Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 803

How Customers Come to Think of a Product as an Extension of Themselves

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Businesses are constantly vying to capture the attention of potential customers. It’s not easy to do. People are inundated with different brands as they stroll through the streets, scan through their social media newsfeeds, and binge television. The average American is exposed to more than 4,000 ads every day.

A simple concept can help businesses cut through the noise. It’s called psychological ownership. That’s when consumers feel so invested in a product that it becomes an extension of themselves.

Companies that encourage psychological ownership can entice customers to buy more products, at higher prices, and even to willingly promote those products among their friends. But if businesses disrespect this feeling, sales can suffer.

To build psychological ownership, companies must use at least one of three factors: control, investment of self, and intimate knowledge.

Enhancing customer control

One way is to allow customers a hand in forming the product. Consider Threadless, the t-shirt company. Founded in 2000, the online firm allows users to submit t-shirt designs and vote on the best ones. Threadless prints and sells the winners.

This model has been extremely successful. By 2006, the company received 150 T-shirt designs per day and had over 400,000 users voting on shirts. That year, the company sold 60,000 t-shirts per month and boasted a profit margin of 35 %—much higher than many traditional clothing retailers.

Touch also generates a sense of control. Consumers are more likely to buy something if they handle the product first.

That’s easy for brick-and-mortar stores. But in an increasingly digital world, businesses have to get creative. Nordstrom, for example, allows customers to select clothing they’re interested in online and pick a store to try them on. When the customer arrives, the clothes are ready in the dressing room.

Encouraging “investment of self”

Businesses should strive to make products customizable. When consumers can personalize products, they buy more and are happy to recommend those products to friends.

Take Coca-Cola’s 2014 “Share a Coke”campaign. The company’s total volume of soft drinks sold had fallen for 11 years straight. So Coke decided to sell bottles and cans labeled with hundreds of common names. And consumers were invited to request their own customized cans. Sales turned around, rising 2.5 percent in just 12 weeks.

Or consider Great Britain’s tourism campaign. The nation’s tourist authority, VisitBritain, invited Chinese residents to name classic British landmarks in Chinese. They submitted more than . The seaside resort Blackpool, for example, was named “A place that is happy to visit” and the famous shopping street Savile Row was named “custom-made rich people street.” Then VisitBritain used these names on social media and websites. The number of Chinese visitors to the United Kingdom increased 27 percent.

Building intimate knowledge

This occurs when customers believe they know every facet of a product or brand so well that they have a special, unique relationship with it. Think about a friend who claims to “discover” a band because they knew about it before any of their peers. Or someone who waits in line for hours for the next iPhone because they want to get it first.

Businesses can cultivate this feeling in many ways. REI—an outdoor supplies company—sells inexpensive co-op memberships, and members enjoy members-only sales, free classes, even in-store “garage sales” of returned merchandise. Realtors offer customers virtual reality tours of hard-to-visit homes, with the additional option to virtually customize a home they are considering. Both of these tactics should elicit feelings of ownership.

The dangers of psychological ownership

Star Wars fans are notorious for their psychological ownership of a film franchise they know intimately. Recently, a group of these fans even launched a campaign to entirely remake the latest sequel—The Last Jedi—because they disliked what it did with “their” brand. The general resentment towards the film showed at the box office; the movie’s sales fell about $200 million short of several Wall Street analysts’ predictions.

As the irate Star Wars fans show, once companies cultivate psychological ownership, they need to respect it. Psychological owners can get defensive—even territorial —about “their” brands.

Tropicana found this out in 2009, when it scrapped its iconic logo of a simple straw in an orange. The redesign turned off a generation of customers who had grown up with the image and felt ownership over the original design.

In less than two months, Tropicana’s sales plummeted 20%. Competitors’ sales increased by double-digits. Tropicana soon went back to its original design.

Opportunities abound for companies to inspire psychological ownership. A furniture store could encourage customers to assemble—with staff assistance, as needed—a small piece of furniture when they first walk into the store. The feeling of accomplishment upon successfully building something would instill a sense of ownership early in the purchase process. Likewise, enticing people to control a product by moving it around on a touch screen would increase online shoppers’ feelings of ownership. Even an animal shelter, by inviting people to submit names online for shelter animals, could get more people to adopt pets!

Companies legally own their brand, but their most devoted customers may own it psychologically. Businesses should cultivate this feeling—and then respect it.

How Companies Can Take a Stand Against Bribery

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In 2016, the International Monetary Fund estimated that corruption amounted to roughly 2% of global economic output — between $1.5 and $2 trillion globally. Consider that in India in 2016, nearly seven in 10 citizens reported paying a bribe to access basic public services such as public schools, public clinics or hospitals, access to official documents, and utilities, according to Transparency International. And despite the many laws against corruption, and increases in enforcement of those laws, bribery in particular continues to thrive and the costs to business and to society continue to escalate.

Since having laws on the books isn’t enough, anti-corruption and anti-bribery efforts need further traction from the private sector. Business needs to play a more powerful role in supporting responsible practices throughout every aspect of their operations. After all, those that find themselves embroiled in bribery scandals, for example, face a host of consequences, including business disruption, steep financial and legal costs, and harm to their brand and reputation.

Companies usually manage bribery and corruption risk through a mix of internal processes, certification requirements, and basic good practices throughout their operations — including with suppliers and vendors. External standards can also be a powerful tool in support of those efforts, helping companies strengthen ethics and compliance practices by offering a clear framework for action. One example of such an external tool is the ISO 37001 Anti-Bribery Management Systems Standard, published by the International Organisation for Standardisation in 2016 and designed by a committee of global business leaders and other stakeholders. The standard offers companies a structure for setting up or benchmarking an effective anti-bribery program aligned with its own risk profile, and building a culture that values ethical behavior.  It outlines a program that can stand alone or be integrated into a company’s existing management system, and offers a common language and approach that stretches across borders and industries. It covers bribery in all of its forms — direct and indirect, inbound and outbound. It does not address fraud, cartels and other anti-trust/competition offenses, money-laundering or other activities related to corrupt practices.

There are five important ways a standard like this can help companies strengthen their practices:

Defining clear roles for boards and top management: The standard focuses on leadership roles as central to an effective anti-corruption system. It spells out the responsibilities of the board and top management, including ensuring that the organization’s strategy and anti-bribery policy are aligned. It also requires that the compliance function be staffed by those with the right skills, status, authority, independence, and resources. Having clearly defined roles and the right resources makes it more likely for anti-bribery and anti-corruption policies to succeed. This is supported by a 2016 report from The Ethisphere Institute and Kroll, which found “a significant correlation between the perception of risk and board-level engagement. The more engaged the board and leadership team were, the more likely respondents were to say they believe their anti-bribery and corruption risk will decrease or remain the same in the coming year.”

Embedding a culture of compliance: The standard’s preventative aspects will support companies’ efforts to build a culture that values ethics and compliance within its operations. In addition to the leadership role requirements, the standard requires communication and training to bolster the compliance program, and continual improvement to ensure that programs do not become stagnant but rather respond to changing risks.

Siemens was able to rebuild trust after a bribery scandal that reached the top of the organization, in part by implementing an effective compliance program. This included strict new anti-corruption compliance processes, appointing competent compliance professionals across the organization, launching comprehensive training and a compliance hotline, and investigating and monitoring to ferret out wrongdoing and ensure continual improvement. Through these efforts, the company sought to move away from a culture that has been characterized as seemingly “openly tolerant of bribes” to one that that is “driven by ethical standards.” Siemens implemented the types of processes required by ISO 37001 (although their work happened before the standard was issued.)

Supporting a consistent approach: Chief Compliance Officers are often monitoring business in more than one location and ensuring a consistent approach is critical. In 2010, during an exercise to review and improve its global anti-corruption compliance program, Ralph Lauren Corporation discovered evidence that its Argentine subsidiary had been paying bribes to officials in the Argentinian government. The company promptly disclosed this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In that case, the parent company paid $1.6 million in combined penalties to the DoJ and SEC to resolve the matter. This fine was relatively light due to Ralph Lauren Corporation’s self-disclosure, cooperation, and remediation.

The standard offers a uniform framework with measurable, trackable indicators that will promote consistency organization-wide. The standard intentionally does not prefer the legal regime or regulatory architecture of one country over another, but rather is meant to outline a set of practices that can be used by companies regardless of where they have operations.

Cascading good practices through the supply chain: In addition to having subsidiaries and workers around the globe, many companies today have a complex web of third-party partners that support their business. This carries benefits and risks — bribery by a business partner being one of them. In addition to due diligence, monitoring, and auditing of third parties, the standard can be used by an organization as a tool to measure third party capability and the strength of the third party’s compliance program. This can be done by relying on certification or by asking third parties to demonstrate compliance with the standard. Because the standard is a global tool, developed by a global expert stakeholder group that was not tied to the law or guidance of any one country, it may be more readily accepted by some as an anti-bribery common language.

Competitive advantage: Fighting bribery builds reputation and brand value. Companies that can demonstrate conformity to an internationally-accepted anti-bribery standard may more easily attract business partners and investors who expect greater financial transparency and disclosure of activities to determine bribery risks. According to data collected by the Ethisphere Institute, companies that implement effective programs realize a 10.72% “Ethics Premium”. Research also demonstrates that ethical companies have lower turnover among employees. And consumers are placing a higher and higher value on whether a company has ethical practices, too.

Companies are beginning to see these benefits, and many are using the standard to bolster their efforts. The list of certified companies includes Legg Mason, Alstom, Mabey, and CPA Global among others. Even so, the standard is at an early stage of adoption and it will take more time for it to gain traction. The pace of certifications has been slow to date, perhaps because of the small number of accredited auditors available to perform certifications. The standard may see wider adoption if governments start requiring certification for bidding on public contracts.

We will have to wait and see whether ISO 37001 becomes more widely adopted. In the meantime, as companies use the standard and share their experiences, the more those conversations can help reduce the power of corrupt practices on business around the globe.

Research: Simple Prompts Can Get Women to Negotiate More Like Men, and Vice Versa

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Do we lie to get what we want out of negotiations?

That depends, according to forthcoming research I conducted with  Jason Pierce of the University of North Carolina, Greensborough. We found that the likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior during negotiation is related strongly to gender: men are more likely to act deceptively than women are.

The difference in bargaining behavior is linked to negotiators’ sense of competitiveness and empathy. In negotiations, men tend to embrace a competitive mode that motivates unethical behavior to get ahead, whereas women opt for an empathic approach, leading to less deceptive behavior.

But it turns out it is startlingly simple to “activate” the competitiveness and empathic motives.  And, when we activate these different motives, both women and men act more like the other gender in bargaining situations.

Gender and Negotiation

My interest in this research area grew partly out of my own experience as a woman in negotiation situations. As a young professor at the University of Washington, for example, I realized I was taking a passive approach to career advancement, waiting for promotions to come to me rather than asserting myself to create opportunity. That was especially remarkable because I was already a negotiation researcher!

As I studied the relationship between gender and negotiation behavior, I found that even the most qualified, elite professional women—including those with MBAs from top programs and decades of experience—fared worse than their male counterparts at the bargaining table. They didn’t go after favorable terms in the same way as men, helping to explain the gender-based pay gap that remains today.

But how far would either gender go in trying to win a negotiation in which it might be tempting — yet unethical — to deceive?

It’s one thing to get ahead by leaning in, speaking up, and asking for more, as women are increasingly encouraged to do. But it’s quite another to lie outright or misrepresent oneself in a negotiation. Substantial research shows that men set lower ethical standards for themselves, including in bargaining situations: they lie more frequently in negotiation than female counterparts, are more likely to believe misrepresentation is acceptable, and endorse seeking negotiation-related information in unscrupulous ways (such as looking at confidential reports not intended for them).

We built on this research by studying the behaviors associated with unethical negotiation behavior, rather than self-reported attitudes—the focus of most past studies. Specifically, we wanted to look at gender differences in deceptive behavior, the underlying reasons for it, and whether we could motivate both men and women to engage in less—or more—ethical bargaining tactics.

Lies in the Lab

In our first experiment, we brought participants into the lab and asked them to engage in what we framed as a “two-person decision-making task.” Then we gave the focal participant—“Player 1” in our task—an envelope containing cash and told them to communicate to Player 2 (1) the amount of money in the envelope and (2) their proposal for how to split the money. Player 2 was purportedly in another room, and all communication took place through online messaging.

Given Player 1’s information advantage, it was tempting to lie to Player 2, misrepresenting the amount in the envelope to keep more of it for themselves. That’s exactly what happened in many cases: participants acted unethically, to serve their own interest. But we observed a large difference in such behavior by gender. Of our male participants, 44% lied; only 29% of the women did.

To get at the reasons underlying the difference, we asked participants to respond to measures of their general sense of competitiveness (more commonly expressed by men) and empathy (more commonly reported by women). Not surprisingly, men scored higher on competitiveness, while women reported greater empathy levels, helping to explain our findings.

Unleashing the Tiger—or the Empath

Based on the findings from our first experiment, we created a second study, one that placed participants in a decision-making task framed explicitly as competitive, to see if this would increase unethical behavior.

Specifically, participants completed the same money-splitting task as in the first study. But this time we provided some of them with competition-inducing instructions, framing the activity as an “ultimatum game” played against an opponent, with clear “winners” and “losers.”

Now the results changed dramatically: in the competition-inducing condition, 64% of men and 61% of women lied to get ahead, compared to only 49% and 23%, respectively, under a neutral condition similar to that in Experiment 1.

So, even simple cues around competition induced women to adopt the more aggressive negotiation mindset men tend to default to, leading to unethical behavior. We’d “unleashed the tiger” within our female participants, and they behaved more like men.

Next we asked whether we could do the opposite: make men behave more like women in negotiation. We tested that in a third study by seeking to induce empathy in participants playing the same game as before. In the high-empathy condition, participants received a message from Player 2 stating that Player 2 participated in such experiments to buy treats for their grandchildren, while living off their limited retirement income; in the low-empathy condition, the message from Player 2 indicated they used proceeds from experiments to buy themselves items and planned to retire early.

In the low-empathy condition, 44% of men lied, and 21% of women did, similar to previous results in neutral conditions. In the high-empathy condition, only 22% of men acted unethically, and 16% of women, suggesting the empathy we induced led to fairer behavior.

Toward More Ethical Negotiations

Taken together, our findings suggest that under normal conditions, men engage in unethical negotiation tactics more than women do, largely because males tend to be more competitive. Women tend to act more empathically, leading to less deceitful behavior on their part.

But context was critical: even simple changes greatly narrowed the gender gap for behavior, making women act much more like men in negotiation, and vice-versa. The needle moved more toward ethical or unethical behavior, depending on the circumstances.

For women, one takeaway is that we will often find ourselves in situations—negotiations or otherwise—where a sense of empathy motivates fair, ethical behavior that might not be reciprocated by those across the table from us. Be prepared and vigilant about this reality, and keep in mind that certain cues (such as framing a discussion as a competition, even if just to yourself) may unleash your inner tiger.

Men, on the other hand, may benefit from understanding their competition-fueled tendency toward misrepresentative behavior and appreciating its real-life implications. Any ill-gotten win may come at some real cost for others.

More generally, taking steps to reduce competitiveness and enhance empathy in negotiations or other professional settings may increase collaboration and joint problem-solving. When we see ourselves as participants in mutually beneficial interactions, it’s more likely we’ll all come out winners.

How to Tell If You’re Delegating Too Much — and What to Do About It

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Everyone knows leaders should delegate to ensure that they are working on the right projects and deliverables.  But if you find yourself frequently miscommunicating with your team on deliverables, hearing about issues at the last minute, and misunderstanding how your team set their priorities, it may be a sign you’ve delegated too much, leaving their employees to feel abandoned and unmotivated. At that point, it’s important to take back responsibility for certain tasks to insure you’re providing your team the guidance and structure they need. Here are three steps you can take.

Take on a symbolic project. Obviously, you don’t want to overcorrect and start doing a myriad of low-level tasks in order to reconnect with your team. But taking on a symbolic project or task can be a visible way of demonstrating your re-engagement, as well as helping the company and advancing your own learning goals. For instance, I coached one senior advertising executive who realized she had delegated too much. She decided to get back into the details by learning a new piece of software. This gave her a new skill to share with other leaders in the company and her own team. Her time spent on the software also helped in the long run because when it was time to delegate, she understood all of the specifics of getting the work accomplished.

Reset with your team. One CTO I coached realized he’d been delegating too much because he no longer had proper visibility into what his teams were working on.  He’d been frustrated that departmental projects he had delegated — such as a dashboard and internal training, (which he felt would differentiate their department in the marketplace) got lost and forgotten with looming client deadlines. To combat this, he scheduled an offsite to reconfirm the vision for the department and get everyone on the same page again about goals and expectations.

He realized through the offsite process that his team hadn’t understood the rationale or urgency behind the internal projects.  Afterward, he could follow up more effectively and make smarter determinations about where he could delegate without going too far, and his team was much more willing to focus on internal projects, as well. 

Recommunicate the vision. The biggest over-delegation risk for leaders is leaving the  vision or culture of the company to others.  Of course, most leaders don’t think they’ve done this. Instead, they believe they’ve delivered and communicated the vision innumerable times. And yet, their teams are confused and missteps occur with delivering the work on a consistent basis. If you’re noticing that output on projects has stalled, there’s excessive disagreement on tasks and process, or unexpected and inconsistent behavior among team members, it may be a sign that you’ve over-delegated the vision to the point where team members feel they’re interpreting it or making it up on their own. A particularly obvious clue is receiving repeated questions from different team members asking you to clarify the vision.

For example, one CMO told me a story of how he had been working on a key partnership initiative for his company. He believed the partnership fit with the overall vision of the company laid out by the CEO. Unfortunately, the CEO had over-delegated the vision to other members of the executive committee and didn’t properly communicate a shift in his revenue strategy. When it was time to present the partnership to the board, the CEO rejected the work because it didn’t track with his new vision and the partnership stalled, wasting the CMO’s time and causing needless conflict and frustration.

As a leader, to combat this form of over-delegation, make sure you’re using every public communication opportunity you have to stress and reinforce the message. For instance, you could remind people about the overarching vision at the beginning of a project, during town halls and other forums, at senior leadership meetings, or periodically through email communications. Without this approach, there can be a cascading effect of morale issues, loss of creativity, and a lack of teamwork.  But most, importantly, there is a loss of credibility for the leader.

While there are times as a leader to step back and delegate to let teams grow, over delegation can backfire.  By using the steps above, you can ensure your department, team, and company are moving in the right direction together.

Do Longer Maternity Leaves Hurt Women’s Careers?

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Career or child care? It’s an unfortunate dilemma faced by every working woman with a baby on the way. Should she take a lengthy maternity leave, knowing that more time at home can improve the well-being of both mother and child? After all, research shows maternity leaves are related to lower infant mortality and reduced maternal stress. Or should she forego that long maternity leave, knowing that getting back to work quickly will improve her career opportunities?

Around the world, we are seeing a trend towards legislating longer, paid parental leaves for both mothers and fathers. Earlier this year, for example, Canada expanded its paid parental leave program from 35 weeks to 61 weeks; several Scandinavian countries have already made similar moves. These changes are motivated by a progressive concern to improve the work-life balance for working parents and encourage greater parent/child contact in those crucial first months of a newborn’s life. But while the sentiment behind these new policies is well-meaning and commendable, there may be a “dark side” to longer parental leaves.

Most of the research to date in this area has focused on mothers who, in most countries, are still offered more time off than fathers. Even when parental leaves are offered to both parents to share, women tend to take the vast majority of that time, unless the policy reserves specific time for men only (which is still rare). These studies show that women who decide to take a longer time off can expect to pay a price for their commitment to motherhood when they return to work.

Evidence from a variety of countries reveals that the longer new mothers are away from paid work, the less likely they are to be promoted, move into management, or receive a pay raise once their leave is over. They are also at greater risk of being fired or demoted. Length of leave can be a factor in the perceptions of co-workers as well – women who take longer leaves are often seen as less committed to their jobs than women who take much shorter leaves. This trade-off undercuts a major goal of legislating national parental leave policies: ensuring that women don’t have to choose between motherhood and career success.

To tackle this conundrum, our research sought to uncover the mechanisms driving the unintended negative consequences of longer leaves and identify ways in which organizations can help women find a balance between work and childcare. At the time of our study, Canadian parental leave policy allowed for a maximum of 12 months paid leave for women. We conducted three complementary studies to identify and examine perceptions of working women’s agency (the degree to which they are considered ambitious and career-focused), as the motivator for these negative consequences. Our results highlight several ways this issue can be addressed.

First, using lab-based experiments, we tested perceptions of a potential female job candidate based on job applications showing they’d taken a maternity leave of 12 months (which is common in corporate Canada) or a shorter maternity leave of one month. We found those who noted a longer maternity leave on their resume were perceived as less desirable. Interestingly, bias that a woman who takes a longer maternity leave is less committed to her career held equally for male and female participants of the study, suggesting such a preconception is widely held.

Next, we tested how providing background information about a job candidate’s career ambitions and work habits (in this case, a letter from a former supervisor) can affect opinions of her agency when a longer maternity leave was taken. Here we found that negative perceptions of commitment and hireability can be overcome by providing additional information about women’s agency to decision-makers. In other words, when the letter was included, we saw no difference in the longer-leave-taking candidate’s desirability.

Finally, we sought evidence from Canadian workers regarding their views on the role of “keep-in-touch” programs. These are programs that allow parents on leave to stay in contact with their workplace and colleagues while they are away. Often the leave-taker will be paired with a coworker who can, for example, keep them updated on their projects, clients, and other coworkers. In an experiment with a sample of 558 Canadian employees, we found that female applicants who took a 12 month maternity leave were perceived as more agentic, committed to their jobs, and ultimately hireable, when a “keep-in-touch” program was used, compared to when no such program was used. It should be noted that it is not enough for these programs to simply exist; these positive outcomes only occurred when women were making active use of them.

Our work, recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, helps explain why longer legislated maternity leaves are related to negative career outcomes for women. We find maternity leave length is perceived as a signal of women’s agency and commitment to the job and thus used to gauge their dedication. In turn, this undermines perceptions of women’s agency, job commitment, and perceived suitability for leadership roles.

Fortunately, our results also point to some ways in which managers, organizations, and women themselves can combat the unintentional negative consequences of longer legislated maternity leaves. For example, managers can provide additional information about women’s agency and career aspirations to counteract negative perceptions among decision-makers and co-workers. Further, the creation and promotion of “keep-in-touch” programs by organizations appears quite promising. While still rare in the work world, “keep-in-touch” programs have been pioneered by some progressive firms in the legal and public relations industries in Canada and Australia as a way to support and retain female employees.

Our work also has implications for policy-makers by showing that longer legislated maternity leaves may unintentionally undermine gender equality by hurting women’s career prospects. Thus, such policies need to be accompanied by additional measures that encourage “keep-in-touch” or related programs. Other potential solutions may be legislating parental leaves reserved for fathers only. Currently only 13% of eligible men use any parental leave in Canada (compared to 91% of eligible new mothers), even though Canada’s leave is supposed to be gender-neutral. Mandating that some portion of parental leave be used by fathers  would encourage more men to take parental leaves, which in turn could reduce the amount of time women are absent from work and also make it more normative for both men and women to use leaves from work to care for their children.

Finally, a few caveats are necessary. Some of our experimental data comes from studies involving university students, who tend to have limited work experience; future research will attempt to study these situations in a wider variety of organizations. In addition, some of our effects appear small. However, the results are still meaningful and powerful because even a slightly lower rating of a woman due to her maternity leave could make a big difference whether that woman is hired or promoted. Bias against mothers in the workforce has been thoroughly documented elsewhere. We also limited our study to women and the effects of maternity leave; future research could include a broader look at the effects on fathers’ careers.

The ability to take one’s full parental leave without suffering diminishing one’s promotion, pay, or leadership prospects is crucial for greater gender equality in the workplace and for helping all working parents, and in particular mothers, achieve greater work-life balance. While HR departments and business leaders have long had this as an item on their agenda, our research provides clear evidence on interventions and programs that can make a real difference for organizations that seek to develop, grow and retain their top talent.

The CEO’s Guide to Retirement

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“I don’t quite know what to do next,” said Simon, a media CEO. Simon had been a chief executive for 15 years, and CFO before he was 30. He had turned around private and public companies, quadrupled profits and quintupled revenue. But, with his company recently sold, Simon was considering retirement. Like many CEOs, he had had no time to plan his retirement — all his focus had been on running the company.

Each year, over one hundred CEOs retire from the S&P 1000. Even in the most well-oiled CEO succession processes, one piece is almost always missing: preparing the current CEO for the next phase in his or her career. “I was so focused on the CEO job, I didn’t spend time figuring out what I would do next,” says Scott Davis, former CEO of UPS. Bill Weldon, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson, echoes what most CEOs tell us, “I didn’t do a lot of thinking about post-employment while I was still the CEO. As a result I went off the off ramp at 110 miles an hour and quickly hit zero. Retirement was a black hole.”

On average, CEOs step down at age 62, relatively young by today’s standards. Few have to work for a living. But almost all want to work, and they do. We studied the post-CEO careers of 50 Chief Executives in the Fortune 500, and interviewed 13 of them. Not one retired to the golf course.

While only a few take on another CEO job, almost all former CEOs are contributing to the U.S. economy and to societal wellbeing. More than a quarter of past Fortune 500 CEOs become active in private equity. Over half assume leadership positions at nonprofit organizations and almost all are philanthropic. Two thirds serve on public boards. Many teach and some even write books.

After retirement, CEOs must grapple with a loss of power, prestige, and immense responsibility. As Ron Sugar, former CEO of Northrop Grumman told us, “The first few days, it does feel like maybe you’ve fallen down the elevator shaft.”

It can be especially hard on CEOs who are women. As Anne Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox warns, “there’s a special place in hell for retired women CEOs. By the time you are at retirement age, your kids have left the home too. It’s double retirement.”

Mulcahy further cautions that, “the things that work for you as CEO work against you as a retiree, such as being in command and your high energy level.” It took her a while to find her footing — she reports “calendar filling.” But not for long, as lead director of Johnson & Johnson, chairman of Save the Children, and a guest lecturer at Harvard, she found work that gave her purpose and passion. “For me, it wasn’t about making money or visibility, but about impact and usefulness.”

Any immediate sense of loss is short-lived. Almost every CEO we interviewed reported great satisfaction in their work lives after being CEO. While deeply proud of their accomplishments in the job, they were relieved at breaking free from the corporate calendar.

CEOs find themselves highly valued after retirement. “It was almost a surprise to me how much you really have to contribute,” says Dick Parsons, former chairman of Citigroup and former chairman and CEO of Time Warner. “But you soon realize: ‘I’ve seen this movie before, I can help here.’”

“It was surprising how quickly opportunity came my way,” agrees Doug Hodge, former CEO of PIMCO. “Within weeks of retiring I had opportunities to join a major board, and exciting invitations from venture capitalists to play an active role in FinTech companies. I have rebooted myself.”

So how do CEOs stand up and find fulfillment in their second phase? Most CEOs we spoke to, like Simon, had no time to plan their retirement while running their companies. In our research, we identified some advice to guide retired CEOs as they plan for “Act II”:

Plan your off-ramp. Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express, advises CEOs to plan their off ramp while they are still in the CEO job by “identifying the categories of things that are important to them” but not necessarily the “specific opportunities.” CEOs who don’t plan risk “falling into the abyss” warns Chenault. “Take the time to plan what is important to you. Don’t ignore it. It is very important to be thoughtful.” Chenault recommends thinking through one’s business, philanthropic, and family priorities. For example, Chenault knew that in his business work he wanted to focus on digital and technology. “In this way,” Chenault says, “when opportunities came my way I was ready, because I had thought about them.” At the beginning of his off-ramp, Ken did not know exactly what he would do, but he knew what was important to him, which allowed him to move quickly and decisively.

Take your time. The most common CEO error is to rush to fill the void, and accept invitations too quickly. As Ron Sugar says, “For the first six months, say ‘no’ to everything that is offered to you. Usually the first offers you get are not the things you should do.” CEOs told us repeatedly that the only thing they got really wrong was to move too fast — which then required unwinding obligations. For example, one CEO accepted a board seat only to have to wiggle out soon after in favor of a better, larger board opportunity. It would have been wiser to take it slow. Say “no” often, “yes” slowly.

Prepare to deal with yourself. Retirement can put even the most self-assured chief executives in the unfamiliar position of self-questioning and self-doubt. “It prepares you for dealing with yourself,” says one CEO. “You need to know who you are when you’re done being CEO,” says Mulcahy. She adds: “That means reflecting on aspects of your personality and temperament and sometimes modifying some CEO traits.” Parsons told his wife that he could write and teach, and she said, “And what will you do next week?” It took him a while to find his passion. He asked himself, what did he want to do as a kid? He always wanted to run a jazz club, so he opened one. He also bought a vineyard, reasoning, “In the worst case, I could drink the results!” And he loves it: “there I am in the soil, it’s a product, there is dirt under your fingernails, it’s tangible.” This is deeply personal. Ask yourself, “What are the things you will enjoy?” advises Bill Weldon, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson.

Partner with your partner. If a CEO has a significant other, it is critical to “align expectations” — to apply a business term to a family environment. If your spouse has been waiting patiently and now wants to travel, and you want to go back to work, now is the time to develop a shared plan endorsed by your family, or at least understood by them. Every CEO we interviewed planned to spend more time with family, and did. Ken Chenault and his wife scheduled out together time to spend time on activities important to them.

Assume the role of mentor. There is one feeling of loss that CEOs find hard to overcome. It’s not the plane, nor the power. It’s the people. When asked what he missed from the job, Scott Davis said what many echoed, “The people. I developed a lot of comrades over the years, and you don’t see them as much anymore.” Ex-CEOs who embrace mentorship opportunities find a great way to fill this gap, and find fulfillment in passing down their wisdom to an eager student. As Bill Weldon told us, “We have experienced things other people have not. We can draw on those experiences to help other people.” Pat Woertz, former CEO of ADM, sits on the boards of P&G and 3M, is on the Northwestern Hospital board, and advises a startup accelerator in Chicago. She is also mentoring women, “saying yes to more people than I was able to before.”

Plan your allocation of time. Write down the hours/day and days/year you want to work. Leave room, as Ron Sugar reminds us, “for surge capacity” as a portfolio of interesting activities can sometimes lead to unpredicted time requirements. Divide your time between for-profit and not-for-profit. Determine where you want to earn money and where you want to give money. Finally, write down how much time you want to spend with family or personal hobbies. Jeff Kindler, former CEO of Pfizer, notes, “The beauty is you can try things out you haven’t been able to before,” and he asks, “What are the things in your professional life you never got around to?”

Give back. Bill Weldon says it best: “The philanthropic side of retirement provides psychic reward and payback far better than any money we receive in our for-profit work.” This is the time to build a foundation, and begin to distribute your wealth. All of the CEOs we interviewed give back. For example, Ken Chenault chairs the board of the Museum of African American History at the Smithsonian and is a member of the Harvard Corporation; Ron Sugar is trustee of the University of Southern California, director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, member of the UCLA Anderson School of Management’s board of visitors, director of the World Affairs Council of Los Angeles, and national trustee of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America; and Scott Davis serves as a trustee of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and is a member of The Carter Center Board of Councilors. The 13 former CEOs we interviewed for this article collectively serve on at least 25 philanthropic boards.

With this guidance, CEOs can take one of the hardest steps of their career: exiting. Boards can help by supporting the transition, offering planning guidance, and practical support. Well-performing CEOs who have given their all for the company’s success should be provided critical services, including travel support, IT, and an administrative assistant. Aetna, Verizon, and Northrop Grumman even provided an office — and we think this is best practice.

In return, it is easier for CEOs to leave.

And, as Jeff Kindler told us, “The opportunities are immense. If I had the opportunity to understand what the retirement world would look like before retiring, I would have been able to get my plans together in a matter of months rather than years.”

How a Cyber Attack Could Cause the Next Financial Crisis

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Ever since the forced bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered the financial crisis 10 years ago, regulators, risk managers, and central bankers around the globe have focused on shoring up banks’ ability to withstand financial shocks.

But the next crisis might not come from a financial shock at all. The more likely culprit: a cyber attack that causes disruptions to financial services capabilities, especially payments systems, around the world.

Criminals have always sought ways to infiltrate financial technology systems. Now, the financial system faces the added risk of becoming collateral damage in a wider attack on critical national infrastructure. Such an attack could shake confidence in the global financial services system, causing banks, businesses and consumers to be stymied, confused or panicked, which in turn could have a major negative impact on economic activity.

Cybercrime alone costs nations more than $1 trillion globally, far more than the record $300 billion of damage due to natural disasters in 2017, according to a recent analysis our firm performed. We ranked cyber attacks as the biggest threat facing the business world today — ahead of terrorism, asset bubbles, and other risks.

An attack on a computer processing or communications network could cause $50 billion to $120 billion of economic damage, a loss ranking somewhere between those of Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, according to recent estimates. Yet a much broader and more debilitating attack isn’t farfetched. Just last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning to banks about a pending large scale attack known as an ATM “cash-out” strike, in which waves of synchronized fraudulent withdrawals drain bank accounts. In July, meanwhile, it was revealed that hackers working for Russia had easily penetrated the control rooms of US electric utilities and could have caused blackouts.

How might a financial crisis triggered by a cyber attack unfold? A likely scenario would be an attack by a rogue nation or terrorist group on financial institutions or major infrastructure. Inside North Korea, for example, the Lazarus Group, also known as Hidden Cobra, routinely looks for ways to compromise banks and exploit crypto currencies. An attack on a bank, investment fund, custodian firm, ATM network, the interbank messaging network known as SWIFT, or the Federal Reserve itself would represent a direct hit on the financial services system.

Another possibility would be if a so-called hacktivist or “script kiddy” amateur were to use malicious programs to launch a cyber attack without due consideration of the consequences. Such an attack could have a chain reaction, causing damage way beyond the original intent, because rules, battle norms, and principles that are conventional wisdom in most warfare situations but don’t exist in a meaningful way in the digital arena. For example, in 2016 a script kiddie sparked a broad denial-of-service attack impacting Twitter, Spotify, and other well-known internet services as amateurs joined in for mischief purposes.

Whether a major cyber attack is deliberate or somewhat accidental, the damage could be substantial. Most of the ATM networks across North America could freeze. Credit card and other payment systems could fail across entire nations, as happened to the VISA network in the UK in June. Online banking could become inaccessible: no cash, no payments, no reliable information about bank accounts. Banks could lose the ability to transact with one another during a critical period of uncertainty. There could be widespread panic, albeit temporary.

Such an outcome might not cause the sort of long-simmering financial crisis that sparked the Great Recession, because money would likely be restored to banks and payments providers once systems were back online. At the same time, it isn’t clear how a central bank, the traditional financial crisis firefighter, could respond to this type of crisis on short notice. After the problem is fixed and the crisis halted, a daunting task of recovery would loom. It would be even more difficult if data were corrupted, manipulated or rendered inaccessible.

How can we prevent such a scenario? Companies must implement systems that enable them to stop the spread of a cyber attack contagion, and to resume operations as rapidly and smoothly as possible. The financial services industry needs to fully agree on, and be prepared to practice, coordinated response and recovery strategies to prevent systemic breakdowns. Regulators in many nations have been working diligently to prepare for and curtail cyber attacks, but they need to look beyond their own borders and introduce regulations, laws, and cooperative frameworks in unison, like the European Union’s Network and Information Security Directive, which is designed to protect an ever-growing list of critical infrastructure from banking and healthcare systems to online marketplaces and cloud services.

Many of these steps are being undertaken to varying degrees. But more needs to be done. An attack that undermines confidence in those very machines also could have debilitating consequences on the flow of money between consumers, businesses, and financial institutions around the world.

How Self-Reflection Can Help Leaders Stay Motivated

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We tend to romanticize leadership. When friends are promoted to managerial positions, we slap them on the back, tell them that they finally made it, and congratulate them for their hard work. Our reactions are understandable. Occupying a leadership role often comes with more prestige, financial resources, flexibility, and future employment opportunities. We often forget, however, that there is a flipside to this coin — leadership is hard and exhausting work.

Leaders have many responsibilities (e.g., budgeting, hiring and firing, paperwork), requiring them to perform diverse tasks and to monitor progress on a multitude of goals. In addition to managing their own performance, leaders are also accountable for their followers’ performance. Employees tend to bring their worries and anxieties to work with them and expect their leaders to manage those too. For example, research suggests that when followers struggle with emotional issues, they approach their leader more often than their coworkers, thinking that it is the leader’s job to help them cope with emotional distress at work. When compounded with getting work done, management of followers’ emotions can exhaust leaders’ own energy, leaving them depleted and unengaged at work. No wonder that survey data suggest that the majority of leaders are exhausted and unengaged at work. For example, in 2017, Gallup reported that only 38% of managers and executives are engaged at work (the number is 29% for middle-level managers). Given these disconcerting numbers, we were interested in developing an intervention that enhances leaders’ engagement at work.

In a study forthcoming in Journal of Applied Psychology, we draw from positive psychology research to develop and test a short daily intervention that helps leaders remain energized throughout the day at work. Research suggests that leaders’ sense of self is closely tied to their leadership role, and leaders care about being successful in their role. For this reason, we expected that an intervention that asks leaders to reflect upon positive aspects of themselves as leaders may energize them by reversing their depletion and improving their engagement.

The intervention is simple. Leaders take a few minutes in the morning to think and write about three things that they like about themselves and that make them a “good leader.” The leaders in our study wrote about personal qualities that they valued (e.g., “I am a good leader because I’m willing to take a stand in the face of injustice”), skills they possessed (e.g., “I am a good leader because I consider others’ opinions”), and achievements they were proud of (“I am a good leader because I helped my team meet deliverables during a crisis”). We ran two studies to investigate whether the intervention helps.

The first study was a daily field experiment with a sample of leaders whom we surveyed for two workweeks. In half of the workdays, first thing in the morning, leaders reflected and wrote about three skills, achievements, qualities, capabilities, or traits that they liked about themselves and that they thought made them good leaders. On the other days, leaders wrote about daily activities not relevant to leadership (we wanted to make sure that the intervention effects were not simply due to writing or taking time to reflect). We then surveyed the leaders multiple times a day. We found that on days when leaders took a few minutes in the morning to reflect and write about aspects of themselves that make them good leaders, they subsequently felt less depleted and more engaged, and they reported having a positive impact on their followers. These effects lasted until the evening, suggesting that leaders felt more positive at home too on intervention days. In a second field experiment, we replicated the energizing effect of the intervention and found that the effect was stronger for employees who hold leadership positions within their organization. These employees self-identify more strongly as leaders and may derive more benefits from interventions that tap into their identity as leaders.

Those aspiring to leadership positions should recognize that leadership can be demanding and exhausting. Such self-awareness may motivate leaders to engage in activities that protect their energy at work. Second, taking a few minutes in the morning to think and write about aspects of oneself that make one a good leader is likely to energize leaders and to make them more influential at work. Finally, followers can help their leaders too. Followers tend to approach their leader for help requests more often than other coworkers and have ample opportunity to express gratitude. Expression of gratitude can benefit leaders’ as well as followers’ own well-being and may offset some of the daily depletion that leaders tend to experience at work.

Planning Doesn’t Have to Be the Enemy of Agile

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Planning has long been one of the cornerstones of management. Early in the twentieth century Henri Fayol identified the job of managers as to plan, organize, command, coordinate, and control. The capacity and willingness of managers to plan developed throughout the century. Management by Objectives (MBO) became the height of corporate fashion in the late 1950s. The world appeared predictable. The future could be planned. It seemed sensible, therefore, for executives to identify their objectives. They could then focus on managing in such a way that these objectives were achieved.

This was the capitalist equivalent of the Communist system’s five-year plans. In fact, one management theorist of the 1960s suggested that the best managed organizations in the world were the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party. The belief was that if the future was mapped out, it would happen.

Later, MBO evolved into strategic planning. Corporations developed large corporate units dedicated to it. They were deliberately detached from the day-to-day realities of the business and emphasized formal procedures around numbers. Henry Mintzberg defined strategic planning as “a formalized system for codifying, elaborating and operationalizing the strategies which companies already have.” The fundamental belief was still that the future could largely be predicted.

Now, strategic planning has fallen out of favor. In the face of relentless technological change, disruptive forces in industry after industry, global competition, and so on, planning seems like pointless wishful thinking.

And yet, planning is clearly essential for any company of any size. Look around your own organization. The fact that you have a place to work which is equipped for the job, and you and your colleagues are working on a particular project at a particular time and place, requires some sort of planning. The reality is that plans have to be made about the use of a company’s resources all of the time. Some are short-term, others stretch into an imagined future.

Universally valuable, but desperately unfashionable, planning waits like a spinster in a Jane Austen novel for someone to recognize her worth.

But executives are wary of planning because it feels rigid, slow, and bureaucratic. The Fayol legacy lingers. A 2016 HBR Analytics survey of 385 managers revealed that most executives were frustrated with planning because they believed that speed was important and that plans frequently changed anyway. Why engage in a slow, painful planning exercise when you’re not even going to follow the plan?

The frustrations with current planning practices intersect with another fundamental managerial trend: organizational agility. Reorganizing around small self-managing teams — enhanced by agility methods like Scrum and LeSS — is emerging as the route to the organizational agility required to compete in the fast-changing business reality. One of the key principles underpinning team-based agility is that teams autonomously decide their priorities and where to allocate their own resources.

The logic of centralized long-term strategic planning (done once a year at a fixed time) is the antithesis of an organization redesigned around teams who define their own priorities and resources allocation on a weekly basis.

But if planning and agility are both necessary, organizations have to make them work. They have to create a Venn diagram with planning on one side, agility on the other, and a practical and workable sweet-spot in the middle.  This is why the quest to rethink strategic planning has never been more urgent and critical. Planning twenty-first century style should be reconceived as agile planning.

Agile planning has a number of characteristics:

frameworks and tools able to deal with a future that will be different;
the ability to cope with more frequent and dynamic changes;
the need for quality time to be invested for a true strategic conversation rather than simply being a numbers game;
resources and funds are available in a flexible way for emerging opportunities.

The intersection of planning with organizational agility generates two other paramount requirements:

A process able to coordinate and align with agile teams

Agile organizations face the challenge of managing the local autonomy of squads (bottom-up input) consistently with a bigger picture represented by the tribe’s goals and by cross-tribe interdependencies and the strategic priorities of the organization (top-down view). Governing this tension requires new processes and routines for planning and coordination.

Consider the Dutch financial services firm ING Bank. It restructured its operations in the Netherlands by reorganizing 3,500 employees into agile squads. These are autonomous multidisciplinary teams (up to nine people per team) able to define their work and make business decisions quickly and flexibly. Squads are organized into a Tribe (of no more than 150 people), a collection of squads working on related areas.

ING Bank revisited its process and introduced routine meetings and formats to create alignment between and within tribes. Each tribe develops a QBR (Quarterly Business Review), a six-page document outlining tribe-level priorities, objectives and key results.   This is then discussed in a large alignment meeting (labelled the QBR Marketplace) attended by tribe leads and other relevant leaders. At this meeting one fundamental question is addressed: when we add up everything, does this contribute to our company’s strategic goals?

The alignment within a tribe happens at what is called a Portfolio Marketplace event: representatives of each of the squads which make up the tribe come together to agree on how the set goals are going to be achieved and to address opportunities for synergies.

The ING Bank example shows how the planning process is still necessary and essential to an agile company although in a different fashion with different processes, mechanisms and routines.

As more and more companies transform into agile organizations, agile planning will likely become the new normal replacing the traditional centralized planning approach.

A process that makes use of both limitless hard data and human judgment

Planners have traditionally been obsessed with gathering hard data on their industry, markets, competitors. Soft data — networks of contacts, talking with customers, suppliers and employees, using intuition and using the grapevine — have all but been ignored.

From the 1960s onwards, planning was built around analysis.  Now, thanks to Big Data, the ability to generate data is pretty well limitless.  This does not necessarily allow us to create better plans for the future.

Soft data is also vital. “While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generate wisdom. They may be difficult to ‘analyze’, but they are indispensable for synthesis — the key to strategy making,” says Henry Mintzberg.

Companies need first to imagine possibilities and second, pick the one for which the most compelling argument can be made.  In deciding which is backed by the most compelling argument, they should indeed take into account all data that can be crunched. But in addition, they should use qualitative judgment.

In an agile organization, teams use design thinking and other exploratory techniques (plus data) to make rapid decisions and change the course on a weekly basis. Decision making is done by a team of people, offsetting in this way the potential biases of a single person making a decision based on her individual judgement. To some extent, an agile team-based organization enables the possibility to leverage qualitative data and judgement — combined today with infinite hard data — for better decisions.

Relying solely on hard data has unquestionably killed many potential great businesses. Take Nespresso, the coffee pod pioneer developed by Nestle.  Nespresso took off when it stopped targeting offices and started marketing itself to households. There was little data on how households would respond to the concept and whatever information was available suggested a perceived consumer value of just 25 Swiss centimes versus a company-wide threshold requirement of 40 centimes. The Nespresso team had to interpret the data skillfully to present a better case to top management. Because it believed strongly in the idea, it forced the company to take a bigger-than-usual risk. If Nestle had been guided solely by quantitative market research the concept would never have gotten off the ground.

The traditional planning approach needs to be revisited to better serve the purposes of the agile enterprise of the twenty-first century. Agile planning is the future of planning. This new approach will require two fundamental elements. First, replacing the traditional obsessions on hard data and playing the numbers-game with a more balanced co-existence of hard and soft data where judgment also plays an important role. Second, introducing new mechanisms and routines to ensure alignment between the hundreds of self-organizing autonomous local teams and the overarching goals and directions of the company.

What to Do If There’s No Clear Career Path for You at Your Company

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We all know the old script: join a company, work hard, move up the ladder. But it’s been decades since that was a reliable path, and not just because of layoffs or outsourcing or robots.

These days, the culprit preventing many professionals from identifying a clear career path at their company is simply that one no longer exists. Given that successful companies must often pivot to adapt to changes in the marketplace, and the half-life of many skills is now estimated to be five years or less, companies often have no idea what staffing needs they’ll have in a few years’ time or who would be qualified to fill them.

As Cathy Benko and Molly Anderson predicted in their 2010 book, we’ve gone from a corporate ladder to a Corporate Lattice, in which professionals’ career progress may only sometimes be linear — and often, may instead appear diagonal or horizontal. Guidance from companies on how to move forward in this environment is often minimal, because they just aren’t sure.

Increasingly, they’re relying on individual professionals to take more active control of their careers — a topic I’m frequently called in to speak about for corporate audiences. Here are four strategies professionals can follow to successfully navigate the new terrain.

First, it’s essential to make yourself aware of the possibilities. One appeal of the traditional linear career path was that it didn’t take much research: while not everyone achieved the end goal (such as a promotion), it was very clear what it was. In the new workplace reality, individual professionals almost have to take a detective-like approach, investigating and vetting opportunities. That may not be hard in smaller companies, but in large global enterprises, information becomes key.

I recently participated in an Aspen Institute roundtable on the future of work, and one C-suite executive noted that in her sprawling multinational, it would be almost impossible — without proactive research and conversations with leaders — to even be aware of the possibilities. That’s why it’s essential to cultivate a broad network, both inside and outside your company, so you have visibility into areas of the business that may otherwise be opaque to you.

Second, it’s important to seek out help. Even if your employer isn’t providing explicit guidance about your career path, they’re likely to recognize and appreciate the value of an engaged employee who is raising their hand and asking for support. If you go to HR with suggestions about professional development programs or conferences you’d like to attend, courses you want to take, or functional areas of the business you’d like to understand better, they will often be extremely receptive, as you’re modeling the ideal, proactive behavior that many of today’s talent leaders seek to cultivate.

Third, don’t wait to hear about open positions. Instead, identify your own ideal opportunities. In my book Reinventing You, I profiled a management consultant named Joanne Chang who reinvented herself into a successful career as a chef. Her secret was — instead of waiting to respond to job postings, where she’d be competing with scores of other better-qualified candidates — she wrote personal letters to a dozen high-profile chefs she admired and explained why she wanted to work with them. Her targeted approach set her apart and landed her a job within days, despite her lack of formal credentials.

In many ways, shifting to a new role inside your company can feel as dramatic a career change as moving from being a management consultant to being a chef. In many companies, departments and divisions may have parochial views about the transferability of skills and experience (“She’s only worked in Asia. What would she know about the Latin American market?”).

That’s why it’s your job to precisely target the opportunities that appeal to you most, and develop a strategy to connect with, befriend, and court those connections. Just as a random management consultant would have difficulty winning a position as a chef, a marketer may be viewed skeptically if he wants to transition into operations. But as Joanne Chang’s example shows, a particular marketer — armed with a thoughtful explanation of why he wants to shift functional roles and what he can bring to the table — may be warmly welcomed.

Finally, work to cultivate influential allies. It’s always useful to have a mentor board of directors that can help advise you as you weigh possibilities — and a sponsor, a leader who is willing to exert political capital on your behalf, is even better. But once you’ve landed these key allies, your job isn’t done. As you progress at your company and in your career, it’s essential to keep your mentors and sponsors informed about your progress, so they’re aware of new skills you’ve developed and your current career aspirations. Otherwise, even if you keep in regular touch about other matters, they’re unlikely to question or update their initial impression of you.

One colleague of mine has had a warm relationship with her sponsor for well over a decade, but she discovered— when he made a gentle poke at her for not developing her brand sufficiently — that his view of her was out of date, and he wasn’t aware of several major projects she’d undertaken in the past several years. She requested a meeting to update him on what she’d been doing, and he gladly agreed — resulting in a far more nuanced understanding of her current skillset, allowing him to better advocate for her and steer the right opportunities her way.

It may feel disconcerting if your company hasn’t crafted a linear career progression for you. But it’s also a significant opportunity to build a career that’s uniquely tailored to your own needs, skills, and interests. By following these steps, you can proactively shape your professional future.