Issue 10
1300 Piccard Drive, Suite LL 14 • Rockville, MD 20850
Spring 2021
Business Supplement More Productive in 2021: 4 Things to Stop Doing and 4 Things to Start Doing How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability Practical Cybersecurity for Non-Cybersecurity Professionals Managing Risk in 2021 and Beyond … Is Your Company Prepared? Turn Your Team’s Frustration Into Motivation The Future of Team Leadership Is Multimodal How Leaders Can Optimize Teams’ Emotional Landscapes
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Table of Contents
Business Supplement 2021
8 More Productive in 2021: 4 Things to Stop Doing and 4 Things to Start Doing
26 The Future of Team Leadership Is Multimodal
By Justin Hale, Vital Smarts It’s 4:55 pm and you’re ending your workday. You need to transition out of work and leave to pick up dinner for your family. As you take a minute to review your day, it occurs to you that you didn’t finish a single key task you intended to finish when you started that morning. And yet, you feel completely exhausted. If you want to avoid this productivity letdown and at 4:55 feel both exhausted and productive, here are four things to stop doing and four things to start doing.
10 How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability
By Ron Carucci, Navalent Accountability processes are the formal and informal ways that leaders talk about, assess, and affirm the contributions of those they lead and the improvements they can make to strengthen those contributions. They include everything from annual performance appraisals to routine check-ins with your boss. Even in the face of deeply flawed formal processes, leaders can ensure that their employees feel that their work is honored while simultaneously embracing opportunities to improve.
13 Practical Cybersecurity for Non-Cybersecurity Professionals
By Michael Reinert, PhD., Reinert Consulting Group Cybersecurity is no longer something you can ignore. Unfortunately, the information about cybersecurity is typically confusing because it is not presented to businesspeople in a language they already understand. Gain a new perspective about cybersecurity so you can make more informed decisions that better protect you while making the proper investment in resources.
18 Managing Risk in 2021 and Beyond … Is Your Company Prepared?
By Michael J. Highum, CPCU, McGowan Insurance Group As business owners and managers, we see these influences continue to penetrate our organizations, creating plenty of challenges but opportunities as well. Our firm has long preached about the need for owners and managers within the AWT framework to be proactive in how they manage the variety of risks facing their companies, and that is truer today than ever. Risk Management has become a core attribute of the best companies. Appropriate attention and successful implementation can help prepare these organizations in dramatic ways for the changes that are coming.
By Robert Hooijberg, IMD Business School, and Michael Watkins, Genesis Effective leadership in this new hybrid world requires different skills that go beyond traditional team leadership. Specifically, organizations will need leaders who can operate well across two distinct modes. For much of the time, they will operate in virtual coordination mode. This means establishing goals, monitoring progress, driving information sharing, and sustaining connections among colleagues working remotely. When their teams periodically come together to engage in true collaboration, leaders will need to operate in face-toface collaboration mode, fostering deep learning, innovation, acculturation, and dedication.
30 How Leaders Can Optimize Teams’ Emotional Landscapes
By Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Christina Bradley, and Lindred Greer, University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business Leaders can no longer avoid taking an active role in architecting emotional landscapes—the collective composition of employee sentiments. Because emotional landscapes directly influence how employees make sense of situations, tasks, and what actions to take, they can help or hinder the pursuit of organizational strategic objectives. By supporting emotional expression within their teams, leaders can help their organizations function at their best. The tools available to leaders for navigating such emotional landscapes with their teams are largely outdated strategies such as encouraging general suppression of emotions at work or offering generic pep talks. Leaders need a playbook for responding to employees’ emotional states with more nuance and, critically, in ways that are tailored to the situation. We offer four plays—to nurture emotions, to align them, to acknowledge them, and to diversify them—that allow leaders to manage the loaded emotional settings they’re working in and help creativity and productivity thrive.
24 Turn Your Team’s Frustration Into Motivation
By Dane Jensen, Third Factor Most leaders view the negative emotions of an upset team member as a contagion to contain or a problem to solve. But our work with sports coaches and business executives has shown that leaders might be better served by a different approach: helping team members channel their negative emotions and turn them into powerful tools for unlocking potential.
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Calendar of Events
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President’s Message
34 Advertisement Index
the ANALYST Business Supplement 2021
1300 Piccard Drive, Suite LL 14 • Rockville, MD 20850 (301) 740-1421 • (301) 990-9771 (fax) • www.awt.org
2021 AWT Board of Directors
President Michael Bourgeois, CWT President-Elect Matt Jensen, CWT Secretary Stephen C. Hallier, CWT Treasurer Noah Baskin Immediate Past President Thomas Brandvold, CWT Directors John D. Caloritis, CWT Stephanie Keck, CWT Mark Coldren, CWT Fred Shurtz Ex-Officio Supplier Representative Garrett S. Garcia Past Presidents Jack Altschuler Bruce T. Ketrick Jr., CWT John Baum, CWT Bruce T. Ketrick Sr., CWT R. Trace Blackmore, CWT, LEED AP Ron Knestaut D.C. “Chuck” Brandvold, CWT Robert D. Lee, CWT Brent W. Chettle, CWT Mark T. Lewis, CWT Dennis Clayton Steven MacCarthy, CWT Bernadette Combs, CWT, LEED AP Anthony J. McNamara, CWT Matt Copthorne, CWT James Mulloy James R. Datesh Alfred Nickels John E. Davies, CWT Scott W. Olson, CWT Jay Farmerie, CWT William E. Pearson II, CWT Gary Glenna William C. Smith Charles D. Hamrick Jr., CWT Marc Vermeulen, CWT Joseph M. Hannigan Jr., CWT David Wagenfuhr Mark R. Juhl Casey Walton, B.Ch.E, CWT Brian Jutzi, CWT Larry A. Webb
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The Analyst Staff
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The Analyst is published quarterly as the official publication of the Association of Water Technologies. Copyright 2021 by the Association of Water Technologies. Materials may not be reproduced without written permission. Contents of the articles are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily express the policies and opinions of the publisher, editor or AWT. Authors are responsible for assuring that the articles are properly released for classification and proprietary information. All advertising will be subject to publisher’s approval, and advertisers will agree to indemnify and relieve publisher of loss or claims resulting from advertising contents. Editorial material in The Analyst may be reproduced in whole or part with prior written permission. Request permission by writing to: Editor, The Analyst, 1300 Piccard Drive, Suite LL 14, Rockville, MD 20850, USA. Annual subscription rate is $100 per year in the U.S. (4 issues). Please add $25 for Canada and Mexico. International subscriptions are $200 in U.S. funds.
Calendar of Events Association Events 2021 Business Owners Meeting
September 21, 2021 Providence Convention Center and Omni Hotel Providence, Rhode Island
2021 Annual Convention & Exposition
September 22–25, 2021 Providence Convention Center and Omni Hotel Providence, Rhode Island
2022 Annual Convention & Exposition September 21–24, 2022 Vancouver Convention Centre Vancouver, Canada
2023 Annual Convention & Exposition
October 4–7, 2023 Amway Grand Hotel and Grand Rapids Convention Center Grand Rapids, Michigan Also, please note that the following AWT committees meet on a monthly basis. All times shown are Eastern Time. To become active in one of these committees, please contact us at (301) 740-1421. Second Tuesday of each month, 11:00 am – Legislative/Regulatory Committee Second Tuesday of each month, 2:30 pm – Convention Committee Second Wednesday of each month, 11:00 am – Business Resources Committee Second Friday of each month, 10:00 am – Special Projects Subcommittee Second Friday of each month, 11:00 am – Cooling Subcommittee Second Friday of each month, 2:00 pm – Pretreatment Subcommittee Third Monday of each month, 9:00 am – Certification Committee Third Monday of each month, 3:30 pm – Young Professionals Task Force Third Tuesday of each month, 3:00 pm – Education Subcommittee Third Friday of each month, 9:00 am – Boiler Subcommittee Third Friday of each month, 10:00 am – Technical Committee Quarterly (call for meeting dates), 11:00 am – Wastewater Subcommittee
Other Industry Events
AWWA, Annual Conference & Expo, June 14–17, 2021 (Virtual) ASHRAE, Annual Conference, June 28–30, 2021 (Virtual) BOMA, International Conference and Expo, July 18–21, 2021, Boston, Massachusetts ASHE, Annual Convention & Expo., August 1–4, 2021, Anaheim, California ACS, Fall Meeting & Expo, August 22–26, 2021, Atlanta, Georgia USGBC, GreenBuild, September 21–23, 2021, San Diego, California WEFTEC, Annual Technical Exhibition & Conference, October 16–20, 2021, Chicago, Illinois IWC, Annual Conference, November 7–11, 2021, Scottsdale, Arizona RETA, Annual Convention, November 9–11, 2021, Schaumburg, Illinois
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the ANALYST Business Supplement 2021
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President’s Message
By Michael Bourgeois, CWT
This past year has challenged all of us personally and professionally, yet it’s amazing to see how quickly our industry adapted. Whether it was adopting new procedures when working with customers, adapting to new sets of regulations that varied from local government to local government, or creating new product lines, our industry rose to the challenge. While we missed having the AWT Business Owners Meeting in February, we are excited to hold it on September 21 in Providence, Rhode Island, the day before the Annual Convention begins. I encourage you to sign up. This meeting gives you concentrated time to focus on your business and to network with your fellow water treatment company owners and suppliers. Some topics this year include maximizing your company’s value, attracting and retaining workers, creating a strong company culture, and a legal roundtable covering a variety of topics of interest to business owners. In the meantime, please enjoy this Business Supplement. You’ll find articles in this issue on how to be more productive, employee accountability, cybersecurity, motivating your team, and the future of leadership. We hope you find the articles in the Supplement helpful. As always, I welcome your feedback and can be reached at mbourgeois@chemcoprod.com.
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2021 ANNUAL CONVENTION & EXPOSITION SEPTEMBER 22-25, 2021 Rhode Island Convention Center | Providence, Rhode Island
Join us in person at the AWT 2021 Convention & Exposition. At this event 1,200 industry leaders learn new ways to lead high-performing companies, improve sales, and better understand the challenges facing all of us. These interactions with one another are vital to staying current and energized. The three-day educational program includes knowledgeable subject-matter experts to ensure that you get the essential updates, fresh strategies, and practical advice you need.
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More Productive in 2021: 4 Things to Stop Doing and 4 Things to Start Doing By Justin Hale, Vital Smarts
It’s 4:55 pm and you’re ending your workday. You need to transition out of work and leave to pick up dinner for your family. As you take a minute to review your day, it occurs to you that you didn’t finish a single key task you intended to finish when you started that morning. And yet, you feel completely exhausted. You think to yourself, “How did I not get anything done? I feel like I’ve been running around all day. Ugh. I never have enough time.” How often does this happen to you? This productivity “letdown” at the end of the day is all too common—and it’s depressing. You work furiously and yet feel like you didn’t do any real work. You wonder, “What did I spend my day doing?” It feels like a blur.
• Others—“If my boss didn’t give me so much to do, then …” What if I told you none of these is the real problem? What if I told you the real issue is you? What if I told you the majority of your stress is not due to a lack of time or the volume of stuff, but to how you manage it all? I’m not saying it’s all in your head. I am saying it’s all in your habits. If you are going to succeed in this world, you have to find a way to manage everything rather than blame everything. Notice I didn’t say “do” everything, I said “manage.” Having too much on your plate and not enough time is not a new challenge. It’s not specific to COVID-19. Neither is having conflicting priorities.
Often our response to this productivity letdown is to work longer hours and burn ourselves out. Or we might engage in the blame game. The three horsemen of blame are:
If you want to avoid this productivity letdown and at 4:55 pm feel both exhausted and productive, here are four things to stop doing and four things to start doing.
• Stuff—“I’m overwhelmed by my tasks, there’s just too much to do.”
Stop checking your email first thing. Let me clarify. I’m not saying you should only look at your email once a day. I’m saying it shouldn’t be the first thing you look at. When you start your day by looking at email, your daily outlook gets distorted by the new stuff
• Time—“There’s just not enough time in the day.”
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Transition 1
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More Productive in 2021: 4 Things to Stop Doing and 4 Things to Start Doing continued
that’s popped into your inbox. All new inputs seem important and therefore override any plans you made for the day.
Start looking at your calendar and to-do lists first. Take two to three minutes each morning to review your calendar. This is the stuff you’ve committed to accomplishing and is the best data regarding how much time you have in which to do other work during the day. After reviewing your calendar, look at your to-do lists. And that’s it. Doing a quick review of your calendar and lists before checking email increases your likelihood of doing the “right” stuff throughout the day. You’ll review the new stuff with a clear view of what you’ve already deemed important.
Transition 2
Stop planning on doing 10 things in one day. Most of us pretend that somehow, between six meetings, lunch, dozens of emails to plow through, and driving the kids to school, we will find a way to accomplish 10 key tasks. It’s highly unlikely. When we give ourselves unrealistic daily goals, we set ourselves up for failure and frustration.
you can’t do it, you might say, “I’m very sorry, but I will need to decline that right now so I can focus on other key priorities.” Or you might renegotiate the request in terms of how much you do or by when. For example, “I can’t commit to having that completed by Friday, but I could start on it Friday and have it done the following Tuesday. Would that work?”
Transition 4
Stop multitasking email and work. This is one reason you never clear your email inbox. Email volume is less important than how you manage it. When you start sorting emails and then spend 20 minutes on a project that pops up in one of the emails, you end up losing time. It’s true, sooner or later you’ll need to do that project. But it’s less efficient to do it in that moment. Processing email is one task, doing the work entailed in email is another. Don’t mix the two. Schedule “email only” time for focus and efficiency. Set aside time each day to be in “email mode.” A time when you won’t do anything else but read each email and decide what the next action is. Then park the results of that decision on a list or a calendar and archive the email away. When you spend 45 minutes solely processing your inbox, for example, you get through more items, which allows you to populate your calendar and lists according to priorities, which then allows you to do more of the right stuff throughout the day.
Start making a list of three things to accomplish each day. I’ve found you can usually accomplish three things well each day. And I’m not talking about mundane or routine tasks—I’m talking about three key items that will help important projects move forward. If you have extra time, great, you can always introduce a new task. But anything beyond three is dangerously ambitious.
Transition 3
Stop saying yes to everything. Too often we think the word “yes” comes with magical powers. We think that by agreeing to every task that comes our way we’ll somehow be able to defy the odds and get it all done. It’s an illusion. Realize there is always more to be done than you can actually do. Stop saying “yes” willy-nilly, believing you’ll figure out the details later. Help your future self by not overloading your plate.
Life is unlikely to slow down any time soon. Follow these eight tips to reclaim your time, attention, and energy. Stress-free productivity is possible, but only if you control your incoming requests and existing projects rather than letting them control you. Justin Hale travels the world, speaking and training others on the GTD skills and principles. When he’s not traveling, he works on VitalSmarts’ product development team and is often the face of VitalSmarts’ award-winning classroom, virtual, and on-demand training courses. For more information, visit www.crucialskills.com.
Start declining requests and renegotiating commitments. When someone makes a request, ask a few key questions so that you fully understand what that request entails. If
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How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability By Ron Carucci, Navalent
Fewer words in corporate vernacular induce a tighter wince than “accountability,” and for good reason. Companies and leaders have grappled with what it is and how to achieve it effectively for decades. Ask anyone if they look forward to their performance evaluation or periodic check-in with their boss, and most will give an emphatic “no.”
Based on my 30 years of observing leaders who do this well, and through my research on accountability, I’ve identified three major shifts leaders need to make to ensure that the accountability experience dignifies employees’ work and challenges them to make greater achievements—without making them feel demeaned or insignificant.
Data shows that 82% of managers acknowledge they have “limited to no” ability to hold others accountable successfully, and 91% of employees would say that “effectively holding others accountable” is one of their company’s top leadership-development needs. Research also confirms how insignificant today’s accountability systems make employees feel. Gallup found that only 14% of employees feel their performance is managed in a way that motivates them, 26% get feedback less than once per year, 21% feel their performance metrics are within their control, and 40% feel as if their manager holds them accountable for goals they set.
Make Dignity the Foundation
Managers must understand the weight of their own judgments. A recent study of the brain shows how other people’s opinions of us influence our sense of self-efficacy. When leaders believe their role is to create conditions in which people make their best contributions— and genuinely enjoy doing so—the following core foundations of accountability improve: • Connections between leaders and direct reports deepen. Instead of obligatory monthly or quarterly check-ins during which employees provide rote updates, conversations should be undergirded by a sense of purpose. Questions like, “What did you learn this month?” or “What do you feel most proud of?” stir employees’ eagerness to tell their stories of achievement and struggle.
Add to that the fact that 70% of employees feel their managers aren’t objective in how they evaluate their performance, and it comes as no surprise that 69% of employees don’t feel they’re living up to their potential at work.
• The quality of feedback and learning increases. When employees believe their bosses are genuinely interested in their success, they feel less guarded and less inclined to hide their underperformance. When bosses are committed to their employees’ success and are less focused on documentation, they feel comfortable offering feedback and coaching about underperformance.
The fundamental problem with accountability is that it now involves little more than the process of accounting. The scorekeeping nature of this process yields a built-in negativity bias, where leaders reflexively hunt for shortfalls, and the tallying usually ends with a forced categorization—a rating system of numbers or labels, sometimes stack-ranking employees against their peers.
Focus on Fairness
Accountability processes are the formal and informal ways that leaders talk about, assess, and affirm the contributions of those they lead and the improvements they can make to strengthen those contributions. They include everything from annual performance appraisals to routine check-ins with your boss. Even in the face of deeply flawed formal processes, leaders can ensure that their employees feel their work is honored while simultaneously embracing opportunities to improve. To make that experience commonplace, mere tweaks to the tallying processes of accountability won’t move the needle. Companies must dramatically redefine what it means for leaders to create a culture of accountability.
When accountability systems are seen as fair, people are four times more likely to be honest (especially about their mistakes), act fairly toward others, and serve the organization’s purpose instead of their own interests. Prioritizing fairness in our accountability processes allows two very important things to change. First, it reestablishes the connection between contribution and contributor. For decades, in an attempt at creating fairness, conventional thinking has kept the evaluation of work separate from the evaluation of people. This made sense when people were producing 11
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How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability continued
large volumes of the same output. But in a knowledge economy, people’s ideas, creativity, and analysis are direct reflections of who they are—the nature of today’s work makes accountability personal. It becomes fair when managers acknowledge contributions as the fruit of the unique talents of their employees.
Make Restoration, Not Blame, the Goal
Second, focusing on fairness exposes biases within accountability systems. Plenty of research shows that organizations privilege certain groups via implicit biases within their accountability systems. Viewing these systems through the lens of fairness prompts honest questions about how to change them. Who has access to prized opportunities? What are the existing expectations about who will or won’t excel? Whose voices and ideas get included?
If leaders believed that falling short of a goal still had merit, it could radically alter how people treat their own—and others’—mistakes. To treat mistakes restoratively, leaders need humility, grace, and patience. They must see any person’s arc of professional success as more than the sum total of any single assignment. Leaders also need the humility to acknowledge their contribution to people’s failures. Did the person have the resources, skills, team support, and realistic timelines to be successful?
Questions like these reveal whether there’s equitable opportunity to succeed, regardless of one’s level of ability, and enable leaders to open up opportunities for people to shine with whatever talents they have. For example, a leader might broaden who gets to speak and present at meetings, or take a new approach to acknowledging traditionally privileged roles (like engineers at tech companies or marketers at branding companies) that levels the playing field for other types of contributions. To demonstrate your commitment to fairness, ask those on your team—preferably anonymously—if they feel the playing field in your group is level, if they see some roles or people as privileged or if they view you as you having “favorites.” Even if your intentions are good, people may still feel like they don’t have an equitable chance for success.
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People dread accountability in their organizations. Why? Because when consequences are levied, they often feel shaming and harsh, despite corporate rhetoric about learning from failures. The reflexive response is to hide mistakes or point fingers elsewhere.
We have a long way to go before accountability within organizations becomes a welcomed process that yields fair, actionable feedback and encourages employees to embrace the opportunity to improve their performance and expand their contributions. Making dignity, fairness and restoration foundational components of accountability systems is a powerful place to start. Ron Carucci is a co-founder and managing partner at Navalent. Copyright ©2020 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp.
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Practical Cybersecurity for Non-Cybersecurity Professionals By Michael Reinert, Ph.D., Reinert Consulting Group
Cybersecurity is no longer something you can ignore. Unfortunately, the information about cybersecurity is typically confusing because it is not presented to businesspeople in a language they already understand. This article will provide a new perspective about cybersecurity so that you can make more informed decisions that better protect you while making the proper investment in resources.
Before diving into the specific content for this article, I’ll give you some background about me and how I came to write this article and give the associated presentation. My interest in water testing and water treatment began when I started in nuclear power in the U.S. Navy. Not only does the Navy test and treat the water but this water is radioactive, so it is treated with great care and consideration. My next big encounter with water was as an assistant professor of horticulture running a study abroad 13
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program in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The focus of our program was a school garden program that we ran in conjunction with a local school on the island. The big water challenge on the island is that it has no fresh water. All water is captured from what hits a roof and is directed into a cistern. We managed our water carefully, as we had no extra water to waste while trying to grow fresh fruits and vegetables. Another real connection to the water industry is through my client AquaPhoenix Scientific. I’ve worked with AquaPhoenix for over 10 years and have learned the names of many of the products and vendors in the industry.
begin to understand the threats and solutions needed to mitigate the issues to their organizations.
Over my career, I made the transition from nuclear power to the information technology industry decades ago and immediately began to manage cybersecurity issues. I’ve worked in multiple industries, including healthcare and biotech, public safety, education, manufacturing, and tech consulting, and learned that each of these industries have mostly the same challenges with cybersecurity. Finally, I earned a Ph.D. in information sciences and technology where I studied and designed information systems to better meet the needs of customers including needs related to cybersecurity.
The new and more successful perspective for cybersecurity is to approach it from the position of risk management. By approaching cybersecurity from the perspective of risk management then companies can better understand the associated risks and make better decisions. Companies manage typical corporate risks in formal and informal ways so applying the same practices to cybersecurity will lead to better outcomes and resource utilization. Typical corporate risks include issues with people in several categories. People risks may come from employees with risks like health and safety or hiring, firing, and promotions. People risks may involve customers with issues like quality or on-time delivery. People risks may also involve suppliers with quality and safety of the products you buy from them and ultimately deliver to your customers. Corporate risks also come from issues related to property and buildings as they are subject to theft and natural disasters.
The purpose of this presentation is to offer a better perspective about how to understand cybersecurity and the associated risks so that you can take better actions to protect yourselves. Ignoring cybersecurity because information technology professionals don’t explain the issues and solutions clearly is no longer a responsible option. The intended audience for this article and presentation are the AWT conference attendees and members that have management responsibilities for cybersecurity or would like to better educate themselves on issues related to cybersecurity. I wish I could have met all of you face-to-face at the 2020 conference, but a global pandemic got in the way, so I hope to meet you at the 2021 annual conference.
Since companies already understand and employ the practices of risk management to people, property, and buildings, they can use the same approach for mitigating risks related to cybersecurity. These mitigation efforts include risk assessments and specific measures to proactively and reactively manage the identified risks. A typical risk assessment asks two main questions, including the potential harm from a risk and the likelihood that the risk will happen to their organization. If the harm from the risk is low and the likelihood that it will occur is low, then a company should dedicate few resources to managing that particular risk. On the other hand, if the harm from the risk is high and the likelihood that it will occur is high, then it is imperative that a
As I’ve already described, the current perspectives on cybersecurity are not explained in a language that is understandable by business professionals. Instead, information technology and cybersecurity professionals use the language of the tech industry and expect their colleagues and clients to learn tech language to even
The outcomes of this tech perspective on cybersecurity are often that companies don’t know where to start so they spend their money elsewhere rather than on securing their infrastructure and businesses as they should from potential attack. In my experience, many companies don’t properly protect themselves from cybersecurity attacks even after they’ve had successful attacks against them and experienced monetary harm to their organizations.
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company take action to mitigate that risk. After the risk assessment is complete, a company should have a better understanding of where to put its resources to best protect itself from cybersecurity attacks. Specific mitigation efforts include both proactive and reactive measures. Proactive measures should be deployed to address the risks that will cause the most harm and are likely to occur. In the world of cybersecurity today, these risks typically include phishing attacks and compromised or stolen credentials, as these are the most likely to occur and often cause the most harm. Countermeasures to these attacks typically include email filtering, cybersecurity awareness training, endpoint protection, scanning the dark web for stolen credentials, password managers, two-factor or multifactor authentication, and log or network monitoring. These countermeasures can be implemented by in-house IT departments, outsourced IT providers, or in combination. If you have in-house IT professionals, it is often best to implement cybersecurity measures in conjunction with a third-party organization that specializes in cybersecurity
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since they are more likely to keep up with current trends and mitigation efforts than in-house people typically have time to manage. The best reactive measure for cybersecurity today is cybersecurity insurance. Cybersecurity insurance is evolving rapidly as the insurance industry better understands the risks and frequencies of the attacks on their clients, but some type of basic policy can go a long way to helping organizations recover after a successful attack. The purpose of this article and associated presentation was to offer a better perspective about how to understand cybersecurity and the associated risks so that you can take better actions to protect yourselves. Using the perspectives and practices from risk management provides the best way to both understand the risks and measures to mitigate the associated risks of cybersecurity. Michael Reinert, Ph.D., is the founder of Reinert Consulting. He can be reached at mike@reinertconsulting.com or on his website at https://www.reinertconsulting.com.
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Managing Risk in 2021 and Beyond … Is Your Company Prepared? By Michael J. Highum, CPCU, McGowan Insurance Group
If you thought things would settle down in this new year, think again. As our nation enters 2021, we are faced with continuing and sometimes growing challenges, both personally and professionally. Multiple times a day we learn of new developments that can affect ourselves, our families, and our businesses. We are learning to keep our eyes on the lookout for potential impacts from governmental, societal, and environmental influences. As business owners and managers, we see these influences continue to penetrate our organizations, creating plenty of challenges but opportunities as well. Our firm has long preached about the need for owners and managers within the AWT framework to be proactive in how they manage the variety of risks facing their companies, and that is truer today than ever. Risk Management has become a core attribute of the best 18
companies. Appropriate attention and successful implementation can help prepare these organizations in dramatic ways for the changes that are coming. But with all the various duties and responsibilities demanding the attention of business owners, the available time and energy can become limited. Risk Management needs to become a principal component of water treatment operations. Appropriate planning, education, and utilization of resources is essential to successfully navigating through all obstacles. Prioritizing risk becomes the first step in that process, ensuring we place the proper emphasis on those areas creating greatest exposure. So, in this article, we look at three of those areas getting a significant amount of attention within the insurance industry, and the water treatment industry, by default. the ANALYST Business Supplement 2021
Managing Risk in 2021 and Beyond … Is Your Company Prepared?
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Cyber Liability Market Is Changing
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the first such risk affecting business across the globe is Cyber Liability. Also referred to as Privacy Breach or Network Security Liability, the negative developments in this sector of business risk have increased exponentially. The perpetrators of fraudulent cyber schemes have become better and better at their craft, and smarter in terms of their deployment of attacks and their demands of victims. The insurance industry keeps a close eye on a variety of emerging and developing risks throughout the world, but the level of attention cyber risk has attracted, and very quickly, is somewhat concerning. A prominent senior executive of a large cyber insurer recently commented that, “Cyber risk has become the financial pandemic of our time.” Carriers are investing in and deploying as many resources as possible to combat the increasing attacks, but changes are coming to this market that will affect all. Given this, we find it still very appropriate to highlight these developments and when and how they may impact AWT members, but more importantly, what owners can do to be prepared and protect themselves. The cyber insurance market has only been in place for about 15 years. During that time, insurers saw a new market where they could devote capital and grow a volume of business satisfactory to earn a profit. Limited coverage with smaller limits was offered at relatively affordable premiums. Most of the sales emphasis was directed at larger organizations having certain amounts of data, or the characteristics of that data that could potentially be attractive targets. As time went on, more carriers entered the market, simplifying the application process, expanding terms, and lowering costs of coverage even further. In many regards, for those interested in adding cyber coverage to their insurance portfolio, it was a buyer’s market. Soon the landscape began to change. Those looking to engage in cyber fraud became more numerous and again, got much better and smarter at how to perpetrate their crime. In addition, schemes were directed at smaller to mediumsized organizations, where the financial reward was more immediate and more efficient to obtain. These smaller to medium-sized targets also began to add cyber coverage to their insurance programs, all containing expanded limits and terms. The problem was that these small to medium 19
businesses lacked the technology sophistication and controls of their networks and other portals of entry to adequately combat the increased attacks. Today this risk is at an all-time high for all sizes and all types of business. As we have heard, it is not if a business will be hit with a cyber-attack, but when. This is also being driven by a growing set of factors outside the immediate control of any business owner. The standards related to PCI, PHI, and PII, in addition to the multitude of both state and federal regulations imposing responsibilities on businesses, are challenging to keep up with. More than anything, however, the societal risks culminating in cyber crime incidents has by far led the most recent difficulties. Such events as social engineering attacks, extortion, phishing, and bricking create daily challenges in managing systems and human behavior. There has been such proliferation of these criminal events, we wanted to offer the following current statistics for perspective: • 68% of all ransomware attacks began with phishing links. • Phishing attacks have increased over 600% since start of the COVID pandemic. • 85% of a ransomware attacks targeted Windows operating systems. • It is estimated that in 2021, a business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds. • The average ransom demand has increased from $5,000 in 2018 to $100,000 in 2020. Compounding these alarming statistics is the reality that such events, while significant in their own regard, can lead to data theft simultaneously triggering a privacy breach incident. As the American workforce has migrated to a remote format, with many not returning to a traditional office environment, the cyber risk presented has multiplied and must be effectively managed. Moving ahead in 2021 and beyond, the insurance carriers maintaining an open market for cyber coverage the ANALYST Business Supplement 2021
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will become fewer, and terms and prices will begin to harden. Some of the largest carriers in this market have seen losses far outweigh premiums collected, thus adding to the need to increase premiums. In addition, the insurance market will look for and expect more of the customers with whom they agree to insure. This heightened expectation will drive the need for business owners to adopt recommended controls, such as multi-factor authentication, a formal Cyber Incident Response Plan, and other provisions focused on more effectively managing the human behavior element of cyber related events. Carriers are answering the call in this regard, however. Many of the top providers offer a full suite of pre-incident risk control, training, and mitigation services aimed at providing the necessary support to insureds. These services are often value-added, with no additional fee or expense. And it makes sense, as whatever the carriers can do to help their customer insureds avoid this growing threat, the better the outcomes for all and the more stable the insurance market will become. Our firm routinely provides these resources and more in our effort to help clients effectively navigate these growing requirements. As a final point on this topic, we need to consider the circumstances in which a claim is necessary of being filed. All carriers maintain strict definitions within their policies to guide when and how a claim is to be made. This is in place mainly to help mitigate the financial impact of the claim as quickly and as effectively as possible, and to not compromise the ability of the carrier to fully adjust the matter. However, in many cases knowledge of events that could reasonably give rise to a claim should be reported so that the carrier can deploy the necessary breach forensic and coaching efforts required.
New OSHA Rules
With the presidential election now behind us, business owners also need to be prepared because of looming changes coming to OSHA driven by a new administration. The most significant change right out of the gate for employers is a potential national COVID-19 standard, which is something that most agree we will see very 20
soon. Until now, to fill the void, many states like Virginia, Michigan, and Oregon have adopted their own Emergency Temporary Standards. Under the new administration, expect federal OSHA to follow suit and seek more aggressive enforcement from their state counterparts. This is supported largely by the administration indicating their intent is to make significant changes to how OSHA deals with employers, as it attempts to further protect America’s workforce over the next four years. In addition, there is likely to be an increase in the number of OSHA inspectors, which could double. Reports are indicating that there are approximately 750 OSHA inspectors currently on the job. If that number jumps to upwards of 1,500, employers can anticipate an increase in the frequency and perhaps the scrutiny of inspections. Diligence will be the name of the game in ensuring your companies are well prepared for these inspections. This will be critically important to avoid costly fines and other challenges. Re-establishing training and education of essential elements of OSHA safety standards, and documenting the same, will help position employers for the unexpected. Perhaps one of the most significant rules potentially looming on the horizon is the restoration of the original Electronic Reporting Rule. In 2017, OSHA began requiring certain employers (including those with more than 250 employees at a single location) to report employee injury and illness information to OSHA. The intent was to post injury details online for public viewing on its website. If this rule is reintroduced, certain employers will also be required to post detailed employee injury and illness information to OSHA (including the information found on OSHA 300 Logs). Another element to consider are rules under most state OSHA plans, where employers must furnish “employment and a place of employment which are free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to their employees.” This is known as OSHA’s General Duty Clause (GDC). OSHA can fine employers for violation of the GDC if a recognized serious hazard exists in their workplace and the employer does not take reasonable steps to prevent or abate the hazard. Although this may sound elementary, the ANALYST Business Supplement 2021
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Managing Risk in 2021 and Beyond … Is Your Company Prepared?
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Commercial Auto: A Continued Focus
consider how many situations may lead to a potential GDC violation and how the COVID pandemic could come into play: • The employer failed to keep the workplace free of a hazard to which employees of that employer were exposed. • The hazard was recognized. • The hazard was causing or was likely to cause death or serious physical harm. • There was a feasible and useful method to correct the hazard. Be prepared for OSHA to immediately begin issuing more GDC citations if employers violate CDC guidelines for health and safety concerns. This will include COVID-19 situations. Although new vaccinations are increasing across the nation, the disease is not going to come to an abrupt halt. We may also see the resurrection of an infectious disease standard with the intent that it will be useful for future pandemics. Awareness should also be given to the 2016 AntiRetaliation Rule, which prohibits employers from retaliating against employees for reporting work-related injuries or illnesses. The 2016 rule also indicated that blanket automatic post-accident drug testing was improper because it discouraged employees from properly reporting injuries. While this part of the rule was rarely enforced, some believe a renewed enforcement emphasis could also come about. As this develops, employers may want to reconsider a blanket post-accident drug testing policy and drug testing when it appears drug use may have contributed to a workplace incident. Given this new approach to OSHA and regulatory enforcement, now is the time for employers to review their policies and procedures as well as their record keeping related to work-place injury. In addition, we have seen several water treatment professionals needing to formally address or newly develop a pandemic response plan in order to comply with customer requirements. In all of these cases, our firm has the compliance tools necessary to help employers prepare, in addition to upcoming information from AWT. 22
A third area of major focus for the insurance industry continues to be commercial fleet management and related driver controls. Over the past couple of years, this important area of risk has seen increasing demands placed on employers for adequately monitoring and controlling the use of vehicles and quality of the drivers operating these vehicles. Yet, to a large degree, the frequency and severity of auto-related incidents has continued at the same pace. Despite COVID, many of the essential service-oriented fleets have continued to operate and function as normal. This would include the water treatment industry which also saw the need to maintain the same service and support levels for customers as was traditionally the case, and the related usage of vehicles was largely unchanged as well. Given this, the push for internal management of fleets and personnel continues and will do so well into 2021. Employers should recognize the degree of risk severity imposed by maintaining a fleet and the need to have in place well-documented and communicated procedures. Primarily, insurance carriers are looking for a few essential elements of any qualified fleet and driver program. First among those would be a fully documented and comprehensive Fleet and Driver Management Policy. Such a policy would specifically outline the expectations of every driver, the rules related to usage of the vehicle, and ramifications to the employee should the policy be violated. Most importantly, however, the policy should include a listing or categories of driving violations or offences and clearly define whether a driver would be acceptable to drive given these parameters. Below is an example of parameters that could potentially be adopted by an employer: Employees with three or more points on the motor vehicle record within a three-year period will be disqualified from driving. Suspension of driving privileges also will be made for the following offenses: •
Driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, including implied consent refusal (refusal to take blood alcohol test)
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•
Three or more violations within the past five years
•
Hit and Run, leaving the scene of a collision
•
Any felony, homicide, or manslaughter involving the use of motor vehicles
•
Reckless, negligent, or careless driving
•
License suspension or revocation
In addition, the fleet management program should also address accident investigations, driver training, and insurance requirements if employees use their owned vehicles for business purposes. Employers are now expected to obtain and review the Motor Vehicle Reports from their respective state’s motor vehicle department on all drivers operating a vehicle for business on a regular basis. So, the bar has most certainly been raised and what may have seemed a task in the past, has now become an
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essential part of managing and maintaining a fleet. The risks can be extreme as well, and if not prepared and handled appropriately, can impose significant financial and legal ramifications to the employer. Business risk has developed into something we all must deal with. While the insurance industry keeps their eye on certain areas where these risks seem high, the real purpose for effective management is to improve the quality and culture of our businesses. By making some simple investments of time, money and energy, the benefits can positively impact our customers, employees, and communities. Make use of the resources at your disposal. Those professional service providers you partner with should have the tools necessary to make the process an efficient one. Michael J. Highum, CPCU, is a partner/vice president at McGowan Insurance Group. He can be reached at (317) 275-1606 or michaelh@mcgowaninsgrp.com.
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Turn Your Team’s Frustration Into Motivation By Dane Jensen, Third Factor
Setbacks and adversity are inevitably accompanied by negative emotions. Someone who has lost a big account, been passed over for promotion or produced poor quarterly results is bound to feel disappointment, frustration or anger. Most leaders view the negative emotions of an upset team member as a contagion to contain or a problem to solve. But our work with sports coaches and business executives has shown that leaders might be better served by a different approach: helping team members channel their negative emotions and turn them into powerful tools for unlocking potential. The inner dissatisfaction and energy that accompany negative emotions can propel people to higher levels of determination and hard work. When members of your team face disappointment or failure, you can use the experience to empower and strengthen them. It comes down to knowing how to have productive conversations around negative emotions. Here is how to navigate three key moments in a conversation to channel negative emotions into positive growth: Label the negative emotion and engage. Many leaders either try to rescue people from negative emotions or retreat from those feelings. Neither approach is effective because both simply paper over the energy seething underneath. Instead, engage disappointed team members. Help them name the negative emotion they 24
are feeling and invite them to talk about it. A senior partner I worked with at a consulting firm was passed over for promotion. He was subsequently shown the anonymous, highly critical feedback from his peers that had led to the decision. He was shocked and hurt. Many people in his circle tried to rescue him from those emotions. They told him he was terrific, that he shouldn’t get down on himself, and that he would bounce back in no time. The well-intentioned reassurances had one effect: they ended conversations. “It didn’t help,” he said. “I had nowhere to take the discussion after that other than to murmur some disingenuous thanks.” There is a more effective approach: Label the emotion for that person and invite a response from him. “It sounds like you’re really disappointed,” I told the executive I was working with. After a long pause, he said, “Honestly, I’m not disappointed — I feel betrayed.” Don’t worry about being wrong, as I was. Just take your best guess. When you put a label on someone’s emotion, that person will instantly either agree or correct you. After the executive corrected me, we both had the information we needed to move forward. He told me how angry he was, but also how hurt. He said he wanted to fight, but also to quit. As he poured out his feelings, he grew visibly energized. The energy
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under the emotion surfaced. It is that energy that you want to channel in a constructive direction.
Instead, leaders should help paint a clear picture of the gap that exists between a future of action and one of inaction — and use the difference to channel energy into action. Start by asking the person who is experiencing negative emotions to imagine how he will feel if nothing changes.
Feed the self-coach, not the self-critic. Once the emotion has been identified and the raw energy underneath is exposed, remember that it’s just that: raw. At this stage, it could trigger the positive self-coach voice that says things like, “I clearly have a blind spot; I need to invest more time in understanding how I’m perceived by others.” But the energy could also spark doubts about one’s abilities and trigger comments like, “People have finally realized I’ve been faking it all this time.”
In the case of the partner passed over for promotion, this was: “How will you feel in 90 days if you’ve brooded on this feedback without doing anything?” “Terrible,” he replied.
The positive self-coach is helpful; the self-critic is self-destructive. Effective coaches engage people in creating a productive answer to the question, “What is this emotion telling me?” The self-critic answers with a list of character defects: “I’m stupid, lazy, unlikeable.” The self-coach answers with a list of actions: “I need to work harder, think differently and recruit support because I’m not there yet.”
“And how would it feel if you were able to act on it and move on?” “Like a huge weight was lifted off,” he said. And in the that moment he felt the emotional gap between action and inaction and was ready to embrace positive steps forward.
You can amplify the self-coach’s voice in a demoralized colleague and muffle the self-critic by framing negative emotion as a sign of meaning. For example, you could say, “This really matters to you, doesn’t it?” or “I can see how important this is to you.” Seeing negative emotion as a sign of passion can help feed productive motivation. You can also trigger the self-coach by sharing your stories. This will counter the self-critic’s tendency to make unfavorable comparisons. “I’m not creative” is shorthand for “Other people are more creative than I am.” As a leader, you can help deflate the self-critic by candidly sharing your own experiences with struggle and growth — key moments when you felt you weren’t good enough and were subsequently able to push forward. Channel energy to action. The energy that underlies negative emotion can be channeled into things we can control or toward highly unproductive ends. One particularly unproductive outlet for teams is getting stuck in conversations that focus only on how bad things are. Such exchanges can be seductive because they build a sense of connection among participants, but they ultimately lead nowhere.
Being passed over for a promotion and feeling betrayed by colleagues is a high-stakes example of negative emotions coming into play. But there are many less severe events that can be turned around by this leadership approach. These are the paper cuts of life: a client meeting goes poorly, a project fails to receive budget approval, strategic decisions create work and frustration for everyone. In each case, there is benefit to naming the emotion (e.g. “I can tell you’re frustrated after that meeting”) connecting it to meaning (“This project really matters to you doesn’t it?”) and then channeling the released energy to action (“How would you feel if we could get this back on the docket for next quarter’s review? What do you think that would take?”). Negative emotions are painful, but leaders can help turn them into something positive. As the groundbreaking Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli put it in his seminal work, Psychosynthesis, “Trying to eliminate pain merely strengthens its hold. It is better to uncover its meaning, include it as an essential part of our purpose, and embrace its potential to serve us.” Dane Jensen is CEO of Third Factor. Copyright ©2020 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp.
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The Future of Team Leadership Is Multimodal By Robert Hooijberg, IMD Business School, and Michael Watkins, Genesis
The pandemic has accelerated a pre-COVID-19 shift in how individuals and teams do intellectual work. Companies have learned that routine tasks involving transactions and coordination can be done purely virtually, while work requiring true team collaboration (collective learning, innovation, building a shared culture) is still best done face to face. We envision that the post-pandemic future of teamwork will be a purposeful hybrid combination of virtual coordination and in-person collaboration.
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Effective leadership in this new hybrid world requires different skills that go beyond traditional team leadership. Specifically, organizations will need leaders who can operate well across two distinct modes. For much of the time, they will operate in virtual coordination mode. This means establishing goals, monitoring progress, driving information sharing, and sustaining connections among colleagues working remotely. When their teams periodically come together to engage in true collaboration, leaders will need to operate in face-to-face collaboration mode, fostering deep learning, innovation, acculturation, and dedication. the ANALYST Business Supplement 2021
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These complex tasks are challenging to perform virtually because they involve four dimensions of impact that are better served through in-person interactions: • Collaboration, which is not just about content collaboration and coordination but also building a shared understanding, relationships, and trust. • Innovation, which requires brainstorming, knowledge integration, and shared learning, for which trust and time together in a nonstressful environment are essential. • Acculturation, which requires extended periods of face-to-face connection to develop mutual understanding, reinforce norms, and build a shared identity. • Dedication, which comes from having a shared sense of purpose, feeling like part of a community, and having opportunities to grow professionally.
The implications for the future of leadership are profound. The multimodal workplace is changing the types of skills required to lead teams virtually and in person successfully. In particular, there are four roles that leaders will need to play as they adapt to managing a hybrid workforce. Their relative importance will depend on the extent of team coordination and integration. Conductor. A mostly virtual team leadership role, the Conductor ensures that plans, decisions, information, and accomplishments are shared to coordinate and motivate team members. The role is akin to that of an orchestra director, who ensures that musicians play well individually and in harmony. In the Conductor role, leaders manage goal setting, simple planning, decisionmaking, work coordination, and progress tracking while sustaining connection, trust, and engagement with team members. For success in this role, leaders must strike the right balance between demonstrating genuine care and engagement and micromanaging, which saps morale.
Multimodal Leadership Roles
The amount of time team leaders work with their teams in the virtual Conductor role as opposed to in-person Catalyst will depend on the extent to which the team's work requires the integration of members' knowledge and perspectives. The greater the interdependence, the more time the leader will have to act as Catalyst. The extent to which leaders will do coaching in person likely will depend on proximity.
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The pandemic has highlighted how exhausting endless video calls are, requiring Conductors to be highly efficient and engaging in their orchestration of virtual team time. Catalyst. When meeting in person, the Catalyst stimulates collaboration, spurs creativity and innovation, creates a shared culture, and fosters dedication. To accomplish this, these leaders must build trust and create an environment of psychological safety. Doing so allows them to facilitate in-depth dialogue and encourage creative conflict—but not harmful personality clashes— when sharing ideas. We use the term catalyst to indicate that the focus here is on enabling others to shine and facilitating collaboration processes. Coach. When working one-on-one with their reports virtually or in person, leaders need to play the role of Coach. This means focusing on helping their people achieve peak performance while building trust and focusing on their well-being and professional development. Playing this role effectively requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and the ability to establish a balance between showing empathy and encouraging people to push beyond their boundaries. When done well, coaching can enhance connections, as well as engagement and productivity. Champion. Whereas the Conductor, Catalyst, and Coach roles involve managing individuals and teams who report directly to a particular leader, the Champion role requires leaders to advocate externally for their teams. It requires leaders to secure team resources, tap into essential information sources, communicate accomplishments, and build trust with peers and other key stakeholders both in person and virtually. The Champion role, therefore, requires skills in negotiating, influencing without formal authority, and building alliances. A central theme linking all four roles is the need for leaders to build and sustain connections and trust. Many companies did not embrace remote work before the pandemic because they lacked trust in their employees to be productive at home. At the same time, there were concerns about managers’ ability to monitor performance. However, building and sustaining trust is essential to multimodal leadership, especially when the team is operating virtually. 28
Fostering trust shows up in each of the 4-C roles in distinct ways. In the Conductor role, leaders encourage trust by sharing achievements so that everyone knows their colleagues are contributing to the team’s success. In the virtual world, we are often suspicious that peers are slacking off, and emotions can run high in a crisis. Another way to strengthen trust is to personally check in with your team members to see how they are coping, how their work is progressing, and what help they might need. This is one of the central themes of emotional intelligence, and it can also strengthen team spirit. Checking in at the individual level is also an essential element of the Coach role. These trust-building methods work well online, but when teams come together in person, leaders will want to channel the Catalyst role, where trust plays an essential role in spurring innovation and creativity. After all, people need to feel safe to experiment and share moonshot ideas without fear of being judged. Therefore, the Catalyst role requires leaders to create healthy, safe bonds with teams by playing more of an enabling rather than a directive role. This requires managers to balance confidence with an appropriate degree of humility and social awareness. For example, when we work with teams of leaders at IMD, we often have executives share some of the highs and lows in their lives, creating connection and trust through the experience of shared vulnerability. It brings people closer together and opens up the possibility for greater collaboration. But we have found that sharing personal issues is not something all participants would feel comfortable doing on a Zoom call. Creating a trusting environment is critical to the roles of both Coach and Catalyst, along with emotional intelligence that can be honed through working on one’s self-awareness, self-care, social awareness, and relationship management. The higher up in an organization you rise, the more critical the Champion role becomes. The matrix organizational structures of many companies require leaders to rely on organizational influence rather than authority to obtain the necessary resources for teams and contribute in a meaningful way to the company’s overall goals. In the Champion role, we build trust with our peers by
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showing interest in their aspirations and by putting organizational goals ahead of our own team’s objectives. Leaders need to recognize that they might need help themselves to provide support to their teams as they play these four roles. Most leaders are already proficient in the Conductor role because it requires many traditional management and leadership skills, such as monitoring, delegating, decision-making, and motivating. In contrast, the Catalyst and Coach roles need different sets of skills and attitudes. Here, we think especially of facilitation skills, emotional intelligence, and humility.
To be successful in this new era, team leaders must learn to adapt the four roles of multimodal leadership: Conductor, Catalyst, Coach, and Champion. These four roles provide a framework for leadership effectiveness in the post-pandemic world of work. Robert Hooijberg is a professor of organizational behavior at IMD Business School. Michael Watkins is a professor of leadership and organizational change at IMD, co-founder of leadership consultancy Genesis, and author of The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. All rights reserved.
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How Leaders Can Optimize Teams’ Emotional Landscapes Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Christina Bradley, and Lindred Greer, University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business
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Emotions are running high. The disruptive events characterizing 2020 — a global pandemic, climaterelated disasters, economic uncertainty, and social discontent—are leading employees to bring a higher level of emotionality to work than ever before. This is clashing with the culturally ingrained norm that an appropriate “professional” demeanor minimizes emotional expression. At the same time, work on emotional suppression suggests that there are long-term costs to keeping emotions buried and that, if stifled, they will erupt in counterproductive ways. For that reason, leaders can no longer avoid taking an active role in architecting emotional landscapes — the collective composition of employee sentiments. Because emotional landscapes directly influence how employees make sense of situations, tasks, and what actions to take, they can help or hinder the pursuit of organizational strategic objectives. By supporting emotional expression within their teams, leaders can help their organizations function at their best. The tools available to leaders for navigating such emotional landscapes with their teams are largely outdated strategies such as encouraging general suppression of emotions at work or offering generic pep talks. Leaders need a playbook for responding to employees’ emotional states with more nuance and, critically, in ways that are tailored to the situation. We offer four plays — to nurture emotions, to align them, to acknowledge them, and to diversify them — that allow leaders to manage the loaded emotional settings they’re working in and help creativity and productivity thrive.
Limits of the Traditional Emotions Playbook Based on our executive leadership development work with global Fortune 100 companies as well as our ongoing research in this area, we’ve noticed that leaders tend to overly rely on two plays from the old, traditional playbook of emotional management of teams and organizations: giving a pep talk and sounding the alarm.
Alternatively, other managers rely on the mood-darkening strategy of sounding an alarm. Many believe that instilling anxiety by highlighting the cost of failure is an effective way to focus a team’s attention and effort. One newly promoted senior executive working in data security shared with us that he has found no better way to motivate his team than to openly share his concerns about the consequences of failing to meet current key performance indicators (KPIs). He reasoned that this kills employees’ complacency and pushes them to work harder. The stark differences between these two approaches hide an important similarity: Both create emotional alignment. Both steer teams toward a shared emotional experience — rather than individualized and diversified ones. Whether a manager relies on positivity or negativity, the result is a reduction in the breadth of feelings. Leaders use these plays because they can work in very specific situations. Indeed, an abundance of research supports the notion that increasing emotional alignment contributes to team performance, specifically when a team is executing a clear strategy. When a team shares a common mood, members are better able to converge on a single point of view and take the actions required to execute a given strategy. However, the full story behind the consequences of emotional alignment is more complex. Because emotional alignment minimizes important individual differences in reactions to current events, it can prevent teams from building an inclusive culture, however counterintuitive that may seem. More crucially, because convergence in a team’s mood directly reduces the diversity of perspectives represented, it shapes how teams operate: When there is uncertainty about the best path forward, striving for the same emotional mood actually suppresses views critical for the creative process, decision-making, and overall innovation efforts.
Many managers remain enamored with the notion that rallying a positive, high-energy mood in a team is an effective strategy for obtaining exceptionally high performance. Accordingly, many managers adapt this play when kicking off meetings by pumping up their team to elevate everyone’s mood. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously illustrated this approach
with the fervor of a rock singer at a music festival. Though that’s admittedly an extreme example, we have seen many other leaders deploy an only slightly downtempo cover version of Ballmer’s routine before meetings, by playing uplifting music, asking everyone to share a piece of good news, or getting everyone to stand up and move around before diving into the agenda.
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Studies coming out of the behavioral sciences have revealed that more complex and diverse emotional experiences actually evoke a broader array of ways to think about a problem. Heterogeneous emotions beget diverse thoughts because of the way emotions interact with how knowledge is organized and retrieved. For example, the mood-congruent memory effect describes the phenomenon of how we are more likely to bring to mind knowledge associated with positive experiences when in a positive mood and with negative experiences when in a negative mood. The anger acquired during a grueling commute on the freeway more readily brings to mind all the pain and suffering in our lives than the joys and bright spots experienced a mere 24 hours earlier.
announcement) has created a situation where team members are having similar feelings. Or, instead, has the variety of experiences in their individual lives (including such disparate events as the birth of a child, progress on a KPI, or that same theoretical organizational announcement) brought about a variety of moods? Focus on the emotional temperament of the entire group and not just one or two people.
Therefore, a collective that is in a similar mood will share a similarly biased perspective. A group with a more emotionally diverse landscape will have less bias and greater breadth in the points of view they bring to the problem at hand.
Four Strategies for Your Emotion Management Playbook. Paying attention to the emotional landscape of a workplace allows leaders to respond to situations with nuance. Depending on what kind of job needs to be done and how aligned or diverse emotions are, different strategies can help teams most effectively pursue strategic objectives.
Your answers to these two questions (execution versus innovation, and aligned versus diversified) are essential for determining which of the four emotion management strategies will be most effective. Choosing the wrong play could detract from the effectiveness of your team.
What is the nature of the primary job to be done at the moment? Is the team’s current primary objective to execute upon a clear strategy that has already been mapped out in advance? Or, instead, do you need the team to innovate, to brainstorm, and to develop new solutions to a pressing problem? What is the current emotional landscape of your team? Focus on what we call the “aperture of your emotional lens” to take a holistic view of your team — shift attention from individuals to patterns in the collective. Are the emotions among members relatively aligned, or are they diverse? Consider whether an external event (such as a major international crisis or a recent organizational 32
Execution Innovation
Rather than homogenizing the emotional experience at work, managers would be wise to deploy a much more tailored approach to emotion management that takes into account the nature of the task at hand and the ideal emotional landscape for that task. From our observations of managers over the years and what has been discovered about emotional landscapes, we recommend that leaders start with two initial questions when aiming to architect the ideal emotional landscape in their teams:
JOB TO BE DONE
Considering Context for Managing Emotions
Nurture Emotions
Align Emotions
Acknowledge and encourage the shared concerns of your team members.
Help your team members coalesce around a collective purpose.
Diversify Emotions
Acknowledge Emotions
Increase the complexity of the emotional landscape to aid innovative thinking.
Create space to emotionally validate team members.
Aligned
Diverse
CURRENT EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE
Expanding the Emotion Management Playbook
Once you’ve identified the nature of the task at hand and the current emotional mood of your team, you’ll be able to identify a strategy that best fits your current circumstances. (See “Four Strategies for Your Emotion Management Playbook.”) Below, we detail why each strategy fits with each combination of circumstances.
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Nurture emotions (when the task is execution and the current emotional landscape is aligned). As noted earlier, research shows that a team is better able to coordinate on clear tasks when its members share a common mood. To benefit from this emotional alignment, leaders need to be active in encouraging and recognizing those feelings to lower the likelihood that new emotions will intrude, which would be counterproductive. Sustaining this cohesive emotional model can require some planning. If the team is upbeat, share information that will continue to rally everyone. If it’s more somber, acknowledge the mood with empathy. One leader recently shared with us how she has been handling the rise in negative emotions of her team due to the COVID-19 crisis. She told us that at the start of one meeting, many team members shared their fears about how the pandemic would affect the company. This leader avoided the temptation to lighten the mood and instead acknowledged that times were indeed tough. By validating the team’s negative feelings and avoiding the urge to sugarcoat the current emotional state, she avoided disturbing the camaraderie of shared concern. Her team maintained a common motivation to continue executing a plan for pulling through the hard times together. Align emotions (when the task is execution and the current emotional landscape is diverse). When your team needs to coordinate toward a common goal and you sense that it’s experiencing a wide range of emotions, the most effective way forward is to deploy a strategy that increases emotional alignment. Here, the “pep talk” or “sounding of the alarm” approaches described earlier are effective in preparing your team to execute its task. In this circumstance, managers need to take immediate and potent actions to help team members get into a similar emotional state. Earlier this year we saw one leader of a large nonprofit enact this strategy shortly after closing all in-person operations and shifting to remote work. Some stakeholders were delighted to not go into the office, some struggled to work while at home with their families, and others were anxious about the changes. This leader began to incorporate punctuated moments during virtual meetings to highlight specific examples of how the organization was continuing to deliver on aspects of its mission that were sacred to the
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employees. This worked to coalesce the collective mood toward a sense of hope and optimism. Acknowledge emotions (when the task is innovation and the current emotional landscape is diverse). When the goal for your team involves finding novel solutions to a pressing problem and you recognize that your team is experiencing a diverse set of emotions, the best way to move forward is to let those different emotions be heard and validated. Avoid opening meetings in a way that could substantially raise or lower—and thus align—the entire group’s mood. Creating room for emotional validation allows people to process their affective experiences, which is more productive than attempting to suppress them or pretending that people are unemotional robots. The diversity of emotions in the room will facilitate diversity of thought. One astute leader uses this approach to begin her Monday morning design hackathons. Recognizing the value of a room containing a mix of irritation from treacherous commutes, elation from weekend adventures, and everything in between, she begins with an online poll asking everyone to indicate two different emotions they are feeling. With this small step, she affirms the diverse emotional landscape in the room and how it’s a perfect mix to fuel their innovation task at hand. Diversify emotions (when the task is innovation and the current emotional landscape is aligned). As we’ve outlined, the level of innovative thinking you will get from your team will be suboptimal when there’s too much emotional conformity. It matters little whether you created this common mood or if it was the result of an external event. What a leader needs to do when a team is tasked with a creative project is to increase the complexity of the emotional landscape. One way to do this is powerfully simple: Set the stage for an ideation session by having team members reflect on specific meaningful moments from their careers and personal lives, including when they were excited and when they were angry. Have them jot down some words that capture how they felt in those moments. The underlying magic of this process is that the range of emotions attached to this broad collection of experiences will help unleash a greater variety of the ANALYST Business Supplement 2021
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thoughts and perspectives to use in the innovation challenge. When we run this exercise in leadership development workshops, we typically ask just a subset of attendees to revisit these emotionally diverse memories. Later, we ask for a show of hands to see whether the number and variety of solutions are higher in that group, and we find that they nearly always are. This seemingly trivial intervention really does squeeze more creative thought from employees. A note on diversifying emotions: When there is big news that creates a similar emotional response—for example, your company’s major quarterly announcement—that’s not a good day for ideation, regardless of whether the news is a pleasant surprise or a major disappointment. It will be difficult to diffuse the team’s distraction and common emotions. Consider scheduling core ideation work for another time, when the source of emotional alignment has subsided. Although all four strategies for managing employee emotions have their places in different situations, from our experience, managers miss important opportunities by not using the acknowledge and diversify strategies. This is understandable, given that they depart from the conventional wisdom that aligning a team’s emotions is always helpful. Again, although a common mood accelerates execution tasks, it is counterproductive for the generation of innovative ideas. For creativity, emotional diversity is key. Managers who understand this can mindfully cultivate the different emotional landscapes required for execution versus innovation. It’s not that this leadership work was not required all along. Rather, the extremely emotional and dynamic events of 2020 are finally forcing leaders to do this difficult work. Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks is the William Russell Kelly Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Christina Bradley is a doctoral student in the Management & Organizations department at the Ross School of Business. Lindred Greer (@lindredg) is an associate professor of management and organization at the Ross School of Business. Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. All rights reserved.
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