Five Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012

Dorie Clark blogs.hbr.org  December 15, 2011

I recently got back from a month's vacation — the longest I've ever taken, and a shocking indulgence for an American. (Earlier this summer, I was still fretting about how to pull off two weeks unplugged.) The distance, though, helped me hone in on what's actually important to my professional career — and which make-work activities merely provide the illusion of progress. Inspired by HBR blogger Peter Bregman's idea of creating a "to ignore" list , here are the activities I'm going to stop cold turkey in 2012 — and perhaps you should, too.

1. Responding Like a Trained Monkey. Every productivity expert in the world will tell you to check email at periodic intervals — say, every 90 minutes — rather than clicking "refresh" like a Pavlovian mutt. Of course, almost no one listens, because studies have shown email's "variable interval reinforcement schedule" is basically a slot machine for your brain. But spending a month away — and only checking email weekly — showed me how little really requires immediate response. In fact, nothing. A 90 minute wait won't kill anyone, and will allow you to accomplish something substantive during your workday.
2. Mindless Traditions. I recently invited a friend to a prime networking event. "Can I play it by ear?" she asked. "This is my last weekend to get holiday cards out and I haven't mailed a single one. It is causing stress!" In the moment, not fulfilling an "obligation" (like sending holiday cards) can make you feel guilty. But if you're in search of professional advancement, is a holiday card (buried among the deluge) going to make a difference? If you want to connect, do something unusual — get in touch at a different time of year, or give your contacts a personal call, or even better, meet up face-to-face. You have to ask if your business traditions are generating the results you want.
3. Reading Annoying Things. I have nearly a dozen newspaper and magazine subscriptions, the result of alluring specials ($10 for an entire year!) and the compulsion not to miss out on crucial information. But after detoxing for a month, I was able to reflect on which publications actually refreshed me — and which felt like a duty. The New Yorker , even though it's not a business publication, broadens my perspective and is a genuine pleasure to read. The pretentious tech publication with crazy layouts and too-small print? Not so much. I'm weeding out and paring down to literary essentials. What subscriptions can you get rid of?
4. Work That's Not Worth It. Early in my career, I was thrilled to win a five-year, quarter-million dollar contract. That is, until the reality set in that it was a government contract, filled with ridiculous reporting mechanisms, low reimbursement rates and administrative complexities that sucked the joy and profit out of the work. When budget cuts rolled around and my contract got whacked, it turned out to be a blessing. These days, I'm eschewing any engagement, public or private, that looks like more trouble than it's worth.
5. Making Things More Complicated Than They Should Be. A while back, a colleague approached me with an idea. She wanted me to be a part of a professional development event she was organizing in her city, featuring several speakers and consultants. She recommended biweekly check-in calls for the next eight months, leading up to the event. "Have you organized an event like this before?" I asked. "Can you actually get the participants? Why don't you test the demand first?" When none materialized, I realized I'd saved myself nearly half a week's work — in futile conference calls — by insisting the event had to be "real" before we invested in it. As Eric Ries points out in his new book The Lean Startup , developing the best code or building the best product in the world is meaningless if your customers don't end up wanting it. Instead, test early and often to ensure you're not wasting your time. What ideas should you test before you've gone too far?

Eliminating these five activities is likely to save me hundreds of hours next year — time I can spend expanding my business and doing things that matter. What are you going to stop doing? And how are you going to leverage all that extra time?

Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. She is the author of the forthcoming What's Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). You can follow her on Twitter at @dorieclark.

Involving Employees in Change

Organizations going through change should involve their workforce as much as possible in the process.
Employee surveys have now become standard in most organizations. Yet too often, the wrong questions are asked and the wrong things are measured. To make employees feel completely involved in the organization, "satisfaction" with the workplace alone is not enough. An employee who is satisfied with his salary or the amount of annual leave is not necessarily, of his own free will, going to lend full support to his employer and his employer's goals. Satisfaction can be connected to passivity -- employees can be satisfied and yet still be indifferent.

The stronger the engagement, the more likely the employee will act in the interests of the employer.

There is more value in optimizing the work environment, thereby increasing emotional attachment -- or engagement -- to the organization by rigorously fulfilling employees' core needs and expectations. The stronger the engagement, the more likely it is that the employee will act in the interests of the employer -- and the more engaged employees there are, the more productive the organization will be. It is possible to measure the degree to which these core needs and expectations of the workplace are met.
What to ask and where to start
Building on years of research, Gallup has developed 12 items -- the Q¹² -- and employee responses to these items give information about the state of employee engagement, which in turn correlates with organizational performance. It is crucial that the results are discussed at the workgroup level as well as with the leadership and that action plans are put into place and followed through. The results act as a focus point for intense discussion within the team. (See graphic "The Employee Engagement Hierarchy.")
To ensure that the process is sustainable, the survey should be carried out regularly. Also, changes in the survey results over time need to be discussed within the team, and both action planning and follow-through must be monitored. Only when this happens will the employees feel really included and get actively involved in action planning. The results of the employee surveys can also be correlated with key performance indicators (KPIs). By combining these two types of organizational data -- the "soft" employee engagement data with the "hard" KPI data -- we can demonstrate the direct economic benefit of the actions on costs and growth.

Stryker Navigation is an example of how this can be put into practice. As a company, Stryker is a global leader in the manufacturing of navigation systems for computer-assisted surgery. Stryker's machines help doctors and surgeons perform operations more quickly, more safely, and more accurately. Development and production for global markets is done at Stryker's site in Freiburg, Germany.
Decreasing motivation rang alarm bells
When the Freiburg management team registered that the engagement of its employees was decreasing, it set alarm bells ringing, as the company was facing some difficult technical issues that needed to be resolved. It was not going to be possible to produce some important products as quickly and economically as previously thought. This lack of engagement became particularly apparent in the cooperation between teams -- for example, between the Development and Production teams. While the individual departments were performing well in their own range of tasks, they were not prepared to view the manufacture of new products as a complete process that required their collaboration.
Stryker turned to Gallup to measure the employees' engagement and to help the company develop actions for improving the situation. In addition to the Q¹² items, questions were asked about the collaboration between teams. The results were analyzed at the project team level and at the department level. The advantage of this approach is that it allows many different opinions on a project to be heard and discourages siloed thinking. The employees involved in a project can then work together to produce a list of actions, which serves to strengthen connections beyond departmental borders.
The most striking results were gathered in a presentation. Using Gallup's database comparisons and benchmarks, Stryker was able to see the areas in which the company was performing at excellence and those in which it was below average. Each team received its own scorecard, and internal benchmarks were used to show the teams how they ranked within their department as well as within the company as a whole.

How Many Customers Did You Lose Today?

Rita McGrath  blogs.hbr.org Dec. 7, 2011

My theme this month appears to be tone deafness among business designers. Cue Bank of America!
But genuinely, one of the most vexing dilemmas for senior executives is being plugged in to what is actually going on in the front lines of their business. It's all too easy to miss critically important customer experience information when one is engaging in the day-to-day grind that constitutes an executive's job. All the same, not being attuned to the way your business is perceived by customers can lead to a lot of damage.
Here's a recent example. My husband and I were traveling from Edinburgh to London, where we were to attend the Thinkers50 gala dinner, on a Monday in November. Our train was due to depart in 15 minutes, and my husband was anxious for a coffee. Aha! Conveniently located next to Track 2 was a Café Nero, one of the more ubiquitous brands of coffee shop that grew up in the wake of Starbucks' enviable success. I was given the task of watching the luggage; he went to get coffee.
Here's where it gets interesting. From my vantage point just opposite the entrance, I was able to observe customers coming and going. I was fascinated to see how many of them came and went — without buying anything — because they took one look at how long the line was and abandoned their coffee mission then and there. Intrigued, I started to count. Fully 3 people looked at the line and bailed on the thought of purchasing for every 1 person who actually made a purchase. Imagine — the café would have increased its business by 300% if everybody who thought they might like a coffee had been converted into a coffee buyer. And this is at a train station, where people risk missing a train if they stand around!
My guess is that these lost sales won't even be picked up in a corporate database. After all, how do you identify the dissatisfaction of people who were potential customers but ended up not being customers at all? How do you measure a non-event that should have been a sale?
I'm not picking on Café Nero, particularly, or the friendly people behind the counter. The business issue, however, is that their potential business was more than cut in half — in fact, cut by 75% — because they missed the obvious about buying coffee at a high-end café in a train station. This sort of thing happens over and over again because business designers miss one or more of customers' critical decision triggers. The companies that can fix this have the potential to create real profits by designing better, more complete customer experiences.
So, here's the challenge — how do you get the people who make strategy and resource allocation decisions to deeply understand what is actually happening on the front lines of their business?

Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath studies innovation, corporate venturing, and entrepreneurship. Her latest book is Discovery-Driven Growth (2009).

The 5 basic manners you need to know in business

Tom Searcy cbsnews.com Dec. 5, 2011

I stand up when a lady arrives at or leaves a table. I know, that is nostalgic and even possibly risky as it might be perceived as sexist. However, it is one of a set of manners I was taught as a child that I still follow. Holding doors, taking hats off indoors, pulling out chairs and lowering voices all seem to be quaint throwback ideas that are dying rapid and unceremonious deaths.

Because of diversity training, political correctness and the changing mores of society, I think the clarity of what are considered to be "good manners" has become murky. The basic guideline of "treat others as you would wish to be treated" is less of the clear path to follow as individualism changes the interpretation.

Manners are still important and can be differentiating, often times in the negative. When you make a mistake, it sticks out and is memorable. For that reason, there are certain things that you must get right.

1. Use of names -- Get the names right. Phonetically write them down and make certain that anyone who is prospect or client facing knows their names. Spelling, correct titles and deciding whether to use a nickname or proper name are all on the "must-get-right" list. I have seen big sales blown up because of a repeated misspelling of a key player's name.

2. Confirm before you proceed -- Ensure that you have agreement at each step in a meeting, tour, phone call or visit and that all of the participants have their questions answered before going to the next set of ideas or concepts. Adults not only stop listening to you when they get stuck or are in disagreement with what has been put forth, they also begin building resentment towards the speaker who proceeds without clearing up the issue.

3. Declare your accountability and keep it -- At the end of each meeting, visit, or call. It is your responsibility to declare what comes next. It is rude to ask the typical question, "What are the next steps?" You asked for the meeting, now you need to be able to provide an encouraged path to follow.

4. Host well when you host -- If you are feeding your visitors, feed them well. Creature comforts including temperature, lighting, drinks and room conditions are all noted. In the better sales organizations, even when those companies are tiny, the handling of a visitor is handled like a guest at Sunday dinner. Even the little details can make the person feel honored and valued.

5. Be gracious as a guest -- Diana Ross may be able to pull of a diva routine, but you can't. Your goal is to be gracious for what you receive. I am amazed at the number of people who miss the most basic of "Please" and "Thank you" courtesy when support staff brings them water or provides help with the projector. Buyers notice and cast a broad net of perception as to what you and your company are like based upon how you handle the simple courtesies of interacting with support staff. Be gracious in every contact.

These manners probably seem like common sense. They are to the degree you get them right. They are deal killers when you get them wrong.

Tom Searcy is a nationally recognized author, speaker, and the foremost expert in large account sales. Tom is the author of RFPs Suck! How to Master the RFP System Once and for All to Win Big Business and the co-author of Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company.

To Grow, Leave What You Know Behind

John Coleman  blogs.hbr.org December 6, 2011

Last year, I was fortunate to moderate a fascinating panel discussion with Harvard's Center for Public Leadership on the topic of "Next Generation Leadership." One of the panelists, Rosalinde Torres, encouraged us to ask the following question: "What has made you successful in the past that you need to change to move forward as a leader?"
As we go through different phases in our personal and professional lives, we're called upon to adapt, to marshal skills different than those we've used in the past. And in the modern world — where the pace of technological and social change is as fast as at any time in human history, those demands on our adaptability are greater. An exceptional grocery store cashier, for example, will need a different set of skills to be a store manager as her career evolves. And those in computer repair have had to learn and unlearn a myriad skills over the past 30 years to keep pace with the changes happening around them.
So what skills do you need to modify or leave behind to grow? For me, a few suggestions come to mind.
Stop seeking answers; start asking questions. In our 20+ years of education, we have been trained to get ahead by having the right answers — to tests, to class questions, to business problems. But the most difficult challenges require leaders who can identify and ask the right questions.
The world needs great problem-solvers, but it also needs people who can make sure their organizations focus on the right problems and miss nothing in the process. One of the more intellectually impressive senior executives I've worked with asked questions twice as often as he offered answers. As a result, the people who worked for him always took full responsibility for their work — because they knew they'd have to answer a stream of deep and thoughtful questions as soon as they entered the boardroom. This leader's questions not only showed his thoughtfulness and helped drive deeper solutions, but they created ownership among the people who worked for him.
Focus on people, not problems. Junior businesspeople often work on heavily analytic, stand-alone problems. They're asked to build models and plans — to find the "right" solution. But the most difficult problems can't be solved and implemented by individuals alone. Good leaders can't just get the right answer. They have to involve people — those who will ultimately implement their programs and those teammates who can help them solve the problem faster and better than they could on their own.
When an individual becomes too rigid about his or her "own" solution at the expense of working collaboratively with others, that individual often loses the momentum to generate change and misses the valuable insights of his or her peers in the process. A famous example of collaboration in the face of a difficult problem — no matter your thoughts on the project itself — is the Manhattan Project. The project, which ultimately led to the construction of the first atomic bomb, was led by General Leslie Groves. Knowing he couldn't handle the project by himself (and neither could anyone else), he called upon as many great minds and competing perspectives as possible to come to the right solutions collaboratively and created an environment in which they could implement against that plan.
Stop working as a generalist. Many of us have lived life so far as generalists — "Jacks of all trades," so to speak — focused broadly on a variety of skills, functions, or industries. Sure, we may have picked some topics on which to become knowledgeable, we've chosen professions, and we've completed "majors" or built specific skills. But by-and-large, we've cast our nets wide, learning broadly to gain context about the world around us. At some point, however, most of us will need to generate proficiency in a very specific topic, both because it makes us valuable sources of expert knowledge and teaches us the habits of mind to generate deep insight.
Take, for example, Steve Jobs's early obsession with calligraphy. After dropping out of Reed College in 1972, Steve spent months immersed in calligraphy, which, at Reed, was an incredibly strong program. In his words, "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture." That experience not only helped Steve build the practical toolkit to create beautiful text and designs, but also improved and sharpened his mind, attention to detail, and his fascination with design.
You may be at a different stage in life — a great "people" manager who needs to work on her problem-solving or a specialist who needs to broaden his experience — but I've found that as my professional career evolves to include more collaboration, management, and implementation, the skills I've depended on, while helpful in their time, need to evolve for successful growth. These adjustments provide new areas of focus that may be common to a number of young leaders who are making the transition from individual contributor to manager as they advance in their careers.
What do you think? In your own work life, what are the traits that have made you successful in the past that you'll need to leave behind to be successful in the future?
John Coleman is a coauthor of the new HBR Press book, Passion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders.

People Are Not Your Greatest Asset

Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald,  blogs.hbr.org. Dec. 6, 2011

Many of us in business have heard the popular aphorism, "People are your greatest asset." Some of us may even believe it. But is this sentiment reflected in our corporate cultures and the way our leaders lead? For the most part, no — and there's a reason for that.
People are not your greatest asset. Even great people are not your greatest asset. In fact, great people can be your greatest liability. If Enron wasn't enough evidence of this, the 2008 financial crisis has now given us plenty more. What about Lehman Brothers, AIG and Countrywide? Arguably, these companies employed some of the smartest business people not only in the room but in the world, and yet those same folks took their firms to ruin (or near it) and came close to causing a collapse of the U.S. economy.
So if it's not people, what is your greatest asset?
It's how you empower your people. Think about it. What is the primary purpose of a business organization? To assemble a group of people, who previously may have had no association, and empower them to accomplish productive work toward the organization's objectives. More effective empowerment typically equals more productive work. As leaders and managers, we are familiar with empowering people. We organize them into divisions, units, groups and teams. We provide goals and incentives to motivate them. And we enable them with authority, tools, resources and processes.
Social media ushers in new ways to enhance your greatest asset, because it is about empowering people to collaborate at unprecedented scale. With powerful implementations of social media, we motivate people to form communities around a meaningful and common purpose . We enable them with new technology, seed content, and guidance on desired participation. The aim is to facilitate "mass collaboration" and its accompanying behaviors.
For our book on the social organization, we studied hundreds of social media implementations and identified a set of key mass collaboration behaviors. Understanding them is critical to successfully engaging and empowering people.
Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence is the meaningful assembly of relatively small and incremental community contributions into a larger and coherent accumulation of knowledge. Collective intelligence is not new, but the mass collaboration enabled by social media provides it at scales never before possible. Even the most modest individual contributions can be tremendously valuable when meaningfully combined at scale. Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr are all social Web examples of collective intelligence. Each Wikipedia article by itself is relatively insignificant, but a million articles collected and linked together is highly powerful.
Expertise Location
Expertise location involves seeking and finding specific expertise in the masses of people and the often-staggering amount of available content. One view of expertise location is almost the opposite of collective intelligence. It is "selective intelligence," where the goal is not to collect numerous small contributions from many, but to find just what is needed. Crowdsourcing is a well-known example of expertise location.
Emergent Structures
Emergent structures are structures such as processes, content categorization, organizational networks and hidden virtual teams that are unknown or unplanned prior to social interactions, but that form naturally as activity progresses. The goal of emergent structures is to gain a better understanding of the true "nature of things" to more effectively organize, guide or interact with a community or its efforts. Social media, applied with transparency, can surface these structures.
Interest Cultivation
Interest cultivation is the forming of communities around a shared interest, with the goal of indirectly deriving enterprise value. Social media facilitates the mass sharing of interests like never before. Enterprises often pursue interest cultivation with the aim of engaging customers to enhance product/service utilization and enjoyment, improve delivery and indirectly spur sales.
Flash Coordination
Flash coordination involves rapidly organizing the activities of a large number of people through fast and short mass-messaging, often spread virally. By effectively employing flash coordination, enterprises can more quickly marshal a powerful and sophisticated response to an important occurrence. We are now seeing the emergence of a new set of business sense-and-respond systems inspired by social-media-enabled flash coordination.
Relationship Leverage
Relationship leverage is the practice of effectively managing and deriving value from a prodigious number of relationships. Relationship leverage strives to maximize the strength of numerous weak ties and the power of unbalanced relationships. Facebook is all about relationship leverage. We can keep numerous people up to date on what we are doing and thinking with minimal effort. We only need to respond to those who choose to interact around something we exposed. We may sacrifice intimacy for scale, but that is the trade-off with relationship leverage.
Examine these behaviors in the context of your business goals, major collaboration challenges, core business practices, etc., to determine where and how mass collaboration might empower your people to deliver strategic value to your organization and enhance what is truly your greatest asset.
Anthony J. Bradley, group vice president, Gartner Research, and Mark P. McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, Gartner Executive Programs, are co-authors of The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees. You can follow them on Twitter at @BradleyAnthonyJ and @markpmcdonald.

The best way to recognize employees

Jeff Haden December 15, 2011 cbsnews.com

(MoneyWatch)
According to a SHRM survey conducted earlier this year, most organizations have employee recognition programs in place. So why don't many of those programs work?

Effective employee recognition isn't based on following arbitrary guidelines or creating insincere recognition systems. That's why so many formal recognition programs only pay lip service to praising employees for their efforts.

Your small business doesn't need a formal program in place to recognize and praise employees. Just follow these tips and it's easy to give the recognition your employees deserve:

See every employee as an individual. Every employee responds differently to recognition. Many appreciate public praise. Others shrink from the limelight. Don't pass out praise on your terms; recognize each employee in the way that produces the greatest impact for that person.

Assume too soon is never soon enough. There's an inverse relationship between recognition and performance: The longer you wait, the lower the impact. Praise employees immediately. Don't wait for "the right time," because the only right time is right now.

Provide details that show you know. Generic praise is nice, but specific praise is wonderful. Don't just tell employees they did a good job. Tell them how they did a good job. Not only will they appreciate the recognition, they'll also know you pay attention to what they do.

Be genuine. We've all received recognition that felt forced, like the boss who walks around once a month and says, "Thanks for your efforts." Only recognize hard work and achievement when you mean it.

Skip constructive criticism, at least for now. Say, "You did a great job, but next time..." and all the employee remembers is what they did wrong or could have done better. Follow up at another time with constructive feedback. Let the warm glow of praise be the feeling the employee carries with them.

Actively find employees to praise. We're all trained to spot issues, hunt down problems, and eliminate errors. We're usually not trained to find people doing things well. Spend part of every day looking for positives. (You might be surprised by how skilled your employees really are.)

Leverage the surprise factor. Unexpected recognition is incredibly powerful. Winning the employee of the month award is great, but being recognized in the middle of a meeting for outstanding achievement can feel even better.

Spot opportunities to share the "praise wealth." It's easy to recognize your great employees. They're great because they perform well. Look for ways to praise less stellar performers when they deserve the recognition. Sometimes all an average performer needs is a little attention and encouragement.

And keep in mind providing praise will get easier over time, because when you do a better job of recognizing employees they naturally perform better - and that gives you even more achievements to recognize.