Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged

Who is more engaged and more committed to their work and rates their leaders the highest?

A. People who work in the office

B. People who work remotely

If you picked A, you might be as surprised as the investment firm I worked with recently, which found in reviewing results of a 360-degree feedback process that the answer was, in fact, B.

The team members who were not in the same location with their leaders were more engaged and committed — and rated the same leader higher — than team members sitting right nearby. While the differences were not enormous (a couple of tenths of a point in both categories), they were enough to provoke some interesting speculations as to why this might be happening.

It made perfect sense to me, though. Here is why:

Proximity breeds complacency. I've worked with leaders who sit in the same office with those they manage but go for weeks without having any substantive face-time with them. In fact they may use e-mail as their primary source of communication when they sit less than 50 feet away. It's even worse if they sit in different parts of a building — or all the way on another floor. This is not to say that these leaders are in any way lazy — just that because the possibility of communicating is so easy, it is so often taken for granted.

Absence makes people try harder to connect. When I managed a team of professionals in nine different locations, I made a point of deliberately reaching out to each of them by phone at least once a week, and frequently more often. I'm not an anomaly here. Most leaders I work with make an extra effort to stay connected to those they don't ordinarily run into. They can see that taking even a few minutes to talk about what's happening in their respective worlds before addressing the tasks at hand makes a difference in maintaining the connection with a colleague. What's more, because they have to make an effort to make contact, these leaders can be much more concentrated in their attention to each person and tend to be more conscious of the way they express their authority.

Leaders of virtual teams make a better use of tools. Because leaders of far-flung teams have to use videoconferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, voicemail, and yes, the telephone, to make contact, they become proficient in multiple forms of communication, an advantage in leadership that their traditional counterparts could well develop but not so automatically.

Leaders of far-flung teams maximize the time their teams spend together. Having had to make such an effort to get the team together, these leaders naturally want to make the best use of their precious time. They take care to filter out as many distractions as possible so they can focus on the work to be done together. They also typically spend more than an ordinary work day together, socializing at planned luncheons, dinners, and activities. This level of focused attention is hard to replicate day to day. I've heard from some employees who work near their bosses on teams whose other members work elsewhere that the most time they spend with their leader is when the others come in for such meetings.

None of this is to say that working remotely is better than coming to the office. Or that virtual teams are better than traditional ones. On the contrary, I'm suggesting that they are exactly the same this regard: Someone working in the same office with their leader needs just as much effective communication as someone located in a different office. It's just that, ironically, they're less likely to get it.

Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged

Scott Edinger

Make the Case for Better Quality Data

"It costs ten times as much to complete a unit of simple work when the data are flawed in any way as it does when they're perfect."

This simple rule of thumb provides a point of light on the topic that those of us in the data profession have not done well. We struggle to provide powerful business cases for improving data quality that command attention and focus the effort. Most senior executives are well aware that their data are not up to snuff. But absent a business case, data quality doesn't make the cut among competing priorities.

Of course, true leaders know this is no excuse. Given the growing importance of data to every aspect of their business, they know they must develop an understanding of the costs of poor data quality, shortcomings in the methodology notwithstanding.

These costs include direct but previously hidden costs, more important but intangible costs such as a loss of trust, and lost opportunity costs. This post aims to help leaders assemble an overall picture, starting with costs they can estimate and using these as a platform for understanding the unknown and unknowable costs.

First, develop a keen eye for non-value-added work. Customer billing is a great example. When a customer complains about a billing error, you spend time to research the correction and make good for the customer.

You spend a lot of time and effort, but you are no better off than you would be if you'd billed the customer correctly the first time. You've done a lot of work, but you can't charge extra for your troubles.

Working to find and fix errors is part and parcel of most operational processes, and once they turn a harsh eye on non-value-added work, most leaders can root it out. These costs are estimable. You simply isolate the non-value-added work, count up the people doing it, and apply the right load factors. Alternatively, you can measure the error rate and use the rule of thumb to get a first estimate.

Either way, the results are usually stunning. Even a very low overall error rate of 3% adds nearly 30% non-value-added costs. Numbers such as these make clear that the best way to reduce costs may well be to improve quality.

There is a lot of non-valued-added managerial work as well. It stems from the cold, brutal reality that most managers simply do not use data they don't trust: "These numbers don't look right. Let's verify them before we make this decision." They then work to verify or justify all the numbers.

In principle, one could measure the associated costs, but they pale in comparison to the costs of trying to manage when you don't know what's going on. You can't act quickly; you can't make good decisions; and you can't align people to the work. The lost opportunity costs are unknown and are almost certainly unknowable. Thus, the second key is to acknowledge that Dr. Deming's famous observation — "the most important costs (of quality in manufacturing) are unknown and unknowable" — extend to data as well. And though difficult, you must get your arms around these costs.

Let's go back to the billing example once more, as it also provides good examples of lost opportunity. Customers only complain about billing errors that hurt them, primarily overbilling. But if you're overbilling, you're almost certainly underbilling as well. Since customers don't complain about that, you've lost the opportunity to collect revenue you're due. Worse, these billing errors make it more difficult to build a long-term, trusted relationship with your customers; these lost opportunity costs are probably unknowable.

For many organizations, the most important impact of bad data will hit home with their big data efforts. Quite simply, bad data make everything about big data — from discovering something truly novel in the data, to building a product or service around that discovery, to acquiring needed support, and finally, to monetizing the new product or service — much more difficult. And no one knows how to quantify the costs associated with an industry-changing discovery that you could have made but didn't.

As you're making the case for better quality data in your organization, learn to apply the developing discipline of infonomics. While in everyday language, it is plain enough that poor-quality data are liabilities and high-quality data are assets, they don't appear on the balance sheet. Doug Laney, of Gartner, and others are building a body of practice that supplements today's accounting methods to help address this shortcoming. They're developing valuation models that help quantify both the economic and noneconomic values for data from a variety of perspectives. Pick the one that best suits your circumstance and apply it.

Lastly, recognize that not all data are created equal. Cut the effort down to size by focusing on your most important data, customers, operations, and strategies. Engage the head with solid estimates of the non-value-added work. Engage the heart with stories that bring the unknown and unknowable costs to life.

Mere managers find all of this daunting indeed. True leaders will acknowledge the difficulties but will also see opportunity — opportunity to understand what's really happening; to build support up, down, and sideways; and to launch the data quality program they know their organizations need.

Make the Case for Better Quality Data
Thomas C. Redman

Are you Busy at Work, but Still Bored?

Boredom is surprisingly stressful. And when we're busy, but still bored, it's even more so. How many of us feel this way? I do, and I suspect you might too.

By the looks of it, my own working life should actually be quite exciting. I travel twice a month to such exotic places as Kuala Lumpur, Doha, New York, and Helsinki to teach bright executives. I write books and articles, give interviews for newspapers and radio. I get to meet interesting people from society's upper echelons. I have been lucky enough to win some fairly prestigious awards. I get to spend months living full-time with teams of high performers in such unique environments as elite sports and war hospitals. I have more projects in the pipeline than I can shake a stick at. I am busy. And I am bored.

Unable to shake off my melancholy, I went out on a limb and told my boss. As a huge credit to him, he said: "Fine ... take your sabbatical year and do something completely different". What I suspect he realized is that my boredom stems not from having nothing to do but from having nothing that seems worthwhile doing. We human beings are addicted to meaning, and this kind of existential boredom signals its unhappy retreat. Surely, it shouldn't ever be as if you never existed at all?

The funny thing is, if boredom were due simply to lack of stuff to do it could be eradicated by giving people more to do. Even relatively mundane tasks will help alleviate the feeling of utter uselessness. However, this is only ever likely to work in the short-term if what people are asked to do does not contribute directly to something more meaningful — something bigger than themselves.

Likewise, if boredom were the result of having had too much of a good thing — the novelty has worn off, the sense of excitement has gone — it could be solved by giving people something new to do. This is one way that many people are busy but bored at work, and this type of boredom is particularly acute with high performers and with people who take to tasks quickly but are easily bored by them. There are some obvious fixes — such as job rotation, or a training program to broaden skills, or a larger portfolio of responsibilities — and usually this kind of boredom can be eradicated after awhile.

But how do we fix our working lives when we suffer from the boredom of having more than enough to keep us busy all hours of the day, but nothing that gives us meaning? I was lucky — I had a boss who understood my problem and I had the luxury of a sabbatical, which most people in organizations do not have, to do something completely different.

And so it ultimately seems that the only obvious solution to existential boredom is to give people something more meaningful to do. As any regular reader of this site will have noticed, discussions about the lack of meaning at work are conspicuously frequent. This is the kind of boredom that the philosopher Kierkegaard labeled the root of all evil. In fact, I occasionally ask executives: if your organization disappeared overnight, aside from you and those that depend on you financially, who would actually care about this? Who would be affected by it, and why? There are many variations on these existential questions, and you will no doubt have yours, but their object is always the same: to wake people up to the realization that what they do on an everyday basis actually matters.

Left to your own devices, how might you address this? If meaningful work is too much to ask, why not develop a passion instead? Is it any surprise that many high achievers have "other lives", or a competence in a skill unrelated to their everyday work? For example, in my own line of work, some of the most highly respected business professors are also quite accomplished in other areas. These include a poet (Stanford professor James March), a nun (Boston College professor Jean Bartunek), a blacksmith (New Mexico State University professor David Boje), and a painter (University of Virginia professor Mary Jo Hatch).

To meaninglessness there may be a different solution too — albeit tougher to implement. A clue to it lies in the second paragraph of this article. Take a look at the first word of almost every sentence in that paragraph — you'll find the pattern consists of a conspicuous single letter word. And as Jonathon Sacks explains, it may well be this singular focus that lies at the root of our discontent. If so, the key to a meaningful life — at work and elsewhere — lies in turning our focus from ourselves to "the other". We can do this by focusing on creating opportunities for those we work with to make a little bit of progress everyday, giving them something to feel good about. Perhaps there lies our real challenge?

HBR article: Mark de Rond

For Those Who Want to Lead, Read

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile.

He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of adult Americans," and for the first time in American history, "less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature." Literacy has been improving in countries like India and China, but that literacy may not translate into more or deeper reading.

This is terrible for leadership, where my experience suggests those trends are even more pronounced. Business people seem to be reading less — particularly material unrelated to business. But deep, broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders and can catalyze insight, innovation, empathy, and personal effectiveness.

Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an "inexhaustible interest" in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets "the original systems thinkers," quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week. And history is littered not only with great leaders who were avid readers and writers (remember, Winston Churchill won his Nobel prize in Literature, not Peace), but with business leaders who believed that deep, broad reading cultivated in them the knowledge, habits, and talents to improve their organizations.

The leadership benefits of reading are wide-ranging. Evidence suggests reading can improve intelligence and lead to innovation and insight. Some studies have shown, for example, that reading makes you smarter through "a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge in addition to the abstract reasoning skills." Reading — whether Wikipedia, Michael Lewis, or Aristotle — is one of the quickest ways to acquire and assimilate new information. Many business people claim that reading across fields is good for creativity. And leaders who can sample insights in other fields, such as sociology, the physical sciences, economics, or psychology, and apply them to their organizations are more likely to innovate and prosper.

Reading can also make you more effective in leading others. Reading increases verbal intelligence (PDF), making a leader a more adept and articulate communicator. Reading novels can improve empathy and understanding of social cues, allowing a leader to better work with and understand others — traits that author Anne Kreamer persuasively linked to increased organizational effectiveness, and to pay raises and promotions for the leaders who possessed these qualities. And any business person understands that heightened emotional intelligence will improve his or her leadership and management ability.

Finally, an active literary life can make you more personally effective by keeping you relaxed and improving health. For stressed executives, reading is the best way to relax, as reading for six minutes can reduce stress by 68%, and some studies suggest reading may even fend off Alzheimer's, extending the longevity of the mind.

Reading more can lead to a host of benefits for business people of all stripes, and broad, deep reading can make you a better leader. So how can you get started? Here are a few tips:

• Join a reading group. One of my friends meets bimonthly with a group of colleagues to read classics in philosophy, fiction, history, and other areas. Find a group of friends who will do the same with you.
• Vary your reading. If you're a business person who typically only reads business writing, commit to reading one book this year in three areas outside your comfort zone: a novel, a book of poetry, or a nonfiction piece in science, biography, history, or the arts.
• Apply your reading to your work. Are you struggling with a problem at work? Pick up a book on neuroscience or psychology and see if there are ways in which you can apply the lessons from those fields to your profession.
• Encourage others. After working on a project with colleagues, I'll often send them a book that I think they'll enjoy. Try it out; it might encourage discussion, cross-application of important lessons, and a proliferation of readers in your workplace.
• Read for fun. Not all reading has to be developmental. Read to relax, escape, and put your mind at ease.

Reading has many benefits, but it is underappreciated as an essential component of leadership development. So, where have you seen reading benefit your life? What suggestions would you have for others seeking to grow their leadership through reading?

For Those Who Want to Lead, Read
John Coleman

If You are Looking for a Job, Get Out of Your Own Way

Why do some job hunters give up when they are just in sight of their goals? I've just seen Simon, a client who has been looking for a job for 6 months. Like many people on the market, he started out optimistically but has given up — not officially, mind you, but he's suddenly taken an urgent interest in redecorating his house.

Based on work with scores of clients like Simon, I suggest that there are six types of frustrated job hunters out there. The first type are people who think they know how to get hired, but don't. They have a lack-luster CV in overstuffed with clichés, a poor sense of what the market is looking for, and pay weak attention to the messages (both explicit and otherwise) they broadcast. If you've ever said to a friend, "All this job hunting advice is insultingly basic," this could be you — and you could be ensuring that you stay stuck in first gear. While some candidates say that job hunting and interview preparation are all common sense, plenty of employers simultaneously complain that even in a recession many applicants exclude themselves from a job conversation from the start.

Habit and pride are powerful forces, demonstrated by the category of people who have got their own way of doing things, thank you. Putting in the same dull interview performance repeatedly is very evidently an adopted strategy. Defending a resume that simply fails to get the right message across comes from the same school of thought. Often a radical rethink is the answer in that case. For instance, I came across a great test for a resume recently. You have the document with you at a party. A stranger asks you to tear off and give him the top three inches of the first page. Would that stranger have enough information to spend the rest of the evening telling people what you have to offer?

Then there are people who are too angry to change strategy. Blogs are full of these people who express irritation at any advice which is vaguely upbeat or optimistic — for them, discussing the glass as half full shows a naive blindness to the harsh realities of the economy. To sustain this anger, job hunts must be long and painful for these people. And yet their dominant mindset seems to be, "This tactic isn't working too well, but I will do it a couple of hundred times more to be sure." These people may start to believe that nothing can work, even holding on to rejection letters to prove to themselves that the market is too tough, too impenetrable, too random. Yet in fact, people in this position often only need to change a few small things to get very different outcomes.

Don't forget the people who engage in activities that look like job hunting. These candidates know they need to network towards decision makers, but they spend time drawing up contact lists and don't pick up the phone. They know you should be out there talking to people, but it's much easier to email resumes into the ether. They know it won't land you a great job, but sitting in front of a screen looks like work, and allows them to tick off all kinds of checklists. Even though candidates know that conversations with decision makers are most likely to shorten job search times, they still hide behind screens. They use LinkedIn as a reason to avoid human contact, not a means to encourage it. They pretend that social interaction in the job search process is an ultra-extravert activity, not a learned technique that can be adapted even by the most introverted.

Finally, there are the job hunters who know what to do, but don't do it. Most candidates looking for professional positions know that they're supposed to do a focused, multi-strategy job search. So why don't they do it? Yes, it's hard work, but the real hesitation comes from wandering outside your comfort zone, facing the risk that someone will say no, or you'll have to ask someone to do something they don't want to do.

Fortunately, I think these people all have the potential to become the sixth type of job hunter: people who learn how to do the right thing late in the day. You can make classic mistakes in the first month of your search: you can fire off random messages to random organizations, unburden your soul to key decision makers (rather than approaching them when you have an intact, single-focus request), and hit the market before you have got their redundancy story out of their system. But they recover.

By insisting that job searching is logical, simple and hardly worth thinking about, we don't think about it at all. We act as if it's as simple as making an online purchase. Yet it's an activity which is all about influencing, communicating a brand, eliciting support, and making connections — skills that can take half a lifetime to perfect. It's about persuading people you don't know very well to do something risky. Less like filing a patent request, more like launching a new product. Less like applying for a postal vote, and much more like getting yourself elected.

Here's an important reality check: employers have a strong sense that the way you look for a job is the way you will act on the job.

So, if you're the sort of person that says "I can organise a job search in my sleep," think again. A good job search means thinking ahead about how you are going to use your time most effectively, and knowing when to use which strategies. Yes, challenge advice and adapt it to your needs. Do things your own way, but make sure you include the things which are most effective, even if they are the least comfortable.

If you reinvent the wheel for yourself, it could be some time before you discover that a circle is the best shape.

If You're Looking for a Job, Get Out of Your Own Way
John Lees

Are You Sure You are Not a Bad Boss?

Conjure up the term "bad boss" and what comes to mind? Scenes of red-faced people berating subordinates in public. Smarmy souls taking credit for other people's work or saying one thing and doing another. Cutting remarks. Yelling. Feel free to continue — we're sure you can.

This is iconic bad boss behavior — defining in our minds the very essence of what bad bosses do. When we see these things portrayed on TV or in the movies, we can't help laughing, even while we're thinking "Whew! I don't do those things; I'm not a bad boss."

But, not so fast. Our research suggests that the offensive actions so often associated with being a bad boss make up less than 20% of the behavior that actually defines the worst bosses.

When we analyzed the behavior of 30,000 managers, as seen through the eyes of some 300,000 of their peers, direct reports, and bosses on 360-degree evaluations, we found that the sins of the bad boss are far more often those of omission, not commission. That is, bad bosses are defined not so much by any appalling things they do as by certain critical things they don't do.

We came to this conclusion from two directions: First in this group of 30,000, we focused on the 11,000 leaders who received the lowest aggregate scores on their 360 feedback reports — the bottom 1% and the bottom 10% — to see if we could spot any early warning signals that might have predicted their lack of success. Then we analyzed a group of executives who had recently been terminated, similarly combing through the data looking for any clues that would explain why they had failed. By combining conclusions from these two groups, we were able to identify 10 fatal flaws that contribute to a leader's failure&#8212 none of which appears in the feedback of the effective leaders.

Here's the list in order, from the most to the least fatal:

1. Failure to inspire, owing to a lack of energy and enthusiasm. Again and again failed leaders were described by their colleagues as unenthusiastic and passive. This was in fact the most noticeable of all their failings.
2. Acceptance of mediocre performance in place of excellent results. The poorest leaders did not set stretch goals, inadvertently encouraging mediocre performance by letting people coast along doing less work, less well than their counterparts working for better managers.
3. A lack of clear vision and direction. Poor leaders have a murky view of the future, don't know precisely what direction to take, and are (not surprisingly) unwilling to communicate about the future, leaving their subordinates with no clear path forward.
4. An inability to collaborate and be a team player. Poor leaders avoid their peers, act independently, and fail to develop positive relations with colleagues. The worst of them view work as a competition and their colleagues as opponents.
5. Failure to walk the talk. Saying one thing and doing another is the fastest way to lose the trust of all your colleagues. The worst offenders here also pose a wider threat as dangerous role models — creating the risk that their organizations will degenerate if others behave as they do.
6. Failure to improve and learn from mistakes. Arrogance and complacency combine in the poorest leaders as they rise, causing them to come to the dangerous conclusion that they've reached a stage in their careers where development is no longer required. Closely connected to this failing is an inability to learn from mistakes, leaving these unfortunates to repeat the same ones over and over.
7. An inability to lead change or innovate owing to a resistance to new ideas. Whether stemming from a lack of imagination or simply too closed a mind-set, this flaw manifests itself as a failure to take suggestions from subordinates or peers.
8. A failure to develop others. Leaders who were not concerned about helping their direct reports develop and were not seen as coaches or mentors were highly likely to fail. Primarily focused on themselves, they were not concerned about the longer-term success of their employees or their department.
9. Inept interpersonal skills. These are the leaders who are rude, talk down, yell, and belittle either out of positive malice or out of boorish insensitivity. But even these failings often are manifested in things these poor leaders don't do. Included in this group are the people who don't listen, don't ask good questions, don't reach out to others, and don't praise or otherwise reinforce good behavior and success.
10. Displays of bad judgment that leads to poor decisions. Here at the bottom are the leaders who lead the troops over the cliff by deciding to do the wrong things.

While any one of these flaws can be fatal enough to tank a leader, our research shows they are commonly displayed in groups of three or four, as one problem creates another. But the point here is that fully eight out of ten of these flaws stem from things leaders don't do, and even some of the most obvious bad behavior is often perceived by colleagues, bosses, and subordinates as failures to act more than as obvious mistakes. 

This makes these flaws difficult to see — they're not the kinds of flaws we instantly recognize, either in others or in ourselves. And they're not the kinds of things people call out, since there's nothing explicit that draws attention.

Worse, they're the sorts of failing people observe only after weeks and months of working together, which means if you're one of those unfortunate few heading toward disaster, you could be traveling down this road right now with no hint that anything's amiss. No hint, that is, unless you take the time to consider not just what kind of a leader you are, but what kind you're not.

Are You Sure You're Not a Bad Boss?
Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman