I want to aplogize

By Peter Bregman

Why Should You Apologize?
One of the clearest ways President Obama has set himself apart from his predecessor is by demonstrating his willingness to apologize. He has apologized for using inappropriate language, making jokes in poor taste and even acting arrogantly toward Europe in the past few years.
What exactly is Obama doing? He is disarming his opponents and paving the path for reconciliation. Next time you are ready to defend your actions and play your part in a knockdown fight, consider apologizing first. Demonstrate empathy, concern, and willingness to change.
Ultimately, apologizing is not an admission of defeat but a humane gesture that can keep you out of a fight.

I was backing out of a space in a mall parking lot in New Jersey when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement and instinctively slammed on my brakes. Another car sped by, missing me by inches.

I was instantly furious. I pulled out fast to chase the other car, leaning on my horn and flashing my lights. Finally, the car stopped and I pulled up right behind him, still honking. We both got out of our cars.

"What the hell were you thinking? You almost hit me!" I screamed.

"I didn't see you!" he yelled back.

"Of course you didn't. You were driving way too fast!"

We yelled at each other for a few seconds and then he opened his arms wide and shouted:

"What do you want from me?"

An awkward silence hung between us for a moment. That was actually a great question. What did I want from him?

I knew he shouldn't have been driving recklessly and I was angry enough to drive recklessly behind him to tell him. What I really wanted was impossible; I wanted him not to have done what he did. Well, too late.

So what did I want now? Why was I screaming at him? The brief pause calmed us both down a little.

"I want you to apologize," I told him.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Thanks," I said feeling strangely better, and we both got back into our cars and drove off without another word.

We have big problems in this country. Wall Street played recklessly with our money. Banks made bad loans. Insurance companies guaranteed stupid risks. People took out unrealistic mortgages and borrowed too much to buy things they couldn't afford. Companies are going out of business and laying off workers. And, the government is bailing people out and billing our kids.

It would be easy (and tempting) to go on. But we have one more, deeper problem that's making all these other problems worse.

No one is apologizing. No one is taking responsibility for what they did to contribute to our problems. They're all blaming someone or something else. We have a kindergartener's problem and it's tearing us apart.

A friend of mine, Paul Rosenfield, was skiing with his six-year-old son Yonah when Yonah fell. It was not a terrible fall, but the binding didn't release and Yonah broke his leg. After an emotionally wrenching day spent in the emergency room tending to his child, Paul went to the shop to return the skis and speak with the owner.

The owner of the shop immediately became defensive. He claimed the bindings were set within the normal acceptable range for Yonah's 40-pound weight (in fact one reading showed the binding set above 60 pounds). He claimed he used a special machine to calibrate the setting, a machine that had been used in several court cases. And he initially resisted Paul's request to see the printout from the machine's test.

Paul went into the shop to have a conversation and he left angry enough to sue.

I asked him what the shop owner could have said that would have given him a different feeling.

"If he had been more concerned with the injury than protecting himself, if he had apologized, if he hadn't tried to cover over the fact that the bindings were too tight, if he hadn't given me a hard time about asking for a copy of the measurement printout, if he hadn't mentioned how many times his machine was used in lawsuits, then I would have left feeling less angry."

We try so hard to protect ourselves from lawsuits that we bring on lawsuits. We forget that we are human beings dealing with other human beings. And what human beings want more than anything is empathy — to be cared for and treated with respect.

By avoiding responsibility, empathy, and apology, the shop owner became a target for all of Paul's anger about the accident.

In a study of medical malpractice lawsuits, the top five reasons people gave for initiating the lawsuit were:

1. So that it would not happen to anyone else
2. I wanted an explanation
3. I wanted the doctors to realize what they had done
4. To get an admission of negligence
5. So that the doctor would know how I felt

And the number one thing the doctor or hospital could have done to prevent the lawsuit? An explanation and apology.

When the University of Michigan Health System experimented with full disclosure, existing claims and lawsuits dropped from 262 in 2001 to 83 in 2007.

Apologies work. Real, heartfelt empathy between one person and another diffuses anger and builds relationships. Defensiveness and resistance to admit mistakes creates anger.

Whatever you think about President Bush, admitting mistakes was not his strong point. If you don't admit mistakes, you can't apologize for them. And if you don't apologize for them, you will generate anger and fighting.

President Obama has shown his ability to apologize for his own mistakes. One of his earliest apologies was during his campaign when he apologized to reporter Peggy Agar for calling her "Sweetie." Most recently he apologized for his joke in poor taste about the Special Olympics on the Jay Leno show.

And now he's apologizing for America's arrogance towards Europe in the past few years. He apologized for being "dismissive, even derisive" towards our allies. For failing "to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world."

And while he chastised Turkey for not coming to terms with their treatment of the Armenians, he admitted "our country still struggles with the legacy of our past treatment of Native Americans." And he reinforced our commitment to do better: "we recently ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, and prohibited — without exception or equivocation — any use of torture."

President Obama is being criticized by some for apologizing. Because, they say, apologizing will reduce America's standing in the world. I couldn't disagree more. The world needs less anger and more apologies. And President Obama is a great example, a role model, for how we can diffuse anger and repair relationships.

Apologizing is a humane gesture, a way to treat others with respect. And, not for nothing, it might just keep us out of a fight.

Source Harvard Business Blog

Read more...

3 Ways to Fail Cheap

By Scott Anthony

I had an interesting dialogue with an innovation practitioner in a large corporation the other day. We were talking about how the high rate of innovation failure can hamstring innovation.

"The failure rate is actually irrelevant," he said. "It's the risk associated with those failures that gets you into trouble."

In other words, failure would be fine, if it wasn't so darn expensive. Because failures cost money (and time), high failure rates can cause corporations to become very gun shy about innovation.

Of course, one way out of this problem is to increase the innovation success rate. A noble aspiration for sure. But be careful. Following that seemingly sensible path can lead to some perverse behavior.

For example, a company can almost always "succeed" by introducing "new and improved" products that cannibalize what they already sell. A company can confidently state that all of its revenue comes from products launched within the past two years, feel good about its innovation efforts, and actually be falling further behind competitors.

The real answer is to dramatically decrease the cost of failure. A leadership team seeking to achieve this aim has three levers at its disposal:

1. Lower the costs of experiments. Running experiments need not be expensive. There are tons of low cost ways to test critical assumptions (chapter 5 of The Innovator's Guide to Growth describes about 30 such approaches).

2. Change the order of experiments. Many companies spend a lot of money answering the wrong questions. They'll seek to perfect a technology without understanding whether there's a market need. Assess strategic risks first, because they are often what sink an idea.

3. Increase the pace of decision making. Entrepreneurs with clearly bad ideas typically don't have the luxury of spending money on those ideas for too long. Companies, however, can let bad ideas linger for inordinate amounts of time because of slow decision-making processes. Shutting down flawed projects early avoids needless spending — and focuses resources on the best ideas.

Pulling these levers requires embracing the notion of "good enough." Experiments are often expensive because companies seek perfection in their own eyes before they run any sort of test. Remember, the less you've spent, the more freedom you have to change your approach.

And finally, remember that failure is not a dirty word. The odds are pretty high that your first idea is wrong along some meaningful dimension. If you fail fast and fail cheap, you can accelerate discovering a winning idea. Successful innovation and fast-cycle iteration go hand in glove.

Of course, it's one thing for companies to say they embrace the right kind of failure. It's quite another thing to create a culture that rewards low-risk failures and savors surprises. Maybe companies could set up a failure target as part of each employee's annual review. Or create a repository of "failure case studies." Any further thoughts?

Source: Harvard Business Blog

Read more...

Time to Detox the Work Environment

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Corporate practices are having effects not just on polar bears and wetlands, but also they may be killing human beings, says Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. The concept of "sustainability" must be expanded to include consideration of whether workplaces are good not only for the environment but also for people.

What Pfeffer calls toxic workplace environments, particularly in the United States, raise rates of disease and mortality. He urges business, government, and the media to pay attention to what has been a shockingly neglected topic. In the present distressed economy, he says, "the problem is only going to get worse."

"The lack of attention to employee needs helps explain why the United States spends more on health care than other countries but gets worse outcomes," says Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business. "We have no mandatory vacation or sick day requirements, and we do have chronic layoffs, overwork, and stress. Working in many organizations is simply hazardous to your health."

Specifically, he says, epidemiological studies show that holding a lower-level position where one does not have much control over job activities and decision making puts employees at a higher risk of having—or dying from—a heart attack. "There’s nothing more stressful than being in an environment in which you have a lot of pressure but relatively little power," Pfeffer says.

In addition, spotty or interrupted health care insurance—a typical consequence of layoffs and job changes—and the trend toward jobs that offer no health coverage at all, leads to a significant decrease in routine preventive medical screening procedures such as mammograms and cholesterol and blood pressure testing, and as a consequence, added risk to workers’ health.

Pfeffer cites research showing that overwork and job stress lead to increases in smoking, alcohol abuse, and high blood pressure, while layoffs contribute to depression, violence, and even lowered life expectancy. "There is evidence that people who experience a layoff live 1.5 years less than those who don’t," Pfeffer says.

The Stanford professor thus maintains that the concept of "sustainability" must be expanded to include not only whether corporations care for the environment and resource conservation, but also whether they are good for their employees.

As to why the serious question of worker well-being has been given scant attention by executives, regulators, and pundits, Pfeffer suggests it may have something to do with current mercenary cultural values. "There was a time when CEOs believed they had an obligation to all of their stakeholders, including employees," he says. "But over time, we've come to look at even the simplest things in financial terms. Childcare, for example, which used to be a matter between parents and children, is now a service to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This way of thinking is taking out the human factor."

The great irony, says Pfeffer, is that most workplace policies that are bad for employees are also bad for companies themselves. Organizations that are more "humane"––offering generous benefits, sick leave, vacation pay, health insurance, and so forth––are shown to be more profitable. Pfeffer points to companies such as Southwest Airlines, Kimberly-Clark in the Andean region, and kidney dialysis provider DaVita as exemplars. "I hope businesses will wake up to the fact that if they don't do well by their employees, chances are they’re not doing well, period," Pfeffer says.

In the current economic climate, he notes, more people will be laid off, work longer hours, become saddled with increasing work responsibilities, and operate without health insurance. The government, Pfeffer says, will almost certainly need to step in with regulation. If nothing else, with health care costs on the rise, government should be looking to the workplace as one culprit in the decline in the quality of workers' health.

—Marguerite Rigoglioso

Read more...

Seven Communication Mistakes Managers Make

By Stever Robbins

1. Making controversial announcements without doing groundwork first.
Any controversial decision can engender rumors, anxiety, and resistance. So rather than announcing a controversial decision to an entire group, prep people one-on-one. Learn who will object, and why.

Decisions about change are the most charged — reorganizations, changing goals, and the departure of key employees create uncertainty, and uncertainty generates anxiety.

To forestall anxiety, open a dialogue with the other person. Put a name to the problem: "This reorganization means we'll be doing some things differently, and that makes some people apprehensive." Then address the concerns raised in response to your statement:

* Is the other person uncertain about the future? Share the scenario you expect to unfold.
* Does the reorganization jeopardize a project? Share plans for keeping it afloat.
* Demonstrate that you get it, keeping in mind that you can address emotion better with body language than with words. Make sure yours conveys concern and empathy.

2. Lying
Some lies or partial truths are well-intentioned. Certain topics must remain confidential while they're under discussion. But be careful how you keep secrets. If people know you've lied, you will lose their trust forever. A start-up company's controller watched the CFO lie to members of other departments and subsequently began to doubt the CFO's sincerity. He began looking for a new job with a boss whose intentions he could trust. In that instance, lying cost the company a valuable employee.

Rather than lie, train yourself to respond, "I'm not free to comment" or "I can't answer that fully right now," when asked about confidential or sensitive topics. Consistency is important. Warren Buffett never discusses his investments, even with shareholders. As a result, his silence on a particular deal gives away nothing.

3. Ignoring the realities of power
Surprised that you never hear bad news until it's too late? Don't be. The more power you have, the less you'll hear about problems. It's human nature: problems are filtered and softened as they ascend the corporate hierarchy, with each messenger seeking to soften the blow. If you want an honest assessment of a problem, seek out bad news. Welcome it. And when it comes, show your appreciation.

Conversely, messages are magnified as they travel down the hierarchy. If you look pained during a presentation, everyone will "know" you hated the presentation (or worse — the presenter). No one will think to blame the pastrami sandwich you ate too fast before you came to the meeting. Jokes are especially dangerous. When the managing director of a consulting firm joked, "If you're not here Sunday, don't bother coming in Monday," his project team wasn't sure what to do. One said, "We were pretty sure he was joking, but. . ."

Put a lid on rumors by using plain, simple language. End meetings by reviewing your reactions and next steps. "I value your analysis, Chris. The sales trend is disturbing. Let's follow up on Wednesday."

4. Underestimating your audience's intelligence
It's tempting to gloss over issues because "people won't understand." Why explain a reorganization when you can simply say, "Here's the new org chart"? But that's a cop-out. Front-line employees may not be masters of organizational design, but they deserve to know the rationale behind changes that affect their lives. If you think your people won't understand something, remember it's your job to explain it to them.

Many managers like to gloss over problems when motivating their teams. But if things aren't going well, those teams are probably well aware of the problems. In fact, they've probably known about them longer than you have. Rather than avoiding the situation, enlist their skills in finding solutions.

5. Confusing process with outcome
In goal-setting, compensation, and evaluation, it's easy to confuse process with outcome. You promise your team a 7% raise, but then the board, concerned about the downturn, caps raises at 3%. You fight like mad to raise the number, and you compromise on 4%. But your people don't appreciate it. In fact, they're downright resentful. How could they be so insensitive to all your hard work?

Simple. Your hard work was process, and you promised them an outcome. You want them to appreciate how hard you tried, but they wanted a specific result. Since they didn't get it, they can't see past that fact. You want people to value you for your hard work. But when evaluating others, it's always easier to judge outcomes. Most organizations penalize employees for the wrong outcome, even if they follow the right process. Perversely, others are rewarded for the right outcome, even when they flout the rules about process.

6. Using inappropriate forms of communication
E-mail is great for conveying information, but don't use it for emotional issues; e-mail messages are too easy to misconstrue. If you're squirming while reading an e-mail, leave your computer and deal with the situation in person or by telephone.

At the same time, phone calls and face-to-face meetings are inefficient ways to disseminate information, but great for discussing nuanced issues. You can respond directly to the listener's reaction, and you can use your tone of voice and facial expressions to control your message. "I'm sure you did a great job" could be read sarcastically in an e-mail, but the same words can be delivered sincerely in person with the right tone of voice.

Furthermore, some people are listeners, while others are readers. Listeners won't focus on written memos but are great in conversation. Readers write great memos and are also glad to read them, but conversation sometimes fails to fully engage them. If you talk to a reader or write to a listener, your message might not get through. Don't be afraid to ask people how they prefer to receive information; most people know the answer. If they don't, a little attention on your part will reveal what works best. (And for some people, it's a combination of the two.)

7. Ignoring acts of omission
What you don't say may be sending as loud a message as what you do say. If you don't give praise, people get the message they're unappreciated. If you don't explain the rationale behind decisions, the message is that you don't trust them. And if you don't tell people where the company wants to go, they don't know how to help it get there.

When fundraising became the CEO's priority at a distance learning company, he stopped communicating his vision to employees. Since money was constantly on his mind, he did mention financial goals. Eventually, the company culture became money-focused, and the vision was lost. But when the CEO delivered a vision-oriented presentation at a conference, one of his employees approached him afterward to say that she had never felt so inspired. As a result, he changed his internal communication strategy to emphasize vision once more, and saw morale soar.

By their very nature, mistakes of omission are hard to uncover. Review your major goals and the communication that's needed to support those goals. Ask what message may have been sent by your silence so far. And be willing to ask people, "What messages are you getting from me?"

Stever Robbins is president of VentureCoach.com, a Cambridge, Mass. entrepreneurial coaching service.

Read more...

How to Lead When You're Not the Boss

By Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay

Real leadership is never a matter of mere formal authority. Leaders are effective when other people acknowledge them as such--by listening seriously to their ideas, valuing and following their suggestions for action, and turning to them for advice.

Opportunities to lead aren't limited to times when you have formal authority over a particular team or venture. When you step forward and demonstrate leadership, you will contribute value to the project or enterprise--and strengthen your leadership skills.

In their book Lateral Leadership: Getting Things Done When You're Not the Boss (2nd ed., Profile Books, 2004), Harvard negotiation specialist Roger Fisher and coauthor Alan Sharp lay out a useful five-step method for leading when you are not formally in charge. Its steps can be applied to virtually any project you're involved in or team or meeting you participate in.

1. Establish goals
People accomplish the most when they have a clear set of objectives. It follows that any group's first order of business is to write down exactly what it hopes to achieve. The person who asks the question "Can we start by clarifying our goals here?"--and who then assumes the lead in discussing and drafting those goals--is automatically taking a leadership role, whatever his or her position.

2. Think systematically
Observe your next meeting: people typically plunge right into the topic at hand and start arguing over what to do. Effective leaders, by contrast, learn to think systematically--that is, they gather and lay out the necessary data, analyze the causes of the situation, and propose actions based on this analysis. In a group, leaders help keep participants focused by asking appropriate questions. Do we have the information we need to analyze this situation? Can we focus on figuring out the causes of the problem we're trying to solve?

3. Learn from experience--while it's happening
Teams often plow ahead on a project, then conduct a review at the end to
figure out what they learned. But it's more effective for teams (or individuals) to learn as they go along.

Anyone who prompts the group to engage in regular minireviews and learn from them is playing a de facto leadership role. Why is this ongoing process more effective than an after-action review? The events are fresh in everyone's mind. And the team can use what they learn from each minireview to make needed adjustments to their work processes or their goals.

4. Engage others
A high-performing team engages the efforts of every member, and effective team leaders seek out the best fit possible between members' interests and the tasks that need doing. Suggest writing down a list of chores and matching them up with individuals or subgroups. If no one wants a particular task, brainstorm ways to make that task more interesting or challenging. Help draw out the group's quieter members so that everyone feels a part of the overall project.

5. Provide feedback
If you're not the boss, what kind of feedback can you provide? One thing that's always valued is simple appreciation--"I thought you did a great job in there." Sometimes, too, you'll be in a position to help people improve their performance through coaching. Effective coaches ask a lot of questions: "How did you feel you did on this part of the project?" They recognize that people may try hard and fail anyway: "What made it hard to accomplish your part of the task?" They offer thoughtful suggestions for improvement, being careful to explain the observation and reasoning that lie behind them.

Source: Harvard Blog

Read more...

Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy

By Peter Bregman

I just heard a story from a client that's hard to believe but true.

In the worst economy we've seen in decades, Passlogix, a privately owned 100-person software development company, just received over a million dollars in prepaid commitments for the next three to five years of service. And they beat out several much larger more established companies, like CA (14,000 employees) and IBM (400,000 employees), to win those customers.

Now, how do you explain that? The bigger companies aren't getting similar deals. It's not standard in this industry to prepay contracts of that size and duration. And the clients received only a small reduction for their upfront payment, less than the cost of capital.

I think it's a trend. And understanding it might just be the difference between failing and thriving in this economy.

Yesterday morning I had breakfast with a good friend of mine, a mentor in the consulting industry. He's a senior partner in a large consulting company and has worked in one large company or another for the past 35 years. Really smart, really talented.

And now really depressed. He hasn't been having fun for some time but it's gotten worse. He's survived several rounds of layoffs but who knows, he tells me, he might be hit by the next one. And if he isn't, he might leave anyway because it's so miserable. He doesn't understand how his company is making decisions, including how they decide whom to let go. He is one of the most senior leaders in this company and even he doesn't trust it anymore.

This is not an isolated case. I've been hearing this from many of my large clients. People in senior positions don't trust the decisions being handed to them. And if you go one layer down, to middle managers, the distrust is palpable. I don't know a single person who works for a large company who feels confident they'll have a job in 6 months. Not one.

Now, imagine you're a client wanting to buy from one of these companies. You call up your client contact to talk about the sale. One of two things will happen:

1. You have a relationship with her and so you talk and get a sense of her insecurity, fear, and distrust.
2. You have no relationship with her because the company is so big and you talk to a different person each time you call.

Either way, you'll probably get the sense that your contact may not be there in the future to fulfill her commitments to you. And that won't make you comfortable committing long-term dollars (or any dollars) to the company?

Now compare that to Passlogix, whose clients know they can pick up the phone and speak with Marc Boroditsky, the CEO. He tells clients about his commitment to the company and to them, and they know exactly who to call if the work isn't done to their expectations. That personal relationship, that trust, is important to them. They're willing to invest in it long term — to the tune of millions of dollars, up front.

And it's not just the CEO. If clients speak with other employees in the company, they'll get the same feeling of trust. A small company gives its employees a sense of security and employees pass that feeling on to clients. Not that small companies don't go out of business. They do all the time. But each employee has much greater control over his own destiny. In a company of 30 employees, if you do a great job, there is a good chance you'll be recognized. But in a company of thousands? It's easy to be missed. And easy to be laid off.

The gap of confidence between small companies and big ones is growing. We used to rely on the security of big companies. That's why we worked for them. And hired them. And put our money in them.

But with the virtual collapse of AIG, Lehman, Citibank, GM, Chrysler, and many more — now even GE is in trouble — all that's changed. Now it's a risk to do business with the big ones.

We simply don't trust companies anymore. We trust people. And in big companies, it's hard to even find a person to trust as we scream "operator" into our telephones only to get transferred to another menu whose options have changed.

That gives small companies a huge advantage.

Just ask John Drummond, who started Unicycle.com after getting laid off from IBM during the last downturn. Once he got the hang of it, he started Banjo.com, his other childhood passion. Both are doing well and he's about to launch more sites.

Source Harvard Blog

Read more...