Creating Leaders for Tomorrow

Organizations rely on strong leadership to remain innovative and competitive. But they must commit to investing the time, staff and money to ensure they are giving leaders all the tools they need to be successful.

BY SCOTT BLANCHARD

If you saw the title of this article and thought to yourself, “This is nothing new,” you’re half right. The truth is that the topic might not be new, but investment in leadership development continues to be critically important — and the need to spread the word persists. Organizational success is driven by strong leadership, and companies that invest in leadership training consistently appear on most-admired and best-of lists. These businesses also enjoy higher revenue and profits, higher market share, and increased employee engagement and retention.

And yet, some companies still need to be convinced that leadership development relates directly to organizational success. That was the business case we were looking to confirm when researchers from The Ken Blanchard Cos. studied the

long-term positive impact of better leadership on organizational productivity and profitability. The study looked at four different factors: (1) the role of leadership capacity in driving organizational vitality; (2) what leaders can do to increase organizational performance; (3) the connections between leadership capacity, customer devotion and employee passion; and (4) how customer devotion and employee passion link to organizational vitality.

In analyzing the results of the study, five elements consistently rose to the top of the list in our findings. We created terms and definitions for each element, which follow, to incorporate a broader range of information. These five elements together provide a direct link to organizational success.

The Leadership-Profit Chain The first element is strategic leadership. It provides the vision, culture, strategic direction and metrics to measure the achievement of goals. It is essentially the “what” of the organization. The second element is operational leadership. It describes the procedures and policies that guide departments and employees in how to specifically contribute to the organizational goals. It is the “how” of the organization.

The third element, employee work passion, results from positive employee experiences and overall satisfaction with the organization’s policies, procedures and management practices. Hard measures of this element include retention, absenteeism, tenure and productivity. Soft measures are defined as employee perceptions of fairness, justice and trust. Customer devotion is the fourth element and represents the positive experiences customers have with a company’s products and services as well as its policies and procedures. Hard measures include customer retention, length of the customer relationship, number and size of transactions, and referrals. The soft measures include survey-based perceptions of quality, value, customer service, product expectations and overall customer satisfaction. The fifth element, organizational vitality, describes the success of the organization. Hard measures can be determined by revenue growth, profits, stock price, venture capital and operating costs. Soft measures include perceptions of public trust, employee commitment and the intent for employees to stay with the organization.

We call the results of this research the LeadershipProfit Chain because we found a direct link between these five elements and organizational success. Strategic and operational leadership directly influence employee work passion and customer devotion, which drive long-term success for the organization. Strategic leadership is the critical building block for setting the direction of the company. Operational leadership owns the role of making the vision and direction come alive. The connection between strategic and operational leadership allows for employees to understand where they are going in relation to the vision, to buy into the culture and what the company stands for, and to understand how to connect their work to the strategic initiatives.

If a gap occurs in this link, initiatives are either inconsistent or not executed at all. But when the link is strong, operational leadership is able to create practices and processes that build an environment where employees and customers can have positive experiences. Aligned operational leadership practices allow employees to be passionate about their work and create a highly engaged workforce.

We also determined a positive correlation between employee work passion and customer devotion. When employees are passionate about what they do, clear about roles and goals, and perceive the organization as fair and just in its treatment of co-workers and customers, their desire to serve the customer increases. This builds customer devotion, which is a key driver of organizational success.

Strategic and operational leadership directly influence employee passion and customer devotion.

The Leadership-Profit Chain model serves as a mental blueprint for creating and sustaining success — but leaders must have the skills to build a motivating, trusting work environment. This is where an organization’s investment in leadership development plays a crucial role. But some companies don’t know where to start to create a lasting development plan that sets their leaders up for success.

Building a Leadership Curriculum

Ensuring your leaders have the skills they need to maintain organizational strategies to support and develop their direct reports requires that learning and development professionals and training managers create an effective curriculum for developing people into trusted professional managers. Since managers are responsible for what their direct reports do and, to some degree, how they feel — especially the emotional connection they establish with their job — companies

need to make sure their managers and leaders have the right skills to be successful in every phase of the leadership journey.

This can seem like a daunting task because leaders need different skills at different stages in their careers. A complete and balanced curriculum will include training not only in managing people, but also in areas such as business and financial acumen, influencing, negotiating, emotional intelligence, technology and industry trends. The purpose of this type of curriculum is to focus on the specific skills leaders at each level need to work directly with their teams to produce results. A curriculum for a leadership journey must include development for new managers, midlevel managers, senior leaders and executives.

For example, people who are first-time managers often have had no leadership skills training. Many are promoted into leadership positions because they were high-achieving individual contributors — but the skills that helped them perform at a high level in their previous role don’t always transfer to the new role of manager. Research from Zenger Folkman, “We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders,” published by Harvard Business Review, indicates that most managers don’t receive training until they are about 10 years into their managerial career. This is damaging to both the individual and the organization. Further studies by CEB (now Gartner) Learning and Development Roundtable show that 60 percent of new managers underperform and often develop negative habits that are hard to break or hold them back for years. New managers need to have training early in order to set them up for success and to stop the possibility of ingraining bad habits.

New managers also need foundational skills in communication to establish positive, productive relationships with their staff. They need to learn how to have conversations to set clear goals, to provide feedback about performance, to praise a job well done and to redirect efforts when necessary. Listening is a critical part of an effective conversation, and managers must learn to set aside distractions and concentrate on each interaction. They must also learn how to ask questions to draw out insights and ideas from the other person, and how to share information that is needed to help move the situation forward and build self-assurance and enthusiasm.

Middle managers, on the other hand, need advanced skills to manage their new reality. They are in the unique position of needing to support their own staff and manage the relationship with their senior leaders while still working on their own projects. They are the link between frontline workers and senior leaders, so communication skills continue to be important. Additionally, midlevel leaders typically manage more people, teams and projects than in their previous position, so time is a valuable commodity. Middle managers are responsible for the operational aspect of leadership. Being able to diagnose the needs of each employee to determine how much support, direction and day-to-day coaching they need enables everyone to work efficiently and productively. Leaders who realize that people need different levels of management depending on the task they are working on will be able to offer the appropriate leadership style for the situation. When people get the level of direction and support they need, they perform better and have improved morale — and their managers are able to create a work environment that is stimulating and productive.

Leaders need different skills at different stages in their careers.

Senior leaders are the strategic arm of the organization. They are responsible for setting direction and communicating it in a clear manner so organizational culture is defined and goals can be met. Senior leaders are an essential element to the success of an organization — yet many times they aren’t included in development plans. As a result, they often lack access to objective, ongoing feedback and could have blind spots and unproductive behaviors that might lead to less-than-stellar performance.

Executive coaching is an excellent resource that can help senior leaders develop their full potential and ability to positively impact organizational goals, objectives and ultimate success. The one-to-one relationship between a senior leader and a coach provides a confidential and neutral sounding board for discussing challenges and opportunities in a safe environment. Coaches provide senior leaders with the personal support they need to quickly sharpen their leadership capabilities, tackle tough business challenges and seize new opportunities.

Learning Journeys

A comprehensive leadership development curriculum includes offerings for all levels of leaders — new, middle and senior. Throughout the curriculum, leaders should use a learning journey approach to learn new content over time. Each step in the learning journey design starts with the actual learning experience. This is followed by an opportunity for the leader to go back to their workplace, apply the new concepts

Hiring and firing around the world New webinar explores how to avoid legal entanglement while building a successful global team By Adina Sapp

Many companies look outside the U.S. to access a larger and more diverse talent pool than they can otherwise access. However, intricacies of country-specific labor laws present HR challenges and legal snags that are quite different from what we take for granted in the U.S. When working across borders and cultures, it’s essential to learn the requirements before hiring your first international employee or contractor. To bring awareness to surprising facts about international labor markets, Andrea Dumont, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Globalization Partners, presented Hiring & Firing Around the World: Avoid Legal Tripwires in the Top Countries for Global Expansion. Guests Francisco Mendez and Justin Hill, Senior Managers of Global Operations for Latin America and the United Kingdom respectively, shared real-world scenarios and solutions. Packed with information, this quick, helpful webinar provides an overview of legal and cultural considerations along with tips on how to build a successful global team.

Reasons to go global

Winning the war for talent is a key motivator for employers looking beyond U.S. borders. There are several operational and financial benefits for doing so: competitive global salaries, access to new markets, and around-the-clock revenue generation. Companies can also take advantage of business-friendly tax policies. Top international markets include Canada, the

United Kingdom, Singapore, Mexico, and China. These markets provide a thriving business

ecosystem, a diverse and skilled workforce, and strategic market entry. For example, technology companies look to Latin America due to its highly skilled workforce and cost effectiveness, as compared to the U.S. The problem is, you can’t just hire anyone, anywhere. At-will employment is unique to the U.S. and does not resonate across borders.

Common tripwires

Despite the attractiveness of global hiring potential, employers should be aware of legal and customary differences when hiring in other countries. Three common tripwires include:

1. HIRING COMPLIANTLY. (not just contracting) with an entity that meets the country’s laws.

2. MANAGING EFFECTIVELY. over time zones, communication styles, and customs.

3. TERMINATING LEGALLY. in accord with the country’s laws.

Hiring internationally isn’t as simple as selecting employees and getting them set up from an IT perspective; employers must set up a subsidiary to run payroll and taxes. They must also ensure the new hires meet the country’s requirements regarding expertise and maintain compliance over time. Benefits, salary requirements, and severance packages also differ across borders. For example, pre-employment background checks aren’t customary in other countries the way they are in the U.S., as privacy laws are very strict in countries such as Singapore and the United Kingdom. It is very important to know

what you can and can’t ask in different parts of the world to avoid legal entanglement. Onboarding overseas can be challenging, and there are intricacies of country-specifi c employment law, termination procedures, and communication practices that must be considered to avoid potential legal exposure, litigation, and costly payouts. Some employers seek to bypass these diffi culties by hiring contractors rather than full-time employees. However, the risks may outweigh the benefi ts. Without full knowledge of the country’s requirements for contract work, inadvertent misclassifi cation may lead to hefty fi nes, back taxes, and potential audits. Additionally, companies are more likely to attract and retain the best talent when going the employment route. Improper termination can be very costly and time-consuming. At-will employment is a U.S. practice not found in other countries. At the same time, layoffs and restructuring aren’t possible in some countries. In Latin America, although prior notice isn’t required, dismissal justifi cation is quite different than in the U.S. and dismissed employees may seek legal advice. In the UK, the length of time an employee has worked for a company dictates the required

notice period, which increases substantially over time for more senior positions. Maternity/ breastfeeding leave is also protected quite strictly in some countries, such as China.

Strategies for success

To set your company up for success from the

beginning, it’s essential to thoroughly research the requirements prior to making your fi rst international hire. It may also be a good idea to invest in local employment law expertise. Keeping employees engaged across time zones and language differences will require a pre-emptive management and communication strategy, and 68% of employees on global teams say their companies struggle to understand local practices and cultures. Learning customs and adjusting for culturally preferred communication styles such as in-person conversations, video calls, chat, and email will help you build trust and manage more effectively. Above all, don’t forget the human element. Global expansion isn’t just business, it’s personal. To watch the webinar Hiring & Firing Around the World, visit workforce.com.

Good Leaders Don’t Always Delegate How Leaders Can Stimulate Learning and Self-Discovery with After Action Reviews

By Adina Sapp

“The After Action Review (AAR) is a versatile and powerful process that leaders can use to keep teams at their best,” said Col. (Retired) Robert Hughes, clinical assistant professor and managing director of executive education at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “This process is a best practice of the military that easily transfers to the corporate world but is often underused or not used to the full potential.” Hughes is an expert in leadership, change management, and organizational development. Prior to joining Kellogg in 2015, he served as the chief of force management and integration at the Department of the Army. In that role, Hughes’ team oversaw the Army’s planning process and cross-functional integration of complex organizational change, the scope of which encompassed nearly 6,000 organizations and 1 million personnel. While the AAR shares similarities with the Scrum “retrospective” or the PMI “lessons learned,” there are important differentiators that make it a learning event and not just another meeting or process review. A typical review assesses progress, resource availability, and priorities, whereas an AAR is a powerful learning mindset focused on individual and collective improvement.

Leadership

Successful AARs depend on humble leadership and an atmosphere of psychological safety. Behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard is credited with the concept of psychological safety, which she defined as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” 1 Leaders have the power to create or destroy psychological safety.

To set the right conditions, leaders can use what Hughes calls the 5 P’s:

“Open-ended questions set the conditions for intangible magic.” — Col. (Retired) Robert Hughes

•Prioritize. AARs as important learning events. • Plan. AARs into the event, project, process, or client timeline. • . Create an environment of psychological safety 2 . • . Be present to guide the discussion. • . Enable everyone to participate; do not dominate. “This is not a time to delegate to someone else,” Hughes said. “The leader needs be present, set the right tone, and use open-ended questions. AARs are fueled by self-discovery and a growth mindset that enables the team to learn from success, failure, and everything in between.”

Growth Mindset

Gordon Sullivan’s book Hope Is Not a Method: What Business Leaders Can Learn from America’s Army describes how the United States Army successfully navigated large scale change and laid the path for transformation in the 1990s. Sullivan points to AARs as the key that enabled the Army to become a learning organization. The Army’s definition of an AAR is “a professional discussion of an event, focused on performance standards, that enables soldiers to discover for themselves what happened, why it happened, and how to sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses.” 3

Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford noted that “in a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work — brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” 4

together as a team and learn from what we’ve done.”

Organizational Effectiveness

Much research has been done on what organizations can learn from the Army’s experience with AARs. As one writer put it, “Every day, soldiers gain experience in the performance of their duties and responsibilities. That experience, if processed well, can be an abundant and continuous source of learning. The Army’s After Action Review process is representative of this form of learning.” 5

A study done on the use of AARs to promote organizational and systems learning in emergency preparedness found that when “insights and experiences are gathered together in documents such as AARs and critically analyzed, they comprise an opportunity to identify common and/or recurring systems-level challenges.” 6 That benefits both the individual and the team. “By analyzing its experience, a team or service branch

can correct mistakes and errors and thereby make incremental improvements to actions already designed and implemented.” 7

Some leaders find it challenging to implement AARs when it is not an organizational practice. “But the answer is, your team can use them even if your whole organization isn’t,” Hughes said. Individual leaders can build momentum by setting the tone and talking to the team about what the AAR truly is: a learning event that is focused on getting better. “The open-ended questions set the tone for teams to identify tangible things they can do to improve their performance in the future. And that’s the intangible magic,” Hughes said. The benefits may be immeasurable, but they are very powerful: communication, motivation, cohesiveness, trust, and continual improvement. Learn more about AARs from Col. (Ret) Hughes at these Kellogg programs: Enterprise Leadership Program — http://kell.gg/kxelp The Leader Within — http://kell.gg.kxlsphere

Whether the goal is to create a standalone solution or fashion part of a complex talent development initiative, Kellogg Executive Education focuses on how individuals and organizations can transform themselves. We offer specific plans and pathways for professional growth and functional development for individuals and teams as well as broader strategies for enterprise-wide executive development efforts.

Sometimes You Should Get in the Weeds Taking a granular look at learning content to engage all learners. By Adina Sapp

L&D leaders need to deliver meaningful content to learners and ensure that learning programs align with business goals. To do so, they must understand all four dimensions of content curation within the context of their organization: people, processes, technology, and the content itself. “You can’t limit yourself to high-level information,” said Stephen Casbeer, principal consultant at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). “This is a time to get into the weeds.” Implementing a learning content management system (LCMS) enables L&D leaders and their teams to manage learning content at the granular level. Whether a company internally develops, sources on the web, subscribes to, or purchases content, the LCMS should enable it to be connected, linked, and packaged in a way that can be distributed meaningfully, without duplication, and in a rights- and mission-compliant manner. An LCMS enables content authors to collaborate, create, and assemble learning content for distribution across a variety of channels and formats, including an LMS, PDF, print course, mobile app, or website for consumption by learners. The LCMS should also be able to add metadata, provide semantic analysis, manage relationships among the content, and organize it for delivering into the learning environment. “Ultimately, you must have a good grasp on how content is organized at your organization, understand the learners and their roles, and be very familiar with the work processes and formatting,” Casbeer said.

Selecting an LCMS and Partner That Will Enable Business Goals

“One of the things that’s key for L&D leaders is to be able to adopt methodologies that ensure actions are aligning with the goal of the business, and to understand that technology is the enabler — not the center — of those things,” Casbeer continued. “There have been a number of failed attempts at implementing LCMS, and often the reason was that the technology couldn’t do what the organizations wanted it to do or the organizations didn’t fully consider a content strategy and how content structure can lead to efficiencies, agility, and future freedom of action.” A good LCMS partner will help L&D leaders look at the ecosystem of their environment and recommend paths that will help them achieve business goals. “Many organizations need to have a clearer understanding of their content curation methodologies and find opportunities for improving the skills, processes, or technologies that will help the team become more productive,” Casbeer said.

Doing the Groundwork to Understand the Current Situation and Move Toward Content Agility

When researching LCMS platforms and partners, L&D leaders need to ensure they’re fully familiar with the tools and processes already in place, as well as the people who manage and use them. “The people on the ground live with the pain of developing and curating content with their current tools and processes. So, digging into what they have today may help L&D leaders find they’re doing things that are really hard with the tools they have in place,” Casbeer said. “Once you have a clear picture of the current state, you can then identify areas that need attention.” The learning world changes fast and L&D must be able to respond quickly to changes in the organizational strategy, employee behavior, and the marketplace. “If the content curators are hampered by the organization’s technology

and processes, it hampers the learning leader in responding effectively to the business, which in turn hampers the learners,” Casbeer said. “When a leader starts asking how to engage learners, how to fit into the workflow, and how to address these needs, they need to address what is going on in the organization’s technology and processes.” New technology won’t fix things all by itself. “The real message is to understand the impact that your people’s productivity has on your ability as a leader to achieve the goals of the business. We don’t want to limit or restrict future action. Putting together a content and process strategy “ Putting together a content and process strategy that allows future freedom of action is a mantra that L&D leaders should have.”

that allows future freedom of action is a mantra that L&D leaders should have,” Casbeer said. A good LCMS partner can help facilitate a discussion with you and your team around what’s working and what could be improved in your current content development and management workflows, processes for tagging and organizing content, and your existing technology stack. Copyright Clearance Center’s (CCC) background in publishing provides a good perspective to driving forward the content in organizations. “We understand the power that can be unleashed with content in order to enable future freedom of action and content agility in the organization, but we know we can’t deliver content management services and professional services in a vacuum. We start by listening to the customer,” Casbeer said. Learn more about content and knowledge management solutions from CCC at: www.copyright.com/ckms

Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) builds unique solutions that connect content and rights in contextually relevant ways through software and professional services. CCC helps people navigate vast amounts of data to discover actionable insights, enabling them to innovate and make informed decisions. CCC, with its subsidiary RightsDirect, collaborates with customers to advance how data and information is integrated, accessed, and shared while setting the standard for effective copyright solutions that accelerate knowledge and power innovation. CCC is headquartered in Danvers, Mass., with offices across North America, Europe and Asia. To learn more about CCC, visit www.copyright.com.

Chief Chaos Officer

Allergan’s head of talent, Soni Basi, helps employees chart their future in a company that is in a constant state of change.

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

Soni Basi is no stranger to disruption. Throughout her career, the current executive director of global talent for Allergan has worked through multiple mergers and acquisitions, shepherding thousands of employees through massive cultural and structural change as their companies and teams were merged or dissolved.

After holding a talent leadership role at the global pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough (now part of Merck), which went through two major acquisitions in three years, she spent six years at the Estee Lauder Cos. “I liked that their brand focus was on creating confidence,” said Basi, who has a doctorate in social psychology from Bowling Green State University.

She also loved that at the time Estee Lauder was a greenfield environment for talent development. When she joined the company in 2011, there was little formal structure around talent development and performance management. “It was ripe for innovation,” she said. In her time there she built multiple global talent programs to support the company’s 40,000 employees and took charge of global onboarding, career development, learning and development, and other talent management programs. “My team made a significant impact and met many of the objectives of the CEO,” she said. She was happy at Estee Lauder, but in 2016, she heard that Allergan, a global pharmaceutical company headquartered in Ireland, had gone through a failed $160 billion merger with Pfizer. A former colleague from Schering-Plough, Karen Ling, was the chief human resources officer of Allergan at the time, and Basi reached out to ask if she could do anything to help them cope.

Ling’s response: Come work for us. “We had been looking for a head of talent for a while, and Soni had a great reputation,” said Ling, who is now CHRO for

American International Group. “I wanted someone like her on my team.” Ling especially liked Basi’s analytical approach to HR. “She understands the science of HR, and she’s great with numbers,” Ling said. “She is also practical in her approach.” “People build careers by making courageous moves. Nothing is reliant on holding one specific role anymore.” — Soni Basi, global talent leader, Allergan

Basi in turn appreciated Allergan’s combined focus on pharma and beauty products, which felt like a natural fit given her past jobs. She also liked that because the Pfizer deal fell through, Allergan was in a position to build its own talent processes from scratch. “It was a blank slate, which is a great way to enter an organization,” Basi said. So, she took the job.

Change Is the Only Constant

Basi’s experience managing employees in the aftermath of mergers and acquisitions was perfectly suited to Allergan’s needs. The $15.79 billion company was built as the result of many rapid product and business acquisitions made over the course of just a few years. These included five company acquisitions in 2015 and another eight in 2016.

The rapid rate of growth through acquisition meant projects and teams were changing constantly, with roles coming and going as needs arose and positions evolving to accommodate new products, skills and market changes.

“It was all very good for the stock price and bottom-line, but the question was how to bring together all of those different cultural perspectives,

32 processes and procedures,” said Jon Green, a partner with Deloitte Consulting’s Human Capital Practices, who worked with Basi on Allergan’s talent transformation. “Allergan had to decide who it was going to be,” he said.

That’s where Basi came in. Early employee surveys showed Allergan employees didn’t understand the career paths in the company and wanted a tool to help them chart their future in the new environment. However, Basi recognized that because the company culture was built around a constant pace of change, she couldn’t follow a traditional approach of mapping careers based on structured moves from one role to the next. So, she and her team came up with a more flexible solution and called it My Allergan Career.

My Allergan Career is an adaptable career path planning tool for all of Allergan’s roughly 17,000 employees based on the skills that employees need to move up in the organization rather than defining precise career paths for every position. “There is no one pathway to success at Allergan,” explained Mitra Agcaoili, executive director of talent management and acquisition at Allergan. “So instead of defining specific roles, we looked at the skills people needed to do well in those roles.”

By defining ideal combinations of skills and linking them to various roles, employees can figure out which skills they already have, what skills they still need, and what roles, learning programs and stretch assignments they should pursue to close the gaps. They also decided to align compensation with skill development rather than positions. This ensures employees can pursue lateral or even lower-level roles that will help them develop desirable skills without sacrificing pay. “It shows that we back our careers philosophy with our compensation philosophy,” Basi said. Career Mapping Through Storytelling

To create the tool, Basi and her team interviewed hundreds of leaders in “representative roles” from across the company. In these interviews, which they captured on video, the leaders talked about their career stories, the opportunities they had that helped them climb the corporate ladder and the skills that have helped them to be successful in these roles. Using these stories, Basi’s team mapped the skills needed for hundreds of different careers throughout the organization.

The tool lets employees see what skills they need to land different roles and to create their own career paths to get to where they want to go. “We showed people what they needed to do to succeed but said, ‘the path you choose is your own,’” Agcaoili said. By providing employees with this flexible career development option, Basi’s team hopes to improve their employee experience while fostering more career mobility within the organization.

Basi noted that many of the most impactful moments from the interviews were not the lists of experiences and job titles, but the interactions these leaders had with peers and mentors. “They told stories about when they felt uncertain about themselves until someone believed in them,” she said. “The storytelling was the biggest component of the project.” These moments demonstrate the importance of networking and helped her communicate the value of taking lateral positions to learn new skills. “People “Instead of defining specific roles, we looked at the skills people needed to do well in those roles.” — Mitra Agcaoili, executive director, talent management and acquisition, Allergan Soni Basi, global talent leader at Allergan, worked with her team to implement a career path planning tool for the company’s 17,000 employees, helping them realize which skills they had and which skills they would need for desired roles.

build careers by making courageous moves,” Basi said. “Nothing is reliant on holding one specific role anymore.”

The project took months to complete and required significant financial support from the executive team — though Basi was able to pull it off. “She was great at getting leaders to collaborate on that project,” Ling said.

Basi’s appeal was that she never forced anyone to participate. Instead, she shared her vision for the tool and explained how their stories could help other Allergan employees follow in their footsteps. Then she asked for their feedback on the project and used what they shared to make it better. “Even though all of the leaders are overworked, they all made time for her because she inspired and motivated them,” Ling said. “They saw how their stories would benefit others.” That grassroots support helped Basi get the resources she needed to build the program and generate buy-in for it across the company. “She put herself out there and dealt with any push-back that came,” Green said. When she faced doubters, Basi educated them on the value it would bring to employee engagement, leadership development and talent management. “She made it stick,” Green said. When her team launched My Allergan Careers in April 2019, employees immediately loved it, according to Agcaoili. “It did more than just provide a road map.” The tool made it easier for employees to reach out to leaders whose career stories they’d seen, to ask for advice and possible mentoring. “It’s become the new norm around here,” she said. “It shifted the mindset of who you can talk to about your future.”

Tell Me About Yourself

While My Allergan Career is one of the biggest initiatives Basi has undertaken since joining the Allergan team, it’s one of many efforts she’s led.

She’s also proud of a series of new training programs she deployed in 2019 to help Allergan employees tell their own career stories. The program, called Pitch Perfect, includes a course on how to talk about yourself internally, how to talk about yourself on LinkedIn and how to be more inclusive in your language.

This program is also tied to Allergan’s history of acquisitions. So many employees are new to the company, and going through changes in their teams and roles, they needed a way to promote themselves for new opportunities, Basi explained.

Pitch Perfect was originally a simple idea in response to the constant pace of change, but as soon as she launched it she knew she’d tapped into a serious unmet need. “Right away we had 500 people on the waiting list,” she said. “There was so much interest, it was clearly something people wanted.”

Basi prepares her people to thrive in constantly changing workplace environments.

The courses cover how people present themselves, how they tell the story of themselves and how they should answer questions about their work experience in a way that demonstrates their value. Basi was surprised at how challenging that could be for some people. “When you ask them what sets them apart, they don’t know how to answer,” she said. Many learners would give a list of titles or projects rather than showcasing what they accomplished in those roles.

She loves to see their reaction when she helps them shift their narrative. “They see how they add value for the organization,” she said. “It has been very meaningful.”

The Next Acquisition

These new communication skills will likely come in handy in the coming year. In October 2019, Allergan shareholders approved a $63 billion acquisition by AbbVie, the U.S. biopharmaceutical company that spun off from Abbott Laboratories in 2013.

This means Allergan employees are facing yet another giant shake-up.

Fortunately, Basi has been preparing them to thrive in a constantly changing workplace environment. “I don’t know what the future holds with AbbVie,” she said. “But I want to give our people a solid set of tools and resources that will help them through these times of change.” CLO

Americus Reed II Professor of Marketing Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

So, you are an identity heorist. What exactly is that? An identity theorist is a scholar who studies how products, services, brands and organizations become “internalized” as part of a consumer’s sense of self-expression, identity, aspirational self and a badge of identity. We explore the question through the lens of social psychology to understand how these objects become fused with a sense of self. When this happens, it creates what I have coined as “identity loyalty”— which means that the product, service, brand or organization becomes one with self and vice versa, and the person becomes an “advocate” of that product, service, brand or organization such that they are willing to defend it against competitive attacks in the marketplace, they are willing to pay more for it, and they become one man one woman walking marketing departments for FREE.

What are some of the triggers that lead consumers to identify with and become loyal to a product, brand or logo? What happens is that what I mention above usually is not by accident. A really savvy product, brand, service or organization depicts and describes itself carefully LESS in terms of “what it does” and MORE in terms of WHY it does what it does. This deeper sociological “narrative” is the social glue that connects potentially with consumers because that WHY resonates with a sense of how that consumer desires to see themselves. When the “values” of the brand, product, service or organization are in alignment with that of the consumer (through clear articulation of that “WHY,”) you get this consequence of “identity loyalty.”

OFFICIAL KEYNOTES OF THE 2020 SPRING SYMPOSIUM Catch them all!

Americus Reed II Mon | April 6 | 1:30 PM Calusa Ballroom Melissa Schilling Tue | April 7 | 1:30 PM Calusa Ballroom Caroline Webb Wed | April 8 | 11:30 AM Calusa Ballroom

In your book, “Quirky,” you discuss the commonalities of creative genius shared by the likes of Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and more. Can you share some of those commonalities? All of the innovators were, not surprisingly, very intelligent. But what was more notable were the things that they had in common that we might not have expected, and that made them differ from averages we might expect from a randomly drawn population. For example, almost all of them expressed a significant social detachment or disregard for social norms. This is part of what facilitated them in generating and pursuing unusual ideas and persisting with them even in the face of criticism. They all also exhibited extremely high levels of self-efficacy (i.e., faith that they could overcome all obstacles to achieve their goals), which is a big part of why they were willing to doggedly pursue ideas that other people thought were impossible. Nearly all of them were very idealistic and had very high need for achievement, which led them to work very long hours, often disregarding their own comfort, health or even families. They were also ALL self-made; that is, none of them started with significant resources and several started in a position of extreme poverty. Many of them were not as formally educated as you might expect, but ALL of them were self-educators (i.e., they were avid readers and would train themselves to a very advanced level in a range of topics). Melissa Schilling Professor and Author Quirky

Of the eight serial innovators you look at, only one, Marie Curie, is a woman. Why are women less likely to be serial innovators? For most of the time period I studied, women were shunned from business and science, and in many cases, they weren’t allowed to pursue higher education. In fact, Marie Curie traveled to France to pursue higher education because women were not allowed to attend college in her home country of Poland. This meant that women were very unlikely to show up as serial breakthrough innovators in technology and science (the focus of my book), though women were undoubtedly innovating in other areas (art, home goods, textiles, etc.) The other important aspect to remember is that all of the serial breakthrough innovators who were successful enough to be selected by my research protocol were obsessively focused on their innovation and worked with a single-mindedness that was extreme. It would have been very hard to reconcile this kind of work with being a primary childcare provider, and over the time period I studied, women were typically the primary childcare providers of the family. Marie Curie demonstrates this tension poignantly — she basically gave her children to her father-in-law to raise, and after her death, one of her daughters wrote extensively of the loneliness and pain she felt by not having received more of her mother’s attention. Marie Curie herself wrote to her daughter that it was not necessary to live such an “anti-natural” existence as the one she chose for herself; she wrote that she had chosen it because she loved science.

What can leaders do to help their people have good days at work, ultimately enhancing their happiness and performance? Recognize that people perform best when they feel like they’re doing something that matters and when they feel respected and supported by their colleagues. And small changes can do a lot to boost people’s sense of purpose and connection — making sure team meetings cover recent successes and their impact, for example, rather than just upcoming tasks. What are some things many companies and leaders are currently doing wrong? When leaders care deeply about what’s at stake, they can be tempted to expect their colleagues to be ‘always on. But research has found that people reach better insights if they have a chance to step away from a task and then return to it with fresh eyes. People also work faster and make fewer mistakes when they’re not multitasking, with messages bombarding them as they’re trying to think. It would be great to see more leaders realizing that their teams will be smarter and more productive if they’re encouraged to take breaks and go offline periodically. Caroline Webb Executive Coach and Author How to Have a Good Day SEVENSHIFT

Based on behavioral science, what makes humans go into fight-or-flight mode? What sparks so much workplace anxiety? Our brain is constantly scanning the world around us for potential threats to defend against. While that means we can react fast in a crisis, the fight-or-flight response unfortunately also reduces activity in parts of the brain associated with sophisticated thinking, which is why we do silly things when stressed. And small things are enough to put our brain on the defensive. Anything that threatens our sense of competence or control can do it — for example, being criticized or put on the spot in a meeting. The same goes for anything that undermines our sense of social standing — being talked over in a meeting or excluded from an email chain, say. The good news is that anything that boosts our self-worth will reduce the sense of threat and help us think more clearly again. That’s why appreciation is so important in the workplace.

Psychological safety is something people talk a lot about these days. How can employers build a psychologically safe environment? And what might that look like? It’s normal for there to be disappointments and missteps in the workplace, especially when a company is trying to do something new. Psychologically safe environments help people do their best work under pressure by keeping everyone’s brains off the defensive when something goes wrong. Instead of blame or irritation (“How could you have let this happen? Why didn’t you check with me?”), the focus is on learning (“What does this tell you? What does that mean you should do differently?”). There’s still clear accountability, but with the second approach you’re far more likely to get creative thinking about solutions.