to be just. That means, for example, demonstrating that those who break the law will be punished, even if they are wealthy and powerful. A leader seeking to assuage these sorts of concerns, for example, might seek to emphasize white-collar crime, which is still too often ignored by prosecutors, and for which the overall number of prosecutions in the U.S. is at a 20-year low. Whatever their approach, future leaders should be guided by the idea that has always underpinned democratic societies — justice is about much more than economic efficiency. It fundamentally also requires fairness.

How to Help a Colleague Who Seems Off Their Game

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When we think about productivity at work, we often think about how to motivate ourselves — or the people on our team. But sometimes the people who are struggling to stay focused and engaged are our peers. And while it may not be an official part of your job description, helping a colleague is the kind thing to do and can be beneficial to your own productivity.

Here are several things you can do for your colleagues to help them through a rough patch.

Acknowledge

The first step is to let your colleague know that you’ve noticed they’re off their game. Find a time to chat with them at their desk or invite them to grab a cup of coffee or a drink after work. Tell them what you’ve observed. Perhaps they look down, or frustrated, or unable to concentrate.

You can’t force a colleague to disclose what’s going on with them, but just letting them know that you’ve noticed that they seem to be acting differently shows them that someone out there is paying attention. They may not want to discuss the issue when you first bring it up, but you’ve planted the seed for future conversation by letting them know that you are there.

And sometimes that’s enough. In an era of hot-desking, flexible schedules, texts, and emails, it is easy to lose the human connection at work, which can make you feel as though you are working for an unsympathetic and faceless organization. Knowing that you have colleagues who care can sometimes be motivating in itself.

Validate

Beyond just stating that you’ve observed that your colleague is struggling, you can also help to validate the difficulty of being productive. One of the big motivation killers for many people involves a combination of imposter syndrome and social comparison.

Imposter syndrome is a common feeling where people believe they’ve risen to a position they don’t deserve. They fear that their colleagues and supervisors will discover that they don’t deserve the position they’ve gotten, so they do their best to hide their bad days and the limitations of their knowledge.

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Imposter syndrome is reinforced by the tendency to compare yourself to other people. In particular, people often engage in upward social comparisons in which they compare themselves to other people who are more successful on some dimension. It’s easy to find people in the workplace who seem to be accomplishing more than you are. You look at them and believe that you don’t have the same qualities they have.

The problem with social comparison is that you can only see what other people project to the world (intentionally or unintentionally). You see what they say and what they do, but not what they are feeling or thinking. So you assume they don’t have the same feelings you do about your work.

This is why reaching out to your colleague is helpful: By talking openly about the times you’ve struggled with projects or had days when you feel like you are running at half-speed compared to everyone else, you’re showing them they are not alone in what they are feeling.

It’s likely your colleague thinks they are unique in their concerns and frustrations. You can help them more clearly understand that everyone has days where they do not get as much done as they had hoped or worry they’re missing the skills they need to succeed.

This type of validation has two benefits. First, it may help your colleague recognize that their feelings about work are not a sign that they don’t belong in their job. Second, sharing your experience makes you a safe colleague to talk to. People may be reluctant to disclose their own frustrations with work to someone else unless they believe their feelings will be understood. By validating their experience, you make it more likely they’ll talk with you further.

Plan

If your colleague does talk with you about the factors that are limiting their motivation, it’s important to make the conversation productive. It’s easy for a well-intentioned attempt to check in with a struggling colleague to turn into a gripe session about what’s wrong with the workplace. But it’s important to develop a plan for the future.

This plan might take many forms. Some colleagues may be ill suited to the organization or their role. Perhaps they don’t resonate with the firm’s mission. Perhaps they just hate the day-to-day work they are doing. If so, then you might be helping a colleague to make the decision to pursue other opportunities. That isn’t always the case, but there will be rare occasions where the plan you help your colleague make is to reconsider their current situation.

More likely, your colleague is suited to their job but is having trouble getting things done. In that case, have them talk through small steps they can take to make progress on their most important goals. It’s possible they’ve lost the forest for the trees. A project may seem so all-encompassing that it feels impossible to make steady progress. But any contribution at work is the result of lots of small jobs done well. Someone paralyzed by the enormity of the project can benefit from focusing on what can be done this afternoon or tomorrow rather than what has to be done over the next several weeks.

Of course, you don’t have to solve everyone else’s problems. And you need to be careful that helping your colleague doesn’t drain your energy or hurt your performance. The aim is for your coworkers to know that they are not alone at work and to help them think about concrete actions they can take to get out of the doldrums.

Managing Parental Leave (Yours or Someone Else’s)

From the Women at Work podcast:

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Having a baby is exciting — and exhausting. Figuring out how to take parental leave, or manage someone who’s doing it, can add an extra wrinkle.

No matter how long you’ll be away from work, there’s preparation to be done: talking to your boss, making sure colleagues can cover your projects, handling unexpected needs and feelings.

With the help of our guest expert, Daisy Wademan Dowling, we talk about how to effectively plan for your parental leave or the leave of someone you manage. And through the story of a lucky woman whose organization offers 12 months of paid leave, we explore what our lives might be like if we had access to more generous leaves.

Guest:

Daisy Wademan Dowling is the founder and CEO of Workparent.

Resources:

“The Best Ways Your Organization Can Support Working Parents,” by Daisy Wademan Dowling
“Need a Good Parental Leave Policy? Here It Is.” by Joan C. Williams and Kate Massinger
“How Companies Can Ensure Maternity Leave Doesn’t Hurt Women’s Careers,” by David Collings, Yseult Freeney, and Lisa van der Werff
“Denmark Has Great Maternity Leave and Child Care Policies. So Why Aren’t More Women Advancing?” by Bodil Nordestgaard Ismiris
“Why Walmart Expanded Parental Leave — and How to Convince Your Company to Do the Same,” by Sarah Green Carmichael

Email us here: womenatwork@hbr.org

Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

What Managers Should Know About Postpartum Depression

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Going back to work after having a baby is tricky stuff. After all, the new parent is simply not the same person they were before.

This personal struggle, combined with a misguided workplace view of what a parent was actually doing on leave (no, they were not just lounging about and cuddling with their baby) add to a cultural disconnect. While the complexities of early days at home with a baby are often overwhelming, most workplaces simply treat any leave as time “off,” like it’s an extended vacation. In reality, a new parent is actively climbing a steep learning curve: mastering a whole new set of skills, tackling challenges that are not only foreign but also highly personal, and making sense of a new emotional and physical normal. The birth parent has to cope with physical healing, which itself can be complicated and tiring, while also caring for and bonding with a newborn.

This transition is challenging for almost every new parent, but for some it can become postpartum depression (PPD). While PPD is the most commonly used term, a range of mood disorders can occur around (not just after) the birth of a child. According to the Centers for Disease Control, how often PPD symptoms occur, how long they last, and how intense they feel can be different for each person. About 1 in 7 women experience PPD, and men often do as well; people are usually surprised to learn that anywhere from 4%–25% of men report feeling some level of PPD.

Most employees don’t share their struggles with their employer. Karen Kleiman, founder of the Postpartum Stress Center, told me, “One of the most universal ‘go to’ responses…is to overcompensate by creating the illusion of being just fine through an extreme professional push. There is a general notion of being able to conquer.” The parent’s struggle doesn’t always show on the outside. As Kleiman explains, “Sometimes the women who look the best right away, the ones who come off as good and strong, are going to extraordinary lengths to show the world how in control and strong they are — these women are actually doing the worst.”

But a manager’s support can make a huge difference. Lucy (not her real name) is a first-time mother who works in a New York hospital. When she was pregnant, she began to experience symptoms of perinatal anxiety (PA), something that continued after the birth of her baby (becoming postpartum anxiety, or PPA). “I had not flat-out told them that I was suffering from PA and PPA, but I was open in describing my struggles and my manager was very kind and understanding,” Lucy said. For example, while hospital policy offered only a three-week leave, her manager supported her as she pieced together 16 weeks of leave using paid sick time and a recently implemented New York state policy offering paid leave. And when Lucy returned to work, she worked out an arrangement with her boss where she could ramp back up by telecommuting, something other women in her department had done. Regular conversations with her manager also helped. “She would regularly ask me to tell her if my workload felt like too much,” Lucy told me.

This preemptive, flexible, and gradual return strategy has been very successful for Lucy and her department, but unfortunately, this kind of arrangement is relatively rare. Lucy stressed that it was only her department, and her very understanding manager, that made it possible — it wasn’t the norm for her institution as a whole.

Anne Smith, the president of Postpartum Support International, is a leading voice and authority in PPD treatment. The organization is actively improving frontline provider training and support to better identify and treat PPD. When we spoke, she stressed that there are three types of support that people with PPD often need: social, therapeutic, and medical. Employers can be a key factor in the first two. Here’s how:

Identify. As a manager, commit to keeping your eyes wide open. Note over- or under-productivity as well as a changed or flat personality or loss of enthusiasm. This is not the same as adjustment issues, which are to be expected and also acknowledged.

Offer peer and professional support. Create a healthy menu of ways to access support without requiring an employee to ask or identify their need. Have ready tools to connect parents with each other. Have outside vendors and other resources listed and easy to access. Not only offer but require nonnegotiable self-care such as post-natal yoga. Consider a required part-time return plan or a mandated telecommute for a period of time.

Provide good coverage. Care, especially private counseling, can be expensive. Still, providing coverage for private or group work can be extremely helpful. Make this an easy-to-access benefit. Take advantage of centers that offer private and group work (such as the Pump Station and Nurtury in Santa Monica, California), as well as services (Pacify or Let Mommy Sleep) for services as part of off- and on-ramp benefit options. Smith says that “most people want to keep their mental health issues separate from the workplace; thus the biggest barrier is not the employers doing the right thing — it is simply too hard for an employee to explore PPD struggles at work.” Communicate the safety of the space and the benefits available without a requiring an employee to expose or ask too much.

Offer tools. Proudly offer options that can include flex time, telecommuting, gradual return, peer mentoring, and other support offerings at your management disposal. Share these with all team members, potential employees, and so on. Simply make it a part of your culture.

Normalize and educate. Actively work to remove misunderstandings around parental leave and PPD. Create a larger view of PPD through hands-on CSR work in the local community to underscore the truth that PPD can hit anyone, anywhere. Host internal or online events with experts on this issue. If you need ideas on what kinds of experts to bring in, some of the leading voices are Lauren Smith Brody, Anne Smith, and Karen Kleiman, all of whom have books and resources for overcoming the complexities of returning to work after giving birth.

Be knowledgeable and prepared. Make a strong commitment to identifying and supporting instances of PPD in your employees. It is a highly worthwhile investment for holding onto those you value through authentic support.

Why Companies Are Creating Their Own Coworking Spaces

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Nestled in the Silicon Sentier district of Paris, the Villa Bonne Nouvelle (“House of Good News”), or VBN, initially appears to be another new coworking space. But what sets it apart is that only half of its 60 occupants are freelancers. The remainder work for Orange (née French Telecom), which launched VBN in 2014 to teach its programmers and engineers how to work with and learn from people outside of the company.

The experiment succeeded: Teams temporarily stationed there worked better and faster than colleagues elsewhere, and they reported greater satisfaction and engagement (along with bouts of depression upon returning to the office). Even the HR executives managing the space were surprised by their bonhomie. More villas are now in the works.

Orange describes its approach as “corpoworking,” a cousin to coworking. It’s not alone in trying to jump on the trend of shared workspaces, of which there are now around 19,000 worldwide. Dozens of companies, ranging from telcos (Sprint, AT&T), to tech giants (SAP, IBM), to automakers and insurance companies (MINI, State Farm) have launched similar experiments. The real revolution in coworking may have less to do with freelancers or startups than with employees of large companies working beyond the boundaries of their organizations.

A case in point is WeWork, the provider of coworking spaces, which has grown its enterprise customer base in the last year by 370%. As of June 2018, corporate occupiers make up roughly one-quarter of WeWork’s members and revenues. It’s also creating stand-alone locations for individual clients such as IBM, UBS, and Facebook.

It’s typically assumed these companies are seeking a jolt of hipness. But our research and reporting show this isn’t the case. We’ve separately toured and interviewed principals in more than a dozen corporate coworking spaces in the U.S., South America, and Europe over the last three years. We’ve found that these companies and their employees are searching for the same qualities freelancers and entrepreneurs report from their experiences in shared workspaces — learning skills faster, making more connections, and feeling inspired and in control.

In addition to coworking spaces for individuals and those that partner with employers, we’ve identified two types of corporate coworking. One is what we call open houses, in which companies offer workspace as a public amenity, typically for brand-building. In Brooklyn, for example, MINI, where one of us works, runs A/D/O, a combination coworking space, café, concept store, and fabrication lab. Its mission isn’t to sell cars, but to attract and learn from local designers.

The other type we call campsites — internal, invitation-only spaces where teams from one company co-locate with peers from another. Campsites are temporary, affording coworkers stationed there opportunities to learn, ignore org charts, and collaborate across corporate boundaries. Orange’s VBN is one example; another belongs to a large telco in Silicon Valley, where its teams huddle alongside those from customers to prototype products and services. Projects that would have taken months of calls are finished in weeks, demonstrating the importance of co-location in innovation.

Some companies are aggressively testing both. SAP’s HanaHaus in downtown Palo Alto is an open house that charges walk-ins $3 per hour, or roughly the cost of their Blue Bottle coffee. (Notable visitors include Mark Zuckerberg.) A few miles away, at its Silicon Valley campus, is AppHaus, one of five such campsites worldwide, where SAP engineers work with local customers and startups to explore consumer software.

But what are the goals of these corporate coworking spaces? Who uses them? And what do they look like? Here’s what we’ve learned.

The purpose of these spaces can vary widely, but they typically fall into one or more of three groups: transformation, innovation, and future-proofing. In the case of transformation, the space is designed to be a Trojan horse, sneaking new ways of working into an otherwise staid organization. This is explicitly the goal at Orange’s VBN, which Ava Virgitti, an employee experience lead for Orange, describes as an “HR lab” to test and learn how teams behave in the presence of leaner and meaner startups.

Innovation is the goal at other campsites, where diverse stakeholders are assembled with specific tasks and equipped with special facilities and methodologies (say, design thinking) to achieve them. Future-proofing is more open-ended; these spaces are designed to generate new contacts or ideas, which seems to be the thinking behind HanaHaus.

For these reasons, users are typically quite diverse in rank, role, and affiliation, and are present for only a few months before rotating out or back into the company. This is a critical feature of campsites in particular — a revolving door means a constant stream of fresh insights and expertise. Orange’s VBN uses nine-month “seasons” to reset the space; others switch participants as necessary.

While the focus of many spaces is to create new digital products and services, evidence from broader coworking surveys suggests other roles could benefit from this practice. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, for instance, Grid70 houses design, business innovation, and product development teams from a grocery chain, shoe retailer, and consumer goods manufacturer — no coding required.

More important is curating the mix of employees, startups, entrepreneurs, freelancers, researchers, and even academics present. While open houses welcome almost everyone as part of their marketing and outreach efforts, campsites carefully vet participants according to expertise, personality, or cultural fit.

The latter is crucial. While the cultures of these spaces vary according to industry, geography, and so on, they are always different from their parent organizations (and often opposed to them). This is unsurprising given their goal of smuggling the benefits of coworking inside. In interview after interview, community managers stressed the importance of members’ initiative, openness, curiosity, and trust, as well as esprit de corps, or what one called “family spirit.”

The role of community managers in fostering this culture can’t be overstated. Traditionally nonexistent in corporate America, they typically help select, vet, onboard, and connect new users with existing ones while organizing the space, arbitrating conflicts, and hosting events. User satisfaction surveys consistently rank them as the favorite aspect of corporate coworking.

The other important aspect in creating these spaces is their physical design. Like the culture, which the design complements and enhances, the layout and amenities of these spaces are a far cry from cubicles. Nothing is stationary — whiteboards, movable walls, and flexible furniture are common. Amenities and kitchens are strategically positioned to “engineer serendipity” and conversations across organizations. And writing on the walls or floors is encouraged, as making a mess is considered a precursor to innovation.

Now, do these spaces work in promoting innovation? This seems to be the case, although, as with coworking in general, their effectiveness is difficult to measure and only quantifiable indirectly, through user satisfaction surveys and interviews.

A few companies we spoke with also offered examples. Orange’s VBN reported a 92% user approval rating of the space, and pointed to the long waitlist for future seasons. At Grid70, one tenant reported a 30%–40% reduction in product development time after a redesign of their workspace.

According to researchers at the University of Michigan, the most common reasons people seek coworking spaces are interaction with people (84%), random discoveries and opportunities (82%), and knowledge sharing (77%). Corporate coworkers seek the same.

As one might imagine, demonstrating the ROI of this is difficult — most don’t even try. Some eschew metrics altogether, gambling they will learn as they go when it comes to measuring what’s important. Many prefer the soft metrics, such as satisfaction and engagement mentioned above, and still others defer measurement into the future, minimizing expenses while awaiting a business case to emerge.

For this reason (and others), strong executive sponsors are crucial for corporate coworking. HanaHaus was instigated as the personal urging of SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner; Grid70 was conceived by a cluster of local CEOs. Orange’s VBN has the firm backing of senior HR executives, and so on. With the metrics so hazy, the decision as to whether these spaces are worth it is being made on a case-by-case basis.

Just as coworking was seen as a fringe phenomenon less than a decade ago, its corporate variant risks being perceived as a vanity project. But in light of the trends animating creative work today — increasingly flexible arrangements, cross-firm collaboration, and employees’ thirst for agency and authentic connections — these spaces hint at a future far beyond WeWork.

We’ve identified a few principles to keep in mind if your company is interested in exploring corporate coworking.

Be clear about your goals at the outset. Is it a Trojan horse for corporate culture, a cross-firm skunkworks, or a public branding exercise and serendipity engine? This decision will drive every facet of the project going forward, including participants, design, sponsorship, and ROI.

Community managers are the key to success. Hire carefully at the outset, involve them at every step of the design and recruitment process, and give them broad latitude in shaping the culture and programming of the space. Your project will likely fail without a strong community manager, and learning how their role could scale elsewhere in the organization is an incredible opportunity.

Don’t overthink the design. Focus less on foosball or Ping-Pong tables, and more on good overall layout principles. Co-locate teams in adjoining spaces for easy conversations; centralize amenities such as kitchens to increase serendipitous encounters (yes, even the unplanned can be planned for!). Empower users to make the space their own, and cut through red tape during construction — no one wants to spend nine months in just another project team room.

Lifestyle Brands Are Building Hotels Now. Here’s Why That Actually Makes Sense.

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These days, it seems, every brand wants to be a “lifestyle brand.”

Peddling burritos? “Our ultimate marketing mission is to make Chipotle not just a food brand but a purpose-driven lifestyle brand,” the company’s new head of marketing said. Selling sweets? Godiva wants “to be seen as a lifestyle brand by leveraging [our] culinary experience to expand beyond chocolates,” a statement read. Shipping meal-preparation kits to families? Blue Apron, its new CEO argued, sees itself as “a strong consumer lifestyle brand that [plays]…a more meaningful role in our customers’ lives.”

All three examples appeared in a recent article in the New York Times, which both chronicled and raised a skeptical eyebrow about the commitment of so many brands, in some pretty prosaic industries, to becoming lifestyle brands. What the Times (and, I fear, many of the brands themselves) could not quite identity were how to turn these aims into action. Chipotle is running ads on water-cooler shows and sponsoring Fortnite players, the article noted. Blue Apron has experimented with “cooking classes, movie screenings, and chef panels” in cool cities. Godiva “would like people to stop in one of its shops for coffee in the morning and a snack in the afternoon.”

Surely marketers with big dreams can come up with bolder real-world strategies than these. So allow me to suggest one radical idea: If you want to build a lifestyle brand, no matter the industry you’re in, consider building a hotel. After all, what more visceral, intimate way is there for you to articulate and communicate the lifestyle attributes of your brand than to invite customers to live in a space that reflects those attributes?

I first encountered this idea several years ago, when I was on a speaking tour in Germany. It was a Friday in Berlin, I was exhausted, so I decided to spend the night rather than trudge on to the next city. I asked a colleague to recommend a place to stay, and he suggested the Casa Camper Berlin. “Camper?” I asked. “Like the shoes?” It seems the innovative footwear company, based in Spain, decided that one way to deepen ties to its fashion-conscious customers was to build hotels, first in Barcelona, then in Berlin, whose look and experience would echo the brand’s attributes. “Everything from the rooms to the halls, terrace, bar and lobby were designed with the Camper look in mind,” one reviewer noted. I didn’t get a room (the hotel was sold out), but I got an interesting lesson in marketing.

Fast forward to last year, when I was part of a conference on how brands could contend with the commoditizing impact of Amazon and other internet retailers. One of the buzzy topics was the move by West Elm, the style-minded home furnishings company, to open a collection of boutique hotels in U.S. cities such as Indianapolis; Minneapolis; Savannah, Georgia; and Portland, Maine. The hotels (outfitted, naturally, with the company’s products) are “focused on achieving consistency of the West Elm aesthetic,” a company executive explained to an industry magazine. “We want the experience of walking into a West Elm hotel to evoke a similar feeling of walking into a West Elm store — but have the opportunity to extend this.”

Meanwhile, just last week I was on a trip to Detroit, whose much-heralded downtown renaissance has been accompanied by the launch of a bunch of boutique hotels. One of the most anticipated offerings, scheduled to open later this fall, is the Shinola Hotel, owned by the Detroit-based maker of watches, bicycles, backpacks, and other consumer items. Shinola has retail stores across the country for its products. But this hotel, which will anchor a complex of residences, restaurants, and shops, is meant to showcase the Shinola brand and the Detroit spirit on which it is based. “In the shift from a retail/consumer products brand to a lifestyle and 360-degree design brand,” one analysis noted, “the Shinola Hotel is paying as much attention to detail as its artisans pay to its timepieces and other items.”

Am I really suggesting that if you are selling burritos, chocolates, or some other familiar consumer item, the way to turn your product brand into a lifestyle brand is to open a hotel? Well, maybe. But at the very least, if you are serious about making deep, emotional, enduring connections with customers, your marketing strategies have to be more daring and far-reaching than ever before. That’s why it’s worth checking into (figuratively, and perhaps even literally) these newfangled hotels. These days, if you want customers to pay attention to your brand, you’ve got to do things that are worth paying attention to.

A 6-Part Tool for Ranking and Assessing Risks

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One of the most overused expressions thrown around by wannabe “Wall Street Rambos” is business is war. But sometimes war tactics really can help in business.

Among these tactics is CARVER, a system for assessing and ranking threats and opportunities. Developed during World War II, CARVER (then one letter shorter and known as CARVE) was originally used by analysts to determine where bomber pilots could most effectively drop their munitions on enemy targets. It can be both offensive and defensive, meaning it can be used for identifying your competitors’ weaknesses and for internal auditing. In addition, many security experts consider it the definitive assessment tool for protecting critical assets. In fact, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has recommended it as a preferred assessment methodology. (One of us, Luke, is so enthusiastic about CARVER that he cowrote a book on it.)

More recently, CARVER has converted a new community of believers in the business world, including CEOs, financial analysts, and risk management planners, not to mention any number of Fortune 500 security directors. Since it draws on both qualitative and quantitative data, CARVER can be applied in almost any scenario that is analyzed and discussed in an organized, logical way. It can be highly useful if you need to, for example, defend a budget request or a strategic plan to company leadership. Because it helps you articulate an efficient story using numeric values, CARVER can be used to clarify mission objectives — whether on the battlefield or in the boardroom. You might say CARVER is a SWOT analysis on steroids.

CARVER is an acronym that stands for:

Criticality: how essential an asset or critical system is to your company
Accessibility: how hard it would be for an adversary to access or attack the asset
Recoverability: how quickly you could recover if something happened to the asset
Vulnerability: how well (or not) the asset could withstand an adversary’s attack
Effect: how much of an impact there would be across your business if something happened to the asset
Recognizability: how likely it is that an adversary would recognize the asset as a valuable target

To use CARVER — whether you’re assessing a system, a business goal, or something else — you assign scores from 1 to 5 (with 5 being “most essential,” “most likely,” and so on) for each of the six criteria above. The sum of the six scores is the total score for whatever you’re assessing. Once you’ve calculated the total scores for a few things, you can compare them. For example, you could use CARVER to compare two business opportunities; whichever has the higher score is probably the better option to pursue.

Here’s an example. Let’s say the chief security officer for an oil and gas company is deciding how to allocate their budget across multiple locations and assets. At a strategic level, the CSO could use CARVER to think through the factors involved for each location and then allocate resources for each facility.

To start, the CSO would ask a series of questions related to the CARVER criteria. Beginning with Criticality, they might ask, “How critical is the oil pipeline in Abuja, Nigeria, to the company’s overall operations?” Because Criticality is based on the importance of the asset (in this case the pipeline), the CSO would need to determine if the destruction or compromise of this asset would have a significant impact on the output, mission, or operation of the company. The CSO would rank Criticality like this:

5 – Loss of the pipeline would stop operations

4 – Loss would reduce operations considerably

3 – Loss would reduce operations

2 – Loss may reduce operations

1 – Loss would not affect operations

Obviously, the higher the number, the more detrimental the loss of the asset would be to the organization. The lower the number, the less detrimental the loss would be, or there might be redundancies in place — other pipelines, for example. (Those redundancies would also affect the asset’s Recoverability score.)

To assess the Recoverability of that same pipeline (perhaps after a natural disaster, sabotage, or a terrorist attack), the CSO would rank it like this:

5 – Extremely difficult to replace; long downtime

4 – Difficult to replace; long downtime

3 – Can be replaced in a relatively short time

2 – Easily replaced in a short time

1 – Can be replaced immediately; short or no downtime

The CSO would then continue ranking the Abuja pipeline on the other four criteria. If the pipeline received a 5 for Criticality and Recoverability, for example, it seems likely that it would be a good candidate to receive more of the CSO’s budget.

To consider another example, say a hedge fund is looking to acquire a tech company that claims to have a leading-edge technology. In addition to simply auditing the company’s books, analysts could perform a CARVER assessment to determine how close the competition might be to catching up to this technology, thus balancing the risk of the investment. The tech company may score low (meaning good) on Criticality and Recoverability but score high (meaning bad) on Accessibility and Effect. That Accessibility score might mean a competitor could beat the product to market, and the Effect could be the fallout from a controversial marketing campaign.

One question the analysts might ask for Effect is: “What is the effect on us if the tech company’s competitors beat us to market?”

5 – Very high economic, political, or social impact on the organization

4 – High economic, political, or social impact

3 – Moderate impact

2 – Little impact

1 – No unfavorable impact

The important thing to remember is that this exercise is conducted to identify, categorize, and prioritize high-risk assets; to assess vulnerabilities; and to make recommendations around risk. Once a CARVER assessment has been completed, and material risks and threats have been identified, security and risk management professionals can determine the best approach to take. Even the smallest difference in CARVER scores could influence whether you open a store in one location versus another, or help you decide between upgrading an existing product line and opting to create something new.

Strategic decisions are being made in boardrooms everywhere, by executives who are looking for any advantage over the competition. Business leaders are looking for hard numbers to provide them with an edge in their decision-making process. CARVER can provide a quantified justification for standing by — or abandoning — a decision or initiative.