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Successfully enabling sales managers to become great sales coaches requires a comprehensive approach. This includes defining what great sales coaching looks like, allows managers to experience great coaching, and enables them to execute it on the job. Shifting sales managers’ mindsets is only the starting point. While training on coaching capabilities alone can be costly in terms of time, performance, and ultimately revenue, combining individualized coaching and training delivers maximum ROI for both your managers and your bottom line.

STOCKHOLM & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Henrik Ekelund, founder and CEO of BTS GROUP AB (publ), a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently recognized by SvD, a leading Swedish daily newspaper, as one of five finalists in its “2021 Business Achievement of the Year” Awards.

Henrik Ekelund, Founder and CEO of BTS Group AB, Selected as One of Five Finalists in SvD’s “2021 Business Achievement of the Year” Awards due to BTS’s Transformation to Virtual Solutions

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“It is an honor to be selected,” said Ekelund. “We are grateful to be recognized among many of Sweden’s leading organizations for our entrepreneurial efforts, specifically the rapid expansion of our virtual capabilities and products to deliver our solutions to anyone, anywhere.”SvD’s “Business Achievement of the Year” award highlights business leaders who inspire growth, endure struggle, and dare to dream that their organization will become the next global leader. The competition, instituted in 2014, is held in collaboration between SvD and the Swedish investment bank Carnegie. Previous winners include leading organizations such as Spotify.In the 2021 competition, Ekelund and BTS were selected as a finalist by popular vote. A jury will select a winner among the five finalists and the award will be presented in a virtual ceremony by Prince Daniel, the Spouse of Princess Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden, on May 11^th, 2021 in connection with the Swedish Young Entrepreneurship Champions.

About BTS Group AB

BTS is a global professional services firm that partners with clients to enable strategy execution. We provide the skills, tools, and knowledge so people understand how their daily work impacts business results. We are experts in behavior change, care deeply about delivering results, and inspire people do the best work of their lives. It’s strategy made personal.BTS is a public company trading on the Nasdaq Stockholm under the symbol BTS B.

About SvD

Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), founded in 1884, is a national subscription newspaper with head offices in Stockholm. SvD is a daily publication which focuses on in-depth coverage in its weekend editions in the form of supplements and magazines. In 2005 and 2010, the newspaper was voted the Newspaper of the Year in Sweden. Its circulation figures have risen dramatically in recent years.

Contacts

Rick CheathamCMOrick.cheatham@bts.com+1 (512) 897-9594

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – BTS GROUP AB (publ), a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently recognized a Top 20 Sales Training Company by Training Industry.

“We are honored to be named one of the world’s top 20 sales training companies,” said Rene Groeneveld, Global Head of the BTS Sales and Marketing Practice. “In 2020, BTS was challenged to deliver world-class solutions in a fully virtual environment. We used this as an opportunity to accelerate innovation, supporting sellers, sales leaders and marketeers in areas such as virtual selling, virtual communication, and in our Acceleration modules, which are learning bursts that drive high levels of engagement and interaction. We are proud of our response and feel excited about how our virtual and digital capabilities have unlocked new possibilities to help our clients achieve success.”

BTS was selected based on the following criteria:

“The quick adaptation and innovation of programs in response to customers’ needs during the pandemic has earned these organizations a spot on this year’s Top 20 Sales Training and Enablement Companies List,” said Ken Taylor, president of Training Industry, Inc. “Through virtual offerings and a focus on selling virtually, these companies prepare their clients’ sales force with the tools to succeed in today’s remote work environment.”

BTS has identified the mindsets around 6 critical areas that FMCGs need to master to be successful in 2021 and beyond.

Originally published by Entrepreneur here.

For leaders, 2020 was a troublesome year. The global health crisis brought swift (and sometimes painful) changes to the way we work and live. This meant leaders had to help employees manage historically high levels of stress and respond to challenges more quickly than they ever thought possible.

‍To better understand what organizations needed from their leaders, my company interviewed dozens of top decision-makers about how they responded to the economic crisis and determined their organization’s future approach. Interestingly, that research demonstrated that many previously successful leaders were struggling. In fact, 2020 acted seemingly like an accelerator; traits that were found only in the minority of leaders were seen more broadly — and arguably became essential to thriving in our new normal.

But why? The answer is simple: 2020 demanded that leaders be empathetic, engage in hot-button issues, look outside their company to society at large, relinquish processes, trust their employees and respond to changes in a moment's notice. Before March 2020, leaders with these traits made up a minority of leaders. And though more traditionally-minded leaders often struggle to embody these qualities, they’re now a requirement for future success.

Last year brought an entire host of issues to their boiling points, with racial injustice, economic inequality and a mental health crisis among them. This has created a demand for more inclusive cultures, greater diversity in buying choices and a shift toward a workforce that’s increasingly global and virtual-first.

The future will bring even more unpredictable change at a breakneck pace, so leaders must prepare to face vexing challenges in the coming years. Here's why the following traits — which can be seen as endemic in “messy” leaders — could also bring success.

1. They prioritize compassion over old-school professionalism

According to a Gallup poll, reports of daily worry among full-time workers increased from 37 percent in 2019 to 60 percent in 2020.

The old “we only talk business here” leadership approach might work during stable times. But when employees are struggling emotionally and perhaps financially, it comes across as out of touch and cold. Our team of researchers found that leaders who struggled to cope during the lockdown and 2020’s racial-justice reckoning were those with a tendency to use professionalism as a shield to avoid difficult but necessary conversations. Regardless, we’ve reached a point where organizations can no longer sidestep sensitive topics such as race and mental health. Employees are demanding to have these conversations, and many leaders feel exposed.

By contrast, the leaders who fared well were those with the courage to talk about emotional (and even controversial) topics, thereby engaging their employees on a decidedly personal level. They reached into the void because it was important to their people. They understood that change starts with broaching tough subjects.

To mirror these messy leaders’ traits, key players should consider how to reach out to support their employees and their communities. They should prioritize compassion over professionalism and get comfortable engaging in personal conversations without any agenda other than deepening their own understanding. They might find it difficult to initiate these talks with many employees still working from home. Instead of waiting for chance interactions, however, they might find that these conversations need to happen during specific meetings rather than between them.

2020 was also the year in which leaders felt accountable for societal impact in a way they’d never felt before. Before 2020, it was possible to work within a relatively loose set of ethical aspirations, but leaders generally worked off the assumption that decisions should be made primarily through a commercial lens. Last year demanded that leaders deeply understand how their business decisions impact the world at large.

We saw this in action in the varying ways businesses responded to the pandemic: For instance, Wisconsin craft distilleries made news when they converted part of their production lines toward making hand sanitizer. Many of these companies offered hand sanitizer for free at a time when their businesses were struggling, but they already had such strong ties to their local communities that they understood the importance of taking positive action anyway.

Related: Emotional Intelligence is the Secret to Leadership in Times of Crisis

2. They focus less on processes and more on outcomes

One of the common characteristics of leaders who struggled to find their footing in 2020 was an overreliance on processes that slow down change. When the crisis hit, these leaders looked to the past for cues about the future, and they attempted to “manage” the change the way they always had.

This approach was problematic for two reasons: First, most of us had never seen widespread lockdowns triggered by a pandemic, so the past didn’t offer any helpful models for predicting the future. Second, traditional change management assumes that change is a linear process with a clear beginning, middle and end, but CEOs are increasingly being forced to lead in an environment where change is constant.

The leaders who have thrived in the unpredictable environment created by this global health crisis are those who were already change-ready. These are the “messy” leaders who care more about outcomes than processes, allowing them to respond rapidly to changing conditions.

Case in point: The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center was able to drastically ramp up its telehealth capabilities in a matter of weeks, even though its data models suggested it would take several years. In our own study, another leader told the story of moving 14,000 staff members out of a head office to work remotely. If the company had even contemplated such a change under normal conditions, it would’ve spent months in the assessment and implementation phases. Without time to spare, however, leaders set goals, trusted their staff and made the switch in just five days.

Now, CEOs are recognizing that the biggest barriers to boldness and speed aren’t technical limitations. Rather, preconceived mindsets about what’s possible, processes that slow things down and bottlenecks created by chains of command are the true limiting factors. To succeed in a future where the next crisis is always looming, leaders must accept change as a constant.

When they always expect that conditions could change, leaders can replace traditional forecasting processes with fast-cycle experimentation. Leaders should stop trying to plan and predict future scenarios. Instead, they should take the actions that are most appropriate in the moment and adjust their approach as data emerges.

Related: 5 Essential WFH Tools for the New Remote Employee

3. They embrace the power of not knowing

We found that leaders who struggled the most during the crisis were those who fell victim to “superhero syndrome,” or wanting to put on a brave face for their employees to project strength and expertise. Leaders who were well-respected in normal times found their people looking to them for guidance, but this only created bottlenecks and inhibited creativity. When the pace of change became too fast for them to lead from the front as they always had, many tried to compensate by working longer, unsustainable hours.

In contrast, the leaders who were able to weather the crisis best were those with the confidence to take themselves out of the driver’s seat and admit that they didn’t have all the answers. They were willing to let go of their attachment to driving outcomes — choosing, instead, to embody vulnerability, humility, and trust.

Letting go of the need to project strength and be all-knowing creates acceptance to working differently. It allows teams to take ownership of change and respond with greater speed. This doesn’t mean leaders should succumb to the impulse to fall apart. Rather, it means gathering all the smartest people in the room and asking, “How do you think we should handle this?” When leaders aren’t busy trying to hold the world on their shoulders, it frees them up to focus on the things that matter.

2020 permanently changed the business landscape, and consequent responses will likely impact how organizations deal with every pitfall in 2021 and onward. The world will stay messy, meaning leaders must learn to lead in a messy way. They must shift from a wait-and-see mindset to a test-and-learn approach to business. Those who always expect change, lean into the unknown, and take a distinctly human approach will be perfectly positioned for whatever the future might bring.

In other words, what and how you say something becomes much more meaningful and lands more heavily as you move up the ranks. Same goes with your actions. It’s a great position of influence to be in – but it comes with a pretty big responsibility – one that leaders often don’t realize until it’s too late.I recently worked with a client who had just been promoted to head up a large business unit at a global technology firm. She was successfully making the leap from leadership team peer to executive leader in all ways but one – setting boundaries with her team. Gone were the days of commiserating over shared experiences, tough clients, unhappiness with company policies. Like it or not, she was now a boss at the executive team level, and she needed to support the strategic priorities of the broader organization.Experts in the team management space talk about this idea of a “First Team” – in other words, leaders must prioritize the team they are a member of over the team they lead. It’s a well-intentioned model that seeks to break down silos, and force managers out of a fierce – and often insular – advocacy of their functional team at the expense of the enterprise. However, it comes with risks. Skew too far to the left, you lose the trust and credibility of your direct reports. Skew too far to the right and your executive team peers feel you’re biased and not acting in the best interest of the organization.So how do you strike a balance? Six tips for a seamless leadership transition:

1. Don’t second guess yourself: You already got the job. You don’t have to take a heavy-handed leadership approach with peers or micromanage direct reports to demonstrate your value. Be confident in your position, and humble in your approach.
2. Talk less, smile more: You’re used to rolling up your sleeves and finding solutions. But not only will you not have all the answers in this new position, your role has changed. You’re no longer working along side your team – you’re the facilitator and empowerer. Ask questions rather than make recommendations. Show the team you trust them.
3. Set clear expectations: Discuss the team’s role in decision making and priority setting. Be clear about when and how you’ll share information and set up open communication channels for raising concerns and gathering feedback. Help create structure for this new dynamic which is awkward for your old team too.
4. Be ok not being “in”: Your personal relationships with peers will change when they become your direct reports – especially as you move up in the organization. It’s a tough pill to swallow, and one that no one really tells you about. Don’t take it to heart – focus on the positive culture you can foster so that the team feels unified, connected, and supported from within.
5. Focus on fair play: To the prior point, you need to reset your interactions to ensure equity. There’s a tendency for recently promoted executives to share information and updates – even innocuous ones – with former peers who they were close to and talked to more frequently. This will only reinforce mistrust and competition within the team. Keep the side conversations on the sidelines.
6. Find a peer confidante: We’ve heard the saying that it’s lonely at the top – but leaders need to vent too. It will be tempting to overshare with your team, so it’s important to have a thought partner or colleague who can help you think through challenges. Think broadly – beyond your company – and find partners in your network with similar seniority and roles who can serve as a sounding board or outlet when things get frustrating.

Under normal circumstances, these transitions can be tough. In a virtual environment – it’s tougher. You don’t have the benefit of in-person conversations, travel to different offices, or team sessions to build rapport and create excitement about the path ahead. Rather, you have to be intentional about redefining and building relationships with each new stakeholder. Consider a “Listening Tour” – set up 1:1s to ask peers and directs how they prefer to communicate and receive information in this environment, how frequently they like to meet, and what kind of support and balance they need right now. You can start demonstrating your leadership style from day one – using empathy and concern as a foundation.

While taking on a bigger role often creates a different dynamic, being an “executive” doesn’t mean leading without transparency or authenticity. Quite the opposite. But it does require a new mindset and reframing of your role to protect and buffer the team from unnecessary conflict or issues, while recognizing that you have new stakeholders to build relationships with. Broaden your loyalties, set necessary boundaries, communicate often, demonstrate empathy, and above else – build self-awareness around the impact of your whisper.

Onboarding new employees into the organization is a critical step in the employment lifecycle.

Without proper onboarding, newcomers run the risk of failing to:

• Learn how the organization operates
• Identify how best to perform their job and help the organization achieve its objectives
• Engage with their new team

So when does onboarding start?

It's not uncommon for organizations to think of onboarding as kicking off on the first day of employment. Afterall, that's when employees receive their computer, email account, access to company information, and perhaps even meet their team for the first time, among many other things.

In reality, onboarding new employees starts long before their first day on the job. It actually starts when they apply for the job, and sometimes even earlier depending on what is publicized about the organization and role.

Throughout the hiring process, candidates begin to form impressions of what life in the organization and job will be like. Does your hiring process and all its components teach candidates about the role and life in the organization?

If not, imagine the possibilities if you could jumpstart the onboarding process by harnessing this time that you have with future employees. Not only could time to proficiency decrease, but retention could also increase because candidates are better informed about life in the organization and role.

What does this actually look like? Here are four elements that should be factored into every hiring process at every organization:

1. ‍An engaging experience that keeps candidates…well…engaged. The objective of the talent acquisition process is to identify, screen, assess, and select candidates, not to entertain them. But that doesn't mean that the process should be as exciting as a root canal, either.
   
   With appropriately designed assessments and interviews (conducted by properly trained interviewers, of course) the talent acquisition process can and should be engaging. Just like eLearning, people should feel good about the time that they spend going through the process—they should feel like it was time well-spent.
   
   And once you have candidates engaged, keep them engaged (often referred to as “warm”) through regular communication. There is little worse for a candidate than wondering where they are in the process, whether the organization has ruled them out, or when a decision will be made.
   
   You want candidates to be excited about the prospect of working for your organization, as this excitement turns into increased job offer acceptance rates as well as increased engagement and performance once on the job.
2. ‍An appropriately rigorous process. This is a balance, and a bit like the British fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The process can't be so rigorous that it dies under its own weight, nor can it be so light that it lacks utility.
   
   What do these two scenarios tell the candidate? The former scenario tells the candidate that the organization overengineers things and makes them more complicated than they need to be—that doesn't sound very fun (unless you also like to overengineer things).
   
   The latter scenario tells the candidate that the organization spends time on things with very little impact—also not good. Instead, Goldilocks likes a process that is just right.
   
   This, of course, depends on the role itself. Candidates for an entry-level role will likely be put off by a lengthy process with numerous steps, whereas candidates for a senior-level role will likely feel unheard by an extremely brief process that consists of a single interview. Instead, align the level of rigor to the role, and make certain that the process conveys the right message to candidates.
3. ‍Assessments modeled after the job and organization. This is perhaps the hardest element to incorporate, but it's also one of the most critical. If you want to know whether a candidate will be able to learn a procedure to produce widgets, the best way to assess this is to put them in a situation where they have to learn a procedure to produce widgets.
   
   Of course, asking them about times when they had to learn something new or administering an assessment of learning ability would both be informative, but nothing will be as informative as having them demonstrate their ability to perform the job.And guess what else this does—it teaches the candidate about the job. The candidate walks away from the hiring process knowing exactly what the job will entail and how closely the job aligns with what the candidate wants.
   
   Granted, most employees will not be hired to produce widgets and instead hired to make decisions, lead others, develop new products, advise customers, etc. These kinds of roles are a bit harder to emulate in the hiring process, but it can still be done.
   
   And the benefits to predicting future job success, reducing time to proficiency, and reducing turnover are well-worth the time and energy to get it right.
4. ‍On-brand messaging. Finally, the hiring process and all of its steps should convey the message about the organization that the organization wants to convey.A tech company, for example, should not have a paper-based application process—what would that say to candidates? An organization that prides itself on having a warm and inviting culture should not have a cold and sterile process—recruiters and interviewers should be warm, assessments should be welcoming rather than intimidating.

The point is that throughout the entire hiring process, candidates piece together what they think is true about the organization and job. When this picture is accurate, the organization and candidate both win. When the picture is inaccurate, no one wins.

It’s no secret that talent acquisition is a mission-critical piece of the employment lifecycle, but it can be used as more than just as a selection tool. By reviewing the process, engagement, messaging, and implementing the proper assessments, your organization can gain more than just a great hire—you’ll get one who is excited, eager and enthusiastic to advance both the culture and the business.

My son's violin teacher recently posted this challenge on Facebook:

Find the correct result.

1+4=5

2+5=12

3+6=21

5+8=_________

I immediately thought I had the answer: 34. I, like many of the people responding, took the sum of each equation and added it to the equation just below to fill in the blank. Another large contingent guessed 45, getting there by using multiplication. It turned out that we were all wrong.

Both answers can be considered to be correct if the challenge is to fill in the blank. The problem was that was not the challenge. The challenge quite clearly and simply asks the solver to "find the correct result." So this is a not really a challenge of math. It is one of reading comprehension. The answer is “1 + 4 = 5” because it is the only equation that has the correct result. It was so easy to jump to the wrong conclusion and charge ahead with the solution.

This had me thinking about all the ways in business and in life that we do this same thing, jump to conclusions and miss the real problem, often with disastrous results.

The road to disaster is paved with the wrong problem

There are some classic business stories on this topic. Kodak and Blockbuster are two of these. The problem Blockbuster was trying to solve was around its stores – how to get more stores and get more sales and profit from each store. They famously turned down an offer to buy Netflix for $50M. Any guess what that investment would have yielded? As I am writing this, Netflix market capitalization is nearly $235B.

It was a similar situation at Kodak, which invented digital photography and had one of the world’s first online photo sharing platforms. During the early 2000s, digital photography was overtaking traditional photography. In this same time frame the problem that Kodak focused on was how to drive the printing of more photos, completely missing that digital photography and online sharing was becoming the business. In 2011 Kodak filed for Chapter 11 protection and turned its focus to commercial digital imaging.

Getting blinded by your own stories

This tendency to ignore or discount information that does not fit our way of thinking was perhaps first talked about by Chris Argyris. He called it the “Ladder of Inference.” The basic idea is that people, teams and even organizations get rooted in a way of thinking and operating that blinds them to any data or information that would contradict their long-held beliefs and experiences.

I witnessed this tendency play out with a senior leader I worked with recently. This SVP level business unit leader has had 2 new bosses in a short time due to a reorganization. One result is that this leader now works for someone who used to be a peer. This leader is doing the same work, for the same pay, with the same title, and she, like many of us might, considers this to be a “demotion.”

This has become the dominant story that she has made up and from which she is operating. She has built this into an even bigger and negative story with the headline, “They are trying to get rid of me.” This has translated into some unproductive behaviors – not least of which has been the spreading of this narrative to others and undermining her team’s faith in her and the company. This has also led her to hold back on big ideas for her business unit and the enterprise, because “they have no chance of being adopted given that they don’t see my value.” In general, she is less effective. By the time I was brought in to coach her, it looked very much like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By contrast, in talking to her colleagues, almost everything I heard about this leader was positive. “She is a master at her trade,” “She is passionate about her work and the company,” “She cares about her direct reports and their development,” “She is a team player.” The list of strengths went on and on. The only opportunities for improvement involved the leader’s response to the structural changes and a general sense that she was depressed and demoralized.

This came to a head during one meeting we had together where she reported that she would be getting more resources and more responsibility—a goal she had long sought. She shared this information with a somber tone, which surprised me, since this issue of not having enough resources had been one of her key bits of evidence for the “They want to get rid of me” narrative. I called her out on this contradiction, and we spent some time working through this inconsistency between her story of the problem she was facing, and the now readily apparent truth—that she was on the verge of undermining her own leadership, and potentially taking her team with her, for a nonexistent reason.

Five ways to avoid the “wrong problem” problem

Fortunately, we had caught the “wrong problem” problem before this leader had done herself irreparable harm, and once she was able to see the truth more clearly, she rapidly reverted to her old self and was able to refocus her team as well. We went on to take the opportunity to work together to lead her team to change the way they view problem solving as a team skill, to avoid the same trap and get to better results, faster.

Building on the practices we worked on together, here are 5 things to do as a leader, and with your team, to avoid chasing after the wrong proble

1. Slow down, especially if the stakes are high. Check your action bias and make it a practice to slow down and take steps to consider how well you understand the situation, and what might be going on, before jumping to the diagnosis of the problem.
2. Develop a list of alternative definitions of the problem you are trying to solve. A great way to start doing that is to consider the different definitions that might apply to your problem. Do this yourself and encourage your team to implement this as an exercise.
3. Invite different perspectives from diverse stakeholders. Another useful practice is to systematically seek out a range of opinions about the problem, to help generate a range of alternatives. Gathering the views of those who see the world differently will guarantee new thinking. During team meetings, make it a practice to go around the table to seek all views, and potentially invite stakeholders outside of your team to weigh in as well.
4. Identify a “devil’s advocate” to challenge assumptions and potential solutions. A great technique for making sure you are thinking broadly enough is to formally identify a “devil’s advocate,” someone to play the role of challenging your view of the problem. It can be a trusted colleague, or an external advisor. This is also a valuable team meeting tool – make sure to rotate the role to make it an effective part of the team culture.
5. ‍Consider looking at your problem with the “eyes of a child” or what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” This practice of having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a problem, just as a beginner would, can help you step back from the moment to consider the problem in a new way.

The next time you are telling yourself a story about a problem you are solving—or your team is hashing through with you—make sure to take a step back to see if you have it right.

By the way – if you want to have some more fun with this topic, I invite you to experience the Colour Changing Card Trick. Have fun!

‍

Without proper onboarding, newcomers run the risk of failing to:

• Learn how the organization operates
• Identify how best to perform their job and help the organization achieve its objectives
• Engage with their new team

So when does onboarding start?

It's not uncommon for organizations to think of onboarding as kicking off on the first day of employment. After all, that's when employees receive their computer, email account, access to company information, and perhaps even meet their team for the first time, among many other things.

In reality, onboarding new employees starts long before their first day on the job. It actually starts when they apply for the job, and sometimes even earlier depending on what is publicized about the organization and role.

Throughout the hiring process, candidates begin to form impressions of what life in the organization and job will be like. Does your hiring process and all its components teach candidates about the role and life in the organization?

If not, imagine the possibilities if you could jumpstart the onboarding process by harnessing this time that you have with future employees. Not only could time to proficiency decrease, but retention could also increase because candidates are better informed about life in the organization and role.

What does this actually look like? Here are four elements that should be factored into every hiring process at every organization:

1. An engaging experience that keeps candidates…well…engaged. The objective of the talent acquisition process is to identify, screen, assess, and select candidates, not to entertain them. But that doesn't mean that the process should be as exciting as a root canal, either.
   
   With appropriately designed assessments and interviews (conducted by properly trained interviewers, of course) the talent acquisition process can and should be engaging. Just like eLearning, people should feel good about the time that they spend going through the process—they should feel like it was time well-spent.
   
   And once you have candidates engaged, keep them engaged (often referred to as “warm”) through regular communication. There is little worse for a candidate than wondering where they are in the process, whether the organization has ruled them out, or when a decision will be made.
   
   You want candidates to be excited about the prospect of working for your organization, as this excitement turns into increased job offer acceptance rates as well as increased engagement and performance once on the job.
2. An appropriately rigorous process. This is a balance, and a bit like the British fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The process can't be so rigorous that it dies under its own weight, nor can it be so light that it lacks utility.
   
   What do these two scenarios tell the candidate? The former scenario tells the candidate that the organization over-engineers things and makes them more complicated than they need to be—that doesn't sound very fun (unless you also like to over-engineer things).
   
   The latter scenario tells the candidate that the organization spends time on things with very little impact—also not good. Instead, Goldilocks likes a process that is just right.
   
   This, of course, depends on the role itself. Candidates for an entry-level role will likely be put off by a lengthy process with numerous steps, whereas candidates for a senior-level role will likely feel unheard by an extremely brief process that consists of a single interview. Instead, align the level of rigor to the role, and make certain that the process conveys the right message to candidates.
3. Assessments modeled after the job and organization. This is perhaps the hardest element to incorporate, but it's also one of the most critical. If you want to know whether a candidate will be able to learn a procedure to produce widgets, the best way to assess this is to put them in a situation where they have to learn a procedure to produce widgets.
   
   Of course, asking them about times when they had to learn something new or administering an assessment of learning ability would both be informative, but nothing will be as informative as having them demonstrate their ability to perform the job.
   
   And guess what else this does—it teaches the candidate about the job. The candidate walks away from the hiring process knowing exactly what the job will entail and how closely the job aligns with what the candidate wants.
   
   Granted, most employees will not be hired to produce widgets and instead hired to make decisions, lead others, develop new products, advise customers, etc. These kinds of roles are a bit harder to emulate in the hiring process, but it can still be done.
   
   And the benefits to predicting future job success, reducing time to proficiency, and reducing turnover are well-worth the time and energy to get it right.
4. On-brand messaging. Finally, the hiring process and all of its steps should convey the message about the organization that the organization wants to convey.
   
   A tech company, for example, should not have a paper-based application process—what would that say to candidates? An organization that prides itself on having a warm and inviting culture should not have a cold and sterile process—recruiters and interviewers should be warm, assessments should be welcoming rather than intimidating.
   
   The point is that throughout the entire hiring process, candidates piece together what they think is true about the organization and job. When this picture is accurate, the organization and candidate both win. When the picture is inaccurate, no one wins.

It’s no secret that talent acquisition is a mission-critical piece of the employment lifecycle, but it can be used as more than just as a selection tool. By reviewing the process, engagement, messaging, and implementing the proper assessments, your organization can gain more than just a great hire—you’ll get one who is excited, eager and enthusiastic to advance both the culture and the business.

Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires — This Chief of Staff Shares His Playbook

In his six years at HashiCorp, Kevin Fishner has strung together a unique set of startup experiences. He joined the cloud infrastructure automation company in 2014 as the first business hire, going on to spin up the sales, solutions engineering, account management, and marketing teams. Afterwards, he spent a few years building out the product management and education groups as VP of Product. But for the last year and a half, he’s had a different perch — as the Chief of Staff.

We’ve written about the Chief of Staff role before here on The Review, of course. This increasingly commonplace startup role typically involves making the CEO more effective, prioritizing precious time, optimizing workflows and perhaps driving strategic projects. But Fishner’s mandate has a slightly different focus.

“My responsibility is to treat the company like a product, where employees are the user. Like a product manager, I spend my days thinking about what we should build and improve on, owning the components that make the company's culture and productivity come to life,” says Fishner. “We do that by asking this question: What are the core systems that are the manifestation of the culture that we want to build? At HashiCorp, we’ve grown from a few hundred to over a thousand people, so the goal is to build scalable systems that enable employees to do their best work and contribute to the outcomes of the company. For us, that’s shaped up into three specific systems: strategic planning, knowledge management, and communications.”

In this exclusive interview, Fishner unpacks what that entails, putting HashiCorp’s operations under a microscope and open sourcing his best practices and templates. We found it to be a fascinating conversation, and we hope you agree. For starters, Fishner’s got the rare ability to flip between the philosophical and the practical — one minute he’s talking about how determinism influenced his thinking on company building, and then a few minutes later he’s walking us through the exact template HashiCorp uses in its highly-structured annual planning process.

But more broadly, we’ve found that the mechanics and tactical ins-and-outs of how companies operate are still underexplored topics in the startup world. Most company systems evolve organically, either hastily cobbled together as the speed of scale takes over, or neglected until they’re forlorn and rather inflexible. Here, Fishner makes a thoughtful case for why the systems side of company building should get more attention, digging into the nitty-gritty details of two specific systems — how the HashiCorp team sets and tracks progress toward goals, and makes decisions through writing.

Whether you’re eyeing a chief of staff role, or you’re a founder hoping to set the right foundation for your fledgling company, read on for a unique chance to dive seriously deep into how one company functions — and garner inspiration for your own startup systems.

WHY YOUR FIRST 10 SYSTEMS ARE CRUCIAL

So much startup advice comes down to one common element: Hiring the best people. Whether it’s Twitter threads about how the first 50 hires set the cultural tone, or blog posts recommending that a founder interview the first 100 employees, most pointers are about keeping an unwavering focus on the people who power startups.

“While I definitely agree that people are your most important asset, I’ve noticed that most content doesn't talk as much about the systems. What I don't come across as often is a read about how the systems that those first hires build are the manifestation of the culture,” says Fishner.

In his view, it’s not an either or — it’s both. “While early employees are of course a driving factor for the company culture, they’re only half the equation. The other half is the foundational systems,” he says. “The comparison I like to draw is the nature versus nurture debate. Both your genes and your memes are highly influential on your outcomes. Likewise, both your people and your systems are highly influential on your company's outcomes — but the system side doesn't get as much attention as it should.”

Care about your first 10 systems as much as you care about your first 10 hires.

Fishner expands on why he thinks systems deserve equal footing. “While early employees help set implicit norms, building systems early in a company's lifecycle sets explicit norms. How do decisions get made? How are meetings structured? How are goals set? These systems are much easier to build when the company is small, and very challenging to put into place as the company grows,” he says.

- Kevin Fishner, HashiCorp's Chief of Staff

This point is particularly resonant these days. “The shift to remote work shows us how tricky this can be. Most of the interpersonal interactions you have day-to-day are through Slack, email, Google Docs, and Zoom meetings. So it's very possible that for many employees, their only face-to-face human interaction for the day is through a meeting. If that meeting is good, then their day is good. If that meeting is bad, then their day is bad,” he says. In response, many companies are trying to encourage more writing and fewer meetings, but find it challenging to adopt this practice because it's not an existing explicit norm, Fishner says. “For an established company, implementing new systems takes top-down executive authority.”

Founders: The earlier you can understand what practices are important to you, the better. Turn those practices into systems as soon as you can.

Fishner’s conviction here surprisingly comes from his college days. “I studied philosophy. My thesis was on the impacts of subconscious advertising techniques. Theories of economics are built on the foundational belief that individuals are rational, well-informed and autonomous. But in practice, none of those things are true. For example, we’re far from autonomous — each person influences other people,” he says.

“In my reading and research for the thesis, I came to more of a determinist worldview that free will is overrated and our willpower is overstated. We're actually much more influenced by the environments that we're put in. These points are really well-made in ‘Atomic Habits.’ If you want to eat better or exercise, don't rely on your willpower. Instead, change some of your environmental influences that lead to those behaviors, such as having sugar in your house.”

Here’s where the connection to startups comes in. “The same is true in company building — instead of relying completely on the willpower and independence of all your employees, think about how to build better systems and create the environment where people can do their best work,” says Fishner.

He extends the philosophy parallel even further. “Elon Musk has a quote that gets repeated all the time, essentially saying that a company is nothing more than a collection of individuals working towards a common mission. And I think that misses the mark. It’s like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment,” says Fishner.

“Imagine you have a big wooden pirate ship and over 100 years, you replace each piece of wood. At the end of that process, is it still the same ship? There's no clear answer, but it’s instructive to think of a company similarly. Employees could come and go over the course of 30 years to the point where none of the same employees are there. Is it the same company?” he asks. “I would argue yes.”

A company is a collection of both its people and its systems. People can come and go over the years, but the systems they put in place and gradually refine over time become part of the company — and companies ultimately compete based on if those systems are strong or not.

In the sections that follow, Fishner walks us through two of his company’s systems and how the team continually sharpens them. Fair warning — systems aren’t easy to copy and paste. “Everything I'm going to discuss is very important for HashiCorp, but I wouldn't say they're generalizable principles. So hopefully you can take them and remix them with your own ideas, — they’re not an absolute truth.”

SYSTEM #1: OPERATING CADENCE — WHY SOURCES OF TRUTH AND RITUALS ARE KEY TO STRATEGIC PLANNING

What HashiCorp vernacular dubs “operating cadence,” other startups would likely call goal-setting or OKRs, says Fishner. “The operating cadence is the quiet drum beat setting our direction and the rhythm driving the business. At HashiCorp, our operating cadence has three speeds — annual, quarterly, and weekly,” he says. Each speed is built on two components:

Sources of truth: defines success in a clear, ideally quantifiable way.

Rituals: a consistent practice to review that source of truth and build accountability.

Before we dive into each element, check out this quick overview below of the example sources of truth and rituals HashiCorp relies on to make progress and stay accountable at the annual, quarterly and weekly levels:

“If you get it right, this system can set clear expectations, track performance, and identify improvements to make along the way,” says Fishner. Unfortunately, for too many startups, this process tends to go sideways. You’ve likely encountered this pattern before: A rapidly-growing startup team encounters confusion about priorities, a lack of alignment, and wasted efforts, so someone suggests the company implement a goal-setting framework. After a lengthy process of setting OKRs, the wheels slowly start to come off. “Oftentimes companies will focus on the source of truth and not the ritual — and that's one of the biggest mistakes that you can make,” says Fishner.

“After OKRs are set, there's no ritual for reviewing them, so they quickly get out of date. Then employees start resenting them because the effort to actually create the goals was a waste of time — and OKRs slowly die because no one looks at them anymore. Expectations aren’t enough. It’s the ritual that it keeps the priorities top of mind and folks focused on what's important.”

OKRs only work if there is a ritual of reviewing progress and holding owners accountable for hitting their goals.

Annual planning:

Source of truth: Company scorecard, organized around 3 executive focuses and broken down in 12 sub-scorecards. See HashiCorp's template here or get our Google Doc version here.

Ritual: Annual planning summit

Timeframe: Brainstorming in September, resource allocation in October, then individual executive planning ahead of coming together for annual planning summit December.

“The first step for us is actually more long-term than an annual planning process. We started by defining high-level company success metrics as our North Star goals. Look for big, ambitious goals that come from years of execution. They’re usually lagging indicators that are almost useless to track quarterly. For us, these are fixed goals that frame our annual operating plans, but they change in magnitude each year,” he says.

“At HashiCorp, our first long-term goal is to win the practitioner (measured as a monthly active user account). Second is to enable the customer (measured through ARR). Third is to grow the ecosystem (measured as a percentage of revenue attributed to our partners). Our finance team then took those North Star goals and built a long-range plan, which is a five-year financial model with derivative financial metrics.”

With that context in place, let’s turn to the annual scorecard. “Essentially, it’s our incarnation of OKRs. Using our scorecard template, we define objectives and a set of key results for each objective, tracking progress on a quarterly basis. These objectives are at the highest level of the company, setting the overall priorities for the upcoming year,” says Fishner. “They’re the leverage points that we as an executive team think will have the most positive impact on reaching that five-year long range plan.”

Source of truth: Scorecards

Here’s how the scorecard gets filled in: “There’s an executive offsite in September where we do a structured brainstorming around what the top three executive focuses should be for our company objectives,” says Fishner.

- HashiCorp's annual scorecard template.

But it’s not a run-of-the-mill brainstorm. “There's a few Harvard Business Review studies around brainstorming that show when you just bring people together and ask them to put stickies up on a wall, it doesn't work that well. So we give executives two weeks before the offsite to write down what they think the three focuses should be for the upcoming year,” he says. “Then, each exec gets five minutes at the meeting to talk through their suggestions. Then we put all the suggestions into a list — there's usually quite a bit of overlap so we end up with about 15. Each exec then ranks five initiatives, five being the most important, one being the least, and then we just do a sorted ranking from there.”

This process has a few benefits, Fishner says. “First, allowing everyone to think about the objectives independently means they won’t get stuck in group think. Second, folks can often be more thoughtful when there's not as much urgency to come up with ideas on the spot. And finally, each leader gets equal airtime and opportunity to have their voice heard.”

With those high-level executive focuses as a starting point, the team dives a layer deeper. “We break down our company objectives (level 100) into goals by four ‘plans’ (level 200) — a go-to-market plan, product plan, people plan, and finance plan. Then, the go-to-market plan is broken down by field geography (Americas, EMEA, APJ) and the product plan is broken down by product line,” says Fishner. All told, they end up with 12 different scorecards.

Interestingly, the “Level 200” plans are jointly owned. “Sales, marketing and customer success executives collaborate on our go-to-market scorecard, and product and eng executives work on our product scorecard. You don't often see that joint ownership in other goal frameworks, the thinking being that you want to have one directly responsible individual,” says Fishner. “But software isn’t something that can be broken down into very tiny constituent parts. It's not an assembly line.”

But that’s not an excuse to skimp on the details — hence the further breakdown by geography and product line. “It’s critical to properly segment company goals to surface insights. If goals are too high-level, over-performance in one product line hides the under-performance in another — which is well captured by Simpson's Paradox,” he says.

When you only look at high-level aggregate metrics, the nuance of what's really happening in your business gets lost.

But if goals are too low-level, the signal can get lost in the noise. “Importantly, we don't force our scorecards further down than the field geographies and the product lines. Take the Americas scorecard as an example,” says Fishner. “There’s about 150 sales, customer success, engineering, and field marketing folks dedicated to the Americas. Their scorecard focuses on metrics like top-line revenue, renewal rate, expansion rate, and then leading indicators like pipeline generation and coverage. As a leadership team, we don't try to cascade it down into individual regions like New York or Texas — that’s their responsibility.”

Ritual: Time to practice

“These draft executive scorecards get built from usually mid-October to December, which is when the annual planning summit is. We bring 70 senior leaders in the company together — this past year was remote of course, but we usually do it in person. It's two days, about four to five hours per day,” says Fishner.

What’s most unique is that the summit is focused on a business simulation. “Using a firm called BTS, we run a business simulation where leaders get to ‘run’ the business for three years. Taking a simplified view of the company, we essentially build a game board based on our five-year financial model and this year’s three executive focus areas,” says Fishner.

- A sample snapshot of the HashiCorp annual business simulation.

Here’s how it works: “We break folks up into teams of six, and they get to be the ‘CEO’ or the executive team for two days. Each round, your team gets to determine what initiatives to invest in. But there are ‘wobblers’ in the game, which are events that come up to throw you off track so you have to make a decision about how to adjust. It deepens our leaders’ understanding of not only what the priorities are for the year, but how they might play out in ‘practice.’”

Of course, this is a complex undertaking suited for bigger teams, so it may not work for your startup. “The essence of this exercise is the notion of practice. I grew up playing competitive soccer. We practiced four or five times a week and had games on the weekend — basically spending 90% of the time practicing and 10% of the time actually having to perform,” he says. “But when you get into a work environment, that notion of practice gets lost. So the simulation is about creating room for practice and making mistakes.” (Editor’s note: This excellent point from Fishner reminded us of Tyler Cowan’s question: What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?)

To bring that spirit to your company in a more simplified version, Fishner suggests more lightweight options. “Bring a smaller group of leaders together for an offsite. Create an exercise where you're sitting in someone else's shoes and going through one of their day-to-day activities, such as answering support tickets,” he says.

A setting for practice, making mistakes, and building up empathy for what other people are going through is key to any annual ritual.

Quarterly progress:

Source of truth: Scorecard and WAR tables.

Ritual: Quarterly business review (QBR)

Timeframe: 12 30-minute QBRs dedicated to reviewing each scorecard The audience is the executive team (all CEO direct reports) and extended leadership team (all VPs ), about 30 people.

With the annual plan fixed, the HashiCorp team turns their attention to their quarterly cadence. “Every quarter we review progress on all 12 scorecards in QBRs. The scorecards from the annual process get updated, filling in the columns with the previous quarter’s results. As an additional source of truth, there are Wins, Action Items, and Requests for Support (WAR) tables,” says Fishner. “The leaders review progress on the scorecard itself, read the team’s reflections and then discuss areas that might need improvement.”

Here’s what the WAR tables cover: “The team filling out the updates reflects on these questions: What are the wins? What are the great accomplishments that we should celebrate and keep moving forward on? What are the challenges and the action items? As an example, for one of our product lines, the activation rate — monthly active users divided by the signups — was low in a recent quarter,” he says.

- HashiCorp's WAR table template.

Here are two benefits Fishner sees from this approach:

Reflection: “One of our principles is reflection not perfection. Goal setting is a process of reflecting on progress, not trying to get your goals so perfect upfront that you never need to change them. They're either off in terms of magnitude or completely misguided,” he says. “The QBRs create the space to reflect. Are we on track to hit goals? Are these the right goals? What can we do to improve?”

Accountability: “As chief of staff, I don’t have the authority or the time to hold owners effectively accountable for their goals. The ritual is what creates accountability — the owners of the scorecards know that every quarter they will review their progress to the executive team and they will also review what they said they would accomplish last quarter,” he says.

The purpose of an operating cadence isn't to dogmatically stick to goals set at the beginning of the year. It's a ritual of reflection and introspection.

Weekly review:

Source of truth: Corporate reporting pack.

Ritual: Exec team meeting

Timeframe: One-hour meetings on Mondays, broken up into four 15-minute time slots

Now for the most granular level of HashiCorp’s operating cadence. “The corporate reporting pack is a superset of the metrics in the scorecards we review quarterly,” says Fishner. “It tracks everything from our current quarter sales forecast to our progress toward our hiring goals. It's an attempt to get as close as possible to a company cockpit where we can see leading and lagging indicators and know if the company is flying effectively.”

Fishner, along with a cross-functional group of sales operations, finance, and go-to-market folks, compiles this set of metrics every week. “The cross-functional element is important here. Take a question like ‘What is our sales forecast?’ Oftentimes the finance team and the sales team have different views on that,” he says. “After reviewing the metrics, we pull out insights — areas that are trending red that we need to take action on.”

Now for the weekly ritual. “It’s a more fine grain review of what's important for the company and how we're progressing. The exec team reviews the corporate reporting pack every Monday in a weekly hour-long meeting. For the first 15 minutes, we review the insights on the metrics. For the other three 15-minute slots, a guest speaker comes in to present on an action item that we identified in the previous QBR — another level of accountability to make sure that we’re following up on the challenges that we surfaced.”

Here’s the thinking behind this fine-tooth comb approach:

Focus on leading indicators. A quarterly look just isn’t enough. “It's hard to change renewal performance in the current quarter. A renewal happens or doesn't happen based on the past year of customer experience with our products and services. We need to track leading indicators that create a strong renewal rate — customer onboarding, account health, and implementation services usage,” says Fishner. “For every lagging indicator, we need to have a set of leading indicators that we review on a weekly basis.”

Focus on what matters. “The science of it is making sure your weekly reporting pack is truly representative of the most important metrics of the company,” says Fishner. “This level of weekly scrutiny keeps us on track to deliver our high-leverage actions — instead of getting distracted by the flow of urgent, low-leverage escalations. If a different leading indicator is acting up, there’s an impulse to take action on it. But if it’s not on the annual scorecard, then earlier in the year we agreed that we don't think that's very important for the health of the company — so it doesn't need to be something we focus on.”

Your rituals should keep you focused on what you decided was important earlier in the year — not on this week’s shiny distraction.

SYSTEM #2: HOW TO FORGE A COMPANY CULTURE OF WRITING AND DECISION DOCUMENTATION

“HashiCorp is a remote company with employees in 13 countries and 40 states. But I like to take one step back and describe us as an open source company,” says Fishner. “It’s a subtle difference, but an interesting one, especially with our company culture of writing. When you're working on open source software projects, there's a ton of written collaboration on GitHub. The origin of our writing practice comes from that open source ethos, as well as the philosophy and principles of the early employees,” he says.

“When Mitchell Hashimoto — the company’s co-founder and namesake — was in college, he would take a notebook with him everywhere. And whenever he had ideas for software projects, he was really diligent about writing them down first. So when he and his co-founder Armon Dadgar started working together, they would create thorough design documents and documentation before writing a single line of code,” says Fishner. “It was specifically on the engineering side at first, but something like 45 out of the first 50 employees were engineers, so that idea of writing the design before implementation became a core part of the company.”

For HashiCorp, their habit of writing is a way to document decisions and get buy-in before moving into implementation. Here’s how it works in practice. “We have two core documents. There’s a PRD, which in most companies is a product requirement document, but we've tweaked it a little bit to be a problem requirement document. It defines the problem. The second is the RFC, or request for comment. It proposes a solution or design, the implementation you want to get approval on before you start,” says Fishner.

We dive into each one below:

Defining the problem

See HashiCorp's PRD template here or grab our Google Doc version:

“Most large projects start with a PRD and are followed by an RFC, but not every RFC will have a PRD. The product management team definitely writes a lot of PRDs,” says Fishner. “But more generally, we’ve found that for some of the more ambiguous challenges we're facing — especially where there are many stakeholders — it's helpful to write a PRD first to make sure everybody's in agreement on the problem we’re actually solving.”

As for the document itself, these are the core sections:

Background context. “In order for a reader to understand the content of the PRD, they must first understand the context.”

Problem and personas. “This is the heart of the PRD as it simplifies the user research into clear problem statements. It also includes a list of personas and how they experience those problems statements.”

Requirements and phases. “This is more of the traditional product management PRD that you would expect, with a list of requirements that the engineering RFC should satisfy. The problem is also broken down into phases to enable iterative implementation.”

The most important component? Your mindset while putting it together. “While the introduction section is read first, it should be authored last. Writing the overview last allows the author to summarize the final content of the PRD, rather than write an introduction without knowing the end result.”

Writing a PRD is about curating information, not creating it; you should go into the process without preconceived notions of what you’ll find.

Scoping the solution

See HashiCorp's RFC template here or grab our Google Doc version

“The guiding principle that we use for whether or not you should write an RFC or not is if the time it takes to make the change is faster than writing the document itself,” says Fishner.

“The RFC itself is really two core sections: the background, and then the proposal. The guiding goal of the background section is: as a newcomer to this project (new employee, team transfer), can I read the background section and follow any links to get the full context of why this change is necessary?” he says.

“In the proposal, there are a bunch of subsections for different aspects of the implementation, including impacts to UX and UI. The last piece is the constituents who approve and give feedback,” says Fishner. “But there's a third optional section called the abandoned ideas. We found that there were really good debates happening in the RFCs. Rather than only leaving what the outcome of those debates were, capturing those alternative ideas gives a more holistic picture and helps the reader understand what the writers were exploring.”

Fishner runs us through an example of an RFC in action outside of the engineering org. “The finance team writes lots of RFCs about what our expense system should be or how we should put together our long-range plan. The background section might explain the finance planning cycles. Then in the proposal itself, they might list considerations, such as arriving at our North Star metrics within 5 years, building a path towards EBITDA profitability, or setting the guard rails to not violate a magic number of one — the current year revenue divided by last year sales and marketing cost,” he says.

“From there they break down the exact components of the long-range plan: our income statement, cash flows, our non-GAAP ARR table, and so on. They then collect comments or feedback on that basic plan, and get it approved and implemented. Afterwards, you send your RFC to the company-wide email list. While most will just read the email rather than the full RFC, sending it to the list gives visibility into decisions being made across the company.”

Fishner shares more about the art of putting this document together. “Funnily enough, we do have a RFC for how to write RFCs, as well as an RFC template that everybody follows. We've learned a lot over the past six, seven years on these written documents, and there are good reasons for why the template is the way it is,” he says.

The process of getting feedback on RFCs is also critical. “First, it’s important to make sure that the solution is appropriate and takes in the necessary perspectives. But second, it's a cultural practice,” says Fishner. “Feedback on RFCs is one of the predominant ways we give feedback in the company. The first rule is to make sure that you're giving feedback on the document itself, not the person. That means changing the way you write the feedback. Instead of, ‘Why did you write this?’ say, ‘Why is this aspect of the solution the right way to go?’”

THREE PARTING PRINCIPLES FOR FELLOW CHIEFS OF STAFF

As a capstone, Fishner shares three lessons he’s learned from architecting these systems in his capacity as chief of staff. Draw on them as you size up your startup’s own potential systems.

Principle #1: Be an observer not doer.

“This was a good lesson learned when I just stepped into the chief of staff role. You get an interesting perspective on a company because you get the CEO's lens of how functions are operating and collaborating with each other. And it becomes really easy to spot problems, between sales and marketing, or sales and customer success. The pitfall is thinking that you can go and fix them. As the chief of staff, you could be responsible for proposing the solution — in our case, writing an RFC and building the source of truth — but you will never be responsible for the ritual. And the ritual is where change happens.”

He shares a specific example. “When I first stepped into the role 18 months ago, we had a discrepancy between the way that sales, marketing, and customer success were segmenting our users. They all had a slightly different model. I approached it with a ‘doer’ mindset. I thought if I just define a customer segmentation model, they'll all use it. And while we were able to get to a model that we all agreed on, because I wasn't in those seats, running those meetings and building the rituals, it was never adopted.”

As chief of staff, you can observe challenges, but you're not really the person to solve them.

Principle #2: Find and enact leverage.

“If there’s anything I've learned as a chief of staff, it’s that leverage is the most important thing you can find — by which I mean, finding the actions that you can take that have the most positive cascading impacts across the company,” says Fishner.

The purpose of leverage is to create as much change as possible with as little effort as possible. “An executive team has limited resources. Every quarter we need to ruthlessly prioritize our focus areas. As a chief of staff, you’re a supporting function to the executive team. It’s your job to make sure the executive team is aligned on the most impactful decisions that we can make as a group,” he says.

“When I first started working on the operating cadence, I kind of lost sight of that purpose. As I’ve done it more, I’ve seen that finding that leverage is about creating a system of observation where you can understand what's going on in different parts of the company. You can see where the soft spots are, and doggedly hold folks to fixing the spots that could have the most dramatic improvement on the company itself. And that's really what the operating cadence system is about. The system to define goals and track progress is a means to the end of finding high leverage actions.”

It’s not about OKRs or any other goal-setting acronyms. If the system doesn’t surface the highest leverage improvements to make, it’s not a productive system.

Principle #3: Sample inspiration, but make sure you remix it.

“I’ve done a good amount of research on other companies’ practices, and the ones that are most influential on us are Amazon and Microsoft. For example, the scorecards are definitely inspired by Microsoft. And while we didn’t copy Amazon’s practice of written memos exactly, it's good validation that it works and it can work at a very, very large scale,” says Fishner.

“But it’s important to remember that these systems are very much cultural artifacts. This has been really apparent to me as companies have been forced to adopt remote work over the past year. Whenever I’m asked for advice on remote practices, the one I lead with is always writing. I walk through a few of our RFCs and the process overall, and 99% of the time, the reaction is, ‘This is great, but it will never work at our company,” he says.

“And this is why it comes back to building systems. Early in the company life cycle, if you treat your core systems with just as much gravitas as your early employees, those systems will build the culture. That’s why the systems need to be organic to the company itself. You can take inspiration from other companies, but it's really just inspiration. You need to remix it with other ideas. Let go of the idea that you're creating new innovations, but rather see how you're creating unique combinations of existing ideas for that work for the specific setting of your company.”

This article is a lightly-edited summary of Kevin Fishner's appearance on our new podcast, "In Depth." If you haven't listened to our show yet, be sure to check it out here.

Cover image by Getty Images / Jorg Greuel. Templates courtesy of HashiCorp.

During turmoil, the business community tends to focus on continuity — emphasizing efficiency in turn. Both are critical. If you were to take any lessons away from the financial crisis of 2008, however, it might be wiser to think about how resiliency is key to long-term success.

Even in the depths of that recession, resilient companies showed a 25-point higher EBITDA than “nonresilient” counterparts and enjoyed markedly better recovery. A large part of this was due to business preparedness, as “resilients” took measures to reduce nonperforming assets, strengthen balance sheets, cut costs and prioritize customer-focused investments.

However, building a successful company involves more than business-oriented resilience (think cutting costs or shifting processes). It also involves organizational resilience: the strength of your people and how they’ll manage and lead moving forward.

4 Tactics for building organizational resilience

Covid-19 reinvigorated the need for both business and organizational resilience. Those at the helm of a business need to not only find ways to lead through uncertainty and anticipate change, but also foster companywide resilience. If you’re looking to do so, focus on these areas:

1. Leadership

Crises often hit companies in many areas at once, whether that’s with teams, communication, or operations. Without the right mindset, leaders struggle to find true north to help everyone see past the present moment. Immersing leaders into similar experiences (through simulations and scenario-planning) can help provide insights into how to ameliorate crises, set clear objectives, and take action holistically — which research suggests has become increasingly important for leaders. Besides this, leadership groups can also encourage an open exchange of ideas and establish new networks.

2. Individuals

Even with Covid-19 out of the equation, there’s no shortage of stressors in employees’ lives. Three-quarters of people admit to experiencing job burnout, with 40% connecting it to Covid-19. Similarly, more than one-third of workers have clocked longer hours recently. To support overall organizational resiliency, companies must start from the ground level by ensuring their employees are fit to work.

With this in mind, offer opportunities to connect with professional coaches. Provide access to platforms or apps (such as TaskHuman) that allow for diverse personalized support. You could also introduce mindfulness training and equip managers with the skills to help them better engage in personal conversations.

3. Teams

Shifting from a hierarchical to a flat structure has been beneficial in many organizations. Zappos adopted a holacracy back in 2014, for instance, and its team members decided to manage themselves as internal “small businesses.” You don’t need to reorganize as radically as Zappos, but it helps to rethink the corporate structure to encourage teamwork. Additionally, invest in collaborative tools like Slack or Yammer, and encourage employees to reach out to colleagues they normally wouldn’t to bring more knowledge into the mix.

4. Talent

Covid-19 brought talent management and business continuity into sharper focus as employees “left the building” — many for good. One CEO at a leading Chinese insurance company utilized a Business Continuity Planning Software and took steps to address job dissatisfaction by investing in employee training and development, reasoning that continued learning will boost growth once the pandemic subsides. This is a solid starting point, but take things a step further and make cultural changes that generate, engage, and empower talent. Focus on solidifying talent in employees in their day-to-day lives — not just through periodic training.

Organizational resilience is a critical component to ensuring success through crisis, and it can only be accomplished by focusing on your most important asset: people. Invest in the right tools, provide the necessary support, and make talent development a priority. Your operations are only as resilient as your leadership.

Here’s something leaders can do right now that would have a significant, powerful, and positive impact on the company: Have fewer, better meetings. More than any other corporate initiative push for growth, or effort to reduce costs, nothing can have a more immediate impact on performance and productivity than fixing meetings.

If this seems too good to be true, consider what poor meetings are costing companies today. It’s bad, surprisingly so, and research confirms the enormous drainaudit on company dollars that comes with excessive, unproductive meetings. Just as significant is the impact that poor meetings have on employee engagement and morale. One client recently expressed an idea I’ve heard from many recently: “Our meetings are soul-crushing. With COVID, it’s meetings all day, every day. Meetings were never great before, but now, they are terrible.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. The good news is that improving meetings can happen at any time, and even small changes can have a tangible impact, often sooner than you think. Here’s a good place to begin.

Put your meetings through a car wash. If you want to improve meetings, clean them up. How? There are many actions that produce positive outcomes, but here’s the most important one: Be willing to try. It is easy to feel like we have very little control over our calendars, and there is no question that leaders have tremendous demands on their time, but don’t let that stop you before you start. You may not be able to clean up all meetings, but you can clean up some, and even great meetings have room for improvement.

Start with a few simple steps.

1. Audit and edit your existing meetings.
   ‍Here’s a good exercise to do on a periodic basis. Make a list of all meetings you lead or participate in on a consistent, predictable basis and remove those that are low value where possible. If you aren’t sure where to begin, take some time to review the meetings on your calendar and let responses to the questions below help guide your next step about what to eliminate: Is there anything you can eliminate without further discussion? Would there be any consequences if you stopped attending this meeting? How would those who attend your meetings evaluate their effectiveness? In one sentence, describe the purpose of this meeting? Do you (or others) prepare for this meeting? If this meeting went away, would anyone care?
2. Make small improvements.
   ‍Take a few simple actions to make your remaining meetings even better. Start by reducing the number of participants who must attend, so you’ve got the right people in the room and everyone who attends is expected to contribute. (Amazon is reported to use the “two pizza” rule to keep meetings effective: No meeting should be so large that two pizzas can't feed the whole group). Consider establishing ‘meeting-free’ days where possible. Cut meeting times in half or reduce the frequency of meetings altogether. At a minimum, better manage meeting time itself. Use timed agendas and timekeepers to prevent meetings from running late. While you’re at it, assign rotating roles, from notetaker to meeting facilitator to a ‘Devil’s Advocate’ – someone who is appointed to deliberately challenge or present an opposing view to an idea.
3. Focus on meeting excellence.
   ‍High performing teams create guidelines for how they will engage with each other during meetings, from defining a meeting purpose, to making decisions, to handling conflict, to preparing for meetings. The best teams we’ve worked with don’t leave good meetings up to chance or assume people will just automatically know what to do. They take the time to get very concrete and specific about defining the relevant behaviors, processes, or actions that will create meeting success. For instance, consider the executive team that wanted to ensure the voice of the customer was better integrated into their strategy, products, and services. So, they developed a list of concrete meeting behaviors and actions to ensure a customer orientation was reflected throughout the process. Today, if you attend a meeting at this company – no matter what the meeting topic – you’ll hear stories about customers, see a ‘customer segment’ built into every agenda, and hear meeting participants ask questions about how the customer perspective was considered when a new initiative or project was being proposed.

The best part about having fewer, better meetings is that the benefits to companies extend far beyond meetings themselves. One meeting at a time, leaders can take deliberate, positive action to advance the company’s strategy, improve their culture, increase ownership and accountability, and make positive inroads that elevate leader and team performance across the board. Imagine: Meetings could become something we want to attend, that we look forward to, that we see as a valuable place for us to learn, contribute, grow, and become even better.

In recent years, interest in concepts such as Big Data, Machine Learning, and Data Science have increased significantly, both economically and in the media. But what do they really mean? There are six aspects of the data world that every leader should understand: Business Intelligence, Data Analytics, Data Science, Data Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data.

Business Intelligence: Understanding the Past

Business Intelligence is the most classic data-based discipline. It is most similar to working with Excel – in fact, it is totally normal to find BI positions in Excel. Business Intelligence is based on the creation of command boxes – also known as dashboards – which represent the current or past state of the business; examples include sales percentages, seasonal evolutions, and tables of best-selling products. Business analysts are great at creating these types of summaries and taking advantage of them to guide future decision-making.

Some of the most popular programs in this field are PowerBI, Excel, and Tableau.

Data Analytics: Making Sense of Data

Data analytics is perhaps the most difficult aspect to define. It is of intermediate accessibility, serving a wide variety of professionals, from the most code-oriented to those in specialized programs. Data analysts’ roles range from data collection to modeling, through transformation and summarization. It is common to find data analysis linked to the concept of insights, which can be translated as keys. Data analytics seek clues or better understanding of data to draw conclusions that were not obvious before.

Apart from the programs used for Business Intelligence, it is common to find analyst positions that employ Python languages, R, and SQL.

Data Science: Anticipating the Future

Data science goes a step further than classic data analytics, and begins to use machine learning models to make predictions. The biggest difference between data analytics and data science that is that the latter deals with events that have not yet occurred and the ways that data can be used to anticipate them. For example, data can help predict the type of product that a customer will buy when accessing your website; it can predict the probability of cancer, given a patient’s genetics. It is usually described as the intersection of Computing, Statistics, and Business.

Data science is mostly linked to programming languages, especially Python, and to a lesser extent R and SQL.

Data Engineering: Organizing the Data

Data engineering is the most technical of all. Associated more with “the how” rather than “the what,” data engineering is based on the principles of extract, transform and load (ETL), which is a summary of the process of moving data for later exploitation. Data engineering professionals oversee the structuring of databases or warehouses, ensuring that the data is stored and used efficiently and safely. It is perhaps the “least friendly” dimension of data for end users, as it is closer to more classical computing than analytics.

To the aforementioned Python and SQL, it’s necessary to add some classic languages such as Java or the lesser-known Scala.

Now, the delicate concepts – AI and big data. These aren’t delicate because of their low validity –  they are actually highly valid – but because of their indiscriminate use in public conversation.

Artificial Intelligence

The concept of Artificial Intelligence is also more nuanced, and in many cases, misused. In most media, it is used to describe processes or algorithms that are actually Machine Learning. The border is a bit blurry: in fact, in many cases, ML is considered a sub-field of AI.  In short, the primary difference between the two is that Intelligence comprises autonomous creativity or decision making, while the vast majority of Machine Learning algorithms  respond to very specific tasks.

For the general public, it is reasonable to confuse Machine Learning with Artificial Intelligence, since in both cases machines produce results autonomously. However, at a technical level, Machine Learning is a field with a great future – and presence – in the vast majority of businesses, while Artificial Intelligence is still far from being widely applied. The best-known examples of ML currently are autonomous driving or voice assistants.

Big Data

Big Data could use a brief clarification. The term refers to all processes that require unconventional methods or technologies to be executed, since private computers, for example, do not have enough power. Big Data commonly refers to increased volume, variety, and speed of data generation.

So, the term Big Data is used when the amount or type of data requires special treatment, usually in distributed architectures in the cloud, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. To be more specific, it is preferable to start using expressions such as “data science solutions in a Big Data environment,” or “Big Data for business analysis.”

In conclusion

Understanding the six major data technologies is a critical starting place for every leader. Whether you’re implementing a data culture, undergoing digital transformation, or just want to keep up-to-date with digital trends, it’s essential to know what these six technologies mean and how they are being utilized in the marketplace.

We agree – 2020 was all about silver linings. Finding them, hanging on to them. Because this ride isn’t over yet.

So you know you from the first post in our blog series that before you look try to support others, you need to put on your own oxygen mask first. That’s key.

So, what’s next? Making sure you surround yourself with a village to sustain that well-being will allow for maximum productivity and effectiveness. In other words – forge connections.

‍Vital Friends author Tom Rath digs into Gallup research that shows the absence of a best friend at work results in only 1 in 12 employees being engaged in their jobs. One. In. Twelve. While some might find humor in the idea of a “best friend at work,” it has real business impact. Gallup’s research links employee engagement to profit, sales, safety, and productivity. It turns out that this skeptically viewed “best friend” question has one of the strongest links to those hard and important measures that the board and investors care so much about.

Everyone needs connection – hardly a groundbreaking concept. Some need it more, some need it less, but research clearly tells us that everyone needs it in some form to be successful and to be happy. It is even more challenging to do this in a still-virtual environment, where it takes more deliberate action. Here are four ways we look at how leaders should be thinking about how their connections can help them excel:

1. Maintain your sanity
2. Get stuff done
3. Expand your influence
4. Find fulfillment

Connect to maintain your sanity—and others’ too

‍“Even though people spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else, people underestimate how work influences their overall wellbeing and daily experience.” - Tom Rath

The typical American works about 1,800 hours per year, and that number has likely increased during pandemic times, with blurred work-life boundaries. Worse yet, we’re more anxious and overwhelmed. A pulse check by the American Psychological Association found that nearly 8 in 10 adults say the coronavirus pandemic is a significant source of stress in their lives, and nearly 1 in 5 adults say their mental health is worse than it was at this time last year. Perhaps not shocking – but are we as leaders helping to create and encourage the outlets to manage that stress?

‍Create a dedicated connection forum or platform

‍Of course, there is much you can do on your own to restore and maintain your sanity. We covered some of that in our first post. The task here is to involve others in maintaining or even growing your – and their – sanity and provide a platform to help your team do the same. In the midst of the pandemic, our founder and CEO Suzanne Bates instituted a “buddy system” at the company. The idea being that on any given day, someone might need a captive ear, a shoulder, or just a colleague to process with. It wasn’t about catching up on work things – it was more about checking in on each other’s well-being. While team members approached it in different ways – some met weekly, others just when they needed support – having a safe space and a means of asking “how are you, really?” has in many cases transcended just emotional connections, and has led to innovative ideas, brainstorming, and in some cases – new ways of working together. In fact, this blog series is a byproduct of a great buddy partnership.

‍Connect to get stuff done

‍As a leader, you need other people to accomplish your goals. You need to rally the troops, ensure alignment, and motivate them to execute. At Bates, we call this intentionality: being able to clarify direction for the team and keep actions aligned and on track. In other words, driving execution through others.

All of that is challenged in this virtual environment. In person, you may more easily get a sense of how projects are going, if there are roadblocks, or if the team is feeling overwhelmed. But when you’re not in the room or having those regular conversations, you may not pick up on the things that slow progress. To adjust, you must develop a more systematic approach to connecting about initiatives and goals.

For example, we are working with the top supply chain leader for a global industrial organization. This leader has been charged with spearheading a re-engineering initiative. This would be a difficult task even pre-COVID. Gone are the impromptu hallway conversations or water cooler chat she might have to ease into these sensitive discussions with her team. She has found that to drive this initiative forward, she must spend more time with people and consciously create interactions that otherwise would have occurred naturally. And it can’t be all about business, given that she is in a position of needing to ask people to give up budget, people, or both – often tough, personal, and emotional decisions.

‍Create a roadmap to make the right connections

‍We recommend you create what we call an Initiative and Influencers Matrix. Jot down a list of the top three things you need to get done – whether big initiatives or small projects – down the left-hand side of the grid. Along the top, capture the key stakeholders you need to get that work done. In each box, break down the stakeholder names into two buckets: stakeholders you’re regularly in touch with, and stakeholders who might have fallen off your radar. Identify and map the connections you might need to create or reignite to be your most effective and productive self and create the buy in you need to move further, faster.

‍Connect to expand your influence

‍The third aspect of connection deals with your work future – who do you need to stay connected and visible to so that you don’t derail your own business success? We all know the adage, it’s not what you know but who you know. Well, we think it is a both/and equation.

Consider this client we worked with. Dan ran a multibillion-dollar business at a Fortune 50 company. For better or worse, he was often quite literally the smartest person in the room – at least according to his senior leadership team colleagues. He tended to write off people who didn’t share the same level of perceived intellect and drive for success. More than once, this discounting of key stakeholders nearly cost him his career. In fact, in at least one case, his inability to take a peer-to-peer approach held him back from taking on a bigger role. Dan learned the hard way that professional growth is a team sport. We know from our research that humility (having an openness to others), inclusiveness (bringing others into the conversation), and interactivity (consistent and frequent interpersonal exchanges) are fundamental to leadership effectiveness and can be the difference between flatlining and expanding your sphere of influence – even if you’re one of the most senior people in the room.

‍Create a personal board of directors

‍Establish a formal or informal network of colleagues, friends, mentors, advisors to connect with regularly as a sounding board, and advisory group. Think about who could help you broaden your perspectives, get exposure to other parts of the business, provide advice and guidance. Think beyond the usual suspects. Who are the individuals who you are not close to who might influence your opportunity for impact – for better or worse? Who might your dissident stakeholders be? And bring them close. Who are some leaders or colleagues outside the company who could bring an unbiased perspective and fresh ideas? For very senior leaders with few peers within the organization, this approach can be game changing.

‍Connect to find fulfillment

‍Sometimes connection isn’t about the day-to-day work at all. Of course, you need connections to get work done. But connections in the workplace don’t have to solely focus on what helps you contribute to the bottom line, hit deadlines, move business forward. They may be about finding personal fulfillment and meaning at work – which often drive creativity and innovation. Gallup would tell us that engaged and motivated employees are more productive. And we don’t disagree with that.

We have a female executive in the technology space who loves her job. She really finds the work interesting, and intellectually challenging. And while she has decent relationships with her senior leadership team colleagues, she doesn’t have a lot in common with them. As working mother with young children – in a predominantly male field – she was missing relatable, empathetic connections that would help her maintain energy and balance when life and work was feeling out of whack.

‍Tap your leadership skills and role to inspire others and yourself

‍We talked about where she could take on a leadership role in one of the organization’s support communities. Most companies have some form of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) or Team Member Networks. ERGs are not just for mid-level or high potential employees – they are critical for senior leaders who can actively participate as executive advisors or sponsors. Visible representation for high-level executives gives credence to the importance of connection and balance. It helps set the tone for more junior team members in the organization while also allowing those senior leaders to benefit from new interactions and community of an expanded group of employees.

This client found a renewed sense of purpose by taking on a sponsor role with the Women’s ERG. She was able to encourage and support networking, leadership programs, and volunteer opportunities for women across all business units and levels of the company – and found herself lifted and inspired by the camaraderie.

Often as leaders we focus on the “what” that needs to get done – driving the business forward, hitting our strategic priorities, delivering for clients and shareholders. But we focus less on the “how” that will get us there. The critical relationships and connections that not only pave the way for efficient work but help lessen the singular responsibility for any one leader by sharing some of that mental and emotional burden with key partners. The hardest part is being intentional and carving out the time to focus on building those connections so you, in turn, can be an even more effective leader for your people.

So consider our advice – find ways to establish relationships at work that will help you stay sane during the tumultuous times, while also helping you push that rock up the hill with a bit more ease. Try out one or more of these ideas we shared and encourage your teams to do the same.

‍Balance is about finding your zen so you can focus on what needs to be done. Connection is about maintaining that zen so you can get work done. And our next blog post about effectiveness? It’s about channeling that zen – cutting out the noise and clutter – so you can deliver with excellence and productivity.

A client recently said, “I have virtual meetings from 8am-6pm, eat dinner, and work until late in the evening. Then I work on the weekend—I am totally fried.” Sound familiar? You’re not alone. We’re hearing this same concern from many of the leaders we advise whose organizations have gone virtual.Without being able to connect with colleagues in the office, calendars are crammed. Formal meetings replace dropping in for a chat. Leaders squeeze in planning time late at night or the 30 seconds between video meetings. Ironically, even with so many meetings, leaders feel they are less in touch with their teams and lack the insight to know what is truly going on. And to top it off, being their best as a partner, parent, and friend, well… that’s reached an all-time low, too.Unfortunately, this is one of the great challenges in our virtual world. A whole set of boundaries leaders previously relied on have been erased. The commute, decompression time between office and home, and the distance between the two are no longer a sanctuary. Home is the office and vice versa. One client recently told us that she misses her commute—something she said she could never have imagined saying a year ago.And, with even more pressure on executives to increase revenue, execute strategy quickly, and reduce expenses, it is likely this division between work and home will become even blurrier.

Boundaries create needed structure for you and others

We know deep down that working this way isn’t sustainable for the long-term and yet it’s unclear now how much longer virtual will be the norm. Many companies are making decisions to eliminate traditional office space. After this pandemic is over, perhaps many will still be remote. This is why boundaries are more critical now than ever for executives. Using strategies to ensure you have ample planning and thinking time and to attend to important work relationships is critical for you to free up bandwidth to lead your team and focus on what’s most important to move your business in the right direction.By treating your time as a highly valuable commodity, you’ll make the right choices to invest your time where it will yield the greatest return.As Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.”Not only does setting productive boundaries create time for you; it enables you to be a better colleague by offering the opportunity for appropriate redirection to get things done even more quickly and efficiently without your involvement. With an already over-booked schedule, taking on multiple new requests daily simply slows down processes, creates a bottle neck for others, and layers on additional stress for you.On the other hand, establishing productive boundaries creates value added focus, strong partnerships, and bridges silos while advancing the business and your team.You’ll be able to respond to requests by providing even better ways to accomplish the objective. Others will begin to see you as a strong sounding board and as a thought partner. They will know they can count on you to share your perspective to get things done most effectively and efficiently. If this is your intention, any reluctance to be a good steward of your own time is to your detriment.This may sound counterintuitive. After all, setting boundaries often implies a lack of cooperation or collegiality. However, many leaders who employ the right boundaries tell us these fences benefiteveryone by fostering the right progress on important strategies.Most people have a hard time saying no. We want to be seen as a team player and being asked to help often equates to being valued. However, too often our performance is diminished by fragmenting our efforts across too many domains. By taking on more, we end up doing less.

So how do you set effective boundaries?

As requests come in, quickly analyze whether taking on the task is a smart use of your limited energy and time. Ask yourself these three tough questions:1. Is my participation necessary? If not, whose is?2. Is it necessary now? If not, what is the right timing?3. Is this the optimal way to do this project? If not, what is the best way?If you answer ‘no’ to any of these three, re-direct the effort in a way that makes better business sense. By saying ‘no’ while offering a solution, you will be considered a collaborative thought partner. Use one of these three phrases:No, not…

• …me: You acknowledge the work needs to be done and, while saying you’re not the person to do the work, you are recommending the right resource.
• …now: You recognize that time is often the scarcest resource and that, if your direct involvement is critical, you are opening the door to a mutually agreeable timeline.
• …this way: While you value the outcome the other party is seeking, you are collaborating on an approach that may be more efficient or effective.

If saying ‘no’ feels uncomfortable, a ‘yes, if…’ phrase is a positive alternative to create the same boundaries:Yes, if…

• …someone else does it: Recommend someone who is a viable replacement for you, perhaps someone who could use some exposure or for whom it can be a beneficial learning opportunity.
• …we adjust the timing: Offer timing that will work for you and the business.
• …we structure it differently: Suggest a way to reach the end goal that is equally or more effective and works for you.

The outcome: good fences and better outcomes

Building strong fences enables you to become an important solution rather than a bottleneck. You become the proverbial good neighbor to your colleagues and the enterprise. And most importantly, you begin to clear valuable pockets on your calendar for your most important focus.The best leaders set aside thinking and preparation time, honor it, and use it wisely. Don’t you owe it to yourself, and everyone else, to create boundaries that enable you and your organization to thrive?

P R E S S  R E L E A S E

Stockholm, January 4^th, 2021

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - BTS GROUP AB (publ.), a leading global strategy implementation firm, has agreed to acquire Bates Communications Inc. based in Boston, USA. Bates was founded in the year 2000 with a mission to drive corporate performance by guiding executives to engage and inspire their organizations.

With revenues exceeding 7 MUSD in 2020 and a strong team of 23 experienced employees, Bates Communications has demonstrated strong resilience against the impacts of the pandemic in 2020.

Bates Communications is helping some of the top companies in the world execute their strategies through C-Suite Advisory, Executive Coaching, Team Performance, Leader Communications, Executive Presence Leadership Development and Executive Succession and Onboarding, primarily in the USA. All of these services, including related solutions and proprietary IP, will strengthen and expand current BTS offerings.

Bates has an impressive client portfolio within a broad spectrum of industries that includes financial services and insurance, technology, healthcare and pharmaceuticals as well as the retail and consumer industries. The client portfolio has only limited overlap with BTS.

Bates’ senior talent and consultants will bring complementary and sought-after capabilities to BTS. Their team members have backgrounds and long experience in business, strategy, corporate communication, and management psychology.

In joining the BTS family, Bates Communications may offer the full range of BTS services to their clients including Leadership, Change & Transformation and Sales Enablement. BTS in turn can bring additional services with good potentials to its clients, both in the USA and internationally.

“2020 was an acute reminder of the criticality of executive leadership. Bates brings expertise to leaders to help them achieve communication that is clear, powerful and authentic. This enables organizations to drive their strategies forward, accelerate their adoption, and foster a caring culture. Bates’ world-class communication and executive presence capabilities bolster the executive leadership offering of BTS,”

says Henrik Ekelund, Founder and CEO of BTS.

Bates Communications will be integrated with BTS USA Inc. and become BTS Boston, which gives BTS USA an important presence in the significant market in the US Northeast. Bates will add important capabilities for all work in the areas of Executive & Team development.

“We are seeing significant demand for guidance for executives and their teams on their ever-evolving strategy implementations. Bates brings seasoned expertise and deepens our capabilities in helping the C-Suite with their challenges in these respects,”

says Jessica Parisi, President of BTS USA.

Founder Suzanne Bates and all members of her leadership team have agreed to stay on with BTS for a minimum of 3 years to accelerate the integration and growth strategy.

“Our team is delighted to join BTS as we share similar values and entrepreneurial cultures. The global presence of BTS, its services and experience will be highly valued by our people and our customers,” says Suzanne Bates. “Bates executive, communication & team services are a perfect complement to BTS, and we are excited to continue to innovate as we begin to work on client challenges together.”

The acquisition includes an initial cash consideration as well as a new issue of BTS shares up to 1 MUSD. Additional amounts will be paid out in 2021-2024 provided Bates meets specific targets 2020-2023. The transaction is effective as soon as the completion procedures have been finalized, which is expected in the coming week.

BTS strategy for acquisitions aims to create a broader base for future organic growth while actively consolidating in a highly fragmented market. Through its acquisitions, BTS also seeks to serve new and existing customers with innovative services based on the next generation of digital technologies.

For more information, please contact:

‍

Henrik Ekelund

CEO and founder
BTS Group AB (publ.)
+46-8-587 070 00

Michael Wallin

Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB (publ.)
‍michael.wallin@bts.com
‍+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

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At the ten-year mark of his tenure as CEO, David thought he should no longer postpone naming potential successors, though the board said it would be happy if he stayed on for several more years.

He chose two candidates: the CFO and the head of the largest commercial business. However, that is where the succession planning ended. There was no formal process by which to evaluate, select and develop the candidates. The ensuing year brought chaos.

The two selected executives formed camps of loyal followers and began undermining one another at every turn. They appeared to the CEO to be engaged in collegial, healthy competition. The reality nearly tore the company apart. The dueling turned bitter, prompted poor decisions, and inspired bad behavior down through the organization, culminating in a potentially fraudulent practice by one candidate. Both were dismissed. The CEO stayed three more years as the board hired a search firm, vetted candidates, chose a president, and prepared to transition the next chief executive.

The danger of failing to plan

While this is an extreme example of failing to plan, many organizations can attest to the bitter internal struggles, organizational disruption, prolonged uncertainty, and negative impact of not having an orderly succession plan.

It does not require complex analysis to understand why many don’t do this. A board typically has confidence in its CEO and gets comfortable with who they have at the helm. They are focused on other fiduciary duties and are often satisfied seeing other senior leaders in the boardroom on a limited basis. Months turn into years. Complacency ensues.

And there is the CEO. Who among us wants to contemplate our own “mortality” in a job? For CEOs, this may be the last job before retirement. As they focus on the here and now, postponing the process may not feel as risky as it is.

Why is it important to start planning now? The average tenure of CEOs has plummeted, from 8.5 years in 2003, down to 3.7 years now. This alone is reason for every board and CEO to begin within three to five years of the anticipated transition. Although it might sound absurd, one implication of this is that new CEOs should start thinking about their own successor during their own first 90 days.

Embracing the both/and mindset

The answer to overcoming complacency is to adopt a “both-and” mindset. The board and the organization can support the CEO AND plan ahead. An orderly process not only secures your company’s long-term success and stability; it is one of the last acts of a CEO to create a well-paved path to future success, and a powerful, positive legacy.

Most experts believe it is best to start at least 3 to 5 years in advance. If you take a “both-and” approach, you are instituting a rigorous program that includes identifying, assessing, and preparing top internal candidates for the role. You get behind the CEO today while developing the best internal candidates for the future. You can always go to an external search closer to the decision time, if warranted.

The urge to anoint a successor

It is tempting for CEOs to select one or two “obvious” CEO candidates. However, we all have conscious and unconscious biases. Starting with a broad search and resisting the urge to anoint a successor, is a far better guarantee of success. The larger pool and rigorous selection and development process not only avoids the negative dynamics of being seen as playing favorites; you are less likely to miss other top-notch candidates, particularly those with a different perspective, or cast in a different mold from the current leader.

Boards can fuel the tendency to let a CEO anoint a successor. They may rely on the CEO to determine who should make presentations to the board. They may be guided almost exclusively in their conversations by the CEO’s view of the candidates.  Boards should encourage the CEO and CHRO to embrace a transparent robust process of creating a profile of the next chief executive well in advance, assess the candidates, coach them, and prepare them with high value experiences.

Start with a CEO profile

The beginning of a rigorous succession process is to build a CEO Profile. What does the organization need in its next CEO, or, for that matter, any C-Suite leader? The CEO Profile can be developed collaboratively with the help of experts in an objective process. External expertise will help you to consider all the factors of success including the strategic vision and market dynamics that a new chief executive will face.

Even if the company is doing well, “more of the same” may not deliver on quantum growth or a competitive shift that can be a game-changer. The Profile provides flexibility to move in a new direction. One board we advised took the opportunity to radically rethink CEO selection as the company reached a pivot point, selecting a leader particularly well qualified to help the company change course.

Data and insights: an objective view

Once you have a well-developed CEO Profile the next step is to gather data, assess, and share these with potential candidates as part of their development plan. The organization and the leaders learn about their strengths and gaps and have the motivation and time to develop the capabilities they need most to do the job. Even your best candidates will not have it all. By providing data and insights and combining that with coaching, feedback, and new experiences, you can establish a unique program to prepare each candidate for the top job.

‍1. Assessment data

‍Assessment is an objective way to appreciate what leadership qualities, skills and experiences each candidate has now, and use the data to inform their development. What gets a leader here may not help them to ascend to the chief executive role.

A 360 assessment provides an objective evaluation about how the leader is showing up to others. One CEO candidate we assessed with the Bates ExPI^TM was exceptionally skilled at the technical side of the business, but needed to learn to inspire, energize, and align others to drive results. He embraced this data because he was able to tackle the right things to become a more well-rounded candidate. There are many types of assessments appropriate to the development phase of CEO succession. The key is to assess against your profile and get a detailed perspective.

‍2. Performance data

‍The second set of data to review and use in development is the candidate’s performance in recent roles. What results have they achieved? Savvy organizations create a sophisticated overview of performance by evaluating both the results achieved, and how the leader achieved them. Leaders that break the rules just to get bottom line performance don’t belong in a CEO succession plan.

In addition to business performance data, you can look at other data that already exists. Employee engagement surveys specific to that leader’s organization can be tracked over time for a historic view. Customer surveys, vendor surveys and interviews with direct reports can round out the picture of how the leader achieves results. As a coach works with the candidate, this data should factor into the development plan.

‍3. Career experiences

‍This third stream of data and development looks at a candidate’s ability to operate outside their comfort zone leading cross-functional, high impact initiatives. One company asked a sales leader with a take-no-prisoners approach to generating revenue to lead a new acquisition. She had to flex her approach and lead the team to collaborate, build agreements, and align. She was successful. Her CEO endorsed her candidacy, as the company planned to grow by acquisition in the future.

Bringing CEO candidates into adjacent or very different roles with new requirements gives them another view of the business, and tests untapped capabilities. Appointing leaders to be the executive sponsor or leader of a major transformation or change initiative is a powerful test. You want to see candidates deliver on a variety of fronts, such as enterprise technology implementation, or driving change in a go-to-market strategy or operating across multiple functions. Putting leaders in these critical roles develops their capabilities and gives you confidence they are ready.

In summary: the succession checklist

A robust succession management system is something you can always be doing, to support an ongoing pipeline to the C-suite. If this is not in place in your company, now is the time to get it right for later.

• Start early and initiate a rigorous process
• Resist the urge to anoint a candidate like you
• Provide the candidates with data and insights for strategic development
• Prioritize their development with coaching and stretch experiences
• Think of succession as a virtuous cycle that makes your organization healthy and strong

“I’ve realized I’m getting in the way of my organization’s speed and agility. I’ve become a decision-making bottleneck. Making quick decisions is so critical right now yet I also want to be inclusive. How can I speed up while getting the right level of buy-in and participation?”

‍An executive recently posed this question in an advisory session and he’s not alone. Many clients are asking similar questions. They’ve realized that with increased pressure the stakes are extremely high— most decisions need to be streamlined and they carry extra weight. The risk of a bad decision may mean the difference between expertly leading your organization through this challenging time or causing undo damage to the business.

"Speeding up while bringing others along is a common leadership concern these days."

Executives are moving faster than ever, and with so many people virtual, communication and decision-making challenges are real barriers to forward progress. During a time when decision making must be fast, leaders find themselves without the safety net of traditional ways they used gather data and garner buy-in, such as through casual interactions or dropping by a colleague’s or team member’s office.

A group of senior leaders we work with at a technology company had a recent ‘ah-ha’ about this very topic. They had been struggling to accelerate the strategies they were trying to put in place to keep the business growing and asked us to work with their team to help them increase their productive collaboration. When we taught them how to create structure and set expectations for intentional decision making, they quickly started seeing results. Their teams began buying into decisions more completely and they knew how to engage with their leader about the decision, resulting in creating quicker and smarter decisions.

What was the trick?

Here are 4 strategies you can use to create speed, buy-in, and a discipline of decision-making excellence:

1. Determine how much involvement and engagement is needed for the decision

2. Set expectations regarding who will make the decision

3. Set guardrails

4. Clarify how the decision is made

 1.   Determine how much involvement and engagement is needed for the decision

The decision-making graphic below shows four ways to make a decision, the resulting engagement each creates, and the involvement each requires. Interestingly, there is a time and place for each of these options, depending on how much time you have and how inclusive you need to be.

The Command approach has the least engagement and involvement. With this technique, the leader makes the decision without any input. This style is quite effective when speed is critical or when in an extreme crisis. For example, when the house is on fire, you don’t have time to consult and collaborate. Someone must take command and get everyone out of the building.

The Consult strategy has the next most engagement and involvement. The leader asks for input but makes it clear up front that they will make the final decision.

The Collaborate approach enables the leader and team to come to a collective decision, with some helpful guardrails to bound the discussion.

The Constrain technique is a ninja leadership skill. The leader delegates the decision and agrees to accept it, as long as it meets certain criteria. This requires trust and clarity on the part of the leader, which ups the ante, but also creates the most involvement and engagement from your team.

2. Set expectations regarding who will make the decision

Once you’ve decided which decision-making strategy you will use, make sure you communicate what strategy you are using and who is making the decision. For example, with Consult be clear up front that you are asking for input and want to hear from the team, but that you will make the final decision. And once the decision is made, you’ll communicate the decision and rationale behind it.

With Collaborate, communicate up front that you’ll discuss as a team and if the team can’t decide or get to a consensus, you will make the decision.

With Constrain, clarify that you are delegating the decision making to another person or a team and make sure they understand they are making the decision and will need to deliver that back along with the reasoning behind it.

3. Set guardrails

he Consult and Collaborate approaches engage others to provide input, but they run the risk of getting bogged down in group think and debate. To ensure timely decisions, the right guardrails need to be in place to maintain momentum.

With Consult you must be clear about what is up for discussion and how long the topic will remain open. For example, you might ask for input from your team about a specific topic for 15 minutes during a meeting, or for 3 days after the meeting. Once the time is up, then you can move in whatever direction you see fit, but the team understands how they can contribute, and there is less opportunity for second guessing once your decision is made.

With Collaborate, to ensure the decision doesn’t die in committee, specify how many need to be in agreement for the decision to stand and time bound the input. Be clear upfront, that you will discuss as a team and if 80% don’t agree by the end of the meeting, you will make the decision and communicate it back to everyone.

Constrain requires you to trust your team, and to provide clarity about your expectations, with any caveats. Since you delegate the decision, the criteria must be very well delineated—for example, it must come in on budget, or take less than a month to execute, or needs to occur by the end of the year.

4. Clarify how the decision was made

After making a decision, it’s easy to make the mistake of moving on without explaining how you reached your conclusion. Yet this common error erodes buy-in and engagement as the lack of transparency raises suspicions and doubt. Communicating how you reached a decision is a powerful teaching opportunity and a great way to get your team to stand behind the decision and execute on the plan. If a team knows the rationale behind a sound decision, they’re also more likely to back you up when communicating the strategy to their teams and to stakeholders.

These strategies create the conditions for sound decision making, not only by you, but also your team.

And this is important: a study referenced in The Harvard Business Review article, The Decision-Driven Organization, indicates that 95% of an organization’s performance comes down to the decision-making abilities of its leaders.

Don’t you owe it to your organization to get better at making the many critical decisions you make each week?

‍

This article was originally published by the Indian School of Business here.

“In a volatile and dynamic world, be ready for change. Always look at it as an opportunity to learn rather than resisting it due to fear of failure.” - Jerry Connor, Global Practice Head, BTS.

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down and how! Globally, a majority of the workforce is working from home and that is the ‘new normal.’ According to a study [1] at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), in the United States alone, 42 percent workers are now working from home full time, accounting for more than two-thirds of economic activity.

Nearly four-in-ten people in the EU began working from home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new Eurofound Survey [2] has found.Economies are rapidly changing. Markets are shifting by the hour. Majority of business houses are going through a massive downturn. At the same time, many business houses are making efforts to salvage the situation and are being diligent in rapid resource allocation. Consequently, business leaders and executives have been pushed into a dark arena they know little about. As leaders, however, they are expected to move ahead with the times and deal with the uncertainty to evaluate the situation, evolve with it and take decisions, putting aside their own fears.It is during these critical circumstances that they are required to come up with novel strategies. Business leaders and management practitioners can take this pandemic as an opportunity to develop new managerial skills and establish effective management practices for their peers to emulate or not do anything and await the waves that will be coming to pass.One of the greatest challenges facing leaders is that most of them may have a limited understanding of how to deal with such a dire global economic crisis and have naturally been caught unawares. Leaders who can reorient themselves and their activities manage to deal with the hard times and navigate their companies through the disruption. In contrast, leaders who do not reinvent some of their time-tested leadership skills tend to become anxious and stay away from taking action and barely survive the crunch.So how should leaders prepare themselves to face a crisis, manage through it and come out of it successfully? To find out, we spent the last couple of months talking to top Human Resource (HR) leaders in 40 of the world’s best companies. Primarily in Chief Talent Officer (CTO) or Chief Learning Officer (CLO) roles, these individuals provided fascinating insights into what organisations themselves are identifying as critical capabilities in dealing with the COVID crisis.Based on our work with leaders across organisations over the years, some key attributes and skills that future leaders need to develop in themselves to sustain through any crisis include accepting change as is, being empathetic and thoughtful leaders and being able to foster a growth-oriented mindset besides developing mature leadership skills.The McKinsey Global Institute workforce surveyed [3] 3,031 business leaders in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States to understand the skills that would be most in-demand by 2030. They found that the demand for higher cognitive, technological, social and emotional skills will grow, while the need for physical, manual and basic cognitive skills will decline.From our recent studies of organisations during the pandemic, here are four key skills that leaders need to acquire to emerge out of a crisis successfully:

1. Seizing Momentum

One of the most common characteristics of leaders who struggle during crisis is an over-reliance on processes. During such extraordinary circumstances, leaders need to step out of the processes-based rigmarole and seize the opportunity to lead their teams. Leaders who cannot work around weekly meetings, annual budgeting, decision making processes and so on will find it difficult to carry on. Leaders who thrive in an unpredictable environment focus less on process and more on outcomes. Exceptional leaders listen and sense the moments that have the biggest impact. People need direction and that is where the role of a leader becomes crucial in making the right decisions in times like these. The same is true of change. For several years we have been talking about and equipping leaders to ‘manage change’. It has become a staple of leadership development to learn the ‘change curve’ and think about the leaders’ role in helping people let go of the old and embrace the new. The old view of change encompassed a beginning, a middle and an end. The unstated assumption was that there was a ‘new normal’ after the change. However, leaders are increasingly experiencing a world in which change is constant. The most responsive leaders, therefore, expect this and rather than starting with a mindset of ‘how do we get through this change’, they start with an expectation that change is constant and with change comes opportunity.This means we need to accept that many of the models that we have relied on to understand change, such as the Kubler-Ross Change Curve [4] are not going to be of much help anymore.

2. Empathy

Empathy is one of the most significant skills that a leader should possess and is even more crucial in times of crisis. The outbreak of COVID-19 has set in motion a period of slow growth. Layoffs, delayed projects and cost cuts have become a global pattern. With remote working, the workforce is juggling multiple roles- that of parents to young children, caregivers to elderly at home and of community members supporting each other in rough times. The level of exhaustion is naturally much more as workers are constantly getting on and off virtual meetings. The fatigue of home and work melding together is slowly taking a toll. A survey [5] by Blind, an anonymous professional network with users from companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Bloomberg collected data from 12,737 responders about fears of being laid off, and beliefs about how long it will take for things to return to normal. 57% feared being laid off while 40.6% believed it will take six months to one year for life to go back to normal. Pre COVID, a similar survey [6] by Blind conducted in 2019 had 35.9 % responders expressing fears of being laid off.Another study by Blind captured emotional well-being due to social distancing in terms of loneliness, anxiety and productivity levels from 10,107 responses. 52.9% answered affirmative to increased loneliness during work from home while 56.4% reported experiencing increased feelings of anxiety during work from home.Given this situation, only an empathetic leader will be able to handle team members with understanding and sensitivity. For working from home to be sustainable, leaders need to set the required boundaries such as communicating on a quick phone call instead of a videoconference, setting up office hours for specific groups, sharing tips on time management, and establishing that it is understandable if emails are not being answered after a certain hour.Over the years, working with leaders at the helm, we have found that being an empathetic leader also gives one a chance to have a bigger sense of purpose. Let your workers voice their apprehensions. Keep in touch with colleagues and co-workers, check in on them often. Ask them if they are feeling overwhelmed at the end of the day or if they have too much to deal with. Commemorate little achievements of the team members to engender camaraderie and foster teamwork, despite being only virtually connected. Even 15-minute teleconferencing breaks or virtual water-cooler chats allow for vital, healthy informal connections.Not being able to foster connections in a non-traditional office set up is a struggle for many leaders. During one of the interviews, we found, “It may entail having to give up control and authority over the workforce”.Technology plays a key role in our lives and so the human connection can still be encouraged over and above the usage of technology. It is not a hindrance in forging human bonds. Various social distancing norms in place have helped us realize that one does not always need to meet someone in person to communicate effectively. Active listening and open discussions that voice encouragement and reassurance can help build morale in the team.

3. Leadership maturity

To be a mature leader, one needs to build on an emotional development path from early on. Often, adults go through various maturity shifts - some in the way they see the world and can relate to others easily, while some still grapple with problems at hand not knowing which direction to head towards. Emotionally mature leaders embark upon a path of holistic development from early on. It is a path of simultaneous growth, where a leader continues to grow on their own, becomes a role model for others, and at the same time handles crises at work.Leaders need to have that growth mindset, which is essentially about a willingness to make mistakes and learn from them. A true leader is one who not only notices when someone makes a mistake but is also there for them, asking all the right questions and discussing viable options to rectify the error in an attempt to develop better decision processes. Being empathetic towards others is a sign of emotional and leadership maturity. Leaders need not shy away from asking for help. It should be normalised for leaders in big institutional setups to seek help from their peers or teammates instead of being looked down upon as a feeble leader. Asking for advice does not make you weak or undermine your leadership.Most leaders operate in a success-driven paradigm. They are constantly under pressure to lead from the front and stay on top of things. At times, a leader cannot do all this without facing exhaustion and saturation. So, stop trying to be a leader all the time. Be a follower and let others take the lead sometimes. Try not to micromanage everything and do not always assert your superiority. One can be a leader and yet be vulnerable. A leader is allowed to break the mould and seek answers. Create space for others to solve problems at hand.

4. Purposeful Strategy

The year 2020 is a curveball stronger than anyone could have imagined. Nevertheless, a leader needs to be a North Star - leading the way in spite of adversities and is able to move towards a larger social purpose even in turbulent times. Many of the business houses we studied as part of the interview series were proud of how they had responded to the recent crises, both in looking after their people and in supporting the communities they serve. For example, an African agri-business described how its belief that purpose needs to come before profit had helped them through the crisis. Their operations had to be kept running and they were reliant on local communities and the communities were reliant on them. So the business quickly pivoted from making alcohol out of sugar cane to making hand sanitiser. Not only was this a profitable innovation but it also was a way to contribute to the health of the community in challenging times.Effective leadership is being able to see connections and interdependencies. Being able to see the larger picture enables leaders to take sharp decisions with minimal repercussions.Post a crisis, leaders tend to look at it in two ways, either as a temporary disruption or a fundamental change to the way they thought and led. This frame of mind impacts the way leaders deal with the future. For example, leaders who struggled tended to think in terms of classic planning processes, taking current trends and projecting them forward to create a plan. But when the future has so many diverse and difficult possibilities, the accuracy of predictions is severely compromised. Consider this, the oil prices have fallen through the floor. As a CEO from a global energy company pointed out, “no-one in their wildest dreams could have predicted the drop off in demand for oil that we just experienced.”Successful leaders took a different approach. Instead of looking at current trends, they envisioned future scenarios and looked back. They looked for ‘weak’ signals in the market and imagined the different ways in which they would evolve. These leaders then adopted specific courses of action with these in mind, constantly adjusting their picture as new data emerged. For instance, retailers that used to do 25% online sales are now relying on e-commerce to drive their sales which account for almost 70 % of their total business.Mounting work pressure coupled with a complete change in the workplace scenario has brought back the missing purpose to leadership while also appealing to the humanitarian side of leaders.

Final thoughts

In a volatile and dynamic world where things may get disruptive, it is vital to be ready for change. Always look at change as an opportunity to learn rather than resisting it due to fear of failure. As you grapple with the uncertainty, do not get stuck in linear thinking which can be constrictive, instead explore multiple ways of approaching the same problem.^[1] Bloom, N.,2020. How working from home works out. Stanford Institue for Economic Policy Research.Policy Brief. Retrieved from https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/how-working-home-works-out^[2]https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/coronavirus-pandemic-reveals-large-differences-prevalence-telework-across-eu^[3] Bughin, J., Subramaniam, A. & others, 2018.Skill Shift: Automation and the future of the Workforce. Discussion Paper. McKinsey Global Institute. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/skill-shift-automation-and-the-future-of-the-workforce^[4] The 'change curve,' derived from the work of Kubler-Ross, describes the internal emotional journey that individuals typically experience when dealing with change and transition. This journey consists of several stages that people go through: shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.^[5] Robinson, B. 2020. What Studies Reveal About Social Distancing And Remote Working During Coronavirus. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2020/04/04/what-7-studies-show-about-social-distancing-and-remote-working-during-covid-19/#141fe0e6757e^[6]https://www.teamblind.com/blog/index.php/2019/02/11/worried-about-layoffs-tech-employees-weigh-in-about-layoff-anxiety/

How do mindsets impact your behavior in moments?

Your life is built by the moments that you experience daily. As you enter each moment, your brain triggers a mindset that offers a thought, belief, feeling, or attitude. This mindset influences how you will engage in the moment presented. In other words, your behavior is directly influenced by the mindset that you adopt in each moment.

Here’s an example. Imagine you are receiving unexpected critical feedback from a respected coworker after giving a presentation to a group of senior leaders. How you react to that feedback will be shaped by the mindset that you adopt in that moment. There are three mindsets that could be activated:

1. I believe my presentation was perfectly acceptable and no further improvement is needed.
2. I believe my presentation was poor and I hope no-one noticed.
3. I believe my presentation was perfectly acceptable yet there is always room for improvement.

Now think about how you would behave during and after your feedback conversation while holding each respective mindset.

• Which mindset will lead you toward taking action on improving your ability to present?
• Which mindset will have a greater impact on your overall personal development?
• Which mindset will have a greater likelihood of driving results that advance your career in the long run?

The answer to these questions is obviously the third mindset. It is consistent with the “growth mindset,” in which you believe that mistakes are opportunities for growth. There are a number of universal mindsets that are powerful for everyone – a growth mindset is one of them.

But, each universal mindset also has its “shadow”or a negative mindset that is triggered in specific moments. In the example provided, it is the fear of not getting it right. This shadow gets triggered if the presentation was particularly important, if you were presenting to an audience you found tricky, or even if you are having a stressful day. To change how you show up in key moments, it’s critical to be self-aware and look out for when you exhibit both constructive mindsets and the shadows that prevent you from exhibiting them.

Humans are not just reactive in terms of the mindset that become active. Choosing the mindset that is activated in each moment is fully under your control. While emotions are powerful and can easily lead to embracing a less productive mindset, you have the executive functioning capability to override your initial primitive emotional reactions.

Everyone has experienced adopting less productive mindsets during stressful moments, but the choice is always under your control. It is just a matter of being able to manage which mindset is elicited even when negative emotions like anxiety or fear are running high.

How can you change your behavior in the moment?

Changing behavior is not easy. It takes a lot of work and people often fail. So much so that many believe humans are incapable of change. People often fail to change because too much focus is placed on behaviors rather than the main inhibitor of successful change - mindsets.

Here’s an example. Suppose you just took a course to develop your reflective listening skills. Reflective listening is a powerful tool that helps people combat their own unconscious biases to increase their awareness of what others are truly communicating.

Using this tool allows you to check your interpretation of what others are saying and give the person a chance to correct your understanding. When used appropriately, reflective listening helps build both trust and empathy by making a person truly feel heard.

After completing this skill-building course, you are empowered to use this new skill on the job to build better relations and work more effectively with your coworkers.

Two weeks after you completed the reflective listening course, a team member, Taj approaches you with some big personal news that will impact his ability to show up for work for an undetermined amount of time.

Taj is currently leading an important initiative that is very visible in the eyes of senior leaders. The news is stressful for you because losing Taj at this stage of the project will very disruptive and possibly derail the success of the project.

How do you react when Taj is sharing the news? The perfect opportunity has arisen to use your new reflective listening skills, but will you? How you react depends on your mindset. There are two competing mindsets that could be elicited in this moment:

1. At Taj’s level, you expect him to be able to juggle the personal and professional. You expect him to find a way to deliver his commitments regardless of what is happening outside of work.
2. Taj may well need support in this difficult time. It is important to me to find the best way to help him regardless of current work demands.

If you have the first mindset when you enter the conversation with Taj, there is a low likelihood that you are going to engage in reflective listening due to your belief that a person must honor their work commitments first and foremost. Embracing this belief will lead you to set the precedent that Taj must figure out some way to fulfill his obligation.

Your ability to truly show your new reflective listening skill is blocked when you have the first mindset. It’s not because you don’t have the skill to demonstrate reflective listening behaviors, it’s because your mindset leads you down a path that shows a different set of behaviors.

Conversely, entering into the conversation with the second mindset primes you to show empathy towards Taj, which is the basis of reflective listening. The congruity between your mindset and behavior in this instance set you up to use your new skill without experiencing any internal discord.

This lack of dissonance between the mindset and behavior is important. When you enter a situation with a mindset to “experience and understand Taj’s world,” listening is natural. But sometimes these moments are triggers. For example, you may feel differently if Taj has a history of taking time off for personal reasons or you feel personal pressure to succeed on the project. In these situations, you are unlikely to have the mindset, “experience and understand others’ worlds” and may enter the situation expecting Taj to deliver, as in the first mindset.

What is holding people back from changing their behavior in moments?

True behavior change will not happen without making the proper mindset shifts. People often assume that skill development equals behavior change, meaning a person will demonstrate new behaviors if they develop a new skill. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Just because a person develops a new skill doesn’t mean they will demonstrate it if there isn’t harmony between their new behaviors and mindset in each situation they experience.

Yet it does take more than one instance of showing new behaviors in order to signify true change. Demonstrating the set of new behaviors in a single instance is not a case for change. It takes repetition for a person to build new habits to allow them to move away from instinctively using old behavioral patterns in similar moments.

Most individual development plans or programs being delivered in organizations today are primarily centered around skill-building. While the focus around skill development does teach people how to perform new behaviors, it doesn’t target the mindset shifts necessary to actually leverage those skills when the relevant moment appears.

Without a shift in mindset, you will continue to perform the behaviors aligned with your current mindset and never use your new skill even if you know how to perform it. A mindset shift needs to happen first to enable you to show your new set of behaviors.

The events of 2020 marked a year of unparalleled uncertainty and speed of change. These challenges pushed leaders and organizations to react in extraordinary ways - undergoing strategic transformation in months rather than years. Financial services organizations were uniquely impacted, serving as a central shock absorber for countries and economies impacted by the crisis. As a result, financial services organizations are experiencing significant change and will continue to do so over the coming years.Based on research from interviews with 45 executives across 21 financial services organizations in 15 countries, this report outlines the 5 ways in which financial services organizations have changed and will continue to do so in the future.

Job interviews aren’t just high-stakes for candidates, they’re high-stakes for organizations as well: research indicates that a bad hire can cost an organization twice their annual salary or more.

Because interviews often play a critical role in the final hiring decision, it’s important to follow a few simple, easy-to-implement rules that will ensure your interviewing process is highly effective, unbiased, and legally defensible—before, during, and after the actual conversation with a candidate. At a time when interviews are primarily conducted via video or telephone rather than in-person, the time is right for organizations to review their interviewing practices and procedures to maximize their utility. Even if interviews are not always conducted in person, the fundamental approach—and, therefore, best practices—remain the same.

Before the interview

A successful interview process begins long before the candidate and interviewer meet. Executing effective and legally defensible interviews requires a high level of preparation for organizations and interviewers.

1. Establish essential skills and behaviors for successful job performance. Focus on the role’s key responsibilities, and then determine the knowledge, skills, competencies, and behaviors required to perform those activities effectively.
2. Build a structured interview guide with questions focused on these essential skills and behaviors. It’s important that every candidate is asked a standardized set of questions to ensure the interviewer covers all necessary topics and obtains consistent information from which to base their hiring decision.
3. Create evaluation standards or guidelines. These direct the interviewer’s attention to the relevant information in candidates’ responses. (More on this later!)
4. Train your interviewers. The person conducting the interview should be properly trained in effective interviewing techniques—not only to select the most qualified candidate, but to do so in a fair, unbiased, and legally defensible manner.

During the interview

Keeping preparation top of mind during the interview will help interviewers ensure that they remain aligned with the organization’s evaluation objectives. Interviewers should capitalize on the below methods to maximize the yield from their time and efforts.

1. Follow the interview guide closely. The above preparation helps facilitate a useful conversation during the interview, but the interviewer must follow the interview guide closely to ensure all candidates respond to the same information. Allowing the candidate to steer the conversation can derail the quality of the information collected and potentially allow the candidate to misrepresent their capabilities, a costly mistake for the organization down the road.
2. Ask behaviorally-based past approach questions. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, so very specific questions such as, “Please describe a time when you had to work closely with someone you did not particularly like to accomplish an important objective,” yield the most accurate representation of a candidate’s tendencies and performance. For less experienced candidates, reframing the question as a hypothetical situation may be more appropriate and easier for the candidate to answer. For example, rephrasing the question as “Imagine that you have to work closely with someone you do not particularly like to accomplish an important objective. How would you handle this situation?” (not “how should you handle this situation?”).
3. Ask probing questions. Open-ended questions elicit the most possible information from the candidate, so interviewers should always start with these. Then, they’ll likely need to dig deeper to obtain enough information to make a more informed evaluation. Probing follow-up questions help interviewers gather more detail about the context, the people involved, the candidate’s actions and reasoning, and the outcomes.
4. Consider using a role play. Don’t just take the candidate’s word for it—use a behavioral role-play to give candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities. Role plays engage candidates in business challenges (e.g., customer interaction) like those faced on the job. Not only do role-plays give organizations more confidence in their hiring choices, but they also enhance the candidate experience—candidates perceive the assessment as fair, whether they’re offered the job or not.

After the interview

You’ve prepared extensively. You’ve conducted the interviews. Now what?

1. Use the pre-established rating scale to score the candidate’s response. Remember those evaluation rules from “before the interview”? This is where they come into play. A clear rating system is essential to a fair assessment of each candidate. This evaluation becomes relatively straightforward with a pre-established evaluation scale. The most effective evaluation scales clearly define what constitutes a good response using behavioral examples, leaving less room for bias and error when assigning ratings to candidates. One type of rating scale, behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS), gives examples of behaviors paired with corresponding numbers to indicate high, moderate, or low levels of proficiency. Using this method allows for consistency in assigning concrete numbers to types of responses. Other rating scales only give examples of highly effective responses with which to compare a candidate’s answer. Whichever scale you choose, the key to objective evaluation is consistency and plenty of behavioral examples.
2. Document your process and decisions. It’s critical to document the supporting evidence for your evaluation and decisions for each candidate. Should the interview process be challenged in a legal setting, the organization will be better able to defend its hiring decisions.

Practice

Finally, practice is critical for learning and honing any skill. Without the opportunity to practice, the learning becomes stale and is forgotten. Practice may be as simple as conducting an interview with a more experienced interviewer, or as complex as a simulation that affords managers the opportunity to “interview,” rate, and make selection decisions in a low-stakes, fictitious setting.

If you want to be credible to a CEO, act like a peer.

What does it mean to act like a peer? It’s the way you show up and lead that says, “I understand my purpose, my value and my contribution. I know what I’m talking about and I’m confident I can do this.” It is also a way of acting and operating in the world where you don’t have to get everything right, be perfect, or impress everyone. In my work as an advisor and coach to CEOs and senior leaders, I’ve seen again and again how acting like a peer is absolutely essential to building credibility and having an impact at the executive level.

Here’s the catch: It’s an easy idea to understand in theory, but in practice, there’s plenty that gets in the way.

For instance:

Making it about you

A few years ago, I heard Emmy award-winning sports broadcaster Joe Buck share his lessons gained over years of delivering play-by-play coverage for the NFL and Major League Baseball. “Nobody cares,” is how Buck described those announcers who spend too much airtime showcasing their personal perspective. He’s clear that viewers tune in because of the game, not because of who is announcing it, so no surprise that his pet peeve is when his peers over-talk to show how much they know.

Even the best of us can get caught here. The pressure to make our point, to sell, and to impress, can overtake us, and we lock into our script. We end up talking too much about our solutions, our process, or giving more information, background, or context than needed. It becomes about us and misses that golden window to connect in a nuanced way. This is particularly true in situations that are new, risky, or even when we’re feeling out of our league (like a first executive team meeting or Board presentation), or when a really big decision is on the table (like getting buy in from a CEO to provide resources for your new project).

Overpreparing

I once had a client who would over-prepare before every meeting with his CEO, spending countless hours working and reworking slides or reports, staying up late with his team in the days leading up to the meeting, as he considered every possible scenario he might encounter with the CEO. I’ve seen leaders invest huge amounts of time preparing for a short, two-minute employee video that they will script and read word-for-word, while their peers and colleagues speak off the cuff.

In both of these cases, the overpreparation ended up working against them, because at its core, it’s a strategy that’s about keeping safe, trying to be perfect, knowing everything, and playing not to lose. When people see an overprepared leader, fair or not, it raises questions about whether they have the confidence and ability to handle what it takes to lead. In practice, the overprepared leader can sound scripted, too rehearsed, or stay glued to notes or index cards instead of connecting with the audience. More important, they may miss the real point of the moment and lose the opportunity to truly connect and engage.

Assuming

I once read an article that pointed out how we know far more about celebrities than they will ever know about us. A similar type of knowledge gap exists between most of us and the CEOs we work with, where our understanding or perspective about the same issue may be vastly different, for different reasons. It isn’t uncommon to assume that our CEOs have a deeper level of knowledge about an issue than is the case (sounds silly, but some of us consider CEOs to be omniscient), or to assume they care about an issue to the extent that we do. This is particularly true in cases where we’re disproportionately impacted or affected by a problem. We may be chomping at the bit to solve an issue, but we can’t assume the CEO shares our sense of urgency or even cares about the issue in the same way we do, if at all.

What happens when we assume? To others, it might look like we’re trying to influence by “persuading harder” or providing lots of explanation and information in an attempt to be understood. Unfortunately, this approach can backfire, because it sounds like forcing, pushing, where we appear tone deaf or show an inability to read the room. Here’s the irony: It is because we care and because we believe so strongly in something that these behaviors might show up, but they can undermine our ability to be heard.

Being overly deferential and people pleasing

People pleasing, even at executive levels, can be a tough habit to overcome, particularly in interactions with the CEO, and undermines our ability to be seen as a peer. It can come across as insecurity, a lack of savvy or ability read the room – any number of “non-executive” qualities. At an executive level, this might look like:

• Being overeager, jumping to speak, immediately answering a question before waiting a beat
• Trying too hard, with language like, “That’s a great point,” or, “I couldn’t agree more”
• Saying yes immediately to something without a plan to support how you’ll get there
• Hesitating to speak up and remaining quiet in meetings
• Leaving meetings with a long list of things you’ve promised to “look into” and “get back to people on,” rather than addressing concerns on the spot
• Overtalking, overexplaining
• “Presenting” with slides instead of talking and having a conversation
• Only speaking about your area of expertise
• Using deferential language like, “Thank you so much,” or, “I appreciate your time, I know how busy you are”

Senior executives don’t get into their roles by accident, but even the best leaders can undermine their own power and impact when they hold on to behaviors that no longer serve them. More important, they can undermine their own CEOs, who are relying on the strong leadership from their executives, now more than ever. The good news is that acting like a peer doesn’t require a change in role or title, and it is something that you can practice, meeting by meeting, bit by bit. When you do, the payoff is big. You lead courageously, as yourself.

I happened to be going through a box of memorabilia recently – looking for a leadership book that used to sit on a shelf in my office – back when I used to go into an office to work. I did not find the book. I did find a campaign button from 1972 which said: “President Nixon, Now More Than Ever.” I laughed out loud at seeing it, appreciating the irony, given Nixon’s impeachment a year later. Don’t worry, this is not a post about politics. This is about leadership, and about how this world needs to continue to develop better leaders now, more than ever.

Many of our clients believe this. I was recently on a call with a C-Suite leader of a large, well-known company that has been hit hard by the pandemic, the economic downturn, and the continuing social unrest in our world. This company has had to lay off or furlough roughly a third of its workforce. And yet, this organization is continuing to invest in the development of some very key senior leaders. Certainly not as much as they did previously, nor as much as they would like to be doing. However, they are determined to continue to support their key leaders, none of whom have faced anything like this set of circumstances before. In fact, if I step back a bit, I see that most of our clients are doing the same thing, and they are asking us for help.

In the course of working with these leaders, we see that a lot of what they need to do now is not fundamentally different. It is about the business and executing their strategy. The main difference is how to adapt those to the current conditions, to clarify the path through to prosperity on the other side. In these times, there are 4 overarching things that leaders should be doubling down on now, to build and maintain momentum for the business.

1. First and perhaps foremost is to remain calm and composed amidst the various storms that surround us.

One of the things that first responders are taught is to a) remain calm themselves and b) spread calm to others that are involved in dangerous or dramatic situations. I experienced this first-hand during a recent session with a senior leadership team that was working through some very hard decisions around people and resources. I witnessed as the tension started to rise in the (virtual) room, with a handful of the team getting visibly agitated over these tough choices. This is normally where the facilitator steps in to calm things down. In this case, though, the CFO beat me to it. First by naming what was going on, second by sharing how hard this was for everyone, and last by reminding everyone of the common goals that the team has for its leadership of the organization. This allowed everyone the time and space to have calmer and more productive deliberations.

2. Second is to chart a clear course through and beyond these crises. This is as true for CEOs as it is for front line managers.

Focus on what we do and do not know, now. Involve others in defining what actions give us the best chance of survival and even growth. The top supply chain leader for a global industrial company has exemplified this over the past 8 months. As is the case with so many other supply networks in the pandemic, they experienced many disruptions, some of them quite serious and dramatic. In response, she mobilized her top team, who in turn collaborated with their key suppliers and internal stakeholders to build a plan to minimize the disruption. She then used the organization’s various communication channels to make everyone aware of the plan. This fast action resulted in the company being able to meet almost all of its commitments to customers. It also resulted in the supply chain organization learning new ways of doing their work – that they tell us will last long after the pandemic is past.

3. Third is to communicate with clarity and transparency.

The first two things don’t matter much if you can’t do this part well. A perfect strategy to weather these storms is almost meaningless unless the vast majority of your organization gets it, believes it and acts in concert with it. My favorite example of this is Arne Sorenson, the CEO of Marriott. Early on in the pandemic, he posted this communication to all Marriott associates worldwide. This is literally a masterpiece of executive communication by anyone’s standards. While I’ve never met Mr. Sorenson, I have talked to a number of leaders at Marriott, who expressed their admiration and respect for his continuing leadership. By the way, you don’t have to be the CEO of Marriott to practice this skill. You simply need to share what you do know, what you don’t know and paint a picture for what you want your people to do next.

4. Last is to find a way to celebrate wins, big and small.

What your stressed and worn out teams need more than anything is positive news—something good to focus on. This could be as simple as reflecting on the positive effects on our environment from burning less carbon, to one person going the extra mile in service of a client, to the big sale, to any number of good outcomes. The CEO of a growing tech company we work with has exemplified this through his increased use of video communications during the pandemic. This is a big leap for someone who has tended to shy away from the camera in the past. Under COVID, he now regularly broadcasts messages of support across his global organization. These messages include news of big client acquisitions, new software releases and promising alliance partnerships. They also include heavy doses of recognition for people at all levels for outstanding work. In interacting with people from Manila to Manhattan, his teams have shared how important and uplifting these communications are in helping them to weather these storms.

The most important thing for leaders to remember in times like these, is that good leadership – and these four critical fundamentals – are not a one-time early crisis action. Prioritize them now and make them part of how you lead and manage every day.