A Framework for Understanding VUCA

Executives have taken to using the military acronym VUCA–Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity–to describe the world in which they operate and to ask that question: In a VUCA world, what’s the point of strategy?

Strategy does still have a purpose, but building one in a VUCA environment requires more nuanced thinking. And treating those four traits as a single idea leads to poorer decision making. 

Watch and listen as Nathan Bennett provides a framework, first featured in an HBR article, for how you should deal with a world that includes V, and U, and C, and A.

A Framework for Understanding VUCA

Measuring the Return on Character

When we hear about unethical executives whose careers and companies have gone down in flames, it’s sadly unsurprising. Hubris and greed have a way of catching up with people, who then lose the power and wealth they’ve so fervently pursued. But is the opposite also true? Do highly principled leaders and their organizations perform especially well?

They do, according to a new study by KRW International, a Minneapolis-based leadership consultancy. The researchers found that CEOs whose employees gave them high marks for character had an average return on assets of 9.35% over a two-year period. That’s nearly five times as much as what those with low character ratings had; their ROA averaged only 1.93%.

Character is a subjective trait that might seem to defy quantification. To measure it, KRW cofounder Fred Kiel and his colleagues began by sifting through the anthropologist Donald Brown’s classic inventory of about 500 behaviors and characteristics that are recognized and displayed in all human societies. Drawing on that list, they identified four moral principles—integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion—as universal. Then they sent anonymous surveys to employees at 84 U.S. companies and nonprofits, asking, among other things, how consistently their CEOs and management teams embodied the four principles. They also interviewed many of the executives and analyzed the organizations’ financial results. When financial data was unavailable, leaders’ results were excluded.

At one end of the spectrum are the 10 executives Kiel calls “virtuoso CEOs”—those whose employees gave them and their management teams high ratings on all four principles. People reported that these leaders frequently engaged in behaviors that reveal strong character—for instance, standing up for what’s right, expressing concern for the common good, letting go of mistakes (their own and others’), and showing empathy. Examples include Dale Larson, who took over his family’s storm door business decades ago after his father died of cancer, growing it from about 30 employees to more than 1,500 and gaining a market share of 55%; Sally Jewell, a former CEO of REI, America’s largest outdoor retailer; and Charles Sorenson, a surgeon who moved into management at Intermountain Healthcare when the company began to grow and eventually took on the top job.

 “I’m Suspicious If a Report Card Is Too Good” 

Charles Sorenson, the president and CEO of Intermountain Healthcare, was one of the highest-scoring leaders in KRW’s study on character. He spoke with HBR about what he learned from the results. Edited excerpts follow.

Courtesy of Intermountain Healthcare

Do you think KRW measured the right principles—integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion?
 
There are two I might add. One is the pursuit of excellence. That’s partly included in the definition of responsibility—the desire to leave the world a better place. It’s especially important in health care. The other is the courage to do the right thing even when it’s difficult or painful. To make changes in a field as deeply entrenched as health care, you need to stick your neck out.

How have you incorporated the feedback?
 




We’ve made some changes in leadership—put in people who model these values. In medicine and surgery, most of us just remember the last five episodes of patient care and extrapolate incorrectly from them. So it’s wonderful to have an objective measure of culture and behavior.

What struck you most about the responses?
 
We had some room for improvement—but that’s OK. I’m suspicious if a report card is too good. One person wrote that it doesn’t always feel safe to disagree with management. We’ve made progress there, so I was a little disappointed. There was also a comment about conservative attitudes toward women. That’s an oucher for me. We have a lot of terrific women in senior positions.

At the other end of the spectrum, the 10 lowest scorers—Kiel calls them “self-focused CEOs”—were often described as warping the truth for personal gain and caring mostly about themselves and their own financial security, no matter the cost to others. This group includes the CEO of a public high-tech manufacturing firm, the CEO of a global NGO, and an entrepreneur who heads a professional services firm. (All study participants were guaranteed anonymity from the beginning. Only a third later gave permission to use their names.) Employees said that the self-focused CEOs told the truth “slightly more than half the time,” couldn’t be trusted to keep promises, often passed off blame to others, frequently punished well-intentioned people for making mistakes, and were especially bad at caring for people.

Early in the project the researchers expected to find a relatively small relationship between strength of character and business performance. “I was unprepared to discover how robust the connection really is,” Kiel says. In addition to outperforming the self-focused CEOs on financial metrics, the virtuosos received higher employee ratings for vision and strategy, focus, accountability, and executive team character.

Do leaders who need to work on their character know it? In most cases, no—they’re pretty deluded. When asked to rate themselves on the four moral principles, the self-focused CEOs gave themselves much higher marks than their employees did. (The CEOs who got high ratings from employees actually gave themselves slightly lower scores—a sign of their humility and further evidence of strong character.) Fortunately, Kiel points out, leaders can increase their self-awareness through objective feedback from the people they live and work with. But they have to be receptive to that feedback, and those with the biggest character deficiencies tend to be in denial.

How can such leaders get past their denial and overcome their character deficits? Seeking guidance from trusted mentors and advisers helps a great deal, Kiel says. He discovered that firsthand early in his own career. After earning a PhD in psychology, he built two large clinical practices and briefly served as the CEO of a publicly held company. Back then, he says, he was more like the self-focused CEOs than the virtuosos: “While I never engaged in any illegal behavior, I’m sure many of my colleagues in those days felt that I was more than willing to throw them under the bus if it meant success for me.” As Kiel reached middle age, though, he began to feel a sense of moral and spiritual emptiness—and he knew he needed to change. It was a long, difficult process. After all, he was trying to undo deeply ingrained habits. But with practice and counsel he succeeded, and he was inspired to help other business leaders do the same.

If Kiel’s experience (and his clients’) is any indication, character isn’t just something you’re born with. You can cultivate it and continue to hone it as you lead, act, and decide. The people who work for you will benefit from the tone you set. And now there’s evidence that your company will too.

Learn more about KRW’s findings in Return on Character, by Fred Kiel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).

The Eight-Minute Test That Can Reveal Your Effectiveness as a Leader

How can I determine if I am a good leader, or perhaps even a great one? What are my strengths, and do any rise to the very highest levels? I know I have some weaknesses (as everyone does), but are any of them so appalling as to derail my career? 

Many people have asked us those questions over the years. For a truly comprehensive answer, we always recommend a well-constructed 360 evaluation, in which your own views of your strengths and weaknesses are enriched by those of your boss, your direct reports, your colleagues, and other associates.

But as a first step that you can do on your own, we’ve developed an abbreviated self-assessment which you can take here. That will give you some sense of what your leadership skills may be and how they compare to others, right now.

It will take you about eight minutes, and you will promptly receive a feedback report, which will compare the way you’ve rated yourself with similar self-scores of 45,000 leaders in our global database. The survey will also measure your current level of engagement and satisfaction in your leadership role.

Obviously, a brief self-assessment is not as valid as a more-extensive assessment that includes feedback from 10 or more of your colleagues, but it will help you understand which of the 16 leadership competencies we measure — such fundamentals as thinking strategically, displaying integrity, focusing on results, taking initiative, developing others, championing change, exhibiting expertise — are your likely strengths.

A score in the 90th percentile means you have an outstanding strength. A score in the 10th percentile (meaning you’re worse than 90% of the people taking the test) may indicate a flaw so profound it could derail your career. We expect most of your scores will be somewhere in the middle.

But the answers may surprise you. You may think, for example, that your strong points are your technical skills only to find your own responses score you far higher on inspiring others than you might have believed.

With such an understanding you might embark on a personal development plan in which you move toward the goal of becoming an outstanding leader by developing a few of your middling strengths to the very highest levels. Sadly, we’ve found that fewer than 10% of leaders take the initiative to create a personal development plan with the explicit goal of becoming a better leader. Yet without a plan you are relying on luck and circumstance to make yourself more effective.

More’s the pity since, as is often the case, we find a straightforward approach to be most effective: Once you identify your strengths, we’ve found, the surest path to improving your overall leadership effectiveness is to pick one and focus on improving that.

Which one should you start with? Think about which of the leadership competencies you have the passion and energy to pursue. Working to improve a competence that you’re passionate about makes the possibility of change much more likely. At the same time, though, consider what your current organization both expects and needs from you. The intersection of your strengths, your passion, and your organization’s needs defines the ideal place for you to target your development.

Once you identify a competence that meets those criteria, what’s the next step? Can you turn a moderately scoring competency into a profound strength? The answer is yes, though perhaps not in the way you’d expect.

To improve a weakness, people typically use a linear approach. If you were a novice, for instance, who wanted to gain some technical expertise, you might take a class at the local university, read up on the subject, or ask an expert in your firm to be your mentor. But if you’re already strong technically you won’t get very much better with further classes or reading more than you already do.

Instead, you might use your already-strong technical skills to improve your leadership effectiveness if you learned, say, to communicate your expertise more effectively or teach those skills to your team. That is, you could strengthen your strength by developing skills that complement it, just as elite athletes do when they improve their already formidable talents through cross-training.

We have discovered in our research that between eight and 12 of these companion behaviors are associated with each competency. (You can see the entire set for all 16 differentiated competencies, and a fuller explanation of how to apply them, in the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable.”) By focused attention to applying these companion behaviors, leaders can and do make striking improvements.

What are your own greatest competencies?

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

Jack Zenger is the CEO and Joseph Folkman is the president of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. They are co-authors of the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable,” and the book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

Developing Mindful Leaders for the C-Suite

 

 

Time Magazine recently put “The Mindfulness Revolution” on its cover, which could either be seen as hyping the latest business fad, or as signaling a major change in the thinking of executive leaders. I believe it’s the latter.

 

The use of mindful practices like meditation, introspection, and journaling are taking hold at such successful enterprises as Google, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, Apple, Medtronic, and Aetna, and contributing to the success of these remarkable organizations. Let’s look at a few examples:

• With support from CEO Larry Page, Google’s Chade-Meng Tan, known as Google’s Jolly Good Fellow, runs hundreds of classes on meditation and has written a best-selling book, Search Inside Yourself.
• General Mills, under the guidance of CEO Ken Powell, has made meditation a regular practice. Former executive Janice Marturano, who led the company’s internal classes, has left the company to launch the Institute for Mindful Leadership, which conducts executive courses in mindfulness meditation.
• Goldman Sachs, which moved up 48 places in Fortune Magazine’s Best Places to Work list, was recently featured in Fortune for its mindfulness classes and practices.
• At Apple, founder Steve Jobs — who was a regular meditator — used mindfulness to calm his negative energies, to focus on creating unique products, and to challenge his teams to achieve excellence.
• Thanks to the vision of founder Earl Bakken, Medtronic has a meditation room that dates back to 1974 which became a symbol of the company’s commitment to creativity.
• Under the leadership of CEO Mark Bertolini, Aetna has done rigorous studies of both meditation and yoga and their positive impact on employee healthcare costs.

These competitive companies understand the enormous pressure faced by their employees — from their top executives on down. They recognize the need to take more time to reflect on what’s most important in order to create ways to overcome difficult challenges. We all need to find ways to sort through myriad demands and distractions, but it’s especially important that leaders with great responsibilities gain focus and clarity in making their most important decisions, creativity in transforming their enterprises, compassion for their customers and employees, and the courage to go their own way.

Focus, clarity, creativity, compassion, and courage. These are the qualities of the mindful leaders I have worked with, taught, mentored, and interviewed. They are also the qualities that give today’s best leaders the resilience to cope with the many challenges coming their way and the resolve to sustain long-term success. The real point of leverage — which though it sounds simple, many executives never discover — is the ability to think clearly and to focus on the most important opportunities.

In his new book Focus, psychologist Dr. Daniel Goleman, the father of emotional intelligence (or EQ), provides data that supports the importance of mindfulness in focusing the mind’s cognitive abilities, linking them to qualities of the heart like compassion and courage. Dr. Goleman prescribes a framework for success that enables leaders to build clarity about where to direct their attention and that of their organizations by focusing on themselves, others, and the external world — in that order.  Cultivating this type of focus requires establishing regular practices that allow your brain to fully relax and let go of the anxiousness, confusion, and pressures that can fill the day. (Editor’s note: here is Daniel Goleman’s related HBR article, The Focused Leader.)

I began meditating in 1975 after attending a Transcendental Meditation workshop with my wife Penny, and have continued the practice for the past 38 years. (In spite of this, I still do mindless things like leaving my laptop on an airplane, but I continue to work on staying in the present moment.) All of our family members meditate regularly. Our son Jeff, a successful executive in his own right, believes he would not be successful in his high-stress job were it not for daily meditation and jogging.

Meditation is not the only way to be a mindful leader. In the classes I teach at Harvard Business School, participating executives share a wide range of practices they use to calm their minds and gain clarity in their thinking. They report that the biggest derailer of their leadership is not lack of IQ or intensity, but the challenges they face in staying focused and healthy. To be equipped for the rapid-fire intensity of executive life, they cultivate daily practices that allow them to regularly renew their minds, bodies, and spirits. Among these are prayer, journaling, jogging and/or physical workouts, long walks, and in-depth discussions with their spouses and mentors.

The important thing is to have a regular introspective practice that takes you away from your daily routines and enables you to reflect on your work and your life — to really focus on what is truly important to you. By doing so, you will not only be more successful, you will be happier and more fulfilled in the long run.

Bill George

Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and former chair and CEO of Medtronic.

The Importance of Giving Credit

Virtually everyone has experienced or witnessed instances in which credit was assigned in an unfair manner: managers unabashedly took credit for the work of their invisible hard-working staff; quiet performers were inadequately recognized for their contributions; credit was assigned to the wrong individuals and for the wrong things.

If a company reliably assigns credit to deserving individuals and teams, the resulting belief that the system is fair and will honestly reward contributions will encourage employees to give their utmost. On the other hand, if credit is regularly misassigned, a sort of organizational cancer emerges, and individuals and teams won’t feel the drive to deliver their best because they won’t trust anyone will recognize it if they do.

From my experiences leading teams in government, academia, clinical medicine, and the private sector, I have evolved a set of rules to help manage some of the issues with the assignment of credit. These rules are my own and don’t reflect any official policies of the organizations where I’ve worked.

Keep people honest. It is important to demand that individuals be honest about their true contributions to projects and initiatives. And their claims should be cross-checked.

Individuals whose careers developed in organizations where they had to fend for themselves will often err on the side of overstating their contributions. A star performer on one team that I led was often taking more than her share of credit and it was rubbing her colleagues the wrong way. When I drilled into the root cause, I discovered it was bad behavior she learned in her previous job, where unabashed self-promotion was required to rise. Guiding her to be honest about her true contributions and to highlight the contributions of others sent a strong message about our organizational culture.

Recognize those who recognize others. In addition to verifying individual accomplishments, there is a lot of value in recognizing and highlighting cases when individuals take the time to recognize others. It sends a signal that generous and honest attribution of credit is something that the organization values. Early in one of my jobs, I took a few moments to send e-mails to thank individuals who had helped make a project of mine successful and copied my boss. My boss, in turn,scheduled time with me to thank me for taking the time to recognize others. In doing so, he sent an important message that he valued this type of behavior, and it became a habit: Ever since then, I’ve religiously sent similar e-mails to members of successful teams I’ve led.

Look out for and elevate the quiet performers. The best contributors are often the quietest. For whatever reason, they are not worried about credit and are happy to take a back seat. But people in the guts of an organization often know that some of these individuals are the lynchpins who sustain a project or unit. Taking the time to identify and reward the quiet heroes can generate good will across an organization because it creates the sense that there is real integrity.

Remember that there’s plenty of credit to go around. A mentor early in my career once told me that “credit is infinitely divisible” — in other words, there are no limits on how many individuals can be recognized for contributing to an outcome. That said, credit quickly loses meaning when everyone gets it, including people who didn’t do anything. Highly specific attributions of credit always trump blanket statements of praise. And the value of praise and credit is always higher when leaders and organizations deliver criticism with equal discipline.
Getting the assignment of credit right is important to everyone. It is a driver of high performance. It is a key to making people feel fulfilled and motivated. The very best leaders and organizations get this and spare no effort to get it right.

Sachin H. Jain

Sachin H. Jain is chief medical information and innovation officer at Merck, an attending physician at the Boston VA Medical Center, and a lecturer in health care policy at Harvard Medical School.

Meet Jill Hazelbaker, the Fastest Rising Senior Executive in the Fortune 100

Jill Hazelbaker has advanced faster than any other senior executive in the Fortune 100, according to research in the March issue of HBR—and she’s the youngest leader in that exclusive data set. She cut her teeth in electoral politics, quickly developing the skills and confidence there to thrive at a high-octane company like Google, where she’s now director of communications, internal communications, and government relations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In this brief interview with HBR, Hazelbaker attributes much of her career success to mentoring from “some real greats,” relentless preparation, and a willingness to pick up and move for the right growth opportunities.

HBR: What experiences have had the greatest impact on your career trajectory?
John McCain took a big chance on me when he named me as his national communications director at a pretty pivotal moment in his primary campaign. We were dropping like a rock in the polls, running out of money, and at that point a number of my friends had left the campaign. When McCain offered me the job, I doubled down. I also grew quite a bit working for Mike Bloomberg in his final campaign for New York mayor, alongside Hillary Clinton’s former communications director, Howard Wolfson—in no other world would Howard and I have come together on a campaign but for Mike Bloomberg. There I learned real lessons about understanding other people’s perspectives. I’ve had the chance to work for, and with, some real greats, from McCain to Bloomberg to Eric Schmidt at Google. Early in my career, an adviser to Rudy Giuliani gave me some great advice: “Act like a sponge and soak it all up.” That always stuck with me.

What obstacles have you had to overcome on your way up?
Well, I moved 10 times in 10 years. I’ve become a very skilled packer. You know, politics can be a bit lonely at times. My friends were living out their twenties in New York and LA and San Francisco, and I was packing up for the next race in the swing states. I had a lot of fun, and certainly it was the right decision for my career, but personally, it wasn’t always the easy decision.

You’ve advanced very quickly. Why do you think that is?
I think life generally rewards risk takers, and I’ve always been willing to take risks and move for the right opportunities. Fearlessness is important, too. There’s only so much training you can do before you go for a live interview on TV or give advice to a politician. I think the best way to learn is to just go for it. I’ve always been confident—confidence is different from arrogance—and I’ve always felt like I could do anything that I put my mind to. Work ethic matters a lot, too. I learned that from my parents early, early on. They modeled that behavior for me, and it certainly stuck with me.

How has your youth helped or hurt you along the way?
I don’t really think of it as a “young” or “old” thing. People are simply more or less experienced. As a manager of people who are my peers, I’ve always tried to remember that. And at this point in my career, I’m fortunate to have had a lot diverse experiences. Certainly there were times, especially in politics, when I was aware that I was the youngest person in the room by a long shot. I remember once during the ’08 Campaign, when I was tapped to give a “state of the race” update to then–Vice President Cheney and a number of the major donors and party big wigs who were in this long, wood-paneled room. And I was not only the youngest person in the room, but the youngest person by about 25 years. So of course, in those moments, you can be intimidated. But I’ve learned to conquer fear by working harder and being relentlessly prepared. When I’ve done my homework and researched my arguments, I’ve stayed confident. And when I’ve had setbacks, I’ve learned from them and moved on. You just have to keep going.

Have your experiences differed markedly from those of your male colleagues?
I don’t think so. At every step in my career, I have had really fantastic role models. In my first job in politics, I worked for a wonderful, strong woman who taught me so much about how to conduct myself in a professional environment. And the same thing goes for when I worked for Bloomberg, and now for Google. A great female executive at Google is my mentor and my boss. I think it’s really important for women to have other great women to turn to when the sea gets rough.

Were there any key “crossroads” moments in your career, when you could have seen yourself taking a different path?
Well, sure. I could have stayed in politics, which was interesting and exciting to me. After the McCain campaign, I briefly thought about running for office myself. Thank goodness I had the foresight to recognize that was probably not a great idea for me at the time. Public service is really important, but you need real life experience in order to contribute in a meaningful way. The Google experience—the Google opportunity—was a real curveball. Working in tech was not something I had previously considered. It’s been a great ride, and a profound learning experience.

Lisa Burrell

Lisa Burrell is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

To Get Honest Feedback, Leaders Need to Ask

"The only way to discover your strengths,” wrote Peter Drucker, “is through feedback analysis.” No senior leader would dispute this as a logical matter. But nor do they act on it. Most leaders don’t really want honest feedback, don’t ask for it, and don’t get much of it unless it’s forced on them. At least that’s what we’ve discovered in our research.

We have the benefit of rich data thanks to the more than one million individuals who have completed the Leadership Practices Inventory, our thirty-item behavioral assessment, over the years. The point of this tool is to help individuals and organizations measure their leadership competencies and act on their discoveries. Looking across how all observers of leaders have filled it out, one descriptor got the absolute lowest rating – and even across the leaders’ own self-assessments it comes out second to lowest. It is this statement: “(He or she) asks for feedback on how his/her actions affect other people’s performance.”

When we related this finding to the director of leadership development for one of the world’s largest technology companies, he admitted the same was true for his organization. The lowest-scoring item on its internal leadership assessment was the one on seeking feedback.

Further validation comes from a recent survey conducted by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman and discussed in a recent HBR blog. Not only did they find that “leaders often don’t feel comfortable offering [constructive criticism].” They also discovered that the individuals who are most uncomfortable giving negative feedback are also significantly less interested than others in receiving it.

Why is this? Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone offer this answer in a recent HBR article. “The [feedback] process strikes at the tension between two core human needs — the need to learn and grow, and the need to be accepted just the way you are. As a result, even a seemingly benign suggestion can leave you feeling angry, anxious, badly treated, or profoundly threatened.” For us, this resonated with something that author Ralph Keyes once wrote about his craft: “As authors discover, all the other anxieties — the many courage points of the writing process — are merely stretching exercises for the big one: feeling exposed (in every sense of the word).” A friend of his, he reports, “compared writing novels to dancing naked on a table.”

What’s true for writers is equally true for leaders. Leaders aren’t eager to feel exposed — exposed as not being perfect, as not knowing everything, as not being as good at leadership as they should be, as not being up to the task. And subordinates are even more reluctant to suggest that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

So what’s a leader to do?

It won’t be enough to increase your receptivity to others’ input. It’s highly unlikely that your direct reports, or peers, are going to knock on your door and say, “I’d like to give you some feedback.” If you want a genuine assessment of how you’re doing, you’re going to have to make the first move and ask for it. That’s what leaders do, by the way: Go first.

That’s exactly the approach taken by a vice president we met at a leading Midwest financial services company. He knew the value of direct personal feedback for his own and others’ growth and development. Yet for his team members, the whole topic of feedback “had a big negative tone to it.” He decided it would help if he reversed the traditional process. “We’re going to do things a little bit different,” he told the group. “Instead of me giving the evaluations, you’re going to start by doing one on me.” After a brief orientation, he left his team to evaluate his performance in private. They were reluctant at first, and the process was initially very challenging. But eventually the team completed it, and then, at the vice president’s request, the team delivered their feedback to him face-to-face.

“The feedback that I received was kind of hard to hear,” he told us. But then he added: “And that was really one of the benefits to the group. To take that personal risk — to model for the group that it’s okay to place yourself at personal risk and take that honest feedback. What I hope the team members would come away with was a sense that it’s okay to be in that environment, that feedback is necessary for growth, and then to see how you accept that feedback and then what you do with it.”

This executive provided the proof of how vulnerability can build trust. Because of his ability to ask others for help, his team gained a newfound respect for the feedback process — and so did he.

Feedback Framed as Learning
Getting valid and useful feedback is essential to learning. And learning is the master skill. Over the years we’ve conducted a series of empirical studies to find out if leaders could be differentiated by the range and depth of the learning tactics they employ. The results of these studies have been most intriguing. First, we find that leadership can be learned in a variety of ways. It can be learned through active experimentation, observation of others, study in the classroom or reading books, or simply reflecting on one’s own and others’ experiences.

What is more important, however, is that regardless of their learning styles, those leaders who engage more frequently in learning activities score higher on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership (our evidence-based model of effective leadership) than do those who engage less frequently in learning. The truth is that the best leaders are the best learners.

Feedback is too often viewed through a frame of evaluation and judgment: Good and bad. Right and wrong. Top ten-percent. Bottom quartile. These frames raise resistance. But when you frame feedback as an essential part of learning, it becomes less about your deficiencies and more about your opportunities.

The late John Gardner, leadership scholar and presidential adviser, once remarked, “Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.” No one likes to hear the constant screeching of harpies who have only foul things to say. At the same time, no one ever benefits from, or even truly believes, the sycophants whose flattery is obviously aimed at gaining favor.

To stay honest with yourself, you need “loving critics.” These are people who care about you and want you to do well — and because they care about your wellbeing, they are willing to give you the honest feedback you need to become the best leader you can be.

Appoint your own circle of loving critics. Turn to them regularly for an honest and caring assessment of your strengths and what you need to do to get even better. Listen to them with the same care they have for you. And when they give you their feedback, your only job at that moment is to say “Thank you.”

Jim Kouzes

Jim Kouzes is coauthor (with Barry Posner) of the bestselling book The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations. The book is now in its fifth edition with over 2 million copies sold and has been translated into 21 different languages. He is the Executive Fellow of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

Barry Posner

Barry Posner is the Acolti Endowed Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, where he served as dean of the school for twelve years (1997–2009). With Jim Kouzes, he authored the bestselling book The Leadership Challenge. 

To Get Honest Feedback, Leaders Need to Ask

by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner

"The only way to discover your strengths,” wrote Peter Drucker, “is through feedback analysis.” No senior leader would dispute this as a logical matter. But nor do they act on it. Most leaders don’t really want honest feedback, don’t ask for it, and don’t get much of it unless it’s forced on them. At least that’s what we’ve discovered in our research.

We have the benefit of rich data thanks to the more than seventy thousand individuals who have completed the Leadership Practices Inventory, our thirty-item behavioral assessment, over the years. The point of this tool is to help individuals and organizations measure their leadership competencies and act on their discoveries. Looking across how all observers of leaders have filled it out, one descriptor got the absolute lowest rating – and even across the leaders’ own self-assessments it comes out second to lowest. It is this statement: “(He or she) asks for feedback on how his/her actions affect other people’s performance.” 

When we related this finding to the director of leadership development for one of the world’s largest technology companies, he admitted the same was true for his organization. The lowest-scoring item on its internal leadership assessment was the one on seeking feedback.

Further validation comes from a recent survey conducted by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman and discussed in a recent HBR blog. Not only did they find that “leaders often don’t feel comfortable offering [constructive criticism].” They also discovered that the individuals who are most uncomfortable giving negative feedback are also significantly less interested than others in receiving it.

Why is this? Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone offer this answer in a recent HBR article. “The (feedback) process strikes at the tension between two core human needs — the need to learn and grow, and the need to be accepted just the way you are. As a result, even a seemingly benign suggestion can leave you feeling angry, anxious, badly treated, or profoundly threatened.” For us, this resonated with something that author Ralph Keyes once wrote about his craft: “As authors discover, all the other anxieties — the many courage points of the writing process — are merely stretching exercises for the big one: feeling exposed (in every sense of the word).” A friend of his, he reports, “compared writing novels to dancing naked on a table.”

What’s true for writers is equally true for leaders. Leaders aren’t eager to feel exposed — exposed as not being perfect, as not knowing everything, as not being as good at leadership as they should be, as not being up to the task. And subordinates are even more reluctant to suggest that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

So what’s a leader to do?
It won’t be enough to increase your receptivity to others’ input. It’s highly unlikely that your direct reports, or peers, are going to knock on your door and say, “I’d like to give you some feedback.” If you want a genuine assessment of how you’re doing, you’re going to have to make the first move and ask for it. That’s what leaders do, by the way: Go first.

That’s exactly the approach taken by a vice president we met at a leading Midwest financial services company. He knew the value of direct personal feedback for his own and others’ growth and development. Yet for his team members, the whole topic of feedback “had a big negative tone to it.” He decided it would help if he reversed the traditional process. “We’re going to do things a little bit different,” he told the group. “Instead of me giving the evaluations, you’re going to start by doing one on me.” After a brief orientation, he left his team to evaluate his performance in private. They were reluctant at first, and the process was initially very challenging. But eventually the team completed it, and then, at the vice president’s request, the team delivered their feedback to him face-to-face.

“The feedback that I received was kind of hard to hear,” he told us. But then he added: “And that was really one of the benefits to the group. To take that personal risk — to model for the group that it’s okay to place yourself at personal risk and take that honest feedback. What I hope the team members would come away with was a sense that it’s okay to be in that environment, that feedback is necessary for growth, and then to see how you accept that feedback and then what you do with it.”

This executive provided the proof of how vulnerability can build trust. Because of his ability to ask others for help, his team gained a newfound respect for the feedback process — and so did he.

Feedback Framed as Learning
Getting valid and useful feedback is essential to learning. And learning is the master skill. Over the years we’ve conducted a series of empirical studies to find out if leaders could be differentiated by the range and depth of the learning tactics they employ. The results of these studies have been most intriguing. First, we find that leadership can be learned in a variety of ways. It can be learned through active experimentation, observation of others, study in the classroom or reading books, or simply reflecting on one’s own and others’ experiences.

What is more important, however, is that regardless of their learning styles, those leaders who engage more frequently in learning activities score higher on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership (our evidenced-based model of effective leadership) than do those who engage less frequently in learning. The truth is that the best leaders are the best learners.

Feedback is too often viewed through a frame of evaluation and judgment: Good and bad. Right and wrong. Top ten-percent. Bottom quartile. These frames raise resistance. But when you frame feedback as an essential part of learning, it becomes less about your deficiencies and more about your opportunities.

The late John Gardner, leadership scholar and presidential adviser, once remarked, “Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.” No one likes to hear the constant screeching of harpies who have only foul things to say. At the same time, no one ever benefits from, or even truly believes, the sycophants whose flattery is obviously aimed at gaining favor.

To stay honest with yourself, you need “loving critics.” These are people who care about you and want you to do well — and because they care about your wellbeing, they are willing to give you the honest feedback you need to become the best leader you can be.

Appoint your own circle of loving critics. Turn to them regularly for an honest and caring assessment of your strengths and what you need to do to get even better. Listen to them with the same care they have for you. And when they give you their feedback, your only job at that moment is to say “Thank you.”

Develop the Leaders You’ve Been Overlooking

Say the word leader and most people immediately think of those with business cards that says “manager,” “director,” or other such lofty title. That is, the people who hold positions of stature within a company’s hierarchy, to whom several individuals report, and whose influence comes in great measure from the positions they hold.

But anyone who has worked in organizations knows that there are also people without managerial titles, and who have no direct reports, and yet wield great influence and make critical contributions to the firm. These are the highly professional individual contributors. They may be petroleum engineers in an oil company, software engineers in a technology organization, industrial designers in a toy company, or pilots in an airline.  In many cases they have deliberately chosen not to pursue a managerial career. Perhaps they prefer technical work. Or perhaps they want to avoid the budgeting, reporting, and steady round of meetings that management jobs entail.

In some organizations (like, say, the National Football League), their importance is obvious, and rewarded. In the early 1980s, Jack Zenger heard Michael Eisner acknowledge another such group when Eisner was president of Disney. He talked of the importance of taking care of the people in any organization who made unique, pivotal contributions, and who were easy to overlook.  “In Disney,” he said, “these people are our animators.”  They conceived the endearing cartoon characters and brought them to life through their craft. Even today, when this work is done with computer-generated graphics rather than laborious drawings, that function remains vital to the organization. 

We submit that every organization has such people.  It may be someone in product development who without any direct reports, plays an essential role in the selection and development of new products.  It may be a key salesperson, who because of some unique connection with customers exerts a powerful influence on the organization’s go to market strategy.

In our opinion, these individuals meet the important criteria of true leaders, but they often get overlooked for any kind of leadership development because they don’t manage or supervise anyone and aren’t thought to need training in management basics like budgeting.

Yes, they may be included in the mandatory compliance programs such as safety or data security, but those programs don’t do much to advance their leadership acumen or behavior.

We think there’s a huge opportunity to provide this group with much of the same development experiences their managerial colleagues receive. For several years, we have conducted development sessions for more than 1,000 such professional, individual contributors. Their response to, and the outcomes from, these development sessions have been very similar to comparable sessions we’ve conducted with managers. In particular, we’ve found that they greatly appreciate receiving the same kind of feedback from others that developing leaders receive in 360 evaluations by their peers, bosses, and direct reports.

While they’re not rated by a group called direct reports (since they don’t have any), they can receive, and benefit from, feedback from peers, from their boss, and from colleagues in different parts of the firm.  Some invite feedback from customers and suppliers. (Perhaps we should call their feedback reports “270s.”)

We can see a host of reasons for investing in this group.

First, investing in their leadership development will make these valuable people feel highly valued, signaling that the organization respects their contribution enough to provide for their continuing development.

Second, talented individuals are more inclined to stay with organizations when they feel they are progressing. In most large organizations, a similar percentage of this group is eligible for retirement in the next five years as their management colleagues (that is, more than a half), and their departure would be a huge loss for the organization.  

Third, they will enjoy increased success. These professional individual contributors succeed in part because of their professional expertise, but just as much because of their ability to work well with others, and communicate effectively with other departments and levels of the organizations.  Leadership development efforts can make them better team players, improve their communication skills, and teach them to be better coaches, skills that are particularly important for people who, given their lack of formal organizational power, must accomplish nearly everything they do through informal influence.

Fourth, some of them could well develop into excellent managers, and they could begin such a transition with­out a shift in their formal position. There are obvious advantages to identifying management potential before promoting some other valuable contributor who will turn out to be unsuited or unhappy in that role. What’s more, as they learn to be more effective interpersonally and become more attuned to the people issues, many with management potential may become increasingly open to managerial roles. Even those who don’t will be more apt to adopt some of the perspectives and behaviors of managers—such as being concerned about developing others and not always taking the short-term, expedient path of “Oh, here, let me do that.”

Individual contributors are a huge assets for every organization. Yet they typically fail to show up on anyone’s radar screen for development. We believe organizations are missing a great opportunity to retain these key people, to help them be even more influential, and to prepare a portion of them for key managerial positions in the firm. How could these forgotten resources be benefiting your own organization within the seasons to come?

Jack Zenger

Jack Zenger is the CEO of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. He is a co-author of the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable,” and the book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

Joseph Folkman

Joseph Folkman is the president of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. He is a co-author of the October 2011 HBR article "Making Yourself Indispensable," and the forthcoming book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

Educate Everyone About Second-Generation Gender Bias

More than 25 years ago the social psychologist Faye Crosby stumbled on a surprising phenomenon: Most women are unaware of having personally been victims of gender discrimination and deny it even when it is objectively true and they see that women in general experience it. 

Many women have worked hard to take gender out of the equation — to simply be recognized for their skills and talents. Moreover, the existence of gender bias in organizational policies and practices may suggest that they have no power to determine their own success. When asked what might be holding women back in their organizations, they say:

"It's nothing overt. I just feel less of a connection, either positive or negative, with the guys I work with. So sometimes I seem to have difficulty getting traction for my ideas."

"I look around and see that my male colleagues have P&L responsibility and most of us are in staff roles. I was advised to make the move to a staff role after the birth of my second child. It would be easier, I was told. But now I recognize that there is no path back to the line."

"My firm has the very best intentions when it comes to women. But it seems every time a leadership role opens up, women are not on the slate. The claim is made that they just can't find women with the right skill set and experience."

These statements belie the notion that gender bias is absent from these women's work lives. Second-generation bias does not require an intent to exclude; nor does it necessarily produce direct, immediate harm to any individual. Rather, it creates a context — akin to "something in the water" — in which women fail to thrive or reach their full potential. Feeling less connected to one's male colleagues, being advised to take a staff role to accommodate family, finding oneself excluded from consideration for key positions — all these situations reflect work structures and practices that put women at a disadvantage.

Without an understanding of second-generation bias, people are left with stereotypes to explain why women as a group have failed to achieve parity with men: If they can't reach the top, it is because they "don't ask," are "too nice," or simply "opt out." These messages tell women who have managed to succeed that they are exceptions and women who have experienced setbacks that it is their own fault for failing to be sufficiently aggressive or committed to the job.

We find that when women recognize the subtle and pervasive effects of second-generation bias, they feel empowered, not victimized, because they can take action to counter those effects. They can put themselves forward for leadership roles when they are qualified but have been overlooked. They can seek out sponsors and others to support and develop them in those roles. They can negotiate for work arrangements that fit both their lives and their organizations' performance requirements. Such understanding makes it easier for women to "lean in."

Second-generation bias is embedded in stereotypes and organizational practices that can be hard to detect, but when people are made aware of it, they see possibilities for change. In our work with leadership development programs, we focus on a "small wins" approach to change. In one manufacturing company, a task force learned that leaders tended to hire and promote people, mainly men, whose backgrounds and careers resembled their own. They had good reasons for this behavior: Experienced engineers were hard to find, and time constraints pressured leaders to fill roles quickly. 

But after recognizing some of the hidden costs of this practice — high turnover, difficulty attracting women to the company, and a lack of diversity to match that of customers — the company began to experiment with small wins. For example, some executives made a commitment to review the job criteria for leadership roles. One male leader said, "We write the job descriptions — the list of capabilities — for our ideal candidates. We know that the men will nominate themselves even if they don't meet all the requirements; the women would hold back. Now we look for the capabilities that are needed in the role, not some unrealistic ideal. We have hired more women in these roles, and our quality has not suffered in the least."

In another case, participants in a leadership development program noticed that men seemed to be given more strategic roles, whereas women were assigned more operational ones, signaling that they had lower potential. The participants proposed that the company provide clear criteria for developmental assignments, be transparent about how high potential was evaluated, and give direction as to what experiences best increased a person's potential. Those actions put more women in leadership roles.

Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely, and Deborah Kolb

Herminia Ibarra is is a professor of organizational behavior and the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning at Insead. Robin Ely is the senior associate dean for culture and community at Harvard Business School. Deborah Kolb is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women and Leadership (Emerita) at the Simmons School of Management.