leadership and managing people

Leadership and Managing People

Included in this collection:

Collective Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 2by Linda A . Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback

The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 12by David A . Garvin and Joshua D . Margolis

Get the Boss to Buy In . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 25by Susan J . Ashford and James Detert

Looking for quick, practical management advice? Sign up for our FREE enewsletter, Management Tip of the Day.

hbr.org

As a thank you from

Harvard Business Review.

ARTICLE COLLECTION

https://email.hbr.org/preference-center

HBR.ORG JUNE 2014REPRINT R1406G

Collective GeniusNo longer casting themselves as solo visionaries, smart leaders are rewriting the rules of innovation.by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback

http://hbr.orghttp://hbr.org/search/R1406G

3 Harvard Business ReviewJune 2014

COLLECTIVEGENIUS

No longer casting themselves as solo visionaries, smart leaders are rewriting the rules of innovation.by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback

FOR ARTICLE REPRINTS CALL 800-988-0886 OR 617-783-7500, OR VISIT HBR.ORG

June 2014Harvard Business Review4

http://hbr.org

oogles astonishing success in its first de-cade now seems to have been almost in-evitable. But step in-side its systems infra-structure group, and you quickly learn oth-erwise. The compa-nys meteoric growth

depended in large part on its ability to innovate and scale up its infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. Bill Coughran, as a senior vice president of engineer-ing, led the group from 2003 to 2011. His 1,000-person organization built Googles engine room, the sys-tems and equipment that allow us all to use Google and its many services 24/7. We were doing work that no one else in the world was doing, he says. So when a problem happened, we couldnt just go out and buy a solution. We had to create it.

Coughran joined Google in 2003, just five years after its founding. By then it had already reinvented the way it handled web search and data storage mul-tiple times. His group was using Google File System (GFS) to store the massive amount of data required to support Google searches. Given Googles fero-cious appetite for growth, Coughran knew that GFSonce a groundbreaking innovationwould have to be replaced within a couple of years. The number of searches was growing dramatically, and Google was adding Gmail and other applications that needed not just more storage but storage of a kind different from what GFS had been optimized to handle.

Building the next-generation systemand the next one, and the one after thatwas the job of the systems infrastructure group. It had to create the new engine room, in-house, while simultane-ously refining the current one. Because this was Coughrans top priorityand given that he had led the storied Bell Labs and had a PhD in computer science from Stanford and degrees in mathemat-ics from Caltechone might expect that he would first focus on developing a technical solution for Googles storage problems and then lead his group through its implementation.

But thats not how Coughran proceeded. To him, there was a bigger problem, a perennial challenge that many leaders inevitably come to contemplate: How do I build an organization capable of innovat-ing continually over time? Coughran knew that the role of a leader of innovation is not to set a vision and

motivate others to follow it. Its to create a commu-nity that is willing and able to generate new ideas.

The Link Between Leadership and Innovation Few companies have the resources of Google at their disposal, but most of them can relate to Coughrans fundamental challenge. In 2005 we joined together to study exceptional leaders of innovationhow they think, what they do, and who they are. We found them across the globein Silicon Valley, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Korea. And we explored businesses as varied as filmmaking, e-commerce, auto manufacturing, professional ser-vices, and luxury goods. We didnt think the world needed more research on leaders or on innovation. Rather, we wanted to study a topic much less un-derstood: the role of the leader in creating a more innovative organization.

The executives we studied are a diverse lot, but they all think about leadership in a similar way. They have moved away from the conventional view. Direction-setting leadership can work well when the solution to a problem is known and straight-forward. But if the problem calls for a truly original response, no one can decide in advance what that response should be. By definition, then, leading innovation cannot be about creating and selling a vision to people and then somehow inspiring them to execute it. So common is the notion of the leader as visionary that many of the people we studied had been forced to rethink and recast their roles before their organizations could become truly and consis-tently innovative.

In the way they behave and structure the orga-nizations where talented people work, leaders can draw out the slices of genius in each individual and assemble them into innovations that represent col-lective genius. The question is not How do I make innovation happen? but, rather, How do I set the stage for it to happen?

Why Innovation Requires a Different Kind of LeadershipThe rhetoric of innovation is often about fun and creativity, but the reality is that innovation is hard work and can be a very taxing, uncomfortable pro-cess, both emotionally and intellectually. In fact, in-novative problem solving may feel unnatural and even dangerous in many organizations if their lead-ers are not skilled.

COLLECTIVE GENIUS

5 Harvard Business ReviewJune 2014 COPYRIGHT 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Innovation usually emerges when diverse people collaborate to generate a wide-ranging portfolio of ideas, which they then refine and even evolve into new ideas through give-and-take and often-heated debates. Thus collaboration should involve passion-ate disagreement. Yet the friction of clashing ideas may be hard to bear. It can create tension and stressparticularly in groups of talented, energetic individu-als who may feel as if there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Often organizations try to discourage or minimize differences, but that only stifles the free flow of ideas and rich discussion that innovation needs. Leaders must manage this tension to create an environment supportive enough that people are will-ing to share their genius, but confrontational enough to improve ideas and spark new thinking.

Innovation also requires trial and error. Innova-tive groups act rather than plan their way forward, and solutions emerge that are usually different from anything anyone anticipated. Most organiza-tions and the people in them prefer to move sys-tematically toward a desired outcome. They set a goal, make a plan, assign responsibilities, work through the steps, and track progress until the goal is achieved. Isnt that approach just good manage-ment? Not when it comes to innovation. Leaders of innovation create environments that strike the right balance between the need for improvisation and the realities of performance.

Finally, creating something novel and useful in-volves moving beyond either-or thinking to both-and thinking. But this also can be challenging. All too often, leaders and their groups solve problems through domination or compromise, resulting in less-than-inventive solutions. Innovation requires integrating ideascombining option A and option B, even if they once seemed mutually exclusiveto create a new and better option. It also requires that leaders be patient enough to let great ideas from

people in all parts of the organization develop. At the same time, they must ensure that a sense of urgency and clear parameters allow integrative deci-sion making to actually occur.

Fostering a Willingness to InnovateTo build willingness, leaders must create communi-ties that share a sense of purpose, values, and rules of engagement.

In 2009, when Luca de Meo joined Volkswagen AG as the head of marketing communication (by the end of 2010 he had become the CMO of the VW Group), his task was to transform a fragmented mar-keting department into an innovation powerhouse. De Meo was energized by the ambitious goal that VWs CEO, Martin Winterkorn, had set just a year earlier: to surpass Toyota and General Motors and be leading the industry within a decade. This goal was about some-thing deeper than being number one: It was about leveraging a near-century of VW history to create cars that made the world betterby delighting customers, limiting environmental impact, and pioneering what it means to be a 21st-century automaker.

De Meos mandate was to build a marketing de-partment that could support this audacious ambi-tion. Although the Volkswa gen brand was strong in many markets, de Meo knew it could be stron-ger. Moreover, the brand was not unified. It was perceived differently across the world, especially in emerging markets, where VW was looking for

Idea in BriefTHE CHALLENGECompetitiveness depends in great part on the ability to innovate. The perennial challenge, then, is to build an organization capable of innovating again and again.

THE KEYTraditional, direction-setting leadership can work well when the solution to a problem is known and straightforward. But if the problem calls for a truly original response, no one can decide in advance what that response should be. So the role of a leader of innovation is not to set a vision and motivate others to follow it. Its to create a community that is willing and able to innovate.

THE APPROACHFostering willingness means creating communities that have both a sense of purpose and shared values and rules of engagement that are designed to encourage collaboration, discovery-driven learning, and integrative decision making. Fostering ability requires developing three organizational capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolution.

he rhetoric of innovation is often about fun

and creativity, but the reality is that innovation can be very taxing and uncomfortable.



http://hbr.org

dramatic growth. A former board chairman of Fiat and CEO of Alfa Romeo, de Meo knew, as he puts it, that you build a brand from the inside out. VWs brand elementsinnovation, responsibility, and valuehad to be more than rhetoric. The company and its people had to live them day in and day out.

VW operated in 154 markets, and its marketing was highly decentralized. Most of the companys marketers had worked only within their home coun-tries and had had limited opportunity or incentive to interact with their colleagues in other countries or at corporate headquarters in Wolfsburg. The silos and the highly linear processes the marketers followed to do their work discouraged them from speaking with one voice, de Meo told us.

Perhaps more concerning, de Meo found that at VW innovation was considered the province solely of engineers in product development, not of people in marketinga common problem we see in engineer-ing- and product-focused firms. De Meo believed that everyone at a world-class company has to be an innovator, a strategist, a global thinker. If his team was to create a powerful global brand, the market-ers had to feel like citizens of a cohesive, collabora-tive community. Facing a desperate need for new capabilities and a ticking clock, de Meo nonetheless focused first on building that sense of community. Without it, his experience had taught him, people would be unwilling to innovate.

Purpose. One of his first steps was to create Marketing Worx!, a series of two-day codesign labs that brought together people, many of whom had rarely interacted before, to work on marketing prob-lems. De Meo believed that the mutual trust and re-spect needed to create a community could come only from interaction and dialogue. He wanted his mar-keters to grow familiar with one another and with the innovation process, from collaborating to experi-menting to integrating ideas. But more than that, he wanted to put his people in new situations that would force them out of old behaviors and catalyze new pat-terns of interacting. There would be no PowerPoint presentations and few seated activities. Rather, the labs would be a place for prototyping, testing, and arguing until the best solutions came to life. Some at-tendees were enthusiastic, but many were skeptical. De Meo had to push them into participating.

Purpose is not what a group does but who is in it or why it exists. Its about a collective identity. Purpose makes people willing to take the risks and do the hard work inherent in innovation. At

The Hard Work of Innovation

ABILITYOrganizational willingness is necessary but not sufficient for innovation to flourish. The group also needs three specific capabilities.

CREATIVE ABRASIONTHE ABILITY TO

GENERATE IDEAS THROUGH DISCOURSE

AND DEBATE

CREATIVE RESOLUTION

THE ABILITY TO MAKE INTEGRATIVE DECISIONS

THAT COMBINE DISPARATE OR EVEN

OPPOSING IDEAS

CREATIVE AGILITY

THE ABILITY TO TEST AND EXPERIMENT THROUGH QUICK

PURSUIT, REFLECTION, AND ADJUSTMENT

PURPOSEWHY WE EXIST

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

HOW WE INTERACT WITH ONE ANOTHER

AND THINK ABOUT PROBLEMS

WILLINGNESSInnovative organizations must nurture a sense of communitywhich rests on three elements.

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

The role of an innovation leader is to create a community that is willing and able to innovate over time.

SHAREDVALUES

WHAT WE AGREE IS IMPORTANT

COLLECTIVE GENIUS


Marketing Worx!, de Meo encouraged his team members to reflect on what being part of VW meant to them. They didnt hold back: They said they were proud of the companys history as the maker of the

peoples car, of providing the freedom of mobility, of VWs role in driving technological and economic progress, of its environmental focus (in the 1970s, long before sustainability became a buzzword, the company had established a department for envi-ronmental protection). They were excited to be part of an effort to build the industrys leading brand.

He also encouraged the team to think about the departments reason for being. Why are we all here? de Meo would ask. A group purpose soon emerged: Marketings job was to reflect VWs pow-erful legacy and build a brand that spoke with one voice around the world. This purpose lifted its work from necessary but not crucial to strategic. As de Meo told the group, Brand is not fluff. There is very concrete evidence of what great brands do. Its real business, not just magic. At VW, which was trying to revolutionize its industry, de Meos team would have to play a central role.

Shared values. To form a community, members have to agree on whats important. By shaping the groups priorities and choices, values influence indi-vidual and collective thought and action. They vary from community to community, but we found four that truly innovative organizations all embrace: bold ambition, responsibility to the community, collabo-ration, and learning.

At VW, de Meo encouraged marketers to use the three components of the VW brandinnovation, re-sponsibility, and valueto guide their work. At one Marketing Worx! session he encouraged a team to flesh out a sustainability initiative ultimately called Think Blue, a concept that unified VWs previous efforts and focused its future ones. An expression of responsibility, Think Blue built on both the rich heritage that de Meos team cared about deeply and VWs bold ambition for social, economic, and tech-nological progress. At the end of Marketing Worx! all the participants signed a manifesto declaring per-sonal commitment to Think Blue.

Rules of engagement. Together with purpose and values, rules of engagement keep members fo-cused on whats imperative, discourage unproduc-tive behaviors, and encourage activities that foster innovation. After the success of Marketing Worx!, de Meo turned to changing the way his group did its on-going work. Getting talented people to function as a

team is far from easy, but Marketing Worx! served as a positive shock, he says, pushing people together. The tensions inherent in collaboration may not only slow down progress but even threaten to tear a cre-ative community apart. Rules of engagement can help control those destructive forcesfor example, by keeping conflict focused on ideas rather than per-sonalities. In every organization we studied, we saw leaders foster and enforce the rules, even becoming directive when the need arose.

Generally, the rules of engagement fall into two categories. The first is how people interact, and those rules call for mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual influencethe belief that everyone in the community has a voice and that even the inexperi-enced and less tenured should be allowed to influ-ence decisions. The second category is how people think, and those rules call for everyone to question everything, be data-driven, and see the whole.

Consider how the VW marketing group re-vamped its approach to rolling out a new car. It created cross-functional launch teams responsible for developing integrated marketing strategies for the entire life cycle of each new model. No longer would marketing operate like a bucket brigade, with separate teams respon-sible for each phase of a cars maturity.

One team, for in-stance, focused on a new model in the up! series of small cars. It reported directly to de Meo, who set high expectations but with-held specific direction. The team had never experienced that kind of autonomy and re-sponsibility before. De Meo made it clear that the members were to take risks and play out their own ideas, according to the rules for how we think. Keeping them on track were key performance indicators that the marketers had defined in the codesign labs.

After some time, when the team was unable to reach conclusions without the formal authority of a senior manager, de Meo named a young leader from outside the group to act as the first among peers and facilitate the decision-making process. The up!

ules of engagement can help control

the tensions inherent in collaboration, which sometimes threaten to tear a creative community apart.



http://hbr.org

team delivered: Its 130-page plan was probably one of the most integrated launch strategies done re-cently at Volkswagen, according to de Meo.

Like all the other leaders we studied, de Meo took a comprehensive approach. He transformed VWs marketing department culture and capabilitiesde-veloping cross-functional teams, establishing cen-ters of excellence, instituting quarterly roundtables to connect marketers globally. Those steps may not sound particularly revolutionary. What was unique about de Meos approach was that he used such seem-ingly mundane changes not as ends in themselves but as mechanisms with which to build a community.

De Meos efforts are clearly having an impact. Marketing began to challenge other functional ar-eas at VW and now plays a catalytic role throughout the company worldwide. Think Blue grew into a guiding principle for the whole organization, with

employees in other functions and more than 40 countries launching their own innovative Think Blue projects. Some 600 such projects were in the works by 2013. One, the Think Blue Factoryun-dertaken by the manufacturing functionaimed to reduce environmental impacts by 25% at every VW plant by 2018. Blue marketing, as de Meo de-scribes it, is truly at the heart of the organization.

Building the Ability to Innovate Willingness is necessary but not sufficient for inno-vation to flourish. Companies also need the ability to innovate. That requires developing three orga-nizational capabilities: for collaboration, creative abrasion, or the ability to generate ideas through discourse and debate; for discovery-driven learn-ing, creative agility, or the ability to test and ex-periment through quick pursuit, reflection, and adjustment; and for integrative decision making, creative resolution, or the ability to make decisions that combine disparate and sometimes even oppos-ing ideas. To see how this works, lets return to Bill Coughran at Google.

As Coughran began talking with his staff about the need for a new storage system, two self- organizing groups of engineers emerged, coalescing around two promising alternatives: One wanted to add systems on top of GFS that would handle the new storage needs. This was the Big Table team. The other believed that Googles new storage require-ments were so different from those of search alone that GFS had to be replaced, not adapted. This was the Build from Scratch team.

Coughran managed the two teams in a manner that he describes as deliberately loose. He gave as much freedom as possible to his engineers, all the while keeping the reins in enough so that we didnt degenerate into chaos. He and his engineering di-rectorsa brain trust of tech-savvy managers and top engineers that he had assembled to help him lead the groupconducted regular review meetings

to force teams to assess their progress relative to their goals. He avoided giving direction and instead tried to ask penetrating questions to inject tension and intellectual reality and to drive debate.

Coughran set certain clear expectations: that each team would move forward through rigorous testing of its ideas, and that its members would respond to challenges and disagreement with objective data. He rarely had to say Dont do thatwords that he believes destroy talent and

Paradoxes of Innovation

In our research we identified six innovation paradoxes. The challenge for leaders is to help the organization continually recalibrate between: affirming the individualand the group supportingand confrontingfostering experimentation and learningand performancepromoting improvisationand structure showing patienceand urgencyencouraging bottom-up initiativeand intervening top-down

Leaders who stay on the right side of these paradoxes will never unleash the full genius of their people; they will have few or no ideas to harness. Those who stay on the left side will have lots of ideas and options to work with, but wont be able to turn them into new and useful solutions; instead, conflict and chaos will reign. The correct position at any moment will depend on the circumstances. But the goal will always be to take whatever position enables the collaboration, experimentation, and integration necessary for innovation.

The leaders we studied understood how to adapt their behavior according to the situation at hand. Conventional notions of leadership, discomfort with conflict or loss of control, and personal preferences can all limit a leaders willingness to shift strategically across the paradoxes. Many leaders find it hard not to favor one extreme over the other. Continually recalibrating requires superb judgment, courage, and persistence.

Finding solutions that are truly new and useful is not easy, in part because the process of innovation is so messy and full of the tension embodied in each of these paradoxes.

At the heart of innovative problem solving is the need to both unleash individual slices of genius and harness them into collective genius. Unleashing talent is essential to developing promising ideas and options. Harnessing talent is essential to shaping those ideas and options and selecting new and useful solutions from among them.

COLLECTIVE GENIUS


motivation. Nor did he answer questions directly, in spite of his expertise. You want to challenge people to think for themselves, he says.

Creative abrasion. Coughran made sure that the review meetings were forums where ideas were put to the test. Honest discourse and rigorous debate were the goals. He encouraged both teams to grapple seriously with the apparent limits of their systemsscalability for the Build from Scratch team, and ser-vicing an ever-growing number of applications with different systems requirements for the Big Table team. He wanted both teams to question their as-sumptions. Coughran was supportive, but he knew that if creative abrasion was to occur, he had to inject some confrontation into the system. He explains:

You dont want an organization that just salutes and does whatever you say. You want an organization that argues with you.

The two ingredients necessary for creative abra-sion are intellectual diversity and intellectual con-flict. Coughran encouraged diversity by allowing teams with fundamentally different approaches to move forward. He ensured that conflict was produc-tive through his intense questions and challenges. He and the other leaders decided to remain delib-erately vague. He realized that 90% of the value of having the engineers speak with me was the fact that they did not know what I was going to ask, he says. If they knew I was going to ask 12 specific questions, theyd be less likely to ask themselves broadly, What are we doing?

Coughran was also sensitive to the drawbacks of bringing the two teams together for debate too early or too often. If one team was building the per-fect left-handed thing, he says, and the other was building the perfect right-handed thing, and you put them in the same room, you might not get anywhere, even with a respected mediator.

Creative agility. Coughran expected the mem-bers of both teams to proceed through the three phases of creative agility that virtually all our lead-ers encourage. First, he pushed them to pursue new ideas quickly and proactively with multiple experiments. That involved some planning, but he placed much greater emphasis on gathering data about how their ideas actually worked. Second, he expected them to reflect on and learn from the out-comes of those experiments. Third, he expected them to adjust their plans and actions on the basis of the results and to repeat the cycle incorporating this new knowledgeuntil a solution ultimately

emerged or it became clear that the basic approach was not going to work.

Creative resolution. After two years, Coughran had to admit that Build from Scratch was not stable enough for Googles needs, and Big Table couldnt handle the growing array of Google apps, including YouTube. However, he believed that the Big Ta-ble approach was more viable in the short term.

His conclusion was a tough call. It was easy to make a decision when something failed com-pletely or succeeded completely, Coughran says. The ambiguous cases were the hardest to deal with, and that was where a lot of the complexity of our systems showed up. We were con-stantly considering and reconsidering our systems. Something that worked well at one scale would likely fail at another. There were few certainties, and since Google was pretty unique in terms of computing re-sources, there were no precedents.

Coughran enlisted Kathy Polizzi, his engineering director for storage and a member of his brain trust, to help him persuade the Build from Scratch team that its system had major limitations. The two encour-aged the team to test its approach and bump upas Coughran loves to sayagainst reality. Polizzi pressed the team to bring its system to a semi- operational state and to run performance and scalability tests. She set a time frame within which it would have to elimi-nate concerns about its systems ability to handle the massive scale at which Google operates. She also put team members in joint meetings with the operations teams that were responsible for keeping Google up and runningthe people whose pagers summoned them in the middle of the night when something went wrong. As Polizzi says, those people put a human face on the problems, issues, and priorities that any new storage system would have to deal with. Finally, she says, the team started to see the limitations of the system they were building.

Ultimately, the storage stack developed by the Big Table team was implemented throughout the company. But Coughran confronted his initial chal-lenge anew: This system would be able to handle Googles storage requirements for only a few years.

reative agility involves quickly pursuing

multiple experiments, learning from the outcomes, and then adjusting plans.



http://hbr.org

So he asked the two most senior engineers in the systems infrastructure group to work on a next- generation system that would eventually replace it. He invited the Build from Scratch team to join the effort, and indeed, some of the ideas developed by its members played key roles in the next-generation systemfor example, by allowing it to handle a dra-matically larger set of data objects and files than had ever before been possible, and by safeguarding data in the event of drive or server failure.

By taking the course he did and avoiding a top-down decision, Coughran helped the company de-velop the best solution to its near-term problem. He also made progress on creating the disruptive new storage system Google would need for the future. But to him, the most important concern was foster-ing a community that would be capable of innovat-ing time and time again. I never wanted to pull rank

and tell a team to stop working on something they were passionate about, he says. We hire innovators, and if I were to forbid a motivated team to do some-thing, it really would misuse their talents.

Consider how the approach of a more conven-tional leader would have stifled innovation in this situation. Preserving harmony by muffling creative disagreement would have limited the number of good options considered. Exercising discipline and control by marching the group to a predetermined solution would have discouraged the trial-and-error efforts that led to the best short- and long-term an-swers. And making choices early and often would have prematurely shut down work that led to the most creative and thoughtful solutions.

Developing Leaders Who Can Create Collective GeniusIf the point is to foster organizations that are willing and able to innovate over the long haul, then tomor-rows leaders of innovation must be identified and developed today. Consider: At Google, Coughran be-lieved that the problem he faced was more a people challenge than a technical one. For all Googles riches, it suffered from a dearth of innovation leaders. To him, individuals who understood that leadership is about creating collective genius were absolutely crucial to expanding and sustaining the innovation capacity of his organization.

Great leaders of innovation, as weve said, see their role not as take-charge direction setters but as creators of a context in which others make innova-tion happen. That shift in understanding is critical to fostering the next generation of innovation lead-ers and must permeate the organization and its tal-ent management practices, because those with the potential to lead innovation, we have found, are of-ten invisible to current systems. We should let them take roles that put their skills on display and provide them with the experiences and the tools they need to both unleash and harness the individual slices of genius around them. HBR Reprint R1406G

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business

School and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. Greg Brandeau, the longtime head of technology at Pixar, is a former EVP and CTO for the Walt Disney Studios. Emily Truelove is a researcher and a PhD candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Kent Lineback has spent more than 25 years as a manager and an executive. They are the authors of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

Are You an Innovation Leader?Start by asking yourself these questions about your organization:

Do members of my organization feel part of a community?

Does my organization have a shared purposeone that binds us together and compels us all to do the hard work of innovation?

Does it live by rules of engagement supportive of a set of core values: bold ambition, responsibility to the community, collaboration, and learning?

Do we have the ability to generate ideas through candid discourse and debate?

Do we have the ability to test ideas through quick pursuit, reflection, and adaptation?

Do we have the ability to make integrative decisions, rather than compromising or letting some groups dominate?

Ask yourself some questions about your own leadership mind-set and practices:

Do I think my primary job as a leader is to create a context in which my team can innovate?

Am I comfortable serving as the stage setter as opposed to the visionary leading from the front?

Do I have the courage and patience required to amplify differences, even when discussion becomes heated and when ambiguity and complexity loom?

If your answer to any of these questions is no or even I dont know, its probably time to look again at your own leadership role and at the leadership potential that may be hiding in your organization. Many of the remarkable innovation leaders we studied had to encourage others to rethink their ideas about leadership and to recognize that operating in the ways weve described is far from easyespecially for those who may be passionate geniuses themselves.

11Harvard Business Review June 2014

COLLECTIVE GENIUS

June 2014

http://hbr.org/search/R1406G

HBR.ORG JANUARYFEBRUARY 2015 REPRINT R1501D

SPOTLIGHT ON SOFT SKILLS YOU CANT NEGLECT

The Art of Giving and Receiving Adviceby David A. Garvin and Joshua D. Margolis

http://hbr.orghttp://hbr.org/search/R1501D

SPOTLIGHT ARTWORK Mauro Perucchetti Jelly Baby 1, 2, 3, 2004 Urethane, 51.5" x 21.6" x 13"

S


The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice

expert advice often creates an implicit debt that recipients will want to repay.

But advice seekers and givers must clear signifi-cant hurdles, such as a deeply ingrained tendency to prefer their own opinions, irrespective of their merit, and the fact that careful listening is hard, time- consuming work. The whole interaction is a subtle and intricate art. On both sides it requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness, restraint, diplomacy, and patience. The process can derail in many ways, and getting it wrong can have damaging conse-quencesmisunderstanding and frustration, deci-sion gridlock, subpar solutions, frayed relationships, and thwarted personal developmentwith substan-tial costs to individuals and their organizations.

Because these essential skills are assumed to emerge organically, theyre rarely taught; but weve found that they can be learned and applied to great effect. So weve drawn on extensive research (ours and others) to identify the most common obstacles and some practical guidelines for getting past them. Though heavily disguised, the examples in this ar-ticle are based on interviewees real experiences in

by David A. Garvin and Joshua D. Margolis

EEKING AND GIVING advice are central to effective leadership and de-cision making. Yet managers seldom view them as practical skills they can learn and improve. Receiving guid-

ance is often seen as the passive con-sumption of wisdom. And advising is

typically treated as a matter of good judgmentyou either have it or you dontrather than a competency to be mastered.

When the exchange is done well, people on both sides of the table benefit. Those who are truly open to guidance (and not just looking for validation) de-velop better solutions to problems than they would have on their own. They add nuance and texture to their thinkingand, research shows, they can overcome cognitive biases, self-serving rationales, and other flaws in their logic. Those who give ad-vice effectively wield soft influencethey shape important decisions while empowering others to act. As engaged listeners, they can also learn a lot from the problems that people bring them. And the rule of reciprocity is a powerful binding force: Providing

David A. Garvin is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Joshua D. Margolis is the James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration at HBS and the faculty chair of the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning.

SJanuaryFebruary 2015Harvard Business Review14


http://hbr.org

a range of settings. Of course, advice takes different forms in different circumstances. (See the sidebar

Know Whats Called For.) Coaching and mentoring are covered extensively elsewhere, so here we focus on situations that involve big, risky, or emotionally charged decisionsthose in which you might con-sult with someone multiple timesbecause leaders struggle with such decisions and must learn to han-dle them well.

Why This Is Harder Than It LooksWhether youre receiving or giving advice, flawed logic and limited information complicate the pro-cess. Advice seekers must identify their blind spots, recognize when and how to ask for guidance, draw useful insights from the right people, and overcome an inevitable defensiveness about their own views. Advisers, too, face myriad challenges as they try to interpret messy situations and provide guidance on seemingly intractable problems.

Below we describe the biggest obstacles on both sides. One reason theyre so common is that theyre basicpeople often dont realize theyre getting tripped upso you may find it helpful to do a reality check of your behavior against these lists.

When youre seeking advice, watch for these obstacles:

Thinking you already have the answers. As people are deciding whether they need help, they often have difficulty assessing their own competence and place too much faith in their intuition. The result is overconfidence and a tendency to default to solo decision making on the basis of prior knowledge and assumptions. A related tendency is to ask for advice when ones real goal is to gain validation or praise. People do this when they strongly believe theyve solved the problem but still want to check the box with bosses or peers. Or they do it when they have lurking doubts about a solution but dread the time and effort it would take to do better. Its a dangerous game to playthey risk alienating their advisers when it becomes evident (and it will) that theyre requesting guidance just for show or to avoid additional work.

Choosing the wrong advisers. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, decision makers stack the deck by turning to like-minded advisers. In a study of CEOs, for example, those at compa-nies with poor financial performance (measured by market-to-book value) were more likely than

those at high-performing ones to seek advice from executives in the same industry and with a similar functional background. The result was limited stra-tegic changeless product-market and geographic diversification. Whats more, several field stud-ies confirm that advice seekers are more receptive to guidance from friends or other likable people. Though friendship, accessibility, and nonthreaten-ing personalities all impart high levels of comfort and trust, they have no relation to the quality or thoughtfulness of the advice.

Seekers also fail to think creatively enough about the expertise they needwhich fields might bring valuable insight, who has solved a similar problem before, whose knowledge is most relevant, whose experience is the best fitor cast a wide enough net to find it. Unfortunately, to make sense of a messy, volatile world, leaders often shoehorn peo-ple into tidy categories that dont reflect their full range of wisdom. Thats a mistake President John F. Kennedy made leading up to the Bay of Pigs in-vasion. He didnt consult Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg for advice, assuming that Goldberg lacked a background in military matters. But as the jour-nalist David Halberstam describes in The Best and

Know Whats Called ForBy understanding the different types of advice, seekers can make requests with greater precisionand advisers can give more-targeted guidance.

We present the types separately here for clarity, but they frequently overlap in practice. For instance, one-off requests for guidance often segue into requests for counsel. And weve included coaching and mentoring, even though they arent discussed in the article, in order to round out the picture of advice seeking and giving.

COPYRIGHT 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.15 Harvard Business ReviewJanuaryFebruary 2015


the Brightest, Goldberg had run guerrilla operations during World War II, so he understood that guerril-las were no good at all in confronting regular units. He explained to the president: Whenever we used them like that, wed always lose all our people.But you didnt think of thatand you put me in the category of just a Secretary of Labor.

Defining the problem poorly. Seekers frequently have trouble reaching a mutual under-standing with their adviserssometimes because of imprecise or ineffective communication, and some-times because of cognitive or emotional blinders. When communicating ineffectively, they may tell

a lengthy, blow-by-blow story that causes listeners to tune out, lose focus, and perhaps misidentify the core of the problem that needs solving. Or they may omit details that reflect badly on them but are central to seeing the big picture. Many seekers also take for granted background essentials (often about past in-cidents or organizational politics) that their advisers dont know. Or they may misdefine the problem by placing arbitrary boundaries around it and exclud-ing important data, which skews their own and their advisers assessments (a pitfall that the decision-making experts Max Bazerman and Dolly Chugh call bounded awareness).

Idea in BriefTHE PROBLEMLeaders must learn how to give and receive advice effectively to do their jobs well, but the exchange is hard work on both sides of the table. Doing it badly can lead to flawed decisions, strained relationships, and stalled careers.

THE SOLUTIONFortunately, you can master the art of advice by adopting a framework of best practices, drawn from a substantial body of research.

THE BENEFITSBy seeking advice from the right peopleand in the right waysyou can develop smarter solutions to problems, deepen your thinking, and sharpen your decision making. And by becoming a better adviser, youll extend your influence and learn from the people who come to you for guidance.

TYPE ACTIVITIES DESIRED OUTCOMES EXAMPLES

Discrete advice

Exploring options for a single decision

Recommendations in favor of or against specific options

Which of my managers should I promote?

Where should we build the new factoryin China, Brazil, or Eastern Europe?

Counsel Providing guidance on how to approach a complex or unfamiliar situation

A framework or process for understanding and navigating the situation

How should I approach price negotiations with our overseas supplier?

How should I handle my domineering supervisor?

Coaching Enhancing skills, self-awareness, and self-management

Task proficiency; personal and professional development

How can I run more-effective meetings?

How can I work more collaboratively with peers?

Mentoring Providing opportunities, guidance, and protection to aid career success

A relationship dedicated to building and sustaining professional and personal effectiveness and to career advancement

Should I accept the position in Mumbai?

How can I get more exposure for my project?

JanuaryFebruary 2015Harvard Business Review16


http://hbr.org

Discounting advice. Once seekers have advice in hand, their most common mistake is to undervalue or dismiss it. This is a strong, recurrent finding in or-ganizational behavior researchso its pretty safe to assume that youre at least susceptible to this prob-lem. For one thing, egocentric bias often clouds seekers visioneven when people lack expertise, they put more stock in their own opinions than in others views. For another, seekers understand their own logic but may be unaware of advisers reasoning. Or they may become so anchored in their preformed judgments that they cant adjust their thinking when they receive feedback to the contrary. Over time, dis-counting advice can damage important relationships. Advisers notice when theyre repeatedly not being heard, and it generates mistrust and ill will.

Individuals in powerful positions are the worst of-fenders. According to one experimental study, they feel competitive when they receive advice from ex-perts, which inflates their confidence and leads them to dismiss what the experts are telling them. High-power participants in the study ignored almost two-thirds of the advice they received. Other participants (the control and low-power groups) ignored advice about half as often.

Misjudging the quality of advice. Most seekers who accept advice have trouble distinguishing the good from the bad. Research shows that they value advice more if it comes from a confident source, even though confidence doesnt signal validity. Conversely, seekers tend to assume that advice is off-base when it veers from the norm or comes from people with whom theyve had frequent discord. (Experimental studies show that neither indicates poor quality.) Seekers also dont embrace advice when advisers disagree among themselves. And they fail to com-pensate sufficiently for distorted advice that stems from conflicts of interest, even when their advisers have acknowledged the conflicts and the potential for self-serving motives.

When youre giving advice, be on the lookout for these tendencies:

Overstepping boundaries. Though many peo-ple give unsolicited advice, its usually considered intrusive and seldom followed. (That stands to rea-son. We all know what its like to be on the receiving end of helpful suggestions we havent invited and dont really want.) Another way advisers overstep is to chime in when theyre not qualified to do so. It can give them an ego boost in the short runbut at

a significant cost. People who liberally offer base-less advice quickly lose credibility and influence in their organizations. Even a single instance of bad ad-vice normally leads to a rapid decline in an advisers standing.

Misdiagnosing the problem. Advisers must gather intelligence to develop a clearer picture of the problem to be solved. Here they can slip up in a couple of ways, as Edgar Schein, of MITs Sloan School, has pointed out. First, they may define the problem prematurely because they think they see similarities with challenges theyve faced. (Often those analogies dont hold up when the full scope of the problem is revealed.) Second, they sometimes forget that seekers are self-interested parties who maydeliberately or notpresent partial or biased accounts. Taking such accounts at face value leads to inaccurate assessments and flawed advice. All this is compounded by an irrational but compelling fear of looking incompetent: Advisers tend to avoid asking

Advice on Advising

William Lee is one of the foremost intellectual

property attorneys in the United

States, a former co-managing partner at WilmerHale, and the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Harvard Universitys governing board, so he gives a lot of advice for a living. Because hes earned a reputation for doing it so skillfully, Garvin and Margolis included him in their research sample for this article. HBR spoke with Lee about his approach to advising and what hes learned with experience.

17 Harvard Business ReviewJanuaryFebruary 2015


HBR: How would you describe your advising style?Lee: I try to understand what the other person faces and provide guidance that makes sense from that perspective. My firm represents large clients such as Apple and Intel, but when were advising insti-tutions like that, were also advising in-dividuals who work there. They have the companys best interests in mind, but they have a boss to think about, their own goals, their personal lives, their ups and downs. Our advice has to work for them as well as for the institution. If we have something to say that the client CEO wont want to hear, we take the heat. If were saying ex-actly what everyone wants to hear, we let an inside person report that.

How do you approach less formal advis-ingfor instance, when youre mentoring someone? Mentoring is the most impor-tant kind of advising, in my view. You have to really get to know the person. I like to begin with a simple, open-ended question: How are things? That lets you know whats on the other persons mind,

so you can better understand what the is-sue is and how you might help.

What do you look for in an adviser? Someone who is open and candid. Someone who gives advice that people can act on. (Otherwise its like telling them, Get taller or Get smarter.) Also, someone who recognizes that every situation is different. I advise clients. I also advise folks about their careers. A lot depends on the circumstances a person faces. When I was younger, and often on the receiving end, I was prob-ably more inclined to believe that theres one way to think about problems. Over time Ive realized its more complicated than that. Ive learned how important listening is.

Listening is a big theme in this articlebut how do you home in on the right de-tails? At times the conversation has to be guided. Asking Have you thought of the issue this way? or How would so-and-so think about the problem? can turn the conversation in a different direction.

The hardest thing to resist is simply cut-ting off a wandering narrative and giving the advice. Its much better to ask ques-tions that allow people to reach conclu-sions themselves. If they do, theyll feel much more confident in the process and the choices they make.

What were some of your toughest experi-ences? About 25 years ago I was the lead trial lawyer in a major case. My second chair was younger, a fine lawyer and a great person. We worked well together. When he came up for partner, we both knew that the decision was largely up to me. He had great presence, but his skills werent the best match for the direction the firm was headed. Over lunch one day, we talked openly about it. I told him hed be enormously successful in a dif-ferent environment, but not if he stayed with the firm. He went somewhere else and really thrived there. It was the most difficult conversation Ive ever had at work, and he later told me the same. But he also said it was the best conversation hes ever had.

Advice on Advising

ULLA

PUG

GAA

RD

basic, probing questions because they dont want to jeopardize their expert status.

Offering self-centered guidance. Advisers often frame their guidance as how I would respond if I were in your shoes. This approach is both off-putting and ineffective, because theyre clearly not thinking about how the seeker feels, perceives the situation, and understands the choices aheadthe kinds of insights that lead to empathic understand-ing and useful recommendations. Advisers may also share personal stories and experiences that fail the

doability test because they simply dont accord with the seekers level of power, negotiating skill, organi-zational savvy, or situational constraints.

Communicating advice poorly. Several mis-takes fall under this rubric. Advisers may provide vague recommendations that can easily be miscon-strued. (For example, Align behaviors with goals might refer to unit goals or company goals, and its not at all clear what behaviors are in question.) Or,

when providing specialized expertise, they may use jargon or other inaccessible language. They may also overwhelm seekers with too many ideas, alterna-tives, action plans, perspectives, or interpretations. Nothing causes paralysis like a laundry list of options with no explicit guidance on where to start or how to work through and winnow the list.

Mishandling the aftermath. Though the final decision is not theirs to make, many advisers take of-fense when their guidance isnt accepted wholesale, curtailing further discussion. This has both short- and long-term costs: in the moment, lost opportunities to provide a general sense of direction even if some of the seekers choices are not to their liking; and over time, a growing distance between adviser and seeker that may limit the trust and intimacy that lie at the heart of effective advising. The reality is that recipi-ents rarely take one persons advice and run with it. More often they modify the advice, combine it with feedback from others, or reject it altogetherand



http://hbr.org

advisers often fail to treat these responses as valuable input in an ongoing conversation.

Best Practices for Seeking and Giving AdviceAs a leader and a decision maker, you must give as good as you get, and vice versabut how can you overcome all those obstacles? Weve identified some guidelines by combining lessons from academic re-search with the practical wisdom of experts on the groundpeople we interviewed because they are known for their skill at advising. Although they come from a variety of fields (technology, financial services, law, politics, educational administration, consulting, and not for profit), we found striking parallels in their behavior throughout the five stages of advising. (See the sidebar Guidelines for Each Stage of Advising.)

Stage 1: Finding the right fit. Each request for advice is unique, reflecting a distinctive combina-tion of circumstances, personalities, and events. But

because time is often of the essence, you wont want to search anew for potential advisers in every situa-tion. Put together a personal board in advance, in-cluding people you value not only for their judgment and their ability to keep confidences but also for their diverse strengths, experiences, and points of view. All of them should have your best interests at heart and a track record of being really willing to tell you what you dont want to hear. Try to find at least one person you can turn to in a variety of situations, be-cause that adviser will develop a multifaceted sense of the problems you face and your natural proclivities and biases.

When selecting an adviser (or multiple advisers) from that board for your immediate needs, deter-mine how youd like her to help and why. (See the sidebar What Advisers Can Do.) Sometimes youll want a sounding boardsomeone who can listen carefully to help clarify and sharpen your thinking. At other times youll want to test a path or an alternative

Guidelines for Each Stage of Advising

FINDING THE RIGHT FIT

IF YOURE A SEEKER Have a preexisting board of diverse,

complementary advisers Determine what type of advice you

are seeking Choose one or more advisers who

fit your current needs

IF YOURE AN ADVISER Assess fit: Do you have the time,

expertise, and experience to help? Identify other potential sources of

guidance

DEVELOPING A SHARED UNDERSTANDING

IF YOURE A SEEKER Provide just enough information

about your problem Acknowledge uncomfortable truths

IF YOURE AN ADVISER Set the stage for effective advising: Allow

ample time, and choose a place thats free from distractions and ensures privacy

Listen actively and suspend judgment Ask open-ended questions to broaden

understanding and then shift to more- detailed probes

Once you have a complete picture of the problem, agree on what type of advice is needed

CRAFTING ALTERNATIVES

IF YOURE A SEEKER Contribute actively to the development

of options Ask questions to understand: - the costs, benefits, and rationale of each option-the relevance and applicability of the advice -the approach to implementation

IF YOURE AN ADVISER Understand and articulate your role as

providing guidance, not making the decision Push to generate several viable choices Spell out the rationale, personal experiences,

and principles behind your advice

2STAGE

1STAGE

3STAGE



youve tentatively chosen. Or you may want someone who can expand your frame of reference, drawing on rich experience and expertise to unveil dimensions of the problem that you did not see. Or perhaps youre looking for process guidancea way of navigating through a ticklish situationor help generating sub-stantive ideas. The better you understand what you need, the better your selection will beand the bet-ter equipped your adviser will be to support you.

Take this example: A regional supply chain head at a medical supply company was asked by the chief procurement officer to play hardball with a lo-cal government that was perpetually late paying for purchases. As the accounts receivable kept stacking up, the CPO suggested choking off supplybut the manager worried that government officials would turn that into a cause clbre. It was a high-stakes situation, and he needed guidance. When consider-ing potential advisers, he knew he wanted people who could provide calibration. Were his concerns

justified or blown out of proportion? The person with the most-relevant experience, he decided, was a manager who oversaw supply chain in a similarly sensitive region. He also turned to a colleague with experience analyzing risks across borders. As a result, he was able to make a balanced recommendation to the CPO: that they canvass multiple regional heads about his proposed plan to choke off supply. And on the basis of their input, the CPO decided not to move ahead with his plan.

As the supply chain manager realized, no single adviser can be helpful in all situations, and the most readily accessible one might not be the right fit. Try to pinpoint what you dont know and how that accords with the knowledge and experiences of the people you might turn to. As the Harvard Business School professor C. Roland Christensen frequently observed,

When you pick your advisers, you pick your advice. Your goal is to find a match between your deficiencies, limitations, or uncertainties and their experiences,

CONVERGING ON A DECISION

IF YOURE A SEEKER Beware of uncritical and dismissive reflexes Consider soliciting a second or third opinion Develop hybrid solutions

IF YOURE AN ADVISER Ensure that all the options are evaluated;

dont jump too quickly to a solution Pause frequently for reactions Convey your availability for further

clarification and elaboration

PUTTING ADVICE INTO ACTION

IF YOURE A SEEKER Be sensitive to changes in the situation

or context and any need for midcourse corrections

Follow up and seek additional guidance if necessary

IF YOURE AN ADVISER Reaffirm that the decision and the

consequences are the seekers Convey your availability for additional

guidance and support

5STAGE

4STAGE



http://hbr.org

expertise, or knowledge base. Avoid picking advisers primarily for their confidence, likability, friendship, or reinforcing points of viewas noted earlier, those are not proxies for quality.

When the roles are reversed and youre ap-proached for advice, ask yourself whether you are indeed a good fit. Do you have the right background to help in this particular situation? Can you dedicate enough time and effort to attend to the seekers con-cerns? Its much better to decline the request than to give uninformed advice, rush the advisee, be dis-tracted in meetings, or discover late in the process that you have little of value to offer. Ask why the advisee sought you outbut remember that you are in the best position to assess whether your judgment and experience are relevant. Saying no is a service too, and you can further help by identifying other sources of expertise. Even if you are well qualified to serve as an adviser, consider recommending some other people to bring in complementary or alterna-tive views. That will give the seeker a more textured understanding of the challenges and choices.

Stage 2: Developing a shared understanding. At this stage your primary goal as an advice seeker is to convey just enough information for your adviser to grasp the problem you face, why it poses a chal-lenge, and where you hope to end up. That will allow her to offer informed, unbiased recommendations without getting lost in the weeds. So ground your

narrative with telling details and provide contextbut avoid taking her on a lengthy tour of antecedents, diverse interpretations, and potential consequences. Otherwise you may distract her from the central is-sues or lose her interest.

In the telling, you may need to acknowledge some uncomfortable truths about your behavior or weak-nesses. Your discomfort with revealing certain infor-mation may actually signal its importance to fleshing out the story. An adviser can be only as good as the personal and organizational portrait she has to work with, so share all key detailseven those that are unflattering or difficult to discuss. It will help her get past your biases and blind spots.

As an adviser, youll want to get a complete pic-ture while also expanding the seekers understanding, all in a reasonable amount of time. So set the stage for openness and efficiency: Pick a place that will free you both from distractions and allow sufficient (but not unlimited) time for a robust discussion. Privacy and confidentiality are essential. Create a safe zone where you can both speak openly. Hear the seeker out, allowing his story to emerge with minimal in-tervention. Suspend judgment and resist the urge to provide immediate feedback and direction: You dont yet know enough to offer thoughtful advice. Jumping to conclusions or recommendations typically signals a flawed or incomplete diagnosis, so gather more in-formation. Begin with broad, open-ended questionssuch as How are you feeling about this?because they establish rapport, uncover what is truly on the seekers mind, and often take you right to the heart of the matter. (Anthropologists call these grand tour questions and suggest using them as a starting point for interviews.) Follow up by drawing out support-ing details and additional context to help the seeker move beyond a self-serving account.

In our interviews with advisers, two people shared stories about seekers who had come to them for affirmation, already intent on a course of action. Both seekers had (and thus articulated) only a par-tial view of the problem; the advisers said they had to tease out the rest through patient inquiry before they could begin to formulate sound advice and move the seekers from affirmation mode to a dawn-ing and genuine understanding of the challenges they faced.

Determine the seekers personal interests and goals and compare them with those of the organi-zation. Consider, in the words of one of our experts,

When youre approached for advice, ask yourself whether youre indeed a good fit. Do you have the right background? Can you dedicate enough time and effort to attend to the seekers concerns?



giving homework assignments to further the seek-ers thinking (Come back to me next week with five reasons why moving to Dallas would be a good idea). Finally, deepen your own understanding as well, by inquiring about root causes, potential consequences, and other pertinent issues not explicitly mentioned. Theyll speak volumes if you can get them out in the open. The stated problem may be only a symptom of these underlying issues.

Once youve done all that, youll be well enough informed to agree or disagree with the seeker on a key question that is seldom asked: What role should you play? Should you serve as a sounding board, pro-vide reassurance, flesh out the picture the seeker has of this sort of situation, or present fresh insights and options? Discuss your conclusions with your advisee to ensure a shared understanding of whats needed.

Stage 3: Crafting alternatives. Because deci-sion making improves dramatically when diverse options are available, seekers and advisers should work together to come up with more than one pos-sibility. Even go/no-go decisions yield improved re-sults when nuanced alternatives are described and considered.

Take this example from our interviews: A con-sumer products division head at an electronics com-pany decided to relocate his marketing group to im-prove collaboration with engineering. He was eager to adopt this industry trend because of its potential to speed up product development and get every-one thinking about more-targeted offerings. But his marketing VP felt it would put too much distance be-tween her staff and sales.

So the division head turned to a trusted colleague, the chief operating officer, for advice on how to deal with marketing. The COO agreed that the move made sense and worked with the division head to generate ideas for getting the marketing VP on boardwithout resorting to fiat. For instance, the division head might try sharing the proposal at small cross-functional meetings so that the VP could hear her direct reports discuss the merits of being closer to the engineers. They could also meet with major retail customers or Wall Street analystseither could comment on how competitors were benefiting from this approach. Talking to the COO expanded the division heads per-spectivehe could now see options beyond one-on-one conversations with the VP.

What Advisers Can Do Depending on whats needed, advisers might:

Restate and play back arguments to sharpen the seekers understanding of the situation and the conclusions she has drawn

Scrutinize the reasoning behind the selection of an option and elaborate on the potential consequences

Provide greater breadth and depth of understanding about the nature of the problem the seeker facesand the implications for action

Suggest how to approach and manage a complicated, delicate, or high-stakes situation

Increase the number and range of options being considered

Asking a few well-chosen questions that probe the seekers underlying rationale and motivationand listening attentively

Assessing the seekers thinking, often using hypotheticals and critical questions to achieve a deeper understanding

Sharing key details and tendencies from prior experiences in similar situations to flesh out the larger context

Examining the interests involved, the possibilities for action, and alternative steps the seeker might take

Brainstorming with the seeker

Serve as a sounding board

Test a tentative path

Expand the frame of reference

Provide process guidance

Generate substantive ideas

KEY PRACTICES



http://hbr.org

If youre a seeker of advice, dont hesitate to solicit a second or third opinionparticularly if you remain uncertain. This can offset any biases or conflicts of interest your adviser may have.

If youre seeking advice, adopt an analytic, prob-ing mindset to identify and weigh multiple choices. Certainly offer up your own ideas, but also listen to your advisers suggestions, especially those that may take you in a different direction altogether. Imagine how you might apply those recommendationsbut subject them to a lot of poking and prodding as well. You want to play out what you would actually do. Ask pointed questions about the costs and benefits of each, the underlying rationale, the relevance of the advice to your situation (to confirm that your adviser isnt forcing his preferred principles and prior experi-ences to fit), the tactics for implementing the ideas, what repercussions might follow, and any contin-gencies you should prepare for. In short, scrutinize the advice as closely as your adviser scrutinized your description of the problem to be solved. The ensuing discussion will prepare you to overcome implemen-tation hurdles.

If youre the adviser, think of yourself as a driving instructor. While you provide oversight and guidance, your ultimate goal is to empower the seeker to act independently. Our interviewees were unanimous in saying, essentially, Its the seekers job to find the path forward. You can never fully step into the advisees shoes, and it is important to acknowledge that clearly. As youre helping her generate viable choices, spell out the thinking behind each possibility. Describe the principles that are shaping your advice, along with any experiences you are bringing to bear or using as analogies. Articulating your thought pro-cessand your possible biasescan help both you and the seeker determine how well your reasoning and perspective fit the situation. If you are senior to the seeker, you can shrink the power difference and increase the likelihood that your advice will be use-ful by explicitly asking what doesnt seem quite right.

Stage 4: Converging on a decision. When its time to narrow down options and choose a course of action, seekers often fall prey to confirmation bias, picking the easy way out, or other forms of flawed reasoning. So test your thinking by reviewing discarded or briefly considered options and by ask-ing your adviser to play devils advocate. And dont hesitate to solicit a second or third opinion at this stageparticularly if you remain uncertain. This can offset any biases or conflicts of interest your adviser may have. Experimental evidence suggests that two opinions are generally enough to yield most of the benefits of having multiple advisers. But for complex,

ambiguous, highly visible, or contested problems, or when implementation is likely to be complicated, a few additional points of view are often helpful. No matter how unsettling or urgent the situation, resist the impulse to jump on the simplest, most readily available solution.

You may want to combine recommendations from multiple advisers with your own insights to form a hybrid solution. A team leader at a consulting firm did this when she was having a hard time managing project meetings. Veterans and newcomers would engage in endless debate, each faction convinced that the other didnt get it. Because the leader com-municated well with everybody one-on-one, she considered reducing the group meetings and manag-ing the project in hub-and-spoke fashion.

Her advisers provided a range of reactions. One emphasized the importance of allowing the group to discuss the clients challenges rather than just argue about competing solutions. Another said that the two camps needed to hear each other to broaden their perspectives. And a third suggested openly dis-cussing the teams dysfunction. The leader drew on all three pieces of advice. After explaining in a series of one-on-ones how the next project meeting would be run and why, she brought her team together and asked individuals with varying levels of expertise and experience to share their views of the clients challenges. Debate didnt disappear, but it was far more constructive: Team members arrived at a col-lective understanding of the problems to be solved.



At the end they talked about how they might have more meetings like that one.

If youre an adviser, your goal at this stage is to work with the advisee to explore all the options at hand before she makes a choice. Talk through the most likely outcomes of each possibility, assess-ing the relative pros and cons and ensuring that the conversation remains a dialogue rather than a mono-logue. Pose hypotheticalsImagine its a year from now, and you did fire that talented but difficult man-ager. What might happen? How bad, or good, could things get?to tease out likely implications. Then focus the discussion on a course of action. This might entail making the case for a single option, or you might suggest experimenting with a few ideas.

Pause frequently to gauge how comfortable the seeker is with the proffered advice and the extent to which she accepts the underlying rationale. Work together to bring to the surface unstated assump-tions, lingering doubts, and unresolved questions. At the same time, recognize that I dont know is a fine answer if you cant predict the impact of certain op-tions, especially if you make clear recommendations on how to learn more about the alternatives.

Follow-up meetings are often essential for firming up advisees choices and developing detailed action plans. So make yourself available for clarification and elaboration. That said, seekers sometimes come back for more and more conversations to delay decision making. If you suspect thats happening, either say so and ask what might be done to move things for-ward, or encourage the seeker to try out a solution and check in with you about how it went.

Stage 5: Putting advice into action. As a seeker, youll need to act on the advice youve re-ceived and make real-time adjustments. Advice is best treated as provisional and contingent: It should be a cycle of guidance, action, learning, and further guidancenot a fixed path forward. Especially if the advisory process has occurred over an extended period, circumstances may have changed by the time you are ready to act.

So follow up for further advice if needed. You may benefit from multiple meetings, especially if you have gleaned new information from your first steps forward or have a series of decisions to make. Its also considerate and helpful to let your adviser know what youve done and how its working out. Its a way of expressing your gratitude, strengthening the rela-tionship, and helping the adviser learn as well.

If youre the adviser, step back from the process at this stage. Reaffirm that its up to the seeker to move forward. Both the decision and the conse-quences are his, not yours, and must be recognized as such. That will help ensure personal account-ability and prevent misplaced blame if things dont work out as hoped. But remain open to providing additional guidance as events unfold. Especially in fluid, rapidly changing situations, even the best advice can quickly become irrelevant. To the extent that youre willing to help with midcourse correc-tions, convey your availability.

THOUGH SEEKERS and advisers work together to solve problems, they have different vantage points. Recent social psychology research shows that people in an advisory role focus on overarching purpose (why an action should be performed), whereas recipients of advicewho usually face an impending decisionare more concerned with tactics (how to get things done). An individual is likely to think idealistically as an adviser but pragmatically as a seeker, even when confronting the same challenge.

Suppose a hiring manager must decide whether to fill a key role with an outside candidate or promote an ambitious employee from within. If youre advis-ing that manager, you may see the merits of bring-ing in a fresh perspective and the healthy shake-up it could provide. But if youre the one seeking guid-ance, you may be more inclined to see the challenges of getting an outsider integrated and poised to de-liver and also the time saved and the boost to morale of going with an insider. Keeping both perspectives in mind, no matter which is yours, will help you achieve mutual understanding, identify the key pri-ority driving the decision (reducing time and effort to integrate? bringing in a fresh perspective?), and prepare for the downsides of any option.

Overall, our guidelines for both seekers and ad-visers amount to a fundamental shift in approach. Although people typically focus on the content of advice, those who are most skilled attend just as much to how they advise as to what they advise. Its a mistake to think of advice as a one-and-done transaction. Skilled advising is more than the dis-pensing and accepting of wisdom; its a creative, collaborative processa matter of striving, on both sides, to better understand problems and craft promising paths forward. And that often requires an ongoing conversation. HBR Reprint R1501D



http://hbr.org/search/R1501Dhttp://hbr.org

HBR.ORG JANUARYFEBRUARY 2015 REPRINT R1501E


Get the Boss to Buy InLearn to sell your ideas up the chain of command. by Susan J. Ashford and James Detert

http://hbr.orghttp://hbr.org/search/R1501E

Get the Boss to Buy In

ARTWORK Mauro Perucchetti, Notre Dame (detail), 2003 Acrylic and urethane jelly babies, 76" x 76"SPOTLIGHT



Learn to sell your ideas up the chain of command. by Susan J. Ashford and James Detert

N ENGINEERING MANAGER at an energy companywell call him John Healywanted to

sell his boss on a safer and cheaper gas-scrubbing tech-

nology. This might have been an easy task if his boss, the general manager, hadnt se-lected the existing system just a year before. Instead it was, in Healys words, a delicate process. Fortunately, user reviews of the new technology had become available only in the past several months, which Healy tact-fully mentioned in his presentation to the GM and other senior executives. He also included a detailed comparison of the two systems, drawing on implementations at comparable plants; the data suggested that the new sys-tem would remove contaminants more effi-ciently and reduce costs by about $700,000 a year. Because the GM was still on the fence, Healy brought in a bio-gas expert his boss trusted and respected to talk about the new technologys merits. The company made the investment and adopted the new system.

Organizations dont prosper unless man-agers in the middle ranks, like Healy, identify and promote the need for change. People at that level gather valuable intelligence from

direct contact with customers, suppliers, and colleagues. Theyre in a position to see when the market is ripe for a certain offering, for instance, or to detect early signs that a part-nership wont work out. But for many reasons, ranging from a fear of negative consequences to compliance with a top-down culture, they may not voice their ideas and concerns. As we know from our research and others work in this area, not to mention recent news stories, such silence can have dire consequenceslike regulatory capture in banking and un-checked product safety risks.

Even when they do speak up, most man-agers struggle to sell their ideas to people at the top. They find it difficult to raise issues to a strategic level early in the decision-making processif they gain entry into such conversations at all. Studies show that senior executives dismiss good ideas from below far too often, largely for this reason: If they dont already perceive an ideas relevance to organizational performance, they dont deem it important enough to merit their attention. Middle managers have to work to alter that perception.

Their task is easier if certain contextual fac-tors are in placefor instance, a track record



http://hbr.org

of strong individual contributions, which enhances credibility, and a culture in which its safe to speak up. Whether or not those stars are aligned, managers can improve their odds of success by using powerful methods of persuasion. Consider John Healys ap-proach: He presented his idea with emotional intelli-gence (making sure the GM didnt look bad for buying the current system), supported it with strong evi-dence from similar companies, and brought in a care-fully chosen outside expert to bolster his argument.

Since Jane Dutton and Susan Ashford (a coauthor of this article) introduced the concept of issue sell-ing into the academic discourse, more than two decades ago, many studies have proposed tactics for effectively winning support for new ideas. In a recent study of our own, we examined what actually works in organizations, across a range of roles and indus-tries. Our participants described their experiences selling three basic types of ideas: new products, pro-cesses, markets, or customers to pursue; improve-ments to existing products or processes; and ways of better meeting employees needs.

Issue sellers who accomplish their goals, we found, look for the best ways, venues, and times to voice their ideas and concernsusing rhetorical skill, political sensitivity, and interpersonal connections to move the right leaders to action. In particular, they employ seven tactics significantly more often than people who dont succeed in gaining buy-in. In this article we pull those tactics into a practical frame-work that managers can use to gain traction for their ideas, and we illustrate them with examples from our research. Each tactic should be part of an extended campaign to win attention and resources.

Tailor Your PitchMore than any other tactic in our re-search sample, tailoring the pitch to decision makers was associated with success. Its essential for issue sellers to familiarize themselves with their audi-

ences unique blend of goals, values, and knowledge and to allow that insight to shape their messages.

Thats how one regional sales manager in the Canada division of an international oil company persuaded senior executives to restructure the sales organization and change its approach to attracting and motivating talent. Although sales teams in the oil industry are usually organized by customer, at this company each one covered a region. Because

TACTIC

1

many customers had offices in multiple regions, teams often undermined one anothers efforts by offering competing deals to the same clients. The organizations poor structure led to misaligned in-centives and a fragmented customer experience. Making matters worse, most of the reps worked for salaries rather than commissions. Thats why a competitor managed to poach more than half my divisions sales force, the regional manager said. Unsurprisingly, nearly all the top performers had left. Having a sales structure so inefficient and out of touch with standard practices made such attri-tion practically inevitable. Although the executives who had created the structure were competent, they lacked sales experience. The remaining sales team, similarly, was technically knowledgeable but inex-perienced, and the force was too small to sustain the business, let alone grow it.

When the regional manager initially shared his concerns with his boss and a few other executives, they disagreed, saying that the solution was simply to push people harder. That sounded very risky to me, given that the division had just lost more than half its sales team, he told us. He made little progress until he asked other leaders in the divisionthose with greater decision-making powerwhat they ex-pected from sales. He met with the new vice presi-dent of marketing and sales for Canada, for example, who wanted to prevent teams from working against one another and damaging credibility with clients.

In light of the feedback hed gathered, the regional manager drafted recommendations and explained how they would help the division double revenue within four years (a target the CEO had re-cently announced to shareholders). Assigning sales teams to clients rather than to regions, he pointed out, would keep reps from stepping on one anothers toeswhich addressed the Canada VPs concerns. The manager also argued that attracting and retain-ing seasoned salespeople was essential to increas-ing revenue within the CEOs desired time frame. He emphasized the divisions high attrition rate for repsabout 40% walked out the door each yearand described how that could be fixed by follow-ing the industrys best practices for recruiting and managing sales talent. Commission-based compen-sation would attract experienced people and give them a reason to stay. Training would help greener reps develop important skills for managing customer relationships.

Middle managers are more likely

to speak up when they:

Identify with the organization

Have a positive relationship with

their audience

Feel psychologically safe in the

organization

Think someone above them will take action

Care enough about the issue to invest energy in selling it

COPYRIGHT 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.28 Harvard Business ReviewJanuaryFebruary 2015


The Canada VP approved the plan and, more important, provided the resources to carry it out.

We added a dozen experienced people to the sales organization, the regional manager said. And after implementation we had only one person leave in four years. That reduced the once-sizable turnover costs to almost nothing. The division also invested $75,000 in training, which more than paid for itself with a contest to see who could sell the most using the methods learned. (That alone brought $2.7 mil-lion in new business in one week.) Although the division missed its four-year target, it doubled revenue in five years.

In light of those benefits, executives no longer blamed laziness for the problems the sales force had experienced. And good people stopped leaving in droves, thanks partly to the shift in mindset at the top and partly to the improved structure and talent practices.

The regional manager attributed the inroads he made to his carefully tailored pitch. In addition to speaking directly to the Canada VPs and other lead-ers goals, he said, I had to show how my ideas could help meet the CEOs revenue expectations. That allowed him to move from one-on-one and small group meetings to a written proposal and a presentation he could share at a more senior level, where the initiatives got the support they needed.

Frame the IssueAn issues place on your organizations list of priorities depends heavily on how you package the idea. A new tech-nological development might seem like techie trivia until you explain

how it supports a strategic goal, such as increasing responsiveness to customers. It then becomes im-portant. Once people see how your initiative fits into

TACTIC

2

the big picture, theyll be more willing to devote resources to it.

Similarly, if youre a unit head presenting one of your directors to top management for promotion, youll want to say that she e

leadership and managing people

Documents