Morale: How Leaders Can Tackle Their Biggest Challenge

Covid Fatigue has officially set in. Nearly one year after the first shelter-in-place orders came down, we are still dealing with social distancing, Zoom headaches, masks, and distance learning. And that’s if we are fortunate enough to have avoided contact with the virus, lost jobs, or at worst, lost loved ones to the pandemic. Add to this Texas ice storms, power outages, and the return of toilet paper hoarding, and you’ve got yourself the perfect recipe for a sharp decline in employee morale.

Those in leadership roles are faced with keeping up not only their own morale, but that of their respective teams as well. The results of a Vistage CEO Confidence Survey for the 4th quarter of 2020 showed that morale was a major concern for C-suite executives. To shed some insight on these challenges and how best to overcome them, Vistage has assembled a renown group of experts: Dr. Eve Meceda, Valerie Alexander, and David Friedman.

Check out the recent Vistage blog post on how leaders can address a historic decline in employee morale. Afterwards, check out the video on Managing Morale for Yourself and Your Team to cover all your bases.

The Science Behind Risk-Taking

The role of leadership demands an ability and willingness to take risks, which is one reason that leaders are relatively scarce.  Much research has documented that humans are risk averse; a trait that had significant survival value in the dangers we faced in the early history of our species.  That aversion may not be helping you and yours in what is now a very different world.

Research has shown, however, that there are circumstances when we are more likely to take that big risk.  This short article from the Kellogg School at Northwestern asks “When Do People Take Huge Risks?”  The answer may lie in the size of the bet you’re asking them to take.

Impostor Syndrome

Maya Angelou, one of the 20th Century’s most resonant figures, wrote poems that were adored by millions. Even so, she often felt like an imposter. “I have written 11 books but each time I think ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now,” she once said. “I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”

The term “imposter syndrome” was coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. They wrote that it’s a feeling of “phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.”  These people are motivated to achieve, but they’re worried that they’ll be discovered as frauds.

Imposter syndrome is stunningly common — 70 percent of people will experience these feelings at some point in their lives, research suggests.

Imposter syndrome has no bias for job, seniority, race, or gender. But it can be especially tough for new CEOs, who have put in years of work and now sit at the top, which can be a very lonely place indeed.

Luckily, there are ways for CEOs to realize the truth: They are not imposters.

WFH Doesn't Have to Mean All-Day Calls

As we enter the 11th month of many of the COVID pandemic in the U.S., many of us are still working from home (WFH). Slowly but surely, we are all coming around to the realization that we can generally maintain a fairly high level of productivity despite our remote locations. Many employers, in order to compensate for a decentralized workforce, have encouraged employees to stick to working normal business hours. One way to maintain these hours is the various video calls employees join daily, sometimes taking up the entire workday. Trying to keep these hours while dealing with competeing requests (from children, spouses, a household, balancing health & wellness, etc.), begs the question: does it really make sense to stick to the normal 9-to-5? The answer seems to be no.

This past fall, Marco Minervini, Darren Murph, and Phanish Puranam of Harvard Business Review looked to the example of GitLab to explore this question. GitLab has been going strong for 6 years, with a 100% remote workforce, and they are a fascinating example of how to navigate the peaks and valleys of this model. With over 1,300 employees spread over 65 countries, GitLab uses tools that allow team members to work on ongoing projects in their own preferred times. This can (and has) increased aggregate productivity, but simultaneously provides coordination challenges across physical space and time zones.

As they say; “Working from home in an effective way goes beyond just giving employees a laptop and a Zoom account.” Check out their in-depth and fascinating article that details how GitLab has successfully run this model for over six years, and how other C-suite leaders and business owners can move away from the regular 9-5 grind.

Back to the Facts

This past Wednesday marked the Inauguration of our 46th President of the United States; Joesph R. Biden. Among the highlights of the pomp and celebrations was President Biden’s inaugural speech. His speech was not just a call to unity, it was a call to a return to truth, science, and generally using factual information to guide our decisions both as individuals and a country. In honor of this call to action, let’s start off the new administration with a good read: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund, and Ola Rosling. Although written in 2018, it is quite relevant and essential these three years later.

Much like mindfulness is defined a stress-reducing habit of living in or focusing on the present moment, “factfulness” is defined by the authors as: “a stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.” Seems simple, right? Not so, apparently. In Factfulness, the authors reaveal why, when asked simple questions about the world, we so often get the facts wrong. Between our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us vs. them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules the airwaves) to how we perceive progress (or what we understand as a lack thereof), Factfulness lays out the ten instincts that distort our perspectives.

Bill Gates called it “One of the most important books I’ve ever read.”, and former President Barack Obama said it is “a hopeful book about the potential for human progress”. Check it out and let’s all start off 2021 with a better understanding of how we can meet this call to unity, sanity, and fact-based living.

Diversity on Your Board

As the founder of one of the country’s oldest minority-led investment firms, John W. Rogers Jr. has spent his career pushing for greater diversity across a variety of different industries. Yet despite his work (and that of many others) and despite diversity and inclusion being at the forefront of recent corporate conversation, the wealth gap between racial groups is growing, not shrinking.

“People have just no idea how much worse off we are. We’re losing out on the key economic opportunities and the parts of the economy where the wealth is being created today, primarily Wall Street and Silicon Valley,” Rogers said. “We are still continuing to try to work in yesterday’s industries. And in tomorrow’s industries, where the real opportunity is, we continue to be locked out. It almost reminds me of baseball in 1940.”

Recently Stephanie Creary of the Wharton School, interviewed Rogers on her podcast (older episodes here), as well as co-authored an article for Strategy & Business with him. In both, the two discuss ideas and practical frameworks for boards to actively advance racial justice and increase diversity within their organizations. For those who have made a commitment to fighting systemic racism, the message is clear: put your money where your mouth is. This should be required reading for any C-suite or board members who would like to authenically increase diversity among their colleagues.

Resolutions You Can Keep

With 2020 thankfully coming to an end, many of us are thinking about what we want to improve about ourselves, our lives, and the world around us.  These ideas typically manifest themselves in the proverbial New Year’s resolutions, and are too often jettisoned by January’s end.  To be achieved, a resolution needs to be transformed into a goal.  We are familiar with the SMART goal methodology (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) which is no doubt helpful, but for many of us not enough.

One of Vistage’s top speakers on communication has some insights that may help you.  Chalmers Brothers has been invited to address our C-Level members over 600 times.  Mr. Brothers is a master of the conversations we have with others, and perhaps most importantly, the ones with ourselves. Changing how we handle both may help us enhance our resolution batting average.  Specifically, Mr. Brothers thinks our goal setting falls short because we fail to consider other powerful aspects of the process.  Read more about it in his short but valuable article: Goal-Setting, Declarations and The Power of Context.  (See his TEDx talk for a deeper, humorous exploration on “How language generates your world and mine.”  Highly recommended for those who aspire to lead).

Happy New Year!

The Great Dispersion

Early on in the pandemic NYU professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway observed that Covid would be less the cause of a new trends than an accelerant of existing ones.  In a recent posting at his “No Mercy/No Malice” blog Galloway writes that the “trend that encapsulates the greatest reshuffling of stakeholder value in recent history is… the ‘Great Dispersion.’  Similar to prior macro trends like globalization and digitization, it offers enormous opportunity, but also real threats.”

Galloway outlines the forms this “dispersion” may take, including “the erosion of empathy” and the threat to our notion of what it means to be an American.  This thoughtful post suggests that both opportunities and threats lie within the dynamics of “The Great Dispersion. “     

Bonus:  Dr. Galloway’s new book Post Corona: does a fine job of pulling together in a short book the stream of excellent analysis he has offered in the past six months.  Should be required reading for every C-Level executive.

Five Questions for CEOs

Just in case there was any doubt, these last few weeks have set the record straight on whether Covid is going away any time soon. No doubt the recent spikes we’ve seen will send many of your employees back into work-from-home (WFH) status (if they ever returned to the office in the first place, that is). And although a few promising vaccines are providing a light at the end of the tunnel, the workplace is not slated to return to normal anytime soon. On the brightside, this winter could provide a time for C-Suite leadership to reflect on the long-term nature of who goes remote, who doesn’t, and other considerations that will spring from those decisions.

Chief Executive magazine recently published a short article reviewing some of these considerations, not the least of which will be equity among those with different work agreements. These considerations include:

• Will your workers’ compensation change, if anyone goes remote?

• What restrictions will you apply to remote workers?

• What is your long-term strategy?

• How will you manage and measure productivity remotely?

• What kind of culture are you creating?

Click on the link above to go into a deep dive of these five questions, and read how some CEOs are addressing these issues. Then take a moment to ponder your own answers.

Creating Change Through Ethical Investing

There’s a new sherrif in town, and they mean business. Specifically the business of fianancial capital and investments. The Adasina Social Capital team launched their first company in 2018 as a social justice investment firm (then known as RISE). Their mission was to find investors interested in companies that met their high standards of racial, gender, economic, and climate equality.

In 2020 the company changed their name and began a new mission to provide a bridge between investors and social justice movements. CEO and Founder Rachel Robasciotti recently sat down with Wharton Business School’s own Katherine Klein to discuss how collective investment (or divestment, in some cases) has an impact on share prices. Check out Miss Klein’s latest blog and podcast to read more about Adasina’s strategies to make the world a better place, one portfolio at a time.