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Every smart employer knows that results matter more than face time. Judging employees chiefly on the number of hours they log in at work is not only demoralizing but does little for company performance. In fact, sixty-nine percent of employers report that supervisors at their organizations are encouraged to assess employees' performance by what they accomplish and not just by the hours they work. This statistic — from the 2012 National Study of Employers conducted by Families and Work Institute (FWI) — indicates there is movement in the right direction. After all, it's obvious why employers encourage supervisors to focus on results. In this competitive, 24-7 economy stretches across the world's time zones, adhering to the notion that presence equals productivity is simply out of date. But there are two problems: One, employees don't fully buy it. And two, many managers don't really know how to do it. About two in five workers think that if they focus on achie...

While people expect fair pay for their services, we all know that money isn't king. Nevertheless, when it comes to business we all too often act as if it were. We think purely in terms of salaries, bonuses, and people's positions on the org chart. While we pay lip-service to the idea that people may have non-financial motivation for their work — acknowledgement, appreciation, pride in accomplishment, enjoyment and so forth — we spend all our time working out how to incentivize our workforce with financial rewards. What an awful way to think about people! Yes, money and status matter, but it can be inhibiting soul-destroying and morally corrupting for managers when companies place too much emphasis on them At some point, after all, doesn't exaggerated pay feel like a bribe ?  In my experience by far the best way to motivate your employees is to find ways that they can take pride in their skills and their knowledge . When you do this, you very quickly discover tha...

Helping people deal with emotions is a key leadership skill, especially in times of crisis. Your tone may effectively quell negative emotions or promote beneficial emotions, and improve camaraderie, trust, and team performance. But recent research into the field of social regulation shows us that how you support your people can make a real difference. It turns out that caring delivered in an indirect, implicit manner tends to have a greater positive impact than support delivered in a direct, explicit manner. In other words, people get more out of compassion when they don't know they're getting it. (I presented these findings at the recent Neuroleadership Summit held in New York in October; you can view it for free on the Summit website .) Whereas implicit forms of caring unfold relatively automatically, explicit caring involves conscious goals to regulate emotional responses and monitor their effect. So, implicit emotional regulation may include the "chameleon...

What do you see in this picture? Depending on how you look at it, you'll see the silhouette of two faces or a vase. It's a classic illusion that psychologists use to demonstrate that all of us have biases that influence how we interpret events. To some extent we see what we unconsciously want to see. Understanding this kind of perceptual distortion is crucial for getting things done in organizations. Most projects or processes require collaborative work with people who come from other parts of the organization — different functions, levels, locations, or business units — and who see the world differently. If you assume that these people perceive the assignment or challenge in the same way that you do, you'll be severely frustrated or disappointed. In fact, you'll be on much firmer ground if you start with the assumption that each person comes to the table with a different spin on the situation. The first thing to do in any cross-organizational assignment i...

Investing in yourself may be the most profitable investment you ever make. It yields not only future returns, but often a current pay-off as well. The surest way to achieve a better quality life, to be successful, productive, and satisfied is to place a priority on investing in both personal and professional growth. The effort you put into consistently investing in yourself plays a large role in determining the quality of your life now and in the future. Investment options 1. Develop your skills Improving your skills doesn’t always mean investing in higher education, though that’s surely an option, and perhaps a necessary one depending upon your career field. Investing in your knowledge and skills can take many forms. In addition, expanding your level of knowledge and skill isn’t limited to the business arena and doesn’t necessarily need to be formal. There are many “skill investment” avenues. Advance your education -  extra classes, advanced degrees, relevant certificati...

Big data isn't new. A wealth of database information has been lying dormant in companies for years — only now we have the technology to understand it. Using new tools and methods, you can use that information to make better predictions (and decisions) about your business. Here's one way to get started: Imagine a matrix — a spreadsheet, if you will. The rows capture something you know about one interaction. That interaction might be a sale, or some other single activity (often referred to as a "case"). The columns are aspects of that interaction; sticking with the shopping analogy, columns might be how you paid, or at what time of day the sale occurred. These are known as "signals," because they may help predict some future target variable. It might be, for example, what else you might want to purchase, given a current purchase. Depending on what you're measuring, it might look something like this: Your goal is to build this matrix, and hav...

You've gotten feedback from your manager as well as word of rumblings within your team: You're seen as a micromanager who tends to get into the weeds — and stay there. You produce great results but senior management sees you as an operational manager and questions your ability to let go and operate at a strategic level. Wait a minute, you think. Who are they trying to kid? Delegation sounds great on paper, but you're responsible for some major projects, and management expects flawless execution. How can they have it both ways? Managers prone to micromanagement fall prey to several misconceptions about delegating to staff. The first is the assumption that delegation has an on and off switch. That is, that they either delegate totally to all direct reports in all situations or not at all. They fail to assess each subordinate's ability to operate independently and don't put in place the "eyehooks" of implementation — the check-ins, milestones, and metri...

An audience can't listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them. Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they're stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. Lots of extras actually take away meaning because they become a distraction. They overtax the audience's cognitive resources. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each sli...

Jane wants to buy a TV and starts her shopping journey with a Google search. She finds an electronics review site, clicks on a banner ad, reads about the product details, and decides to go into the store to see the model. She speaks with a sales associate and posts a picture of the TV on Facebook for her friends' feedback. She also uses her smartphone to do a quick price comparison, and scans the QR code to get additional product information. Welcome to problem #1 for retailers: The company knows that a potential customer has interacted with it across a lot of touch points but it has no idea that all these interactions are with Jane. It can track each of these interactions across touchpoints, but doesn't know how to tie them to an individual customer. Since each touchpoint yields a particular piece of data, this becomes a complex data management challenge. Retailers are desperate to unlock this intelligence so they can make more personalized offers. Research shows that pe...

When we looked at the newest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, released in mid-September, what we found was quite alarming. As of January 2012, the median time that wage and salary workers in the U.S. had been with their current employers was just 4.6 years. Other recent data points are equally disturbing: The staffing company Randstad says that 40% of employees are planning to look for a new job within the next six months. Another survey notes that 69% of employees are already at least passively shopping for new job opportunities via social media today. Clearly, statistics show the majority of employees at every level are unhappy enough in their current positions to be actively or at least passively considering new jobs. As business owners, we have big incentives to do all we can to keep our talented people around. But beyond our own motives, we think it's often good for employees to stick around, too. Here are the 10 reasons why we think executives...

When new entrepreneurs ask me for advice, I sometimes tell them to NYFO — Network Your Face Off. Nearly everything I've accomplished in the past two years, from speaking on CNN to watching my company cross 1.7 million users in less than a year, can be directly traced back to connections I've made and help I've received from a network that is vast, diverse, and active. The best networking suggestion I can offer? Always say yes to invitations, even if it's not clear what you'll get out of the meeting. I'm not arguing for long, pointless, unstructured conversations with everyone you meet. But many of my most fruitful relationships have resulted from a meeting or call in which I was not entirely sure what would or would not come of the conversation. You could call it making your own luck , by increasing the odds of making the right connection. Because you can't assume that you know much about someone you don't know very well. You may know their o...

You've started a company and it goes belly-up. Or you launched a new product and not only does it fail to sell, customers actually hate it. Or you get fired. What happens when you dare to dream, make that dream real, and then fail? There's the plucky Henry Ford quotation which admittedly, and almost embarrassingly, I have used: "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." Since Ford was eventually wildly successful, this aphorism does reassure, but it also jauntily skips over the emotional precipice on which we teeter when we fail. No matter how many chirpy quotes I may tweet out, when I fail my initial response is despondency, pessimism, and the feeling that perhaps I need to relocate to another city because I can never show my face in public. Ever. Again. I tend to identify with Margery Eldredge Howell, who said: "There's dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that burns and burns again." A...

A number of years ago, I worked on an executive team in which everyone was located in the same building but people seemed frustratingly far apart. Yet at my first job out of business school, I worked on a number of teams in which we were scattered across the globe but I felt closely connected with those individuals. What accounts for such huge, seemingly counterintuitive differences? One model that explains the disconnect comes from some interesting research by Karen Sobel-Lojeski at Stony Brook University. From her research studying more than 600 teams, she has developed a new concept — called "virtual distance" — that measures the perceived isolation of members in a team that relies on electronic communications. Three categories of different factors determine virtual distance: 1. Physical distance: the geographic separation of the members (including differences in time zones) and whether everyone works for the same company or for multiple organizations. 2. ...

Most HBR readers can relate to a central dilemma of knowledge work today: We're using rules for how we work in a factory in a time when most of our work product requires deep thinking. A study of 6,000 people conducted by the NeuroLeadership Group in collaboration with a large healthcare firm asked respondents questions about where, when, and how people did their best thinking. Only 10 percent said it happened at work. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we've been looking at ways to bring more of that deep thinking into the workplace. More specifically, we've been conducting research into what brain science shows us about how leaders think, develop, and perform, and recently we've been studying the role of the unconscious mind. We've identified three particularly promising techniques, backed up by research, than can help you think more deeply: Distracting Yourself Carnegie Mellon neuroscientist David Creswell can shed some light on this topic. In hi...

"I'm getting to the end of my patience," Dan,* the head of sales for a financial services firm, told me. "There is so much opportunity here — the business is growing, the work is interesting, and bonuses should be pretty good this year — but all I hear is complaining." When he passed his employees in the hall and asked how it was going, they would respond with a critical comment about a client or they would grumble about the amount of work they were juggling. "How can I turn around the negativity that pervades my team?" he asked me. I asked him what he was doing now. "At first, I told them how much opportunity we had in front of us, and I reiterated our mission statement," he said. "I wanted to remind them what we're all working towards. Now though?" he threw his hands up in the air, "I'm just pissed. I want to shake them out of their slump." Dan's response is completely natural and intuitive....