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5 tips for improving your public speaking presence

Do you have the presence of a leader? Are you comfortable public speaking? A vital skill in business and life is the ability to genuinely connect with others, yet many are intimidated at the thought of standing and speaking before friends or peers.

eCornell’s Chris Wofford interviews Cornell professor David Feldshuh (March 26, 2019).

David Feldshuh, Theater Professor and Artistic Director of the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts at Cornell University, can absolutely relate to this.

“I was extremely shy,” admitted Feldshuh, “but I decided to get over my fear of public speaking by going to drama school and becoming a professional actor.” Learning from these techniques, Feldshuh invented his own method of training people to have a presence, communicate, and connect, and ultimately become more effective when speaking on any subject, in any place, and to any audience.

Feldshuh discussed a few tips for refining public speaking skills in a recent webcast with eCornell, Executive Presence: the Lifelong Process of Public Speaking.

1. Take Up Space

Public speaking requires becoming comfortable with taking up space. Feldshuh suggests practicing simple exercises, including posture, centering, balance and stillness. “Your head is high, your shoulders are wide, you’re balanced. You reach out, you ‘catch rain’. Your shoulders come back. Relax… Think about yourself as a pendulum; side to side, until you come to a point of stillness.”

2. Freedom of Expression

Executive presence should be authentic, Feldshuh advises. You must have freedom of expression and access to a range of vocal and physical communication skills. Recognize and become familiar with your own gestures and sounds; you want to use your voice and body without fear or self-consciousness. Relax your face, breathe, and smile.

3. Magnetism

Feldshuh defines magnetism as “the ability to bring variety to how you present yourself so people want to hear more.” It is important to connect with your audience, and understand how each person is different. Change your delivery as needed; take a moment to ask yourself what you want from that person, and make that connection.

4. Performance

Not everyone can be a magnificent speaker, but Feldshuh says the measure of success is being able to see and believe in yourself as competent. The easiest way to do this is to observe yourself – ask a friend to take videos of you presenting, or ordering something from a menu. The more you acclimate to seeing yourself, the more you become comfortable with your own voice and gestures.

5. Practice

Becoming an effective speaker doesn’t happen overnight. Feldshuh encourages individuals to take the time to become self-aware of their habits, and learn techniques to change those habits and develop new ones. “Record it, look at it, change it,” says Feldshuh. “You’re coaching yourself, and that’s the measure of success.”

This method is the basis of Cornell University’s online certificate program, Executive Presence. Over the course of fifteen weeks, students learn to refine their public speaking skills through the act of analyzing their own performance, performing exercises and practicing transformative techniques.

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What makes a photograph “good?”

You want to take “good” photographs. But what exactly does that mean?

Perlus, Barry. Untitled.

Opinions of photographs are always subjective, but there are a number of factors you can consider when determining what makes a photograph “good.” Whether you aspire to work commercially or simply step up your Instagram game, being able to visualize the world as a photographer—and discern what can catch a viewer’s eye—is essential.

Cornell University Professor Barry Perlus, author of eCornell’s new Digital Photography Certificate program, breaks down four specific criteria to consider to understand what makes a photograph stand out:

 

1. Does it fulfill a defined purpose?

“Photographers generally start with a purpose,” Perlus says. “They have something in mind about what the photograph should express or be about. One way to begin to talk about purpose is by looking at today’s photography genres.”

Genre and purpose can often align, but they are two distinct things. Let’s take the genre of portrait and wedding photography as an example. In portrait photography, Perlus says, “the purpose is to express the character and humanity of the subject.” In wedding photography, he counters, “the purpose is to create the best and most complete visual records of a memorable event.”

 

2. Does it meet your vision?

“One way to know if your photograph met your vision is the feeling of surprise or joy when you see the final result,” Perlus notes. “You know, that yes!”

Good photographs capture something unquantifiable. Does your final result meet what you had in mind? Does it go beyond? Is there just something about it that makes you want to keep returning for another look? This criteria is the most subjective; it falls upon you and your own unique photographic eye to see what clicks. This is when it’s key to trust yourself, and follow your gut!

 

3. Does it affect your audience?

“One of the reasons we make photographs is to share them with others. We look for signs of appreciation, and they can come from many directions,” Perlus explains.

While professionals may look for affirmation from their clients in terms of sales and positive exhibition reviews, evidence of your work’s impact on your audience can come from anywhere. Particularly in the age of social media and Instagram, “this can mean reposts and comments from our friends and followers,” Perlus says. Clue yourself in to what’s working on your social channels and sharing platforms—what receives the most engagement? What doesn’t? Why?

 

4. Does it use the capacities of the medium effectively?

In discussing how best to optimize the capacities of the camera, Perlus offers an example of a surfer riding the waves. To capture such an action shot—bright sunlight, rapid movement, and commotion—a good photographer knows how to use elements like “a telephoto lens, fast shutter speed, thoughtful framing, and backlighting to dramatize the action.”

In photography, the capacities of the medium can range from lighting, to perspective, to specific camera functions. If you’re snapping photos on an iPhone, have you utilized the HDR function to capture the full range of light and color? If you’re taking photos of someone in action, have you managed to dramatize the action with the tools available? In portraiture, have you optimized the framing, along with good directing and timing, to capture the subject’s face?

 

Interested in continuing to advance your photography skills? You can learn about the Digital Photography Certificate program that Perlus teaches through eCornell here.

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Everyone’s in the hospitality business, every day

In today’s competitive market, the customer experience is everything — and not just in the hospitality industry. From the very first impression until the customer walks out the door, there are countless opportunities for making their experience memorable.  As part of eCornell’s Keynote webcast series, customer service expert Elizabeth Martyn from Cornell Hotel School joined eCornell’s Chris Wofford for an interactive discussion on understanding the customer mindset, how to exceed expectations — and even when offering guests a warm cookie might backfire.

What follows is an abridged version of that conversation. Watch the full keynote here.

Martyn: I feel like I always have to tell people that I’ve never actually worked in a hotel, which throws people off a little bit when we start talking about hospitality. But I take a broader view and believe that hospitality is really everywhere. If you have clients, or customers, or patients, or anyone who buys anything from you, you’re really in the business of providing a service and therefore you’re in the business of hospitality.

Wofford: The two of us were talking a little bit about the modern tech-savvy consumer and their expectations.

Martyn: I think whenever I start to talk about these things, I ask people to think about themselves. Because I know I’m one of these people. I’ve got my phone attached, I’ve got my computer ready. And whether you’ve thought about it or not, we’re all becoming really highly trained by our devices and by technology to have information at our fingertips. You expect that you’re going to be able to get everything done on your phone. Now, not everyone prefers to do it on their phone, don’t get me wrong. Some people are more traditional. They want that phone call or they want to do it on their computer.

But that’s where we’re moving to, because we’ve been trained that we’re always going to get exactly what we want, and there’s so much on our phones that we can use to make it exactly how we want it. But it’s not like we’re all issued the same phone with the same apps or the same email provider. Everybody can pick and choose what’s going to work for them and to create a digital experience that reflects who they are as a person. But now that we’re so used to having this thing that’s like attached to our bodies all day, every day, these ideas, preferences and expectations start to come out of the digital experience and into everything else that we participate in.

The second that your organization or your business doesn’t have a digital experience that allows people to get at those commonly asked questions with key information, or your digital information is out of date, that starts creating some conflict really quickly because now people feel disappointed. Because if other companies can do it, why can’t yours?

Wofford: As service providers, the next question that comes up is: well, what can we do about that? How do we manage these expectations?

Martyn: Start by paying attention to the questions people are asking. If you’re hearing the same question over and over, you should be thinking, “Whoa, this is a trend. We have an opportunity here.”

Wofford: If something comes up time and time again, it should really be searchable information on your website, right?

Martyn: Exactly. You should be thinking about how to make it more present on our homepage, whether that’s in the FAQs or the About section. You want to have that information available. I think a lot of service organizations tend to make the mistake of thinking that high-quality service is high-touch service. The second that you make the mistake of thinking that the only way to provide high-quality service is to force me to interact with someone on your team, you’re missing the mark because that might not be my preference.

You want to offer a choice by putting things online for the people who are going to go to your website and navigate there. It should also be easy to get ahold of someone who’s going to talk to me and engage with me maybe over the phone or in person, if that’s my preference. But you don’t want to choose for your consumers what’s going to be best for them. No one likes being told what they like.

Wofford: I really relate to that. Sometimes when you’re out to dinner and the server has come to you twenty times unnecessarily, it gets to be a little bit much. I understand that it comes from a genuine place of wanting to help, but it can be a little much. Now, let’s take on the idea of establishing operational systems. When you come to an organization and start working with a hospitality group, how do you get everybody up to speed and on the same page?

Martyn: You cannot climb the mountain the first time you ever go on a hike. It’s really important to identify your core problems and tackle those first. What can you put in place right away that will impact at least some guests?

Oftentimes, it’s an issue of bandwidth. You can’t see really great solutions if you’re behind the curve all the time. So start with a triage approach and identify the fast and easy things that will impact some folks and give you a little more space to start to then tackle the next, maybe more sophisticated, version of this solution. Don’t feel like you have to solve everything perfectly right away.

Wofford: What are the greatest opportunities that you can see with technology being able to help?

Martyn: I think it’s so easy to think that technology is going to solve it. That’s really not the right viewpoint. The viewpoint should be about how it supports us and supports anyone who’s interacting with our clients, our customers or our guests.
We talked about getting information up on your website, making your FAQs more available. What are those common questions that you’re hearing several times a day on the phone or over email? You need to get that information more quickly into the hands of your consumer so they can find it and move on with their day. That way, your frontline teams have more time and space to provide really meaningful interactions to the guests who really need it rather than anxiously trying to rush them through the conversation because there are ten people in line or the email inbox is filling up. You want your workers to feel like it’s acceptable and appropriate to take more time to work through those more complicated solutions. So it’s not only solving problems, but also making those investments to grow the relationship between your organization and your consumers.

Wofford: How do you see big data and analytics helping face-to-face interactions?

Martyn: You have to understand who the person is you are interacting with. Can you get a jump on some of that through the use of profile information? Does this person have a family? Are they a single business person? Where are they based? The faster I can get at that, the more sophisticated my engagement with them is going to be.

But there’s one thing I want to caution everyone against – and I feel very strongly about this – and that is that I’m a different person every time I interact with your brand. I am not the same person from my first purchase to my last. Travel’s a really great way to illustrate this. I’m a very different person with different needs and different expectations when I’m traveling alone for business than when I’m traveling with my husband for a getaway. It’s still me, so my profile’s going to say all the same things, but what I’m looking to get out of the service interaction really shifts depending on the context of my trip.

Wofford: What’s the takeaway on that?

Martyn: I think that’s one of the values of human interaction. The thing that’s emerging out of all the technology advancements is that there is still a very, very important place in the world for the human-to-human component of service delivery. And that’s true regardless of what industry you’re in. So, how do you take out all the perfunctory pieces?

Checking in or checking out of a hotel is a classic example. The process can be very perfunctory, focused only on the room number, the key, getting the customer to sign the waiver. But what if that interaction could be about something else entirely, and the room key and the waiver signature and the credit card are more like afterthoughts? What would be most helpful for the guest to have a wonderful stay? If there’s one thing the property could do for them over the next two days, what would it be? In my case, when I’m a business traveler, I might say that it’s providing bottled water. When I’m with my husband, I might say it’s letting us decide when housekeeping should come.

Wofford: Let’s say you’ve inherited staff who have worked for twenty plus years under one brand and they now find it difficult to follow a new training plan under a rebranded hotel. What do you do?

Martyn: Change is so hard for everyone. I think with all things, everybody wants to be a little bit in control. As an employee that means they want to know what their job is, how to do it well and how to do it in a way that is well respected. What’s really hard about what you’re going through is you have new expectations that maybe haven’t been completely explained to your team. And you’re probably sitting there going, “But I’ve said it ten times.” But that doesn’t mean that they’ve understood it or that they’ve bought in.

Companies have things like mission, vision, and values that help explain why they are doing the things that they are. In your re-flag situation, the answer can’t just be because the new brand says: “This is what we do.” If that’s the answer, or if that’s how it’s presented, there’s no incentive for employees to make an emotional investment into that adjustment.

Hypothetically, let’s say you re-flagged because the hotel wasn’t performing financially under the old brand. It’s important to explain that you were at risk of closing and ended up moving brands to better align with where you’re located, what your amenities are or whatever, so that you can keep the hotel financially viable and keep everyone employed. That’s a level of trust and transparency that also helps people understand why are they being subjected to this change. But how do you gain an emotional buy-in? And how do you work toward understanding what’s important to people in terms of what they’re really looking to get out of their job? Those are really two critical components in driving any change.

Wofford: What do you feel is more important, recruiting new employees or continuing to train existing ones?

Martyn: People say that you can’t train attitude. I actually don’t believe that. I believe training is incredibly valuable. I think that so often folks get written off as not caring or having a bad attitude, but I feel like you cannot say that that’s the case if you haven’t talked to them about the issue. I like to say “No one’s trying to be the worst.” It’s a bit sarcastic, but it means that until you feel 100 percent confident that you’ve sat this person down and explained what they’re doing, how it impacts other people, or how it’s being perceived, you can’t know that they are aware the problem exists. Until you’ve told them what they’re doing is wrong, you can’t assume that they know it.

My experience with a lot of training is that there are some people who are terrific with guests. I’m sure you have your rock stars and your people are amazing and everyone feels the love when they work with them. But if you ask them, “What did you do with Mr and Mrs So-and-So to make them so happy?” They’re going to give you a really bland answer because they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just being themselves and fortunately for them it is perceived really well by the people to whom they’re providing service. But for people who don’t have that innate ability and want to do their job well, someone has to tell them. And some of the things that I think often go untrained are the things that don’t fall into the book of standards.

I’m sure at your property you have standards or guidelines about how you do certain things, what the rules are, how often you reach out to guests, how you communicate with them, or how many rings are allowed before you pick up the phone. All of that stuff oftentimes is documented. That’s like the ‘what’, the technical aspects of delivering your service. But the part that’s a lot harder is the ‘how’, which is actually what service excellence training is all about.

Wofford: What are your thoughts on maintaining an appropriate level of guest service when much of your staff is provided by third-party employment agencies? There are conflicting loyalties in terms of employment and focus.

Martyn: A lot of people have this, and if you have any kind of third-party contracts, or you have a management group interacting with an ownership group, it can be very, very complicated. But it goes back to what we were talking about before: getting people to understand the ‘why’.

Now, there could be a situation in which you are giving one set of directions and then the other manager that the employees technically report to is directly contradicting you, and that’s tricky. But that’s a technical piece that you have to work out between the two managers to make sure that the messaging is really consistent.

What is helpful is to make it less subjective and not about one person’s opinion versus another’s, because there’s not one person on this planet who isn’t going to say that their opinion is better. That’s just human nature. So you need to make it more objective by creating a rather vanilla, opinion-free approach to the decision-making process.

So with your different stakeholder groups, I would encourage you to go back and figure out those things that everyone is in alignment on. Maybe it’s financial incentives, maybe it is about guest experience. Once you figure out what the common point of departure is, you start to look at every situation and scenario through that common lens.

Wofford: How do you communicate metrics to frontline staff and turn it into something actionable?

Martyn: First off, hopefully everyone out there is measuring their guest experience. If you’re not, make sure you’re collecting those post-experience surveys. Consumers around the world are well trained, so there are pretty reasonably high response rates. So if you’re not yet doing a post experience survey, that’s a huge opportunity for you.

So, how do you take that information and make it into something real? Something I’ve seen done really effectively is figuring out a way to provide accolades to the people who are your stars. You might have to write questions into your survey like, “Was there any member of our staff who was particularly helpful to you?” Once you start getting that information, make a point of celebrating that Anna got three comments this last month or Sean was mentioned five times. So first off, make it personal. The scores themselves are hard to connect with and quite frankly, they’re really arbitrary benchmarks. We can’t even be sure they’re interpreting our questions correctly. But if you start to look at your qualitative data, your open-ended questions, then you have this opportunity to really raise up employees that are doing well.

Wofford: Do you have an example of a recent service interaction that really blew you away, that we could sort of look to as an example to follow?

Martyn: You know, I really see a lot of examples of great customer service, but for me I’m not really looking for some sort of special gesture. I don’t want anything comped. I don’t want a complimentary dessert. I really don’t want any of those things because so often they are a sign that the basics were not well executed. The best experience for me is when everything just happens. I don’t need anything special. I just want to pay for the thing or service that I wanted, and it all just happens smoothly so that I can pay my bill and leave. That is truly the best experience. As soon as you get into talking about ‘surprise and delight’, which is a common industry term, or these ‘above and beyond’ gestures, they actually don’t hold a lot of value for me.

So often, these gestures are nice and thoughtful, but they’re not really what I want. As an example, let’s say I’m unexpectedly delivered a cheese tray. Well, okay, that’s nice, but I’m not hungry now and I’m checking out at six am tomorrow, so I’m not going to eat it. I think it’s so hard to get gestures right in a way that’s actually very meaningful and relevant to the individual because what they need at any given time is constantly shifting. For me, I’d really rather have that energy and time invested in just doing what I originally asked for extremely well.

Wofford: Do you have any thoughts and strategies on first impressions?

Martyn: Picture this. You’ve just driven eight hours with your children and they were crying for the last hour of the journey. How do you feel when you get to that hotel? Do you feel great? No, you feel exhausted and at the end of your rope. The same could be said after a day of air travel or even a long day of work. So you’ve got a guest who is coming into what’s supposed to be this restful thing or happy thing. But so often we as guests are carrying our own baggage, or maybe we really need to use the restroom because we haven’t stopped for hours. Whatever. Then you arrive and you’re given the check-in information, the Wi-Fi password, and all that. So the guest is already feeling tired and overwhelmed and the warm cookie just isn’t going to be as effective as it would be when the guest is relaxed, isn’t lugging around their 50-pound bags and so on. Then all of a sudden the cookie would create a much larger impression because the guest has more bandwidth to absorb it.

So I would say that it’s important to really think about those first impressions. There is so much already going on during that arrival experience, so how can you take the non-necessary things out of the experience so it feels less overwhelming?

Wofford: Has your research revealed any meaningful generational differences when it comes to employees delivering amazing guest experiences?

Martyn: The research I’ve done hasn’t focused on that directly, but I can offer some of my impressions. I think generationally, what is different, goes back to the beginning of our conversation, when we talked about identifying ‘the why’. Why should I care? What’s in it for me? That’s what’s really different generationally.

Your oldest group and cohort in the workforce might not be super comfortable with tech but they have a ton of experience. They used to think customer service just meant smiling, and now you’re trying to tell them it’s all these other more sophisticated things. You have to be able to really help them understand how the changes that you’re recommending are actually going to impact the guests. Oftentimes that group in particular is so emotionally invested in the guests. They just want them to have the best time. They are so committed to that, so you have to be able to connect the dots for why that’s important.

The younger employees are going to find the tech part so easy. They’re really flexible and nimble and they want to learn. They have a different ‘what’s in it for me’ reason to adjust what they’ve already been told. On the other hand, the younger employees might need help making better connections with the guest base, who might not be just like them. Trying to better communicate with 40, 50 or 60-year-olds can be a struggle because those people aren’t like them. So although I don’t have formal research on this, what I would recommend is kind of stepping back and thinking about the different groups in your workforce and what’s important to them in terms of feeling satisfied with their job and like they’re doing the right thing and then helping to connect the dots between what you’re asking of them and the values that they hold, because they could be very different based on generation.

Wofford: Beautiful advice. A big thanks to Elizabeth for joining us today.

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eCornell student leads change at the United Nations

Dr. Adam Simpson, a recent alumni of eCornell’s Change Leadership certificate program, is the Manager of Global Programmes for UN Women in New York 

I recently completed the Change Leadership certificate program, developed by faculty at Cornell University, delivered through the SC Johnson College of Business. The program consists of four core courses and two leadership electives that have enabled me to address specific development goals within my organization.

As a leader and manager in United Nations Women, my organization always needs to be prepared for change. UN Women is the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. As a global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established in 2010 to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide. Whether we are working on planned initiatives, or addressing the impacts of global volatility and unexpected situations, change is constant and inevitable in our field of work. In this program, I was able to identify and clarify my position in the power hierarchy of both my organization as well as across the broader United Nations system. Through this, I was able to better understand how the fluctuating power dynamics play into my role in the organization and how this affects organizational and system-wide decision making. Ultimately, this knowledge will help UN Women continue supporting Member States of the UN as they set global standards for achieving gender equality, and strengthen our work with governments and civil society to design the laws, policies, programs and services required to ensure that the standards are effectively implemented and truly benefit women and girls worldwide.

In addressing the changes I am involved with in my organization both corporately and on behalf of our global offices, the program has equipped me to better understand where and how large-scale change management initiatives are moving, and how I must implement the changes needed to sustain the momentum of these initiatives to advance our organizational mandate and maximize impacts. Specifically, the program helped me to analyze my organization and its tendencies toward change, to build approaches for identifying and influencing key stakeholders and overcome resistance, and explore critical decisions around negotiations and power dynamics.

I highly recommend this program for leaders, managers, and practitioners involved in addressing or leading large-scale, high-impact change management initiatives.

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Cornell’s new Executive Women in Leadership certificate program

Women comprise 44 percent of the overall S&P 500 labor force, and yet they hold just 25 percent of executive and senior-level positions, occupy only 20 percent of board seats, and represent just 6 percent of CEOs. Power structures and gender dynamics often favor and reward the contributions of men over women, and even the most experienced and capable women can struggle to overcome these to attain leadership positions.

To empower accomplished professionals with the strategies and techniques needed to skillfully level the playing field while working to attain higher levels of leadership, Cornell has announced the launch of the new Executive Women in Leadership certificate program. Available online through eCornell, this certificate program equips learners with the tools needed to identify and reduce the gender bias and power dynamics present in their own organizations, and to bring greater parity to workplace culture.

“Research shows that when both women and men think of a leader, they think of a man,” says faculty co-author Dr. Deborah Streeter, the Bruce F. Failing, Sr., Professor of Personal Enterprise at Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business. “For centuries, men have held the highest positions of power in most organizations, which has led people to associate leadership with stereotypically masculine traits, including aggression, decisiveness, strength, and willingness to engage in conflict. This certificate program allows learners to create a personalized action plan using recommended strategies to understand the gendered environments in which they are operating and then navigate the most effective path to leadership, status, and power in their organization.”

Women leaders in mid- to senior-level positions, women who hold or are interested in seeking board positions, women entrepreneurs and founders, and male leaders seeking to better understand gender dynamics in their organizations will find value in this program. Learners will refine their executive presence to improve interactions with people at higher power levels, improve their approach to negotiations, explore the strategies needed to develop a strong professional network, and assess the core competencies needed for board membership.

“In order to become a senior leader, an individual must first be perceived as one. This requires demonstrating myriad skills such as being an effective negotiator, a visionary, and an excellent networker, as well as personal characteristics such as gravitas, authenticity, and the right mix of authority and warmth,” says Dr. Susan S. Fleming, co-author, executive educator, and former Senior Lecturer at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration and the Johnson Graduate School of Management. “Learners will explore ways to prepare for the challenges women face in developing and evidencing these skills and qualities.”
Once learners complete the Executive Women in Leadership certificate program, they are well-positioned to navigate institutional dynamics and achieve higher levels of leadership.

Courses include:

  • Power and Gender Dynamics
  • Developing Executive Presence for Women Leaders
  • Gender Bias and Negotiation Strategies
  • The Network Effect
  • Decoding the Gender Gap in Board Membership

Upon successful completion of all five courses, learners earn an Executive Women in Leadership Certificate from Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, 40 professional development hours, and 4 Continuing Education Units.

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Careers, Family, and Gender: Managing Effectively in Today’s Shifting Workplace

Over the past fifty years, America has seen steady shifts in the makeup of its workplace. Managing these changes in career, family, and gender have needed to be addressed by both HR and workers themselves. Pamela Tolbert, professor from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, has been studying how social changes affect organizations and vice versa. She sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss how organizational leadership can address challenges for workers in today’s workplace and what they can do to create a more progressive environment that leaves everyone at the table more fulfilled.

What follows is an abridged version of that conversation.

Wofford: I think one of the through lines to today’s conversation, the thing we’re going to be talking about is work-life balance. Why is that an issue today? What’s the landscape look like? Give us some perspective.

Tolbert: So this gets into how organizations affect social life in part. And I think there are a couple of things that have led to this becoming a really big issue today particularly. I mean people have always worked, people have always had families. But there’ve been changes in both families and the workplace that have kind of lead to a perfect storm in how these two spheres relate to each other. We moved from the kind of traditional family where you have the husband is the bread winner, and the wife stays at home and takes care of things, to a place where you have dual earner couples are common place. And that change occurred pretty quickly actually. About 50% of all families, the husband worked, the wife stayed at home. By the 2000s, it was somewhere between 60% to 75% of the workforce were dual earners.

And then the workplace really didn’t change that much. You know, you have this big social change going on outside the workplace that affects it, not so much adaptation.

Wofford: I’m curious what companies are doing.

Tolbert: So there are a couple of major experiments in particular that I think are really promising. And part of the thing that makes them I think work, is that they’re really focused on rethinking how we work. Not just trying to help people manage work family relations, but the basic premise, these are a couple of experiments. One was done at Best Buy.

Wofford: What happened at Best Buy?

Tolbert: In the case of Best Buy, it was called Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). So in that case it was started by their HR, but they were very conscious of the fact that part of what had gone wrong in the accommodations arrangements, where you have to ask your supervisor if you’re going to take a leave, or you have to make a deal to have flexible work arrangements. So it’s clear that it’s very important to get the supervisors involved in this. That it’s not something that’s just imposed upon them. So what they did was to bring together teams of employees and their supervisors, and the supervisor was responsible for helping the team come up with the ideas and to think the processes through essentially- everything is fair game. Let’s think about the meetings that we have. Let’s think about whether we could use technology more effectively to do things, rather than having all these meetings. If we made some kind of scheduling arrangements, could we then allow people to have more time off, so that they’re not having to be there constantly? Just to be more effective in thinking about the arrangements for coordinating and controlling.

Wofford: They would close the loop on a lot of their initiatives.

Tolbert: Yeah, yeah. So they could readjust. And it turned out it was a very effective program. I mean the employees were incredibly enthusiastic about it. It spread to a large number of others- it started at headquarters, and then it spread throughout the company, and actually a number of other organizations adopted it. They had data, it reduced turnover by almost half.

And the employees reported that they were getting more sleep, they had more energy, they could focus better, because of being able to control their work. So I think part of what’s important here is that because people were motivated to try and think, how can I work better? Because they have the carrot at the end, that your life would actually be improved. It’s not like, think how to work more efficiently so you can work more often.

With a national policy you could kind of provide incentives for employers to spread the work out a little bit more. Everybody would benefit. Including families. And all kinds of things. So that’s one direction that things could go. We also have model organizations to provide pathways. I mentioned the SAS corporation. There is a case study from … I think it’s in the Harvard. But anyway, it’s about this big data analytics company which has been around since, I don’t know, 1976 maybe. It’s a successful company. Always done well. This is the one where they have a 35 hour work week policy. Although people are also expected that if you’re needed you will be there. But the norm, you have a norm that work is not supposed to wake up every day of your life. They provide childcare policies. It’s a very employee centered company.

And the case makes it sound like Shangri-La. But the thing is is that it’s a private company and I think it’s easier to do that than in a public company because in a public company you start getting pressures from stockholders to cut out the fat and make it run more effectively. It is a private company but it’s had like a 10% sales growth on average every year since it was founded. Clearly it’s succeeding. It’s not like the “fat” is being wasted. You can’t make it an HR sort of project. You’ve got to get it spread throughout the company. But HR’s historically been sort of the champion of these kinds of initiatives.

So I think that the thinking about work and family as kind of integrated whole is an important thing for policy. For national policy but also for company policy.

Want to hear more? Watch the recorded live eCornell WebSeries event, Careers, Family, and Gender: Managing Effectively in Today’s Shifting Workplace, and subscribe to future events.

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How Entrepreneurs Think and Behave

“Entrepreneurial thinking is about imagining the end and creating the means.”

That’s the mantra of Neil Tarallo, a senior lecturer at The Hotel School at Cornell University and the director of Cornell’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities. Tarallo, who learned about entrepreneurship at the knees of his father and grandfather, says that the term ‘entrepreneurship’ has become too closely tied with startups when in reality entrepreneurship is not solely about starting a business. It is a way of looking at the world.

As part of eCornell’s Entrepreneurship webinar series, Tarallo spoke with Chris Wofford about the behavior traits of successful entrepreneurs and the foundation for entrepreneurial thinking. What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.

Wofford: Nice to see you again, Neil. The last time you were here we covered the business model canvas, a great tool for entrepreneurs and managers. Today we’re going to be talking about how entrepreneurs think and behave. Why is this something we should look at? What can we hope to learn from today’s talk?

Tarallo: For me, having been an entrepreneur and then moving into an academic environment and teaching the subject, one of the things that became apparent is that entrepreneurship is less about starting businesses and more about how the people who start these businesses think and behave.

Over the past four or five years, there’s been some really great research into how entrepreneurs behave and documentation of the behaviors of expert entrepreneurs. For me as an academic, if we can teach those behaviors and help our students understand those processes, we can put them on a path to be much more successful in their endeavors.

Wofford: The obvious question here: What are those behaviors?

Tarallo: I think more than anything else, the behavior can be summed up as a level of comfort in moving forward without really understanding what the final goal will be or even which path you will take.

One of our Hotel School alum put it really well: “Most of the world needs to know every turn and every nuance in the path that they’re taking wherever they go. Entrepreneurs just need to get to the first turn. When they get there, they’ll look around and evaluate their environment and then they’ll make a decision on which way to go based on that information.”

To start a business or to create something new is very dynamic and it requires that we have a lot of information coming from the environment around us and that we can use that information to find the right direction to go.

Whenever I talk about this subject, I always like to define entrepreneurship because it’s really interesting to me that as I talk to people about what entrepreneurship is, there are a lot of different impressions.

While I wouldn’t say that anybody’s really wrong about how they define entrepreneurship, I like to make sure we’re on the same page. So I always start out by asking, “What is entrepreneurship and what does it mean?” Many of the definitions of entrepreneurship that you see involve some reference to starting businesses and honestly I’ve moved very far away from that. For me, entrepreneurship includes starting businesses but it’s not solely about starting businesses. I like to define entrepreneurship as the process of creating value by bringing together a unique package of resources to exploit an opportunity.

If you use this definition, you’ll see that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behavior can occur in many different contexts. As we remove the idea of a startup being the focal point of our definite measure of entrepreneurship, we find that it applies to corporate environments, social enterprises and nonprofits.

Wofford: So you’re saying that maybe people have actually exhibited entrepreneurial behavior but they might not think of it that way because the idea of being an entrepreneur is so closely related to having started a business?

Tarallo: That’s right, it’s really not just about starting businesses. The behavior aspect of it really winds up being an alternative way of thinking, and it’s a way that I approach my entire life and especially my work.

I think about entrepreneurship as being a capacity to perceive and act upon opportunities based on the environment around you and the ability to create and build something from practically nothing. That’s what really great entrepreneurs are able to do, and it involves putting things together in a way that other people haven’t thought of yet.

Wofford: We’ve got some questions coming through in the chat box here and I’m just going to throw one out at you and then let you respond: Do you think entrepreneurs are born or can we teach people to be entrepreneurs?

Tarallo: Well, I sure hope so because Cornell pays me to teach people about entrepreneurship! There is some research out there about how some people are born thinking effectually, meaning they think entrepreneurially. If you watch children playing together, you can see this really clearly. When you see little boys sitting down playing and they have a whole bunch of dump trucks but they need a firetruck, they don’t just say, “Oh geez, we don’t have a firetruck so therefore we can’t have a fire.” No way. What they say is, “Okay, you see this dump truck right here? From now on, that’s our firetruck.” And from then on out, any time one of them touches that firetruck, they’re making the siren noises and all that. That’s a form of effectual thinking.

What we’ve learned is that as people move through the education system in the United States, and I would argue in most other countries, they become less and less effectual in their thinking and they become more focused on how to get someplace and what is needed to accomplish something along that defined path. We work on changing that and it is something that I definitely think we can teach.

Wofford: How do you teach people to maintain or reclaim that effectual thinking?

Tarallo: When I came to the Hotel School at Cornell, my responsibility was to help hotels move their entrepreneurship programs forward. One of the first things we did was to separate the skills and tools that we can teach in the classroom – marketing, finance, those kinds of things – from the behavioral component of entrepreneurship.

The only real way to teach the behavioral part of entrepreneurship is to really immerse the students in the behaviors because that’s where you learn. I learned to be an entrepreneur at the knees of my father and my grandfather because they immersed me in that behavior. Teaching practical skills in a classroom is a very simple thing to do, but the behavioral part is a little bit more challenging.

But we do know that we can teach people to be entrepreneurial. Research shows that if you have had even one formal entrepreneurship course, your likelihood of succeeding as an entrepreneur increases exponentially. That’s because you start to become aware and you start to become conscious of these things as you go along.

Saras Sarasvathy, who has done some really great research at the University of Virginia into how entrepreneurs behave, has identified the two primary ways that people think as causal and effectual. Let’s break those down a little bit. Causal thinking is what we’re all accustomed to and what most of us do throughout the course of our day. In business schools, this might be characterized as a managerial way of thinking. Basically this is thinking about how to achieve a predetermined goal. This is when you say, “Okay, here is the challenge I have in front of me and this is what I am going to do to overcome it.”

The next level of thinking is called strategic thinking. In business schools, we sometimes equate this with creative thinking. This is about generating new means to achieve a predetermined goal.

When it comes to effectual thinking, and this is what Sarasvathy identifies as the way entrepreneurs think, it’s more about moving forward by understanding the means that are around you. Instead of saying, “This is the goal that I have”, what you’re saying as an entrepreneur is, “Here’s the problem I need to solve.” The goal is the solution to that problem but in effectual thinking you are not specific about what that solution might be.

Wofford: To oversimplify it, it’s sort of going with the flow, right? Reacting to what comes along?

Tarallo: Yeah, in a way. Sarasvathy also talks about not thinking about either the means or the end but just understanding the problem that needs to be solved and then kind of letting everything take you in that direction.

Entrepreneurs understand that we can’t control the future, nor do we want to. Because if we let the future unfold on its own, generally speaking it will be driven by our customers and therefore the solution that we create will be the solution that our customers desire. That’s why expert entrepreneurs tend to be more successful than others.

Wofford: Something I’ve heard a lot in the startup world is this idea of the agile methodology. I mean, in the end you’re trying to solve a problem and your solution might look very different than what you initially anticipated.

Tarallo: That’s absolutely true. You know, when anybody comes to me with a business idea and asks me what I think of it, I always tell them that it doesn’t really matter what I think. In fact, it doesn’t really matter what they think about it either. You can only present a product or a service; in the end it is only the customer’s opinion about it that matters.

As I evaluate whether or not someone has the potential to really be a successful entrepreneur, one of the things that I think about is how willing they are to be flexible with the solution that they’re creating. The problem we see with new and inexperienced entrepreneurs is they have this vision of what their company is going to look like and they follow that vision to the exception of all the information that’s around them. That leads to failure.

Wofford: Is this in part because they’ve put too much emotional stake into it?

Tarallo: Exactly. They get very personally attached. You have to be willing to let go. What’s interesting about some of the research into the behavior of expert entrepreneurs is that the only thing that matters to them is solving the problem. The thing that’s really compelling for them is that there’s a problem out there or a gap in the marketplace that needs to be filled. They don’t care they do it, they just care that it gets done.

I’ve created this little mantra: “Entrepreneurial thinking is about imagining the end and creating the means.”

To go back to Sarasvathy, she has something called “the lemonade principle”. This is about the old saying that if the world give you lemons, make lemonade. Entrepreneurs understand that when we have something happen to us, there are usually opportunities to be found. How do we take this worst case scenario and turn it into something that is a true opportunity? How do we move forward with it?

I have another little saying: “The world doesn’t happen to me but the world happens for me.” In other words, when bad things happen there’s generally an opportunity there for me to do something different and new. It’s the old silver lining in the cloud kind of thing.

Another one of Sarasvathy’s principles of entrepreneurial expertise is what’s called “the patchwork quilt”. This is about the fact that entrepreneurship is really messy. It never goes according to plan and things happen that force you to change what you do. So instead of looking at things like a puzzle, where we have very specific pieces that fit into very specific spaces, which is what most causal thinkers would do, for entrepreneurs it’s more like a patchwork quilt. It’s more about finding a piece of fabric and sticking it in, then finding another one and realizing you can fit it in over there if you squeeze it or stretch it out a little bit. No matter how I do it, at the end of the day it’s going to create a big quilt that will keep me warm. But I have no idea what that quilt will look like before I start down that path.

I’ve only touched on a few of Sarasvathy’s principles of entrepreneurial expertise, but I encourage everyone to look them up because they are all very interesting.

Wofford: Great. I can see that we are quickly running out of time. Do you want to leave us with some parting words?

Tarallo: I want to stress that entrepreneurship is not something you do, it’s a behavior. I’m really working hard personally to scrub entrepreneurship as a word that I use to describe a career, because it really is a behavior for me. It’s the way that I act, the way that I think.

Wofford: Neil, thank you once again for joining us. I know you are going to be coming back soon for a webinar that looks at innovation. I’m already looking forward to it.

Tarallo: Thanks, Chris. This was fun. See you next time.

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Neil Tarallo’s live eCornell WebSeries event, How Entrepreneurs Think and Behave. Subscribe now gain access to a recording of this event and other Entrepreneurship topics.

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Adding It Up: Hidden Lifetime Costs of Sexual Assault and Misconduct

Victims of sexual assault, violence, and misconduct suffer in multiple ways following the crimes committed against them. Liz Karns, professor from Cornell’s ILR School, has been following the lifetime costs for victims of these sexual crimes. As both a lawyer and an epidemiologist, she is tackling the data from an interesting perspective and sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the lasting effects for survivors both on campus and in the workplace.

What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.

Wofford: You are an epidemiologist and also a lawyer, so you’re coming at this from two very interesting angles that together make for a really compelling story, so tell me a little bit about when you started looking at this and your experience.

Karns: As an epidemiologist, I started thinking about it just in terms of the types of data we would have, right? But it wasn’t until I went to law school like 13 years after being an epidemiologist that I started applying it to sexual assault, and in that context, I treated, and I continue to treat those cases just as I would any type of medical malpractice case or environmental harm case. They are the exact same set of ways that we assess damage. We need the studies, we need the research, we need the experts, and, it’s been a while coming that we got all of those things together. But at this point, we have so much research, so much information that makes it quite clear that the cost is a lifetime cost, and that currently it is usually the person, the victim, who pays for that – and that’s my interest, is to shift that.

In 2015 we had like a banner year of doing lots of different studies, and these studies were all essentially asking the same, which was ‘Have you been sexually assaulted while in college?’ And, there was some slight difference in terms of the phrasing. This was a study that was done by Kaiser and the Washington Post, and we have 25% of people who were assaulted since starting college, 20% for women, 5% for men. We see pretty similar pattern across all the different places, right? It never varies in a big way. The one that says 27 AAU, this was a study that Cornell was part of. We had 27 different colleges that did the same survey, and it’s important to have this information because it’s consistent across studies. There’s so many people who will say, ‘Oh, but people just make that up or it was dependent on the respondents.’ There’s been a lot of reliability and validity testing on this and this is solid data. The sad thing is that this the exact same data that we had in 1987. The numbers are the same since 1987 – roughly 20% is a consistent thing and it has not changed with anything.

Part of the reason that we add this up is that money matters. Somehow when we start attaching a price tag, people become more accountable, and the different systems that we look at are the legal systems. We’ve got the criminal and the civil system, and the financial obligation that arises out of that. Let’s imagine that a perpetrator is found guilty, and under the criminal system, ordered to pay restitution. That means they have to pay the victim money, and that is a contract now. That cannot be discharged, under a personal bankruptcy, so it is something that will stay with that perpetrator forever until they’ve paid it off.

Wofford: Wow.

Karns: That would change the world.

Wofford: I would imagine.

Karns: This is the standard approach to all injuries. This is exactly what’s used in your car accidents, your slip and falls, medical malpractice, everything else, so it’s interesting that people don’t think of it when it comes to sexual assault. So it’s part of my job, to articulate it, and make people think about that. If we assign dollars, we’ll get societal change. I’m quite sure about this one. The person initially talks to the psychiatrist, and then talks about different situations that this arises in, to figure out how invasive it is in their life. I have had people who could not go to covered parking lots ever again in their lives, and that meant that they would drive 50 miles out of the way to go to a different train station because they didn’t wanna use that one that had the covered parking lot. That meant that she couldn’t take certain jobs, so it’s got this sort of ripple effect.

Wofford: Yes, exactly. So what I’m getting at, or where I was going with that was, linking this particular diagnosis to these behaviors, and I wonder often how that plays out legally.

Karns: Yeah, well, I mean it’s absolutely part of the case because you’ve got, first the initial injury, which is the assault itself, and that doesn’t have a huge amount of value, obviously, like in terms of money, but the ways that it impairs one’s life after that are what get documented. That is the job of the lawyer to go through and describe the day and the life – you bring in different experts to say, this person will have a very predictable set of problems when they have their own children, so that’s a cost that you should be thinking about.

So the expert is who ties this person’s diagnosis and situation and then projects it forward, and when I’ve worked on medical malpractice cases where we had something happening to an infant, we would do the same thing. We’d say this is what their life looks like in the future.

Wofford: Yeah. Okay, behavioral health, again, this is not a big surprise, that they are more likely to be using alcohol or hard drugs, and they’re aware that they need to cut down, so they are aware that they’re using it as a substitute for treatment, if you will. And then this is the one that the insurance company knows is that they continually use more healthcare than non-victims, so whenever somebody discusses, gosh, maybe we should decide this is a preexisting condition, you can see why the insurance company is interested in that ’cause these are very costly, they have higher costs, 20% higher.

Karns: So, when people start acknowledging that the assault occurred, and that’s a process in itself, and realizing that they need counseling, it’s not unusual to have a diagnosis come up from that. They don’t have to go and seek a diagnosis to say, ‘mmm, boom, I have it.’ It’s going to evolve, and you have this statute of limitations, so you have so many years afterwards, that depends on your state, to file this case, and so, you don’t have to seek it right away. If you’re gonna build a case, and you’re talking to your lawyer, right, a lawyer, then they will very much ask you, ‘Are you in counseling? Do you have a diagnosis?’ Most of us have health insurance that would cover some aspect of that so there’s some record of that as well.

Wofford: So you’re recommending that the damages are then directed to the perpetrator, legally. What is the state of the law, what’s happening out there, as far as cases like this? Is this line of thinking adapted?

Karns: Yeah.

Wofford: Okay, so this is nothing new.

Karns: This is not, nothing I’m doing is new. All I’m doing is calling attention to it in a different way, and the way that I check myself, if you will, is that I look at what are called default cases – these are cases where the perpetrator, who then became a defendant in civil court, never showed up and the plaintiff, the person who experienced the assault, has the right to make the argument of, ‘What are the costs?’ And then the judge assesses those costs and decides whether or not they’re warranted.

This is all about true economic loss.

But, compensation funds will actually pay for things like therapy, so you could get that immediate counseling that you need, it’s just onerous to get there. Second one is – I mentioned this before – criminal restitution. This is part of any court process, that the criminal court can order the perpetrator to pay the victim. And then finally, civil damages, and this is the one I think most of us are familiar with, where we undertake legal action. The plaintiff, the person who is the victim, brings the case against that defendant, and everything I’ve talked to today goes into that damages number, and then that number gets used all the way through the civil court process, so demand letter, complaint, arguments.

So shifting the burden is what we need to do. That is absolutely what we’ll have to do. So things we can change. One, sexual assault happens in schools quite a lot, and we need to address the fact that it interrupts their education, and we need to think about a student loan deferral on this. It’s absolutely mandatory. The legal ones, holding the perpetrators responsible. And then finally, support, engaging survivors in discussions about the economic impact.

Want to hear more? Watch an excerpt of the live eCornell WebSeries event, Adding It Up: Hidden Lifetime Costs of Sexual Assault and Misconduct, and subscribe to future events.

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Customer Service Week Q&A with Cornell hotelie grad

In honor of Customer Service Week 2018, Cornell Hotelie grad Kelly To recently spoke with eCornell about the value of customer service from the perspective of a recent Cornell Hotel School grad.

Kelly is a 2018 graduate of Cornell’s Hotel School, with a degree in hotel administration and a minor in design and environmental analysis. Originally from Long Island, she now works in New York City as an events operation coordinator at a management consulting firm, and has experience in customer service, outreach, and hospitality.

What follows is an abridged version of our Q&A with Kelly To.

eCornell: Congrats on your graduation! As you enter the working world, how do you feel your education at Cornell has prepared you to be successful in your career?

To: My Cornell education definitely helped prepare me to be successful in my day-to-day work responsibilities. Right now, I’m working as an Events Coordinator which involves outreach, market research, negotiations, and project management—all of which I have learned and experienced in my courses.

I believe Cornell has provided me a very practical education that I’m now able to directly apply to my work. For example, I studied business computing, management communications, and negotiations at the Hotel School that provided really valuable skills that now help me in my daily responsibilities here in NYC.

I’m also so grateful for the community and support that the Hotel School provided me not only while I attended Cornell, but even today as a graduate.

eCornell: What do you enjoy about working in the customer service industry?

To: What I enjoy the most about working in hospitality is the people. While working in a customer-facing role, you are constantly meeting new people from all walks of life. You get to learn their stories and where they come from, and you have the privilege of creating and providing them a memorable experience. I have also learned that the people who choose to work in hospitality are some of the most hardworking and passionate people that you will ever meet.

Throughout my service roles, I’ve been able to develop strong communication, interpersonal, and leadership skills. I was able to learn the operations of hotels, clubs, and restaurants—but more importantly, I learned how to quickly adapt to different environments and people—and how to react when things went wrong.

eCornell: On the flip side, what do you find challenging about the customer service industry or field?

To: Really, the most challenging aspects of a customer service role are the same things that make it exciting. You can never please everyone, and there will always be difficult customers and situations. However, this serves as a motivation for me to always keep improving and innovating in order to continuously raise standards.

It can also be challenging because every single day is different, and you never know what’s going to happen at any given moment. However, understanding the operational standards and being ready to solve any problem that comes your way definitely keeps things exciting and keeps you on your toes.

eCornell: More broadly, why do you think knowledge about customer service is valuable across organizations and for all team members?

To: Hospitality is important because it’s in everything that we do. Wherever there are people and interactions, there can be (and I think there should be) a focus on hospitality and service. This is not limited to the hotel, cruise, or airline industry or customer service roles that are externally client-facing. You can think of your “clients” as your coworkers and teammates. There are always opportunities to be of service to others.

It’s been a new, exciting experience working in corporate events because I’m now on the “client-side” of the hotels and restaurants. The “customers” that I am now serving are the internal employees of the company, which is exciting in its own way because I am able to help create and cultivate the company culture.

Ultimately, my goal is to build community and an inclusive culture through curated experiences. I enjoy this field because I’m able to interact with many different types of people every day, and it’s so rewarding to see events come to life knowing that your hard work has led up to an experience that others can have, enjoy, and remember.

eCornell: Finally, as a Cornell Hotelie yourself, how do you think the Service Excellence training through eCornell could benefit team members, employees, or anyone who engages in customer service?

To: The Service Excellence training through eCornell has a very practical curriculum that I think you can apply directly into your everyday life. Elizabeth Martyn, the author, is also a Hotel School ‘07 alum and worked as an undergraduate core curriculum instructor at Cornell, so I can definitely speak to the value of that background and experience.

Understanding how to effectively communicate and collaborate with others is definitely an essential skill for people working in customer service and hospitality, but it’s really applicable to anyone looking for further develop themselves as a leader. I believe that having first-hand experience and training in service excellence is crucial in developing the problem-solving and “people” skills that are necessary to excel in any job in any industry.

Photo of Kelly To by Jason Ben Nathan

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Empower Your Team Through Servant Leadership

Servant Leadership is fast-becoming a prominent leadership style, and for good reason: It tends to increase trust and collaboration among team members, helps to build coalitions and community, and promotes ethical business practices.

While many leaders use the power of their position to direct and control employees, the servant leader listens; her focus is on understanding employees to develop and support them. Servant leaders flip the traditional relationship between the employee and the leader, fostering a strong service culture by empowering and involving workers.

As part of the eCornell Entrepreneurship webinar series, Judi Brownell from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration joined Chris Wofford for a interactive discussion on how servant leadership can transform your organization to one that is service-centered and culturally inclusive.

An abridged version of their conversation follows.

Wofford: Judi, we previously had a great conversation about the art of listening as it relates to leadership (((link to previous transcript))). Today we’re going to be covering the concept of servant leadership. What is that? It sounds like a response to a top-down leadership style.

Brownell: Well, servant leadership is relatively recent. The term was coined at some point in the early 1970s, but it was only recently that it became a truly prominent leadership style. What happens in servant leadership is that the follower experience really changes. Instead of followers taking a backseat and looking to a leader as the one who knows everything, servant leadership really puts the power front and center.

A servant leader follows a philosophy of service. A servant leader needs to believe that his or her role is really to serve, and they get satisfaction and gratification out of that type of behavior.

Wofford: I don’t want to preempt something you plan to talk about later, but does gender figure into this?

Brownell: It’s fine to talk about it now. I’ve done a lot of work with women’s career development and I do believe that men and women have different sets of competencies that come naturally to them. There are some people who would disagree, but men tend to be more assertive and more readily authoritative. Women tend to be better listeners. Women tend to be more emphatic.

The servant leader has a lot of characteristics that have always been associated with women’s leadership style. The wonderful thing is that, where in the past these characteristics may have been associated with weakness or pointed to as reasons why women are less effective, now the pendulum has swung and these same characteristics fit perfectly with the philosophy of servant leadership.

Wofford: And what’s at the heart of that philosophy?

Brownell: Servant leadership empowers followers. Rather than telling them what to do, and giving them a little bit of training here and there, servant leadership is about really developing your employees, really sitting down with them and asking, “What is it that you need to do your job better?”

It’s about looking at each employee as individually as possible. I believe that the opportunity to do this exists in most organizations. It could be as simply as just sitting down with people and asking, “Are you happy at your job? What is it that I can do as a leader to help?”

A leader presumably has more access to more resources and can perhaps shift an employee to a better position or cross-train them or whatever it is that they need to be happier and more effective in their work.

Wofford: We’ve got a good question here from Karen. She writes: “Yes, the servant leadership style may be more like a ‘woman’s style’ but in my experience (and I think research backs this up) men’s style of leadership includes a mentoring skill, whereas it is harder to find women leaders who mentor other females up the ranks.” Judi, any thoughts on that?

Brownell: Yeah, I’ve got lot of thoughts on that. I did a lot of work on that particular problem, in fact. This is really digressing from our main topic, but it’s interesting. I did a study asking women coming out of an MBA program whether they thought they would be as effective as men in a leadership role. They all said yes.

Then I asked them if they would rather work for men or women, and almost 90 percent of the women said they would rather work for a man than work for a woman. When it comes to mentoring, women either are the very best team ever or they are in conflict with one another, particularly when they are in an organization with very few women and a lot of men.

We need women mentoring women and we need women being advocates for women. And I think there are a lot of women out there who are great mentors – we just need to expand that pool. I think if organizations can build women’s confidence, then they will do a lot more to mentor other women.

Wofford: You said that was a bit of a digression. Where were you planning to go?

Brownell: I wanted to talk about the importance of compassion in the workplace. If you’re a servant leader and you really listen well to your employees and to your colleagues, it really does start a very positive chain reaction. People will see you as a role model and then they too will begin to also listen and be more compassionate in the workplace. Satisfaction at work really escalates when people feel like they are friends. There was a time when employers didn’t want their workers to be their friends because they thought the employees wouldn’t be as productive, but actually we’re finding that almost the opposite is true. The feeling that you’re surrounded by people who care about you makes a huge difference in how we feel about the workplace.

Wofford: Still, from an employer’s standpoint it’s a lot harder to fire someone you’ve become friends with.

Brownell: Yeah, well that’s true. It is harder to fire a friend, for sure. But I’m not talking about friends in the sense that you go bowling together after work. I mean a friend more in the sense of caring about someone because you know a little about them and they know a little about you. But your point is really well taken because that leads to another really interesting area, which is how close can you be with people that work for you without creating perceptions of preferential treatment or favoritism.

Nevertheless, compassion, empathy and caring is really important for a leader. The servant leader feels that the organization is in their care, so they care about its people and everything in it in a way that’s somewhat different than a leader who feels like they own the organization and that they’re driving it in whatever direction they want.

Another thing that I think is really interesting that characterizes the servant leader is self knowledge. I think often we’re so caught up in the actual doing – do this, do that, have this meeting, manage that project – that to have someone who is able to sit back and be introspective is a real treat.

You know, people are taught to talk, talk, talk but no one ever teaches anyone to really listen. Yet, to make good decisions you really need to gather information. Listening is really important to servant leaders. Not only that they’re listening but that people are able to see that they’re listening. Empowering employees and caring about them means paying attention to them.

I think the things that the servant leader focuses on are a little bit different. It’s more people-centric. It’s not that servant leaders are weak. They’re not weak at all. They’re very courageous in how they are honest and caring in the organization.

Wofford: It’s much more about making the best decisions even when they very well might be unpopular, right? Ultimately, the idea is to serve your vocation, right?

Brownell: Right, and being forthright with the information – some good, some bad – about what was done and what decisions were made. I think the whole transparency theme in organizations is important, and I think the servant leader facilitates that.

Wofford: We’ve got another great question from Karen here: “What about when servant leadership bites you in the butt? I tried to practice servant leadership but it comes back to bite me sometimes. Too much empathy, in particular, bites me.” What do you say to that?

Brownell: Empathy should be about recognizing someone else’s position and feeling how it affects them, but the consequences still need to be there. You know, if a student comes to me and says, “Oh I was trying to print and my printer broke down and that is why I’m a day late.” That’s when I say, “I understand that this happened and I’m sorry, but I’m still not giving you credit.”

Empathy is just indicating to the individual that you have in fact heard them, you understand how it could happen and you appreciate that they came to you and explained. But you still have a goal to reach. You still have a policy to meet. So empathy does not mean allowing people to slack off.

Rather than telling people what to do, servant leaders use persuasion whenever possible. This gets people sincerely on board and fosters ethical practices. Ethics have been a real big concern of mine. Sometimes we assume that someone is unethical when actually they haven’t even recognized that there was an ethical issue or an ethical component to what they were doing. They haven’t necessarily considered how their decision affects other people. So modeling ethical practices and being vocal about them are other important aspects of servant leadership.

Wofford: This also ties in to the self-reflection you mentioned earlier, right?

Brownell: That’s right and I think that self-reflection is actually a neglected leadership behavior and yet, if you read about really powerful leaders in various types of industries, almost without exception they mention how important it is to just sit back and kind of think about yourself and your own goals and what’s important to you, what you value, your strengths and weaknesses.

One of the things that a leader needs to do is to have what we call behavioral integrity, which means behaving in a way that corresponds with what they say. If I say I value being healthy but the bowl of M&Ms on my desk is the only thing I have for lunch, that is not displaying behavioral integrity. I think leaders should reflect on whether their actions back up their words.

Another thing to explore is who you become as a leader. One of the transformative things that I’ve been taking a look at is what being a leader does to one’s sense of self. There is this view that power corrupts, and I think servant leadership really helps prevent that.

I think self-reflection, no matter what position you’re in, is really important in the end. Sometimes it may have been so long since you last gave yourself the freedom to really think in these terms that it can be hard to know where to begin. One way to begin is to take some key themes and write down your own self-perceptions and then have someone else tell you what they think about you in those areas.

Wofford: And the servant leader is not only providing this sort of self feedback, they are also providing supportive feedback to their employees, right?

Brownell: It’s really about empowerment. As you empower someone, it implies that you trust them because you’re taking the time to coach them and mentor them. You’re giving them feedback, which is a sign that you care about them and how they are doing. You’re observing and helping them perform even better.

That then increases trust because as a leader you are basically saying, “I’m sure you’re not going to do it exactly the way that I would do it, but I trust that you understand the values and the goals and I trust that you are doing the best you can on behalf of the organization.”

Employees really take off when they feel like someone’s supporting them and that they can be instrumental in the organization’s success.

Wofford: Judi, thank you so much for this introduction to servant leadership.

Brownell: Thank you, Chris. It was nice to join you again.

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Judi Brownell’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Empower Your Team Through Servant Leadership. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Hospitality topics.