Ed Batista

How to Have Better One-on-Ones

One-on-one meetings with employees are seemingly among a leader's most straightforward tasks. Two colleagues have yet another conversation about work--what could be simpler? But a theme in my practice is that a more deliberate approach to one-on-ones can turn them from perfunctory exchanges into much higher sources of leverage. [1] If you're a leader who'd like to hold better one-on-ones, here are some questions to ask yourself and a set of proposals to consider:

If you're not holding formal one-on-ones, why not?

Andy Grove, the late CEO of Intel, noted that managers from other companies viewed formal one-on-ones as unnecessary, telling him, "I don't need scheduled meetings with my supervisor [or subordinate]; I see [them] several times a day." [2] I sometimes work with early-stage CEOs who feel similarly and view formal one-on-ones as superfluous bureaucracy. But this approach has several problems.

Even when you're communicating frequently with employees, it's likely that those interactions are highly tactical, with with little time devoted to more strategic issues, and no time at all to address the quality of your working relationship or anything of similar complexity. And, as Grove continued, "there is an enormous difference between a casual encounter by a supervisor and subordinate, or even a meeting to resolve a specific problem, and a one-on-one." [3]

The absence of formal one-on-ones means that when you do schedule a meeting to address a bigger challenge, you signal to your employees that such events are for "tough conversations," rendering them more stressful and less likely to succeed. (And this may be equally true when an employee schedules a one-on-one with you.)

Alternatively, holding formal one-on-ones on a regular basis normalizes the experience, allowing you and your employees to grow more comfortable addressing complex or difficult topics. Simultaneously, it highlights that this is a particular type of conversation and not just an ordinary meeting, motivating both you and your employees to be more thoughtful about how you prepare and participate.

Who merits a one-on-one?

Having formalized the process, it's important to assess how you're allocating the time you have available for one-on-ones, which is one of your organization's most precious resources. This isn't self-aggrandizing--it's simply a consequence of the fact that your attention is finite. [4] And a one-on-one meeting involves a major "investment" of attention from which you should expect a substantial "return," just as you would with any other limited resource. [5]

In addition to meeting with their direct reports, some of my clients initiate or make themselves available for skip-level one-on-ones with more junior employees. This practice can provide you with a new perspective on the organization, but it comes with potential dilemmas. It doesn't scale, and can leave you spread too thin. It can also short-circuit normal managerial channels--although if you have concerns about one of your direct reports, this may be the point.

I've had clients who levelled an employee and offered ongoing one-on-ones as a way to cushion the blow, but again, this doesn't scale and is generally a short-term fix. The key is recognizing that people want the leader's attention because it's a valuable resource, and beyond a certain point in your career it's unlikely that you'll be able to meet this demand entirely without compromising on other responsibilities.

What's the appropriate cadence? How long should a one-on-one last?

Here Grove offers some useful guidelines:

How often should you have one-on-ones? Or put another way, how do you decide how often somebody needs such a meeting? The answer is in the job- or task-relevant maturity of each of your subordinates. In other words, how much experience does a given subordinate have with the specific task at hand? This is not the same as the experience they have in general...

The subordinate should feel that there is enough time to broach and get into thorny issues... I feel that a one-on-one should last an hour at a minimum. Anything less, in my experience, tends to make the subordinate confine themselves to simple things that can be handled quickly. [6]

Given that your employees' "job- or task-relevant maturity" likely varies, the cadence of regular one-on-ones need not be uniform, nor is there a single best practice. Most of my clients hold weekly one-on-ones with most of their direct reports, but meeting every other week is also common. A longer cadence with direct reports is less typical, but skip-level one-on-ones are often monthly or quarterly. Ultimately it's up to you and each employee to determine what works best.

The key is predictability, so you should only ever cancel or reschedule a one-on-one as a last resort. If you do this repeatedly you send a very clear message that it's a low-priority event, and your employees will act accordingly. And if you have a direct report who's reluctant to hold one-on-ones or who cancels on you, this merits further investigation. It may be a sign of a deeper problem in the relationship [7], or it may simply be that the quality of your one-on-ones needs to be improved. Make clear your desire for one-on-ones to be valuable to them, solicit feedback on your current arrangements, and enlist them in joint problem-solving.

What's on the agenda? How should we prepare?

As with cadence, there's no universal template for agenda-setting or preparation, but there are some general principles to bear in mind. Grove stresses that the employee should feel a sense of ownership:

A key point about a one-on-one: It should be regarded as the subordinate's meeting, with its agenda and tone set by [them]... So the [subordinate] should be asked to prepare an outline, which is very important because it forces them to think through in advance all of the issues and points [they] plan to raise. Moreover, with an outline, the supervisor knows at the outset what is to be covered and can therefore help to set the pace of the meeting according to the "meatiness" of the items on the agenda. An outline also provides a framework for supporting information, which the subordinate should prepare in advance. The subordinate should then walk the supervisor through all the material.

What should be covered in a one-on-one?... The most important criterion governing matters to be talked about is that they be issues that preoccupy and nag the subordinate. These are often obscure and take time to surface, consider, and resolve. [8]

Claire Hughes Johnson, the former COO of Stripe, expresses similar sentiments:

I generally tell folks, especially more experienced people, that the 1:1 is their time. We set up a mutual doc that we can both edit, and we track action items and link out to goals and career conversation notes. Beyond that, I ask the individual to propose each 1:1 agenda, and I only edit the doc to add in agenda item suggestions when I have them. [9]

When your employees own the agenda, not only is this much more efficient for you, it also ensures that the discussion will focus on issues that are most important to them. But having your employees set the agenda doesn't mean that you have no input, as Grove and Hughes Johnson make clear. You can also give feedback to an employee on the quality of their agenda if you conclude that the time isn't being well-spent. My clients who've asked their employees to take responsibility for agenda-setting typically find it a useful exercise in revealing who's well-prepared and who's not.

A particular form that lack of preparation can take is the employee who treats the one-on-one primarily or even exclusively as a vehicle to report out. If you find yourself listening to extensive updates that should have been written reports or automated dashboards for you to review in advance, you can let them know that it's a missed opportunity to have a more meaningful dialogue.

How should one-on-ones be conducted? What role should I play as leader?

An employee who sets the agenda and provides you with sufficient time to digest any preparatory materials enables you to add value not by directing the conversation or even having answers to all their questions, but by posing questions yourself. While there are limits on the extent to which you can serve as an employee's "coach," you can readily employ coaching as a methodology. [10] This not only scales, it also allows you to add value in one-on-ones even with senior employees who possess specialized expertise that you lack. Grove recommended what he called "dialectic management":

What is the role of the supervisor in a one-on-one? They should facilitate the subordinate's expression of what's going on and what's bothering them. The supervisor is there to learn and to coach... How is this done? By applying Grove's Principle of Dialectic Management, "Ask one more question!" When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all they want to say about a subject, [the supervisor] should ask another question. [11]

And your questions should include inquiring about your employee's state of mind and well-being. Hughes Johnson notes that a one-on-one should always begin by "asking how someone is doing--checking in really matters." [12] Grove firmly agrees: "The supervisor should also encourage the discussion of heart-to-heart issues during one-on-ones, because this is the perfect forum for getting at subtle and deep work-related problems." [13]

It's by attending to the logistical details above that you create an environment in which employees are willing to truly tell you how they're doing and be candid with you on "heart-to-heart" issues. Holding formal one-on-ones that are rarely cancelled or rescheduled and for which both of you are fully prepared goes a long way toward creating the psychological safety that's necessary for real openness. This doesn't mean that you should avoid contentious issues, as I've noted previously:

Psychological safety entails candid and direct communication. It requires asking and answering hard questions. It does not mean "being nice." It does not mean avoiding difficult conversations or fraught topics to ensure that no one experiences distress. To the contrary, a setting in which people are reluctant to be candid and direct for fear of triggering any distress in others is psychologically unsafe. [14]

I opened with the idea that better one-on-ones can be a great source of leverage for a leader, and I'll close with Grove's thoughts on the same subject:

What is the leverage of a one-on-one? Let's say you have a one-on-one with your subordinate every two weeks, and it lasts one and a half hours. Ninety minutes of your time can enhance the quality of your subordinate's work for two weeks, or for some eighty-plus hours, and also upgrade your understanding of what [they're] doing. Clearly one-on-ones can exert enormous leverage. [15]

 

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Footnotes

[1] 1x 10x 100x (On Leverage)

[2] High Output Management, page 73 (Andy Grove, 1st edition, 1983)

[3] Ibid.

[4] Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial Attention (Linda Stone, 2009)

[5] Growth, Profitability and Return on Attention

[6] Grove, pages 73-74.

[7] Better Working Relationships

[8] Grove, page 75.

[9] Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company-Building, page 399 (Claire Hughes Johnson, 2023)

[10] For more on coaching as a leadership tool (and its limitations), see the following:

• Connect, Reflect, Direct...Then Ask (On Coaching)
• How Great Coaches Ask, Listen and Empathize
• Investment vs. Attachment

[11] Grove, pages 75-76.

[12] Hughes Johnson, page 399.

[13] Grove, page 77.

[14] Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination

[15] Grove, page 77-78.

 

Photo by World Bank Photo Collective.

Defensiveness Is in the Eye of the Beholder

A theme in my practice is defensiveness, which I define as an unwillingness to accept responsibility for setbacks, characterized by a disproportionately hostile, anxious or evasive response to critical feedback. When it arises as a topic I'm usually working with a client who's figuring out how to deal with a defensive employee or colleague, but occasionally I have a client who's been accused of defensiveness and is wondering what to do in response.

The key word in the definition above is "disproportionate." When someone is slightly hostile, anxious or evasive in response to critical feedback, we don't think of them as "defensive." Critical feedback is stressful under the best of circumstances. [1] So when someone responds with curiosity and calm we view that as a sign of maturity and professionalism, but a moderately negative response is normal and expected.

And yet we also expect this negative response to be temperate and short-lived. It's only when the other person's hostility, anxiety or evasion seem excessively emotional or unduly persistent that we label them as "defensive." This is highly contextual, determined by the surrounding cultural norms, our relationship with the other person, and our individual standards. What qualifies as defensiveness is truly in the eye of the beholder. So what are the implications of all this, and what can we do about it?

When You're Dealing with a Defensive Person

Don't call them "defensive."

Don't even use the word, as it will only make the situation worse. Bear in mind that they don't think of themselves as "defensive"--no one ever does--so being labeled as such will feel to them like an unjustified accusation and amplify the negative emotions they're already having difficulty managing. You may be perfectly justified in thinking of them as defensive, but keep it to yourself, at least for the moment.

In the present moment, de-escalate.

Defensiveness emerges in response to unexpected bad news, and you and your counterpart may be facing an immediate crisis. In this moment your task is to help them de-escalate their threat response and regain the ability to regulate their emotions. [2] Slow down--choose your words thoughtfully, make decisions judiciously, be mindful of how you might be contributing to their sense of threat. [3] In some circumstances, encouraging the other person to discuss what they're feeling can help them down-regulate those feelings. [4]

As soon as possible, make it a learning opportunity.

When the sense of urgency has abated--but before so much time has passed that the details have grown hazy--make use of this situation as a learning opportunity for the other person. At this point it may be useful to acknowledge that you perceived their response as defensive, but don't stop there. Offer behaviorally-specific feedback that allows the other person to gain a new perspective on their response and understand why you experienced it as counter-productive. [5]

In the meantime, clarify your own lessons.

There's undoubtedly ample learning here for you as well. Why did this bad news come as such a surprise to the other person? How did you share it with them? If you hired them, why did you fail to identify their defensiveness in the process? [6] How successful were you at de-escalating their defensiveness? Did you inadvertently make it worse, and if so, how? And if you're repeatedly encountering defensiveness over time, that merits a look in the mirror. Just because defensiveness is in the eye of the beholder doesn't mean it's always a fair or reasonable perception.

When You've Been Accused of Defensiveness

Don't make it worse by rejecting the label.

You almost certainly don't feel defensive, nor is that how you would describe your behavior, and it's unfortunate that the other person has chosen to label you this way. But reflexively responding, "I'm NOT defensive!" will only be perceived as further evidence of your defensiveness. Remember that defensiveness is in the eye of the beholder, and the fact that you feel unfairly maligned has no bearing on the other person's belief in the validity of their perspective.

If you haven't heard this very often, it's a learning opportunity.

It's likely that the behaviors being perceived as "defensive" are the result of your surprise and disappointment at encountering an unexpected setback. If you've enjoyed sustained success in your career, this may be the first time that you've experienced a meaningful failure. And if you've rarely (or never) been called defensive before, you're learning that your responses to setbacks are perceived as problematic by this person at this moment. As challenging as it may seem, this presents you not only with an opportunity to transform setbacks into fruitful experiences [7], but also to accelerate your overall growth and development. [8]

If you've heard this repeatedly, take it very seriously.

Learning opportunities sometimes come at a cost, and being called defensive can be career-limiting if the label sticks. When I'm working with a client who's hiring to fill a role, I encourage them to test for defensiveness in the interview process because defensive people can have such a corrosive effect on company culture, and it's difficult if not impossible to get them to change. [9] If this person has perceived you as defensive multiple times, it's a signal to invest in your working relationship. [10] And if you've been called defensive at multiple points in your career, consider whether a failure to take responsibility is holding you back professionally. [11]

No matter what, it's feedback, and feedback is data.

Being called defensive is a form of feedback, and like much feedback, it can be stressful, confusing and unwelcome. As I've noted before, feedback isn't a "gift" that we should automatically express appreciation for, but it is potentially valuable data that merits investigation to assess its utility. [12] You're not obligated to agree with this feedback, nor are you required to take any particular action in response, but consider the extent to which you trust this person's judgment and value their opinion of you. Should you conclude that they're trustworthy and acting in good faith, thank them for taking the risk to speak up, and ask them to tell you more. [13]

 

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Footnotes

[1] For more on feedback and stress, see the following:

• Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful
• Why Some Feedback Hurts (and What to Do About It)

[2] The Tyranny of Feelings

[3] How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)

[4] Talking About Feelings

[5] How to Deliver Critical Feedback

[6] Surfacing Defensiveness (Three Questions for Candidates)

[7] The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

[8] Learning How to Learn

[9] Surfacing Defensiveness (Three Questions for Candidates)

[10] Better Working Relationships

[11] The Trium Group on Responsibility

[12] Feedback Is Not a Gift

[13] Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

 

Photo by West Point.

Currencies (On Motivating Different People)

A theme in my practice is the leader who's seeking to increase employee motivation. In this context it's important to bear in mind the work of Frederick Herzberg, a 20th century psychologist who had a profound influence on our understanding of motivation in organizational life. Herzberg offers a sharp critique of the conventional approaches to motivation, which he refers to as "kicks in the ass" or KITA. These aren't only negative, in the form of criticism or threats--they can also be positive, in the form of desirable rewards:

Let us consider motivation. If I say to you, "Do this for me or the company, and in return I will give you a reward, an incentive, more status, a promotion, all the quid pro quos that exist in the industrial organization," am I motivating you? The overwhelming opinion I receive from management people is, "Yes, this is motivation." I have a year-old schnauzer. When it was a small puppy and I wanted it to move, I kicked it in the rear and it moved. Now that I have finished its obedience training, I hold up a dog biscuit when I want the schnauzer to move. In this instance, who is motivated--I or the dog? The dog wants the biscuit, but it is I who want it to move. Again, I am the one who is motivated, and the dog is the one who moves. In this instance all I did was apply KITA frontally; I exerted a pull instead of a push. When industry wishes to use such positive KITAs, it has available an incredible number and variety of dog biscuits (jelly beans for humans) to wave in front of employees to get them to jump. [1]

Herzberg is exaggerating for comic effect here--I don't think he ever kicked his dog. [2] But his larger point holds: rewards like dog biscuits and jelly beans may result in movement, but that's not the same thing as motivation. This doesn't mean rewards are irrelevant as incentives, but a key in deploying them effectively is understanding that there are two different types of motivation, intrinsic (deriving from the work itself) and extrinsic (deriving from by-products of the work or aspects of the environment in which work occurs). As I've written before,

Herzberg's research suggests that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction aren't endpoints on a single spectrum, but two distinct scales. Satisfaction is derived from sources of intrinsic motivation such as a sense of achievement, recognition, responsibility, and opportunities for growth. In contrast, sources of extrinsic motivation (also known as "hygiene factors") such as working conditions, compensation, status, and security generate dissatisfaction if they're perceived as inadequate. [3]

But this understanding only gets a leader so far. Intrinsic motivators increase job satisfaction, and a sufficiency of extrinsic motivators prevent job dissatisfaction--but what does this look like in practice? If you're a leader seeking to increase employees' motivation, what can you do? Leadership experts Allan Cohen and David Bradford offer some suggestions. [4] In Influence Without Authority they articulate a set of principles and frameworks to support the development of stronger working relationships and more effective collaboration. [5] Although the title indicates that they're writing for people who lack directive control, I find their ideas highly relevant in my work with leaders. My clients are typically in senior positions, but their employees expect a high degree of latitude and autonomy, and leadership in these settings rarely involves "giving orders." [6]

One of Cohen and Bradford's most useful concepts related to motivation is what they call currencies: "resources that can be exchanged [as] the basis for acquiring influence." The list below is adapted from Chapter 3 in Influence Without Authority, "Goods and Services: The Currencies of Exchange." I've followed Cohen and Bradford's general schema, while modifying some of their terminology.

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Inspiration-Related

1. Vision: A compelling view of the company's future and a description of how someone could contribute to its accomplishment.

2. Excellence: Opportunities to work at the highest standards of achievement.

3. Values: Opportunities to pursue moral or ethical virtues through work.

Task-Related

4. Resources: Additional budget, personnel, technology, space, etc.

5. Challenge: Opportunities to pursue difficult goals and develop enhanced skills and capabilities.

6. Assistance: The ability to delegate unwanted duties or obtain support in facing difficulties.

7. "Air Cover": Public or private help in influencing decision-makers and overcoming resistance.

8. Speed: Confidence that requests and inquiries will be met with a rapid response.

9. Information: Access to restricted or private organizational knowledge.

Position-Related

10. Recognition: Public or private acknowledgment of effort, accomplishments or abilities.

11. Visibility: Opportunities to be known by and interact with senior figures.

12. Reputation: A positive image that opens doors to additional opportunities.

13. Status: Participation in select groups or events.

14. Contacts: The ability to join or build a larger or more valuable network.

Relationship-Related

15. Inclusion: Feelings of closeness and emotional intimacy with specific individuals or groups.

16. Understanding: Opportunities to voice concerns and feel heard.

17. Kindness: Thoughtful and timely expressions of support during difficulties.

Personal

18. Gratitude: Expressions of appreciation in the form of thanks, deference, or a recognition of indebtedness.

19. Ownership: An intrinsically fulfilling sense of control and responsibility.

20. Affirmation: Reinforcement of a person's values, beliefs, sense of identity or self-worth.

21. Comfort: The minimization of headaches, hassles, interruptions or embarrassment.

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If you're seeking to increase employee motivation, Cohen and Bradford's inventory offers a wide range of potential interventions--and here's where it's important to apply Herzberg's insights. Any number of the currencies above can be dispensed like "dog biscuits or jelly beans," but will the result be motivation or merely movement? When people move in response to a promised reward, that's a form of compliance, but motivation springs from a deeper level of commitment. And as I've written before,

Compliant people remain so only as long as they aren't too dissatisfied, but the absence of punishment and the promise of rewards doesn't generate sustained motivation. Committed people are motivated, and the fulfillment they find in the pursuit of their aims makes them more likely to persist in the face of difficulties. [7]

Herzberg indicates that the most significant intrinsic motivators are "[a sense of] achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility, and growth or advancement," while the most significant extrinsic motivators are "company policy and administration, supervision, interpersonal relationships, working conditions, salary, status, and security." [8] Some of Cohen and Bradford's currencies fall readily into one category or the other, but in many cases the distinction is unclear or may be highly contextual.

None of this is to suggest that intrinsic motivators are somehow superior, but recall that Herzberg originally dubbed extrinsic motivators "hygiene factors" to express his finding that sufficiency prevented dissatisfaction, but a surplus didn't necessarily yield more satisfaction. This is where I see many leaders make a category error--they're surprised when increases in compensation or status don't result in sustained motivation, and yet that's common with extrinsic factors that are subject to the process of hedonic adaptation. [9]

But all of this guidance needs to be assessed in light of the needs and preferences of the specific individuals you're seeking to motivate. Herzberg's work can be viewed as a map to help you navigate these issues, and yet, as with all findings from social psychology, "the map is not the territory." [10] Hopefully Cohen and Bradford's inventory expands the possibilities under your consideration, but what ultimately matters isn't whether a given currency is intrinsic or extrinsic in an abstract sense, but the value it holds for a particular employee.

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

• Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)
• Mind the Gap (On Leading Senior Executives)

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Footnotes

[1] One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? (Frederick Herzberg, Harvard Business Review, originally published 1968, republished 2003)

[2] I don't really know anything about how Herzberg felt about dogs. But he helped liberate Dachau as 22-year-old U.S. Army sergeant, an undoubtedly searing experience that influenced his interest in motivation, and I'd like to think that such a man would only be kind to animals.

[3] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

[4] David Bradford has been an important mentor to me.

[5] Influence Without Authority (Allan Cohen and David Bradford, 2nd edition, 2005)

[6] Force Isn't Power

[7] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

[8] Herzberg, 1968/2003

[9] Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"

[10] The Map Is Not the Territory

 

Photo by Philip Brewer.

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 2 (On Hiring)

In Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1, I discuss the factors that cause leaders to delay a necessary termination. A mirror image of this fear can affect leaders during a hiring process, one that causes them to rush. They're so concerned about a role going unfilled that they make missteps or discount potential red flags along the way. Sometimes this is the result of inexperience, but even long-tenured leaders can be affected. What do leaders driven by a "fear of the empty chair" overlook or ignore when hiring? And if you're a leader preparing to make a hire, what can you do about it?

Cognitive Biases

There's ample research on the limitations of job interviews in predicting performance. [1] A particular problem is the unstructured interview, in which the interviewer lacks specific questions designed to elicit responses about the candidate's real-life experiences to test for a desired set of characteristics. The unstructured interview moves randomly from one topic to the next, with the candidate guessing what the interviewer wants to hear and eagerly seizing on any points in common. And the results are readily subject to cognitive biases, the mental shortcuts that preserve our limited capacity for logical reasoning at the cost of systematic errors:

• Confirmation bias: Searching for and promoting data consistent with pre-existing hypotheses about a candidate, while rejecting disconfirming data.
• Halo effect: Viewing a candidate's attributes more positively (or negatively) than is merited on the basis of positive (or negative) impressions of other attributes.
• Stereotypes: Assumptions about a candidate's fitness based on similarities to (or differences from) the interviewer's often vague assumptions about an "ideal candidate." [2]

Leaders will obviously continue to rely on interviews, despite their drawbacks. This isn't irrational behavior--even unstructured interviews have benefits [3], and structured interviews can be difficult to implement. [4] However, as organizational psychologist Robert Dipboye has noted, "The evidence is compelling that the inclusion of formal job analyses, standardized questioning of applicants, and behavioral rating scales improve the validity and reliability of interviewer judgments." [5]

If you're a leader who's feeling a sense of urgency about making a hire, it will likely be worth the effort to slow down and take the advice of Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman: 1) Create a structured set of questions to prevent you from simply pursuing the questions that you find most interesting, 2) Use the time available in an interview to obtain as much information as possible about the candidate's life in their normal environment, 3) Do not make decisions solely on the basis of your global evaluations, and 4) Rely upon statistical summaries of separately evaluated attributes. [6]

Defensiveness

More specifically, hiring processes should screen for defensiveness, which I define as an unwillingness to accept responsibility for setbacks, characterized by a disproportionately hostile, anxious or evasive response to critical feedback. When one of my clients has an under-performing employee, defensiveness is almost always an issue. Jean Leslie and Ellen Van Velsor of the Center for Creative Leadership studied "derailed" executives who left their organizations non-voluntarily or were plateaued at a level short of expectations. The two leading factors in such cases were "inability to develop or adapt" (61 percent) and "poor working relations" (57 percent), and in my experience defensiveness is a primary contributor to both. [7]

But a candidate is unlikely to show signs of defensiveness during hiring, when they're striving to be their best selves, so if you're a leader making a hire it's up to you to test for it. Here are three questions to ask candidates during the process, and in this order (although not all three may be necessary):

1. Tell me about a time when things went wrong.

If the candidate can't answer this question thoughtfully, that's an initial red flag, suggesting that they're unwilling to be forthright about their setbacks or unable to observe and interpret such situations without experiencing distress. But some candidates will provide an adequate answer while leaving themselves out of the story, blaming the setback on the failings of others or inescapable misfortune. In these cases, proceed to the next question:

2. Tell me about a time when you made a mistake.

The wording here is deliberate, providing the candidate with an opportunity to take responsibility for a setback without using unduly fraught language. We all "make mistakes," and only the most defensive among us will refuse to admit it. Still, some candidates will respond with an example in which the consequences of their mistake were relatively trivial, providing little data on their capacity to acknowledge and learn from serious missteps. In these cases, proceed to the final question:

3. Tell me about a time when you failed.

The wording here is also deliberate, inviting the candidate to identify a situation in which they bore personal responsibility for a meaningful setback. Some candidates who were less forthcoming in response to the first two questions will finally avail themselves of this opportunity--and others will not, providing examples of inconsequential "failures," or evading the idea that they failed, finding others to take the blame.

If a candidate's unable to provide a satisfactory response to any of these questions, consider that a likely sign of defensiveness. And if you're still bullish on their candidacy, ask whether your eagerness to fill the role might be distorting your judgment. [8]

Leverage

Once the top candidate has been identified, the leader has to close them, sometimes requiring multiple rounds of negotiation across a range of issues. The leader's goal shouldn't be to extract the most concessions possible from the candidate. By adopting such an aggressive stance, not only do they run the risk of losing the best candidates over relatively minor differences, they also increase the likelihood that a qualified candidate will accept the role begrudgingly, or that only less-qualified candidates will remain available, in either case sowing the seeds of future difficulties.

But it can be equally problematic when a leader is so anxious to fill a role that they give up their leverage in the negotiation, making concessions that they later regret. When the dust settles after the hire's completed, the result is an employee who's one of the following:

• Over-compensated: This can take the form of excessive base pay or equity grants, but it may also reflect unsound management practices, such as poorly-structured variable or bonus plans. Even confidential information about compensation rarely remains so indefinitely, and any arrangements that are outside the company's norms have the potential to wreak havoc should other employees come to feel that they're now under-compensated or have been treated unfairly.
• Over-titled: They candidate is really a Director, but they held out for VP. Or they're really a VP, but they held out for C-level. Or the role shouldn't even have a hierarchical title, but the leader felt obligated to award one to close the candidate. As I've written before, "at first...titles may seem cheap--I've even had clients call them 'free.' But not only are those hidden costs eventually revealed, they also tend to escalate--so supposedly 'free' titles ultimately become very expensive." [9]
• Over-scoped: This isn't to say that the candidate is unqualified per se, but, rather, that their ambitions extend beyond their current capabilities, and they negotiated for a set of duties that will stretch them to the point of failure.

Again, the solution isn't to adopt a bare-knuckles negotiation style and pick a fight over every single issue. But if you're a leader in the midst of making a hire, pay close attention to how you feel about the prospect of losing the candidate and the extent to which such feelings might be causing you to underplay the leverage you hold in the negotiations. In this context it can be helpful to better understand your strengths and weaknesses as a negotiator. There's no one right approach, but in my experience there are two distinct negotiating "cultures":

In a list-price culture, there's a high degree of transparency and very little flexibility. An opening offer may not be take-it-or-leave it, but there's relatively little gamesmanship... In a haggling culture, the opposite is true. There's very little transparency and a great deal of flexibility. Opening offers are never take-it-or-leave-it, and gamesmanship abounds. [10]

A challenge in hiring is that you and the candidate probably haven't negotiated before, so you may come from opposing cultures without realizing it, which is a recipe for miscommunication:

When a list-price leader meets a haggling candidate, the leader may be surprised by a seemingly outrageous counter-offer, and the candidate may be surprised by the leader's rigid inflexibility. And when a haggling leader meets a list-price candidate, the leader may be surprised by the candidate's apparent lack of responsiveness, and the candidate may be surprised by the insultingly low opening offer. [11]

Short-Term Pain vs. Long-Term Pain

As I noted in Part 1, a theme here is the belief that the short-term pain will be greater than the long-term pain. When filling an empty role, the short-term pain is evident: Important work is going undone. This includes not only the work that is the purview of the role, but also the work that the leader must defer or forego in order to dedicate time and energy to the hiring process.

It's also not uncommon for leaders to find hiring itself a somewhat painful experience. Even when recruiters or other employees are available to source a pool of candidates and conduct the initial screens, the leader must ultimately spend a substantial amount of time in later rounds with candidates who won't work out--and in many early stage companies the leader is doing all this work on their own. And some leaders enjoy negotiating, but many find it onerous at best. In most cases, the leader is driven to seek relief and put an end to the short-term pain by selecting a candidate and closing them quickly.

However, as I also wrote in Part 1, what gets left out of this equation is the possibility that the long-term pain might outweigh the short-term pain, and perhaps by a substantial margin. Candidates who breezed through a series of unstructured interviews might look the part but be woefully underqualified. Candidates whose defensiveness wasn't surfaced during the process (or, worse, was ignored) will almost certainly fail to fulfill their potential. Candidates who extracted outsized concessions in their negotiation may be overmatched by the role or create perceptions of unfairness, undermining trust in management.  And someone who fits any of these criteria may well need to be managed out or terminated abruptly. The long-term pain of a poor hire is nearly limitless.

If you're a leader preparing for or in the middle of an important hire, you're undoubtedly feeling some pressure to fill the role. But managing your "fear of the empty chair" and tolerating some short-term pain in order to create a more structured interview process, test deliberately for defensiveness, and carefully assess your leverage as you conduct negotiations may well spare you from much more pain in the long run.

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1 (On Termination)

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Footnotes

[1] For more on the shortcomings of interviews, see the following:

• Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection (Scott Highhouse, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2008)
• Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion (Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson, Judgment and Decision Making, 2013)
• Overconfidence in personnel selection: When and why unstructured interview information can hurt hiring decisions (Edgar Kausel, Satoris Culbertson and Hector Madrid, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2016)
• The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews (Jason Dana, The New York Times, 2017)

[2] For more on cognitive biases in interviewing, see Structured and Unstructured Selection Interviews: Beyond the Job-Fit Model (Robert Dipboye, Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 1994) and How Cognitive Biases Make Interviews Unreliable (Huy Tran, TRG International, 2016).

[3] Dipboye, page 112:

Unstructured approaches allow for richer communication among interviewers and between interviewer and the applicant (Daft & Lengel, 1986); as a consequence, those involved in the selection process can achieve greater reductions in the equivocality associated with hiring decisions (Weick, 1979). Second, the political behavior that can emerge with an unstructured procedure can prove valuable in resolving conflict over underlying objectives and alternative job candidates. Third, when knowledge of cause-effect is incomplete and there is no consensus on standards, fairness becomes more of an issue, and the interactional quality of an unstructured interview can provide for greater procedural justice. Fourth, the overall fit of the individual to the job context becomes more important in these situations and as discussed earlier, unstructured procedures seem to provide a better basis for achieving a good fit to this broader context. Finally, it is in these ambiguous situations that the personal commitment of those conducting the interviews is especially important to the ultimate success of the decision, and through providing autonomy, an unstructured procedure may help build this commitment...

[4] Ibid, page 113:

There are several ways that a structured selection process can conflict with the existing system, and as a consequence can be rejected or destructured. In the search for personal satisfaction, interviewers deviate from guidelines by incorporating task characteristics such as variety and autonomy. In the attempt to achieve a good fit to the organization, interviewers stray from the job-related attributes to consider the personality, values, and goals and to allow recruiting, socialization, rind self-selection. Other deviations occur as a consequence of power tactics, such as building coalitions or controlling the decision process. In the attempt to be fair, interviewers deviate from the one-way interrogation."

[5] Ibid, page 94.

[6] Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

[7] A Look at Derailment Today: North America and Europe, page 11 (Jean Leslie and Ellen Van Velsor, Center for Creative Leadership, 1996)

[8] Adapted from Surfacing Defensiveness (Three Questions for Candidates).

[9] Very Cheap, Then Very Expensive (On Job Titles)

[10] Culture, Compensation and Negotiation

[11] Ibid.

 

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 1 (On Terminations)

A theme in my practice is the leader who's been delaying a hard decision. [1] This can be particularly challenging when it involves terminating an employee. Sometimes this reluctance is well-founded, but my clients often look back on these scenarios and wish they'd been more decisive and less hesitant. [2] Instead, they were held back by a set of concerns that in hindsight don't seem to justify their prior inaction. What's behind this "fear of the empty chair"? And if you're a leader in similar circumstances, what can you do about it?

Self-Doubt

Some of my clients are relatively new to leadership roles, and they don't fully trust their intuition. Termination decisions should not be made purely (or even primarily) on an intuitive basis, nor is our intuition is always accurate. [3] But few difficult decisions are made on the basis of objective data alone--when the data is that clear, the decision is easy. In termination decisions there's always some data--the missed quarter, the botched project, the critical feedback--and it's the leader's responsibility to interpret that data and determine its significance.

This involves a degree of intuition, but it's not some sort of mystical process. Economist and psychologist Herbert Simon offers a straightforward definition: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition." [4] If you're wrestling with self-doubt, the first step is creating an environment that's free from distractions, so you can tune into your intuition more accurately. [5] The key over time will be tracking your decisions to assess when your intuition pays off and when it's subject to cognitive biases that lead you astray. [6]

Guilt

Alternatively, a leader may be clear that termination is the right decision, but they're held back by feelings of guilt. They may have hired the employee, and even offered inducements to convince them to accept the role. The employee may be a friend, family member, or classmate, and termination may damage or end the personal relationship. Or the leader may feel that they've let the employee down by failing to provide appropriate resources or guidance.

Guilt is a powerful motivator of prosocial behavior, in large part because we go to great lengths to avoid the actions that induce this unpleasant feeling. [7] But we may also fail to take necessary actions to prevent the feeling from arising in the first place. If guilt is holding you back from following through on what you believe to be the right course of action, the key is emotion regulation. This doesn't mean suppressing those feelings, as I've noted before:

Suppression is essentially an act of make-believe--we pretend we're not feeling what we're feeling and hope to distract ourselves until the feeling passes... In contrast, emotion regulation involves improving our ability to sense, comprehend, articulate and express what we're feeling, and we develop those skills by getting closer to our emotions, not by distancing ourselves from them. [8]

Once you've determined how to prevent guilt from serving as an obstacle, there's still a valuable learning opportunity here for you: If you hired this person, what red flags did you miss or discount? If you have (or had) a relationship with them outside of work, how will you balance your personal and professional relationships in the future? If you failed to provide necessary resources or guidance, how will you alter your approach to management?

Obstinacy

Leaders are often persistent, and that's generally an admirable quality--but at some point a capacity to endure difficulties becomes irrational obstinacy. One way to prevent this is to recognize and write off sunk costs. An under-performing employee usually represents a substantial sum of time, effort and money. Meaningful amounts of these resources were expended to source a pool of candidates, identify the best prospects, select and close one, and onboard them. And the longer they've been in the role, the more resources that have been directed toward their training and management.

Tallying up these resources often fuels a hope that they can be recovered through improved performance and long-term retention. But it's essential to view such expended resources not as investments that may yield a return, but as sunk costs, a concept explored by professors of management Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier in their research on why entrepreneurs persist in striving toward goals when the rational choice is to quit:

An uncompleted goal prevents production costs from being treated as sunk because they are mentally categorized as investments rather than expenses until evidence overwhelmingly disconfirms the likelihood that they will produce the expected return... Sunk costs and time invested are costs of abandonment that grow from delay, further increasing the desirability of outcome attainment for decision makers who do not want to appear wasteful. [9]

If you find yourself resisting an otherwise rational decision to terminate an employee, consider the extent to which you remain hopeful that the resources expended over the course of their employment might somehow be recovered. Now write down the value of those resources to zero, and take a fresh look at the situation. Rather than asking yourself how those resources could be recovered, ask yourself whether you should continue trying.

Optics

Perceptions matter, particularly for a growing company that may be facing a great deal of uncertainty. In this context leaders must attend closely to the narratives that surround the company and actively shape them through storytelling, as I've written before:

Why is [storytelling] such an important aspect of leadership? Because reality is socially constructed, and the vehicle for that process is narrative. There are few ground truths in social structures, organizational life, or interpersonal experience. Once we get beyond the realm of physics, the "truth" is what we believe to be true, and when enough people, or the right people, profess their belief in a given narrative its influence is as irresistible as gravity. The converse also holds, of course: when enough people, or the right people, withdraw their belief in a given narrative, it has no influence at all. [10]

The departure of an employee contributes to a company's narrative and may well be perceived negatively, particularly if they're a senior executive or have strong relationships with other employees or external stakeholders. This is one reason why terminations should be handled in a way that affords the affected employee as much grace and dignity as possible, maximizing the possibility that the leader and employee can agree on a shared public narrative that explains their departure. This narrative will undoubtedly be simplified--public discourse doesn't afford much room for nuance or complexity. But this isn't always possible, even when both parties make a good-faith effort.

In such cases leaders often overemphasize the risk of bad publicity resulting from a termination and resist taking needed action. But in my experience people are increasingly skeptical about such claims, recognizing that adverse publicity about a company in the media or on review websites represents the subjective viewpoint of the claimant, not objective truth. Further, leaders often discount the possibility that the narrative attached to an unwilling departure may be a net positive for the company, signalling a commitment to high performance or accountability for professional behavior.

If you're a leader who's reluctant to pursue a necessary termination because of concerns over optics, first consider how you might reach agreement with the employee on a shared public narrative. This shouldn't be false or misleading, but it will leave out certain details and focus on others in order to serve both parties' interests. This is why departing executives so often profess a desire to "spend more time with the family"--this is never the whole truth, but it is almost always true.

If agreement on a shared public narrative proves impossible, consider how you might judiciously communicate with your stakeholders. To be clear, in almost all cases you should not make public details regarding the employee's performance or behavior in order to justify your decision. This will generally be perceived as a violation of privacy and undermine trust in you and the company. But in some cases you can comment on general standards of performance or behavior, without sharing any details related to this particular situation. Or you may have an opportunity to simultaneously announce other, happier departures with a degree of fanfare, while electing not to comment on the termination. Silence is also a form of communication. [11]

Short-Term Pain vs. Long-Term Pain

An element in all of these rationales is the belief that the short-term pain will be greater than the long-term pain. Sometimes the leader doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of long-term pain--they imagine that an under-performing employee can be retained indefinitely without causing irreparable damage. More typically, the leader is aware that allowing an under-performing employee to continue in their role will cause long-term pain, but they resist taking action because the short-term pain of a termination seems so much more evident and troublesome.

Moving forward with a termination will compel the leader to overcome any lingering self-doubt and trust their intuition. It will require a confrontation with any feelings of guilt and taking responsibility for their contributions to the situation. It will entail admitting the futility of recovering all resources expended on the employee's behalf and writing them off as sunk costs. It will be necessary to struggle to craft a shared public narrative, or to run the risk of adverse publicity if this proves impossible. All of this work will be painful.

In many cases leaders are also concerned about a gap in continuity, which will generate even more short-term pain. The terminated employee's duties will have to be delegated, and it may fall to the leader to take them on. Or this may simply not be possible, causing pain for customers or other stakeholders. Shortening or eliminating the gap in continuity will require an expedited search for a replacement, which is often arduous work under the best of circumstances. There will be no shortage of pain.

But what gets left out of this equation is the possibility that the long-term pain might outweigh the short-term pain, and perhaps by a substantial margin. An under-performing employee can take a toll on everyone around them, not just their manager, and left unchecked this can cause very painful problems. The employee's poor performance or unprofessional behavior is rarely evident only to the leader, and the leader's inaction will be noted and raise questions. The best employees may choose to leave, while others may lower their own standards of performance. And as education experts Steve Greunert and Todd Whitaker have noted, "The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate." [12]

In encouraging you to weigh the risk of long-term pain more carefully and perhaps overcome your reluctance to move forward, please note I'm not suggesting you act rashly or terminate an employee over a trivial offense or a single setback. Very few mistakes are truly fatal, and the ability to grow and learn from failure is a vitally important quality to cultivate in organizational life. [13] But it's also worth considering that your under-performing employee is also suffering, and allowing them to remain in the role is not merciful, but cruel. As the great management thinker Peter Drucker once wrote, "I have never seen anyone in a job for which he was inadequate who was not slowly being destroyed by the pressure and the strains, and who did not secretly pray for deliverance." [14]

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

Merciful Exits (On Under-Performing Executives)

On Firing a Senior Team Member

Fear of the Empty Chair, Part 2 (On Hiring)

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Footnotes

[1] Kicking the Can Down the Road (On Hard Decisions)

[2] Don't Wait

[3] For more on intuition, see Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut? (Interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, McKinsey Quarterly, 2010)

[4] What is an "Explanation" of Behavior? (Herbert Simon, Psychological Science, 1992)

[5] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

[6] For more on decision tracking, see Creating a Decision Journal (Shane Parrish, Farnam Street, 2014) and Decision Journal (Shane Parrish). For more on cognitive biases, see When Heuristics Go Bad (On Cognitive Biases).

[7] For more on the value of guilt, see Guilt and Helping (Christian Miller, 2010) and Avoiding and Alleviating Guilt Through Prosocial Behavior (Mica Estrada-Hollenbeck and Todd Heatherton, Chapter 20 in Guilt and Children, 1998).

[8] The Tyranny of Feelings

[9] Trapped by the Entrepreneurial Mindset: Opportunity Seeking and the Escalation of Commitment in the Mount Everest Disaster, page 679 (Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier, Journal of Business Venturing, 2016)

[10] The Importance of Shared Narrative

[11] "No matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate. Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value... The mere absence of talking or of taking notice of each other is no exception to what has just been asserted." (Paul Watzlawick et al, Pragmatics of Human Communication, page 49, 1967)

[12] School Culture Rewired: How to Define, Assess, and Transform It, page 36 (Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker, 2015)

[13] The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

[14] The Effective Executive, page 89 (Peter Drucker, 1966)

 

Photo by Votchitsev Viacheslav.

Are the Best Salespeople the Best Sales Leaders?

Not necessarily--and sometimes they're terrible. A common figure in my clients' companies is the high-performing salesperson who aspires to sales leadership, is promoted to a managerial role, and promptly fails to meet expectations. In some cases this stumble motivates them to improve their managerial skills, but just as often they have to be replaced, and occasionally they drag the entire sales org down with them. I'm not merely relying on observations from my practice--this dynamic has been documented in the management literature:

Using detailed microdata on sales workers in U.S. firms, we provide the first large-scale empirical evidence showing that firms prioritize current performance in promotion decisions at the expense of promoting the best potential managers. Our findings are consistent with the "Peter Principle," which, in its extreme form, states that firms promote competent workers until they become incompetent managers. In particular, we show that high-performing sales workers are more likely to be promoted, but that prior sales performance negatively predicts managerial performance. [1]

And by sales expert Bruce Sevy, who advises companies on their talent strategies:

GrowthPlay has assessed hundreds of thousands of candidates for sales and sales management roles and we do this in a way that lets us empirically assess a person’s fit to both roles. What we found is more than a bit counter-intuitive. First, only about one out of every six candidates who is a strong fit for a sales role is also a strong fit for a sales management role. Perhaps equally surprisingly, as many as five out of every seven candidates who are poor fits for sales roles are strong fits for sales manager roles. [2]

And by sales SaaS founder Steli Efti, an exceptional salesman himself:

My style of pitching only worked for me. It was a unique way of doing things for a unique person. And by trying to inspire my team to do the same instead of coaching them on the fundamentals, I was taking good, hardworking, ambitious people and setting them up for failure. [3]

What's happening here? There are three underlying factors:

• The characteristics that support exceptional sales performance don't correlate with exceptional sales leadership.
• But many ambitious salespeople remain motivated by status, titles and managerial responsibilities.
• So companies strive to retain top salespeople through promotions while mitigating the costs of their mismanagement.

Part 1: Why (So Many) Great Salespeople Can't Lead

David McClelland was a prominent social psychologist in the 20th century, and his "motivational needs theory" explains the surprising disconnect between exceptional sales performance and exceptional sales leadership. [4] McClelland's research suggests that people have three primary needs--for achievement, power, and affiliation--and that an individual's combination of needs renders them more or less suitable for different professional roles. People with a high need for achievement tend to make outstanding salespeople, as sales expert Sevy underscores:

At the heart of every great sales person you will find a strong achievement motive... What’s special about the achievement motive is that it’s only ever really satisfied by personal accomplishment. It’s not enough that the team did well, I have to excel. And the achievement motive simply adores sales. Sales is the perfect environment for achievement. Sales has everything achievement needs to take root, grow and flourish. [5]

So sales as a profession attracts high achievers, but such people don't make the best leaders. Their emphasis on individual excellence and personal autonomy can cause them to view colleagues as obstacles rather than resources. They prioritize activities that require their direct involvement over building systems that enable groups to accomplish more at scale.

In contrast, great leaders are much more strongly motivated by power. To be clear, as McClelland and his co-author David Burnham note, "Power motivation refers not to dictatorial behavior but to a desire to have impact, to be strong and influential." [6]. The best leaders recognize that power in organizational life is realized through others, and there's a necessary tradeoff between accomplishments achieved through individual effort, and the ability to have extensive influence without being directly involved.

Such leaders also have a relatively low need for affiliation--put simply, they care about power more than being liked. This doesn't mean that they're unpleasant or abrasive, but they're not going to let a desire for interpersonal harmony get in the way of accumulating or exerting the power that's necessary to accomplish their goals.

What does all this look like in practice? In my work with clients I've observed three primary ways in which their highly-effective salespeople typically fail as sales leaders: They're poor systematizers, unable to distill their methods into a teachable playbook. Or they're reluctant delegators, slow to hand off accounts and quick to re-insert themselves at the slightest sign of trouble. Or they're people-pleasers, scared to offer critical feedback and hesitant to hold under-performers accountable. (These failings are distinct but not mutually exclusive.)

Part 2: Why (Some) Great Salespeople Want to Lead Anyway

Not every stellar salesperson aspires to a leadership position, and one of the most valuable resources a company can have is a sales star who just wants to get rich. They don't want to manage, they don't want to teach, and they don't really want to talk to anyone who's not a prospect. Give them the tools they need, and get out of their way.

And yet so many great salespeople yearn for more--why? The specifics vary, but the single most important reason is status, a topic discussed by contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton:

The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. [7]

Great salespeople will get rich, but in some organizations (and in some domains of life) they won't be viewed as high status. I first realized this when I was an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business many years ago, where I was astonished to learn that there were no classes on sales. I eventually grasped that sales was viewed as a low-status function, presumably a consequence of the fact that there's no such thing as a PhD in Sales. The GSB has since added courses on sales to the curriculum, but it remains a surprisingly marginal discipline in academia relative to its vital importance in commerce.

Our desire for status isn't just the result of egomania or insecurity, although these can be exacerbating factors. Even the most well-adjusted among us are subject to social comparison, the psychological process by which we gauge our success in life relative to the accomplishments of those we consider peers. [8] Net worth plays a significant role here, but it's not always visible--and obvious displays of wealth will be viewed as low-status in certain settings.

But title, headcount, and managerial responsibility are the self-evident manifestations of status that accompany a leadership role. The great salesperson who's not content with getting rich and desires higher status, either within the organization or in their personal life, will invariably strive for a promotion--sometimes to their detriment.

Part 3: How Companies Respond (and What You Can Do Differently)

As a consequence of these factors, companies reliably promote the highest-performing salespeople into leadership roles--but why? Are they acting irrationally? Not according to the research cited above:

Finding evidence of the Peter Principle does not imply that firms make mistakes. Alternative promotion policies that maximize managerial match quality may lead to the loss of incentive benefits associated with existing promotion policies. Indeed, a promotion policy that favors top sales workers may provide a variety of incentive benefits that justify the costs of managerial mismatch. [9]

Further, as Sevy notes, "No salesperson worth their salt wants to work for a manager who hasn't 'carried a bag.' This is understandable--who doesn't want a manager who has the experience and battle scars to understand what I'm going through? But it leads to the common but mistaken belief that you can't lead a sales team unless you carried a bag." [10]

My clients who have promoted a great salesperson into a leadership role are by no means unaware of the risk that this person will under-perform as a sales leader--this is often one of our main discussion topics. But they also have to take into account the possibility that the great salesperson who's not promoted (or who's levelled under a proven sales leader) may well become a flight risk, seeking higher status elsewhere.

So if you're a CEO or another leader who oversees sales, what might you do differently? How can you keep ambitious salespeople happy while minimizing the likelihood that they'll flame out as sales leaders? The starting point is simply acknowledging that great sales performance alone is no guarantee of great sales leadership and may actually be a risk factor. Then consider the following:

Promote differently.

In addition to sales performance when making promotions, be sure to assess candidates' managerial abilities. One measure cited in the research is their willingness to collaborate, as determined by the number of colleagues with whom a salesperson shares credit on deals. Collaboration is positively correlated with subsequent managerial performance but is generally not a consistent factor in promotions. And yet in companies where sales managers lead relatively larger teams--and where the cost of poor management would be more significant--collaboration is weighted more heavily in promotion decisions, resulting in better sales management. [11]

You can employ any number of alternative metrics or incentives, from peer feedback to team compensation, but the overarching goal is ensuring that your salespeople know that promotions are contingent not only on their personal performance, but also on their ability to positively influence others' performance. Note that this isn't about rewarding likeability--great salespeople can summon that quality at will--but, rather, about creating an environment in which high achievers are motivated to look beyond their individual scorecard.

Manage differently.

As high achievers, great salespeople value autonomy and will resist anything they perceive as "micro-management" after being promoted into a leadership role. But management isn't micro-management, and you can't simply make a promotion and hope for the best. As I've written before, "It's possible for a less-experienced CEO to get in the way of their senior leaders--but more typically I see the opposite problem. The CEO gives their executives a great deal of space, only to find several months or quarters later that they backed off too far, and some important objectives were neglected and fell into the gap." [12]

Even--and especially--if you're not an experienced salesperson yourself, you can still offer your sales leader meaningful guidance and support in the form of active management. But this may well entail revamping your understanding of what it means to manage, a topic I've discussed previously:

Senior leaders manage people who sit much closer to the problems being solved and who may have more expertise in their functional area than the leader. Directive guidance from a senior leader can be counterproductive by preventing execs and employees from making full use of their own knowledge or from taking responsibility for a problem they would rather leave to the leader. Such an approach also keeps senior leaders involved with tactical details and distracts them from larger strategic issues, which is a particular concern in rapidly growing or changing organizations. An alternative approach for the senior leader is to employ coaching skills to help direct reports come up with their own solutions to the problems they face. [13]

Provide status differently.

Finally, consider how to fulfill a great salesperson's legitimate need for status in ways other than a promotion. Leadership experts Allan Cohen and David Bradford discuss the concept of "currencies," resources that can be exchanged as a basis for mutual influence. [14] Of greatest significance here are what they call "position-related currencies," such as public recognition for accomplishments, visibility throughout and beyond the organization, a reputation for competence, a sense of belonging to a group of insiders, and opportunities to expand one's network.

These currencies are precisely the forms of status that cause a great salesperson to desire a promotion, but they can usually be made available via means other than a leadership role. A challenge in some technology-centric companies is that Product and Engineering are the dominant power centers, while Sales is viewed as less important. Occasionally this is a rational arrangement--product-led growth isn't always a fantasy--but it often reflects a set of biases, as I once observed at Stanford. The key is managing the balance of power across functions, so that your best salespeople don't feel that a leadership role is the only path to high status.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Promotions and the Peter Principle (Alan Benson, Danielle Li & Kelly Shue, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018). For a concise summary of the research that resulted in this paper, see The Best Salespeople Don't Make the Best Managers (Alex Verkhivker, Chicago Booth Review, 2017).

[2] Why Great Salespeople Make Terrible Sales Managers (Bruce Sevy, Forbes, 2016)

[3] Why Great Salespeople Make Terrible Managers (Steli Efti, Close, 2018)

[4] For a discussion of motivational needs theory and its broader implications for organizational life, see McClelland and Burnham on Power and Management. Their original work is best summarized here: Power Is the Great Motivator (David McClelland and David Burnham, Harvard Business Review, originally written 1976, revised 1995, republished 2003).

[5] Sevy doesn't mention McClelland or motivational needs theory in his Forbes piece, but I suspect that he drew specifically on this concept and (understandably) chose not to make an academic reference in an article for general readers.

[6] McClelland and Burnham, HBR.

[7] Status Anxiety, page 6 (Alain de Botton, 2005)

[8] For more on social comparison, see the following:

• Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, pages 33-34 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)

• The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 131-132 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)

[9] Benson, Li & Shue, NBER.

[10] Sevy, Forbes.

[11] Benson, Li & Shue, NBER.

[12] Mind the Gap (On Leading Senior Executives)

[13] Coaching and Feedback Tools for Leaders

[14] Influence Without Authority, Chapter 3 (Allan Cohen and David Bradford, 2005)

 

Image via moviememe1978. If you don't recognize Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, then you owe it to yourself to watch his (very NSFW) monologue, written by David Mamet:

Surfacing Defensiveness (Three Questions for Candidates)

One of the greatest barriers to learning, growth and improved performance is defensiveness, which I define as an unwillingness to accept responsibility for setbacks, characterized by a disproportionately hostile, anxious or evasive response to critical feedback.

Talented professionals typically experience an upward trajectory in their career, with past successes enabling them to take on bigger challenges in pursuit of greater rewards. Most people are interrupted on this journey, reaching a point where their capabilities are insufficient to meet the challenge at hand. Optimally they view this as a learning opportunity and adapt in response, enabling continued progress, albeit sometimes in new directions.

But some people feel threatened by the idea that a setback may be a consequence of their own limitations, and they search frantically for other explanations, other figures to blame. And some unlucky people don't experience a meaningful setback until relatively late in life--as the Rev. William Swing once noted, "Some people don't conspicuously fail until they are 45 years old, and it devastates them." [1]

Whatever the cause, it's not uncommon for previously successful professionals to experience difficulties and respond with defensiveness. A theme in my practice is the leader who's struggling to manage a senior employee who's under-performing and is unwilling to acknowledge and accept critical feedback, let alone learn from it. [2]

In some of these cases it's certainly possible for the leader to intervene and help the person make progress toward overcoming their defensiveness. But this requires a willingness to change [3], a degree of psychological safety in the environment [4], and sufficient time and resources to address the issue--and all of these factors are likely to be in short supply when performance is suffering.

So in many cases it's not possible for the leader to help a senior employee overcome defensiveness, and the all-too-typical result is a messy termination. The key to minimizing these situations is surfacing defensiveness in the hiring process, well before it becomes a problem. This enables the leader to assess the potential cost of dealing with the person's defensiveness and weigh it against their likely contributions.

I'm not suggesting that employers automatically rule out candidates who manifest any sign of defensiveness. As the great management thinker Peter Drucker once wrote, "The idea that there are 'well-rounded' people, people who have only strengths and no weaknesses...is a prescription for mediocrity if not for incompetence. Strong people always have strong weaknesses, too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys." [5]

And it's a fact of life that we make exceptions for particularly talented people and tolerate their shortcomings, including defensiveness. That said, a defensive senior employee will impose a high cost on their leader, their colleagues and the organization as a whole. And on balance my clients who've had to deal with such people wish they hadn't made the hire in the first place or moved more quickly to terminate them. [6]

So what does this look like in practice? Here are three questions to ask candidates during the interview process, and in this order (although not all three may be necessary):

1. Tell me about a time when things went wrong.

If the candidate can't answer this question thoughtfully, that's an initial red flag, suggesting that they're unwilling to be forthright about their setbacks or unable to observe and interpret such situations without experiencing distress. But some candidates will provide an adequate answer while leaving themselves out of the story, blaming the setback on the failings of others or inescapable misfortune. In these cases, proceed to the next question:

2. Tell me about a time when you made a mistake.

The wording here is deliberate, providing the candidate with an opportunity to take responsibility for a setback without using unduly fraught language. We all "make mistakes," and only the most defensive among us will refuse to admit it. Still, some candidates will respond with an example in which the consequences of their mistake were relatively trivial, providing little data on their capacity to acknowledge and learn from serious missteps. In these cases, proceed to the final question:

3. Tell me about a time when you failed.

The wording here is also deliberate, inviting the candidate to identify a situation in which they bore personal responsibility for a meaningful setback. Some candidates who were less forthcoming in response to the first two questions will finally avail themselves of this opportunity--and others will not, providing examples of inconsequential "failures," or evading the idea that they failed, finding others to take the blame.

If a candidate's unable to provide a satisfactory response to any of these questions, consider that a likely sign of defensiveness, and assess your capacity to take on the additional burden of dealing with it in the event that they suffer a setback in the role. To be clear, we're all prone to defensiveness under certain circumstances, and you may well determine that the candidate's strengths outweigh this particular weakness. But don't be caught by surprise--should you hire them, be prepared to improve your ability to provide effective critical feedback. [7]

 

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Footnotes

[1] Rev. William Swing on Failures and Daydreams

[2] Why Executives Derail and What You Can Do About It

[3] Why Change Is Hard

[4] Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination

[5] The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, page 72 (Peter Drucker, 1966 / 2006)

[6] Merciful Exits (On Under-Performing Executives)

[7] How to Deliver Critical Feedback

 

For Further Reading

Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

Interviewing for Values Alignment (Itamar Goldminz, 2020)

Hiring Isn't Rocket Science: Why the Most Boring Strategy Is Best (Laszlo Bock, Behavioral Scientist, 2019)

How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews (Iris Bohnet, Harvard Business Review, 2016)

Hiring as Cultural Matching (Lauren Rivera, American Sociological Review, 2012)

Look Beyond "Culture Fit" When Hiring (Dylan Walsh, discussing work by Amir Goldberg and colleagues, 2018)

How to Improve the Accuracy and Reduce the Cost of Personnel Selection (Don Moore, California Management Review, 2017)

What's going on here, with this human? (Graham Duncan)

How to conduct interviews so good, candidates will thank you for rejecting them (Jennifer Kim, Safe for Work, 2023)

 

Photo by West Point.

A Leader's Offsite Survival Guide

I talk frequently with clients who are preparing to hold an offsite with their employees, and at the moment some of these gatherings are the first in-person events they've held in years. If you're in similar circumstances, whether it's a full-company retreat or a small gathering of the executive team, here are ten issues to consider before, during and after your event:

1. To Facilitate or Not to Facilitate?

The question of whether to engage an external facilitator will be influenced by your budget, timeline, and the availability of capable providers, but the determining factor should be the role you want to play during the event. An external facilitator can take on a number of functions often fulfilled by the leader, with a particular focus on process, group dynamics and time management. This can free you up to be a more active participant without dictating the outcome.

An external facilitator is also an independent figure operating outside of the organization's power structure, which enables them to do some things that you can't. This won't happen if a facilitator is too deferential to you (or is perceived to be), so it's essential that they have the ability to strike the right balance. But by serving as another source of authority without usurping yours, an experienced facilitator can have a liberating effect on everyone, including you.

2. The Agenda

It can be tempting to craft the agenda on your own and announce it to your team. This will be more efficient, but when people have no sense of ownership over the agenda, they feel no responsibility for the outcome. It can be equally tempting to delegate the agenda to employees or your facilitator. This will also be more efficient, but you may be unpleasantly surprised to find that the agenda fails to reflect your priorities. Instead, view the process of creating the agenda as an investment in the event's success and an opportunity to build commitment. [1]

Offsites serve various purposes, but they all have the potential to foster stronger relationships and an enhanced sense of social cohesion. This doesn't happen automatically, however, and these goals should be reflected in your agenda. This may involve formal activities explicitly aimed at interpersonal dynamics, but that's not always necessary or even desirable. But at the very least there should be ample time for informal interactions at the beginning and end of each day and in between all formal activities. One of the most common mistakes I see in offsite planning is an over-stuffed agenda that leaves no room for mingling and small talk, which are particularly valuable aspects of in-person experiences. [2]

3. The Welcome

A theme in my practice is the symbolic dimension of leadership. You don't merely make strategic decisions and allocate resources--you also serve as an avatar, a figure who personifies your organization. [3] This role takes on a heightened importance when your team gathers together and looks to you to signify the meaning and purpose of the event. There will be just such a moment at the offsite when everyone is finally assembled, and you'll have an opportunity to kick things off with a few remarks.

If the entire company is present this may take place in a ballroom or as a formal keynote, but no matter the size of the event it's a moment when you'll be onstage. There's no need to speak at great length--this may be counter-productive, especially if people are eager to get started or fatigued after a day of travel. But make the most of the opportunity by having some points prepared that will set the right tone.

4. The Spotlight and the Microscope

If the event is sufficiently large you may spend a portion of it on a literal stage, but remember that you'll be under a spotlight--and a microscope--the entire time. Your comments, demeanor and body language will be closely scrutinized. Even the most seemingly casual interactions will be viewed by your colleagues as potentially significant, a dynamic that will be heightened when facing junior employees who may be meeting you for the first and only time.

This can be exhausting, particularly if you haven't participated in many in-person events in recent years. While dinner and other evening activities are as important as everything else on the agenda--see below--be sure to plan for some downtime alone in your room or at home. Do not try to catch up with other work or personal responsibilities at the end of the day--get some rest instead.

5. Going Offline

Even if your entire company is participating in the offsite, you'll undoubtedly have other stakeholders whose daily lives will continue uninterrupted and who may expect you to be as readily available as always. Some parties may have a legitimate claim on your attention, such as users of mission-critical services who view you as the point of contact in the event of a crisis. But in my experience a great many "crises" can be handled without escalation as long as an appropriate contingency plan is in place.

The problem is that many leaders are unable to unplug from the constantly-available data alerting them to potential issues. [4] They short-circuit any contingency plans by diving into the weeds at the slightest provocation. There's no single solution, but recognize that one cost of such responsiveness will be a clear signal to your employees that neither they nor the offsite merit your full attention, and they will probably follow your example.

6. Eating (and Drinking)

An ample body of research suggests that eating together contributes to stronger relationships among colleagues. [5] In addition to opportunities for mingling and small talk, noted above, this is why meals and coffee breaks during an offsite can be as valuable as the formal sessions. You may choose to deepen existing relationships or to engage with people you don't see regularly, but bear in mind that while these activities may be optional for others, they're obligatory for you, and your presence (or absence) will be noted.

If you don't drink, I'm certainly not suggesting that it's necessary. But in many settings moderate alcohol use contributes to a degree of sociability and informality that can make hierarchical relationships warmer and more personal, and your presence is more important than whether or not you imbibe. As the leader of a global professional services firm once told me, only half-jokingly, "At the end of the day, you have to join your team in the bar. You can't be among the last group there at closing time, but you do have to go." You can always order a Gibson. [6]

7. The Hot Tub

Hot tubs are an HR nightmare waiting to happen, and if your event planner has an ounce of sense there will be none at the venue, but sometimes this is unavoidable. While you may have to go to the bar, take the opposite approach here: Under no circumstances get in (or even near) the hot tub. If there are more than a hundred people in attendance over several nights, expect at least one incident that will require the attention of your senior People leader and possibly your labor & employment counsel, and make sure they're prepared. (I'm being a little flippant here, but I'm not joking!)

8. The Goodbye

Just as your opening remarks played a meaningful ceremonial role, you'll also have an opportunity to close the proceedings. Again, with large groups this may take place during a keynote in a ballroom or on a stage, but even with small teams in an informal setting people will look to you to demarcate the ending, and you may have to seize the moment before everyone begins drifting away.

One of the reasons this moment matters so much is what psychologists call the "peak-end rule"--our memories of events are disproportionately influenced by how we feel during the periods of greatest emotional intensity and at the ending. [7] No matter what happened beforehand, your closing remarks have the potential to shape everyone's perception of the offsite, for better and for worse. Brevity will be necessary--no one wants to hear a long speech on their way out the door--but don't opt out just to save a minute or two.

9. The Return Home

After an offsite leaders often return home to people who are eager to spend time with them and clamoring for their attention. If this describes your situation, you may find it a welcome respite or it may feel like another form of work--or some combination of the two. To the greatest extent possible, let these people know that you're looking forward to seeing them and that you'll be depleted, which may limit your ability to be present and available while you recharge.

Alternatively, you may be riding a high from the constant interpersonal stimulation at the offsite, and home may feel empty or even lonely in contrast. In this case, you'll be well served by reaching out in advance to people who care about you as a person, not as a leader, and enlisting their support in helping you decompress, whether it's over a meal, a movie, or a peaceful walk. The key is giving some thought in advance to what you're likely to need at home, rather than scrambling to figure it out after you arrive.

10. The Day After

A similar lesson applies to your first day back at work after the offsite. You'll probably feel behind in various ways, and as a result you may be inclined to overcommit yourself. But you may still be recuperating from the event, and you're unlikely to be doing your best thinking. Just as at home, at work there may be a number of people who've been waiting patiently for your return and now feel an urgent need to meet. But consider whether these conversations are truly important to you--they may not be. [8]

Try to keep your calendar clear, at least for one day, and if someone helps you manage your schedule let them know that this is a priority. Even--and sometimes especially--when an offsite goes well, the spaciousness will enable you not only to resume your routines at an orderly pace, but also to reflect on what you learned, making the entire experience that much more valuable.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

[2] Bosses and Birthdays (The Importance of Small Talk)

[3] Leader as Avatar

[4] The Siren Call of Constant Data

[5] For more on shared meals and team-building, see the following:

• Social eating connects communities (University of Oxford, 2017)
• Groups that eat together perform better together (Susan Kelley, Cornell Chronicle, 2015)
• Team Building in the Cafeteria (Harvard Business Review, 2015)

[6] If you actually order a Gibson, you'll get a Martini garnished with a cocktail onion rather than an olive or twist, but according to an undoubtedly apocryphal story, the drink was originally nothing but water, a subterfuge invented by a diplomat or banker to remain sober while fleecing his companions.

[7] Thinking, Fast and Slow, page 380 (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)

[8] Importance vs. Urgency

 

Photo by Bertram Nudelbach.

Weak Ties, Well-Being and Work Today

What types of interactions support well-being? Who helps us feel a sense of belonging and how? And what are the implications for our professional lives today?

A body of research dating back half a century has explored the distinction between "strong ties" and "weak ties" among people, reflected in the amount of time spent together, the emotional intensity and intimacy of the relationship, and the degree of reciprocity. The former typically exist between family members and close friends, while the latter characterize relationships between more distant colleagues and acquaintances.

Influential work by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter showed that weak ties play a special role in the spread of information throughout social networks. [1] Because people who share a strong tie tend to be similar, and because strong ties often overlap, forming a node in a network, people in these relationships tend to have access to the same information.

Weak ties create more diverse connections across nodes, facilitating the dissemination of novel information. This is why you're more likely to hear about a job opportunity through a weak tie, from a colleague or acquaintance, which was one of Granovetter's most important findings.

More recent work by psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, among others, has demonstrated the impact of interactions with weak ties on our sense of well-being and belonging: "Community members who had, on average, more weak tie interactions than others reported greater feelings of belonging. Furthermore, people reported greater feelings of belonging on days when they interacted with more weak ties than usual." [2]

Subsequently Sandstrom and colleagues conducted a broad survey of related research, highlighting several noteworthy points:

• A more diverse social network (including both strong ties and weak ties) contributes to improved physical health.
• Weak ties are more likely to have helpful information regarding difficult life events.
• In some circumstances people prefer receiving support from weak ties rather than strong ties.
• Minor interactions with weak ties help satisfy our need to belong and contribute to well-being. [3]

That last point takes on a heightened significance when we consider that our understanding of what it means to "belong" is often focused on connections with strong ties. For example, in another influential paper psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary emphasized the extent to which our sense of belonging derives from relationships in which we experience lasting bonds characterized by emotional expression and intimacy. [4]

While my own work over the years has demonstrated the importance of safety, trust, and intimacy in supporting improved interpersonal performance [5], it's also been my experience that seemingly superficial "small talk" plays an outsized role in helping people develop these qualities in relationships and groups. [6] And it's clear that we can initiate such interactions more readily with weak ties--and that in many cases it's unlikely or unnecessary that weak ties become strong ones. [7]

Three years after the onset of the pandemic, I think these findings have meaningful implications for professionals who continue to work remotely and for leaders who are seeking to find the right balance of virtual and in-person work within their organizations. Recent data cited by The Wall Street Journal indicates that U.S. office occupancy is at 49 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and that figure has increased minimally over the past year, after rising from a low of 15 percent to over 40 percent in 2020-21. [8] It seems quite plausible that we've arrived at a "new normal."

I spend all day, every day talking with leaders in my coaching practice, and their experience mirrors these figures. With notable exceptions in fields such as biotech or manufacturing, my clients shifted to virtual work in 2020, slowly returned to spending some time in an office over the past two years, and have largely settled into a permanent-hybrid culture. Other than employees who never left the lab or the factory floor, almost no one is back in an office with all their colleagues five days a week. This has a number of benefits, as I identified in mid-2021:

Rather than viewing remote work during the pandemic as a temporary response to a crisis, my clients generally see it as a learning experience that enabled their organizations to become more flexible on a permanent basis. The benefits of this flexibility include responsiveness to employees' preferences, the ability to attract and retain talent in a wider range of geographical locations, and even increased productivity in some circumstances. The idea that remote work prevents hustle certainly hasn't occurred to my clients, although its impact on culture and idea generation is more complex. [9]

But this doesn't mean there aren't downsides to working virtually, or that my clients haven't struggled to address them, as I also noted: "It's becoming apparent that having every individual decide on a daily basis whether or not to join their colleagues in person will be sub-optimal and possibly dysfunctional. Instead, making the benefits of remote work sustainable will require a collective understanding of when, how, and why co-located work is necessary." [10]

The research on weak ties offers compelling evidence that organizations can support employees' sense of well-being and belonging by creating opportunities for such interactions among colleagues. I suspect that this is one of the most important benefits of in-person experiences, even (and perhaps especially) when they occur infrequently. But there are certainly ways to foster such interactions virtually, although this requires a much more deliberate and thoughtful approach than simply stringing Zoom meetings back-to-back-to-back all day. What might any of this look like in practice?

In-Person Events

As I wrote in mid-2021, my clients generally reject the idea that all employees need to be in the same building constantly, but they do agree with some of the concerns raised by leaders who want to get "back to the office":

They agree that aspects of organizational culture--specifically relationship-building and social cohesion--are supported by consistent in-person experiences, and they also agree that certain types of idea generation are more effective when people are physically present in the same room. However, they don't agree that everyone in the company needs to be in the office five days a week. Instead, they're determining which groups of people need to be co-located, for how long, and how often in order to accomplish these goals, and this can take any number of forms. Typically this involves more frequent in-person gatherings of the executive team and occasional in-person events for larger, more heterogeneous groups of employees. The key here is recognizing that in-person time is the scarce and valuable commodity, so long-term planning is critical, and time and effort must be expended to make the most of these opportunities. [11]

That trend has continued over the past two years. Most of my clients' executive teams conduct a substantial amount of their work virtually, and most of them include one or more members who live in different locations. But almost all of them get together in-person on a consistent basis, often for several days a month or even one or two weeks per quarter. And these events typically include a mix of structured activities and open, unstructured time intended to promote social interactions.

On a larger scale, most of my clients hold in-person events for functional teams and in some case the entire company. These occur less often, largely to minimize expenses and maintain productivity, but most clients who were holding such events pre-pandemic have continued to support them. And again, such events are generally designed to foster increased weak tie interactions.

Virtual Activities

Many in-person weak tie interactions occur as the result of serendipity and are unplanned--we encounter someone in a hallway, find ourselves behind them in a checkout line, or sit next to them at a meal. But virtual interactions that take place in real time, with both parties present, require advance planning and coordination. This not only adds a logistical burden but can also diminish the perceived value of the interaction, causing it to feel forced or awkward.

We're still in the process of identifying the best ways to encourage weak tie interactions in virtual settings, but there are steps we can take. At the outset of the pandemic when countless numbers of people experienced a dramatic decrease in weak tie interactions as the result of lockdowns, institutional closures, and social distancing, Sandstrom and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans suggested several strategies, including the use of asynchronous channels that maintain a connection without requiring real time presence:

1. Use informal modes of communication.

Phone calls can feel intrusive, and emails seem impersonal. Instead, try reaching out to a weak tie via text message or Facebook. This will allow the other person to respond whenever they can, so you don’t need to worry about reaching out at the wrong time.

2. Don’t expect a reply.

Rejection rates when reaching out to a weak tie are extremely low--in one of Gillian’s studies fewer than 12 percent of people who talked to strangers experienced a rejection. [my emphasis] However...if you don’t get a response, don’t take it personally.

3. Set an expectation for a short and simple conversation.

Your goal is to let the other person know you are thinking about them and open up the opportunity to chat, if they want to. It’s okay to keep the conversation short: In recent data one of us collected, a "just right" conversation with a stranger was about 10 minutes long... [12]

But relying upon individuals to take the initiative to reach out virtually to weak ties will always be a partial solution. Organizations bear a responsibility to develop a virtual culture that supports weak tie interactions as well. What helps?

• Experiment with a range of virtual activities that go beyond business-as-usual: Rituals for Virtual Meetings (Kürşat Özenç and Glenn Fajardo, 2021) [13]
• Create more space for small talk and serendipity by managing time effectively: Take Five (Stop Meeting Back-to-Back-to-Back!)
• Provide support so employees can invest in tools and equipment to improve their virtual experience: Better Conditions for Working Remotely.

And on occasion, even weak ties may want to invest some time and energy to get to know each other better and perhaps grow a little stronger:

• CONNECTIONS: Meaningful Virtual Conversations

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Strength of Weak Ties (Mark Granovetter, American Journal of Sociology, 1973)

[2] Social Interactions and Well-Being: The Surprising Power of Weak Ties (Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2014). Sandstrom and Dunn acknowledge that their findings don't determine causality: "It is possible that feeling better causes people to interact with more weak ties; indeed these possibilities are not mutually exclusive." Even if causality runs in both directions, my work with many clients and personal experience leads me to find Sandstrom and Dunn's thesis compelling.

[3] Social support from weak ties: Insight from the literature on minimal social interactions (Joshua Moreton, Caitlin Kelly and Gillian M. Sandstrom, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2023)

[4] The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation (Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, Psychological Bulletin, 1995)

[5] Safety, Trust, Intimacy. Also see Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups (Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven Wolff, Harvard Business Review, 2001).

[6] Bosses and Birthdays (The Importance of Small Talk)

[7] Five Levels of Communication

[8] The Covid-19 Crisis Is Officially Over. Everything Changed. (Stephanie Stamm and Danny Daugherty, The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2023)

[9] Four Buckets (On Co-Located Work)

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Why You Miss Those Casual Friends So Much (Gillian Sandstrom and Ashley Whillans, Harvard Business Review, 2020)

[13] Özenç, a user experience designer, has also co-authored a related book for in-person activities: Rituals for Work (with Margaret Hagan, 2019).

Photo by AJ Cann.

Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)

At times a gap emerges between a leader's expectations and employees' behavior, and a theme in my practice is the question of how to close such gaps when they occur. Sometimes this entails adjusting a leader's unrealistic expectations, but most of my clients are striving to achieve something that's both ambitious and novel, and allowing the status quo to determine what's "realistic" may guarantee failure.

So in many cases the challenge is how to influence employees to modify their behavior in order to make it more likely that a meaningful stretch goal will be accomplished. This need not be limited to financial or technical milestones--it includes all efforts to develop a more functional organization. Broadly speaking, there are two very different ways to accomplish such behavior change: enforce compliance or build commitment.

Enforcing compliance is easy at first, but it becomes more difficult with time. People comply when they're either threatened with punishment or promised a reward. This is initially easy because some punishments and rewards are inexpensive and readily at hand: the leader's disapproval or approval, a reprimand or praise, the loss of a bonus or a minor bump in status or compensation.

But this approach imposes increasing costs on both leaders and employees. People comply when they're being policed, which requires management to expend time and effort identifying violations--which people will be motivated to conceal. Many people will find such oversight heavy-handed and resent it, and the best people--who have the most options--will tend to leave.

Further, the punishments and rewards themselves become more costly, both literally and figuratively. When disapproval and reprimands fail, the next steps are reassignment, demotion and, eventually, termination. When praise grows stale and the impact of minor bumps wear off, more effusive praise and major bumps are required.

Even more fundamentally, enforcing compliance fails to address any resistance to the leader's expectations. Debate is stifled via threats and bribes, differing points of view are squelched, and resistance goes underground. Compliance ultimately relies on coercion, and people comply because they fear further and more severe punishments, or they fear the end of the gravy train and the loss of future rewards.

I'm not suggesting that there's no place for compliance in organizational life. We rely on compliance all the time, but it works when there's a shared consensus on 1) what constitutes expected behavior and violations of same, and 2) the appropriate response for various violations. This is most apparent where organizational life meets the legal system, and a host of laws and regulations set out expectations for leaders and employees alike. Violations are met with punishments such as fines or imprisonment. The reward for compliance is simple: you keep your money and your liberty.

But in most of the situations I discuss with clients there's no applicable legal or regulatory structure, nor is there a shared consensus on expectations for behavior. In fact, it's the absence (or breakdown) of such a consensus that typically leads a client to raise the issue with me. How do we define excellence or best effort? How much time and what resources should be allocated to a given task or initiative? What constitutes a productive company culture?

Trying to resolve these challenges by enforcing compliance is often unsustainable and at times utterly impossible. But there's another way: building commitment. When people are compliant, they're essentially passive figures responding to external pressure and unlikely to expend further effort once a minimum threshold has been attained. But when they're committed, they're active agents who are internally motivated to take initiative and will draw upon their full capabilities to achieve--and surpass--a goal.

Enforcing compliance is relatively mechanical, reducing human motivation to avoiding punishments and obtaining rewards. In this regard it reflects the industrial-era managerial philosophy that M.I.T. professor Douglas McGregor dubbed "Theory X" [1], which "assumes that people dislike work and must be coerced, controlled, and directed toward organizational goals." [2]

Building commitment is a far more complex undertaking, but it's also far better-suited to the management of contemporary knowledge workers. And in this regard it's aligned with what McGregor called "Theory Y" [3], which "emphasizes the average person’s intrinsic interest in his [sic] work, his desire to be self-directing and to seek responsibility, and his capacity to be creative in solving business problems." [4]

There's also a relationship with the distinction that psychologist Frederick Herzberg made between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on the job. [5] Herzberg's research suggests that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction aren't endpoints on a single spectrum, but two distinct scales. Satisfaction is derived from sources of intrinsic motivation such as a sense of achievement, recognition, responsibility, and opportunities for growth.

In contrast, sources of extrinsic motivation (also known as "hygiene factors") such as working conditions, compensation, status, and security generate dissatisfaction if they're perceived as inadequate. Compliant people remain so only as long as they aren't too dissatisfied, but the absence of punishment and the promise of rewards doesn't generate sustained motivation. Committed people are motivated, and the fulfillment they find in the pursuit of their aims makes them more likely to persist in the face of difficulties.

As noted above, it gets more difficult and expensive to apply the right mix of punishments and rewards necessary to obtain compliance. Commitment is also costly, but more than money it requires other equally precious and limited resources, most notably the leader's time, attention and creative energy. So what does this look like in practice? How does a leader build commitment?

Dialogue

There's a reason why we use the phrase "disagree and commit." [6] So the first step is ensuring an open dialogue in which disagreements can be aired and a range of factors addressed: the leader's expectations, employees' existing behavior, any gaps that exist between the two, potential explanations for said gaps, the organization's relevant goals, and the assumption that alternative behaviors will increase the likelihood of successful outcomes.

This inevitably requires a willingness on the leader's part to have some tough conversations in which resistance to their expectations can be safely expressed and explored. That doesn't mean leaders must defer to any resistance. But the absence of a free-flowing dialogue in which disagreement is welcomed ensures that any efforts to motivate behavior change will eventually default to enforcing compliance, whatever the leader's intentions.

Influence

Engaging in a dialogue presents a leader with opportunities to exert influence. And note the distinction between influence and coercion--the latter relies upon a simplistic formula of threats and rewards to induce behavior change, while the former is a much more nuanced process. The leader seeking to exert influence acknowledges and respects others' right to choose and expends time and effort to win them over.

This doesn't mean that people are free to opt out with no consequences. Rejecting the leaders' expectations may result in a loss of opportunities, a reassigned role, or expulsion from the organization. But the leader who is seeking to build commitment through influence will make these consequences clear at the outset (or restore clarity when it's been lost), so that people can make both positive and negative choices with full awareness and agency.

Work by psychologist Robert Cialdini identifies six factors that make us more (or less) open to another's influence. [7] While it may take years to master these principles, simply understanding Cialdini's framework provides a leader with a starting point to guide their efforts:

• Likeability: We respond to people who convey warmth.
• Reciprocity: We repay favors.
• Social proof: We follow others' example.
• Consistency: We strive to live up to stated commitments.
• Authority: We defer to experts and authoritative figures.
• Scarcity: We're anxious about potential losses or insufficiency.

Norms

The leader's aspiration is to have their expectations result in a set of behavioral norms, which are "social regularities that individuals feel obligated to follow, and patterns of behavior based on shared beliefs about how individuals should behave." [8] But it's important to recognize that compliant people have not adopted the leader's expectations as norms--they've adopted the norm of doing whatever it takes to avoid punishments and obtain rewards. When punishments and rewards no longer suffice (or grow too costly to implement), compliance will vanish.

In contrast, committed people have adopted the leader's expectations as norms, and in so doing have come to internalize such expectations as their own--very possibly because engaging in open dialogue enabled them to influence the leader as well. And it's absolutely futile to try to establish norms in the absence of dialogue and mutual influence. The results aren't norms at all, but merely a set of rules, and we only follow rules when we're being policed--which brings us right back to compliance and coercion.

But even arriving at a set of shared beliefs about how people should behave isn't necessarily sufficient to cause people to feel obligated to act accordingly. We've all participated in groups and organizations that proclaimed a lofty set of values that everyone agreed with in principle but were routinely ignored in practice--the proverbial "plaque on the wall." Once the dialogue and influence process has yielded a set of shared beliefs, what else is needed to transform those beliefs into norms?

• Sufficient mutual esteem among members so that its withdrawal would be felt as a loss by any individual.
• A willingness by members to openly acknowledge a norm violation by a peer.
• A willingness by members to withhold esteem from a peer as a consequence of a norm violation.

I define this as a high-accountability, high-empathy culture. [9] It's not merely a high-accountability culture, in which people are harshly punished for their lack of compliance, nor it is a merely high-empathy culture in which people are richly rewarded for following the rules. In such a setting leaders do very little policing at all--instead, employees hold themselves accountable because of their shared beliefs regarding productive behavior coupled with their desire to avoid the loss of mutual esteem.

Again, all of this takes ample amounts of time, attention, and creative energy--and even many well-intentioned leaders are unable or unwilling to make these investments, so they wind up relying upon compliance. Which works, until suddenly it doesn't.

 

This is a companion piece to the following:

• Hard Problems in Soft Cultures
• Accountability and Empathy (Are Not Mutually Exclusive)
• Rules Aren't Norms (On Company Values)

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FOOTNOTES

[1] "The Human Side of Enterprise," page 6 (Douglas McGregor, Leadership and Motivation, 1966):

With respect to people, [Theory X management] is a process of directing their efforts, motivating them, controlling their actions, modifying their behavior to fit the needs of the organization. Without this active intervention by management, people would be passive--even resistant--to organizational needs. They must therefore be persuaded, rewarded, punished, controlled--their activities must be directed... Behind this conventional theory there are several additional beliefs--less explicit, but widespread:

• The average man is by nature indolent—he works as little as possible.
• He lacks ambition, dislikes responsibility, prefers to be led.
• He is inherently self-centered, indifferent to organizational needs.
• He is by nature resistant to change.

This essay is McGregor's best-known and most influential work--it originated as a speech on the Fifth Anniversary of the School of Industrial Management at MIT (later known as the Sloan School) in 1957, and was published in the American Management Association's Management Review in November of that year. It subsequently formed the basis of his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise. My citations here are from a posthumous collection of McGregor's work issued by MIT two years after his death to commemorate his contributions.

[2] Beyond Theory Y (John Morse and Jay Lorsch, Harvard Business Review, 1970)

[3] McGregor, pages 15-16:

People are not by nature passive or resistant to organizational needs. They have become so as a result of experience in organizations.

The motivation, the potential for development, the capacity for assuming responsibility, the readiness to direct behavior toward organizational goals are all present in people. Management does not put them there. It is a responsibility of management to make it possible for people to recognize and develop these human characteristics for themselves.

The essential task of management is to arrange organizational conditions and methods of operation so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives.

This is a process primarily of creating opportunities, releasing potential, removing obstacles, encouraging growth, providing guidance. It is what Peter Drucker has called "management by objectives" in contrast to "management by control."

And I hasten to add that it does not involve the abdication of management, the absence of leadership, the lowering of standards, or the other characteristics usually associated with the "soft" approach under Theory X.

[4] Morse and Lorsch, HBR.

[5] One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? (Frederick Herzberg, Harvard Business Review, originally published 1968, republished 2003)

[6] While the principle of "disagree and commit" seems to have originated with Andy Grove or Scott McNealy, Jeff Bezos provided a useful definition in his 1997 letter to shareholders:

Use the phrase "disagree and commit." This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, "Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?" By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time... [emphasis mine]

[7] The most concise articulation of Cialdini's model can be found in this classic Harvard Business Review article: Harnessing the Science of Persuasion (2001). Cialdini discusses his work more thoroughly in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2021, 3rd ed. / 1984, 1st ed.) He also explains the principles of persuasion on his own website. (On that page he adds a seventh principle--"unity"--but that was not an element in his original framework, and I omit it here.) For further reading:

• The Language of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2008)
• The Uses (and Abuses) of Influence (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2013)

[8] From Rules Aren't Norms (On Company Values). (The section above on norms is adapted from this piece.)

[9] Accountability and Empathy (Are Not Mutually Exclusive)

 

Photos: Police car by Scott Davidson. Tug-of-war by Napat Chaichanasiri.