It’s easy to blame the person at the top. Everyone wants to take shots at authority figures, so why pay attention to such complaints? Leadership development has typically focused on making the individual, not the team as a whole, better. All the training, educating, and seminaring we’ve done has led to an abundance of autocratic individuals who see themselves as saviors. They didn’t do this by themselves; we helped. Under the old model, the team exists, at least in the leader’s mind, to help the boss get ahead, to increase production, maximize profit, and make the leader look better.

Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup and author of The Coming Jobs War, wrote, “What the whole world wants is a good job, and we are failing to deliver it… This means human development is failing, too. Most [individuals] are coming to work with great enthusiasm, but the old management practices — forms, gaps, and annual reviews — grind the life out of them.” Management styles, which have changed very little since the late 1700s, are due to evolve with the changing face of business. The world of work is changing fast, and management needs to follow.

A true leader goes beyond mere titles and does more than fulfill a role. Leadership is a responsibility shared by everyone that involves working with the right people to identify their strengths and help develop them for the organization’s betterment. Doing this job well takes emotional capital, which is one reason why many bosses are so bad at it.

Telling people what to do rather than showing them what to do takes a lot less effort. And yet the latter is precisely what we need. Sadly, we may not find the answer at the top. It will likely come from the middle or even the bottom. We are experiencing today a crisis of true leadership. Few are willing to stand up to the cultural problem that wants to put a single individual at the forefront of everything. And no amount of advice from bestselling authors and leadership gurus can fix it.

What we are doing is not working. The days of making the leader better to make the team better, which then improves the company, are over. Change will no longer come from just the top. It’ll come from you and me, right here and now, wherever we may find ourselves in the hair ball. But first, we have to assess the damage. By training the leader as a superhero type, we have managed to frustrate the entire workforce, the world over, in our quest to improve the workplace. At best, leadership is overrated; at worst, a complete failure.

What even is a leader nowadays? It’s not someone respected in the workplace. It’s not a particularly industrious person who earned their way up the ranks of an organization, whose experience and expertise are highly valued by peers and subordinates alike. In today’s work climate, leadership is practically anything anyone wants to say it is, and leaders are anyone with a label, appointed by someone with a fancier label.

With engagement rates in the workplace continuing to plummet over the past two decades and only being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the time for change is now. We are dealing with global failure of leadership that has affected the mental, emotional, creative, intellectual, and even physical health of human beings the world over.

It’s time to get rid of our old ways of thinking about leaders and leadership. The bad bosses need to go, and the way to replace them is to become something better than that which we have aspired to. The days of the selfish upstarts who charm and manipulate their way to the top are over. Individual success at the cost of the rest of the team is growing obsolete. It’s time for us to recognize that what we’re doing is not working and to see what it’s truly costing us. Change in our organizational structures and system is closer than we think, but the way it happens will be unlike anything we have ever seen before.

If leadership is overrated, then what comes next? In a sense, we have to kill what we’ve understood a leader to be so that another, better organizational model can emerge. It is no longer leadership that saves a company or defines a movement — it’s the culture — and that’s something we all can have a hand in creating. If we don’t step up and change things, we may be those bad bosses everyone is complaining about. At best, we will have submitted to another autocrat; at worst, we will have become the leaders who ought to be “killed.”

This article Leadership is overrated is featured on Big Think.

Consider these challenges middle managers, across all types of industries, are facing every day: a lack of time, a lack of resources, a lack of appreciation, and a lack of agency to perform one of the most important roles — no, the most important role — at an organization: managing talent. 

We define middle managers as the people who are at least once removed from the front line and at least a layer below the senior leadership. From this pivotal position, a middle manager’s job is to bring out the best in their people, and in that way bring out the best in their organizations. 

They do this best by serving as navigators, connectors, and coaches. But in most cases senior leaders, failing to realize this, are putting their middle managers to the wrong use. They are using them as a kind of catch-all to do all the tasks that no one else is willing, able, or available to do. As a result, managers are suffering under a host of burdens and stresses that have stretched them beyond their limits. And they are being blamed for outcomes that are not their fault.

A survey McKinsey conducted of 700 middle managers shows just how serious the problem is across a range of industries. Almost half of managers in the United States, and 42% globally, said they disagreed or were unsure whether their organizations had set them up to be successful managers of people. 

Overall, the managers said that they spent more of their time on individual contributor work than on any other type of work. We’ve seen this with many of our clients. Executives promote someone to a management role and then expect them to continue doing some of their old job, too. Or they expect managers to perform frontline roles to make up for staff shortages.

The managers who responded to the McKinsey survey also said they were spending an average of nearly 20% of their time, or one full workday per week, on administrative work. And it probably isn’t a coincidence that they also felt that the biggest obstacle to their success as people managers was organizational bureaucracy.

Too many organizations have lost sight of the fact that the talent of management — the real energy, creativity, and focus — should be unleashed toward the management of talent. Put another way, the best managers attract and keep the best people. We firmly believe well-performing individuals in well-structured middle management roles are the secret weapon in the war for talent, a term that McKinsey introduced nearly 25 years ago. Now, faced with the perfect storm of automation, hybrid work, an impending economic downturn, a scarcity of skilled workers and profound shifts in attitudes, whether an organization wins or loses will depend largely on its managers.

But right now, many managers are simply not equipped to take on the challenge. That’s because the headwinds they face are just too strong. In talking with middle managers, some common themes emerged:

• Many felt that it was their responsibility to protect their teams from misguided executives. More than one mentioned having to shelter their employees from a toxic leader higher up in the hierarchy. A common thread: Senior leaders just don’t understand the details of a task or strategy and too often ask for the impossible.
• Middle managers understand the importance of training — for both their employees and themselves — but often have trouble getting buy-in and budget from senior executives who are focused on the short-term bottom line.
• A word that middle managers used a lot: trust. They want their bosses to trust them to get things done and make changes in their own way, and that’s how they gain the trust of their team. But all too often, they don’t feel they are receiving that trust from above.
• Some would prefer to stay in their jobs but see no choice but to seek other positions because the reward systems — compensation, equity, bonuses, and promotional opportunities — just aren’t in place if they want to grow within their organizations.
• There is a huge psychological strain that goes along with having this job — one that affects both work and home.

The time is right to focus on managers because the nature of work is changing at a breakneck pace, requiring a new set of people skills. Workplace communication, while easier than ever because of advanced technology, is also more abundant, complex, and confusing than ever. Automation is altering which tasks can be done by humans and which by machines, making some people’s jobs obsolete. And the rise of remote work, accelerated by the pandemic, has led to a fraying of the ties that bind employees together.

Middle managers will play a vital role in dealing with all of these shifts, and many others. They will serve as filters and translators between the executive suite and the front line. They will rethink and re-bundle jobs as they shift large swaths of workers to new roles. And they will be key to restoring the human connections that technology and the pandemic tore apart.

Over and over, as we’ve consulted with organizations, we have seen middle managers being overlooked as a way to improve productivity, boost retention, motivate staff, and create a shared sense of purpose. That’s why we believe that their reputations, reward systems, and job roles need a serious overhaul.

We want more senior leaders to realize that if their middle managers seem unnecessary or underutilized, it’s probably because they aren’t being given the tools, the training, and the autonomy to do their jobs effectively.

This article Middle managers serve the most important role — but companies waste their talent is featured on Big Think.

With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, standardized process efficiencies through automation — factories, mills, quality control, accounting and workflow planning — brought conveniences, cost efficiencies and better overall lives for everyone. 

The goal of many early management thinkers such as Adam Smith, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Gantt, Frank and Lillian Galbreth, and Herbert Townes was to increase the efficiency and consistency of production, reduce variation, and make processes more predictable with fewer errors. 

Leaders could only be as effective as their managers, so giving managers a process to follow was essential. Process efficiency was integrated into how people were managed — find defects and correct weaknesses. 

Human progress developed quickly through the Industrial Revolution, but human development didn’t. 

In designing the processes that led to production efficiency, leaders took advantage of one of human nature’s greatest strengths: Our brains are hardwired to critique and find fault. Defect reduction is critical, particularly in environments where lives and safety are at stake. In more modern workplaces, managers write up annual employee reviews, and the first instinct is to focus on failures or “opportunities for improvement.” 

Traditional performance management is set up to rate and rank employees and focus primarily on their weaknesses. But this approach fails to improve performance. Just 19% of employees strongly agree that how they are managed motivates them to do outstanding work. 

We may be naturally wired to give criticism, but we sure aren’t wired to receive it. We crave praise any time we can get it. Constant criticism makes it nearly impossible for a manager and employee to build a healthy relationship. 

What is the right balance between praise and criticism? 

Critical feedback is necessary, and everyone needs to be aware and accountable for their shortcomings. But to inspire great performance, managers must lead with meaningful feedback that’s grounded in team members’ strengths. This simple starting point builds trust and increases the chance that critical feedback will turn into real development. 

And no matter how many studies have been conducted illustrating the impact of humanistic (positive) psychology, it has remained easier for mainstream leaders and managers to try to inspire their workforces using systems that assume people operate like machines and that everyone develops in the same way. 

How then should managers structure the “ideal” day for employees to encourage higher engagement and performance? 

Today’s workers expect their manager to coach them — primarily based on their strengths. 

Coaching managers change the starting point from this: 

We are all the same, develop in the same way and need to be well-rounded.

to this: 

We all have our own unique innate talents that can be turned into exceptional competencies. 

In a study conducted years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Gallup asked employees to review their most recent workday and to report the number of hours they spent doing various activities. What best differentiated engaged from actively disengaged (miserable) employees was how much time they spent using their strengths — feeling so absorbed in their work that they experienced timelessness and flow. 

Engaged employees spent 4x as much time using their strengths compared with what they don’t do well. Miserable employees spent about equal time using their strengths and weaknesses. 

Gallup replicated the study above in 2022. We again asked employees to reflect on their most recent workday and found that strengths mattered even more in today’s workplaces. In 2022, engaged employees spent 5x as much time using their strengths compared with what they don’t do well. Miserable employees still spent about equal time on their strengths and weaknesses. 

Engaged employees aren’t immune to negativity or job stress. Gallup research shows that engaged or not, employees experience more stress during the workweek than on the weekend. That’s not surprising. Most employees deal with unexpected requests and workplace drama all the time. 

A strengths approach to performance is not about glossing over weaknesses or making sure employees get to work on only assignments and projects they like. Everyone’s role includes tasks that aren’t much fun. 

Likewise, there will be times when managers need to give employees constructive feedback to help them improve in their roles. But when managers treat feedback like it’s a balancing act, performance management falters. They shouldn’t spend equal time on criticism and praise. The scales should be heavily tilted toward what employees do best. 

Management consultant Peter Drucker, and psychologists Abraham Maslow and Don Clifton, came to the same conclusion about human development in organizations: People develop best when they have opportunities to use their strengths. While their professional careers overlapped by almost five decades, these strengths pioneers took different paths to finding this essential truth.

This article Why great managers don’t spend equal time on criticism and praise is featured on Big Think.

Psychopath.

The term often evokes a mental image of a ruthless criminal or a serial killer. It’s a reasonable stereotype. Between one quarter and one third of convicted murderers are psychopaths, along with almost nine in ten serial killers. These heinous offenders earned that diagnosis because they lie and manipulate to get what they want. They are regularly reckless and impulsive, have an outsized ego, are quick to anger, and lack empathy for others. Despite all this, they can often be charming and even likable.

But while most violent criminals are psychopaths, most psychopaths aren’t criminals. These successful psychopaths inhabit a variety of niches in civilized society, but one of the most common places they end up is in corporate management. In fact, psychopaths are so common among the upper echelons of companies that psychologists have concocted a name for them: “corporate psychopaths.”

Clive Boddy, an associate professor at Anglia Ruskin University, originated the term and has been researching the effects of toxic, psychopathic managers since 2005. “Corporate psychopaths are… simply those psychopaths who exist successfully in society and work within corporations,” he wrote in a paper published in 2015. “They are conceptualized as highly career-oriented but ruthless, unethical, and exploitative employees.”

For a popular, yet fictitious example of corporate psychopaths, look no further than the hit HBO show Succession. The comedy drama depicts the exploits of the Roy family, leaders of the media conglomerate Waystar-Royco. As they strive to preserve their wealth and power, the Roys broadly act with little regard or care for anybody other than themselves — especially those who are not as obscenely wealthy as they are. With only minor deviations, each family member has many or all of the characteristics of a corporate psychopath. They are initially charming, poised, and calm, yet they ultimately reveal themselves to be untruthful, cheaters, egocentric, remorseless, emotionally shallow, interpersonally unresponsive, irresponsible, and lacking in self-blame.

But Succession is just a television show and not written as a faithful depiction of real-life corporate psychopaths. So how many psychopaths really exist in corporate management? And what effects — positive or negative — do they have on their firms?

Corporate psychopaths

While it’s difficult to estimate their prevalence, a few researchers have taken a stab at it. Simon Croom, a professor of supply chain management at the University of San Diego School of Business, is one of them. “My colleagues and I found in our research that 12% of corporate senior leadership displays a range of psychopathic traits,” he shared in an article published to Fortune Magazine in 2021. Robert D. Hare, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia and creator of the primary diagnostic tool for psychopathy, the Hare psychopathy checklist, found a smaller prevalence of just 3.5%.

Both estimates suggest that psychopaths are far more prevalent in corporate management than in the general population — about 3.5 to 12 times more. And they may be even more common in the top office, with one analysis finding that one in five CEOs could be a corporate psychopath.

So then, what happens when a psychopath is promoted into a corporate position of power? Because these individuals can be charismatic, persuasive, and creative, it’s possible they could excel in their roles and propel their companies to great profit. Researchers, however, have broadly found the opposite.

Corporate psychopaths’ malicious traits outweigh their positive ones. They often bully others, create conflict, discourage subordinates’ ideas, behave unethically, and even urge others to do the same. Their actions can result in a hostile workplace environment, increasing competition, stress, absenteeism, disengagement, and even theft. “Deviant workplace behaviors cause losses of billions of dollars across all business organizations, and much of this behavior stems from corporate psychopaths in positions of leadership,” researchers wrote in 2015.

That same year, Boddy published a lengthy case study describing an instance of an apparent psychopath becoming CEO of a nonprofit with 70 employees. His behaviors started exacting a detrimental toll within weeks, which compounded over the ensuing years of his reign. Fundraising numbers fell. Productivity declined. Employee sick days skyrocketed. Yet convinced of his leadership prowess, he repeatedly and persuadingly reported a glowing picture to the board of trustees, while those under him knew the opposite was true. The psychopathic CEO apparently didn’t care as he had no plans to remain in the role for long. Rather, he intended to use it as a springboard into a political career. Quickly “climbing the ladder” or moving on to other organizations is a frequent aim of corporate psychopaths, Boddy noted.

Did psychopaths cause the Global Financial Crisis?

Some psychologists have also theorized a much grander example of the dangers of corporate psychopaths: blaming them in part for the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

“The theory basically states that corporate psychopaths, drawn to corporate banks in disproportionate numbers because of the material rewards on offer, played an important part… through their participation in the corporate banking sector and their influence on the culture, ethics, and risk profiles of the banks that employed them,” Boddy explained.

A 2019 analysis turned up empirical evidence of corporate psychopaths’ potential harms. A trio of UK researchers attempted to quantify company performance based upon psychopathic characteristics of senior management. Many factors including auditing problems and reduced charitable giving were linked to lower shareholder returns and reduced earnings and revenue growth.

There could be two possible channels through which boardroom psychopathy could affect business performance, the authors explained.

“First… counterproductive work behavior in response to bullying and exploitation, inability to retain key staff members, fraudulent activities and deliberate chaos created by psychopaths, as well as their parasitic behavior can all contribute to a reduction in profitability. Second, psychopathic attributes of decision making may potentially lead to reputational damage. Media controversies, audit problems, lack of involvement in charitable giving and corporate social responsibility activities can put the company into disrepute and lower the value of its intangible assets.“

The pros and cons of psychopathy

Psychopathy, of course, is on a spectrum, and every person exhibits at least some psychopathic traits. A CEO who scores higher in emotional detachment, for instance, may be more successful than others because it allows them to make more rational decisions in hiring, firing, and deal-making. But in the end, a full-blown corporate psychopath in a key position of power likely will be disastrous for the company because they will ultimately prize their own selfish desires over the needs of the business and its employees.

This article How many “corporate psychopaths” are CEOs? is featured on Big Think.

The reason the expressions “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” and “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together” are so often repeated is because they’re true. You need to pace yourself, and you need to have someone to run with. 

When I think about some of the hardest moments building Google and then Stripe, I think back to the many meetings, dinners, and occasional late nights when the stress turned into laughter. I treasure the friendships I carry from those experiences. You’ll meet people you can reach out to at any moment for the rest of your life, and I guarantee they will be there to help. These friendships come from all corners: your manager, your colleagues, your team, even your boss’s boss. Take the time to make those connections, ask for help, and share the load. 

Ask for help. Management is not just about building a complementary team but also about having the mutual self-awareness to look at your entire orbit and seek out those with different strengths. You can’t go far together unless you’re not just self-aware but also confident enough to be vulnerable and seek others’ assistance. 

Working well with your own manager

Leverage goes two ways. Your manager should get leverage from you, and you should get leverage from them. Your manager can help unblock your team, advocate for more resources, provide the necessary context to do your job well, work with you to identify priorities, and hopefully help you develop. You’ll be a better manager if you can successfully “manage up,” by which I mean being able to work with your manager to get the best results for your team and for the company. I don’t mean being political, which is how the term “managing up” seems to be used more of late. Help your own manager be their best, and never surprise them with late news of challenges hitting your team or poor results. 

The good news is that if you’re reading this, you’re likely a manager yourself, and you probably already have an idea of what makes a report great to work with. Think about the things you appreciate as a manager. Your manager probably won’t be that different! Get to know each other personally. If your manager could use some feedback, provide it constructively and suggest ways the two of you might work more effectively together. It’s in both of your interests to jointly succeed. 

Working with other managers

Speaking of managing up, it’s equally important to manage sideways. Your colleagues are critical to you and your team’s success, and part of your role is to understand where you and your team sit within your organization’s larger ecosystem. For people to work together well, the whole must produce something greater than the sum of its parts. How does that happen? By forging formal and informal connections.

Although running into someone in an actual (or virtual) hallway helps, you also need to actively identify and cultivate relationships that you can draw on to succeed even as you’re helping the other person do the same. Share information about your team’s mission and goals with key partners and stakeholders, and seek out those you need to work with, especially those who might create or prevent obstacles. Remember that other leaders are great resources, both as sounding boards for handling tough situations — there’s nothing better than practicing a hard 1:1 with another manager — and as sources of information about what matters and how to flourish in the organization. It’s easy to neglect those relationships when you’re too focused on your day job.

I suggest taking two actions: 

• Map your team’s partners and stakeholders, and either hold 1:1s with them or sit in on meetings for key individuals or teams. Share your team’s objectives and discuss how you can best work together. 
• Identify leaders you admire within your company or even at other companies. Ask them to coffee or lunch to get to know each other and compare notes on management practices and the work of your respective teams and companies. Some of these connections might become folks you can call on to test out ideas or seek advice in difficult situations.

Identify leaders you admire within your company or even at other companies. Ask them to coffee or lunch to get to know each other and compare notes on management practices and the work of your respective teams and companies. Some of these connections might become folks you can call on to test out ideas or seek advice in difficult situations.

I find these relationships also grow out of working together on a shared project for your team or company. Working with your own manager to make sure you’re making connections and getting integrated with organizations outside of your immediate area of focus is also time well spent. 

Be a good peer. Honor your commitments, listen thoughtfully, and help others. Share information you think might be helpful. If you have an issue with a fellow manager or with their team, make sure they hear it from you, and then work together to resolve the issue before it escalates.

This article How to build a lasting team: friendship, trust, and the art of managing sideways is featured on Big Think.

There’s a long-standing joke that a consultant is someone who “takes the watch off your wrist and tells you the time.” It’s funny because it’s partly true. Consultants can really suck. We’ve all experienced a consultant or two in our time, and often the resulting stories are ones of terrible experiences with unclear outcomes at best, and expensive organizational distractions at worst.

I say this because I live it. I’ve been a consultant for over a decade, working with clients across multiple industries and sizes. Some engagements are healthy and evergreen. Some have died a painful, slow, and guilt-ridden death. 

The problem with consulting is that you frequently begin work on one premise, which then metamorphosizes into a series of rabbit holes and misdirection, riddled with misinformation, from which you need to draw the right conclusion and path forward. For example, one client contracted us to help reduce employee attrition, only to insist the solution was to rewrite the organization’s mission statement and values.

This isn’t to say that the client is always to blame. In fact, many times they don’t exactly know what they want. Or the organization itself changes mid-stream, whether it be internal or external factors at play. This combination of environmental, cultural, and contextual forces often sets consultants up for a complicated relationship, which many consultants fail to navigate effectively.

Two conflicting mindsets

As a consultant, you must hold two conflicting mindsets simultaneously — one of expertise and knowledge, and the other of humility and naiveté. In essence, there are things you know from your experience and education, and other things you are clueless about within the client’s organization that you’re serving. The problem with most consultants is they ignore the latter — believing their insight, methodology, approach, or perceptions are correct, and that the organization simply needs to adapt its behavior and mindset to embrace the new.

However, this is exactly what consultants shouldn’t do. In fact, it’s the primary reason why many consultants lack staying power. They fail to adapt and pivot quickly and early when the environment and context begin to change. They plow ahead with their methodology, believing this is what they were hired for, and that with a little more convincing and persistence, the organization will reach the “Aha!” moment and embrace it. Yet — and I can attest to this personally — that is a futile endeavor, and such an attitude only continues to tarnish the reputation of an industry which truly has contributed significant value to help some companies succeed.

As consultants, it’s natural to drink your own Kool-Aid. The problem is being drunk on it. The “Big 4” firms have even made an industry out of it by serving up proprietary processes at exorbitant hourly rates. There’s no question that these companies have taken extensive time to study and develop approaches to solving common business challenges in a repeatable, scalable, and measurable way. The issue is that companies aren’t static. Plugging and playing a “tried-and-true method” into an environment unsuited to implement it is a recipe for poor outcomes. 

Perhaps this partially explains the results of a study conducted by Source Global Research in 2022, which found that satisfaction with consultancies has been flat (at around 75%) over the last five years and only saw a recent lift due to the forced-change environment from the COVID pandemic.

Consulting should be like a medical diagnosis

Consulting needs to become much more focused on diagnosis rather than cure, like a doctor assessing a patient’s symptoms. But when the doctors are heart surgeons, spine surgeons, and brain surgeons, the solution is always surgery. Likewise, consultants specialize: leadership, human resources, strategy, industry verticals, marketing, and much more. Their solutions will fall in line with those specialties.

Yet, just like patients, companies are not often the best and most effective evaluators of their own problems. Sales are down, so let’s get a sales consultant. Employee attrition is up, so let’s get a human resources consultant. Companies often see the manifestation of symptoms rather than the underlying cause. It’s like having an itch and buying a back scratcher when you really have eczema. This situation requires someone who is like a family doctor who has a wide breadth of knowledge, but perhaps lacks the specialized skills to solve the problem directly.

This isn’t a profitable position to be in. In this analogy, the surgeons make the big money. Therefore, the industry continues to conduct itself in the two most common ways: specialty niches or exclusive methodologies tied to brands with clout. So, consultants continue to fall into the same patterns, and the industry’s reputation suffers.

Three crucial skills

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Most consulting is bullshit because it chooses to be. The consultant jargon, puffery, fluff, one-size-fits-all, overly rote, duplicative, misguided, narrow-minded nirvana fallacy makes for a poor experience and lackluster results. The illusion of knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance.

Even though organizations view their problems and needs in different ways, approaches that only comfort the C-suite will never translate into actual, tangible change. Thus, it takes a concerted effort to step back and understand what consulting could look like without the bullshit. If consultants focused on sharpening three specific skill sets (diagnostic, practicum, and adaptation), we would all be better off.

Diagnostic skills encompass learning to effectively examine the client’s cultural landscape, not simply focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of the problem at hand. Understanding the behaviors, people, structures, and powers-at-play are often the heart of why a problem hasn’t been addressed or a solution implemented effectively in the past.

Practicum skills encompass the experience of taking something from soup to nuts through an organization’s layers. Most implementation failures aren’t from lack of skills, resources, technology, or funding, but rather inertia and disengagement. This means honestly understanding the realities of the front line, not the executive suite.

Adaptation skills encompass being able to operate in a state of constant flux, with the environment fluid and ever changing. Companies don’t stand still, and changes in one area will always impact another. This means being conscious of the tunnel vision that comes with focusing on a single problem and constantly examining and addressing the larger environment.

I used to be proud of being a consultant, but it has gradually turned into something I almost feel embarrassed about. Many of my colleagues avoid the word “consulting” altogether because they feel it makes them look incapable of doing anything concrete that really helps organizations succeed. And it’s understandable. One of my clients told a story about one of their previous consultants, who was originally hired to help launch a new internal initiative. Their strategic approach to success was T-shirts, posters, and window clings. I doubt their work was worth the money. 

It’s high time that the industry itself takes a swig of its own medicine and learns what it needs to change to create “positive brand equity in the marketplace.” After all, I should know — I’m a consultant.

This article Why most consulting is bullshit is featured on Big Think.

In recent Gallup polls, majorities of American workers rate their  jobs as mediocre or bad. Globally, the situation is even worse, with only 20 percent of employees reporting that they are engaged with their jobs. A recent study of British citizens found that, when they were working at their job, their happiness dropped around 8 percent relative to their average happiness in other life activities. The only thing they associated with more unhappiness than working was being sick in bed. 

Apparently, for entirely too many people, work is an unpleasant place of cynicism and despair, and something to be endured rather than a source of satisfaction or pride. Our own research has included many conversations with a broad spectrum of workers about their workplaces. Here are comments representative of the discontent and frustration we’ve heard: 

From a physician: “I gave 110 percent for many years only to find myself exhausted, bitter, and disillusioned. If I could do another profession with my medical degree, I would. I would advise my children to avoid medicine.” 

From a tech worker: “I love my work. I am an avid learner and a very positive person. But I work in a socially toxic workplace. This is a highly political environment that encourages competition between colleagues, backstabbing, gossiping, and hiding information. I find going to work very difficult and I come home exhausted.” 

From an engineer: “A large problem is that the company is always moving in new directions, and this is done in secret without receiving input from the professionals who actually perform the jobs. It makes us feel devalued when changes are made to a department or program, but the staff is never consulted or asked what could be done to improve their job.” 

There is a paradox here. Organizations’ ideals and employees’ experiences are disconnected, even at odds with one another. At a time when leaders extol the virtues of respectful workplaces and engaging teamwork, complaints of incivility, abuse, and bullying run rampant. Even as consultants and managers incessantly beat the drum of engagement, dissatisfaction remains an intense concern, including in the professions offering the greatest possibilities for vibrant, dedicated, absorbing work. Everywhere, there are thoughtful leaders deeply concerned with helping their employees be productive, fulfilled, and healthy — and there is proof that some of what they do makes a difference. But the evidence also shows that, all too often, their efforts fall short of the mark. 

Various social, political, and economic factors have shaped the work environment such that many jobs are increasingly stressful. Competitive pressures to cut costs and increase profits have resulted in downsizing, for example, leaving smaller staffs to manage the same workloads. In some sectors, changing public policies — and in health care, the rise of managed care — have strongly affected what customer-facing workers can provide and what they cannot. For many kinds of work, real wages have declined, and job benefits have been cut back. The result is a fundamental contradiction in the workplaces of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, organizations increasingly need the creativity and involvement of their employees. On the other hand, organizations have made changes that undermine people’s capacity to be engaged in their work. 

The negative impact of these workplace trends creates an employee experience of a crushing exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and alienation, and a sense of ineffectiveness — the triumvirate known as burnout. The burnout syndrome occurs when people experience combined crises on all three of these dimensions, most of the time. They feel chronically exhausted; they have withdrawn mentally, socially, and emotionally from their work; and they have lost confidence in their capacity to have a constructive impact. Basically, this means that they are experiencing high stress, a hostile job environment, and a pessimistic evaluation of themselves. Burnout is an apt term, suggesting a once-hot fire that has been reduced to ashes: those ashes are the feelings of exhaustion and a lack of engagement left after an initial, internal flame of dedication and passion is extinguished. The accelerants are the workplace conditions creating  too-hot environments and leaving behind this trifecta with its scorching effects on people’s lives. 

Burnout is also not a new term. Indeed, it has been part of the popular vocabulary for the better part of a century, and perhaps even longer. (Google’s Ngram viewer charts its rise from a starting point in the 1820s.) The concept of the human stress response to difficult life events (stressors) was developed in the 1950s. Before then, burnout (or burn-out) was most commonly used in engineering to describe the result when repetitive stress or excessive load on a piece of equipment ruins its ability to function (as when a motor, or light bulb, or rocket booster burns out). Perhaps the engineering use of the term was why its application to workplaces took off in Silicon Valley, where early start-up ventures were referred to as “burnout shops.” But burnout also became a slang word for a chronic drug abuser, and resonated with the idea of “burning the candle at both ends.” Graham Greene called his 1961 novel about an architect in a state of spiritual crisis and disillusionment A Burnt-Out Case. 

By the 1970s, workers in various realms of health and human services were using burnout to describe their own job crisis. One of us (Maslach), conducting interviews with such workers for a research project, heard the term repeatedly along with the stories behind it—and soon shifted the project to focus on burnout instead.6 She collaborated with Susan Jackson in 1981 to publish the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), an instrument for assessing the experience. Then the two of us (Leiter and Maslach) joined forces on three lines of work: developing additional versions of that measurement tool, and a new one, the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS); con ducting research studies on burnout along with international colleagues; and writing our first book on burnout. Since the latter came out in 1997, we have conducted studies in numerous organizations, tracking the development of job burnout, finding ways of reversing it, and nudging people toward engagement instead. Clearly, understanding burnout has been a major focus of our lives’ work. In this book, we pull all of it together into an integrated perspective on burnout and what to do about it. 

In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized burnout as a legitimate occupational phenomenon that could have a negative impact on the well-being of workers in the workplace. In its words: 

Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 

• feelings of energy depletion, or exhaustion. 

• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job. 

• reduced professional efficacy. 

The year after WHO recognized burnout as a legitimate occupational phenomenon, the coronavirus disease — abbreviated as Covid-19 — forced the closure of many workplaces, including offices, schools, restaurants, food-processing facilities, and more. Starting in early 2020, the pandemic caused many people to experience dramatic changes in their job, often with no warning or preparation — just think of the healthcare workers whose workload increased with the onslaught of Covid patients, or the teachers suddenly educating students online rather than in person. Other people had to deal with the uncertainty of cutbacks in their organizations, and risks of losing their jobs entirely.

We already knew that, when workplaces are designed mostly for the economic bottom line, they may miss the mark on the human one, and that they can actually be bad for the people who work within them. Many decades of research on various risk factors in the workplace (such as high demands, toxic hazards, job insecurity, lack of control, and so on) have shown that unhealthy job environments harm employees both physically and mentally, with ultimate damage to the economic bottom line. The pandemic added even more risk factors to this equation — such as working too close to other people, for longer hours, in enclosed spaces. 

During the pandemic people were using the term burned out colloquially to describe feeling stressed. Doing so does not question burnout’s research-based definition, any more than people saying colloquially that they are depressed challenges the reality that depression is a clinically diagnosable condition. But it was in the midst of this challenging time that we felt, more than ever, that we needed to share a deeper understanding of burnout and how to combat it, based on decades of research and analysis of data. 

We believe burnout arises from the increasing mismatch between workers and workplaces. As the WHO definition explains, the occupational phenomenon of burnout is the result when chronic workplace stressors have “not been successfully managed.” If conditions and requirements set by a workplace are out of sync with the needs of people who work there, this bad fit in the person–job relationship will cause both to suffer. Our research has identified at least six forms of mismatch that can exist between a job and the person holding it: 

• work overload 

• lack of control 

• insufficient rewards

• breakdown of community 

• absence of fairness 

• value conflicts 

Poor alignment in any one of these six areas increases the risk of burnout. For example, let’s consider work overload. If job demands cannot be met within the usual workday, then employees have to work extra hours and take time away from other important parts of their lives (such as personal interests, family and friends, and sleep). We’ve found that these bad mismatches often have their roots in erroneous assumptions about what makes people tick — what motivates them, what rewards them, and what discourages them. In other words, there is often a misunderstanding of basic psychology. The more that any or all of these six conditions depart from employees’ aspirations or preferred ways of working, the more they are vulnerable to burnout. 

In the chapters that follow we detail these six mismatches — what they are, why they have such a toxic effect, and how to fix them and achieve better matches between the job and the person. If mismatches can be corrected or improved, then there are ways to prevent burnout and promote greater engagement with work. 

The analogy we began with of the canary in the coal mine is an apt one for understanding the burnout experience, because it focuses our attention on three critical things: the individual, the context, and the relationship between them. If the individual canary is noticeably suffering within the context of the mine, it is a red-flag warning that the context has problems — that will affect not only the canary, but any other individuals working there. One could say that the relationship between the canary and the coal mine represents a serious mismatch between the individual (with its need for oxygen) and the workplace (with its carbon monoxide–filled air). What can be done, for the individual and the workplace, to fix the relationship between them, so that work can be done safely? The answers lie in the pages to follow.

This article What causes burnout, and how to prevent it is featured on Big Think.

Commander Guy Snodgrass is a retired fighter pilot.

His intense training and experience in the cockpit helped him craft 10 skills for leadership and personal performance.

These lessons apply to everyone from medical doctors to social media influencers.

This video What the Navy’s TOPGUN program really teaches you is featured on Big Think.

Excerpted from Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance Between Intuition and Information by Christopher J. Frank, Oded Netzer, and Paul F. Magnone. Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Used with permission of the publisher, Wiley. All rights reserved.

Questioning is a skill. Like other skills such as active listening, time management, or collaboration, it takes training, practice, and application to become proficient. The journey begins with an appreciation for different types of questions. Questions can be broadly classified into four categories:

• Factual Questions: This type of question has straightforward answers based on facts or awareness. These questions can be open or closed. The answers to questions are based on facts but may require an explanation.

• Convergent Questions: These are close-ended questions with a finite set of answers. Typically, these questions have one correct answer. The most basic convergent question can be answered with a “yes” or “no.” 

• Divergent Questions: These are open-ended questions that encourage many answers. These questions can best be understood as exploratory — as means for analyzing a situation, problem, or complexity in greater detail and then predicting different outcomes. Frequently the goal is to stimulate creative thought or to expand the conversation. 

• Evaluative Questions: This requires deeper levels of thinking. The questions can be open or closed. Evaluative questions elicit analysis at multiple levels and from different perspectives to arrive at newly synthesized information or conclusions. 

Building an inquisitive team

One of the best LinkedIn profiles starts with “I am insatiably curious.” What would it take to build a team of insatiably curious, truly inquisitive people? Building an inquisitive culture involves a combination of what and how. The what is a combination of the types of questions previously outlined, and the how is the environment you create. Great leaders create great cultures. There are three basic steps to building an inquisitive culture:

1. Start with an open-ended question. 
2. Respond, don’t react. Embrace silence. 
3. Ask a stream of questions.

Step 1: Start with an open-ended question

Having a good arsenal of questions at one’s disposal is a must for any leader, but the one staple of any leader is the open-ended question. Asking open-ended questions is like adjusting the lens of a camera, opening the aperture to create a wider field of view. This wider field sets a tone of receptivity, signaling that you are open to new information, in learning mode, and ready for a dialogue not a monologue. Here are three practical open-ended ways to start a conversation: 

1. Help me understand.
2. Have you considered … ?
3. What surprised you?

The simplicity of starting with one of these three-word statements belies their power. We call these multiplier questions as they are designed to increase the dialogue. Open-ended questions also serve as a relief valve, reducing the tension of having the correct answer.

“Help me understand” enables you to take a posture of learning and humility. It communicates that I don’t know what I don’t know. I am hungry to learn.

“Have you considered” puts the power in the other person’s hands. It equips them to discuss their assumptions and caveats and share any trade-offs they may have made. A variation of this, beneficial when providing feedback, is “you may want to consider.” Again, it is up to them to decide whether they want to take action or explore further. You are empowering them.

“What surprised you?” is an open-ended question designed to reduce bias. The word surprise is a bias killer. We all have biases — preconceived notions. Some are conscious and others are unconscious. The latter is often called “implicit biases,” which the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University defines as “the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, decisions, and actions in an unconscious manner.”

Without being aware of their influence, implicit biases affect how we interpret and tell a data story. The brain is wired to connect new information to past interpretations to learn quickly. These mental processes naturally introduce bias as we interpret new information. An analyst, as someone who is expected to interpret data rationally and logically, may be hesitant to share data they cannot explain. They may be tempted to label an unexplained result as an outlier and disregard it or relegate it to an appendix. As the leader, you may miss a rich data point or a potential winning solution by not knowing about these outliers. When you ask, “What surprised you?” you are giving your colleagues permission to share what they did not expect to see, what might fall outside of their logical lens. “What surprised you?” creates a trusting, inviting space for an open discussion.

Step 2: Respond, don’t react. Embrace silence.

You may have heard the term active listening. It involves paying close attention to words and nonverbal actions and providing feedback to improve mutual understanding. But have you ever stopped to consider passive listening? Passive listening also involves listening closely to the speaker but without reacting. Instead, passive listening leaves space for silence. By combining both of these modes, we achieve what we call effective listening.

Effective listening focuses on two elements of the communication process: silence and responding versus reacting. To create a learning environment built on trust, you need to listen. Listening begins with silence. Because it creates a void, silence may cause some discomfort, but it is an effective way to enhance learning. During the silence, the speaker will fill the void, often revealing more information; hence, you learn more. Silence signals that you are fully engaged; you are listening intently, considering what is being shared so you can respond in a meaningful way.

The difference between responding and reacting lies in the level of consideration. Reactions tend to be instinctual, spontaneous impulses driven by emotion without considering the result. Reactions often come without a filter, without much thought or analysis, and without taking time to consider possible implications. Even if a reaction isn’t intense or negative, it disrupts communication. For example, a listener may feel the need to share a related story. The intent is positive — to show understanding — but the unintended consequence is to redirect the speaker’s attention toward the listener. The listener has shifted the conversation and taken control of the discussion.

Contrast this with responding. A response is thoughtful, logical, and informed. Responding uses your head and your heart to consider the outcomes of a reply before speaking. Responding is thoughtful; it involves taking time and using silence to process new information. Responding is also proactive, using intuition and experience to consider what is optimal for you, for others in the meeting, and for the desired outcome. You can then engage in a way that is accretive to the result you’re trying to achieve. In many situations, work or personal, responding versus reacting will yield richer results. You should joyfully embrace it, not only when someone is presenting an idea or information but also when someone asks a question.

Step 3: Ask a stream of questions.

One of the most powerful response techniques is the ability to ask questions. Questions frame the issue, remove ambiguity, expose gaps, reduce risk, give permission to engage, enable dialogue, uncover opportunities, and help to pressure-test logic. Questions that are informed, thoughtful, and relevant advance learning.

Varying the questions sustains engagement and fosters creative thinking. The goal of asking questions is not to achieve a single right answer but to accumulate and expand knowledge through the questioning process.

Returning to our camera lens analogy, open-ended questioning provides a wide-angle lens. It enables you to capture the broader picture and take in crucial background elements, allowing you to explore the scene with an unrestricted view rather than through a narrower analytical lens. 

Of course, this wide view also creates distortion. Open-ended questions provide much more real estate to work with, but ultimately, we need a sharper picture to make smarter decisions. To quote the famous photojournalist Robert Capa, “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Questions also allow you to narrow the lens, to get closer. By asking a stream of questions and using the different types, you can focus the data picture.

Start with the basics. Your ability to focus starts with developing comfort with the four types of questions—factual, convergent, divergent, and evaluative. This is the question library that equips you with the capacity to ask a stream of questions.

As your progress with the discussion, the secret to asking questions is to be precise. Your questions are still open-ended but focus on particular aspects of an outcome you are looking to achieve. Start to transition from a broad question — How do we increase sales? — to more precise questions — What specific promotion has had the highest response among older millennials? Did your analysis uncover any variations by gender? Were there surprises in the sales data from a geographic view? How would your conclusion change if you were the competitor? As you consider the new information shared, are you clear on how it relates to the original problem or the outcome you are working toward?

This article Great leaders ask great questions: Here are 3 steps to up your questioning game. is featured on Big Think.

A global recession could be around the corner – unwelcome news after years of disruption from everything from a pandemic to war.

But with markets in flux, leaders might have a unique opportunity to think beyond the next quarter to fix the way their teams solve big problems and help their staff navigate change.

On the latest Meet The Leader, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield discussed how leaders could approach this next upheaval – and to consider what they’d change for their workers if they could change anything – making their teams more efficient and effective.

Here are some of the questions leaders can consider:

1. Am I working like it’s 2019? 

Most meetings today are run like they were pre-pandemic – workers, regardless of timezone – gather at a pre-appointed time and stop their work for a topic they may or may not be best positioned to contribute to. Many innovators have developed solutions for asynchronous meetings, tools where meetings are held as a sort of advanced recordings that can be paused or sped up with skimmable transcripts for some to scan for the insights most critical to their work. “If you could get rid of a third of meetings, collectively, you’re talking about billions of hours of people’s time per year.”

2. Is my focus in the wrong place? 

While digital infrastructure has become more critical to productivity in recent years, physical infrastructure continues to steal a disproportionate share of attention. Even at Slack, Butterfield said that he has spent far too much time in last decade on real estate leases, office buildouts and seating charts, when that time could have been invested in honing how teams get work done – helping workers become even more effective communicators and helping them run even more efficient meetings. “The ratio is totally wrong,” he said. “It’s 10 to 1 and should be 1 to 10.”

He suggests leaders consider how workaday processes like meetings could improve and develop guidelines, training and work these measures into onboarding to ensure they’re baked into company processes. “You don’t want to get too bureaucratic about it, but actually setting some guidelines and some policies because there usually aren’t at most organizations.”

3. Can I repeat that? 

Repeating key messages – while it seems elementary – is critical to alignment. It’s something Butterfield says he’s always working on, knowing that the real coordination comes when you’re sick of hearing yourself say the same things. Such work will never end for leaders and can’t be ignored, regardless of the person, project or phase.“Humans are really hard to to organize and coordinate and align,” said Butterfield. “But you can get so much more accomplished than when people are pointing in different directions.”

Butterfield shared all this in a conversation recorded at the Annual Meeting in Davos this past May. Learn more about Butterfield’s approach to how leaders can make their teams stronger and more effective during a period of uncertainty — and the Slack tips he can’t work without — on the latest Meet The Leader.

Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield on how leaders can navigate uncertainty to make their teams more effective

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: We can start with crises. There’s a lot of disruption happening right now. What is your take on it and how should leaders be approaching this very sort of strange and uncertain moment?

Stewart Butterfield: I think it’s an enormous opportunity to make changes that might, in the course of normal business, be too difficult or too painful to make. And when I say crisis, in this context, I mean definitely the pandemic, which kind of wraps everything but war, inflation, the market’s tanking, all of those things, all of which — upsetting is probably the wrong word — but, you know, a lot of business leaders here have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees who really feel on edge. And I think that also means that they’re more open to fundamental changes.

I work at Slack, obviously, so I have a slightly more narrow focus, but I use this analogy, let’s see if it works with you. So, I’m not a really big sports fan. However, if you imagine we’re watching the World Cup, they may have a big screen in here and I press pause and then start stepping through it frame by frame. Every player on both teams is constantly readjusting their position, their momentum, they’re signaling to one another. They’re taking in the situation where the ball is, how fast people are moving, where their opponents are. And if you think about the resources that are available to those players to complete their objectives, like their physical bodies, the short twitch muscle fibers, the glucose of their blood stream, all of their talent and experience, almost all of it is effectively utilized in the accomplishment of their objectives. And the objective is just put the ball in the net more than the other team does to you. When I look around most companies — and this is not a criticism, I think this is really the standard — what percentage of the intelligence, creativity, talent and experience of all the employees is actually being effectively applied towards the accomplishment of goals? And it’s 10%. You know, it’s very, very low because it’s very, very difficult to coordinate people. And it’s not truly a fair comparison because the football players play the same game every single time. There’s only 11 of them. There’s not thousands. Their objectives are very, very clear and obvious, whereas most large companies take three months to even come up with the objectives for next year, three months of debate. So, I don’t want to suggest that we should be at 90, 95%. But I do think that 15 or 20% is possible for a lot of organizations. And the magnitude of that impact would be really amazing.

“What percentage of the intelligence, creativity, talent and experience of all the employees is actually being effectively applied towards the accomplishment of goals?”

Stewart Butterfield, CEO and founder, Slack

So, in the context of Slack, we think about communication and automation and integration of different software services. But just to kind of frame it, if you look back over the last 60ish years, we’ve slowly advanced the frontier of what computers can do for people. And first it was things that computers are way better than people. So doing arithmetic really fast without making any mistakes and remembering things forever. And as we progressed that frontier of whatever is automatable advances with us.

But there’s still a huge amount of mindless, repetitive work that knowledge workers have to do over the course of the day. And you can recognize it when you see one window open on a computer and with a bunch of information and another window open on the other side of the computer where someone’s typing out basically the same information to another window. It’s a huge amount of people’s time, and so those opportunities to automate are really significant.

Wrapping it all up, it’s difficult to imagine better alternatives. It’s difficult to get people to change, I mean there’s a whole discipline of change management inside of large organizations. But if we were ever going to take the opportunity, now that we’ve had the years of people working from home remotely, now that we’ve established that that’s possible. When things you thought were impossible turned out to be possible, you have to ask yourself: What else? What other assumptions do I have that that aren’t necessarily true?

“Now that we’ve had the years of people working from home remotely, You have to ask yourself: What other assumptions do I have that that aren’t necessarily true?”

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Leaders are just as burnt out as their staff, so if they were looking to try tap into the creativity of their team or make their team, you know, ten, 15 more percent effective, efficient, where should they be looking? What would be the before and after in their teams that would make a big change?

Stewart Butterfield: It’s a great question because that’s obviously the challenge, because if it was easy or free, then everyone would have already made those changes. Part of it is the incentives that we have as human beings just by virtue of our psychology, and some of them are business-specific sociological incentives that get created.

Just as an example – everyone wants more people to report to them, no matter what their job is, because there’s just an obvious correlation that is demonstrated to people all the time: there’s more power, there’s more prestige, there’s more money to be made if you have more people. And as an organization, you probably want the opposite. You want to say like, let’s hire as a last resort only when objectives are as clear as they could be and everyone understands their role and the processes are streamlined and the team is functioning at a very high level and there’s a lot of trust. Only then do you add people, because if you add people first then all those things become much harder to make improvements or to solve for.

So, part of it is that. Part of it is everyone complains about meetings where there’s someone presenting at you and just reading the slides as they appear on the screen because everyone can read faster than the other person can talk. And yet it happens. And it’s, you know, tens of millions of people’s experience every single day. You start to think about hundreds of millions of hours over the course of a couple months, billions of hours over the course of a year. These tend to be well-compensated people. The percentage of GDP that’s impacted — it could be like several whole digit percentages, you’re like in the trillions of dollars. And we need to find ways to counteract that.

I’ll give you maybe something a little bit more concrete. Which meetings could be replaced with asynchronous work? So, rather than everyone stops what they’re doing at 10:29 a.m. so that we can join the 10:30 call. And most of the people or let’s be fair, some of the people at least don’t have any interest in this topic, don’t have anything to contribute. They’re just there because it sat in their calendar. They hadn’t given a forethought. And so they’re not really in a position to contribute. Some of those, I think, are important, though. Some live discussions are really important, but some of them would be much better if people put some effort into a written form or even recording a video.

I definitely do not want to be promotional about Slack, but one feature that we recently added is called Clips, and so it’s a video people upload. The advantage of the recording of video and sending it to you versus you and I getting on a video call at the same time is that we can do it at different times. I can be a night owl and you can be someone who gets up really early. You can have childcare responsibilities or you know, whatever it is. You can pause it and go to the bathroom in the middle, you can speed it up to 1.5X. If someone talks really slow, we can generate a transcript of everything that was said and people can skim the transcript, find a part that’s interesting then click on that and jump to that point in the video.

And that’s something that Slack’s doing, but there’s, I guess, hundreds of companies that are starting to really deliver some innovative features and we have to train people to use this. We have to tell them to use it, because otherwise you do get stuck in the same habits. That stuff might not sound impactful, but if you could get rid of a third of meetings, again, collectively, you’re talking about billions of hours of people’s time per year.

“If you could get rid of a third of meetings, collectively you’re talking about billions of hours of people’s time per year.”

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: You mentioned questioning assumptions. Is there an assumption that you’ve questioned recently that’s led to a change in how you lead at Slack or how you think about things at Slack?

Stewart Butterfield: You know, one recurrent conversation that I had, actually on my walk over to the studio, I just had an hour-long conversation with someone about employee activism.

I think most people would probably if they don’t describe themselves as a ‘stakeholder capitalist’, they’re least sympathetic to that idea. And most people want to be good people, but there’s a very strange kind of phenomenon where we are — when I say we, I’m talking more about the U.S., I think the same thing is true to a certain extent in Europe, maybe less so in Japan, less so in China — but we’re often divorced from our roots. Very few people live in the same town that they grew up in, and very few people live close to their family. Very few people have strong religious traditions. So, all of the things that would have anchored us, you know, five or ten generations ago, aren’t there. People look elsewhere for leadership and for their identity. And we spend an enormous amount of time at work. So, work becomes one of those places. And there’s now an expectation of leaders that there’s more or less an immediate response to whatever happened today.

Last night there was a really terrible school shooting in the U.S., and a lot of people are parents. A lot of people, it’s like their worst nightmare. And it’s really difficult to imagine that stuff. And people end up very upset and distracted. And there is an expectation. People look to their employer not necessarily for guidance, but for kind of confirmation that their values align with the employee. Any organization of any size has employees who have conflicting values. It becomes more and more challenging and a bigger and bigger preoccupation. So, I’m not sure if that’s something that I’ve changed my mind on, but it’s something that there’s kind of a continual struggle with how best to support people and manage the business and find the right balance between being a human and being someone who is responsible for the company.

“Two things that I think have served me well are really deep thinking about what is going on in the mind of the other person and what kind of incentives have been created and what kind of behaviors are being rewarded.”

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: You have a degree in philosophy. Does that help you as a tool to navigate some of this uncertainty or some of these things where you’re maybe there’s no clear answer on? You know, how should you think about people’s identification with work, or how people are depending more on their workplace for different things? How does that background help you as a tool to navigate this?

Stewart Butterfield: Philosophy is a little bit of this, but it’s also just a bunch of adjacent areas of inquiry, sociology and psychology, also economics. Two things that I think have served me well are really deep thinking about what is going on in the mind of the other person and what kind of incentives have been created and what kind of behaviors are being rewarded. Because sometimes you can get frustrated with people and everyone gets frustrated with others in their lives. It’s usually because you can’t think of a motivation that isn’t something negative or destructive. There’s that old saying, you shouldn’t ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to ignorance. Ignorance doesn’t sound that great either, but really trying to understand what is motivating people I think is very important.

And the other one, this is a more recent realization, I draw these graphs all the time for people in the product team, and this is a podcast so it’s weird for me to describe a graph, but it’s actually pretty simple. The x axis, the horizontal, is the quality of something, and the y axis is the amount of value that someone gets from it. And so, you imagine draw a line that’s very shallow and very flat and then suddenly gets very steep and then flattens out. A simple example: if you have a hammer the handle is so weak that it breaks, but every time you use the hammer it’s just junk and you could improve the handle, like make it a little bit stronger, but if it’s still too weak to withstand the actual use, that’s still kind of useless. So you look at that graph and it goes: useless, useless, useless, kind of okay, suddenly fine, great, and then after that it doesn’t really matter — you can make an invincible hammer that could never be broken by anyone.

To me, almost everything in life has this nonlinear relationship, because the behaviours that you care about — does the employee stay, does the customer buy, does the candidate accept your offer — all those things are binary outcomes, but the inputs are all continuous. And so people talk about the straw that broke the camel’s back. You never know when something’s at the 49% level and it only needs to get to 51, or whether you’re down to 20. So, starting to think about the cumulative impact of a really full spectrum or holistic view of what’s influencing the decision making, especially when we’re struggling collectively with attrition, with people reimagining what they want to do with their lives, what their purpose is, where they want to work. I think you need to take into account the incredible variety of factors that influence those kind of decisions.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: At Slack you guys have probably a very unique perspective on using digital platforms and hybrid work. Is there something that you think people are overlooking, that’s a way that they can maximize it, or even a best practice that’s worked for Slack?

Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, I got two things. So, one, just the thought experiment. If you go back to March of 2020 and in this other parallel universe, you could go to the office, you could commute, you could use conference rooms, business travel is fine, like all of those things could still happen. But your software was taken away. Then, more or less every company would’ve just disintegrated, like they couldn’t even last 24 hours. We were able to kind of keep going and there was a lot of stuff going on in people’s lives, like the actual impact of the pandemic and being locked up and all this political upheaval and stuff like that. But most organizations, unless they were directly impacted, like, you know, hotel business or something like that, they did fine.

“At some point in the last several decades, the digital HQ – the digital infrastructure that supports productivity and collaboration – actually became more important than the physical HQ.”

So at some point in the last several decades, there is an inversion that happened where the digital HQ, and I know that sounds like a marketing term, but I just mean the digital infrastructure that supports productivity and collaboration, te digital HQ actually became more important than the physical HQ.

If I look back over the last decade for me and I add up all the time I spent on real estate leases and office buildout and conference room design and seating charts, and like all of that stuff, compared to how much thought I put into how to help people become more effective communicators, how to help people run more efficient meetings, how to instill in them a good set of guidelines for how to use communication tools and all of that, the ratio is totally wrong. It’s inverted, you know, it’s 10 to 1 and should be one 1 to 10.

The second thing, a little rhetorical trick, is you know, the Amazon six-page memo format? They put it in writing and then everyone reads, starts the meeting, which the reason you say yes and every single person I ask says yes, is because there’s so few examples of people even trying to improve how we’re spending those billions of hours a year.

The examples of where people do try something really, really stand out. You put those two together. And the opportunity that I think people have is to just invest more. And even it’s in employee onboarding process, training courses, there could be certifications, you don’t want to get too bureaucratic about it, but actually setting some guidelines and some policies because there usually aren’t at most organizations. There’s maybe a sign up on the TV in the conference room that kind of the default screen. It says, please enter meetings on time and be courteous to the next person by cleaning up your trash, but nothing about like ‘don’t have 25 people in the meeting if you only need 15’.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Is there a favourite Slack feature that you have that people overlook or they don’t know about?

Stewart Butterfield: There’s so many little things. And, you know, you watch someone who’s very inexperienced with the computers and they’re editing a text document and they slowly move the mouse up at the top and they click on edit, and then they slowly move the cursor over the menu items and they choose copy and then they move it. So the equivalent of that in Slack is there’s a shortcut called Command K — Windows Control K — and it just lets you switch between the channels and direct message conversations and everything you could be looking at in Slack. And it’s so painful to go manually find the channel in the long list, it’s overwhelming if you don’t do that.

There’s a pair: that command K, and then hiding channels that don’t have any unread activity. If there’s nothing new, just hide it from me and I don’t see it. That changes people’s experience of Slack, where I get to decide whether this is important to me or not.

And most of the time I go to a channel when I have a question or someone mentions me. I don’t need to look at it otherwise. I could go on literally for hours about this.

But so, one other very, very basic thing is most people are familiar from Facebook and Instagram of if you mention someone’s name they’ll get a notification and the culture or etiquette that you build up around mentioning people’s names is really important, because if I trust that any time something requires my attention, someone will mention me, when I come back from vacation and there’s 200 channels that are unread, if there’s no mentions I don’t have to look at any of them, you know, because no one pointed it out.

Or if you don’t have that culture, if you don’t have the expectation that people will mention you if something requires your attention, suddenly you have to look through all 200 of these channels to see if there’s anything that’s relevant to you, and that really shifts your experience. But we are working on lots of — you know, I’m talking about like 2015 stuff — we’re working on a lot of great stuff today and I’m actually pretty optimistic about the industry and the group of software companies that are working on collaboration because I just think we learned so much in the last two years that it takes a while for that to filter into the products. But I think we’re going to have a pretty exciting roadmap and are going to have the opportunity to make bigger improvements over the next couple of years.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: If leaders could do one concrete thing so that they are prepared to help their teams for the future of work, what should they be doing?

Stewart Butterfield: If there’s one thing that certainly I continually need to work on as a leader, and it kind of never ends, is the amount of repetition of the message that is necessary to kind of create alignment across the organization. It’s always when you’re absolutely sick of hearing yourself say the same thing, that it really begins to sink in. Because humans are really hard to organize and coordinate and align, but when they are, you can get so much more accomplished than when people are kind of pointing in different directions and pushing it in different directions.

This article was reprinted with permission of the World Economic Forum. Read the original article.

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The world is a networked place, literally and figuratively. The field of network science is used today to understand phenomena as diverse as the spread of misinformation, West African trade and protein-protein interactions in cells.

Network science has uncovered several universal properties of complex social networks, which in turn has made it possible to learn details of particular networks. For example, the network consisting of the international financial corruption scheme uncovered by the Panama Papers investigation has an unusual lack of connections among its parts.

But understanding the hidden structures of key elements of social networks, such as subgroups, has remained elusive. My colleagues and I have found two complex patterns in these networks that can help researchers better understand the hierarchies and dynamics of these elements. We found a way to detect powerful “inner circles” in large organizations simply by studying networks that map emails being sent among employees.

We demonstrated the utility of our methods by applying them to the famous Enron network. Enron was an energy trading company that perpetrated fraud on a massive scale. Our study further showed that the method can potentially be used to detect people who wield enormous soft power in an organization regardless of their official title or position. This could be useful for historical, sociological and economic research, as well as government, legal and media investigations.

From pencil and paper to artificial intelligence

Sociologists have been constructing and studying smaller social networks in careful field experiments for at least 80 years, well before the advent of the internet and online social networks. The concept is so simple that it can be drawn on paper: Entities of interest – people, businesses, countries – are nodes represented as points, and relationships between pairs of nodes are links represented as lines drawn between the points.

An abstract network, at left, shows lines between points representing relationships. The network on the right shows a small fragment of a real-world network of West African traders, based on data from Oliver J. Walther. (Mayank Kejriwal / CC BY-ND)

Using network science to study human societies and other complex systems took on new meaning in the late 1990s when researchers discovered some universal properties of networks. Some of these universal properties have since entered mainstream pop culture. One concept is the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, based on the famous empirical finding that any two people on Earth are six or fewer links apart. Similarly, versions of statements such as “the rich get richer” and “winner takes all” have also been replicated in some networks.

These global properties, meaning ones applying to the entire network, seemingly emerge from the myopic and local actions of independent nodes. When I connect with someone on LinkedIn, I am certainly not thinking of the global consequences of my connection on the LinkedIn network. Yet my actions, along with those of many others, eventually lead to predictable, rather than random, outcomes about how the network will evolve.

My colleagues and I have used network science to study human trafficking in the U.K., the structure of noise in artificial intelligence systems’ outputs, and financial corruption in the Panama Papers.

Groups have their own structure

Along with studying emergent properties like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, researchers have also used network science to focus on problems such as community detection. Stated simply, can a set of rules, otherwise known as an algorithm, automatically discover groups or communities within a collection of people?

Today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of community detection algorithms, some relying on advanced AI methods. They are used for many purposes, including finding communities of interest and uncovering malicious groups on social media. Such algorithms encode intuitive assumptions, such as the expectation that nodes belonging to the same group are more densely connected to one another than nodes belonging to different groups.

Although an exciting line of work, community detection does not study the internal structure of communities. Should communities be thought of only as collections of nodes in networks? And what about communities that are small but particularly influential, such as inner circles and in-crowds?

Two hypothetical structures for influential groups

In a manner of speaking, you likely already have some inkling of the structure of very small groups in social networks. The truth of the adage that “a friend of my friend is also my friend” can be tested statistically in friendship networks by counting the number of triangles in the network and determining whether this number is higher than chance alone could explain. And indeed, many social network studies have been used to verify the claim.

Unfortunately, the concept starts breaking down when extended to groups with more than three members. Although motifs have been well studied in both algorithmic computer science and biology, they have not been reliably linked to influential groups in real communication networks.

Six examples of motifs with four nodes. (Mayank Kejriwal / CC BY-ND)

Building on this tradition, my doctoral student Ke Shen and I found and presented two structures that seem elaborate but turn out to be quite common in real networks.

The first structure extends the triangle, not by adding more nodes, but by directly adding triangles. Specifically, there is a central triangle that is flanked by other peripheral triangles. Importantly, the third person in any peripheral triangle must not be linked to the third person on the central triangle, thereby excluding them from the true inner circle of influence.

The second structure is similar but assumes that there is no central triangle, and the inner circle is just a pair of nodes. A real-life example might be two co-founders of a startup like Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, or a power couple with joint interests, common in global politics, like Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Understanding influential groups in an infamous network

We tested our hypothesis on the Enron email network, which is well studied in network science, with nodes representing email addresses and links representing communication among those addresses. Despite being elaborate, not only were our proposed structures present in the network in greater numbers than chance alone would predict, but a qualitative analysis showed that there is merit to the claim that they represent influential groups.

Examples of the two structures found in the Enron network. More such structures are present in the network and cannot be explained by chance alone. (Mayank Kejriwal / CC BY-ND)

The main characters in the Enron saga are well documented by now. Intriguingly, some of these characters do not seem to have had much official influence but may have wielded significant soft power. An example is Sherri Reinartz-Sera, who was the longtime administrative assistant of Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron. Unlike Skilling, Sera was only mentioned in a New York Times article following investigative reporting that took place during the course of the scandal. However, our algorithm discovered an influential group with Sera occupying a central position.

Dissecting power dynamics

Society has intricate structures at the levels of individuals, friendships and communities. In-crowds are not just ragtag groups of characters talking to one another, or a single ringleader calling all the shots. Many in-crowds, or influential groups, have a sophisticated structure.

While much still remains to be discovered about such groups and their influence, network science can help uncover their complexity.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Excerpted from RECULTURING: Design Your Company Culture to Connect with Strategy and Purpose for Lasting Success. Copyright © 2022 by Melissa Daimler. Used with permission by McGraw Hill.

Culture can be operationalized and reinforced through the behaviors, processes, and practices that are put in place. It is strengthened or weakened every time an interview question is asked, an employee is onboarded or promoted. ReCulturing is not an HR initiative that is done once. It is not a multiyear change transformation. Rather, it is a designed set of ongoing actions that employees are expected to do daily. Thinking of it in terms of a transformation is old thinking and even overwhelming for any leader trying to manage all the other complexities demanded from them. 

No culture is static. Just like we continue to review our strategy and the associated objectives and priorities, we need to continue to iterate and evolve our culture and the associated behaviors, processes, and practices.

I’ve been a part of a lot of “change transformations.” They usually have a beginning and an end. They have a lot of energy in the beginning, only to fade at the time of launch, with the project team burnt out on all the details it took to get to the launch point. With ReCulturing, there may be a beginning, but there is no end. This is an ongoing, cocreation between executives and employees that everyone, at every level, every day is responsible to do. 

In addition, even if values remain the same, the associated behaviors, processes, and practices need to be reviewed so that they, too, scale with the company. Here’s an example: A value at one startup I worked with was “Communicate Openly.” They hadn’t identified behaviors with that value, so the value got misinterpreted over time. When the company was first founded, that meant sharing everything with employees. As the company grew, they couldn’t share everything. Though they kept the value, the associated behavior created was, “We responsibly share information.” They shared examples with employees and managers of what this looked like, highlighting that it wasn’t about mistrusting employees and more about streamlining communication to what employees needed to know to do their jobs. 

So, how do we close these gaps? The gaps between the elements of culture itself and the gaps between culture and strategy? We do it through ReCulturing—the continuous act of redesigning and reconnecting behaviors, processes, and practices to each other and to the organizational system.

ReCulturing: A Seven Step Framework

I don’t believe in prescribing the “right” framework or steps for you or your company, but I do believe that frameworks help guide conversations, prompt discussion, and prevent you from starting from a blank document with the cursor obnoxiously blinking, waiting for your innovative thoughts while you google a few articles to get you started. You can leverage all seven steps, some of them, none of them, add your own, or create an entirely different set of actions. Maybe you will even do them in a different order. That’s why I didn’t number them. As long as you find a way to connect behaviors, processes, and practices to each other and the greater organizational system, use whatever steps, plan, or framework that facilitates you doing that.

The following is an overview of the seven steps. This process can be done by an internal or external facilitator. I don’t recommend leaders on the executive team facilitate this as they need to be contributors to the process versus the ones driving it. 

Contextualize Define culture and how behaviors will be the playbook for working together. In the past, I’ve made the mistake of working with companies without spending a lot of time clarifying and understanding their purpose and strategy before discussing their culture. ReCulturing is about working with the executive team first to ensure that they are inspired by their purpose and aligned on the strategy before diving into how the culture can support it. It is essential to understand the current cultural dynamics within the executive team and how those play out across the organization. Most executives have likely already done a “values exercise,” but clarify that this process is different. Get clear alignment around why you’re doing this: what it is and what it is not.

Curate Even young startups have a lot of information about what’s important to them already embedded into their system. Review all organizational data. This could include the engagement survey results, attrition data, number of promotions and to whom, exit interview data, onboarding materials, recognition practices, learning curriculum, diversity metrics, communications shared internally and externally through social media, Glassdoor reviews, and hiring data. This is an exhaustive list. You do not need to review all of it. Just identify patterns of behaviors, strengths the organization has, gaps, and recommendations for more of those aspirational behaviors that could be needed at this stage of the company.

Define Leverage the data to come up with an initial draft of behaviors. If, after the behaviors are identified, a value needs to be tied to an overall value, that is OK. Figure out a communication channel that can be leveraged for additional thoughts, examples, stories, and ideas. Identify no more than fifteen behavioral statements, and make sure these behaviors go beyond platitudes to meaningful and observable behaviors, easily embedded into processes and practices.

Iterate This is the time for the behaviors to be shared, discussed, and revised. After the behaviors are in a solid place for the first version, an important part of this design process is the pause period. This does not mean “do nothing.” Rather, it is about testing, experimenting, and discussing how the behaviors could be used for decisions, hiring, and rewarding. Do the behaviors come up in meetings? Are they helping make decisions? Are they useful in helping new employees onboard faster? Researchers call the space between creating something and implementing it “incubation” or “mental digestion.”

Some organizations skip this part because they think there has been enough space in between meetings for the behaviors to gestate and form. This works only if there truly was space to test the behaviors, rather than just a need to keep moving forward and “get it done”. Why? Because, well, you know by now – ReCulturing is never really done.

Integrate Identify one core process to integrate behaviors into, such as onboarding. What stories could be shared about the behaviors? How can you create a way for new employees to understand and internalize those behaviors for themselves?

Communicate When communicating the behaviors that were newly designed to employees, it is important to share them in a way that everyone understands. Communicating these doesn’t mean just sharing a list. It is telling the story of how the company has evolved— honoring where the company has been, where it is now, and where it is going. It is bringing everyone along the journey of how these behaviors were formed, why they were designed, and reconnecting those behaviors to how people work. These are the core components of the company message. Share the stories and examples of why these particular behaviors were chosen. Specific stories about how behaviors are helping employees is a powerful message. After hearing these messages employees are ideally even more inspired and want to learn more about how to leverage the behaviors.

Operationalize Continue to embed the behaviors into all the processes and identify practices that support and reinforce the behaviors. Track how they are helping–or not. How are they being used? What is resonating? What is not resonating? What is not being reinforced? Keep learning what is working and what is not. Remember, this is an ongoing process, a journey, not a destination.

Together, we can ReCulture. We can redesign our workplaces with an updated playbook for how to work with each other. That playbook becomes even more impactful when it is connected to the organizational purpose and strategy. When employees know why they are showing up every day, how to show up most effectively, and what they need to work on, the employee experience becomes more enjoyable, management becomes more robust, and the company becomes more adaptable to change.

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The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

Managers may mistreat employees who perform poorly because they assume it results from a lack of diligence rather than other factors, according to research we published in September 2021.

Surveys show that about 1 in 7 U.S. workers feel that their manager engages in hostile behaviors toward them. Abusive supervision may range from relatively mild behaviors such as lying or not giving credit for work to more severe actions, such as insults or ridicule.

While past research has suggested that it’s the poor performance of workers provoking managers’ abusive reactions, we wanted to examine whether the faulty perception of the supervisor deserves at least some of the blame.

So we conducted two studies, drawing on research showing that people are prone to perceptual errors when judging negative events. One of these is the fundamental attribution error, a tendency to overattribute negative outcomes to others’ personalities rather than other explanations.

In the first study, we recruited 189 pairs of employees and supervisors from a variety of industries. We asked supervisors to rate their employees’ job performance as well as their conscientiousness or diligence – that is, how organized, industrious and careful they are. We then asked employees to rate themselves on the same measures.

Finally, we asked employees to rate how abusive their supervisors were toward them – such as by ridiculing them in front of others – within the previous month.

We found that managers assessed lower-performing employees as less diligent than the workers rated themselves. Research shows self-ratings of personality traits like diligence are generally more accurate than external ratings. This suggests supervisors believed poor-performing employees were less diligent than they actually were. In addition, these employees perceived higher levels of abuse than others did.

This study didn’t include independent measures of the employees’ diligence or their managers’ abuse. So in our second one we wanted to determine if the managers still blamed a lack of diligence for an incident involving poor performance even when the supervisor knew that the employee wasn’t the primary cause.

We recruited 443 supervisors via an online portal to complete two surveys. In the first, we asked them to think of one of their employees whose first name began with a randomly generated letter and rate their degree of conscientiousness. We used random letters to avoid bias.

One week later, we contacted the same supervisors to complete the second survey, presenting each with an imagined incident in which the employee from the earlier survey performed poorly on a work project. We then randomly assigned them to various scenarios indicating what was responsible for the poor outcome, such as the employee, a software malfunction or both. We asked them what share of the blame they put on the software versus the employee.

We found that when supervisors were told that the employee’s lack of effort and the malfunction were equally responsible for the poor outcome, they still blamed the employee most. When asked to provide feedback, managers who blamed employees were more objectively abusive, such as by using expressions of anger or threats.

Why it matters

The consequences and costs of abusive supervision are significant. For example, it can worsen employees’ psychological health and may be costing U.S. employers up to US$24 billion a year in lost productivity.

Suggesting abusive management behaviors are justified or that a worker may deserve the treatment is problematic because it puts the onus for correcting these harmful actions on the targets of abuse rather than the perpetrators. Our research suggests it may be perceptual errors on the part of managers that deserve more blame.

What’s next

We would like to explore how people and employers can reduce instances of abusive supervision. And we’d like to look into what other factors besides perceptual biases might be responsible.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The best presidents – including figures such as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington – are celebrated not only as good leaders, but as good men. They embody not simply political skill, but personal virtue.

Why, though, should anyone expect a president to demonstrate that sort of virtue? If someone is good at the difficult job of political leadership, must they demonstrate exceptional moral character as well?

Character and democracy

Voters disagree about the extent to which the president must demonstrate moral leadership. Scholars who study political ethics disagree as well.

Those who insist that the president must be virtuous often begin with the thought that a person in that office will face new and unanticipated problems during his or her term. A president whose decision-making is informed by a consistent character, will, in the face of new challenges, rely upon the lessons that have built that character.

As scholar James David Barber wrote, the best way to understand a president’s likely responses to a crisis is to understand what that president values most highly.

Abraham Lincoln, for instance, consistently and publicly referred to the same set of moral values throughout his life – values centered on a deep, while imperfect, belief in the moral equality of people. These principles provided him with guidance throughout the horrors of the Civil War.

A president whose decisions are not grounded in the right sort of ethical values may be less well-equipped to respond well – and, more importantly, might be frighteningly unpredictable in his or her responses.

Other political ethicists have emphasized the ways in which democracies can fall apart in the absence of personal virtue. Conservative thinkers, in particular, have argued that political institutions can only function when all those who participate within them are capable of compromise and of self-government. Rules, to put it simply, don’t work unless people governed by those rules care about them and voluntarily choose to abide by them.

If this is true of citizens, it is even more true of the president, whose opportunities to damage the system through unprincipled actions are so much greater.

Vice and efficiency

Niccolò Machiavelli believed that political life demands certain characters that could be understood as vices. Italy in US/Flickr.com, CC BY-ND

These arguments have been met with powerful objections. Political philosophers – including, most prominently, Niccolò Machiavelli – have argued that the nature of political life requires a willingness to demonstrate habits of character that would ordinarily be understood as vices. The good leader, insisted Machiavelli, is morally right to do what is usually taken as wrong. He or she must be cruel, deceptive and often violent.

The philosopher Arthur Applbaum refers to this as role morality. What a person is right to do, argues Applbaum, often depends upon the job that person is doing. The good lawyer, for instance, may have to bully, browbeat or humiliate hostile witnesses. That is what a zealous defense might require. Machiavelli notes simply that, in a hostile and brutal world, political leaders might have similar reasons to do what is usually forbidden.

Modern philosophers such as Michael Walzer have continued this line of reasoning. If the world is imperfect, and requires a politician to lie, cheat or otherwise do wrong in the name of doing good, then there is sometimes a moral reason for the politician to do that wrong.

George Washington, for example, was quite happy to engage in deception, if that deception would help protect the United States. He consistently sought to deceive his adversaries about his intentions and his resources – and, importantly, sought to deceive his own subordinates, reasoning that a lie must be believed at home for it to be useful abroad.

A president who refused to engage in this sort of deception, argues Walzer, would be choosing to keep his or her conscience clear, instead of providing some genuine and concrete help to others. Walzer’s conclusion is that a good political agent must often refuse to be a good person. It is only by sometimes doing what is ordinarily wrong, that the politician can make the world better for all.

Virtue, vice and the presidency

These ideas have, of course, been a part of many long-standing debates about presidential morality. Henry Kissinger, for instance, defended the Nixon administration’s decision to seek the firing of the special prosecutor, based upon the need for that administration to present itself to the Soviet Union as both powerful and unified.

It was not necessary, Kissinger wrote later, that the American leadership displayed personal virtue. It was enough that their decisions enabled a society in which the American people were capable of demonstrating that virtue.

More recently, many evangelical supporters of President Trump have used the Biblical story of Cyrus the Great, an ancient Persian king, to explain their continued support for the president. Although Cyrus was not himself Jewish, he chose to free the Jews held as slaves in Babylon. Evangelical leader Mike Evans noted that that Cyrus, like Donald Trump, was an “imperfect vessel,” whose decisions nevertheless made it possible for others to live as God wished them to.

So, too, some evangelicals argue that President Trump’s own seeming lapses of virtue might not disqualify him from the presidency – so long as his decisions enable others to lead lives exemplifying the virtues he does not always show himself.

Effective vice

These debates – between those who seek a president who models ethical virtue, and those who would regard that desire as misguided at best – are likely to continue.

One thing that must be acknowledged, however, is that even the best defenses of presidential vice cannot be taken to excuse all forms of moral failure.

Machiavelli, and those who follow him, can at most be used to defend a president whose vices are effectively able to create a more ethical world for others. Not all sorts of wrongdoing, though, can plausibly be thought to have these effects.

Some vices, such as an outsized confidence, or the will to use violence in the name of justice, may be defended with reference to the ideas of Machiavelli or Walzer.

Other ethical failings, however – such as a vindictive desire to punish perceived enemies – often seem less likely to lead to good results. This sort of failure, however, appears to be common among those who have sought the presidency. It is a failure, moreover, that does not depend upon party affiliation.

In recent years, for example, both Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon took particular delight in humiliating and degrading their political adversaries. Both, perhaps, might have been better leaders, had they been more reflective about when and how to wrong.

In presidential politics, all parties might at least agree on this much: If there is sometimes a reason to seek an ethically flawed president, it does not follow that all ethical flaws are equally worth defending.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The principle thesis of our new book, The Human Element, is that people think in “Fuel.” In this excerpt from the book, we describe the concept and talk about the limitations of having a Fuel-based mindset.

Putting new ideas into motion

Most marketers, innovators, executives, activists, or anyone else in the business of creating change, operate on a deep assumption. It’s a view of the world so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we rarely see its influence or question its value. It is the belief that the best (and perhaps only) way to convince people to embrace a new idea is to heighten the appeal of the idea itself. We instinctively believe that if we add enough value, people will say “yes.” This reflex leads us down a path of adding features and benefits to the idea or increasing the sizzle of the messaging – all in the hope of propelling people to get on board.

We refer to strategies designed to give an idea thrust as “Fuel.” Fuel is what heightens the appeal of an idea and incites our desire to change. The job of Fuel is to enlighten the intended audience on all of the positive attributes and benefits associated with the “new way.” The need for Fuel is so well established that we have built entire industries around generating it (advertising, public relations and product design, to name a few). While Fuel may be necessary for an innovation to take hold, it has critical limitations. Understanding these limitations is the first step to breaking out of a Fuel-based mindset.

Limitation # 1: Bad is stronger than good

A doctor asks, “I have good news and bad news: which do you want to hear first?” What would you say? A majority of people (78% in a recent study) pick the bad news. This is because, for the human mind, bad is stronger than good. If you’ve ever gone through a performance review, you’ll know what we are talking about. One negative comment can instantly wash away all the positive observations that preceded it. Psychologists call this the negativity bias.

Our bias for bad affects how we see almost everything. We remember negative events more intensely than positive events. We process negative information faster than positive information. People are quick to spot an angry face in a crowd, but are much slower to find a smile. This is because the amygdala, the region of the brain responsible for recognizing facial emotion, devotes considerably more neurons to processing danger. A threatening image can trigger our fight or flight response in milliseconds, but positive events produce much slower reactions. You can jump back from a snake much faster than you can jump toward your favorite snack.

When people hesitate to embrace a new idea, there are two broad explanations. Either the idea lacks appeal (insufficient Fuel), or a Friction is blocking progress. Negativity bias has a clear implication – focus on the Frictions. This shift in mindset can be seen in Bob Sutton’s wonderful book, The No Asshole Rule, which tackles a problem that plagues many companies: low workplace morale. The conventional response to a disengaged workforce is to – this will sound familiar – add benefits. Crank up the positive in hopes of drowning out the bad. What Sutton proposes instead is fearless intolerance for bad people and bad behavior. The Negativity bias leads to the realization that benefits and perks will rarely overcome a toxic culture.

The parallels with innovation are striking. When we sell an idea, our focus is on the benefits the idea offers. We implicitly ask ourselves, “How will we seduce people into saying yes?” And when our message is ignored or outright rejected, our response is to crank up the perks. Fuel is important, of course. But Fuel isn’t the mind’s first priority. 

Limitation # 2: Fuel is costly

Fuel can propel an idea and do so powerfully. But there’s a catch: Fuel is costly. Let’s take Fuel’s most common currency, money. Money moves people. And innovators often use it to get people to embrace change. Black Friday – where American shoppers wait in lines for hours to get deeply discounted goods – illustrates the influence of money quite well. But it comes at a cost. 

Like shoppers, employees respond to money. But it takes a lot of money to move the needle. One recent study asked the simple question: how much of an increase in base salary does one need to improve performance? For the average employee, it was about 8 percent. Paying anything less than that did nothing. This means that if someone makes $150,000 a year, you need to promise them at least a $12,000 bonus to see an uptick in performance. Findings like this led the Behavioral Economist Ury Gneezy to conclude, when it comes to incentives, “either pay a lot or don’t pay at all.”

Limitation # 3: Fuel is often self-evident

Many good ideas are self-evident. The value is there on the surface, for everyone to see. Take the military. A stint in the military has a number of obvious and psychologically powerful benefits. The military provides excitement. It’s a chance to see the world, experience new cultures, and go on daring missions. The military offers camaraderie. People describe the service as joining a family. The military is a membership into a life-long community. People don’t just want to be part of a community. They want to be respected by that community. And the military immediately gives you that, too. We honor and recognize those who serve. The military also gives purpose. People want to see how their lives contribute to something bigger. Patriotism gives you that. And finally, there are big financial incentives. Serving in the military is many people’s path to college and upward mobility.

Does this description of the many benefits military life has to offer tell you anything you didn’t already know? We suspect not. The value proposition of joining the military isn’t hidden. Through cultural osmosis, American citizens learn about the benefits and opportunities that come with joining the military.

The US Army relies heavily on TV ads to Fuel recruitment. The ads use powerful imagery to bring all the value of the military to life. One ad opens with a soldier on a daring mission with his Special Forces team (excitement and camaraderie). We then see that same soldier coming home to be honored in his hometown parade (respect and patriotism). Finally, the commercial ends with the now former solider applying the technical skills he learned in the military to a high paying career.

It turns out (according to recruiters we’ve spoken with), a lot of kids that dream of joining the military never do because a powerful set of Emotional Frictions holds them back. One reason many would-be soldiers never enlist is because… they are afraid to tell mom. They don’t know how to start the conversation. They are afraid she will be beyond upset at the thought of her child going off to war. Despite all the value that Fuels the idea of enlisting, many just can’t overcome the emotional hurdle. Notice how ineffective these TV spots are for these would-be recruits. It is telling them what they already know without solving the problem they really have.

Most good ideas have obvious benefits. When people aren’t receptive to our message, our instinct is to highlight the benefits or find ways on the margins to sweeten the deal. This approach would make sense if the benefits needed to be discovered, but they often don’t.

Limitation # 4: Fuel amplifies friction

In the physical world, applying force to an object has an opposite and equal effect – it increases Friction. The same is true of ideas. Applying Fuel can, quite unintentionally, amplify resistance to the idea.

A former student of ours worked at a large environmental non-profit. The organization had just brought in a new CEO with bold ambitions. Although he inherited an experienced workforce – many employees had been with the organization for their entire career – he feared many had grown complacent. He wanted his team to “live the mission” and he didn’t see that commitment from them. So to boost engagement, he created a bold initiative: the 20-for-20 campaign. The goal was to raise 20 million dollars in 2020. This was a lofty goal. 2017 had been their best ever year, raising a little over 17 million. But much of that was due to a once-in-a-lifetime gift. They had raised just 14 million in 2019, so 20-for-20 was truly ambitious.

The CEO kicked-off the campaign with a celebration. He spoke about his dedication to the mission. Employees were brought on stage to share their success stories and receive applause and accolades. A retired farmer gave an emotional speech about how, without the help of the non-profit, the community would have been damaged beyond repair. And then, to close out the celebration, came the big reveal: the CEO challenged them to hit the 20 million mark in the upcoming year. His closing line was reportedly, “I am blessed to work with such an amazing group of people. You have done so much for this cause. But I believe we can all do better. We’ve seen tonight how our cause matters – there are literally lives on the line. So I ask you all to commit to the 20-in-20 challenge – raising 20 million dollars in the next year. I believe you can do it. I know you can do it.” That year, they raised just 12 million dollars, two million less than the previous year. And they recorded their highest rate of turnover in memory.

The 20-in-20 challenge was meant to give employees the added Fuel they needed to achieve new fundraising heights. Instead, the initiative created strong Emotional Friction. It backfired, we suspect, because employees didn’t believe the goal was realistic. They were trying their very best already. And now they were being asked to do even more with the same amount of resources. The CEO was saying, “I believe in you.” But what they heard was “This guy doesn’t think we are trying hard enough.” They left the celebration feeling insulted, not energized. 

These examples illustrate another important consequence of not accounting for Friction. It isn’t just that the idea that suffers. The innovator suffers too. The CEO invested heavily in his vision, and put his reputation on the line, only to watch it fail. What does the CEO learn from this experience? Many learn to lose faith in those around them. They learn the “it’s impossible to get anything done around here” mentality. Frictions are usually hidden from plain sight. If we don’t understand the forces of resistance, we end up placing the blame on the people and institutions that reject our ideas and not the dark forces that undermine them.

The Human Element by Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal, published by Wiley, is available here.

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The disruption and devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. Not only has it taken the lives of more than 5 million people around the world, it has also seriously wounded the global economy.

Thousands of businesses have gone bust and employees are demotivated, with almost four in 10 feeling less galvanised at work since the pandemic. There has been a decline in productivity for most businesses, with those sectors involving the most social contact bearing the brunt.

I recently wrote about the skills that effective leaders need to possess. These have never been more relevant, especially now that we need strong leadership to guide us to recovery after the pandemic. Here are four key skills crucial to help make that happen.

1. Be empathetic

Effective leaders need to understand the feelings, motivations and emotions of others, especially the people who work for them. Empathy with employees is crucial now that many people are facing diverse challenges such as anxiety, stress and adjusting to new work conditions and income decline. Leaders need to show that they are human.

A good example is Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott, the largest hotel chain in the world with a workforce of around 121,000 people. Marriott’s revenues experienced a drastic decline at the start of the pandemic. Sorenson recorded a video message, which has since gone viral, expressing compassion for employees and their families, reassuring them that things would get better. At the time he was being treated for pancreatic cancer and undergoing chemotherapy, but this did not prevent him from showing empathy – or leadership. This act of compassionate leadership is what differentiates good from great leaders during crisis.

2. Be decisive

The pandemic made it imperative for business leaders to act swiftly. Situations can change quickly, and successful businesses are the ones able to respond quickly and adapt to change. Good leaders need to be decisive and not averse to taking risks. They should be able to identify, evaluate and assess the risks while making difficult decisions. Resources during the pandemic were limited, so it was important that leaders adopted a logical, analytical approach to ensure that decisions were made not just quickly, but thoughtfully.

Amazon emerged from the pandemic stronger compared to other companies because of the decisions Jeff Bezos made at the start. As people found themselves confined to their homes due to restrictions in movement, Bezos recruited 175,000 extra employees and increased pay by £2 an hour, knowing that the pandemic was going to have a drastic impact on the supply chain and jobs. This was instrumental in helping to increase Amazon’s profits during the pandemic. Which leads on to the next rule.

3. Recognise and exploit opportunities

The pandemic was also a period that saw a huge leap in new and existing opportunities. The ability to recognise them in a crisis is vital. Leaders must be aggressive catalysts and identify opportunities where others see chaos, confusion and problems. Such opportunities vary from expansion into emerging markets, to selling new products and adapting existing services, such as restaurants becoming takeaways.

Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, is a classic example of a leader who was able to recognise and exploit opportunities that arose as a result of COVID. The pandemic led to an abrupt shift to remote working for many businesses around the world. This transformed Zoom into a global brand during the pandemic. Profits in 2020 soared to $186m, while customer growth rose by 458% compared to 2019.

Yuan identified that success would depend on the company’s capacity to attract big-spending corporations to Zoom in addition to people just using it for free. Zoom’s CEO is acutely aware that the future has changed and, regardless of how the post-pandemic world unfolds, remote working will be a fixture of it. Great leaders know the importance of this skill and are usually prepared to exploit opportunities when they emerge.

4. Build effective teams

Leadership is about influencing and motivating people. Leaders need to promote teamwork and foster team spirit to ensure their staff cooperate and collaborate to work together effectively. To do this, employees need to trust those in charge. Leaders must be role models who lead by example; employees learn a lot from good leaders, especially in difficult times.

Carsten Spohr, CEO of Lufthansa, was faced with an extremely difficult and tragic situation in March 2015 when a suicidal pilot deliberately crashed his plane, killing 150 passengers. During this crisis, Spohr displayed honesty and took responsibility. This inspired and impressed his employees and helped build a culture of trust within the organisation after such a shattering event.

To develop these skills, mentoring and personal growth activities are important. Leadership is a personal journey and business leaders need to commit to developing their own skills. No one is perfect or has all the answers, but good leaders should not be afraid to fail. They should show that life continues and can improve after failing – if lessons are learned, however painful. Like anything, strong effective leadership takes practice.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The following is excerpted from Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave by Ryan Holiday in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Ryan Holiday, 2021.

Inspire Through Fearlessness

It was, for a man famous for gambles, perhaps his biggest one. On August 30, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur touched down in Japan. A decade before his bold stroke in Korea, this situation was just as dire. The fighting between the Allies and the Axis powers had only just ceased. In six years of world war, enemy boots had never trod on Japanese soil.

Every intelligence report warned of danger everywhere. Every adviser suggested he wait.

And yet MacArthur proceeded into the heart of enemy territory, unarmed. As he watched his staff holstering pistols before leaving headquarters for the flight to Tokyo, he had given the order. “Take them off,” he’d said. “If they intend to kill us, side- arms will be useless. And nothing will impress them like a show of absolute fearlessness. If they don’t know they’re licked, this will convince them.”

If one wonders how Japan so quickly made the unprecedented transition from suicidal warmonger to a peaceful, open nation and unwavering ally of the country that broke its back, this day is the answer. MacArthur landed and never betrayed a hint of fear or doubt. Every little gesture was deliberate—he ate without checking to see if his food was poisoned, he lifted martial law. He came in peace. He was completely confident.

It wasn’t quite the same as facing artillery fire, but it likely required even more discipline and commitment. Churchill called it the single most courageous act of World War II. Never once did MacArthur think of his personal safety, only the groundwork for peace and reconstruction.

How many lives did this save? How many guerrillas did it deter? How much resistance did it prevent? Every island in the Pacific had been a bitter, deadly fight, but Tokyo itself went with- out a shot. MacArthur’s entrance told them it was over . . . and they believed him. A more trepidatious commander could have never pulled it off, nor an angry or vengeful one.

Was there a moment—as they circled the runway, as he poked his head out of the plane for the first time, when he took the first bite of his dinner at a hotel staffed by people who would have killed him just days before—that MacArthur must have been terrified? That he might have wished he was back at headquarters? Of course, but for his men, for his country, for the cause of peace in the world, he had to put all that aside. He had to display complete and total fearlessness. He had to plunge ahead with poise.

All great leaders understand this. De Gaulle too practiced what he called bain de foule—plunging into the crowds of rapturous French citizens, bathing in their mutual spirit and love. Just as MacArthur’s aides had warned against these public displays, de Gaulle’s staff worried furiously about the safety of their leader, but he knew that it was precisely because it was so risky that it must be done.

The decision to walk down the Champs-Élysées after the liberation, even as snipers lurked and firefights still raged, helped free France. It gave purchase—at the potential cost of his life—to a relationship with the French people that he depended on for the rest of his career. It gave the French courage that sustains them still.

A leader cannot sit in some ivory tower or behind thick castle walls. They cannot protect themselves from every danger and risk while they let their followers or employees or soldiers take the brunt of what the world throws at us.

No, a leader must have real skin in the game. Whether that’s putting their own money in the firm at a rock-bottom moment or riding in open-top cars, keeping the door to their office open, or sharing vulnerably what others would hide, the connection that is forged by such gestures provides far more safety than any risk avoidance can guarantee. The boss steps up to the micro- phones and answers every hostile question from the crowd—even the embarrassing ones about their own mistakes, taking the hit even for the stuff that wasn’t their fault. The chief can’t take up the rear, they lead the troops into battle. The parent doesn’t just tell their kid to face their fears, they have to show them what it means to do that in their own life.

You must care about the people in your care. You must put them first. You must show them with your actions. Call them to something higher.

It was the moment when Martin Luther King Jr. went to jail that his followers saw he was more than just a preacher. He was with them. He risked his life for them. He was one of them.

We can’t be afraid or we won’t be able to do what needs to be done. But also, by this fearlessness—willingness to represent the cause, in the flesh, against all dangers—we show everyone else that they’ll be okay as well.

The leader risks themselves for us. They step to the front. They make their courage contagious.

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If you want to become a leader, start yammering. It doesn’t even necessarily matter what you say. New research shows that groups without a leader can find one if somebody starts talking a lot.

This phenomenon, described by the “babble hypothesis” of leadership, depends neither on group member intelligence nor personality. Leaders emerge based on the quantity of speaking, not quality.

Researcher Neil G. MacLaren, lead author of the study published in The Leadership Quarterly, believes his team’s work may improve how groups are organized and how individuals within them are trained and evaluated.

“It turns out that early attempts to assess leadership quality were found to be highly confounded with a simple quantity: the amount of time that group members spoke during a discussion,” shared MacLaren, who is a research fellow at Binghamton University.

While we tend to think of leaders as people who share important ideas, leadership may boil down to whoever “babbles” the most. Understanding the connection between how much people speak and how they become perceived as leaders is key to growing our knowledge of group dynamics.

The power of babble

The research involved 256 college students, divided into 33 groups of four to ten people each. They were asked to collaborate on either a military computer simulation game (BCT Commander) or a business-oriented game (CleanStart). The players had ten minutes to plan how they would carry out a task and 60 minutes to accomplish it as a group. One person in the group was randomly designated as the “operator,” whose job was to control the user interface of the game.

To determine who became the leader of each group, the researchers asked the participants both before and after the game to nominate one to five people for this distinction. The scientists found that those who talked more were also more likely to be nominated. This remained true after controlling for a number of variables, such as previous knowledge of the game, various personality traits, or intelligence.

How leaders influence people to believe | Michael Dowling | Big Thinkwww.youtube.com

In an interview with PsyPost, MacLaren shared that “the evidence does seem consistent that people who speak more are more likely to be viewed as leaders.”

Another find was that gender bias seemed to have a strong effect on who was considered a leader. “In our data, men receive on average an extra vote just for being a man,” explained MacLaren. “The effect is more extreme for the individual with the most votes.”

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What should you be doing with your money during the coronavirus financial crisis? In this Big Think Live session, Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and co-founder of Ellevest, a financial advisory and investment platform for women, will discuss personal finance and wealth-building career strategies with Bob Kulhan, founder and CEO of Business Improv. What steps can we take to guard ourselves from an uncertain financial future? Find out on Tuesday at 1 pm ET.

Ask your questions for Sallie Krawcheck during the Q&A!

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COVID-19 is unlike anything we’ve experienced before. How is it forcing us to rethink what it means to be the boss?

In this Big Think Live session, Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill will update her 3 imperatives for leadership—manage yourself, manage your network, and manage your team—for a world grappling with coronavirus.

Ask your questions for Professor Hill during the live Q&A!

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Linda Hill is the co-author of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader and Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.

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In this live session with James Citrin, one of the world’s foremost executive recruiters and leadership experts, you’ll explore skills for success in a virtual world—whether you’re at the helm of your organization or are considering a career move.

You’ll learn:

• 3 CEO leadership abilities that boards are looking for as a result of the pandemic: 1. Ability to streamline the company’s business model in the near term; 2. Ability to make select investments to accelerate growth post-pandemic; 3. Ability to wrap actions in purpose and mission.
• The essential qualities and narrative arc of effective, short-form crisis communication, including a case study of Queen Elizabeth II’s televised addressed in April 2020.
• The #1 job-saving action you can take right now: Make yourself essential by adding unexpected value using the 20/80 rule.

James Citrin is the author of The Career Playbook: Essential Advice for Today’s Aspiring Young Professional.

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The COVID-19 crisis has launched us headfirst into a new “normal”, and the organizations that survive and thrive will be the ones that can lead their remote teams effectively. That means more than merely transitioning to Zoom meetings.

In this live session, Chris Fussell will leverage his experience as a Navy SEAL and his expertise in leadership to detail how you can design an operating rhythm, articulate a strategy, and maintain your culture for an extended remote world.

You’ll learn:

• How U.S. Special Operations teams evolved from a segmented operational model toward a team of teams model.
• A checklist of leadership behavior changes that are critical for remote work environments
• 6 Navy SEAL qualities to embrace in uncertain times: grit, refusal to quit, team-orientation, focus, ability to deal with disruption and pivot, acceptance of reality.

Chris Fussell is the co-author of NYT best-selling book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, and its sequel, WSJ best-selling book One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams.

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