AMA Quarterly

AMA

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

SPRING 2015 • VOLUME 1 • NUMBER 1

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SPECIAL REPORT

The Top 30 Leaders Who Influenced Business in 2014 Page 12

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS GRIT IT UP Page 5

An interview with Daniel Goleman LEADERSHIP IN THE AGE OF EI Page 16

An interview with David Allen MAKE ROOM, NOT LISTS Page 20

An interview with Jeff Tagney LEADING WHERE HIGH-TECH MEETS HEALTHCARE Page 33

HOW TO MANAGE A STRONG-WILLED EGO Page 40

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SPRING 2015 Volume 1 • Number 1

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

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SPECIAL REPORT

The Top 30 Leaders Who Influenced Business in 2014 As part of AMA’s mission to serve as a forum for leading management ideas, we set out to

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determine which business thought leaders influenced business the most in 2014. After six weeks of open nominations and voting on our blog, Playbook.amanet.org, we evaluated all nominees to arrive at our Top 30.

FEATURES

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DEPARTMENTS

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Leadership in the Age of EI One of AMA’s influential leaders of 2014, Daniel Goleman answered a few questions for AMA Quarterly about the role of emotional intelligence in innovative leadership and how innovative leaders lead. By Christiane Truelove

Leading Where High-Tech Meets Healthcare Jeff Tagney has started not one but two companies in the space where high-tech meets healthcare.

Tagney founded Epocrates in 1998 and Doximity in 2010. By Christiane Truelove

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International Leaders Need to “Style Switch” When a chameleon sits on a tree, it turns green. When a chameleon sits on a rock, it turns gray.

When a chameleon sits on Mitt Romney, it just switches back and forth.

Make Room, Not Lists David Allen, one of AMA’s influential leaders of 2014, is known for the time management system “Getting Things Done,” which centers on the idea of moving planned tasks out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into items to take action on. By Christiane Truelove

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By Karen S. Walch, PhD

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Motivating People Doesn’t Work Thinking of motivation as having the energy or impetus to act fails to convey the essential nature of human motivation. It does nothing to help you understand the reasons behind the action. By Susan Fowler

How to Manage a Strong-Willed Ego You need smart, talented employees.

These are the employees who perform.

They achieve goals. They have innovative ideas. But some of these smart, talented, high-performing, goal-achieving, and innovative employees also give you headaches because they don’t listen to you. By Marcia Reynolds, PhD

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44

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Seven Keys to Being an Irresistible Leader Becoming an irresistible leader requires that you attract and connect with people in a genuine and authentic way. Here are seven effective ways to build engagement with your staff.

The Rise of a New Model of Leadership We are witnessing the end of our current management model and the emergence of a new model that is radically more productive, more soulful, and more purposeful. By Frederic Laloux

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EDITOR’S PICK What It Takes to Innovate

3 PERSONAL INSIGHTS Listen and

Lead Leaders must always look for ways to improve to improve the way they communicate. Getting communication right is vital to building something great—a family, a business, anything.

By John Hewitt

5 COMMENTARY GRIT It Up! How do

you lead your people to bust through the crud and get more of the important stuff done, and done well, when the entire world is conspiring against that happening? By Paul G. Stoltz, PhD

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INSIGHTS Don’t Blame Culture Organizational disasters usually don’t occur because of a flawed culture—at least not the traditional definition of culture. They happen when leaders do violence to good sense. By Linda D. Henman, PhD

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OUR VIEW The Path to Innovation Just as you can learn the skills needed to be a good leader, you can learn how to innovate. By Edward T. Reilly

By Alesia Latson

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 1

EDITOR’S PICK

What It Takes To INNOVATE

AMA

UARTERLY

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION GUEST EDITOR

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here are many facets to good leadership, and in this issue we’re polishing up the one focused on innovation.

AMA has polled readers to choose the Top 30 leaders who influenced business in 2014 in an innovative fashion. The messages of these leaders go beyond personal development to shape management or leadership in meaningful ways. You’ll find the list beginning on page 12, and Q&As with two of those leaders, Daniel Goleman and David Allen, on pages 16 and 20. Goleman talks about the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership, and Allen address some of the ways that good leaders can “Get It Done,” yet not be slaves to their checklists.

A special Q&A with Jeff Tagney, CEO of the physicians’ social and professional network Doximity, shows the innovation occurring in healthcare today and the type of leadership needed to be successful in a company where Silicon Valley and medicine meet.

Susan Fowler examines the issue of motivation, explaining why the accepted tactics leaders use to motivate employees simply do not work.

Peak Learning, Inc. CEO Paul Stoltz looks at the concept of “grit versus GRIT” in leadership, highlighting how it takes more than tenacity to be a good leader. Alesia Latson gives us the seven keys to being an irresistible leader, while Karen Walch writes about how international leaders need to “style switch” in order to prevent culture clashes.

Don’t blame culture when mergers or plans fail, Linda Henman tells us, and presents the types of leadership decisions that can lead to failure.

Marcia Reynolds outlines how you, as a leader, can manage the talented but egotistical employees in your organization and have uncomfortable—but necessary—conversations with them. The leader of Liberty Tax Service, John Hewitt, describes what he has learned from his employees, and Frederic Laloux reveals the rise of a new leadership model that represents the future of today’s organizations.

And speaking of innovation, this issue marks the new design and new name of the magazine. MWorld is now AMA Quarterly, and as we head into 2015, we hope you enjoy the new look and feel—and the continued innovation.

Christiane Truelove Guest Editor, AMA Quarterly

Christiane Truelove CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Seval Newton COPY EDITOR

Eileen Davis GRAPHIC ARTIST

Tony Serio PRODUCTION MANAGER

Laura Grafeld

PUBLISHER

Christina Parisi PRESIDENT & CEO

Edward T. Reilly

AMAQuarterly © (ISSN 2377-1321) is published quarterly by American Management Association International, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-7420, Spring 2015, Volume 1, Number 1. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to American Management Association, 600 AMA Way, Saranac Lake, NY 12983-5534.

American Management Association is a nonprofit educational association chartered by the Board of Regents of the State of New York. AMA Quarterly is an independent forum for authoritative views on business and management issues.

Submissions. We encourage submissions from prospective authors. For guidelines, write to The Guest Editor, AMA Quarterly, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-7420 or email CParisi@amanet.org. Unsolicited manuscripts will be returned only if accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Letters are encouraged. Mail: Letters, AMA Quarterly, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-7420; email: CParisi@amanet.org. AMA Quarterly reserves the right to excerpt and edit letters. Names and addresses must accompany all submissions.

Subscriptions. Executive and Individual Members of American Management Association receive AMA Quarterly as part of their annual dues, a nonrefundable $50 of which is allocated for the subscription to AMA Quarterly. Single copies are available at $25 plus shipping and handling. Requests should be sent to sgoldman@amanet.org Rights and permissions. ©2015, American Management Association.

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

2 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

PERSONAL INSIGHTS

LISTEN and Lead Over my many years in business, I have had the privilege of learning a lot of things from a lot of really smart people.

BY JOHN HEWITT

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have started two national organizations and created more than 800 millionaires, and I currently own and run the fastest-growing tax service on the planet, Liberty Tax Service. But, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know it all. Along with steering the fast-paced daily operation of a growing organization, I arrange for opportunities to learn and grow from the people around me.

Communication is everything One of the best of those learning opportunities is a management retreat we hold several times a year. At one of those retreats, I asked the 30 or so people in the room, “How many of you think that your supervisors or peers do an excellent job of communicating with you?” Only one or two people raised their hands. Then I asked, “How many of you think you do a good job of communicating with your peers?” That time, four or five people raised their hands. In my opinion, they were all wrong. And here’s why: When it comes to communication, no one gets it right all the time.

In fact, I would suggest that we rarely get it right. Everybody knows that communication is an essential part of every relationship, whether it’s a marriage, a partnership, or an employer/employee relationship.

And yet, no matter how hard we try, we often are misquoted, misunderstood, and taken out of context. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do better, though, because getting communication right is vital to building something great—a family, a business, anything.

Here’s the problem We human beings are, for the most part, communication stoppers. Every person I

know wants to receive communication— he or she wants to know everything—but is reluctant to give communication back or distribute it liberally and accurately. We’ve all heard that information is power, and because that is true, we tend to hoard it.

As a rule, this decision is a huge mistake.

Ear to the ground There is no one solution to our constant communication dilemma, but we can work at improving our communications every day.

Let’s talk about just one way of improving: listening to the people in your AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 3

PERSONAL INSIGHTS organization who are closest to the customer. As a manager at any level, you shouldn’t make assumptions. If you are not the one in direct contact with your customers on a daily basis, you have to communicate with those who are to get the truth about how your organization is doing and how your customers feel about every aspect of what you offer them.

Bottom line Successful owners and managers have to listen to their employees. Those in authority need to pay careful attention to the troops on the ground. They know

many CEOs issue edicts—“This is what we’re going to do”—instead of listening to the advice of people who deal with the customer and heeding their feedback.

The leaders do this, in part, because they feel that if they admit they don’t know best, they’ll somehow look inferior or won’t be perceived as a good CEO. So they give out a lot of communication, but they don’t receive much back, even though they, like their employees, want to receive communication and information. By issuing edicts and not listening, however, CEOs discourage their employees from communicating.

Be honest. Take a hard look at how you communicate as a leader. Find the many ways that you fall short.

Each one is an to improve as a listener.

opportunity

things you cannot know because they are there and have a bird’s-eye view. It’s arrogance, pure and simple, to think that you can know what they know.

Unfortunately, bad information flow is the norm in many organizations. Everyone just gets used to it, and pretty soon you and your organization are going over the precipice. Nobody knows why, exactly.

People who work in those organizations assume that poor communication is the coin of the realm everywhere.

Our chief marketing officer, Martha O’Gorman, and I once flew to Kansas City to interview a person for the CFO position. During the interview, she asked the candidate, “What is your management philosophy?” He replied, “Ours is not to reason why, but to do or die.” In his world, all the orders came from above and were not to be questioned.

Just do it, like a good soldier. Yes, that is how many companies are run.

Because they think they know best,

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A failure to listen I learned all about how not to discourage communication as a leader in the first few steps in my career. I started at H&R Block, where I worked hard as a hired hand to eventually become a regional director. During that time, my father and I developed a program that would do taxes more efficiently and make tax preparers better at what they do. When it became apparent that my bosses weren’t going to listen to me about my invention, I took my software and founded Jackson Hewitt Tax Service. Between 1982 and 1997, we grew that company from 6 to 1,400 offices and were the fastest-growing tax service.

After splitting with the company that bears my name, I went on to found Liberty Tax Service in 1998, which today operates almost 5,000 offices in the United States and Canada. Now Liberty has become the fastest-growing tax service. This kind of growth doesn’t just happen by chance.

Becoming a better listener I would suggest that my company has grown in large part because I have learned to be a better listener. I’ve worked at it. I’m secure enough in my leadership to listen to the bright and energetic people who work with me. They are, after all, the boots on the ground. They know what the customer really wants. Whether it’s a way to provide a higher level of service or a request for more kid-friendly offices or refreshments, I listen.

And, of course, we listen to our customers and try to be responsive to what we hear. They know we are listening, and they’re happy to let us know how they feel.

But we do listen to our employees closely, and here is one example of their thoughts taken into action: We print out a letter that is given to all our customers with their tax returns.

When we originally wrote this letter, we listened intently to the people closest to our customer and then…we let them write it.

Why not? Why in the world would I think I could do better than the person who actually communicates the most with the customer? Just think about it— these people give out 2 million letters with tax returns. It makes sense that they should design the letter; we should just implement it.

Take your opportunities There are hundreds of issues like this in every organization, including yours. Be honest. Take a hard look at how you communicate as a leader. Find the many ways that you fall short. Each one is an opportunity to improve as a listener.

And, I’ll make this guarantee: While none of us is likely to perfect our communication, making an effort each day to improve as a listener will make you a better leader and help you build a great organization. AQ John Hewitt, founder and CEO of Liberty Tax Service, is fanatical about taxes and unmatched customer service. A nationally recognized name in the tax return preparation and accounting world, Hewitt is a veteran of 45 tax seasons, the founder of two top tax preparation firms, and a former H&R Block regional director.

COMMENTARY

GRIT It Up! How do you lead your people to bust through the crud and get more of the important stuff done, and done well, when the entire world is conspiring against that happening?

BY PAUL G. STOLTZ, PhD

U

ltimately, there’s only one way to get there. You have to tap into your GRIT—your capacity to dig deep and do whatever it takes to achieve your most important, long-term goals—and lead in an entirely new way.

This article will equip you with four vital factors that help you to lead with greater agility, creativity, and fortitude.

There are self-reflective questions for each factor that you can easily convert into tools to help everyone get more done.

Let’s start with a hard look at the trends.

Completion erosion syndrome Completion erosion is real. In 2010, my team at PEAK Learning did a survey of 29,000 leaders, and 82% of them reported they were getting a lower percentage of their stuff done. We have found that the trend is consistently upward, with the latest data crunch, which we did in December 2014 with roughly 1,250 leaders, showing that 91% now report they are getting a lower percentage of their stuff done. And this affects all facets of their jobs and their lives.

The problem is not limited to leaders.

According to our most recent findings from a study of 1,540 employees in January 2015, 86% are completing a lower percentage of their assigned tasks compared with the past. (Note: These latest findings are part of an ongoing, 11-year survey of more than 500,000 individuals in 63 countries.) Even that number may be low. Based on the latest 2015 data, leaders are reporting that, in reality, closer to 97% of their people are completing comparatively less of what they signed up to do.

Most leaders, and the majority of people reading this article, read less than half of their emails. On a good day, they respond to 25% to 40% of the messages they receive. We base these findings on live groups that we have surveyed across industries since 2011. Our latest data, based on responses from 2,850 sales and functional leaders on January 9, 2015, revealed that leaders read beyond the subject line on only one-third of their

emails. They respond to only about 20% of all emails received.

When asked why this is so, the most common answer is some version of, “Because it is humanly impossible to respond to everyone and get everything done.” You may feel similarly. Is it really any different for your people?

Is it any wonder leaders struggle harder than ever to keep their people fully engaged, let alone deliver on the objecAMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 5

COMMENTARY tives for which they are held accountable and on which their raise, bonus, retention, and promotion rely? How motivating is it to show up to work every day, work longer and harder than ever, and feel less and less accomplished, with virtually no true sense of completion? It’s like climbing an endless mountain, with each new twist in the trail revealing an ever higher, and probably false, summit.

Weather on the mountain

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Getting stuff done clearly involves greater frustration, struggle, time, effort, and energy. In short, what once took mere guts and resilience now requires a serious dose of the right brand of true GRIT.

continuum to the three-dimensional “GRIT Cube” (see illustration above).This shows how the four factors below play into the GRIT cube.

Grit versus GRIT

Factor 1 Choose smart over dumb GRIT

Common grit, or what we’ll call “grit 1.0,” is the kind we talk about in everyday conversation. Grit is vital to success. It refers to the basic quantity or level of persistence and effort a person shows toward a goal. Two common questions asked regarding grit are, “How much grit do you (or does anyone) have?” and “Can a person have too much grit?”

GRIT is the proposed upgrade, based on my team’s global research. It is what we refer to as “GRIT 2.0,” and it encompasses both quantity and quality. As it turns out, quality can often trump quantity when it comes to leading innovatively and getting more stuff done in an ever more demanding world. With GRIT, the new questions become, “What kind of GRIT do you (or does anyone) show?” and “How can you improve your GRIT to enhance your contribution and results?”

To answer these and other vital questions, we need to morph our mental model from the two-dimensional grit

You may have witnessed “dumb GRIT” if you’ve ever known that person or team that pounds their head(s) to a bloody pulp, screaming to the heavens, “We never quit! Never say die!” With dumb GRIT, we pursue what are usually less than optimal goals in less than optimal ways. In its extreme, we go after the wrong stuff in stupid ways.

“Smart GRIT” is the opposite. It is defined as “pursuing the best possible goals (or versions of those goals) in the smartest, best ways.”

The contrast between dumb GRIT and smart GRIT is easy to spot. On a recent business trip, I watched a redfaced, clearly irate customer complain about his increasingly delayed flight. No matter what explanations or alternatives the gate agent patiently offered, he simply repeated his mantra-like demand verbatim: “I paid for this seat. I will have this seat. I paid to get there on time. And you will get me there on

ILLUSTRATIONS: COURTESY OF PEAK LEARNING SYSTEMS

During the 28 years since I formed PEAK Learning, I’ve asked groups at all levels, including leaders around the world, to look on the horizon and tell me their weather forecast. I challenge them with these questions: Are things becoming more predictable or more uncertain?

Easier or tougher? Simpler or more complex? Faster or slower? More or less demanding?

And for 28 years, a composite of 98% of nearly 1 million people have answered that things are tougher, more complex, and slower. This trend held strong in January 2015, with 98.5% of 2,850 people answering similarly. Arguably, for 28 years, they’ve also been correct.

Add to that a more recent trend which argues that a shift must be made from resilience to GRIT. Since 2012, I’ve been asking groups worldwide these additional questions: Compared with the past 5 or 10 years, does getting stuff done require: • More or less time?

• More or less frustration?

• Greater or lesser struggle?

• More or less effort?

• More or less tenacity?

Of the roughly 48,000 people surveyed from six continents, 98% have said that tasks involve more time, more frustration, greater struggle, more effort, and more tenacity. Those respondents include the most recent batch of 2,850 individuals in January 2015. In a recent session, when a single individual contrarily announced, “I disagree. I think most tasks actually require less effort and time than before,” the group’s stunned amazement quickly turned to laughter when someone toward the back shouted out, “Gee, I’d like to have some of whatever you’re smoking!”

after the CEO unleashed yet another of his signature scathing, abusive rants on one of his key people. Tons of GRIT. Just the wrong brand. His results were stunningly impressive. How he got them, much less so.

To get good GRIT, ask, “How can I/we go after our goals to maximize the upside (good) and minimize the downside (bad) effects our efforts have on me/us/others?”

Factor 3 Show strong GRIT

time!” At least five times he repeated the exact words, with his feet planted wide and arms folded defiantly across his chest. He was a bit more emphatic each time, as if the agent’s answer would change if he said it one more time. It was like watching a woodpecker trying to penetrate steel.

While this was happening, I watched a smartly dressed young businesswoman next to me whip out her phone and casually tap and swipe a few times.

Then, with a satisfied grin, she gathered her belongings and confided, “I mean, really. What’s the big deal? I just got booked on a backup flight that leaves in 30 minutes.” As she motioned toward the guy causing the scene, she added, “Some people just amaze me.”

As an exercise, to achieve smart GRIT, ask yourself, “What, if any, adjustments can I/we make to either the goal itself or the way we are going after the goal to at least increase our pace and potential success in achieving it?”

Factor 2 Go with good GRIT Sometimes leaders go after the right goals in the wrong ways. And the more intense the situation becomes, the easier

it is to adopt a damn-the-consequences mindset in order to achieve the goal.

Chances are, you’ve known or at least witnessed that kind of leader somewhere along your journey. Notice that when it comes to “bad GRIT” versus “good GRIT,” the key word is not “intentions.” It’s “consequences.”

Harmful versus beneficial consequences spell the difference. The degree

At the end of the day (or week, quarter, fiscal year), the sheer magnitude of GRIT you show matters tremendously. Agreeing with or pontificating about GRIT vehemently is immaterial in comparison to demonstrating it relentlessly, and in chronically massive doses. GRIT is not a binary on/off light switch. It is more akin to a dimmer, with adjustable levels of intensity.

If GRIT is your capacity to dig deep and do whatever it takes—even suffer, struggle, sacrifice—to achieve your most worthy goals, then how deep you dig and for how long matter, as does how much struggle, sacrifice, and suffering you’re willing to endure to make it happen.

A professor I recently encountered was an impressively quick study on GRIT—its various dimensions, facets, and

“GRIT is not a binary on/off light switch. It is more akin to a dimmer, with adjustable levels of intensity.” to which you relentlessly pursue goals in ways that are, even unintentionally, detrimental to others is the degree to which you demonstrate bad GRIT. The degree to which the way you go after your goals benefits yourself and others is the degree of good GRIT you are likely showing.

One CEO I worked with had a full-time psychotherapist housed on the executive floor, purely to talk people off the ledge

so on. She could give an effective lecture on it and even map out how, behaviorally, she demonstrated good, smart GRIT. The reason she could not get university bureaucracy to approve her new course was not that she lacked an appreciation for or understanding of GRIT, but rather that she showed, at best, modest levels of it across the board. She showed the right GRIT, just not enough of it to achieve her goals.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 7

COMMENTARY To effectively show GRIT, ask, “How and where can we best amplify the intensity and duration of our GRIT to help at least increase the chances that we achieve our objective(s)?”

Factor 4 Optimize robustness Ever notice how cheap sandpaper wears down extra fast? Its initial strong grit is quickly depleted. Superior sandpaper maintains its grit after countless demands. How well do you hold up over time? To what degree do you maintain your best self regardless of how much GRIT life requires?

This missing element in the discussion and implementation of GRIT is the wear-and-tear factor, called “robustness.” In the world of material science, robustness is “the capacity of a structure to maintain its ideal state despite the unexpected perturbations that may assault it.” If you build a home in Joplin, Missouri, you plan for tornadoes. How well that home holds up when the primeval fault line under Missouri acti-

vates a 7.6 earthquake is how robust the structure truly is.

The same is true for leaders, their organizations, and their people. In fact, as the trends show things becoming more frustrating, protracted, demanding, and difficult, robustness shifts to the foreground of what great leaders strive to nurture—first in themselves and then in the teams and organizations they lead.

When is the last time you saw a secondgeneration photocopy be any sharper or brighter than the first? In the same sense, how dare we as leaders require more staying power, fortitude, and true GRIT from our people than we do from ourselves? Great leaders are in it for the long haul, the marathon versus the sprint.

Ask yourself, “How can I adjust the way we pursue our objectives in order to minimize the detrimental wear and tear it has on everyone, over time?”

Gritty leadership As a leader, you will discover that when you put these four factors into action, you can overcome completion erosion and

achieve the almost unimaginable. You can dramatically increase the pace and the chances of taking on and achieving the most arduous aspirations.

These four factors will fuel your quest to lead with greater agility, creativity, and fortitude, and they will equip you for the ultimate quest, which is not only to demonstrate more GRIT but to achieve optimal GRIT. You’ll know you’re there when you find yourself demonstrating your smartest, best, strongest GRIT across all dimensions, in all situations, in order to achieve your most important and highest ambitions. Bold ideas and solid strategy are just the start. Ultimately, it takes some serious GRIT to lead others and get the important stuff done, no matter how intensely the world can conspire against those results. AQ Paul G. Stoltz, PhD, is founder and CEO of Peak Learning Inc. As director of the Global Resilience and GRIT Institutes, Stoltz oversees a research agenda in 29 countries dedicated to exploring, expanding, and advancing the applications of GRIT to strengthen people and their organizations.

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8 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

INSIGHTS

Don’t Blame Culture People bat around the word “culture” as though it were a conversational shuttlecock. When an individual, merger, or organization fails, culture takes the blame.

LINDA D. HENMAN, PhD

W

e use the word "culture" fairly arbitrarily, citing it to explain why things don't change, won’t change, or can't change. Culture has become a subtle yet powerful driver that leaders strive—often futilely—to influence.

Traditionally, we defined corporate culture as the pattern of shared assumptions that a group adopts to explain “the way we do things around here.” When something worked well, members of the organization taught the behavior to new people. Through this process, newcomers found out what others thought and felt about issues that touched the organization. These perceptions helped coordi-

nate activity tacitly—without the need to communicate too much or think too often. “Culture” offered a simple defense for just about everything but explained almost nothing important—such as its ties to business results.

Corporate organizations developed codes, jargon, symbols, rules, and norms to share our assumptions about what would and should happen and raised each new litter of novices to embrace both the artifacts and the assumptions.

Largely human resources driven, the effort to explain culture started as a wellintended attempt to understand how humans work together. It gradually mor-

phed into a La Brea Tar Pit, where good intentions go to die amid all the dinosaurs and fossilized specimens of organizational decisions.

Blaming failed mergers and acquisitions on incompatible cultures, rather than faulty decision making and good oldfashioned bad judgment, hastened the formation of the culture trap. Soon, patterns of bad judgment—those things that don’t work but that people are loath to change because “we’ve always done that”—emerged. The culture trap took the forms of anti-learning, anti-change, and eventually, anti-success.

A paradox has emerged. On the one AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 9

INSIGHTS

Decades ago, Peter Drucker advised that if you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. hand, nearly everyone agrees these traps compromise effective performance. On the other hand, very few have focused on how leaders can prevent them. We need new ways of thinking about the environment of the organization—a kind of Philosopher’s Stone like those of ancient alchemists who used the substance to transform lead into gold.

Although we traditionally have defined corporate culture in vast, sweeping generalizations, we now understand that only some parts of a given organizational culture are relevant to organizational transformation. What are they? And why do leaders continue to fail to do the things that would overcome resistance to change?

Ineffective leadership seldom happens because of rusty management skills.

Similarly, organizational disasters usually don’t occur because of a flawed culture— at least not the traditional definition of culture. They happen when leaders do violence to good sense.

Culture and the BAR Decades ago, Peter Drucker advised that if you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. Yet the facts continue to indicate that 80% of the time companies don’t lose sales to the competition; they lose them to the status quo—a formidable enemy within. Why? Often they don’t recognize that they themselves don’t truly understand culture and its relevant elements: beliefs, actions, and results—BAR. Transformation begins with the organization’s core beliefs. These values reflect those perceptions that leaders consider “correct.” Over time, the group learns that certain beliefs work to reduce indecision and doubt in critical areas of the organization’s functioning. As leaders continue to embrace these beliefs, and the beliefs continue to work, they gradu-

10 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

ally transform into an articulated set of espoused values, norms, and rules of behavior. Eventually these beliefs become embodied in an ideology or organizational philosophy that serves as a guide for dealing with ambiguity, difficult events, or sudden changes.

However, operational beliefs—the attitudes that people develop in response to current conditions to get things done— sometimes conflict with or contradict espoused values. Then the trouble begins, and everyone blames culture.

The “action” portion of this model consists of two elements: learning and decisions. Organizations improve when leaders proactively solve problems, learn from mistakes, and make effective decisions about what needs to change.

When leaders resist the temptation to imagine that truth resides in any one source (themselves) or method, they find solutions in experienced practitioners in whom they place their trust, and they experiment and live with errors until they find a better solution. This cycle embraces core beliefs and keeps operational shortcuts at bay.

Senior leaders spend most of their days solving problems and making decisions, the two critical functions that form the hinges of destiny—and ideally the elixir of organizational longevity. Each time leaders engage in either, they stand at a pivot, a turning point that will take their organization in directions that contribute to its success or demise. Understanding how these pivotal decisions affect the organization provides far more value than yet another analysis of that force we call culture.

Decisions, decisions When things don’t go well, a person with power has usually made one of the kinds of decisions described here:

1 Ostrich decisions and indecisions

Frequently senior leaders decide not to decide. With their heads firmly in the sand, they ignore all evidence that they should make a call—especially a tough call. Usually, in their opinion, making a change will involve more discomfort than denial does. Consequently, they deal with difficult decisions by not making them.

Decisions—good, bad, or decent—get stuck in the entrails of the organization, much as flotsam and jetsam accumulate on an untended beach. Indecision, or an inability to choose among alternatives, creates bottlenecks and harms organizations in ways that the competition never could, causing the company to become the enemy within.

Ostrich decisions and indecision differ in that the former involves an unwillingness to see alternatives, the latter an inability to choose among them.

2 Blinder decisions and biased decisions

Equestrians use blinders and blinkers to keep their horses focused, encouraging them to pay attention to the road ahead instead of becoming distracted. This approach doesn’t work for leaders who

Years ago, the father of organizational culture, Edgar Schein, noted that culture is not a surface phenomenon; of the organization. it forms the

5 Desire-based decisions and cupidity decisions

core

fashion their own blinders and blinkers.

Some leaders have intuition that they trust, even when the facts contradict; other leaders have biases that harm.

Both create self-imposed blinders and blinkers.

All leaders have biases. Until and unless these decision makers know how their biases influence their decisions, however, they will remain powerless to alter them. A sounding board, trusted advisor, or devil’s advocate can help a leader keep biases in check.

believe an otherwise sane person would allow them to hold sway. Putting logic aside, leaders often allow emotion to distract them as they settle for short-term emotional gains that often demand longterm payback. Logic makes them think, but emotion makes them act.

4 Safe decisions and fear-based decisions

3 Opaque decisions and irrational decisions

No one, except the decision maker, can figure out opaque decisions. Obscure and incomprehensible, these decisions often affect the lives of those who played no part in making them, causing confusion, resentment, and sometimes sabotage. People frequently support decisions they never agreed with, but they seldom do the same with ones they don’t understand.

Unreasonable and illogical powers play a role in irrational decisions—decisions that often make no sense to anyone other than the decision makers. Or, others understand the influences but can’t

Never underestimate the appeal of the status quo. In addition to offering a safe haven from change, it assures security.

Those who embrace safe decisions realize that the pain of changing will likely surpass immediate gain—that is, the pain of change will occur in the present while gains will remain steadfastly in the future. These decision makers repeatedly lose more business to the status quo than they ever would to the competition.

Most ineffective decisions have one thing in common: fear. Fear of loss of control, fear of criticism, fear of being discovered a fraud, or fear of rejection drives them all.

Fear acts as a flame accelerant that burns through all your good intentions and chars your ship right before it sinks it into oblivion.

The British poet Samuel Johnson once called second marriages “the triumph of hope over experience.” The same can be said for other desire-based decisions. If what you’ve done hasn’t worked, stop doing that and do something else, no matter how attractive the first alternative.

Don’t let hope contradict the knowledge that experience has provided.

No one can have it all, but people who make decisions as though they can will suffer the consequences of cupidity decisions—the decisions driven by greed or meanness.

The winner can’t always take all, primarily because those who lose often find a way of paying back the avarice with some of their own.

Years ago, the father of organizational culture, Edgar Schein, noted that culture is not a surface phenomenon; it forms the core of the organization. We now know that beliefs and decisions create the core formula that allows for stellar results.

When leaders demand better decisions of themselves and those in their chain of command, a mysterious alchemy takes place, transforming ordinary practices into golden ones—the bedrock of a successful culture based on a higher BAR. AQ Linda D. Henman, PhD, has helped leaders in Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and military organizations define their direction and select the best people to put their strategies in motion. A former university professor, Henman belongs to the adjunct graduate faculty at Washington University, the National Speakers Association, the National Association of Corporate Directors, and the Air Force Association. Find out more at www.henmanperformancegroup.com

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 11

SPECIAL REPORT

2 0 14

The Top 30 Leaders

Who Influenced Business in 2014

BY CHRISTINA PARISI

As part of AMA’s mission to serve as a forum for leading management ideas, we set out to determine which business thought leaders influenced business the most in 2014. After six weeks of open nominations and voting on our blog, Playbook.amanet.org, we evaluated all nominees based on number of votes, how often their works were cited, and their social media following. Here is our ranking for 2014.

AND THE TOP 10 INFLUENCERS ARE… 1 John C. Maxwell is a number one New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker who has sold more than 25 million books in 50 languages. Called America’s top leadership authority, Maxwell received the Mother Teresa Prize for Global Peace and Leadership from the Luminary Leadership Network in 2014. That year, he also was identified as the world’s most influential leadership expert in an article by Inc. magazine.

For six years, Maxwell has been voted the top leadership professional on LeadershipGurus.net. As the founder of the John Maxwell Company, the John Maxwell Team, and EQUIP, he has trained more than 5 million leaders in nearly every country of the world. Each year, Maxwell speaks to Fortune 500 companies, presidents of nations, and many of the world’s top business leaders.

2 Malcolm Gladwell is best known for his series of bestselling books in the area of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Starting with The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000) and most recently with David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013), Gladwell's books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work. In a July 2002 article in the New Yorker, Gladwell introduced the concept of "The Talent Myth,” in which he explains how some companies with excellent reputations and the apparent ability to attract the best employees often exercise this power incorrectly, promoting those with little experience.

John C. Maxwell

PHOTO CREDITS: SETH GODIN: CIUDAD DE LAS IDEAS. SHERYL SANDBERG: MATT ALBIANI

3 Daniel Pink‘s career as an author started after he quit his job as chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore in 1997, an experience that became the basis of a Fast Company article, “Free Agent Nation,” and a book of the same name in 2001. He has written five books on the changing workplace, the most recent being To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. In 2014, he became host and co-executive producer of Crowd Control, a TV series on the National Geographic Channel that draws on academic theories, experiments, and the secrets of retail and advertising to unravel and change human behavior.

His TED talk on the science of motivation is one of the 10 most-watched TED talks of all time, with more than 12 million views.

4 Seth Godin is the author of 17 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-Industrial Revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership, Seth Godin and, most of all, changing everything. His books include Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and Purple Cow. In addition to his writing and speaking, Godin has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. In 2013, he was inducted into the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame, one of three chosen for this annual honor. Recently, Godin once again set book publishing on its ear by launching a series of four books via Kickstarter.

5 Sheryl Sandberg brings two words to mind: lean in. The chief operating officer of Facebook and the first woman to serve on the company’s board, Sandberg led Facebook to profitability in 2010. She oversees business operations, including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, and communications. In 2013, Sandberg released her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, co-written with journalist and TV writer Nell Scovell. The book looks at the barriers—such as discrimination, blatant and subtle sexism, and sexual harassment—preventing women from taking leadership roles in the workplace. The book has inspired the Lean In movement, which aims to help women achieve their professional and personal goals by "leaning into their ambitions."

Sheryl Sandberg

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 13

THE TOP 10 INFLUENCERS CONTINUED… 6 Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist and author of the international bestsellers Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence. He is co-author of the acclaimed business bestseller Primal Leadership. Goleman was a science reporter for the New York Times and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Emotional Intelligence was named one of the “25 Most Influential Business Management Books” by Time magazine. The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Accenture Institute for Strategic Change have listed Goleman among the most influential business thinkers. He currently co-directs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University.

7 Marcus Buckingham, formerly of the Gallup Organization, addresses more than 250,000 people around the globe each year on strengths-based productivity. He has three bestselling books: First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman); Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton); and The One Thing You Need to Know. With Gallup, Buckingham developed the StrengthsFinder exam, which identifies signature themes that help employees quantify their personal strengths in the workplace and at home.

He holds a master’s degree in social and political science from Cambridge University.

Ken Blanchard, above David Allen, below

8 Ken Blanchard has authored more than 30 bestselling books about management. He is chief spiritual officer of the Ken Blanchard Companies, an international management training and consulting firm that he and his wife, Marjorie Blanchard, co-founded in 1979.

Blanchard’s involvement in leadership began in the 1960s, when as an assistant dean at Ohio University he co-wrote the textbook Management of Organizational Behavior. This book introduced Situational Leadership, a new way of looking at management, and is now in its 10th edition. In 2013, the company introduced the SLII Experience, a “game changing” approach to leadership development and instructional design.

Blanchard’s goal: “We need a new leadership model that focuses not only on goal accomplishment, but also on the greater good.”

Daniel Goleman, above Marcus Buckingham, below

9 David Allen is a bestselling author and a personal and organizational productivity consultant. He has done pioneering research and coaching for 30 years with managers and CEOs of some of America's most prestigious corporations and institutions. Forbes has recognized Allen as one of the top five executive coaches in the United States, and Business 2.0 magazine included him in its 2006 list of the "50 Who Matter Now." Time magazine called Allen’s flagship book, Getting Things Done, "the definitive business self-help book of the decade." Allen also has authored Ready for Anything and Making It All Work.

10 Robert Sutton is a Stanford professor, organizational researcher, and bestselling author. His six management books include the New York Times bestsellers The No A--hole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss. His latest book, written with Stanford's Huggy Rao, is Scaling Up Excellence. Sutton was named one of 10 "B-School All-Stars"— described as "professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond academia"—by Businessweek. Sutton is an IDEO Fellow and co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the Center for Work, Technology & Organization, and Stanford’s Institute of Design (the "d.school"). He has written more than a hundred academic and popular articles and chapters and more than a thousand blog posts.

14 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

TOP 30 INFLUENCERS CONTINUED… Name

Organization

Title

Most Influential Accomplishment

11

Colin Powell

Salesforce.com; formerly U.S. government

Member of board of directors; Served as secretary of state from 2001 to 2005, and as chairman of former U.S. secretary of state and the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

12

Gary Vaynerchuk

VaynerMedia; Wine Library TV

Co-founder and CEO

Developed Wine Library TV and VaynerMedia, a strategic creative marketing agency that has helped several Fortune 500 companies.

13

Jack Welch

Jack Welch Management Institute; formerly General Electric

Founder; former chairman and CEO

Former CEO of General Electric who spurred a 4,000% rise in company value during his 20-year tenure.

14

Michael Hyatt

Intentional Leadership; formerly Thomas Nelson Publishers

Independent author; former chairman and CEO

NYT bestselling author and blogger on “intentional leadership,” helping leaders leverage influence.

15

Richard Branson

Virgin Group

Founder

Founder of the Virgin Group, which has started up more than 400 companies, including Virgin Mobile, Virgin Atlantic, and Virgin Trains.

16

Simon Sinek

Start With Why

Author and motivational speaker

Author and creator of the “golden circle” and “start with why” business concepts of inspirational leadership.

17

Tony Hsieh

Zappos.com

CEO

CEO of Zappos.com who is revolutionizing customer service, encouraging employees to go above and beyond traditional service.

18

Adam Grant

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Independent author and professor

Bestselling author considered one of the top business professors in the world, and one of Businessweek’s favorite professors.

19

Elon Musk

Tesla Motors; SpaceX

Co-founder, CEO, and product architect; CEO and chief designer

CEO and product developer at Tesla Motors, a major electric car producer.

20

Carol Dweck

Stanford University

Professor

Major contributor to social psychology and developer of the implicit theories of intelligence.

21

Howard Gardner

Harvard University

Professor and author

Creator of the theory of multiple intelligences, a revolutionary educational and psychological theory.

22

Michael Lewis

Independent author and journalist

Author

Author of bestsellers-turned-movies Moneyball and The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.

23

Robert Scoble

Rackspace

Futurist

His blog, Scobleizer, was one of the most popular tech blogs before he began posting exclusively on social media.

24

Bob Burg

Independent author

Author and speaker

Bestselling author of Endless Referrals and co-author of The Go-Giver.

25

Gary Hamel

Independent author; Author, professor, and speaker London School of Business

Bestselling author of Competing for the Future, Leading the Revolution, and The Future of Management.

26

Harvey Mackay

Independent author; MackayMitchell Envelope Company

Author; chairman of the board

Author of number one NYT bestsellers Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt.

27

Jonah Berger

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Professor and author

Author of NYT and WSJ bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On and contributor to NYT, WSJ, NPR, Science, HBR, and LinkedIn.

28

Steve Blank

Independent author; Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley

Entrepreneur, author, and consulting associate professor

Created the “customer development” methodology, a pillar of the Lean Startup movement. Considered a "Godfather of Silicon Valley."

29

Dan Rockwell

Leadership Freak

Writer, editor, and consultant

His blog, Leadership Freak, is one of the most socially shared leadership blogs in the world.

30

Jim Collins

Independent author; Management consultant and writer; Author or co-author of Good to Great, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, formerly Stanford Graduate and Great by Choice and contributor to HBR, Businessweek, and Fortune. former professor School of Business

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 15

AN INTERVIEW WITH

Daniel Goleman

Leadership in the Age of EI

BY CHRISTIANE TRUELOVE

Daniel Goleman, PhD, is the author of several books, including Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, 1995) and Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Bantam, 2006), and the co-author of Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). He was a science reporter for the New York Times, was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the American Psychological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award for his media writing.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 17

When it comes to the psychology of innovative leaders, what are the characteristics that distinguish these leaders from the not so innovative?

DG: Well, if you are looking for personality traits, there’s a large amount of psychological literature on people, for example, who can think out of the box. It’s called divergent thinking and so on. But I actually think that is a potential of just about anybody. Depending on which strategy you use, there are two ways of thinking about business, for example.

One is to look at what’s working and to keep tweaking it and making it work better and become more profitable. Many businesses do that. That is an exploitative strategy. And then, on the other hand, there is another way of thinking about a business, which is about “what aren’t we doing that we could be doing that could grow into a major business.”

Apple, under Steve Jobs, is probably the best example of that. That’s called an exploratory strategy, where you look around and try out new things. It is high risk but has a bigger potential payoff.

It turns out that each of those kinds of innovation can work, and they partake of different systems in the brain. The exploitative strategy, where you play it safe but do get more profitable, activates the rewards systems. It feels good. It is comfortable. The exploratory strategies are not exactly as comfortable. They use a different part of the brain and that takes effort, where mental work occurs. That takes more energy, it takes more risk. So both can pay off, but in different ways.

You have said how the most successful leaders have learned and can smoothly navigate between four or more leadership styles. How many styles of leadership are there, and can you briefly describe each of them?

DG: I am talking about a template that draws on very familiar styles. It uses six. This is inventoried by a measure by the Hay Group. They share data with me from 3,781 managers. And, interestingly, their direct reports, who are asked in confidence, what’s it like to work for this person?

Do you want to give your best? Do you hate going to work?

Do you feel proud and so on? What emotional climate do they create?

There were six styles. One is a visionary leader, sometimes called transformative. It is someone who can articulate a shared vision that’s genuine, from the heart to the heart.

Doing this lets a leader be very clear in their feedback. You know where you want to go. You can tell a person what they are doing helps or doesn’t and what to do to fix it. And so it creates great clarity, which is very helpful to people.

18 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

The second style is a coaching style, which doesn’t mean mentoring, exactly. It is more about having a one-on-one conversation with a person where you find out about them.

That creates intense loyalty. Both of those have a very positive impact on the working climate of direct reports.

Two others that are positive are the consensus builder, the democratic style, the person who gets other people’s input, particularly when it is going to impact how they do their work or their part of the business. That also has a positive impact. And then there is the kind of leader who is affiliative, who wants to hang out, have a good time, get to know people personally. And that builds emotional capital, so people will be there for each other when the pressure is really on.

Of the two styles that tend to be negative, though not always, one is the pacesetter. The pacesetter is someone who has been typically a very outstanding individual contributor, and now is promoted to head a group, team, division, whatever, and they don’t draw on the other styles.

They just lead by example. It is basically “do it the way I do it.” Steve Jobs at Apple is probably a good example of it, actually. People self-selected. A lot of people dropped out, but the people who stayed were like him. They worked very hard, were very motivated. It doesn’t work, however, for most people in most situations, because leaders have to draw on a range of styles, not just set an example. They need the coach when that’s called for. They need to articulate a vision.

The sixth style is command and control—people who just give orders by virtue of their position. The pacesetter and the commanding style both tend to have impacts on how people feel about doing their work. The command style, however, is just appropriate in an emergency. You don’t have time to get consensus. You have to tell people what to do.

So there are six styles. Four of them tend to have a very positive emotional impact; two of them tend to be negative, but in the right situation they can have a positive impact.

What the research shows is that the most outstanding leaders—in terms of the actual results they get, business results—are able to draw on four or more of those styles as appropriate to the situation.

Which leadership styles are absolutely critical to have?

DG: Well, out of those six I would say three of the most positive. Being a visionary leader is very important because you can articulate a mission in a way that motivates people and also gets some clarity about what you want them to do.

Along with articulating that mission, I should add, you don’t want to be micromanaging. You don’t want to tell people how to get there, but you do want to give them feedback, and immediate feedback, about whether or how they are trying to reach that goal is working or not working. So I think that is a critical style.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF DANIEL GOLEMAN

One of AMA’s influential leaders of 2014, Goleman answered a few questions for AMA Quarterly about the role of emotional intelligence in innovative leadership and how innovative leaders lead.

How can a leader build up emotional intelligence and empathy? What are the exercises you would recommend?

DG: The good news about emotional intelligence is that it is not a fixed ability like IQ. Your IQ pretty much stays the same through life. Emotional intelligence is fluid. It takes form in the early years when the emotional and social circuits of the brain are forming, into the mid-20s. And if you get the right experiences—there are now curricula in schools called social-emotional learning to help kids get this right—if you get it right in the first place, then you are in a very good position for leadership later in life. If you find as a leader that you need to build some of these skills—empathy is one in particular that often people complain a leader is short on—it is still possible, but you need to make more effort.

So, for example, one of the signs of not having a good capacity for empathy is simply not listening. I think it is becoming more and more common among leaders because people are so pressured. We have so much information coming at us. We actually process about five times more information today than we did 20 years ago, and there is a maxim in cognitive science that what information consumes is attention. So when an overwhelming amount of information creates a poverty of attention, I think many leaders today feel that they are really burdened.

The way that shows up in terms of empathy is [that when] someone comes up to talk to you, you cut them off and just impose your agenda rather than really hearing what it is they came to talk to you about. So a learning plan for someone like that might be to first ask yourself, do I care?

Am I motivated? Yes, I am. Get some feedback about what you need to do. I need to listen better. Think of someone who’s a model. Someone you know who does it well. Keep that in mind and practice it at every opportunity. Stop what you are doing, pay full attention to the person, put aside your digital screen or whatever it is, your distracting thoughts. And just be present to the person while you listen. That’s the new habit. And finally, practice that at every naturally occurring opportunity. If you can do that for three to six months, you will strengthen the circuitry in the brain for doing that automatically, and one day you won’t have to think about it. You will do it, which means that you have a new default circuitry in the brain for that new emotional intelligence habit.

You recently blogged about how playfulness in the workplace can be a critical motivator at work. How playful are innovative leaders, and how do they express that playfulness in a productive manner?

DG: Well, you have to understand that playfulness is a marker for a certain brain state, which actually is very conducive to creative thoughts. When people are uptight, when they are goal focused, when they are stressed out—“I just have to achieve this goal”—they are in a state of mind

which is antithetical to creative insight. When people relax, when they can daydream, when they can joke around— those are all markers for a shift in the brain, which allows the creative combination of two novel elements that have never been put together before in a useful way. That is the operational definition of creativity, of innovation. All innovations come from seeing things in a new way, and people are more likely to see that when they are playful, because playfulness is another indicator of that very open brain state.

In which industries do you think it is easier to be an innovative leader? And where do you think innovation is sorely lacking?

DG: I think the tech industry is kind of the poster child for innovation, because you live or die by innovation in the tech industry. Part of that has to do with product life cycles, which are very short in the tech world.…

The one sign of a lack of innovation is that an industry is dying. For a long time, for example, this was true of the steel industry in this country. Not only did lower-price steel go offshore, but steelmakers failed to come up with the innovations that would help them survive the new business reality. So I think that anywhere you see a waning industry, you are seeing a lack of innovative thinking.

Actually, I think that we are on the cusp of an enormous innovative opportunity because of the environmental cost of the way we do things, in industry, in B2B, and in commerce.

All of our platforms and practices were developed long before we actually realized the impact of transportation, energy, construction, and manufacturing on the global systems that support life. This is going to become a bigger and bigger issue for younger generations as they grow older and those costs become more apparent. I think that will drive and reward an enormous innovative push in terms of rethinking everything. Absolutely everything.

For example, petroleum-based products are a big problem because they never disintegrate.

They never go back into nature.

One of the innovations I admire came from two students at Rensselaer Polytech who rethought Styrofoam, which is a petroleum product. It just floats around in water and oceans or sits in landfills. It doesn’t decompose.

They came up with one made out of rice husks and mushroom roots, and it is perfectly as good as petroleum-based Styrofoam. But you throw it away and it goes back into nature. That’s the kind of thinking that is going to spark innovation across the board in every material we make and in the platforms we use. AQ AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 19

AN INTERVIEW WITH

David Allen

Make Room, Not Lists

BY CHRISTIANE TRUELOVE

David Allen, one of AMA’s influential leaders of 2014, is known for the time management system

“Getting Things Done,”which centers on the idea of moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into items to take action on.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 21

Allen sat down with AMA Quarterly to answer some questions about how innovative leaders get things done, how he uses his own system—and how it’s not all about making lists.

How do innovative leaders organize themselves, in your observation? Do those who make lists invariably rise to the top?

DA: I think it’s not a matter of making a list. It’s a matter of being able to reserve your creative energies for where they are best used, which is not about remembering and reminding. The best leaders tend to structure their life so that they don’t have to be involved with decisions they shouldn’t be making; they can basically have a trusted system that allows them to free up their attention to be creative, strategic, and innovative. In other words, if you have to remember where you need to be when, as opposed to having a trusted staff, system, or systematic approach that has already laid that out for you, that’s not the best use of your creative energies.

Are you saying, in other words, that you shouldn’t have to do everything?

DA: Sure. How much time does it take to be creative? Zero.

How much time does it take to be innovative? Zero. How much time does it take to have a good idea? Zero. You don’t need time. You need room. So I think what creative leaders do is structure their life so that their brain is more available for that kind of stuff. Really, it’s not about managing time.

It’s managing your attention. You have to manage where you are during the time you have, so time is an important factor. But that’s not something actually that you manage.

You can’t manage time.

What you can manage are the things that would distract you or take your attention away from being creative and strategic. So, when something is on your mind, it’s usually because there’s some decision you haven’t made, or you haven’t parked the results in some place you trust. Really innovative leaders wind up building systems for themselves so that they don’t have to use their creative energies on things that are not quite as meaningful.

Where should lists end and the go-with-the-flow hunches begin? And when is it OK to toss aside plans?

DA: Personally, I plan as little as I can get by with. The lists are only there so that my mind doesn’t have to keep rethinking anything more than once. I think the whole time we should be spontaneous and intuitive. In other words, as soon as you think “I need cat food” twice, you’re inappropriately involved with your cat, right? So once you

22 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

have a thought—a would, could, should, need to, ought to— you need to appropriately deal with what that thought means, park it in some appropriate place. And many times that does mean putting it on a list. But that doesn’t mean you live your life just looking at lists. Heavens no. You live your life so you can trust that, hey, when I need that, I’ll see it at the right time.

For people who are self-acknowledged micromanagers, how should they approach your system?

Is it possible for them to achieve relaxed control?

DA: Well, I’m not sure what you mean by a “selfacknowledged micromanager.” A micromanager just says, “Look, I’m handling something that maybe I shouldn’t be handling.” That’s just stupid.

There are people who feel that unless they have personal involvement in something, it’s not going to get done correctly.

DA: That may be true. If they think they need to be involved in everything, then of course that’s going to prevent them from being able to be freed up to do things that are more and more meaningful. So it always comes back to, where are they going? What do they want to be accomplishing? If they’re on track to accomplish [what they need done] by being a micromanager, that’s fine. If that’s preventing them from being able to put their focus somewhere that will take them where they ought to be going in terms of playing the bigger game—if they have a bigger game to play—then sure, that’s just an inappropriate use of that.

Oftentimes, micromanagement is simply because you don’t trust—either you don’t trust yourself or you don’t trust the people around you. Building in the ability to be able to entrust things to a system or systematic approach allows that [accomplishment of tasks] to be a little bit easier.

You’re not going to change people’s personalities. You can change how they express themselves. If you have a high attention to detail—oftentimes, these are the kinds of personalities that tend to be micromanagers. They want to make sure everything’s perfect. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you just want to be able to lift that to the level so it’s working for you, as opposed to being a limitation.

Have you had to work with or consult for micromanagers in the past? Did you ever find yourself telling them to step back, slow it down?

DA: Well, I don’t do that kind of coaching or consulting. My whole thing is, what has your attention? Why does it have your attention? What do you need to do to get your mind off of that, and what do you need to do about that? Now, that can take on a lot of subtle levels that will address what I’ve just been talking about. If they...should be doing something that they're not, I go, "Well, great, what's your next step on that? How do you need to manage that?"

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF DAVID ALLEN

Allen’s GTD system allows one to focus on accomplishing tasks instead of getting bogged down in the minutiae of recollecting what needs to be done.

What I do is get people to actually objectify their inventory of all their commitments, and all the things they ought to or should be involved or engaged in. Once they take a look at that, most people will then self-regulate. They go, “Whoa, I’ve got a whole lot more to do than I can possibly do.”

Most people just have no idea how many things they’re committed to. So once you become conscious about that, you’ll invariably be smarter about how you make your decision, because you can only do one thing at a time.

Is the thing you decided to do the right thing you ought to be doing? Or are you feeling crappy about all the stuff you’re not doing because you’re doing this other thing?

That’s really the game. You want to be able to be appropriately involved so you can be present with whatever you’re doing.

By the way, innovative leaders, when you sit down with them, you’ll see that they’re not rushed. They don’t have to go somewhere else. They’re not looking at their smartphone. They’re looking right at you, and they’re present. Whether that’s the cause or the result of being an innovative leader, I don’t know, but oftentimes that is an indicator of somebody who’s got their act together.

How do you use your own system?

DA: As I said before, my personal style and inclination is to follow my spontaneous, intuitive hunches and just feel good about whatever I’m doing, and plan as little as I can get by with because life changes a lot. I don’t structure anything that I don’t need to structure in order to be able to get it off my mind. Practically speaking, usually the night before the day I’m looking at, I’m checking in on what is my hard landscape: What are the commitments I’ve got? Where do I need to be when? How do I structure myself in space and time?

And then, on some regular basis, usually on a weekly basis, I step back for a couple of hours and catch up—What are all the things I’m committed to? What has changed? What’s the status of all the things that are unfinished yet I still have a level of commitment to finish?—and essentially bring up the rear guard.

By the way, one of the things that is probably most lacking or most in the way of people being innovative leaders is their lack of reflection time, and their lack of ability to be able to catch up in the world they’re involved in, and be present with that.

You have had a wide and varied number of professions before becoming a consultant. What are the organizational lessons you learned from that time?

DA: A lot of what I learned was how many things are common to everybody—trying to run a business, trying to manage a business. I was a pretty good number-two guy.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I had a bunch of interesting friends who were doing interesting things, so I wound up helping them do a lot of what they were doing. What was fascinating was oftentimes the biggest issue was the fact that they had processes that weren’t working or that were in the way. Or that they were lacking the ability to execute on the creative stuff they were holding as an entrepreneur or a businessperson.

Now, I didn’t start out with that as a big plan. It’s just that I would go in and look around, see how I could improve the situation so they could get more done with less effort, and then fix it. And then I got bored, so I looked around for something else. One day I discovered they actually paid people to do that, and they called them something—called it “consultant.” Oh, OK, I guess that’s my job. So I hung out my shingle and said, “OK, let me just see if I can sell my services on a project-by-project basis.” And that’s how I got into the consulting game. Then I quickly looked to see what was common to all of these people, and what were some of the methods or methodologies or techniques that affected everybody, and if they used them, they invariably improved their situation. And that’s how I came up with ultimately what got to be known as GTD, or the “Getting Things Done” methodology.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 23

You mentioned there are things you do each day according to your system. For example, take the 10,000-foot look—what are the things that you consider to be on that level?

DA: There’s what I call the ground level, and [those are] the commitments each day. There are a lot of things that are not on my schedule because I just do them as they show up—eat lunch, go for a walk, take the dog out, all kinds of stuff. They happen simply because that’s the ground level.

Then there are the commitments on the physical, visible activity level, and that’s usually what’s on your calendar. If I have discretionary time, then there are all the other things that I’ll do as soon as I can get them done, as soon as that seems appropriate. Most people, by the way, have between 100 and 200 of “next actions” as a general inventory of those things, and most people have somewhere between 30 and 100 projects, meaning things that are going to take more than one step to actually finish but they have some commitment about.

That’s a typical sort of inventory, and that’s what I like to refer to as “orientation maps.” I’m going to orient myself.

OK, what are all the things I need to be looking at? It’s managing the forest instead of hugging the trees. I don’t necessarily do that on a daily basis, because if you’re doing that on a weekly basis, you don’t need to do it daily. I mean, how often should a leader be reviewing strategic plans? If they’re looking at them every day, they’re probably not really reviewing them. They need to be looking at them as often as they need to, to make sure their resources are allocated appropriately.

There are different horizons that we have commitments to.

That would be everything from the phone calls I need to make at a certain time today, all the way up to “here are all the things I need to finish in terms of hire the assistant, launch the ad campaign, restructure my senior team, etc.”

Those are projects. That’s another level that you need to look at, not daily but weekly at least.

Then there’s another level called, “OK, what’s my job as a leader?” How am I doing in terms of staff development, succession planning, asset management, customer service, strategic direction, product development? That depends on what your job is. How often are you looking at all the things that either your boss or your board is holding you accountable to do well? That’s another map of another horizon.

And then you have the horizon called, “Where do you want to be by the end of 2015?” That’s strategic. Plans usually are slated for completion anywhere from the next 3 to 24 months. What are you committed to finish, accomplish, or have in place?

Then you have another level called, “Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up, in terms of company or career?”

Would you know where your company is going? What’s five

24 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

years from now? What business are you in? What’s your vision, for yourself and/or an organization?

And then you have the top level of commitment, which is, “Why are you on the planet?” Why does your company exist?

So those are six horizons, essentially, of commitments that I’ve identified. I couldn’t get it any simpler than that. Those are all very real discussions you need to have with yourself and/or other key people that may be engaged with your life and your work. It’s not “is any one better than the other?” It all ultimately comes down to execution. It all comes down to what, physically, are you doing with your resources and your attention right now. But all of those become conversations that help inform your intuitive decisions about what you think you ought to do.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule. If there was a silver bullet, I haven’t seen it, and somebody would have made a gazillion dollars. But there is no silver bullet. The silver bullet is basically to make sure you’re looking at these different maps, or these orientation contexts, for yourself sufficiently so that you can just trust your gut or your spirit or the seat of your pants, or whatever you trust, to make those intuitive judgment calls.

What is your own 50,000-foot plan?

DA: Well, 50,000 feet is not exactly a plan. The top level is sort of “why do you exist?” I just have a working hypothesis, which is basically to access the highest level of energy that I can and express that as elegantly as I can. So I figure if anybody can actually figure that out before you die, you’d be in the fast lane.

I wouldn't say this is a problem, but you can only see your goal from your current maturity. A week from now you’ll have a different spin on it because you’ll be a little older.

So it’s just “keep on working to build on the day, build on the week”?

DA: Yes, it’s agile programming, essentially. It’s hold as big a vision as you can and course-correct. Just get moving, and then you course-correct based upon that. That’s why, ultimately, it really comes back to “what’s got your attention?” That’s why, as simple as my stuff is, it can handle and address some pretty sophisticated things.

Because once you actually handle what has your attention, then you’ll discover what really has your attention. But if you try to handle the big stuff before you handle the stuff right in front of your face that’s distracting you, good luck.

What I think is a little unique about my approach is, I tend to work with people where they are, not with where they should be. Because if you can’t control where you are and get your attention back and be present with it, then good luck at trying to stretch out anywhere beyond that. AQ

Motivating People Doesn’t Work

BY SUSAN FOWLER

For many years, my go-to definition of motivation was simply “the energy to act.” It turns out that my definition has the same fatal flaw as the other 102 definitions you can find for

motivation.

Thinking of motivation as having the energy or impetus to act fails to convey the essential nature of human motivation. It does nothing to help you understand the reasons behind the action.

An important truth emerges when we explore the nature of motivation. People are always motivated. The question is not if, but why, they are motivated.

The motivation—or energy and impetus—a person brings to any action can be qualitatively different depending on the situation. Some motivations can spur people to promote wellbeing for themselves and others—and unfortunately, some motivations can’t.

For example, motivation that comes from choosing to do something is different from motivation that comes from having to do it. Motivation generated from values, purpose, love, joy, or compassion is different from motivation generated from ego, power, status, or a desire for external rewards. And motivation to compete because of a desire to excel (where the score serves as feedback on how successfully you are growing, learning, and executing) is different from competing for the sake of besting someone else, to impress, or to gain favors.

One of the primary reasons motivating people doesn’t work is our naive assumption that motivation is something a person has or doesn’t have. This leads to the erroneous conclusion that the more motivation a person has, the more likely she is to achieve her goals and succeed. When it comes to motivation, assuming that more is better is too simplistic and even unwise. As with friends, it isn’t how many friends you have—it is the quality and types of friendships that matter.

INSIGHTS OF MOTIVATION Imagine you are a sales manager. You wonder if your sales reps are motivated. You look at the midquarter sales reports for your two highest-selling reps and conclude that, yes, they are both highly motivated. What you might fail to notice is that they are motivated differently. The reason one rep works hard is to win the sales contest, to be seen as number one, and to make the promised bonus. The reason the other rep works hard is because he values your products and services, his efforts are connected to a noble purpose, and he enjoys problem solving with his clients. The science of motivation provides compelling evidence that the reps’ different types of motivation have major implications. The quality of their energy affects short-term results and long-term stamina.

26 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

Traditional motivation prompts the questions “Is this person motivated?” and “How much motivation does this person have?” These questions reduce your answers to simplistic black-and-white, yes-or-no responses that fail to provide much-needed insight into the nature of the motivation. But asking why a person is motivated leads to a spectrum of motivational possibilities. Appreciating these possibilities, and the implications behind each of them, enables you to take advantage of the new science of motivation and guide your people to a more optimal and higher-quality motivational experience.

IGNORING THE EVIDENCE The time is right to challenge antiquated ways of leading through a combination of contemporary motivation science and real-world application. There is a different and better way to approach motivation, which raises a question: If there is a proven better way to approach motivation, why aren’t more leaders using it?

This question has three potential answers: You are not aware of the evidence; you don’t believe the evidence; and you don’t know what to do with the evidence.

● You are not aware of the evidence. A funny thing happened on the way to understanding human motivation.

Psychologists decided to study animals. For example, you can watch Harvard psychology professor B.F. Skinner on YouTube showing how he “motivates” a conditioned pigeon to do a 360degree turn by rewarding its behavior with pellets. It is fascinating to watch; he rewards the bird for doing what he wants it to do, and he can get it to do almost anything.

Behaviorists reasoned that this method could motivate people in the workplace the same way: Reward people for doing what you want them to do, and you can get them to do almost anything. And guess what? It worked—or seemed to. I call it the Pecking Pigeon Paradigm.

Using metaphorical pellets as incentives to “motivate” employees to do tasks they don’t necessarily want to do has become common practice. A massive industry has evolved that provides complex schemes to motivate workers with compensation systems, rewards, contests, tokens, badges, prizes, and formal recognition programs—pellets and more pellets.

Current data clearly demonstrate the futility of the Pecking Pigeon Paradigm. In thousands of experiments worldwide, the

results are the same: Even though people will take the money or rewards you offer, the only correlation between those incentives and performance is a negative one. In other words, external rewards produce a disturbing undermining effect on the energy, vitality, and sense of positive well-being people need to achieve goals, attain excellence, and sustain effort.

Traditional forms of motivation may appear to work in some types of jobs or industries. For example, if you promise people more pellets, they may produce more on the assembly line in the short term. However, it is unwise to confuse productivity with thriving and flourishing. Without thriving and flourishing, short-term gains tend to turn into long-term opportunity losses. The Pecking Pigeon Paradigm never worked the way we thought it would—no matter the type of job or industry. The simple fact is, people are not pigeons.

● You don’t believe the evidence. It’s not personal; it’s just ___. The purpose of business is to ___ ___. Leaders are in a position of ___.

These beliefs are so embedded in our collective psyche that you probably don’t even need to check your answers. Just because these statements represent common beliefs doesn’t mean they are legitimate, however. I encourage you to consider that holding on to these beliefs may undermine your ability to effectively investigate alternatives, change your methods of motivation, and embrace new ways of leading.

Through the exploration of evidence and alternative approaches to motivation, I hope you will come to appreciate how your basic beliefs may be undermining your leadership intentions. For example, your belief in driving for results may be creating the psychological distress, tension, and pressure that make it less likely you’ll get the quality short-term results or sustainable long-term outcomes that you— and those you lead—are seeking.

● You don’t know what to do with the evidence. You may be familiar with scientific evidence proving how traditional methods of motivation undermine employees’ quality of work and productivity. It may have captured your imagination and piqued your curiosity.

But as often happens in attempts to simplify science, the ideas get boiled down to clichés that make them difficult to use. For example, the virtues of intrinsic motivation resonate with most of us at a deep level.

They also cause fear and trepidation as the leader within you wonders, what are alternatives to abandoning the stick and weaning people off the carrot? How do I get and keep people intrinsically motivated? As well intentioned as these questions are, they still reflect a traditional approach to motivation that suggests motivation is something you do to people.

Popular books and speakers are doing the important job of

“We need to realize that applying pressure to achieve results has

undermined the

results we were seeking. We need to consider that promoting competition or winning a contest is not the best way to encourage or sustain performance.” raising awareness about the positive attributes of intrinsic motivation and the detrimental effects of extrinsic motivation.

But the simplistic duality of good-bad, internal-external, and either-or does not provide enough depth to use the ideas in a meaningful way. Misunderstanding what motivation means leads to a misapplication of technique to make it happen.

Admitting that many traditional approaches to motivation that have been practiced all these years have been counterproductive—or worse, destructive—frees us up to look at motivation in new ways. We need to realize that applying pressure to achieve results has undermined the results we were seeking. We need to consider that promoting competition or winning a contest is not the best way to encourage or sustain performance. We need to appreciate that— despite the practical need for money and people’s incessant requests for more—the focus on monetary rewards has obscured what really satisfies people in their jobs. It appears that motivating people doesn’t work, and leaders need alternatives that do. It is time to stop beating our people with carrots and sticks and embrace different, more effective, leadership strategies. AQ Susan Fowler is senior consulting partner at The Ken Blanchard Companies and a professor in the Master of Science in Executive Leadership program at the University of San Diego. She is a developer of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ “Optimal Motivation” product line as well as the lead developer of “Situational Self Leadership.” For more information, go to susanfowler.com Adapted, with permission of the publisher, from Why Motivating People Doesn't Work…And What Does: The New Science of Leading, Energizing, and Engaging by Susan Fowler. Copyright 2014, Susan Fowler.

Published by Berrett-Koehler.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 27

xxx xxx BY

SEVEN KEYS TO BEING AN

IRRESISTIBLE LEADER

BY ALESIA LATSON

28 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

Leadership is a tough job. Not only do you have to be adept at managing multiple priorities, but you also have to possess expert people skills.

After all, regardless of industry, a leader is only as good as his or her team. Without the buy-in, rapport, and respect of your employees, you’ll have a difficult time accomplishing the organization’s goals. The challenge, then, is figuring out how to create the conditions by which people can’t resist your message and vision and therefore want to align and partner with you.

Becoming an irresistible leader requires that you attract and connect with people in a genuine and authentic way. That’s why the key for any leader is to create experiences by which people want to engage with you. What follows are seven effective ways to build engagement with your staff.

1. BUILD RAPPORT The best way to build rapport with people is to simply listen to them. When people feel listened to, they are more likely to

trust you and are more eager to engage with you. To make listening a priority in your role, start doing monthly listening tours. These do not have to be long sessions—15 minutes is enough. The point is to actually schedule time where you meet with people informally and just let them talk.

At the beginning of the meeting say, “This is just a listening meeting. For 15 minutes I just want to hear your ideas, your concerns, or anything else you’d like to share.” Then, let the person talk. Don’t interrupt or dominate the conversation.

In fact, only speak when the other person asks you a question.

The rest of the time just listen and take notes on the conversation. After the person finishes speaking, paraphrase what you heard.

Taking only 15 minutes out of your day to listen to an employee will help you forge a greater connection with your staff and make a huge difference in employee engagement.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 29

2. BE REAL One of the best compliments a leader can receive is that he or she is down to earth. Unfortunately, many leaders feel that they must keep others at arm’s length or put on a false persona (usually that of someone directive or ultra professional) if they want to be successful. They think that exposing their true self is a weakness, when in reality being real is what engages people and draws them to you.

If you think that being real isn’t important to success, just look at Oprah Winfrey and Mitt Romney. For years Oprah struggled to cement herself as a serious anchorwoman, even modeling herself after Barbara Walters. It was only when she let everyone see the real her, flaws and all, that her career took

that your proposal is a reflection of your commitment to finding viable options that will increase our profitability (validation number 1). It’s evident that you’ve put a lot of effort into taking a look at the numbers (validation number 2). And you’ve offered a compelling business case for us to consider (validation number 3). We’re aligned in that we’re both looking for a committed solution. Where we differ is in how aggressive the plan should be and how much risk we should take on.

Maybe that’s something we can talk about.” Remember, the magic number is three points of validation.

At this point you can ask some open-ended questions to get a better idea of the employee’s thinking, or you can agree to

consistency

“Humans by nature crave in others. When they feel that they’re dealing with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of person, they’ll pull away and hide problems.” off and she became the powerful businesswoman she is today.

In contrast, Mitt Romney, during his presidential campaign, was often criticized for not being able to relate to a wide demographic. In fact, many experts have commented that his inability to relate to the average person was detrimental to his campaign.

An easy way to let others get to know you better is to tell a story about yourself. It doesn’t have to be an overly revealing personal story—it can be as simple as sharing a story about a time in your career when you made a mistake, faced challenges, or learned a lesson. People are always fascinated to learn about the career trajectory of leaders. So when you can reveal something about your own biography that relates to work, you create connections with others, which helps them relate to you and builds rapport.

3. DISAGREE WITH GRACE Disagreements at work are inevitable. The key is how you handle them. Too often, leaders come across as harsh when they disagree, inadvertently making employees feel inferior or that their ideas are without merit. So rather than abruptly telling people things like, “No, that will never work” or “You obviously don’t understand the full situation,” when you disagree with them, start by acknowledging and validating the other person’s perspective.

Doing this requires that you listen attentively and then legitimize the other person’s point of view. It is most effective when you can provide at least three points of validation because that’s when the person is more likely to feel that you actually heard what he or she said. So, for example, if someone offers an idea for increasing profits that you think is too risky and won’t work, you could say something like, “I see

30 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

disagree. But it’s the validation that enables you to disagree with grace. Rather than shutting the conversation down, you’re acknowledging the employee and valuing his or her effort. This is what creates irresistibility, because when the employee walks away from that meeting, he may not have gotten what he wanted, but he wasn't defeated. And that’s vital to building employee engagement.

4. BE CONSISTENT A detrimental leadership practice is being inconsistent in your words and deeds. When people don’t know what to expect from you, it’s incredibly unsettling—the proverbial “walking on eggshells” feeling—and it makes people disengage. However, when you’re predictable and consistent, whether things are going well or not, then people know that they can come to you with bad news as well as good.

Being consistent gives people permission to be honest with you. It’s challenging to go to a manager with bad news. When you’re consistent, no matter what happens, your people will give you the benefit of the doubt that you’ll likely manage any situation fairly based on the fact that they have a track record of you consistently demonstrating those behaviors.

Additionally, humans by nature crave consistency in others.

When they feel that they’re dealing with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of person, they’ll pull away and hide problems.

But when they know you’ll be consistent, they’ll come to you sooner rather than later, which can make all the difference in a successful resolution.

5. SHOW INTEREST IN OTHERS People like to know that others are interested in them— especially when the person interested is the boss! When you

display a genuine interest in others, it shows that you care, which naturally draws people to you.

The best way to show interest is to simply ask questions. Find out what your people think about certain situations, as well as their outside interests or hobbies. For example, when you’re chatting with an employee, you can say, “I know you’re heading up the Acme account. Tell me more about what’s been working well.” Or “What have been some of your proudest accomplishments this year?” Or “How was your weekend?” Or “What was your biggest learning this year?” Or “Where would you like to be in the next two to three years?” Simple questions like these go a long way.

Of course, people are always communicating about themselves.

So the big question is, “Are you listening and paying attention to what they’re saying?” Just as the most effective salespeople keep client notes, irresistible leaders keep employee notes.

Realize this isn’t about keeping intel on each employee; it’s simply acknowledging people by writing down some key facts about them or some great ideas they produce that you want to remember for later. In fact, when an employee has an idea or says something important, an irresistible leader writes the information down—often right in front of the person. Talk about making an employee feel special! If you are in your leadership role for the long term and you really believe that people are your most important asset, then you have to act like it and show some interest in those assets.

6. DISPLAY EXCITEMENT People know when you’re not “in it to win it.” They know when the leader is giving a half-hearted effort versus when the leader is really committed and excited about the company, products, customers, and employees. And excitement is contagious. When the leader is truly excited, it ignites enthusiasm and energy in others.

Realize that excitement doesn’t mean being highly exaggerated and cheering every second. Rather, it’s about displaying a strong sense of why things are important, even the seemingly mundane tasks. When you can link the small things to the big picture, you show how every person’s role is vital to overall success, which then builds engagement and commitment. As a result, people will want to spend their discretionary effort because it’s appreciated and valued.

We all have aspects of our jobs that are not very exciting or interesting. But when you, as the leader, can express your acknowledgment for employees' work in a way that demonstrates how what they do moves the organization toward achieving important goals, then you help create the forward momentum that leads to success.

Showing excitement like this makes you irresistible because it honors everybody’s contribution. It’s not about being incredibly animated about everything; it’s about expressing the importance and the value of each task while having energy, compassion, and passion for even the smallest pieces of the puzzle.

“The more engagement and partnership you have with your team, the more the work experience will be for everyone.”

rewarding

7. OFFER ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND PRAISE Too often leaders are so busy, stressed, and overwhelmed that they forget to acknowledge people. But human beings crave acknowledgment and want to feel that they are making a meaningful difference in some way. Therefore, offering acknowledgment and praise goes a long way toward building engagement.

Acknowledging someone doesn’t mean gushing over them and touting superlatives that aren’t warranted. It’s also not about empty phrases like “Good job.” Offering acknowledgment and praise works best when you’re factual and point out specifics that made an impact. For example, instead of telling someone, “You did a good job on that report,” you could say, “I wanted to compliment you on your report. It detailed the topic in a clear way, gave a strong call to action at the end, and was visually very appealing in the layout.” The more specific you can be with your praise, the more meaningful it is for the employee.

Remember, too, that acknowledgment and praise do not only happen during a formal meeting or year-end review. You can offer a word of acknowledgment in passing at the water cooler.

Often, it’s those little interactions that leave a lasting impression on others.

ATTRACT THE BEST If you want to be one of those leaders that people can’t seem to resist—the kind of leader who has loyal employees and a strong environment of trust—then you need to focus on these seven employee engagement practices. Not only will your current employees find you irresistible, but you’ll also have a steady stream of eager potential employees (the best of the best) who want to work with you. Ultimately, the more engagement and partnership you have with your team, the more rewarding the work experience will be for everyone. That’s when the organization will experience true and lasting success. AQ Alesia Latson is a speaker, trainer, and coach and founder of Latson Leadership Group, a consulting firm specializing in management and leadership development. With more than 20 years of experience, Latson helps organizations and leaders expand their capacity to produce results while enhancing employee engagement. For more information, please contact her at alesia@latsonleadershipgroup.com or visit www.latsonleadershipgroup.com

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 31

32 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

AN INTERVIEW WITH

Jeff Tagney

Leading Where

HIGH-TECH Meets HEALTHCARE

BY CHRISTIANE TRUELOVE

Jeff Tagney has started not one but two companies in the space where high-tech meets healthcare.

Tagney founded Epocrates in1998, serving as president and chief operating officer.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 33

AMA Quarterly spent some time talking with Tagney about lessons in leadership, what it takes to cultivate understanding between physicians and software engineers, and knowing what a leader is responsible for in a company.

Did you ever think you would be leading a company?

And when you got into that position, what skills did you find you had to develop and learn to lead effectively?

JT: I love that you are using the word “leadership” and not “management”! I think the most important thing in being a leader in this day and age is having that true passion.

You can’t fake it. You really have to care—and particularly in product-centric Silicon Valley, where it’s all about that end-user experience and loving that user and loving that experience. You can’t just be the managerial type who is four layers removed from the product. There are folks like that; I reckon about a third of the CEOs I’ve met here in Silicon Valley are in that format—power first and product second. But if you can’t demo your own products, then you go the way of Detroit. There, we had a bunch of MBAs who didn’t know anything about cars and basically ruined the industry over a couple of decades.

The other thing I’d say is that if your main role is managing people who do procedural work—the extreme example is people working on an assembly line—that kind of work is increasingly being done by robots and computers. So the real essence of living these days in a place where software is eating up these procedural jobs is “how do you lead creative work teams, people who are innovators and creators?” I think that comes down fundamentally to passion, giving them leash to run and humbling your own passion with data. Don’t let the HiPPOs—the highest-paid person’s opinion—rule what is decided. From my end, I do think management of operations is becoming relatively less important. We’re seeing the death of management and a burst of true leaders who care for their customers and their people.

As for me, I never really planned on being a leader. I planned on building great products. To me, great management is what happens on the way to great products. You can talk about the method and process all you want, but if you don’t come out with a great product, it really doesn’t matter. If you focus on the great products first, you’ll learn a lot about the right processes to get there.

34 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

This is the second company you have under your belt as a leader. What are the lessons you learned from Epocrates/Athena Health that you transferred to Doximity?

JT: As one investor joked, I’m sort of the “doc whisperer.”

I created the two most popular software products that physicians and doctors have used—number one being Epocrates and number two being Doximity. The main lessons I’ve learned are that building software for doctors does require understanding what it’s like to be a doctor, but it also requires what it’s like to be a software engineer.

In one day we might be talking in the office about percutaneous stents, what cardiologists need to know about them, and at the same time talking about the latest Ruby technology for HIPAA compliance. Those are two completely different spheres, different worlds, so my job is getting these people to understand each other and talk to each other.

It’s a little harder in some ways than at someplace like Google, where it’s engineers building products that engineers also use. They all understand what it’s like to do searches because they do that a lot themselves, whereas our engineers don’t understand what it’s like to be a physician seeing a patient who has a gallbladder problem. A lot of the strength of the properties, and now Doximity, is we do a lot of live meetings, dinner meetings, between our engineers and our physicians. We have a lot of physicians on staff who work hand in hand with the product teams, and it’s great to keep that understanding, that mutual empathy, in one place.

What do you consider to be your biggest challenges, day to day and long term, in being a leader?

JT: As a senior executive and founder of a company now, I can say the biggest challenge is…everything is my fault!

When you start a company and run it, it doesn’t matter if the coffee is too cold in the breakroom, or the product didn’t work every minute yesterday, or the website went down. It’s ultimately my fault. And I have to own that. I do own that, but it can get to be overwhelming for a lot of founders. There comes a point at which you have to be able to say, “That’s not my fault, that’s the office manager’s fault,” and have that flow down to your team.

You have to learn how to give pressure instead of feel pressure. And feeling pressure is what makes a great product guy. You’re very sensitive to the customer vibe, you listen a lot, and you really empathize with what they need.

But to turn that around as the company gets to 100-plus people, you’ve also got to be able to equally give pressure, make other people accountable for some of the problems and challenges, and move that ahead. That transition from one to the next is where I think most founders or CEOs fail, where they just get overwhelmed by the number of things and are not able to compartmentalize and say, “No, it’s this person’s job, and if they’re not doing it, I need to find someone else.”

PHOTO: COURTESY OF DOXIMITY

Epocrates provided free mobile drug references for physicians, allowing them to check drug-drug interactions and other data while in the clinic on their smartphones, and rapidly expanded its services to include other learning and clinical apps. In 2010, Tagney founded Doximity, a private network for doctors to share medical and case information in a compliant way. More than half of U.S. physicians are now on Doximity, and the number is expected to grow.

What has been your greatest challenge in team building, and how have you met that challenge?

JT: Our greatest asset at Doximity has been a pretty deep bench of people from my previous company that we can draw upon. Ideally, we feel like we’re putting the band back together. We already know a lot of the right talented folks.

The first time around, when you are building into an entirely new industry, even the best interview process will fail. If three-quarters of the time your interview process brings in a person who’s great for that role, you’re doing really well.

But that means a quarter of the time, you need to move on.

My mantra on this is “hire slow, fire fast.” We have a lot of contract-to-hire roles here. We have not hired any product managers here at the company without them first being on a three-month contract. I’d say half of them don’t fit at the end of that three-month contract, yet that’s still the best way for us to make sure we’re feeling a strong fit.

When do you think a leader has to step back from a situation and let others handle it? There are always the micromanagers who swoop in there and try to do everything themselves. Where do you fall on that scale?

JT: As a founder/CEO type, I do have to say you tend to get a little bit too involved. The most humbling thing for me, and the most instructive, has been the use of data. We run contests here internally, for example. Say we have a really important page on the website or a really important feature in the iPhone app, used by hundreds of thousands of doctors, more than 50% of U.S. doctors, and we’re looking for feedback. We actually have enough doctors so we can test with 10,000 here and 10,000 there and see which solution does better. I put myself on one of those teams, and I win maybe half of the time. The other half of the time, I celebrate the people who came up with a better way of doing it. What I’ve learned from those contests, where we’re sitting there and humbling ourselves with the data, is where you can add value and where you can’t. And we have a couple of physicians in-house who are very good at understanding how to deal with workflow for a cardiologist, for example, and have demonstrated that quantitatively.

So I do think humbling yourself with data, putting yourself on a team, and letting the two teams try things—letting teams compete internally—can be fun if done well. But it also can show you where you need to engage as a manager and where you don’t. The good news is, I think I’m approaching the place here where there is almost nothing that I need to be involved in day to day.

What is one lesson you took from your experiences with Epocrates?

JT: The honest answer, at Epocrates we had biotech investors and we were a high-tech company. Investors are a marriage, and they, at the board level, need to agree with

the strategy of the company. I had a falling-out with the board that led to my departure. I turned out to be right; the company spent $25 million building an electronic health record that ultimately was sold for $100,000. And that burst the company’s IPO because it was a big part of the roadshow. But I take very little pleasure in watching what was my baby going down the wrong path and going from a $700 million company to being a $300 million company.

It had nothing to do with the individual personalities or people. It was that they weren’t that involved or engaged partners in a high-tech company. They were, again, biotech investors who were used to a different management style and a different marketplace.

So choosing your investors is a very important process; it’s very easy to have 100% hindsight. The ones with foresight are the founders in the enviable position we were in, where we have multiple options, multiple choices of investors. You might socially get along with one person better than another, but over time what you want in a strong bond with investors is a similar expectation about the market you are in, that there are other investments in that same market.

You’re learning and growing together. You love to do the same things, basically. If that isn’t the case, and you are heading in separate directions and they’re not as interested long term in your space, it’s just easier to have disconnect.

It’s important to have local investors. Our investors at Doximity are literally a few blocks away. I can swing by and have a coffee and come back. Being able to do that is great.

We had investors from New York at Epocrates, and it was just harder to stay in touch. And that also led to some strategy breakdown.

A lot of people say mentoring is part of being a good leader. Do like to mentor, and how do you do it?

JT: I do like to mentor, and the best way to mentor is to lead by example, show that you care. We do these quarterly team meetings where we have different leaders within the company who are tasked with an initiative and then report back to the entire team of that quarter on how they did. At the end of the day, what we all crave is appreciation. It’s not even really money—money is a form of appreciation—but knowing that you are really good at what you do… I am of the school that believes you should play to people’s strengths as opposed to trying to sand down all of their weaknesses. You try and put folks in the roles where they can be really world class, given their skills.

So in mentoring people, guiding them to the place where they are strongest, and giving them a transparent platform for appreciation, let them show you and the rest of the company and the world what they can do. I do my job as service provider by helping them get to that goal. And that leads to them coming to me and asking what I would do in a particular situation. It’s more me coaching, rather than me managing. AQ AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 35

International Leaders Need to

“Style Switch”

BY KAREN S. WALCH, PhD

When a chameleon sits on a tree, it turns green.

When a chameleon sits on a rock, it turns gray.

When a chameleon sits on Mitt Romney, it just switches back and forth.

36 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

In the same way that chameleons switch colors, international businesspeople and negotiators, who encounter idiosyncrasies of other cultures that may not align or may even clash with their own cultures, are now mastering a similar skill called “style switching.”

orientation (a traditional way of doing things), and my colleagues and I have embraced it by wearing the traditional abaya. We were successful in our negotiations there as a result of our style switch.

Style switching has three dimensions: interaction style, thinking style, and sense of self. There are several different positions within these three dimensions. These positions define how people interact and communicate, process information, and view identity and motivation in work situations. To successfully implement style switching in negotiations, executives have to know which positions separate them from their counterparts. When these differences are found, executives must adapt to them in order to build the foundation of a successful negotiation and partnership.

STYLE SWITCHING ON THE WORLD STAGE

When an executive is involved with international presentations, negotiations, and workshops, circumstances may arise that require effective style switching. In particular, I have found that Western women need to be aware of the history and cultural norms concerning gender in various countries and societies where they engage in negotiations. Once that knowledge is gained, the adaptation process can begin.

While you may be uncomfortable at first to have your cultural or behavioral preferences take a backseat, the experience and practice of style switching do not have to be negative. In fact, if you have a firm understanding of your own cultural or behavioral preferences and your place in the global societal landscape, and a firm vision of yourself and your own identity, style switching in international business settings should not be intimidating or difficult. For example, Saudi Arabia has a “past”

Successful world leaders often implement the practice of style switching, sometimes successfully and other times with less success. During President Obama's November 2014 visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Beijing, he—along with other world leaders—wore traditional Chinese tunics as a show of respect for the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and his culture. This subtle acknowledgment and sign of respect for a different culture and country opened the door to more serious, austere talks on issues Obama and his Chinese counterpart do not always see eye to eye on. But President Obama was able to walk away from a positive conference with a new climate-change agreement with China under his belt.

The conference was a success, but it was not free of social faux pas, in particular from both Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. President Obama’s first mistake was to turn down the offer of being transported by China’s luxury limo service, and his second was to chew smoking-cessation gum in public. Chinese internet users were furious—they described Obama as an impolite “idler” and a careless “rapper.” In this situation, Obama failed to keep in mind the Asian cultural position of “being”—that is, focusing on establishing a personal and trusting relationship. To the Chinese, chewing gum and eschewing a limo service do not AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 37

DIRECT

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However, President Putin committed a faux pas that blew the U.S. president’s minor blunders out of the water. It is common knowledge that Putin is quick to take items of clothing off, having been photographed without his shirt on many occasions, but it’s not only when AL he’s horseback riding or doing M R photo shoots with bears that this FO occurs. China’s First Lady, Peng Liyuan, casually commented on the cold temperature to those around her, and without a shred of hesitation, Putin took off his coat and placed it on her shoulders. This gesture, a normal and chivalrous one in many countries around the world, is actually interpreted by Chinese people as a very romantic gesture. Putin made a social gaffe because of his “direct” position—a focus on accomplishing tasks. First Lady Peng Liyuan, on the other hand, responded quickly with impressive timing by handing off the coat to an aide just slowly enough to show Putin appreciation but quick enough to avoid any awkward cultural clashes. Her actions were “indirect”—an implicit and/or mediated handling of conflict with an emphasis on “saving face.”

STYLE

ACTION R E T IN

M OR F IN

indicate an appreciative person who cares about establishing relations.

M RU T NS

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I

Style Switching Earns Respect

BY KAREN S. WALCH

As a professor of global negotiations, I have been fortunate to have many opportunities to travel and study around the world.

These opportunities have allowed me to take the idea of style switching out of the classroom and apply it to real-world situations. One memory in particular stands out—an instance of stepping into a potentially uncomfortable situation but remaining comfortable and positive.

I prepared myself emotionally not to take a defensive stance on the dress and cultural tendencies that did not align with my own; this mindset would not have been conducive to fostering a working trust and cooperation for our long-term project. I quickly came to appreciate the culture and embrace the opportunity to learn more about it. In fact, in this particular situation, I came to enjoy wearing the abaya and scarf.

Most important, right from the start of the consulting and training, a magical rapport was generated between my colleagues, our Islamic Development Bank counterparts, and myself. Because we displayed a clear effort to adapt to their culture, abide by it, and respect it, they returned the gesture with the utmost respect and warmly welcomed our presence and participation. From the very beginning, our ability to style switch fostered a closer relationship and deeper mutual respect, and the meetings, as a result, proved to be productive and effective.

38 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

ILLUSTRATIONS : COURTESY OF KAREN S. WALCH

A few years ago, I was invited to travel to the Islamic Development Bank and participate in its assessments and training activities in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Two colleagues of mine were also invited—a man and another woman. The Islamic Development Bank is funded by governments of the Islamic countries. This means that 56 countries are involved, but the bank’s values and business practices are rooted in the Islamic tradition. The bank had specifically invited us, so they knew that two female professors were visiting and openly welcomed us. Ahead of time, my female colleague and I informed our counterparts that we would wear the local dress of an abaya and a scarf on our heads out of respect for their customs and culture, a gesture that they appreciated.

“Style switching provides the flexibility necessary to be a successful leader, and ultimately a proficient negotiator, in the global business community.”

This narrative of finding common ground with Chinese culture in order to begin serious negotiations is not a new one. In the early 1970s, the two countries thawed relations through the exchange of table tennis players. What became known as ping-pong diplomacy was a quintessential display of two parties acknowledging their respective cultural perspectives, combing through those differences, and finding a common playing field to begin negotiations.

ADAPTING YOUR STYLE In the end, style switching provides the flexibility necessary to be a successful leader, and ultimately a proficient negotiator, in the global business community. However, the idea of style switching does not have to stop with negotiating blatant cultural differences. In a negotiation, for example, if Negotiator A, who prefers indirect communication, needs to develop trust and rapport with Negotiator B, who is a very direct communicator, Negotiator A will have to switch his or her style. Rather than asking a lot of vague, leading questions, Negotiator A will prepare to deliver direct statements and ideas to match the style of Negotiator B, allowing him or her to feel more comfortable in the negotiation.

Mastering the art of style switching takes a lot of personal reflection. You must be clear on who you are as a business professional, negotiator, and person. In the previous example, Negotiator A firmly knew that he or she was an indirect communicator. Through this knowledge and personal reflection, Negotiator A was able to actively and effectively monitor his or her own communication techniques and adapt as needed.

Style switching is not a form of lying or manipulation— it is a form of understanding and leadership. Once this concept is understood, you can switch styles productively, respecting the anchors of your own identity and tendencies.

With a clear picture of yourself, a clear picture of the other party, and a willingness from both sides to adapt and switch styles accordingly, a successful negotiation is very likely. AQ Karen S. Walch, PhD, emeritus faculty and consultant at Thunderbird School of Global Management, has an academic background in international negotiation, cultural competencies, and political economy.

She has several decades of experience in various business and academic contexts, including insurance, law, tourism, aquaculture, security studies, and MBA graduate education.

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 39

How to Manage a

Strong-Willed Ego

BY MARCIA REYNOLDS, PhD

40 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

Picture yourself sitting in a conversation with one of your smartest employees. His colleagues frequently complain about his condescending tone and behavior.

You have witnessed the way he criticizes his teammates’ ideas in meetings. You give him feedback, but he waves it off while pointing out the value of his contribution. You suggest other ways for him to engage his peers. He complains that they are stuck in old thinking. You tell him you want him to help lead the team but that he has to change his behavior first. He says, “Do you want me to produce or baby-sit?”

You need smart, talented employees. These are the employees who perform. They achieve goals. They have innovative ideas.

But some of these smart, talented, high-performing, goalachieving, and innovative employees also give you headaches because they don’t listen to you.

The problem isn’t their insubordination. The problem is that they don’t see the bigger picture. They will not change until they see the value of altering their behavior, understand how their actions could be hurting their long-term goals, or discover on their own the harm they are doing to others and themselves.

In short, these employees will not heed your advice. No matter how well you deliver your message, your words have little impact. As a leader, you need to work with their brains at a deeper level. They will only change their behavior if their view of themselves and the world changes first. You can help those changes occur by understanding the limitations imposed by the ego and learning how to work around them. Although these conversations are uncomfortable, it is in those moments of discomfort—the “Discomfort Zone”—that true change can take place. By using a step-by-step technique I call the DREAM model, you can navigate Discomfort Zone conversations and help your employees shift their outlook.

WORKING WITH THE EGO To define who we are and make sense of the world around us, our brains compose the rules we live by based on past successes and missteps. This construct, known as “ego,” defines our sense of self, what is important, and how we fit into our world. The frame around the ego is fairly rigid so that we don’t have to stop and question who we are and what we should do throughout the day. Therefore, our brains resist when people tell us to change who we are and how we relate to others. The more successful we were in the past, the stronger the resistance to change will be going forward. Even if there are better things we could be doing, we defend our current behavior. Because of these factors, changing “who we are” is difficult by human nature.

Smart, high-achieving employees are rewarded for their

results. They have answers. They know how to win. Their brain protects this position, making it hard for them to see what else they can do and be that might bring them a different type of success or happiness in the future.

To help someone think differently about a situation, you have to disturb the ego’s automatic processing.1 This is best done by challenging beliefs and surfacing the underlying fears, needs, and desires that are keeping the constructs in place. If you can get people to stop and question their thoughts and actions, they may actively explore, examine, and change their beliefs and behavior.

CREATING A DISCOMFORT ZONE The best way to break through the protective frame around the ego is to ask a question that makes people stop and question their thinking or make a statement that compels them to reflect on their thoughts and emotions from a different perspective.

If you break through the protective barrier, they will stare at you for a moment as their brains rewire in order to make sense of what they are considering.2 This Discomfort Zone is the moment of uncertainty in which people are most open to learning. In this uncomfortable moment, the brain is most open to developing a new perspective and seeing a different solution to a problem. The Discomfort Zone is the most opportune time for personal growth.

Once people see their blind spots and understand what is not rational in their resistance and what else could be true that they had not considered before, they might have an emotional reaction. They could laugh, feel sad, or even get angry. If you act on this moment, you have a chance to solidify the new awareness. If you do not act, a strong ego may work backward to justify the previous behavior.

For true shifts in thinking and behaving to occur, you must be willing to challenge a person’s beliefs, interrupt his patterns, and short-circuit his conviction to his logic even when it feels uncomfortable for both you and him. This is a Discomfort Zone conversation.

The most successful leaders are those who participate in helping others to create new realities.3 The leader engages in conversations that bring to light a person’s filters and frames.

When the factors that frame the meaning of a situation are revealed, the view of what is true changes and becomes clear.

A change in the view of what is true is needed for long-lasting and positive change. To do this, you have to be comfortable AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 41

with disruption and tension in a conversation, creating a Discomfort Zone where new ideas are birthed. A leader who uses the Discomfort Zone emphasizes potential rather than problems.

HOLDING DISCOMFORT ZONE CONVERSATIONS In the DREAM model, you will begin and end the conversation deliberately. At the start, you help the person determine what would be the most beneficial outcome to achieve as a result of the conversation.

This desired outcome may take time to formulate as you help him or her clarify the view of the problem. At the end of the conversation, the person declares what he plans to do next, even if the next step is to go away and think about what was discovered.

During the conversation, you will reflect and explore what underlies his assumptions, beliefs, feelings, desires, and fears until a new view of the situation emerges and it feels like progress has been made.

You will not follow linear steps. You may not end with a solid action plan, but it should be clear that the person is using a new awareness or perspective to assess the situation.

The acronym DREAM stands for these activities: D = Determine what the person wants as a desired outcome of the conversation

E = Explore what needs, desires, disappointments, and fears could be interfering or blocking a different perception A = Acknowledge the emerging awareness M = Make sure there is a plan or commitment for what is next The flow should feel spontaneous, not contrived, especially when you dive below the surface and use the unstructured, nonlinear steps of reflecting, exploring, and acknowledging.

Progress is spurred by the reflections you share and the questions you ask. This process is most successful when you shut down your analyzing, judging brain and listen with an open mind, heart, and gut.

I like to compare the DREAM model to the creative process that rappers experience when they are composing.

Neuroscientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders hooked up 12 professional rappers to a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and had them create a rap. They noticed that although the brain’s executive functions were active at the start and end of

42 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

the song, as they continued freestyle rapping the parts of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, critiquing, censoring, and editing were deactivated. The researchers explained that in this context the rappers were “freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control.”

As a result, sudden insights could easily emerge.4 Your aim is to create a similar process when using the DREAM model to coach someone to think differently. Once you establish the desired outcome the person wants to achieve, you switch off your inner critic and analyzer so that you can access your intuition. When you listen more deeply with your entire nervous system, including your heart and gut, the reflections you offer and the questions you ask will stimulate the person to stop, question his thinking, and discover what else could be true and possible.

There is an entire chapter on how to listen so that you know what to say in The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs.5 The exercises will help you develop deep listening skills to use in coaching your strongwilled employees in a way they will appreciate instead of resist.

You don’t have to be perfect at these skills to make a difference. Employees will appreciate being listened to this way. They want you to be present more than they need you to be perfect.

ILLUSTRATION, PHOTO CREDIT: COURTESY OF MARCIA REYNOLDS

R = Reflect on assumptions, beliefs, and reactions as the person tells his or her view of the situation (hold up a mental mirror by affirming what the person thinks and feels)

about the problem situation. They can’t see outside the box until they first see the box they are holding on to.

Sometimes they will see the gaps in their logic simply by telling their story. Then be curious about what they feel is most important, what could be causing their frustration, fear, impatience, or anger, and what they value in their current situation and may be attached to that is keeping them from trying out new behaviors.

In these conversations, you are a “thinking partner,” not the expert on what is good for them. You facilitate shifts in thinking through questions and reflective statements instead of by telling them your desires and opinions.

THE NET RESULTS

PITFALLS TO AVOID When you have that Discomfort Zone conversation with an employee, remember that this is not about you. Reference these points.

• Putting the focus on yourself. If you go into these conversations with a focus on achieving your goals or fixing people, you will only trigger defensiveness. Instead, consider how the conversation will benefit them. What are their goals?

What do you think they want to be more successful (not what you want for them, but what they actually want)? Do they want to be recognized as a leader? Do they want more respect from their peers? Do they want to be left alone to do their work instead of working with others? You must enter the conversation with the purpose of helping the person discover solutions for something important to him or her.

• Losing your emotional grounding. During the conversation, notice if you tense up or fall into arguing your point of view.

The moment your muscles tighten or your breathing shortens, take a deep breath and exhale to relieve the tension. The process could take a while before new ideas form.

A good practice is to choose an emotion you want to feel before the conversation. Select one word to use as an emotional anchor you can go back to when your impatience, anger, or fear arises. Consider what you want the other person to feel—inspired, hopeful, or courageous? Then occasionally remind yourself to feel this emotion too. Or maybe you know you need to feel calm, caring, or bold.

Choose one emotion word that you can breathe into your body to help you stay focused on the result you want.

Remember that if you are angry or disappointed with people, they won’t be open to having a conversation with you. They will likely be defensive in return. You need to set and maintain a positive emotional tone.

• Forgetting to listen. You can’t get people to change their minds until you have them lay out what they believe to be true

These conversations not only will give you have a better chance of changing the minds of your employees but also will improve engagement and retention. Your top talent wants you to listen to them and to trust that they can figure things out with some help in thinking problems through. They also want development opportunities that expand their minds and their skills. A survey published in the Harvard Business Review found that although young high achievers were given highvisibility jobs and increasing responsibilities, they were dissatisfied with the lack of mentoring and coaching they received.6 There seems to be a gap between what management thinks and what employees want, indicating that leaders aren’t listening.

Leaders who master the skills of helping others think through their blind spots, attachments, and resistance are both effective and the most remembered and revered of managers.

You can achieve these results by courageously coaching people with your head, heart, and gut. When you do, you may rattle, confuse, or make them angry…and then, they grow. AQ 1 Srinivasan S. Pillay. Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders. FT Press, 2011. Pages 132-137.

2 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Kahneman describes what happens when thinking is disrupted and new perception forms on pages 24, 33, 51, 89, 174.

3 Joseph Jaworski. Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996. The description of how Jaworski defines true leadership is on page 2 of the introduction, written by Peter Senge.

4 “This is Your Brain on Freestyle Rap: NIDCD Study Reveals Characteristic Brain Patterns of Lyrical Improvisation.” National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, Nov. 15, 2012. http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/news/releases/12/Pages/111512.aspx 5 Marcia Reynolds. The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs. Berrett-Koehler, 2014. The DREAM model is described in chapter two and how to listen from your head, heart and gut is taught in chapter three.

6 Monika Hamori, Jie Cao, Burak Koyuncu. “Why Top Young Managers Are in a Nonstop Job Hunt.” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2012. http://hbr.org/2012/07/why-top-young-managers-are-in-a-nonstop-job-hunt/

Marcia Reynolds, PhD, works with clients around the world who seek to develop effective leaders. She understands organizational cultures, what blocks communication and innovation, and what is needed to bring people together for better results. She is the author of The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs (Berrett-Koehler, 2014).

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 43

The Rise of a

New Model of Leadership

BY FREDERIC LALOUX

Many of us sense that our current management paradigm—the way we think about management and our organizational practices and processes— feels exhausted.

Survey after survey shows that the vast majority of employees are disengaged, and I don’t know a single business leader who doesn’t complain that his or her organization is too internally focused and too slow to change. After a few years of research, I’m convinced that we are witnessing the end of our current management model and the emergence of a new model that is radically more productive, more soulful, and more purposeful.

This may sound fanciful. Is it really possible to fundamentally reinvent management? But few people realize that every time humanity has shifted to a new stage in the course of history, it has also invented a radically new—and radically more powerful—manner to collaborate, a whole new organizational model.

I’ve been researching extraordinary pioneers who already operate with next-stage organizational structure and practices. What they achieve is just phenomenal. These are truly productive, soulful, and purposeful organizations. When this trend starts to generalize, there is no doubt that it will mean another leap in the human journey.

This worldview brought three fundamental management breakthroughs: innovation, for which organizations invented departments that didn’t exist before, such as R&D and marketing; meritocracy, or the idea that the mail boy can become the CEO; and accountability, with the notion that bosses only need to define the what, not the how, and that if you dangle carrots, people will run to you. Accountability has also given us the modern inventions of management by objectives, targets, budgets, and midterm planning. The combination of these three breakthroughs brought us the enormous and sudden explosion in prosperity and life expectancy that the world has seen over the past two centuries. This is the paradigm that governs most large business corporations today.

Yet some circles, such as academia and organizational development practitioners, are already deeply rooted in the next paradigm—the postmodern worldview. Postmodern organizations have emerged over the past 20 years or so.

PAST SHIFTS BROUGHT US HERE

The postmodern worldview is uncomfortable with modernity’s material obsession, with the sole pursuit of profit and market share. It values diversity and wants to make sure everyone’s values and voices are heard.

Every major stage in history has its own organizational model.

For instance, when humanity shifted to the age of civilization— the age of agriculture, government, and institutional religion— it also invented formal, hierarchical organizations. In this paradigm, the world is God-given, immutable; there are absolute rights and wrongs. The organizations this worldview produced are very stable and very hierarchical. Some obvious examples of organizations that are still shaped by this worldview today are the Catholic Church, large parts of the military, government agencies, and many public school systems. People have a place in the org chart and are interchangeable. Change and competition are viewed with suspicion because there is one right way to do things, and that doesn’t change.

So what are postmodern organizations? They are the likes of Southwest Airlines, Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, and the Container Store, for instance. These organizations have come up with three more breakthroughs. They have championed the notion of empowerment, the idea that people at the front line know best and that management needs to defer decisions down as low in the organization as possible. To do this, these companies work with values-driven cultures. We are frequently cynical about values because too often they are just buzzwords, but in these organizations, values really drive the culture and make empowerment possible, and this makes for vibrant, energetic workplaces. The third breakthrough is to embrace the stakeholders model instead of focusing narrowly on shareholder value alone.

With Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution came a whole different worldview. The world is no longer immutable.

It is a complex clockwork that can be understood by scientific exploration. The smarter and faster you are compared with others at understanding it, the bigger the prize for you. It is a worldview that is no longer driven by the question of what is right or wrong, but by the question of what works and what doesn’t.

THE NEXT MODEL STARTS TO EMERGE Yes, the rate of change is accelerating; it’s quite dizzying. It always starts at the individual level. Here is what is happening: A growing number of people go through an inner transformation, spontaneously or as a result of some personal or spiritual work. Suddenly they find their organizational environment to be lifeless and painful, inhospitable to the AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 45

“What is new? In this model, most aspects of management have been reinvented. There is no more pyramid, and there are no job descriptions, no targets, and no budgets! Instead, there are a host of new,

soulful practices.“

deeper longings of their soul. More and more executives, for instance, are leaving the corporate world, often to become coaches and consultants, because they don’t want to play in a system that they have outgrown. Teachers, doctors, and nurses are leaving their profession in droves, because the way we run our schools and hospitals is profoundly toxic when seen from a higher perspective.

In some ways, this is a terrible loss. The people who have the most to offer often are disillusioned with organizations. The problem is that we know what’s wrong with today’s organization. We sense that more must be possible, but we lack an articulation of how we could operate organizations from a higher ground. What I’ve been researching is people who went through this transformation and were crazy enough to decide to create a business, a nonprofit, a school, or a hospital, but on a whole new basis. They launched themselves and their employees into radical experiments, throwing all received wisdom overboard when it didn’t fit their values.

There are a dozen large organizations (many of them have several thousand employees) and a few smaller ones as well operating in all sorts of sectors in the United States and in Europe. There hasn’t been much written about these organizations before, if at all. These are not the Googles or Apples of this world. Their practices are much more radical, so much so that the rare articles written about them don’t really know how to define them. From a more conventional perspective, these organizations shouldn’t be able to function, and yet they do, and quite spectacularly so.

So, for instance, there is a 9,000-employee nursing organization, a 500-person automotive supplier, and a 600person chain of psychiatric hospitals. In my research, I was positively surprised at the breadth of industries—there are for-profits and nonprofits, blue-collar and white-collar organizations.

What is striking is the degree of similarity in the way these organizations work, even though they are in very different industries and didn’t know of each other. Some organizations have pushed the boundaries more in certain areas and less in others. But collectively, they allow us to describe in great detail the structures and practices that underpin this emerging model.

What is new? In this model, most aspects of management have been reinvented. For instance, there is no more pyramid,

46 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

and there are no job descriptions, no targets, and no budgets!

Instead, there are a host of new, soulful practices.

THE THREE BREAKTHROUGHS In looking at the most radical practices at these organizations, the first breakthrough is self-management. Some of these companies have cracked the way to structure very large organizations entirely without the boss-subordinate relationship.

The power hierarchy is entirely gone, replaced with much more powerful systems of distributed authority and intelligence that you find in complex ecosystems in nature. These new structures are made possible by a breakthrough decision-making mechanism that is far more powerful than traditional top-down or consensus decision-making mechanisms.

The second breakthrough can be characterized as striving for wholeness. Historically, organizations have always been places where people showed up wearing a mask. People often feel they have to shut out part of who they are when they dress for work in the morning to conform to the expectations of the workplace. In most cases, it means showing a masculine resolve, displaying determination and strength, and hiding doubts and vulnerability. The feminine aspects of the self— the caring, questioning, and inviting—are often neglected or dismissed. Rationality is valued above all other forms of intelligence. In most workplaces, the emotional, intuitive, and spiritual parts of ourselves feel unwelcome and out of place.

And most important, in most workplaces it isn’t acceptable to share our most intimate hopes and longings.

There is a conspiracy of fears at play that involves employees as much as their organizations. Organizations fear that if people were to bring all of themselves to work—their moods, quirks, and weekend clothes—things would quickly dissolve into a mess. Employees, for their part, fear that if they were to show up with all of who they are, they might expose their selfhood to criticism and ridicule and make themselves vulnerable.

The problem, of course, is that when we show up with only a narrow part of ourselves, we also come to work with only a small part of our energy, our creativity, and our passion.

Next-stage organizations are conscious of this enormous waste, and they put in place a great number of practices that support employees in their journey to wholeness, making it safe to bring all of who they are to work. Extraordinary things begin to happen when people stop leaving parts of themselves

behind. In wholeness we are life-full. We discover in awe how much more energy and creativity there is in us than we ever imagined.

The third breakthrough is evolutionary purpose. This one is often the most difficult to grasp at first. It stems from the way we view an organization. In this emerging paradigm, leaders view their organizations not just as a collection of people and assets, but as living entities that have their own soul, their own life force, their own sense of direction. This view has profound implications in all sorts of domains, including strategy, target setting, budgeting, product development, and so on.

Let’s take strategy. In today’s management paradigm, the CEO is the captain charting the strategic course. He needs to set a direction and goals. In the new paradigm, the organization has its own sense of direction, its own evolutionary purpose that it is called to manifest in the world. The role of leadership is not to impose a direction onto the organization. It is to listen to what the organization wants to become and then to dance with it. There are some beautiful practices, ranging from simple to profound, that people in these organizations use to listen in to the organization.

I’ll share another implication. The business world is obsessed with competition. One day, I was struck that none of the organizations I had researched ever talk about competition.

The reason, I found out, is simple: If an organization’s purpose is really paramount, and not just some slogan in the annual report, then there is no competition. Anybody else who pursues the same purpose is an ally to be embraced, not an enemy to be fought. There is a real level of fearlessness at play here. If another organization is better than us at pursuing our purpose, by all means, let them win! Life is abundant enough.

We’ll find something else to do.

That belief requires leaders who have embraced a whole new perspective.

The research shows that there are two necessary conditions to run an organization based on this new model. One is that the CEO has made the inner shift to this new paradigm. The second is that the board is also aligned. These are the two conditions, and they are the only two. For the rest, this model seems to work in every kind of industry and in every kind of

“If an organization’s purpose is really paramount, and not just some slogan in the annual report, then there is no competition.

Anybody else who pursues the same purpose is an ally to be embraced, not an enemy to be fought.“ geography, in organizations of a few people or of tens of thousands.

But meeting these two conditions is still a tall order. The conditions are, of course, easier to meet when some person who has gone through that shift starts a new organization.

TAKING ON THE NEW MODEL Of the 12 large organizations I researched, three used to operate along traditional lines before making the switch.

What’s quite fascinating, in some regards, is how easy the transformation can be if the CEO is committed. There will be resistance from some middle and senior managers, who will lose their command-and-control power with the switch to self-management, but after a while, almost everyone feels enormous relief and is energized by the new way of operating.

Many small to medium, and a few large, businesses are making the really radical leap to this new model, which is quite exciting. Schools and healthcare institutions also are resonating to this model, which I believe can help people work from a place of vocation again and live out the gifts they are to the world. For example, I’ve been talking with the management team of a chain of hospitals. These managers believe that the current trend—to seek economies of scale, resulting in ever-larger hospitals that become hugely complex and unmanageable—is exactly the wrong way to go. They have been inspired to prove that the solution to our healthcare problem is agile, small units of highly motivated and trusted care professionals who have the freedom to do what’s right for their patients. AQ Frederic Laloux works as an advisor, coach, and facilitator for corporate leaders who feel called to explore fundamentally new ways of organizing.

He is a former associate partner with McKinsey & Company.

Adapted, with permission of the publisher, from Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux. Copyright 2014, Frederic Laloux.

Published by Nelson Parker. Go to www.reinventingorganizations.com

AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015 I 47

OUR VIEW

The Path to INNOVATION I

nnovation. It’s a word that gets bandied about a lot, but it is also one that has a lot of meaning when it comes to leadership. Good leadership demands innovation. Recognizing when to invest in innovation is an essential skill for managers to develop. Just as you can learn the skills needed to be a good leader, you can learn how to innovate, to tap the creativity in yourself and others.

For the first time, and premiering in this issue, AMA is acknowledging the innovative executives and experts who had an impact on business in 2014. As part of our mission to be a forum for leading ideas and insights on management practices and trends, we asked readers to nominate those leaders they felt inspired them and the business world at large—those who led the way to different ways of thinking about customers, business operations, and breakthroughs in products.

Our readers responded with more than 200 nominations. Check out the Top 30 profiled in this issue. We’ll be featuring interviews from some of these leaders in our eNewsletters, podcasts, and web events in 2015.

How can we become more innovative? Some are born innovative leaders. Some can develop the skills to innovate instinctually, through time and experience. But the best way to learn is with others, through a more structured classroom experience.

AMA has several courses that can assist in developing innovation in leadership. For example, there is Creativity and Innovation: Unleash Your Potential for Greater Success. This hands-on seminar concentrates on teaching proven creative thinking techniques that can help generate new ideas and break through mental barriers.

Developing Team Creativity and Initiative is designed to help managers free up ideas and tap the talents of their teams.

These are just a few of the courses and seminars on offer that can help you become a more innovative, dynamic manager and leader. And maybe you can end up on an AMA Top 30 list in the future.

Edward T. Reilly President and CEO American Management Association

48 I AMA QUARTERLY I SPRING 2015

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