The debate about the best way to lead has been raging for years: Should you empower your people and get out of their way, or take charge and push them to do great work? The answer, say the authors, is to do both. Their research shows that effective leaders routinely shift between these two seemingly opposing modes-and build teams whose members are good at switching back and forth too. Sometimes teams need diverÂgent thinking (during idea generation, for instance); at others, they need convergent thinking (to, say, make a decision and map out next steps). Leaders must be crystal clear about which mode is appropriate when. They have to make it psychologically safe for people to speak up, contribute, and argue, and when it's time to end the discussion and act, signal that they're taking charge again. There are four ways to increase the ability to shift modes: Question your assumptions about power and fixed hierarchies. Study your habits and your team's to see if you're stuck in one mode or the other. Set clear expectations with meeting agendas and rituals that mark transitions. And reinforce shifts with your own words, deeds, and body language.
A fitness executive contemplates her next move. This fictional case study by Jon M. Jachimowicz, Francesca Gino features expert commentary by Sarah Robb O'Hagan, and Lan Phan.
A fitness executive contemplates her next move. This fictional case study by Jon M. Jachimowicz, Francesca Gino features expert commentary by Sarah Robb O'Hagan, and Lan Phan.
A fitness executive contemplates her next move. This fictional case study by Jon M. Jachimowicz, Francesca Gino features expert commentary by Sarah Robb O'Hagan and Lan Phan.
In the midst of increasing press scrutiny of the bottled water industry's environmentally harmful practices, FIJI Water made a series of sustainability promises. The boldest of these was a pledge to go "carbon negative." The company said that not only would they offset or mitigate all of their carbon emissions, but would go further, making every purchase of their hip, luxury bottles a net benefit for the environment. The unusual methodology they used to calculate their environmental benefit drew skepticism, and FIJI executives needed to evaluate how to move forward with their sustainability agenda.
Under the leadership of Larry Miller, chairman and former president of Nike's Air Jordan brand, annual revenues for the Jordan brand soared from $150 million to over $4 billion. But for over 40 years, Miller guarded a secret. When he was younger, he spent nearly a decade in and out of prison for homicide and armed robberies. While incarcerated, he focused on his education, and graduated with honors from college. After a potential employer rescinded their offer when he disclosed his crimes, Miller decided to remain silent about his past for the next four decades. Miller hopes that sharing his story will affect positive change, serving as a source of inspiration for troubled youth and encouraging leaders to promote fair chance hiring of formerly incarcerated people.
One of the toughest challenges leaders face is managing diverse perspectives--and given heightened tensions over politics and movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, that's more difficult today than ever before. At the same time, productive disagreement and engagement with opposing views are crucial to high-functioning teams and organizations. So how can leaders both foster passionate debate and preserve collaboration and trust? Drawing from work conducted with scholars of psychology, sociology, and management, Harvard's Julia A. Minson and Francesca Gino offer advice for leaders on approaching disagreements productively and helping employees at all levels do so. Tactics include training that defuses fears of disagreeing (it's usually not as unpleasant as we expect); encourages people to cultivate a receptive mindset by, for instance, intentionally considering information from the opposing perspective; teaches people to choose words carefully, hedge claims, and emphasize areas of agreement; and fosters a culture of tolerance through actions and tone. Honing these skills takes time and practice, but the resulting decrease in frustration and negativity is well worth the effort.
To become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, many companies have turned to unconscious bias (UB) training. By raising awareness of the mental shortcuts that lead to snap judgment--often based on race and gender--about people's talents or character, it strives to make hiring and promotion fairer and improve interactions with customers and among colleagues. But most UB training is ineffective, research shows. The problem is, increasing awareness is not enough--and can even backfire--because sending the message that bias is involuntary and widespread may make it seem unavoidable. UB training that gets results, in contrast, teaches attendees to manage their biases, practice new behaviors, and track their progress. It gives them information that contradicts stereotypes and allows them to connect with colleagues whose experiences are different from theirs. And it's not a onetime session; it entails a longer journey and structural organizational changes. In this article the authors describe how rigorous UB programs at Microsoft, Starbucks, and other organizations help employees overcome denial and act on their awareness, develop the empathy that combats bias, diversify their networks, and commit to improvement.
In November 2018, Sarah Robb O'Hagan is reeling from an unceremonious exit as CEO of Flywheel, a chain of indoor cycling studios. In the past, Robb O'Hagan had led transformational change across companies throughout the sports and fitness industry, including as President at Gatorade and Equinox. As a highly passionate fitness enthusiast, stepping into the CEO role at Flywheel felt like the pinnacle of her career, one that she would be extremely passionate about. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong, though Robb O'Hagan couldn't quite put her finger on it. Her tough experience left her questioning: She was 20 years into her career, had seemingly reached the pinnacle-only to find that this isn't what she wanted. Thinking about the next 20 years of her career was dizzying, and her ideal dream job wasn't revealing herself. What should Robb O'Hagan be looking for? What should the next step in her career and life look like?
&Pizza is a pizza chain that in the spring of 2020 finds its business completely up-ended by the COVID-19 crisis and shut-down. Many companies in the restaurant and hospitality sector responded to the crisis by shutting down their operations and laying off employees. &Pizza's leader took a different approach: as the company pivoted mainly to a delivery model, he realized there would be added strain on his employees, and so he decided to not only avoid lay-offs, but to increase wages and provide other benefits to its Tribe (i.e., the employees).
Leaders from The Second City, the legendary Improv comedy company, reflect on its broad portfolio of activities through the lens of future opportunities and growth. In particular, they discuss ways in which Second City can further invest in its professional arm, Second City Works, and help workplaces embrace some of the main ideas of improv comedy to improve conversations, presence and collaboration.
Steve Kerr, coach of the 3-time NBA champion Golden State Warriors, reflects on his values-driven leadership style in the wake of a challenging season.
Historically, personal and commercial banks (P&CB) maintained long relationships with their clients who tended to do most if not all of their banking with one bank. However, by 2017, industry-wide change was well underway as switching costs had become negligible if not non-existent. New entrants were disrupting the banking industry as digitization allowed upstarts to break through long-standing barriers to entry. RBC's Cultural Transformation, intended to reposition the enterprise for the "new normal" in the financial industry, included the creation of this team of collaboration enablers (called Operations Transformation or OT) to drive efficiencies across operations within the current fulfillment operating model and importantly to envision and enable a new digital operating model where people only intervened in a transaction when there was an exception, i.e., a transaction that fell outside the technology's capabilities. OT was tasked with enabling-through collaboration and without radical surgery-the day-to-day optimization of P&CB fulfillment activities and facilitating major change in the way work was done. At the time of the case, eighteen months in, the team was seeing mixed results, which deeply troubled its leadership. Questions abounded: Was it foolish to try to enable major change through collaboration without upending the traditional RBC organization with more radical approaches? Or was the OT group not structured correctly to enable it-and if not, what changes should be made? Was a different collaboration model needed? Internally, some questioned whether the group was optimally located within the organization (as part of the back office organization structure), since the back office was often viewed as more of a servant to the front office. Others wondered if OT's internal structure was getting in the way of its purpose.
Historically, personal and commercial banks (P&CB) maintained long relationships with their clients who tended to do most if not all of their banking with one bank. However, by 2017, industry-wide change was well underway as switching costs had become negligible if not non-existent. New entrants were disrupting the banking industry as digitization allowed upstarts to break through long-standing barriers to entry. RBC's Cultural Transformation, intended to reposition the enterprise for the "new normal" in the financial industry, included the creation of this team of collaboration enablers (called Operations Transformation or OT) to drive efficiencies across operations within the current fulfillment operating model and importantly to envision and enable a new digital operating model where people only intervened in a transaction when there was an exception, i.e., a transaction that fell outside the technology's capabilities. OT was tasked with enabling-through collaboration and without radical surgery-the day-to-day optimization of P&CB fulfillment activities and facilitating major change in the way work was done. At the time of the case, eighteen months in, the team was seeing mixed results, which deeply troubled its leadership. Questions abounded: Was it foolish to try to enable major change through collaboration without upending the traditional RBC organization with more radical approaches? Or was the OT group not structured correctly to enable it-and if not, what changes should be made? Was a different collaboration model needed? Internally, some questioned whether the group was optimally located within the organization (as part of the back office organization structure), since the back office was often viewed as more of a servant to the front office. Others wondered if OT's internal structure was getting in the way of its purpose.
The founders of Braver Angels, an organization that uses family therapy principles to foster constructive dialogue between conservatives and liberals, consider how to improve its effectiveness and reach.