# data[].attributes.body
NYTimes: Esther Perel’s Business is Your Business

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Esther Perel’s Business Is Your Business

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
She is podcasting-famous, considered a “crossover breakthrough artist” by other therapists — and still trying to both see patients and conquer new platforms.

# data[].attributes.headline
WSJ: How to Complain to Your Boss the Right Way & Get Ahead at Work

# data[].attributes.subject
WSJ: How to Complain to Your Boss the Right Way & Get Ahead at Work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Want to advance your career? Learn to complain well.

Stay silent and you'll stew in resentment and let burgeoning problems fester. Speak up and you can alert leaders to hidden issues, fix the frustrating parts of your job and show you're ready for the next step up.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Complain to Your Boss the Right Way and Get Ahead at Work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Want to advance your career? Learn to complain well. Stay silent and you'll stew in resentment and let burgeoning problems fester. Speak up and you can alert leaders to hidden issues, fix the frustrating parts of your job and show you're ready for the next step up.

# data[].attributes.headline
Inc: You Don’t Need to Choose Between Empathy & Accountability 

# data[].attributes.subject
Inc: You Don’t Need to Choose Between Empathy & Accountability 

# data[].attributes.headline
HearMeOut: The Promise & Peril of AI Assisted Feedback 

# data[].attributes.subject
HearMeOut: The Promise & Peril of AI Assisted Feedback 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Promise and Peril of AI-Assisted Feedback

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Performance reviews written by ChatGPT look like the real thing. That’s a problem.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Worker Productivity Is Down 4.1% in the US in 2022, and Ennui May Be the Cause. | Thoughtful

# data[].attributes.headline
Thoughtful: Worker Productivity is Down 4.1% in the US in 2022, and Ennui May Be the Cause

# data[].attributes.subject
Thoughtful: Worker Productivity is Down 4.1% in the US in 2022, and Ennui May Be the Cause

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An epidemic of ennui (boredom and lethargy) has set in across the US and shows no signs of leaving. In 2022, worker productivity took a shocking 4.1% dip, and experts believe this may be the root cause of the decline. Could listlessness and dissatisfaction have become too much for us to bear? Perhaps.

But with economic decline on the horizon, the worst drop in US worker output since 1947 has worried many organizations. Luckily, automation, specifically robotic process automation, could answer this head-scratching trend. But how? Let's get into it.

Why Are US Workers Less Productive?

Employers everywhere are troubled by their employees' diminishing work output - and the facts back up that anxiety. While productivity in manufacturing is still solid and other areas of the private sector are experiencing a decline, as reported by Diego Comin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. Moreover, data from the US Bureau of labor statistics show that the US workforce could be more productive than a year ago. But why? What's going on here?

Like so many economic trends, worker productivity is complex, and many factors likely contribute to this drop in worker output. For example, many experts believe that significant swings in the job market have led to feelings of listlessness, boredom, and lethargy in the workforce. An eye-watering 20 million people were laid off in just a few weeks at the pandemic's start as companies prepared for a financially rocky future. And the workers who were spared were overworked to the point of burnout, causing fatigue and anxiety to skyrocket.

But months later, these same companies were suddenly desperate to hire, and layoffs reached historic lows. This meant that the power lay in the hands of the workforce, and many new hires benefitted from higher wages or didn't have to meet the exact stringent requirements they may have done in the past. The result? This chaotic job market period left many workers powerless and demotivated. The overworked employees who were lucky enough to keep their jobs saw their new colleagues get a more leisurely ride. At the same time, those fired and then hired elsewhere felt disposable and were less likely to pledge loyalty to their employers in the future.

Essentially, many workers are left feeling that their work is ultimately pointless. They feel powerless, and this lack of agency impacts their work pace and enthusiasm.

So, workers are unhappy in their jobs, but they're not worried about unemployment either - in January 2023, unemployment hit a five-decade low in the US. This means employers can only respond to poor worker output by firing people if there are enough unemployed people to fill those jobs.

How Can Automation Combat the Ennui Epidemic?

Once ennui takes hold, it can be challenging to stop. Humans are social creatures - we display our emotions on our faces, our body language, and of course, our words. And how we feel tends to rub off on other people. As a result, a few demotivated workers can soon lead to a demotivated workforce. And that is what's happening today.

However, there is hope. The best thing employers can do is support their workers with tools and resources that make their jobs easier. This is where automation comes in. Automation technologies can remove a good deal of the tedium involved in many daily front-office and back-office activities.

For example, the repetitive (but essential) administrative work necessary in many departments across the business is incredibly time-consuming and prone to error. We have AP approvals, invoicing, AR journal entries, and more in accounting. And in HR, we have activities like employee onboarding and time-sheet management.

Each of these activities manually requires many hours of work and a keen eye for detail. For example, a simple mistake in accounting can cause costly delays and hurt the company's bottom line. At the same time, the work could be more engaging for employees, driving up job dissatisfaction and error rates.

But with automation, employees are freed of much of this mundane work and can focus on tasks that require uniquely human skills, like higher-order thinking and creativity. This kind of work gives people a sense of agency and motivates them to come to work every day and give their all.

Final Thoughts

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be a game-changer for businesses, allowing employees to break free from mundane and repetitive tasks and focus on more meaningful work. With RPA, employees can spend their time on innovative, creative projects that bring about higher job satisfaction and improved worker output, as well as boost profits for the business. Who wouldn't want to work smarter, not harder? Let RPA help you and your team make the most of your work and workday!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Worker Productivity Is Down 4.1% in the US in 2022, and Ennui May Be the Cause. | Thoughtful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An epidemic of ennui (boredom and lethargy) has set in across the US and shows no signs of leaving. In 2022, worker productivity took a shocking 4.1% dip, and experts believe this may be the root cause of the decline. Could listlessness and dissatisfaction have become too much for us to bear?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's never been more important - or more difficult - for leaders to be good listeners. Job switching is rampant, and remote work means we don't get the nonverbal cues we'd pick up from an in-person conversation. Employers who fail to listen and thoughtfully respond to their people's concerns will see greater turnover. And given that the highest rates of turnover are among top performers who can take clients and projects with them, and the frontline employees responsible for the customer experience, the risk is clear.

While listening is a skill universally lauded, it's rarely, if ever, explicitly taught as such, outside of training for therapists. A 2015 study showed that while 78% of accredited undergraduate business schools list "presenting" as a learning goal, only 11% identified "listening."

Listening well is the kind of skill that benefits from not just teaching but coaching - ongoing, specialized instruction from someone who knows your personal strengths, weaknesses, and most importantly, habits. Reading this article won't turn you into a champion listener any more than reading an article on balance will turn you into Simone Biles. Our aims are to increase your understanding of what good listening is, and offer research-backed advice to improve your listening skills.

Becoming a Better Listener

A participant in any conversation has two goals: first, to understand what the other person is communicating (both the overt meaning and the emotion behind it) and second, to convey interest, engagement, and caring to the other person. This second goal is not "merely" for the sake of kindness, which would be reason enough. If people do not feel listened to, they will cease to share information.

This is "active listening." It has three aspects:

Cognitive: Paying attention to all the information, both explicit and implicit, that you are receiving from the other person, comprehending, and integrating that information

Emotional: Staying calm and compassionate during the conversation, including managing any emotional reactions (annoyance, boredom) you might experience

Behavioral: Conveying interest and comprehension verbally and nonverbally

Getting good at active listening is a lifetime endeavor. However, even minor improvements can make a big difference in your listening effectiveness. Here's a "cheat sheet" with nine helpful tips:

1. Repeat people's last few words back to them.

If you remember nothing else, remember this simple practice that does so much. It makes the other person feel listened to, keeps you on track during the conversation, and provides a pause for both of you to gather thoughts or recover from an emotional reaction.

2. Don't "put it in your own words" unless you need to.

Multiple studies have shown that direct repetition works, even though it may feel unnatural. Rephrasing what your interlocutor has said, however, can increase both emotional friction and the mental load on both parties. Use this tool only when you need to check your own comprehension - and say, explicitly, "I'm going to put this in my own words to make sure I understand."

3. Offer nonverbal cues that you're listening - but only if it comes naturally to you.

Eye contact, attentive posture, nodding and other nonverbal cues are important, but it's hard to pay attention to someone's words when you're busy reminding yourself to make regular eye contact. If these sorts of behaviors would require a significant habit change, you can instead, let people know at the beginning of a conversation that you're on the non-reactive side, and ask for their patience and understanding.

4. Pay attention to nonverbal cues.

Remember that active listening means paying attention to both the explicit and implicit information that you're receiving in a conversation. Nonverbal cues, such as tone of voice, facial expression, and body language, are usually where the motivation and emotion behind the words is expressed.

5. Ask more questions than you think you need to.

This both improves the other person's experience of feeling listened to, ensures that you fully understand their message, and can serve as a prompt to make sure important details aren't overlooked.

6. Minimize distractions as much as possible.

You'll want to avoid noise, interruptions, and other external distractions, but it's important to minimize your internal distractions as well. If you are preoccupied with another topic, take time to re-center. If you know a conversation might be upsetting, calm yourself as much as possible before going in.

7. Acknowledge shortcomings.

If you know going into a conversation that you may be a subpar listener - because you're exhausted from a dozen intense conversations earlier that day, unfamiliar with the topic under discussion, or any other reason - let the other person know right away. If you lose your footing during the conversation - a lapse of attention or comprehension - say you didn't quite get it, and ask the person to repeat themselves.

8. Don't rehearse your response while the other person is talking.

Take a brief pause after they finish speaking to compose your thoughts. This will require conscious effort! People think about four times faster than other people talk, so you've got spare brainpower when you're a listener. Use it to stay focused and take in as much information as possible.

9. Monitor your emotions.

If you have an emotional reaction, slow the pace of the conversation. Do more repetition, pay attention to your breathing. You don't want to respond in a way that will cause the other person to disengage. Nor - and this is a subtler thing to avoid - do you want to fall into the easy defense mechanism of simply tuning out what you don't want to hear, or rushing to discount or argue it away.

The Skills Involved in Active Listening

Listening is a complex job, with many different subtasks, and it's possible to be good at some and bad at others. Rather than thinking of yourself as a "good listener" or a "bad listener," it can be useful to evaluate yourself on the subskills of active listening. Below is a breakdown of these subskills along with recommendations for what to do if you're struggling with any one of them.

First, let's start with what we call the "picking-up skills," the skills that allow you to gather the information you need.

1. Hearing

If you have hearing loss, be honest about it. For whatever reason, people will boast about their poor vision but hide hearing loss. Help break that stigma. Ask for what you need - e.g., for people to face you when talking, or give you written materials in advance. Let others know, so that they will be alert to indications that you may have missed something.

2. Auditory processing

This refers to how well the brain makes sense of the sound cues. If you're struggling to understand someone, ask questions to clarify. If it's helpful, from time to time recap your understanding of both the subject and the other person's reason for bringing it up - and ask them to validate or refine it. (Make it clear that you are doing this for your own understanding.)

3. Reading body language, tone of voice, or social cues accurately

The advice for auditory processing applies here. Asking a trusted colleague to be your nonverbal communication translator may be helpful in situations where accurate listening is important, but confidentiality is not.

The next two skills involve staying mentally present in the conversational moment.

4. Maintaining attention

If you often find yourself distracted when trying to listen to someone, control your environment as much as possible. Before you begin, set an intention by taking a moment to deliberately focus on this person, in this moment, in a conversation that will be about this topic. If appropriate, use a written agenda or in-the-moment whiteboarding to keep yourself and the other person aligned. If you do have a lapse in attention, admit it, apologize, and ask the person to repeat what they said. (Yes, it's embarrassing, but it happens to everyone occasionally and to some of us frequently.) Arrive a few minutes early to acclimate yourself if you are having a meeting in a new place.

5. Regulating your emotional response

Meditation has both immediate and short-term benefits for relaxation and emotional control, regardless of the particular practice. The key is to do it twice a day for 10 to 20 minutes, focusing on a mental image or repeating a phrase and dismissing other thoughts as they come.

In the moment, focus on your breathing and do a "grounding exercise" if you feel agitated. These are simple psychological practices that work to pull people back to the present moment by directing attention to the immediate environment. Typical exercises include naming five colored objects that you can see (e.g., green couch, black dog, gold lamp, white door, red rug) or identifying four things that you are hearing, seeing, feeling, and smelling (e.g., hearing birdsong, seeing chair, feeling chenille upholstery, smelling neighbors' cooking).

Finally, the active listener has to pull the entire package - receiving the message and acknowledging its receipt - together, in the moment. It can be challenging!

6. Integrating multiple sources of information.

At the very least, you are both listening to words and watching body language. You may also be listening to multiple people at once, communicating on multiple platforms simultaneously, or listening while also taking in visual information, such as building plans or sales projections.Figure out what helps you listen best. Do you need information in advance? A "processing break"? A chance to circle back and confirm everyone's understanding? This is another situation where it can be helpful to have another person taking in the same information, who can fill you in on what you might have missed.

7. "Performing" active listening (e.g., eye contact, nodding, appropriate facial expressions).

If you have a natural poker face, or find it easier to pay attention to people's words if you don't make eye contact, share that information with your conversation partner, and thank them for accommodating you. Do extra repetition to make up for the lack of nonverbal communication. You may want to practice better performativity skills, but don't add that mental burden to important conversations. Ask a five-year-old to tell you about their favorite superhero, then practice acting like you're listening.

Please note: This list is not intended to be diagnostic instrument, but if any of the skills listed above seem truly difficult to you, you may want to consult your doctor. Scientific understanding of these processes, from the sensory organs to the brain, has expanded greatly in the past years. Many successful adults have discovered mid-career that they have undiagnosed sensory, attention, information-processing, or other disorders than can impair listening ability.

For each of these subskills, there is also a range of natural ability, and your life experience may have enhanced or muted this potential. We know, for example, that music training improves auditory processing skills, and acting or improvisation training improves your ability to "read" people and perform the role of an active listener. Having power, by contrast, decreases your ability to read others and accurately grasp their message - don't let this happen to you!

Listening is vitally important, sadly undertaught, physically and mentally taxing, and in the aftermath of Covid-19 has never been more difficult. As we close in on a third year of unprecedented upheaval in work and life, employees and managers alike have more questions than ever - concerns that they may find it difficult to articulate for a variety of reasons, from mental fog to the sheer novelty of the situation.

When this happens, take a moment to listen closely. Consider the questioner, not simply the question. Now is the time for leaders to really listen, understand the context, resist the temptation to respond with generic answers, and recognize your own listening limitations - and improve on them. Have compassion for yourself - you can't scream at your own brain like a drill sergeant and whip that raw grey matter into shape. What you can do is recognize your weak points and make the necessary adjustments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Listening is a skill that's vitally important, sadly undertaught, and physically and mentally taxing. In the aftermath of Covid-19, particularly with the shift to remote work and the red-hot job market, it's never been more important - or more difficult - for leaders to be good listeners.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Stop wasting your most precious resource: Middle managers

# data[].attributes.headline
McKinsey: Stop Wasting Your Most Precious Resource: Middle Managers

# data[].attributes.subject
McKinsey: Stop Wasting Your Most Precious Resource: Middle Managers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Middle management is a vital yet beleaguered role within organizations. Managers face pressures from above and below, they tend to be both underdeveloped and unempowered, and they face growing pressure to deliver in flatter, faster, and leaner organizational structures, all of which leads to being underutilized and unappreciated. The findings of a new McKinsey Global Survey of middle managers suggest that many companies may be unintentionally thwarting middle managers' ability to perform in their roles. Companies treat middle management as a catchall, requiring managers to spend much of their time handling nonmanagerial work and navigating organizational bureaucracy rather than allowing them to focus on the most important role at an organization: fostering talent.

Good managers with strong team relationships can lead their teams to higher organizational performance, drive more effective organizational operations, and provide the link between organizational vision and execution. Previous McKinsey research found that workplace relationships account for 39 percent of employees' job satisfaction. Moreover, relationships with management, in particular, account for 86 percent of workers' satisfaction with their interpersonal ties at work. Yet, despite the importance of these manager-employee relationships, surveyed managers report spending almost three-quarters of their time on tasks not directly related to talent management. In our survey, we found three areas where organizations can better support their managers to deliver more value:

More time on talent. Organizations can help managers who are stuck spending time on planning and lower-value tasks shift their focus toward higher-priority talent needs.

Removal of organizational hurdles. Many managers report challenges from above and below, and responses suggest that any reductions in excessive bureaucracy could improve managers' work.

Personalized incentives. Understanding what really motivates middle managers can help organizations provide the best environment for their managers to succeed.

Managers are stuck in the menial

The survey findings provide insight into how middle managers' time is spent. Nearly half of their time is devoted to nonmanagerial work-specifically, respondents say they are spending nearly one full day out of every week on administrative work, and more of their time is taken up by tasks we refer to as individual-contributor work than any other area (Exhibit 1). Although these respondents are all people managers, on average they say they spend less than a third of their time on talent and people management, of which they primarily focus on coaching employees and supporting their development, as opposed to tasks such as recruiting and performance appraisals.

Most respondents see individual-contributor and administrative work as less valuable than strategy and talent-related work. So why are middle managers spending so much time in areas they don't consider the most beneficial for the organization?

'Value-adding areas' diverge

It's partially because there is a mismatch between what middle managers see as important and the work they say their organizations value, suggesting that organizations lack clarity about what managers should be doing with their time (Exhibit 2). For example, managers are much more likely to say their organizations value individual-contributor work than to say they personally create the most value with this work-and time spent on it seems to come at the cost of more opportunities to spend time on talent and people management.

There is agreement about managers' value in one area, however. More than half of surveyed managers say they deliver the most value through strategy-focused work, such as developing work plans and overseeing initiatives, and it's also the area that they most often say their organization values most. Yet managers report spending, on average, less than a quarter of their time on strategy-focused work, and the value generated from this work generally requires properly developed talent.

Employee development requires time

Our survey reveals that fostering employees' growth is the second-most-commonly cited area where managers say they deliver the most value. Within talent and people management, 86 percent of respondents say coaching employees and 56 percent say development of employees are the top two ways they add the most value. Yet as mentioned above, organizations may be more likely to value-and therefore expect managers to spend more time on-strategy-related and individual-contributor work rather than talent management, making it difficult for managers to devote adequate support to their teams.

Nearly half of respondents who devote less than a quarter of their time to talent and people management say they simply don't have more time to spend on it. Another 35 percent say they don't have the resources required, suggesting that their organizations don't have a structure in place that encourages them to prioritize talent management or that allows them to devote more time. For example, if a manager doesn't have enough team members to meet the team's goals, that manager might have to fill in the gaps by completing lower-value work.

While we believe middle managers would benefit from spending more time on talent and people, it's also important to ensure that when they are spending time on strategy work, they devote most of that time to efforts that are connected to and enhance their talent work. Managers engage in strategic work that falls into two categories: individual and collective. Individual strategy work includes elements such as planning, while collective strategy work might focus on mobilizing the team to achieve a set of objectives. This collective strategy work is indeed a form of people management-just not what managers might classify as classic "people management." Consequently, strategy work is something that managers say both they and their organizations find to be valuable, so organizations would benefit from strengthening the link between classic people management work and the strategy work that can augment those efforts.

Hurdles from above and below hinder managers' work

The findings show that managers not only are not spending their time in the areas they should but also are facing multiple obstacles to managing talent effectively. Just 20 percent of surveyed managers strongly agree that their organizations help them be successful people managers. A much larger group of respondents (42 percent) either disagree or are unsure that their organizations set them up to be successful people managers.

Middle managers face a range of complications with leaders and employees-as well as the organization's ways of working-that impair their work as people managers. When asked what circumstances have most negatively affected their experience as a manager, respondents most often mention organizational bureaucracy (Exhibit 3). In fact, bureaucracy is the most-cited negative factor among respondents in every region: excessive meetings, emails, and approval processes are a problem everywhere. Additionally, at least a quarter of respondents point to each of these challenges: underperforming employees, senior leaders who have a negative impact on their teams, and departures of valuable employees after the organization did not offer what they believed they needed. This mirrors previous McKinsey research that shows when organizations do not support their managers, they put their recruiting and retention efforts at risk.

The carrot shouldn't feel like the stick

To motivate managers to put forth their best efforts in the most impactful areas, organizations should not only remove the barriers to managers' success but also reward them in the ways they want to be rewarded. The survey findings suggest that middle managers want more agency in their roles just as much as they want financial rewards for their accomplishments. Looking at responses from all surveyed middle managers, they most often say they want their work to be rewarded with increased autonomy and responsibility, followed closely by bonuses and raises (Exhibit 4). Preferences differ somewhat by location, however. For example, a greater proportion of US respondents prefer to be rewarded with raises than those in other regions, while respondents in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and developing markets are much more likely than US-based managers to want learning opportunities.

Looking at how organizations are actually rewarding them, the survey suggests that organizations are already on the right path, frequently rewarding managers in the ways that are most important to them. New responsibilities are the most commonly reported reward: nearly six in ten respondents say they've received new responsibilities thanks to their efforts in their current role. Furthermore, about half of all respondents report that their work has been rewarded with increased autonomy and bonuses. Those in the United States, where respondents prefer financial rewards, are more likely than those elsewhere to say they've been rewarded with bonuses and raises. The roughly even split of respondents expressing interest in different types of rewards-and relative alignment between their desired rewards and those they've received-suggests that, rather than focus on which rewards to offer, organizations would do well to commit more energy to determining which accomplishments should be reinforced by them. For example, is the organization rewarding managers whose employees receive promotions?

If organizations are rewarding good work with more work, we suggest they ensure that these managers' new responsibilities don't detract from their ability to focus on the work that matters most. Organizations should allow managers time to focus on their people, otherwise they risk breaks in their talent pipelines and strategic plans. Time is a nonrenewable resource, and organizations that rethink how managers spend their time will better set up their managers to succeed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Stop wasting your most precious resource: Middle managers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Middle management is a vital yet beleaguered role within organizations. Managers face pressures from above and below, they tend to be both underdeveloped and unempowered, and they face growing pressure to deliver in flatter, faster, and leaner organizational structures, all of which leads to being underutilized and unappreciated.

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: How to Stop Micromanaging Your Team

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: How to Stop Micromanaging Your Team

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Micromanaging is a hard habit to break. You may downplay your propensities by labeling yourself a " control freak " or by claiming that you just like to keep close tabs on your team, but those are poor excuses for excessive meddling. What can you do to give your people the space they need to succeed and learn? How should you prioritize what matters? And how do you get comfortable stepping back?

What the Experts Say
If you're the kind of boss who lasers in on details, prefers to be cc'ed on emails, and is rarely satisfied with your team's work, then-there's no kind way to say this- you're a micromanager. "For the sake of your team, you need to stop," says Muriel Maignan Wilkins, coauthor of Own the Room and managing partner of Paravis Partners, an executive coaching and leadership development firm. "Micromanaging dents your team's morale by establishing a tone of mistrust-and it limits your team's capacity to grow," she says. It also hampers your ability to focus on what's really important, adds Karen Dillon, author of the HBR Guide to Office Politics. "If your mind is filled with the micro-level details of a number of jobs, there's no room for big picture thoughts," she says. As hard as it may be to change your ways, the "challenge is one that will pay off in the long run," says Jennifer Chatman, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "There may be a few failures as your team learns to step up, but ultimately they will perform much, much better with greater accountability and less interference." Here are some pointers on how to let go.

Reflect on your behavior
The first step is to develop an awareness of why you micromanage. "You need to understand where this is coming from," says Dillon. "Most likely it's because of some insecurity-you're afraid it will reflect badly on you if your team doesn't do something exactly the way you would do it or you're worried you'll look out of touch if you're not immersed in the details, so you overcompensate," she says. Wilkins recommends "asking yourself: what excuses am I using to micromanage?" Common justifications include: "It will save time if I do it myself." Or "Too much is at stake to allow this to go wrong." She advises focusing on "the reasons why you should not micromanage"-it's bad for your team as they don't learn and grow-"and the benefits you'd derive if you stopped," chiefly more time to do your own job.

Get feedback
"Often there is a significant disconnect between what leaders intend and what the team is actually experiencing," says Chatman. You may merely suspect you have a problem while your team members are already annoyed by your constant hovering "Feedback is essential to see how significant the issue is." To get a handle on what your direct reports really think and whether it lines up with your intentions, she recommends "undertaking a cross-evaluation assessment." Gather confidential data from your people-or better yet, have a third party do it-and aggregate those results so employees know you can't find out exactly who said what. What you hear may be sobering, "but it's critical to understanding the broader patterns and reactions and the impact [your micromanaging has] on your team," she says.

Prioritize what matters-and what doesn't
"A good manager trains and delegates," says Dillon, and you can't do that if you're taking on everything-regardless of how important the task is-yourself. Start by determining what work is critical for you to be involved in (e.g. strategic planning) and what items are less important (e.g. proofreading the presentation). Wilkins suggests looking at your to do list "to determine which low-hanging fruit you can pass on to a team member." You should also highlight the priorities on your list, meaning "the big ticket items where you truly add value," and ensure you are "spending most of your energy" on those, she adds. Remember, says Chatman, "Micromanaging displaces the real work of leaders, which is developing and articulating a compelling and strategically relevant vision for your team."

Talk to your team
Once you've determined your priorities, the next step is communicating them to your team, says Dillon. "Have a conversation about the things that really matter to you-the things that they'll need to seek your guidance and approval on-so your direct reports can get ahead of your anxiety," she says. Tell them how you'd like to be kept in the loop and how often they should provide status updates. "Be explicit with your direct reports about the level of detail you will engage in," adds Wilkins. At the same time, enlist their help in making sure you don't fall back into your old micromanaging ways. Chatman suggests: "Tell them you are trying to work on this" and ask targeted questions such as: How can I help you best? Are there things I can do differently? Are our overall objectives clear to you and do you feel you have the support and resources to accomplish them?

Step back slowly
Fighting your micromanaging impulses might be hard at first so pull back slowly. You need to get comfortable, too. "Do a test run on a project that is a bit less urgent and give your team full accountability and see how it goes," Chatman says. "Recognize that your way is not the only, or even necessarily, the best way." The acid test of leadership, she says, "is how well the team does when you're gone." Another way to ease out of micromanaging is to discretely seek feedback from other coworkers about how your team is operating, says Dillon. "Ask a colleague you trust: 'How's that project going?'" The answer will provide valuable information, says Dillon. "You may feel better knowing that everything is fine, or you may realize you pulled back too much." In the latter case, you need to "find a way [to support the work] that doesn't involve peering over your employees' shoulders."

Build t Because your team members are used to you not trusting them, they may want to come to you for approval before taking charge of a project. "Acknowledge this is a growth opportunity for the person and say that you know in your heart of hearts he or she will rise to the challenge," says Dillon. This is more than a pep talk. You're in effect "giving your employee the psychological power to lead." Making sure your team members know you trust them and have faith in their abilities is actually "very simple," says Wilkins. "Tell them so. Say, 'I fully trust you can make this decision.'" And then, "walk the talk," she says. Don't excessively scrutinize. Don't insist on being cc'd on every email. And don't renege on your vote of confidence. "Let them do it and don't back pedal and change everything they did."

And if things don't go exactly as you'd like, try your hardest not to overact. Take a breath; go for a walk; do whatever you need to do to come "back from that agitated micro-managerial moment," says Dillon. After all, does it really matter if the memo isn't formatted exactly to your liking? "For most things, nothing is so bad it can't be corrected."

Know your employees' limitations
"Some people will over correct by pulling away too much; but it's smart to give appropriate support," says Dillon. "Talk about how you will help them problem solve and how you'll support them" even if you're not deeply involved in a particular project or task. At the same time, keeping a closer eye on certain projects or certain employees is sometimes warranted, she adds. If "your report is junior," say, or "not yet ready to be trusted," you will need to keep close tabs on her work. Similarly, says Wilkins, "when the deliverable is urgent and high stakes" it may make sense to intervene or ask to be kept regularly apprised of things. "In this case, it's helpful if you explain to the person why you are being so hands on," she says. "You should also give feedback to the employee and coach them, so they can complete the task on their own over time."
Principles to Remember Do:

Ask yourself why you micromanage and reflect on your need for control

Refine your to do list by prioritizing the tasks and projects that matter most to you

Talk to your team about how you'd like to be kept apprised of their progress

Don't:

Renege on your vote of confidence-tell your reports you trust them and let them do their jobs

Overact when things don't go exactly as you'd like them to-take a breath and figure out a way to correct the situation if it's truly necessary

Go too far-you don't want to become a hands-off boss

Case Study #1: Clarify your priorities
Jordan Fliegel, the founder and CEO, of CoachUp-the Boston-based startup that connects athletes with private coaches, learned to deal with his micromanaging tendencies after a bad experience early in the life of his company.

It was fall 2013-CoachUp's second year of business. The company's summer interns had completed a big blogging project, and CoachUp's content team was responsible for editing the posts and tagging them for maximal search engine optimization. Given that the company was experimenting with blogs for the first time and the fact that Jordan is a formidable writer in his own right, he says he "felt attached to the project."

The content team, however, was not moving fast enough on the project. He figured it would be easier and faster if he did it himself. "I took me three weekends to finish the work."

When he presented the completed product to his team, his employees responded with a mixture of annoyance and puzzlement. "Their reaction was, was this really the most important or high-impact thing you could have been doing with your time? And, if you really thought this project was that important you should have told us," he recalls.

Jordan understood that by completing the project he had, in effect, been doing other people's jobs-which is a sure way to "undermine their creativity and drive," he says.

He now knows to be more explicit about his reasons when he's delegating certain tasks. "I realize that if I want something to get done, I need to explain the context and the return on investment to the team," he says. "If there's pushback-meaning that the team disagrees that it should be a priority-there can be a debate. But I shouldn't shy away from saying what I think needs to get done."

He attributes his earlier meddling to his newbie CEO status. "I hadn't had a lot of experience managing people at that point," he says. "And as the founder, I was used to doing everything myself. It was hard to let go. When it's your business-your baby-you want to be involved."

Today, Jordan is much more hands-off and tries to focus on "working on the business and not in it."

Case Study #2: Explain why you're being hands on
Mike Faith, the founder and CEO of Headsets.com, the San Francisco-based headset supplier, says that sometimes micromanaging can be a necessary part of leadership-especially when it comes to training new hires. "I've come to the conclusion based on experience that I need to stay close to new employees early on to give encouragement, correction, and learning," he says. "I can't let the fear of being called a micromanager prevent me from staying close at first."

Mike is explicit about his management style with new recruits. "It's important that they know what to expect. I tell them 'I am going to check in with you early and often' and then I follow through and do just that. Once they reach a level of confidence and competence, I am more comfortable pulling back."

This policy occasionally applies to longtime executives, too. Recently, Mike and his VP of Marketing embarked on a big new project related to how Headsets.com handles online advertising. His VP will handle the day-to-day operations of the project, but Mike has a keen interest in its progress. "I told him that for now, we're going to stay close to each other and learn as we go. I will be checking in with him daily, and I want him to be checking in with me," he says.

Mike told his VP that the constant need for status updates wouldn't be required forever. "I told him that once we get the hang of it and we're hitting our numbers, we'll check in with each other monthly or just as needed. There is no perfect recipe or perfect formula," he says.

Mike also offered his support. "I told him that I had confidence he can do it," he says. "I said: 'We are going to try our damndest, and I've got your back."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Micromanaging is a hard habit to break. You may downplay your propensities by labeling yourself a " control freak " or by claiming that you just like to keep close tabs on your team, but those are poor excuses for excessive meddling. What can you do to give your people the space they need to succeed and learn?

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR IdeaCast: Why Leaders Should Rethink Their Decision-Making Process

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR IdeaCast: Why Leaders Should Rethink Their Decision-Making Process

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Curt Nickisch.

When it comes to making tough decisions, leaders often draw on their experience, whether they're a consensus builder or a pacesetter, it makes sense for them to do what has worked before. Don't we all? But today's guest says, in reality, many leaders fall into traps when they manage problems the same way each time. Because each situation is different.

Organizations evolve and what got you here isn't necessarily what's going to get you there. Instead, she argues that successful leaders take a more expansive view of situations at hand. They reevaluate those problems across a broader set of possible solutions and dynamically adapt their management to each problem.

Carol Kauffman is a professor at Harvard Medical School and founded the Institute of Coaching and with David Noble of View Advisors, she wrote the HBR article, "The Power of Options," and the new book, Real-Time Leadership, Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High. Carol, thanks for being here.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Thank you.

CURT NICKISCH: Conventional wisdom is that leaders are great at solving problems because they've done it before. Isn't that why experience counts?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Absolutely. You can say maybe 90% of the time, 95% of the time. But when the world is topsy-turvy, what you need is massive agility and the capacity to make space to make a smart choice.

CURT NICKISCH: This is where modus operandi gets its name, your MO, we know what we like to do. People also know how we like to do things, and that helps with predictability. If that works 90% of the time, that actually sounds pretty good to some people.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Well, that's true unless your life is on the line or your company is on the line, a curveball gets thrown at you. One of the things that really helped us think about this is the Viktor Frankl quote that, "Between every stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our freedom." What we try to do in Real-Time Leadership is help people know to make that space, but then what to do in that space. And pattern recognition and default options work a lot of the time, but you have to really be mindfully alert when you got the biggest opportunities- what are the greatest risks facing you.

CURT NICKISCH: You use this term, "Make the space for thinking about this," people like to get to the response quickly. Why do people always fall back on solving problems the same way? What's the benefit to that?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Fallback is the perfect word. When we are under stress and high stakes, we become exaggerated versions of ourselves. So if you're someone who leaps into action, you're going to immediately leap and you might leap in the wrong direction. But if you're someone who thinks a lot, you may actually lean back and rely on data for too long and take too much time. And if you're a natural nurturer, you will take care of people first, and that may be exactly the right thing to do. It's how do you overcome that automatic default, again, particularly under stress.

CURT NICKISCH: We recognize that it's handy, but it is a trap, right? Let's talk a little bit more about creating that space and taking a more expansive view. How do you start to do that?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: In our book we have an acronym and we have an acronym because particularly under stress, we can't remember things. And this will help. It also helps me remember it. One is when you're in a situation, how can you make space by being mindfully alert? Then how can you make space by being an options generator? Then to really validate your vantage point, because we tend to believe ourselves too quickly. And then E is how you actually engage and effect change.

CURT NICKISCH: And those spell MOVE - the MOVE framework.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Exactly. So the first one, how to be mindfully alert? That's noticing. How do you just create a space by noticing? And then noticing what? Most people are one dimensional leaders and we think about three-dimensional leaders. There's the one who just gets things done and we know those, they're really brilliant, but they run rough shot over their people, et cetera.

The first dimension of leadership is, what do I need to do? The second one that's often overlooked is, who do I need to be? What about my inner resources so I can make space and choices? And then the third one is, how do I relate to other people?

And we tend to get it wrong, that one, with the golden rule, treat others as you would want to be treated, as opposed to the platinum rule, treat others as they would want to be treated. So for that to expand your leadership question one, what do you need to do? Question two, who do you need to be? And question three, how do people need me to relate to them?

CURT NICKISCH: Okay, what's an example on how might you answer those questions then?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: One of the stories that we really love is Matt. Matt was the shoo-in candidate to be a CEO of an organization and he's in front of the board, those two-day things you do in front of the board. The first dimension of leadership would be what is he going to accomplish? His understanding of what was being demanded of him was to be super smart, show how much he knew the business. He was the guy. He's doing that he's watching the board look bored. Then he is watching them, he's lost them, but he only has that first dimension in mind and he hasn't really thought it through. He just tries harder and it gets worse. He finally, with his dignity intact, just leaves.

He then calls me and David going, "Help." So we started talking to Matt, and first we looked at, "What was your first dimension of leadership? You decided that was what it was, but were you right?" He then got to the point where he realized that what he needed to accomplish wasn't so much to wow them with information, but to communicate to them to act like a CEO rather than a supplicant. That was the first dimension of change.

The second dimension of change in leadership was what was going on inside of him. What happened is he wasn't able to be flexible in the moment he saw what was happening, he panicked. But another thing is he had decided that he had to be this sort of tough guy and hide his caring. In reality, he was a very caring person. That third dimension of leadership, he actually had screened out of the interview rather than brought it in.

And when he did, he showed up the next day not thinking about, "What is it that I have to say?" But, "How can people absorb? How can I create an environment where people feel safe and interested and safe with me at the helm?" And by making space and thinking about those things, the board was able to see that they would be in safe hands with him.

CURT NICKISCH: It's good he had a two-day interview, he was actually able to step back. He had that time to reflect and then make space. A lot of leaders have time for this. Problems may come up or crises come up, but it's not like it has to be done right away. We often have more time than we realize. How many options do you need to come up with when you're facing something and you're trying to just get beyond what you would normally do?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: When I work with my leaders, what I want them to do is to be able to have four options available to them. What I say is, "I don't care which option you pick, but I want you to be able to do any of them." Let's say you're at a meeting and somebody sneers at you during the meeting. That sneer is the stimulus, and your response may be whatever. But what I want a leader to be able to do is have four responses, and we call this way power. Someone makes a snide remark. Do you lean in and talk to them about it, confront it, take it on? That's one option.

It may be someone makes that snide remark, and you may be aware that if you don't cut this off at the pass, things are not going to work out. You want to be able to make that choice, but you don't want it to be driven by anger or frustration. Now, the other choice you could have would be to lean back and perhaps think, "Okay, what's the data here? I don't think this is going to be really impacting anyone.

I might just make one comment about the information and move on." But you also may want to lean with, "What's going on with this person that he or she is being snarky?" And remember they're having a really bad day or things going on in their life. You can actually be empathic to that person and perhaps say something supportive.

Or the hardest one is to not lean at all. You can lean in and engage, lean back, go to the data, lean with and connect or worry about the emotional personal consequences or not lean, which is the hardest. And not lean is your capacity to truly be able to not be triggered. Pause for a moment and then see what comes to you in the moment. And that is the equivalent of creating the aha in the shower moment. How can you pause enough so that you can receive knowledge? And neurologically, that's how can you activate your default system of the brain, all of these have a lot of science underneath them.

CURT NICKISCH: Thinking about Viktor Frankl talking about the emotions that you have right after you receive a stimulus and how you have to almost give it time to fade away before you respond to something. It's tricky. It's hard. You really have to be self-aware.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: And that reminds me again of the second dimension of leadership. Who do you want to be? And he is such a paragon of that. Part of that is really knowing your inner resources and a real powerful support is your sense of purpose and the meaning you're making. Let's say you're running that meeting and someone does something sneering.

Are you going to let your ego get in the way? Are you going to remember, "Wait, my purpose here is to be of service right now and our organization needs to do X, Y, Z." And somebody throw in a lobbying a complaint in real time, that really doesn't matter, but it's your sense of purpose and mission that can keep you moving forward and can help create that space that you need.

CURT NICKISCH: How many options do you need to come up with? Four is a lot, if you're stressed or doing something that you're unfamiliar with or trying to get away from how you would normally handle something.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: I'd say you should pick your top two. The research is four or even more, but I think it's know your default. For example, for me, if I'm going to default, I'm going to do something. And what I often say to myself-

CURT NICKISCH: You have the bias for action.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Totally. And then under stress it's even more. What I do a lot is I say to myself, "Carol, downshift. Just downshift." And I try to get myself to either a lean back or a lean with, because I know that I'm fast and under stress, I'll go faster. I would say get two of them down and then try to add the third. And usually the one of don't lean is the fourth. That is the hardest to do.

CURT NICKISCH: Some of these options have to be better in some situations. Does this just come with experience?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: What's interesting, I was talking with a seasoned CEO last week, she's been a CEO three times and she read the book and we were talking, she was really saying, "The reps help, it's in the reps." I would say two things is one, you practice small. If you keep one of these in mind, when I first came up with the idea of who do I want to be right now, I actually asked myself that question 80 times one day. And it is amazing how many of these split second choice moments we have that we see if we make ourselves a tiny bit of space. Those kinds of reps.

For the who do I want to be right now, that one actually works better I think small and instant as well as on the larger decision side. That could be, again, you're at the end of a day and one of the people that reports to you, you're really tired, they report you and they have done shoddy job.

Who do I want to be right now? Do I want to be the person who just is cranky with them and says something contemptuous? Do I want to be someone who lets it slide? Do I want to try and just lean in a caring way? This is like, "Who do I want to be right now? Who does this person need me to be right now?"

But it also works when you are at the cashier and the person in front of you is really slow. Who do you want to be right now? How can you course correct in the moment? And the neurology researches is those little dings during the day that create the most cognitive wear and tear. Who do I want to be right now in these small moments matters, and then if you can really slow down in the bigger moments, it can matter then too.

CURT NICKISCH: That's interesting. You do need the reps matter, you can put on training wheels for this. Are there other ways to develop those muscles, besides starting small and practicing with smaller moments?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Yeah, I think they're small. There's getting the reps and there's really getting who are you meant to be as a leader? What is your identity in this moment? And one of the things people don't tell you about leadership, leadership sucks. It's really hard. You're sacrificing all the time. There's all these things you want to do and you are not allowed to. It doesn't serve your company.

And what we talk about is how does a leader go from individual identity to entity identity? You are the embodiment of your organization and it is your responsibility to have way power, to have choices in the moment. You are at a news conference and somebody lops something at you, you can't answer as you have to embody the entity. And that takes you back to a sense of your purpose and your mission and it can be incredibly supportive if you live there. On one hand, the reps, the micro behaviors and the other one, your sense of purpose and all these macro behaviors.

CURT NICKISCH: I imagine. What are some of the biggest places that people have trouble adopting this mindset?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Definitely under fire. One of them is there's the validating your vantage point, and I read a fabulous HBR article 2005, it said, "75% of small business failures were the result of over optimism." One of the big areas to practice this is validating your vantage point and in some ways the more powerful you get and the smarter you are, the most vulnerable to believing yourself. And how do you start thinking, "Well, what is an ideal vantage point? How do I know that I'm seeing clearly? What gets in the way of my seeing clearly?"

And that's where a lot of the unconscious bias work comes in. And what's your own cognitive style and how does it impact how you think in what you do? That whole area we find is very important for people. The big enemy is ego. You really need to be a great leader on one hand, have a super powerful sense of self, and I can have an impact, but to also be able to be humble and be an open system so you're able to be wrong.

CURT NICKISCH: This also makes you less predictable because you are more dynamic and especially with CEOs or really any leaders, sometimes people only have so many interactions with that person. And it's helpful for team members to know, "This is the way this person likes to receive information when they've said this before, that means this." And here's a situation where CEOs may be acting differently in different situations and that might make them harder to read.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: It may take getting used to, I think what we're talking about though is ideally somebody operating from their core, and it also doesn't have to be so radical. It may be that I gently lean in with you at the beginning of a meeting when I want to get things going and when they do, I lean back and let people bring in the data, then be aware of the people issues and then be comfortable with silence.

You've just done lean in back with and don't lean, but it can be subtle. The core is your capacity to make space, and I think that's what brings it together. It's not going to be wild and jerky, but this leader is able to be agile and to respond to what's coming their way rather than always a cookie cutter leader.

CURT NICKISCH: You can do this without being hard to read or coming across as wishy-washy.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Yeah. Or as you said, jolting people all the time because the toughest leader is the one that's deeply unpredictable, but it's emotionally unpredictable whether they're nice and supportive one time and then really caustic another. Better to be caustic all the time, then caustic and then nice. I think you're picking up on that in a way I hadn't really thought of, but how do you be centered and agile? Rather than this unpredictable, which reduces psychological safety.

CURT NICKISCH: You want to be consistent and agile.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Yeah, exactly.

CURT NICKISCH: Is this completely an individual leadership thing or can this be part of a lead leadership culture or system at an organization?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: I love that question. Your question is how do you make it part of the culture and the core leadership capabilities that you want to flow through an organization, which basically is this scalable.

CURT NICKISCH: A culture of decision making, yeah.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: One of the things we do is we also have a couple of meta tools, and one of them is something I called coach by numbers or the 10 of 10 conversation. That one ripples out very quickly. Ten of 10, that's basically, you've heard this in positive psychology, et cetera, but it makes it really very specific, which is if you wanted to accomplish something outside or inside, if you were a 10 out of 10, what would you look like? If you were going to work on something, it can be hypothetical, what would it be?

What we would start out with, I would say if you were a 10 out of 10 on this, what would you look like? What would you be doing? And we would really spell out not what the problem is, but if you were really good at it.

CURT NICKISCH: What would it look like? Yeah.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: What would it look like? Paint the picture, what would people be seeing if I had a video camera, if I was listening to you, what are you thinking, feeling, doing? And really paint that picture 10 out of 10 and that's not easy. Then the second question would be, on that scale of one to 10, what number would you give yourself now? What would you rate yourself?

We'll pretend that you said a six. The next question, which I think of as the question that counts is what are you doing that you are a six and not a 5.5 and really make you think. Cognitively, it's much easier for you to describe what you're doing wrong. It is much easier for you to be critical.

And we would really, really unpack that with the same intensity of something that went horribly wrong and say, "Well, what else did you do wrong? What else did you wrong?" That same energy, but a positive confrontation and truly make you map it out and it's hard. Only then would we go to, "Okay, what could you do over the next eight weeks to get from a six to a 6.5?" This is a conversation you can have with yourself.

It works really well with the team. Any interaction, it works well at home and it's like a fractal conversation. It's a pattern of a conversation that can just ripple out through a company. Even just the 10 out of 10 part. To say, we once did a strategy consultation, David Noble and I, and they came up with their 10 strategies and this guy walked up and said, "Okay, if this strategy, we know strategy meetings, what do you do?" We tear things apart. That's what funny is. Instead, he said, "If this strategy was a 10 out of 10, what would it look like?" And in that moment, that orientation basically frackled out through the entire company. Now in every business development conversation, what would a 10 look like for you? That question alone is very powerful, and what did I do right conversation is very powerful.

CURT NICKISCH: When people do this, what are some of the surprising and great things that can happen?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: One thing that surprises them a lot is it helps to put their ways of being and operating into a larger context and to realize their choice. A lot of times they realize the things that they are doing right and it surprises them that that's an area where they can grow. Very often, the big surprise for them also is in this vantage point of really getting, there's lots of choices in how I'm going to look at a situation. Some of the things we think about are how clear do you have on rose colored glasses, charcoal colored glasses, or are you nearsighted? Are you fire sighted? And just think about, "Okay, what does that mean with this decision I'm about to make?"

Then the other one is, do you need to be super precise or is a grainy pitcher going to work? That's a choice. The other one I really like is Rosabeth Kanter talks about this zoom in, zoom out, and I think of it, do you want to be a hawk or a hummingbird or, my personal favorite is, do you want to be a dolphin? A lot of people think to really have a good vantage point, you need to see everything like an eagle. But a lot of people don't operate that way, but they're more like dolphins.

CURT NICKISCH: They're swimming in it.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Yes. Exactly. You're underwater and you're ping with echolocation, and then you're able to be opportunistic and then you burst above the water now and then to take a look-out. What makes me personally feel the best about this work is when I see people valuing themselves and getting like, "Yeah, I'm a dolphin. I thought that wasn't okay." Or someone saying, "Gee, I often do that stop and pause thing, and I didn't know that was okay." I find something just incredibly satisfying when people feel like they can really be them and the best leader they can be and that they have these choices available to them.

CURT NICKISCH: It's just a richer way to be if you have more than one MO to draw on, right?

CAROL KAUFFMAN: You're actually making me realize something for the very first time, which is on one hand you talked about people have this modus operandi, and now we've circled around to people being able to appreciate themselves, but what if the modus operandi they've been having isn't really true to their core self? And maybe that MO isn't really who they're supposed to be, and maybe this kind of approach can help them develop their true organic modus operandi rather than what they've been inculcated with or taught.

CURT NICKISCH: That's a hopeful place to end the conversation. Carol, thanks for coming on the show to talk about it.

CAROL KAUFFMAN: Thank you.

CURT NICKISCH: That's Carol Kauffman. She's a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the HBR article, "The Power of Options," and the new book, Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes are High.

And we have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, manage organizations, and manage your career, find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Our audio product manager is Ian Fox. And Hannah Bates is our audio production assistant. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Curt Nickisch.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Leaders Should Rethink Their Decision-Making Process

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Curt Nickisch. When it comes to making tough decisions, leaders often draw on their experience, whether they're a consensus builder or a pacesetter, it makes sense for them to do what has worked before. Don't we all?

# data[].attributes.body
Click Here to learn more and sign up!

# data[].attributes.headline
Fortune: Poor Onboaring is Causing New Hires to Quit

# data[].attributes.subject
Fortune: Poor Onboaring is Causing New Hires to Quit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Finding talent is expensive.

After using resources to advertise a role, sitting through multiple interviews to whittle down applicants, and then training a new hire, the last thing employers want to go through is that costly process all over again-just months later.

So businesses with a high churn rate among new staffers will be eager to hear what's making workers go from having that new-job excitement to handing in their resignation so quickly after accepting the job.

According to new research, it all comes down to poor onboarding.

Paychex surveyed over 1,000 workers who started their current job in the last year and found that 80% of respondents who felt undertrained from poor onboarding plan to quit soon.

First impressions count

The onboarding process can tell new employees all they need to know about a workplace's culture, support systems, processes, and structure (or lack thereof).

Despite the importance of this first impression, only about half of new hires feel satisfied with the onboarding experience at their current job, according to the study. Meanwhile, those working remote-only or for small companies are more likely to suffer a poor onboarding experience.

Nearly one-third of employees find the onboarding experience confusing-with this figure rising to 36% for remote workers, who are most likely to feel undertrained, disoriented, and devalued after onboarding, compared to on-site or hybrid workers.

It's why remote employees are 117% more likely than on-site employees to plan to leave their employers soon, according to the research.

"Given the large percentage of employees who prefer remote work, companies may want to refine their remote onboarding process to fill in these gaps," the report suggests.

Meanwhile, employees working for small companies are less satisfied with their onboarding than employees in large companies, and more likely to feel undertrained. As such, around two-thirds of those working at smaller companies reported that they plan to leave their employer soon.

Gen Zers, the newest working generation with the least prior experience to compare with, are also the least satisfied with onboarding and most likely to feel undertrained, compared to older cohorts.

With this in mind, the report says that human resource departments should keep this potential generational gap in mind when onboarding new hires and consider offering them additional training and on-the-job support.

Re-onboarding employees

According to the report, these are the top five elements that employees believe would improve the onboarding process:

1. Getting the team involved (22%)

2. Creating an epic welcome (18%)

3. Keeping the process simple (18%)

4. Addressing career development (14%)

5. Assigning a buddy or mentor (12%)

But employers who have failed to use any of these elements in their onboarding process are not a lost cause. Not only can employers start making changes to their current process for future joiners, but the report also recommends managers re-onboard their entire workforce.

"As organizations look to improve their onboarding process, creating a welcoming, engaging, and clear onboarding experience can vastly improve employee retention and morale," Alison Stevens, director of HR Services at Paychex told Fortune. "It is equally important to offer longer-term employees a re-onboarding as a retention strategy in order to rejuvenate their work environment and address any individual concerns."

Businesses that fear employees will find the process of being reintroduced to the company's culture and expectations dull and another long-winded box-ticking exercise needn't worry; the study actually found that 71% of employees want their employer to conduct a company-wide re-onboarding.

And when done correctly, it can be beneficial for both the business and individuals:

After re-onboarding, employees' focus reportedly can increase by almost 50%. Over a third of workers also reported feeling more productive, efficient and closer to their team.

In another plus for businesses, retention improved by 43% after re-onboarding, which helps reduce the need for hiring in the first place.

Fortune's CFO Daily newsletter is the must-read analysis every finance professional needs to get ahead. Sign up today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Poor onboarding is causing new hires to quit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Finding talent is expensive. After using resources to advertise a role, sitting through multiple interviews to whittle down applicants, and then training a new hire, the last thing employers want to go through is that costly process all over again-just months later.

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: 6 Questions to Ask When You're Frustrated with Your Team

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: 6 Questions to Ask When You're Frustrated with Your Team

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Today's managers are under a lot of pressure. When it's a constant strain to get work done, it's easy to have a short fuse. When expectations aren't met, the brain short-circuits to judgment and reaction. This is exactly the opposite of what your employees need. In healthy workplace cultures, leaders know how to balance accountability for results with empathy. One way to do this is to aim for reflection instead of reaction. These six questions will help managers revisit their expectations and make sure they're centering empathy in their attempts to encourage performance.

"They're just not doing their job," grumbled an executive in a group one of us (Amii) was recently facilitating. She was resentful over what she viewed as a lack of productivity on her team.

Performance Appraisal Course

Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning's online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Performance Appraisal. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.

Take the pain out of employee reviews.

Learn More & See All Courses

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6 Questions to Ask Yourself When You're Frustrated with Your Team

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today's managers are under a lot of pressure. When it's a constant strain to get work done, it's easy to have a short fuse. When expectations aren't met, the brain short-circuits to judgment and reaction. This is exactly the opposite of what your employees need.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
13 Tactics Employers Are Using To Improve The Employee Experience - HR.com

# data[].attributes.headline
HR.com: 13 Tactics Employers are Using to Improve the Employee Experience 

# data[].attributes.subject
HR.com: 13 Tactics Employers are Using to Improve the Employee Experience 

# data[].attributes.body
So excited to have shared my thoughts with HR.com for this article!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
13 Tactics Employers Are Using To Improve The Employee Experience - HR.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Looking for ways to improve your organization’s employee experience? Discover 13 effective tactics, from solid onboarding to side project time, that can help enhance engagement and satisfaction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
How Managers Can Help Employees Cope with Layoff Fears

# data[].attributes.headline
SHRM: How Managers Can Help Employees Cope with Layoff Fears

# data[].attributes.subject
SHRM: How Managers Can Help Employees Cope with Layoff Fears

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
​Earlier this year, companies were scrambling to hire enough employees to fill open positions. Now, with concerns that a recession may be near, many of these same organizations are considering staff layoffs.

Companies in the financial technology and cryptocurrency sectors are rescinding employment offers, and some organizations, including Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Netflix, Peloton, Redfin, Re/Max, Shopify and Coinbase, have announced plans to reduce their workforces.

Experts are expecting layoffs to bleed into other industries. In fact, a PwC survey of 722 U.S. executives in August found that 50 percent of respondents were planning staff reductions.

"Headlines can cause anxiety in the workforce as people see, in real time, cost increases and layoffs," says Bjorn Reynolds, CEO of Safeguard Global, a payroll platform based in Austin, Texas. Although companies are continuing to add talent each month, employees may become increasingly concerned if they keep hearing and reading about a possible recession, he notes.

Rumors of potential layoffs tend to rattle employees and can impact productivity, even if they aren't true. Almost 80 percent of U.S. workers fear they will lose their jobs if there's a recession, according to a June survey of more than 1,000 employees conducted by staffing firm Insight Global. A separate June survey of more than 1,000 employees conducted by software firm ResumeLab found that 58 percent of respondents believed they would lose their jobs this year.

"Rumors are often more damaging than layoffs themselves, and this is especially true in organizations where there have been layoffs in the past," says Danielle Beauparlant Moser, an executive consultant with ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions in Raleigh, N.C.

Layoff rumors can impact workers' ability to trust management, says Melanie Peacock, SHRM-SCP, associate professor of human resources at Mount Royal University's Bissett School of Business in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. "Rumors signal that employees aren't trusting their managers, so they create their own stories and truths."

Here are six ways people managers can respond to employees' layoff fears.

Acknowledge workers' anxieties. A potential layoff is just one of many concerns employees have right now. Workers are worried about inflation; the increased cost of living; and illnesses such as COVID-19, monkeypox and even polio.

"It's important to acknowledge their challenges and find ways to support staff," Reynolds says.

Karla J. Shugart, SHRM-SCP, knows firsthand how failure to address workers' concerns can have a negative impact on staff. Shugart worked in HR at two different universities during the 1990s. During her tenure at each school, concerns about staff downsizings surfaced. The universities handled these situations very differently, says Shugart, now senior director of associate experience for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma in Durant. One approach was better received than the other.

The Florida university where she worked held weekly meetings, during which staff could ask questions and HR openly shared information. "There were very few rumors or speculation, and employees appeared to be calm and not frightened," she recalls.

In contrast, the HR director at the Washington state university where she worked didn't want to hold staff meetings until HR had all the information about the pending staff reductions. This approach caused rampant rumors and distrust, Shugart says.

"The perception was that HR knew what was going on but wasn't providing information, so everyone assumed that whatever was happening was bad," she says.

Be transparent. Often, employees have no idea if their company is financially stable because leaders don't share such information, according to Jill Santopietro Panall, SHRM-SCP, owner of 21Oak HR Consulting in Newburyport, Mass.

"Management doesn't have to open the entire ledger to everyone, but they need to give employees a good sense of the overall financial picture so they know if their fears are accurate," she says. Be honest and let staff know whether the company is expected to have a successful year or if difficult times are ahead, Panall advises.

If business returns are solid, Reynolds similarly recommends letting employees know about the company's strong position in the marketplace.

When staff reduction rumors are unfounded, managers should ask senior leaders to send an e-mail letting workers know layoffs aren't being planned, Peacock says.

However, leaders shouldn't promise that there will never be layoffs.

"No one can ever promise that, and you could inadvertently create a legal obligation," she says.

Further, managers should avoid telling staff that it's "just a rumor" without first checking with senior leaders and HR because if the company does end up laying off staff, employees' trust in the company and in management will erode even further, Peacock says.

Maintain composure. Remember that the manager sets the tone, so be careful not to show panic, Panall says.

"If you, as a manager, don't know what's going on with the bigger picture, you need to find out," she notes.

If layoffs are, in fact, planned, Peacock recommends talking with senior leaders about acknowledging workers' concerns in an e-mail that recognizes staff reductions are a likely outcome. The e-mail should provide a timeline as well as information about the assistance the company will provide, such as severance pay or career counseling services to those who lose their jobs, she says.

Promote cross-training opportunities. Despite fears of a recession and possible layoffs, some companies still say they can't hire enough people or keep up with demand for certain goods. Managers can help shift employees into much-needed positions by advocating for cross-training, Moser says.

"It's cheaper to redeploy existing staff than to find new talent," she notes.

If senior leaders are open to it, let staff know of the plans, Moser says. Then find out what skills employees are interested in learning and give them stretch assignments that connect them with other departments.

Highlight what employees can control. Remind staff that it's wise to always have an updated resume and LinkedIn profile and to maintain a professional network, says Nancy Halpern, leadership coach and founder of Political IQ, a New York City-based consulting firm that diagnoses political dysfunction in organizations. If staff reductions are planned, help workers see the possibility of a layoff as a bump in the road of a long career, remind them that there will be other opportunities and provide job-search help if possible.

"Be as honest as you can be, and let your staff know you care about them and their careers," Moser says.

Acknowledge any layoffs. When a layoff occurs, managers often don't address with their direct reports what happened. Even if only one person was let go, it's important to acknowledge the individual's contributions and that the team is smaller, Peacock says. Just be sure to consult senior leaders and HR first to understand what information you are allowed to share and to ensure your communications are aligned.

"The people left behind often have survivor syndrome," Peacock says.

Do they seem depressed or worried? If so, consider meeting with staff individually to ask broad questions, such as whether they have any concerns about their workload or if they're worried about what's happening with the company, she advises.

"When staff is laid off," Peacock says, "you can't ignore it and think that people won't notice."
Lisa Rabasca Roepe is a freelance writer in the Washington, D.C., area.

Illustration by Marc Rosenthal for HR Magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Managers Can Help Employees Cope with Layoff Fears

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
​Earlier this year, companies were scrambling to hire enough employees to fill open positions. Now, with concerns that a recession may be near, many of these same organizations are considering staff layoffs. Companies in the financial technology and cryptocurrency sectors are rescinding employment offers, and some organizations, including Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Netflix, Peloton, Redfin, Re/Max, Shopify and Coinbase, have announced plans to reduce their workforces.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
'Marvelous' early career friendships are pivotal to today's leaders and CEOs

# data[].attributes.headline
Fortune: Marvelous Early Career Friendships are Pivotal to Today’s Leaders & CEOs

# data[].attributes.subject
Fortune: Marvelous Early Career Friendships are Pivotal to Today’s Leaders & CEOs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The C-suite is famously a lonely place.

Without having forged friendships earlier in their career, it's hard for top leaders to encourage a report to truly open up, hang out (outside of work) without feeling obliged to, and get genuine feedback on making sensitive decisions like hiring and firing.

It's not impossible for leaders to be friends with their workers, but it's an entirely different relationship from the ones they hold with those that climbed the ranks with them.

That's why many CEOs told Fortune that they still lean on their former peers turned friends for advice and support.

The importance of friendship in the C-suite

"There is something bloody marvelous about someone who saw you crying once at the binding machine, sending you a heartfelt note the day your LinkedIn post changes to CEO," says Katy Wright, CEO of the advertising agency FCB Inferno, who has remained in contact with workplace friends dating back to the first agency she ever worked at.

Having worked their way up the ad industry together, she says, "they understand the business I work in, thus they immediately get the context or have faced a similar situation, so the advice, the challenge, the calling BS and the cheerleading stands."

She says that this support has become even more important since stepping into the chief executive role last year.

Iñaki Ereño, the global CEO of health insurance firm Bupa, echoes that for perspective he turns to the friends he made at the start of his career.

"I've been able to make bold decisions knowing that I have a network of people who will support me," he says. "We don't always have to agree, but we have created a safe space to have a constructive debate. Those open conversations can help me to see others' point of view and better form my own stance on a topic too."

Over the years, Ereño says that his former peers have taken different career paths, so his network has expanded-as has the ability to learn more from one another.

In addition to being a source of professional advice, many CEOs say, having friends dotted across the industry is why they love their job-they've gone on to witness one another's weddings and, just like regular workers, they still use their buddies as a reference call when applying for a new job.

While many CEOs made their closest friends early in their career, a few told Fortune that's when they met their future partners-both romantically and in a business sense.

"I met two of the most important people in my life through working at that first 'real job'-my wife and my cofounder and COO, James Hirst," said Martin Buhr, cofounder and CEO of the software company Tyk.

"And there are countless other stories like this," he adds while pointing to another work friend who founded a separate company and became a soundboard for Buhr's ideas.

Plus, he thinks having genuine friends in business is good for both one's mental health and the health of one's business: "They can spot gaps you're blind to or call you out when you maybe didn't follow your own advice, in a way that others in your company may not feel able to-especially when you're the CEO."

If today's leaders were starting out now

It's hard to quantify the importance of those early workplace friendships, and this throws up an interesting question in today's post-pandemic environment: Would these businesses have been founded if there wasn't an office for the bright minds to bond in?

Picture a TV show like The Office without, well, the office: Would Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute have become best friends if their relationship was primarily over email? Would Jim and Pam still have fallen in love and had a Zoom "meet-cute"?

That's the reality that young new hires today face, as they enter a new working world that's remote-first.

And while it's an entirely different world from the one that today's leaders look back on, the need for friendships at work isn't going away.

The majority of hybrid workers, surveyed by International Workplace Group, reported that office friendships increase job satisfaction, and almost half said that close friends keep them at their jobs.

But at the same time, 40% of remote and hybrid workers have found it harder to connect with their colleagues and build a relationship with their seniors.

According to a 2022 Glassdoor survey, a third of hybrid and remote workers also feel that their working arrangement has stunted their progression-with this sentiment rising to 55% among 18-to-25-year-olds.

It's bad news for career development and productivity: "When colleagues have strong relationships, they are more likely to innovate and share ideas, get more work done in less time, and generally enjoy their job more," says Jill Cotton, career trends expert at Glassdoor.

"Engaged employees will stand out to their boss, increasing their opportunity to be identified for career growth within a company," she adds.

So are new hires really missing out?

"The shift to increased flexibility in the workplace doesn't automatically mean new hires and graduates are missing out," Cotton assures. But it does require new hires to make a lot more effort to develop relationships with teammates through a screen.

"If you're not working full-time in an office environment surrounded by people, it can be easy for interactions with colleagues to become perfunctory and focus solely on work," Cotton says.

Her top piece of advice, for young new hires entering the workforce is to "consciously make time to really get to know your colleagues."

More practically, this means carving out time to socialize with your peers-this could be online, in real life, or even after work.

To break the ice, Cotton suggests starting small and asking something simple like "tell me something fun you did at the weekend." Then you can build up from there, as you learn more about their personal interests.

During your first 90 days, career coach Dr. Kyle Elliott advises setting a weekly target for how many peers you can connect with until these check-ins grow into more natural friendships, by which point you shouldn't need the diary reminder.

"While putting yourself out there can feel intimidating, particularly when you're a new hire, know that the benefits often far outweigh the risks," he says.

Because although friendship isn't critical to becoming successful, it makes the 81,000 hours we are estimated to work in our life far more enjoyable-and can provide vital perspective and support as you climb the ladder and become "the boss."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Marvelous' early career friendships are pivotal to today's leaders and CEOs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The C-suite is famously a lonely place. Without having forged friendships earlier in their career, it's hard for top leaders to encourage a report to truly open up, hang out (outside of work) without feeling obliged to, and get genuine feedback on making sensitive decisions like hiring and firing.

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: How Leaders Can Get the Feedback They Need to Grow

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: How Leaders Can Get the Feedback They Need to Grow

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When uncertainty is high, knowing where you stand - and learning about your mistakes while there's still time to fix them - is more important than ever. To be able to adapt to changing conditions and ensure that your team continues to feel supported and motivated, you need to understand what you're doing well - and where you're falling short. Soliciting clear, actionable feedback allows you to make better, more informed decisions and pivot when necessary.

Asking for feedback also creates a culture of trust and transparency. With concerns about an economic downturn rising, already overwhelmed teams are being asked to do more with less. When employees feel like their input matters, they're more likely to remain loyal, engaged, and productive. They're also much more willing to surface valuable concerns and suggestions.

But uncertainty also makes it much, much harder to get honest feedback. When people feel anxious or like their jobs might be in jeopardy, they're more reticent to speak up, especially to management. Add to that the fact that when people move up the ranks in an organization, they tend to get less corrective feedback, even though a 2014 study by Zenger Folkman showed that by a three-to-one margin, people believe corrective feedback does more to improve their performance than positive feedback.

In other words, right when you need it most, getting an accurate pulse on your performance as a leader becomes really, really hard. So how do you get feedback when people are least likely to offer it? How can you solicit actionable, useful advice from your reports? Neither one of you wants to have a hard conversation, but when you're the leader, it's your job to overcome that reluctance for yourself and help the other person overcome it, too.

Knowing how and when to ask for feedback is a learned skill - as is checking your (normal) defensive reaction in the face of helpful criticism. Based on our books and research, we put our heads together to outline the specific steps leaders should take to ask for feedback. The first thing to do is to ask for criticism, especially if you're the boss. This is awkward at best and can be a difficult emotional journey, so here are six tips for how to successfully solicit Radical Candor from your employees.

1. Embrace feeling "negative" emotions - often.

Hearing what you need to improve rarely feels good. Ask yourself: How many times each week do the people you work with tell you things that make you anxious, upset, or even defensive? How often do they tell you things that make you feel wonderful? If it's all feel-good praise and no hard-to-hear criticism, beware! You're not getting the real story. You need to work harder to get them to criticize you.

Remember, when it comes to soliciting Radical Candor, good news is no news, no news is bad news, and bad news is good news. As one of Liz's former managers told her, "Someone who cares about you tells you that you have food on your face. Everyone else will stay mum because they don't want to feel uncomfortable." Even though criticism is hard to hear in the moment, you need it to get better over time - and in time, it will sting less, too.

2. Have a go-to question.

It can be awkward to ask people point blank about what's going on. And when things are uncertain, it can feel risky to them to say what they actually think. We recommend that you come up with a go-to question that establishes psychological safety. There are three elements to a good go-to question:

The question cannot be answered with a yes or a no, or an "Oh, no, everything is fine" - which is exactly the answer you'll get most of the time if you ask, "Do you have any feedback for me?" Liz and Mollie love, "What one thing can I do to support you?" By asking for "one thing," you make it much more likely that you'll get a specific, actionable response.

Your question must sound like you - something you would naturally say. The question Kim likes to use is, "What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?" However, If those words don't fall easily off your tongue, find words that do.

Your question must be adapted for the person you're talking to. Jason Rosoff, who cofounded Radical Candor with Kim, told her he hates her go-to question, so she needs to ask him a more specific one.

Consider making your go-to question a recurring part of your 1:1 agendas. If your team knows what you'll be asking ahead of time, they'll have more time to prepare a useful answer.

3. Embrace the other person's discomfort.

No matter how good your go-to question is, the other person is likely to feel uncomfortable. And you're likely to feel uncomfortable because they're uncomfortable. It can be tempting to let the person off the hook at this point. But if you do that, you'll never get the feedback you need to succeed.

The only way out of this discomfort is through. Try asking your question and then remaining silent. Count to six, slowly, in your head. Very few people can endure six full seconds of silence. They'll tell you something.

4. Listen to understand, not to respond.

When listening to feedback, your motivation matters. You should want to understand what the other person is telling you, rather than listening so that you can deliver a response. It's the difference between, "I hear what you are saying, thank you" (great) and "I hear what you are saying, but..." (not so great).

Feedback opens us up to seeing our behaviors from different points of view. If we're focused on defending ourselves, we lose out on the opportunity to learn and improve. A helpful hint about listening to understand: look for the criticism. Often people will hide the criticism. Sometimes you'll get "oreo" feedback: two positive thoughts around a negative one. (This is sometimes called, less appetizingly, the shit sandwich.) Make sure you don't miss the criticism. Other times the feedback will be more like an oatmeal raisin cookie. Don't miss the raisins!

5. Close the loop: Make your listening tangible.

The best way to ensure you'll continue receiving feedback is to follow up and share the actions you've taken based on what you heard.

When you receive critical comments, it's useful to immediately outline what you'll do with the suggestions or concerns that were flagged. Try, "Here's what I'll do moving forward." And remember: You don't need to promise to make massive changes (you might not be able to deliver on those promises). You can say something like, "My next step will be to talk to other leaders to see what's possible."

Take Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who gets an annual 360-degree written assessment that any employee can contribute to. Hastings closed the loop on his 2019 360 by writing a memo to all Netflix employees. Here's an excerpt from his book No Rules Rules:

I find the best comments for my growth are unfortunately the most painful. So, in the spirit of 360, thank you for bravely and honestly pointing out to me: "In meetings you can skip over topics or rush through them when you feel impatient or determine a particular topic on the agenda is no longer worth the time...On a similar note, watch out for letting your point-of-view overwhelm. You can short-change the debate by signaling alignment when it doesn't exist." So true, so sad, and so frustrating that I still do this. I will keep working on it.

Once you've taken action, make sure you share the changes you've made. Ask if you overcorrected or undercorrected. Helpful hint: If the problem is something you've struggled with for some time, it's usually a good idea to try to overcorrect. If you get feedback that you move too fast, work on slowing down until someone tells you you're moving too slowly.

And if you weren't able to do anything differently, communicate why. When an employee told Kim she interrupted him and other employees in meetings, she wore a rubber band to her next staff meeting, told everyone about the feedback, and asked for help in changing this deeply ingrained bad habit that she couldn't realistically change overnight. She asked people to snap the rubber band on her wrist when they noticed her interrupting. (She knew that the people on her team would actually do that, and with a laugh - you might decide to take a different approach.) The rubber band helped her interrupt less. But more importantly, it made her listening tangible - and explained that although she couldn't change things overnight, she was working on it.

One of the biggest missteps we see leaders take is staying silent when, after careful consideration, they realize they're unable to act on feedback. When employees never hear back after giving feedback, they'll assume that their suggestions were ignored. It's much, much better to come back to your team and say something like, "Unfortunately, due to the executive team's priorities for the quarter, we won't be able to do ____, but I'm going to keep it in mind," than to say nothing at all.

6. Make giving feedback - not venting - a team habit.

Consistent venting, when you rehash the same problems without trying to understand or solve them, can make you and your team feel worse. This is because you're ingraining the frustration in your brain by talking about it over and over, without actually focusing on what can be learned or changed.

Even worse is when a person doesn't feel safe giving feedback to another person and instead vents their frustrations to a neutral third party. This may make the frustrated person feel better in the moment, but it doesn't solve anything long-term, since the other person is oblivious to their frustrating behaviors. When someone comes and talks to you about someone else who is not in the room, it may feel like you're being an empathetic listener. But really all you're doing is stirring the political pot. Instead, encourage them to go talk directly with the other person. Offer your services as a mediator, but remind them that it still requires both of them to talk to you at the same time. There are obvious exceptions - if a person is being bullied or harassed, don't tell them to go work it out directly.

Make feedback a team habit so that people feel safe giving it directly instead of venting to someone else. The place to start is soliciting feedback. If everyone is soliciting feedback, it's more likely to be met with open ears.

. . .

When things are up in the air, it can feel comforting to avoid difficult feedback. But creating stability for your team - and success for your organization - depends on your ability to learn what needs to change. Burying your head in the sand is never the safe thing to do. A culture of ruinous empathy or false harmony is not the path to success! Instead, invite criticism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Leaders Can Get the Feedback They Need to Grow

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When things are uncertain, it can feel comforting to avoid difficult feedback. But creating stability for your team - and success for your organization - depends on your ability to learn what needs to change. Burying your head in the sand is never the safe thing to do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
A 5-Part Process for Using Technology to Improve Your Talent Management

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: A 5-Part Process for Using Technology to Improve Your Talent Management 

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: A 5-Part Process for Using Technology to Improve Your Talent Management 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the law firm Allen & Overy, the idea of replacing traditional, annual performance appraisals with a technology-enabled continuous feedback system did not come from human resources. It came from a leader within the practice. Wanting something that encouraged more-frequent conversations between associates and partners, the senior lawyer read about what companies like Adobe were doing, and then asked his firm to help him create a new approach. When the new system, Compass, was rolled out to all 44 offices, the fact that it was born of a problem identified by internal staff helped accelerate the tool's adoption across the firm.

In an era of transformative cognitive technologies like AI and machine learning, it's become obvious that people, practices, and systems must become nimbler too. And because organizational change tends to be driven by those who most acutely feel the pain, it's often line managers who are the strongest champions for "talent tech": innovations in how firms hire people, staff projects, evaluate performance, and develop talent.

But as we have observed in our research, consulting work, and partnerships with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and top professional services firms, the transition to new and different ways of managing talent is often filled with challenges and unexpected hurdles. Gaining the most from talent tech, we find, depends on the adopting firm's ability to confront, and ultimately reinvent, an often outdated system of interlocking processes, behaviors and mindsets. Much like putting a new sofa in the living room makes the rest of the décor look outdated, experimenting with new talent technologies creates an urgency for change in the rest of the organization's practices.

While the jury is still out on the long-term impact of many of the talent tech experiments we have witnessed, we have observed five core lessons from those firms that seem to be positioning themselves most effectively to reap their benefits:

1. Talent tech adoption must be driven by business leaders, not the C-suite or corporate functions.

2. HR must be a partner and enabler - but not the owner.

3. Fast-iteration methodologies are a prerequisite, because talent tech has to be tailored to specific business needs and company context and culture.

4. Working with new technologies in new and nimbler ways creates the need for additional innovation in talent practices.

5. The job of leaders shifts from mandating change to fostering a culture of learning and growth.

Let's look at these one by one.

1. Talent tech adoption must be owned and driven by business leaders.

Many business leaders we have spoken with have stressed: It's not about the technology, it's about solving a problem. It's no surprise then, as we have observed, that talent tech projects have a greater likelihood of succeeding and scaling when they are driven by the business line - and not by top management or functional heads in HR or IT. Because operational managers are closer to the action, they have better insights into specific business challenges and customer pain points that can be addressed by new technologies.

As a VP charged with talent tech innovation at a large consumer products company told us: "We started our digital transformation top-down, creating a sense of urgency and cascading it down. Now it's much more bottom-up because you have to experiment, you have to do things that are relevant in the field. The urgency has to come from inside the individual instead of top management." The company organized a series of road shows that exposed high-potential managers to new developments in AI and enabled them to propose and run with projects of their own.

Putting responsibility for innovation in the hands of those who are closest to customers, and reducing layers of control and approval, increases the likelihood that the talent technologies will be fit for purpose. But for a generation of senior managers and functional heads raised on a steady diet of "visionary leadership," this more adaptive approach does not always come naturally.

2. HR must be a partner and enabler - but not the owner.

Not only are line managers closely connected to business imperatives, but they are also eager to move fast in technology adoption. They want to seize on the promise of AI, machine learning, and people analytics to improve business results and enhance their career prospects. But their priorities can conflict with other parts of the business.

At one of the companies we worked with, a young, ambitious manager experimented successfully with an on-demand talent platform for staffing employees on projects. But the experiment raised questions, for example, about what latitude bosses had in deciding who'd be allowed to take on extra projects and about whether performance on these extra projects could or should count toward an employee's annual appraisal and compensation. HR was not involved early enough, was more attuned to the risks than the opportunities, and opposed scaling the project further. Only after a lot of stakeholder management and leadership intervention did the pilot get back on track.

The ramifications of reimagining work are far-reaching, necessitating talent strategies built on the ability to access the right people and skills at the right time and then put them to work in flexible ways for which they will be coached and rewarded. But if middle managers wind up caught in bureaucratic procedures and rule-enforcement mindsets, implementations will falter. That's why getting buy-in from HR early in the process is so important - and necessary for scaling up when pilots yield promising results.

3. Knowing how to use lean, self-managing team methodologies is a prerequisite.

Because AI-powered tools like on-demand talent platforms and project staffing algorithms are not simply "plug and play," it can be helpful to use methods such as rapid prototyping, iterative feedback, customer-focused multidisciplinary teams, and task-centered "sprints" - the hallmarks of agile methodologies - to determine their usefulness.

For example, one large industrial company needed a better way to get people on cross-functional projects. Information about people's skills and capabilities was dispersed across siloed business lines. Rather than attempting to build out a comprehensive system to identify and match employees across all the projects (and the silos), the company piloted the idea with only a few projects and a carefully selected pool of employees. Starting small allowed extremely fast learning and iteration, broader scaling, and more-complex uses of the system.

We have worked with a range of companies that are experimenting with technology platforms that catalogue projects that need doing, match project needs to skill supply, and then source appropriate talent. In each case, significant modifications were needed to adjust to specific requirements. And in most cases the data necessary to run the new systems existed in different formats residing in silos. Companies that lacked experience with lean methodologies had to be trained to operate as agile teams in order to define a specific use case for the technology. This learning curve is often the culprit behind implementation processes that take significantly longer than managers expect.

4. Talent tech raises urgency for further talent innovation.

Much has been made of the scarcity of AI engineers, along with the fact that the precious few are quickly snapped up at huge salaries by the usual suspects - Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. Beyond the hype, many firms are finding that they cannot hire the talent they need (because the top experts prefer to be free agents or already work for competitors) and that the skills and capacities they need evolve rapidly or are best sourced externally. These trends are fueling a strategic shift from acquiring talent to accessing talent on an as-needed contract basis; yet the cultural hurdles to staffing externally can be as, if not more, challenging than the technological ones.

One organization we worked with did not have a good mechanism in place for prioritizing the work requested of its shared internal consulting services. Its highly skilled consultants were responding on a first-come, first-served basis and fielding more demands than they could handle. Often they were also the wrong demands. When the team didn't have the right people on the team for the work, they'd either do their best to complete it themselves or abandon it altogether. An analysis revealed that a good portion of the work could be better done externally by highly skilled contractors, and in fact the team could dramatically increase its ability to provide value across the organization if it could access a specific set of external expertise. But implementing the change was a challenge because the unit's internal clients felt "safer" working with internal employees.

Once one part of the people system changes significantly, the pressure is on to change related processes. Companies that have shifted to more-agile ways of working have also found that they can no longer evaluate people once or twice a year on their ability to hit individual targets; they now need to look at how people perform as team members, on an ongoing basis. All of this is driving a shift from annual performance assessments to systems that provide feedback and coaching on a continuous basis, as firms ranging from Allen & Overy to Microsoft have found.

5. Leaders must foster a culture of learning.

One CTO we spoke to tells a story about an AI project that "hit the wall" despite a sequence of green lights. "It was over-administered," she explained. "We had specified detail into 2019." As reality on the ground began to diverge from the plan, the people in charge of executing the plans failed to speak up and the project derailed. Without people who feel an "obligation to dissent," she concluded, it's hard to innovate.

Across industries and sectors, practitioners and academics seem to agree on one thing: Successfully piloting new technologies requires shifting from a traditional plan-and-implement approach to change to an experiment-and-learn approach. But experiment-and-learn approaches are by definition rife with opportunities for failure, embarrassment, and turf wars. Without parallel work by senior management to shift corporate cultures toward a learning mindset, change will inch along slowly if at all.

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took charge, for example, he saw that fear - and the corporate politics that resulted from it - was the biggest barrier to capturing leadership in cloud computing and mobility solutions. A convert to Carol Dweck's idea of a growth mindset - the belief that talent is malleable and expandable with effort, practice, and input from others - he prioritized a shift from a "know it all" to a "learn it all" culture as a means to achieving business goals. Today, not only does Microsoft rank among the top firms in cloud computing, but the company is also "cool" again in the minds of the top engineering talent it needs to compete.

There is a lot of fear about the speed and scope of technological change, and it's perhaps most acutely felt by the middle-management survivors of years of corporate layoffs. Fear does not make people more open to experimenting; rather it leads us to put all our energy and ingenuity toward protecting ourselves - and that is lethal for innovation. That's why the critical task for leaders in a world in which machines will do more and more of their routine work is to enable a shift, from valuing being right, knowing the answers, or implementing top-down changes, to valuing dissent and debate, asking good questions, and iterating to learn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A 5-Part Process for Using Technology to Improve Your Talent Management

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In an era of transformative cognitive technologies like AI and machine learning, it's become obvious that people, practices, and systems must become nimbler too. And because organizational change tends to be driven by those who most acutely feel the pain, it's often line managers who are the strongest champions for "talent tech": innovations in how firms hire people, staff projects, evaluate performance, and develop talent.

# data[].attributes.body
Fractional Director:Talent Development & Learning | Workplace Experience & Engagement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I work closely with global business leaders/stakeholders, [C-Level, HRBP, DEIBA, & ICbusiness partners] in PEOPLE-FIRST organizations to create, design, facilitate, and execute blended learning and development curricula, programs, and experiences that engage people and that are tied to business strategy on a global scale. I can 'zoom out' and keep the strategic focus on scaling for growth, proactive employee engagement, and retention of high-performance individuals.

My experience includes working hand-in-hand with broader PEOPLE leaders on projects, instructional design, curricula design, sourcing right-fit platforms/vendors, in-person and virtual facilitation, and initiatives to cultivate an optimistic, collaborative, and human culture & people-first practice that creates leaders for the Future of Work. Passionate about making an impact in the Onboarding & Retention journey of new hires through their first year & beyond!

I am available for full-time-permanent, fractional, or consulting projects.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I work closely with global business leaders/stakeholders, [C-Level, HRBP, DEIBA, & ICbusiness partners] in PEOPLE-FIRST organizations to create, design, facilitate, and execute blended learning and development curricula, programs, and experiences that engage people and that are tied to business strategy on a global scale.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Why We Love to Hate HR...and What HR Can Do About It

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: Why We Lobe to Hate HR…and What HR Can Do About It.

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: Why We Lobe to Hate HR…and What HR Can Do About It.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Idea in Brief

The Problem

When talent is in short supply, business leaders see HR as a valuable strategic partner. But when the labor market loosens up, HR suddenly seems like a nuisance, because we don't like being told how to behave-and we see no immediate benefit to complying.

The Opportunity

Instead of sitting tight until the next market shift changes leaders' perception, HR managers should set the talent agenda now. They have the required perspective and expertise.

The Solution

HR managers can score big wins for their companies by rethinking programs that have been around since the 1950s, making a business case for the initiatives that matter, and cutting loose pet programs that lack impact.

Recent complaints about the HR function have touched a nerve in a large, sympathetic audience, particularly in the United States. The most vocal critics say that HR managers focus too much on "administrivia" and lack vision and strategic insight.

These feelings aren't new. They've erupted now and in the past because we don't like being told how to behave-and no other group in organizational life, not even finance, bosses us around as systematically as HR does. We get defensive when we're instructed to change how we interact with people, especially those who report to us, because that goes right to the core of who we are. What's more, HR makes us perform tasks we dislike, such as documenting problems with employees. And it prevents us from doing what we want, such as hiring someone we "just know" is a good fit. Its directives affect every person in the organization, right up to the top, every single day.

The complaints also have a cyclical quality-they're driven largely by the business context. Usually when companies are struggling with labor issues, HR is seen as a valued leadership partner. When things are going more smoothly all around, managers tend to think, "What's HR doing for us, anyway?"

This doesn't mean that HR is above reproach. Quite the contrary: It has plenty of room to improve, and this is a moment of enormous opportunity. Little has been done in the past few decades to examine the value of widely used practices that are central to how companies operate. By separating the effective from the worthless, HR leaders can secure huge payoffs for their organizations. But it's important to understand HR's tumultuous history with business leaders and the economy before turning our attention to what the function should be doing now and in the future.

Further Reading

Assessing performance Magazine Article

How Deloitte is rethinking peer feedback and the annual review, and trying to design a system to fuel improvement

The "Personnel" Pendulum

How top executives feel about HR pretty reliably reflects what's going on in the U.S. economy. When the economy is down and the labor market is slack, they see HR as a nuisance. But sentiments change when labor tightens up and HR practices become essential to companies' immediate success.

Think back to the Great Depression. People would put up with nearly anything to stay employed. Line managers complained that personnel departments were getting in the way of better performance, which they thought could be achieved with the "drive" system: threatening workers and sometimes even hitting them if they failed to measure up.

Similarly, business leaders didn't put a lot of stock in HR during the 2001 and 2008 recessions, because employees-keenly aware of how replaceable they were-stayed put and more or less behaved themselves. Because companies had a large pool of job seekers to draw from, wages stayed flat and productivity rose. More employees were working harder for the sake of security. And that remains true in our "jobless recovery" from the latest financial crisis. Although 83% of people in a Salary.com survey said they would look for a new job in 2014, the number who are actually quitting has not yet spiked. So it's still easy for leaders to push back on all those annoying HR policies. They seem superfluous.

Consider, in contrast, times when labor wasn't so plentiful. In the 1920s-when the economy was booming, and keeping workers was both hard to do and crucial to business-personnel departments started to make supervisors treat their employees well. And after World War II, U.S. industry suffered a talent shortage unlike anything since. Many of the men (it was always men) who might have gone into business had fought instead. It didn't help matters that talent development had received little or no attention during the Depression. The postwar question "What happens if the boss gets hit by a bus?" pointed to a huge concern. About one-third of executives died in office-many of them from heart attacks-and no one was around to take their place. A lot of small companies went out of business, and many big ones had to be sold.

In that leadership void, modern HR was born, ushering in practices such as coaching, developmental assignments, job rotation, 360-degree feedback, assessment centers, high-potential tracks, and succession plans. They sound routine now, but they were revolutionary then. And they arose from an urgent need to develop and retain talent in the 1950s.

In that "gray flannel suit" era, 90% of positions (and virtually all those in the top ranks) were filled from within-and 96% of large companies dedicated an entire department to planning for workforce needs. Those numbers reflect an intense commitment to development, which paid large dividends. HR was a powerful function, voted the most glamorous area in business by executives.

Things have changed quite a bit. Only a third or so of today's hires are internal. Companies engage executive search firms to fill most senior-level vacancies. One in four CEOs comes from the outside. And companies spend less time and effort than they used to mapping out the talent they'll need in the years to come: By the mid-2000s only a third were doing any planning in this area.

What happened? The economic slowdown of the 1970s practically eliminated labor shortages, and business leaders began dismantling those postwar programs designed to identify and develop good managers and workers. Corporations that held on to them, such as GE, were the exception. New companies, particularly in tech, could hire all the executives they needed when-thanks to layoffs and stalled advancement-people left the great organizations. Microsoft became the largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization, with virtually no investment in developing management skills. Others followed its example. As one CEO said to me at the time, "Why should I train people when my competitors are willing to do it for me?"

Meanwhile, supervisors spent less and less time on their direct reports. They had too many people under them to manage everyone carefully, and other tasks were given higher priority. In his book The Leadership Factor, the Harvard Business School professor John Kotter reported on this phenomenon at a leading New York bank in the early 1980s. Junior managers complained that their people-management tasks were distracting them from their more important roles as individual contributors, so the bank's leaders allowed them to devote less energy to evaluation and coaching.

Thus employees weren't getting the investment and attention they needed to grow. Even HR's brief resurgence during the dot-com boom-corporate recruiters, rather than IT workers, had the hottest job in the United States then, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics-was limited to hiring and retention.

At the same time, more and more tasks that had traditionally been performed by HR (from hiring to development to compensation decisions) were pushed onto line managers, on top of their other work. And that's been the case ever since. HR is now in the position of trying to get those beleaguered managers to follow procedures and practices without having any direct power over them. This is euphemistically called "managing with ambiguous authority," but to those on the receiving end, it feels like nagging and meddling.

I recently participated in a debate of HR leaders staged by Will Peachey, the head of HR transformation for Capgemini. He kicked it off with a provocative question: Is HR as a function doing more harm than good by prompting line managers to take their responsibilities as supervisors more seriously? The position that carried the day was that things would be much worse for employees without HR's involvement. But there was also a palpable sense that in many organizations HR is simply slapping bandages on problems that will persist until top executives make talent issues a clear priority for managers.

What HR Should Be Doing Now

As the economy continues to recover, businesses may very well wait for labor to become scarce again before looking to HR for meaningful support. But HR can speed things up by assuming the reins now. It has the expertise to help companies get ahead of the market shift that we should all see coming. Here are the basic but powerful steps HR leaders can take:

Set the agenda.

Like any other function, HR must show why the issues it addresses matter to the business and that it has sensible ways to manage them. A few years ago the head of HR at a leading corporation-someone who had survived lots of restructurings-was asked about the key to his success. He said, "I do whatever the CEO wants." Though doing things the boss doesn't want is certainly a career-limiting strategy, too many HR managers wait to be told which issues to tackle. If a company starts a wellness program after the chief executive has a heart attack, or launches a women's initiative after his daughter takes a job in the business, you can be sure that the HR team is not leading the charge.

CEOs and other operating executives are rarely experts on workplace issues. They often have no relevant experience, now that fewer of them are coming up through training programs and rotational assignments in which they could have learned effective people-management practices from knowledgeable peers. So the HR team can show these executives what they should care about and why. That means articulating a point of view on every people-related topic relevant to the business. For instance:

Performance management.

Forced ranking-imposed by top executives who thought supervisors weren't tough enough in their evaluations-was the rage about a decade ago. Now most companies (including GE, where the practice became famous) are stepping away from it as they realize what HR has long known: Supervisors need the training, the time, and the incentives to have serious conversations with subordinates about performance and growth.

HR should be in front of every one of these issues, saying, "Here's how we should be managing this task, and here's the evidence behind that view."

Focus on issues that matter in the here and now.

Many U.S. businesses still follow the talent-management playbook written in the 1950s. For example, even though elaborate succession plans are rarely used, companies keep creating them. Instead of copying what large corporations did decades ago, HR should craft company-specific (and industry-specific) policies that respond to today's challenges.

Back in the 1950s, HR controlled the promotions and career of every manager at every level. For precisely that reason, William H. Whyte wrote in The Organization Man, it was the most glamorous job in business. The only other time that was true in the United States was in the late 1990s, when the labor market tightened up again and companies vied to become the "employer of choice."

HR hasn't fallen out of favor in other countries, however. In Japan it is still the preferred track to the C-suite. And in India, my studies with colleagues suggest, it's arguably the most powerful of all the functions. Indeed, across Southeast Asia, top executives are investing in the training and development of employees and more-sophisticated systems, especially for hiring. Even in Europe, which has a talent glut, HR appears to be growing in influence as companies recognize the importance of organizational culture, knowledge management, and so forth. The U.S. is the outlier.

The main reason HR is more vital elsewhere is that organizational power goes to the group that deals with the biggest problems-an idea dating back at least to the great economist Alfred Marshall. Businesses in the rest of the world have to deal with aggressive government regulation of the workplace, strong unions, political support for workers' interests, and often a real shortage of people who can even be trained for key jobs. Among developed countries the U.S. has the most favorable environment for employers-and the least incentive to make changes.

Ideology plays a role as well, though. The leaders who ran U.S. corporations after World War II had broad training in and appreciation for management and used a governance model based on balancing the interests of stakeholders, who included employees. Those leaders have been replaced by people disproportionately from financial backgrounds, whose model of governance-maximizing shareholder value-awards no special role to the interests of employees.

If you're wondering why that's not obvious, think of the simmering debate within HR about whether it should be a profession like accounting, with universal practices. This view has been championed by the Society for Human Resource Management and driven by its very successful certification programs, which teach and then document knowledge in designing compensation systems and other specialties.

Detailed knowledge of practices is essential, but it's more important to understand what works when and where. For example, rather than just knowing how to put a broad-based stock option plan in place, one ought to understand its pluses and minuses in various circumstances. Such plans add volatility to compensation that can be difficult for the business to control, so they may not be the top choice in an economy that's already unstable or even one that's in recovery but subject to unpredictable swings. And they are effective only when employees feel that they have sufficient autonomy and authority to influence stock performance.

To appreciate the importance of context, consider what's happening in consulting and tech firms, where developing skills and human capital is crucial to success. PwC and Juniper Networks have already abandoned traditional performance appraisals-perhaps the most reviled standard practice in all of management-and moved toward a model of ongoing conversation designed to improve skills and results. (See "Bright, Shiny Objects and the Future of HR," in this issue.) Microsoft and Deloitte are moving in a similar direction. Concerned about retaining key talent, Deloitte broke up the traditional promotion ladder, providing a more open and flexible framework for career advancement that accommodates both employee interests and changing business demands. (See "Reinventing Performance Management," HBR, April 2015.) And Infosys, in India, has figured out how to use the classroom to deliver the kind of contextual knowledge people previously assumed had to be acquired on the job. The company teaches managers how to do business in other cultures and in particular industries-for instance, how to tailor their IT services to chemical companies in Germany.

All this is a matter of looking more closely at the environment in which the organization operates. It's about continually identifying new challenges and designing tools to meet them.

Further Reading

Talent management Magazine Article

Line managers are taking on duties that once belonged to human resources. Here's what they need to know.

Acquire business knowledge.

HR has (and should have) deep knowledge about workplace issues. But it should also bring first-rate analytic minds into the function to help companies make sense of all their employee data and get the most from their human capital.

In a recent survey by Deloitte, HR leaders said they felt least prepared in the area of analytics-but some are doing exciting work on that front. Not surprisingly, Microsoft and Google mine their own data to predict good hires, and IBM uses its enormous employee database to create project teams more effectively. But companies outside the tech sector, too, are bringing analytics into HR. Cigna uses sophisticated data to minimize its own health care costs and identify its best performers. Managers of Cornerstone OnDemand (formerly Evolv) and other providers of call center software are parsing simple jobs in a hundred ways to predict and then improve performance.

In many businesses, CIOs and their teams are the ones wrestling with big data to solve classic HR problems, such as how to find the best candidates and which practices increase productivity. If HR is to set the agenda on people management, it must either staff up to handle those analyses itself or partner with people in the company who can do the work. Otherwise, the answers to fundamental HR questions will come from elsewhere in the business, and HR might as well pack it in.

Highlight financial benefits.

During the tight labor market of the late 1990s, an HBR article described how the HR team at Sears, Roebuck had demonstrated that improved employee attitudes led to a better customer experience and, in turn, to higher store profits. (See "Employee-Customer-Profit Chain at Sears," January-February 1998.) Few HR departments since have felt compelled to make the case that any of their practices could drive profits. Many don't calculate ROI, even though other functions have been expected to do so for at least a generation. That just feeds into business leaders' view of HR as a cost center where the goal is always to cut, cut, cut.

No doubt most HR departments were initially caught off guard by questions about whether practices such as expat and rotational assignments actually pay off. The information they gathered tended to focus on individual outcomes, such as job satisfaction; they didn't feel equipped to estimate financial returns. But that excuse no longer holds. The enterprise resource planning systems of most organizations contain copious data on turnover, productivity, and other factors that suggest which talent development programs merit investment.

Take IBM's recent decision to retrain IT consultants whose skills were obsolete. The company said it would provide on-site training during working hours one day a week for anyone who wanted to participate, but employees would share the costs by forgoing pay for the days they participated. With that requirement baked in, it was relatively easy to make a financial case for offering the program: The savings in hiring would be more than twice the costs of the training.

Quantifying costs and benefits in this way turns talent decisions into business decisions.

Walk away from the time wasters.

HR invests heavily in many programs that lack impact. Consider the current preoccupation with generational differences. There's little compelling evidence that they even exist: Young employees today appear to be remarkably like young employees decades ago, and they've always been a challenge to older managers. Their supervisors aren't having any unusual problems with them now. Nevertheless, many HR departments spend a lot of energy worrying about how Millennials want to work. Given all the other things to worry about, it shouldn't be a priority to learn how to manage one subset of subordinates differently. Everyone wrestles with engagement and satisfaction; Millennials aren't alone in that. But even if they were unique in their preferences, HR couldn't make managers tailor the supervision of them-it doesn't have the authority.

The same is true for diversity programs. Employment law prohibits diversity mandates in hiring and promotion practices, so companies try to change line managers' attitudes and priorities instead. But such efforts are effective only if top executives lead them, transforming the culture. Otherwise HR is just a cheerleader for an initiative it can neither enforce nor measure; its leaders will end up pleading with line managers to take on yet another set of tasks, burning up more social capital in the process.

The Way Forward

One of traditional HR's biggest difficulties has been supporting business strategy, because it's such a moving target these days. Companies seldom have long-term plans with straightforward talent requirements. Instead they generate streams of projects and initiatives to address successive needs.

But HR is by nature a long-term play. Developing talent, heading off problems with regulations and turnover, building corporate culture, and addressing morale problems all take time. Often, leadership teams and priorities change before such initiatives have paid off. And when companies don't meet their performance goals for the quarter, those programs are among the first to go.

How can HR bring the long view back into organizations? By reconciling it with the immediate pressures that businesses face, which those one-at-a-time projects are designed to address. Even when company leaders say, "We will do this without our own employees, by outsourcing or engaging contractors," HR folks should be involved, because they're best able to assess whether those engagements will succeed. (After all, outsourcing is just paying to use another company's human capital and becoming reliant on it.) But meanwhile, HR should also keep stepping back to study those initiatives in the aggregate: What emerging needs do they point to? How do those needs map to the organization's talent pipeline and practices? Which capabilities need shoring up? How are things likely to change in the marketplace, and what will be needed then? Why don't we have the ability to handle those tasks internally? That's the kind of analytic counsel the "new HR" should provide. Then its job is to help organizations act on the insights.

Consider the recent decision at Comcast to bring world-class IT capabilities in-house, which will allow the company to develop its own software for managing and delivering online entertainment. The HR challenge there is clear: attracting and retaining the best talent in Philadelphia, which is not known as an IT center. But with HR's guidance, the company is addressing that in creative ways, such as building and supporting an IT start-up community and targeting IT students and recent graduates raised in Philadelphia for internships and jobs. This big bet on the future rests on HR's ability to pull all that off.

Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple are now on the front lines of HR innovation, largely because they have an acute need for specialized talent. Human capital is practically their only major asset; talent is in short supply; and competitors are eager to lure employees away. There's been some creative HR thinking in financial services as well, to predict and ward off unethical behavior. JPMorgan, for instance, is using an algorithm to identify employees who are likely to break the rules.

No crisis or scandal is necessary for HR to transform its practices, though. Nor should the function focus solely on innovations in hiring. Discretionary effort-by employees who are engaged and willing to give their best-is at the heart of organizational success, and managing and developing people is the way to drive and sustain that effort. So the time is ripe for reimagining human capital much more broadly. Business leaders will see that-if HR makes a compelling, evidence-based case for what matters, and jettisons what doesn't.

A version of this article appeared in the July-August 2015 issue (pp.54-61) of Harvard Business Review.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why We Love to Hate HR...and What HR Can Do About It

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Idea in Brief The Problem When talent is in short supply, business leaders see HR as a valuable strategic partner. But when the labor market loosens up, HR suddenly seems like a nuisance, because we don't like being told how to behave-and we see no immediate benefit to complying.

# data[].attributes.headline
TedTalk: There's More to Life Than Being Happy

# data[].attributes.subject
TedTalk: There's More to Life Than Being Happy

# data[].attributes.body
Happiness comes and goes, says writer Emily Esfahani Smith, but having meaning in life -- serving something beyond yourself and developing the best within you -- gives you something to hold onto.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but what if there’s a more fulfilling path? Happiness comes and goes, says writer Emily Esfahani Smith, but having meaning in life -- serving something beyond yourself and developing the best within you -- gives you something to hold onto. Learn more about the difference between being happy and having meaning as Smith offers four pillars of a meaningful life.

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: Quiz Yourself - Do You Lead with Emotional Intelligence?

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: Quiz Yourself - Do You Lead with Emotional Intelligence?

# data[].attributes.body
The 25-question quiz from Harvard Business Review was posted by Annie McKee, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the PennCLO Executive Doctoral Program.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Quiz Yourself: Do You Lead with Emotional Intelligence?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rate yourself on five key dimensions, and see how you compare with others.

# data[].attributes.body
If you're in People Ops, join me for this fabulous & growting community!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Turn data collection into an experience with Typeform. Create beautiful online forms, surveys, quizzes, and so much more. Try it for FREE.

# data[].attributes.headline
NPR: Friendships at Work Can Boost Happiness. Here's How to Nurture Them.

# data[].attributes.subject
NPR: Friendships at Work Can Boost Happiness. Here's How to Nurture Them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The pandemic had a huge impact on how we work, and our relationship with our jobs. For many people who worked remotely for months (or still do), the lost boundaries between their work and personal lives may have helped fuel a rise in burnout.

Trends like "quiet quitting" have taken off as many tried to pull back how much of themselves they invested in their careers.

But if putting in extra grueling hours at work has lost its appeal, investing in the other humans that you work with may be worth a second look.

One of the key factors that make for happier, healthier workers is how connected people feel with their colleagues, says Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest running studies on what makes humans thrive.

Waldinger explores the results of that study - and other studies on the topic - in a new book, The Good Life, which he wrote with his colleague Marc Schulz. In it, the authors share findings of the 85 years of research following people from their teens throughout their lives, assessing factors that lead to health and wellbeing.

The big takeaway? "The people who had the warmest connections with other people weren't just happier, they stayed healthier longer, and they lived longer," Waldinger says. "We get little hits of well-being, if you will, from all kinds of relationships, from friends, family, work colleagues."

While the study found that very close relationships - romantic partners, siblings and friends - are critical, it also found that a whole spectrum of other relationships matter.

"All of that seems to affirm our [need for] belonging," Waldinger says. "That we are seen and recognized by others, even the most casual contact."

And since much of our waking lives are spent at work, workplace bonds make a real difference. Unfortunately, the lack of social connection at work, is starting to be recognized as a growing problem.

A recent Gallup poll found that only about a third - 32% - of workers are engaged in their work, down from 36% in 2020. The survey also found that the number of actively disengaged workers has risen since the pandemic.

Another recent Gallup poll found that only 2 in 10 American workers say they have a "best friend at work" - that's someone you can confide in about the personal side of your life. And for those under 35, that number dropped by three percentage points since 2019.

The 20% with a work bestie "were better performers on the job," Waldinger says. "They were much less likely to leave their job for another one because they had a friend at work."

And the Gallup poll also found that having a close friend at work had become even more important since the pandemic, and the rise in hybrid and remote work.

Exercise your social muscles

So how can we build that sense of warmth and connection with your co-workers? Waldinger compares it to exercising regularly for physical fitness - you need to make a habit of it to reap the rewards.

He suggests starting with small steps. For example, think of a colleague you haven't seen in a while.

"You could send them a text, or an email, or even call them on the phone," he suggests, "and just say, 'Hi! I was thinking of you, and wanted to connect.'"

It's something that takes barely 15 seconds, but those actions often bring us little doses of happiness.

"Much more often than not, you will find that something very positive comes back," he says. "What we know with strengthening your relationships is that very tiny steps can lead to responses that will make you feel good."

And if you want to make new friends at work, Waldinger suggests leaning into your curiosity about your co-workers.

"So you could, for example, decide just to notice something about somebody else at work who you'd like to get to know," he says. "Notice something they're displaying on their desk that might be personal."

And just ask them about it, he says.

"One of the things we know is that when we are curious about someone in a friendly way, it's flattering and it engages people in conversation."

These seemingly insignificant conversations can bring big and ongoing benefits to our wellbeing. In fact, there's research that shows that small talk, even with strangers, gives a hit of happiness.

"We know that small talk has these benefits of enhancing well-being," says Waldinger.

But it needs to be practiced a lot, he adds.

"This is a little like a baseball game where you don't expect to hit the ball every time," he says. "But if you try this several times, you will find that much more often than not, you will get that positive response to small talk, to reaching out in some way."

And those conversations can also pave the way to deeper conversations, and friendships.

Get out of your rut, especially if you're remote

If you've been working remotely, Waldinger advises coming in to work every now and then to interact with coworkers in person. "That experience of coming and seeing your colleagues [will] give you this little upsurge of emotion, because you realize you've been deprived of that in-person connection."

Waldinger acknowledges all of this can be harder than, say, staying at home and watching Netflix.

You might have to push yourself to go for happy hour with colleagues. "It's just much easier to do what's familiar and controllable," he says. Relationships are less predictable.

But if you catch yourself feeling that way, "notice the resistance, and then let yourself step over it and take the action. If you think about doing it, do it and see what happens."

And he notes that it shouldn't be up to individual employees to do all the work in forging bonds and connections at work. Leaders can do a lot to foster a culture of warmth and connection.

For instance, he says, they can intentionally create situations where people feel comfortable being vulnerable, sharing something about their hobbies and life outside of work.

"You need leaders to say being personal with each other is valuable, it matters, and it starts at the top," he says. "When that happens, the culture can shift in a company where people tend to know each other better, and then care about each other and care about the workplace."

And that can go a long way in creating a happier, more engaged workplace.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Friendships at work can boost happiness. Here's how to nurture them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sure, you may resent how much of your energy gets sucked up by your job. But research finds that keeping up relationships with colleagues may have a big upside to your health and happiness.

# data[].attributes.headline
FastCompany: How to Spark a Revolution in Company Culture That’ll Improve Retention 

# data[].attributes.subject
FastCompany: How to Spark a Revolution in Company Culture That’ll Improve Retention 

# data[].attributes.headline
WaPo: 13 Work Tips To Make Your Job Less Stressful This Year

# data[].attributes.subject
WaPo: 13 Work Tips To Make Your Job Less Stressful This Year

# data[].attributes.headline
NYTimes: Are You a Cubicle Cat or a Couch Koala? Test Your Office Personality (Fun Assessment)

# data[].attributes.subject
NYTimes: Are You a Cubicle Cat or a Couch Koala? Test Your Office Personality (Fun Assessment)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Are You a Cubicle Cat or a Couch Koala? Test Your Office Personality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Personality assessment has ballooned into a giant industry that aims to explain your working style. Take our quiz to find out what kind of office creature you are.

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here's How to Create It

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here's How to Create It

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"There's no team without trust," says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant's massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won't be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off - just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.

Ancient evolutionary adaptations explain why psychological safety is both fragile and vital to success in uncertain, interdependent environments. The brain processes a provocation by a boss, competitive coworker, or dismissive subordinate as a life-or-death threat. The amygdala, the alarm bell in the brain, ignites the fight-or-flight response, hijacking higher brain centers. This "act first, think later" brain structure shuts down perspective and analytical reasoning. Quite literally, just when we need it most, we lose our minds. While that fight-or-flight reaction may save us in life-or-death situations, it handicaps the strategic thinking needed in today's workplace.

Read more about becoming a manager

Twenty-first-century success depends on another system - the broaden-and-build mode of positive emotion, which allows us to solve complex problems and foster cooperative relationships. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina has found that positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe. Humor increases, as does solution-finding and divergent thinking - the cognitive process underlying creativity.

Read more about psychological safety

When the workplace feels challenging but not threatening, teams can sustain the broaden-and-build mode. Oxytocin levels in our brains rise, eliciting trust and trust-making behavior. This is a huge factor in team success, as Santagata attests: "In Google's fast-paced, highly demanding environment, our success hinges on the ability to take risks and be vulnerable in front of peers."

So how can you increase psychological safety on your own team? Try replicating the steps that Santagata took with his:

We humans hate losing even more than we love winning. A perceived loss triggers attempts to reestablish fairness through competition, criticism, or disengagement, which is a form of workplace-learned helplessness. Santagata knows that true success is a win-win outcome, so when conflicts come up, he avoids triggering a fight-or-flight reaction by asking, "How could we achieve a mutually desirable outcome?"

Underlying every team's who-did-what confrontation are universal needs such as respect, competence, social status, and autonomy. Recognizing these deeper needs naturally elicits trust and promotes positive language and behaviors. Santagata reminded his team that even in the most contentious negotiations, the other party is just like them and aims to walk away happy. He led them through a reflection called "Just Like Me," which asks you to consider:

This person has beliefs, perspectives, and opinions, just like me.

This person has hopes, anxieties, and vulnerabilities, just like me.

This person has friends, family, and perhaps children who love them, just like me.

This person wants to feel respected, appreciated, and competent, just like me.

This person wishes for peace, joy, and happiness, just like me.

"Thinking through in advance how your audience will react to your messaging helps ensure your content will be heard, versus your audience hearing an attack on their identity or ego," explains Santagata.

Skillfully confront difficult conversations head-on by preparing for likely reactions. For example, you may need to gather concrete evidence to counter defensiveness when discussing hot-button issues. Santagata asks himself, "If I position my point in this manner, what are the possible objections, and how would I respond to those counterarguments?" He says, "Looking at the discussion from this third-party perspective exposes weaknesses in my positions and encourages me to rethink my argument." Specifically, he asks:

What are my main points?

What are three ways my listeners are likely to respond?

How will I respond to each of those scenarios?

If team members sense that you're trying to blame them for something, you become their saber-toothed tiger. John Gottman's research at the University of Washington shows that blame and criticism reliably escalate conflict, leading to defensiveness and - eventually - to disengagement. The alternative to blame is curiosity. If you believe you already know what the other person is thinking, then you're not ready to have a conversation. Instead, adopt a learning mindset, knowing you don't have all the facts. Here's how:

State the problematic behavior or outcome as an observation, and use factual, neutral language. For example, "In the past two months there's been a noticeable drop in your participation during meetings and progress appears to be slowing on your project."

Engage them in an exploration. For example, "I imagine there are multiple factors at play. Perhaps we could uncover what they are together?"

Ask for solutions. The people who are responsible for creating a problem often hold the keys to solving it. That's why a positive outcome typically depends on their input and buy-in. Ask directly, "What do you think needs to happen here?" Or, "What would be your ideal scenario?" Another question leading to solutions is: "How could I support you?"

Asking for feedback on how you delivered your message disarms your opponent, illuminates blind spots in communication skills, and models fallibility, which increases trust in leaders. Santagata closes difficult conversations with these questions:

What worked and what didn't work in my delivery?

How did it feel to hear this message?

How could I have presented it more effectively?

For example, Santagata asked about his delivery after giving his senior manager tough feedback. His manager replied, "This could have felt like a punch in the stomach, but you presented reasonable evidence and that made me want to hear more. You were also eager to discuss the challenges I had, which led to solutions."

Santagata periodically asks his team how safe they feel and what could enhance their feeling of safety. In addition, his team routinely takes surveys on psychological safety and other team dynamics. Some teams at Google include questions such as, "How confident are you that you won't receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?"

If you create this sense of psychological safety on your own team starting now, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, more learning and development opportunities, and better performance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here's How to Create It

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety - the belief that you won't be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off - just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Alisha Haridasani Gupta, Photographs by Stefano Ortega and Illustration by Aaron Lowell DentonMarch 3, 2023

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Breathing correctly is a skill — and learning to control it can improve your health, mood and well-being. Here are a few simple exercises to help you get started.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Why You Should Have (at Least) Two Careers

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: Why You Should Have (At Least) Two Careers

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: Why You Should Have (At Least) Two Careers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do you dream about switching to a career that's drastically different from your current job? Many people do. But they never make the leap: the costs of switching seem too high, and the possibility of success seems too remote. The answer isn't to plug away in your current job, unfulfilled and slowly burning out. The answer is to do both. Two careers are better than one. And by committing to two careers, you will produce benefits for both. You can learn new skills, broaden your network, and discover truly creative new solutions by committing to two (or more) wildly divergent careers. When you follow your curiosities, you will bring passion to your new careers, which will leave you more fulfilled. And by doing more than one job, you may end up doing all of them better.

It's not uncommon to meet a lawyer who'd like to work in renewable energy, or an app developer who'd like to write a novel, or an editor who fantasizes about becoming a landscape designer. Maybe you also dream about switching to a career that's drastically different from your current job. But in my experience, it's rare for such people to actually make the leap. The costs of switching seem too high, and the possibility of success seems too remote.

Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning's online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Career Management. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.

What's your next career move? Learn how to set yourself up for success.

Learn More & See All Courses

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should Have (at Least) Two Careers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do you dream about switching to a career that's drastically different from your current job? Many people do. But they never make the leap: the costs of switching seem too high, and the possibility of success seems too remote. The answer isn't to plug away in your current job, unfulfilled and slowly burning out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Huberman Lab podcast discusses science and science-based tools for everyday life. New episodes are released every Monday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
'Quiet hiring' will dominate the U.S. in 2023, says HR expert-and you need to prepare for it

# data[].attributes.headline
CNBC: ‘Quiet Hiring’ Will Dominate the US in 2023. 

# data[].attributes.subject
CNBC: ‘Quiet Hiring’ Will Dominate the US in 2023. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Quiet hiring' will dominate the U.S. in 2023, says HR expert-and you need to prepare for it

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gartner analyst Emily Rose McRae predicts a rise in "quiet hiring" in 2023. Here's what that means for you and your workplace.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Your Next Career Move: Part-Time Executive

# data[].attributes.headline
WSJ: Your Next Career Move: Part-Time Executive (Fractional)

# data[].attributes.subject
WSJ: Your Next Career Move: Part-Time Executive (Fractional)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the latest issue, The Future of Everything explores what's ahead for education, from the pandemic's long-lasting impact on a generation of students to new roles for tech in teaching reading.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Your Next Career Move: Part-Time Executive

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the latest issue, The Future of Everything explores what's ahead for education, from the pandemic's long-lasting impact on a generation of students to new roles for tech in teaching reading.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
It's time to discuss the problem with 'owning your own development'

# data[].attributes.headline
CLO: It’s Time to Discuss the Problem with “Owning Your Own Development”

# data[].attributes.subject
CLO: It’s Time to Discuss the Problem with “Owning Your Own Development”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a 1967 interview with CBS News, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "It's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his bootstraps."

That quote plays in my head every time I hear a learning leader proudly proclaim something like, "We've built a learning culture, where employees own their own development."

A few years into it, we can look back and thoughtfully examine the results on the other side of this movement to "own your own development." The headline is that it's not going terribly well.

According to research by McKinsey & Company, the leading reason for quitting jobs from April 2021 to Apri 2022 was: "lack of career development & advancement." It's those same companies that believe they've built a culture of learning that are also seeing challenging turnover rates.

It appears that our employees either missed the memo that they now own their own development - or they're not thrilled with what it means.

It's at this point that I will admit that I think the sentiment of "owning your own career development" is partly right. You can't make someone grow. They do have to own their own development.

However, what is implicit in this statement is that if learning and talent development gives everyone the same access to platforms or learning catalogs, then the learning and development team has done its part. "Parity" (aka "equality") has been achieved by implementing that LXP and turning on access for all.

To be fair, that approach is great for purposes of scale. However, it also allows the L&D team to deprioritize the additional needs of helping folks get started on their reskilling journey, and guiding their development so it achieves great career outcomes.

In the most generous of situations, you may believe that the intelligence and personalization within your platforms will do the heavy lifting of customizing the learning experience to account for existing skills and variable distances to travel in the upskilling journey. For a small piece of content to learn a skill, sure, that may work. For reskilling and mobility that leads to new career opportunities? It's underwhelming and is likely to produce widely variable outcomes.

In Guild Education's American Worker Survey, about half of all workers (47 percent) say that not having the right experience, the right education or access to training programs has held back their careers, but this is even higher for Black workers (51 percent) and is much higher for Hispanic workers (60 percent).

Here's the problem: The philosophy of "owning your own development" assumes that every employee has the same understanding of how to do it. But the truth is that all employees are not on an equal footing. There are folks in your organization who want to grow, they just don't know how to start. They also might not know what is most tangibly linked to the next job. Or which program can help them navigate a complex schedule.

This is why our high schools and colleges are full of guidance and career counselors who give us contextual feedback about what's available to us, what's required of us, and what we can do next. After that, most of us in white collar roles had access to mentors or could see others who had made transitions - there were models for us to follow.

All of your workforce didn't have a parent who was paid for their brains, not their hands. All of your workforce didn't have family members who went to college. All of your workforce hasn't seen a model for mentorship and networking.

Academic research on occupational identity in adolescence paints a compelling picture about parental influence on how children see themselves and what kind of occupational identity they begin to form at a young age, how it influences their education selection, and what job they imagine they'll have. In Guild's internal research, we've found that more junior employees, especially those in front-line roles, need support in designing their career future and answering the question, "Where do I start?"

It's hard to know how to run the race of your own career if you don't even understand where the starting line is.

Beyond that initial shaping, research has shown that networking has a causational impact on both salary and career growth. Last summer, McKinsey conducted a Social Capital survey and their findings show that senior leaders spend much more time getting in touch with old contacts, building new relationships and strengthening existing relationships than either middle managers or frontline workers. The same is true of men over women - only 11 percent of women say their network has grown over the past two years.

Employees feel that reality as well. In the American Worker Survey, we also heard from employees that approximately one in four (26 percent) think that not having the right connections or network has been a barrier to advancing their careers. When discussing networking skills with a coworker, I was shocked when I found out that they actually taught her how to network in her MBA program. I've yet to find a company that teaches their employees about the importance of networking as a critical part of the "own your own career development" philosophy. Meanwhile, in Guild's mid-program surveys, professional networking is the highest-requested area of career support among learners.

This is most deeply needed among your most vulnerable populations -those frontline employees who are leaving in droves for a company they think will give them a little more money and a lot more opportunity. The data in the American Worker Survey tells us they don't want to leave, 70 percent hope to still be with their current employer in two to five years, and in another study, Guild heard from 55 percent of respondents that they sought internal opportunities before leaving their employer.

Creating a content library and having a philosophy of "develop yourself" isn't enough for the majority of your workers to understand how to develop into the talent pipeline you need for the future, and they're being left behind as a result. Roughly three-quarters of all workers (74 percent) in Guild's American Worker Survey said they would be "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to leave their current employer if they were offered another job with additional education and career opportunities. This is even higher for Black workers and Hispanic workers (82 percent and 88 percent, respectively).

Here's how you can start to drive a richer experience for all of your employees, no matter where they start from:

1. Leverage assessments that show people where to go next and offer them skills-matching tools, but ensure those tools capture who people are outside of work as well as their education and work experience.

2. Leverage well-trodden and clear pathways that employees know work, and tell the stories of those who have made the transitions before.

3. Provide access to growth and career coaches so they can explore where to grow next and how to get ready for the next job.

4. Increase access to programs that connect all employees to mentors, sponsors and coaches.

5. Ensure that credential-bearing programs are available free of charge for all employees.

For a not insignificant part of your population, failing to provide the wraparound support for reskilling workers sets them up for failure.

For this population, the table must be tilted in their favor - that's what equity does. To be truly equitable, we must recognize the increased needs in parts of our employee base and respond in kind. This is how "opportunity" goes from a dream to a reality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It's time to discuss the problem with 'owning your own development'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a 1967 interview with CBS News, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "It's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his bootstraps." That quote plays in my head every time I hear a learning leader proudly proclaim something like, "We've built a learning culture, where employees own their own development."

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning & Development

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning & Development

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Not only is the majority of training in today's companies ineffective, but the purpose, timing, and content of training is flawed. Want to see eyes glaze over quicker than you can finish this sentence? Mandate that busy employees attend a training session on "business writing skills", or "conflict resolution", or some other such course with little alignment to their needs. Like lean manufacturing and the lean startup before it, lean learning supports the adaptability that gives organizations a competitive advantage in today's market. It's about learning the core of what you need to learn, applying it to real-world situations immediately, receiving immediate feedback and refining your understanding, and then repeating the cycle. In order to begin practicing lean learning, organizations need to move from measuring credits earned to measuring business outcomes created. Lean learning ensures that employees not only learn the right thing, at the right time, and for the right reasons, but also that they retain what they learn.

Organizations spent $359 billion globally on training in 2016, but was it worth it?

Not when you consider the following:

75% of 1,500 managers surveyed from across 50 organizations were dissatisfied with their company's Learning & Development (L&D) function;

70% of employees report that they don't have mastery of the skills needed to do their jobs;

Only 12% of employees apply new skills learned in L&D programs to their jobs; and

Only 25% of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey believe that training measurably improved performance.

Not only is the majority of training in today's companies ineffective, but the purpose, timing, and content of training is flawed.
Learning for the Wrong Reasons
Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, and author of The Case Against Education, says in his book that education often isn't so much about learning useful job skills, but about people showing off, or "signaling."

Today's employees often signal through continuous professional education (CPE) credits so that they can make a case for a promotion. L&D staff also signal their worth by meeting flawed KPIs, such as the total CPE credits employees earn, rather than focusing on the business impact created. The former is easier to measure, but flawed incentives beget flawed outcomes, such as the following:

We're learning at the wrong time. People learn best when they have to learn. Applying what's learned to real-world situations strengthens one's focus and determination to learn. And while psychologist Edwin Locke showed the impact of short feedback loops back in 1968 with his theory of motivation, it's still not widely practiced when it comes to corporate training. Today's employees often learn uniform topics, on L&D's schedule, and at a time when it bears little immediate relevance to their role - and their learning suffers as a result.

We're learning the wrong things. Want to see eyes glaze over quicker than you can finish this sentence? Mandate that busy employees attend a training session on "business writing skills", or "conflict resolution", or some other such course with little alignment to their needs.

We quickly forget what we've learned. Like first year college students who forget 60% of what they learn in high school, studying merely to get the CPE credit suggests that employees, too, will quickly forget what they learn. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus pioneered experimental studies of memory in the late 19th Century, culminating with his discovery of "The Forgetting Curve." He found that if new information isn't applied, we'll forget about 75% of it after just six days.

Use It or Lose It
We can blame biology - and our innate, evolutionary desire for survival - for the fact that humans quickly forget what we learn. As Matthieu Boisgontier, of the University of British Columbia's brain behavior lab put it, "Conserving energy has been essential for humans' survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators." As a result, our brains quickly forget what we don't use. Incorporating new learning into your work is one way to retain knowledge. Another is spaced repetition. Originally proposed by psychologist Cecil Alec Mace in 1932, it refers to spreading learning out over time (material should be reviewed in gradually increasing intervals of roughly one day, two days, four days, eight days, and so on). This approach takes advantage of the psychological spacing effect, which demonstrates a strong link between the periodic exposure to information and retention. Studies show that by using spaced repetition, we can remember about 80% of what we learn after 60 days - a significant improvement.

Sadly, most L&D programs overlook these biological realities and invest billions of dollars into what amounts to transfers of quickly forgotten information.
What needs to change
Today's fast-moving business landscape calls for organizations and their people to adapt to changing circumstances rapidly, and to always be learning. As Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly puts it, "Get good at beginner mode, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, and teaching others what you learn."

Lean learning, which pays homage to Toyota's lean manufacturing system, stresses using effort only when it's needed, improving outcomes, and cutting waste; it's short, affordable, and provides employees and organizations with an immediate capability update.

Lean learning is about:

1. Learning the core of what you need to learn

2. Applying it to real-world situations immediately

3. Receiving immediate feedback and refining your understanding

4. Repeating the cycle

Like lean manufacturing and the lean startup before it, lean learning supports the adaptability that gives organizations a competitive advantage in today's market.
How to Apply Lean Learning
Think 80/20. Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur and author of The Four Hour book series, is an advocate of a lean learning method he calls DiSSSCaFE. He suggests identifying the minimum learnable unit (MLU), and applying the Pareto Principle. If you want to learn Japanese, focus on the 20% of words and phrases that show up 80% of the time. Then apply what you learn in actual conversations with Japanese speakers as frequently as needed.

Apply learning to real-world situations. At Collective Campus, we don't just teach executives a specific innovation methodology. We first ensure that they can actually apply the methodology internally, and we request that they bring real-world projects to workshops so that we can apply what's learned in real-time, shorten the feedback loop, deliver business outcomes, and encourage "aha" moments.

Leverage guided learning. Rather than provide training at specific intervals, guided learning embeds continuous learning into a live application. Think screen pop-ups as-you-go that support rapid, context-sensitive, and personalized learning. This is especially applicable for functional leads, employee on-boarding, cross functional teams, IT, and end-user training.

Personalize content. Using today's technologies, you can personalize training so that it adapts lessons based on employee performance, tailoring content to every single employee's needs, learning style, and delivery method.

Provide ongoing support. Providing employees with further support after a learning session via a combination of instant messaging, voice messaging, and chatbots ensures that they can apply learning to specific challenges.

Activate peer learning. When your employees want to learn a new skill, they typically don't Google it or refer to your learning management system (LMS) first; 55% of them ask a colleague. When you account for the fact that humans tend to learn as they teach, peer learning offers a way to support rapid, just-in-time learning, while strengthening the existing understanding your employees have about concepts. It could be as simple as establishing an online marketplace, or periodic peer learning workshops, to connect employees who are willing to teach specific skills with colleagues who want to acquire such skills. Incentivizing peer learning by incorporating it into performance reviews can ensure that employees continue to invest time into the program.

Offer micro courses. Give employees short, bite-sized learning opportunities, which can take the form of digestible, hour-long courses on topics of relevance to an employee's immediate challenges or opportunities.
Moving From Credits to Outcomes
In order to begin practicing lean learning, organizations need to move from measuring CPEs earned to measuring business outcomes created. Lean learning ensures that employees not only learn the right thing, at the right time, and for the right reasons, but also that they retain what they learn.

And as Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, says, " The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else." This has never been truer than it is today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning and Development

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Not only is the majority of training in today's companies ineffective, but the purpose, timing, and content of training is flawed. Want to see eyes glaze over quicker than you can finish this sentence? Mandate that busy employees attend a training session on "business writing skills", or "conflict resolution", or some other such course with little alignment to their needs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Chief | Trauma at Work Is a Form of Betrayal. Here's How Organizations Can Do Better

# data[].attributes.headline
Chief: Trauma at Work Is a Form of Betrayal. Here’s How Organizations Can Do Better. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Chief: Trauma at Work Is a Form of Betrayal. Here’s How Organizations Can Do Better. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are the obvious forms of workplace trauma: Bullying, harassment, microaggressions. Then there are the more common: Being passed over for a promotion, having superiors minimize your concerns, or peers questioning your work ethic or judgment. In 2023, the question isn't whether workplace trauma exists (it does) but rather what leaders can do to build resilient, trauma-informed organizations.

Not only is workplace trauma real, it's pervasive. According to a 2021 McKinsey report, women overall, and Black women and women with disabilities in particular, were more likely to experience microaggressions, such as having their judgment questioned or having others interrupt or speak over them in professional settings. A 2022 analysis from MIT's Sloan School of Management found that a toxic corporate culture is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover.

To better understand why both explicit traumas like harassment and subtle traumas like microaggressions can be so damaging, it's crucial to recognize that workplace trauma "can be any psychological injury that affects performance," says Katherine Manning, author of The Empathetic Workplace: 5 Steps to a Compassionate, Calm, and Confident Response to Trauma on the Job.

Manning notes that everyone responds to trauma differently, and there's no single "normal" response. Symptoms can range from weeks to years. However, ongoing microaggressions have been shown to contribute to prolonged stress, trauma, anxiety, and workplace performance. A 2023 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that Black employees who were subject to microaggressions in the workplace were more likely to experience burnout and job dissatisfaction over the long term.

Because work tends to consume a big part of our psyche, workplace trauma can manifest in ways that are ongoing and pervasive. Obsessively checking emails, constantly worrying that you're never enough regardless of work ethic or output, and the perpetual fear of being reprimanded or terminated are often considered par for the course in competitive, fast-paced corporate culture. But in reality, these behaviors could signal that workplace trauma has shaken one's self-assurance and is impacting performance - and when superiors dismiss this as normal it's yet another layer of gaslighting, suggests Dr. Rischa Gottlieb, a psychologist who specializes in PTSD and trauma.

"Some of the results of psychological trauma can include a loss of a sense of safety, nightmares, intrusive thoughts about work, hypervigilance, fear, sadness, and a sense of isolation and more. The sequelae of betrayal and abuse is not limited to the workplace; these reactions usually are diffused into a person's personal time so that there is little reprieve."
Trauma and Institutional Betrayal
The double whammy of workplace trauma and lack of protection is what's known as institutional betrayal, explains Manning.

"When we are in times of crisis or trauma, we tend to go to the institutions that we align ourselves with for support and protection. When those institutions fail to provide that support and protection, that can create a second injury on top of the first. This institutional betrayal really has a long-term effect on a person's healing. The interesting thing is that the closer a person is aligned with an institution, the greater the sense of betrayal when they receive an unsupportive response," says Manning.

For women in the C-Suite, whose careers often provide meaning and purpose, the effects can be devastating. "When work is central to our identity, the potential for institutional betrayal can be especially strong. It's also why it's difficult to speak up when someone is under threat or experiencing a trauma. [The institution] is their whole life."

Institutional betrayal can be particularly insidious when there's a disconnect between an organization's values and actions, explains Gottlieb. For example, a company that champions diversity but repeatedly passes over women of color for promotions, comments on their emotional state or questions their judgment, then dismisses their concerns, can cause traumatic invalidation.

"This occurs when a person's environment repeatedly and intensely communicates that their characteristics, behaviors, or emotional reactions are unacceptable," Gottlieb said. "Many people assume that because invalidation is not a physical attack it is less harmful, but research shows that severe invalidation is as or more harmful than physical violence in terms of PTSD and mental health outcomes."

Manning shared a story about a friend who experienced workplace trauma and institutional betrayal. As a Black woman who was a partner at a law firm when protests over the murder of George Floyd erupted in June 2020, she waited for her firm to address the news. She stood by as her clients and other law firms condemned the murder - while her firm remained silent for two weeks before putting out a statement. Within the context of years of racial trauma, the firm's silence during a watershed moment that was impossible to ignore was incredibly painful and traumatic for her friend, which caused her to nearly quit, Manning explains.

"Here she is at this moment when this horrific thing has happened. She's giving her blood, sweat, and tears, plus so many hours to this firm. And now she's thinking, 'I don't know if they even care about people like me,'" explains Manning.
Building Trauma-Informed Organizations
Women who've experienced workplace trauma often feel pressure to take action to protect others, but Manning emphasized that "the first priority has to be your own healing."

The onus is on leaders to build trauma-informed organizations, which proactively work to mitigate the negative effects of a crisis on the organization's employees and the communities it serves. They can do so in three key ways, says Manning: First, they acknowledge employees' struggles and make it clear that leadership is listening. Next, they show support by defining clear action steps in response to trauma, and finally, they build trust through consistent follow-through.

"It's so important that organizations realize they're not just a company that makes a product. They are also the culture of people that they're creating. You can't just say, 'This is not our business, we're not political, we don't get involved.' Well, you employ people who have a diverse set of backgrounds. When you say, 'It's not my job to get involved,' what you're doing is really perpetuating the dominant culture," explains Manning.

For leaders who are already building trauma-informed organizations, it's critical to watch out for compassion fatigue, which can be "a slow burn" that "sneaks up on you," says Manning. In some cases, that might mean leaders are transparent about their struggles, too.

"It's one thing to say we have an employee assistance program, and they offer free and confidential counseling. It's another thing to say we have a great EAP - and it really helped me when I needed it. When you add that last part, you're making it okay for everybody else."

Manning suggests practicing "noisy self-care" to model how to avoid burnout. "Your team doesn't need you to be a superwoman," says Manning. "They need you to be present for them."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chief | Trauma at Work Is a Form of Betrayal. Here's How Organizations Can Do Better

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are the obvious forms of workplace trauma: Bullying, harassment, microaggressions. Then there are the more common: Being passed over for a promotion, having superiors minimize your concerns, or peers questioning your work ethic or judgment. In 2023, the question isn't whether workplace trauma exists (it does) but rather what leaders can do to build resilient, trauma-informed organizations.

# data[].attributes.headline
TalentLab: St. Patrick's Playlist for Happy Hour

# data[].attributes.subject
TalentLab: St. Patrick's Playlist for Happy Hour

# data[].attributes.headline
Have Some Fun While You Discover Your Creative Type! 

# data[].attributes.subject
Have Some Fun While You Discover Your Creative Type! 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Everyone has a creative “type”—knowing yours helps you maximize your potential. Take our quiz to discover your type!

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: How to Ask Whether an Employee is Happy at Work

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: How to Ask Whether an Employee is Happy at Work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
People quit jobs all the time - for better pay or a more exciting opportunity, to escape a toxic culture, or because they've reached an impasse in their current job. Some feel because they don't feel valued by their manager or organization, or because their managers don't spend enough time understanding their level of job satisfaction. And all this comes at a cost. The cost of replacing an employee can range from one-half to two times the employee's annual salary. But this is more than just about losing money. It's about losing your good people, dampening the team's morale, and may be even losing customer relationships along with the employee. While you can't make everyone stay, you can improve your attrition rates by investing time now to keep your team members by really understanding any underlying issues. The author offers recommendations for how to have effective "stay conversations" with your employees.

One mistake leaders often make is assuming that because a team member isn't complaining, they are happy at work.

Take my client Rana (not her real name), a member of a senior team at a large international organization. By every measure, she was highly engaged in her work. She proposed fresh ideas in meetings, completed projects on time, and was responding to messages 24 hours a day as she had for the last several years. But, she was also applying for other jobs. Like many people, the pandemic caused her to reevaluate her priorities. In two years of working remotely, her well-intentioned but busy boss failed to make time to check in about anything other than work, did not talk about her career development, and ignored requests for support. As a result, frustrations built up and she left, and with it went her institutional knowledge, client relationships, and contribution to the team's culture.

Could Rana's departure have been avoided? Perhaps. According to research conducted by Gallup, 52% of voluntarily exiting employees say that their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job. While you can't make everyone stay, you can improve your retention rates if you take the time to check in with your people.

Most people are familiar with the concept of an exit interview, where someone in HR interviews an employee who has given their notice to understand why they're leaving. A "stay conversation" is when a leader checks in to make sure an employee is having an experience at work that makes them want to stay. I recommend having these conversations quarterly and also setting them up around key milestones (like work anniversaries). Research shows just how important it is to keep these "career risk triggers" in mind. The largest risk happens when an employee experiences a change in manager or responsibility, with job search activity going up by 17%.

Here's how to prepare for these conversations and what to actually say when you meet with your employee.

Set the context

Let your employee know this is not a performance conversation or a meeting to talk about projects, but instead a check-in to understand how they are doing and how you can best support them. You could say:

I wanted to let you know that I really appreciate having you on our team. As we start the new year/quarter/etc. I wanted to set some time aside to just check in to make sure you're having a good experience at work. There is no specific agenda, but I would love to have you think about the following before we meet (c hoose 3-4 questions from the list below):

How have you been feeling about work in general?

What part of your job are you enjoying the most?

What aspect of your job do you enjoy the least?

How have you been feeling about being able to balance work and home?

What has been the biggest challenge this year/quarter and is there anything I can do to better support you?

What can I do differently to support you and the team?

Is there anything you want feedback from me on?

Do you feel like you are learning and growing here? If not, is there anything I can do to improve your experience?

Mentally transition to the conversation

Our ability to listen and connect is largely impacted by our frame of mind when we enter a conversation. If you are scrambling to finish a project, or rushing from another meeting, it is unlikely you will be present and empathetic with your team member. When you schedule your conversation, make sure you have a buffer before you meet. When advising leaders, I recommend they take a few minutes to reflect on the below questions to help them get present to the person they are meeting with and why.

Who is the person I am speaking with and what does it take for them to do their job each day?

What would be the impact on me and our team if this person left tomorrow?

Start the meeting off right

Whether you are meeting in person or via phone or video put away any distractions. Turn off notifications, put away your computer and phone, and close out your email and any chat functions. Intentionally or unintentionally, nothing closes down sharing faster than someone looking away or responding to something else when they are sharing.

Then, express the context of your meeting in the beginning. Remind the person that you are here to listen, understand their experience and see if there is anything you can do to improve it. Start by asking one of the questions you listed in your email to them. I recommend you start with a more general question to get the conversation flowing and then move deeper.

Probe, then really listen

When training leaders to have stay conversations, they will often express the concern "What if my team member brings up a problem I can't address, or asks for a raise or promotion I can't give them?" My response is always, "Isn't it better to understand what is going on than to ignore it?" And, in most cases, the act of authentically listening to a person's concerns often addresses them or, at a minimum, helps you identify a path forward together.

In my experience, nervous leaders will enter conversations expecting the worst, when things are actually going well.

As your team member shares their experiences, (really) listen. Then probe by celebrating and reflecting on what's working.
"I have been really enjoying working from home, I feel like we are much more efficient as a team."

Celebrate: "That's great to hear, I feel the same way."

Reflect: "What do you see has been making the difference?"

"I have really been enjoying working on the launch of the new app!"

Celebrate: "I am happy to hear that. I love the passion you have put into it."

Reflect: "What have you enjoyed most about working on it?"

Look for hidden commitments

If the person starts sharing frustrations or what comes across as complaints about their work, working remotely, lack of childcare, etc., remember that behind every complaint is a commitment. Avoid the temptation to try and propose solutions, instead, listen for their commitment, reframe it, and ask about what you could do to address it together.
"I feel like I am in non-stop meetings every day and I am up until midnight every night to get my actual work done."

Reframe: "I get you're committed to doing great work and it is frustrating when you don't feel you have the time during the day to get it done."

Reflect: "What do you feel we could do that would make a difference for you?"

"I feel like I am doing the same thing every single day and I am not getting anywhere in my career."

Reframe: "I get you are really committed to growing and, right now, you feel like that is not happening at all."

Reflect: "What do you feel we could do that would make a difference for you?"

Agree on next steps

In the last ten minutes of your conversation, shift your discussion to the next steps. If there are multiple things you did not have time to discuss, schedule a meeting to continue the discussion. If there are follow-up actions you will each take, put them in writing so your team member knows you really heard them out.
"Thank you for your openness in our meeting today, I really appreciate you sharing all that you did. As promised, I am going to (list follow-up actions), and send you an invite now for another conversation in two months. And, if anything comes up prior, please know we will always make time to check in."
While this may feel like "extra work" that you may not have time for, in reality, you don't have time not to have a stay conversation. Remember, it is the simplest actions that often have the biggest impact.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Ask Whether an Employee Is Happy at Work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
People quit jobs all the time - for better pay or a more exciting opportunity, to escape a toxic culture, or because they've reached an impasse in their current job. Some feel because they don't feel valued by their manager or organization, or because their managers don't spend enough time understanding their level of job satisfaction.

# data[].attributes.headline
HBR: Coaching Your Team as a Collective Makes It Stronger

# data[].attributes.subject
HBR: Coaching Your Team as a Collective Makes It Stronger

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Teams are the engine of the corporate machine. They bring together diverse sets of skills to solve problems, innovate, and execute strategy. They're also where the work experience is shaped, and where culture is experienced real time. Teams generate opportunities for newer employees to learn and help solve problems, and for more senior employees to share their knowledge and leverage their experience.

Despite all of this, most management systems continue to focus on individual employees. This is particularly true of coaching, which until recently has been considered primarily a one-on-one practice designed to deliver better individual performance and job satisfaction. There's nothing wrong with that - good individual coaching is an immensely valuable management skill and, when done well, has elevated performance of many individuals. But no matter how effective employees are on their own, they can only contribute to the real power of the collective if their managers provide them with quality support and coaching as a group.

A Team-Based Approach

Leaders can close this gap by embracing the practice of team coaching, which shifts the focus from individual performance to collective impact. In this environment, a leader's role is to support the team as an organic unit, providing support and guidance, setting routines and practices, and creating constant opportunities for group learning.

The team-coaching approach encourages team members to go beyond their roles and understand one another's strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations. Members are encouraged to build stronger relationships themselves, not just one-on-one with their manager. They're also challenged to sharpen their collaboration skills, to hone their ability to collectively take ownership of and solve business challenges, and to address any team-related issues that may arise. The approach creates an environment of agency and accountability, with a healthy balance between challenges and support.

In our work as educators and practitioners, we've studied, led, and worked with teams using the tools and techniques of team coaching. Below are the three we've found to be the most important for fostering accelerated learning and successful outcomes.

Problem-based coaching.

There's a natural instinct among team leaders to step in and take over as problems and challenges arise. But in a team-coaching environment, leaders treat problems and challenges as opportunities for real-world learning and growth that all team members can - and have to - take advantage of.

One place that employs this approach effectively is the Osler Internal Medicine Training program at Johns Hopkins, where, from day one, first-year doctors are expected to "own the patient experience" as they make their rounds, with the more-experienced physicians on the team serving as their guides and coaches. It's a mandatory arrangement: With a first-year doctor at "the point of the wedge," everybody discusses and assesses the situation, provides perspectives, and proposes solutions. The most senior doctor on the team listens in, finding out what team members know and asking questions - and, of course, making sure that everybody's assumptions and decisions are sound. Although this approach requires a little more time and energy up-front than having the senior doctor simply step in to solve problems, the long-term benefits - accelerated learning, increased confidence, team spirit, a collective investment in the work - are substantial.

Coach, don't tell.

A second and related leadership technique is based on the Socratic-method of teaching: Team leaders use questions, not answers, to invite and shape how team members understand situations and solve problems. It takes restraint and practice to learn how to formulate questions that prompt insights and shift thinking, but when leaders have mastered this skill, it can become a powerful management technique.

In employing this approach, it can be useful for leaders to develop a list of questions to ask. For instance: "What have you tried thus far?" "What's working? What's not?" "Is there a different way we could frame the problem?" "Do you have all the data?" "What assumptions are you bringing to the problem?" "Who does this well? What would she do?"

When team members respond to these questions, leaders often gain immediate and important insights into how well their teams understand the work, and where additional support may be required. We've worked with several client organizations and executive-leadership teams that that have employed this approach very successfully. "Not only does practicing this method deepen team learning around specific customer challenges," a manager at a leading professional-services firm told us after using the approach, "it focuses the whole team on exploring issues more thoroughly, possibly unearthing previously overlooked errors and incorrect assumptions."

Treat both successes and failures as opportunities to learn.

This approach transforms the work dynamic. When team members understand that successes and failures are both considered opportunities to learn in a no-blame environment, they become more willing to test the boundaries of what's possible, to challenge assumptions, and to admit when things have gone wrong. This makes it easier to learn and pivot from mistakes, which in turn enables faster and cheaper failures, and bigger breakthroughs.

For this approach to work for teams, all members need to be given the chance to contribute, because some are likely to notice details and patterns of behavior that others are blind to. It can take time to expose those details and patterns, because they can be buried several levels down in the ingrained thinking and behavior of an organization. So another key to this message is to encourage everybody to repeatedly ask the question "Why?"

The U.S. Special Forces have successfully adopted this approach. After every mission, they conduct an after-action review (AAR), during which team members are invited to provide their perspective on everything that went right and wrong, without assigning any blame, and then before their next mission they conduct a pre-action review (PAR), during which they consider how what they've learned in previous AARs might be applied to the new mission. (For more on AARs, see "A Better After-Action Review," by Angus Fletcher, Preston B. Cline, and Matthew Hoffman.)

* * *

Teams today are having to learn how to deliver results in shorter cycles with fewer resources. They need leaders who can help them learn collectively from their successes and failures, optimize their performance, and adapt quickly to changing demands. Leaders who adopt the approaches to team coaching that we've outlined in this article are well positioned to achieve this, and in so doing can successfully differentiate their businesses by drawing on the remarkable power of the collective.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coaching Your Team as a Collective Makes It Stronger

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Until recently, coaching was considered primarily a one-on-one practice. But no matter how effective employees are on their own, they can only contribute to the real power of the collective if their managers provide them with coaching as a group.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
If you want employees in the office, build creative spaces and quiet zones

# data[].attributes.headline
HR Brew: If You Want Employees in the Office, Build Creative Spaces & Quiet Zones

# data[].attributes.subject
HR Brew: If You Want Employees in the Office, Build Creative Spaces & Quiet Zones

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

Offices are undergoing a (let's be honest) long overdue transformation. As office design decisions have become more closely linked to talent strategy, HR leaders have had to figure out how to reconfigure workspaces in a way that will bring employees back in the door.

"A lot of our clients are actually looking at using this as a time of experimentation and piloting and learning," Janet Pogue McLaurin, global director of workplace research and a principal at workplace design firm Gensler, told HR Brew.

HR leaders looking to make improvements to their cubicle-farm layouts can start with adding spaces for creative group work and individual quiet work, according to recent Gensler research on the office amenities that are most attractive to employees and drive productivity.

What they want. Tech-free zones and innovation hubs were the amenities most closely correlated with workplace experience and effectiveness, according to Gensler's 2022 Workplace Performance Index, which surveyed over 2,000 US workers who have returned to the office at least part-time.

Survey respondents also outlined the different vibes they want from their workplaces. The ideal mix, they said, includes different spaces for the different types of work they do, from collaborative to individual.

"People are more willing to return for their ideal mix of experiences," Pogue McLaurin said. "In fact, 42% said they would come back one more day a week and 24% said they would come back full-time if they had [their perfect] mix."

Perhaps not surprisingly, some preferences varied by generation, with Baby Boomers ranking the "corporate," "residential," "library," and "conference center" environments higher than Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z workers. But all kinds of spaces are under consideration for some businesses.

"Libraries are making a huge comeback," Pogue McLaurin said, "and it's not about the books, it's about the rules of a library and having a place that you can just quietly get your work done."

New philosophy. Office design decisions were once pretty straightforward. Companies required most employees to come into the office every day and provided them with a space-efficient workspace, Pogue McLaurin explained. Today, that's not enough.

HR is challenging. HR news doesn't have to be.

HR Brew keeps you effective in the fast-changing business environment.

"It's got to be a destination, not an obligation," she said.

This might mean developing workspaces that are more like a hotel lobby or college lounge than a corporate office, and customizing them based on teams' unique tasks.

"We're learning that not all functions work the same, and we really need to think about tailoring this to how their employees work," Pogue McLaurin said. "We are borrowing from hospitality. We're borrowing from everyday life experiences...outdoor spaces, meditation spaces, even nap areas."

Some companies are even migrating to more walkable, urban locations for the amenities available around the building, she added, such as gyms, happy-hour spots, or access to public transportation.

Marriott, she noted, moved about four miles from suburban Bethesda to a downtown, metro-friendly neighborhood. The hotel chain told Fortune that it hoped the new location and surrounding amenities would attract prospective employees.

"We're seeing a lot of our clients relocating to mixed-use developments for that very reason," Pogue McLaurin said. "Because they want to take advantage of all those spaces around them."

First time? When it comes to workplace design decisions, "HR is more involved now than ever," Pogue McLaurin said, echoing sentiments shared by peers in commercial real estate.

"Our client decision-makers have really shifted to be more people-focused and talent-focused," she said.

For those just getting started on an office redesign, Pogue McLaurin recommended asking employees for feedback and noted that large-scale changes are not always necessary. Instead of a major refurbishing or a move, companies can start with smaller changes and pilots.

"We would start by having focus groups," she said, "and talking and listening to what their employees really need, [and] understanding what's around that location that they can take advantage of." -AK

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
If you want employees in the office, build creative spaces and quiet zones

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Offices are undergoing a (let's be honest) long overdue transformation. As office design decisions have become more closely linked to talent strategy, HR leaders have had to figure out how to reconfigure workspaces in a way that will bring employees back in the door.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
The LeaderLab powered by LifeLabs Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The LeaderLab powered by LifeLabs Learning

# data[].attributes.headline
The NewYorker: Corporate Alternatives to the Compliment Sandwich

# data[].attributes.subject
The NewYorker: Corporate Alternatives to the Compliment Sandwich

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A recent survey of our employees indicated that people are sick of the "compliment sandwich"-negative feedback sandwiched between compliments. The executive team is pleased to offer some alternatives that we hope will be effective for managers serving up constructive criticism in the workplace.
This cheesy open-faced option has no meat. Perfect for employees who enjoy being regaled with hours of stories from your past, like how you "worked your way through college" (when it was $2,350 a year) and the time you met Lee Iacocca. This crusty sandwich is one-sided, with hints of nuttiness. Pairs well with a cup of day-old coffee from the break room.

These meatballs fra diavolo are extremely tough. Treat your employees like part of the "family," with an emphasis on loyalty. Deliver the message that long hours are the norm in this culture, in which the Boss gives you orders that you can't refuse. Workers are expected to sign N.D.A. agreements in blood. Those who are disloyal are sent to Vinny in H.R. and never seen again.

Hate giving negative feedback? The Honey Bomb delivers heaps of praise and positive reinforcement to motivate your busy bees to take on even more work. Employees may feel an unexpected sting when they get fired without warning. If they ask why, just release real honeybees and run away. A liability waiver is recommended, as side effects may include employees with swelled heads.

Feedback is vague, and job requirements and advancement opportunities constantly shift, in this spiralling cruller. Best given to employees who want to feel as if they're climbing the stairs to a higher level that is, in fact, impossible to reach. The sweet illusion of promotion will have them circling back, unsatisfied, still hungry for another serving.

This performative multicultural sandwich disintegrates upon the first bite. Instead of encountering specific actionable feedback, diverse members of your staff will appreciate having their photos featured prominently in Corporate's annual report. Praise their great attitude when you ask them to do something way outside of their expertise (or job description), like leading a diversity-training seminar. This sandwich will no doubt fill up your team with synergy and mutual respect.

These transparent jello pies are perfect for employees who need everything spelled out for them. Staff activities are tracked and ranked for healthy competition. Workers love feedback based on quantitative metrics. Managers use a fair-pay formula:

These raw-meat skewers are served on swords, on top of a chopping block. A hearty appetizer for employees who welcome direct, pointed feedback. Best delivered with no dressing or emotional intelligence. Strong criticism may be painful and take days to digest, but your employees will come out stronger on the other side.*

Consuming raw meats may increase the risk of self-doubt, performance anxiety, and sudden letters of resignation. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Corporate Alternatives to the Compliment Sandwich

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A recent survey of our employees indicated that people are sick of the "compliment sandwich"-negative feedback sandwiched between compliments. The executive team is pleased to offer some alternatives that we hope will be effective for managers serving up constructive criticism in the workplace. This cheesy open-faced option has no meat.

# data[].attributes.headline
LifeLabs Learning: Watch Feedback Delivered 3 Different Ways

# data[].attributes.subject
LifeLabs Learning: Watch Feedback Delivered 3 Different Ways

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The secret to giving great feedback | The Way We Work, a TED series