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Interesting because any company I've been a part of that has tried to implement Six Sigma has done so through the use of consultants and uptraining only the highest levels of management, which could explain its spectacular failure.

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The steps of Six Sigma for quality improvement.

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Important because quality is integral to performance.

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Quality Assurance vs Quality Control - Learning Resources | ASQ

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Quality assurance and quality control refer to ways of ensuring the quality of a service or product. Click to learn more.

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The important differences between power and control in leadership.

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Many leaders, especially those new to leadership roles, make the mistake of wanting control over the actions people take rather than power over the people.

The rationale for this preference is different for different people.

A supervisor I managed many years ago was promoted to a management role on the other side of the country. I called him a month or so after his promotion to see how he was settling in being a manager rather than a supervisor.

He said he was finding in difficult. Supervisors would not do what he wanted and no matter how many times he demonstrated how things should be done, they did not comply. No matter how much he showed his displeasure they might conform for a while and then they would revert to "the way they had always done it".

I enquired whether he had asked for their views on the changes he wanted to make. He said, "Yes". I asked him what he did with their advice. He said, "I explained to them why it was wrong and told them they needed to change. I then showed some of the guys on the floor what they should be doing too."

"What did they do with your requested changes", I further enquired.

"Nothing", came the reply.

I then enquired how he would have felt if I came into his area when I was his manager and started to tell him what he was doing wrong. "I would have not liked it", he commented.

"What about it would you not have liked?" I probed further.

"I would not have liked you telling me what to do and doing my job for me", he sighed the reply.

He was trying to control what they did and what their subordinates did rather than exert influence over them.

Power over a person means that we can influence what the other person does.

It is much better to have and to cultivate power than to try to exercise direct control. For one thing, if, as a manager, you are directly controlling what everyone does then you will be limited to running a very small organisation well or a larger organisation badly. Span of control and twenty-four hours in a day does not permit anything else to happen.

So if power over people is better, how do we as individuals build our power base and as managers help others to build their power?

Legitimate power can be increased by changing reporting lines, getting higher levels of authority and, sadly with some people, by changing titles and the trappings of office.

What is termed "Reward Power" can be increased simply by doing things for people. The sense of obligation that exists to do something to deserve the "reward" freely given is high in most people. In any new organisation where I am going to spend a lot of time, I know to make life easy for the personal assistants of the key people. Being flexible, polite and engaging builds a bank of rewards that one day, in most cases, will be redeemable.

Expert power can be changed by taking on extra learning and volunteering for cross functional projects to get greater breadth of expertise or by concentrating on a niche to get greater depth of expertise.

When I had my first ever serious discussion with a boss about my career development, he showed me a matrix with six boxes in it. Each box had a broad level of competence he wanted to "cross-off" to increase his likelihood of influencing Human Resources and senior management to progress his career. The jobs he had chased since joining the company were those jobs which ticked off a specific box. He was not seeking increased legitimate power in his career development; he was seeking increased expert power.

Confident, assertive (not aggressive) people have referent power. In my experience, leaders who lack expert and or referent power are more likely to want to control than influence.

My wife of more than thirty years is a good example. (I have to be careful here, she proof reads my articles).

Going back thirty years ago, my wife did not have much legitimate power and although she built rapport readily, by working hard at it, she did not have referent power. She needed, however, to have control to feel comfortable and relaxed about her daily life. She did not like change.

She also had a great sense of right and wrong and when leading groups wanted to control what they did to make sure they did what was "right". When things were done which were not "right" she fell back automatically to legitimate, and at times, coercive power.

Fast forward thirty years and I increasingly see a powerful woman who relies on expert power occasionally and referent power most of the time.

"What changed?" you might asked. The answer is always many things but one example of how people can develop referent power and should be encouraged to develop referent power involves her work with choirs.

She always played music and loved singing. On our return to Australia some eight years ago she agreed to take on the administrative/leadership role of a choir she had joined. She had some experience in Fiji and in London of leading groups and felt she could cope.

Using the most severe yardstick, she didn't. She hated cold calling looking for gigs. She did not delegate much. She did not like being directed by the head office in Canberra. She was not in control of the choir and did not like it. She resigned. She desperately wanted to sing but was upset enough that she left the choir for a short while. Some time after rejoining she was asked to take on the role again.

She made a better fist of the job this time. She delegated more, she forced herself to cold call looking for gigs and began to realise that it was not so hard once she had a "script" of the things to say. The control issue though had not gone away completely.

The remarkable moment came when she was asked to conduct the choir, the choirmaster of the time having moved overseas. She found something she was passionate about. She found something that did indeed give her high doses of power, legitimate power. After all, a conductor conducts and a choir follows.

Within weeks, she was transformed. The legitimate power had morphed into referential power. She was consulting with the choir members, innovating to make life easier for them, making choir more fun and challenging them as individuals and as a choir but knowing when to take a step back when the change is too much.

She now conducts three choirs a week as her reputation has spread. She is confident and caring and leads the people in her choirs to do things they thought they could not.

The key was to find something she was passionate about. Leaders with referent power have one thing in common above all; Passion!

My wife no longer seeks to control the choir or Canberra directly. She allows the passion for what she does to flow through in all of her choir activities. She now has the kind of power and control she could only have dreamt of through exercising control alone.

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Many leaders, especially those new to leadership roles, make the mistake of wanting control over the actions people take rather than power over the people. The rationale for this preference is different for different people. A supervisor I managed many years ago was promoted to a management role on the other side of the country.

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Most useful for the comments section. I have been a part of teams that have pushed a Six Sigma implementation as a new management buzzword while failing spectacularly to understand it is not a 'one size fits all program'.

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Post-It notes and facemasks are among some of the trademark products from 3M--a company which prides itself in innovation. In fact, it is ranked the world's third-most innovative company, after Google and Apple.

'15 percent time'

3M employees are allowed to use 15 percent of their time to pursue their own research outside their usual course of work.

That has been how many of its key products have come to light.

Youngbae Park, head of 3M's Singapore R&D center, said the program has evolved to becoming a culture at the company such that no one really "counts" the time spent on the program.

Innovation has become too much of a "buzzword", noted Geoff Nicholson, 3M ambassador, and former vice president for international technical operations. Nicholson is also widely regarded as the "father" of the Post-It note initiative.

Companies first need to define innovation and how it fits into their business plans, then provide the resources to support it, explained Nicholson, who was speaking at a recent media tour of 3M's research and development facility in Singapore.

"It is important to provide the leadership and then people know that they can practise innovation. That is part of the problem, people are afraid of failure. Maybe it's because of 'losing face' in an Asian society, but the fact of the matter is, failure is not failure. I would rather call it a learning experience," he said.

The 3M ambassador also outlined pitfalls companies should avoid in order not to stifle creativity:

Asking for a 5-year plan

Insisting people go through all levels with a new idea

Being control-conscious

Expressing criticism and withholding praise

Being suspicious of every idea that originates below you

Making a decision to reorganize in secret and maximize surprise

Rigid process a significant roadblock

The lack of freedom, or too strict a process, is also a significant roadblock, such as the Six Sigma process.

Six Sigma was popularized in the late 1990's and introduced into 3M by former CEO James McNerney, a former GE executive. It involves a set of process tools designed to eliminate production defects and wastage, and raise efficiency.

"The Six Sigma process killed innovation at 3M," said Nicholson. "Initially what would happen in 3M with Six Sigma people, they would say they need a five-year business plan for [a new idea]. Come on, we don't know yet because we don't know how it works, we don't know how many customers [will take it up], we haven't taken it out to the customer yet."

However, the 3M ambassador pointed out he had nothing against the Six Sigma, but felt it was not ideal for the creative process. "I met the guy who in fact put Six Sigma together and I said to him, 'What about innovation? Because at 3M right now we are having problems--we're being asked about Six Sigma and trying to utilize it in the creative stage'. He said it was never designed for that, it was designed for manufacturing when starting to scale up a product," said Nicholson.

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Six Sigma 'killed' innovation in 3M | ZDNet

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Post-It notes and facemasks are among some of the trademark products from 3M--a company which prides itself in innovation. In fact, it is ranked the world's third-most innovative company, after Google and Apple. '15 percent time' 3M employees are allowed to use 15 percent of their time to pursue their own research outside their usual course of work.

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Important because to be successful, you have to bridge the gap between facts and support.

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Infographic contrasting traditional management duties vs leadership duties. Important because I think people are too quick to demonize management as all bad, when in reality, someone needs to be doing the fact checking and numbers work even if it isn't as supportive or glamourous.

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How the role of management has changed to a leadership role that supports and empowers employees.

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For years we were taught that management has to do with forecasting, budgeting, planning and controlling. Managers were taught to manage, not to lead.

New supervisors and grizzled management veterans were taught how to assign work to subordinates, how to evaluate their teammates' work, how to counsel people on performance problems and how to hire and fire staff members. Everything we were taught about management assumed that the manager would know what to do and was calling the shots.

These days we understand that the old-fashioned view of a manager's duties is wholly insufficient for the new-millennium workplace.

Responsibility for a team of people and its success -- not to mention each team members' well-being and professional development -- is a big assignment to take on. Leadership has very little to do with controlling, budgeting and so on. It has little overlap with assigning work and evaluating it.

Our traditional view of management is task-based and mechanical. In that worldview, we don't think about topics like "How are my teammates holding up? Are they stressed out? Are they feeling good about the future and about the energy on the team?"

For years we pretended that human energy isn't a factor in a team's success, even though anybody who has ever been on any kind of team knows that the team energy, also known as trust level, is the whole ballgame!

We can use the carrot and the stick to get people to perform for a while but eventually, if they don't care about the mission, about their leader and/or about one another, the team will fracture and lose steam. It's inevitable! Today we know that empathetic, trust-based human leadership is not only the most effective way to lead a team but also the most profitable way to run a company.

Here are five enormous differences between managers and leaders. If you hold a leadership role now or aspire to do so in the future, think about steps you can take in each of these areas.
Mission
The traditional view of management assumes that a manager's job is to run an apparatus -- perhaps a corporate Credit Department or a team of programmers. There are clear inputs and outputs and expected results from the engine each manager is responsible for. The manager's job is to keep the machine running smoothly.

In that worldview, the people on the manager's team are essentially machine parts. They are interchangeable. Once they are hired into a role, their job is to perform that role (to run their piece of the machine) according to goals and standards that preceded them and that will outlast their tenure in the job. The presumption is that the machine is more important and more powerful than anyone who helps to run it.

Leadership takes just the opposite view! The energy on your team powers everything you will accomplish.

The machine can change whenever it makes sense to change it, even many times a day. Maybe your machine should change, or maybe it's time to junk the machine and invent something totally new. People are creative. Machines in general are not.

Leaders allow people to design their own jobs as much as possible and to put their own stamp on their jobs.

A leader is not working to achieve machine-like process perfection to be repeated over and over until the end of time.

A leader and his or her team have a mission. They all know what the mission is and they know their piece in it. Maybe at one point your mission is to replace your outdated Credit Department procedures with new procedures that are faster and simpler. Apart from the fact that they have a job and need the paycheck, your teammates know what the Credit Department modernization means for customers, for themselves and for the company.

A mission has a beginning, a middle and an end, no matter what the mission is. When you complete the mission, you'll start a new one.

Maybe your mission is to produce an off-Broadway play or to invent a better mousetrap. Leadership is inextricable from a specific mission that people are excited about. Without a mission, there is no place to lead your team toward! Without a mission, where are you headed?

Who can get excited about doing the same things day after day, year after year, to no visible end except to make a few executives rich? There has to be more to the mission than that, and part of a leader's job is to explore and exalt the connections between his or her team's mission and each team member's personal mission.

This is why I write about plugging into your power source at work, whether that means using a different part of your brain or getting to teach what you know or another element that important to you. We all need that power jolt at work. We all deserve it, too!
Self-Awareness
The old-fashioned, command-and-control view of management did not require that a manager look in the mirror, but leadership requires that activity of a leader every day.

A leader is someone who get outside his or her busy brain to see him- or herself rather than being controlled by his or her emotions, especially fear.

Fear is the emotion that makes managers freak out and bring the hammer down. It makes some of them yell at subordinates or put the fear of termination into them so that people skulk around in terror that they'll make a mistake.

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Management Vs. Leadership: Five Ways They Are Different

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For years we were taught that management has to do with forecasting, budgeting, planning and controlling. Managers were taught to manage, not to lead. New supervisors and grizzled management veterans were taught how to assign work to subordinates, how to evaluate their teammates' work, how to counsel people on performance problems and how to hire and fire staff members.

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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The important differences between groups and teams and when it's strategically advantageous to use both.

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"A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself
and his contribution to praise the skills of the others."
- Norman Shidle
Most people participate in some form of a team or group on a regular basis. This happens through recreation in the realm of sports and clubs. This happens on the job as people come together to get things done within organizations.

Although you likely have been part of both groups and teams in the past, do you understand the difference? What are the key distinctions between a group and a team?
Defining Teams
Larson and LaFasto describe three basic characteristics of teams.

Two or more people

Specific performance objective or recognizable goal to be attained

Coordination of activity among the members of the team is required for attainment of the team goal or objective

Independent or Coordinated Effort
Larson and LaFasto's third point is the key to answering our question.

Groups organize around individuals bringing together independent work in light of individual goals.

Teams organize around individuals bringing together coordinated work in light of collective goals.

Contrasting Groups and Teams Valuing Both
I highly value teaming done well. However, there is a time and place for both groups and teams.

Groups are generally more helpful for quickly and efficiently getting things done in the context of a temporary working relationship. When individual and independent work can be brought together to advance the individual goals of multiple parties, then a group is an efficient way to work together. Many of the group projects and assignments I've completed over the years of my schooling fit into this group model.

Teams are generally more helpful for taking on bigger projects over a longer period of time. When the outcome requires coordinated work being brought together to advance collective goals that will be collectively evaluated, then a team is the most effective way to work together. Although teaming done well tends to take more time than working as a group, this extra time investment pays off in the quality of the team's performance.
Speed or Quality

Groups are best when the stakes are lower and speed is the key.

Teams are best when the stakes are high and quality is more important than speed.

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
- African proverb

This African proverb sums it up well. Though most of us want to go fast AND far, usually we have to prioritize one over the other. Groups help us go fast. Teams help us go far.

Enjoy the journey of working with others. I'd love to hear your experience of working with groups and teams!

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Groups vs. Teams: What's the Difference?

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"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." - African proverb This African proverb sums it up well. Though most of us want to go fast AND far, usually we have to prioritize one over the other. Groups help us go fast.

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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The steps of a positive performance appraisal and how the annual review is only one tiny part of a successful feedback loop.

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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A useful visual of the steps of a poor performance appraisal, shows how missing one important step has a run on effect on the rest.

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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Important information about not only the types of questions, but how formatting can make a difference in your survey results.

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There's no doubt that companies can benefit from workplace surveys and questionnaires. A GTE survey in the mid-1990s, for example, revealed that the performance of its different billing operations, as measured by the accuracy of bills sent out, was closely tied to the leadership style of the unit managers. Units whose managers exercised a relatively high degree of control made more mistakes than units with more autonomous workforces. By encouraging changes in leadership style through training sessions, discussion groups, and videos, GTE was able to improve overall billing accuracy by 22 in the year following the survey and another 24% the year after.

Unfortunately, not all assessments produce such useful information, and some of the failures are spectacular. In 1997, for instance, United Parcel Service was hit by a costly strike just ten months after receiving impressive marks on its regular annual survey on worker morale. Although the survey had found that overall employee satisfaction was very high, it had failed to uncover bitter complaints about the proliferation of part-time jobs within the company, a central issue during the strike. In other cases where failure occurs, questionnaires themselves can cause the company's problems. Dayton Hudson Corporation, one of the nation's largest retailers, reached an out-of-court settlement with a group of employees who had won an injunction against the company's use of a standardized personality test that employees had viewed as an invasion of privacy.

What makes the difference between a good workplace survey and a bad one? The difference, quite simply, is careful and informed design. And it's an unfortunate truth that too many managers and HR professionals have fallen behind advances in survey design. Although the last decade has brought dramatic changes in the field and seen a fivefold increase in the number of publications describing survey results in corporations, many managers still apply design principles formulated 40 or 50 years ago.

In this article, we'll explore some of the more glaring failures in design and provide 16 guidelines to help companies improve their workplace surveys. These guidelines are based on peer-reviewed research from education and the behavioral sciences, general knowledge in the field of survey design, and our company's experience designing and revising assessments for large corporations. Managers can use these rules either as a primer for developing their own questionnaires or as a reference to assess the quality of work they commission. These recommendations are not intended to serve as absolute rules. But applied judiciously, they will increase response rates and popular support along with accuracy and usefulness. Two years ago, International Truck and Engine Corporation (hereafter called "International") revised its annual workplace survey using our guidelines and saw a leap in the response rate from 33%to 66%of the workforce. These guidelines-and the problems they address-fall into five areas: content, format, language, measurement, and administration.

Guidelines for Content

1. Ask questions about observable behavior rather than thoughts or motives. Many surveys, particularly those designed to assess performance or leadership skill, ask respondents to speculate about the character traits or ideas of other individuals. Our recent work with Duke Energy's Talent Management Group, for example, showed that the working notes for a leadership assessment asked respondents to rate the extent to which their project leader "understands the business and the marketplace." Another question asked respondents to rate the person's ability to "think globally."

While interest in the answers to those questions is understandable, the company is unlikely to obtain the answers by asking the questions directly. For a start, the results of such opinion-based questions are too easy to dispute. Leaders whose understanding of the marketplace was criticized could quite reasonably argue that they understood the company's customers and market better than the respondents imagined. More important, though, the responses to such questions are often biased by associations about the person being evaluated. For example, a substantial body of research shows that people with symmetrical faces, babyish facial features, and large eyes are often perceived to be relatively honest. Indeed, inferences based on appearance are remarkably common, as the prevalence of stereotypes suggests.

The best way around these problems is to ask questions about specific, observable behavior and let respondents draw on their own, firsthand, experience. This minimizes the potential for distortion. Referring again to the Duke Energy assessment, we revised the question on understanding the marketplace so that it asked respondents to estimate how often the leader "resolves complaints from customers quickly and thoroughly." Although the change did not completely remove the subjectivity of the evaluation-raters and leaders might disagree about what constitutes quick and thorough resolution-at least responses could be tied to discrete events and behaviors that could be tabulated, analyzed, and discussed.

2. Include some items that can be independently verified. Clearly, if there is no relation between survey responses and verifiable facts, something is amiss. Conversely, verifiable responses allow you to reach conclusions about the survey's validity, which is particularly important if the survey measures something new or unusual. For example, we formulated a customized 360-degree assessment tool to evaluate leadership skill at the technology services company EDS. In order to be sure that the test results were valid, we asked (among other validity checks) if the leader "establishes loyal and enduring relationships" with colleagues and staff; we then compared these scores with objective measures, such as staff retention data, from the leader's unit. The high correlation of these measures, along with others, allowed us to prove the assessment's validity when we reported the results and claimed that the survey actually measured what it was designed to measure. In other assessments, we frequently also ask respondents to rate the profitability of their units, which we can then compare with actual profits.

In another case, we designed an anonymous skill assessment for the training department of one of the nation's largest vehicle manufacturers and found that 76% of the engineers believed their skills were above the company average. Only 50% of any group can be above the average, of course, so the survey showed how far employee perceptions about this aspect of their work were out of step with reality. The results were invaluable for promoting enrollment in the company's voluntary training program, because few people could argue with the conclusion that 26% of the respondents-nearly 8,000 engineers-had a mistakenly favorable view of their skills.

In addition to posing questions with verifiable answers, asking qualitative questions in a quantitative survey, although counterintuitive, can provide a way to validate the results. In an employee survey we analyzed for EDS in 2000, we engaged independent, objective readers to classify the topic and valence (positive, negative, or neutral) of all written comments-45,000 of them. We then examined the correlation between these classifications and the quantitative data contained in the survey ratings from all 66,000 respondents. The tight correlation between ratings and comments in each section of the survey-high ratings accompanying positive comments-gave us strong evidence of the survey's validity.

3. Measure only behaviors that have a recognized link to your company's performance. This rule may seem obvious, but as many as three-quarters of the questions (such as "I know about my company's new office of internal affairs") in surveys we review have no clear link to any business outcome or to job performance. This shortcoming explains many of the more startling survey failures. Most often, the problem arises because questions have not been systematically chosen. To avoid this, we use a two-step process to select question topics. First, we interview informed stakeholders, asking them to describe the main problems and what they think their causes are. Then, we review published research to identify known pairings of problems and causes.

For instance, to build a survey for International, we interviewed nearly 100 managers, employees, union representatives, and executives in the workforce of 18,000. We asked each to specify what aspect of performance they thought most needed improvement and what they believed was its primary cause. Interviewees all agreed that the defect rate required improvement but were less certain in identifying behaviors possibly causing the problem. Research on quality, however, seemed to confirm the suspicion of some stakeholders that improving communication would lower the defect rate.

As a result, we included a number of questions about communication in the survey. One question asked respondents to indicate how often "In our department, we receive all the information we need to get our jobs done." The results confirmed that poor communication was indeed associated with the defect rate. The company then implemented a pilot program at one of its larger manufacturing facilities to improve communication within and between departments. Following this intervention, communication scores at the pilot site rose 9.5% while defects fell 19%. Although any of a number of factors may have been behind the defect rate, it was incontestable that the more communication improved, the more the defect rate fell.

Guidelines for Format

4. Keep sections of the survey unlabeled and uninterrupted by page breaks. Boxes, topic labels, and other innocuous looking details on surveys can skew responses subtly and even substantially. The reason is relatively straightforward: As extensive research shows, respondents tend to respond similarly to questions they think relate to each other. Several years ago, we were asked to revise an employee questionnaire for a large parcel-delivery service based in Europe. The survey contained approximately 120 questions divided into 25 sections, with each section having its own label ("benefits," "communication," and so on) and set off in its own box. When we looked at the results, we spotted some unlikely correlations between average scores for certain sections and corresponding performance measures. For example, teamwork seemed to be negatively correlated with on-time delivery.

A statistical test revealed the source of the problem. Questions in some sections spanned two pages and therefore appeared in two separate boxes. Consequently, respondents treated the material in each box as if it addressed a separate topic. We solved the problem by simply removing the boxes, labels, and page breaks that interrupted some sections. The changes in formatting encouraged respondents to consider each question on its own merits; although the changes were subtle, they had a profound impact on the survey results.

5. Design sections to contain a similar number of items, and questions a similar number of words. Research and our own experience show that the more questions you ask, the higher the resulting scores for the entire section tend to be. Similarly, respondents often give higher ratings to questions that contain more words and require more time for reflection. Maintaining fairly equal question and section lengths provides the highest probability that you'll obtain compatible survey responses across all questions.

A customer satisfaction questionnaire used by a large retailer in the Northwest illustrates those dangers. In evaluating the survey, we found that longer questions and longer sections evoked higher ratings, regardless of the product being evaluated. Together, response biases produced by these two question characteristics elevated scores on the survey's final question ("How likely is it that you will repurchase from us?") and lowered the overall accuracy of the survey's findings. The company could have avoided both of these problems by maintaining consistent question and section length.

The same response bias-wherein scores increase with question and section length-will also elevate scores in excessively long surveys. In addition, the average score for survey questions increases as a respondent works through a questionnaire: It is not unusual to see the average score on a 100-question survey climb by 5%. At the same time, research and our experience show that the range of responses (the standard deviation) usually becomes smaller.

6. Place questions about respondent demographics last in employee surveys but first in performance appraisals. An optional section on demographics is a staple of customer questionnaires, and its value is uncontestable. Questions about demographics also frequently appear in employee surveys since managers believe the generated information can produce useful general data about workforce trends. Of course, it is imperative to avoid demographic questions that can seem invasive or irrelevant.

Including demographic questions, however, can dramatically depress employee response rates, especially when respondents feel that their anonymity may be jeopardized. A survey carried out in 1999 by one of the nation's largest appliance manufacturers began by asking respondents whether they belonged to a union. Most of the union employees stopped filling out their surveys at this point; they reportedly feared that the data would be used to make misleading comparisons with unrepresented workers and that those comparisons could weaken the union's position during future contract negotiations.

In employee surveys, it's generally best to put demographic questions at the end, make them optional, and minimize their number. Such placement avoids creating an initial negative reaction at the very moment when readers are deciding whether to participate. A 1990 study by M. T. Roberson and E. Sundstrom found that moving demographic questions to the end of an employee survey improves response rates by around 8%.

Content

1. Ask questions about observable behavior rather than thoughts or motives.

2. Include some items that can be independently verified.

3. Measure only behaviors that have a recognized link to your company's performance.

Format

4. Keep sections of the survey unlabeled and uninterrupted by page breaks.

5. Design sections to contain a similar number of items, and questions a similar number of words.

6. Place questions about respondent demographics last in employee surveys but first in performance appraisals.

Language

7. Avoid terms that have strong associations.

8. Change the wording in about one-third of questions so that the desired answer is negative.

9. Avoid merging two disconnected topics into one question.

Measurement

10. Create a response scale with numbers at regularly spaced intervals and words only at each end.

11. If possible, use a response scale that asks respondents to estimate a frequency.

12. Use only one response scale that offers an odd number of options.

13. Avoid questions that require rankings.

Administration

14. Make workplace surveys individually anonymous and demonstrate that they remain so.

15. In large organizations, make the department the primary unit of analysis for company surveys.

16. Make sure that employees can complete the survey in about 20 minutes.

In contrast to employee surveys, performance appraisals and leadership evaluations should include demographic questions and identifying items at the beginning. Placing those items first highlights their importance and increases the likelihood that respondents will answer them fully.

Guidelines for Language

7. Avoid terms that have strong associations. This rule of language is one of the most frequently ignored. Metaphor plays a prominent role in descriptions of management, but it can also trigger associations that bias responses. A leadership evaluation conducted in the mid-1990s by one of the nation's largest manufacturers of photographic equipment asked respondents whether their team leader "takes bold strides" and "has a strong grasp" of complicated issues. While such phrases are commonly used to describe leadership qualities, they are counterproductive in surveys because they can trigger associations favoring males, whose stride length and grip strength, on average, exceed those of women. As a result, the leadership ratings of male leaders for this assessment were unfairly elevated. Here, simple revisions in wording solved the problem: "Has a strong grasp of complex problems" was changed to "Discusses complex problems with precision and clarity." Subsequently, we found-as published research leads us to expect-no significant difference between the average scores of male and female leaders. We have observed similar results when words that trigger ethnic and religious associations have been changed.

8. Change the wording in about one-third of questions so that the desired answer is negative.One of the best-documented response biases is the tendency of respondents to agree with questions, a tendency that becomes more pronounced as work progresses through a survey. The best way to overcome this bias is to periodically introduce questions that are phrased negatively. It's possible to transform almost any question or statement ("In my department, we do a good job of resolving conflicts") to its opposite ("In my department, we do a poor job of resolving conflicts") without creating tortuous wording, double negatives, or the like. This practice is quite common. When airline personnel ask passengers about their baggage, they usually ask one question so the desired answer is yes and another so the answer is no. For instance, "Did you pack your bags yourself?" might be followed by "Have your bags been out of your control since they were packed?"

It is also important to describe reverse wording in the instructions to the survey and to clearly signal its presence to respondents. Readers can easily miss minor word changes; a statement such as "My leader makes unfair hiring decisions" might be misread as "My leader makes fair hiring decisions." So the wording of the negative questions must be carefully considered. One good way to prepare readers for this possibility within the questionnaire is to introduce a simple reversed item early on, in the third or fourth question. This reminds respondents about the presence of these kinds of queries throughout the survey. In our experience, we've found a good rule of thumb is to change the wording in about one-third of the questions.

9. Avoid merging two disconnected topics into one question. Many survey questions combine two elements. When items are associated, it makes sense to minimize the length of the survey by combining them, but at other times, merging two elements can be problematic. For example, a leadership assessment at a telecommunications company in the late 1990s asked employees to rate their leader's skill at "hiring staff and setting compensation." Clearly, data from such a question would result in little insight about a leader's specific skill in each of the two related but distinct tasks. In determining whether to include two related elements in the same question, decide whether the behaviors associated with them will require the same intervention if they need to be fixed. It can be quite reasonable to ask employees whether they think a leader both "provides and responds to constructive feedback" because both processes (to various degrees) require insight, tact, candor, flexibility, and a willingness to learn. But asking about hiring and compensation at the same time will probably elicit muddied responses of little specific usefulness.

Guidelines for Measurement

10. Create a response scale with numbers at regularly spaced intervals and words only at each end. Many surveys invite respondents to evaluate an item by selecting words that best fit their own reactions. For instance, a global computer company's annual performance appraisal asked managers to evaluate employees by ticking one of five boxes labeled "unacceptable" to "far exceeds expectations." (See the top of the exhibit "Numbers Are Better than Words.")

Numbers Are Better than Words

The results of this kind of evaluation, however, are notoriously unreliable because they are influenced by a variety of extraneous factors. The biggest problem is that each response option on the scale contains different words, and so it is difficult to place the responses on an evenly spaced mathematical continuum in order to conduct statistical tests. Although the labels may be in a plausible order, the distance between each pair of classifications on the continuum remains unknown. For many people, for instance, "unacceptable" and "does not meet expectations" may be closer to each other than "meets expectations" and "exceeds expectations" are to each other. In addition, the response scale uses words that overlap ("exceeds" and "far exceeds") and that may mean different things to different people over time. Therefore, it is difficult to compare ratings on these scales from different managers in different years or to compare ratings from different departments, geographic regions, and even seasons.

You can avoid these and other distortions created by word labels by using a scale with only two word labels, one at either end with a range of numbers in between. Questions answered with numerical scales may not appear to be very different from those with word answers, but the responses to them are far more reliable and can be submitted to a much more informative statistical analysis.

11. If possible, use a response scale that asks respondents to estimate a frequency. Relying on a numerical scale is only part of the story. There can still be a great deal of subjectivity in the question or in the words at each end of the scale that you'll need to eliminate. For instance, an employee survey we reviewed in the late 1990s asked respondents how much they agreed with the question: "Are you dedicated to quality in all that you do?" People were asked to tick a box on a scale between "disagree strongly" and "agree strongly." But questions that invite respondents to measure extent of agreement often produce biased responses. The bias may be especially pronounced if, as in our example above, disagreement would be unflattering to the respondent. After all, who would say that they were not dedicated to quality? Naturally, responses to this survey question were clustered at the high end of the scale.

The best way around the problem, we've found, is to invite respondents to provide an estimate of frequency, with percentages or ratings between "never" and "always," as shown in the lower part of the exhibit "Numbers Are Better than Words." For example, in conducting a nationwide benchmark survey of employee motivation, we asked: "What percent of the teams in your company produce high-quality work?" In contrast to the agree-disagree question on quality mentioned above, we used a rating scale with numbers and obtained a normal curve of responses (see the results for both types of surveys in the exhibit "Well-Designed Surveys Produce Normal Results"), indicating that the responses were unbiased. What's more, a large body of research confirms that respondents' frequency estimations are typically quite reliable and accurate, even if they'd never consciously kept track of the behaviors examined in the survey.

Well-Designed Surveys Produce Normal Results

12. Use only one response scale that offers an odd number of options. Many surveys have a jumble of different response scales, jumping from one to another without warning. A survey currently being used by a large hotel chain asks respondents to rate the service's friendliness on a scale from "very unfriendly" to "very friendly," then the service's efficiency on a scale from "very inefficient" to "very efficient," and so on for dozens of questions about the hotel's service. One response scale, such as "never" to "always" with numbered ratings in between, allows for an easy comparison of responses and is simpler for respondents. Single-scale surveys take less time to complete, provide more reliable data, and make quantitative comparisons between different items much easier than multiple-scale surveys.

We find that it's advisable to provide an odd number of response alternatives, so that respondents have the option of registering a neutral opinion. We also advocate including a "don't know" or "not applicable" answer (preferably made to look different from the other answer options, as illustrated in the exhibit). Without that option, respondents may feel compelled to provide answers that they know are worthless. Including this option enhances response rates and makes it less likely that respondents will leave blanks or abandon the survey in the middle.

Take care not to offer too many or too few response options. In its annual employee survey, one of the nation's largest oil companies asks employees about attitudes and offers them only two response alternatives: "agree" or "disagree." Inevitably, managers complain that the results are simplistic and difficult to interpret. We have found that a graded response scale with seven or 11 alternatives (the latter for scales from 0% to 100% in increments of ten) furnishes sufficiently detailed results.

13. Avoid questions that require rankings. Many surveys require respondents to rank a number of items in order of preference. A survey we reviewed in 1997 asked people to "Rank in ascending order of severity the problems threatening productivity in your department: on-the-job injuries, absenteeism, attrition, out-of-specification materials from vendors, lack of tools." Research shows, however, that responses to such questions are biased by a host of factors-most prominently the number, order, and selection of items. Respondents will best remember a list's first and last items and will tend to assign them the top and bottom ranks. Moreover, other research shows that a ranking question can disrupt ratings on subsequent questions, presumably because respondents become sensitized to the topic of the ranking question.

Guidelines for Administration

14. Make workplace surveys individually anonymous and demonstrate that they remain so. As we have already pointed out, respondents are much more likely to participate in surveys if they are confident that personal anonymity is guaranteed. In our employee survey for International, we told employees that the anonymous surveys contained no hidden marks and that we would never be able to connect any individual survey to a specific employee. We backed up this claim by having boxes of spare surveys (under minimal supervision, to discourage people from submitting more than one questionnaire) at every facility. Access to all those loose surveys went a long way toward reassuring people about our commitment to anonymity.

The desire of respondents for anonymity explains why many companies prefer using paper-based surveys, even when all employees have access to a computer network. Most workers are savvy enough to know that each computer has a unique fingerprint and that passwords can be easily decrypted or overridden. A 2001 pilot test of a leadership assessment at Duke Energy illustrates the problems of administering surveys electronically. Duke ran, in parallel, an electronic and a paper-based version of its 360-degree leadership assessment so that the company could complete a cost-benefit analysis of the two methods.

Analysis of the pilot data revealed that ratings administered via the company's e-mail system had a higher mean, a narrower range, and more blanks than ratings taken from optically scanned paper forms. The distribution of the scores was also markedly different: Paper-based ratings were distributed along a normal bell curve, indicating reliable and valid results, while ratings from the company server were strongly skewed toward favorable answers. These results suggested that respondents were reluctant to provide anything other than unrealistically favorable ratings of their leader and peers when they knew that their responses were being compiled somewhere on the company mainframe. Duke now lets participants choose the format they prefer for the survey: a conventional paper form or a new Web-enabled version running on an external server owned by a third party.

15. In large organizations, make the department the primary unit of analysis for company surveys. While the need to retain anonymity is paramount, large corporations still need to organize and analyze the results of internal surveys at the department or operating unit level because they assess performance at those levels. Clearly, surveys that are undifferentiated by department will be limited in their usefulness. In designing large surveys, therefore, it is useful to add a check-off sheet (or a list of codes) identifying a respondent's facility and department. This feature helps you put together customized feedback reports that cluster departments and divisions into the precise groupings you need. Adding this feature to a large survey for International enabled us to deliver nearly 400 customized reports-some summarizing a single department's results, others summarizing sectors (a cluster of departments), facilities, or entire divisions-only one month after we collected surveys from more than 10,000 employees.

16. Make sure that employees can complete the survey in about 20 minutes. Employees are busy, and nobody really likes surveys and assessments. If a questionnaire appears excessively time-consuming, only people with a lot of time (hardly a representative sample) will participate, and the response rate will fall dramatically. We've already seen that when surveys are long, respondents' answers become automatic and overly positive. In general, we've found that surveys that can be finished in 20 minutes can provide substantial results for a company.

A sign at the auto parts store in my hometown states: "The wrong information will get you the wrong part...every time." Good surveys accurately home in on the problems the company wants information about. They are designed so that as many people as possible actually respond. And good survey design ensures that the spectrum of responses is unbiased. Following these guidelines will make it more likely that the information from your workplace survey will be unbiased, representative, and useful.

A version of this article appeared in the February 2002 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Getting the Truth into Workplace Surveys

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There's no doubt that companies can benefit from workplace surveys and questionnaires. A GTE survey in the mid-1990s, for example, revealed that the performance of its different billing operations, as measured by the accuracy of bills sent out, was closely tied to the leadership style of the unit managers.

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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M6-Managing Human Resources And Communications

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Interesting because despite what internet gurus and self help writers may tell you, the steps to build influence in the workplace are simple and based on building trust and respect rather than anything flashy, complicated, or underhanded.

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Lead
7 Ways to Build Influence in the Workplace

Influence has countless benefits, and is a particularly lucrative asset in the business world. Here are seven ways to build your influence!

Influence is power. No matter who you are, where you work, or what your professional goals are, achieving more influence in the workplace is critical for success. Gaining influence on a team can help you work together more effectively. Gaining influence in a supervisory position can make you more respected and appreciated. Gaining influence in a meeting can make your voice more likely to be heard and acknowledged.

Influence has countless advantages, but gaining that influence, like learning a skill, takes time and effort. Fortunately, there are many strategies you can use to cultivate this characteristic.

1. Build Trust With Your Co-Workers. Influence is most often and most easily carried through trust. Only when a co-worker trusts you will he or she be open to your influence. If you're in a higher position in the company hierarchy, it's possible to convey a demand or assign a task that must be carried out by your employee, but true influence suggests a free will component. If you assigned the same task but didn't carry a higher authority, would your employee still listen to you and believe that the task is necessary to execute?

This hypothetical may not be relevant to your situation, but regardless of your position in comparison to the positions of your co-workers, if you want a healthy and influential working relationship, you're going to have to cultivate trust. The easiest way to do that is to be open and honest, no matter what. State your opinions, disclose your apprehensions, and don't keep secrets. It's as simple as that.

2. Cultivate Reliability Through Consistency. Inconsistency is the fastest way to ruin your reputation. Consistency, on the other hand, is slow but sure--if you execute your tasks effectively and on time, day after day, eventually people will come to rely on you. The same is true when you execute a consistent style of leadership, setting consistent expectations with your employees and giving consistent rewards for good work. People will come to rely on your behavior and expect you to be a consistent performer.

That consistency is vital for building influence. Otherwise, you'll have an air of unpredictability about you, and people won't know whether to trust or impugn your suggestions. If you're consistently motivated by the same principles, people will trust that your ideas are solid and reliable as an extension, and that will make it easier to get people on your side. Consistency is especially important when you're in a lower position, since it demonstrates a degree of dedication.

3. Be Assertive, Not Aggressive. Being assertive is the only way to get your ideas noticed, especially when you're competing with others for visibility, such as in a meeting. However, there's a difference between being assertive and being aggressive. You'll need to present your thoughts and ideas with a high degree of confidence, indicating your convictions, but any excessive degree of confidence could be mistaken for needless arrogance, which will compromise your perceived authority. Tread carefully, especially when you're unfamiliar with your audience or if you're presenting your thoughts on an area outside of your expertise.

This assertiveness should extend as a general quality to all your interactions, regardless of whether you're speaking to employees above, below, or at your level, and regardless of the conversation format. Being assertive, so long as you truly believe in what you're saying, is a way to cultivate a reputation of authority and earn the ability to influence your peers and employees.

4. Be Flexible. Flexibility is also important. While this may seem like it conflicts with the need to be assertive--after all, it's difficult to assert yourself fully if you're open to changing your opinion--being too stringent or adamant in your beliefs will work against you. In this case, people will come to see you as a stubborn, immovable monolith, incapable of believing in anyone other than yourself. This can decrease the respect people have for you and compromise your overall influence.

Instead, work actively to show your flexibility while holding firm on your beliefs. Negotiations and compromises are often the best ways to do this. Stay rigid in your beliefs when someone contradicts you, but work with them to find a mutually acceptable solution. When people believe you to be flexible, they'll be more likely to listen to you even if they're stubborn in their own right.

5. Be Personal. A little personality goes a long way, especially when you're trying to build influence in the workplace. This is especially important when you're in a higher position, as a boss or a supervisor. If you isolate yourself, or try to build your perceived authority by distancing yourself from the others, it might only serve to alienate you and put you in a position where you're viewed with distrust or even resentment.

Instead, go out of your way to have personal exchanges with your employees and co-workers. You don't need to build friendships, but there's no reason why you can't get to know each other. Personal working relationships are important for cultivating a sense of team, and if people see you as another person on the team, they'll be more receptive when you disclose your ideas or opinions. The key here is to seem imperfect, approachable, and human.

6. Focus on Actions Rather Than Argument. Trying to build influence through words is useless. Even a leader with perfect diction and a background in rhetorical strategy can't hope to win the influence of his or her peers through speeches and arguments alone. If you're going to build influence in the workplace, you need to speak through your actions, or at the very least have the actions and history to back up whatever it is you're saying.

Part of this comes into play when you build consistency. Working hard consistently and getting consistently good results shows people that you're able to walk the walk. Demonstrating your ideas through real examples is the next step in this process. Instead of arguing about how your structure will work in theory, put it to the test. Show instead of tell.

7. Listen to Others. Finally, remember that influence is a two-way street. The more you believe in the people around you and incorporate their ideas into your vision, the more they'll believe in your ideas and incorporate them into their work habits. If you want to build up this kind of relationship with your co-workers and employees, you first have to listen. Listen to everyone's opinion, and encourage people to speak up, especially if they don't often voice their opinions. Take time to respect and acknowledge everybody's opinion, and let people know that you value them.

This creates an atmosphere of mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual teamwork. If you're spearheading the initiative to build this environment, they'll come to see you as a leader, and your opinions will naturally be heard, acknowledged, and respected as a result.

Influence is an extraordinary asset in the professional world, but remember, your goal here should be to become more respected in the workplace, not to increase the likelihood of getting others to do your bidding. One is a respectable journey to greater prominence and productivity, while the other is simply a Machiavellian power trip.

Influence is power. No matter who you are, where you work, or what your professional goals are, achieving more influence in the workplace is critical for success. Gaining influence on a team can help you work together more effectively. Gaining influence in a supervisory position can make you more respected and appreciated. Gaining influence in a meeting can make your voice more likely to be heard and acknowledged.

Influence has countless advantages, but gaining that influence, like learning a skill, takes time and effort. Fortunately, there are many strategies you can use to cultivate this characteristic.

1. Build Trust With Your Co-Workers. Influence is most often and most easily carried through trust. Only when a co-worker trusts you will he or she be open to your influence. If you're in a higher position in the company hierarchy, it's possible to convey a demand or assign a task that must be carried out by your employee, but true influence suggests a free will component. If you assigned the same task but didn't carry a higher authority, would your employee still listen to you and believe that the task is necessary to execute?

This hypothetical may not be relevant to your situation, but regardless of your position in comparison to the positions of your co-workers, if you want a healthy and influential working relationship, you're going to have to cultivate trust. The easiest way to do that is to be open and honest, no matter what. State your opinions, disclose your apprehensions, and don't keep secrets. It's as simple as that.

2. Cultivate Reliability Through Consistency. Inconsistency is the fastest way to ruin your reputation. Consistency, on the other hand, is slow but sure--if you execute your tasks effectively and on time, day after day, eventually people will come to rely on you. The same is true when you execute a consistent style of leadership, setting consistent expectations with your employees and giving consistent rewards for good work. People will come to rely on your behavior and expect you to be a consistent performer.

That consistency is vital for building influence. Otherwise, you'll have an air of unpredictability about you, and people won't know whether to trust or impugn your suggestions. If you're consistently motivated by the same principles, people will trust that your ideas are solid and reliable as an extension, and that will make it easier to get people on your side. Consistency is especially important when you're in a lower position, since it demonstrates a degree of dedication.

3. Be Assertive, Not Aggressive. Being assertive is the only way to get your ideas noticed, especially when you're competing with others for visibility, such as in a meeting. However, there's a difference between being assertive and being aggressive. You'll need to present your thoughts and ideas with a high degree of confidence, indicating your convictions, but any excessive degree of confidence could be mistaken for needless arrogance, which will compromise your perceived authority. Tread carefully, especially when you're unfamiliar with your audience or if you're presenting your thoughts on an area outside of your expertise.

This assertiveness should extend as a general quality to all your interactions, regardless of whether you're speaking to employees above, below, or at your level, and regardless of the conversation format. Being assertive, so long as you truly believe in what you're saying, is a way to cultivate a reputation of authority and earn the ability to influence your peers and employees.

4. Be Flexible. Flexibility is also important. While this may seem like it conflicts with the need to be assertive--after all, it's difficult to assert yourself fully if you're open to changing your opinion--being too stringent or adamant in your beliefs will work against you. In this case, people will come to see you as a stubborn, immovable monolith, incapable of believing in anyone other than yourself. This can decrease the respect people have for you and compromise your overall influence.

Instead, work actively to show your flexibility while holding firm on your beliefs. Negotiations and compromises are often the best ways to do this. Stay rigid in your beliefs when someone contradicts you, but work with them to find a mutually acceptable solution. When people believe you to be flexible, they'll be more likely to listen to you even if they're stubborn in their own right.

5. Be Personal. A little personality goes a long way, especially when you're trying to build influence in the workplace. This is especially important when you're in a higher position, as a boss or a supervisor. If you isolate yourself, or try to build your perceived authority by distancing yourself from the others, it might only serve to alienate you and put you in a position where you're viewed with distrust or even resentment.

Instead, go out of your way to have personal exchanges with your employees and co-workers. You don't need to build friendships, but there's no reason why you can't get to know each other. Personal working relationships are important for cultivating a sense of team, and if people see you as another person on the team, they'll be more receptive when you disclose your ideas or opinions. The key here is to seem imperfect, approachable, and human.

6. Focus on Actions Rather Than Argument. Trying to build influence through words is useless. Even a leader with perfect diction and a background in rhetorical strategy can't hope to win the influence of his or her peers through speeches and arguments alone. If you're going to build influence in the workplace, you need to speak through your actions, or at the very least have the actions and history to back up whatever it is you're saying.

Part of this comes into play when you build consistency. Working hard consistently and getting consistently good results shows people that you're able to walk the walk. Demonstrating your ideas through real examples is the next step in this process. Instead of arguing about how your structure will work in theory, put it to the test. Show instead of tell.

7. Listen to Others. Finally, remember that influence is a two-way street. The more you believe in the people around you and incorporate their ideas into your vision, the more they'll believe in your ideas and incorporate them into their work habits. If you want to build up this kind of relationship with your co-workers and employees, you first have to listen. Listen to everyone's opinion, and encourage people to speak up, especially if they don't often voice their opinions. Take time to respect and acknowledge everybody's opinion, and let people know that you value them.

This creates an atmosphere of mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual teamwork. If you're spearheading the initiative to build this environment, they'll come to see you as a leader, and your opinions will naturally be heard, acknowledged, and respected as a result.

Influence is an extraordinary asset in the professional world, but remember, your goal here should be to become more respected in the workplace, not to increase the likelihood of getting others to do your bidding. One is a respectable journey to greater prominence and productivity, while the other is simply a Machiavellian power trip.

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7 Ways to Build Influence in the Workplace

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Lead Influence is power. No matter who you are, where you work, or what your professional goals are, achieving more influence in the workplace is critical for success. Gaining influence on a team can help you work together more effectively. Gaining influence in a supervisory position can make you more respected and appreciated.

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Important because in today's marketplace financial incentives are not always available to motivate employees.

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Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that their primary motivation is to "change the world" and to build something lasting, not to make a lot of money. But the conventional wisdom is that employees work for money, above all else. Yet my own experience, and a recent McKinsey survey, leads me to believe that non-cash motivators may be more effective in the long term than financial incentives.

I agree with Charles P. Garcia, who ties motivation most strongly to leadership, in his book " Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows," based on this group of more than 600 prominent leaders from every sector of American society. They assert that employees value having strong leaders, who incent them to do their best, just as much if not more than money.

For action, he provides a list of principles for entrepreneurs and managers alike, derived from his first-hand discussions with some of the nation's greatest leaders. We all need to learn from these as we rebuild employee morale following tough economic times, with limited budgets:

Energize your team. Instead of being the type of leader who sucks the energy away from others, resolve to be the kind of leader who strives to bring passion and positive energy to the workplace every day. Your employees have just helped you pull your company through one of the nation's worst economic periods. It's time they had a source of positive energy.

There's more to life than work. Great leaders have deep reserves of physical, spiritual, and emotional energy, and that energy is usually fueled by a strong and supportive relationship with the people they love, regular exercise, a healthy lifestyle, and setting aside time for reflection.

Put your people first. No organization is better than the people who run it. The fact is that you are in the people business-the business of hiring, training, and managing people to deliver the product or service you provide. If the people are the engine of your success, to be a great leader you need to attend to your people with a laser-like focus.

Act with integrity. In a time when news reports are filled with the stories of private and public leaders who've acted inappropriately and have gone against the best interests of their employees or constituents, showing your employees that you value integrity can help motivate them and create a sense of pride for your organization.

Be a great communicator. Leadership is influencing others, and this cannot be achieved without effective communication. If you're struggling with communicating to your employees, first work on your ability to influence individuals by choosing words that are impactful to carry your message. Then you need to figure out how to communicate to a larger audience.

Be a great listener. The most effective leaders are the ones who take the time to listen not just to their team members' words but to the priceless hidden meaning beneath them. Remember that during good times and bad, sometimes your employees just need someone to talk to. Communicate to them that you are always waiting with open ears.

Be a problem solver. Post a sign above your office door that reads, "Don't Bring Me Problems. Bring Me Solutions." Then set about the task of guiding each person on your team toward the goal of becoming a top-notch problem solver during this crucial period.

Lead through experience and competence, not through title or position. Mentor your employees, encourage them, make partners out of them, and your organization is sure to benefit. If you want to survive the tough economy, that's exactly the kind of leadership motif you need for your organization.

The fundamentals of leadership don't change between good times and bad. But when money is in short supply, these principles can be the difference between success and failure. Now is the time to start motivating your employees by applying these principles, and your team will lead you through the hard times.

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8 Ways Leaders Can Motivate Employees Beyond Money

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Credit: Rice University Baker Institute Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that their primary motivation is to "change the world" and to build something lasting, not to make a lot of money. But the conventional wisdom is that employees work for money, above all else. Yet my own experience, and a [...]

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Important guide to the differences in organizations and the pros and cons of each type.

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Heroic Technical Writing: Advice and Insights on the Business of Technical Communication

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First, a few definitions so you understand what I'm talking about.

A "vertical" company is known for having a large staff of middle managers between the CEO and the front line. In a vertical company-which was most the most common business model in organizations for the much of the mid- to late-20th century-lines of authority branch outward from the top down like a tree's roots. Individual vice-presidents direct the activities of the staff below them according to specific lines of business. Vertical organizations arose in the 1930s and 1940s in order to combat the tendency toward cronyism and nepotism in privately held businesses.

Advantages

The advantages of vertical structures are that they have defined chains of command and areas of responsibility; employees advance through ability and performance on familiar, known tasks; and the career path of someone looking to advance "through the ranks" is clearly understood. Also, the longer one stays in a vertical organization the more in-depth knowledge and expertise they gain over the course of time.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages of vertical structures are that they take longer to make decisions and information does not always filter upward to management or down to front-line personnel. The major problem with vertical organizations is that bureaucracy can become rampant as individual lines of business become isolated from each other, develop separate cultures and procedures, and sometimes seek to justify unprofitable lines of business. Or, one level of an organization can be in contact with another, but the "levels" above or below that contact are unaware of those conversations, resulting in lost communications or duplication of effort if someone else at a different level tries to initiate the same level communication. A final challenge with a vertical organization is that communications with other departments can sometimes be actively discouraged or seen as disloyalty below a "certain level"-the idea being all the information you should need to know to do your job is within your "stovepipe."

A "vertical" organization chart might look something like this:

Horizontal Organizations

In response to the observed and perceived weaknesses of the vertical company, "horizontal" companies started popping up more often-especially in the Dot-com companies of the 1990s, where companies were too small to afford a large "vertical" organization. Horizontally oriented companies have relatively few layers of management between the CEO and front-line personnel. It is thought that with fewer individuals in the chain of command, decisions can be made more quickly. As a result of this new management thinking, middle managers in "vertical" organizations saw more layoffs. Much of this thinking was born out of our nation's space program (see The Secret of Apollo if you're really gung-ho to learn about systems management.)

Advantages

The goals of horizontal organizations are to speed up decision making; to allow for more management flexibility and cross-training as individuals work more closely with other areas; to eliminate bureaucracy because more people are talking to each other across vertical lines of business; and to increase a company's flexibility when it comes to creating new products or reacting to new market conditions.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages of horizontal organization include workforce reductions that create a loss of experienced managers, who often make up the "institutional memory" of a company; the breaking up of specialized lines of business, thus reducing the company's ability to innovate; and uncertain career paths for aspiring managers. There can also be a perception that an individual who works in a small, flat organization lacks necessary expertise in his or her particular specialty to truly excel because effort is diluted-the operative example being a "jack of all trades, master of none."

A "horizontal" organization chart looks something like this:

Ideally, matrixed organizations attempt to integrate and use the best of both horizontal and vertical structures. The idea is this: a (typically large) company keeps its specific lines of business expertise intact-finance, marketing, engineering, etc.-but brings together specialists from each vertical organization to work on temporary projects that develop new products, services, or even lines of business. A person working in such a structure would thus have vertical lines of accountability to the immediate line-of-business superiors and horizontal accountability to one's project teammates.

As stated above, matrix organizations would keep their vertical lines of business intact to maintain their core competencies while also farming out individuals within those specialties to develop new products and services. The other advantage that this type of organization has is that it has more regular and formal contact across disciplines.

The primary challenges for individuals working in matrix organizations are accountability, authority, and perceived "loyalty." If a manager is a project team lead or member, she or he must constantly balance which work takes precedence: project work or daily line-of-business work? Next, matrix structures can also impact employee loyalty: if individuals are more interested in doing project work than in doing the specialty work for which they were hired, they might be perceived as "disloyal" by their vertical line-of-business superior. Also, a line-of-business manager might not see their subordinate's work if he or she is heavily involved in project work. There can be a corporate problem of being "out of sight, out of mind," where a project worker misses opportunities for promotion within her/his vertical organization because of a focus on the project. If cooperation does not occur both horizontally and vertically, the company can easily be overrun by politics, as people break into fragmented camps: "Are you a 'project' person or are you an 'institutional' person?"

A "matrixed" organization chart looks something like this, with both horizontal and vertical accountability:

Opportunities

Since 2000, many large organizations have taken on the matrix form of organization. One primary reason is networking: because computers allow us to be connected in more ways than ever before, individual workers expect their companies to behave the same way. More importantly, customers expect that.

Large organizations like Disney spent much of the last 20 years on Customer Relationship Management (though I forget what they call it internally now). CRM is the process of developing information streams that allow multiple parts of an organization to access customer information and use it to better meet the customer's and the organization's needs. One example of this CRM-type integration is the Disney Magic Band, which is actually a rather complex piece of hardware (and software). It allows guests to wear one tool on their wrist that serves as their theme park admission, hotel room key, and credit card for making merchandise and food purchases on their hotel account while staying at the resort. On the spooky side, once you've stayed at the hotel and visited the parks and made all those purchases, the next marketing letter or email you get from Disney is likely to work like Amazon.com and recommend similar purchases the next time you visit.

None of that could have happened without a matrixed organization to support it.

And of course along the way they needed technical communicators working alongside the Information Technology people and all the other related organizations (Marketing, Attractions, Resorts) to ensure that all their needs were met. I shudder to think of what the requirements document looked like for Magic Band, but I've seen it in action, and it does indeed work as advertised. What these tools mean for technical communicators is plenty of opportunity to work in cross-functional projects, which can last weeks, months, or years.

Another reason cross-functional teams are better (and more fun, in my opinion) to work for is that you're interacting with more customers, more lines of business, and so are learning a lot more about how the whole organization works, which makes your knowledge much more valuable when you're looking for the next job.

Lastly, project work helps you build your personal network within an organization much better than if you just stayed within one organization. You might know Finance inside and out, for example, but you might have no idea who works in Marketing, how Marketing does its business or how it affects what you do there. If only out of self-defense, I think project work would be beneficial to someone learning to be valuable to an organization, but I've been known to be wrong about such things.

Challenges

I'm not going to kid you: matrixed organizations have their challenges. For me, the biggest challenge was the number of meetings I had to attend. As a member of a "vertical" organization (say, the Communications department), you're beholden to that organization's schedule, standards, and meetings and are expected to comply with all three while in the project. Just because you're "off on project work" doesn't mean that your line-of-business boss doesn't want to see you. S/he does, which means that your meeting schedule effectively doubles.

Loyalty and Conflicts of Management Interest

The "loyalty" question is always a puzzler to me, because to me accountability is pretty straightforward: I'm supposed to provide a good service as a communicator (representing the line-of-business organization) to a project team, regardless of who they are. My boss is in the communications department; my customer is in the project office.

In reality, "Loyalty" doesn't become an issue until your line-of-business manager wants you to support something besides the project you're working on at the moment while the project manager needs you for project work. In such situations, the best thing to do is bring the matter into the open, contact both managers, and let them sort it out between themselves. If necessary, higher managers get involved, and then someone comes back to you and wants to know how you can serve both masters anyway in a way that makes everyone happy. It's a challenge, but to me the best way to demonstrate "loyalty" to the organization is not to show favorites-just let the chain of command sort it out once they realize the conflict.

If you're a project manager in a matrixed organization, you might face the challenge of authority. That is, you might be a "Project Manager" on your project, but one of your attached line-of-business team members might be a subject matter expert who outranks you in the vertical chain of command (this is especially problematic in military or civilian government agencies, where "rank" is taken seriously). It's usually good, when setting up a project charter, to lay out clear lines of authority, with a clear understanding that the line-of-business higher-ups will back up with words and deeds. For example, of the higher-ranking subject matter expert decides to do a line-of-business task rather than focus on his project work, the Project Manager needs to have the authority to keep him in line...or take it to his superiors if he refuses to cooperate. Not saying it always happens, just that it can.

As I've already noted, I preferred project work in a corporate setting. That suited my somewhat broad (someone once called them flighty) interests. If you're a steady person who likes to become an expert on one topic and appreciates traditions and always understanding how and why things are done a particular way, there is always necessary work to be had in "vertical" or institutional organizations. Bills always need to get paid, operations always have to run smoothly, and products always need to come out working properly. Within those ongoing processes, there is always a need for technical communicators to maintain the institutional memory of How Things Should Be Done and what it means when someone says a task must be done "the company way." Regardless of your preferred type of work, it's good to know what types are available and what structures exist to support them.

The point of this little essay is to help you understand a little bit more about how corporate entities are structured, how they can affect your work, and how you can best serve them. As always, the answer to the last item is, "Do good work, and someone will want to hire you."

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Vertical, Horizontal, and Matrixed Organizations (And Why You Should Care)

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First, a few definitions so you understand what I'm talking about. Vertical Organizations A "vertical" company is known for having a large staff of middle managers between the CEO and the front line. In a vertical company-which was most the most common business model in organizations for the much of the mid- to late-20th century-lines...

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Important for this paragraph:
"I think that a lot of people look at Jobs and think being headstrong is the way to go, but they haven’t understood the subtleties of his management skills. Headstrong is a small part of being a successful manager–in fact, it’s not necessary at all. It worked for Steve. But that’s no reason it should work for someone else. Steve’s management style was very much in keeping with who he was, and that should probably be the first thing a manager asks himself–am I posing, or is this really me? If the answer is posing, it’s time to find a new style."
It is important to have your own style and know your own strengths and weeknesses as a manger.

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"Kind. Patient. Human. The Steve you didn't know."

Those are the words accompanying a portrait of the late Apple cofounder on the cover of this month's issue of Fast Company, which features an exclusive excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs, a new biography by longtime Valley reporter Brent Schlender (who came to know Jobs intimately over the 25 years he spent covering Apple) and Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli.

The book aims to debunk the notion that the characteristics typically ascribed to Jobs-petulant, cruel, visionary-were static attributes, when in fact his evolution as a leader occurred over a lifetime. To celebrate the book's release today, we held a live Q&A with the authors. Here's five insights:

According to Schlender:

He developed patience, which believe it or not, is a leadership skill. He learned not to rush things that needed more work. He also learned how to be more sensitive to the physical limits of how much his people could work and moderated his demanding behavior. He still was a tough boss, but he got better at helping people share his high ideals for whatever Apple made.

And Tetzeli pointed out that part of Jobs's bad-boss reputation might have just been social awkwardness. He said:

He didn't care what the public thought of him. At times, he was surprised to have hurt someone's feelings. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, took this as a sign of an occasional social awkwardness, rather than an innate meanness.

Schlender shared his first hand insight into Jobs's event prep with this story:

Steve spent months preparing for his product intros and other public appearances, and rehearsed them exhaustively. I once spent an entire day watching him run through multiple rehearsals of a single presentation, tweaking everything from the color and angle of certain spotlights, to editing and rearranging the order of the keynote presentation slides to improve his pacing. He could get pretty petulant if some technical aspect went awry. In one instance that day, he just sat silently onstage with his chin in his hand, staring at the floor for nearly 15 minutes, out of frustration with a wrong lighting cue. He didn't yell this time, but just made everyone wait while he cooled down. Even before that stage, he would call journalists like me or Steven Levy who wrote for Newsweek and later Wired, to try out metaphors and lines he was thinking about using, just to see if we thought they resonated. This could be weeks and weeks before the actual event.

Tetzeli reveled this detail about how Jobs went above and beyond with employees:

We have many anecdotes of Steve defying the common stereotype. One from his personal life is the fact that Steve, after he got sick, helped several Apple employees and friends when they or their loved ones developed cancer. He'd make up spreadsheets of the kinds of care available, he'd talk about the doctors who did the treatment, he'd talk about cost.

Tetzeli also shared this example of Jobs's style of honest criticism:

A work example is from Pixar, where, when a movie was in trouble, Ed Catmull would call on Steve to have a personal conversation with the director. This wasn't a scolding thing. Steve and the director would just go on a walk together, and Steve would lay out-in his own, unvarnished, crystal-clear way-exactly where the movie had gone off the tracks.

It was a punch to the gut, but it was told in a way that made it clear that the failure was anything but personal. This is one of the complexities of Steve's criticism-it could injure those who didn't know him well, but it could be extremely valuable to those who did know him well.

As much as many may want to take leadership lessons from Jobs, Tetzeli shares why that's not the best idea:

I think that a lot of people look at Jobs and think being headstrong is the way to go, but they haven't understood the subtleties of his management skills. Headstrong is a small part of being a successful manager-in fact, it's not necessary at all. It worked for Steve. But that's no reason it should work for someone else. Steve's management style was very much in keeping with who he was, and that should probably be the first thing a manager asks himself-am I posing, or is this really me? If the answer is posing, it's time to find a new style.

Schlender revealed what really motivated Jobs:

Steve was motivated more than anything to feel he had made a solid and positive impact on the world during his lifetime. It was as simple as that. He would say, "I just want to put a dent in the universe." The funny thing was, that wasn't hyperbole. He really meant it. But at the same time, Steve was an aesthetic idealist in a very particular way. It was more important to him to create the best product than to sell the most. There's a certain snobbishness and elitism to this notion, but the second time around at Apple, Steve rarely failed to live up to the high standards he set for himself and others. And there is no question that he left his mark on the world.

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5 Surprising Insights About Steve Jobs's Management Style

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"Kind. Patient. Human. The Steve you didn't know." Those are the words accompanying a portrait of the late Apple cofounder on the cover of this month's issue of Fast Company, which features an exclusive excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs , a new biography by longtime Valley reporter Brent Schlender (who came to know Jobs intimately over the 25 years he spent covering Apple) and Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli.

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Horizontal Organizations. Useful visual reference. Pros: more focused on teamwork, faster decision making. Cons: less room for innovation, less opportunity of "upward" mobility.

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Vertical Organizations. Just a quick & useful visual reference. Personally, vertical organizations are slightly more appealing because you feel you can move up a corporate ladder. Cons: information takes more time to move up and down the ladder, dealing with potentially ineffective bureaucracy.

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Want effective delegation? Start with clarity. Important because everyone has felt like they've had a manager dump projects on them just because they don't feel like doing them. Learning effective communication techniques weeds out issues.

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While most everyone in business would agree that delegation is critical to managerial success, how often are we dissatisfied with the results of what we've delegated? How often is the "product" that is returned to us not exactly what we'd hoped for? While this is sometimes the fault of the person of completing the assignment, it's often the fault of the person giving the assignment. And there's a common root to the problem.

One word, I believe, sums it up: clarity. (Or lack thereof.) While those executing an assignment have the responsibility to deliver a professional product, those making the assignment have the responsibility to ensure that the assignment is, as an old editor of mine used to put it, "clear as a mountain crick."

Let's dissect delegation. Following are four common areas where it can go astray.

Clarity of objective - What exactly is it that needs to be done? Is an assignment as clear as it ought to be? Take an imaginary example: An executive (likely distracted, edgy, harassed by too much to do in too little time) calls you and says, "I need a quick competitive analysis of Barking Dogs of America. The board's expressed an interest in it and so has Schnauzer (your CEO). High priority. Gotta run to a meeting now, but I want you and Beagle to handle this. I know I can count on you both - trust me, there's a lot of interest in this one!" (FYI, Barking Dogs is a key rival that has been gaining market share at an alarming rate.) How will you respond to this phone call and assignment? Probably a fair amount of the time, taken off-guard yourself and slightly disturbed by the urgency and impatience in your boss's voice, your answer will be something along the lines of a jaunty, "Sure, no problem - you can count on us. Beagle and I are on it!" But what exactly is it you and Beagle are on? Does your boss want a paragraph? A page? Slides? A 20-page report? And analysis of what? Sales? Earnings? Market share? Distribution? Advertising? All of the above? Who knows? All you really know is that the project is important and your boss is anxious.

Clarity of responsibility - I can't tell you how many times in my corporate career I was given assignments for "me and Beagle" to handle. Or worse still, "me and Beagle and Spaniel," three trusted lieutenants. Even if you and Beagle and Spaniel are all very capable, which no doubt you are, whose assignment is it? Who does what to whom? Without a clear project lead, what you've mostly been handed is a recipe for confusion.

Clarity of time - Let's return to our hypothetical canines. The request was for a " quick competitive analysis." Well, how quick is quick? Could it be a day? Maybe. A week? Possibly? Two weeks? Conceivable - a competitive analysis can get pretty meaty. What both you and your boss most want to avoid is a phone call just, say, three hours later with your boss barking, "Where's that competitive analysis? I'm meeting Schnauzer in 10 minutes!" (When you were planning to meet Beagle over coffee first thing tomorrow morning to discuss how you'd approach the project...)

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While most everyone in business would agree that delegation is critical to managerial success, how often are we dissatisfied with the results of what we've delegated? How often is the "product" that is returned to us not exactly what we'd hoped for?

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Zappos and the effects of unraveling structure. Important because we think more freedom results in more creativity and more success, but a lack of clear structure creates an HR and logistical nightmare. Literally undoes everything positive I thought about Hsieh's management style.

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Photographs by Brad Swonetz

A move to "self-management" has shaken the online shoe retailer. Can it regain its mojo?

It's just another Wednesday afternoon at Zappos headquarters-which is to say that it's unlike any other Wednesday afternoon anywhere else in corporate America. The company's "resident artist," who started as a Zappos call-center worker, is painting an enormous chrysanthemum on a canvas near the entrance. Red lanterns festoon the lobby of the semicircular 1970s edifice, which once housed the Las Vegas city government, in honor of Chinese New Year. A few hours later, all 1,500 employees of the online shoe and clothing retailer gather in the nearby MGM Grand theater, home to the Cirque du Soleil show Kà, for Zappos's quarterly All-Hands Meeting, an afternoon of progress reports, music, and fun.

The young, diverse staff, heavy on neon-tinted hair and nose rings, cheers when Tony Hsieh, the company's longtime CEO, announces that everyone will get a paid vacation day on Feb. 29 in honor of leap year. They give a standing ovation to a worker in shipping who raps passionately about the company, offer a rousing send-off to a longtime "Zapponian" who's leaving the company, and take in a surprise Cirque du Soleil performance, complete with a cameo appearance by Zappos's signature box.

This quirky mix of circus, therapy session, and revival meeting exemplifies what has made working at Zappos so special: an obsessive focus on creating a culture that embraces the idiosyncrasies of each individual. That, and top-of-the-line perks such as free health care. The emphasis on employees-to the near exclusion of the usual metrics used to evaluate business-has made Zappos, owned by Amazon since 2009, a stalwart on Fortune's annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. It has been so celebrated for its 10 core values-which include "Create fun and a little weirdness" and "Build open and honest relationships with communication"-that the company has its own consulting unit to help others emulate the Zappos way.

But this year, nearing the third anniversary of a shift from a traditional management structure to "holacracy," a system that replaces hierarchies and bosses with "self-management," something is different. In between the rapping and the report on the company's "Pawlidayz" initiative to support pet adoptions, Hsieh, 42, takes to the stage to report disappointing news. He announces that scores on Fortune' s Best Companies to Work For survey have tumbled on 48 of 58 questions. Indeed, Zappos has fallen off the overall list for the first time in eight years. Two questions that generated particularly dismal results: Do employees think management has "a clear view of where the organization is going and how to get there"? And do managers "avoid playing favorites"?

Yet Hsieh didn't seem particularly rattled. Over the past few months he'd moved beyond holacracy to an even more abstract system he calls "teal." (We'll explain.) "It's just part of the journey," he tells the troops. "I don't think it's going to be all roses. But whatever the top-of-mind things are right now, history has shown that we will get through them."

Still, there's been a lot to get through lately. The shift to holacracy, combined with a wildly ambitious software project called Super Cloud-not to mention a reconceived business strategy-has left employees confused, demoralized, and whipsawed by the constant pace of change. Over the past year, in part owing to a buyout offer, 29% of the staff has turned over.

Holacracy is "a social experiment [that] created chaos and uncertainty," says one Zapponian who left last year. A current employee, who filled out a survey (provided to Fortune by the company) following the all-hands meeting, praised Hsieh for openness about the negative feedback but added in a burst of frustration: "I would have liked to hear some actions that may be taken to address how drastically approval of managers and legacy leadership has fallen, and how strongly more and more employees are feeling like favoritism [and management issues are] becoming a bigger problem ... They aren't remnants of legacy structure that have survived despite holacracy; they're things that have somehow found power in it and worsened in the current system."

Zappos has always been a risk-taking enterprise. It was born from an experiment in 1999 (sell shoes via the Internet!) and has, under the deceptively anodyne leadership of Hsieh, embarked on one mold-shattering change after another. He made Zappos the first website to offer free shipping both ways. He moved the company to the suburbs of Las Vegas to build a culture apart from Silicon Valley, then uprooted it again to a gritty area of downtown Vegas in hopes of creating a work-life paradise.

In his mind, the move to holacracy, in which teams are replaced by "circles," and managers by "lead links," is his attempt to avoid the eventual fate of most large companies: death. "The one thing I'm absolutely sure of," Hsieh says, "is that the future is about self-management."

The result has been an epic clash between a doctrinaire set of rules and a culture whose very essence has been a tolerance for the unruliness that comes with individual self-expression. Holacracy has empowered some people and hamstrung others. The company's most utopian dreams, which include banishing internal politics, have not yet been realized.

The remaining Zapponians insist the transition, painful as it has been, has turned the corner. They believe in the company, even as they wonder what it will stand for. But at times it feels as if Hsieh, to borrow an old phrase, may be destroying the village in order to save it.

Tony Hsieh has always cared deeply about the human side of work. He wrote a book called Delivering Happiness, which asserted that employee satisfaction is the key to business success. Indeed, in recent years workers seemed content, though sales growth had tapered. Turning the company upside down is the last thing most managers would have done. But Hsieh worried that Zappos was becoming more bureaucratic and losing some of its spark.

In 2012, at the Conscious Capitalism conference in Austin, he attended a speech by a software company CEO named Brian Robertson. Robertson argued that it was the messiness of human interactions-the emotional discord, the power struggles-that prevent businesses from achieving their potential. What if, he asked, there's another way to organize-one that doesn't rely on bosses, politics, and power?

Robertson found inspiration in sociocracy, a century-old concept that relies on a sort of Quaker meetinghouse decision-making system. He devised a rule book-an operating system, as he likes to call it-for a bossless organization.

The result was holacracy, in which traditional top-down reporting lines are replaced by work circles that operate next to, and on top of, each other. People don't have jobs; they have "roles." Lead links are the nominal managers-but they have little formal authority and can't force employees to do anything they don't want to do.

All this egalitarianism comes larded with strictures and meetings, particularly in the implementation phase. There are "tactical" meetings, focused on moving the workflow forward, and "governance" ones, which hash out processes and roadblocks. "Holacracy does add structure and rigor and discipline," Robertson says in an interview. "If you don't have parents, you need self-discipline."

Hsieh contacted Robertson-who offers a software system, GlassFrog, that aspiring holacrats may purchase-and signed on. In early 2013 the human resources department became the first group at the company to deploy holacracy. Employees were shocked and frustrated by the numerous mandates, the endless meetings, and the confusion about who did what. Says Christa Foley, an 11-year vet who was a senior HR manager and is now lead link for the Culture-Connecting the Dots circle and the Zappos Insights circle: "I hated all of it, in particular because it was off-the-shelf, so focused on the rules of the game, and it explicitly felt icky without a focus on the people." Foley says she has come to like the system.

Holacracy created new winners and losers-and it sparked fresh ideas. With experience and expertise de-emphasized, less "typical" and more junior types have been able to succeed. Introverts have benefited from the expectation that everybody speak in meetings. Says Danielle Kelly, 25, lead link of the State of Mind circle, the Teal Mappers circle, and the Teal Kit circle: "The structure of the meetings forces each person to ... say what they want. Before I might've thought something and wouldn't have jumped in. Now I have that time to myself."

Another beneficiary is Derek Noel, 30, a onetime customer-service employee. Noel had wanted to transfer to Zappos's culture team but found himself blocked by his manager. "As soon as I found out about how holacracy worked," he says, "I was like, 'Actually, my boss can't tell me that.' " Noel's ideas, which included weekday events where employees watch a movie in the auditorium while working on their laptops, gained traction. Now he works in the Fungineering circle, a kind of events-planning/pep squad. "My worst day at Zappos is still better than my best day anywhere else," he says. "I can't imagine going back to traditional hierarchy anymore."

The biggest shock for Hollie Delaney, previously the head of people experiences at Zappos and now the lead link of the People Ops circle, among others, was that as a career manager, she no longer had the muscle to force anything to happen. Her longtime career goal, to become the VP of human resources, was no longer achievable at Zappos.

As holacracy unfurled, Delaney realized her power was ebbing. "I said, 'I literally have no job.' I was freaking out. That got me to start thinking about why I didn't have other roles. Yeah, I had the big title and the quote unquote power. But was that really fulfilling? The answer was no." In the spirit of self-management, Delaney found "roles" that appealed to her. An avid runner, she became lead link of the Healthy, Happy Zapponians circle, which is starting a race series for employees. But is having an experienced HR executive spend much of her time on a road race really the best use of Delaney-for her and for Zappos?

To get a sense of how some of this works in person, Zappos-which is strikingly open-let me attend, via Skype, a regular meeting of the Pursue Growth and Learning circle. It's the rough equivalent of an employee-training department. There were 10 participants, including one lead link, Chris Peake. It was a hybrid of a governance and tactical meeting. (I agreed not to reveal the topics of discussion.)

The meeting began with "check-ins and checkouts," in which each participant (including me) was expected to speak about how they were feeling-about their work, their personal struggles. One woman talked about her love for her "annoying 13-year-old daughter." It was an acknowledgement that everybody has issues besides work that affect his or her state of mind.

After check-in, which took seven minutes, it was all business. A facilitator cut off digressions (known as "distractions"), and the pace accelerated. The agenda was "made up on the fly," according to Peake. "Agenda items are typically referred to as 'tensions.' A tension is simply the difference between 'what currently is and what it could potentially be.' " Tensions could be anything from practical obstacles to brainstorms, and they proliferated-but were mostly tabled for resolution at a later time.

For all the odd lingo ("I'm making myself an action to send you feedback on that"), it wasn't much different from a conventional meeting. The lead link did almost all the talking. He made requests rather than issued orders (though not without the occasional guilt trip) until someone agreed to take on a task. The meeting lasted over an hour and ended after everybody was asked to name their favorite current TV show.

Holacracy is supposed to slay the demons of politics. It hasn't yet. Some managers tried to consolidate their old power inside the new structure, says Nox Voortella, who came to Zappos in 2014 as a sales planner. "In the beginning I thought [holacracy] was great," she says. "Then I saw the old managers around me grow more and more insecure and try to see how they would restructure management. The people who should've stayed and were leaders and could have rallied people left. And the managers that stayed were just the ones who had nothing else to offer." She recently chose to depart for a more traditional company.

Holacracy also lacks some crucial elements, such as a compensation process. The system doesn't value seniority or the size of your budget. There are no formal performance evaluations. How, then, do you calculate how much to a pay a person, and for that matter, who makes the decision?

Zappos just launched its own method. It has nothing to do with achieving financial results; instead, people are paid according to skills they possess or earn, a system called "badging." Just like Girl Scouts, people can earn, say, a Java Coding badge or a Merchandise Planning badge by fulfilling certain requirements. Zappos says it will pay at the market rate for each skill, but every job comprises many skills. To stave off the anxiety of not knowing what you'll be paid, the company created a Grandfather badge that guaranteed pay wouldn't fall in 2016.

Another big issue is how to determine how much time one spends in the various circles and whether they add up to something approximating a full-time job. Every circle has a certain number of "people points" that together approximate the scope of work. Zappos workers have 100 points each and must distribute them among their circles. If they don't enjoy their circles or feel they aren't doing a good job-or if, as some employees report, lead links don't approve as many points as they need-they must find a new circle.

If they don't, they can end up on "the Beach," a kind of purgatory. "You just sat ... in a conference room and talked with the 'why' coaches about what your passions were," says Voortella, who says she nearly landed on the Beach after clashing with a lead link. Today the Beach has been renamed and the path split. You either enter "Hero's Journey," in which a team helps you find a new raison d'être. Or you enter "Transition Support" to help you join another circle. If that doesn't happen in two weeks, you transition out of Zappos entirely.

Meanwhile, holacracy hasn't been the only disruption. In 2014, Zappos reconceived its sales strategy, from one that emphasized volume to one that targets a smaller number of "best customers" who pay full price. Almost simultaneously, the company embarked on a giant software migration-moving its e-commerce system onto Amazon's-a still-ongoing project titled Super Cloud. One result: Zappos's website has barely changed for two years-a lifetime in the world of the Internet. "I wish we had waited until Super Cloud was done," says Manish Honnatti, who leads the Zappos Zero unit and has become an advocate for self-management.

That wasn't all. A year ago, as holacracy had finally become law throughout the company, Tony Hsieh issued another decree. It came in a 4,300-word memo entitled "Reinventing Zappos: The Road to Teal." Wrote Hsieh: "We are going to take a 'rip the Band-Aid' approach to accelerate progress towards becoming a Teal organization (as described in the book Reinventing Organizations)." Therefore, he explained, "as of 4/30/15, in order to eliminate the legacy management hierarchy, there will be effectively be no more people managers."

Hsieh was referring to a 2014 book by consultant Frederic Laloux, who argues that throughout history people have organized themselves in various ways. Laloux assigned a color to each type: orange for modern corporations such as Walmart, and green for what he views as more evolved operations, like Starbucks. Teal, he wrote, was the next stage of development, characterized by self-management, bringing one's "whole" self to work, and having a purpose beyond making money. "There is something broken about management, something exhausted," Laloux tells me over the phone.

For Hsieh, teal was the logical next step, the state that could be achieved only via a process like holacracy. "Teal is the goal; holacracy is the system," says John Bunch, a former professional poker player and Zappos developer whom Hsieh tapped to lead the move to holacracy in 2013.

Then the low-key CEO injected more drama. He asked everyone to commit to teal-or leave (with extremely generous severance). Hsieh knew he'd lose some good people, but he also thought the nonbelievers were impeding progress.

The logic made sense. Still, the emotional side of it was devastating. Many people who had helped create Zappos and had risen to become leaders were being told they were no longer wanted. It felt like a purge. What unfolded next amounted to a collective wail: We've only just started holacracy. What the heck is teal? And, by far, the most common reaction: Will all this ever end?

Hsieh says he didn't know how many people would accept the offer. "Whatever the number was was the right number," he says today. In the end, 18% of the 1,500 employees took buyouts, and another 11% left without a package.

Atomic liquors is a rare vestige of an older Las Vegas. With its mid-century signage and history as the place on whose roof locals stood to observe nuclear tests, it has the sort of retro cachet Hsieh loves.

Waiting for him are three glasses containing his regular beverages: from left, a Diet Coke, a shot of Fernet-Branca liqueur, and a White Russian. Hsieh has his eccentricities. He's worth around half a billion dollars but lives in an Airstream trailer with two pet alpacas on-site. Unmarried and apparently unattached, he sees his company as his family. I drink a shot of the NyQuil-like Fernet with him, then order a beer. (I can't abide White Russians.)

Hsieh turns serious when I ask what he didn't anticipate in the process of implementing holacracy. "I've been surprised," he says, "at how hard it is to let go of the psychological baggage." I ask if he regrets undertaking so much change at once. No, he says: "In retrospect, I would have probably ripped off the Band-Aid sooner."

For Hsieh, self-management is as much a societal strategy as a business one. Having spent much of the past few years building and personally funding-to the tune of $350 million-the Downtown Project, an attempt to build a work-life community in the heart of Las Vegas, Hsieh has ambitions beyond commerce. He likens self-management to the interactions that spring up organically in a city rather than the top-down bureaucracy of a typical company.

Hsieh is thoughtful-a seeker. Yet it's striking that neither he nor other Zapponians make more than perfunctory comments about the company's business. (He did say Zappos has achieved its highest operating profits ever.)

That's a crucial point. If Zappos continues to make money, Amazon will leave it alone. If it doesn't, Zappos could just as easily cease to exist. The company achieved its 2015 profit goals, but several employees say that it has lowered its 2016 targets. (Zappos declined to comment.) Whether that's due to holacracy, growing competition in the online shoe category, or something else is impossible to tell.

Holacracy's value remains far from proven. Its creator, Robertson, says the process takes five to 10 years to be fully integrated-an eon in business. He seems blasé when asked whether holacracy truly works. "Where I don't measure success is by looking at the actual end results," he says. "I don't put much stock in it, because who knows? For me it's about ease of use."

Some 300 companies use his system-Zappos is easily the largest-and there have been failures. In early March, content site Medium announced it was abandoning it. Bud Caddell, a consultant who has studied self-management systems, says his former firm, Undercurrent, tried it without success. "I found it extremely dogmatic and rigid and overly complex, and it took attention away from our customers," Caddell says. Even Hsieh's own Downtown Project tried holacracy but gave up on it in 2014. ("It was too early to adopt in Downtown Project's time line," says Hsieh.)

When asked for an example of something that couldn't have happened without holacracy, Jamie Naughton, Zappos's chief of staff, cited this: Dogs are now allowed in the office. If that had been proposed earlier, she says, anyone could have blocked it because of allergies, fear, etc.  But under holacracy, one of the threshold questions is "Is it safe enough to try?" Now, even though Hsieh was opposed, dogs are welcome, as long as they pass a behavioral assessment. People afflicted by dander have declared "allergy zones" that dogs may not enter. "Self-organization," she says, "allowed one employee to figure it out."

Last spring, while Zapponians were weighing whether to take the offer, one of them invited Caddell to share his own experiences with holacracy in an open forum. He interviewed 15 to 20 employees beforehand, then spoke to a group of about 150. "It felt like a wake," he says. "The people I did speak with expressed a general feeling of loss of control of their own working environment." When Caddell emailed Hsieh suggestions on how to improve morale, he says, he was shut down: "He said I used the word 'leadership' too much, and that I was a biased actor." (Hsieh says that's not the type of phrase he would use.)

For all the havoc, there are signs of optimism at Zappos. Some referred to a book called The Dip, by Seth Godin, which argues that in times of great transition, things always get worse before they get better. Now that the employee buyouts are completed, few apostates remain to slow things down.

"We grew up," says Tyler Williams, who leads the Brand Aura circle (a.k.a. marketing). "Now we are getting back to that place where we are being kind and forgiving to people, and people that used holacracy as a weapon are finding themselves getting smaller and smaller islands to work from. We're more policed now as a company based on peer pressure rather than on micromanagement."

Many are pushing to bring culture back to the forefront. One possibility: adding a Culture Check to the agenda at every governance meeting. A six-step conflict resolution process, developed in-house, may help soften holacracy's rigidity. And Zappos is altering its recruiting process to ensure that new hires are wired for self-management.

The day after the all-hands meeting, there were two parties going on at lunchtime: one for Chinese New Year, with women making dumplings, and a Valentine's Day blowout featuring a cruise-themed costume contest and a cookies-and-tattoos setup. Holacracy hasn't reduced the company's social activities. Says Naughton: "We didn't get ranked one of the best companies to work for in America this year, but we're still really a great company. This is my family, and I hope that's what people take away when they see Zappos." Fair enough. Yet that may be true in spite of holacracy rather than because of it.
A version of this article appears in the March 15, 2016 issue of Fortune with the headline "The Zappos Experiment."

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Photographs by Brad Swonetz It's just another Wednesday afternoon at Zappos headquarters-which is to say that it's unlike any other Wednesday afternoon anywhere else in corporate America. The company's "resident artist," who started as a Zappos call-center worker, is painting an enormous chrysanthemum on a canvas near the entrance.

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Interview questions and answers about company culture. Important because finding a corporate culture that suits you is almost as important as the job itself. I don't want the best job at the worst company.

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Important as a guide and also interesting to see how closely it measures the scientific method. It's also interesting to see that the same steps you would take before deciding on an important business decision are similar to the decision process I went through while buying an oven.

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Important because of the usefulness of these tips"
Strategic Planning Tips
1. Field test your assumptions
2. Eliminate Fuzzy Language
3. Break away from templates
4. Do not shy away from asking difficult questions

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No great strategy was born without careful thought. That's why the process of planning a strategy itself is an important vehicle for setting priorities, making investment decisions, and laying out growth plans. But for many companies, the activity has devolved into either an overexplained budget or just bad amateur theater - lots of costumes in the form of analysis, charts, and presentations - but with very little meaningful substance that can be translated into action. As a result, many strategic plans end up as shelf decorations or hard-to-find files in crowded hard drives.

Since this is the season when many companies are engaged in strategic planning, it's just the right time to break bad habits. Here are four steps that you can take to make better use of the hard work that goes into planning a strategy:

Insist on experiments to test the assumptions you've made. Strategic plans necessarily involve hypotheses that certain outcomes (increased revenue, improved margins, higher ROI) will result from a given set of initiatives. But too often those assumptions are supported by secondary research, educated guesses, or assumptions rather than field tests. As a result, managers are uncomfortable actually moving into action or committing resources, preferring to stay with the business they know rather than possibilities that may or may not pan out. To overcome this inertia, ask managers to include specific, short-term experiments, whose results will communicate what works and what does not. In one company, the senior manager called these "scouting missions" and made sure that each of his managers was responsible for at least one every quarter.

Banish fuzzy language. Strategic plans are often filled with empty phrases such as "Leverage our World Class Operating Capabilities" or head-scratching aspirations like "Reshape Our Pricing and Trade Strategy to Effectively Drive Demand While Maintaining Market Access." Language like this can signal that a team doesn't have a clear idea of what they need to succeed. To counter this dynamic, the CEO of a large financial services firm banned her organization from using a list of words and phrases such as "leverage" "synergy," "disintermediation," and "robust" (to pick a few of the most overused terms).

Escape from template tyranny. Templates are often a standard fixture of strategic planning. Ideally they force teams to consider important topics - competitive analysis, shifts in external markets, performance gaps that need to be closed - and more easily compare data from different divisions. But the rigid use of templates can lead a team to be more focused on corporate requirements than on doing the hard thinking about how they plan to grow their business. And when teams have to complete the same templates each year, the result can be stale ideas, rote responses, and plans that don't fully capture - or worse, obscure - the key issues and opportunities that a business needs to address. Avoiding this problem may be as simple as eliminating sections of the planning template that no longer make sense; or it may mean more radically changing the requirements. For example, a large food manufacturer reenergized the process by shifting from a 3 year planning template requiring many different and overlapping pieces of information to a shorter, more open-ended format that gave teams greater latitude to develop their growth plans in the form of a narrative.

Ask provocative questions. In theory, strategic planning should foster intense debates and discussions; but when the process is rigidly structured, and the documents are dense with data, the dialogue can be stilted or constrained. To overcome this, it's important to ask tough questions when the plans are presented - and to do this in a way that can lead to unscripted answers that will enrich the thinking and increase everyone's level of confidence in moving forward. A few that we've heard include: " What are the top 2 or 3 things that must go right for this strategy to work?" "If we pursue this strategy, what are we deciding not to do?" and "What specific capabilities will we need to develop in order for this plan to succeed?"

The strategic planning process is an important part of most organizations' operating rhythm. The leadership challenge, however, is to make sure that it's more than just a corporate exercise - or bad theater.
This piece's coauthor, Logan Chandler,is a partner with Schaffer Consulting and the co-author of the HBR article Off-Sites That Work.

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No great strategy was born without careful thought. That's why the process of planning a strategy itself is an important vehicle for setting priorities, making investment decisions, and laying out growth plans.

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A look at how the same techniques you would apply to a business would apply to a personal analysis of your strengths and areas of improvement. When I get a spare moment, I'd like to sit down and complete my personal analysis as I feel like it would help me develop more specific personal & professional development goals so I'll be more prepared when I reenter the workplace.

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Business SWOT. A handy guide reference guide and explanation of SWOT analysis.

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How to Do a SWOT Analysis

Avoid relying on your own, partial understanding of your organization. Your assumptions could be wrong. Instead, gather a team of people from a range of functions and levels to build a broad and insightful list of observations.

Then, every time you identify a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, or Threat, write it down in the relevant part of the SWOT analysis grid for all to see.

Let's look at each area in more detail and consider what fits where, and what questions you could ask as part of your data gathering.

Strengths

Strengths are things that your organization does particularly well, or in a way that distinguishes you from your competitors. Think about the advantages your organization has over other organizations. These might be the motivation of your staff, access to certain materials, or a strong set of manufacturing processes.

Then turn your perspective around and ask yourself what your competitors might see as your strengths. What factors mean that you get the sale ahead of them?

Remember, any aspect of your organization is only a strength if it brings you a clear advantage. For example, if all of your competitors provide high-quality products, then a high-quality production process is not a strength in your market: it's a necessity.

Weaknesses

Weaknesses, like strengths, are inherent features of your organization, so focus on your people, resources, systems, and procedures. Think about what you could improve, and the sorts of practices you should avoid.

Once again, imagine (or find out) how other people in your market see you. Do they notice weaknesses that you tend to be blind to? Take time to examine how and why your competitors are doing better than you. What are you lacking?

Be honest! A SWOT analysis will only be valuable if you gather all the information you need. So, it's best to be realistic now, and face any unpleasant truths as soon as possible.

Opportunities

Opportunities are openings or chances for something positive to happen, but you'll need to claim them for yourself!

They usually arise from situations outside your organization, and require an eye to what might happen in the future. They might arise as developments in the market you serve, or in the technology you use. Being able to spot and exploit opportunities can make a huge difference to your organization's ability to compete and take the lead in your market.

Think about good opportunities that you can exploit immediately. These don't need to be game-changers: even small advantages can increase your organization's competitiveness. What interesting market trends are you aware of, large or small, which could have an impact?

You should also watch out for changes in government policy related to your field. And changes in social patterns, population profiles, and lifestyles can all throw up interesting opportunities.

Threats

Threats include anything that can negatively affect your business from the outside, such as supply-chain problems, shifts in market requirements, or a shortage of recruits. It's vital to anticipate threats and to take action against them before you become a victim of them and your growth stalls.

Think about the obstacles you face in getting your product to market and selling. You may notice that quality standards or specifications for your products are changing, and that you'll need to change those products if you're to stay in the lead. Evolving technology is an ever-present threat, as well as an opportunity!

Always consider what your competitors are doing, and whether you should be changing your organization's emphasis to meet the challenge. But remember that what they're doing might not be the right thing for you to do. So, avoid copying them without knowing how it will improve your position.

Be sure to explore whether your organization is especially exposed to external challenges. Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems, for example, that could make you vulnerable to even small changes in your market? This is the kind of threat that can seriously damage your business, so be alert.

A SWOT Analysis Example

Imagine this scenario: a small start-up consultancy wants a clear picture of its current situation, to decide on a future strategy for growth. The team gathers, and draws up the SWOT Analysis shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. A Completed SWOT Analysis.

Strengths What do you do well? What unique resources can you draw on? What do others see as your strengths?

Weaknesses What could you improve? Where do you have fewer resources than others? What are others likely to see as weaknesses?

We are able to respond very quickly as we have no red tape, and no need for higher management approval.

We are able to give really good customer care, as the current small amount of work means we have plenty of time to devote to customers.

Our lead consultant has a strong reputation in the market.

We can change direction quickly if we find that our marketing is not working.

We have low overheads, so we can offer good value to customers.

Our company has little market presence or reputation.

We have a small staff, with a shallow skills base in many areas.

We are vulnerable to vital staff being sick or leaving.

Our cash flow will be unreliable in the early stages.

Opportunities What opportunities are open to you? What trends could you take advantage of? How can you turn your strengths into opportunities?

Threats What threats could harm you? What is your competition doing? What threats do your weaknesses expose to you?

Our business sector is expanding, with many future opportunities for success.

Local government wants to encourage local businesses.

Our competitors may be slow to adopt new technologies.

Developments in technology may change this market beyond our ability to adapt.

A small change in the focus of a large competitor might wipe out any market position we achieve.

As a result of the team's analysis, it's clear that the consultancy's main strengths lie in its agility, technical expertise, and low overheads. These allow it to offer excellent customer service to a relatively small client base.

The company's weaknesses are also to do with its size. It will need to invest in training, to improve the skills base of the small staff. It'll also need to focus on retention, so it doesn't lose key team members.

There are opportunities in offering rapid-response, good-value services to local businesses and to local government organizations. The company can likely be first to market with new products and services, given that its competitors are slow adopters.

The threats require the consultancy to keep up-to-date with changes in technology. It also needs to keep a close eye on its largest competitors, given its vulnerability to large-scale changes in its market. To counteract this, the business needs to focus its marketing on selected industry websites, to get the greatest possible market presence on a small advertising budget.

Frequently Asked Questions About SWOT Analysis

1. Who Invented SWOT Analysis?

2. What Does SWOT Analysis Stand For?

SWOT Analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

3. What Can a SWOT Analysis Be Used For?

SWOT analysis is a useful tool to help you determine your organization's position in the market. You can then use this information to create an informed strategy suited to your needs and capabilities.

4. How Do I Write a SWOT Analysis?

5. How Do SWOT Analysis and the TOWS Matrix compare?

6. What Are the Biggest SWOT Analysis Mistakes?

Making your lists too long. Ask yourself if your ideas are feasible as you go along.

Being vague. Be specific to provide more focus for later discussions.

Not seeing weaknesses. Be sure to ask customers and colleagues what they experience in real life.

Not thinking ahead. It's easy to come up with nice ideas without taking them through to their logical conclusion. Always consider their practical impact.

Being unrealistic. Don't plan in detail for opportunities that don't exist yet. For example, that export market you've been eyeing may be available at some point, but the trade negotiations to open it up could take years.

Relying on SWOT Analysis alone. SWOT Analysis is valuable. But when you use it alongside other planning tools (SOAR, TOWS or PEST), the results will be more vigorous.

How to Use a SWOT Analysis

Use a SWOT Analysis to assess your organization's current position before you decide on any new strategy. Find out what's working well, and what's not so good. Ask yourself where you want to go, how you might get there - and what might get in your way.

Once you've examined all four aspects of SWOT, you'll want to build on your strengths, boost your weaker areas, head off any threats, and exploit every opportunity. In fact, you'll likely be faced with a long list of potential actions.

But before you go ahead, be sure to develop your ideas further. Look for potential connections between the quadrants of your matrix. For example, could you use some of your strengths to open up further opportunities? And, would even more opportunities become available by eliminating some of your weaknesses?

Finally, it's time to ruthlessly prune and prioritize your ideas, so that you can focus time and money on the most significant and impactful ones. Refine each point to make your comparisons clearer. For example, only accept precise, verifiable statements such as, "Cost advantage of $30/ton in sourcing raw material x," rather than, "Better value for money."

SWOT Analysis Tips

Here are four tips for getting more out of a SWOT analysis:

Be specific. The more focused and accurate you are about the points you write down, the more useful your SWOT analysis will be.

Work backwards. Experiment with filling in the four sections of your SWOT analysis in a different order, to stimulate new ways of thinking. Working backwards, in particular, from threats to strengths, may cast new light on the situation.

Get together. Highlight the most useful people to contribute to your SWOT analysis, then gather information and ideas from them all.

SWOT your competition! To stay ahead of your competitors, carry out a regular SWOT analysis on them. Use everything you know about them to evaluate their situation, and use SWOT analysis to plan your competitive strategies accordingly.

SWOT Analysis Infographic

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SWOT Analysis With SWOT Templates and Examples !

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SWOT Analysis is a simple but powerful framework for analyzing your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Includes template. Access on-demand resources, expert videos by becoming a Mind Tools member now!!

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Global Brands. Interesting because it shows the global reach and spread of only 10 companies and how their products are diversified to target a global market.

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25 Best Multinational Companies to Work For
Microsoft at #1, Marriott at #7, Apple is not even on the list. Interesting on how Apple is so commonly lauded, but not from an employee standpoint. Plus based on our case study on marriott no shock to see them listed as highly.

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Robert Scoble via Flickr
Last night there was a huge party at the New York Stock Exchange honoring the top 25 multinational corporations (where 40% of a company's workforce is stationed outside its headquarters).

The event was put on by the Great Place to Work Institute, which determined the list by surveying 2.5 million employees from more than 5,500 companies worldwide.

Employees were asked about workplace culture, and how much faith they have in their company.

Guess who's No. 1?
Great Place to Work determined rankings based on the average score from surveys sent to employees. Countries must be mentioned on lists from at least five countries to be considered a best multinational company.

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The 25 Best Multinational Companies To Work For

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Last night there was a huge party at the New York Stock Exchange honoring the top 25 multinational corporations (where 40% of a company's workforce is stationed outside its headquarters). The event was put on by the Great Place to Work Institute, which determined the list by surveying 2.5 million employees from more than 5,500 companies worldwide.

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My results on the Skipprichard.com Leadership Type test. Useful to know what type of manager I am and the pros and cons of my type of leadership.

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"Culture is the least understood of the challenges of global expansion."
Important as it is a realistic discussion of the limits and challenges faced in globalization.

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How do you determine which countries to pursue and which to avoid?
When growth stalls, many managers decide that the answer to the slowing metrics is in going global. In many instances, managers don't appreciate the inherent risks, miss the cultural nuances, and miscalculate the legal costs of the lofty goals globalization requires.

Robert Salomon is a professor of International Management and Faculty Scholar at NYU's Stern School of Business and has been teaching and studying the effects of globalization for nearly 20 years. His new book, Global Vision: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization, is a guide to successfully navigating the global marketplace.

As the CEO of a global business myself, I was intrigued by the lessons in the book and reached out to Robert to share some of his findings with you.
In your book, you say that one of the biggest problems with globalization is managers and their unbridled optimistic attitude. How does this increase risk?
The problem is that managers systematically overestimate the benefits of globalization and underestimate its costs. They tend to believe that globalization is relatively easy, and they therefore overlook the economic, political, and cultural risks involved.
Many people cite Thomas Friedman's book "The World is Flat" as an urgent call toward globalization. What's usually wrong with this thinking?
More and more research suggests that the world is less global than Friedman suggests, and not just by a little, but by a lot. And so if managers base their views of globalization on Friedman's work, they will end up making very dangerous assumptions about globalization's risks and challenges.
Why is overestimating market potential so prevalent?
It is prevalent because managers tend to think that consumers will respond to their company's products similarly in every market. They therefore believe that they can simply port their existing business model to global markets with little change. In this respect, they fail to recognize the challenges that culture-in the form of different consumer cultures-can place on their business model.
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Strategic Mistake: Porting existing business models to global markets with little change.

Your research led you to the conclusion that "culture is probably the least understood." Tell us more about the importance of culture and its role.
Culture is the least well understood of all of globalization's challenges because culture is difficult to define and measure. Is culture about language differences? Yes. Is culture about religious differences? Yes. Is culture about differences in behaviors, norms, customs, and social structure? Yes. But even if we recognize these differences across countries, they are difficult to quantify and measure. Because culture is difficult to quantify and measure, managers end up discounting its effect on globalization. In my book, Global Vision, I discuss how culture impacts globalization and also how managers can quantify the impact of culture on global companies.
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Culture is the least understood of the challenges of global expansion.

Would you share just one or two instances where culture norms mattered in business dealings (or some common business faux pas)?
Sure. One common mistake is failing to realize how important relationships can be to business dealings. In some countries, it takes time to establish trusting relations with business partners before they are willing to engage in business with you. In a country like the United States, transactions often precede relationships. For this reason, American managers will often underestimate the importance of establishing personal relationships with business partners in new markets. They must realize that, in some countries (in Asia or the Middle East, for example), it can take several years of building relationships before counterparties are willing to engage in transactions. And so in some countries, relationships precede transactions.
How did you develop the Global Acumen framework? What does it facilitate for managers?
Global Acumen is based on 15 years' worth of globalization research. I have studied how economic, political, and cultural factors impact globalization and, armed with that knowledge, built a tool that prices the risks (in terms of their direct impact on the bottom line) that economic, political, and cultural differences between countries can have on global and globalizing companies.

The Future of Globalization
What's your current view of the global business climate? Will we see more or less globalization in the next few years?
I see an increasing amount of economic and political risk all over the world at the moment - whether in countries like Russia or China, in Emerging Markets, or in the Middle East. For this reason, I expect to see the rate of growth in globalization slow over the next several years.
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GLOBAL VISION: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization

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How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization

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How do you determine which countries to pursue and which to avoid? When growth stalls, many managers decide that the answer to the slowing metrics is in going global. In many instances, managers don't appreciate the inherent risks, miss the cultural nuances, and miscalculate the legal costs of the lofty goals globalization requires.

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Corporate Social Responsibility. Important visual on the stages and importance of CSR.

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Ethical Management Pyramid. Interesting because you would think legal responsibility would be on the bottom since it would govern a lot of economic choices.

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The combination of competencies needed to be effective on a global level.

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The 3 images are important because they address the importance of a diverse workplace, but funnily enough still falls prey to outdated thinking. Why should an all-white, all-male management or work team be understandable in 2017? If anything the first slide should read, "This is outdated.This is insular thinking." It's promoting diversity, while lacking ethics.

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Important because slide 23: "Organisations can have, on the face of it, sophisticated diversity policies and champions- but still not practice diversity." It's important to find a company that puts their promotions and hiring in line with their published policies.

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Addressing Diversity in the Workplace | Talent Connect London 2014

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Skype & Philips share how they have embraced and strengthened diversity by implementing new processes and technology. Continue your talent acquisition transfor...

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Gender Diversity in the Workplace. Important for this tip on hiring:

Develop a hiring strategy that increases gender diversity in these units without reducing or ignoring merit. For example, studies indicate that when women feel they are hired to fill quotas, it negatively affects relationships between coworkers.

There is no reason a person cannot be the most talented person for a job AND gender or ethnically diverse. Fair hiring strategy mitigates feelings of workplace bias.

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How hiring a gender-diverse workforce can improve a company's bottom line

Men and women have different viewpoints, ideas, and market insights, which enables better problem solving.

Gender diversity is vital to any workplace. Not just because it's a laudable goal; it simply makes bottom-line business sense. If you need proof, look no further than a recent Gallup study, which finds that hiring a demographically diverse workforce can improve a company's financial performance.

The study of more than 800 business units from two companies representing two different industries -- retail and hospitality -- finds that gender-diverse business units have better financial outcomes than those dominated by one gender:

Gender-diverse business units in the retail company have 14% higher average comparable revenue than less-diverse business units (5.24% vs. 4.58%).

Gender-diverse business units in the hospitality company show 19% higher average quarterly net profit ($16,296 vs. $13,702) than less-diverse business units.

And if the gender-diverse business units are also highly engaged, financial performance improves dramatically. Retail units that are diverse and engaged have a 46% higher increase in comparable revenue. Similarly, diverse and engaged units in the hospitality company have a 58% higher net profit than single-gender and less-engaged units. These results show the additive effect of gender diversity and engagement on a company's bottom line.
The advantages of gender-diverse teams
Our research suggests that gender-diverse teams perform better than single-gender teams for several reasons:

Men and women have different viewpoints, ideas, and market insights, which enables better problem solving, ultimately leading to superior performance at the business unit level.

A gender-diverse workforce provides easier access to resources, such as various sources of credit, multiple sources of information, and wider industry knowledge.

A gender-diverse workforce allows the company to serve an increasingly diverse customer base.

Gender diversity helps companies attract and retain talented women. This is especially relevant as more women join the labor force around the world. Companies cannot afford to ignore 50% of the potential workforce and expect to be competitive in the global economy.

For these reasons and others, it makes sense for businesses to make gender diversity a priority.
What companies should do
A key finding of this study is that gender-diverse and engaged business units outperform those that are less diverse and less engaged. Managers not only need to increase gender diversity in business units but also create workplaces that engage employees. Open, trusting, and supportive relationships among coworkers and supervisors unleash the power of diversity by enabling employees to turn their differences in thought, behavior, skills, knowledge, and talent into innovative ideas and practices that can drive a company forward.

Secondly, the study finds that gender diversity varies substantially across business units within a company, which in turn affects the business performance of these units. To achieve the real benefits that diversity can bring, leaders and managers must look carefully at the gender balance in specific business units when designing and implementing a strategy to increase diversity. A blanket policy designed to increase overall gender diversity at a company, for example, is unlikely to achieve the desired results or to increase financial performance.

Making gender diversity a business priority can lead to financial benefits and help a company realize its full potential. To reap the bottom-line benefits that diversity can bring, business leaders must:

Identify business units that are less gender diverse.

Develop a hiring strategy that increases gender diversity in these units without reducing or ignoring merit. For example, studies indicate that when women feel they are hired to fill quotas, it negatively affects relationships between coworkers.

Create an engaged culture that enables men and women to form trusting relationships and motivates them to perform at a high level.

Set inclusiveness goals, and hold managers accountable for diversity.

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The Business Benefits of Gender Diversity

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How hiring a gender-diverse workforce can improve a company's bottom line Men and women have different viewpoints, ideas, and market insights, which enables better problem solving. Gender diversity is vital to any workplace. Not just because it's a laudable goal; it simply makes bottom-line business sense.

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Excellent Leader, Awful Manager. Useful because it makes me wonder if Steve Jobs thought he was actually good at the act of management.

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Innovation and determination. Important because it gives you an understanding of what made jobs an innovative leader.

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Important advice inspired by Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs taught us so many things... To us whose professional life strides tech, ads and media, his way of fostering innovation, of creating an obsessive culture of perfection remains both inspirational and enigmatic. For those who like design and engineering, there isn't a single field Apple hasn't entered - or at least influenced. When I fumble with the appalling multifunction display of my Prius, when I struggle with the remote control of my office A/C, or when I wonder why in hell the $2,000 battery-assisted bicycle I consider buying doesn't have an programmable memory chip to upgrade software that looks forever stuck in version 1.0, I wonder how the Cupertino guys would have handled it. Needless to say, I do the same when I look at media applications or newspapers/magazine designs, many of which seem to have succumbed to a sad mélange of sloppy execution and a lack of decisiveness in design.

For years, I have been reading everything I could about Apple from the management/innovation perspective. As a business journalist, I find Apple being the most frustrating company to follow. Very little comes out. The culture (and the cult) of secrecy extents way beyond any employee tenure; even the usually profligate academic literature is rather bare when it comes to Apple.

However, over a span of 14 years, as it impacted so many sectors, Apple's unprecedented turnaround yielded a few clues. I tried to isolate some with potential applications outside the tech world. What interests me in Apple ranges from its choice of frosted-glass for my MacBook Pro's trackpad (instead of cheaper plastic), to the use of its immense cash hoard, to the way the company prepared itself for the post-Jobs era.

1. Focus. Apple is a $100bn revenue corporation with an extremely small number of products: about 30 different models for four lines of items (computers, phones, music players, tablets). In Jobs's own words: "Focusing is about saying no" ( 1997 video here). Apple could always be tempted to wade in new markets. Especially since it expanded to the mobile space. Instead, management chose to concentrate on things it could do better than the competition, regardless of alleged customers' expectations or pundits' incantations. For now (as an example), the iPhone comes in one single screen-size (instead of dozens for each of its competitors) and Apple has been adding features only by following its quality-centred agenda.

This is connected to the perplexing question of choices. The news business, whether print or digital, is prone to external and internal influences. On the web, there are alleged "must have" or fashionable features that a digital editor can't avoid. Each editorial fiefdom demands a presence on the home page. It leads to confusion and to the reader's inability to understand what's important, what are the media's strength and sometimes what the site or the app is about.

2. Creativity/design. Not being an engineer actually helped Steve Jobs work better with them, and to connect aesthetics with function:

Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. (...) Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesise new things.

3. Obsessive attention to details. Last August, Vic Gundotra, a Google executive, shared an anecdote about receiving a Sunday morning phone call from Jobs apologising for an tiny imperfect rendering in the Google logo as displayed on the iPhone. Jobs paid attention to every detail of the business, and demanded a correction right away if necessary. He once said:

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Strangely enough, when you look at the Apple ecosystem there are no discernible ''false notes", disconnectswith its environment. The vision expressed at the top cascades down to the lowest level without losing intensity and precision. In his Fortune magazine piece"How Apple works", Adam Lashinksy sums it up:

Jobs himself is the glue that holds this unique approach together. Yet his methods have produced an organisation that mirrors his thoughts when - and this is important - Jobs isn't specifically involved. Says one former insider: "You can ask anyone in the company what Steve wants and you'll get an answer, even if 90% of them have never met Steve."

4. Accountability. It meshes with the previous point and is a key element in Apple's execution process. Accountability is at the cornerstone of Apple's management. Not a single meeting without a DRI - direct responsible individual - in charge of a well-defined piece of the puzzle. At the individual level, it's obviously a double edged sword: the person feels really in charge... of both success or failure.
Here is what Jobs said about its internal organisation at the AllThingsD conference (video here, worth watching):

Do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We have no committees. We are organised like a startup. We are the biggest startup on the planet. We all meet for three hours once a week and we talk about everything we're doing, the all business. And there is tremendous teamwork at the top of the company which filters down the teamwork through out of the company.

That's Jobs' view of management:

You have to be run by ideas, not by hierarchy.

5. Marketing. Jobs said this about the Macintosh in its 1985 interview with Playboy:

"We built [the Mac] for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build."

Twelve years later, he nailed it in Business Week:

"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Having said that, once launched every product is supported by a strong market research and analysis of customer choices.
Most of the time, print or digital publishers perform countless pre-marketing studies and focus groups. I have mixed feelings about those. In many instances, it is good to confirm an intuition or to avoid serious mistakes. But it many others, I've seen market studies becoming the tool of choice for managers to evade responsibilities in the event of a failure.

6. Money. Apple is a fabulously rich company ($76bn in cash reserve, more than the US Treasury). Still, resources are allocated in a rather scarce way. But once a decision is made, the company will spend whatever it takes to get the best possible of everything. (The Fortune piece mentions the hiring of the London Symphony Orchestra to record the soundtrack of Apple's video editing software iMovie). Less anecdotal, Apple management won't hesitate to send a product back to the drawing board regardless of the costs. Cash is also used as a strategic weapon: earlier this year, the company disclosed a $3.9bn investment to secure component supplies and production capacity, thus affecting competition. Jobs said at the time:

We've demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don't let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don't allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we'd like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.

Funnily, just one week after this financial disclosure by Apple, AOL announces the $315m acquisition of the Huffington Post. AOL might have some powder left, but no gunner. And I won't mention New sCorp's misfortunes with MySpace.

7. Legacy. Very few companies in the world have set up such a systematic process of mapping out their DNA to make sure it doesn't degrade over time. To do so, Jobs went to the very best in the talent pool: Joel Podolny, at the time dean of the Yale School of Management. Podolny left his prestigious post to work at Apple, in a programme wrapped in secrecy dubbed the Apple University (for more, read this story in the Los Angeles Times titled "Steve Jobs to live on, virtually, in Apple University").

I'm particularly sensitive to Apple's lessons. For one, I had the luck to work for a Norwegian company which invested a lot to learn from others' experience. Schibsted ASA's management willingness to understand others' success and failures played a significant role in its achievements.

Secondly, as someone who loves journalism and the media business, I'm preoccupied by what I see as an unprecedented wave of mediocrity sweeping through the news business, which suffers from deteriorating business models coupled to questionable management.

At the same time, I really believe most media companies can deal with such challenges by finding out what their DNA is really about, by doing whatever it takes to preserve it, and build its future on such a foundation.

One final note. Take 40 seconds to watch this video showing Steve Jobs responding to a student who recently asked him what he would add to its famous 2005 Stanford speech.
frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com Topics

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Steve Jobs: seven lessons from Apple's founder

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Steve Jobs taught us so many things... To us whose professional life strides tech, ads and media, his way of fostering innovation, of creating an obsessive culture of perfection remains both inspirational and enigmatic. For those who like design and engineering, there isn't a single field Apple hasn't entered - or at least influenced.

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Important words on how being the best version of yourself allows you the freedom to persue your goals without the weight of other people's opinions stopping you.