The Emotional Adventure of Leadership

by Peter Bregman  |   2:55 PM June 14, 2012

I was lost.

I looked at the map and my heart raced as I admitted to myself — only to myself — that I had no idea where I was. It felt too humiliating to let the others know.

This was the summer of 1990 and I was leading a group of students on a 30-day mountaineering expedition. It was the first day of our trip and the students had no experience in the outdoors. They were relying on me. My anxiety level had been creeping up and was now at full tilt.

We were already one hour late for our rendezvous with two other groups with whom we planned to camp and we had been hiking for about three hours. Where were we?

My uneasiness grew as I looked at my watch and realized I was running out of time. The sun would be setting soon and it was dangerous to go on much longer. We would have to make camp while we still had light.

I bit my nails as I looked obsessively from the map to the mountain range and back to the map. We weren't in immediate danger — we had plenty of water and plenty of food — but I was embarrassed. My hands shook nervously and I could feel my heart beating.

Thirty minutes later we hit snow. In July. Which, though not uncommon at a certain altitude, confirmed that I couldn't hide my failure any longer. We were far off track and we needed to set up camp. The jig was up.

I gathered the students in a circle and told them we would have to set up camp by ourselves on the snow, and that we would find the other groups in the morning.

"So, we're lost?" a student asked me.

I felt so lame and inadequate. This was not at all what I had thought it would feel like to lead. Leaders are supposed to have the answers. They're supposed to be confident, self-assured, and knowledgeable. They're supposed to know where they are and where they're going at all times.

But here is what I have discovered in my subsequent 25 years of leadership experience: leadership is, as much as anything, an emotional adventure.

If you want to be a powerful leader, you have to become familiar with the sweat-inducing, anxiety-producing, adrenaline-generating emotions of being lost while people are following you. Because that is, as often as not, the emotion of leadership.

One of the defining characteristics of strong leaders is their ability to endure uncertainty and ambiguity. They are willing to move through shame and embarrassment and anxiety and fear. Those are the feelings of leadership as much as courage and persistence and faith. In fact, it's because those feelings are ever-present that we need courage and persistence and faith.

It takes tremendous confidence to lead. Not the confidence of having all the answers — that's arrogance — but the confidence to move forward even without the answers. You have to be capable of feeling awkward and uncertain without giving up. You have to believe that you and your team have what it takes to see yourselves through — or, if need be, to pick yourselves up and start again.

Here's what not to do: pretend you're in control. Because that erodes trust, increases your shame, and robs those around you of the opportunity to step in, learn, and help.

"Yes, we're lost, " I admitted, "And, to be honest, I'm really embarrassed. But we'll be fine. We'll find the other two groups in the morning. Let's use this as an opportunity to learn how to camp on snow."

I wish I could say that erased my anxiety. It didn't. I stayed anxious until I actually found the other groups the next day and figured out where I had gone wrong.

But coming out of hiding did ease my suffering. And that night turned out to be an exciting bonding experience for everyone on the trip. It gave us — all of us — the confidence that, even though we could get lost, we would find our way.

Below is a TEDx talk I gave about these unpleasant emotions of leadership and how we can use them to become better leaders and increase innovation:

Dealing with a Bad Boss

by John Beeson  |  12:32 PM June 28, 2012

It's often said there's nothing certain in life except death and taxes. The parallel in organizational life is that at some point in your career you'll have a bad boss — or at least a boss who's bad for you. Bad bosses come in all shapes and sizes: abrasive and insensitive, indecisive, inconsistent and unfair, the micromanager who stifles your ability to perform and grow, and "matador managers" adept at sidestepping every tough issue that comes their way. So, the question isn't whether or not you'll have a bad boss. Rather, it's how you'll respond when you do.

Faced with a bad boss, many managers retreat to commiserating with co-workers or adopt a passive "this too shall pass" attitude. Or in the case of an extremely bad boss relationship, they are driven to jump ship to take a job with another company — often with negative consequences.

Your starting point in dealing with a bad boss is confronting some important realities. First, your boss, regardless of whether she is effective or not, is a major factor in your ability to perform well in your job, and she plays a key role in shaping senior executives' perceptions of your performance and career potential. Second, in most organizations it's difficult if not impossible for a subordinate to dislodge a boss in the short term. Frequently, if you do some digging, you'll find that your manager has some special ability his manager values — for example, a close relationship with a key customer or specific expertise that the boss lacks. As a result, rather than get demoralized or seek comfort from peers in your misery, it's better to take steps to try to address the situation proactively.

Start by doing some diagnostic work. What are your boss's goals and interests? What does he value? A sense of urgency, attention to detail, getting everyone on board before advancing a proposed initiative? How does he take in and process information: reading, verbal updates, fact-based analysis? How does he make decisions: analytically or based on the endorsement of trusted lieutenants? What issues is he vitally interested in — and which is he prepared to delegate to you with only periodic updates? By helping your boss achieve his goals and communicating actively on those issues he cares about — and doing so in his preferred style — you can begin to build the boss's confidence and make an imperfect relationship acceptable for the period of time you report to him. Also, try to identify your boss's base of knowledge and expertise and convey a desire to learn from him. Often when a boss feels valued and confident that he is receiving all of the information he feels necessary to do his job, the seeds of a more positive relationship are sown.

Clearly, however, these tactics aren't foolproof — and in some cases you may need to try to engineer a move to a new position within your organization. As you do, make sure your boss knows about your career goals and the career discussions you've had with other executives in the past. Your boss may or may not agree with your career goals. However, informing your boss about past career conversations makes it easier for you to set up meetings with other executives with whom you have a relationship since it won't seem like you're going around her. In such meetings be professional, but let the executives know that you'd be interested in pursuing a new assignment — sooner rather than later. In those conversations listen for any information that might shed light on your boss's actions and give you a sense of whether her behavior is temporary or well-ingrained.

For example, your boss may be on the hot seat with her boss or on edge about an impending reorganization. Unless you know an executive very well, be careful not to criticize your boss directly. However, if you've reached the point where you either need to find a new manager or leave the company, let your tone convey your strong desire to move to a new assignment. If you are a high-performer the company wants to retain, an uptick in your sense of urgency to find a new role may well signal to other executives that it's time to intervene.

Dealing with a bad boss can be one of the most nerve-wracking events of your career. However, you can learn from the experience. In their landmark study, The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job, Morgan McCall, Mike Lombardo, and Ann Morrison found that having a bad boss was actually one of a future leader's most formative developmental experiences since those leaders were able to identify the ways they didn't want to manage. Beyond that, the techniques described for building a relationship with a bad boss (focusing on the manager's goals and values; deciphering how he processes information and makes decisions) can also be applied to forging more productive working relationships with peers you need to work with inside your company's matrix organization.

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming HBR Single Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

If You're Not Micromanaging, You're Not Leading

11:45 AM Wednesday May 23, 2012  | Comments

The single most revealing moment in the coverage of JPMorgan's multibillion dollar debacle can be found in this take-your-breath-away passage from The Wall Street Journal:

On April 30, associates who were gathered in a conference room handed Mr. Dimon summaries and analyses of the losses. But there were no details about the trades themselves. "I want to see the positions!" he barked, throwing down the papers, according to attendees. "Now! I want to see everything!"

When Mr. Dimon saw the numbers, these people say, he couldn't breathe.

Only when he saw the actual trades — the raw data — did Dimon realize the full magnitude of his company's situation. The horrible irony: The very detail-oriented systems (and people) Dimon had put in place had obscured rather than surfaced his bank's horrible hedge. What he'd dismissed as a "tempest in a teapot" less than a month earlier had turned into a multibillion dollar humiliation. If Dimon had seen those positions — naked and unsummarized — back then, could his bank have saved itself and its CEO a lot of money and embarrassment?

Dimon (whom I've met and admire enormously) acknowledges he was too complacent. But this vignette affirms my belief that leaders need to "go to the source" even before they turn to their best people. Seeing the data raw instead of analytically pre-chewed can have enormous impact on executive perceptions. That's not to minimize or marginalize the importance of analysis and interpretation. But when tempests threaten to outgrow their teapots, nothing creates situational awareness faster than seeing with your own eyes what your experts are trying to synthesize and summarize. There's a reason why great chefs visit the farms and markets that source their restaurants: The raw ingredients are critical to success.

At one global telecommunications giant, for example, a critical network software upgrade was not only slipping further behind schedule, but the bug density was slowly creeping up, as well. The program managers' key performance indicator dashboards showed nothing alarmingly unusual except the seemingly usual slippage and delays associated with a complex project with moving parts worldwide. The executive responsible for the deliverable (but not the software engineering itself) felt something amiss. The error rates felt too high and the delays too long, given the clarity of project milestones. He wasn't technically sophisticated enough to read the code or analyze the testing, but he asked several project managers to share how their code was being documented. The raw material astonished and appalled him. The code was both hastily and poorly documented; the result was confusion and ambiguity that not only created delays but introduced errors into the software. The deadline-driven programmers, unfortunately, thought nothing of improvising just-in-time documentation via email, and misunderstandings and typos quickly propagated program-wide. The result was a worsening mess.

The executive intervention — making documentation a priority, streamlining version coordination, and changing the testing protocols — didn't get the complex program back on schedule, but stopped things from getting worse, and dramatically improved both product quality and post-launch maintainability. It could never have happened unless leadership had the courage and competence to go to the source. Is this micromanagement? You bet! But real leaders are constantly called upon to create new contexts for people to succeed. Sometimes holding people accountable is the path of least resistance rather than what's best for the organization.

There's both a cultural and personal difference between this kind of micromanagement and being a control freak. In the former, leaders want to see — and feel — what's going on with their own eyes and gut; they want to draw upon their own experiences and expertise. In the latter, they want a greater command of detail in order to tell people what to do. The best micromanagers (like Dimon) go to the source, so they can see, listen, and understand better; the control freaks do it to remind people that they run the whole show.

Yes, there's something vaguely mistrustful and distrustful about insisting on a diet of raw data rather than a richly prepared presentation of nutritious analytics. The core message — that you want/need to see for yourself — may feel disempowering to some. But there's a fundamental difference between trusting your people and trusting their data. Trust me, you'll breathe easier if you go to the source when those teapots start whistling a little too sharply.

In our last blog, we discussed the importance of competence for fostering the trust you need as a manager to influence others. We stressed that management competence includes not just technical knowledge of the work but operational and political know-how as well.

Here we want to focus on the other great component of trust — character — but by taking a different approach.

Think of the most chilling villain you've seen in the movies, the one who shows up in your nightmares, the one you would avoid at all cost if he really existed, the one, in short, you absolutely cannot trust. We don't know what villain comes to mind for you, but one of our most memorable is Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, played by Anthony Hopkins. Lecter is a genius, especially at reading people's minds; in other words, he's super competent. Whatever he sets out to accomplish, we're confident he knows or will figure out what to do and how to do it. Think about that. An idiot villain would be a joke. That's why serious villains are virtually always highly capable: Darth Vader (Star Wars), Dr. Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes' archenemy), and one of our favorites, Magua (the embittered Huron warrior played by Wes Studi in Last of the Mohicans).

But what makes these characters so frightening isn't just competence. That forces us to take them seriously; it makes them compelling. But, for the most part, competence is neutral. What truly chills us, what virtually defines villains, are their evil intentions. Their purpose is to do harm. What they seek to do with their competence is what terrifies us. Intentions are the heart of what we call character — the values, norms, goals, and priorities that drive someone's actions and choices.

Our visceral reactions to villains illustrate an important point — that our feelings about someone, whether we fear or trust them, are largely determined by their intentions. By divining what they want, we answer the question we all instinctively ask about someone new: ally or enemy? Intentions are how we distinguish a villain from someone whose influence we accept, whom we move toward. Competence may be appealing, but intentions are what attract or repel us and foster trust or mistrust.

Thus, if you want to lead and influence others, you must reveal your intentions. People won't believe you will do the right thing unless they're convinced you genuinely want to do it.

That requires more conscious effort than most bosses understand. We all more or less assume that others will see our positive motives or at least give us the benefit of the doubt. But it often doesn't work that way. As a leader and manager, you must often make tradeoffs among the competing interests of your own group, other groups, the organization as a whole, important outsiders, and the individuals who work for you. That obviously creates many opportunities for people to misinterpret your intentions.

That's why it's often critical to take conscious and purposeful steps to reveal your motives and values and to open yourself so others can see inside you. Here are three important ways to reveal your intentions and convince others of their sincerity.

1. First, talk explicitly about your intentions — what's important to you, the goals you seek, the values and motives that guide your actions and decisions. Talk as well about the sources of your intentions — the experiences that forged them. When you do something or make a choice, explain both the business and personal reasons. Don't assume people will see them. Say them outright. Invite a discussion of them.

This sounds easy, but many managers resist the idea that the boss must stoop to explain himself. Being the boss, they think, means not having to do that. But if they want to generate the kind of trust that gives them real influence and elicits the best from their people, they will talk about their intentions. This is important because intentions often aren't obvious, and they're always open to interpretation — especially, as we said, in a complex setting like work. So relying on others to guess what's in your head and heart is, at best, a problematic way to produce the outcome — trust — that you want.

2. The second way to reveal your intentions is through integrity. Walk the talk. Keep your word. Be sure that what you say is consistent with what you do. This will prove your authenticity. If you tell people to be open to new ideas, but you're not, they will doubt what you say. If they don't understand or believe your intentions, how can they trust you to do the right thing?

3. The third way you reveal your intentions is through consistency. The intentions you speak about and practice should be the same from day to day, from person to person, from situation to situation. If they're not, and there's no reason for the difference, your lack of consistency will lead people to doubt you as well. If there are differences, be sure to explain them. Be sensitive to how others see and interpret your reasons for what you do.

So far we've argued that intentions — character — are the foundation of trust, that they must be supported by competence, and that you must take pains to reveal them. But we haven't addressed the question of your intentions themselves. Does it matter what your intentions are?

Yes, of course it does. We don't trust anyone simply because they have clear intentions. Otherwise, we'd trust Hannibal Lecter and other villains. People trust us because we have the right intentions, which are those intentions people accept and agree with.

What are "the right" intentions? That's not an easy question to answer, especially for a boss, and it's the subject of our next blog.

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Good Managers Lead Through a Team

12:22 PM Tuesday April 3, 2012  | Comments

We consider the ability to manage a team so important that, in a recent book, we made it one of the "3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader:" Manage Your Team — the first imperative — is about creating a real team and managing through it. For the record, the other two imperatives are Manage Yourself — which is about building relationships based on trust, not authority — and Manage Your Network, which is about connecting and collaborating with those you don't control.

"Manage your team" might seem clear and straightforward. Yet when we talk about it, we often find it's not an intuitive concept for many managers and for some it even cuts against the grain of what they think they should do as bosses.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the problem, as we've come to understand it, is through the phrase we used above — manage "through the team." By that we mean you should use the social dynamics of the team to manage individual members, rather than managing members primarily one-by-one. This is a critical distinction that many managers miss. Though they extol the benefits of teamwork, they insist on managing their teams individual-by-individual. Thus, they virtually ensure that their groups will never become true teams.

Every group is not a team. Most are not, in fact, and so it's good to start with a definition.
A team is a group of people who do collective work and are mutually committed to a common team purpose and challenging goals related to that purpose.

Teams are more productive and innovative than mere work groups. They produce results that exceed what groups of individuals can do through simple cooperation and coordination. Such results reflect a "team effect:" members perform better when they feel they're part of a team. The root of this benefit is members' strong mutual commitment to their joint work. This commitment creates compelling social and emotional bonds among members, who come to believe that "we" will all succeed or fail together and that no one can succeed if the team fails. In every team, "we" trumps "I." Unless you've been part of a team yourself, it's hard to understand the exhilaration produced by this sense of what "we" can accomplish together.

This mutual commitment, this "we," the potent interpersonal bonds among team members, spring from two related sources:

1. A mutual sense of purpose. Every high-performing team believes it exists for a compelling reason and that the world will be better for what it does. Its purpose is not the task or work it does but the benefit it delivers. It's the difference between "We scrub hospital floors" and "We prevent the spread of deadly infections." This is what pulls people together and makes them feel part of something bigger than themselves.


2. Tangible goals based on that purpose. Purpose must be made concrete or it will quickly wither. To sustain its sense of purpose, every team needs to strive toward specific, real achievements that will fulfill that purpose.

In short, purpose and related goals are the glue that holds a team together. Purpose without concrete goals is just a dream. Goals without purpose are aimless activity. But although they are critical, purpose and goals are not enough. A team also needs clarity. In particular, team members need clarity about:

• Members' roles and responsibilities — not everyone can do everything


• Important work processes — the way the team does its work, such as making decisions


• Values, norms, and standards that define what members expect of each other — how conflict, for example, may and may not be expressed


• The kinds of feedback and metrics needed to measure progress.

These may be the more nitty-gritty aspects of team infrastructure but they're needed to keep the team's work flowing smoothly and to minimize destructive conflict. And when all these conditions are present and a group becomes a true team, members perform at a high level not because the boss demands it but because their team colleagues expect it. Members work hard so as to support each other and not let the team down. In effect, then, the team manages itself. If a team member fails to perform, other members will let him know. In this way, performance is guided by the social and emotional bonds among members, not the expectations of the boss. When this occurs, the manager is managing through the team by using the social bonds among members to shape behavior.

It's a more effective way to manage because it elicits more commitment and effort from the individuals involved. But it's obviously not a comfortable approach for those bosses who need to be "in charge" and want to believe that their team will succeed because of their direct influence. They dislike, in particular, the fact that creating a team requires such an indirect approach, like a pool player making a bank shot off the side rather than straight into a pocket. They don't realize that the more direct approach they prefer will most likely prevent their group from becoming a real team. Real teams emerge spontaneously when the right conditions are present; a team can't be created by decree. The boss cannot dictate a compelling purpose; the team members must choose one, though it certainly can be one the boss has suggested and the team discussed.

Thus, instead of imposing and directing, you as group leader must suggest, support, define, focus on, talk about, expect, hire for, lead discussions about, and evaluate performance against the conditions that foster the spontaneous formation of a team. Your formal authority can be useful for directing people's time and attention to the right issues and conditions. That's far from nothing, but in the end only your group's members can make themselves into a team by freely committing themselves to a mutual purpose.

Your job as team leader is to foster and then sustain the conditions that help them do that. You may not feel completely comfortable with such an indirect approach, but that's how teams work.

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center on The Secrets of Great Teams.

The Biggest Mistake You (Probably) Make with Teams

10:09 AM Thursday April 5, 2012  | Comments

Throughout most of my career, I've made a big mistake in the way I've lead teams — and wouldn't be surprised if you have, too.

Which is more important to promoting collaboration: a clearly defined approach toward achieving the goal, or clearly specified roles for individual team members? The common assumption — and my personal approach for many years — is that carefully spelling out the approach is essential, while leaving the roles of individuals within the team open and flexible will encourage people to share ideas and contribute in multiple dimensions.

But our research has shown that the opposite is true: collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood — in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task.

We've also found that team members are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team's goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as one that requires creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest more time and energy in collaboration.

Consider a team of doctors and nurses working in a hospital emergency room. Before the next ambulance to arrives, they have no idea of the nature of the task ahead. Will the patient require surgery, heart resuscitation, medications? The condition of the next patient is unknown; the tasks that will be required of the team, ambiguous. But at no time while the team waits, do they negotiate roles: "Who would like to administer the anesthesia? Who will set out the instruments? Who will make key decisions?" Each role is clear. As a result, when the patient arrives, the team is able to move quickly into action.

At the BBC, we studied the teams responsible for the radio and television broadcasts of special events and daytime television news. These teams were large — ranging from 66 people in one case to 133 in another — and included members with a wide range of skills and from many disciplines. One would imagine, therefore, that there was a high possibility of confusion among team members.

To the contrary, we found that the BBC's teams scored among the highest in our sample with regard to the clarity with which team members viewed their own roles and the roles of others. Every team was composed of specialists who had deep expertise in their given function, and each person had a clearly defined role. There was no overlap in the responsibilities of the sound technician and of the camera operator, and so on. Yet the tasks the BBC teams tackle are, by their very nature, uncertain and to some extent ambiguous, particularly when they involve covering breaking news. The trick the BBC and others in the film industry have pulled off has been to clarify team members' individual roles with so much precision that it keeps friction, internal competition and the possibility of mistakes of omission to a minimum.

In the same research, we also studied successful teams at Reuters — teams that worked out of far-flung locations and, in many cases, didn't speak a common language. (The primary languages were Russian, Chinese, Thai, and English.) These teams, largely composed of software programmers, were responsible for the rapid development of highly complex technical software and network products. Many of the programmers sat at their desks for 12 hours straight developing code, speaking with no one. Each individual was given autonomy for one discrete, well-defined piece of the project; the rapid pace and demanding project timelines encouraged individual members to work independently to get the job done. Yet because each individual's work had to fit seamlessly into the final product, shaped with an eye toward achieving the overall team goal, these teams judged collaborative behavior to be high among their members.

The leader's role, as I learned from this research, is to ensure that the roles and responsibilities of the team members are clearly defined for the specific project at hand (members' roles may change from project to project to provide variety and broaden experience). Conversely, leaders should help team members understand the project's importance and ultimate objective but leave the exact approach to the discretion of the team.

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center on The Secrets of Great Teams.

The One Skill All Leaders Should Work On

11:30 AM Thursday March 29, 2012
by Scott Edinger | Comments

If I had to pick one skill for the majority of leaders I work with to improve, it would be assertiveness. Not because being assertive is such a wonderful trait in and of itself. Rather, because of its power to magnify so many other leadership strengths.

Assertiveness gets a bad rap when people equate it with being pushy and annoying. But that shouldn't stop you from learning to apply it productively (that is — in service to your strengths). More harm is done when people aren't assertive enough than by being too assertive. At least you know what pushy people think, but those who don't assert themselves can be keeping vital ideas hidden and useless when they don't speak up or speak too softly. So I'd assert that when you are able to balance this critical skill with your other leadership abilities, you greatly amplify your power and impact.

Here are some specific ways in which assertiveness complements a wide range of the critical leadership skills you may already have:

• Creating a culture of innovation: A couple of years ago I conducted a study to determine the characteristics of the most innovative leaders in one of the largest companies in the world. One of their most powerful traits, their peers and direct reports told me, was their ability to push back on the hierarchy. These leaders were by no means rebels; rather, they were perceived to be fearless. Coupling assertiveness with their ability to foster innovation enabled them to take on difficult issues — to fight for resources for new projects or openly disagree with more senior managers about policy changes that could have severe unintended consequences. Being challenged required people to think more deeply to justify a course of action, which frequently produced much better ideas.

• Being customer focused: We typically think of service or business development professionals as being good at, and focused on, building relationships. But the most successful sales professionals, as Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson point out in their blog and their book, The Challenger Sale, are not the ones who build relationships. They're the ones who push back, challenging their clients to see problems they hadn't anticipated. Essentially, Dixon and Adamson's research finds, assertiveness creates more value for clients than conciliatory relationship building does.

• Fostering teamwork and collaboration: It might seem like assertiveness has little to do with the skills you need to be a team player. But teams thrive when their members are able to express their not-always-popular points of view. Excellent team players (who generally are already inclusive and able to defer to others) would improve considerably by learning when to assert such views. And team leaders who are assertive in creating a safe environment for less-popular opinions will make their teams all the stronger by increasing all team members' ability to participate fully.

• Leading change: Constructive change rarely happens passively. Change requires the leaders to challenge the status quo and find new ways of doing things to further organizational goals. It's nearly impossible to lead change without some measure of assertiveness because in most cases, even when change is generally viewed as positive, some kind of resistance still needs to be addressed.

• Acting with integrity: There are plenty of highly principled people who are too timid to speak up in meetings — to question a decision that appears to violate a corporate value or is otherwise not in the best interests of the organization. Assertiveness doesn't cause honesty or vice-versa, but when the two operate together they give people the courage not only to know what is right but to stand up for it as well.

• Creating a safe environment: This might seem self-evident — there are times when it's vital to speak up in the face of danger. And yet there are so many times when people don't, even in cases of life and death. The National Transportation Safety Board, for instance, has traced the cause of some plane crashes to co-pilots who were so deferential to their pilot in an emergency that they made suggestions too subtly. While most of us are not faced with life or death decisions each day, plenty of leaders are responsible for the safety of those they lead.

• Communicating effectively: Assertiveness adds power and conviction to a message and enables a leader's voice to be heard. You can clearly tell the difference between a message communicated with passion and vigor as a leader asserts his or her point of view and one that lacks the energy of conviction. Assertive leaders also tend to communicate more often, as their passion leads them to capitalize on every opportunity they can find to deliver a message.

Many leaders (though certainly not all) struggle with being assertive enough, whether through self-doubt, a lack of confidence, a fear of not being liked, or a host of other reasons. Most people who know me personally would probably say that I possess a reasonably strong level of assertiveness. Yet there are times (like when I'm with people whom I admire or whose opinion is particularly important to me) that I become relatively timid and less likely to assert my point of view. Ironically, when I review those situations, I recognize that they may be some of the most important times for me to speak up.

"Leadership" has changed when a decentralized group of people can take down a government. "The Value Chain" has changed when the customer is no longer just the "buyer" but also a co-creator. "Human Resources" have changed when most of the people who create value for your organization are neither hired nor paid by you. "Competition" has changed when individuals can create value through a centralized network of resources: for example, designing a product from anywhere, producing it through a 3D factory, financing it through community and distribution from anywhere to anywhere.

Yet our business models have not changed to keep pace with these shifts.

This five-part series has shared case studies and examples of how the social era affects all areas of the business model: how we create, deliver, and capture value. (See part one, part two, part three, and part four.)

Here's a quick visual summary of what we've covered so far:

These changes are not transitory or reversible, but fundamental and irrevocable. The social-era models are inherently more fast, fluid, and flexible than the models that preceded them. The big question is: how are we actually going to do this thing?

And it is a huge question: it is a life's work-sized-question that can't possibly be answered in a blog post, or even a series of posts. But I can offer three actionable, thought-provoking exercises that you can start with, today:

From paid to purpose-driven. In the social era, purpose precedes scale. And as we discussed in part two of the series, shared purpose allows many communities to engage with you — without you having to invest resources in controlling their actions. When TED unleashed TEDx, they created a force multiplier. Shared purpose aligns people without coordination costs.

Purpose is also a better motivator than money. Money, while necessary, motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. Purpose does.

Actionable exercise: Have the people you work with write down the purpose of your work, then compare answers. Then ask, are any of these purposes something that would create a multiplier effect? Engage hearts and minds?

From isolated organizations to communities. The social era will reward those organizations that understand they can create more value with communities than they can on their own. Communities of proximity, where participants share a geographic location (Craigslist is an example but co-working locations are another) will allow people to organize work differently. Communities of passion who share a common interest (photography, or food, or books) can inform new product lines. Communities of purpose will willingly share a common task to build something (like Wikipedia) that will carry your brand and its offer to another level. Communities of practice, where they share a common career or field of business, will extend your offer because it extends their expertise (like McAfee mavens). Communities of providence that allow people to discover connections with others (as in Facebook) and thus enable the sharing of information, products and ideas.

Actionable exercise: Imagine that if you asked, you could get communities to co-create with you. What could you do together? What would be one way to try it out?

From centralized to distributed. While management often espouses the notion that good ideas can come from everywhere, in practice there are "thinkers" who create strategies and designated "doers" who execute those strategies. But that only leaves an air sandwich in the organization, where debates, tradeoffs, and necessary discussions are skipped. This air sandwich is the source of all strategic failure. Instead of centralized decisions, we need distributed input and distributed decisions.

Actionable exercise: Rather than making command and control a "bad" thing, discuss what areas needs which controls. Then examine how more, if not most, areas and decisions can distributed (and thus made radically more flexible). For the purpose of the exercise, say that you want 50% or 70% all decisions to be free of permission-seeking and check-ins. What would it take to get there?

When we emphasize purpose, engage communities, and distribute decision-making, we begin to stop talking about being fast, fluid, and flexible, and actually begin to make our organizations become fast, fluid, and flexible. This can change how we organize every single part of these organizations — from what we make, to how we product and distribute, to how we market and sell. Everything.

Disrupting How We Work
Many of you know of Clay Christensen's iconic work the Innovators Dilemma. Small newcomers eat off bits of an established leader's business through lower cost structure and a willingness to accept lower margins. This phenomenon has been seen in industry after industry, and usually focused on the cost of delivering goods and services. In other words, "Look how the steel mini-mills making rebar disrupt the established integrated steel mills making sheet steel." At each point in the disruption, it makes economic sense for the big company to surrender that bit of the market to the disruptor, and so big companies logically put themselves out of business.

I think there is an analogous process going on with the organizational structure of businesses themselves; that aside from market-specific competition from below, there is also competition from disruptive organizations that are finding new ways to get work done. This change is just as threatening to established businesses as the process competitors Christensen identified, and just as difficult to respond to.

Where once you could reexamine the organization's model (the how) every few years to support the rest of the business (the what), reinventing the how becomes its own muscle to develop.

How does this lead to disruption? To answer this question, let's look at Singularity University, which I mentioned earlier in this series. You might recall that they deliver an education curriculum of 300 hours with seven full-time staff. Their organizational model lets them then fluidly reinvent what they create next, thus baking innovation in with their disruptive design. In particular some 80% of their business resources are fluid. Their purpose doesn't change, but their "what" does. Their business model allows them to persistently review "what's the next big thing" and adjust. Using Christensen's metaphor, educational institutions are the sheet steel with its ever-increasing tuitions to support their tenured staff, while Singular University is the rebar. But their flexible design gives them the chance to keep being the "rebar."

What Happens Now
Rather than try to power through with size, we'll have to find power through shared purpose.

Rather than hiring and directing inside the walls of an organization, we'll tear down those walls altogether and allow everyone to own a part of the big picture.

Rather than taking long stretches of time to perfect something, we'll build fast, fluid and flexible organizations.

What we create in the end will be a different type of organization, one that embodies a culture of innovation.

Since I began writing this series, many of you have written publicly and privately asking, doesn't this just mean the "800-pound gorilla" dies? Entrepreneurs and the startup ecosystem who embody fast / fluid / flexible attributes certainly believe that the established players are fated to die. Many think of these big organizations as the dinosaurs of our time. But one can look at the history of dinosaurs and see that dinosaurs didn't really die. Paleontologists have suggested that dinosaurs are all around us today actually, as birds.

Applied to today's business giants, the analogy probably holds. The "species" that adapt to the changes in the environment faster will do better. That is for sure. What is less clear is what they will become as they adapt. Perhaps the new model for a successful business should be "Nimble." Or "Flux." Or "Humanized." Or "Networked." Frankly, I find the search for naming less-than-fruitful. We have plenty of names already; will another name really help you act?

Over time, there will be a lot more dots filling out this picture. But the fundamental principles of the social era are already clear enough to form a new set of organizing principles for business. The world has changed; how we create value has changed. Organizationally we have not. It's time to pay attention to these emerging business models now, to benefit our organizations, our economies, and ourselves.

This post is the fifth in a series on how the social era will reward fast, fluid, flexible organizations. Read the other posts here:
Part 1: Rules for the Social Era
Part 2: Social Means Freedom, for Better or for Worse
Part 3: Why Porter's Model No Longer Works
Part 4: Why Social Marketing Is So Hard

Firing Someone the Right Way

1:00 PM Tuesday March 20, 2012  | Comments

Perhaps the most difficult part of any manager's job is telling a subordinate that he can no longer stay with the company — that he's been "fired," "let go," "dismissed," or otherwise taken off the payroll. It's a gut-wrenching conversation, knowing how this simple act affects a person's career, self-esteem, and livelihood. Firing an employee also affects everyone else on your team. Not only does it change work assignments, but it also makes people wonder about your judgment as a manager and their own job security.

Given these emotional undercurrents, many managers let anxiety drive the firing process instead of intellect, making a difficult moment even worse. For example, I know of a senior manager who walked unannounced into his employee's office, junior HR person in-tow, and declared: "You've been fired. Our HR associate will answer your questions and then escort you out of the building." The manager then exited, leaving the shocked (former) employee and the ill-prepared HR person staring awkwardly at each other. What made this situation even worse is that the senior manager had given no previous indication of the employee's performance difficulties and had given him nothing but positive feedback in the previous six months. Now, suddenly, the reason for the firing was "lack of teamwork." And because it was "for cause," no severance was offered and pay was terminated immediately.

From the manager's perspective, this approach avoided the anxiety associated with firing. He didn't have to engage in any difficult performance discussions or justify his actions. He also avoided any kind of emotional scene and (temporary) budget impacts. Of course, he also probably generated a major lawsuit that left the company liable for far more than the cost of a severance. And once the story got out, he likely lost the respect of his team.

Clearly this may be an extreme example,but there are too many stories like this one. Because firing is so emotionally charged, it's easy to act counterproductively. To avoid that, here are some guidelines for those times when firing an employee becomes a necessity:

First, make sure that letting your employee go is the last step in a careful, thoughtful, fair, and transparent process that started long before the actual firing. In other words, if the dismissal is for poor performance, then it should occur after a series of performance discussions, plans, and documented actions. If it's due to reorganization or job elimination, it also should follow conversations, announcements, and a reasonable "fair warning." The key is that, if possible, firing should not come as a surprise. In most companies, the HR function has guidelines for how this process should unfold.

Second, come to the "firing meeting" prepared to address the practical logistical questions that the person will have about leaving her job: When is the official end date? Are there severance arrangements? Are there opportunities elsewhere in the company? Is career counseling available? What happens with benefits? You may need help from HR to make sure that these answers are available.

Third, at the meeting be ready to listen but not react. Losing a job can be traumatic, and your employee may display a range of emotions, which he might direct towards you. Try not to get caught up in responding. Listen with respect and then direct the person towards the practical realities of moving on. Offer to talk again later when the emotions are not so raw, or ask a trained HR counselor to join you.

Finally, after the firing, talk to your team about the process, the reasoning, and the implications for them (within the limits of confidentiality). In some cases, they will fully understand the decision. In others, they may have a very incomplete picture. In either case, you need to be sensitive to their emotions, and then help redirect their focus back on work.

Firing a subordinate is one of the most difficult and painful tasks you'll ever have to do as a manager; and for most of us it never gets easier. Unfortunately, avoiding the anxiety associated with firing only makes things worse. So if you have to do it — do it right.

What's been your experience with firing — or being fired?

Sally Augustin is a practicing design/environmental psychologist, an expert on person-centered design, and a principal at Design With Science. She consults with organizations and individuals to inform optimal design solutions.

Your Coworkers See Your Office Differently

2:35 PM Tuesday March 13, 2012
by Sally Augustin | Comments

When people from several different countries share the same workplace, misunderstandings can generate friction. Sure, there are language issues and not everyone likes the way other people manage their time, but the most insidious and intractable problems between coworkers from different parts of the world often arise from variations in how colleagues perceive (literally) and prefer to use space. The most commonly recognized difference is the amount of personal space people need to feel comfortable when they're conversing — but that's just one of many cultural preferences that affect the way people interact with each other and their surroundings. The psychology research described below may help smooth some discussions and provide explanations for behaviors that you might otherwise find baffling.

In North America, people are very attuned to what spaces and objects look like, but vision doesn't reign supreme everywhere. Edward Hall, in The Hidden Dimension, noticed differences in sensory sensibilities several decades ago, and his work is still relevant today. In Japan, people are much more likely to attend to smells, sounds, and tactile sensations when in a space or using an object. Functionality of sense organs is not the issue here; what does come into play is the attention given to information collected through the senses. Traditionally, in Arab cultures, the smell of a conversation partner's breath is felt to convey all sorts of important information — and people need to stand close enough to each other during conversations to pick up those olfactory signals. So keep in mind that your colleagues may respond differently to a space or an object than you do because they register different aspects of its sensory profile.

Geert Hofstede, in Cultures and Organizations, discusses five dimensions of national culture. One of them is whether a culture is more individualistic or collectivistic. People from more individualistic cultures expect to be able to spend more time alone than people from collectivistic cultures, which has implications, for example, for how people may respond to the design of a public space, such as a workplace. People from more individualistic cultures are also more likely to modify a space or object to meet their individual needs — if the design of those places or objects resists modification, they will "ugly up" fast. Countries that are relatively more individualistic include the United States. Great Britain, and the Scandinavian countries. Some of the more collectivistic cultures are China, Costa Rica, and Indonesia.

Hofstede also points out that cultures vary in their acceptances of differences in power. Countries that are more accepting include Malaysia, Russia, and Mexico, while those that aren't include the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. This has clear implications for workplace design. People from countries more accepting of differences in power can be expected to clearly differentiate the workspaces of those of higher status from those of lower status and include workplace amenities tied to relative status, as well.

The various structures of language can come into play, as well. You may have suspected this if you've ever distributed product prototypes or drawings of potential work or retail environments, for example, among colleagues in different parts of the world. If the noun used to connote whatever's being talked about is associated with a particular gender, for example through the use of different articles (think "le" and "la" in French), discussions of the physical form of the thing connoted by that noun are affected. The classic related research, reviewed along with similar material by Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, involved the word "bridge," which is masculine in some European countries and feminine in others. In countries where "bridge" is feminine, bridges are more apt to be associated with elegance, while in countries that speak languages where "bridge" is a masculine word, bridges are more likely to be associated with sturdiness — even when native speakers of other languages speak in English. The word "office" is masculine in some European languages and feminine in others, which may cause native speakers to think about those spaces in subtly different ways.

There's a lot more to consider when you're working with people who grew up in another country than making sure you astutely manage interpersonal distances.

David Aaker is the vice chairman of Prophet and the author of Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant. He writes the davidaaker.com blog on branding.

Steve Jobs and The Bobby Knight School of Leadership

10:45 AM Tuesday March 13, 2012
by David Aaker | Comments

I believe that Steve Jobs was among the best CEOs of this generation because he created entirely new categories six times in a decade, and built the largest company market cap ever. Yet two recent and excellent books (Inside Apple, by Adam Lashinsky and Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson) describe a management style that was disturbingly harsh.

To understand Jobs's success, I find it helpful to look at the success of Bobby Knight, the fabled basketball coach at Indiana. Knight was one of two coaches to win over 900 games, won the NCAA championship three times, and was the national coach of the year four times yet had a management style similar to Jobs (described in detail by John Feinstein's book A Season on the Brink). What are the common success characteristics shared by these two? Before answering that question, it is useful to elaborate the two management styles.

Jobs's treatment of employees and partners has been described as brutal and even cruel. He routinely denigrated the ideas and accomplishments of employees, expected a commitment to work but seldom appreciated loyalty, arbitrarily fired people, disregarded the feelings of others, excluded people from "secret" projects, routinely took credit for the accomplishments of others, and did not allow others to have a public face. It is the very opposite of the supportive and nurturing Theory Y management pioneered by MIT's Douglas McGregor over a half century ago.

Knight's treatment of players has been termed abusive. He shouted, pushed, denigrated, humiliated, threatened, and harped on faults. Other coaches were loud and negative but Knight took it to a whole new level. He was so cruel that a key job of assistant coaches was to council distraught players to ignore what he said. Among his many examples of loutish behavior was throwing a chair across the basketball floor during a game. After many warnings, he was ultimately fired from Indiana 28 years after being accused of choking a player.

Knight and Jobs shared four common success traits that seem more obvious when looking at the two together.

1. They were incredibly knowledgeable and insightful. Jobs would make decisive decisions on large and small issues and again and again would be proved right by the market or technology. With that ability to make the right decision came respect and a tolerance for his negativity. Knight not only had an amazing knowledge of the game, but he also had insight into competitors and an ability to tailor the efforts of players and a team to get them in a position to win. The knowledge for both in part came from discipline and hard work. Each was obsessive about their jobs and put in astonishingly long hours. But the insight also came from a talent that simply could not be taught.
2. Both were perfectionists and micromanagers. They did not stop at strategy but got into tactics at a very micro level. Jobs was famous for getting involved in details for all aspects of a product including design, packaging, and advertising. He wanted perfection and expected everyone else to have the same aspiration. Knight was the same way as he would teach fundamentals, blocking out, passing, and defending and expected each player to know the right way and to execute. There was no room for anything less than ongoing perfection in Knight's world.
3. Both were winners. They hated to lose and could virtually gain victory just by the force of their wills. Winning was crucial to their success over time. People like to be associated with winners and to be on a winning team. The people under both Jobs and Knight in general felt that that these two leaders pushed them to achieve above their natural limits and that result was exhilarating and worth the pain.
4. They had a higher purpose than just winning. Jobs wanted to generate insanely great products and use them as a vehicle to change the world. Knight wanted to go beyond winning to produce players and teams that reached or exceeded their potential. Many of his players, few of whom were NBA-level gifted, said that the coach got them to perform beyond their personal limitations. His purpose extended to the classroom where also demanded discipline. Nearly all of his players graduated, a rare achievement when it comes to elite college sports teams. Winning a championship was not enough for Knight.

This analysis reminds us that there are many routes to CEO success; there is no one style that is the best. In particular, it highlights the truism that it is not necessary to be well-liked or even supportive and encouraging. The Bobby Knight style worked for Knight and for Jobs. Could Jobs or Knight have been as successful or even more so by being a bit more sensitive and less emotional and negative? Or would an effort to temper their style taken the edge off and undercut their performance? We don't know the answer. It is not clear that style adjusting, which is the goal of many training programs and performance reviews, will result in improved executive performance.

The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time

8:53 AM Wednesday March 14, 2012  | Comments

Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.

What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you're taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you're driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn't?

The biggest cost — assuming you don't crash — is to your productivity. In part, that's a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you're partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it's because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you're increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

But most insidiously, it's because if you're always doing something, you're relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.

I know this from my own experience. I get two to three times as much writing accomplished when I focus without interruption for a designated period of time and then take a real break, away from my desk. The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal.

If you're a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:

1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what's been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.

2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it's urgent, you can call them — but that won't happen very often.

3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.

It's also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you'll be. When you're done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don't, you'll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that's relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you're off, you're truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you'll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you're engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you're renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.