Posts By: Matthew Golden

Starting at a new job in a new workplace is exciting, but it can also be uncomfortable. Regardless of how many jobs you’ve had before, you may suddenly feel like the new kid in class, with all eyes on you. How can you overcome the awkwardness of those first few weeks? Is there any way to feel at ease when you’re brand new? And if you’re the one welcoming a new person to your team, what can you do to smooth the way for them?

It’s helpful to know a bit about what makes these transitions so difficult so you can mitigate the awkwardness.

Your prediction engine fails.

The most significant source of awkwardness is that you just aren’t sure what to expect. The brain is a prediction engine. It wants to accurately forecast what’s going to happen, and a lack of confidence about the future creates anxiety. (That’s the same reason why foreign travel is often more fun in retrospect than it is in the moment.)

When we’re uncertain about what will happen, we default to inaction. This is for two reasons. One, our anxiety motivates us to avoid potential threats or calamities. Two, when we do experience bad outcomes, we’re more likely to blame actions we take rather than things we fail to do. So we convince ourselves that not doing anything is less likely to cause problems. As a result, when you’re not sure what’s going on, it can be difficult to start conversations with new colleagues or to speak up.

This tendency to remain silent is made worse by concerns that you’ll say the wrong thing. Even when we’re talking to people we know well, we tend to avoid saying things we think might be misinterpreted. As it turns out, in reality, people focus mostly on the intent behind what you say rather than the specific words you use to say it. So, new colleagues are unlikely to form a negative impression of you, because they rarely notice the things you were concerned would be awkward. It really is ok to chat with your new colleagues and to ask questions when you’re confused.

To help ease the way for a new colleague, try to make things feel more certain. Introduce them to others in the office. Let them know how the workday ebbs and flows. If you’re working remotely, leave yourself a note to reach out to your new colleague at least once a day so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

You don’t know the language.

Even if you’re ready to speak up at work, there’s a whole set of jargon you’re probably unfamiliar with. Every organization has its acronyms for particular departments or processes — not to mention its own terms for people, places, and things. Those first few weeks at a new job can feel like you’ve been dropped into a country in which you speak enough of the language to feel like you ought to understand more of what’s being said around you.

It’s uncomfortable to stop people whenever they use a new term to get them to define it. And people who are fluent in their office jargon can spit out sentences that are completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated. (“I had to get EVPP and VPR to approve a PAR before sending it to OSP.”) So, it’s useful to get a translator. See if a colleague can put together a cheat sheet for you of commonly used acronyms and phrases in the company. (Some smart organizations even include this in their onboarding materials.) Then, get their permission to email or text them when a new phrase comes up that you don’t know. It will be reassuring to know you have a lifeline when you’re not able to fully follow ongoing conversations.

If you’re working with someone new, try to wrap your head around the beginner’s mind. It can be difficult to remember how steeped you are in your organization’s way of speaking. When you find yourself using some of the local jargon, use the term (so that your new colleague gets used to hearing it) and then define it (so that you don’t confuse them completely).

You don’t have a squad — yet.

Perhaps the hardest part of starting a new job is that you don’t have a group of people you feel comfortable with yet. Research suggests that having positive social connections at work is crucial to happiness and job satisfaction. You may see groups of people spending time together and talking about shared experiences, which can make you feel like an outsider, or even isolated. And, chances are, you don’t have a lot of practice integrating yourself into a pre-existing social structure, unless you’ve relocated a lot in your life. We generally only meet a lot of new people when everyone is in the same boat and creating a new social group (such as arriving at college as a first-year student).

Remember that it takes time, and everyone else there was new at one point too. You can start out by having conversations with a few people. Get to know them, and find out how the group engages. Are there coffee breaks or shared lunches? An easy way to meet a group of people is to get someone to serve as your ambassador and to introduce you to others. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to help you to meet your new colleagues. People are generally happy to agree to simple favors like this for their colleagues, especially new ones.

When you have a new colleague at work, help them to get settled into the social scene. You don’t have to commit to being a close friend or to spending time with them outside of work. Just help them to meet a few other people and include them in workplace conversations. It’s particularly valuable to make these introductions when people in the organization are working remotely. Most social interactions in remote workplaces have to be explicitly arranged, so it is easy for a new person to get left out entirely. Ensuring that new hires get connected to others also helps to improve retention.

Ultimately, remember that you are more worried about the awkwardness of being new at the job than anyone else is. The rest of your new colleagues are just going about their daily routines. The best part is that in six weeks or so, most of your anxiety will fade. You will develop new habits, you’ll discover you understand at least half of the new jargon that gets thrown at you, and you’ll have a couple of people who can guide you through the social scene.

Humans are wired to fear the unknown. That’s why uncertainty—whether at the macro level of a global economic, health, or geopolitical crisis or at the micro level (Will I get that job? Will this venture be successful? Am I on the right career path?)—can feel nerve-racking, exhausting, and even debilitating. However, that gut reaction leads people to miss a crucial fact: Uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin.

Consider the achievements you’re most proud of, the moments that transformed your life, the relationships that make your life worth living. We’ll bet that they all happened after a period of uncertainty—one that probably felt stressful but that you nevertheless pushed through to accomplish something great. When we moved abroad, for example, we faced uncertainty about making less money, paying higher taxes, doing more-challenging work, and introducing our children to new schools, a new language, and a new culture. But seven years later we are so grateful for all the possibilities the move opened up.

Our modern-day heroes all have a similar story. Rosa Parks faced great uncertainty when she refused to give up her seat, igniting the Montgomery bus boycott and paving the way for desegregation. Nearly everyone initially thought that Elon Musk and his team would fail when they set out to revolutionize electric vehicles and push the world toward a more environmentally friendly future. They couldn’t have achieved their breakthroughs if they had been afraid of uncertainty.

Uncertainty doesn’t have to paralyze any of us. Over the past decade we have studied innovators and changemakers who’ve learned to navigate it well, and we’ve reviewed the research on topics like resilience and tolerance for ambiguity. The findings are clear: We all can become adept at managing uncertainty and empower ourselves to step confidently into the unknown and seize the opportunity it presents. Applying the following four principles will help you do that.

1. Reframe Your Situation

Most people are loss-averse. Multiple studies demonstrate that the way you frame things affects how you make decisions. The research shows, for instance, that if one treatment for a new disease is described as 95% effective and another as 5% ineffective, people prefer the former even though the two are statistically identical. Every innovation, every change, every transformation—personal or professional—comes with potential upsides and downsides. And though most of us instinctively focus on the latter, it’s possible to shift that mindset and decrease our fear.

One of our favorite ways of doing this is the “infinite game” approach, developed by New York University professor James Carse. His advice is to stop seeing the rules, boundaries, and purpose of the “game” you’re playing—the job you’re after, the project you’ve been assigned, the career path you’re on—as fixed. That puts you in a win-or-lose mentality in which uncertainty heightens your anxiety. In contrast, infinite players recognize uncertainty as an essential part of the game—one that adds an element of surprise and possibility and enables them to challenge their roles and the game’s parameters.

Yvon Chouinard, the cofounder of Patagonia, is an infinite player. As a kid he struggled to fit in, running away from one school, almost failing out of a second, and becoming a “dirtbag” climber after he graduated. But rather than seeing himself as a failure, he recounts in his book Let My People Go Surfing, he “learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner.”

Chouinard not only created one of the world’s most successful outdoor-apparel brands but also changed production norms by adopting more-sustainable materials, altered the retail model by refitting old buildings for new shops, and challenged traditional HR policies by introducing practices like on-site childcare. Some of those innovations created uncertainty for the business. For example, Patagonia adopted organic cotton before it became popular, when it was expensive and hard to source. When a financial downturn hit, outsiders encouraged the company to buy cheaper materials. But using organic cotton was in keeping with its values, so Patagonia persisted, despite the cost and the supply risks, and in the end grew its sales while its competitors saw their sales fall.

Chouinard has learned to face uncertainty with courage—and in fact to be energized by it—because he views his role as improving the game, not just playing it. “Managers of a business that want to be around for the next 100 years had better love change,” he advises in his book. “When there [is] no crisis, the wise leader…will invent one.”

Of course, when uncertainty is forced upon us, we often need help reframing. Consider Amy and Michael, a professional couple with four children who moved from the United States to France in 2017 for Michael’s job. When the pandemic started, his position was eliminated, and then companies that initially promised him job offers started stalling. In July 2020, Amy and Michael were scheduled to fly home to the United States, but three days before they left they still didn’t have jobs or even a place to live. Family and friends were asking for updates, and their teenagers harangued them: “You are the worst parents ever! How can you have no clue where we’re going next?”

Two days before their flight, Amy confided to us over lunch that Michael had been offered a job, but neither of them wanted him to accept it. “Should we just take the bird in hand?” she wondered aloud. “I feel like we are such losers.” We encouraged her to reframe. She and Michael were showing resilience and bravery by exploring all possible next steps and holding out for the right one. How lucky their kids were to have parents bold enough to know what they really wanted and wait for it! The couple returned to the States with curiosity and courage and, by summer’s end, had both found jobs they loved as well as a fixer-upper home in a fun location.

2. Prime Yourself for New Risks

Although innovators often talk about eating uncertainty for breakfast, if you dig deeper, you discover some curious habits. When Paul Smith—a designer known for daring color combinations—travels, he always stays in the same hotel, often in the same room. Others we’ve studied book the same airplane seat for every flight, follow the same morning routine, or wear the same clothes. Steve Jobs had a lifetime supply of black turtlenecks.

All those habits provide balance. By reducing uncertainty in one part of your life, they prime you to tolerate more of it in other parts. Some people ground themselves with steady, long-term relationships, for instance. As the serial entrepreneur Sam Yagan, one of Time’s 100 most influential people and the former CEO of Match.com explains, “My best friends are from junior high and high school. I married my high school sweetheart. Given how much ambiguity I traffic in at work, I do look for less in other areas of my life.”

You can also prime yourself for uncertainty by getting to know the kinds of risk you have a natural aversion to or an affinity with. Case in point: Back when Nathan was pursuing a PhD in Silicon Valley and Susannah had started a clothing line that wasn’t yet making money, we had four children to support and were still living off student loans in a few hundred square feet of on-campus housing. At lunch one day, Nathan told his mentor, Tina Seelig, “Let’s face it, if I really had any courage, I would become an entrepreneur, but I’m just not a risk-taker.” Tina disagreed. She explained that there are many types of risks: financial, intellectual, social, emotional, physical, and so on. In Nathan’s situation, avoiding financial risk by pursuing a stable career as an academic—while still taking intellectual risks—was a prudent choice. The important lesson is that knowing which risks you tolerate well can help you see where to push more boldly into the frontier, while knowing which you don’t will help you prepare so that you can approach them with more confidence.

Just as important, you can increase your risk tolerance by taking smaller risks, even in unrelated fields. Consider Piet Coelewij, a former senior executive at Amazon and Philips. When he was thinking of leaving the corporate track to head the expansion of Sonos—then a start-up—in Europe, he decided to take up kickboxing. Coelewij describes himself as “naturally fearful of physical confrontation,” but trying kickboxing helped him build up his muscles for dealing with uncertainty, which made him “more comfortable with higher-risk decisions in other settings with less complete information,” he says. “Once you are in a cycle of lowering fear and developing courage, you create a virtuous circle that allows you to continuously improve.”

3. Do Something

Taking action is one of the most important parts of facing uncertainty, since you learn with each step you take. Research by Timothy Ott and Kathleen Eisenhardt demonstrates that most successful breakthroughs are produced by a series of small steps, not giant bet-the-farm efforts. Starting modestly can be more effective and less anxiety-provoking than trying to do everything at once.

When I ask my undergraduate students at Brandeis what they hope for in their future jobs, their answers typically involve making an impact. They have big, sometimes revolutionary, ideas around how to address climate change and social justice issues. They talk about ways we can improve our efficiency by updating outdated communication systems, and even pitch solutions that could help big corporations market their products to younger consumers. But most of all, they are excited to put their pitches into practice — that is, until they get their first jobs and realize they have much less power than they had imagined.

I feel for them, and for anyone making their way into the corporate world for the very first time. It’s not easy to turn an idea into a reality, especially when you are in an entry-level role with limited resources and connections. The people who do have the power to make big decisions often have their own beliefs and assumptions about how to do business based on what has, and has not, worked in the past. If those people are not on your side, they can present you with some serious roadblocks.

So, how do you work around them and get your big ideas noticed, especially as a young person in the workforce?

I’ll tell you what I tell my students: You don’t. You work with them. To make a real impact, you need to get the right people — people with decision-making power — to listen and believe in you.

Here’s how.

First, figure out who holds the power to implement your idea.

Before you pitch your idea, ask yourself: Who has the power to decide whether or not it will be implemented, and what they will base their decision on?

Sometimes this question will be easier to answer than others, depending on what kind of company you work at. Organizations with a clear, hierarchical structure are more likely to have a well-defined process around who needs to approve an idea before it is executed. But organizations with a flat structure, in which there is no real “person in charge” at each level, can be more difficult to navigate.

Take the time to study these dynamics at your own company. There are a few tools you can use to help you diagnose who holds the ultimate decision-making power. One of the most common is called a RACI matrix. The acronym “RACI” stands for the four roles people usually play on a team or project. Here’s a simple breakdown:

• Responsible: the people who are in charge of completing tasks or reaching an objective.
• Accountable: the person who must sign off on the work of the group mentioned above, and give final approval.
• Consulted: the people who need to give input in order for the group in charge of completing tasks to do their work.
• Informed: the people who need to be updated on the status of the project and the decisions that are being made.

Creating this matrix will help you clarify the roles and responsibilities at each level of your organization. Most likely, the person you identify as “accountable” is the one who will say ultimately say “yes” or “no” to your idea.

Note that it’s rare for one person to have all the deciding power. More likely, it will be broken up among different leaders who are accountable for different teams, projects, or people.

For example, let’s say you have a fresh idea around how to engage a new audience for a particular marketing campaign. It may be easiest (and fastest) to look for the person who drives your overall engagement strategy. This could be the leader of the marketing division, or someone who works closely under them. Using the RACI matrix, you may discover that this person makes the final decisions on engagement initiatives, but also relies heavily on specific members of their leadership team for input, and considers market data before making big decisions.

Whatever team, project, or division your idea falls under, get to know what leaders are involved in those areas of your company, and ask around to learn about what factors they consider when making choices.

Choose your champion.

Even after you identify the decision-maker, it’s unlikely that you will get direct access to them. Few young professionals have the social capital to get their ideas immediately noticed by the right people. That’s why you need a champion — someone to advocate for your idea in the high-level meetings and discussions that you probably won’t be invited to.

Picking the right champion will depend on the magnitude of your idea. If it’s a smaller idea, or one that won’t cause significant disruption (like experimenting with a social media post, or reaching out to a new type of client), you might be able to find a champion who has the direct power to put your idea into motion. But if your idea is more disruptive (updating an age-old business model or restructuring a team’s entire workflow), you might need to find a different kind of champion: someone who has acquired a level of informal power that allows them to exert influence over those who are formally in charge.

Take the previous example of engaging a new audience for a marketing campaign. Your champion might be the chief of staff to the head of the marketing division. While this person won’t have direct decision-making power, they still have influence over the person who does.

That said, before bringing your big idea to a champion, you first need to build a foundation of trust with them. This will take time, and it will need to be developed over a series of projects in which you prove your ability to pitch good ideas, provide evidence that give those ideas merit, and consistently follow through on your assignments or tasks. You need your champion to to respect you as a professional, and believe you are credible if you want them to be your advocate.

To fast-track your relationship, study and analyze your champion’s management style. Then adapt your ways of working to fit their style. By doing so, you will increase the odds of producing work they are aligned with and proud of. When they speak, listen with intention, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Proactively set up feedback sessions with your champion and leverage this feedback into clear goals for improvement.

Do your homework.

Once you build that foundation of trust with your champion, you may feel ready to share your big idea. But wait. It’s critical to stress-test the idea first. This process will allow you to create a more robust and thorough pitch with fewer holes and logic gaps.

Start by gathering feedback from various stakeholders. A stakeholder could be someone directly involved in the decision-making process (who you identified earlier using the RACI matrix), or someone in your organization whose work might be directly impacted by your idea.

Sticking with our previous example, a key stakeholder might be the head of sales. Although the head of sales does not influence decision-making within the marketing division, they may be able to provide you with a perspective you had not considered before, especially if your marketing and sales teams work closely together. Another stakeholder might be a trusted peer or manager on the marketing team whose responsibilities may shift should your idea be implemented. This person may raise or problem or concern you can now address.

Stakeholders often have access to critical information that can strengthen your pitch. Connecting with them can also help you develop advocates throughout the organization.

For a company to be successful, it must find a way to develop talent. It isn’t always possible to hire leadership from the outside. Being able to develop leaders within the ranks will help the company to grow and fill future needs that come about organically.

When I worked for a company that was growing, we knew we had to spend time with our staff to help them grow into the leaders we needed. I created a training format that we used over and over to coach up emerging leaders and prepare them to take on more responsibility.

This training was ongoing. We instilled four principles in their work. This translated the core values of the company into their daily actions. It gave them a foundation to build their individual leadership style.

It didn’t mean that everyone could take on a leadership role. Some people naturally make better leaders. Some people enjoyed keeping their technical focus and didn’t want to change. Others wanted the additional money but not the extra work.

To be able to take on more, the individual also had to show that they could handle their current responsibilities. The example I would use is that the third string punter on a football team wouldn’t be voted captain. While talent isn’t the only requirement, there had to be enough ability to do their job at a high level. If someone isn’t at the top of their game, they would not be viewed as a leader.

We were able to go from a staff that wanted the extra benefits of leadership (more money, promotions, authority to make decisions, etc.), to a staff willing to do what was necessary to improve as leaders. Instead of just showing up and checking off a box, they put in the work to get better.

But for those with leadership potential and the drive to grow their skills, we could provide them foundational knowledge they can rely on to be successful. Here are those four principles:

Principle 1: Take ownership

The first principle was to take ownership. They needed to own their tasks. They had to own the processes and procedures. They had to own the outcomes and the production output.

This is different than being in charge. If they are in charge but don’t own it, they will always find others to blame when things go wrong. They won’t step up to do the extra work necessary when something gets fouled up.

The reality is that there are always going to be outside factors to blame. It is easy to find a scapegoat, because today’s business processes are complex and interconnect with other areas. This gives us plenty of places to point the finger when mistakes happen.

Instead, leaders need to make it their job to keep pushing things forward. They don’t sit back and wait for tasks to be given out to them. They search for ways to improve the team and catch mistakes early to prevent them from turning into major problems.

We emphasized that this was the antithesis to the “us versus them” attitude. We broke down silos by having leaders willing to step beyond their area to work with other teams to solve problems and improve efficiencies.

When everyone takes ownership, people are willing to do what is needed without finding ways to skirt responsibility. By taking ownership, this also meant consistency. It was more than one-time effort. It was exemplified in the habits, routines and patterns, not just in the one-off.

Has this ever happened to you: You debrief from a strategic meeting, only to find you can’t remember anyone besides yourself sharing ideas or contributing input? Many leaders need to be coached to speak up. But what if you have the opposite problem — and you can’t seem to stop talking? This can lead to frustration all around — your team members become frustrated because they want to share their own ideas, and your manager grows frustrated because they want to hear other viewpoints. Your ideas get lost because stakeholders lose patience with your habit of dominating the conversation — and start to tune you out.

If you suspect you may be monopolizing the conversation in meetings, experiment with these tactics to help get your message across.

Measure exactly how much you’re talking.

Take time to reflect after meetings. If you feel like you have been sharing too much, look back and consider who else contributed. Ask yourself honestly: “Did I talk over people?” Estimate how much of the meeting you were speaking.

For example: “I spoke up about one third of the time and talked over Jim twice.” Note that there isn’t a specific set point for how much you should or should not talk. You will need to use your gut. If you notice you have a pattern of talking over others, it’s time for a reset. Moving forward, make an effort to prioritize listening over talking.

Make a rule for yourself regarding when to share. For example: “I won’t speak until at least two other people in the meeting have shared their input,” or “I will limit my sharing to one point.” Or, “I will time myself and allow only three minutes of speaking.”

Of course, this advice won’t work all the time; your input will be needed and solicited when the stakes are high. But for routine meetings, practice pulling back and letting others have the floor. I coach clients to over-index on sticking to their allotted speaking time. While you don’t want to limit your speaking time forever, adhering to the time rule in the beginning will help you build the habit of yielding the floor.

Consider using other ways to share your ideas.

If you excel at creativity, you may come alive in a brainstorming session and quickly generate a wealth of ideas. However, if you tend to ramble when describing those ideas, you could come across as scattered and ill prepared. Consider other ways to organize your ideas and communicate them to audiences. For example, can you keep a running list of your brilliant insights on your computer so you’re better prepared to share them in the next meeting? Or, can you share ideas in a non-meeting setting — for example, in a follow-up email or an internal chat platform?

Use whatever forms of communication are at your disposal to help organize your thoughts. You’ll then communicate well-thought-out concepts when you do share. One client I worked with had many fantastic ideas; however, in her review, her supervisor noted that my client’s ideas got lost when she attempted to verbalize those ideas. This client wasn’t succinct enough and monopolized senior leadership meetings. To help regain her credibility after this review, my client only shared one point of view at a time that was fully flushed out so that she looked more strategic and organized. For important matters, she followed up afterward with another meeting or an email. This strategy helped her regain control of how she spoke in meetings.

Practice compressing your thoughts.

When speaking, make sure that what you’re saying is necessary and impactful. You can even think of your sentences in tweet form: How would I communicate this idea if I were tweeting and facing a character limit? How can I cut my message down to its essence? 

You can also try writing down the thoughts you plan to discuss in a meeting. This will help you see the cadence in how you deliver ideas. Once you establish a rhythm for compressing your thoughts, you won’t need to take much time to prepare and practice.

Think of yourself as an editor eliminating words and ideas that don’t communicate the essence of what you want to share. I worked with one leader who found that she could reliably scale back each of her sentences by about five words. While that may not sound like a lot, those extra words made for more muddled communication. She delivered messages with a more significant impact by trimming back her sentences.

Build in pauses.

Are you giving your colleagues enough time to digest what you say and to ask questions? If not, give yourself a signal to pause.

One client I worked with decided that when he needed to slow down and stop talking, he would pinch himself. This was a signal to take a breath, stop talking, or ask the group questions. This straightforward tactic can be amazingly effective. By slowing down and taking deliberate pauses, you’ll be able to regulate your impulse to overshare, and your message will have a better chance of landing.

Ask for help.

It may be hard to know in the moment if you’re oversharing. A fresh perspective can offer insight. Ask a trusted colleague or advisor to provide insights into how you’re meeting your goal of talking less and listening more.

Request specific feedback: “Did I share my ideas in three minutes or less?” The answer you receive could provide additional insights that you can use for future conversations. One client I worked with decided to have a reciprocal agreement with a trusted peer.  They would make sure to notice each others’ patterns and would then meet once a month to share their perspectives.

While it’s important to share your point of view, it’s critical to know when and how. Experiment with some or all of these tactics to make sure your input is being heard.

For the past two years, leaders have been performing a high-wire act: seeking stable footing while dealing with a disruptive and unpredictable pandemic, struggling to hire amidst a 15-year high in talent shortages, and revamping policies to meet employee demands for more flexibility at work. Multiple waves of coronavirus variants and an outbreak of war in Europe have left leaders in a daunting place — trying to reassure and focus employees in the face of constant uncertainty while having no real clue what will happen next. They are being told to “embrace uncertainty” as if that’s a natural and easy thing to do. (It’s not.) And their own struggles with stress and burnout often take a back seat as they address the rising mental health challenges of their employees.

So many leaders are now caught in the middle of wanting to provide a clear and upbeat message to employees and yet are having to back-pedal and pivot quite frequently as conditions change. It’s an exhausting proposition.

More than ever, leaders need practical strategies for taking care of themselves and their teams. At Potential Project, we have coached thousands of leaders, and we start in a somewhat unexpected place – helping them to understand and manage their minds.  Unfortunately, none of us can physically control our mind which neurologically has its own patterns and default modes, but we can train it so that it’s working with us and not against us.

Here are three things we recommend to leaders to lead in these uncertain times.

Beware of your ego.

Though most of us like to see ourselves as having the best interests of others in mind, the truth is that our ego is a powerful force, committed to our self-interest and self-preservation.

As we rise up in the ranks of leadership, our ego can naturally become inflated. When it does, this puts us at higher risk of poor decisions and missteps. An inflated ego narrows our vision and makes us look for information that confirms what we want to believe. We lose perspective and end up in a leadership bubble where we only see and hear what we want to rather than the full picture. And, in the face of setbacks and criticism, we find it harder to admit and learn from our mistakes.

Last summer, we witnessed a good example of ego in action. Despite the appearance and then surge in the Covid delta variant, James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, confidently asserted that his employees would be back in the office by September. He even threatened pay cuts for those who didn’t follow the plan and return to the office. When his vision failed to materialize, Gorman at least had the good sense to admit publicly that he was wrong rather than doubling down on a failed plan. “I was wrong on this,” he told CNBC in December.” “I thought we would have been out of it and we’re not. Everybody’s still finding their way.”

Ego can kill our ability to be agile in an unpredictable world. Keeping it in check gives leaders the freedom to be wrong, to make mistakes, to admit to being human, and to move on.

Choose courage over comfort.

As human beings, we’re hardwired to embrace certainty and safety and to avoid danger and discomfort. In fact, sometimes we’ll do nearly everything we can to convince ourselves that staying in our comfort zone is the best thing to do. This is where courage comes in. Courage is different from fearlessness. We can still experience fear about making a difficult decision or delivering negative news, but we find the inner strength to overcome the fear, to shift out of our comfort zones, and to move forward.

Pamela Maynard, the CEO of Avanade, a 45,000-person global technology company, shared with us her experience with fear. In 2020, just six months into her role as CEO, she needed to deal with the realities of the global pandemic. Many organizations were reducing workforce numbers to keep their business afloat. But early on, Pam committed to protecting jobs, even as that felt like a risk. “As a new CEO, it felt challenging to make this decision because I wanted to come in as a leader, drive growth, and hit my targets,” she said. “But in this truly once-in-a-lifetime situation, my most important responsibility was to take care of our people. There was no other option and no greater priority.”

Pam removed chargeability requirements for consultants in the early months of the pandemic and lifted PTO limits as people needed to step away. As a leader, she saw an opportunity to demonstrate real courage to steer the ship through difficult times. She shared a principle that has guided her throughout her career: “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” In this moment, she faced her fear of negatively impacting company performance and disappointing her stakeholders and demonstrated Avanade’s values in action.

Choosing courage over comfort puts us in a vulnerable position because we will likely take heat and make mistakes as we venture into uncertain territory. But this vulnerability opens the doors for others to be vulnerable too. If we face our fears and mess up sometimes, we allow people to see our humanity and invite them to share theirs too.

Practice caring transparency.

McKinsey has reported that more than three-quarters of the C-suite executives they surveyed expect the typical employee to be back in the office at some point for three or more days a week. At the same time, nearly three-quarters of the 5,000 employees surveyed indicated that they would like to work from home for two or more days per week. It’s understandable how leaders view a return to the office as a positive thing. For some, it signals an end to the chaos, a return to the known and manageable. For others, it may seem the best solution to the real experience of disconnect and fatigue that working remotely has burdened us all with.

But the disconnect in expectations and the public communication of plans that run counter to employee sentiment is a dangerous brew that can erode trust.  The answer is not for leaders to avoid strategies and plans that are unpopular but necessary; this is often the hard work of leadership. But the caring and compassionate approach is to be as transparent as possible.

Caring transparency means getting ideas and thoughts out in the open — to make visible what can often be invisible, under the surface. It means being open and honest about what is on our minds and in our hearts. We don’t hold back important information out of fear of how it will be received or how we will be viewed. By doing this, we strip away the power that comes with exclusive knowledge and level the playing field. As a result, people know where they stand and what comes next and can better plot their course in life. Transparency is distinct from candor in that you can be candid and still conceal information. When you are transparent, people know what is on your mind. And when you add caring to transparency, people also know what is in your heart.

Looking to launch a successful business but don’t know where to start? You’re not alone. Today, tens of thousands of people are considering starting their own business, and for good reasons. On average, people can expect to have two and three careers during their work life — and with the great resignation in full effect, many are looking to become their own boss or a small business owner. Those leaving one career often think about their second or third career move being one they can run out of their own home. The good news: Starting a home-based business is within the reach of almost anyone who wants to take a risk and work hard, as are a plethora of other low-cost ideas. Here are some business ideas to get you started.

1. ACCOUNTANT

Experience, training or licensing may be needed

Create a flier outlining your services. Before you do that, you need to know what those services will be. Do you want to simply do bookkeeping for a small business? A more involved level of accounting would be to work up balance sheets, income statements, and other financial reports on a monthly, quarterly, and/or annual basis, depending on the needs of the business. Other specializations can include tax accounting, a huge area of potential work.

2. BICYCLE REPAIR

n many parts of the country, this business tends to be seasonal, but you can find ways around that. Rent a storage unit and offer to store people’s bicycles over the winter after you do a tune-up and any needed repairs on them. If you want to cater to the Lance Armstrong wannabes, you can have business all year round. These road race riders are training through snow, sleet and dark of night. Some of them work on their own bicycles, but many of them don’t, so you can get their business all year. And if you keep Saturday shop hours, you can be sure you will have a group of enthusiasts coming by to talk all things cycling.

3. BOAT CLEANING

Experience, training or licensing may be needed

Boats that are hauled out of the water for the winter or even just for mid-season repairs will need the hull cleaned. And depending on the type of boat, it is a good time to give a major cleaning everything else too–the decks, the sleeping quarters, the head, and the holds. Start by approaching homes that have a boat sitting in the yard. Or you could market your services to the marina to contract you to do the boat cleaning it offers to customers.

4. BUSINESS PLAN SERVICE

Has expansion possibilities

Offer a soup-to-nuts business plan, including market research, the business plan narrative and the financial statements. Plan your fee around the main one that the client will want and offer the others as add-on services. You can give clients an electronic file and allow them to take it from there, or you can keep the business plan on file and offer the service of tweaking it whenever necessary. Have business plan samples to show clients–and make sure to include your own!

5. RIDE-SHARING DRIVER

Getting paid to drive during your free time is a great way to make extra money. It won’t likely replace a full-time paycheck but can be a lucrative extra revenue stream or side hustle. According to Nerd Wallet , here is a break down of the income you can expect: “To make an annual income of $50,000, the average Uber driver needs to provide 60.21 rides each week, while those working for Lyft need to give 83.76 rides a week, and Sidecar drivers would have had to provide 72.03 rides in a week.”

In many organizations, it’s the season for individual and team goal-setting. Deciding on a goal is generally something we want to be a rational and evidence-based exercise, combining a careful consideration of possibilities, resources, and obstacles with just the right amount of stretch. But what do you do when you feel like you have a very limited sense of what’s possible? When new obstacles seem to pop up around every corner and the sands are always shifting? When the idea of stretch seems laughable given how stressed and overwhelmed most of us are?

Setting goals in times of uncertainty and burnout can feel pointless, but it isn’t. Research shows that to engage our motivational systems and direct our brain’s energy to the right actions (both consciously and below our awareness), we need to have a clear sense of where we are, where we’re going, and whether we’re closing the gap between the two at the right rate. Without goals, we make bad choices and miss opportunities to act. But just as important, we can’t feel effective, which many psychologists believe is the most powerful source of life satisfaction and well-being humans have.

To set goals that make sense and motivate ourselves and others in such strange and often discouraging times, we need to set them with a growth mindset. And by that I don’t mean just “believe you can improve” or any of the other common oversimplifications of growth mindset. Having a growth mindset is a bit more nuanced (and more powerful) than simply believing that improvement is possible.

Your mindset is what you believe to be the larger meaning or purpose behind the work you do every day. A growth mindset is about believing that developing and making progress is the point of what you’re doing. As I’ve said before, it’s about getting better as opposed to just being good. And it’s about engaging in specific growth mindset strategies and habits to help keep you focused on the potential for growth in everything you do.

When you approach goal-setting through the lens of a growth mindset, you become more comfortable with uncertainty and more willing to entertain the idea of longer-term goals. Here are two strategies to help you get there that you can use for yourself or with your team.

Use growth-mindset trigger words to frame your goals.

When researchers want to study the effects of a growth mindset, one of the ways we do this is to describe the goal or task that someone is about to perform using certain words that evoke the idea of getting better rather than being good: improve, develop, over time, progress, become, and of course, grow.

These words serve as both explicit and implicit “primes” to your thinking. In other words, they shift the very meaning of the goal to being about developing, and they shift your mindset along with it. To use them, start by writing out your goal the way you would normally think about it. For example, your goal might be to “be an effective communicator” or to “increase sales by 5%.”

Then, rewrite it again using one or more growth mindset triggers. “Be an effective communicator” is now “become an effective communicator,” and “increase sales by 5%” is “develop our network of leads to improveour sales by 5%.”

This way of framing your goals isn’t about lowering the bar or being okay with poor performance. In fact, research shows that people who approach their goals with a growth mindset set more challenging stretch goals for themselves, not less. For example, in one study of medical supplies salespersons, researchers found that those who approached their work with a stronger growth mindset set more ambitious sales targets, put in more effort, engaged in more territory and account planning, and ultimately sold more units.

Establish progress and pivot points.

In such uncertain times, it’s important to explicitly establish progress and pivot points on a timeline right at the outset, so you can monitor both your rate of progress and the need to shift in light of new information along the way.

It can be all too easy to lose track of your goals, or to not think much about them until you get closer to the time you expected to reach them. When that happens, you may fail to adjust when progress is slow, or cling to a goal you should have revised when resources or customer expectations started shifting. For example, you may set a goal for yourself of developing a specific skill or reaching a particular sales target by year’s end. To succeed, what should you accomplish in the first month? At six months? If you don’t know, you won’t be able to course correct and, if necessary, try a different strategy or set a revised goal to have the impact you want to see for yourself or your team.

By using these two strategies to prepare for and engage in your goal-setting conversations, as a leader or a team member, you start out with a firm growth mindset foundation that you can then sustain as you pursue your goals through uncertainty, setbacks, and challenges of all kinds — something we all need now more than ever before.

By now, most of us have come across a version of the meme that poses the question: “Couldn’t that meeting have been an email?” Meetings get a bad rap, one-on-one meetings included. But they don’t have to be cumbersome or a waste of time and energy. They can actually be … great.

First, keep the objective of the meeting in mind. Your team members’ main objective is to get the necessary support to do a great job. This includes your help prioritizing issues and unblocking them if they are stuck. It is ultimately “their time,” and team members should “own” the one-on-one meeting to ensure they cover all of the necessary subject matter.

The best one-on-one meetings feel like a great conversation rather than a report-out. This means following your team member and guiding the conversation as a form of coaching. This means listening with an open mind, asking high-impact questions and giving thoughtful feedback as appropriate. Many managers don’t spend nearly enough time listening and can even monopolize the time by talking in place of their employees. They can miss critical data this was and also miss opportunities to find deeper solutions embedded in the employees’ narrative.

Tips for a successful one-on-one

The one-on-one conversation should be informed by a thoughtful, loosely held agenda. Encourage your team member to own the agenda that includes a prepared set of materials; this helps to guide the conversation. An agenda should include the following:

• Updates that can’t be found within a company dashboard or data tracker
• Support needed from the manager and other members of the leadership team
• Questions the team member has about particular issues
• Feedback the team member would like to receive

Request that your direct report send key information ahead of time so that as a manager, you can be prepared and come ready with questions or discussion points.

A brief check-in at the top of the meeting can help team members communicate how they are feeling about their role/job responsibilities and what it’s like to be in their position. According to TLNT.com, “Checking-in is an intentional practice for a team to open a meeting or session. Each participant shares what (mindset) they are bringing to the table before the work conversation starts … When everyone can remove their personal distractions, it’s easier to focus on getting the job done. A mindset check-in is about the status of your mind, not that of the project.”

However, it’s important to remember not to process this too much. Let it be their experience unless part of the check-in needs some specific support. The goal is to establish the check-in as a safe space and encourage more and more candor. Of course, there may be critical and obvious things to follow up on, and you can always ask if they need support with any specifics mentioned.

Your role as a manager is to help your direct reports learn, build capacity and execute. Part of the job is helping them learn to prioritize and problem-solve on their own; this creates capacity for you! It also gives them the gift of learning they can take for the rest of their career. In fact, I’ve heard many employees highlight managers who have supported them as being some of the biggest influences on their life. This is effectively coaching; managers should listen deeply and intentionally to a team member’s concerns, ask questions and offer clear feedback.

Although the team member owns both the meeting and the recap, managers should take their own notes to track developmental points; these can be used for bi-annual development conversations or performance management reviews. When a manager takes meeting notes in a one-on-one, it shows they value the team member with whom they are meeting.

But what might this look like in practice? Here are five ideas to consider, each grounded in research from Kellogg faculty.

Tackle the hard stuff first

When you’ve got a lot on your plate, it can be tempting to check off a few of the easier items on your to-do list first. And then, maybe, just a few more easy ones.

“You feel like you’re making more progress,” says Maryam Kouchaki, whose research has found that people gravitate toward simpler tasks when struggling with a heavy workload.

She and her colleagues found, for instance, that when ER physicians were given a choice about which patients to treat, they were more likely to choose an easier patient when they already had a lot of patients under their care.

However, the strategy doesn’t pay off in the long run. Over a six-year period, physicians who’d taken a trickier caseload learned to become more efficient than those who’d treated an easier caseload. “Physicians who are picking up difficult patients are the ones who learn over time, and they generate more value for the hospital,” Kouchaki says.

Because avoiding hard tasks indefinitely cuts off opportunities to improve one’s skills, Kouchaki suggests breaking more difficult projects into bite-sized pieces. That way, you still get the satisfaction of ticking items off your to-do list—but also the growth of tackling the tougher stuff.

Plan around end-of-day fatigue

Food-safety inspectors use a rigorous process to identify health violations at restaurants, schools, hospital cafeterias, and other places where foods are handed. Still, inspectors are only human, and the quality of their work can vary somewhat.

Specifically, Maria Ibanez and a colleague have found that inspections that occur later in the day result in fewer violations. Each subsequent hour an inspector conducts inspections during the day results in 3.7 percent fewer citations per inspection that day, likely due to fatigue. In addition, if inspectors begin an inspection at a time that would mean they would not finish before their normal quitting time, they finish the inspection 4 percent more quickly than usual—and catch 5 percent fewer violations. The researchers also found that the order in which the inspections occurred could also affect their quality. For instance, after an inspection that yielded a particularly high number of violations, inspectors were likelier to spot extra violations at the next joint, too.

“At the end of the day, being busy may not equal being productive.”

—

Jan Van Mieghem

The takeaway here is clear: it’s worth asking yourself (and perhaps measuring) whether certain sequences of tasks or times of day change the quality of your work. “That gives us an opportunity to improve performance by being smarter about scheduling,” says Ibanez.

Multitask smarter

So quality of work can be affected by scheduling—but what about efficiency?

A study from two Kellogg School professors—Nicola Persico and Rob Bray—tested this idea by altering the way Italian appellate labor court judges schedule court hearings.

The courts, which handle cases having to do with firings and pensions, are notoriously slow, and it takes multiple hearings to resolve a case. So judges typically put each new hearing at the end of the queue, finding the first open slot in the calendar and filling it. They also wait until the conclusion of the current hearing to schedule a new one.

But Persico, Bray, and their collaborators worked with six appellate labor court judges in Rome to implement a new scheduling method over a three-year period. Specifically, they scheduled hearings in advance and grouped them close together. This allowed a case to move through the system quickly once it reached its first hearing because it was unaffected by what happened with other cases.

This new method cut the time it took to resolve a case by 140 days, or 19 percent, relative to judges who used the traditional method.

While this exact approach to juggling tasks may not translate to other activities—or even other judicial hearings—the overall idea is that a lot of workers could probably get more efficient by focusing on completing a few tasks rather than simply pushing forward on many.

“All sorts of workers schedule their workflow ineffectively, in the sense that they tend to jump from one task to another too frequently,” Persico said. “They spread themselves thin, and then they achieve less than they would if they worked on something until completion.”

There are costs to collaboration

Collaboration is often described as unilaterally good—but it’s important to remember that there are costs associated with it, too.

Jan Van Mieghem and Itai Gurvich, both professors of operations management, showed in a theoretical paper that when skilled workers are engaged in concurrent collaboration—when they are all needed to execute a single task—the throughput of the entire system can suffer. This need to synchronize while coordinating can lead to a productivity loss, and workflow can slow down even further than would be predicted by the usual bottlenecks in the system.

These costs show up in real-world situations, too. A study conducted by Van Mieghem, Gurvich, and then-PhD student Lu Wang found that the productivity of one type of physician, known as a “hospitalist,” fell dramatically when that physician was required to collaborate with specialists. Collaboration had a direct effect by adding the time needed to communicate with the specialist. But it also had a “spillover” effect that ended up causing the hospitalist to spend an extra 20 percent of time on the patient’s medical chart.

Twenty-five percent of this spillover came from the increased time it took to document the conclusions of a valuable consultation. But forty-five percent came from work sequencing, or the effect of interruptions by collaborators that necessitates the hospitalist to change their workflow—switching from one chart to another, say.

“Being busy may increase interruptions,” says Van Mieghem. “At the end of the day, being busy may not equal being productive.”

In our work as career-development experts, we help people develop the skills to succeed in their increasingly “squiggly,” nonlinear careers. One skill that both managers and individuals frequently identify as a priority area for improvement is feedback — how to ask for it, how to give and receive it, and how to establish the principles and practices to make feedback a habit that helps people grow.

The flow of feedback is important for everyone, but all too often, it ends up feeling forced, formal, and infrequent. As a result, people’s development stalls and team growth is stifled. We’ve identified these five common feedback flaws:

1. Focus: Very few organizations or teams have a shared understanding of what feedback is and why it matters. When individuals apply their own interpretations, this typically leads to inconsistency and misunderstandings about both the purpose and practice of feedback.
2. Formality: When feedback is tied to formal reviews and requires filling out forms, it feels like a box-checking exercise triggered by quarterly or annual HR processes. Giving and getting feedback becomes something people feel they must do instead of something they find helpful and want to do.
3. Fear: Fears about feedback prevent conversations from getting started and insight being actioned. Concerns about having difficult conversations can lead managers to water down their feedback communication and deliver unclear messaging. And worries about what people think results in employees avoiding asking for (and being able to act on) the insight.
4. Frequency: The day-to-day demands on managers are overwhelming, leading to many missed opportunities for real-time feedback. Feedback therefore becomes an extra task to be remembered and often gets deprioritized during busy times.
5. Framing: When feedback is ad hoc and disconnected from people’s priorities, it can feel too generic to be useful or meaningful. Employees are left to connect the dots to their development, which runs the risk that they won’t be able to effectively act on the insight.

To overcome these challenges, managers can take the lead on creating a shared understanding of what feedback is for, increasing the speed and ease of feedback, and unlocking difficult conversations through the art of asking. Here’s how to create a culture of fearless and frequent feedback.

Create a shared understanding about feedback.

If the goal is for feedback to become part of a team’s culture, everyone needs a shared understanding of what it is and why it matters. Without this, managers may struggle to create the commitment needed for feedback to become a regular feature of people’s work.

We aren’t proposing a universal definition of feedback for everyone to use. Instead, we recommend managers involve their teams in creating a memorable description of feedback that feels fit for purpose for the team. Questions to prompt a discussion could include:

• What does feedback mean to you?
• When feedback is effective, how does it feel?
• When does feedback feel forced?

From these discussions, you can gain insight to inform your shared team definition. Here are some definitions we’ve seen teams come up with:

• Actionable insight
• Data for your development
• Perspectives to help people be at their best
• Information that enables improvement
• Ideas to help us to grow

Increase ease and speed of delivering feedback.

Managers can kickstart a new approach to feedback by making it quicker and easier for people to give insights to each other. Here are a few approaches we’ve seen teams implement successfully:

Idea 1: “Brilliant because…”

Praise is an easy place for people to start with feedback, but it rarely provides enough insight for people to action. Feedback becomes significantly more useful when the person delivering it includes more detail to support the recipient’s development. This can be as simple as managers encouraging team members to expand on moments of praise by adding “because” to their response. For example, consider the difference between “I thought that was brilliant” and “I thought that was brilliant because you stayed so calm and composed when someone challenged what you were presenting.”

Idea 2: “Idea-for-improvement” questions

Reframing critical feedback as ideas to improve can reduce people’s fear about sharing what they think. Once a month, managers can open up this conversation by asking their teams for feedback using an “idea-for-improvement” question, such as:

• What’s one way I could help you do your job even better?
• What’s one change we could make to improve our team’s ways of working?
• What’s one thing that frustrates you that you think we should change?

These questions can be added into existing meeting agendas so they become part of everyday ways of working.

Idea 3: “Challenge-and-build” meetings

These meetings are an opportunity for anyone on a team to receive feedback on an idea or project they’re working on. Employees share a summary of an idea and invite people to attend a challenge-and-build meeting about it. These meetings give individuals the opportunity — and the permission — to practice feedback and share their perspective in a way that feels safe, with the emphasis on a project or idea rather than a person. Questions could include:

• What do you like the best about this idea?
• Why could this idea fail?
• How might our competitors approach solving this problem?

Improve the art of asking.

Many people associate feedback with difficult conversations, which means that even the word “feedback” is wrapped up in fear. Managers can reduce that fear by focusing on asking rather than telling, particularly in difficult discussions about people’s development.

When managers start by asking rather than telling, it transforms the dynamic of difficult conversations. These questions might sound like:

• How do you think that meeting went?
• What is your experience of working with that person?
• I know you’re working on your presentation skills. How are you progressing?

By asking first, managers can then adapt their approach depending on the recipient’s level of self-awareness. Feedback follow-up questions that can help someone move from awareness to action could include:

• What could you learn from someone who you see do that well?
• Where’s a comfortable place you could develop that skill?
• What could you do differently next time?

Business leaders are constantly searching for ways to build highly effective teams that can deliver results in a rapidly changing business landscape. I’ve searched high and low, drawing inspiration from philosophy, history and literature. However, I’ve found the deep tradition of leadership established in the U.S. military, and specifically the Navy SEALs’ code of conduct, to be particularly helpful.

The SEAL code is a set of guiding principles that embody the warrior ethos of the Navy SEALs. It is a code of conduct that all SEALs are expected to live by, both on and off the battlefield. The code is based on a set of core values that are central to the SEAL ethos, including loyalty, honor, courage, discipline, respect and excellence.

These values are not just ideals or aspirations but a way of life that SEALs are expected to live and uphold at all times. They are the foundation of the SEAL ethos and are critical to the success of SEAL teams in achieving their missions.

Business leaders can learn a great deal from the SEAL code and apply its principles to develop highly effective teams in mid-sized organizations. Here are some ways that business leaders can utilize the SEAL code to build strong, cohesive and high-performing teams:

1. Build a culture of trust and loyalty

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of loyalty to country, team and mission. This same sense of loyalty and commitment can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to put the needs of the company and the team above their interests.

Business leaders can build a culture of trust and loyalty by fostering open communication, encouraging collaboration and creating a shared sense of purpose and mission. When employees feel that they are part of a team that is working towards a common goal, they are more likely to feel a sense of commitment to the team and the company.

2. Encourage excellence in all things

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of striving for excellence in all aspects of life. This same emphasis on excellence can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to continuously improve and strive for better results.

Business leaders can encourage excellence in all things by setting high standards for performance, providing opportunities for training and development and recognizing and rewarding employees who demonstrate excellence in their work. When employees feel that they are part of a team that values and rewards excellence, they are more likely to strive for it themselves.

3. Foster a culture of discipline and self-control

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of maintaining a high level of discipline and self-control, both in training and in everyday life. This same discipline and self-control can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to stay focused, on track and deliver results.

Business leaders can foster a culture of discipline and self-control by setting clear expectations for behavior and performance, providing regular feedback and coaching, and holding employees accountable for their actions. When employees feel that they are part of a team that values discipline and self-control, they are more likely to adopt these same values in their own work.

4. Encourage courage in the face of fear

The SEAL code emphasizes the importance of demonstrating courage in the face of fear and acting decisively and confidently even when faced with uncertainty. This same courage can be applied to business teams, where employees are expected to take risks, make tough decisions, and navigate uncertain terrain.

Meeting etiquette is key to good business, as face-time allows for clear communication and effective decision making. But all too often, meetings run longer than they should and fail to keep attendees engaged.

Whether you’re meeting with partners, vendors or employees, showcase your boardroom brilliance with these meeting musts.

Determine the objective. A clear goal will set the tone for the meeting and determine its direction. Your goal should be specific and measurable. If you’re expecting attendees to brainstorm, ask each participant to arrive with a list of ideas.

Ask yourself if a meeting is actually necessary. Meetings can be expensive. To calculate the precise cost, multiply the hourly wage of each person present by the length of the gathering. If your objective can be met through e-mail, conference call, Skype, or even a quick one-on-one discussion, skip the meeting altogether.

Invite decision-makers. The most effective meetings involve stakeholders to ensure decisions can be made immediately. If a key decision-maker is unavailable, ask a subordinate to attend. Ideally, this person will be able to speak for their supervisor, and–at the very least–take notes and report back.

Stand up. Routine meetings designed to touch base with employees and discuss status reports can usually be accomplished in 15 minutes or less. You’ll be more likely to keep the meeting short and to the point if everyone remains standing.

Schedule strategically. If you want each meeting participant to be fully engaged, avoid Monday mornings, when everyone is catching up on e-mail. Also avoid Friday afternoons, when employees are busy wrapping up the week and looking forward to the weekend. Schedule meetings on a day and time when participants are most likely to engage.

Set a time limit and stick to it. Meetings that drag on for hours cause attendees to lose patience and focus. Attention spans are short, and time is valuable. The most productive meetings start on time and end on time. 

Prioritize the agenda. Don’t leave the most important topics for last. To ensure that the highest priority objectives are met, discuss the most pertinent issues first. That way, if someone needs to step away or leave the meeting early, you’ll still have accomplished your main goals.

Stick to the agenda. The agenda is an outline–a framework–to keep everyone on topic and to maintain the meeting’s flow. The agenda should be kept to one page and should not include anything other than main topics of conversation. Sidebar conversations waste valuable time. If participants insist on talking out of turn, step in and suggest that they talk after the meeting or schedule a separate discussion. Then segue immediately back to the topic at hand.

But it’s not due to lack of effort. While company leaders will talk about what’s important to them in the coming business cycle, the message often gets lost because it lacks a clear framework that succinctly says what’s important. This can leave individuals and teams feeling lost or confused about their company’s goals and the impact of their work.

A recent poll found only 28% feel fully connected to their company’s purpose. Let’s fix that.

The OKR framework provides a structure for setting high-level Objectives and subsequent Key Results that leaders expect their organization will meet. Once leaders have set clear expectations, business units can use that information to create their own OKRs, followed by teams and even individuals.

During this event we’ll discuss how OKRs are being used in businesses across the globe. We’ll also share some good – and not so good – examples that will help you understand how this framework can help your entire workforce align their actions with company-wide goals, even during turbulent times.

Join Entrepreneur for a free webinar called How to Increase Alignment and Productivity with the OKR Framework, presented by Oracle NetSuite and Entrepreneur. Leading the discussion will be moderator Terry Rice. He will be joined by Arthur Wittman, a Content Director at NetSuite.

Register Now

Successful leaders can fall into the trap of thinking they know what’s best for their team or organization. After all, they worked hard to get where they are and have made many tough decisions along the way. However, some leaders rely too heavily on their ability to make decisions on their own — with steep consequences for themselves, their team, and the organization.

Mike, the chief technology officer of a fintech organization and one of Luis’s clients, was facing a dilemma of his own making. He found himself questioning his direct reports — “Why is it so hard for you to follow through? Can’t you get anything right?” — and barking out orders to his peers — “I’m the CTO, right? Stay in your lane; I’ll decide what to do.”

Mike, a former military officer, seasoned professional, and ex-CEO, had joined the organization via an acquisition. Early on, it was evident that there was a clash of personalities and cultures on his team and among his peers. He was used to making all the decisions and demanded loyalty and execution. Once, he made a decision that his team knew was not going to work but had them implement it anyway. His decision cost the company a considerable amount of money. It also prompted the CEO to address Mike’s overconfidence and leadership style. As he discussed the engagement with Luis, he said, “Mike is a liability to this organization and needs to be dealt with.”

When leaders who are used to calling all the shots start working with peers and stakeholders who are as successful, hungry, and confident as they are, they sometimes find themselves at odds. Their previously successful decisive, command-and-control-leadership style is no longer a viable option. And unless they pivot their decision-making style and reposition themselves as open-minded, collaborative leaders, they might be putting their future success on the line. Thus, the overconfident, decisive leader must go through a mindset change.

Gallup research estimates that the cost of poor leadership and lost productivity can tally up to $1.2 trillion dollars per year due to disengaged employees. In organizations, decisiveness, confidence, and the ability to take and carry out bold action are highly rewarded — and can lead to costly mistakes. Of the variables that impact decision-making, overconfidence can be the hardest to improve, as it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things,” as Nobel prize–winning psychologist, economist, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, puts it.

If you’re a leader who struggles to let go of control over decision-making, here are several ways to make the mindset and behavioral changes required to become more collaborative.

First, determine why you make decisions in isolation.

If you’re an overconfident, dogmatic leader who tends to make unilateral decisions and expect your team and peers to see them through, you first need to understand why that is. Here are some questions to ask yourself to examine your decision-making style:

Do you think decision-making is a simple gut reaction?

You have many years of experience, so your gut reaction or initial judgment may often be right. But making the correct decision is a complex process that several factors can influence. One big reason people don’t make the right decision is that they don’t have all the information they need due to a lack of input. Many decisions aren’t black and white. They require input, data, expertise, and diverse perspectives from team members and stakeholders.

Do you think other people’s opinions don’t matter?

When leaders make decisions in silos and don’t seek alignment, they signal to other stakeholders, “I don’t value your opinion.” Every individual wants to feel valued, recognized, and relevant. When leaders make decisions in a vacuum, they’re not providing any of those. However, including others in crucial decision-making can increase buy-in and accountability as the decision moves to the execution stage. It also showcases a leader’s confidence in the team, strengthens relationships, and fosters a collaborative culture.

Do you believe you own decision-making rights?

Some leaders feel that their title and position give them the right to make decisions alone. They want to be in control and rely on hierarchy and authority rather than their leadership capabilities. They must recognize their authority and power are not absolute. In fact, position leadership — where a person’s leadership power comes solely through the position they hold in the organization — is the most basic level of leadership, and staying there limits their potential.

Do you believe only you can make the right decision?

Confidence is a valued skill that is closely linked to professional success. However, confidence can become detrimental when a leader overestimates their ability, knowledge, or judgment. Perhaps they’ve fallen into the expertise trap and are more likely to “jump the gun” and take on more risk than necessary due to their perceived decision-making abilities.

Second, determine how you want to reposition yourself as a leader.

Moving from being a lone wolf to a more strategic, collaborative, and inclusive decision-maker requires you to make behavioral changes in order to influence how others perceive you. If you want to be known as an influential leader, you must encourage your team’s engagement, collaboration, and accountability for collective goals and decisions. Here are some ways to get started:

Cultivate humility.

Being humble means acknowledging you don’t know everything, and that’s OK. So, always ask yourself, What is the objective? You must reframe what success means for you. Success is not having the final word or getting your way — it’s accomplishing your business objectives. And that requires having a team that’s engaged and inspired.

Be thorough.

Abraham Maslow, a psychologist and creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, said: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

What do you do when a high-priority project doesn’t go as planned?

Whether your team fails to deliver on its sales targets, your latest high-visibility product launch is riddled with glitches, or your marquee product faces a recall, you as a leader have a responsibility to respond to problems as they arise. 

One common instinct is to put your regular responsibilities on the back burner, roll up your sleeves, and immerse yourself in operational details. You may begin to question your team members and double-check their work as if it were your own.

This natural impulse to take control and try to fix what’s broken may seem like sound leadership. But it can lead to more problems than it fixes, says Colonel Fred Maddox, an assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College and Chief of Staff of the Army senior fellow at the Kellogg School.

“When leaders act like they’re the only ones who can solve something, it can become an issue for the whole organization,” Maddox says, “because they’re not focused on strategy and they’re doing someone else’s job.”

Leaders who interfere also signal to their teams that their input is not desired—and may not be considered—which erodes motivation. Instead of taking over, leaders should show restraint and consider how their actions and decisions impact the broader company. 

Maddox explains how to refrain from trying to solve your team’s problems alone—and free your team to grow into their own roles.

Let Go of Being a Hero

The responsibility of senior leaders in any organization is to focus on the bigger picture and not be mired in tactical processes. In a crisis, though, many leaders—and especially leaders who have risen through the ranks—can feel the urge to step into the breach. It’s here where leaders may think they are solving a problem. 

“As soon as you take over any part of execution, you’ve stepped out of your strategic role,” Maddox says. “Your skills, time, and attention are focused on tasks which are other people’s jobs, so you’re misallocating resources.” 

If your sales team loses two major clients in a week, your gut may tell you to get on the horn and try to lure them back. But appointing a senior staff member who understands your sales team’s priorities, and who has the skills to manage and communicate upwards, will free up your attention to focus on how the loss of clients impacts other parts of the business.

Even worse, if you insist on doing everything yourself, you are taking away opportunities for your team to prove that they are capable of doing the job.

“When you’re in a position of authority, it’s your responsibility to extend trust to the individuals on your team,” Maddox says. 

Acting like you are the sole person who can fix a problem disregards their knowledge and expertise. Maddox warns that it won’t be long before your team’s culture deteriorates if you step in too often to “fix” problems. 

Trust Your Team

Instead, if you constantly feel the impulse to intervene in a crisis, it is helpful to put on the brakes and reflect on why you might be overreaching.

“In the back of your head, you’re either afraid your team is going to fail, you think that someone’s not capable of handling the responsibility you gave them, or you haven’t created accountability,” Maddox says. 

Consider what you can do differently to prepare your team (and yourself) for these moments so that you can feel confident in your team’s ability to execute.

Maddox points to the military’s practice of ongoing training and simulations as a model to prepare teams for the unexpected. Though most companies would not have the resources to replicate this kind of preparation, leaders can accomplish the same goal by creating safe opportunities for teams to learn and share hard lessons. He encourages leaders to establish frequent opportunities for team members to practice new skills, supported by candid feedback. 

Every position has its responsibilities and boundaries, but leaders should always be attuned to ways their team members can weigh in and find innovative solutions. This can mean relinquishing authority to provide team members autonomy to make decisions and learn.

For example, when introducing a new skill to a team member, leaders shouldn’t rush to give instructions, but first ask how the individual would approach it, to encourage problem-solving. The goal, Maddox says, is to train team members to “walk in autonomy.”

He also advises that teams adopt a post-exercise “action review” in which participants discuss what worked and went wrong at every step of an operation. Each team member contributes so that successes and shortcomings are evaluated from multiple perspectives. 

When learning and feedback are integrated into team culture, employees are primed to take more ownership when difficult issues surface. As a result, you will no longer feel the onus to fix something which could be better addressed as a team. 

“They have the opportunity to build their confidence and skill sets in tasks that will allow them to eventually take some of the weight and burden off of you.” 

Avoid Confirmation Bias

Effective leadership awareness is about more than resisting the urge to do everything yourself in a crisis. It also means thinking critically by acknowledging the limits of your ability to gain first-hand knowledge about the crisis in the first place.

“In situations with a high degree of complexity, you are going to be reliant on others to gather more information to make the best decision possible,” he says. 

To do this, you need “multiple sensors” or viewpoints from your team members to get the full picture. “Have you considered all the variables at play?” Maddox says. “Because there’s usually more to the situation than is presenting itself in hand. Relying on others gives you the opportunity to see components that may change your decision.”

Maddox points out that leaders often are surrounded by talented staff—and may even trust those staff to react capably in a crisis—but still fail to listen to them when the information does not confirm their prior views. “We’re more attuned to listening to input that supports our decision,” he explains. “But when a person dissents, it’s harder for us to hear it and take the necessary steps to consider it, contemplate, and move forward.” 

Maddox had to confront his own confirmation bias when developing a reporting tool for his senior leaders on a division-wide initiative. He saw what he thought was a great opportunity to build a data dashboard for his colonels and generals.

“I’m thinking this is the best thing since sliced bread,” Maddox says. 

Maddox begins distributing the dashboard. His team populates it with new data every Friday. He thinks he is seeing the benefits. “In my head, this is working,” he says. 

Several weeks after the launch, he finally solicits feedback from two of the dashboard’s recipients. The first commander Maddox reached didn’t know what the dashboard was. The second commander he contacted told him it wasn’t his cup of tea, so he didn’t look at it either.

“I was so convinced it was a great tool that was so necessary,” Maddox says. “But weeks later, I learned we had created something that no one was using. That was painful, because we lost a lot of sleep putting it together.” 

To prevent confirmation bias from seeping into decisions, Maddox encourages leaders to “walk through” scenarios with team members from all angles, paying extra attention to viewpoints that contradict or challenge their own. It’s quite possible that, had Maddox listened to more voices before designing the dashboard, he would have discovered that senior leaders already had effective ways of learning this information.

“There are very few situations where the person at the top of the chain can see everything completely,” Maddox says.

Improvements in labor productivity have been the engine of U.S. economic power and prosperity since World War II. But in the past 15 years, productivity growth has faltered averaging just 1.4% annually, compared to long-term rates of 2.2% since 1948.

These small differences add up: If the United States can get back to the long-term trend, it could be worth $10 trillion in cumulative GDP by 2030. And the benefits of productivity would help the country meet longer-term challenges like the looming national debt, underfunded entitlement programs, and the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Companies have a starring role to play in this putative productivity miracle. Our research found striking variations in productivity among leading and lagging firms within each sector. Manufacturing provides a particularly stark example, where leading firms operate at 5.4 times the productivity of laggards. Academic researchers have documented similar trends in services, particularly information and communications, which show wide disparities between leading firms and the rest.

Not only are productivity disparities within sectors quite wide — they’re also getting wider. Our research shows that in manufacturing, the gap was 25% wider in 2019 than it was in 1989. Some analysts suggest this growing gap is the result of accelerated growth among leading firms coexisting with stagnation among the rest. That’s encouraging: It suggests that if those in the rear can match the leaders, the United States could restore productivity growth to historical levels.

These productivity gaps also suggest that firms can raise their own ambitions. Doing more with less, or doing more with the same, shows up in corporate income statements as higher margins and stronger revenue growth. And in aggregate, those performance improvements lead to economy-wide changes in productivity.

Lessons from the Most Productive Firms

For business leaders looking to unlock performance, there’s something to be learned by observing the companies at the top of the productivity heap. These frontier firms are usually larger than others (though not always, as we discuss below). They are present across most sectors and geographies.

What they have in common is a playbook with the following four elements:

They capture value from digitization. 

From 1989 to 2019, our research finds a strong correlation between sectors’ productivity growth and their level of digitization. Other researchers have found a similar connection between firm productivity and digitization; frontier firms are better able to technologically innovate than their peers.

However, many firms investing in technology are not seeing its benefits. McKinsey research finds that firms typically realize only about 25% to 30% of the expected value of their digital transformations. Much of the shortfall comes from not properly updating the firm’s strategy and business model to take advantage of new digital strengths.

Frontier firms set bold business goals enabled by technology. They reconfigure their organizations to digitize their operations and capture the benefits of technology, rather than augment existing ways of working. And they drive accountability for results across the organization.

They invest in intangibles.

Frontier firms go beyond technology investments and also place bets on complementary intangibles such as R&D, intellectual property, and the capabilities of their workforce. Our research finds that frontier firms invest 2.6x more in intangibles compared to other firms.

For many of these firms, taking a long-term perspective is critical. These investments likely create a productivity J-curve, in which the early benefits of investments are small, but compound rapidly over time to create outsized long-term value.

They build a future-ready workforce. 

Frontier firms also disproportionately secure the skilled talent they need to get the most out of technology, either by attracting top talent or by an in-house investment in employee skills.

Both frontline talent and tech-savvy executives are necessary to successfully navigate the reconfiguration of complex firms. Leaders are winning the talent war by recognizing the value of employee experience, investing in on-the-job training programs, and expanding policies that make it easier for parents and aging workers alike to stay in the labor force.

They adopt a systems approach. 

Frontier companies are typically system thinkers, looking for opportunities to access new markets or collaborate creatively with stakeholders.

High-performing firms tend to be more connected to global value chains, giving them access to global markets, ideas, and talent. They collaborate with suppliers and customers to form new ecosystems that benefit from agglomeration effects and create shared pools of value. They also look for opportunities to collaborate more closely with their public-sector counterparts to solve for challenges in skilled talent and physical infrastructure.

America’s New Productivity Champions

The opportunity to apply these lessons is wide open to firms of all sizes and shapes. Many frontier firms are part of what we call the Titanium Economy — small, often privately held industrial-technology companies that are among the fastest growing and most profitable enterprises in the country. These companies are often based in smaller cities, sometimes even in rural areas, and present across a variety of sectors.

Take Dot Foods, a foodservice distributor based in Mount Sterling, Illinois, population 2,006. For Dot, everything starts with the employee. “Our volume is off the charts and we can’t staff it… we’re typically 500 employees short,” CEO Joe Tracy told us.

To attract workers, Dot rewrote its shift schedules in ways that give employees more flexibility to take time off. The company invested in automation to do the jobs that no one wants to do, like slinging cases in the freezer on the night shift. It embraced technology throughout the operation and invested time in teaching workers the skills needed to operate the equipment. It worked to integrate logistics with advanced analytics, so that customers receive the products they want as fast as possible. And it acquired ShopHero to give its customers a customized, locally branded e-commerce platform replete with video and photos. Dot Foods is now the nation’s largest foodservice distributor, delivering more than 125,000 products from 1,000 suppliers to all 50 states.

Dot’s growth story is typical of Titanium Economy companies — and the opportunity for others to join them is vast. Recent data indicates that small and medium-size companies are less productive on average than large firms. But in some sectors where niche products or services can be offered at higher price points, small companies can be as productive as their bigger rivals. These data should give plenty of encouragement to business leaders looking to drive improvements in their business.

Neither size nor sector is the full measure of a company’s destiny. To be sure, grocery store owners cannot snap their fingers and suddenly enjoy the profit margins of software makers. But almost all firms can increase their productivity to approximate that of the frontier firms.

Autonomy is a hallmark of an innovative culture. The ability to make decisions for yourself enhances motivation, which turn contributes to higher levels of performance and well-being. It also gives leaders more time to focus on the most significant and complex decisions and explore new sources of value creation. Creating more autonomy involves shifting power from the top and center of the organization to the front line by empowering people to make decisions.

It might look straightforward. In practice, it’s hard to pull off. It’s a big change for executives who have “grown up” in traditional, hierarchical organizations, in which decision-making authority is held tightly by a select few and many decisions are left unspoken.

As a result, employees aren’t accustomed to making decisions. And when they are empowered to take on more decision-making responsibility, they’re often left to figure it out themselves without clear guidance or support. Even the most capable and enthusiastic employees wonder whether they’re doing the right thing. This can feel risky, especially when they see some of their coworkers being laid off; they worry about the consequences if things go wrong.

This gap between the desire for more empowerment and capability (with confidence) is what I call the “decision deficit.” Left unaddressed, employees become frustrated that the promise of greater empowerment and autonomy isn’t followed up with actions and don’t see the opportunity to develop themselves. Leaders also feel frustrated with the lack of progress.

Here are five strategies that can help you reduce this decision deficit.

Prepare yourself to empower others.

Empowerment is a management term that consistently fails to live up to its promise, in large part because executives find it difficult to give up control. They see their role and status as tightly linked to their decision-making authority. Delegating responsibility is seen as a diminution of their power. While they might appear confident and assured, underneath they may feel insecure and lack sufficient trust in others.

Prepare yourself to delegate decisions by:

• Reflecting on what has held you back from empowering people in the past. Was it a failure when you tried? What could you have done differently to make it a success? What were your feelings when you delegated, and what can you learn from them? What will it take to make the first step?
• Planning for a staggered transition of responsibilities, starting with giving low-risk decisions to capable people. This helps build up confidence in yourself and others before you distribute responsibility more widely.
• Considering it an opportunity to increase the quality of your decision-making and to explore other aspects of your role, such as innovation and growth, as you free yourself from some of your managerial responsibilities.
• Reminding yourself why you’re doing this — which should be to give people an opportunity to develop and harness their (often greater) insight into the product, service, or market in question.

One of my clients, John,* had to re-examine his own leadership style before he was ready to take these steps. He ran a tightly managed business unit, in which he made all of the calls. But his management style — fed by his underlying insecurities about whether he was good enough — was hampering the team’s ability to innovate and meet their ambitious growth targets. Working with one of his direct reports, he identified the employees he could trust the most with some of his decisions, which marked the beginning of his empowerment journey.

Develop a set of decision principles.

Your role as the leader is to encourage your people to think for themselves — not to enact a set of rules for them. Encourage them to consider what is in customers’ and the organization’s best interests when making decisions. Establish bounds for return and risk. Highlight potential behaviors that might derail sound decision-making (for example, tiredness, myopia, or overconfidence). Insist on transparency so they’re able to communicate not only the decision, but the reasoning, as required.

These principles determine the questions any decision-maker should be able answer as they prepare to make a decision:

• The decision: Capture and classify the problem that needs to be addressed and the decision that needs to be made.
• Materiality: Why does it matter?
• Timeframe: When is the decision is required by?
• Alternatives: What are the other options? Can you examine from a different perspective?
• Evidence: What do you know from direct experience and insights from analytics?
• Beliefs: What do you need to believe or assume?
• Biases: How have you mitigated potential biases, such as confirmation bias or overconfidence?
• Criteria: How will you assess the decision?
• Stakeholders: Who should be involved in making the decision?
• Judgement: What have you decided?
• Communication: How will you summarize and communicate the decision?
• Review: What lessons can this decision teach you about future ones?

Clarify decision-making roles.

It’s essential to clarify decision roles, rights, and accountability. This starts at the top. Write down the decisions you’re responsible for, individually and collectively. Consider whether you’re the best person to make these decisions while remembering that you still have overall responsibility — delegation shouldn’t be confused with dereliction of duties.

Whether or not to delegate a decision depends on your role, your (and others’) capabilities, the materiality of the decision, and the expectations of others. The more complex and sensitive the decision, the more likely it is that you’ll retain the decision-making role. For example, one of my clients, Keith Underwood, COO and CFO of The Guardian, said that he won’t delegate when “the decision involves a sophisticated view of the context the organization is operating in, has profound implications on the business, and when stakeholders [e.g., employees, investors] expect me to have complete ownership of the decision.” Kelly Devine, president of Mastercard UK and Ireland, told me, “The only time I really feel it’s hard to delegate is when the decision is in a highly pressurized, contentious, or consequential situation, and I simply don’t want someone on my team to be carrying that burden alone.”

Identify who you can give more decision-making responsibility to, based on both their capabilities and area of responsibility, and define the scope of what they can make decisions about. Over time, encourage them to cascade their responsibility downward once both of you are confident the new system is working.

For example, the CFO and the president of a division might make the key decisions in a large commercial negotiation, consulting specialists in legal or procurement as required. Then, the business unit leader or product manager can make pricing or resourcing decisions for specific products. Similarly, the person dealing directly with customers can decide how best to respond to customer complaints.

In unfamiliar, high-stakes situations, it can be difficult to remain calm and open-minded. Our instinctive reaction is to stick with what has worked for us in the past. That’s normal, and it can work well in familiar situations. But defaulting to old habits in new situations that call for new solutions is usually a recipe for failure. The challenge is that new, high-pressure situations often create a level of anxiety that triggers the very reactions that tend to limit us, stifling innovation. This is the adaptability paradox: When we most need to learn, change, and adapt, we are most likely to react with old approaches that aren’t suited to our new situation, leading to poorer decisions and ineffective solutions.

Navigating periods of turbulence successfully requires leaders to adopt a sophisticated form of self-mastery that we call Deliberate Calm. “Deliberate” refers to the awareness that you have a choice in how you experience and respond to a situation. “Calm” refers to rationally considering how best to respond, without being governed by old habits.

“Deliberate Calm” is a solution to the adaptability paradox. It enables leaders to act with intention, creativity, and objectivity, even in the most challenging circumstances, and it helps us to learn and adapt to novel challenges when the stakes are highest. The practice of Deliberate Calm — and it is a practice — changes our relationship with uncertainty.

Deliberate Calm in practice

Here’s a hypothetical example. Jeff is a sales director at a consumer goods manufacturing company facing technological and market disruptions as well as slow sales. When his boss calls with a warning that his numbers need to improve, he feels pressure, frustration, and anxiety. He responds in the style that has worked for him in the past, telling her, “I’ll fix it.” He tells himself he just needs to redouble his efforts and pull out all the stops to sell more. Except it’s possible that his new reality can’t be fixed with old approaches, and that they’ll keep him in this tough spot. What if the carrots-and-sticks method that was successful in the past doesn’t work? In this situation, setting new sales goals, building in more incentives and consequences for performance, and telling his team to work harder and do better is likely to fail or backfire. And when pushing harder in the old ways continues to fail, this is when panic can set in, triggering Jeff to pull the same levers even harder, rather than adapting to a new reality and discovering new solutions.

If Jeff were to practice Deliberate Calm, he would take a deep breath, take stock of his situation, and discuss it candidly with his boss. He would admit that he doesn’t have all the answers, that the traditional approaches aren’t working, and that he sees signs that the competitive landscape will make it harder to maintain sales. He may still feel anxious, but he’d accept that retreating to the false security of old methods is a form of denial that provides only a brief respite. He’s better off surfacing underlying concerns, managing through his own discomfort, and opening a dialogue about exploring new approaches.  He can also advocate for ways to find new responses and ask for help in developing new ideas.

Next, he should think about how to approach his sales team. In this hypothetical scenario, Jeff’s traditional carrots-and-sticks method will fail, because fundamentally new approaches are needed to solve novel challenges. Instead, he needs to explore the situation, invite new ideas, and admit he doesn’t have all the answers. The team might feel stress, but Jeff can provide some hope and optimism — along with some clear-eyed realism about the situation. He can invite his team to help discover new solutions in a way that promotes creativity and learning without fear of punishment, rather than reactive “more of the same” tactics that are showing diminishing returns. There are no guarantees, but this response is far more likely to result in new solutions and successful outcomes in the face of uncertainty.

Does the practice of Deliberate Calm actually work? Yes. We designed a Deliberate Calm leadership program for a global pharmaceutical company that put 1,450 leaders through weekly practice sessions for approximately 30 minutes per week for 12 weeks, and then measured changes in their behavior and their performance (including self-assessments and assessments by their boss, teammates, and other colleagues). The results were striking. Compared to a control group (those who were asked to try to improve the same behaviors and outcomes, but who did not participate in the program), participants in the capability program showed three times more improvement in the targeted behaviors and outcomes, including overall leadership performance, adaptation to unplanned circumstances, optimism, relational effectiveness (e.g., empathy, compassion), collaboration and teaming (e.g., fostering psychological safety), and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. Additionally, their sense of well-being improved 7.5 times more than that of the control group. Open-ended comments from the participants suggested that they experienced as much benefit in their personal lives as they did at work.

Three skills to develop to become more adaptable

How can you start? There are three major elements to cultivating Deliberate Calm:

Learning agility

is about learning from experience, experimenting with new tactics, approaching new situations with a growth mindset, seeking and learning from feedback, and applying these lessons in real time to new situations. The principle is that leaders need to be learners even in the most challenging circumstances. It is difficult to overestimate how important this is: One meta-analysis of dozens of empirical studies found that adaptability and learning agility were the top predictors of a leader’s performance and potential.

You can build this muscle by, for example, setting your intention each day for how you want to show up for challenging situations. This may sound something like: “Instead of trying to have an answer ready for all difficult, unexpected challenges today, I will approach them with curiosity and an open mind, inviting multiple perspectives.” Doing this helps you remain open to feedback, learn, and adjust your response that otherwise may have been an unhelpful default reaction.

Emotional self-regulation

is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions, and to channel those emotions into productive ways of thinking and acting. Research has consistently shown that leaders with greater emotional self-regulation perform significantly better, as do their teams. Before you can regulate your emotional responses, you first need to become aware of what triggers them and what these responses tell you, because they can provide very valuable information.

Try to keep a diary for a couple of days, writing down moments where you feel emotionally triggered, and describe your thoughts, bodily sensations, and actions in that situation. After a week, you will have a number of these entries, and you can start to see a pattern. The more you do this, the easier it becomes to be aware in the midst of an emotional response. That’s when you can start regulating, learning not only to process the unhelpful emotions but also to become comfortable with the discomfort they bring.

Dual awareness

is the integration of internal circumstances (experiences, thoughts, emotions, and responses) and external ones (an objective reading of the situation and what it calls for). We are integrating two important things — the awareness of our own emotions, assumptions, and reactive habits, especially under pressure, and the nature of the situation we are facing. By taking a moment to take stock of ourselves and the situation, we better understand not only our true motivations and intentions, but also what the situation calls for, and how our habits and tendencies will serve us in this moment. This makes it possible to observe yourself while in action — and then match your responses to the demands of the moment.

After I noticed this, I started paying attention to people I know who are not so successful at getting what they want. And, sure enough, they were not good at recovering quickly from disappointments. They spent time beating themselves up, blaming others or circumstances, thinking about all they lost or could lose, or asking, “Why did this happen to me?” They let the problem turn into self-doubt.

Great athletes know that they can’t waste time like that. A pro golfer makes a bad shot and has just a few minutes to pull themselves together as they walk to their ball so that their next shot isn’t as bad or even worse.

A pitcher who throws a bad pitch but doesn’t have time to moan and groan about it. They must bounce back within seconds and prepare to throw the next pitch. In a sport like volleyball or pickleball, an athlete has just split seconds to recover and receive what’s coming at them.

Don’t just shake it off

A friend of mine trained in Aikido years ago. She had to take a test to earn her black belt, and part of the test was a “randori, ” meaning three other students would attack freestyle all at once. Yikes! Of course, she was taught strategies to handle this, but she told me that a big part of her training was learning to recover instantly whenever she made a mistake. If she didn’t, the next attacker would come in and nail her!

But the idea was not to just “shake it off.” She said, “If you made a bad throw, the key was to dig deeper at that moment, to call up even more energy and more determination, to let that mistake bring in even more power.”

Successful entrepreneurs don’t just “shake it off” and move on. Like the Aikido example, they use that mistake or setback to get stronger and smarter. They spend the time they have learning from the problem. Then they take those lessons learned and apply them. Focusing on the lessons versus the problem leads to more self-confidence rather than more self-doubt. You’re reinforcing that you can learn and improve and that you’ll know how to handle this situation better because you now have a new tool or more wisdom in your toolbox.

Money likes speed

In business, you’ve typically got more time than a split second to recover from a problem, and there isn’t some guy in the wings waiting to nail you if you blow a presentation or lose an important client. Usually, you have hours, if not days, to figure out what to do next.

Unlike a racket ball player or being in a randori, you usually have time to think it through before your next play. Still, successful people don’t waste a lot of time. They recover very quickly, whether they have to or not. One of my mentors always told me, “Money likes speed.”

This isn’t to say that you can’t rant and rave for a few minutes. In fact, if I let myself have a few minutes of feeling totally angry or upset, it helps clear the air and my head. But I don’t let myself stay there. I move as quickly as I can to figure out the lesson this problem offers me. Then I’ve trained myself to ask two questions: “Okay, so how will this make me stronger and better? And what is my best response right now?”

The startup world is in disarray as I write this, and the economic outlook is not great. Many companies are performing mass layoffs, scaling back on initiatives and rethinking their entire approach to sales and marketing. It won’t always be this way — it’s a cycle — but that doesn’t make it much easier while you’re going through it. The big question every marketer seems to have is, “What can we do?”

Start with these five startup marketing moves. They make a great foundation for any marketing strategy, even in the best of times, but they’re particularly prudent in the worst. Implement these, and when the cycle comes back around, you just may find yourself head and shoulders above your competitors.

1. Talk to your customers!

When in doubt, talk to your customers. What are they going through, what do they need, and what do they anticipate happening over the next three, six, 12 months? What’s troubling them may be news to you, and what’s troubling you may not matter to them at all. Here are a few questions to get the conversation going:

• How are things now compared to this time a year ago?
• Are you looking to spend more, less or about the same in this area?
• What’s your biggest challenge right now?
• What do you think the biggest challenge will be in six months? 12?
• What would make you buy this thing or upgrade your account?
• What would keep you from spending money on this?
• What are we doing that you particularly like? That you don’t?

Use these customer interviews to shape your marketing.

2. Create frictionless buying experiences

The best customer experiences remove everything that stands in the way between the customer and making a purchase. “Frictionless” is always a good target, but uncertain times like these are when you need to look for over-the-top ways to remove friction.

A few ideas to get your gears turning:

• Build a migration tool that enables customers to switch their data from competitors to you.
• Offer something incredible for free or at a massive discount to get people in the door — your lowest tier plan, onboarding, shipping, a managed service, etc. Hubspot did this incredibly well during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Show the product or pricing, and put the control in the buyer’s hands.
• Do the work for customers — create templates, packages, widgets or something similar that they would normally have to invest time and energy into.

Through this, you can turn a nasty landscape into a great opportunity for both you and your customers.

3. Communicate clearly and consistently

The companies that are present are the ones that are remembered. This is especially true in times of uncertainty, volatility and crisis. The caveat is that you cannot simply repeat what everyone else is saying. You must lead.

Take a stance on a topic, flesh out your positioning and messaging, and communicate it. If there’s so much volatility that you don’t yet know what your position is or don’t have the data to make a decision, share that. Bring people into the loop. Become the go-to brand or thought leader. Getting all eyes on you creates significant leverage for your sales and marketing.

4. Bet bigger where you can

A knee-jerk reaction in uncertain times is to cut back, but think about it: All of your competitors are cutting back. This is the perfect time to double down on what’s working. You can increase the gap between yourself and your competitors. Then whenever the cycle rights itself, you’ll be so far ahead with so much momentum, no one will be able to catch you.

You still need to be responsible with your resources. If you can invest actual dollars into projects and channels that are already working or that you know your customers need, great. If you don’t have the money, invest your time.

Ask leaders how they will respond to a crisis or a massive new opportunity, and they often will tell you they already know what to do. This is surprising because most crises and opportunities have unexpected elements. A high-powered executive whom we coach once told us, “In any crisis, I come out of the gate fast and take action. I go over, under, or through any wall in my way. With my people, I lead from the front.” To be sure, that approach has the benefit of decisiveness, but it offers a narrow path, especially in high-stakes situations. What happens when such leaders run into obstacles they can’t muscle their way through?

Another leader we coached had a different approach. He was an incredible delegator with legendary calm. This worked well until a crisis surfaced and his team started feeling lost and overwhelmed. He stayed steady, confident in his default style, telling people, “Don’t worry, I have confidence that you’ll figure it out.” They didn’t figure it out, team members began fighting with one another, and within months the company lost its market-leading position.

In our work coaching and advising senior leaders, we have found that when faced with unfamiliar or risky situations, leaders often rely on their familiar playbook. They act instinctively, falling back on behavior and postures that worked for them before. But should their operating environment experience a discontinuity, reflexes—which may still be right at times—can no longer be counted on. To be effective, leaders need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to act in the very moments when they are needed most.

Few leadership roles come with a treasure map showing a direct line to where X marks the spot. That’s why the ability to generate multiple pathways to a desired destination is crucial to success. Whether it’s chasing a strategy that could drive 10x growth in a business, facing a potentially catastrophic threat, or guiding a team through uncharted territory, great leaders generate options so that when an opportunity arises or a crisis hits, they can pivot in real time and make the optimal move.

Our experience shows that leaders’ success depends on their ability to MOVE—that is, to be mindfully alert to priorities, to generate options so that they always have several ways to win, to validate their own vantage point, and to engage with stakeholders to ensure that they are along for the ride. (We lay out this framework in our book, Real-Time Leadership.To gauge your ability to MOVE, take our self-assessment at RealTimeLeadershipInstitute.com.) In this article, we examine the crucial second step of our model. Specifically, we look at four common leadership approaches and the scenarios in which each can be most helpful, and we introduce a process for navigating the options in real time.

The Four Stances

Dozens of research studies spearheaded by American psychologists Charles “Rick” Snyder and Shane J. Lopez demonstrate how people’s capacity to reach their desired goals can be increased by conceiving multiple possible pathways. Most people assume that success at a task is a question of perseverance or willpower. But Snyder and Lopez show that willpower must be coupled with “way power” to drive successful outcomes. Their research suggests that ideally you will have four or more options or pathways for achieving your goals (external priorities). It also demonstrates the importance of determining who you want to be as a leader in terms of your character strengths and values (internal priorities) and how you can best relate to others (interpersonal priorities).

Building on this work, we have developed an approach, called the “four stances,” to help leaders generate options for interpersonal communication. Think how tennis players nearly instantly shift their stance to make an optimal response to a ball hurtling over the net. The core concept for our approach is rooted in evolutionary psychology and how our basic reflexes (fight, flight, and so on) automatically deploy under dangerous or novel circumstances. In the more evolved world of leadership, the four stances help leaders identify and access more interpersonal options. The stances are:

• Lean In. Take an active stance on resolving an issue. Actions in this stance include deciding, directing, guiding, challenging, and confronting.
• Lean Back. Take an analytical stance to observe, collect, and understand data. Actions include analyzing, asking questions, and possibly delaying decisions.
• Lean With. Take a collaborative stance, focusing on caring and connecting. Actions include empathizing, encouraging, and coaching.
• Don’t Lean. Whereas a Lean Back posture involves observing and analyzing, Don’t Lean is about being still and disciplining yourself to create space for a new solution to bubble up from your subconscious. This stance also serves to calm you if your emotions have been triggered. Actions include contemplating, visualizing, and settling through diaphragmatic breathing.

To win in any leadership moment, great leaders need to develop and be able to access all four stances. To illustrate, let’s consider one of our clients, Isobel, a newly appointed president of a major business line at a tech company.

Isobel was in trouble and called us in. She was at loggerheads with the firm’s mercurial CEO, who had a tendency to be unreliable—contradicting himself, changing positions, and often making promises the company couldn’t deliver on.

“I’m getting a bad reputation for being aggressive at board meetings,” she told us at our first two-on-one coaching session. “I just tell the truth—someone needs to—but I’m the one getting dinged.”

As we talked, we identified a clear gap between her own and others’ perceptions. Leaning In—way in—was her default stance. As a former lawyer, she was a world-class debater, and her impact was far more powerful than she realized. It was clear she needed to overcome her reflexive behavior and find other viable ways to win. We described the four stances and asked her to consider alternatives to her default approach.

“But I need to be authentic,” she countered.

“Of course,” we responded, “but you can use other stances while still being true to yourself.”

We went through the stances one by one. In situations in which Lean In was the best choice, she saw that she could be more skillful by better calibrating the intensity of her remarks. If she could learn to Lean Back and not rush into conflict, she could slow down her reactions and be more strategic about when she would engage. If she applied Don’t Lean, she could take a moment to breathe, which could help her neutralize her activation by the CEO and keep a clear head. We were all surprised that asking about Lean With was what pivoted Isobel into a new way of operating. Drawing on Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson’s groundbreaking work on psychological safety, we asked, “What if your job at the board meeting was to make the CEO and directors feel safe?”

Isobel immediately embraced that approach, which appealed to her protective side. She spontaneously started thinking through the implications. Supporting the CEO would probably help him calm down and make the meetings less painful for everyone. In the Lean With stance, she could also tolerate his contradictions by understanding that his first reaction wasn’t always his final word. She decided that she would enthusiastically support his comments when they were in alignment with the executive committee’s assessment and refrain from reflexively challenging him when he veered off course, unless the board was close to a vote on that recommendation. After adopting this approach, her reputation with the board skyrocketed. She became known as a leader who made peace rather than war.

Putting the Process to Work

How can you adapt the four stances without an executive coach? We recommend a five-step process for addressing major opportunities and crises, whether they play out in the moment or over the long term. It will enable you to choose your way forward rather than being propelled by reflex.

Identify your default stance.

Rank how comfortable you are working with others in each stance. This simple exercise is often all our clients need to identify their default stance, but if there’s any doubt, reflect on feedback you’ve been given, such as a 360-degree review. You may think of yourself as a Lean With leader because you favor decisions based on consensus—but is that accurate? When you have power as a leader, people rarely tell you the truth about how you come across. Be honest with yourself. 

Reflect on high-stakes situations.

Is the stance you take under stress different from your default stance? Think back to instances when you were able to pivot in the moment if your default stance wasn’t leading to the desired result and compare those moments with times when you stubbornly stuck with a failing approach. What held you back from moving to a different option? Habit? Panic? How can you build on experiences when you’ve done well while avoiding mistakes?

Determine the optimal stance on the basis of whom you are interacting with.

Most leaders we work with are familiar with the Golden Rule of treating others as you would like to be treated. But the best leaders we have worked with employ the Platinum Rule—treating others as they would like to be treated, which may be different from what the leader would want in their shoes. Imagine an introvert suddenly interrupted by an extrovert who means to be helpful by offering a pep talk. Or, conversely, an extrovert in need of encouragement who ends up feeling ignored by an introvert whose intention is to offer the gift of space and time to think. To live by the Platinum Rule, become a keen observer of other people and yourself. Notice body language, tone of voice, eye contact, and reactions to what you do and how you move.

Make a plan.

When an interpersonal issue arises, make space in real time to figure out how to handle it. This beat in time may last only a matter of seconds, but the point is to pause and get clarity on your intention so that you can be deliberate in your reaction. How do you want to relate, right now? Recognize that your default stance will be pulling at you—but remember that you have the option to choose a different one. We all need to dial back on some stances and develop others.

Even if you aren’t in a situation where you must think on your feet, you can use the four stances to unlock options and create a plan in advance. Suppose you need to communicate a change in strategic direction to your team, such as a shift from a major cost-transformation effort toward a growth strategy. First, Lean In and come up with a list of options for how you might best get people on board. When you think you are finished, Lean Back and be even more objective. Ask yourself, “What else would align the team?” Then Lean With by consulting others about what they think the options are for you to create a trusting and positive climate in which the change will be best received. And then Don’t Lean and see if anything else pops into your mind. Put the issue on the back burner for a moment and let your subconscious go to work.

Look for signs that it’s time to pivot.

To create the impact you want, you need to be aware of any negative effects that a given stance is having on the people around you. This will be your signal that it’s time to adopt a new one. If Lean In is your default (as it is for many leaders), recognize that doing so too often—or too hard—can shut others down, especially when you are in a position of authority. In meetings, pay attention to how much you’re speaking compared with others. Automated transcription software can provide data showing whether your voice is (or is not) the dominant one in the room. Most leaders are surprised by how much they need to switch to Leaning Back or Leaning With. Focus on listening with the goal of understanding. Consciously catch yourself not only when you’re jumping into the conversation but also when you stop listening carefully and start thinking about your response. After someone has finished speaking, take three breaths before you reply.

If you get an IRS notice — official correspondence will only come through the mail — you should respond promptly with the requested documentation like bank statements or donation letters from charities.

Typically, if your taxes are under review, the IRS will first request more information by mail. For instance, more than three out of four of the agency’s tax reviews in 2021 were conducted by mail rather than in person.

You may also benefit from an audit. Over 17,000 of the 983,000 tax returns reviewed in 2021 resulted in additional refunds to Americans.

Here are the most common reasons the IRS may audit you.

Missing income

If you’re a gig worker or contractor and don’t include income from those jobs, the IRS will notice the missing income. In most cases, the agency gets copies of the 1099 forms from companies that you worked for. The IRS uses that information to compare with your return. If it doesn’t match up, that will trigger a review.

Too-high deductions

Certain deductions can be inflated, so the IRS keeps an eye on those. For example, it’s easier to overstate charitable donations because the agency doesn’t receive documentation on your contribution from the nonprofit.

But the IRS depends on statistical algorithms to determine if your deductions make sense based on your total income. If those deductions are too high, the agency may ask for documentation, such as a letter from the charity showing your contribution, to support your deduction.

Foreign accounts

You might need to report a foreign financial account — say, a bank account, brokerage, or mutual fund — when you file your federal taxes.

You must file Form 8938 if the total value of your foreign assets is more than $50,000) for single taxpayers or those married filing jointly) or $100,000 for joint filers on the last day of the tax year. You also must file if the total value of your foreign assets is more than $75,000 for single taxpayers or those married filing jointly) or $150,000 (for joint filers) at any point during the tax year, according to the IRS.

High earners

Those who make more than $1 million are more likely to get audited by the IRS.

For example, the IRS reviewed 0.2% of all individual tax returns for tax year 2019. That rate tripled to 0.6% for taxpayers reporting $1 million to under $5 million, 1.0% for taxpayers reporting $5 million to under $10 million, and 2.0% for taxpayers reporting $10 million and more in income.

Child dependent

Only one person can claim a child as a dependent, even if the parents don’t file taxes together. This can be even more complicated if another adult, such as a grandparent or older sibling, also helps support the child.

Today’s macroeconomic environment is marked by high inflation, low consumer confidence, abysmal stock market performance and rising interest rates. Few sectors of the economy are exempt from the current malaise, and discretionary spending by consumers and businesses alike is at an all-time low.

In times like these, it’s natural for entrepreneurs to focus on surviving rather than thriving. But recessions can actually be fertile ground for companies that are prepared to seize opportunity. Here are four ways entrepreneurs can take advantage of a recession to achieve massive growth:

1. Look for white space in the market

In a recession, many companies trim their product lines and focus on their core offerings. This creates opportunities for companies that are able to identify and fill gaps in the market.

For instance, in September, Facebook shuttered Novi, its digital wallet. The move comes as no surprise. Facebook is facing big challenges in maintaining both user and investor confidence amidst a slowdown in growth, all while its metaverse dreams flounder. But the death of Novi opens up an opportunity for a new entrant to provide a digital wallet. In fact, a phoenix has already risen from the ashes: A Web3 wallet, Martian, raised a $3 million pre-seed following Facebook’s announcement.

Just as Novi aimed to provide a simple way to store digital currencies and make payments, Martian is said to “allow users to hold, store, and use multiple digital assets.” The key difference is that Martian is being built on top of open-source technology, rather than Facebook’s centralized infrastructure.

In another example from the Web3 world, the FTX exchange famously collapsed, leaving thousands of users looking for other trading solutions. Yuriy Sorokin, the CEO of 3Commas, explains in an article that, amidst this volatility, their “goal remains the same as always: to meet the needs of every crypto investor by providing industry-leading services and professional-grade tools.”

Rather than suffer from an industry downturn, Sorokin found an opportunity to double down. These kinds of opportunities are everywhere in a recession. As incumbent companies focus on their core offerings, new entrants can swoop in and provide the missing piece of the puzzle. In another example, while Ford is reducing the production of its trucks and SUVs, Tesla is gearing up to mass produce its Cybertruck.

2. Attract top talent

From Google to Facebook to Uber, many of the most successful tech companies have announced layoffs this year. While this is devastating news for the employees who are impacted, it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs who are looking to attract top talent.

In a recession, it’s not just big companies that are making layoffs. Small businesses are cutting back as well. But as employees at all levels find themselves out of work, they’ll be looking for opportunities that offer both security and upside potential. For entrepreneurs, this presents a golden opportunity to attract the best and the brightest to their team.

Some recruiters have already started to take advantage of the current climate. As Reuters reports, following layoffs at Google and Apple, Stack Overflow more than doubled its headcount. Stack Overflow isn’t alone, as a survey of startup tech executives found that more than 40% of them boosted their hiring plans in the first half of 2022.

If you’re an entrepreneur, now is the time to start thinking about how you can attract top talent to your company.

Gregg Berhalter coached the U.S. men’s soccer team in the 2022 FIFA World Cup, where they achieved a memorable victory over Iran before losing to the Netherlands. Berhalter, who was a professional soccer player himself for 17 years, has coached in Europe and the U.S., and for the past four years, he’s been the head coach of the U.S. national team.

In the past couple of weeks, he’s been under another kind of spotlight. Berhalter’s decision to limit the playing time of one of his young players prompted the player’s parents to threaten to expose an incident from more than three decades ago in which Berhalter got into a physical fight with his girlfriend at the time, who later become his wife. Berhalter and his wife issued a statement in which he expressed his regret for his action at the time and his cooperation with a U.S. Soccer investigation into the matter.

Berhalter sat down with HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius for our video series “The New World of Work.” In addition to the controversy, he discussed:

• Leadership lessons he’s learned through coaching teams of highly competitive individuals who may not be used to working together and who are vying for limited starting positions.
• How players can stay focused amidst the noise and distractions that come with playing sports at such a high level. (It starts by not looking for validation on social media.)
• The differences between talent and character—and how to capitalize on both.

“The New World of Work” explores how top-tier executives see the future and how their companies are trying to set themselves up for success. Each week, Ignatius talks to a top leader on LinkedIn Live — previous interviews included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. He also shares an inside look at these conversations —and solicits questions for future discussions — in a newsletter just for HBR subscribers. If you’re a subscriber, you can sign up here.

ADI IGNATIUS:

I’m really glad you’re doing this. I want to start with the controversy. What are you feeling about this? What have you learned from all of this?

GREGG BERHALTER:

I think it’s sadness. Our entire family is saddened by these events. It’s something we want to move forward from. As we said in the statement, it was something that we didn’t hide from back then, and we weren’t prepared to hide from it now, and that’s why we issued this statement. Actually, the events of that night 31 years ago and the lessons learned from that basically set the foundation for our relationship moving forward. It’s a loving relationship, a devoted relationship, and we have four amazing kids to show for.

I think the worst part of it for me is my heart aches for my wife, because it was her story to tell, if she chose to or not. It just really, really saddens me. But it’s moving forward and that’s the way we have to look at it together as a family. The family’s been amazing and has taken it one day at a time and moving forward.

A big reason for doing this show is because I committed to doing it. We committed to doing this before all this stuff happened and I wasn’t going to back down from it, because I said I would do it.

Several years ago, I traveled from New York to Geneva, Switzerland to be the closing keynote speaker for the World Communication Forum. I was excited to have the opportunity to speak with global leaders about how nonnative English speakers can present their ideas — and themselves — with greater clarity and confidence. For my allotted 45-minute time slot, I prepared high-quality research, relatable examples, actionable takeaways from my book on the topic, and ample opportunities for audience engagement.

But then, the conference ran late. Every single presentation and panel prior to mine exceeded its time limit. By the time my closing speaking slot arrived, I had only eight minutes to deliver my 45-minute presentation — a presentation I had flown across the Atlantic Ocean to give.

Here’s what I wanted to do: cry, insist on my full time, and then hop on the next plane back to New York.

Here’s what I did instead: managed my emotions, empathized with the audience’s wants and needs, and delivered an eight-minute presentation that gave them practical tips and tools that they could use immediately.

Here’s how it went: great. Participants shared their appreciation for my adaptability, focus, and my good humor, as well as their gratitude that I didn’t make them late for dinner.

In the moment, I chose servant leadership over self-interest.

The term servant leadership was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf, and refers to a leader who “shares power, puts the needs of others first, and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.” This is in contrast to the traditional leadership model which focuses on the power of one at the “top of the pyramid.”

As public speakers, we can often feel like we’re at the top of the pyramid because we’re at the front of the room. It can be tempting to interpret a presentation as an opportunity to showcase what we know rather than address what the audience wants and needs to know. But that makes it about us, not about them. In contrast, speakers as servant leaders demonstrate self-awareness, empathy, and foresight. Here’s how you can do the same.

What makes a servant leader?

Self-awareness

As soon as I realized that I was going to have to cut almost 80% of the presentation I had been working on for months, I felt myself get flooded with both anger and anxiety. I was angry that other speakers went over their allotted time. I was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to adapt my remarks in time to make them both concise and compelling.

And I also realized that, as a visibly expressive person, I could pass that anger and anxiety on to the audience. Emotions are contagious, and leaders must recognize that their feelings can “infect” others, for better or for worse. Furthermore, the more expressive someone is, the more likely others are to notice that expression, and mimic it.

Unless I wanted an angry and anxious audience, I had to manage my emotions before taking the stage. Chances are, you’ve experienced anxiety (among a host of other emotions) before making a presentation. Leverage that self-awareness to make sure you’re not infecting your audience. One strategy is to “name it to tame it.” Originally developed by Dr. Daniel Siegel, founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, this technique involves noticing and naming how you’re feeling as it’s happening. Identifying your emotions can quickly reduce the stress and anxiety in the brain and the body that that emotion is causing.

You can also ask yourself, “WTF?” (“What the func?”). According to Dr. Susan David, co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital and a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, our emotions serve a function. They’re trying to get our attention, and to remind us of the needs and values that we hold as important to us. When you present, ask yourself what functions those emotions serve. Maybe you feel anxious because you care deeply about accuracy, and you don’t want to get the facts wrong. Perhaps you feel worried because you’re motivated by harmony, and you’re about to say something that could rock the boat.

And, if you’re like most people, you feel anxious speaking in front of people in general because you value excellence (“What if I don’t do a great job?”) or acceptance (“What if they don’t like my ideas?”). Harness your drive towards excellence to practice delivering your presentation aloud to a colleague, and use their feedback to improve it. If you’re concerned about acceptance, practice with a colleague who will play devil’s advocate with you. By practicing how you manage pushback and objections, you’ll gain additional insight into your audience’s concerns, and be better prepared to address them in the moment.

Whatever your hard feelings are, know that they’re pointing you towards something you value — and towards something you can use to become a more audience-centered presenter.

Empathy

If you were to ask me what the most common mistake is that presenters make, I wouldn’t say using filler words or having a boring PowerPoint or not being able to answer tough questions.

I would say that it’s leading with the ideas that they want to talk about rather than being empathetic towards the audience’s hopes and fears.

Presenting with a servant leadership approach flips this model. Rather than prioritizing your own agenda, you put the agenda of the audience ahead of yours. You seek first to understand rather than to be understood. You show curiosity, concern, and compassion for others, even if you have a different experience.

In Geneva, I wanted all 45 minutes of the stage time I was promised. But I knew that fighting for air time would be in service of me, and not in service of the needs of my fidgety, hungry listeners.

So, I prioritized their need to get the most applicable information from my presentation over my desire to tell interesting stories. I told them that I recognized that I was all that was standing between them and dinner, and that I wouldn’t make them late. And I mentioned that I knew that they had been sitting for many hours, and invited them to stand up, walk around, stretch, or do whatever they needed to do while I spoke.

Here’s an exercise you can do to help you develop the empathy you’ll need to present from a servant leadership perspective: Picture a bed — any bed. Let that bed inspire you to ask these servant leadership questions about your audience.

• What gets them out of bed in the morning? In other words, what are they excited about and motivated by? Is it growth? Opportunity? Collaboration? Innovation? That’s one clue to what you should prioritize in your presentation. If this is an internal presentation, you will likely know this because whomever you’re presenting to will have shared these goals in previous meetings, conversations, or emails. For an external audience, you can ask the person convening the meeting, or reach out to a few attendees to ask them by email or via a quick phone call.
• What keeps them up at night? What are they worried about? Is it time? Money? Quality? Headcount? Visibility? Viability? Reputation? Whatever it is, that’s your second clue to what you should prioritize in your presentation. Use the same strategies from above to find the answers to this question, too.

Once you know what’s in the heads and hearts of your audience, design your presentation to address those topics first and foremost. You’ll have your audience’s attention and buy-in because you’ve demonstrated empathy over self-concern.

Foresight

Servant-leaders leverage their experience and intuition to draw lessons from past experiences, to understand the realities of today, and to reasonably predict the consequences of a decision for the future.

Good presenters need to be able to do the same.

As someone who has been a professional speaker and speaking coach for three decades, I knew from past experiences that trying to maintain an audience’s attention, interest, and goodwill beyond the time they were expecting to stay was a losing battle. I also knew this from my experience as an audience member myself — I regularly felt tense and frustrated when I was being asked to pay attention beyond the allotted time.

The reality of that day was that several other speakers who preceded me had exceeded their time. It was now eight minutes before dinner time after a long day. Another reality was that I had 45 minutes of content, but I no longer has 45 minutes to deliver it. I could reasonably predict that if I decided to take more time than we had left, the audience would no longer pay attention. I could also anticipate that if I tried to rush through my content, the audience would feel overwhelmed and confused — and it would undermine my credibility as a speaker. My decision was to give the audience the most important content they needed to know and to get the conference back on track.

It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but my foresight (and hindsight) informed what I needed to do to be of service.

Consider your audience.

As you think about presenting to your audience, ask yourself these questions:

What do I know about their understanding of this topic?

(And if you don’t know, ask someone who does.) If your audience has minimal understanding of your topic, include some foundational education about the topic early in the presentation. Make sure to minimize jargon, in-speak, acronyms, and technical terms that can confuse your listeners. (Remember, it’s not about demonstrating what you understand — it’s about making sure they understand.) If your audience is already educated about and experienced with your topic, then start where they are.

What if you have an audience with mixed knowledge? A presentation for multiple audiences can become confusing, so consider who your primary audience is and gear your presentation towards them. And yet, you still want to be inclusive. Try acknowledging this aloud to the group by saying, “I understand that some of you are new to the field, many of you have been working in the field for a few years, and some of you have decades of experience. I’ll start by defining some basic terms and then we’re going to get into the details they understand. For those of you who are experts, I hope you’ll add your valuable experience and perspectives to the conversation today. (I do this regularly when I am speaking to a group of experts in my own field, and they appreciate being acknowledged and included.)

And that’s why communication is no longer considered a “soft skill” among the world’s top business leaders. Leaders who reach the top do not simply pay lip service to the importance of effective communication. Instead, they study the art in all its forms — writing, speaking, presenting — and constantly strive to improve on those skills.

For example, while Jeff Bezos was building Amazon, he put a premium on writing skills. In the summer of 2004, he surprised his leadership team and banned PowerPoint. He replaced slides with “narratively structured memos” that contained titles and full sentences with verbs and nouns.

Bezos is not alone among top leaders. “You cannot over-invest in communication skills — written and oral skills,” says former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who now serves on Amazon’s board. “If you cannot simplify a message and communicate it compellingly, believe me, you cannot get the masses to follow you.”

During my research for The Bezos Blueprint, I found a number of common tactics top leaders use when communicating with their teams. Here are four to try:

1. Use short words to talk about hard things.

Long, complicated sentences make written ideas hard to understand — they’re mentally draining and demand more concentration. You’ll win more fans if you replace long words and sentences with short ones.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do,” writes Nobel prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He argues that persuasive speakers and writers do everything they can to reduce “cognitive strain.”

Software tools like Grammarly assess writing quality by generating a numerical readability score. The score assigns a grade level to writing samples. For example, a document written for a person with at least an eighth-grade education (the average 13-year-old in the U.S.) is considered “very easy to read.” It does not imply that your writing sounds like an eighth grader wrote it. It simply means that your sophisticated arguments are easy to grasp — and ideas that are easy to understand are more persuasive.

Since writing is a skill, you can sharpen it with practice. Bezos improved as a writer over time. His first Amazon shareholder letter in 1997 registered at a tenth-grade level (comparable to The New York Times). Over the next decade, 85% of his letters were written for an eighth- or ninth-grade level.

For example, in 2007, Bezos explained the benefits of Amazon’s newly introduced Kindle in a paragraph a seventh grader could understand:

If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

Bezos chose short words to talk about hard things. When you make things simple, you’re not dumbing down the content. You’re outsmarting the competition.

2. Choose sticky metaphors to reinforce key concepts. 

A metaphor is a powerful tool that compares abstract ideas to familiar concepts. Metaphors bring people on a journey without ever leaving their seats. Chris Hadfield, a famous Canadian astronaut, is a talented speaker and TED Talks star who tapped into the power of metaphor to describe an indescribable event:

Six seconds before launch, suddenly, this beast starts roaring like a dragon starting to breathe fire. You’re like a little leaf in a hurricane…As those engines light, you feel like you’re in the jaws of an enormous dog that is shaking you and physically pummeling you with power.

Roaring beasts, leaves in a hurricane, the jaws of a dog — these are all concrete ideas to describe an event that few of us will ever experience.

In business, metaphors are shortcuts to communicating complex information in short, catchy phrases. Warren Buffett understands the power of metaphor. If you watch business news or follow the stock market, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “moats and castles” attributed to companies that dominate an industry that’s difficult for competitors to enter. Buffett popularized the phrase at a 1995 Berkshire Hathaway meeting when he said, “The most important thing we do is to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle.”

The castle metaphor is a concise shortcut, a vivid explanation for a complex system of data and information that Buffett and his team use to evaluate potential investments.

When you introduce a new or abstract idea, your audience will automatically search for something familiar to help them make sense of it. Introduce a novel metaphor and beat them to the punch.

3. Humanize data to create value.

The trick to reducing cognitive load and making any data point interesting is to humanize it by placing the number in perspective. Showing them PowerPoint slides with statistics and charts only adds cognitive weight, draining their mental energy.

Any time you introduce numbers, take the extra step to make them engaging, memorable, and, ultimately, persuasive.

For example, by 2025 scientists expect humans to produce 175 zettabytes of data annually, or one trillion gigabytes. It’s simply too big a number for most people to wrap their minds around. But what if I said that if you could store 175 zettabytes of data on DVDs, the disks would circle the earth 222 times? It’s still a big number, but the description is more engaging because it paints a vivid image in your mind’s eye.

Famed astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson once told me that the secret to science communication is to “embed the concept in familiar ground.” In other words, turn data into language mere humans can understand.

One of Tyson’s famous examples of humanizing data occurred in 1997 when NASA launched the Cassini space probe to explore Saturn. Skeptics questioned its $3 billion price tag, and so Tyson appeared on television talk shows to educate the public on the benefits of the mission. But first, he had to deal with the price shock, so he pulled a data comparison out of his rhetorical toolbelt. He explained that the $3 billion would be spread over eight years. He added that Americans spend more on lip balm every year than NASA would spend on the mission over that timeline.

To demonstrate the value of your idea, humanize data and make it relevant to your listeners.