0  

How to Plan and Prepare for Organizational Change

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “the only thing that is constant is change”. This is true both in life and in business. Organizational changes are inevitable. It’s how we handle them that matters.

As part of eCornell’s Women in Leadership webcast series, Amy Newman from the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University joined eCornell’s Chris Wofford for a discussion on how to effectively communicate and prepare for organizational change. What follows is an abridged version of their discussion.

Wofford: Amy, it’s great to have you again.

Newman: I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Wofford: Amy and I have done this before. About a year ago, we did a webcast on crisis communications. That’s pretty related to this but tell me, Amy, what are we going to learn here today?

Newman: The focus is on managing a change and communicating that change. What I’ve found is that organizations are pretty good at implementing change but they often forget to actually communicate with people both internally and externally. Sometimes, the external communication seems to be the priority in companies. They’ll tell their investors and their customers but often forget that employees are important ambassadors of the change and are the ones who will actually implement the change.

Wofford: All right. So what is the value of communication planning?

Newman: Well, let’s look at some research. In a paper published in Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Wim Elving identified four goals of change communication. The first is to increase buy-in and decrease resistance. We know that people naturally resist change, so the more we can do to prepare them to increase readiness, the more likely that they’ll buy into the change. So that’s one component.

The other is obviously to inform the audience. People need to know there is a change. They need to know how it affects them and what they’re going to be doing differently. Those are kind of the basics, but they’re essential.

Next, we have creating a sense of community or a sense of belonging, and this is the piece I think people don’t really think much about. When people hear there will be organizational change, they worry about layoffs or worry that they’ll have more work to do. There’s a tendency to focus on the negative results of a change, so you want people to feel like they’re part of the process and they’re going to be a critical piece of the organization going forward.

And then finally, it’s important to reduce uncertainty. You need to let people know what they can expect and what is expected of them. This also gives you a better chance that your change is going to be successful.

Wofford: I think a lot of people in the corporate world have probably experienced situations in which hirings and firings and big, sweeping departmental changes don’t always tend to be communicated very well.

Newman: Absolutely. And I think the tendency is to not communicate for a couple of reasons.
One, we simply forget because there are all these logistical things to deal with. But I also think people don’t like to deliver bad news, so they think it’s better to say nothing at all. Of course, that’s not true.

There are really two types of communications strategies for change. One is to inform people of what’s happening, but the second is critical and that’s about creating a sense of community.

I’ll give an example. When Marriott acquired Starwood last year, in one of the early messages that Arne Sorenson, the CEO of Marriott, sent to Starwood associates announcing the change, he said, “It’s strange for us to go from competitors to teammates.” I thought that was just such a great way to say it. He acknowledged that, “Yeah, this is weird.” First we were competitors and now we’re supposed to be part of one big happy family. Everybody’s thinking it, so acknowledging that up front makes people really feel like they’re part of the process.

Wofford: That we’re all in the same boat.

Newman: Exactly. Honesty like that reduces uncertainty and job insecurity. It prepares people for the change and then it ensures an effective change.

Now I thought that there was one goal missing from Elving’s work that I added and that’s to prevent a crisis situation. If you’re not communicating well, at some point your employees can be angry at you. So can your investors or your customers. And we know that social media will respond.

Wofford: There will be a whistleblower tweet out there or something like that, right?

Newman: Yes… It could go viral and, suddenly, in addition to trying to communicate the change, you now also have a crisis situation to handle. So it’s best to get out ahead of things even if it’s bad news.

Wofford: Like in The Godfather when Tom Hagen says, “Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news at once.” Obviously that was great advice.

Newman: That’s right. With bad news, you just need to get it out. In my classes, we talk about indirect communication and direct communication. The older style of thinking is indirect communication for bad news. You know, soften the blow. I don’t think that really works anymore. People want to hear what it is and just get past it.

Wofford: So that’s good advice for crisis avoidance?

Newman: Absolutely. I can share an example where the planning may have not gone so well. This is the Carrier situation and I know it’s a very sensitive one. President Trump got involved.

Wofford: The heating and air conditioning manufacturing jobs in Indiana?

Newman: Exactly. They announced that this plant was moving to Mexico and they did it in a large forum. I mean, I’m not so sure what would be a better choice really, maybe smaller department meetings. There’s no great way to tell 1,400 or so employees that they’ll be losing their jobs but, in this case, someone had an iPhone and recorded it and that’s what went viral for everyone to see. So it did not turn out so well for them and it’s something that they really should have thought about in advance.

I think part of the communication planning process is that you have to assume that any internal message is going to go external.

Wofford: You’ve developed an actual change communication plan, haven’t you? Should we get into that now?

Newman: Yes, I have something that I’ve used for many companies. It’s something to be used for major organizational changes like a merger or acquisition. But even with small department changes like a new system implementation, it would be helpful to think about who we need to communicate to and what our messages are.

Wofford: Okay, so how does it work?

Newman: The major categories are to identify the audiences, to do some work thinking about their potential reactions and to look at some communication objectives. What media or channels are you going to use? What is the timing?

Let’s start with the audience and their potential reactions. I put together a sample involving the closing of a restaurant. In every situation, this is going to be a little bit different but this is the way you might think through that kind of change.

The first thing I would do is to identify all of the audiences. Usually, we get into something called cascading communication where most likely you’re starting at the senior-most level of your organization and working your way down. You’ve got to think about the levels of management and the level of employees involved. So in this case, I’m saying the corporate management team, the restaurant management team and then the restaurant staff. Clearly they need to be notified pretty quickly. The corporate staff might be next and then you might have to notify the local government depending on the local laws. You may want to directly reach out to some VIP customers. Maybe the media will be next.

They all get different messages, different media choices. All of that has to be thought through.

Next is to look at the background of the different audiences and their potential reactions. This is the step I often find is missing. It’s really about empathy, about trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. It’s thinking through some of those potential, particularly negative reactions and trying to address them.

Wofford: Right. What else is involved in your template?

Newman: First, let’s look at the communication objectives. You want the corporate management team to understand the rationale and details and then you have to plan communications for their team. And when you’re coming up with these communication objectives, I would really recommend to once again think from that audience’s perspective.

The next thing to consider is responsibility, and this is easy to identify but a little harder to carry out in the communication plan. If we’re using this cascading communication, the corporate management team would communicate to the restaurant management team, for example, and the restaurant GM would communicate to the restaurant staff, probably with the help of H.R.

Next we’ve got to decide on our communication media or channel. You know, the default communication channel is most often email. For 12 years now, I’ve been hearing about the death of email. I’m still waiting for it to die.

Email is particularly effective in communicating bad news. Can you think about why?

Wofford: Well, it’s directed at me. I mean, people are tethered to their phones, right? So there’s an expediency to it.

Newman: Right. Plus, everybody’s getting the same message at the same time. In layoff situations, companies will usually send those messages on a Friday and then people go home so they’re not in their office angrily talking to each other and getting each other riled up.

But there is a downside to email. Many people would prefer a call, or better yet, a face-to-face conversation. So that’s a decision that really has to be thought through.

The last component here is about the dates or the timing of the messages. It is important to think about who should know what and in what kind of sequence. I’ll go back to the Marriott Starwood example, because I think they did a pretty good job overall.

When the announcement was first made, and this was back in November 2015, there was an email from Starwood executives to Starwood associates with a press release that hadn’t gone out yet attached. That was really the first communication, as it should be, because this was an acquisition, not a merger. Starwood associates are the ones who are thinking they might have the most to lose. When that email went out, it was presumably the first that anybody had heard of this.

Next, we get an email from Marriott executives to Starwood associates that came less than two hours later. Clearly this was all well orchestrated and planned. And that was the message I mentioned before, where they say it’s strange to go from competitors to teammates. It was just a very welcoming message. There was also a video with Arne Sorenson that was lovely.
Then, we had the press release. That public announcement was a little later in the day, but at this point employees already knew that it was coming. In other words, they didn’t have to read about it in the press. All of this happened within three hours of that first message.

Wofford: Amy, thanks so much for joining us once again and thanks to all of you who tuned in.

Newman: Thank you, Chris. It’s been a great conversation.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Amy Newman’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Communication Planning: Preparing for Organizational Change. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Women in Leadership topics. 

  0  

Women are “Bossy” and Men are “Decisive”

What Gender Stereotypes Really Mean in the Workplace and How to Overcome Them

Susan Fleming is a senior lecturer at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, specializing in entrepreneurship and women in leadership. She’s a veteran of Wall Street and no stranger to the challenges that women run up against in the workforce.

As part of our Women in Leadership webcast series, Fleming sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the difficult tightrope that women are expected to walk and to dish out advice for how best to navigate situations why gender biases may be at play.

Fleming: Today I’m going to talk about some of the biases and barriers women in leadership roles face as well as some strategies for overcoming them.

I find that when I kick off these presentations, it’s useful to share some information about the current status of women in leadership, at least in the US. Today, women make up just under 50 percent of the US workforce. They also make up more than 50 percent of managerial and professional positions — meaning mid-management and lower middle management positions.

One might logically think that if women are half the population, make up half the workforce and half of the managerial and professional positions, they must also make up half of the leadership positions. But I probably wouldn’t be giving a talk on this if that were the case.

I’m curious to see what our audience might know in terms of the representation of women in a few sectors of our society, the first being Congress, the second being law firm partners and the third being board directors and CEOs within the Standard & Poor’s 500.

Wofford: We’ve got the guesses coming in now. Looks like the audience thinks the percentage of current female Congressional representatives is around 10 percent.

Fleming: The correct answer is that, as of 2015, women made up about 20 percent of the Senate and 19 percent of the House. So when you think that women are half of the population, clearly things aren’t where you might expect them to be on that front.

I often get asked how the United States stacks up against other countries in this. There are 190 direct-election countries in the world and the United States is actually ranked 72nd. Just to give you a bit of context, we are just below Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Greece, and Kenya. And just above Kyrgyzstan and Slovakia.

We often hear our politicians say that we’re the greatest democracy on the planet. To me, democracy would include both genders.

Wofford: Indeed. Do you want to look at law firm partners next?

Fleming: It looks like for the most part, the audience poll is showing answers between 2 and 20 percent. They are pretty much on the mark there. Women account for just under 20 percent of law firm partners. In some ways, you might say there has been a significant increase back from 1995, when women were at about 13 percent. That is a huge increase but it’s a little disheartening with all of the change that you see in our society to only see it go from 13 percent to just under 20 during that time.

Wofford: How did our audience do in guessing the percentage of women in leadership positions within the S&P?

Fleming: Well, two percent was the most popular answer and they pretty much nailed it. When it comes to S&P 500 CEOs, women make up 4.6 percent. Again, there has actually been huge progress mathematically on that. When I first started teaching this, it was one percent. On the board seat side, the answer is about 19 percent.

Wofford: So why are these numbers are so low?

Fleming: There are many complicated reasons. There’s no one thing. It can’t simply be ascribed to discrimination or bias or this idea that women want to have babies. There is a very complicated set of dynamics that are going on culturally and socially that are at play.

The one thing that I really want to focus on today in particular is gender bias and stereotyping.
Gender beliefs, probably more than most people realize, are incredibly powerful in shaping our culture, in shaping the business world, in shaping our behavior and the way that we go about our daily lives.

Part of the reason for that is that gender is the dominant basis for categorization, across virtually all social contexts. Just to give you an example, when you walk into a room of people you don’t know, the first thing that you categorize people on is gender. The next one could be race, it could be class, it could be age, and so on. But gender wins pretty much across the board in every culture.

Another thing that is very important for people to understand is that when you bring up the word stereotyping, and you start talking about bigotry, you get people very concerned and feeling defensive. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Most of this is unconscious. Stereotyping is a type of cognitive shortcut. So when we walk into that room, we don’t have the mental energy or time to differentiate everything about everyone in the room, yet we want to behave appropriately. So we use those cognitive shortcuts in order to guide our behavior.

The downside of stereotypes is that all of those associations that we make, while they might be right and they might be useful, they might also be wrong. So if you walk into a meeting assessing a woman, you might immediately associate feminine characteristics as being more communal and less aggressive. But perhaps the woman is more aggressive than you expected, so you’re reacting to her in a way that is different than you would react to her if she were a man. That’s where stereotypes get us in trouble.

Wofford: So even though these things sort of spring into mind subconsciously, they can still affect how you respond to a given situation?

Fleming: Right. I want to talk a little bit about the content of gender stereotypes, and I thought it could be fun to ask the audience to provide one word that’s a stereotypical description of a woman.

Wofford: Okay, let’s see what we got. The first three all say ‘emotional.’

Fleming: That always comes up but, wow, three in a row?

Wofford: Here come some more: controlling, nurturing, bitchy, soft, timid, communicative, sweet, nice, intelligent, weak, sensitive.

Fleming: Look, here we have “unassertive” and “bossy” right next to each other — that’s interesting.

I can see some more are continuing to roll in, but what you see is that many of the stereotypes fall into what we call communal characteristics. And then you see that people list all of these negative words that are applied to women when they violate that communal stereotype. That’s where you get bitchy, controlling, overly assertives.

Wofford: All of which would probably be considered assets for a male, right?

Fleming: For males, it would be an asset. So that’s kind of the content of gender stereotypes and they do change over time, but mostly you see the same answers.

The problem with stereotypes is not so much around description, it’s when they become prescriptive. Those prescriptive stereotypes are what give rise to the comments we saw in the chat box. Controlling, too assertive, pushy, those kinds of things.

We’ve just talked about typical stereotypes about women and men. When it comes to stereotypes about leaders, they tend to fall into the masculine category. Numerous studies across many different countries, different age groups, etc. have consistently demonstrated that when individuals think of the typical leader or manager, they think of a male. They think of those male characteristics. So when you see that aggressive male leader – confident, intelligent, decisive, exercising authority – the world feels right. In contrast, when you consider a female leader, you have inconsistent stereotypes being triggered.

A female leader is supposed to be strong and authoritative, know her stuff, hold her ground and speak her mind, but while doing that, she is simultaneously also supposed to come off as sweet, supportive, nice, communal, kind and gentle — all of those expectations of what an appropriate woman is supposed to be. As a woman who’s worked in the business world, that’s really hard to do simultaneously and the failure to do that triggers a lot of bad things for women leaders. That inconsistency contributes to prejudice against female leaders.

If the female leader is too communal, she’s seen as a poor leader and too weak. If they’re too agentic, they’re seen as competent but they’re unlikable and for women, likeability is a requirement for success. For men, it’s nice to be likeable but there’s a lot more leeway for a man than a woman to be likable and be tough.

That creates what we call the Double Bind, which is having to walk a tightrope between being simultaneously assertive and smart in order to be seen as competent while simultaneously being nice and warm in order to meet stereotypes of communality. The people that don’t navigate that tight rope well will be either labeled as an incompetent or as a bitch.

Wofford: It seems like a no-win situation.

Fleming: I like to use the Sarah Palin – Hillary Clinton illustration. The political media painted Clinton as the bitchy and unlikable one while Palin was the incompetent bimbo. So women in politics often get painted into one corner or the other.

There was a really funny clip recently on Jimmy Fallon where Hillary Clinton was on and he had her give a talk and he critiqued it by saying, “No, you’re being too loud.” “No, you’re being too quiet.” “Could you be a little less pushy?” or “You’ve gotta want it more.”

Wofford: You hear others say she should smile more.

Fleming: Right, exactly. Fallon said that too and then she smiled and he’s like, “Come on.” So, it was illustrating that Double Bind. It’s a funny clip.

The Double Bind is really important but I also want to touch on some other stereotypes about women’s competence. There are a lot of stereotypes about other things, around women’s commitment, around their credibility, around their organizational fit, but what I really want to touch on is competence.

Women are perceived to be generally less competent than men. The difference isn’t huge but it’s there and it will particularly show up when you’re dealing with male-type tasks. But it’s also true on gender-neutral tasks. In experimental studies where people are assessed doing a general neutral task, women will be assessed lower despite the exact same performance. That’s because there’s bias that they’re less competent.

There was a study in which an identical essay was put out but when you attached a woman’s name as the author, the essay was rated lower even though it was identical to the one bearing the man’s name.

Another barrier that women have to deal with is what we call shifting standards for evaluating men and women. Some researchers did a study on hiring for the position of police chief, which is a very male-typed position typically. They created two resumes, one that had more experience and one that had more education. They then pre-tested them with no names on them and they were evaluated as fairly equivalent. Then they put a woman’s name on the one with more education and a man’s name on the experience one. When they asked people which one they would pick, they picked the man and they justified their decision by saying he had more experience.

Then they flipped the names so that the woman’s resume had more experience and they still said they’d hire the man. Why? Because he had more education. That’s shifting the standards. Because of these unconscious biases, there is an answer they want to get to and they’ll change their perception of the facts in order to get to the answer that makes them comfortable.

Wofford: And these unconscious biases are something that we all have? Can they be overcome?

Fleming: We all have them. One of the things that I find really insidious is that people will use stereotypes to set expectations for themselves and guide their own behavior. Before anyone else can tell them they can’t do something, they’ve already said, “Well, I was really good at math and I’m interested in it, but women aren’t so good at math or computer science or whatever, so I don’t think I’m going to be good at that.” And so they don’t even try, they opt out into different tracks.

Everyone has biases. The goal is to be aware of them so that you can stop yourself from using them unfairly. I would ask you all to be particularly mindful of this when you’re in a context where you are hiring others or you’re evaluating people for promotion or you’re assessing who should get an opportunity in the workplace. You owe an extra level of attention to make sure you’re not using those stereotypes unconsciously.

And don’t apply stereotypes to yourself. When you’re considering career advancement, you might be unwittingly limiting your own opportunities.

Wofford: I think that’s great advice. Do you have any other pearls of wisdom you want to share before we run out of time?

Fleming: Just a couple other things. If you’re a woman, you need to develop a communication style that responds to the reality of the double bind. Truthfully, I don’t like giving this advice and I’d rather see every individual be authentic and be themselves. I’m a real kind of go-getter, I’m loud, I speak up a lot. I don’t like having to dial back and to sort of be less authentic but I have had to do that at times in order to advance.

I think that one of the great ways to start to change the culture to allow more women into leadership positions is to get into the leadership positions to begin with. You’ve got to get that cycle going and if that means that you have to dial it back and maybe bite your tongue on occasion, that’s an okay thing to do in my view. Then over time, you can hopefully drive change by helping to make more women leaders.

Wofford: So there are compromises that still need to be made before we get to where we want to be?

Fleming: I’m a big fan of changing society, changing culture, changing perceptions and getting rid of stereotypes — but in the meantime, you also have to survive.

When I’m teaching MBAs and teaching undergraduates who are about to go into the workforce, I say to them, “This is your own personal choice. You have to read the environment and read the culture of the organization. But be mindful of how you’re being perceived and mindful that it will be different than the way a man is being perceived who’s doing the exact same thing. And you have to decide if you want to tone it down or not.” That’s their call.

Wofford: Thank you Susan, this has been great.

Fleming: Thanks for having me.

 

Want to hear more? This article is based on Susan Fleming’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Bias, Barriers and Strategies for Overcoming Them. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Women in Leadership topics. 

  0  

Here’s What the “Glass Ceiling” Really Means for Women Leaders

Global studies have found that words traditionally defined as feminine in nature, such as expressive, reasonable and loyal, are the words that people most commonly list as the competencies they want to see in their leaders. But if people favor these ‘feminine’ leadership traits, why aren’t there are more female CEOs and board members? In the US, only around 16 percent of corporate board seats go to women, despite women currently holding between 50 to 60 percent of all graduate degrees in the country.

Allison Elias, a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University’s ILR School and expert on gender in the workplace, says the disparity is due in part to a disconnect between what is expected of women and what is expected of business leaders.

In a recent Women in Leadership Webcast hosted by eCornell, Elias suggests that traditionally assigned gender roles affect our perceptions of female leaders. Female leadership candidates have to contend with the often unconscious or unintentional discrimination of males in the hiring role. When a man interviews a woman for a leadership position, for example, his mind may wander to thoughts about her family life, leading him to wonder if she would need a more flexible work schedule than a male candidate.

“Perhaps that employer really wants to hire a woman. Perhaps he has even explicitly declared that he wants to make gender diversity a priority in his organization. But our brains automatically take these cognitive shortcuts,” Elias said.

Even when women achieve the highest positions within a company, they are often hit with what Elias refers to as the “likeability penalty.” Social science research shows that women who are more advanced in their careers are often found to be less likable, too power hungry or too aggressive.

“A lot of women remain in sort of a lose-lose situation. When they behave in a more aggressive or competitive way, they’re punished by being disliked. But if they exhibit traits that are more aligned with their gender role—being warm, supportive, and caring—they might be liked, but they might not necessarily be viewed as competent. Women are punished in a way men are not,” Elias says.

Women also have to contend with an American work culture that expects employees to put work as their first and only priority. Workplaces are too often “structured for a man who has someone to take care of the kids and domestic issues,” Elias said.

“It’s changing a bit, but this ideal worker norm kind of pervades a lot of traditional jobs and that’s a structural way that women face a barrier on their way to the top. A lot of times moving into leadership positions requires always being on, always being responsive to email, never missing days.”

She pointed to a study done by the consulting firm Bain and Company that found that 43 percent of women aspire to reach top management when they start a new job, but that number plunges to 16 percent after the women gain experience within the company. The study showed that women didn’t see themselves as “fitting in” at the workplace, with many of them citing that they weren’t willing to put work above everything else in their lives in order to move to the top.

While everyone is familiar with the concept of the glass ceiling, Elias and a number of other scholars say that the phrase might not be the best metaphor for what women face in the workplace. Instead, they advocate for the ‘labyrinth of leadership’ because all sorts of barriers can block a woman’s progress at different points within her career.

“The glass ceiling metaphor suggests that women are going to be able to ascend and be successful in the workplace until the very top. But when looking at why the talent pipeline doesn’t progress women to the top, the idea of a labyrinth can be more effective because there’s all sorts of barriers that come up at all sorts of points of a woman’s career that can deter her from being able to make it to the end,” Elias said.

 

Want to hear more? This article is based on Allison Elias’ live eCornell WebSeries event, Unlocking the Hidden Leadership Potential Inside Your Company. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Women in Leadership topics. 

  0  

Hotel School Offers Online Food and Beverage Management Certificate

With more Americans eating out than ever before, today’s food service operations rely on food and beverage managers for sales growth, profitability and cost control in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

The School of Hotel Administration has launched a new Food and Beverage Management online certificate program to give food and beverage managers an opportunity to develop the specific operations and management skills necessary to drive sustainable results.

“From menu development, to guest service management, to revenue analysis, supply chain management and employee training, this program provides professionals with essential tools to improve operations and become value-driven supervisors. Students gain hands-on experience through exercises, projects and tools, combined with insights from some of today’s most influential food and beverage industry players,” said Alex Susskind, associate professor of food and beverage management and faculty co-author of the program.

Offered through eCornell, students can learn the essentials of managing and operating a successful food and beverage business in three to five hours per week, over three months. Participants take five courses and one elective, preparing them to:

  • design and optimize menus;
  • manage the food and beverage supply chain;
  • use a systematic inventory purchasing and management process to minimize loss;
  • assess revenue with a Restaurant Revenue Management system;
  • build guest loyalty through performance standards, service recovery strategies and better guest feedback methods; and
  • effectively lead and engage employees to improve operational performance.

The certificate is recommended for food and beverage professionals, from front-line to general management, who want to improve their operation.

  0  

Why It’s So Hard to Say ‘No’

Exploring social perceptions in the workplace

Imagine that your phone has just died but you have a very important call to make. Would you be comfortable approaching a stranger and asking to use their phone? How many people do you think you’d have to ask before someone agrees?

These are the kinds of questions that fascinate Vanessa Bohns, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University’s ILR School. Bohns does research on social influence and our perceptions of the influence that we have over other people.

She’s interested in the underlying psychological mechanisms like how feelings of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and embarrassment affect our willingness to ask others to do something for us and how these dynamics play out in the workplace.

As part of eCornell’s Women in Leadership WebCast Series, Bohns joined Chris Wofford for a discussion on how to get others to say yes and why it can be so hard to say no.

Wofford: Vanessa, thanks for joining us today. What can asking a stranger to borrow their phone teach us about interactions in the workplace?

Bohns: The real question is, why is it so hard to ask people for things? Likewise, why is it so hard to say no? A lot of it has to do with the underlying psychological mechanisms like emotions that prevent us from recognizing our own influence over others and potentially prevent us from seeing when other people feel like they can’t ask us for help.

In many cases, it comes down to awkwardness. Something as simple as asking someone for their phone can be a very distressing interaction. The self-consciousness, the awkwardness, this idea that you’re imposing on someone, it can create anxiety.

There is also a gender aspect to the discomfort of asking. Studies have shown that women experience about two and a half times more anxiety when asking for things than men. We all probably think of the stereotype about men not wanting to ask for directions, but that comes from a different place than when you have to ask for something for yourself, like a raise or promotion at work, for example.

We all tend to mistake our own feelings of discomfort for other people’s feelings of discomfort. We all deal with egocentric biases, because we know what’s happening in our own head—it’s very rich with information about our own experiences, and because of that, we don’t necessarily recognize other people’s experiences.

Wofford: Can you give us an example of these biases in action?

Bohns: I’ll start with something called the spotlight effect, which is basically the idea that people are paying more attention to us than they actually are. There’s a classic study from the 1990s in which college-aged participants were given this Barry Manilow t-shirt, which was considered a pretty embarrassing thing to wear. The participants were asked to go interact with others and then come back and rate how likely it was that these other people recognized what they were wearing. Of course, they all thought everyone noticed their Manilow shirts and judged them harshly for it, when, in fact, most people didn’t even notice what they were wearing and if they did, they certainly didn’t judge them because of it. So we tend to think that everyone’s looking at us, noticing our bad hair days, noticing our bad outfits, noticing when we trip. But most of the time, people are much more interested in themselves than anything you are doing.

Wofford: So I shouldn’t worry about wearing this outfit again tomorrow?

Bohns: Exactly, no one is going to notice.

The spotlight effect is very related to another egocentric bias that’s called the illusion of transparency, which is this idea that our emotions sort of leak out of our skin and everyone can see how anxious we are when we’re giving a talk, for example. The truth is that people in the audience usually say they had no idea that the speaker was anxious. Our emotions don’t leak out to the extent that we think they do.

Another egocentric bias is the illusion of courage and this is one of my particular favorites. The illusion of courage is this idea that other people are less affected by self-consciousness, embarrassment, and awkwardness than we are ourselves. A classic study on this entailed playing the song ‘Super Freak’ by Rick James really loudly in a big auditorium full of students. The students were told that a number of them would be brought up to dance in front of the entire audience, so naturally a lot of people get nervous and worried that they’d be the ones picked. As part of the experiment, the students were asked to write down how much money they’d need to be paid in order to get up on stage and dance. They were also asked how much they thought other people would need to be paid to do the same.

On average, the students said that they would need more than $50 before they would actually consider dancing up on stage but when they judged other people, they thought that they would take less than $20 to do it. They thought that other people just wouldn’t be as embarrassed or feel as concerned about doing this as they themselves would. This is the illusion of courage.

Wofford: So when when you take all these egocentric biases together, they sort of suggest that we think that other people would judge us more harshly than they actually do?

Bohns: Exactly. We think that they’re paying attention to our mistakes, that they’re remembering them and that they’re making all sorts of judgments based on them.

So that’s why if we ask for something, we think people are going to judge us. If we say no to something, people are going to judge us. We simply don’t realize the extent to which other people also have feelings of anxiety and self-consciousness. We’re so worried about how people view us that we’re not paying attention to how other people feel in a lot of situations.

This goes beyond our personal interactions. Just recognizing the extent to which self-conscious concerns affect us and the decisions we make on a daily basis as managers, as employees, as bosses—and the extent to which our employees are making similar decisions based on self-conscious concerns—is a really important thing when it comes to organizational behavior.

Wofford: Let’s turn to another big question: why is it so hard for people to say no?

Bohns: In part, people are just mindlessly following a social norm that we say yes to people. So when someone comes up to you and asks for something, you just go along with it without really thinking. That’s part of it. Another big factor is that we don’t want to impolite. If you say no, there’s something that you could be insinuating about the other person that there’s something wrong with what they’re asking.

At the end of the day, it’s just really awkward to say no. And so it’s often just easier and more comfortable to say yes, and just go along with whatever somebody is asking you.

Wofford: Am I wrong to feel encouraged by this? I feel like people are generally good.

Bohns: I think there’s something to be said for the fact that our mindless default is to agree, to just go along with helping other people. The takeaway is that people are often much more willing to help us than we think—and that we have a certain degree of influence.

But there can be a dark side to this. There’s the phenomenon of social engineering that can be used to get people to do things that they should say no to. That can be used by nefarious people who understand this and who want, for example, to gain access to sensitive information by exploiting psychological vulnerabilities. So instead of technically hacking into someone’s computer, you call them up and say, “Hey, I know so-and-so and he said that maybe you’d be willing to give me this, and I just need your password to log on.” One of the reasons this is so effective is that people feel so awkward challenging what someone is saying to them.

The last thing I want to talk about is how this idea that we don’t recognize other people’s feelings of discomfort can affect the ways in which we can encourage them to ask us for things. When we are the ones who can actually help others, do we recognize the barriers that prevent people from seeking our help? Do we realize how awkward they might feel and can we better encourage people to actually come ask for help when they need it?

You can imagine a situation where you have an employee who’s struggling with a project but just too nervous or self-conscious to ask you, the boss, for help. You might not realize that the reason he’s not asking is because he feels awkward, not necessarily because he doesn’t have any questions related to the project.

Wofford: And that might directly affect the outcome of the project.

Bohns: Yes. On the other hand, you can imagine a more nefarious situation in which a supervisor asks a subordinate to do something that she’s uncomfortable with. She feels awkward saying no and the supervisor, because he’s not aware of this discomfort, assumes that she was fine with it. He assumes that if she didn’t want to do what he was asking, she would just say no. A lot of us make this assumption because we’re in our own egocentric world.

Wofford: You’ve shared some really interesting examples. What are some of the conclusions and takeaways you want our audience to leave with?

Bohns: One major conclusion that should be completely evident from all these studies is that self-consciousness drives much of human behavior. We usually think that embarrassment is this trivial emotion but it actually drives so much of behavior that we should take it seriously. We should be aware of the extent to which we are likely to overlook embarrassment in others and the extent to which it drives our own behavior.

So part of the takeaway is to manage the control that self-consciousness has over you. You might think that you’re the only one who is affected by embarrassment, but actually everybody is. Also, be aware of how it might affect others’ behaviors and prevent them from doing things like asking for help.

When it comes to asking for things that you actually need, the first thing is to just ask. People are much more likely to say yes than you think.

Finally, don’t worry about the way people will interpret a request. Be direct. People tend to think that they should be indirect and sort of beat around the bush, when in fact people are much less likely to respond positively to these kinds of subtle hints. They are much more likely to respond positively to a direct request.

You might think that if people are saying yes out of awkwardness or because they feel they can’t say no, that means they’re going to interpret this as being pressured into it. But actually we have actually found that, afterwards, people re-interpret why they did something in a way that makes them feel good.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Vanessa Bohns’ live eCornell WebSeries event, Your Power of Persuasion: Getting Others To Say “Yes,” and Why It Is So Hard To Say “No.” Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Human Resources topics. 

  0  

What #OscarsSoWhite and Chipotle Can Teach Us About Crisis Communication

In today’s age of instant social media amplification, there has been no shortage of examples of crises and crisis communication in popular culture.

To walk us through what organizations should do to prepare for a crisis and how to best react, eCornell’s Chris Wofford was joined by Amy Newman, a senior lecturer of management communication at Cornell University.

While Newman says that “crisis is inevitable,” she believes that when handled properly a crisis can actually give a boost to an organization. What follows is an abridged version of her eCornell WebSeries presentation.

Wofford: There are a lot of things that could constitute a “crisis” within an organization. What are we talking about when we talk about crisis communication?

Newman: Let’s start by looking at an academic definition. Timothy Coombs, one of the leading researchers in crisis communication, defines a crisis as “the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes.”

It’s important to note that while a crisis is unpredictable, it’s not necessarily something that you can’t anticipate. Some organizations should know what crisis is coming and even if they don’t, they should be prepared for some crisis because it will happen at some point. It’s just a matter of what it is and when it strikes.

A crisis does threaten the expectancies of stakeholders. There might be health or safety issues, environmental consequences or economic consequences, and all of these will have an impact on the organization. So by definition, a crisis affects the organization’s reputation or bottom line or something else.

Wofford: What’s a good example you could share? Are there any recent situations you can point to as a case of crisis communication?

Newman: There’s one that I’m sure you’re aware of and that the viewers are aware of. The Academy of Motion Pictures recently identified their slate of nominees for this year’s Oscar awards and they were all white for the major categories. There was a lot of backlash about this, with Spike Lee and some major actors threatening to boycott. There’s a hashtag trending on Twitter called #OscarsSoWhite. So this is something that has evolved to the level of a crisis.

Wofford: The consequences in this case are pretty obvious, right?

Newman: If there are people who are respected in the industry who don’t attend the awards because of this, the ceremony is going to suffer and advertising revenue might go down. I would also say also the general reputation of the organization is being harmed. The Los Angeles Times has been doing the most reporting about the situation and they took a look at the demographics of the academy itself and guess what the average age of the people voting for the Oscars is?

Wofford: I’d say it’s up there. 50-plus, 60, 70.

Newman: It’s about 62. So, you know, it’s people who have won awards, people who have been in the industry for a long time. They have a lifetime membership. You can see why there might be a lack of diversity.

In this case, I wouldn’t say that the crisis was entirely unanticipated. They should have known better. Last year, there were also all white nominees and criticism of the Academy. At the time, the Academy president,Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who happens to be an African American, was adamant that the Academy didn’t have a problem recognizing diversity. But now it’s escalated to the point that they really do need to do something about it.

We’ll talk later about their response, but first I’d like to talk about three phases of crisis management: preparing for a crisis before it happens, managing through the actual crisis, and then learning from a crisis.

Wofford: It’s the leader’s job to prepare an organization for decisions using these three steps, right?

Newman: It certainly is. The preparation is very important. We usually think about crisis management happening at the most senior level of an organization and certainly if it’s a large organization, there’s a corporate communication department that handles much of this.
But it becomes everyone’s responsibility during a crisis to represent the organization well and to try to turn things around.

So in preparing for a crisis at first, well, of course the best way is to prevent a crisis from happening at all. You can’t do that in every situation but you can in some. I’ll present Volkswagen as the case here. They installed diesel deception software in their cars so, in effect, created their own crisis. It was bound to come out at some point.

Wofford: Do you think Volkswagen was at all prepared for this? They got caught red-handed.

Newman: It really didn’t seem they were ready for it. What I understand about Volkswagen is that they have a very tightly controlled centralized management. That’s good in some situations but in a situation like crisis communication, it made them very slow to respond. I think it’s because they kept information so tightly closed—they really were not prepared for what happened at all.

One thing an organization should do is to document what would happen in case of a crisis. This means identifying contacts and putting together a team of crisis communication people. Usually that will be some HR people, maybe your local department, communications people, of course, some emergency management people, safety—All of those functions should be represented.

Included in that kind of plan is an approach for the media. What should we say if we get a phone call? What will the communication challenges be? Which channels should we use? How do we notify different audiences?

Part of the preparation process is being honest about the vulnerabilities in an organization, and this really depends on the industry. If I own a restaurant, I am likely to have a problem with food poisoning at some point or some other food safety issue that has to be handled. If I work for a hospital, we will probably have a malpractice situation, so we might as well think about how we’ll address that when it happens.

The other way to think about this is situational. If we’re doing layoffs, well, we might have a situation of workplace violence. If we’re in the process of labor negotiations, we might face a strike so we should prepare our messages ahead of time.

When a crisis hits an organization, emotions are running high and you have to act quickly. You don’t want to be trying to craft messages and figuring out the best way to respond. That should be done ahead of time.

Another thing we can do is to try to catch a situation before it becomes a full-blown crisis. An example I can give is McDonald’s.

Wofford: Okay, I see your slide shows a poster saying ‘You’re not alone. Millions of people love the Big Mac”. But yikes, the woman looks very depressed or even suffering from mental illness. I can’t imagine this campaign worked out very well.

Newman: Well, a lot of people suffer from mental illness, depression in particular, and this was not appreciated. So someone took an image of the ad and posted it to social media and there we go: a crisis is born.

But I have to compliment McDonald’s for handling it quickly. They immediately put an apology out. They also blamed their ad agency, which could be a dangerous strategy. But the ad agency in Boston took responsibility and confirmed what McDonald’s had said, which is that they had not approved the ads. So the agency apologized as well.

The ads were taken down and it quickly resolved, which is the best way to handle a crisis.

Wofford: McDonald’s probably offended some people but by responding quickly, there wasn’t a major effect on the company’s bottom line.

Newman: Exactly, McDonald’s handled it correctly.

But sometimes, despite our best efforts, there is still a crisis. I’m going to review three principles and I’ll show some examples of each. The first is to communicate quickly. That is essential, especially within the social media environment. The second is communicating consistently. And the third principle we’ll talk about is communicating openly.

Let’s start with the first. A study found that 53 percent of Twitter users who expect a response from a company on Twitter expect that response within just one hour. The thing is, within an hour all sort of things can happen on Twitter. One tweet could go to millions of people, so if companies aren’t in that conversation they’re really going to miss out.

Let’s give an example. People may know of the movie ‘Blackfish’, which came out in 2013. It’s about SeaWorld and how they treat their animals. It showed how SeaWorld was treating their orcas, putting them in restricted spaces. According to the film, there were some trainer injuries and a couple of trainer deaths because of how the orcas were being treated. It is a pretty damning film.

SeaWorld had no response to the movie at all and the conversation just kept elevating and elevating and social media celebrities were all over it. Some acts canceled planned events at SeaWorld. PETA, of course, had its own campaign. People were making this analogy of living in a bathtub for 40 years, referencing the confinement that the orcas had suffered.

SeaWorld showed exactly what not to do in a crisis situation. They refused to do any interviews. Months later, they finally did start to use social media and their website to share some videos meant to portray that they’re actually an organization that helps animals. But it was too late, and now what we’re seeing is that SeaWorld has really suffered in terms of ticket sales and lost partnerships. This was just a classic example of a tone-deaf organization that wouldn’t admit to wrongdoing.

Wofford: You mentioned you would get into how the Academy responded to the #OscarsSoWhite crisis.

Newman: Well, after that hashtag started trending, Cheryl Boone Isaacs did respond pretty quickly. The Academy tweeted out a statement from her, which you can see on my slide.

In her first statement, she says “I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful work of this year’s nominees.” And I think it’s really important to remember that when a leader is working on a crisis situation, there are many, many audiences involved, and many people to try to appease. One thing she can’t do is take anything away from the current nominees, so she’s doing the right thing here in acknowledging them.

She goes on to use really strong words: “I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation and it’s time for big changes.” This sounds sincere.

Wofford: And she’s owning it by using “I”, right?

Newman: Yes. She’s doing the right thing. She’s the president of the organization but she’s also saying this as an African American. I’m sure she probably has her own feelings about this as well.

She goes on to say: “In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity.” So she’s promising action and, of course, you say that you had better do it, right?

She continues by saying that the Academy has done quite a bit to encourage diversity in recent years but she acknowledges it hasn’t been enough. So I think that’s good too.

But then I think she really falls a bit short in the end when she says “This isn’t unprecedented for the Academy. In the ’60’s and ’70s, it was about recruiting young members.” Now, as my students would remind me, that was a long time ago.

Wofford: Right, and probably a lot of her detractors haven’t been around that long so I’m not I’m not sure that line did her any favors.

Newman: Exactly, it makes you think of old white guys. But she ends on a positive note: “I recognize the very real concerns of our community.” That’s a good line.

So the Academy’s response, issued just four days after the crisis, is not a perfect response, but it is a good example of a quick response.

Now let’s look at another principle for communicating, which is communicating consistently. You’ve got three tools that are going to help you communicate consistently within the organization. One is the crisis communication plan that we looked at before. The second tool I would suggest is social media guidelines. The third tool I want to recommend is to have a communication plan.

Organizations need to identify all of their audiences, internal and external, and think about how those audiences might feel or respond to a crisis situation. That helps us really empathize and then identify what we are trying to accomplish with our communication. What do we want them to feel after they read our message or watch our video? What do we want them to think differently about the company?

It’s always good to use a variety of communication channels because we know that people have different learning styles and different ways of receiving information. So you have to use multiple forms: social media, emails, press releases, statements on websites and, of course, video can be very powerful in a crisis situation.

Too often companies forget about internal employees so I would recommend prioritizing those before anything goes to the press to make sure that internal employees are aware of what’s happening and any response that the company is planning to make.

Wofford: Your third principle is communicating openly, right? What does that mean?

Newman: Being available to the media, being honest about the communication and, ideally, being transparent. Now, there can be a lot of questions about how transparent an organization really should be. There’s always this healthy tension. Lawyers tend to be more conservative and don’t want the companies to disclose much. They might prefer an organization to say “No comment.” But corporate communicators know that kind of stance is not going to help the company in the long run. People really want to know what’s going on.

My view is that information will come out anyway, so you might as well control the message as the organization.

Another area of great debate within some companies is whether organizations should apologize. Lawyers sometimes argue that apologizing demonstrates guilt. But we don’t have to apologize in a way that says we’re responsible. We can apologize in a way that shows sympathy and regret. There’s a ton of research that says showing sympathy will actually mitigate the reputational damage for an organization in the long run and could actually reduce financial loss.

Wofford: Once you’ve made it through a crisis, what should you have learned?

Newman: What most people want to do is just get back to work because it’s incredibly emotionally draining and time consuming, but one of the most important things a crisis leader can do is to reflect on what happened. How did we do in terms of the media coverage and community relations? How did the crisis management team itself do?

Taking stock in that way is really important to build leaderships skills and to prepare for another crisis if it does happen again.

I want to end on a positive note here and that’s to say that there’s definitely a life after crisis. I’ll give an example with the Tylenol case. In 1982, cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol appeared on the shelves. At first, the company said it didn’t come from their plant; they denied responsibility and the predictions were that the company was pretty much done.

But then they acted very proactively, pulled all of the product from the shelves, and they actually came up with those tamper-proof bottles that we know today. They took real positive action and became an industry leader.

For a more current example, we can look at Chipotle’s response to its E. coli breakout. They are being very transparent about changes. Just this past week, the company had a meeting at all its locations. They closed down for four hours and they live-Tweeted the meeting. Chipotle founder Steve Ells says that he wants to become a leader in the industry in terms of food safety. We’ll see whether he achieves that goal, but most analysts say they have no doubt that the company will recover.

People have short memories and as soon as another crisis comes along, we will forget about this one.

Wofford: Amy has a Twitter account, @bizcominthenews, that is very current and keeps up with all of these sorts of issues—we invite you to check it out.
Amy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Newman: Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Amy Newman’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Crisis Communication: Expect the Best, Prepare for the Worst. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Women in Leadership topics. 

  0  

Want to Build High-Performing Relationships at Work? Try This.

Building collaborative work relationships with colleagues and avoiding threats to project collaboration are issues that every employee today must deal with.

To address the real-life challenges that people face in today’s diverse and often global – or even virtual – workplaces, eCornell’s Chris Wofford was joined by Dr. Michele Williams, a scholar at Cornell University’s Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution as well as a Faculty Fellow at the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Network. Their wide-ranging discussion is part of our ongoing Women in Leadership WebCast series.

Wofford: Michelle, thanks for joining us. I’d like to start with the results of some poll questions we posed to our audience. Here’s the first one: “Do fear, stress, or anger play a part in the erosion of trust at your organization?” The overwhelming response was ‘yes’, which is probably not much of a surprise.

Williams: No, it’s not. But what I think is really important in today’s society is that there’s so much economic pressure, a lot of mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and so on, so fear, stress, and anger have become almost a daily part of work. Figuring out how we build and maintain trust when emotions are starting to be just a common part of our work experience is a real challenge.

Wofford: I’ve got another one here I think will be interesting to look at, which is, “Do you believe that lack of trust in your organization is an issue that needs to be addressed?” Again, probably no surprise that 100 percent of the responses say “yes”.

Williams: This is a widespread issue. If we look more broadly, the erosion of trust in our institutions and politicians and government parallels what’s going on within organizations.

I would argue that trust is really the key to collaborative relationships because it really increases things that are essential to collaboration, like information sharing, helping behavior, responsiveness,and flexibility.

If something goes wrong every time you work with a contractor, for instance, you have to renegotiate the contract. That’s extremely costly. If you trust them, you can respond in a more responsible way that allows you to work around whatever problems arise.

Trust also decreases the need to monitor everyone. If you have to watch everything your team member does, it’s going to really slow down the project.

Wofford: Ok, trust is important. I think that’s something we would all agree on. But what is trust, really?

Williams: Everyone has almost their own definition, including academics, economists and
organizational people, and all of them tend to vary a little bit. But what we’re going to talk about here is psychological trust.

Whenever you collaborate with someone, if they don’t do their part, it can really harm you. When you rely on someone there really is a risk of opportunism or revenge. But you take this risk, not as a huge leap of faith but based on the expectation that others will be helpful or at least not harmful.

This belief that others have benevolent integrity and confidence is really the basis of trust; the trustworthiness you perceive in your colleagues. Do they have the ability to carry out the tasks or write the report or analyze the numbers? Do they follow through on what they say? That’s really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about building trust.

Wofford: Going back to our opening question, how does trust deteriorate?

Williams: Fear and stress can undermine rational cooperation. Time and time again, research studies show that people will punish others even at a cost to themselves if they believe they’ve been treated unfairly.

Tough economic times and layoffs make people fear that others are not going to be able to cooperate and are just trying to protect themselves. Fear can also cause employees to avoid one another and it’s very hard to get work done when people are avoiding you.

When it comes to anger, it can really cause vengeful behavior and override understanding and forgiveness. Everybody makes mistakes, but if people aren’t given a second chance, it often ends up undermining your project without giving them the chance to either explain what happened or to rebuild the trust.

Wofford: How do our different personalities and personal assumptions play into issues of workplace trust? I mean, we’re all individuals right?

Williams: I teach a course in intergroup dialogue and part of the foundation of that course is trust and how you give people the benefit of the doubt when talking about issues that are controversial. Can we have a discussion with people who have different assumptions and can we do it in a way that moves things forward rather than placing blame?

Wofford: Isn’t a lot of that just making people feel comfortable?

Williams: Exactly, and honesty is what brings about those high-quality connections that really facilitate work.

I want to talk a little bit about emotional work. Everyone’s probably had a colleague who’s had a bad day and you’ve tried to cheer them up. That’s what emotional work is. It’s when you try to change your own emotion or someone else’s emotion. Emotional work is really key to building trust in settings where there may be high emotions.

If you are all working really hard to get something done, there’s a lot of stress and tension. If team members are able to help each other manage that, they’re able to maintain that trust at a higher level.

Wofford: So we have to manage emotions in addition to doing our work? How does this play out in a real-world setting?

Williams: Emotional work has two fundamental foundations. One is emotional influence. Can you make the other person feel differently than they’re feeling now in a way that will help them work and continue their relationship with you and with a project? Can you see the situation from the other person’s point of view so that you can figure out the best strategy for interacting?

So how do you do that? There are several different things you can do. One is to alter the situation. Managers often do this if they have a negative feedback report to give to an employee. Instead of calling them into the conference room or the manager’s office, they might instead take them out to lunch and make it a more informal situation.

Another way is to alter the other person’s interpretation of events. You know, projects often fail and that can be crushing. But being able to reframe that into a message of “failures only lead to success” is very effective. Get them to think about it in a different way. Those types of interpretations help people go forward and build and maintain trust.

You can also change the environment. Go play racquetball, go out for a drink – that’s probably not a long-term solution but it works in the short term.

Another approach is that sometimes people say, “Suck it up, just keep going and move on.”

Wofford: Is this emotional work the responsibility of HR, of leadership, or of all of us?

Williams: This is definitely something that leaders do and something that people expect of their leaders. But it’s also something that people do within a team. You need to support each other.

If you don’t notice how other people are feeling, there’s not as much the manager can do about it. Team members have a huge impact because they’re with that person every day, so they’re in the position of being able to reframe a failure or a challenge in a way that makes people go forward.

I think that this is important at all levels of the organization. HR certainly has a critical role to play, including in what type of training they can provide so that people start to understand these behaviors.

Wofford: I want to turn back to our audience for a moment and ask them to weigh in on this poll question: When you feel anxious, stressed or angry, what would you like your team members and managers to do? We have some options: one, use humor to distract you; two, listen to your story; three, help you think more positively; and four, give you advice.

The answers are now in and I don’t know if you’ll be surprised by this, Michele, but the most popular answer was two, to simply listen.

Williams: Listening is critical. I think that a lot of times people jump in with advice when they haven’t understood the situation because they haven’t taken the time to really listen to the person. They’re only half listening and then they start offering solutions. So listening is extremely powerful and it shows that you care and are trustworthy.

Wofford: Not everyone is willing to share their feelings though. How do you find out that your team members are angry or stressed if they don’t come out and say it? How do you anticipate it?

Williams: You’re right that people won’t always tell you, so you might have to look for clues. It may be that you have a team member who used to always go to lunch. If they stop going out to lunch with you, that’s a clue that something’s probably up.

A lot of this is about the proactive process of imagining other people’s thoughts or feelings from their point of view. This is important not only in terms of emotional influence but also just in terms of communication. Communication scholars have looked at perspective-taking and it turns out that when you take someone else’s perspective, you adjust what you say to their knowledge level and to their experience. You frame things in a way so that they actually understand what you’re saying better. It also helps you feel closer to people once you’ve taken their perspective and this in turn makes you care more about their outcomes. It’s a very powerful process if people engage in it.

You know, there is this myth that people are simply trustworthy or not and all you have to do is watch your colleagues and see how they behave and you can figure out if they’re trustworthy or not. But in reality, trustworthiness is something that’s negotiated. Both sides have expectations for trustworthiness and you have to talk about them to figure out where to meet in the middle.

Wofford: So we know that perspective-taking and managing other people’s emotions and emotional influence are important, but how do we get there? How do we get to a place where we’re doing that regularly?

Williams: I would just say practice, practice, practice. Perspective-taking is critical because perspective-taking decreases when people are under stress, under time pressures or when they’re trying to multitask. And of course, this is exactly when it’s most needed.

On a personal level, get feedback. Solicit feedback from individuals about how well they think you understand their perspective. Ask people, what are the situations in which I’m at my best?
Think about those types of situations so that you can build on those strengths.

And finally, practice generative listening. Generative listening goes beyond active listening. So you are listening – you’re not texting while they’re talking to you – but more than that, you’re also affirming their perspective.

You don’t have to agree with someone to affirm that you’ve heard, what they’re saying, and what assumptions they are moving forward from.

Wofford: What are the takeaways you hope people get from our talk here today?

Williams: Building high-performing, collaborative work relationships requires effort, perspective-taking, emotional work, and threat reduction. It’s an interpersonal process that’s ongoing. You don’t do it once and stop.

In today’s global workplace, effective work relationships are key to promotions, project success, and a company’s profitability. Some of the concepts we’ve talked about today can help you build and maintain the trust you’ll need within your team or organization.

Wofford: Michelle, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining me.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Michele Williams’ live eCornell WebSeries event, Building High-Performing Relationships at Work: What Leaders, Followers and Team Members Need to Know. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Human Resources topics. 

  0  

Commercial real estate certificate launches

Faculty from the School of Hotel Administration at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business have partnered with eCornell to develop an online program focused on commercial real estate investment projects. From property development to valuation and management, the new Commercial Real Estate certificate program prepares real estate professionals to successfully develop and manage real estate assets.

“We walk students through the entire real estate process, from start to finish, unifying the specialized knowledge and principles in a very intentional way,” said faculty co-author Jan deRoos, the HVS Professor of Hotel Finance and Real Estate. “Whether you’re new to real estate or looking to move up in the industry, this certificate provides a robust overview grounded in application.”

The Commercial Real Estate certificate, offered online through eCornell, comprises six courses designed to be completed in three to five hours per week. DeRoos collaborated with Hotel School colleagues Jeanne Varney and Bradford Wellstead on the curriculum. Participants will learn and practice:

  • Planning a real estate development project;
  • Managing a project budget, schedule and contingencies;
  • Developing a real estate investment strategy;
  • Structuring and financing real estate investment deals;
  • Effectively leasing and maintaining real estate properties, and
  • Managing real estate assets.

The program is ideal for real estate developers; professionals with responsibility for real estate investments; financing and asset-management professionals; and people aspiring to work for real estate funds, real estate investment trusts (REITs) or real estate advisory firms. Students who complete all courses receive a Commercial Real Estate Certificate.

  0  

Cornell Engineering online project management certificate launches

According to Deloitte, the successful organizations of the future will likely be those that can “move faster, adapt more quickly and learn more rapidly.” A total of 15.7 million new project management jobs are expected to be created this decade, as organizations position themselves to create the speed and agility today’s digital world demands.

Now, professionals can build skills for the project-driven future with eCornell’s new Project Management online certificate program, while accumulating 50 education hours toward a Project Management Professional certification.

“This program is for anyone who works in a project environment, regardless of function or industry,” said faculty author Linda Nozick, professor and director of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell. “Professionals gain a concise understanding of today’s project management space, learn practical skills and tools, and address crucial behavioral issues affecting project success.”

The Project Management program includes five online courses that can be completed over three months, in three to five hours per week. Students will learn and practice how to:

  • Get organized: Schedule, track and control projects using work breakdown structures, project networks, Critical Path and PERT calculations;
  • Plan and manage resources: Combat “creeps” in scope, budget, effort and time by identifying critical project resources over the course of the project, resource leveling, “crashing” or “fast tracking” certain tasks and understanding behavioral dynamics;
  • Manage risk: Understand types of project risk, and use tools to conduct a risk analysis, assess risks associated with forcasting project duration, understand how heuristics and biases effect decision-making;
  • Track performance and forcast future performance using earned value management (EVM) to summarize project performance across budget, deliverables and schedule as work unfolds;
  • Think agile: Learn the agile project management mindset, where best to use it, and how it differs from waterfall and LEAN methodologies.

The Project Management certificate is relevant for team leaders, managers, and individual contributors from any functional area who are responsible for the success of projects.

  0  

Why I’m Quitting Online Shopping This Year

This holiday shopping season presents another mega-consumption opportunity that will separate successful retailers from the rest of the pack as the list of 2017 store closures and anticipated 2018 store closures continues to grow. Six weeks from now, consumers across the country will have demonstrated to retailers – with their dollars – just what exactly it is that they are looking for as the new shopping economy takes hold.

My money, literally, is with any retailer that’s willing to give me a memorable in-store experience.

Since the massive influx of online shopping, the world of what is known as “differentiated goods”, or products that vary significantly from retailer to retailer (think clothing, home wares, gadgets), has largely lost sight of the fact that these products require some type of experience or interaction to actually confirm the purchase. Basically this means that I, as a consumer, need to feel the material, try on the size, see the color/pattern, or physically test out the gadget in person before actually deciding to keep that product in my life.

A recent study by PwC confirmed that only 3% of in-store clothing purchases result in returns, while a whopping 25% of online purchases are returned. The numbers tell the story loud and clear – a live interaction with the product is critical for sales retention and retailer success.

But why did shoppers abandon brick and mortar stores in the first place? When online shopping came, well, online, it caused a seemingly overnight and massive disruption in the sales of consumer goods. With revenue shifting away from brick-and-mortar stores, retailers panicked, and like a herd of sheep, they all made the obvious choice: they cut costs. Personnel were let go, wages reduced, and turnover was rampant. Then came the natural consequence of those decisions: terrible shopping experiences in dirty, cluttered, and understaffed stores manned by stressed-out, poorly trained, and inexperienced salespeople. No rational person would subject themselves to that horror show when you could sit on your couch and order the same goods online. So you and I, and everyone else in America, did just that – we stayed home.

Fast forward a decade, and I am not alone in having grown tired of the order-and-return circus that is online shopping. Some savvy brands are finally recognizing this growing consumer frustration and starting to tackle the problem by revamping and reinventing the in-store experience. The most widely known for this is Best Buy, who overhauled their store experience and pricing strategy to do precisely what Amazon cannot – give you an opportunity to look, hold, examine, and discuss their tech gear before hauling that massive box into your living room or wrestling the new mouse out of a clam-shell package that’s more difficult to break into than Fort Knox. Best Buy has realized what consumers already know – online shopping is exhausting and can be ridiculously ineffective for certain goods.

Best Buy’s strategy isn’t just marketing fluff. Earlier this month my husband and I headed to our local Best Buy to check out their inventory for a new computer monitor for our home office. What we encountered was a great selection, multiple salespeople who could speak specifically about the monitors we were looking at (I was truly shocked) and the realization that ordering online would’ve been a disaster since we use a funky space for the office. The in-person evaluation completely changed our plan and allowed us to get something that was the right size and scale for our home – there was value in the in-store experience. Not to mention, it was such a relief to have a fun, enjoyable, and actually helpful and productive visit to a brick-and-mortar store.

Retail shopping has a lot of life and legs in the new economy, as people are burned out after getting burned by shopping online. The future of brick-and-mortar retail (I’m looking at you, clothing stores) is the “showroom” or “gallery” shopping concept. At a showroom, consumers go to a retail location to experience products and then place orders while in-store. Bonobos has already proven the value of their Guideshop model through their acquisition by Walmart, and even Amazon is opening bookstores just to encourage you to download titles to your kindle while you browse. Showrooms offer an opportunity to combine the best of all of shopping elements: excellent service by knowledgeable staff, a comfortable in-store experience, and the opportunity to fully test, try on, and evaluate products with the convenience of shipping directly to your home.

By focusing on the experience of shopping, rather than the transaction of shopping, retailers can bring customers back to brick-and-mortar. This holiday season I’ll be rewarding those retailers that are trying – even if not always succeeding – to deliver a high quality in-store experience. Best Buy has already won my business and my money; what remains to be seen is which other retailers will rise to the occasion, reinvest joy and value in the in-store experience, and ultimately survive in the new shopping economy.

—–