SPOTLIGHT ON THE EMOTIONAL ORGANIZATION
Most students of organizational culturefocus on shared values, beliefs, and behaviors—but an organization’s emotionalclimate may be even more central to its success.
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Manage Your Emotional Culture
Sigal Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neill | page046
Most companies don’t realize how centralemotions are to building the right culture. They tend to focus on cognitiveculture: the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions thatset the overall tone for how employees think and behave at work. Though that’sincredibly important, the authors’ research shows that it’s only part of thestory. The other critical part is emotional culture, which governs whichfeelings people have and express at work.
Barsade and O’Neill have found thatemotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even“hard” measures such as financial performance and absenteeism. So when managersignore or fail to understand it, they’re glossing over a vital component ofwhat makes organizations tick, and their companies suffer as a result.
By not only allowing emotions into theworkplace but also consciously shaping them, leaders can better motivate theiremployees. This article describes some of the ways emotional culture manifestsat work—for instance, in the form of joy, companionate love, and fear—and theimpact it can have in a range of settings and industries. It also suggests waysof creating and maintaining an emotional culture that will help you achieveyour company’s goals.
HBR Reprint R1601C
PSYCHOLOGY
The Limits of Empathy
Adam Waytz | page 056
Empathy is all the rage pretty mucheverywhere. It’s touted as a critical leadership skill, one that helps youinfluence others in your organization, anticipate stakeholders’ concerns,respond to social media followers, and even run better meetings. But it has itslimits.
Empathy taxes us mentally and emotionally,and can even impair our ethical judgment. It’s also a finite resource: The morewe spend on one person or group, the less we have left for others. Expectingemployees to continually drain their reserves can impair individual andorganizational performance.
Managers can prevent the ill effects ofempathy and promote the good by using a few simple strategies. First, havepeople focus on certain sets of stakeholders, rather than asking them tounderstand and empathize with anyone and everyone. Second, help them meetothers’ needs in ways that also address their own so that they don’t end upfeeling depleted by every interaction. And third, give them empathy breaks,where they focus strictly on their own personal needs, to allow them toreplenish their reserves.
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MANAGING PEOPLE
Collaborative Overload
Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant |page 062
Collaboration is taking over the workplace.According to data collected by the authors over the past two decades, the timespent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by50% or more. There is much to applaud about these developments—but whenconsumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should alsogive us pause.
At many companies, people spend around 80%of their time in meetings or answering colleagues’ requests, leaving littletime for all the critical work they must complete on their own. What’s more,research the authors have done across more than 300 organizations shows thatthe apportionment of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided.
In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-addedcollaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. The avalanche of demandsfor input or advice, access to resources, or sometimes just presence in ameeting causes performance to suffer. Employees take assignments home, and soonburnout and turnover become real risks. Leaders must start to managecollaboration more effectively in two ways: (1) by mapping the supply anddemand in their organizations and redistributing the work more evenly amongemployees, and (2) by incentivizing people to collaborate more efficiently.
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The Big Idea
MANAGING ORGANIZATIONS
The Biology of Corporate Survival
Martin Reeves, Simon Levin, and Daichi Ueda| page 032
U.S. public companies are dying at fasterand faster rates; in fact, they have a one in three chance of being delisted inthe next five years. Why? They are failing to adapt to the growing complexityof their environments, the authors argue—misreading those environments,selecting the wrong approaches to strategy, or failing to support a viableapproach with the right behaviors and capabilities.
Drawing on their research at theintersection of business strategy, biology, and complex systems, BCG’s MartinReeves and Daichi Ueda, along with Princeton biologist Simon Levin, describesix principles that confer robustness in what’s known as complex adaptivesystems—principles that are directly applicable to business. Firms should:
• maintain heterogeneity of people, ideas, and endeavors
• sustain a modular structure of loosely connected components
• preserve redundancy among components
• expect surprise, but reduce uncertainty
• create feedback loops and adaptive mechanisms to ensure the variation,selection, and propagation of innovations
• foster trust and reciprocity in their business ecosystems
Rising corporate mortality is an increasingthreat, and the forces driving it are likely to remain strong for theforeseeable future. Understanding and implementing the principles that createrobustness in complex adaptive systems can mean the difference between survivaland extinction.
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Features
Innovation
The Innovative Power of Criticism
Roberto Verganti | page 092
Thanks to powerful ideation approaches suchas design thinking and crowdsourcing, it has become incredibly easy andrelatively inexpensive for companies to obtain a vast number of novel concepts,from both insiders and outsiders such as customers, designers, and scientists.Yet many organizations still struggle to identify and seize big opportunities.That’s because major changes in society and technology fundamentally challengethe conventional understanding of what is valuable, rendering obsolete whatevercriteria companies are using to identify customer problems they could address.To see which ideas truly have potential, managers need new assessment criteria.
From studying and working with 24 companiesthat have succeeded in capturing big opportunities, the author has devised aprocess to create such criteria—one that is rooted not in the art of ideationbut in the art of criticism. It engages a company’s own employees and helpsthem articulate their individual visions. These are then compared anddiscussed, first in pairs and later in a group, in order to distill them into ahandful of even better proposals. The views of outsiders are sought only at theend.
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Managing Yourself
Secrets of the Superbosses
Sydney Finkelstein | page 123
When you look at the top people in a givenindustry, you often find that many of them once worked for the same well-knownleader. In the NFL, 20 of 32 head coaches trained under Bill Walsh or someonein his coaching tree. Dozens of top hedge fund managers got their start underJulian Robertson of Tiger Management. Nine of Larry Ellison’s top execs becameCEOs, COOs, or chairs of other companies. The list goes on: Jay Chiat, AliceWaters, Bob Noyce, Lorne Michaels, and Mary Kay Ash are all known for groomingextraordinary people who became leaders in their fields.
After conducting deep research into thepractices of these superbosses, Tuck professor Finkelstein found similaritiesin their “people strategies.” In hiring, they focus on intelligence,creativity, and flexibility; look for unconventional talent; and adapt roles andeven organizations to suit people. In development, they set high expectations,build masterapprentice relationships, and encourage fast, step-change growth.All of us can borrow from their playbook to improve our own ability to identifyand hone talent.
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