Ask Customers to Use Less of Your Product

Last week I attended an Executive Sustainability Summit hosted by Xerox, Waste Management (WM), and Arizona State University. The short conference brought together public and private sector managers working on environmental and social issues. Xerox asked me to attend and give my thoughts on what I heard and saw*.

What really struck me is that both Xerox and Waste Management are doing something mostly unheard of: they're working with customers to help them use less of their traditional product or service. The plenary panel during the Summit included execs from both companies proudly talking about these fast-growing, service-oriented parts of their businesses. And what's really important is that these are not just niche product lines, but fundamental shifts in what these companies do.

In some sense, this shift is not optional, as both companies are in the throes of fundamental transformations of their industries. Xerox has been navigating the shift to digital documents for years, and WM is facing an existential threat. As CEO Dave Steiner put it, "When your company is called Waste Management, and your customers all talk about 'zero waste,' you better change your business model."

So both corporate giants are handling the industry transitions by embracing sustainability to the core. Xerox's president, North America , Russell Peacock, speaking for the company at the event last week said, "Sustainability...is what is driving the transformation of Xerox to a services-led business."

Xerox advises companies on how to save money on document handling, and holds a sizable 48 percent market share in the broadly defined, and surprisingly large, $7.78 billion "managed print services" (MPS) industry (according to research firm IDC). Part of this new strategy is an outsourcing play — they'll take over all your print needs for you — to grab share. This is clearly not a niche business-this is a firm that existed on selling devices, paper, and machine servicing, so the more it's used the better.

But at the core, what Xerox is offering is less total printing. That's a big shift in business as usual.

Xerox has worked with multinationals such as Dow (case study here) to drastically reduce the number of printers sitting in individual offices by thousands, shifting instead to many fewer centrally-located multifunction devices. But at the Summit, Xerox execs gave an example from their corporate backyard. The company helped the city of Rochester, NY slash the number of printing devices from 459 to just 168, saving a very budget-constrained local government millions of dollars over the next five years.

These printing retrofits save clients up to 30 percent of their document-related costs. And the sustainability story is significant. In addition to using less energy to run machines, slashing paper use also saves large amounts of energy and water upstream in the paper production process.

For Waste Management's part, the story their execs told was similar but goes beyond cost savings and has a measurable financial upside. When WM helps customers reduce waste to landfills — which is how WM has made all its money until recently — it diverts those waste streams to recycling facilities which segregate materials to resell or to waste-to-energy (WTE) plants.

Recycling streams can generate income for customers. So instead of paying to dump garbage, customers may get paid for valuable material, which adds up (GM, for example, has made $2.5 billion on recycling over the last five years). Meanwhile, the other stream of waste will create a potentially significant source of clean energy (adding to the sustainability win). In its WTE plants, WM now produces enough energy to power 1 million homes, more than all the solar power in the United States. From waste hauler to energy company — that's a transition for sure.

These two companies are not the only ones out there going down the "use less" path. It's increasingly common in the B2B space. Another client of mine, Kimberly Clark Corporation, has similar conversations with its customers for its K-C Professional division, which supplies paper and cleaning products to public and private sector organizations. The customers appreciate supply partners that help them save money.

Let's be clear: Xerox, Waste Management, Kimberly Clark, and others are purposely cannibalizing their own businesses. The wisdom of such a strategy has been discussed in business circles for years, most notably in the work of Harvard's Clayton Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma). My tweak to Christensen's famous term "disruptive innovation" is to describe sustainability-driven creativity as even more heretical; it's about questioning the entire consumption model — it's heretical innovation.

It can be painful for companies to threaten their own cash cows, but what's the other option? I interviewed Xerox's CEO Ursula Burns for my last book, Green Recovery, and asked her about this strategy. Talking about Xerox's service business strategy and its "solid ink" technology, both of which displace existing printers, she said, "Will these new products cannibalize our machines? Maybe, but someone else doing it is much worse."

So the choice is not between asking your customers to use less of your product and ignoring the trend...it's about whether they work with you or with someone else. That's the risk reduction logic. But a related logic relies on improved customer service and deeper customer relationships. As Waste Management's Steiner said last week, "We're cannibalizing our own business to give back more to our customers."

Xerox's VP of Environment Patty Calkins probably put it best during the Sustainability Summit: "Who would think that Xerox would help you reduce printing or that Waste Management would move toward zero waste?"

Who indeed.

Source: HBR

Thank You for Doing Your Job

On November 10, 2010, Cisco's stock price dropped 16%, erasing roughly $20 billion of market value in a matter of hours. Had something catastrophic happened? No. In fact, this stock market bellwether had just beat earnings estimates by 6%. The problem? They reported $0.42 for the quarter, just barely clearing the consensus estimates of $0.40.

Those who follow the market are familiar with the earnings game: deliver an unexpected stellar quarter, and a stock can gain hundreds of millions, if not billions, of market value. But match, or barely beat expectations, and the market yawns, or worse, dumps the stock, as it did with Cisco.

Those of us who are in the market understand and play by these rules. But how many of us are guilty of falling into the same "what have you done for me lately?" mentality with our employees? When what our colleagues and employees do every day becomes no more than a benchmark to beat (e.g. the $0.42 of earnings that Cisco did deliver), it can seem unimpressive. We may start to undervalue what makes our organization really hum. Yet if they stopped doing what they always do, our business would surely unravel.

Early on in my career, I had a boss who discounted my ability to connect with clients. My numbers for meetings and phone calls with clients was 40% higher than the firm average, but he brushed off these efforts because I clearly enjoyed that part of my job and it was easy for me. Later, a different boss recognized and encouraged my talent for reaching out to people, and his praise enabled me to further develop that skill. It had a far-reaching impact on my job performance at that company, and in everything I've done since. As my HBR colleague Peter Bregman wrote, "there is no more powerful way to acknowledge others, than to be thankful for them just as they are."

Maybe some bosses worry that praising people for the stuff they do every day will disincentivize them from going the extra mile. But in fact, gratitude can be a vital tie that binds in a workplace.

Consider the investment advisory group Cambridge Associates. As CEO Sandra Urie explained after a recent 100WHF event, "During the recent global financial crisis, we made the decision not to lay off any of our employees. We knew we had good people, and that the firm — and its clients — would need those people when the market rebounded." Not surprisingly, morale has stayed up -- and the Boston Globe has ranked Cambridge Associates as one of the best places to work in Massachusetts in each of the last three years. Even as firms up and down the Wall Street food chain were shuttering.

Also consider this story recently recounted by Bob Sutton: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith put their own jobs on the line rather than carry out layoffs at Pixar. That act, and the gratitude and trust it helped foster, has become foundational to the creative company culture of Pixar. 

But enough talk.

Here's what I propose. And knowing that our "upside surprise" mentality will not be easily overturned, my proposal is modest. Every day for the next week, will you express appreciation to an employee or colleague for something they routinely do that makes your business run well? It can be via e-mail, over the phone, or even better, in person. Be specific. For example, as I take the challenge myself, I plan to say to one colleague, "I am continually impressed by how you can craft such a compelling investment thesis." And to another: "Every day, I notice how meticulously you attend to operations. Because more investment firms have gone belly-up because of back-office sloppiness than because of poor fund performance, this helps me sleep at night! Thank you."

I'll report back here about my experiences in the comments; I hope you will too. As Tom Peters wrote in a recent tweet, "It takes more time, but one at a time, 15-second praising is 10x more valuable than a group 'way to go, gang'."

For a public company to increase its market value, it needs to beat investor expectations by wide margins. That is fairly immutable, in my opinion. But how companies get there is not. Rather than only thanking your employees for improvements, highlight what they already do like clockwork. In a recent Wall Street Journal article headlined, "Thank You. No, Thank You," by Melinda Beck, she cites research by Dr. Jeffrey Froh who surveyed 1,035 high school students and found that the most grateful students had more friends and higher GPAs, while the most materialistic had lower grades, higher levels of envy and less satisfaction with life. There's an analog here for running a corporation. Those that focus only on more and more end up with less; those that are grateful for what their employees are doing today may actually end up with an upside earnings surprise.

Source: HBR

Executives Say They're Pulled in Too Many Directions and That Their Company's Capabilities Don't Support Their Strategy

 













Most execs (52%) don’t feel their company’s strategy will lead to success; two out of three respondents admit that their company’s capabilities don’t fully support their strategy; only one in five (21%) are fully confident they have a right to win; and the majority (64%) agree that their company has too many conflicting priorities.

NEW YORK CITY (January 18, 2011) — The majority of executives in all industries indicate that their companies lack “coherence”: They struggle with setting a clear and differentiating strategy, ensuring that day-to-day decisions are in line with their strategy and allocating resources in a way that supports the strategy, according to a Booz & Company survey of more than 1,800 executives.

The research also shows that companies with more “coherence” — where executives claim that strategy, capabilities and product offerings are in synch — perform better.

“The survey results tell us that deciding on priorities is a huge issue for companies — and that actually linking priorities to decisions is a hurdle that few companies get past. We see this ‘incoherent’ operating environment across industries and geographies, among all types of companies. It’s draining — and forcing companies to pay a significant penalty. We call it the incoherence penalty,” said Paul Leinwand, co-author of the just-released book The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press, December 2010) (www.theessentialadvantage.com).

Executive Frustration is Palpable — and a Marker of Incoherence

According to the survey,

• A great majority of executives (64% of the survey respondents) say that their biggest frustration factor is “having too many conflicting priorities.”
• Executives report that their biggest challenges are (a) ensuring that day-to-day decisions are in line with the strategy (56%) and (b) allocating resources in a way that really supports the strategy (56%).
• Half of the executives (50%) consider setting a clear and differentiating strategy a significant challenge.
• In fact, most executives (52%) do not feel their company’s strategy will lead to success. Only 21% say their company has a right to win in all the markets in which it competes.
• Most executives (81%) say growth initiatives lead to waste, at least some of the time.
• The vast majority of executives (82%) say functional departments in their companies get competing demands from different business units.

Probable Cause of the Frustration: Strategies not Differentiating and Not Focused on What the Company’s Truly Good At

“The root of the problem is that too many companies grab too hastily for what seems like the next answer to growth. They don’t have a solid framework to decide which set of opportunities will lead to sustainable success. They end up stretched thin, trying to play in too many disparate markets. The winners, on the other hand, stick to a well-articulated path to success: They define the fundamental identity of their company by developing a clear idea of what it does best and how it creates value — and focus investment on the capabilities that matter. Growth then follows as a consequence of the strategy rather than as a set of separate and often unsuccessful initiatives,” said Booz & Company Managing Director and co-author Cesare Mainardi.

The survey confirms that few executives find themselves in that kind of "coherent" environment:

• A significant number of executives (43%) say their company’s strategy does not fundamentally differentiate the company in the market.
• Nearly half of executives (49%) say their company has no list of strategic priorities.
• While most executives say their company has a clear way to create value, most (53%) say that this “way” is not understood by employees and customers.
• Similarly, most executives say their company has a clearly stated set of capabilities, but only a third of executives (33%) say those capabilities support the company’s strategy and the way it creates value in the market.
• Very few executives (21%) say all of the company’s businesses leverage the same set of capabilities.
• In fact, most executives (54%) say their company’ capabilities do not reinforce each other.

Bottom Line: Big Problem with the Way Many Companies Set Strategies

“There’s clearly a problem with how a lot of companies set strategies. We passionately believe companies must choose what they will be excellent at — what they will do rather than just what they sell. The survey results, however, suggest that most companies take a somewhat ‘incoherent’ approach,” said Leinwand.

• Most executives (57%) say their company creates strategy by either “pursuing a broad portfolio of strategic options and spreading the risks” or by “choosing an attractive market and figuring out how to be successful in it.”
• Only 43% say their company’s philosophy about strategy starts from the inside — looking at what they’re great at and finding markets that capitalize on those capabilities.

“It’s not surprising that, based on an algorithm applied to the participants’ answers, only 13% of the respondents come from a company that we would deem ‘coherent,’” said Mainardi. (Based on a point system, the algorithm slates companies into three groups — coherent companies, those on the journey towards coherence and incoherent ones.)

The Coherence Premium

The survey results also point to the financial and growth rewards of coherence.

• Executives who say their companies have very few (one to three) firm-wide strategic priorities are the most likely to say their companies have above average profitability and revenue growth (compared to those having more firm-wide strategic priorities or no list of priorities at all).
• Executives who say their company’s capabilities support the company’s strategy are most likely to say profitability and revenue growth are above average. (The same is true of executives who say the company has a clear set of capabilities, vs. those who say the company doesn’t.)
• Respondents whose companies are deemed coherent by the Booz & Company algorithm are most likely to say profitability and revenue growth are above average. (They are more than twice as likely to say their company has above-average profitability than those respondents whose company has been characterized as incoherent by the same algorithm.)

“Companies succeed when they have a well-defined set of differentiated capabilities that connect to their chosen way of competing and their portfolio of products and services. Unfortunately, few companies have these elements in what we would describe as a ‘coherent’ strategy, and therefore don’t have a right to win in their markets,” Leinwand said.

Source: booz&co

Three steps to building a better top team

Few teams function as well as they could. But the stakes get higher with senior-executive teams: dysfunctional ones can slow down, derail, or even paralyze a whole company. In our work with top teams at more than 100 leading multinational companies,1  including surveys with 600 senior executives at 30 of them, we’ve identified three crucial priorities for constructing and managing effective top teams. Getting these priorities right can help drive better business outcomes in areas ranging from customer satisfaction to worker productivity and many more as well.

1. Get the right people on the team . . . and the wrong ones off

Determining the membership of a top team is the CEO’s responsibility—and frequently the most powerful lever to shape a team’s performance. Many CEOs regret not employing this lever early enough or thoroughly enough. Still others neglect it entirely, assuming instead that factors such as titles, pay grades, or an executive’s position on the org chart are enough to warrant default membership. Little surprise, then, that more than one-third of the executives we surveyed said their top teams did not have the right people and capabilities.

The key to getting a top team’s composition right is deciding what contributions the team as a whole, and its members as individuals, must make to achieve an organization’s performance aspirations and then making the necessary changes in the team. This sounds straight-forward, but it typically requires conscious attention and courage from the CEO; otherwise, the top team can underdeliver for an extended period of time.

That was certainly the case at a technology services company that had a struggling top team: fewer than one in five of its members thought it was highly respected or shared a common vision for the future, and only one in three thought it made a valuable contribution to corporate performance. The company’s customers were very dissatisfied—they rated its cost, quality, and service delivery at only 2.3 on a 7-point scale—and the team couldn’t even agree on the root causes.

A new CEO reorganized the company, creating a new strategy group and moving from a geography-based structure to one based on two customer-focused business units—for wholesale and for retail. He adapted the composition of his top team, making the difficult decision to remove two influential regional executives who had strongly resisted cross-organizational collaboration and adding the executive leading the strategy group and the two executives leading the retail and the wholesale businesses, respectively. The CEO then used a series of workshops to build trust and a spirit of collaboration among the members of his new team and to eliminate the old regional silo mentality. The team also changed its own performance metrics, adding customer service and satisfaction performance indicators to the traditional short-term sales ones.

Customers rated the company’s service at 4.3 a year later and at 5.4 two years later. Meanwhile, the top team, buoyed by these results, was now confident that it was better prepared to improve the company’s performance. In the words of one team member, “I wouldn’t have believed we could have come this far in just one year.”

2. Make sure the top team does just the work only it can do

Many top teams struggle to find purpose and focus. Only 38 percent of the executives we surveyed said their teams focused on work that truly benefited from a top-team perspective. Only 35 percent said their top teams allocated the right amounts of time among the various topics they considered important, such as strategy and people.

What are they doing instead? Everything else. Too often, top teams fail to set or enforce priorities and instead try to cover the waterfront. In other cases, they fail to distinguish between topics they must act on collectively and those they should merely monitor. These shortcomings create jam-packed agendas that no top team can manage properly. Often, the result is energy-sapping meetings that drag on far too long and don’t engage the team, leaving members wondering when they can get back to “real work.” CEOs typically need to respond when such dysfunctions arise; it’s unlikely that the senior team’s members—who have their own business unit goals and personal career incentives—will be able to sort out a coherent set of collective top-team priorities without a concerted effort.

The CEO and the top team at a European consumer goods company rationalized their priorities by creating a long list of potential topics they could address. Then they asked which of these had a high value to the business, given where they wanted to take it, and would allow them, as a group, to add extraordinary value. While narrowing the list down to ten items, team members spent considerable time challenging each other about which topics individual team members could handle or delegate. They concluded, for example, that projects requiring no cross-functional or cross-regional work, such as addressing lagging performance in a single region, did not require the top team’s collective attention even when these projects were the responsibility of an individual team member. For delegated responsibilities, they created a transparent and consistent set of performance indicators to help them monitor progress.

This change gave the top team breathing room to do more valuable work. For the first time, it could focus enough effort on setting and dynamically adapting cross-category and cross-geography priorities and resource allocations and on deploying the top 50 leaders across regional and functional boundaries, thus building a more effective extended leadership group for the company. This, in turn, proved crucial as the team led a turnaround that took the company from a declining to a growing market share. The team’s tighter focus also helped boost morale and performance at the company’s lower levels, where employees now had more delegated responsibility. Employee satisfaction scores improved to 79 percent, from 54 percent, in just one year.

3. Address team dynamics and processes

A final area demanding unrelenting attention from CEOs is effective team dynamics, whose absence is a frequent problem: among the top teams we studied, members reported that only about 30 percent of their time was spent in “productive collaboration”—a figure that dropped even more when teams dealt with high-stakes topics where members had differing, entrenched interests. Here are three examples of how poor dynamics depress performance:

The top team at a large mining company formed two camps with opposing views on how to address an important strategic challenge. The discussions on this topic hijacked the team’s agenda for an extended period, yet no decisions were made.

The top team at a Latin American insurance company was completely demoralized when it began losing money after government reforms opened up the country to new competition. The team wandered, with little sense of direction or accountability, and blamed its situation on the government’s actions. As unproductive discussions prevented the top team from taking meaningful action, other employees became dissatisfied and costs got out of control.

The top team at a North American financial-services firm was not aligned effectively for a critical company-wide operational-improvement effort. As a result, different departments were taking counterproductive and sometimes contradictory actions. One group, for example, tried to increase cross-selling, while another refused to share relevant information about customers because it wanted to “own” relationships with them.

CEOs can take several steps to remedy problems with team dynamics. The first is to work with the team to develop a common, objective understanding of why its members aren’t collaborating effectively. There are several tools available for the purpose, including top-team surveys, interviews with team members, and 360-degree evaluations of individual leaders. The CEO of the Latin American insurance company used these methods to discover that the members of his top team needed to address building relationships and trust with one another and with the organization even before they agreed on a new corporate strategy and on the cultural changes necessary to meet its goals (for more on building trust, see “Dispatches from the front lines of management innovation”). One of the important cultural changes for this top team was that its members needed to take ownership of the changes in the company’s performance and culture and to hold one another accountable for living up to this commitment.

Correcting dysfunctional dynamics requires focused attention and interventions, preferably as soon as an ineffective pattern shows up. At the mining company, the CEO learned, during a board meeting focused on the team’s dynamics, that his approach—letting the unresolved discussion go on in hopes of gaining consensus and commitment from the team—wasn’t working and that his team expected him to step in. Once this became clear, the CEO brokered a decision and had the team jump-start its implementation.

Often more than a single intervention is needed. Once the CEO at the financial-services firm understood how poorly his team was aligned, for example, he held a series of top-team off-site meetings aimed specifically at generating greater agreement on strategy. One result: the team made aligning the organization part of its collective agenda, and its members committed themselves to communicating and checking in regularly with leaders at lower levels of the organization to ensure that they too were working consistently and collaboratively on the new strategy. One year later, the top team was much more unified around the aims of the operational-improvement initiative—the proportion of executives who said the team had clarity of direction doubled, to 70 percent, and the team was no longer working at cross-purposes. Meanwhile, operational improvements were gaining steam: costs came down by 20 percent over the same period, and the proportion of work completed on time rose by 8 percent, to 96.3 percent.

Finally, most teams need to change their support systems or processes to catalyze and embed change. At the insurer, for example, the CEO saw to it that each top-team member’s performance indicators in areas such as cost containment and employee satisfaction were aligned and pushed the team’s members to share their divisional performance data. The new approach allowed these executives to hold each other accountable for performance and made it impossible to continue avoiding tough conversations about lagging performance and cross-organizational issues. Within two years, the team’s dynamics had improved, along with the company’s financials—to a return on invested capital (ROIC) of 16.6 percent, from –8.8 percent, largely because the team collectively executed its roles more effectively and ensured that the company met its cost control and growth goals.

Each top team is unique, and every CEO will need to address a unique combination of challenges. As the earlier examples show, developing a highly effective top team typically requires good diagnostics, followed by a series of workshops and field work to address the dynamics of the team while it attends to hard business issues. When a CEO gets serious about making sure that her top team’s members are willing and able to help meet the company’s strategic goals, about ensuring that the team always focuses on the right topics, and about managing dynamics, she’s likely to get results. The best top teams will begin to take collective responsibility and to develop the ability to maintain and improve their own effectiveness, creating a lasting performance edge.

Source: Mckinsey Quarterly

Three Times You Have to Speak Up

It was said of Abbot Agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent.

I was thinking about that story by Thomas Merton during a recent board meeting.

The CEO and CFO were marching through their 112-slide presentation. Recent market updates, a technical deconstruction of various trends, then product frameworks — all in quick succession.

One board member sighed deeply. Another glanced surreptitiously down at the BlackBerry in his lap, perhaps thinking no one would notice. Some of the other people at the table were staring out the window at the grey day. It was not a highly engaged moment — but it was an all-too familiar one.

Is this a case of PowerPoint burnout or BlackBerry addiction? Or was there something more meaningful happening? Were they, I wondered, placing an imaginary stone (or two or three) in their mouths? What if this scene was not a demonstration of apathy but the application of wisdom?

Early on in our careers, we might speak up without concern or context. Or we might be reticent to speak up, fearful of what others might think, perhaps remembering the famous quip attributed to Lincoln: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." Or perhaps we have wondered, as others have, if it's worth the cost of speaking up. Enthusiasm, naïveté, fear of repercussions, conformity to the group norms, and even wisdom are all things that can influence whether someone speaks up or not.

Perhaps the question is less "should I speak up?" than "when should I speak up?" To that end, we can ask ourselves more nuanced questions, like:

    * How will it improve the process?

    * Do I know something that will benefit the organization?

    * Of course, underlying all that...does anything need to be said at all?

Seen with that context, the board's silence could be a deliberate choice. In complex organizations and complex times, we face complex choices. We don't get to optimize all products, go after all markets, or add all programs. There are choices to be made in dollars and resources and even if we make our opinion known. Each person could be biding their time until a private closed-door moment, or they could be letting the rest of the presentation unfold before jumping in. The choice to stay quiet may very well be a good one.

Or their passivity could be a state of denial, an unwillingness to engage debate, avoiding unnecessary conflict, or fear of standing out from the others. And that would be a bad thing, especially when it comes to the cost to the organization.

Because silence does have a cost. When great debacles get dissected, very often the underlying tension of why the issue went wrong was that no one spoke up. It happened during the Kennedy Administration's Bay of Pigs fiasco when "groupthink" carried the day. And it happened again when the Challenger space shuttle exploded during liftoff because of a poor decision-making process. Perhaps the recent BP oil spill, the largest marine oil spill in history, would have been avoided if the right dialogue had taken place; many within the organization knew their well casing and blowout preventer were insufficient but the organization decided to skate ahead anyways.

Whether you're on the board of directors, or an individual contributor in a weekly staff meeting, knowing what to let slide and what to make an issue of, what to bring up publicly and what to raise privately, requires wisdom and judgment. Underlying that wisdom and judgment is the moment of conscious choice when we decide to speak, or to hold our tongues.

When is the time for you to speak? Let me share three crucial criteria:

When it will improve the results of the group. Minority viewpoints have been proven to aid the quality of decision making in juries, by teams, and for the purpose of innovation. Research first published in the Journal of Applied Psychology shows that even when the minority points of view are wrong, they cause the rest of the group to think better, to create more solutions, and to improve the creativity of problem solving.

When it gives others permission to speak their truth. An interesting study of conformity put people into groups and arranged for a majority of the group to lie about the length of a line. When the majority lied without opposition, 70% of those tested capitulated and passively went along with the incorrect group assessment. But when a single dissenting voice was introduced, only 30% went with the group majority answer. In other words, when one person had the courage to speak their truth, it gave permission to the others to have and own their truth.

When the costs of silence are too high. This final point is more subjective than the first two. Only you know how to answer the question, "Is this worth it?" When do you allow others to determine what you believe and say to be true? If it is an issue of justice or integrity, or when the implication to getting things wrong could affect many, perhaps the cost is too high for silence. In those times, for the sake of your organization and for your own integrity, it's time for you to say something.

There are times when what we say or don't say impacts our organization's ability — and even our own ability — to succeed. And it's rarely as clear as someone handing you some stones to put in your mouth, or whispering that it's time to take them out. Knowing when to speak is an art, and like any art, requires skill. But it's a skill worth pursuing.

Source: HBR

3 Steps to Asking for a Favor

Whether they are holding a door open or introducing you to a potential client, everyone offers favors at different times in life. But, asking someone for a big favor can be daunting. Next time you need someone's help, follow these three steps.

1. Set the stage. Be explicit about the nature of your request. The phrase, "I have a favor to ask," implies a contract in which you will someday try to return the favor.

2. Explain the reason. People like to know why they are being asked to do something. Saying "Can you cover that meeting for me?" is far less effective than "Can you cover that meeting for me because I have another meeting I can't miss?"

3. Give an out. No one feels good about being forced to do something. Offer an escape route by saying. "If you can't, I understand," or "I know you're busy."

Source: HBR

Rethinking knowledge work: A strategic approach

In the half-century since Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge workers,” their share of the workforce has steadily grown—and so has the range of technology tools aimed at boosting their productivity. Yet there’s little evidence that massive spending on personal computing, productivity software, knowledge-management systems, and much else has moved the needle. What’s more, a wide variety of recent research has begun suggesting that always-on, multitasking work environments are so distracting that they are sapping productivity.

After researching the productivity of knowledge workers for years, I’ve concluded that organizations need a radically different approach. Yes, technology is a vital enabler of communication, of collaboration, and of access to rising volumes of information. But least-common-denominator approaches involving more technology for all have reached a point of diminishing returns. It’s time for companies to develop a strategy for knowledge work—one that not only provides a clearer view of the types of information that workers need to do their jobs but also recognizes that the application of technology across the organization must vary considerably, according to the tasks different knowledge workers perform.

Few executives realize that there are two divergent paths for improving access to the information that lies at the core of knowledge work. The most common approach, giving knowledge workers free access to a wide variety of tools and information resources, presumes that these employees will determine their own work processes and needs. The other, the structured provision of information and knowledge, involves delivering them to employees within a well-defined context of tasks and deliverables. Computers send batches of work to employees and provide the information needed to do it.

Both the free-access and structured-provisioning approaches are in wide use, but they make radically different assumptions about how knowledge work should be performed and its productivity improved. Executives who aren’t conscious of the trade-offs they are making between them and thus don’t look for opportunities to harness the power of structure probably won’t get the most from knowledge workers.

Equally important, leaders must pursue IT and productivity opportunities at the right level of granularity. While it might be tempting to think that a given approach will work well for an entire organization, reality is rarely so tidy. In my experience, the unit of analysis should be particular jobs and roles—or at least distinct categories of jobs and roles. To move the needle in a specific business unit or function, it’s not enough to launch a set of company-wide initiatives or to count on a piece of software. Instead, leaders of knowledge workers should understand the key differences among them and tailor solutions to these peculiarities.

The free-access approach

Over the past two decades, giving knowledge workers free access to information and knowledge has been the primary way of arming them to do their jobs. The rise of the Internet, the establishment of organizational knowledge-management systems, and, most recently, the advent of social media provide knowledge workers with a vast array of information from public and private sources. More analytically focused knowledge workers may also draw upon warehouses of structured data and quantitative-analysis tools.

In this model, knowledge workers define and integrate their own information environments. The free-access approach has been particularly common among autonomous knowledge workers with high expertise: attorneys, investment bankers, marketers, product designers, professors, scientists, and senior executives, for example. Their work activities are seen as too variable or even idiosyncratic to be modeled or structured with a defined process. Their need for access to IT sources—ranging from the Internet to various online databases and social media to work tools such as e-mail, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and more complex business intelligence analytics—is presumed to be equally eclectic and unpredictable. With an increasingly porous technology barrier between personal lives and jobs, these employees can often be found doing paid work from home and tending to their personal affairs in the office.

In the free-access model, the presumption is that knowledge workers, as experts, know what information is available and can search for and manage it themselves. It’s also assumed that they have the discipline to avoid wasting time surfing the Web or watching pornography, sports, or funny YouTube videos at work. Of course, these assumptions may sometimes be incorrect.

Benefits of the free-access approach

Knowledge workers typically enjoy the free-access approach, which provides plenty of autonomy in their work processes and in how they use information. For employers, this positive feeling is probably useful for retention and job engagement.

Free access is well suited to work where it’s difficult to predict contingencies in advance. A structured-process technology would be inadequate, for example, when an investment-banking client suggests a completely novel way of structuring a transaction or, in legal settings, when a key witness becomes unavailable unexpectedly. Free-access approaches allow for creative responses to uncertainty and ambiguity.

The information technology behind the free-access model is relatively easy to implement. The Internet and social media are readily accessible to anyone, and access to third-party databases is possible with any Web browser—although closed company cultures sometimes impede knowledge sharing. Most knowledge workers know how to use basic office productivity tools, and some are even quite skilled at them. Systems integration issues are minor, since workers lie at the center of the information flow.

Shortcomings of the free-access approach

The problems of free access are fairly obvious: while workers may know how to use technology tools, they may not be skilled at searching for, using, or sharing the knowledge. One survey revealed that over a quarter of a typical knowledge worker’s time is spent searching for information. Another found that only 16 percent of the content within typical businesses is posted to locations where other workers can access it. Most knowledge workers haven’t been trained in search or knowledge management and have an incomplete understanding of how to use data sources and analytical tools.

Productivity losses can be substantial. Even before the advent of social media, workers in one 2005 survey sponsored by America Online and Salary.com cited personal Internet use as the biggest distraction at work. Another study of workplace productivity found that average knowledge workers access their e-mail more than 50 times, use instant messaging 77 times, and visit more than 40 Web sites a day. A UK study suggests that social-media use by knowledge workers costs British companies £6.5 billion a year in lost productivity.

Productivity metrics are nearly nonexistent. If productivity is measured at all, it’s only at the highest level, such as legal briefs developed per month, research articles written and published per year, or new drug compounds discovered per decade. Fine-grained monitoring of productivity and information would, of course, help to improve productivity but risks clashing with the spirit of free information access.

The structured provision of knowledge

Structured-provision technologies first appeared in the early 1990s and have improved considerably of late. They often have a range of functions. The most important is workflow technology that controls how knowledge workers get information and job tasks. These workers may encounter supporting technologies that include information portals, business rules or algorithms to automate decisions, document- or content-management systems, business process management-and-monitoring systems, and collaboration tools. Increasingly modular component designs make these technologies easier to deploy.

In corporate parlance, such technologies are often called case-management systems because they allow workers to complete an entire case or unit of work. Such applications include the processing of legal cases, insurance claims, or bank loans; the issuing of permits or licenses; and the completion of interactions with patients in health care. Case management can create value whenever some degree of structure or process can be imposed upon information-intensive work. Until recently, structured-provision approaches have been applied mostly to lower-level information tasks that are repetitive, predictable, and thus easier to automate.

Benefits of the structured model

Productivity is the major benefit: as measured by the completion of key tasks per unit of work time, it often rises by 50 percent when organizations implement these technologies. One automobile-leasing company, for example, achieved such gains after it implemented a new system for lease processing and end-of-lease sale offers. The reason for the improvement was that workers had few distractions and spent no time searching for information.

Adding to the efficiencies, in most cases companies can route tasks globally to any worker with the time and expertise to undertake them; if Sally is away on vacation, the system knows and sends cases to Joe for approval instead. Work processes become more transparent, and it becomes easier to manage them, to exercise approval authority, and to monitor improvements. The structured model also facilitates collaboration and the coordination of tasks. Many implementations help companies engage multiple workers and groups to process cases. These systems also often incorporate business rules or algorithms, determined by an organization’s best experts, that help companies decide, say, whether to issue policies, make loans, or pay claims. For managers, these systems can therefore improve the quality and consistency of decision making, while also speeding it up through automation or semiautomation.

Shortcomings of the structured model

The downside of these technologies is negative reactions by the workers who use them. Some managers I have interviewed say that workers feel there is too much structure and too little autonomy in their work; they sometimes feel “chained to their desks.” Socialization at work—informal chats in the hallway—can decrease dramatically. In some cases where workers previously had a high degree of autonomy (physicians at an academic medical center, for example), they revolted against such systems. Some organizations that encountered initial resistance found that it decreased over time. Other organizations overcame workers’ objections by instituting new forms of social interaction that meshed with improved work processes.

In structured information environments, computer systems rather than knowledge workers integrate the work, so extensive system and process design is required up front for implementation. While these systems can be tailored to fit complex business processes, that kind of tight fit can become a problem if business environments or processes change. When the system includes an automated decision-making component, it’s important to monitor the business environment and the outcome of decisions to ensure that the system continues to produce the desired process output. One chilling example of how things can go awry: automated but insufficiently monitored mortgage decisions were among the contributors to the recent financial crisis.

How companies apply these principles

The greatest potential for productivity improvements involves bringing more structured knowledge to workplaces and processes where the free approach has dominated. So far, lower-level process work has been the primary beneficiary of structured-provision tools. However, advancing technologies are making them better suited to tasks that until now have been the preserve of free-access approaches—tasks centered on expert thinking and collaboration. In one example, a major academic medical center is employing “smart forms” that present physicians with all the available information about a particular patient’s disease on one screen and even produce first drafts of notes about their interactions with patients for medical records. 

Some forward-looking companies are testing more structured approaches in a broader range of work, often with positive results. Here are three areas of progress.

High-level work

Companies have considerable opportunity for applying structured technology and processes to the more routine aspects of even highly collaborative jobs. An insurance company, for example, implemented workflow- and document-management technologies to help develop and modify its investment portfolio. The system replaced numerous spreadsheets and e-mails with a common global system that synchronized communications and transactions among several different groups across several countries. Each group (including operations, funding, controls, and legal) now adds its components to the portfolio. When a new portfolio or modification is completed, the documents are finalized and sent to an external custodian for management and recording. Fund managers find the system relatively noninvasive; if their involvement is needed for a decision or approval, they are notified automatically via e-mail.

Better processes

Technologies are also being used to structure previously unstructured processes. For example, GE Energy Financial Services, which specializes in lending for large energy projects, has worked to boost the productivity and quality of decisions in its loan underwriting. A managing director with responsibilities for the unit’s marketing and investment strategy brought together GE analysts and researchers, who extracted typical decision rules from experienced company executives. The rules were embedded in a semiautomated decision system that scores prospective deals and recommends that they be approved or disapproved. Junior analysts can use the system to determine whether a deal is likely to succeed—without taking it to a credit committee comprising senior business unit executives, who can of course override the recommendation if they wish to do so. Deals made using the new approach have generated returns 40 percent higher than the old, unstructured one did.

Hybrid approaches

Some organizations combine the free and structured approaches. One of the easiest ways of doing so is to place partial restrictions on the types of information highly autonomous workers can use—for example, by limiting access to pornography, sports, or social-networking sites while at work. A more nuanced approach allows employees to be both free and structured. Partners Healthcare, which comprises several teaching hospitals in Boston, has a structured system that automatically recommends appropriate drugs and treatments to physicians but allows them to override it. The organization also makes a variety of free-access knowledge databases available to doctors, but the structured system, which incorporates medical knowledge into the process for ordering care, is used much more frequently.

A related approach imposes structured techniques for only some aspects of a job. Some companies, for example, use product-lifecycle-management systems to structure the back end of the product design process but don’t use them during the early product conceptualization and brainstorming stages. The key issue here is to decide which aspects of the relevant process could benefit from more structured technologies and processes and which should be left largely untouched by them.

Crafting a strategy for knowledge work

Few organizations have thought systematically about where additional structure could enhance productivity. A good starting point is identifying your knowledge workers and understanding the range of tasks they perform. The unit of analysis should be a particular knowledge job, not the organization as a whole. That’s important because different types of knowledge workers within the same organization often have very different knowledge and information requirements. Furthermore, knowledge is more readily structured for some jobs than for others, and some workers can resist imposed structures more than others.

Matching technology and work

I have found the matrix in the exhibit very useful when planning technology strategies for knowledge workers. It is based on my experience that knowledge work generally falls into one of four clusters, each with its own characteristics. These four knowledge work classifications are shaped by two factors: the work’s degree of complexity (x-axis) and the level of interdependence among workers who carry out a task (y-axis). Leaders can use this taxonomy as a guide to determine whether a structured, free, or hybrid approach best fits a given job.

 The transaction cell of the matrix describes knowledge work requiring relatively low amounts of collaboration and judgment, such as employment in call centers, claims processing, and other administrative-intensive roles. Structured-provision approaches fit this type of work well—indeed, it is the only type where they are commonly applied. One example is a call center system that channels calls from customers to workers, along with all the information and knowledge needed to meet the customers’ needs. Another would be an insurance-claims-processing system that delivers all necessary documents and forms to claims workers.

As the degree of collaboration required for a job moves up into the exhibit’s integration cell, free-access tools become widely available. It is common to find work circulating by way of e-mail and voluntary collaboration and much less common to find structured-provision technologies. Yet there are some semistructured exceptions, including lower-level roles in software development, engineering, and product design and development. The aforementioned product-lifecycle-management system that tracks designs, components, and approvals might help structure the work of certain engineers, for example.

In the exhibit’s expert cell, the goal is to apply expert knowledge to tasks or problems. The relevant knowledge traditionally is stored in the expert’s brain, but today many organizations want to supplement it with online knowledge. Although free-access technologies are typically the chief means of accessing it, in some instances structured approaches can be applied, particularly when productivity and online-knowledge access are equally important. In such cases, the organization must find some way for a computer to mediate the expert’s job, so that knowledge can be embedded in the flow of the work process, as some health care organizations have done with intelligent order entry systems for providers. Similarly, a few leading IT-consulting firms are attempting to bring more structure to the delivery of various IT services by using online tools. Expert jobs may also benefit from “guided” data-mining and decision analysis applications for work involving quantitative data: software leads the expert through the analysis and interpretation of data. 

Finally, work in the exhibit’s collaboration cell—which involves knowledge activities such as those of investment bankers crafting big deals, financial analysts creating corporate plans and budgets, marketers developing major marketing plans, attorneys working in teams on large cases, and scientists playing a part in large scientific projects—is usually iterative and unstructured. Typically, the only tools that succeed in such environments provide free access to information and are used voluntarily by the worker. Although systems involving structured workflows and embedded knowledge aren’t entirely beyond the scope of this kind of work, they will be hard to develop. Exceptions might include areas such as knowledge reuse: a group of collaborating attorneys, for example, could recycle a legal brief.

Mastering common challenges

While the classification of work and roles will vary considerably across organizations, the pursuit of productivity through structure typically brings with it at least two common challenges. These are preventing the alienation of formerly free knowledge workers and avoiding automated crack-ups like the ones some financial-services firms experienced with mortgage approvals.

Allowing knowledge workers to override automated or semiautomated decisions can help alleviate both of these problems. Such measures can not only lead to better decisions but also reduce resentment or even rebellion against the system. Of course, if experts constantly override it, you must find out why.

Another way of smoothing the path to structure is letting knowledge workers use familiar, typically free-access tools when they interact with a structured system. To alert them when it’s time to use a structured application, for example, have it send them an e-mail. If a structured task requires, say, passing financial information to and from the system, let workers use a spreadsheet. Always remember: high-end knowledge workers don’t want to spend all their working hours interacting with automated tools. 

Finally, it’s critical to ensure that at least some knowledge workers and executives understand how the structured system works, so they can be alert for signs that it is out of kilter with changes in the economic environment or business model. Identifying such mismatches will help organizations know when they should pull the plug on structured systems and return to human judgment—a return that can save them from losing lots of money, fast.

We live in a world where knowledge-based work is expanding rapidly. So is the application of technology to almost every business process and job. But to date, high-end knowledge workers have largely remained free to use only the technology they personally find useful. It’s time to think about how to make them more productive by imposing a bit more structure. This combination of technology and structure, along with a bit of managerial discretion in applying them to knowledge work, may well produce a revolution in the jobs that cost and matter the most to contemporary organizations. 

Source: Mckinsey Quarterly

When to Reward Employees with More Responsibility and Money

Managers who want to recognize employees for good work have many tools at their disposal. One of the more traditional ways to reward a top performer is to give her a promotion or raise or both. But how can you know whether someone is truly ready for the next challenge or deserving of that bump up in pay?

HR policies and company culture often dictate when and how people move up in a company. However, managers in most companies have a good deal of input into the decision, and in some cases they are the ultimate decision makers. Whether you have this authority or not, promotions and raises need to be part of an ongoing discussion with employees about their performance.

What the Experts Say

"Many times a manager feels responsible for finding their people their next step in the organization," says Herminia Ibarra, the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning and Faculty Director of the INSEAD Leadership Initiative. It's critical that managers make these decisions about  promotions and raises carefully. "I think who an organization promotes is a very strong index of their core culture," says Susan David, co-director of the Harvard/McLean Institute of Coaching, founding director of Evidence Based Psychology LLC, and a contributor to HBR's The Conversation blog.

Managers should recognize that who they reward sends a signal to the rest of the organization. Therefore, they need to be sure they are endorsing behavior that is in line with the organization's values. For example, an employee who exceeds his targets but treats his team members poorly should not be rewarded in an organization that values teamwork.

Similarly, the way an organization promotes people has implications for an individual's success. Organizations often assume that a promotion should involve giving star performers responsibility for managing more people and developing - rather than just executing - strategy. "Yet, these are not areas of genius for all. Many organizations lose some of their best operational people because of creating single pathways to organizational
success," says David. 

It's possible to reward people in other ways.

"Organizations who create multiple, flexible pathways to success will keep their best people, keep them engaged, and keep them for longer," says David. Next time you are trying to decide whether to recognize strong performance with a promotion or raise, follow these principles.

Assess current performance using multiple sources

As a first step, you need to be sure the employee is able to do the job you are considering promoting her into. Take a look at her performance. "There will be markers even in the current job that show how they'll do in the newrole," says David. She recommends you use multisource feedback: draw not only on your own assessment but talk to others as well. 

It is especially important to seek input from people who interact with the employees in ways that you don't. Talk to peers, team members, and people she manages. In some cases, you may find that she's already doing parts of the new job. "Some people do their job as it is described and some enlarge their job; they innovate around the parameters of the job. That's the best evidence of all - when they're already doing the job," says Ibarra.

Consider the "competence-challenge balance"

"We all want to be and feel we are good at things. We also have the need to feel we are growing and learning," says David. A good indicator that you may need to promote someone is if he is expressing a desire to learn more and take on a new challenge. People who are particularly good at their jobs may quickly master them and need to be stretched. "If in their current jobs employees are reaching points where they are over qualified, this is a strong risk factor for disengagement and loss of those employees," says David. You need to always be assessing your people and be sure they are working at the edges of their abilities. If they are performing well but not learning anything new, a promotion or an alternative assignment may be best for both the individual and the organization.

Make sure there is a match

Before promoting someone into a new role, consider whether it's somethingshe will enjoy doing. Many managers fail to consider that just because someone is good at a job, doesn't mean she will take pleasure in it. "One of the greatest tools a manager can use is an authentic, honest conversation  with the individual," explains David. Ask your employee whether she is interested in and excited about the new responsibilities. If not, consider creating an alternative role that stretches her, fulfills her, and fills a need in the organization. Experiment before making the new job permanent Occasionally, you may need more information to judge the employee's expected performance in a new role. As Ibarra points out, "It gets tricky when performance in a current role is not a good predictor of performance in a new role." In these cases, design an assignment that is similar to the tasks and challenges of the new job to test the employee's ability. Be transparent with the employee about this experiment. Make it short-term and outline clear success criteria and an evaluation timeline. Be careful though - you don't want to invisibly promote your people without recognizing their contributions. Providing more responsibility without a corresponding change in title or raise can sap motivation.

How much of a raise?

With some promotions, it may be obvious how much of a raise you should give based on how much others doing the same job are paid. However, many job changes are not as clear cut. The employee may be retaining some of her former responsibilities while taking on new ones. Create a job description for the new role. Take a look at all of her duties and try to benchmark them against other jobs in the company or in the broader employment market. If you don't have similar positions in the organization, look at increases that went with other promotions in the organization. If most promotions come with a particular increase in salary, stick with a similar percentage.

When you have to say no

There are people who will ask for a promotion even if they're not ready and those who will hold back even though they are ready," says Ibarra. Your job is to help calibrate those requests. If your employee raises the idea of a promotion but you worry he's not ready, have an open discussion to hear his reasoning and share your concerns. Be clear about what competencies or experiences he needs to gain in order to be promoted and create an action plan for how he can do that. Provide him with the tasks and assignments he needs to expand his skills.

Remember, there are other ways to motivate

Due to a limited budget, you may have to say no to someone who is deserving. "With the financial crisis, a lot of people haven't been able to use promotions and raises as motivational levers," says Ibarra. There also may not be the right opportunity. In order to promote, David says, "there needs to be a strategic need in the organization" that this person can meet. These can be tough conversations. Be honest and transparent. Explain the rationale and be sure the employee understands that you value him. Give him stretch goals that help prepare him for the future when the company is better positioned to give him a promotion or raise.Most importantly, find other ways to keep the employee engaged. "Leaders are often comforted by their capacity to give a raise or a promotion because these strategies are seen as tangible and executable. However, while these extrinsic motivators are a useful and important part of keeping employees engaged, they are certainly not the only ones," says David. Instead, rely on intrinsic motivators, such as recognizing contributions, providing opportunities to gain new skills or experiences, and supporting autonomy and choice within a job.

For example, you may have leeway as a manager to make modifications to the employee's current position so that he is spending half of his time on his current job and the other half on new, more challenging responsibilities. Doing this may be more motivational in the long run and can often inspire loyalty. "Overreliance on pay and promotion as motivators leads to an organizational culture that is very transactional and disengaged," says David. Employees who feel valued are likely to wait out the hard times.

Principles to Remember

Do:

* Make sure your people are working at the edge of their abilities

* Create an assignment that helps you assesses whether the employee will excel in a new role

* Find other ways to motivate your people - beyond raises and promotions

Don't:

* Say no to a request for a raise or promotion without a clear explanation

* Rely solely on your assessment of the employee's performance - ask others for input

* Assume that a promotion will make the employee happy - look for a fit with the person's interests and abilities

Case Study #1: A new role for the firm and the employee 

Elise Giannasi was hired by Katzenbach Partners in 2006 as the executive assistant to the managing partner. A year into the job, she was receiving glowing reviews and Shanti Nayak, Katzenbach's director of people, says it was clear that she was a star performer. In particular, Shanti noted that Elise had done a great job of building relationships with clients. Her relationships had been instrumental in setting up key appointments and ensuring that bills got paid. The managing partner felt she was ready to move up. But according to Shanti, "there was no typical role for people to move into unless they were on the traditional consultant path." At the time, the firm didn't have a staff person dedicated solely to usiness development. People throughout the firm were doing it as an "extracurricular" task. However, the recession forced the firm to develop a much more formalized process and they needed someone to be responsible for it. Shanti explains that they had two debates going on simultaneously: was this a role they needed? And if so, was Elise the right person for the role?

While Elise was doing small pieces of client development already, she had never filled a role like this before. Shanti knew that Elise had worked hard to develop the right relationships both inside and outside the firm and she had confidence she could do it. When she talked to others in the firm, they endorsed her assessment. In the end, Shanti says, "It felt like a risk worth taking." Shanti explained that since this was a new position, it was difficult to decide how much to pay Elise once she was promoted. They looked at what other promotions carried in terms of a raise, in particular the percentage increase that associates received when they became senior associates. Elise was given a similar percentage increase and a new title: manager of business development.

Case Study #2: Job sculpting to prepare for the next step

When Sarah Vania joined the International Rescue Committee as the senior HR partner in late 2009, she was particularly impressed with an HR administrator named Nicole Clemons. Nicole was studying for her master's degree while working full time. She commuted two hours by bus to her job, using that time to study. Nicole had always received very good reviews. Sarah thought, "Here's a high-potential person who has earned her right to development." When Sarah sat down with her for their first review together, Nicole asked, "What's the path ahead for me?" She had applied for an open HR partner role but because it was two steps up from her current role, the organization didn't feel she was ready. 

Without a logical next step for her, however, she would be stuck in her current role. "As a manager, I owed her a career path but I didn't have the budget to create a new role and hire a new admin," says Sarah. Instead, she decided to create an alternative role for Nicole. Nicole would continue her duties as an HR administrator but also take on two of Sarah's client groups to manage. This apprentice model would allow Nicole to learn on the job what it means to be an HR partner with Sarah providing her feedback and support. "It helps her learn in a manageable, supported way rather than trial by fire," explains Sarah. Sarah spoke with the leaders of each of the client groups. She made it clear that although Nicole was still learning the role, she would make their groups her first priority and Sarah would be there if any issues came up. "I asked for their help and explained the benefit," says Sarah. Nicole has since taken on more responsibility and Sarah says she is well on her way to qualifying for the partner role.

Source: HBR