AMA Quarterly Winter 2020

AMA

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

UARTERLY WINTER 2020 • VOLUME 5 • NUMBER 4

AMA Certified Professional in Management ™

See back cover and page 41 for more details.

The new standard for management excellence www.amanet.org/cpm

AMA RESEARCH

The Case for AMA Management Certification See page 8

AMA CASE STUDY

Read how Sharp leveraged AMA’s management training expertise to upskill its top talent See page 4

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AMA

UARTERLY

WINTER 2020 Volume 5 • Number 4

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

AMA Certified Professional in Management™ THE CASE FOR AMA MANAGEMENT CERTIFICATION There is broad support for a certification process to standardize the role of manager.

Page 8

AMA CASE STUDY Attracting and Retaining Top Talent with a Custom Professional Development Program Page 4

FEATURES

12

Enabling the Future of Work: Implications for L&D If you work in the learning and development field, you know that the nature of work is changing and the competition for skilled talent is intense. The learning function must be strategic and accountable for all its actions to close skill gaps and meet the company’s emerging talent needs.

By Albert Siu, PhD

20

How Leaders Can Build Winning Coaching Cultures Engaging in five key steps, including reviewing your talent acquisition strategy and longterm business vision, can lay a solid foundation for your coaching efforts.

By Ash Seddeek

24

Managing the Mastery of Data In today’s dynamic, ever-shifting business environment, most companies realize that data is a key source of strategic advantage and an important differentiator that must be used properly. By Suketu Gandhi and Joshua Swartz

29

Cultivating Your Opinion to Make Better Technology Decisions For most managers, the choice of technology is bewildering. If you’re charged with growing any business, a robust opinion on technology will help you make better decisions. By Graham Binks

DEPARTMENTS

33

Make a Resolution to Avoid Common Leadership Mistakes The new year is upon us. For many leaders, that means planning for the year— setting strategy, building/re-building our teams, making big decisions, and setting goals as we aspire to lead healthy, successful organizations.

By Mike McHargue

37

Taking on Employee Disengagement by Managing Change How do we calibrate our organizations to benefit from change, to use its energy to propel us forward? The short and simple answer is, we calibrate our people to be change agents and to benefit from change themselves. By Whitney Johnson

42

2 EDITOR’S PICK

Managers Aren’t Born, They Are Trained

3 FROM THE DESK OF THE CEO

2020—The Year That Managers Can Earn a Well-Respected Certification Credential Appropriate management puts you in a much better position as an organization to succeed and execute against your strategy. In many cases, you will find organizations succeed because of successful execution at the manager or individual contributor level.

By Manny Avramidis

16 AMA Members-Only Quarterly

Survey Results The Role of Management Competencies in Achieving Success

Multitasking and Mindfulness: Can They Work Together? What is mindfulness? Is it achievable? And, can a successful manager be both mindful and someone who multitasks? By Dian Griesel

46

Building Better Relationships Through Everyday Negotiations Many of our most challenging negotiations don’t occur at the board table, but at the dinner table. From this perspective, we come to see negotiation in a new light, and everyday interactions as a series of micronegotiations that, over time, weave the fabric of our relationships.

By Aimee Koval

AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 1

EDITOR’S PICK

Managers Aren’t Born, They Are Trained C

ast your memory back to your first manager. What kind of job were you working at the time? My first job as a teenager was working in a suburban local movie theater. I was just 16 and thought that it would be a fun summer job. I didn’t have the job for very long, as the working conditions were not that great. All I remember of the manager was that he was in his 30s, very tired, and obviously frustrated with his career. He provided little training and even less motivation. Needless to say, he did not make a good impression on me. And I’ve had much better managers since then.

What makes a good manager and what makes a bad one? As the AMA Certified Professional in Management™ program kicks off, this issue of AMA Quarterly focuses on the skills managers need to succeed. AMA CEO Manny Avramidis talks about the reasons why AMA decided to develop the program. Steve Rumery shares research

by AMA that spells out the current need for management certification.

Our cover feature tells the story of how AMA helped Sharp Electronics Corporation build a training and education program for its employees that is not only geared toward new hires, but also lets managers continue to hone their skills.

Suketu Gandhi and Joshua Swartz of Kearney share how managers can best master the use of data in their businesses.

Graham Binks details how leaders can train their opinion to make better decisions about what kind of technology is needed for their business.

Albert Siu of Parexel takes a look at how the changing nature of work has prompted his company to think about the future of learning and development for its employees.

Whitney Johnson illustrates how leaders can overcome employee disengagement by mastering change.

Mike McHargue outlines the five most common mistakes among leaders and how to avoid making these mistakes in 2020.

As you work on how to become a better manager, AMA will continue to provide the resources you need to succeed.

Christiane Truelove Guest Editor, AMA Quarterly

2 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

AMA

UARTERLY

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION GUEST EDITOR

Christiane Truelove CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Lauren McNally ART DIRECTOR

JohnCarlo Pellicciotta COPY EDITOR

Eileen Davis GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Tony Serio

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Claire Koby

PUBLISHER

Piera Palazzolo PRESIDENT & CEO

Manny Avramidis

AMA Quarterly © (ISSN 2377-1321) is published quarterly by American

Management Association International, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-7420, WINTER 2020, Volume 5, Number 4. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to American Management Association, 600 AMA Way, Saranac Lake, NY 12983-5534.

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Subscriptions. Executive and Individual Members of American Management Association receive AMA Quarterly as part of their annual dues, a nonrefundable $50 of which is allocated for the ­subscription to AMA Quarterly. Single copies are available at $25 plus shipping and handling. Requests should be sent to sgoldman@amanet.org Rights and permissions. ©2020, American Management Association.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written ­permission. Requests should be sent to Piera Palazzolo, ppalazzolo@amanet.org Editorial Offices 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-7420 Tel: 212-903-8075; Fax: 212-903-7948 Email: amaquarterly@amanet.org Opinions expressed by the editors, contributors or advertisers are not necessarily those of AMA. In addition, the appearance of advertisements, products or service information in AMA Quarterly, other than those of AMA itself, does not constitute endorsement by AMA.

FROM THE DESK OF THE CEO

2020—The Year That Managers Can Earn a Well-Respected Certification Credential I

n my conversations with leaders of organizations, I often ask what they consider to be their top three assets: Invariably, people are always included in their answer. And, of all those people or employees, perhaps the most pivotal and vital role is held by managers.

In the U.S., we have 24 million people classified as “management.” This means that one in five employees is working in a managerial capacity.

Their importance cannot be stressed enough: There is research showing that the variability of performance for a team is greater than 50% with an effective manager versus an ineffective one. Having a poor manager has a negative impact on the organization as well as the personal and professional lives of the individuals on that team.

As you may know, AMA has serviced management professionals for many, many years. In the last three to four years, our peer groups, our colleagues, and our customer base have been asking that we standardize management.

This was a significant undertaking that required extensive research and an excellent partner, ACT, the trusted leader in college and career readiness solutions.

Together, we took on the challenge, for the most part, of boiling the ocean, with the goal of creating a standard of excellence in management. The first step was confirming the need, and the next step was developing the credentials that would address that need.

When we went out and spoke to management, 75% of managers surveyed indicated that having managers who were certified would lead to increased efficiency and better management—and 77% of employers indicated that there is a demand in their organizations for individuals with validated expertise.

What does this mean for you? Often, being an excellent technician gets you considered for a management position. But getting the job done on your own is very different from getting the job done through others. This certification will ensure that you have the necessary knowledge to do the job effectively and provide a differentiator that will certainly enhance your career prospects.

What does it mean for your organization? At the organizational level, you must determine if you have the right leadership team that can align your people to your strategy. That’s because the manager plays a significant role between alignment and execution. Appropriate management puts you in a much better position as an organization to succeed and execute against your strategy. In many cases, you will find organizations succeed because of successful execution at the manager or individual contributor level.

Using nearly 100 years of management training experience and extensive research, AMA recently published The Management Body of Knowledge, which is the foundation of the certification exam. In addition, to support the preparation needed to pass the exam, AMA has developed an intensive prep course.

It is our hope that you will trust AMA with the vital development of one of the most important members of your team: your managers!

Manny Avramidis President and CEO American Management Association

AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 3

PHOTO: TONI ANNICARO

Susan Osgood, vice president of human resources, and Matthew Martorano, training and development manager, Sharp Electronics Corporation 4 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

SHARP:

Attracting and Retaining Top Talent with a Custom Professional Development Program Ranked one of the Top 100 Global Technology Leaders by Thomson Reuters, Sharp Electronics Corporation is recognized as one of the industry’s most successful organizations.

Sharp is a household name whose innovations—from the latest 8K professional displays and multifunction printers to network security services—have been improving lives for more than 100 years. But operating at the cutting edge of such a competitive market requires top talent at every level.

UPSKILLING FOR THE FUTURE With the U.S. unemployment rate at its lowest in decades, it’s a job seeker’s market, and the war for talent is on. Sharp wanted an engaging and focused approach to employee development, and began to design a scalable program that would strengthen its talent bench, upskill new and existing employees, and help fill open positions by incentivizing new-hire prospects with learning.

“Employees view learning and development programs as a benefit, just like a 401K and health insurance, with increasing frequency,” says Matthew Martorano, training and development manager, Sharp Electronics Corporation.

“A company like Sharp, with long-standing global brand recognition, needs to be competitive to continue to not only advance their people from within, but to attract and retain the right talent from outside as well.”

Prior to its partnership with American Management Association (AMA), Sharp didn’t have a formalized, structured program in place to effectively develop highpotential employees and leaders. However, in 2018, Mike Marusic was promoted to president and CEO of Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America (the B2B arm of Sharp Electronics), and he brought with him a renewed vision for how to take Sharp to the next level.

“We sought a solid professional development program, spanning from onboarding to succession planning,” Marusic says. “In addition, we wanted to facilitate a higher degree of collaboration and problem solving within the various divisions of Sharp, breaking out of any ‘silos’ to cultivate leaders who are focused on Sharp’s challenges to take them to the next phase of growth.”

While Sharp has always worked to develop its staff, the approach was on an ad-hoc basis to fill gaps or solve problems. There was also a scattered perception that they weren’t promoting internally frequently enough. Sharp always works to promote from within the organization whenever it’s the right fit, and addressing this misperception was a major focus to retain its best talent. “Our team consists of some of AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 5

the most talented people in the world,” Martorano says. “We absolutely want to see them continue to grow with us.”

Armed with Marusic’s vision, Martorano began to design a professional development strategy that would bring the organization into the future. He was eager to launch quickly, and began to search for a partner that offered customizable best-in-class training and the ability to engage various skill-levels of employees. The resulting program was a collaboration with AMA called Sharp University, Career Development—an intensive, yearlong professional development curriculum designed to cultivate a learning environment for Sharp Electronics’ high-potential employees. It also allowed their current leadership to practice and refine their abilities.

PARTNERING FOR AGILITY, CHANGING BEHAVIORS “When we were reviewing our options, AMA stood out not only because they’re one of the most distinguished providers in the industry,” Martorano says, “but also because their solutions are specifically designed to change behaviors.”

Together over the span of several months, they built multiple curricula consisting of four to six courses geared toward three levels of learners: high-potential staff, mid-level management, and executives.

The high-potential group participates in classes on making the transition to supervisor, building relationships, understanding the fundamentals of marketing, and improving presentation, analytical thinking, and problemsolving skills.

6 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

Managers receive training on moving from an operational manager to a strategic leader, improving presentation skills, strategic planning, and leading with emotional intelligence.

Executives hone their coaching skills, executive speaking, strategic execution, and overall business acumen.

Sharp’s L&D team met with AMA before every class to review the agenda and provide specific examples and data to make the training more relevant to employees.

“This extra attention to detail makes all the difference in how we’re accelerating changes in individual behaviors and attitudes, which in turn has positively impacted our corporate culture as a whole,” Martorano says. “Our approach has worked so effectively that it hasn’t felt like we’re working with an outside vendor. The planning and execution for each course has been fantastic, and it’s unmistakable that each facilitator genuinely cares about the success of each learner as much as we do. That’s a quality that can’t easily be taught; it’s more about the character of who you are, and AMA clearly cultivates that quality in everyone who works on their programs.”

RESULTS ON THE JOB AND BEYOND The first year, Sharp University’s results have been universally positive, with overall participant feedback averaging 88% in post-training surveys. “It’s evident that our high potentials value the investment we’re making in them,” shares Martorano, “and the initiative has led to some incredibly positive side effects.”

“

e sought a solid professional W development program, spanning from onboarding to succession planning...and wanted to facilitate a higher degree of collaboration and problem solving within the various divisions of Sharp…

”

— Mike Marusic, President and CEO of Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America

After the training, employees have proactively been asking how they can be considered for the next round of the program, and there’s been an uptick in promotions since it launched. “We’re proud to highlight that we’ve promoted nearly 100 people internally over the last year, or roughly 5% of our U.S. staff,” Martorano continues. “We’ve also started promoting Sharp University and our other development opportunities as a competitive incentive when attracting and retaining top talent.” Rather than struggle to find the perfect hire, Sharp can now confidently promote or hire someone who has the potential to shine but may need some polish.

In addition, Martorano has seen other changes: “Outside of the classroom, we’re finding that employees are reevaluating the way they engage their own professional growth, with a shift toward continuous learning rather than stand-alone events. In addition, it’s forced many of our high potentials to evaluate themselves candidly, and I think that’s perhaps the most powerful ability a person can have: self-awareness.

We’ve seen participants personally acknowledge they aren’t quite ready for advancement, while others who seemed satisfied in their current role realize they are actually hungrier for a bigger challenge.”

Another exciting byproduct is that participants are taking it upon themselves to form smaller ecosystems, like resource groups, to strengthen the skills they learned in training.

They are organically becoming more collaborative and more focused on the organization’s strategic challenges.

“I will say that each of the courses has given me a skill that I can immediately apply to my job as well as the opportunity

to work more closely with the members of my cohort on a regular basis,” says Susan Osgood, vice president of human resources, the executive sponsor of the program as well as a participant. “We have a renewed sense of partnership from this learning opportunity.” This sense of camaraderie and renewed engagement has been energizing for the entire organization.

Now that the learning portion of the program has concluded, Sharp will assign the inaugural program’s final project. The learners will be divided into small groups to develop a formal plan for how to address various realworld business cases—real issues at Sharp. They’ll have to work together to brainstorm solutions and develop a formal strategy, which will then be presented to a board of senior executives. This final project refocuses all the things they’ve learned over the last year and pushes them to collaborate on real-world problem solving. It also provides an opportunity for these high-potential individuals to get some time in the spotlight to showcase their newfound skills in front of Sharp’s leadership. The executive panel will choose the winning presentation, and the participants in that group will receive a substantial credit toward any training of their choice—even if it’s not directly related to their current role.

“We’re energized and looking forward to further cultivating our partnership with AMA,” Martorano says. “They’ve helped us to quickly and effectively kick-start Sharp University, and they’ve provided world-class talent development content, which has empowered us to recruit, retain, and accelerate the best talent in the industry.” AQ AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 7

AMA RESEARCH

The Case for

AMA MANAGEMENT CERTIFICATION

BY STEVE RUMERY, PhD

CERTIFICATION: A designation awarded to an individual who has demonstrated knowledge, skill and/or abilities as defined in a predetermined set of standards. Certification validates an individual’s qualifications in a certain subject—here being management.

8 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY There are about 24 million managers in the U.S. workforce, and research suggests that there is great opportunity to improve their effectiveness. American Management Association (AMA), using research conducted on thousands of leaders globally, has identified the 4 key areas that create excellence in management. Those 4 areas are the foundation for the Total Professional framework. In addition, AMA has examined the feasibility of implementing a certification process for managers. Results indicate broad support, from both current managers and employers, for a certification process to standardize the role of manager. Results also indicate that AMA, given its nearly 100 years of experience developing managers, is perceived to be the right organization to confer such a certification.

So why, you might ask, is it time for management certification? For one thing, there are a lot of managers out there. A recent estimate1 is that there are about 24 million managers, supervisors and administrators in the U.S. workforce today. That works out to about 1 manager for every 5 employees, or 17.6% of the workforce and 30% of the total compensation distributed. On their own, managers influence a huge chunk of the economy.

And these managers make a profound impact on the performance and vitality of organizations. Recent research2

by Clifton and Harter on the impact of good (and bad) managers on employees suggests that upwards of 70% of the variability of performance between teams is explained by the performance of managers and supervisors.

Managers, through their actions, enable employees within organizations to produce the products and services that we want and need.

Unfortunately, this research also suggests that managers could have a great deal more impact than they currently do.

Clifton and Harter go so far as to say that “most current team leaders do not have the natural tendencies for managing people.” This striking issue is likely due to the practice of promoting employees based on strong performance in an individual contributor role, not because they have the right set of knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics that will make them a great manager.3

70%

U.S. WORKFORCE STATISTICS:

24 million managers 1 manager for every 5 employees 17.6% of the workforce Another factor is that many individual contributors who ascend to management roles retain some of their original individual contributor roles and responsibilities. In these cases, employees are being tasked to play two separate roles at once, sometimes called being a “player-coach.”

Though in theory it may seem to be a good idea to combine these roles, in reality the individual often only focuses on the role they do best, the individual contributor one. In a study of player-coaches,4 researchers found that playercoaches tend to “meddle and micromanage” when they have a handful of direct reports, and tend to only “communicate goals and focus on trouble spots by defining expectations” when they have a larger set of direct reports. Their research suggests that a proliferation of player-coaches can do real

70% of variability in team performance is impacted by managers or supervisors

Hamel, G. and Zanini, M. (2016). Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year. Harvard Business Review.

Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-3-trillion-per-year.

1

Clifton, J. and Harter, J. (2019). It’s the Manager. Gallup Press.

2

I n a 2015 report, Gallup estimated that only 1 in 10 people have the skills necessary to manage effectively; however, an additional 2 in 10 have some of these skills and could be successful managers with the right training and development.

3

Kaufman, E., Morieux, Y. and Scullion, C. (2006). The Fallacy of the Player-Coach Model. The Boston Consulting Group, Inc.

4

AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 9

“ A certification process could lead to increased opportunities for career advancement, both inside and outside of their organization.” harm to organizations, contributing to “corporate bloat and inefficiency.”

When we again consider the estimated ratio in the U.S. workforce of 1 manager to every 5 employees5, one can clearly see the prevalence of the player-coach model in organizations. Interestingly, top-performing companies often have a smaller ratio of managers to employees, sometimes as low as 1 manager to 10 employees. The authors of this research suggest that these high-performing organizations benefit greatly by having fewer managers, but these managers are also highly qualified and have the skills and experience to manage effectively.

So, again, why is it time to certify managers?

Because there is a huge opportunity to clarify the role of manager across organizations and standardize it, with real impact on the bottom line. As noted before, there are a lot of managers and many of those managers have competing roles. A certification process will clarify the role of manager, which in turn will improve the effectiveness of managers in those roles. Researchers in one study6 estimated that the cost of lost productivity due to inefficient management is around $1 trillion annually, or about 5% of the GDP. It is time to certify managers because building a validated certification process can serve to codify the role of manager and to Hamel and Zanini (2016) in their article in Harvard Business Review.

5

Clifton and Harter (2019) in their book It’s the Manager.

6

10 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

1

$

5

trillion or % loss of GDP is attributed annually to inefficient management

improve the overall effectiveness of managers globally.

Of course, there are many other professions that have strong certification and credentialing requirements, from doctors to lawyers, accountants to project managers to human resources professionals. In 2015, about 22% of employees had a license (Bureau of Labor Statistics). What’s somewhat mind-boggling is that about 18% of the workforce is in a management position.

It is time for a certification process for managers.

Another reason for a management certification process is the fact that managers and organizations simply want one. Research conducted by American Management Association (AMA) clearly identified an unmet need for a certification process. The study involved about 770 managers and employers and results showed broad support for a certification process. For example, 84% of employers indicated that, given the choice, they would encourage

75%

75% of employers surveyed indicated that having managers certified by AMA would lead to increased efficiency and better management

current employees to pursue an AMA management certification. About 3 in 4 employers also indicated that having managers in their organization certified by AMA would lead to increased efficiency and better management in their organization, and would be of value to their organization.

the globe to develop a clear and concise depiction of what the current role of manager entails.

Managers in the AMA research study also highlighted a host of benefits to certification: 73% of managers indicated that a certification would be evidence of a professional commitment and would lead to an enhanced feeling of personal accomplishment. A certification would also serve as a validation of specialized knowledge and a demonstration of management competence. Finally, a certification process could lead to increased opportunities for career advancement, both inside and outside of their organization.

In a comprehensive 2016 study of 11,624 employees at all levels of organizations operating across the globe, AMA examined the confidence these employees had in a number of specific areas of knowledge, skill and experience that are critical for business performance. Results of this research indicated many “skill gaps” for employees, including business acumen, relationship management, professional effectiveness and analytical intelligence. On average, all of these critical areas fell in the “Emerging Competence” range of scores, suggesting the need for comprehensive development of a number of skill areas for employees operating at all levels of organizations.

Clearly there is a need for a professional certification for managers. However, for a management certification process to work, the role of manager must be clearly defined and measured. Recognizing the need, AMA recently “rolled up their sleeves” with managers and thought leaders around

Based on this research, AMA created the “Total Professional” framework for managers, which consists of 16 competencies organized into 4 critical domains. The diagram below provides an overview of the Total Professional framework, and each of the domains. AQ

For more information, visit amanet.org/cpm

AMA’S TOTAL PROFESSIONAL FRAMEWORK Professional Effectiveness: Mastery of personal awareness and interpersonal skills.

Relationship Management: Ability to establish and maintain professional relationships.

Business Acumen: Understanding of business operations.

Analytical Intelligence: Application of systematic thinking, analysis and data interpretation.

Business Acumen

Professional Effectiveness

Analytical Intelligence

Relationship Management

AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 11

Enabling the Future of Work

IMPLICATIONS for L&D

BY ALBERT SIU, PhD

If you work in the learning and development field, you know that the nature of work is changing and the competition for skilled talent is intense.

The learning function must be strategic and accountable for all its actions to close skill gaps and meet the company’s emerging talent needs.

As a clinical research organization (CRO) and global provider of biopharmaceutical services, Parexel has focused its attention on our changing workforce, training functions, and how learners are experiencing the training to meet everchanging business requirements.

SETTING L&D PRIORITIES Two years ago, Parexel collaborated with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to study the impact of innovation on drug development. We noted that in the prior 10 years, drug development costs had doubled, and looking ahead to the next 20 to 30 years, costs might increase 10 times. Concurrently, the “time to market” in our industry—from identifying a compound that has clinical treatment possibilities to launching a new drug—is around 12 years, and the failure rate of these new inventions runs as high as 90%.

12 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

The study dug into understanding the “why” of those findings and identified two broad drivers. The first is an inadequately trained workforce, and the second is the low adoption rate of innovative methodologies in clinical studies, which are hampered by organizational silos and risk-averse cultures.

Parexel partners with our biopharmaceutical clients to remediate these gaps, and we have had many external discussions about the impending global skilled labor shortage. In clinical research, we need scientists and technicians who are well schooled in their respective disciplines and people who have strong foundational knowledge in the academic disciplines they pursue. We hen provide industry and functional skills and knowledge to our recruits to complement the strength of their foundational knowledge.

For Parexel, three sources of information were seminal in influencing our thinking about enabling the future of work and the implications for L&D.

In a 2017 Pearson report, “The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030,” the researchers took a comprehensive approach to describe how employment is likely to change and the implications for skills acquisition being shaped by the dynamics of globalization, technological advancements (e.g., AI), and unique industry segments’ requirements.

At the 2019 World Economic Forum, in a white paper titled “Strategies for the New Economy,” the authors argued that “…skills are the new currency for the New Economy, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” In the drug development industry, the EIU analysis revealed a similar pattern, particularly evident in the area of recruiting properly credentialed data scientists.

Finally, a 2018 Korn Ferry report, “The Talent Crunch,” forecast that by 2030, demand for skilled workers will outstrip supply, creating a global talent shortage of more than 85.2 million workers.

With the changing skill-set requirements and impending talent shortage, we know that the war for talent will only intensify. An organization must make it a priority to examine what the learning and development function will do to address the talent challenges ahead.

FOCUSING THE EFFORTS OF L&D At Parexel, we’ve focused on both internal and external needs.

Internally, we examined how we train our workforce. In the contemporary drug development industry, we are looking for well-rounded talent with broad interdisciplinary and functional skills. For example, we need people who are well schooled in their scientific or technical disciplines, but they also must have sound business and interpersonal skills.

We understand that at the end of every drug development pathway is a patient, and we keep the patient at the heart of everything we do.

Another area of internal focus is to reexamine our workforce development framework based on a new “taxonomy,” breaking down key skills, competencies, experiences, and capabilities into four components: foundational, contextual, practice, and credentialing.

The foundational component is largely the output of employees’ education. We are beneficiaries of our educational system. We can influence but not necessarily control this component.

The contextual component is the domain controlled by industries. As an L&D function, we are the organizer and provider of functional and industry knowledge.

The practice component begins to straddle both the internal and external focus, where we provide on-the-job training to make sure employees know how their skills and knowledge are applied in a real-world setting. We also

provide internships and faculty exchange opportunities to help influence the design of academic curricula and provide students with practical experiences that shorten their development lead time and reinforce how work gets done.

The credentialing component encompasses the partnership organizations, including academic institutions, professional associations, and government agencies. Through the design of partnerships, we can create a strong talent development pipeline.

CREATING A TRAINING GOVERNANCE BOARD An L&D function needs an internal governance body that can be relied on to identify and prioritize issues and allocate the appropriate resources to address the issues.

Parexel’s governance body has two levels (see the figure on page 14): • The Training Governance Board includes the most senior-level leaders. They help determine the right training priorities for the company, with the appropriate level of financial and expertise resources allocated. They help to set the strategic direction for training.

• The L&D Leadership Council includes all leaders who have a training remit. Training is required by many parts of our businesses; therefore, we engage all learning leaders to define common training approaches to requirements, standards, processes, metrics, and practices.

At Parexel, we have learned that governance is a must-have to manage the training investments required to meet the business needs.

ALLOCATING TRAINING INVESTMENTS Many companies have difficulty getting a handle on how much money they spend in training, or whether they are investing adequately in one area versus another. I have created a framework (see the figure on page 15) to separate training investments into four categories and have collected benchmark data on how much companies on average spend in each category.

At Parexel, training investments are made for two general purposes. The first is focused on the tactical and strategic aspects for training, and the second is focused on the organization and individual aspects for training.

As shown in the figure, these dimensions create four quadrants of training • Functional training. Most companies spend 50% to 80% of training hours and costs here.

• Professional development. This investment is meant for the individual’s consumption and benefit.

• Mission, values, strategy and culture. The smaller investment here merely reflects a smaller target audience, AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 13

“ As companies position themselves to meet talent challenges, the L&D organization must have the right mechanisms to stay close to the business.” not lesser importance. Many would argue that this is the most important investment needed.

• Leadership and management practices. Companies that have a strong cultural identity tend to spend a robust amount to ensure the business is managed according to their unique and indigenous management expectations.

Perhaps the most important use of this training investment map is not just to decide how much to invest where, but to discuss with the training governance body which investments should be redirected from one quadrant to another.

Companies in general are reluctant to increase training investments just for the sake of it. But if the leadership has a firm understanding of these investments, they can redirect expenditures.

We’ve managed the cost of people and management development through leveraging resources and practices not indigenous to Parexel. This requires a close business relationship with a partner that can globally support Parexel’s mission, vision, corporate values, business and training strategy. Parexel has forged a 10-year partnership with American Management Association, International, in which we’ve utilized content assets, delivery resources, and

delivery methods to scale globally more than 18 different programs covering management skills, interpersonal effectiveness, business acumen, analytical intelligence, and project management. AMA has trained over 8,500 of our leaders and individual contributors in 46 countries over the last decade. This kind of partnership has led to high performance scores across the board and a direct impact on job performance and on our bottom line. We credit AMA with helping us develop talent in an efficient and cost-effective way.

Managing these four dimensions carefully is the most important reason to have an accurate understanding of the total training investments made in a company.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE OF WORK As companies position themselves to meet talent challenges, there are two additional requirements for L&D. The first is to make sure the L&D organization has the right mechanisms to stay close to the business, attending to business needs in order to adjust the learning needs and requirements.

At Parexel, we have “training business partners” who are the dedicated client account representatives. They interface

Create a Training Governance Body The Governance Process Model: Two Levels Stakeholders’ Representation

L&D Leadership Council Focus and Priorities Measure Impact and Accountability

Training Governance Board

• Engage all leaders that have training responsibilities • Define common training approaches to requirements, standards, processes, metrics, practices • Negotiate sequence and cadence of releases • Coordinate development of qualified instructors • Review proposed target audiences (right training for the right people at the right time) • Determine training priorities

Who Does What How and When

• Allocate resources (e.g., financial, SMEs) • Resolve cross-functional training issues • Drive training accountability • Decide strategic direction for training

14 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

with the business leads and translate business requirements into training and learning requirements. They manage all the training design and development projects and work closely with the business leads to determine who needs to be training on what, and when and how. The training business partners guide the curricula assignments within the assigned businesses and functions, and they collect data and feedback on the volume, costs, effectiveness, and efficiency of programs delivered.

The second requirement is to measure training outcomes and impact. The training business partner helps the business to answer this question: For all the training investments made, how do we know it matters for the business?

We focus the measurement of training on two key dimensions: reactions and impact.

The measurement of reactions occurs right after a training experience. We gather reaction data from participants on their perception of content quality, relevance, and instructor effectiveness, and their “net promoter” score for that learning experience. These metrics help ensure our programs meet the “fitness for use” expectations and provide information to guide our continuous improvement actions.

The measurement of impact is broken into two parts: business results and outcomes. The business result metrics come from the businesses, not from HR or training. Each business has a set of results it likes to measure, so when a program is done, we measure the achievement of those expected results.

Training outcome measurements are executed using metrics and indices from the employee opinion survey data and other experimental design study outcomes. Internal studies have shown a direct correlation between AMA’s management training program and leader performance, particularly in those key competency categories that have been identified that have led to performance success.

Since training is both an investment and a cost, we take it seriously that we should know the returns on such investments.

COMPETITION FOR SKILLED TALENT IS INTENSE AND REAL It is a worldwide phenomenon, and the learning and development function has a strategic role to play in meeting the looming challenges. Leadership actions are needed to engage the right partners inside and outside the company in mapping out remediation strategies. L&D must also have a firm grip on the dynamics and realities within the enterprise, and the learning leadership must have the mechanisms to manage its own function credibly. A trusted management team and system will ensure the training function delivers on its charge. AQ Albert Siu, PhD, is corporate vice president, Global Learning and Development, at Parexel. He has over 30 years of experience in managing global learning and HR functions. Siu’s specialty is in creating a costeffective and globally centralized learning and talent management infrastructure.

Manage the Right Workforce Development Investment Portfolio Assess How Training Dollars Are Invested: Two Dimensions ORGANIZATIONAL FOCUS (50% - 80%) Functional capabilities (skills / knowledge / process)

TACTICAL FOCUS

(5% - 20%) Professional skills and knowledge

(% - %) = Benchmark ranges on the % of total training investments

(1% - 5%) • Business strategy • Mission • Vision • Values, culture • Core philosophy

(50% - 80%)

STRATEGIC FOCUS

• Leadership effectiveness • Management processes • Excellence in execution • Quality culture: philosophy and practices

INDIVIDUAL FOCUS

AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 15

AMA Members-Only Quarterly Survey Results

The Role of Management Competencies in Achieving Success

SURVEY RESPONDERS’ LEVEL IN ORGANIZATION

50%

Beginning to mid-level management

26%

Nonmanagement

24%

Senior management

To learn more about improving management skills

Business Acumen

Professional Effectiveness

Analytical Intelligence

Relationship Management

SM

AMA’s Total ProfessionalSM competency model classifies the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to meet today’s performance demands. #1 Most Important Proficiency Within Each Area

#2 Most Important Proficiency Within Each Area

1

Communication

#

2

Self-awareness

#

1

Coaching for performance

#

2

Collaboration

#

1

Customer focus

#

2

Talent management

#

1

Critical thinking

#

2

Decision making and analysis

#

Professional Effectiveness

Relationship Management

Business Acumen

Analytical Intelligence

Visit www.amanet.org/cpm www.amanet.org/cpm

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AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 19

How Leaders Can Build Winning

COACHING CULTURES

BY ASH SEDDEEK

Engaging in five key steps, including reviewing your talent acquisition strategy and long-term business vision, can lay a solid foundation for your coaching efforts.

On April 26, 2019, I sat in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., listening to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki interview Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and chairman and current chair of Defense Innovation Advisory Board, Jonathan Rosenberg, former senior vice president of Google, chief operating officer of Motorola, and current advisor at Alphabet, and Alan Eagle, Google’s director of communication. The three are the authors of a book called Trillion Dollar Coach (Harper Business, 2019). The book features management lessons from coach and business executive Bill Campbell, who the authors say helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value through his mentoring of entrepreneurs and executives.

From the interview, it was obvious how much impact Campbell, who also coached and was a close friend of Steve Jobs, had on Schmidt, Rosenberg, and Eagle and the organizations they work for. In their book, they talk about how the Google leadership team came to see that the best

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path to success in today’s fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form highperforming teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things. According to them, a critical component of these high-performing teams is a leader who is a very good manager and, more important, a “caring coach.”

There is a lot to learn from the work Campbell did with Silicon Valley luminaries and high-performing teams, teaching leaders to not only manage their teams but also coach them along the way.

I asked Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit (Page Two, 2016), about the key action steps leaders should take to build a coaching culture and how this culture ties in to high-performing organizations. According to Stanier, while many organizations strive to create a coaching culture, they struggle to do so. There are two things organizations need to do.

“First, get clear how a coaching culture serves the business goals,” he says. “A coaching culture can only ever be a means to an end, not an end in itself. If the two goals every organization has are productivity and engagement, how will a coaching culture tangibly improve one or both?

Second, culture change means at its root behavior change across the organization. It’s not enough to talk about, it’s not enough to stick up posters about it, it’s not enough to running training programs. You have to tackle the difficult challenge of starting and sustaining different ways of working from the top to the bottom. No behavior change, no culture change.”

So what can companies do to lay the foundation for a coaching culture? I recommend five key steps:

1

Review the company’s long-term business strategy and vision. Just as Stanier emphasizes the importance of focusing on behaviors and behavior change, companies today are looking at the experiences of employees and customers and how to transform them to create differentiation advantages in a highly competitive world. As you look at your company’s strategy, determine what elements of the strategy would require everyone to adopt an updated set of values and behaviors to achieve success, and how these behaviors should be manifested daily. It’s important to look at what you’re doing today—your business model, systems, and the values and behaviors that support that vision—and from

there figure out what key changes you need to make to be positioned for future success.

2

Review your talent acquisition and development strategy. As you start to steer the ship in the right direction, how are you going to balance between running the day-to-day business and acquiring and developing talent? Shefali Budhraja, global HR leader at Uber, says the company is developing its managers to be coaches to their teams and pairs some leaders with coaches as part of the development process. “Coaching creates a unique one-toone development environment that cannot be replicated in a large group training setting,” Budhraja says. “We’re evolving our coaching culture as we speak.”

According to Robert Kovach, director of leader success at Cisco, the company is using coaching as more than “pinstripe therapy.”

“When Chuck Robbins took the helm at Cisco and in one of his first leadership companywide talks, Cisco Beat, he observed that we build products in teams, we sell in teams and serve our customers in teams. And we need to build on this strength,” Kovach says.

Cisco’s Leadership and Team Intelligence group, which includes Jennifer Dudeck and Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people officer, uses a coaching culture model that is designed around how people managers coach their teams AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 21

“ The magic in stakeholder-centered coaching cultures is the rebirth of more aligned and energized relationships among leaders, their staff, and individual contributors.”

to their strengths. “We reimagined coaching to be strengthbased and, more importantly, team-based and included measures,” Kovach says. “We also built a community of external coaches to help our team leaders become better coaches internally.”

Using the app teamspace, in-person encounters, and videoconferencing technologies, Cisco’s team leaders can do oneto-one check-ins and team-specific pulse surveys that allow them to adjust and modify their approach. “We found that the best teams had leaders who were focused on strength and goals, meeting with their teams every week or every other week,” Kovach says.

Kovach advises companies that are trying to build a coaching culture to start to network and talk to people who are further ahead in the journey. “Not all leaders will come along at the same pace. Start with the ones who are more supportive,” he says. “In our case, we saw one sales leader and one engineering leader come and say, ‘We want to roll out this coaching approach to the whole organization.’ So we went where the energy is to find sponsorship and start implementing this coaching approach throughout the organization.”

3

Align the talent development strategy to the immediate and long-term business strategy and outcomes.

One coaching culture model is the Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder-centered approach. According to Chris Coffey, a leadership coach and a mentor to many coaches in the Marshall Goldsmith community of coaches, this coaching model, when applied by internal or external coaches, creates a culture of accountability and a leader-driven

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coaching culture. The culture not only encourages forwardlooking behavior improvement but also creates an esoteric perception change and the reengineering of key relationships within the organization. Coffey argues that the magic in stakeholder-centered coaching cultures is the rebirth of more aligned and energized relationships among leaders, their staff, and individual contributors.

4

Create a cohesive approach to talent development at all levels: learning and development and coaching.

Companies now combine leadership assessments, 360 assessments, performance reviews, stakeholder input, pulse surveys, and culture surveys as the inputs for an integrated leadership development approach.

At Cupertino Electric, an electric utility and services firm in San Jose, Calif., I am part of a team of coaches working with the senior leadership team. Coupled with leadership training, assessments, and peer calls, coaching is taking place here in a one-to-one format with key leaders. As part of the coaching, we work with these leaders to develop their own coaching capability within the firm so they apply discovery questions with their team of managers and directors to help them uncover solutions to problems. I ask them to cascade such an approach throughout their teams—ask more, tell less.

At Symantec Corporation, I also saw a high-potentials leadership program coupled with a yearlong coaching program. At Uber, where I am coaching key leaders in engineering and finance, I am applying what I call “deep coaching” that extends behind the leaders being coached to

include their teams and stakeholder engagement. This looks at performance as a reflection of the overall environment and how leaders can impact and be impacted by their context.

their teams. Transparency on metrics, accountability, and commitment to results and what you’re doing about them is fundamental to your coaching ,culture success.”

5

STAGES OF COACHING CULTURES

Measure results through regular impact assessments and adjustments. Coaching organizations use measurement tools and metrics heavily. We agree that if you don’t measure it, it is not going to be top priority.

360 assessments are now a stable feature of many organizational efforts to ensure that leaders and their teams continue to track to performance expectations and remain aware of behavior strengths and weaknesses and whether behavior changes actually match with the perceptions of those changes. However, the conversations around performance are still not frequent and timely enough. Coaching leaders should be willing to share their own and stakeholder input on the performance of each team member regularly so there are no surprises. The longer leaders wait to have these critical conversations, the more negative the long-term impact will be on employees.

Nido Qubein, president of High Point University, emphasizes the role of leaders in building capacity within their organizations, through working with their teams and helping people grow as individuals and as a group. “In its essence, leaders, as good coaches, eye existing levels of performances, identify where they need to raise standards, and work with their teams regularly to uplevel their skillsets, mindsets, and toolsets,” he says. “Without measurement, they can’t do this. Ensure you have high regard for metrics and share dashboards with your leadership team and

There are three potential stages in building a coaching culture: Stage 1: Coaching for today’s business needs. At this stage, coaching focuses on the behavior delta that we need to address to sustain our existing business and protect it.

Stage 2: Coaching for the obvious future. Here, coaching focuses on how we can scale our existing business as we organically grow and serve our customers.

Stage 3: Coaching for self-disruption and innovation. This stage focuses on a courage-to-lead model in which leaders challenge the status quo, create an aspirational view of the future, and use coaching as a support mechanism in their capacity-building efforts. One tool that can be used is my own Courage To Lead 360 Assessment, which is focused on a feed-forward set of behaviors the organization must adopt and apply to achieve a transformational future vision. This kind of assessment can help create a blue-ocean strategy where you can fashion your own unique approach to how the organization will fare going forward. AQ Ash Seddeek is a leadership communications coach and the founder of Talent Coaches, a global coaching service provider focused on helping organizations create coaching cultures. His clients include Cisco Systems, Uber, Cupertino Electric, Ebates, Philips, PayPal, and the State Fund of California.

“ In its essence, leaders, as good coaches, eye existing levels of performances, identify where they need to raise standards, and work with their teams regularly to uplevel their skillsets, mindsets, and toolsets.”

— Nido Qubein, President of High Point University

AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 23

MANAGING THE MASTERY OF

DATA

BY SUKETU GANDHI AND JOSHUA SWARTZ

In today’s dynamic, ever-shifting business environment, most companies realize that data is a key source of strategic advantage and an important differentiator that must be used properly.

Many companies, though, are struggling with managing their mastery of data because they don’t look at it in the right way and can’t react to it efficiently. Many are managing their businesses without seeing the full picture, such as by using and evaluating only backward-looking data instead of incorporating alternative datasets.

However, a few companies are managing the mastery of data, and their success both lights the path for others and underscores two important reasons for mastery. One, companies using data well can generate as much as 83% more profits than those whose analytics maturity lags significantly behind that of the leaders, according to Kearney’s 2019 Analytics Impact Index. Two, the value of the data itself has become much greater. In 2018, data represented 84% of the value of most companies’ intangible assets. The overall value of these intangibles was $21 trillion in the United States, alone—more than five times greater than the value of companies’ tangible assets, up from three times greater in 2005, according to AON and Ponemon Institute’s Intangible Assets Financial Statement Impact Comparison Report.

Each data leader has succeeded by taking specific steps: they have gained an understanding of the three dimensions

24 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

of digital transformation; they have clearly recognized and overcome the roadblocks to transformation that others overlook; and they have begun their transformation with targeted actions rather than by attacking all issues at once.

The three interacting dimensions of digital transformation and managing the mastery of data are mindset, skillset, and toolset. They are equally important and work in tandem.

Successful companies have learned that transformation is more likely to drive improvement when all three are addressed together, rather than individually—an approach that may seem counterintuitive to those who think technology investment will solve all their problems.

MINDSET Mindset is about changing what the company thinks about the data itself, how it thinks about its business, how it makes decisions, and how the business should operate. Changing the company’s mindset in the following five ways is a key step to managing the mastery of data: Shift from backward-looking data.. Throughout industries, including retail, it is common for companies to think that what

happened yesterday will happen again tomorrow; so (their thinking goes) all they have to do is look at history to predict the future. This mindset gives a limited, and incorrect, view of the future because it relies only on backward-looking data in a rapidly changing business environment. Further, analytic capabilities to enable predictive and prescriptive insights are readily available in “turnkey” offerings from large cloud providers. To manage the mastery of data, companies can no longer drive their operations with a lens on the past.

Shift to a probabilistic view of data. Most companies today have a deterministic perspective of data: They believe that because data is definite, it is always 100% correct, so they tend to put too much faith in their interpretation of it. To overcome this problem, they need to change their mindset to a probabilistic perspective, which means thinking about the accuracy and likelihood of implied insights (for example, scoring).

This change is a huge shift in structural thinking and more difficult to achieve than moving away from a reliance on historical data. To achieve it, companies must develop a much greater knowledge of, and deeper appreciation for, statistical methods. They must stop believing that data is always right. As successful companies have aggregated large quantities of both well-defined and alternative data (such as that from many sources), they have learned how misleading a deterministic view can be. They know that a probability perspective leads to different—and more accurate—responses than those based on a deterministic view of data alone.

Shift to a closer working relationship between people and data. The third necessary mindset change is to gain an understanding of the importance of having people and large

amounts of data and analytics work together. Companies are starting to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to build business models and manage the business, but they often fail to bring these two approaches together to build the best model. Instead, they let a machine run through the data and find a model they assume is correct because it came from a machine. A better approach is to start with this model but then assign someone to run the data separately to find an independent model and to check and balance the different models to arrive at the best one for their operations.

Shift to multiple sources of data. Companies also must learn that the algorithm’s power increases with more data, which is delivered through multiple datasets. One dataset will provide only one answer, whether correct or not. But by running through different datasets, a company can generate dramatically different, more complete results. Goldman Sachs used limited data to determine the credit level for a husband and wife who each applied for the new Apple Card.

As a result, the man received a much higher credit level on his card than the woman obtained, and a maelstrom of criticism erupted on social media.

Shift from viewing data as an afterthought. Companies often view data as an add-on or afterthought—an old mindset that will slow, if not stop, their digital transformation. Instead, they need to change this mindset so they view data as a core component of the business and of each product and service—a major perspective shift that will affect everyone in the company.

SKILLSET The skills companies have depended on for years no longer meet the demands they face now. As always, they need AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 25

“ Companies need these data scientists to gather, interpret, and draw insights from all the available data. Work will no longer be done by siloed groups that protect their turf from outsiders, but rather by agile teams from multiple functions coming together to drive decisions.”

people who understand their business and how it operates.

But, equally important, today they also need people who know how to make the business win in a digital and datarich environment, people who can work closely with those who have a different skillset: data engineers and statistical experts.

Companies need these data scientists to gather, interpret, and draw insights from all the available data. Furthermore, adding these skills will change the way the company’s work is accomplished. Work will no longer be done by siloed groups that protect their turf from outsiders, but rather by agile teams from multiple functions coming together to drive decisions.

Most people would agree that these business and datascience skillsets are logical requirements for companies today, but they may be surprised to learn that the following skills are important to companies as well.

Psychological and anthropological skills. Retailers should employ a psychologist, or at least someone well trained in how people make decisions when confronted with large amounts of data or conflicting signals that impede decision making. The psychologist will help the company present information in a way that clears workers’ confusion and biases and nudges them into making decisions that enable them to efficiently extract value from the data, freeing them to move on to other issues quickly.

Similarly, someone with anthropological skills will give the company insight into why people have a negative bias

26 I AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020

against results generated by machines, especially if those results disagree with their own preconceived notions.

This person can help others overcome this bias or at least learn to work around it and help them understand the difference between the two kinds of decisions that need to be made: those concerning problems whose factors are known and those about problems with unknown variables.

Factors surrounding certain decisions—like those of math— are well understood, so prescriptive recommendations can be done by machines. Further, where these decisions have no subjectivity (for example, sales indicators), automation can reduce human work, and where subjectivity is required (for example, customer feedback), human intervention is aided by machine recommendations.

On the other hand, problems that have unknown variables require decisions that come only from human thinking. When employees understand the difference between these types of decisions and know how to separate them, they will no longer waste time on transactional decisions but will focus on the subjective and difficult ones that require human interpretation.

Storytelling skills. Companies that want to manage their mastery of data need to become efficient in storytelling—a skill perhaps most considered necessary for fiction writers, not businesspeople. A storyteller can provide a descriptive analysis of the data, bringing it to life for those whose eyes glaze over when looking at spreadsheets.

While visualization of data is often helpful, studies show that many people find that reading a sentence or two about the findings produces a more immediate and clearer understanding of what someone is trying to depict. A table showing a sales drop might present this information as “-35%,” leaving readers to interpret the data as they choose.

But a qualitative and insightful description of the change will force readers to think more carefully about the information and what it really means.

TOOLSET At the same time that a company changes its mindset and skillset, it also will want to adjust its toolset, making sure it puts in place the underlying technology-enabled capabilities that will make it work more efficiently.

Toolsets built on a belief that tomorrow’s business and customers will be much like those of yesterday are useless for the digital enterprise. Today’s forward-looking toolset will give the company abilities that only recently became possible, such as the following: • Working with hybrid clouds to reduce cost and increase data accessibility • Using AI and machine learning visualization tools to improve the consumption of data insights • Taking advantage of third-party data in real time to complement and complete the data picture • Evaluating past actions against their outcomes to inform future predictions

• Running simulations about planned actions to inform future recommendations None of these abilities is possible with outdated analog toolsets.

Organizations across industries are changing their mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets—and in doing so are providing examples of how companies can improve their business and better serve their customers. In the medical industry, for example, doctors are now looking not only at transactional data about patients with the flu but, more important, at an array of alternative datasets (local Google searches for “Do I have the flu” and weather patterns, among others) to understand where a flu epidemic might begin and how it might spread. Then, they use the insights from this research to stock nasal sprays, hydrating fluids, and other items in their offices and hospitals before the illness affects their communities.

Also, three U.S. economists won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 for their work on the concept of randomized control trials (RCT). Through this work, they developed significant insights by using deep data at an extremely granular level in studies in which randomly selected participants received either a standard treatment or a particular intervention. The results of one study point to ways of lifting people out of poverty, while those of another found that if doctors in India offered a kilo of lentils to the adult accompanying a child to their office, they could significantly improve the country’s vaccination rates.

AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 27

ROADBLOCKS Why do many companies find digital transformation to be so difficult? Because the transition from being a historically analog company to a modern-day digital enterprise does not take place along an easy and smooth path. Every company attempting to manage the mastery of data must overcome a number of obstacles, including these three major ones: Acquiring data-science skills. No silver bullet exists for skipping over or going around the roadblock a company faces when trying to acquire needed data-science skills.

There is a severe shortage of data-science talent in the marketplace today, and this shortage continues to increase.

In addition, the available talent is costly to recruit, and the competition for these workers often leads to a short tenure at one company before they move on to better opportunities and increased salary somewhere else. To lower this barrier, companies are looking for alternate solutions. Some are sending their employees to be trained, although this is not a quick fix. Others are outsourcing at least part of their datascience requirements to third parties.

Obtaining data tools. Many companies believe that obtaining the new data tools they need is a daunting and expensive effort, so they try to go around this roadblock by forcing their old tools to do new tasks they were not designed to handle. This approach never works. Updating the toolset can be less expensive and daunting than many companies envision. Furthermore, they do not have to start from scratch to organically design a one-off set of tools. Instead, they can leverage open-source software because every algorithm any company needs is available somewhere in the market today, and can best be obtained by treating this purchase like that of any piece of industrial-grade software: Know what tools are available, evaluate the responses, and choose the tools that best support the company’s efforts and address its challenges.

To make certain it gets the best tools, the company will want to put in place a chief data officer (CDO) who is accountable for this purchase and for overseeing the data-science team.

This team must be recognized as a strategic business function of the company and not just a technology function.

And the data department should be separate from the IT department, with the CDO serving on the company’s leadership team and reporting to the COO or CFO. Changing the company’s data mindset. The biggest roadblock a company faces when trying to manage the mastery of data is changing how data is viewed throughout the business. Typically, the old view of data as an add-on or afterthought is deeply entrenched in the way companies operate, and this mindset can be changed only with a concerted, long-term effort.

The effort will start with C-level leaders, all of whom must fully accept the importance of data in the company’s

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success and see it as a core component of each product and service. They must then integrate this new mindset throughout the company so that employees in every function—not just data science—understand data’s significance and how their roles impact the company’s strategic decisions.

GETTING STARTED—FIRST STEPS To manage the mastery of data, a company must change the three dimensions of digital transformation and overcome the roadblocks obstructing success. This effort may take many months, if not years. The good news, though, is that no company has to jump into the effort by trying to attack every aspect of it at once. In fact, it can—and should—start small, beginning with these three efforts: • Focus areas. The company will want to focus on the highest payoff areas of the business—customer interaction, supply chain, and competitive landscape.

Focusing on these areas will give the company knowledge of working with digital externally, internally, and within the competitive landscape—knowledge that will help it enhance the customer experience and improve the supply chain, while beginning to look at the future of its business and industry.

• Acquiring skills. Although the company eventually will need many new skills, it should not expect, or even want, to add large numbers of employees early in the digital transformation process. Instead, it will want to start small by hiring a few people for key positions and leveraging third-party workers to raise the skillset to the required level.

• Dual-mandate process. The company will want to run a dual-mandate process with one track being a series of small experiments and the other aiming to create the business’s long-term platform.

Companies everywhere are changing their mindsets by beginning to think differently about all the data available to them both within their operations and from multiple external sources. They are changing their skillsets by considering all the different skills now needed for success and ways to obtain those skills. And they are changing their toolsets by gaining an understanding of the kinds of tools that will work best for them in the environment in which they compete.

As they make these changes and overcome the roadblocks hindering their progress, they are learning how to manage the mastery of data and are successfully transforming into digital enterprises. AQ Suketu Gandhi is a partner with the global management consulting firm Kearney in the Digital Transformation Practice and the global product leader, Plan and Digital Supply Chain. Joshua Swartz is a principal in Kearney’s Digital Transformation Practice.

Cultivating Your Opinion to Make Better

TECHNOLOGY DECISIONS

BY GRAHAM BINKS

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Every business is a tech business today, yet few of us work in the tech industry. For most managers, the technology options are bewildering. If you’re charged with growing any business, a robust knowledge of technology will help you make better decisions.

Lifelong learning is always easier when we’re excited about the topics and can see the potential fruits of our research, consultation, and reading. Technology is a field where opinion is divided on everything from “Why doesn’t it work?” to “How does this work?” In addition, while every business today relies on technology, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that only 5% of the working population is in the tech industry. Even for this minority, it’s a massive field—there are over 100 career paths available in “tech.”

You may be a leader with no interest in learning about the nuts and bolts of technology, a die-hard techie, or—most likely—somewhere between the two. Regardless, you simply can’t make your best technology decisions without a solid understanding of the potential, based on your knowledge and the opinions you develop from learning.

BEGIN WITH A QUESTION If the idea of mastering such a foreign field sounds bewildering, take comfort from knowing that the first steps are straightforward if you begin with the right question.

That question is twofold: • In what ways do you need to improve your business?

• What is the best role for technology to play in this improvement?

“Improve your business” could mean having better products, better information around the design and delivery of those products, streamlined transactions, and a host of other improvements. As a general assumption, any improvement will only be valued when it is evident to your customer in some way: a better outcome when they buy; an easier process for finding, selecting, purchasing, and receiving your goods; or better assurance that you’ve got their backs if something goes wrong.

At the end of the day, this comes down to how the customer perceives your offerings, what outcomes you target, and how you get comfortable with a path to achieving those outcomes.

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TAP INTO THE CUSTOMER YOU KNOW BEST—YOURSELF How does your customer perceive your products and services? When you spend all your professional time within your business, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. You know the thought you put into improving that call center experience, how much you invested in the new online ordering system, and how often you asked customers for their feedback. You’re so close to the details that it’s easy to substitute opinion for the actual customer’s voice.

If you’ve ever been surprised by a customer’s candid feedback, you need to be deliberate about removing your internal hat and walking a mile in your customer’s shoes.

Not once or twice a year, not at quarterly offsites, but every day. When it comes to understanding how technology can help a business upgrade, we all have a qualified opinion— because we’ve all been bombarded with technology solutions to problems we did (or didn’t) have.

When you’re seeking insight into how to change your customers’ lives, try starting with your own experience.

Pick up a pen right now and list out the ways that technology has changed your life over the past 5, 10, or 15 years.

Choose some routine daily tasks in your personal and professional lives and ask yourself how you do these differently now as opposed to before. Here are some helpful triggers: • How do you communicate with friends, family, and colleagues?

• Where do you purchase goods?

• Entertainment?

• How do you allocate time throughout the day? What did that look like in prior years?

• What new roles exist in your business? What roles have ceased to be? Why? When you’ve listed a few tasks, see if you can note the innovations that brought about these changes. Sure, you can start with your smartphone, but go deeper where you can,

“ How could better information reduce their cognitive load, allowing them to make better decisions? How could you cut down the number of buttons they need to push to take action on those decisions?”

such as new apps, fancier gizmos, equipment that wasn’t previously affordable or cost effective, and so on.

If you were skeptical of my claim that “every business is a tech business,” hopefully this exercise helped you realize that this is true.

Consider that technology does two things well: • It channels information to generate insights.

• It enables efficient, somewhat automated action.

Take a look at your list. Which innovations provided you with more accurate, more timely, or more reliable information?

How did this change the way you made decisions? And which innovations gave you a magic button that you simply push to complete some previously laborious task?

Now put yourself in your customers’ position. How could better information reduce their cognitive load, allowing them to make better decisions? How could you cut down the number of buttons they need to push in order to take action on those decisions? (We’re touching on the topic of usability here—a good area for your further reading.)

At this point, you may have a list of blue-sky ideas about the use of technology in your business, things that you can’t see a path to achieving.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS MAY NOT SEEM REALISTIC—YET You base your definition of blue-sky on the things you’ve

seen work in the past. Your opinion on what is feasible will only be shifted by evidence of success. Tech can be scary— remember that 95% statistic—so it’s natural for many leaders to be wary of aiming high.

Technology is a platform for our ideas, and big ambitions and lofty goals don’t have to be the preserve of Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Elon Musk. Thanks to those pioneers who took the risks (and the arrows), tech is littered with inspirational success stories.

Take confidence in the simple fact that every business can be improved by adopting technologies and techniques that have been tried and tested elsewhere—in other industries, perhaps in competitive businesses. Proven technologies are ready for you to deploy without having to take those same arrows. Your opinion is enriched by becoming aware of these successes (and failures), then being able to adapt the underlying concepts to your context.

Another aspect of ambition-setting lies in the distinction between solving a problem and pursuing an opportunity.

Problems arise when some element of your business ceases to perform in the way that it used to. This drop in performance can be explained only by a change somewhere in the system. Find the change, and you can restore the original performance. Problem solved.

But there’s another way. Why not at least consider the problem—a fix that has been forced upon you by circumstances—as an opportunity to improve on the original performance if that would strengthen your business.

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“ Here’s a little secret: Don’t begin with the technology. Instead, gain an understanding of the techniques that tech winners have in common.”

A product fails in the market—create a new product. An old transaction process breaks—replace that process with a more efficient, lower cost alternative.

Problem solving leads to incremental thinking. I call that +1 thinking.

But if you adopt an opportunity-first opinion, you’re more likely to find whole new (to you) ways of improving performance. That’s 10x thinking. (Even if you only achieve a 3x improvement, how much better is that than simply restoring old performance?)

Whatever your expectations, you still must have confidence in success before embarking on your plan. Which brings us to: Where to begin?

TECHNIQUES BEFORE TECHNOLOGY If the proof is in the pudding, how do you get comfortable with the path to achieving these ambitious outcomes?

When we embark on something new, there’s a blend of anticipation and anxiety. The higher the stakes, the greater your fears. If you’re going to put your reputation on the line, you’ll want to have seen evidence that similar initiatives have worked elsewhere and that you can replicate that success in your context.

I have good news: Not only are proven technologies available, but there’s also a library full of techniques for choosing and implementing technology that have been developed (tried, tested, failed, refined, and succeeded). You can master these techniques in your organization. They don’t guarantee success at the push of a button, but they offer a path that many have followed in that direction.

Here’s a little secret: Don’t begin with the technology.

Instead, gain an understanding of the techniques that tech winners have in common: • Reduce risk by adopting proven technologies first. You might win on the bleeding edge, but it’s rarely required.

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• Thing big, act small. Approach your outcomes in small, testable steps involving the customer as often as you can.

• Build your team’s confidence with a series of small changes, some wins, and some lessons learned.

There are many other techniques—consider reading up on Agile techniques, design thinking, usability design, and information science—but the underlying objective is to create a culture that is confident with change, encourages informed experimentation for the purpose of learning, and recognizes that no experiment fails as long as it answers a question.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY? I began by saying that 95% of us do not work in the tech field.

Mastery of technology for non-tech leaders does not require a tech degree. On the contrary, it calls for an appreciation of how others have used technology to further the core business questions we should ask every day: • What do my customers need next?

• How well can we deliver on that need?

• What’s our path to success?

If you learn more about—and stay current—on the topics discussed, your well-informed opinions will equip you to make balanced, risk-sensitive decisions on how to enrich your customers with a better experience and your business with a more loyal customer base. AQ Graham Binks is CEO of primeFusion and helps his global client base make better use of technology. Over the course of three decades in tech, he has worked with over 250 businesses ranging from name brands like NIKE, P&G, and JP Morgan to many small/medium-sized businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia. He is the author of three books, most recently Trusting Technology: Mastering Technology for Non-Tech Leaders (Post Hill Press, 2019).

Make a Resolution to Avoid

COMMON LEADERSHIP MISTAKES

BY MIKE McHARGUE

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The new year is upon us. For many leaders, that means planning for the year—setting strategy, building/rebuilding our teams, making big decisions, and setting goals as we aspire to lead healthy, successful organizations.

None of this is easy, but it is especially difficult if you are a leader who is susceptible to one or more of five common errors in leadership.

Over my 30-year career, I have witnessed—or have been guilty of—some common leadership mistakes that either stymied or altogether derailed my work or best intentions as a leader. And, in fact, I watched many of my colleagues committing the same blunders I was. For my book, Rookie Mistakes: Advice from Top Executives on 5 Critical Leadership Errors, I interviewed hundreds of leaders about mistakes they made either as a young leader or as a time-wizened veteran. With only a few exceptions, the list became clear.

Common mistakes made by leaders (both rookies and senior leaders alike) include: • Allowing confusion regarding the most important things • Failing to connect with their team members • Running truly awful meetings

wanted to be in, to split off the other business (in this case, the food side), and to articulate the purpose of our organization. We focused our energies to determine the purpose of the company and eventually crafted a message that our employees and constituents could endorse and appreciate. We believe our clear purpose is to keep Oklahomans safe, informed, and entertained.

Employees in every organization want to know the work they do has meaning. As the leadership team of our company, it was our job to define our company’s purpose and to make sure our employees understood that purpose. My senior leaders and I use the “safe, informed, and entertained” statement to open every presentation, both internally and externally, and talk about it regularly in meetings across our enterprise. It informs our strategy, helps guide our decision making, and helps us attract the right people to Griffin.

• Failing at giving and receiving feedback.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of clearly identifying the business you are in, creating an accurate and clear purpose statement, and communicating that purpose regularly across your organization.

None of us deliberately makes mistakes in any of these areas, but as leaders we are human and fallible. I’ve found that it’s the best leaders who look for help, guidance, and advice from other leaders who have been there.

Once my leaders and team recognized and embraced this strategy and purpose, it was much easier for us all to work together to achieve our mission of keeping our fellow Oklahomans safe, informed, and entertained.

• Hiring too fast and firing too slow

ADVICE FROM THE TOP To combat these five errors, consider the following advice shared from senior leaders across a variety of industries: To avoid confusion, David Griffin, the CEO of Griffin Communications, a media company based in Oklahoma City, had this story to share: Our 108-year-old company was once divided into two distinct businesses: food manufacturing and a television station in Oklahoma City. Because there was literally no synergy between the two, our purpose in the organization and ownership, as well as with our leadership and teams, was unclear.

A critical point in our company’s history came when we made the decision to identify the one business we

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To avoid a lack of connection with his team, Dr. William Morice, II, president of Mayo Medical Laboratories and division chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic, insists a willingness to be vulnerable is the key. He says: I’ve learned over the course of my career as a leader that vulnerability is a key trait in leadership excellence.

Although it may sound “touchy-feely,” vulnerability it is anything but.

This trait, which I try to model for my senior leaders and encourage across our departments, has led to improved business outcomes, increased employee engagement, and, most importantly, better patient care— the primary reason the Mayo Clinic exists. But saying we are going to be vulnerable and actually doing so are still challenges. I am far from perfect at this. In fact, my

“ With discipline in applying the process, our meetings became more productive, our leadership team became better aligned, and we set the tone for meetings across the organization.” ability to demonstrate vulnerability in the midst of change repeatedly has been put to the test.

Recently I had been tasked to create and give a presentation that hopefully would bring buy-in from senior leadership about a new initiative. The meeting went well, and the executives offered their support. I was thrilled with the decision and excited about the prospect of sharing this news with my team. I expected they would be supportive and ready to jump in.

But that’s not how they responded.

Since I hadn’t briefed the team in any detail about the initiative and I hadn’t asked for their opinions or advice, they were far from pleased. I had inadvertently excluded them from the process. I had made a leadership error and needed to find a way to recover. Though I could have denied the mistake, forced the issue, and demanded support, this was not the kind of leader I want to be.

I immediately began setting up meetings across the department’s divisions to admit my mistake, make a proper and thorough case for the new initiative, and ask for their help, buy-in, and support. My team appreciated my honesty and vulnerability. The approach and apology addressed their concerns and lessened their resistance to the forthcoming change. They gave me their support, and we are now aligned around the new initiative, which is key to the future success of the business.

To avoid running truly awful meetings, Idaho Supreme Court Chief Justice (retired) Linda Copple Trout suggests leaders focus on clarity. She says: I served on the Idaho Supreme Court as a Justice for 15 years, seven as chief and eight as an associate justice on the high court. In that time, I sat on over 1,800 cases and, of those, authored more than 400.

In a court of law, there is great clarity about a number of things. There is clarity about who is leading the case: the judge. It’s clear what will be discussed and decided in each case, and specific rules and known, acceptable behaviors are followed to make sure order is kept and ensure justice

is served. Protocols allow for appropriate debate, and procedures are followed as decisions are being made. And once made, there is not only understanding about what the decisions are but documentation of those decisions to ensure clarity.

When I left the bench and took over as the administrative director of the courts, though, I learned quickly that clarity was far less prevalent in other areas of the organization, especially in meetings. Often, our meetings lacked clarity of purpose, were uneven in participation, had no clear process, and decisions were often unrecorded or not communicated. And my sense, having talked to business and community leaders, was that this problem was pervasive across many organizations outside of the courts and other government entities.

After recognizing the challenge with meetings facing the courts organization, I took steps to correct the problem: We would not only agree on appropriate behaviors for the meeting, but the meeting leader also would ensure we started and ended with clarity. We were clear up front about why we were there, and we were clear when we finished as to what had been decided, what the next steps were, and how we would communicate. With discipline in applying the process, our meetings became more productive, our leadership team became better aligned, and we set the tone for meetings across the organization.

To avoid hiring the wrong people, Adecco Vice President Nick Schichtle says you must never ignore red flags. To prove his point, he shares a story about hiring a difficult employee after ignoring some obvious concerns. He says: After securing approval from the senior executives to hire two additional positions to take advantage of favorable market conditions, I knew I needed to act quickly. Our industry is a leading economic indicator, and this was one of those times when the market was especially strong.

Unfortunately, that meant the demand for the subject matter experts I needed was high. I was thrilled to find two strong candidates who exceeded my requirements AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 35

and expectations. I felt I should move quickly before competition for them escalated, and because I had an elevated target to meet.

Both candidates cruised through the interview process, as both women were polished, professional, and proven.

Add to that the huge plus that they would be able to hit the ground running—this was crucial for me as I needed to minimize ramp time, considering our clock was ticking toward our fiscal year end and executive leadership expected results.

As I prepared the offer letters and reflected on the multiple conversations and interviews I had with each, something wasn’t sitting well with me about my interactions with one of the candidates, Linda. Despite her exceptional credentials, she was verbose. Her explanations and examples during interviews had gone on a bit too long, and she hadn’t responded to the verbal and nonverbal cues from myself and others. Besides that, once I expressed my intentions of making an offer, she felt compelled to continue to convince me, at length, that I was making the right decision. I quickly chalked it up to passion, energy, and excitement to join the team and contribute.

Although situational awareness wasn’t in the job description, in hindsight I knew it was critical for success at multiple levels in the organization. If hired, Linda would interface with internal and external customers consistently. Yet we were in the final stages of the hiring process, and I needed to move forward quickly. So, despite these seemingly minor red flags, I made the decision to go ahead with the hire instead of investigating these concerns further.

It ended up costing me.

Initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive as colleagues started to experience Linda’s obvious strengths. But it didn’t take long for the same red flags I saw to surface.

A few months in, I realized the magnitude of my error.

Under the pressure of goals, a desire to impress, colleague competition, and the need to achieve quickly, Linda’s explanations grew longer under stress, adding to her intensity and verbosity. This all equated to strained customer relationships, lost productivity, missed targets, challenges amongst my team, and questions from my senior leaders. I had to move her off my team and eventually out of the business.

My advice? Zero in on the red flags, regardless of whether they are minor or major. Slow the process down to take the additional steps necessary to vet through concerns.

Hiring too fast, in my experience, has proven to be a risk I can’t afford to take.

Failing to receive feedback is to encourage disaster, according to many of the leaders I interviewed. CEO advisor

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and principal with TLG Associates, Taavo Godtfredsen, believes that leaders soliciting feedback can make all the difference in the success of a company. He says: I am extremely passionate about feedback, as it is the muscle behind continuous improvement. The idea behind feedback is really quite simple: How can we improve if we don’t know how we are doing? As leaders, don’t we want to model improvement and growth for our followers and demonstrate courage and humility? This is why I believe asking for feedback is the single biggest way a leader can have impact on his or her organization.

Now that’s a bold statement to make and one that a number of the CEOs I have coached over the years have asked me to back up.

Having worked with and interviewed hundreds of CEOs and executive leaders over the past two decades, my own qualitative research supports the importance of leaders asking for feedback as well: • Multiple senior executives I have coached have taken significant strides in their overall effectiveness and business outcomes, as reported by their peers and direct reports, after asking for feedback and taking action on that feedback.

• When the most senior leaders ask for feedback regularly, it sets the tone for other leaders to do the same and leads to continuous improvement for the whole organization. In many cases, people do what people see. It can be that simple!

• Also, by asking for feedback, a leader shows vulnerability, which allows others in his or her organization to do the same. This creates an environment of openness, sharing of ideas, and debate, and allows for better decisions and ultimately better organizational success.

What if every leader in your organization made a commitment to asking for feedback regularly and worked hard to change behaviors that the feedback recommended?

In this new year, I’d like to challenge you to looking at the simple mistakes you are making and take one step to correct one mistake for the good of your team and organization.

Small improvements by senior leaders, whether it be increasing clarity, showing vulnerability, running better meetings, hiring with greater care, or acting upon the fact that improving leaders can have a profound effect on an organization and its people.

It’s a new year. Why not give it a shot?

AQ

Mike McHargue is a consultant, author, and leader who is a champion for organizational health. He has 20-plus years of outside sales and customer service experience at startups and tech companies.

Adapted, with permission of the publisher, from Rookie Mistakes: Advice from Top Executives on 5 Critical Leadership Errors (Aloha Publishing, 2018). Copyright Mike McHargue, 2018.

Taking on Employee Disengagement by

MANAGING CHANGE

BY WHITNEY JOHNSON

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The No. 1 problem facing organizations— and the leaders and managers within them—is the disengagement of their employees.

No. 1.

An S Curve of Learning has three primary phases:

It’s not your competitors or the economy or the political landscape; it’s not global uncertainty, the pace of change, and the constant pressure for innovation. Or rather, it’s not those things except that they become very dangerous to an organization with a disengaged workforce. Every potential problem looms large when you’re not equipped with highly engaged, creative, problem-solving and productive people.

• There is a low end, or launch point, where a lot of learning needs to take place in a relatively short period of time, and it feels like progress is slow or limited. People may require extra support from others due to frustration and discouragement.

Unless your firm is one of the rare exceptions to whom the data does not apply, you are being dragged down by employee disengagement. Organizations are just a shell, a skeleton. They are fleshed out and made lively by the people—the talent—that work within. High-growth organizations need high-growth individuals; they are the lifeblood of progress. If you are not proactively managing your people for their growth and engagement, then your organization is not adequately armed for battle in a highly competitive world.

Let’s examine the challenge of constant change to illustrate the point.

Change is rolling over all of us, all the time, both personally and professionally. We don’t have to like it, though much of it we do. Regardless, we aren’t going to change change; it’s here to stay. The real question is whether we’re being submerged under the rolling wave front, or are harnessing its power and energy and riding the wave to get where we want to go. Are we managing change, or does it manage us?

Are we leading change or merely being carried along in the current, soon to be left behind on the shore like so much sea wrack?

How do we meet the modern challenge of constant change?

How do we calibrate our organizations to benefit from change, to use its energy to propel us forward?

The short and simple answer is, we calibrate our people to be change agents and to benefit from change themselves.

Organizations only do what their people do.

FOLLOWING THE S CURVE The S curve was popularized by E.M. Rogers in the 1960s.

He used it to model the diffusion of new technologies through the marketplace. We’ve adapted it to illustrate the unpredictable process of human growth as individuals surf their personal “S Curve of Learning.” It helps model how people grow and respond to change.

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• Then comes an ascent up the steep back of the curve.

Growth and progress are rapid while learning continues after a basic competency has been achieved. This is a sweet spot of high engagement and greatest productivity.

• Finally, growth and learning flatten out again as the potential of the learning curve is exhausted at its high end.

Mastery has been achieved. Complacency, boredom, and stagnation—disengagement—are on the near horizon.

Your organization is a collection of S Curves of Learning.

Every job, every role is its own S curve. Every employee is working on a personal S curve. Once you know where individuals are on their curve, you understand what this means for their personal growth and their potential to be change agents within your organization.

As we have analyzed and aggregated data from our S-Curve Locator (scurvelocator.com), a tool that identifies where individuals are on their current S curve, we are seeing a pattern among high-growth organizations: approximately 15% of employees are working at the launch point of their curve, approximately 70% are situated along the high-growth sweet spot, and the final 15% have mastered their role and are preparing to jump to a new learning curve. You want to maximize the growth opportunity along each curve, and when people are no longer growing—and therefore, no longer engaged—you facilitate their movement to a new curve.

GAINING MOMENTUM ON THE S CURVE Because high-growth organizations need high-growth individuals, here are suggestions for helping the people in your organization build momentum along their current S curve: Hire for high potential, rather than maximum proficiency. Many, even most, managers resist this idea as counterintuitive. But I can’t emphasize enough how important it is in combatting the persistently high levels of employee disengagement that are reported year after year.

Reevaluate every position, every time it needs to be filled. The world has changed since the last time you hired; make sure you are revising your job descriptions. If you aren’t evolving

and adapting, but simply regurgitating what has been advertised before, you’re shortchanging the opportunity for positive change.

The common practice of inflating the requirements for a position and then hiring the most qualified—read overqualified—candidate means we onboard a new worker who will soon be bored and dissatisfied with his or her work.

This leads to both poor productivity and rapid turnover.

How can we expect to be the beneficiaries of change when a significant percentage of our workforce, including recent hires, are more engaged seeking new employment elsewhere than they are in working for us?

Overstating the requirements for a job may simplify the work of HR by limiting the number of applicants, but it wastes growth potential. As “How Degree Inflation Weakens the Economy,” a January 8, 2018 article in Forbes observes, it’s bad for organizations, workers, and the larger economy.

Instead, hire someone who will be challenged by the role and growing from the outset of his or her tenure with your firm.

Always consider internal movement of employees; potential is most readily evaluated as you observe people at work over the course of time. There is no method of screening outside applicants that will give you the same insight, so don’t succumb to the temptation to always look for someone new and shiny to hire externally. Keep talented employees for as long as possible by providing them with new learning curves in-house. They’ll keep growing and so will your organization.

Understand where your employees are on their S Curve of Learning and manage appropriately. Here are some considerations for the three primary phases: Launch point. If you’ve hired for potential rather than proficiency, an employee at the launch point level of the

S Curve of Learning should experience considerable challenge. I want to clarify that I am not talking about entrylevel positions only; I am talking about the launch point of all types of positions, whether a recent entrant into the workforce or a new C-suite executive. Periodically, everyone should be in this stage again for ongoing growth.

High challenge—with the amount to be learned and the perception of slow growth that accompany it—means that employees in the entry-level phase in their curve may require extra support to help manage frustration and avoid excessive discouragement. Metrics should measure growth in the role, as opposed to objective overall performance. Managers should be monitoring to determine if the employee is on the wrong curve. If the employee is not able to bring his or her strengths to work, then tweaking or outright change may be required.

Though progress may be slow, it should be taking place.

One of the best ways to show support at the launch point is to value inexperience. At the entry level of an S curve, employees aren’t blinded by the familiar and therefore are capable of asking questions like “Why do you do it like this?”

Such questions lead to innovation and should be encouraged, which is why your team needs 15% of its people on the launch point of the curve.

Sweet spot. After six months or so, depending on the complexity of a role, an employee should have developed a basic level of competence and be poised for an explosion of growth. Both individual workers and their teams/ organizations reap great benefits in this phase. It is a time of rapid learning, creativity, innovation, high engagement, and productivity. Work is fun and rewarding.

Key to managing employees in the sweet spot is to extend the length of time they spend here. Thoughtfully provide stretch assignments to stimulate additional learning. Shake AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 39

up and refresh the work environment by changing team configurations and offering new training opportunities and interesting projects and problems to work on. Incentivize the achievement of milestones and reward employees for their performance. Because they know enough but not too much, they are now capable of both asking and answering the questions that are the raw materials of innovation—hence the need for 70% of your people to be in the sweet spot.

Make sure employees know they are valued, and proactively have frequent discussions about their next step in the organization. Understand their ambitions for themselves and what they hope to achieve. According to Gallup research released in March 2019, more than 50% of employees who leave their organization report that conversations about their job satisfaction and future opportunities have been absent.

High end. Though it may seem that your most valuable employees are those at the high end of the curve, alas, this is not necessarily the case. It’s hard to argue with the importance of those who have mastered their role. But this is a precarious position—the plateau can quickly become a precipice. Monitor enthusiasm levels as this phase approaches. Does the employee feel there is more to learn in the role, or is their perception and yours that they are exhausting their potential? Ideally, the manager will know what the employee hopes to do next, and the employee will know what the organization has to offer him or her. I reiterate: Have these conversations before performance begins to slide.

Neither a good employee nor the team is advantaged if plans are not made before that.

Because they are in a position to answer questions and act as a stabilizer for the team, you want 15% of your people at the top of the S curve. Use your high enders to provide training and mentoring to employees on the launch point. Being a mentor is a learning curve of its own and can help extend the lifespan of an employee in the current role until a jump to a new curve can be made. If there is nowhere for a talented employee to move in-house, it may be time to help broker an advantageous move for the individual to another employer. But be unconventional in your thinking. Remember, you want employees to jump to new curves where they will have a lot to learn.

If you want to manage your people along the S curve, to plot where people are on the S curve, and then optimize those curves, go to scurvelocator.com to get started.

Recognize that you can’t do the same thing and get different results. This old cliché has never been more applicable to how we manage than it is today. A changing business environment and world mean we must evolve our management techniques as well. It can’t be business as usual if we want to be prepared and competitive in the face of change, much less if we want to lead change. Don’t hire the same old way, don’t expect people to want to stay unless you help them stay, and don’t have a “we like you right where you are” attitude toward the organic, growing, learning machines that work for you.

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Develop your team leaders and managers to be talent spotters, watching for potential and imagining possibilities. Facilitate disruptive employees who are proactive about their own career development and personal growth and nudge talented workers who may be a little more hesitant about embracing change to do so. Green-light new ideas and innovation as much as possible, and beware the naysayers who would thwart change.

Adopt the mindset of a cycling team, where everyone helps the fittest riders move into the lead.

In my experience, most organizations are not doing what they should to reward talent-developers. Who in your organization is willing to encourage the people who could replace them?

Who promotes a lot of subordinates from their department and is willing to broker moves for new learning? These types of managers add value to the organization by promoting individual growth, and they build morale and momentum by helping valuable employees disrupt themselves internally, rather than losing them to competitors.

Think long term. I estimate the average shelf life of an employee on an S Curve of Learning to be three to four years.

Then change is needed to stimulate additional growth. An organization full of stagnant employees will also be stagnant.

We can’t afford not to change.

It’s a challenge to accept this fact and act accordingly. There are impacts to near-term productivity that occur when we move highly competent employees to new roles where they are not nearly as adept. Very early in my career, I worked for a public library in a modestly sized but rapidly growing community. Library use was skyrocketing, creating demand for more funding, more materials, more programs, more employees, and so on. The pace of change and growth were a problem—what the library director called “a classy problem.” It’s the kind of problem we want to have in our organizations. Moving employees to new S Curves of Learning precipitates short-term growing pains, but they are nothing to compare with the pain of ossification and degeneration we will experience if we don’t keep our people growing.

The only question is whether your valuable employees will change for you or away from you. Whether they will learn for you or elsewhere. Innovate internally or externally. You can harness the power of human learning and growth to propel your organization into the future. High-growth organizations need high-growth individuals. Organizations that want to grow make people growth their top priority. AQ Whitney Johnson is the CEO of WLJ Advisors and one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. She is an expert on helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. An innovation and disruption theorist, she is the author of the bestselling Build an “A” Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (Harvard Business Review, 2018), and Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work (Bibliomotion, 2015).

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MULTITASKING and

MINDFULNESS

Can They Work Together?

BY DIAN GRIESEL

In 2020, technology will cause more distractions than ever before.

Every buzz, beep, ping, and chime will shift focus from the tasks at hand. All of this will majorly impact short- and longterm productivity, according to numerous studies. As such, it’s no surprise that literature is increasingly addressing the importance of mindfulness in daily life, particularly in the workplace. Simultaneously, honing the ability to multitask, a trait often attributed to successful employees and their managers, is still highly valued.

So the questions arise: What is mindfulness? Is it achievable?

And can a successful manager be both mindful and someone who multitasks?

HOW DISTRACTIONS CHANGE THE BRAIN Numerous studies have indicated that distractions aren’t fleeting. A 2007 study conducted by researchers at Microsoft and the University of Illinois, “Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis, and Directions,” found that people are spending more time than they realize responding to alerts. Even if the intention is to respond quickly and resume the task immediately, these distractions are proving to take up significantly more time as it becomes difficult to refocus on the original task at hand, ultimately requiring more time to complete a job.

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Another study in 2015 by researchers at Florida State University, “The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification,” discusses how alerts, even ones that are very short-lived, can cause “mind wandering” or thoughts that are not relevant to the task at hand. This damages performance.

Further, even when people do not pick up their phone when an alert appears, the same study found these alerts significantly disrupt the completion of attention-demanding tasks.

Finally, although the 2014 study “Higher Media Multi-Tasking Activity Is Associated with Smaller Gray-Matter Density in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex,”didn’t prove causality, researchers at the University of Sussex found that density of gray matter in the region of the brain known to be responsible for cognitive and emotional control functions, the anterior cingulate cortex, was decreased in those who are high-media multitaskers (using several media devices at the same time), which was significant enough to draw connections.

MINDFULNESS GAINS IN POPULARITY How can we counteract the effects of distractions in the electronic age? There has been much discussion about the

importance of mindfulness, led not only by celebrities but also successful executives and entrepreneurs.

to employees at Aetna, the corporate culture changed for the better.

Oprah Winfrey, on her website Oprah.com, has discussed the impact meditation has had on her life (“What Oprah Knows About the Power of Meditation”) and has developed online programming to encourage others to do the same.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld frequently talks in interviews about transcendental meditation and his daily practice. Perhaps one of the most influential advocates for mindfulness is Arianna Huffington. Huffington has said that mindfulness is what has helped her through a midcareer crisis, allowing her to refocus her priorities.

When an unnamed director of a multinational pharmaceutical company received poor grades for leadership effectiveness and engagement—despite making an effort to spend time interacting with his direct reports—he turned to 10 minutes of a daily mindfulness practice, according to Harvard Business Review’s December 2017 article, “If You Aspire to Be a Great Leader, Be Present.” The result? His colleagues found him more engaging, inspiring and nicer. Even more interesting, the article reported that while the executive received better feedback, it turned out he was spending much less time with people. So in this case, “quality time” was better than “quantity time” because the executive was fully present and not thinking about any of the countless things that occupy one’s headspace at any given time.

Beyond celebrities, numerous business leaders have espoused the benefits of being mindful and practicing some form of meditation. Tech industry leaders such as Jeff Weiner (Yahoo, LinkedIn) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce) are proponents of the practice, according to Inc.’s September 2016 article, “11 Wildly Successful Entrepreneurs Who Swear by Daily Meditation.” Even Wall Street executives, such as Ray Dalio, the founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates, have been known to meditate. He joins insurance industry executive Mark T. Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna, who used meditation to help get himself back to work after a skiing accident, according to a New York Times November 2018 article, “Talking Mindfulness on the C.E.O. Beat.” The same article notes that after mindfulness classes were offered

The anecdotal examples above are backed up by the latest scientific findings. A study titled “Effects of Meditation Experience on Functional Connectivity of Distributed Brain Networks,” conducted by researchers at Emory University and published in 2012 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, set out to determine the effects that meditation might have on various attentional brain regions. It concluded that people with more meditation experience had increased connectivity in various parts of the brain that may be involved in the development of cognitive skills such as ignoring distraction and keeping attention. What’s even more interesting is that AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 43

“ A study of 267 participants, conducted by a professor at Dominican University of California, found that more than 70% achieved their goals after writing them down and sending them to a friend.”

the altered brain connectivity was observed in experienced meditators, even when they weren’t actually meditating— leading the researchers to believe that cognitive abilities gained while meditating transfer into daily life.

Another piece, “Contemplating Mindfulness at Work: An Integrative Review,” published in the Journal of Management in 2016, looked at some of the 4,000 scholarly articles on the subject published to date. Co-authored by researchers at nine different universities, the article noted that 13% of U.S. workers report engaging in mindfulness-enhancing practices. It discusses key findings about the benefits of mindfulness in the workplace. For example, it found “mindfulness has been associated with improved attentional stability (sustaining attention on a current target with less mind wandering), better control of attention (selecting appropriate targets from among a field of potential targets), and attentional efficiency (economical use and allocation of attentional resources).” It encourages researchers to continue to explore the impact of mindfulness on work performance, as initial data has so far supported it.

NOW, HOW TO ACTUALLY ACHIEVE MINDFULNESS What exactly is mindfulness? The academic definition, according to the Journal of Management article referenced above, is “clear-minded attention to and awareness of what is perceived in the present.” So does this mean we have to plop down on a floor cushion, chant words that aren’t understood, and breathe deeply? Is it possible to be mindful in a fastpaced workplace, or is it unrealistic when many people are holding us accountable, demanding immediate answers and responses (more on that later)? The fact is, mindfulness can be practiced in many different forms, in any place.

To me, mindfulness means truly listening and thinking.

Listening not only to what other people are telling you, but

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also to what they’re not telling you—then taking the time to think about the implications of those words before reacting.

Listening to the voice in your own head, while also listening to the environment that surrounds you. For example, a colleague may come to you with a problem. Your initial reaction and response might not be the best because of what’s going on in your environment. Maybe you just received disappointing news. Maybe you have a child who’s not feeling well. Maybe you’re simply focused on another deadline or goal that’s requiring your attention.

I believe better decisions are made by listening and pausing and then taking the time to reflect. In my opinion, one of the most underutilized tools in business is the phrase “Let me get back to you on that” or “I’d like to think that one over.”

MINDFULNESS FOR BUSY PEOPLE As noted above, while integrating time to sit down, get comfortable, and meditate is ideal, it is not always realistic— or necessary. Those who aren’t “sitting still” types can still practice mindfulness in a variety of ways, such as simply taking a few deep breaths with your eyes closed.

Another option is to take a walk while identifying points of tension within the body and gently stretching.

Simultaneously, activate other senses: What are some background sounds you hear? How about the smells?

(Granted, if you live in New York City, like I do, you will always notice the smell, particularly on a hot summer day!) But the point is to calmly focus. For those who still need “a task,” give yourself a goal like discovering one thing that you’ve never noticed before. Find a bird, squirrel, cloud, a friendly face, a fancy-looking car—anything that makes you smile.

Journaling can be another way to gather thoughts and focus.

In business, this can help center the mind on specific goals.

A study of 267 participants, conducted by a professor at

Dominican University of California, found that more than 70% achieved their goals after writing them down and sending them to a friend. In contrast, only 35% of those who kept the goals to themselves and never wrote them down were successful. Of course, I believe the best way to write is to literally write—not type on a smartphone or computer— because of the distractions involved.

For those who prefer books as their guides, reading is another mindfulness strategy, if done selectively. Many books in the self-help genre promise that readers will be magically transformed. The pitch is always positioned as if someone else—not us—has all the answers, which need to be revealed to us so that we can become as evolved and enlightened as the author. But I tend to advise the executives that I work with to avoid these types of books because they don’t allow readers to wholly embrace their own unique greatness.

The best inspirational material helps readers to understand themselves, while encouraging them to take full responsibility for the individual characteristics and qualities that distinguish each of us from another. I believe that as people become more mindful of who they truly are, they can approach their everyday lives with greater acceptance.

Imperfections can be viewed as misunderstandings, and— perhaps most important—we can remind ourselves that we are all complicated, unique, feeling-full humans who are trying to navigate life. So rather than a “self-help” book, an alternative might be to find a book of inspirational essays that allow for reflection first, rather than immediate action. That is the goal of my book, The Silver Disobedience Playbook: 365 Inspirations for Living and Loving Agelessly (DGI, 2019), which has been used to practice mindfulness by people in all walks of life and careers—from those just finishing college and entering the workforce to established executives who sit on boards of international, publicly traded companies.

Practicing mindfulness can also go hand-in-hand with practicing gratefulness. Although it is not a new concept and the benefits may seem obvious, showing gratitude is something that is often lost in the modern work environment.

As you breathe, walk, write, or read—try to also reflect on what you’re grateful for.

DOES MINDFULNESS MEAN NO MORE MULTITASKING? Before diving into whether or not multitasking is desirable, we must ask ourselves why would managers want someone to multitask? As an entrepreneur who has run my own business for 30 years and as an executive who has worked with hundreds of CEOs, I have found that multitasking is not a skill, it is a tactic used in an attempt to satisfy demands to get as much work done as fast as possible. Instead, to prevent a sacrifice of quality, I prefer to encourage people to work smarter, not harder. Practicing mindfulness helps achieve this.

“ Mindfulness does not mean doing less work. It is a means to allow the subconscious mind to prioritize, push back, delegate, and trust while ensuring that the work gets done. In fact, many who practice mindfulness describe it as the ultimate resource for uncovering new creative solutions to solve challenges.”

Mindfulness does not mean doing less work. It is a means to allow the subconscious mind to prioritize, push back, delegate, and trust while ensuring that the work gets done.

Regarding prioritizing, mindfulness will help set your own priorities while understanding those of others as well. In fact, many who practice mindfulness describe it as the ultimate resource for uncovering new creative solutions to solve challenges.

SETTING AN EXAMPLE Encouraging employees to be mindful does not mean requiring everyone to have meditation breaks. But it does mean having more openness. It means being OK with not always receiving an instant response to an email, text, or Slack thread—particularly after typical business hours (and yes, those should be defined!)—unless in the event of an emergency or exception. It means encouraging employees to take time to process, time to think, and time to take breaks. It means providing reasons for people to meet faceto-face to tackle challenges efficiently, but it does not mean having a meeting just to have a meeting (the ultimate recipe for wandering minds).

The data is clear—mindfulness at work is not a fad like the latest diet. It should be perceived as a fundamental skill for career growth and success. AQ Dian Griesel is a bestselling author, a businesswoman who has advised more than 1,000 executives on messaging strategy, a living agelessly advocate, and model. She is a member of the Authors Guild, PEN America, the Hypnotherapists Union, and the American Counseling Association.

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Building Better Relationships Through

EVERYDAY NEGOTIATIONS

BY AIMEE KOVAL

The word “negotiation” calls to mind images of hard-bargaining suits around an impressive conference room table, each fighting to divvy up the pie to his or her greatest advantage.

We think of movies like Wall Street, where the Gordon Gekkos of the world drive deals home through sheer force of will and reductionist philosophies, crowing “It’s all about bucks, kid.

The rest is conversation.”

He was right about one thing: Negotiation requires conversation.

“A negotiation isn’t a battle,” says Brian Gunia, PhD, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, in the school’s March 2018 blog post “Top 4 negotiation skills professionals need right now.” “It’s a problem-solving exercise. Everyone’s at the table because they have some interests in common and some in conflict.

Cooperation lets us discover the common interests and come to terms that benefit all involved. Competition allows us to secure outcomes that satisfy our own needs.”

Many of our most challenging negotiations don’t occur at the boardroom table, but at the dinner table. Whether it’s a discussion with your spouse about family finances, a political

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debate with a not-so-favorite uncle, or a challenge from your kids about bedtime rules, we all negotiate in some way, every day. From this perspective, we come to see negotiation in a new light, and everyday interactions as a series of micronegotiations that, over time, weave the fabric of our relationships.

TAKING YOUR EMOTIONAL TEMPERATURE Traditional wisdom has it that emotions run highest when the stakes are highest. And because we tend to be myopic creatures with a limited appetite for understanding the internal lives of others—especially when our positions lie in opposition—we are prone to making faulty assumptions about just what those stakes are, and why they may be important.

Consider the performance review: According to Gallup’s 2017 research shared in “Re-Engineering Performance Management,” “Only 2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.” It’s easy to imagine why the person

on the receiving end of the equation might feel anxious.

A poor performance review could mean no raise, fewer professional opportunities, or even no job at all.

Beyond the monetary implications, performance reviews can churn up all kinds of emotions fueled by power dynamics and challenges to our very identities—and not just for the reviewee. The stakes are highly subjective: The same raise that an employer sees as a desirable carrot (or a stick, if withheld) might not motivate an employee who most desires autonomy in his or her daily work schedule.

When feedback begins and ends with a position (a demand, or the “what”) without exploring interests (the reasons behind the demand, or the “why”), we set ourselves up for failure.

In their book Thanks for the Feedback (Penguin Group, 2014), Harvard Negotiation Project authors Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen cite three feedback triggers that can act as both obstacles and roadmaps to better communications: • Truth triggers “are set off by the substance of the feedback itself—it’s somehow off, unhelpful, or simply untrue.”

• Relationship triggers “are tripped by the particular person who is giving the feedback.”

• Identity triggers “are all about us. Whether the feedback is right or wrong, wise or witless, something about it has caused our identity—our sense of who we are—to come undone.”

It follows, then, that the same feedback, delivered in different contexts or by different people, might yield significantly different responses.

While a longtime co-worker’s advice on how to tackle a complicated project might be received as a welcome bit of wisdom, the same feedback from a newly minted manager several years your junior might not generate the same feelings of gratitude. But dig a little deeper, and you may discover that the co-worker is also feeling threatened as soon-to-be obsolete and waging a silent battle against the forces of change—personified by that newly minted manager, who may also be waging his own battle against impostor syndrome and entrenched systems that have lost their efficacy.

What may seem on the surface to be a clear-cut case of wisdom versus inexperience may in fact be a complicated tangle of interests and emotions.

BUILDING TRUST The quality of a relationship can be measured in direct proportion to the level of trust felt by the people in that relationship. It is a “felt experience,” informed by factors over which we have limited control, such as upbringing and cultural context, as well as those that can be actively adapted, such as our choice of words and behavior.

“We used to feel more connected to our neighbors in part because they were also often our colleagues,” posits philosopher Alain de Botton in his book Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion (Vintage, 2012). “Home was not always an anonymous dormitory to be reached late and left early. Neighbors became well acquainted not so much because they were adept conversationalists, but because they had to bring in the hay AMA QUARTERLY I WINTER 2020 I 47

or put up the school roof together, such projects naturally and surreptitiously helping to foster connections.”

We see these forces at work when natural disasters strike and communities come together as one, working side by side to help those they may have never met, regardless of ideological differences. We extol the virtues of the family dinner, understanding at a gut level (however imperfect our execution may be) that there is some special sauce in simply connecting at a human level. But can something as extraordinary as communities coming together during a natural disaster or as seemingly mundane as a family dinner be compared to conflicts that are born of deeply held and opposing convictions?

As it turns out, the very existence of strong convictions can signal trustworthiness—even between those who fundamentally disagree on principle. In a series of five studies published in 2019 in Psychological Science, Julian Zlatev, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, “found evidence that people trust others who demonstrate strong feelings about social issues, even when they disagree with or dislike them.”

Former U.S. Senators Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Tom Daschle, D-S.D., would likely concur, sharing their thoughts on coming together through conflict in a 2019 interview for NPR’s All Things Considered. “I do believe that big moments, important issues, give people an opportunity to rise to the occasion and do things maybe they wouldn’t have done otherwise,” said Lott. “[O]ne of the secrets, I think, to our relationship, is Tom and I talked all the time.” “[W]e used to have two small [Senate tables] at lunch,” added Daschle. “And you’d come and sit family-style, and you’d sit with as many Republicans as Republicans would sit with Democrats. And somehow they closed that little lunchroom down for some reason...I think those off-therecord, completely without staff, member-only lunches did a lot to create the kind of opportunity for people to get to know one another, maybe build relationships and have a candid conversation that doesn’t exist today very often.”

EMPHASIZING THE “RELENTLESS WE” As colleagues on opposing sides of the political aisle, Daschle and Lott embodied philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s “porcupine dilemma”—that in order to stay warm and survive, porcupines will huddle in the cold, but not so closely that they will be pricked by the others’ quills.

Daschle and Lott nurtured their relationship through the everyday experience of breaking bread together, a timehonored tradition observed whenever we hope to prioritize cooperation over conflict.

In his book Human Universals (McGraw-Hill, 1991), UC-Santa Barbara Professor of Anthropology Donald Brown describes human universals as comprising “those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there

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are no known exception.” His research revealed universal commonalities as wide-ranging as facial expressions, our observance of rites of passage, and our tendency to see ourselves as part of a collective identity or to overestimate our own objectivity. It is by understanding and leveraging the power of these human universals that we can begin to forge better relationships through a shared positive identity, whether as families, citizens of a community, or colleagues.

To be sure, human universals can also compel us to conflict.

“In the course of a conflict, you may become so focused on defeating the other side that you take on a negative identity: You define your identity in opposition to theirs,” says Daniel Shapiro, founder of the Harvard International Negotiation Program in his book Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts (Penguin Books, 2017). By emphasizing what Shapiro terms the “Relentless We,” we can reframe conflict as a shared challenge. “It is not you versus the other side,” advises Shapiro, but rather each party “attempting to resolve the conflict together.”

START WHERE YOU ARE When relationships are strained, morale is low, and the very idea of trust-building seems like a fool’s errand, it can feel disingenuous to take steps to improve relations. Tempting as it may be to take your new active listening skills out for a spin at your direct report’s next performance review, good intentions don’t necessarily produce good results.

Author Kim Scott advises in Radical Candor (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) against offering up insincere praise, which she characterizes as “an attempt to push the other person’s emotional buttons in return for some personal gain.” No better is insincerity’s arguably less manipulative cousin, “ruinous empathy,” according to Scott, wherein “niceness” becomes a means of avoiding tension or discomfort rather than one of many tools to better our understanding of and relationships with each other.

Justin Wright, CEO of Habitus Incorporated, a Bostonbased negotiation and conflict management consultancy, recalls the advice of a former Navy SEAL on the concept of “practicing at sea level.” “The time to practice your maneuvers for the first time is not under 100 meters of water,” remembers Wright. “Start slow. Ask about interests with appreciative inquiry. Listen with presence. Reflect back to be sure you have understood the other person’s interests, whether or not you agree with them. If you can work with people in a way that strengthens the relationship—even when you’re giving bad news—you’re going to succeed.” AQ Aimee Koval is an alumna of the Harvard Program on Negotiation and president of Metis Consulting Group, a certified B Corp and New York State Benefit Corporation. In addition to leading her team of IT management consultants and software developers, Koval specializes in strategic planning and negotiation, operational design and development, and social impact entrepreneurship.

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