Quantitative data is not enough to solve your trickiest problems.

This article was originally published in Kellogg Insight Magazine and is based on insights from David and Kellogg colleague Joel K. Shapiro.

As data analytics becomes a more pervasive business tool, many leaders are being sold on the idea that all you need to diagnose any perplexing problem is more data. While there’s no doubt that quantitative analysis can play a powerful role in telling you what happens, even the most robust, granular data won’t tell you why something happens.

Instead, employing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to identify both the what and the why, according to two Kellogg School professors, is what makes an analytics strategy a useful tool for change.

“Each has something powerful to offer,” says Joel Shapiro, a clinical associate professor of data analytics at Kellogg. “Quantitative analysis helps you identify broader trends, while qualitative analysis digs into human motivation, but the insights are hard to scale.”

David Schonthal, a clinical associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Kellogg, says the real value is in how these two approaches complement each other. “When you combine data analytics with a deeper understanding of a customer’s motivation and experience—that’s how you will create better products and services.”

So how exactly is this done? How should companies avoid the misconception that more data provide all the answers and instead combine “qual” and “quant” to find better solutions to important business problems?

Determine Where to Focus

When searching for new approaches to a long-standing challenge, collecting and analyzing data such as sales figures or conversions can lead to surprisingly fruitful insights.

“This is one place where quant can really help—just knowing where to focus design efforts is extraordinarily valuable,” says Schonthal. “Data can act as a source of inspiration, not just a source of validation.”

Say, for example, that a university has a retention problem with its nontraditional student population. A quantitative analysis can identify that women who live far from campus and have young children are at greatest risk of dropping out. That information is useful—to an extent—in that it identifies who is at risk and where to focus.

But knowing who drops out is not the same as knowing why they do so, which would help the school know how to solve the retention problem. At first glance, these data might suggest that offering childcare might be an appropriate strategy to enhance retention. But the numbers alone are not able to explain whether the retention problem is due to a lack of childcare, poor public transportation options, too much homework, or something else entirely.

Similarly, analyzing data can also make it easier for businesses to avoid addressing the wrong problems, chasing the wrong opportunities, or getting lost in minutia. If analysis reveals that new mothers make up a very small segment of total students, for instance, this might inform the university’s decisions about how much time and effort to invest in recruiting, childcare, or curriculum design.

“Data can act as a source of inspiration, not just a source of validation.” — David Schonthal

For example, Netflix instituted the $1 million “Netflix Prize” with the intention of improving its movie recommendation algorithm by 10 percent. Research groups around the world spent years before achieving the goal—with an algorithm so complex that Netflix never implemented it. Once the company added user profiles to customer accounts, the accuracy of recommendations increased by far more than 10 percent.

“Had Netflix thought of the user interface and algorithm holistically, instead of as distinct functions,” Schonthal says,” they would have invested in designing something intelligent rather than in squeezing the last few digits out of the recommendation algorithm.”

Capture Underlying Motivations

As companies harness the power of data analytics, however, it helps to remember that even if they find an interesting trend or relationship in the data, they may not fully understand how the variables are related or how that relationship will change over time.

“All predictions are based on past relationships,” Shapiro says. “But the environment is constantly shifting. What is true of Amazon shoppers today might be true tomorrow, but for how long? It’s hard to say. So, a business has to ask itself: ‘What are all of the reasons this might not be true tomorrow, or next year?’”

Understanding the possible reasons why a trend might exist is where more qualitative data methods can often help companies.

Say you work in the financial services industry. You know that banking has changed tremendously over the past two decades, with ATMs, online banking, and apps displacing most tellers. Yet a quantitative analysis indicates that your bank still has a hard time getting customers to sign up for “eBanking” accounts.

While the data can reveal that eBanking accounts are unpopular, it might not tell you why customers are resistant to eBanking. Is it a lack of trust? Are customers turned off by the website’s design? And just because the analytics show that app users seem happier with e-banking than desktop users, that does not mean the solution is to redesign the website; it could just be that app users are more comfortable with all types of e-commerce and e-service.

Qualitative analysis—in the form of focus groups, surveys, and customer observation—might provide some insight here by examining customers’ motivations.

What might this look like in practice? Take, for another example, IDEO—where Schonthal also works as Senior Director of business design. The company recently gathered a team of data scientists and designers to help a major travel company reinvent its customer sales and service processes.

An analysis of the travel company’s sales-team data found that although each salesperson worked at the same rate of commission, a handful were consistently outperforming their peers by a wide margin. Still unclear, however, was why that was happening—and how it might be replicated.

Through interviews and observation, IDEO learned something interesting: these high performers often ignored the tools and interaction recommendations that the company provided. Instead, they used unsanctioned methods to help build stronger personal relationships with customers—such as connecting with customers on social media and via text message. This highly personal, somewhat informal approach to their customer communications paid off in the form of materially increased sales, much higher employee satisfaction, and greater customer loyalty—often to both the company and the sales associates themselves.

Scale Your Insights

Still, insights derived from individual interviews and observations will not be useful unless a company can determine how applicable they are to most customers. The most effective tool to track how people behave on a large scale is quantitative analysis.

“You use ‘quant’ to figure out what happened,” Shapiro says. “You use ‘qual’ to figure out why.

Then at some point, you need to explicitly test your hypotheses about people’s motivations—to see if they scale into cost-effective solutions.”

This is where analytics re-enter the picture. By returning to quantitative analytics, companies can measure how a potential change might impact revenue, savings, cost, or whatever its value drivers might be.

In IDEO’s work with the travel company, for instance, even after the team had learned about the unconventional approaches used by some of the most successful salespeople, they still needed to understand whether those approaches could help lower-performing members of the sales team. Can these methods help anyone improve, or was this something only the high-performers can pull off?

“It’s always a process of triangulating what you learn in the qualitative research with the factors indicated by the data,” Shapiro says. “When ‘qual’ and ‘quant’ are presented as self-contained methods of analysis, they can lead to bad assumptions. Ultimately, the two should be linked in this dynamic, ongoing process of using data to solve problems.”

(This article was written by Drew Calvert, a freelance writer based in Los Angeles)

Here’s how to gain clarity and focus when your tendency is to overcommit.

(This article is based on insights from Carter and was published in Kellogg Insight)

 

Given the pace of life today, it’s increasingly common to feel overwhelmed by a blizzard of professional obligations. To-do lists grow despairingly long; calendars fill with meetings and calls. Even those with laser focus can struggle to keep up.

But some of us are more susceptible than others to getting swept up in this frenzied accumulation of tasks, struggling to set priorities or say no. By trying to do everything at once, some of us end up falling behind.

Carter Cast, a clinical professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School, spent several years examining career derailment. In his new book, The Right (and Wrong) Stuff: How Brilliant Careers Are Made—and Unmade, he explores five common issues that impede career progress. Of the five, this is the issue people self-identify with most frequently.

“Careers can derail when people don’t deliver on promises,” Cast says. “This can be a real problem because fellow workers start to distance themselves when they think you can’t be counted on.”

Recognize this trait in yourself? Cast offers five recommendations on how to get organized and get ahead.

Be Clear on What’s Expected of You

Many employees, at least on paper, have more responsibilities than any single person can realistically tackle. A sales executive may have a vast client portfolio. An HR executive may be charged with the growth and development of hundreds of employees. A compliance director might technically have oversight over dozens of complex vendor relationships.

For an extreme example, consider the high turnover rate among Chief Marketing Officers. In 2016, the average CMO tenure at top ad-spending firms was just 42 months. Given that CMOs are responsible for a broad range of specialties—from advertising to brand management to customer experience—they are always in danger of stretching themselves too thin.

“CMOs can find themselves in real trouble by trying to take on too much,” says Cast, who is a former CMO at eBay and online diamond seller Blue Nile. “They can end up not delivering on the most important aspects of their job and end up derailing.”

Cast recommends approaching each role with an eye toward delivering results. This means coming to a clear understanding of what the company actually expects from you, and when. And while this is good advice for just about anyone, those of us who overburden ourselves need to stay particularly focused on the prize.

“Being clear with your boss on what success looks like is really important for setting expectations and ensuring you’re aligned,” Cast says. “What are your goals and objectives for the year? What are the key initiatives that map to those objectives? What are the timelines for those initiatives, and what sort of resources will you need?”

If you don’t address these larger questions early on, you may end up trying to focus on the wrong—or too many—objectives.

“You can win the battle in getting a great big span of control,” Cast says, “but then lose the war because you have so much to do that you can’t possibly deliver on it.”

Understand Your Organization’s Workflow Process

If you are struggling to finish what you start, consider whether you are thinking deliberately about what each step in a task entails. Those who over-reach tend to be creative people with lots of ideas but an unstructured way of approaching them.

“Their eyes are typically bigger than their stomachs,” Cast says, “which is why they tend to overpromise and underdeliver.”

To counteract that tendency, Cast recommends understanding the workflow in an organization. Most companies have established ways to move projects from inception to completion—project roadmaps.

“Decide which tasks will really move the needle for your organization, and focus on those first. You can’t treat every message in your inbox equally.”

“You may need to tap someone who knows this—perhaps a product or project manager—to take you through the steps so you understand what it takes to complete an initiative well and on time,” Cast says. “If you can draw a Gantt chart or some other tool that shows the amount of work to be completed in a certain period of time in relation to the amount planned for that same period, you’re in good shape. If not, you need to ask more questions and gain a better understanding.”

“If you say you’ll launch a new food product by June, but you don’t expect FDA approval until late April, and you need that approval before ordering the packaging film, which takes three months to deliver, then you’re setting yourself up to fail,” Cast says. “You need to know every step in the product-launch process!”

Be Intentional about Prioritizing Your Work 

By a certain point in our careers, most of us are used to keeping lists that outline what we have on our plate for the day. But there is a difference between jotting down a few scattershot items and taking a more systematic approach to prioritizing that list.

“Decide which tasks will really move the needle for your organization, and focus on those first,” Cast says. “You can’t treat every message in your inbox equally.”

One key part of prioritizing is knowing when you work best. Cast suggests breaking your day into segments and tackling challenging work during times when you are sharpest and most productive. If your brain is most active between six and ten in the morning, for instance, that may not be the best time to respond to noncritical emails. Save those missives for a built-in time slot dedicated to administrative tasks.

Just as important is isolating yourself from distractions during your most productive segment of the day. This could mean turning off email alerts or keeping the phone at a safe distance.

“If you look at your phone after every ping, you put yourself in response mode, which is common,” Cast says. “It ends up becoming a major distraction. The tail ends up wagging the dog. Remember that, by and large, your inbox is composed of other people’s agendas, not yours. Try to first work on your big priorities, then respond to your inbox.”

Learn How to Say “No” 

If you are feeling overwhelmed by your responsibilities, consider whether you are by nature a “pleaser,” as many high achievers are. Pleasers tend to take on more than they should—their default response is, “yes, why not?” But learning when to say “no,” and learning to do it tactfully, is critical for preserving valuable time and energy.

Of course, there is a reason that most of us are hesitant to say no: we want to foster relationships and stay as connected to others as possible. But guarding your time does not require disconnecting completely. Carter suggests turning requests into manageable “favors.”

For example, instead of sitting down for an hour-long conversation with a colleague about a project idea, you could take five minutes to share some ideas via email or over the phone. That way you maintain the relationship without sacrificing too much time.

“Entrepreneurs often struggle with this,” Carter says. “Especially if they become known, they’ll start getting all kinds of offers to be on panels and take non-essential meetings. All of a sudden, their time is not their own. They have to find ways to not lose their bearings and stay focused on the activities that will propel their startup forward.”

Look for Opportunities to Delegate 

In addition to learning how to say “no,” anyone struggling to cross critical items off of the to-do list needs to learn the art of delegating. Delegation doesn’t always come naturally to high achievers.

“We tend to think the best person to perform a given task is ourselves,” Cast says. We may also be under the mistaken impression that delegating is viewed as a sign of weakness.

Even in cases where you are the most qualified person to do the job, that does not mean you have to—or that you should.

“It’s easy to think that because you have a certain domain knowledge, you should perform every task in that area,” Cast says. “But if someone else can perform the task even 80 percent as effectively, and it’s not mission-critical, it might be a good idea to delegate.”

Apart from freeing up time to focus on more important tasks, delegating also helps others gain valuable experience and build new capabilities.

“In many cases, you have to learn to let go a bit,” Cast says. “Things won’t go exactly the way you’d like, but you have to move forward and avoid needless distractions.”

 

(Article written by Marc Zarefsky a freelance writer based in Evanston, Illinois)

This piece was originally authored by Carter for Chief Executive.

For more than a decade, corporate hallways have echoed with the encouraging words of the strengths movement—enhancing employee strengths as a primary form of managerial and leadership development. Leaders have worked to incorporate the findings into their organizations and to create strong employee engagement. But now, another problem has surfaced. With all the focus on what people do well, managers are failing to give critical feedback, and the results are troubling.

One study shows as many as 67 percent of talented people will derail in their career at a cost of up to 20 times that of that employee’s salary. It’s an epidemic of underperformance.

I know firsthand how debilitating the problem is because I experienced my own career derailment event. Over 25 years ago, I was a young, promising executive at PepsiCo, certain I was on the fast track when my boss called me in and told me I was “unpromotable.” Why? Because I was “obstinate,” “resistant” and “insubordinate.”

In retrospect, that critical feedback was the best gift I ever received because it caused me not only to be more self-reflective about my own behavior, but to find out why talented people derail. What goes wrong? To that end, I’ve dug through the extensive research about career derailment, interviewed scores of HR leaders, senior managers and C-Suite executives and surveyed 100 people, who—in what should have been the prime of their career—had been fired, demoted or whose careers had plateaued. From managers and leaders to executive coaches, recruiters, CEOs and C-Suite executives, I listened to them talk about why and how good careers went bad.

“MANAGERS SHOULD HAVE WEEKLY OR BI-WEEKLY ONE-ON-ONES WITH THEIR SUBORDINATES, WHERE THEY DISCUSS PERFORMANCE AGAINST OBJECTIVES AND GIVE CLEAR DEVELOPMENTAL FEEDBACK, BOTH POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE.”

The source of the problem
I discovered that two top culprits are an inability to work well with others and a lack of self-awareness about personal areas of vulnerability. The big question for leaders: Why aren’t we giving the kind of feedback to make people more aware of these shortfalls? I believe that often the strengths movement has been taken too far and used to the exclusion of other methods.

Leaders must look closely at 3 areas of their company to enact change.

1. Create a culture of frankness. If the culture of an organization is modeled around open and honest communication and clear developmental feedback, it flows down through the entire organization. It starts with the values and behaviors that are espoused by the firm’s leaders. What are the top 3 to 5 values stressed by senior leadership? Are you behaving in ways that are consistent with them? For example, when I worked at Walmart, “attention to detail” was stressed, for “retail is detail.” So I needed to ask myself questions like, “Am I really up-to-speed on the status of a particular initiative? Am I well-versed on the performance of a particular product line?

2. Give frequent, candid feedback. Having candid feedback sessions with employees once a year during the performance review cycle is standard practice, and woefully insufficient. Companies need to stress to managers the importance of giving immediate developmental feedback to their team members. Managers also should have weekly or bi-weekly one-on-ones with their subordinates, where they discuss performance against objectives and give clear developmental feedback, both positive and negative. Keep the process simple and brief, as most people can only recall and act on one thing at a time.

3. Embrace more weakness-oriented development tools. Effective personnel development assessments exist which include potential derailment areas that firms can use to initiate or further this conversation. The Hogan Development Survey and Korn Ferry / Lominger Leadership Assessment Instruments are both good, robust tools.

Organizations pursuing a developmental strategy focusing on strengths alone will not lead to the career ascension of their employees. Soon or later, unaddressed needs will limit the career progress of good people—hurting both employees and the organization.

It’s time to bring straight talk and candid discussions back into the company. Not just on performance review day, but every day.

You may not have unlimited time to brainstorm, but you can do more to ensure that it’s on your side.

(This post originally appeared in Inc. Magazine and Kellogg Insight)

Time: you can kill it, call it, serve it, save it, make it, or get it to fly. But one thing entrepreneurs should not do with it, per David Schonthal, is leave it in a liquid state. Constraint, properly harnessed, can be one of the most powerful forces behind ingenuity. And no constraint is more powerful than time.

There are a lot of ways to deploy time successfully. Whether you are deciding to speed up or slow down processes, impose deadlines, or set aside time for reflection, the key is to be conscious of how much time you have and realistic about how you plan to allot that time.

Schonthal, a clinical associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School and a portfolio director at IDEO, offers four key suggestions for how innovators can use time to their advantage.

Change Up Your Brainstorming Sessions

The first step of any creative process–generating ideas–can also be the most painful. Cue the mental image of your team members sitting listlessly around a conference table, ostensibly brainstorming but actually inventing new ways to doodle in the margins of their legal pads.

The best way to kick-start the idea-generation process may be to mix things up.

When brainstorming more creative solutions, one approach–backed up by Kellogg research–is to push yourself to brainstorm beyond your normal limits. Once you hit the wall, the thinking goes, you may still have a lot of very good ideas that have not made it out yet.

Schonthal swears by a process that is a bit more counterintuitive: hit it and quit it. Give your team a very short period of time–no more than 10-15 minutes–to get as many ideas as possible related to a specific prompt out on the table. Then work from there.

“People usually enter brainstorms with the wrong objectives and expectations in mind, so it’s no surprise they are dismayed with the results.”

“When you take a resource and constrain it, it forces people to do more with less, and oftentimes they come up with unexpectedly creative solutions,” Schonthal says. “So when you constrain time, it’s great for the process of being generative. People are always surprised by how much they are able to accomplish in three to four minutes. Just getting things out from the inside doesn’t take a lot.”

An important distinction Schonthal makes, however, is that he believes the best use of brainstorming is to set a general direction or vector for design, not that it will yield the

“final” billion-dollar idea right there and then.

“People usually enter brainstorms with the wrong objectives and expectations in mind,” Schonthal says, “so it’s no surprise they are dismayed with the results.”

Launch to Learn

Once your team has identified a concept to pursue, it is tempting to devote a lot of time to refining it before showing it to others. But that may not be the most effective course of action, Schonthal says.

“Something that’s been developed within a week–why not toss it out into the world and see what happens to it?” he asks. “Take the minimum viable version and get real reactions from real people.”

“Some of the earliest examples of Twitter and Airbnb products, they were literally just sketches,” Schonthal says. “But they were good enough concepts to put in front of people for reactions. Yes, there’s the danger of falling on your face, but you don’t want to spend $50 million making the same mistake that you could have made much sooner for less money.”

But will enough face-plants make potential customers wary of your creations? Not necessarily, as long as you are up-front about the fact that you are showing them products in beta.

“You can let them know, ‘Look, this is a work in progress. I just want to see your reaction to it,'” Schonthal points out.

“Consumers have become much more comfortable with looking at stuff long before it’s ready. Look at Google. They slap the word ‘beta’ right there on the masthead, so you know that you’re taking a risk in trying something that’s maybe a little bit ahead of its time.”

Iterate Often and Quickly

If you are launching in beta, you are accepting the fact that you will need to iterate–protoyping, testing, analyzing, and refining your product.

“People often don’t build time in for the iterative process,” he says. “They just assume that things will go well. They look at iteration as a very linear progression: you start at this stage, and you go to this stage. But the reality is, it’s totally messy.”

To allow for that messiness, Schonthal advises, factor in time for lots and lots of iteration cycles–but move through those cycles as quickly as possible.

He points to the experience of student entrepreneurs he oversees in Kellogg’s Zell Fellows Program, a selective venture accelerator. Initially, it takes the students three weeks to move through the first iteration cycle. The next cycle takes two weeks. By the end of the course, each iteration cycle takes less than a week, because the students have learned what “good enough” is.

That’s a crucial lesson, given how quickly things move in today’s product-development world.

“Innovation is faster today than it’s ever been,” says Schonthal. “What can be accomplished in a unit of time is completely different now than what it was when I started ten years ago. Innovation is going to be faster next year than it is today. It’s probably going to continue to go down, down, down, down.”

Take Time to Reflect

But structuring time for invention does not always mean speeding up processes. One of the most important steps in the design process–synthesis–entails deliberately pausing to reflect on what has been observed. And it is a step that is often overlooked.

“I can’t think of very many organizations that create a very clear project objective for reflection,” Schonthal says. “Usually it’s ‘Go, go, go, go, go! What’s the next step? What’s the next step?’ Well, sometimes the best next step is taking a look back at what’s happened already.”

It is natural–even expected–to realize during the synthesis process that the problem you have set out to solve with your product may not be quite the problem your product solves. That may seem like less than great news, but there is an upside: taking time to reflect makes course correction possible.

“Trying to rush synthesis is the kiss of death,” he says. “Unexpected insights necessitate reflection. They’re never on the surface. If they’re on the surface, they’re obvious to everybody, and they’re probably not all that innovative.”

 

This piece is based on insights from Carter and originally published in Kellogg Insight

Most organizations have employees who are solid performers; fewer organizations are astute—or lucky—enough to have superstars.

So how can you ensure that your organization gets the most out of those superstars?

High-potential performers (or Hi-Pos) stand out due to their associative thinking skills—which help solve problems and drive innovation—their strong emotional awareness, and their incredible perseverance, according to Carter Cast, a clinical professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School and former CEO of Walmart.com.

When your team lands a superstar-in-the-making, nurturing these traits is critical if you want that superstar to flourish. And tailoring a career plan gives high-flyers challenge enough to stick around.

“With high-potential high performers, it’s important to put your arm around them and say, ‘I think you have a lot of potential, and one of my key jobs is helping you reach your potential. I will get satisfaction out of helping you do that,’” says Cast.

Encourage Associative Thinking

One of the calling cards of valuable employees is the ability to innovate. But not everyone is automatically inclined to blue-sky thinking. Encouraging associative thinking—making connections between seemingly disparate ideas—can spur high-potential employees to become more creative and innovation-minded.

“Learning agility may be the most important trait of them all,” Cast says. “You are curious. You’re open to new experiences. You read a lot. You question things. You don’t take no for an answer—if something just doesn’t seem right, you go ahead and investigate it yourself. That trait drives creativity and leads to innovation.”

When Cast was at the CEO of Walmart.com, he had an interesting exercise to get his high-potential employees thinking creatively: a little bit of show-and-tell.

“As a leader, I can provide direction, clarity, and resources, and I can try to figure out what motivates an employee and then try to appeal to their motives.”

At Monday morning senior leadership meetings, the first twenty minutes were devoted to a simple question: What did you see over the weekend that struck you? Employees then shared any new trends, think-pieces, objects, or experiences that had captured their attention. “We had people bring up clothes, devices, articles, advertisements, circulars, you name it,” Cast says.

Next, they had to explain how these new trends or observations might positively affect the organization.

“People loved this open session because it was all about experience and application. You observe, capture, and try to parlay into what the company can do differently: If you saw this, what’s the application? If yes, then what?”

Cast advocates a healthy dose of career self-reflection for all employees, and those with high potential are no exception. Encourage them to consider: “What can impede your progress? What about you—we all have these things, because we’re humans—could hurt you? Where do you have weaknesses that could derail you? If you don’t want to come clean with me, at least come clean with yourself—talk to your friends, mentors, and colleagues to get a better understanding.”

Cast also suggests that employees look beyond their own intuition for skill gaps and other blind spots by utilizing 360 feedback. Putting a mirror up in front of people can help them recognize weaknesses, triggers, and gaps that may be impeding self-regulation and performance.

“Not putting your foot in your mouth, not butting in, not having flashes of anger, not receding into your shell when you’re challenged—basically, learning to modulate your behavior—allows you to present yourself more effectively, which can help you to be more effective with other people,” Cast says.

Remember, as well, the importance of developing an emotional awareness about others. High-potential employees need to learn how to really listen. “The basic principle is: seek to understand before being understood,” Cast says, “which can be hard for hard-charging Hi-Pos who are driven to complete their agendas.”

He reminds Hi-Pos to ask their own employees and colleagues how they can help. “Do you understand what goals and objectives they’re trying to accomplish? Do you understand what they need from you? If you help them, they’re more likely to reciprocate.”

Another way to cultivate that awareness of others is to make sure Hi-Pos actively engage across the organization.

“At Walmart, we encouraged our associates to get out from behind their desks, go out to stores, observe and learn,” Cast says. “We said, ‘you should shadow employees who handle customer checkout. You should shadow employees in electronics to see how they handle tough questions about how to install a home entertainment system. You should sit in the product return center to see firsthand how confusing the process is for customers to return an item they bought online to a store.’”

“Encourage them to go through an actual user scenario where they’re trying to buy something or conduct a task. It’s a really good way to get inside the experience of the consumer to see what they go through.”

Motivate, Motivate, Motivate

Employees with the grit and perseverance to keep answering the bell after getting knocked down will go far. But toughness is difficult to instill in people. It is most often a complicated, very individual drive.

“As a leader, I can provide direction, clarity, and resources, and I can try to figure out what motivates an employee and then try to appeal to their motives,” Cast says. “But ultimately they have to find a way to tap into what drives them. In the case of high-potential performers, they’re usually highly motivated and it’s more about tapping into it and directing it.”

Still, there is plenty that leaders can do to stoke employee motivation. For one, recognition can go a long way.

Cast and a colleague were in a shop in Bentonville, Arkansas and found a dusty red razorback statue at a five and dime store. “The guy gave us two bucks to get it out of the place,” Cast jokes. “We brought it back to our office in California, where the Internet division was headquartered, and we created a Red Razorback Award. Every quarter, the person that went above and beyond, or had a really good idea that improved the customer experience, got the Red Razorback.

“This ugly thing was actually coveted! I saw in resumes years later, where people wrote, ‘Red Razorback Award winner, Q2, 2006.’”

As you might expect, it is also crucial to make high potentials feel like they are improving their skills and working on projects with value.

Just don’t assume you know what counts as “self-improvement” or what motivates employees. You have to ask them. Here is a place where some leaders go wrong: they lay out a development plan without input from the employee. Cast once had an employee whom he was grooming to become a general manager. But it turns out, that employee was not looking to become a CEO. He wanted to become a CMO—the best retail and e-commerce marketer in the United States.

“I had the wrong assumption,” Cast says. “He wanted to be a functional expert. So we stopped and I said, ‘Let’s look at your skillset in marketing and where you think you have gaps, and let’s start talking about how we can fill those gaps.’”

“Treat different people differently,” Cast stresses. “Seek to understand their motives and what they’re trying to accomplish. With super high-potential people, I worked to create tailored programs to develop them, giving them unique experiences and access to resources in order to accelerate their growth.”

Cast opens these developmental conversations by asking high potentials where their passion lies—what they want to be doing in five to seven years—rather than starting with their current position. He then has them work backwards into their current position to create the through line.

“I always lead with their passion of interests and motives,” Cast says, “and then secondly, have them define areas where they have effortless ability or strong talents. So I like to start with passion and talents. Then, together, we can move on to how to apply it through projects, assignments, and other developmental activities. But I’ve found it’s key to ask them! Take nothing for granted and let them lead the conversation.”

Follow Through

You have invested in your superstars’ success. You’ve increased their learning agility and strengthened their emotional awareness. You have helped them to find their own passion and collaborated on a plan to keep them engaged and progressing. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot—if you leave the plan to chance.

Whatever you do, “don’t overcommit upfront and offer something you can’t deliver on,” says Cast. “Find a couple things you can do to help them, and then a couple more. If you talk a good game and don’t follow through with a cadence of assistance, it could be very detrimental, because you’ve set their expectations. It takes high potentials about five minutes after they don’t feel challenged to leave.”

Of course, superstars may leave a company anyway. But the chances are much better that they will stick around to realize their potential if they see that they are valued. “One, they’re going to be excited about the challenges, and two, they’re going to feel this affiliation towards you and towards the company for investing in them,” Cast says.

He likes to tell a story about one particular high-potential employee under his wing.

“I said, ‘You’re not going to leave here, because the opportunities we’re going to give you are going to be so phenomenal that you’re just not going to think of leaving.’ He laughed and said, ‘We’ll see.’ Seven years later, when I left the company, he was still working there.”

Carter and I were sharing embarrassing stories of our own well-intended presentations gone awry and we decided to write a quick blog about it.

Great quarterbacks in football tend to have a handful of attributes in common, not the least of which are a mastery of the playbook, the ability to read defenses and an on-the-spot ability to improvise based on what they see. (Just watch Peyton Manning make constant play adjustments as he barks orders on the line of scrimmage)

Like quarterbacks, good business leaders (be they entrepreneurs or otherwise) tend to possess similar improvisational qualities. They too have an ability to read their audiences and throw out the playbook and improvise based on what they see going on around them.

It’s this last point that we want to focus on – the ability to read your audience and “call an audible” if you don’t like how your message is being received. In some cases mastery of the playbook and reading an audience can be in direct opposition to each other. Mastery can sometimes become reliance on the playbook, and this can cause problems. Or mastery can lead to overconfidence, resulting in a lack of flexibility in adapting your message to the circumstances you’re facing.

Here are examples from each of us:

David’s recent experience:

This past month I gave a presentation to a group of executives. They were interested in a topic that I’ve spoken on a number of times, and my material on this subject was… if I may say so… pretty damn good.

I had delivered this presentation dozens of times and it had never once failed me.

Things started off decently, but it wasn’t long before I could see that I was losing the audience. I hadn’t adapted my material for their specific interests or vantage point at all, it was a tough time of day to talk to them (after lunch), and I could tell that the one-directional way in which I was delivering the content was not engaging them at all.

 Having read the situation, I had two choices:

1. Stick to my material and my script and hope that eventually they would join me on my wavelength
2. Stop what I was doing and change the game plan on the fly with some unrehearsed Q&A, stories or other conversational ideas in an attempt to reengage them

I wish that I could tell you I went with choice B, but I didn’t. I proceeded forward with more-or-less my original plan and probably brought about one-third of the audience along with me while other two-thirds silently stared at their smartphones.

If I were to have a do-over, I clearly would have done it differently. I would have stopped the presentation the moment I saw it going sideways, acknowledged it and asked for the audience to offer-up some stories/examples of their own, or even to share some contrary opinions – just to get a real conversation going. If I were particularly bold, I might even try to throw in some kind of an exercise to get them interacting.

Carter’s recent experience:

Actually I have two: one where I just chugged along (poorly) without making any adjustments, and one where things were going so badly that I did call an audible. In the first example, only a week ago, I delivered what I generally consider to be my best lecture, my signature move. Oh the pearl that were dripping from my lips! Bang! Pow! Zowee! How do you like me now?! There was only one problem: midway through delivering my magic, I noticed that people were giving me this certain “I’m digesting my Thanksgiving meal” look, eyes glazed over, arms crossed over bellies. It was like they were being held hostage to a Kenny G song.

What did I do? Like a person sinking in quick-sand, I thrashed about harder, increasing my decibel level and gesturing about wildly, like I was swatting at a bee. It didn’t work. A student came up to me after the lecture and said, “Professor Cast, that’s a long time to hold our attention in the middle of the afternoon.”

Here’s my second experience. Last fall I was at the Allen Center, delivering a lecture to a group of eMBA students who had just taken their final class exam and were ready to graduate. I’d decided to talk about Joseph Campbell and The Hero Journey. Good stuff, right? What’s not to like about the dragon-slaying message of The Hero Journey to a group of students about ready to walk out into the working world, armed with MBAs?

 Well, in this case I was worried from the get-go. These eMBA students had been celebrating the completion of their curriculum with a glass of wine and they were in a festive mood. I wondered if it was the right time and place to deliver a lecture. Nevertheless, I gamely started. But about eight minutes into my one hour lecture, I noticed that people were swiping through their smartphones, getting up to find more wine, even talking quietly to one another. So I did two things. I first politely asked one fellow in the front row to please remove his feet from the desk and put them back on the ground and then I turned off the projector and said, “This isn’t working. What do you guys want to talk about, if anything?” We ended up having a really good free-form conversation about career management and career direction…

These experiences got us thinking about past presentations, customer meetings, investor interactions and other important “playbook” moments. Funny enough, we both realized that some of our most effective and successful sessions were ones where we allowed ourselves to make unscripted, on-the-fly changes.

No question that these types of “audibles” come with inherent risk, and moving off script can be scary – especially when you’ve rehearsed a lot and feel like you have a really sound playbook. Yet there are few (any?) scripted plays that are more effective than having a genuine connection with the individual or group you’re speaking with, even if it comes at the expense of polish.

Oh well, we live and learn. We both feel like we can’t train for these moments. We just have to stay aware of our surroundings and remain flexible…just like a good quarterback.