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Want Better Data? Build from the Bottom Up.

At Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research, one of the main aims is to make research available in a digestible format for those in the hospitality and service industries. A large part of that work involves helping the industry not only collect significant data but to make sense of it in order to make better business decisions.

As part of eCornell’s webcast series, the center’s director, Professor Chris Anderson, joined eCornell’s Chris Wofford for a discussion on data analytics and why industry professionals should adopt a bottom-up approach to data. What follows is an abridged transcript of their conversation.

Wofford: Welcome. Let’s talk about data-driven analytics and what the bottom-up approach means.

Anderson: The first thing to note is that good analytics is not necessarily new. I’ve been in this space for a little more than 25 years now. What’s really happened in the last five to ten years is that analytics have become much more accessible — and with that new accessibility comes lower costs. As a result, it’s become much more widely adopted.

But I think we’ve kind of lost a bit of what I refer to as the bottom-up approach, which is involving those who are critically close to the business itself in the data analytics. You need to have an understanding of where that data came from, what potential variables you’re missing, and how it was sampled. In order to get the most out of data analytics, you need a firm understanding of the business itself and how things should be working towards some sort of outcome. In the opposite scenario, the top-down approach, we let technology tell us what’s going on and we sort of let the data drive the solution.

Wofford: Can you give us a real-world example of what you mean?

Anderson: I come at this historically from the hospitality space, from the demand and pricing side of things. That space to me has always been fascinating because, in order to price and control a hotel or an airline, you really have to have a fundamental understanding of where demand comes from, how the business manages that demand, and what kind of decisions they can make. You really get this deep insight into how you make money.

So for a lot of data analytics, that becomes this core set of skills and once we’re good at it, then we really understand our business well and it brings a lot of opportunities for us.

Wofford: What kinds of data analytics are relevant to the hospitality and service industries?

Anderson: There are three basic forms of data analytics. The first is what we refer to as descriptive, where we’re just describing what has happened or just reporting. It’s kind of a backward view of the world.

Our second is the predictive world, it’s the forward-looking part of analytics where we’re trying to use our insight from reporting to help us look at relationships and make predictions about the future. And then predictive analytics goes one step further and tries to see what factors resulted in us achieving previous metrics, what we might do to impact those and what the future outcome might be.

The third part is prescriptive analytics. Once you understand where you’ve been and have a good sense of how to go forward, then you want to use some tools and techniques to make sure you’re going forward in the profit-maximizing or cost-minimizing sort of way.

It’s about using a set of tools to help us do the best going forward, given the insight that we’ve been able to extract from this both descriptive and predictive framework.

Wofford: What are those tools? What are you looking for within the data?

Anderson: We use things like optimization, where we are looking at making multiple decisions at a time. We use things like decision analysis and programming.

We work on incorporating uncertainty into our decisions. No decision is made out of certainty, so we don’t want to just ignore that. We want to make decisions knowing that there is some uncertainty and once I make one decision I can adjust to those uncertainties and make subsequent decisions.

We use different tools if there’s a lot of uncertainty that’s evolving over time and we might use another set of tools if there’s so much complexity that it’s hard for us to map out how things are all working together.

We think about the starting block as being reporting. Your goal is really to understand how well you’ve been doing, so you’re focused on key performance indicators. How was I pricing? How was my competitor pricing? We are just looking at some of these things together in concert with our backward-looking metrics.

This really lays the groundwork of the predictive part, in which we are trying to understand that these things may be impacting some of our key performance indicators, and we may look at those in different ways.

Even before we can start to do this we’ve got to collect the data, put it in a data warehouse, and have it organized in some sort of centralized way. One of the trickiest parts about this is we have to make sure that we have a lot of integrity around that data. We want to have a secure process from which we can extract, pull and analyze, but we don’t want to necessarily change that underlying structure.

There are a lot of pieces we have to make sure are lined up so that if we have lots of users, they are not going to distract from the quality of that data.

Wofford: In your experience, do you find that most companies have their data in order or when you go to work with them, or do you find you have a lot of work to do right out of the gate?

Anderson: For most organizations, it’s about getting their data house together. It’s often not well organized.

Wofford: So getting that data organized is almost always the biggest challenge?

Anderson: That’s right.

Wofford: Once things are put in order, are we then looking at the predictive component? You mentioned using this to reduce uncertainty – how do we do that?

Anderson: Well, let’s say you are looking at what your sales were last year. That would provide a naive estimate for the next year, right? But while you might be able to take last year’s average, there is a lot of variance around that average. So our goal is to generate a better estimate for the future that has less variance around it, so it’s a more refined guess. We try to make less naive guesses by using information from other attributes that may be impacting sales. If we know those factors going forward, that will help us refine the estimate for whatever that metric is, whether it’s sales or some other key performance indicator. The predictive part is all about reducing uncertainty and we do that through different kinds of relationships.

Wofford: Like competitive analysis, for instance?

Anderson: Right. How my competitor is pricing relative to how I’m pricing. But we have to be cautious because there’s no point in looking at the impacts of relationships unless you know those factors in the future. My sales are a function of how I price and how my competitors price but I don’t necessarily know how my competitors are going to price tomorrow or next week or next year.

Once we’ve got those two parts under our belts – the reporting and the predictive – then we can start to make better decisions going forward instead of just shooting from the hip. And that entails using a lot of these mathematical tools, along with our knowledge, intuition and expertise, to look at some of this complexity.

The prescriptive part is getting us beyond just making obvious logical decisions and trying to look at how things are interconnected. We don’t necessarily jump into this part unless we have our foundations in the information because the prescriptive modeling component is going to need inputs from reporting or inputs from our predictive components. They’re the critical first two steps before we get into part three.

Wofford: And the prescriptive element involves running a simulation in some way?

Anderson: Yes, you could think of it like that. You can think of a hotel trying to set optimal prices to maximize revenue. To do that, the hotel owners have to have some estimate of future demands and ideally some estimate of future price-dependent demand. That estimate of future price-dependent demand from our predictive analysis will then be input into our optimization models to help us formulate those decisions going forward.

Wofford: We hear a lot about things like “text analysis” and other new techniques that help us look beyond simple numeric data. Can you tell me about that?

Anderson: Think of Amazon reviews. We’re selling products on Amazon and we’re looking at what consumers are saying. We have to be cognizant that other consumers are reviewing that content. They’re paying attention to that average review score on Amazon but they’re also actually looking at what people said about the product. So we need to look for keywords and repetition of those keywords.

Yes, I could read all that information manually, but we can now use tools to help us pull up keywords and their frequencies to help us get a sense of what’s going on.

Wofford: I’m guessing this is probably common across all industries at this point.

Anderson: Yes, because now you can review anything. And there’s hardly any business that doesn’t have some sort of online chat service where consumers are typing information. So it’s about trying to look at what questions they’re asking, what problems they’re having with your product and then asking yourself how you can use that data to improve the product.

There’s just so much unstructured text today so we’re trying to look for ways to streamline how we extract insight because we don’t have infinite time to read it. Most of the tools for analyzing text are pretty standardized and most of the algorithms that we can use have been well developed. We’re ten-plus years into things like sentiment analysis so it’s not like we have to reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of off-the-shelf approaches.

Wofford: I’d like to turn to a question from the audience. Peter, who identifies himself as a “non-analytics person” posed this question: “In terms of decisions, I sometimes hear, ‘The numbers don’t support that.’ But it’s often on content that I know has not been marketed. So it seems the decision may be made on numbers that are correct, but that the decision comes from a faulty premise. Is this something you see often?”

Anderson: One of the classic things that I see is that organizations think price is going to impact demand, and they think they are changing prices but what they’re really doing is moving prices seasonally. And when things move together, you can’t really tell the impact of the season versus the price, because those are both adjusting together.
So one of the things we see in that data is that we may not have created the right kind of variance in order to see the outcomes.

Most of us don’t experiment with our business on a regular basis but in order to get insight from data, we have perturb those inputs. It’s just like the science experiments with two petri dishes, where you pour bleach on one and not on the other one to see what kind of bugs grow.

We have to have that experimental mindset when generating this data, because if we’re not making those little perturbations to our business practices, then it’s very hard for us to see how A leads to B because we’ve never manipulated A. Or we’ve only manipulated A at the same time we’ve manipulated B, C and D. If I always drop prices and spend more on marketing together, it’s hard for me to unravel which of those was the driving factor. Our data will not tell us that unless we’re cognizant from the business standpoint of having manipulated those things in such a fashion to generate that variance.

Wofford: So to glean real insight, you’ve got to be willing to take risks?

Anderson: Right. Be like a scientist and do some experimenting. You know, the online world has dramatically changed because of what we call A/B testing. Now it’s so easy to tweak something, so we can do all of these little A/B experiments. It’s very easy to create variances and see the outcome.

Wofford: So in some ways, you describe this as a linear process, but at the same time, it’s not. It’s iterative.

Anderson: It is. One minute to the next. The goal of predictive analysis is to look for robust insight into the future. And that is where, for me, the bottom up approach is critical. Yes, we’re trying to understand your business model but nothing is constant. There could be a new competitor, underlying changes in dynamics or some sort of disruption happening. In order to be robust to those changes, the models that we build from the predictive framework have to be grounded in our business practices.

And that comes from this bottom-up approach, versus just letting the data tell us what’s going on. For me, as a data analyst, it’s always about thinking about my two minute elevator pitch. How do I justify my models and can I clearly explain those models in layman’s terms? If I need to use statistical terminology to explain my insight and my models, that is going to tell me that I’m not necessarily grounded, that I’m relying on the data versus relying on my intuition.

It’s some give and take. You have to go back and forth, but the more bottom-up you are, the easier it is for you to justify models and to communicate those models to other people.

Wofford: I want to thank Chris Anderson for joining us today.

Anderson: Thank you, Chris, this was great.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Chris Anderson’s live eCornell WebSeries event, A Bottom Up Approach to Data-Driven Analytics and Why We All Need to Be Involved. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Hospitality topics. 

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Want to Lose Weight? Drop the Diet and Get One of These.

The world is in the grips of an obesity epidemic. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned last year that “adult obesity is rising everywhere at an accelerated pace.” Some 640 million adults worldwide are now considered obese, or roughly 13 percent of the global adult population.  

As part of our Expanding Nutrition Frontiers webcast series, eCornell’s Chris Wofford was joined by professor David Levitsky from the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University to discuss why so many of us are putting on extra weight and what can be done about it.

Wofford: David, we’ll get into the solutions later but let’s start by talking about the problem. What is age-related weight gain? What is happening physiologically?

Levitsky: Well, I think age-related weight gain is perhaps the most serious medical problem in our country and maybe the world. Age-related weight gain is weight gain that occurs after you stop growing vertically. So after about 18 years of age, you continue to gain weight without growing taller. That age-related weight and the rate at which you gain the weight are the best predictors of whether you’re going to suffer from diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke and many kinds of cancers.

Wofford: I was doing a little bit of research before this and I read that our muscle fiber tissues begin to disappear to some degree and get replaced with fat. Is there a biological reason for that?

Levitsky: Well, the decrease in muscle mass really doesn’t occur until middle age, your 50s or 60s. And it’s not that the muscle is replaced by fat, we’re just adding fat. Most of that weight gain is due to the fact we consume more calories than we expend. Simple as that. Despite all the hundreds of diet books out there teaching all kinds of magic, it is simple energetics.

Now we can ask why we are consuming more calories than we expend… My colleagues and I agree that we live in an environment in which we are surrounded by signals that make it easy. In psychology, we call this priming. So if we see food, it actually makes us want to eat. And we have experimental data showing that if you see people eating, you want to eat. When we see a television commercial containing food, we’ll get up and go to the refrigerator to get something to eat. We are totally surrounded by these stimuli and what is referred to as an obesogenic environment.

It’s obesogenic because simply responding to all the stimuli in the environment causes us to gain weight. And that’s the reason we’re gaining weight as we get older. We’re subjected to more and more of these stimuli and we’re going to respond by eating just a little bit more than we expend.

Wofford: Let’s back up a little bit and talk about your experience as it relates to psychology and nutrition, and the experiment that you conducted several years ago related to weight gain and how it might be prevented.

Levitsky: Okay. This all started for me when I was sitting in my office and I had someone pop in and say that they wanted to study “the freshman 15”, which is the idea that college students gain around 15 pounds during their first year. It turns out it’s less than that – more like 5 pounds – but the problem is real. Nobody was really studying it so I said, “Okay, go ahead and look at it.”

So we gave freshmen scales at the beginning of the semester, had them weigh themselves at the beginning the semester and again at the end of the semester, and by then they had gained about 5 pounds here at Cornell. We didn’t really believe it was real, so I got very excited about these findings because it represented an opportunity to study techniques to try and prevent that weight gain.

The most logical way to lose weight is to say, “I’m just going to reduce my calories by 200 per day.” Diets have been around forever, and forever they’ve shown that they don’t work for the vast majority of people.

They’re still responding to the stimuli in their environment and it gets more and more difficult the more weight you lose. So the traditional way of concentrating on caloric intake fails.

Wofford: Nothing new there. Okay, so you’re doing this study and discover that the freshman 15 – or maybe the freshman 5 – is real. What’s next?

Levitsky: My training is in psychology and it’s in a certain kind of psychology called behaviorism, which is a discipline that’s simply dedicated to your behavior in certain situations. In order to change behavior, you have to have some monitor of that behavior. When it comes to weight, that monitor can simply be stepping on a scale.

So the first thing we tried was to give freshmen scales and ask them to weigh themselves every day and keep a graph of their weight. We found that those who followed through and weighed themselves did not gain weight while those who didn’t follow through gained two and a half kilos. I did not believe it the first time we did the experiment so we replicated it the following year and the results were very clear: those who weighed themselves every day and had a record of their weight in the form of a graph do not gain weight.

But of course, college students do not represent the population so we then used older people at a health center for a two-year study and again, those who continually monitored themselves actually lost weight.

Now we have a project that we’ve just started here at Cornell, working with the staff because neither students nor people who belong to a health club are representative of the population. We’ve recruited staff from the groundskeepers to the police force here — wherever we could find real people who are more representative of the population — and half of them have scales and half of them do not. We weigh everybody at the beginning and we weigh everybody at the end. Our hypothesis is that people who weigh themselves regularly won’t see a weight gain. We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.

Wofford: What is happening from a behavioral psychology standpoint? When they look at this weight graph, what is happening in their minds? How does that affect what they do?

Levitsky: Well, there are actually three hypotheses that we have been entertaining as to how this works. The first is that it is simply having the information. They look at the scale and say, “Oh, 155 pounds is too much for me.”

A second possibility is that it works as reinforcement. If you see yourself losing weight, you say, “Oh wow, that makes me feel good” and then you are going to reinforce those behaviors that made you lose weight. That is also a possibility but I’m not holding my breath that either one of these two hypotheses will work.

I prefer to consider the third hypothesis, which is based on priming. Just like when you see food and it makes you want to eat that food, we are working on a priming idea where just stepping on a scale is a primer for all the health information that you already know. You know what to eat, you know how you should behave but you need something to stimulate you. I think that is what happens on the scale.

We have done a number of studies in our laboratory where we bring people in for a focus group. Well, we tell them it is a focus group, but it’s not really. We put snack food in front of them and then sometimes we show them advertisements for cars or how beautiful it here is in the Finger Lakes and sometimes we show them food commercials. When we show them the food commercials, they consume considerably more than if we show them a food-neutral stimulus.

But when you have them weigh themselves just before they go in – we don’t tell them anything about why we’re weighing them, we just get their weight – they consumed considerably less.

Wofford: Even though they’re exposed to the same amount of stimuli.

Levitsky: Right, the stimuli is the same but stepping on that scale changes the way you react to things.

Wofford: I’d like to turn to the audience and get them involved. We have a question here from Christine, who says, “I have been stepping on the scale every day for years and I run three to four miles three times per week and yet I have gained at least 10 pounds.” Is this where we get into the issue of the quality of the calories?

Levitsky: Well, stepping on the scale does not produce magic. It should be a means of informing you of where you are. If she’s gained ten pounds over a few years, she can reverse it by making changes to her eating. You have to change something. If you can live without desserts, without snacks or with smaller portions, these are all good techniques to cause that negative energy balance to get you to lose weight. The only thing I would warn her is try not to lose that ten pounds overnight. She has to think of it in terms of a slow return back to her weight and she can do it. I mean, running 10 to 15 miles is no small thing.

Wofford: I’ve got a question here from Marsha. She says, “I weigh myself every day and work out at the gym every day but I could also use a calorie counter app on my phone. I feel like keeping track of the calories is the most influential in my weight control.”

Levitsky: Calorie trackers work but the problem with the trackers, whether it’s movement trackers or diet trackers, is that most people can’t keep that up for long periods of time. People don’t have room for extra things in their lives and inputting that information is an extra thing. That’s why I tell people in our studies to put their scale right by their bed. You get out of bed and step right on that scale and it takes two seconds to get a measurement, but it’s nothing extra you have to add into your life.

Wofford: Erica asks: “Do you believe that weight loss is about 80 percent of what you put in your mouth and 20 percent physical activities?” Is this a common metric?

Levitsky: There are a lot of reasons why people should exercise. However, and I hate to tell you this, exercise has very little effect on what you weigh. The reason is that the body is so efficient that when you go out and spend that energy and then come back and rest, your metabolic rate after you rest actually goes down lower than it would have had you not exercised. So, exercise doesn’t benefit your weight. It does, however, benefit your risk of heart disease, the prevention of diabetes, and the prevention of stroke and cancers.

Wofford: OK, so exercise isn’t going to get you there. It’s all about what you eat?

Levitsky: I strongly recommend that if you try to lose weight, it should be done very slowly. You should lose weight probably at no greater than one percent decrements. So you see what your weight is and then set a goal for a weight at no more than one percent lower than that for whatever time period you need. You need to take it one step at a time. Some people could do it immediately, while for others it will take them a while to figure out that maybe they can’t live without that afternoon snack. And that’s fine. You just try something else like lowering your portion sizes or skipping dessert. You figure out what works for you and then you try to get to that lower value. Once you discover you can live with whatever change you made, then you make another change. You go down another one percent.

I don’t recommend that anybody get below 10 percent weight loss. At 10 percent, you can reverse things like diabetes and lower blood pressure. All of the beneficial effects of weight loss occur at a maximum of about 10 percent weight loss. That’s all you need in order to improve your health. Now, if you want to lose it for other reasons, aesthetic reasons or whatever, that’s another matter.

Wofford: Another question from the audience focuses on so-called good calories versus bad ones. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Levitsky: Healthy food will do the most to reduce your caloric intake. Low fat foods will clearly decrease your caloric intake. If you reduce the portion size, you’ll be satisfied with less food. If you can do without the potatoes, without the the carbs, fine. Are there good carbs, bad carbs or good calories? It makes a great title for a book, but the nutritional science says that a calorie is a calorie.

Wofford: We’ve discussed weight solutions for individuals but is there anything we can do as a society to address this problem?

Levitsky: I think the scale is the most healthy tool that you can use, so why not give out scales? Let the government give out scales to those who want one. It will be cheap for them. It would cost them probably about $50 a scale and they could save millions if they could prevent you from getting diabetes or hypertension.

A number of my colleagues believe that the government should step in and curb food commercials, particularly ones targeting children. I mean, it sounds reasonable but I am very skeptical because the food industry is perhaps one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.

Wofford: What’s next for you? Are there any new weight-related research projects you’re working on?

Levitsky: My dream experiment that I’ve been trying to do for a while is to work with obese children. We know that if you don’t do anything to help a pre-adolescent obese child, they will become an obese adolescent. We also know that if you do nothing once you’ve become an obese adolescent, you are going to maintain that obesity throughout your life. The chances aren’t just extremely high, it is almost a certainty.

So what I want to do is take these pre-obese children and give them and their family scales and see if we can we get these children to grow at a slightly reduced rate by watching their weight. Could that get them into their adolescence in a non-obese state? That’s where I would like to go but I’m still trying to get funds.

Wofford: That’s a noble cause. Isn’t the obesity rate among children something shocking – like over 20 percent?

Levitsky: It is and what is more shocking is the rate at which it’s increasing. The actual rate of child obesity is lower than adult obesity but the rate at which they’re getting fatter is what’s really threatening. And that’s what I want to prevent.

Wofford: We all wish you the best of luck with that. I want to thank the audience for coming today. And thank you David, this has been illuminating for me. I’ve learned a lot today in the short time that we’ve been together.

Levitsky: My pleasure. Thank you.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on David Levitsky’s live eCornell WebSeries event, The Only Weigh to Prevent Age-Related Weight Gain. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Expanding Nutrition Frontiers topics. 

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Women are “Bossy” and Men are “Decisive”

What Gender Stereotypes Really Mean in the Workplace and How to Overcome Them

Susan Fleming is a senior lecturer at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, specializing in entrepreneurship and women in leadership. She’s a veteran of Wall Street and no stranger to the challenges that women run up against in the workforce.

As part of our Women in Leadership webcast series, Fleming sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the difficult tightrope that women are expected to walk and to dish out advice for how best to navigate situations why gender biases may be at play.

Fleming: Today I’m going to talk about some of the biases and barriers women in leadership roles face as well as some strategies for overcoming them.

I find that when I kick off these presentations, it’s useful to share some information about the current status of women in leadership, at least in the US. Today, women make up just under 50 percent of the US workforce. They also make up more than 50 percent of managerial and professional positions — meaning mid-management and lower middle management positions.

One might logically think that if women are half the population, make up half the workforce and half of the managerial and professional positions, they must also make up half of the leadership positions. But I probably wouldn’t be giving a talk on this if that were the case.

I’m curious to see what our audience might know in terms of the representation of women in a few sectors of our society, the first being Congress, the second being law firm partners and the third being board directors and CEOs within the Standard & Poor’s 500.

Wofford: We’ve got the guesses coming in now. Looks like the audience thinks the percentage of current female Congressional representatives is around 10 percent.

Fleming: The correct answer is that, as of 2015, women made up about 20 percent of the Senate and 19 percent of the House. So when you think that women are half of the population, clearly things aren’t where you might expect them to be on that front.

I often get asked how the United States stacks up against other countries in this. There are 190 direct-election countries in the world and the United States is actually ranked 72nd. Just to give you a bit of context, we are just below Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Greece, and Kenya. And just above Kyrgyzstan and Slovakia.

We often hear our politicians say that we’re the greatest democracy on the planet. To me, democracy would include both genders.

Wofford: Indeed. Do you want to look at law firm partners next?

Fleming: It looks like for the most part, the audience poll is showing answers between 2 and 20 percent. They are pretty much on the mark there. Women account for just under 20 percent of law firm partners. In some ways, you might say there has been a significant increase back from 1995, when women were at about 13 percent. That is a huge increase but it’s a little disheartening with all of the change that you see in our society to only see it go from 13 percent to just under 20 during that time.

Wofford: How did our audience do in guessing the percentage of women in leadership positions within the S&P?

Fleming: Well, two percent was the most popular answer and they pretty much nailed it. When it comes to S&P 500 CEOs, women make up 4.6 percent. Again, there has actually been huge progress mathematically on that. When I first started teaching this, it was one percent. On the board seat side, the answer is about 19 percent.

Wofford: So why are these numbers are so low?

Fleming: There are many complicated reasons. There’s no one thing. It can’t simply be ascribed to discrimination or bias or this idea that women want to have babies. There is a very complicated set of dynamics that are going on culturally and socially that are at play.

The one thing that I really want to focus on today in particular is gender bias and stereotyping.
Gender beliefs, probably more than most people realize, are incredibly powerful in shaping our culture, in shaping the business world, in shaping our behavior and the way that we go about our daily lives.

Part of the reason for that is that gender is the dominant basis for categorization, across virtually all social contexts. Just to give you an example, when you walk into a room of people you don’t know, the first thing that you categorize people on is gender. The next one could be race, it could be class, it could be age, and so on. But gender wins pretty much across the board in every culture.

Another thing that is very important for people to understand is that when you bring up the word stereotyping, and you start talking about bigotry, you get people very concerned and feeling defensive. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Most of this is unconscious. Stereotyping is a type of cognitive shortcut. So when we walk into that room, we don’t have the mental energy or time to differentiate everything about everyone in the room, yet we want to behave appropriately. So we use those cognitive shortcuts in order to guide our behavior.

The downside of stereotypes is that all of those associations that we make, while they might be right and they might be useful, they might also be wrong. So if you walk into a meeting assessing a woman, you might immediately associate feminine characteristics as being more communal and less aggressive. But perhaps the woman is more aggressive than you expected, so you’re reacting to her in a way that is different than you would react to her if she were a man. That’s where stereotypes get us in trouble.

Wofford: So even though these things sort of spring into mind subconsciously, they can still affect how you respond to a given situation?

Fleming: Right. I want to talk a little bit about the content of gender stereotypes, and I thought it could be fun to ask the audience to provide one word that’s a stereotypical description of a woman.

Wofford: Okay, let’s see what we got. The first three all say ‘emotional.’

Fleming: That always comes up but, wow, three in a row?

Wofford: Here come some more: controlling, nurturing, bitchy, soft, timid, communicative, sweet, nice, intelligent, weak, sensitive.

Fleming: Look, here we have “unassertive” and “bossy” right next to each other — that’s interesting.

I can see some more are continuing to roll in, but what you see is that many of the stereotypes fall into what we call communal characteristics. And then you see that people list all of these negative words that are applied to women when they violate that communal stereotype. That’s where you get bitchy, controlling, overly assertives.

Wofford: All of which would probably be considered assets for a male, right?

Fleming: For males, it would be an asset. So that’s kind of the content of gender stereotypes and they do change over time, but mostly you see the same answers.

The problem with stereotypes is not so much around description, it’s when they become prescriptive. Those prescriptive stereotypes are what give rise to the comments we saw in the chat box. Controlling, too assertive, pushy, those kinds of things.

We’ve just talked about typical stereotypes about women and men. When it comes to stereotypes about leaders, they tend to fall into the masculine category. Numerous studies across many different countries, different age groups, etc. have consistently demonstrated that when individuals think of the typical leader or manager, they think of a male. They think of those male characteristics. So when you see that aggressive male leader – confident, intelligent, decisive, exercising authority – the world feels right. In contrast, when you consider a female leader, you have inconsistent stereotypes being triggered.

A female leader is supposed to be strong and authoritative, know her stuff, hold her ground and speak her mind, but while doing that, she is simultaneously also supposed to come off as sweet, supportive, nice, communal, kind and gentle — all of those expectations of what an appropriate woman is supposed to be. As a woman who’s worked in the business world, that’s really hard to do simultaneously and the failure to do that triggers a lot of bad things for women leaders. That inconsistency contributes to prejudice against female leaders.

If the female leader is too communal, she’s seen as a poor leader and too weak. If they’re too agentic, they’re seen as competent but they’re unlikable and for women, likeability is a requirement for success. For men, it’s nice to be likeable but there’s a lot more leeway for a man than a woman to be likable and be tough.

That creates what we call the Double Bind, which is having to walk a tightrope between being simultaneously assertive and smart in order to be seen as competent while simultaneously being nice and warm in order to meet stereotypes of communality. The people that don’t navigate that tight rope well will be either labeled as an incompetent or as a bitch.

Wofford: It seems like a no-win situation.

Fleming: I like to use the Sarah Palin – Hillary Clinton illustration. The political media painted Clinton as the bitchy and unlikable one while Palin was the incompetent bimbo. So women in politics often get painted into one corner or the other.

There was a really funny clip recently on Jimmy Fallon where Hillary Clinton was on and he had her give a talk and he critiqued it by saying, “No, you’re being too loud.” “No, you’re being too quiet.” “Could you be a little less pushy?” or “You’ve gotta want it more.”

Wofford: You hear others say she should smile more.

Fleming: Right, exactly. Fallon said that too and then she smiled and he’s like, “Come on.” So, it was illustrating that Double Bind. It’s a funny clip.

The Double Bind is really important but I also want to touch on some other stereotypes about women’s competence. There are a lot of stereotypes about other things, around women’s commitment, around their credibility, around their organizational fit, but what I really want to touch on is competence.

Women are perceived to be generally less competent than men. The difference isn’t huge but it’s there and it will particularly show up when you’re dealing with male-type tasks. But it’s also true on gender-neutral tasks. In experimental studies where people are assessed doing a general neutral task, women will be assessed lower despite the exact same performance. That’s because there’s bias that they’re less competent.

There was a study in which an identical essay was put out but when you attached a woman’s name as the author, the essay was rated lower even though it was identical to the one bearing the man’s name.

Another barrier that women have to deal with is what we call shifting standards for evaluating men and women. Some researchers did a study on hiring for the position of police chief, which is a very male-typed position typically. They created two resumes, one that had more experience and one that had more education. They then pre-tested them with no names on them and they were evaluated as fairly equivalent. Then they put a woman’s name on the one with more education and a man’s name on the experience one. When they asked people which one they would pick, they picked the man and they justified their decision by saying he had more experience.

Then they flipped the names so that the woman’s resume had more experience and they still said they’d hire the man. Why? Because he had more education. That’s shifting the standards. Because of these unconscious biases, there is an answer they want to get to and they’ll change their perception of the facts in order to get to the answer that makes them comfortable.

Wofford: And these unconscious biases are something that we all have? Can they be overcome?

Fleming: We all have them. One of the things that I find really insidious is that people will use stereotypes to set expectations for themselves and guide their own behavior. Before anyone else can tell them they can’t do something, they’ve already said, “Well, I was really good at math and I’m interested in it, but women aren’t so good at math or computer science or whatever, so I don’t think I’m going to be good at that.” And so they don’t even try, they opt out into different tracks.

Everyone has biases. The goal is to be aware of them so that you can stop yourself from using them unfairly. I would ask you all to be particularly mindful of this when you’re in a context where you are hiring others or you’re evaluating people for promotion or you’re assessing who should get an opportunity in the workplace. You owe an extra level of attention to make sure you’re not using those stereotypes unconsciously.

And don’t apply stereotypes to yourself. When you’re considering career advancement, you might be unwittingly limiting your own opportunities.

Wofford: I think that’s great advice. Do you have any other pearls of wisdom you want to share before we run out of time?

Fleming: Just a couple other things. If you’re a woman, you need to develop a communication style that responds to the reality of the double bind. Truthfully, I don’t like giving this advice and I’d rather see every individual be authentic and be themselves. I’m a real kind of go-getter, I’m loud, I speak up a lot. I don’t like having to dial back and to sort of be less authentic but I have had to do that at times in order to advance.

I think that one of the great ways to start to change the culture to allow more women into leadership positions is to get into the leadership positions to begin with. You’ve got to get that cycle going and if that means that you have to dial it back and maybe bite your tongue on occasion, that’s an okay thing to do in my view. Then over time, you can hopefully drive change by helping to make more women leaders.

Wofford: So there are compromises that still need to be made before we get to where we want to be?

Fleming: I’m a big fan of changing society, changing culture, changing perceptions and getting rid of stereotypes — but in the meantime, you also have to survive.

When I’m teaching MBAs and teaching undergraduates who are about to go into the workforce, I say to them, “This is your own personal choice. You have to read the environment and read the culture of the organization. But be mindful of how you’re being perceived and mindful that it will be different than the way a man is being perceived who’s doing the exact same thing. And you have to decide if you want to tone it down or not.” That’s their call.

Wofford: Thank you Susan, this has been great.

Fleming: Thanks for having me.

 

Want to hear more? This article is based on Susan Fleming’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Bias, Barriers and Strategies for Overcoming Them. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Women in Leadership topics. 

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Here’s What the “Glass Ceiling” Really Means for Women Leaders

Global studies have found that words traditionally defined as feminine in nature, such as expressive, reasonable and loyal, are the words that people most commonly list as the competencies they want to see in their leaders. But if people favor these ‘feminine’ leadership traits, why aren’t there are more female CEOs and board members? In the US, only around 16 percent of corporate board seats go to women, despite women currently holding between 50 to 60 percent of all graduate degrees in the country.

Allison Elias, a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University’s ILR School and expert on gender in the workplace, says the disparity is due in part to a disconnect between what is expected of women and what is expected of business leaders.

In a recent Women in Leadership Webcast hosted by eCornell, Elias suggests that traditionally assigned gender roles affect our perceptions of female leaders. Female leadership candidates have to contend with the often unconscious or unintentional discrimination of males in the hiring role. When a man interviews a woman for a leadership position, for example, his mind may wander to thoughts about her family life, leading him to wonder if she would need a more flexible work schedule than a male candidate.

“Perhaps that employer really wants to hire a woman. Perhaps he has even explicitly declared that he wants to make gender diversity a priority in his organization. But our brains automatically take these cognitive shortcuts,” Elias said.

Even when women achieve the highest positions within a company, they are often hit with what Elias refers to as the “likeability penalty.” Social science research shows that women who are more advanced in their careers are often found to be less likable, too power hungry or too aggressive.

“A lot of women remain in sort of a lose-lose situation. When they behave in a more aggressive or competitive way, they’re punished by being disliked. But if they exhibit traits that are more aligned with their gender role—being warm, supportive, and caring—they might be liked, but they might not necessarily be viewed as competent. Women are punished in a way men are not,” Elias says.

Women also have to contend with an American work culture that expects employees to put work as their first and only priority. Workplaces are too often “structured for a man who has someone to take care of the kids and domestic issues,” Elias said.

“It’s changing a bit, but this ideal worker norm kind of pervades a lot of traditional jobs and that’s a structural way that women face a barrier on their way to the top. A lot of times moving into leadership positions requires always being on, always being responsive to email, never missing days.”

She pointed to a study done by the consulting firm Bain and Company that found that 43 percent of women aspire to reach top management when they start a new job, but that number plunges to 16 percent after the women gain experience within the company. The study showed that women didn’t see themselves as “fitting in” at the workplace, with many of them citing that they weren’t willing to put work above everything else in their lives in order to move to the top.

While everyone is familiar with the concept of the glass ceiling, Elias and a number of other scholars say that the phrase might not be the best metaphor for what women face in the workplace. Instead, they advocate for the ‘labyrinth of leadership’ because all sorts of barriers can block a woman’s progress at different points within her career.

“The glass ceiling metaphor suggests that women are going to be able to ascend and be successful in the workplace until the very top. But when looking at why the talent pipeline doesn’t progress women to the top, the idea of a labyrinth can be more effective because there’s all sorts of barriers that come up at all sorts of points of a woman’s career that can deter her from being able to make it to the end,” Elias said.

 

Want to hear more? This article is based on Allison Elias’ live eCornell WebSeries event, Unlocking the Hidden Leadership Potential Inside Your Company. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Women in Leadership topics. 

Here’s How to Make Innovation Real

There’s a wealth of information on innovation out there, but how can you turn all the theories into action?

Professor Neil Tarallo, a senior lecturer at Cornell’s Hotel School, focuses on how to foster innovation within the workplace in his most recent discussion with eCornell’s Chris Wofford.

Wofford: Neil, it’s great to have you back here with us. What do your students and our webinar viewers need to know about innovation?

Tarallo: My favorite definition of innovation—and believe me, there are many of them out there—was articulated by Peter Drucker, a great researcher out of Harvard who really had a great take on how and where innovation and entrepreneurship come together.

Drucker said, “Innovation is change that creates a new dimension of performance.” I really like that concept of a new dimension. It provides us with opportunities to apply things in a very different way than they’ve ever been applied before.

Innovation really comes in two different levels. One is incremental, or what some people call “sustainable innovation.” And then there is disruptive innovation.

Wofford: Can you walk us through what you mean by those?

Tarallo: Well, an incremental innovation is really a small improvement or upgrade to an existing concept. It can be technology, a product or service. Think of software upgrades that fix minor things or add new features. In the physical world, think of Gillette. They started with a single razor. Over time, Gillette has innovated and created a lot of different things. They went to disposable razors, they have multi-angle blades, they have lubrication bars. So Gillette is an interesting example of how incremental innovation has allowed a company to sustain market leadership for a very long time.

When it comes to disruptive innovation, we’re talking about innovation that changes the way people think about things. Clay Christensen coined the term to describe a process by which a product or service takes root initially in a very small and unnoticed way but gathers momentum as it goes to the market and then people start to really grab onto it.

One of the interesting things about disruptive innovations is that we don’t know if disruption is happening before it actually starts to happen. An example of this, to stay within the shaving realm, is Dollar Shave Club, which has taken us away from the expensive replacement blades by saying they’ll just send you new blades every month for just a couple of dollars.

Wofford: Right, for them it is a subscription-based product and a recurring revenue model for the company. That’s kind of how they get you.

Tarallo: Exactly, and that disrupts the old business model that Gillette created, which was to give you the razor handle and then sell the blades at very high prices.

The important thing to remember is that both incremental and disruptive innovations are necessary for organizations. In my opinion, you need to have a plan for both the incremental improvements that you’ll be doing as well as constantly searching for that disruption that’s going to completely change things.

These two innovations generally focus around three areas: technical innovation, product innovation, and service innovation. A great example of service innovation is how Netflix changed the movie rental business.

But in order for innovation to be successful, you have to create an opportunity within the organization for entrepreneurial behavior to really manifest itself and to take hold. You need an organizational architecture that fosters and supports entrepreneurial behaviors so that you can be chasing after these innovations as you go along.

Wofford: How does a business go about establishing that?

Tarallo: There are two components that I think of when I try to action innovation within an organization. One is what I like to think of as “opportunity discovery” and the second is value proposition design.

When it comes to opportunity discovery, there is a clear methodology that applies. It starts with observation of the market and of potential customers, getting them to talk about their experiences—doing interviews with them to gather information, applying surveys and focus groups and the science behind those. It’s observing people and how they behave as they go throughout their days.

This process is actually called ethnography, which is sort of a fancy word, but it’s really a simple process of just watching people and taking note of what they’re doing and what they’re experiencing as they go through their daily lives. We’re looking for things that are missing for them as they try to accomplish tasks. We’re looking at problems that they encounter that need to be overcome and we’re also looking for pain that they’re experiencing along the way.

In those observations, I’m thinking about three specific behaviors: the functionality of what it is that they’re trying to apply, the social implications of what they’re doing, and also any emotional implications.

Wofford: We have some open-ended questions here that I think it would be good to get the audience to think about. When was the last time that you spoke with your customers regarding their experience with your product, service, or technology? If you would put your answers in the chat window please.

Tarallo: Look at that, someone wrote “just yesterday.” I like that, that’s great. Someone else replied “every single day.” That’s a lot of work so I would be curious how that actually works. Is that through a survey, and what do you do with that information when you get it? That’s really the big thing.

Wofford: That brings me to the natural follow-up question. What do you do with this feedback?

Tarallo: For me, every time a student comes into my office to talk to me about anything, I get information from them for some research that I’m doing about entrepreneurship and how we teach entrepreneurship. I’ll ask a very simple open-ended question, which is “What has it been like for you registering and taking entrepreneurship classes here at Cornell?” And when that student leaves, I have a little red book on my desk and I’ll open it up, put the date and their name and take notes on what they told me. So it’s good to pose these really open-ended questions to get your respondents to tell you stories.

Storytelling is really one of the most powerful tools in this process. When you can get people talking you through their experience, you really learn things you wouldn’t have anticipated.

Obviously an important part of that is to listen carefully, but you also need to look for those nonverbal cues as well as you go along. From there, you can start to generate a hypothesis about what is going on in the marketplace or what is happening within the context of your interest.

Wofford: And what’s the best way to get people to share their stories with you?

Tarallo: It can be through singular and/or multiple engagements, meaning I can sit down with you for an extended period of time and have a longer interview, or we can do multiple engagements where I’m talking to you for 10 to 15 minutes over a long period of time. Both of those are powerful applications of the interview process.

Surveys are another step. Here we start to move away from the qualitative aspects of our research and we start moving more into the quantitative. Surveys primarily help validate hypotheses by reaching a very large sample size. You can also use surveys at the very beginning of your process simply to identify the people that you want to be speaking with to make sure that you have a diverse population in your sample size. You’ll be looking for demographic information like race, geographic location, household income, age, and so on to ensure that you get the right population to ask. Otherwise, your validation is not going to be accurate and you’ll have problems going forward.

Focus groups are another popular thing but I personally stay away from them because there is a real science to focus groups. To run a focus group well, I think you need to be trained in it or you need to hire people to do it for you. And they’re expensive, so when I’m in startup mode, focus groups are generally not something I’ll incorporate.

Wofford: Whichever method you choose, you need to then do something with the information you gather. What do you do?

Tarallo: When we analyze the data, there are a handful of things we do: code the information that we have, look for patterns or anomalies in the information, and then start to generalize and create a narrative around it.

We want to track our assumptions and any biases that we think were brought in and then we want to validate it in the market through a series of controlled experiments and prototyping. We know that these experiments are often designed to fail, but they’ll teach us something that will help us move forward again and take that next step.

I’m a big fan of controlled experiments that are likely to fail, but when they fail, they’re not going to impact our market or people’s perception of our company. I’m not a proponent of the philosophy these days of going out and failing big and failing fast. Failure is just not a good thing, I’m sorry. Controlling it makes a lot more sense, as I can learn more when I do that.

This, in my opinion, is particularly true in the service industries. Service-based businesses are much harder to innovate in and much harder to build business models around. It’s relatively easy to hand somebody a tangible product or put a technology in front of them and have them tell you what’s wrong with it and then you can do an update or a new iteration. But if you’re trying something new out in your restaurant and it results in bad service, most of the affected customers won’t come back to your restaurant a second time. So we want to be very careful. It’s about testing. It’s about failing in a controlled way. It’s about repeating that process until we have what we need as we go forward.

Wofford: Can you tie all of this together for us?

Tarallo: As I’m going through the innovation process, I’m thinking about and utilizing all of the information that I got through the ethnographic research that I’ve done. Through that process of observation, storytelling, interviewing, surveying, and validation, I’m bringing those components in and placing them on the value proposition canvas, which is a powerful tool that presents a graphic illustration of what I’m experiencing and what I’m seeing in the marketplace. I use Post-it notes so that I can take them down and move them as things change, so it’s a very dynamic tool and really lets us get to where we want to go.

My advice to folks is always that if you find yourself sitting at a computer doing research, you’re doing it wrong. It’s all about really interfacing with the marketplace. All your hypotheses need to be validated in the market. We need to be doing those small controlled experiments that help us validate things without damaging our relationship with our customers.

Wofford: Neil, thank you so much for joining us once again.

Tarallo: Thank you, Chris. And just remember, it’s all about getting out there and trying it. You probably won’t succeed the first time you do it, but don’t be dissuaded. Get out and practice. It’s the application of it that you get better and better at.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Neil Tarallo’s live eCornell WebSeries event, A Fresh Look at Innovation. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Entrepreneurship topics. 

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Does Your Environment Impact What You Eat?

How to Improve Healthy Eating and Active Living in Rural Communities

America is in the grips of an obesity epidemic. While it may be tempting to lay the blame on personal choices, the reality is much more complicated. It’s hard to live healthily when you have limited nutritious food options nearby or if your community does not provide the types of environmental features that promote physical activity.

As part of our Expanding Nutrition Frontiers WebCast series, Chris Wofford was joined by Rebecca Seguin, an associate professor in Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, to discuss healthy living in rural communities.

Wofford: Rebecca, what is the current state of affairs when it comes to healthy eating and active living? Why is this something we should be concerned about?

Seguin: I think everybody knows that we have a major problem with the number of overweight and obese Americans. Two out of three adults are overweight, and that is certainly problematic in and of itself. But it also carries all of these additional risks like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer.

We also have a major epidemic of child obesity, with one in three children being overweight or obese and about one in five children qualifying as actually obese. We know that if individuals are overweight as children, they are more likely to be overweight or obese as adults and that will then carry through all these additional health risks. If current trends continue, the next generation will be the first to die younger and sicker than their parents.

We know that while individuals make their own decisions about what they eat and what they do, they are part of social and physical environments that influence them both negatively and positively. So we need to better understand the features of those environments so we can help guide people towards making healthier living choices.

We can also influence policy at the local, state, and federal levels in terms of policies and guidelines that can help people make better choices and live healthier lives.

Wofford: Can you give us an example of how the physical environment in rural communities affects healthy living?

Seguin: There’s a town in Pennsylvania that we’ve worked with that’s fascinating. There’s a sort of a triangle in the middle of these two state highways and the community center and school are sandwiched in between. You have residential communities on each side of the highways and the children all get driven to school even though they only live a 16th of a mile away.

They have to be driven because there’s no safe way for them to get from their residences to the school or to the other side to the library, which is really the heart of this community. I myself took a walk through this area and it really felt dangerous. There weren’t sidewalks, there weren’t crosswalks. Cars were not looking for pedestrians at all.

So the question becomes whether you could build some structures and start changing social norms that would enable the kids to actually be more active in their daily lives. That’s what we really need. We don’t necessarily need people to be more active by going to gyms. They need ways to become more active in their daily routines.

Wofford: What’s the solution?

Seguin: A local policy might be to organize “walking school buses.” Parents could sign up to take one day a week in which they would help the kids safely walk to school. That’s an example of a residential policy initiative that could really help kids get active in their day-to-day lives.

Wofford: So that ties in to what’s known as the “built environment” concept, right? And doesn’t the same concept apply to things like the availability of healthy food?

Seguin: Absolutely. Something we have to think about, particularly in rural environments, are the small businesses. Small store owners, for instance, are often barely staying in business. So while you might want there to be healthier choices for people in those small town retail environments, in some cases healthier food choices are going to spoil because people aren’t buying enough of them. A local initiative that might actually help drive business would be to use local marketing to highlight some of these healthy options. If you can create enough demand within these small stores, the owners wouldn’t lose money and then they could stock more variety and higher quality products.

Wofford: As you said, the obesity epidemic is a national problem, not something that is confined to rural communities. What are some of the factors behind it?

Seguin: This is really simple stuff but I think it’s important to remind people that when we talk about obesity it is about energy in and energy out. What we want is for people to maintain an energy balance. Even if you are overweight, staying weight stable is a benefit compared to continuing to gain weight. And if you’re obese or overweight and want to lose weight, that means you have to expend a bit more energy and eat a bit less. If you just make those tiny shifts over time, you’ll get closer to a healthier body weight.

A lot of this has to do with sedentary behavior. We’ve built all of this efficiency into our lives and that efficiency has actually caused us to hold onto extra weight and not be as physically active or physically fit.

Two out of three people are not getting any daily physical activity. And at our schools, this number is a little out of date, but around 90 percent of children have no physical education classes. We need people to be more active. We want them to engage in vigorous physical activity. We want them to do a range of leisure activities and to simply sit less.

We’re all sitting down a lot but there are little things you can do to help: just getting up and moving around, parking a couple blocks away when you’re running errands, taking the stairs, that sort of thing. Those little bits of activity really add up throughout the day.

Wofford: Activity is one thing, but what about what people eat?

Seguin: We really need to see a shift in eating patterns, like eating more whole grains and having fruits and vegetables take up a much bigger bit of real estate on your plate, as well as having a variety of protein sources.

Let’s look at what Americans are eating. Too much in the way of refined grains, not enough in the way of whole grains. Too much in the way of added sugars and sodium. I don’t think people realize all of the foods that have added sugar. Bread and cereal are good examples. Both can have quite a lot of added sugar—more than people might realize.

Part of this is individual decision-making but part of it is also the social environment. And part of it is the built environment—financial access and physical access.

Wofford: Can you tell us about some of these environmental factors?

Seguin: When it comes to health in rural communities, there is a list of questions you need to look at. Is there a sidewalk? Are there crosswalks? Is there a restaurant there? Is it a fast food restaurant? Is there a grocery store? Is the only food store in town the gas station that sells convenience food? The built environment matters.

When people think about the environment, they think about things in nature but when we talk about the built environment, these are man-made features: streets, playgrounds, sidewalks, community centers, et cetera.

Wofford: So, making a community more walkable can help with obesity?

Seguin: Yes, but it really depends on a variety of factors. Part of it depends on how far people actually live from where they’re walking. There are also factors related to low-income neighborhoods and minority neighborhoods and there are safety and transportation factors. There’s not a clear answer but in general, community features that we consider to promote active living are associated with lower obesity rates.

Wofford: You mentioned earlier trying to walk a few blocks when out running errands, but in some rural communities the nearest market might be ten or more miles away.

Seguin: That’s right. For a lot of people the closest market is far from home and in a lot of cases it’s not even a good market in terms of healthy choices. That’s what people are faced with. They are basically forced to drive.

We did some work in rural Montana and, in some cases, people out there only shop once every three weeks or more because they are driving 100 miles to a mega-superstore and getting all this food.

Wofford: You hear a lot about “food deserts.” When it comes to access to food, what are we talking about?

Seguin: I think people will often hear the term “food access” and they just think maybe there isn’t a store there. But it’s actually more than that. It’s proximity to the store—can you get there? There are many people, including a lot of the older adults whom I work with, who don’t have access to consistent or reliable transportation. And so, that Dollar Store or the local convenience store becomes their only food access point because they don’t have any other options.

Wofford: A big part of your work has been dealing with the local community members, whether that be in Pennsylvania or Montana or wherever. How did you get people engaged and did you meet with any resistance?

Seguin: We absolutely faced resistance. In food environments, the big issues are working in schools. There are huge barriers involved, like the food that the schools have access to, and time factors for the workers involved.

When it comes to the built environment and a focus on increasing physical activity, the biggest resistance is cost. How do you pay for all of this? It might sound great to build a bridge over those two busy roads to get the kids from the library to the school and then home again. But who’s going to pay for it?

There’s also the capacity issue. People have limited capacity and they’re busy, so how do you keep them engaged over time? That’s an ongoing challenge.

However, through some of the community work that we do, we can see that one of the key motivators for residents in the projects that we run is that they’re incredibly concerned about their children, their grandchildren, and future generations. That motivates them to get involved in changing community environments, because they want their grandchildren to be healthier.

Wofford: We’ve covered a lot of ground here today. Rebecca, thank you for joining us.

Seguin: Thank you, this has been great.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Rebecca Seguin’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Improving Healthy Eating and Active Living in Rural Communities Through Citizen Science. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Expanding Nutrition Frontiers topics. 

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Why It’s So Hard to Say ‘No’

Exploring social perceptions in the workplace

Imagine that your phone has just died but you have a very important call to make. Would you be comfortable approaching a stranger and asking to use their phone? How many people do you think you’d have to ask before someone agrees?

These are the kinds of questions that fascinate Vanessa Bohns, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University’s ILR School. Bohns does research on social influence and our perceptions of the influence that we have over other people.

She’s interested in the underlying psychological mechanisms like how feelings of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and embarrassment affect our willingness to ask others to do something for us and how these dynamics play out in the workplace.

As part of eCornell’s Women in Leadership WebCast Series, Bohns joined Chris Wofford for a discussion on how to get others to say yes and why it can be so hard to say no.

Wofford: Vanessa, thanks for joining us today. What can asking a stranger to borrow their phone teach us about interactions in the workplace?

Bohns: The real question is, why is it so hard to ask people for things? Likewise, why is it so hard to say no? A lot of it has to do with the underlying psychological mechanisms like emotions that prevent us from recognizing our own influence over others and potentially prevent us from seeing when other people feel like they can’t ask us for help.

In many cases, it comes down to awkwardness. Something as simple as asking someone for their phone can be a very distressing interaction. The self-consciousness, the awkwardness, this idea that you’re imposing on someone, it can create anxiety.

There is also a gender aspect to the discomfort of asking. Studies have shown that women experience about two and a half times more anxiety when asking for things than men. We all probably think of the stereotype about men not wanting to ask for directions, but that comes from a different place than when you have to ask for something for yourself, like a raise or promotion at work, for example.

We all tend to mistake our own feelings of discomfort for other people’s feelings of discomfort. We all deal with egocentric biases, because we know what’s happening in our own head—it’s very rich with information about our own experiences, and because of that, we don’t necessarily recognize other people’s experiences.

Wofford: Can you give us an example of these biases in action?

Bohns: I’ll start with something called the spotlight effect, which is basically the idea that people are paying more attention to us than they actually are. There’s a classic study from the 1990s in which college-aged participants were given this Barry Manilow t-shirt, which was considered a pretty embarrassing thing to wear. The participants were asked to go interact with others and then come back and rate how likely it was that these other people recognized what they were wearing. Of course, they all thought everyone noticed their Manilow shirts and judged them harshly for it, when, in fact, most people didn’t even notice what they were wearing and if they did, they certainly didn’t judge them because of it. So we tend to think that everyone’s looking at us, noticing our bad hair days, noticing our bad outfits, noticing when we trip. But most of the time, people are much more interested in themselves than anything you are doing.

Wofford: So I shouldn’t worry about wearing this outfit again tomorrow?

Bohns: Exactly, no one is going to notice.

The spotlight effect is very related to another egocentric bias that’s called the illusion of transparency, which is this idea that our emotions sort of leak out of our skin and everyone can see how anxious we are when we’re giving a talk, for example. The truth is that people in the audience usually say they had no idea that the speaker was anxious. Our emotions don’t leak out to the extent that we think they do.

Another egocentric bias is the illusion of courage and this is one of my particular favorites. The illusion of courage is this idea that other people are less affected by self-consciousness, embarrassment, and awkwardness than we are ourselves. A classic study on this entailed playing the song ‘Super Freak’ by Rick James really loudly in a big auditorium full of students. The students were told that a number of them would be brought up to dance in front of the entire audience, so naturally a lot of people get nervous and worried that they’d be the ones picked. As part of the experiment, the students were asked to write down how much money they’d need to be paid in order to get up on stage and dance. They were also asked how much they thought other people would need to be paid to do the same.

On average, the students said that they would need more than $50 before they would actually consider dancing up on stage but when they judged other people, they thought that they would take less than $20 to do it. They thought that other people just wouldn’t be as embarrassed or feel as concerned about doing this as they themselves would. This is the illusion of courage.

Wofford: So when when you take all these egocentric biases together, they sort of suggest that we think that other people would judge us more harshly than they actually do?

Bohns: Exactly. We think that they’re paying attention to our mistakes, that they’re remembering them and that they’re making all sorts of judgments based on them.

So that’s why if we ask for something, we think people are going to judge us. If we say no to something, people are going to judge us. We simply don’t realize the extent to which other people also have feelings of anxiety and self-consciousness. We’re so worried about how people view us that we’re not paying attention to how other people feel in a lot of situations.

This goes beyond our personal interactions. Just recognizing the extent to which self-conscious concerns affect us and the decisions we make on a daily basis as managers, as employees, as bosses—and the extent to which our employees are making similar decisions based on self-conscious concerns—is a really important thing when it comes to organizational behavior.

Wofford: Let’s turn to another big question: why is it so hard for people to say no?

Bohns: In part, people are just mindlessly following a social norm that we say yes to people. So when someone comes up to you and asks for something, you just go along with it without really thinking. That’s part of it. Another big factor is that we don’t want to impolite. If you say no, there’s something that you could be insinuating about the other person that there’s something wrong with what they’re asking.

At the end of the day, it’s just really awkward to say no. And so it’s often just easier and more comfortable to say yes, and just go along with whatever somebody is asking you.

Wofford: Am I wrong to feel encouraged by this? I feel like people are generally good.

Bohns: I think there’s something to be said for the fact that our mindless default is to agree, to just go along with helping other people. The takeaway is that people are often much more willing to help us than we think—and that we have a certain degree of influence.

But there can be a dark side to this. There’s the phenomenon of social engineering that can be used to get people to do things that they should say no to. That can be used by nefarious people who understand this and who want, for example, to gain access to sensitive information by exploiting psychological vulnerabilities. So instead of technically hacking into someone’s computer, you call them up and say, “Hey, I know so-and-so and he said that maybe you’d be willing to give me this, and I just need your password to log on.” One of the reasons this is so effective is that people feel so awkward challenging what someone is saying to them.

The last thing I want to talk about is how this idea that we don’t recognize other people’s feelings of discomfort can affect the ways in which we can encourage them to ask us for things. When we are the ones who can actually help others, do we recognize the barriers that prevent people from seeking our help? Do we realize how awkward they might feel and can we better encourage people to actually come ask for help when they need it?

You can imagine a situation where you have an employee who’s struggling with a project but just too nervous or self-conscious to ask you, the boss, for help. You might not realize that the reason he’s not asking is because he feels awkward, not necessarily because he doesn’t have any questions related to the project.

Wofford: And that might directly affect the outcome of the project.

Bohns: Yes. On the other hand, you can imagine a more nefarious situation in which a supervisor asks a subordinate to do something that she’s uncomfortable with. She feels awkward saying no and the supervisor, because he’s not aware of this discomfort, assumes that she was fine with it. He assumes that if she didn’t want to do what he was asking, she would just say no. A lot of us make this assumption because we’re in our own egocentric world.

Wofford: You’ve shared some really interesting examples. What are some of the conclusions and takeaways you want our audience to leave with?

Bohns: One major conclusion that should be completely evident from all these studies is that self-consciousness drives much of human behavior. We usually think that embarrassment is this trivial emotion but it actually drives so much of behavior that we should take it seriously. We should be aware of the extent to which we are likely to overlook embarrassment in others and the extent to which it drives our own behavior.

So part of the takeaway is to manage the control that self-consciousness has over you. You might think that you’re the only one who is affected by embarrassment, but actually everybody is. Also, be aware of how it might affect others’ behaviors and prevent them from doing things like asking for help.

When it comes to asking for things that you actually need, the first thing is to just ask. People are much more likely to say yes than you think.

Finally, don’t worry about the way people will interpret a request. Be direct. People tend to think that they should be indirect and sort of beat around the bush, when in fact people are much less likely to respond positively to these kinds of subtle hints. They are much more likely to respond positively to a direct request.

You might think that if people are saying yes out of awkwardness or because they feel they can’t say no, that means they’re going to interpret this as being pressured into it. But actually we have actually found that, afterwards, people re-interpret why they did something in a way that makes them feel good.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Vanessa Bohns’ live eCornell WebSeries event, Your Power of Persuasion: Getting Others To Say “Yes,” and Why It Is So Hard To Say “No.” Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Human Resources topics. 

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Building Digital Brands with Analog Products

Here’s How Today’s Hottest New Companies Actually Disrupt

Micah Rosenbloom, managing partner at Founder Collective in San Francisco, knows a thing or two about bringing digital ideas to the analog world. The Cornell grad started the 3D scanning company Brontes, which introduced a handheld scanner to replace the conventional dental impressions used for centuries.

His company was purchased by 3M, which he says “put enough money in my pockets to start angel investing.” At Founder Collective, he and his partners built a fund to invest in the next generation of great businesses at the seed stage. While the company originally focused on technology companies like Uber, BuzzFeed and Hotel Tonight, Rosenbloom quickly became attracted to brands that were building digital success while selling old-school analog products like mattresses, jewelry and eyeglasses.

Rosenbloom joined eCornell’s Chris Wofford as part of our Entrepreneurship WebCast Series. What follows is an abridged version of his presentation.

Casper. Dollar Shave Club. Warby Parker. These days, some of the fastest-growing companies aren’t what you think of, traditionally, as tech businesses.

These companies are what Andy Dunn, the CEO of Bonobos, has dubbed ‘DNVBs”—Digitally Native Vertical Brands.” In other words, brands that have a direct relationship with their customers. For example, if you were to buy a mattress from Sealy in the past, Sealy didn’t know that you yourself were the buyer of their mattress. All the company knew was that it was selling mattresses to Sleepy’s Mattress Store, and Sleepy’s was the one that actually had the knowledge of the buyer. What most businesses come to realize is that whoever knows the end customer has the most value. In the end, the customer information and that relationship is the most valuable.

Many new companies have decided to go directly to the customer rather than through retailers. Some may not even go through Amazon. There are exceptions to this, of course, but the idea is that most of these brands are primarily online.

Most of these “DNVB” brands were born in the last ten years and that newness has allowed them to be built  on modern systems. They’re not saddled with legacy software. They’re not bogged down by crazy inventory systems that have to talk to Target and Walmart. They’re building on web-based technologies that give them a way of speeding up the process in the way they communicate with customers or offer promotions.

That’s just too hard for the incumbents—they simply couldn’t build a business this way.  So that’s why you are seeing a lot of the big players starting to buy these new guys up.

That’s the D—digital—in DNVB. Now let’s talk about the V: the vertical specific. One of the things you learn in the startup world is focus, focus, focus. While conventional wisdom has always been that it is better to have a bigger menu and the more options the better, what some of these new hot brands have realized is that people are overwhelmed with information. It’s actually very difficult to pick which glasses, which mattress, which this and which that. We want people to help us pick it. So what we’re seeing is a realization of the benefits of just having one or maybe a few products.

Price is also really important here. The best Digital Native Vertical Brands are a fifth to a tenth of the cost of the traditional ones. Dollar Shave Club is probably the perfect example of this. Just as the name suggests, they came in and said, “It’s a dollar.” There are those who say that the blades at Dollar Shave Club are not as good as Gillette blades, but for the lion’s share of the customer base, being able to save that much money on the product and still get a good enough product is a really strong value proposition.

So when you’re thinking about these businesses, both as an investor and as a builder, the goal is to be able to charge five to ten times less than a similar equivalent by pulling out of physical retail, by focusing on a few products and by not paying a margin to a distributor.

Some DNVB companies have also managed to disrupt the traditional buying practices. I think most consumers kind of hate the experience of buying a mattress and even to an extent, buying things like glasses or luggage. You just feel like it was a lot of B.S., a lot of marketing. One of the interesting things about Casper is they have a 100 night trial. After a hundred nights or fewer, if you don’t like it, they’ll take it back for a full refund. Changing the way people think about buying things—taking out the risk, the anxiety, the dealing with that sleazy salesperson—really changes the game and that’s why you’re seeing the growth of a lot of these brands.

I feel like I’m doing a commercial for Casper, but it is also a good example of how these types of businesses focus on design and packaging. If you search on YouTube, you can find all of these videos of people unboxing their mattresses and they spring out because they are so highly compressed into this box. If you think about it, it’s a real innovation. In the past, if you were buying a mattress, not only would you have to buy it from a sleazy dude but usually a couple other sleazy guys would come into your home, maybe take their shoes off if you’re lucky, go into your bedroom, take out the old mattress, and put in the new one. The reason they did this is that mattresses just couldn’t ship via UPS. Now all of a sudden, you’ve got a brand that uses traditional delivery services, and that changes the way one can get a mattress.

A lot of the innovation also centers around packaging. We’re involved with a company called PillPack, which is a pharmacy that fills all your prescriptions. Instead of those little brown bottles with the white tops that are hard to open, they put the pills in this beautifully designed sealed envelope that will have your name and the day of the week. The pack will say ‘Thursday’ and then you rip it open and it’s everything you should take on Thursday. It’s a great experience but it’s not a different product. These are the same pills you would take if you went to CVS or Walgreens, but it’s the packaging and the design.

The other thing these great brands share is having a voice. They have a unique edge, a unique perspective, a unique way of talking to their customers. Casper’s branding, for example, uses a lot of animation. The Warby Parker branding uses a lot of cool literary names to market the glasses. The Honest Company has the actress Jessica Alba as the spokesperson and face behind it and even that word, Honest, suggests something very specific about the company’s voice, which is, “You’re going to know the ingredients, you’re going to trust us, and this is going to be good for you.”

That voice has to be very inherent to the owners of the brand, it can’t be artificial. I think that’s what sets these modern companies apart from the traditional guys. When you see a Gillette  commercial you kind of think, “Yeah, it was entertaining, but there was probably an agency, and there was a committee, and there were edits.” Then you watch the Dollar Shave Club video with the the dude who says, “Our blades are f’ing great,” and you think, “ I like that guy.” There’s something really authentic about it and it makes you want to buy them.

We’re starting to see the fruits of these new approaches and I think it’s just the beginning. You see Unilever buying Dollar Shave Club for a billion dollars, you see Unilever also in talks to buy Honest Company, and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing some of the other brands, like Warby and Casper and these others, potentially get acquired or maybe even go public.

That’s sort of the next chapter, but as they say, it’s the early days. Having said everything I’ve  said about these brands, I think you have to be careful. It’s not as easy as simply saying you’re going to come up with the best new earbuds or shirts or cell phone cases. Most of these categories have been historically extremely hard to break into, and there are many, many companies out there.

Product companies, unlike traditional technology companies, require building stuff, making stuff, slow turnarounds, and taking inventory. It is not just bits and bytes like software, where you can write some more code, see how it goes, release it into the wild, and fix it tomorrow. You can’t do that with glasses or mattresses or shampoo.

I think one needs to do a lot of homework before thinking about launching their own brand, or investing in one. So here’s some of the cold water. One, the multiples in these industries are low. Historically, consumer goods have traded at one to 3x sales, not five to 10x like software and technology. Second, you’ll quickly find that you have a lot of competitors. If you Google “buy a mattress online,” you’ll see Casper was first but is now hardly alone. So new companies will find that others will quickly copy them and undercut them on pricing, so that’s a challenge. Third, the brand message is hard to get right. You really have to have that voice and it’s got to be authentic. Some brands do that well and some don’t.

Finally, this idea of creating a hipster brand for everything that’s going to cost less is just not that simple. There are structural differences between all these industries. You’ve got to really look at the industry structure and see if you think there are some soft spots.

Let’s take glasses for example. If you Google Luxottica you’ll discover it owns almost every other brand in glasses you could ever imagine. But I think what what is nice about monopolies from an entrepreneur’s standpoint is that typically one company that owns a lot of the market will price a little bit too high because it’s had pricing power, so if you can get in there with a new product you can really disrupt practices that have been around for a long time.

 

Want to hear more? This article is based on Micah Rosenbloom’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Building Digital Brands in Analog Product Categories. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Entrepreneurship topics. 

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What #OscarsSoWhite and Chipotle Can Teach Us About Crisis Communication

In today’s age of instant social media amplification, there has been no shortage of examples of crises and crisis communication in popular culture.

To walk us through what organizations should do to prepare for a crisis and how to best react, eCornell’s Chris Wofford was joined by Amy Newman, a senior lecturer of management communication at Cornell University.

While Newman says that “crisis is inevitable,” she believes that when handled properly a crisis can actually give a boost to an organization. What follows is an abridged version of her eCornell WebSeries presentation.

Wofford: There are a lot of things that could constitute a “crisis” within an organization. What are we talking about when we talk about crisis communication?

Newman: Let’s start by looking at an academic definition. Timothy Coombs, one of the leading researchers in crisis communication, defines a crisis as “the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes.”

It’s important to note that while a crisis is unpredictable, it’s not necessarily something that you can’t anticipate. Some organizations should know what crisis is coming and even if they don’t, they should be prepared for some crisis because it will happen at some point. It’s just a matter of what it is and when it strikes.

A crisis does threaten the expectancies of stakeholders. There might be health or safety issues, environmental consequences or economic consequences, and all of these will have an impact on the organization. So by definition, a crisis affects the organization’s reputation or bottom line or something else.

Wofford: What’s a good example you could share? Are there any recent situations you can point to as a case of crisis communication?

Newman: There’s one that I’m sure you’re aware of and that the viewers are aware of. The Academy of Motion Pictures recently identified their slate of nominees for this year’s Oscar awards and they were all white for the major categories. There was a lot of backlash about this, with Spike Lee and some major actors threatening to boycott. There’s a hashtag trending on Twitter called #OscarsSoWhite. So this is something that has evolved to the level of a crisis.

Wofford: The consequences in this case are pretty obvious, right?

Newman: If there are people who are respected in the industry who don’t attend the awards because of this, the ceremony is going to suffer and advertising revenue might go down. I would also say also the general reputation of the organization is being harmed. The Los Angeles Times has been doing the most reporting about the situation and they took a look at the demographics of the academy itself and guess what the average age of the people voting for the Oscars is?

Wofford: I’d say it’s up there. 50-plus, 60, 70.

Newman: It’s about 62. So, you know, it’s people who have won awards, people who have been in the industry for a long time. They have a lifetime membership. You can see why there might be a lack of diversity.

In this case, I wouldn’t say that the crisis was entirely unanticipated. They should have known better. Last year, there were also all white nominees and criticism of the Academy. At the time, the Academy president,Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who happens to be an African American, was adamant that the Academy didn’t have a problem recognizing diversity. But now it’s escalated to the point that they really do need to do something about it.

We’ll talk later about their response, but first I’d like to talk about three phases of crisis management: preparing for a crisis before it happens, managing through the actual crisis, and then learning from a crisis.

Wofford: It’s the leader’s job to prepare an organization for decisions using these three steps, right?

Newman: It certainly is. The preparation is very important. We usually think about crisis management happening at the most senior level of an organization and certainly if it’s a large organization, there’s a corporate communication department that handles much of this.
But it becomes everyone’s responsibility during a crisis to represent the organization well and to try to turn things around.

So in preparing for a crisis at first, well, of course the best way is to prevent a crisis from happening at all. You can’t do that in every situation but you can in some. I’ll present Volkswagen as the case here. They installed diesel deception software in their cars so, in effect, created their own crisis. It was bound to come out at some point.

Wofford: Do you think Volkswagen was at all prepared for this? They got caught red-handed.

Newman: It really didn’t seem they were ready for it. What I understand about Volkswagen is that they have a very tightly controlled centralized management. That’s good in some situations but in a situation like crisis communication, it made them very slow to respond. I think it’s because they kept information so tightly closed—they really were not prepared for what happened at all.

One thing an organization should do is to document what would happen in case of a crisis. This means identifying contacts and putting together a team of crisis communication people. Usually that will be some HR people, maybe your local department, communications people, of course, some emergency management people, safety—All of those functions should be represented.

Included in that kind of plan is an approach for the media. What should we say if we get a phone call? What will the communication challenges be? Which channels should we use? How do we notify different audiences?

Part of the preparation process is being honest about the vulnerabilities in an organization, and this really depends on the industry. If I own a restaurant, I am likely to have a problem with food poisoning at some point or some other food safety issue that has to be handled. If I work for a hospital, we will probably have a malpractice situation, so we might as well think about how we’ll address that when it happens.

The other way to think about this is situational. If we’re doing layoffs, well, we might have a situation of workplace violence. If we’re in the process of labor negotiations, we might face a strike so we should prepare our messages ahead of time.

When a crisis hits an organization, emotions are running high and you have to act quickly. You don’t want to be trying to craft messages and figuring out the best way to respond. That should be done ahead of time.

Another thing we can do is to try to catch a situation before it becomes a full-blown crisis. An example I can give is McDonald’s.

Wofford: Okay, I see your slide shows a poster saying ‘You’re not alone. Millions of people love the Big Mac”. But yikes, the woman looks very depressed or even suffering from mental illness. I can’t imagine this campaign worked out very well.

Newman: Well, a lot of people suffer from mental illness, depression in particular, and this was not appreciated. So someone took an image of the ad and posted it to social media and there we go: a crisis is born.

But I have to compliment McDonald’s for handling it quickly. They immediately put an apology out. They also blamed their ad agency, which could be a dangerous strategy. But the ad agency in Boston took responsibility and confirmed what McDonald’s had said, which is that they had not approved the ads. So the agency apologized as well.

The ads were taken down and it quickly resolved, which is the best way to handle a crisis.

Wofford: McDonald’s probably offended some people but by responding quickly, there wasn’t a major effect on the company’s bottom line.

Newman: Exactly, McDonald’s handled it correctly.

But sometimes, despite our best efforts, there is still a crisis. I’m going to review three principles and I’ll show some examples of each. The first is to communicate quickly. That is essential, especially within the social media environment. The second is communicating consistently. And the third principle we’ll talk about is communicating openly.

Let’s start with the first. A study found that 53 percent of Twitter users who expect a response from a company on Twitter expect that response within just one hour. The thing is, within an hour all sort of things can happen on Twitter. One tweet could go to millions of people, so if companies aren’t in that conversation they’re really going to miss out.

Let’s give an example. People may know of the movie ‘Blackfish’, which came out in 2013. It’s about SeaWorld and how they treat their animals. It showed how SeaWorld was treating their orcas, putting them in restricted spaces. According to the film, there were some trainer injuries and a couple of trainer deaths because of how the orcas were being treated. It is a pretty damning film.

SeaWorld had no response to the movie at all and the conversation just kept elevating and elevating and social media celebrities were all over it. Some acts canceled planned events at SeaWorld. PETA, of course, had its own campaign. People were making this analogy of living in a bathtub for 40 years, referencing the confinement that the orcas had suffered.

SeaWorld showed exactly what not to do in a crisis situation. They refused to do any interviews. Months later, they finally did start to use social media and their website to share some videos meant to portray that they’re actually an organization that helps animals. But it was too late, and now what we’re seeing is that SeaWorld has really suffered in terms of ticket sales and lost partnerships. This was just a classic example of a tone-deaf organization that wouldn’t admit to wrongdoing.

Wofford: You mentioned you would get into how the Academy responded to the #OscarsSoWhite crisis.

Newman: Well, after that hashtag started trending, Cheryl Boone Isaacs did respond pretty quickly. The Academy tweeted out a statement from her, which you can see on my slide.

In her first statement, she says “I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful work of this year’s nominees.” And I think it’s really important to remember that when a leader is working on a crisis situation, there are many, many audiences involved, and many people to try to appease. One thing she can’t do is take anything away from the current nominees, so she’s doing the right thing here in acknowledging them.

She goes on to use really strong words: “I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation and it’s time for big changes.” This sounds sincere.

Wofford: And she’s owning it by using “I”, right?

Newman: Yes. She’s doing the right thing. She’s the president of the organization but she’s also saying this as an African American. I’m sure she probably has her own feelings about this as well.

She goes on to say: “In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity.” So she’s promising action and, of course, you say that you had better do it, right?

She continues by saying that the Academy has done quite a bit to encourage diversity in recent years but she acknowledges it hasn’t been enough. So I think that’s good too.

But then I think she really falls a bit short in the end when she says “This isn’t unprecedented for the Academy. In the ’60’s and ’70s, it was about recruiting young members.” Now, as my students would remind me, that was a long time ago.

Wofford: Right, and probably a lot of her detractors haven’t been around that long so I’m not I’m not sure that line did her any favors.

Newman: Exactly, it makes you think of old white guys. But she ends on a positive note: “I recognize the very real concerns of our community.” That’s a good line.

So the Academy’s response, issued just four days after the crisis, is not a perfect response, but it is a good example of a quick response.

Now let’s look at another principle for communicating, which is communicating consistently. You’ve got three tools that are going to help you communicate consistently within the organization. One is the crisis communication plan that we looked at before. The second tool I would suggest is social media guidelines. The third tool I want to recommend is to have a communication plan.

Organizations need to identify all of their audiences, internal and external, and think about how those audiences might feel or respond to a crisis situation. That helps us really empathize and then identify what we are trying to accomplish with our communication. What do we want them to feel after they read our message or watch our video? What do we want them to think differently about the company?

It’s always good to use a variety of communication channels because we know that people have different learning styles and different ways of receiving information. So you have to use multiple forms: social media, emails, press releases, statements on websites and, of course, video can be very powerful in a crisis situation.

Too often companies forget about internal employees so I would recommend prioritizing those before anything goes to the press to make sure that internal employees are aware of what’s happening and any response that the company is planning to make.

Wofford: Your third principle is communicating openly, right? What does that mean?

Newman: Being available to the media, being honest about the communication and, ideally, being transparent. Now, there can be a lot of questions about how transparent an organization really should be. There’s always this healthy tension. Lawyers tend to be more conservative and don’t want the companies to disclose much. They might prefer an organization to say “No comment.” But corporate communicators know that kind of stance is not going to help the company in the long run. People really want to know what’s going on.

My view is that information will come out anyway, so you might as well control the message as the organization.

Another area of great debate within some companies is whether organizations should apologize. Lawyers sometimes argue that apologizing demonstrates guilt. But we don’t have to apologize in a way that says we’re responsible. We can apologize in a way that shows sympathy and regret. There’s a ton of research that says showing sympathy will actually mitigate the reputational damage for an organization in the long run and could actually reduce financial loss.

Wofford: Once you’ve made it through a crisis, what should you have learned?

Newman: What most people want to do is just get back to work because it’s incredibly emotionally draining and time consuming, but one of the most important things a crisis leader can do is to reflect on what happened. How did we do in terms of the media coverage and community relations? How did the crisis management team itself do?

Taking stock in that way is really important to build leaderships skills and to prepare for another crisis if it does happen again.

I want to end on a positive note here and that’s to say that there’s definitely a life after crisis. I’ll give an example with the Tylenol case. In 1982, cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol appeared on the shelves. At first, the company said it didn’t come from their plant; they denied responsibility and the predictions were that the company was pretty much done.

But then they acted very proactively, pulled all of the product from the shelves, and they actually came up with those tamper-proof bottles that we know today. They took real positive action and became an industry leader.

For a more current example, we can look at Chipotle’s response to its E. coli breakout. They are being very transparent about changes. Just this past week, the company had a meeting at all its locations. They closed down for four hours and they live-Tweeted the meeting. Chipotle founder Steve Ells says that he wants to become a leader in the industry in terms of food safety. We’ll see whether he achieves that goal, but most analysts say they have no doubt that the company will recover.

People have short memories and as soon as another crisis comes along, we will forget about this one.

Wofford: Amy has a Twitter account, @bizcominthenews, that is very current and keeps up with all of these sorts of issues—we invite you to check it out.
Amy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Newman: Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Amy Newman’s live eCornell WebSeries event, Crisis Communication: Expect the Best, Prepare for the Worst. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Women in Leadership topics. 

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Want to Build High-Performing Relationships at Work? Try This.

Building collaborative work relationships with colleagues and avoiding threats to project collaboration are issues that every employee today must deal with.

To address the real-life challenges that people face in today’s diverse and often global – or even virtual – workplaces, eCornell’s Chris Wofford was joined by Dr. Michele Williams, a scholar at Cornell University’s Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution as well as a Faculty Fellow at the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Network. Their wide-ranging discussion is part of our ongoing Women in Leadership WebCast series.

Wofford: Michelle, thanks for joining us. I’d like to start with the results of some poll questions we posed to our audience. Here’s the first one: “Do fear, stress, or anger play a part in the erosion of trust at your organization?” The overwhelming response was ‘yes’, which is probably not much of a surprise.

Williams: No, it’s not. But what I think is really important in today’s society is that there’s so much economic pressure, a lot of mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and so on, so fear, stress, and anger have become almost a daily part of work. Figuring out how we build and maintain trust when emotions are starting to be just a common part of our work experience is a real challenge.

Wofford: I’ve got another one here I think will be interesting to look at, which is, “Do you believe that lack of trust in your organization is an issue that needs to be addressed?” Again, probably no surprise that 100 percent of the responses say “yes”.

Williams: This is a widespread issue. If we look more broadly, the erosion of trust in our institutions and politicians and government parallels what’s going on within organizations.

I would argue that trust is really the key to collaborative relationships because it really increases things that are essential to collaboration, like information sharing, helping behavior, responsiveness,and flexibility.

If something goes wrong every time you work with a contractor, for instance, you have to renegotiate the contract. That’s extremely costly. If you trust them, you can respond in a more responsible way that allows you to work around whatever problems arise.

Trust also decreases the need to monitor everyone. If you have to watch everything your team member does, it’s going to really slow down the project.

Wofford: Ok, trust is important. I think that’s something we would all agree on. But what is trust, really?

Williams: Everyone has almost their own definition, including academics, economists and
organizational people, and all of them tend to vary a little bit. But what we’re going to talk about here is psychological trust.

Whenever you collaborate with someone, if they don’t do their part, it can really harm you. When you rely on someone there really is a risk of opportunism or revenge. But you take this risk, not as a huge leap of faith but based on the expectation that others will be helpful or at least not harmful.

This belief that others have benevolent integrity and confidence is really the basis of trust; the trustworthiness you perceive in your colleagues. Do they have the ability to carry out the tasks or write the report or analyze the numbers? Do they follow through on what they say? That’s really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about building trust.

Wofford: Going back to our opening question, how does trust deteriorate?

Williams: Fear and stress can undermine rational cooperation. Time and time again, research studies show that people will punish others even at a cost to themselves if they believe they’ve been treated unfairly.

Tough economic times and layoffs make people fear that others are not going to be able to cooperate and are just trying to protect themselves. Fear can also cause employees to avoid one another and it’s very hard to get work done when people are avoiding you.

When it comes to anger, it can really cause vengeful behavior and override understanding and forgiveness. Everybody makes mistakes, but if people aren’t given a second chance, it often ends up undermining your project without giving them the chance to either explain what happened or to rebuild the trust.

Wofford: How do our different personalities and personal assumptions play into issues of workplace trust? I mean, we’re all individuals right?

Williams: I teach a course in intergroup dialogue and part of the foundation of that course is trust and how you give people the benefit of the doubt when talking about issues that are controversial. Can we have a discussion with people who have different assumptions and can we do it in a way that moves things forward rather than placing blame?

Wofford: Isn’t a lot of that just making people feel comfortable?

Williams: Exactly, and honesty is what brings about those high-quality connections that really facilitate work.

I want to talk a little bit about emotional work. Everyone’s probably had a colleague who’s had a bad day and you’ve tried to cheer them up. That’s what emotional work is. It’s when you try to change your own emotion or someone else’s emotion. Emotional work is really key to building trust in settings where there may be high emotions.

If you are all working really hard to get something done, there’s a lot of stress and tension. If team members are able to help each other manage that, they’re able to maintain that trust at a higher level.

Wofford: So we have to manage emotions in addition to doing our work? How does this play out in a real-world setting?

Williams: Emotional work has two fundamental foundations. One is emotional influence. Can you make the other person feel differently than they’re feeling now in a way that will help them work and continue their relationship with you and with a project? Can you see the situation from the other person’s point of view so that you can figure out the best strategy for interacting?

So how do you do that? There are several different things you can do. One is to alter the situation. Managers often do this if they have a negative feedback report to give to an employee. Instead of calling them into the conference room or the manager’s office, they might instead take them out to lunch and make it a more informal situation.

Another way is to alter the other person’s interpretation of events. You know, projects often fail and that can be crushing. But being able to reframe that into a message of “failures only lead to success” is very effective. Get them to think about it in a different way. Those types of interpretations help people go forward and build and maintain trust.

You can also change the environment. Go play racquetball, go out for a drink – that’s probably not a long-term solution but it works in the short term.

Another approach is that sometimes people say, “Suck it up, just keep going and move on.”

Wofford: Is this emotional work the responsibility of HR, of leadership, or of all of us?

Williams: This is definitely something that leaders do and something that people expect of their leaders. But it’s also something that people do within a team. You need to support each other.

If you don’t notice how other people are feeling, there’s not as much the manager can do about it. Team members have a huge impact because they’re with that person every day, so they’re in the position of being able to reframe a failure or a challenge in a way that makes people go forward.

I think that this is important at all levels of the organization. HR certainly has a critical role to play, including in what type of training they can provide so that people start to understand these behaviors.

Wofford: I want to turn back to our audience for a moment and ask them to weigh in on this poll question: When you feel anxious, stressed or angry, what would you like your team members and managers to do? We have some options: one, use humor to distract you; two, listen to your story; three, help you think more positively; and four, give you advice.

The answers are now in and I don’t know if you’ll be surprised by this, Michele, but the most popular answer was two, to simply listen.

Williams: Listening is critical. I think that a lot of times people jump in with advice when they haven’t understood the situation because they haven’t taken the time to really listen to the person. They’re only half listening and then they start offering solutions. So listening is extremely powerful and it shows that you care and are trustworthy.

Wofford: Not everyone is willing to share their feelings though. How do you find out that your team members are angry or stressed if they don’t come out and say it? How do you anticipate it?

Williams: You’re right that people won’t always tell you, so you might have to look for clues. It may be that you have a team member who used to always go to lunch. If they stop going out to lunch with you, that’s a clue that something’s probably up.

A lot of this is about the proactive process of imagining other people’s thoughts or feelings from their point of view. This is important not only in terms of emotional influence but also just in terms of communication. Communication scholars have looked at perspective-taking and it turns out that when you take someone else’s perspective, you adjust what you say to their knowledge level and to their experience. You frame things in a way so that they actually understand what you’re saying better. It also helps you feel closer to people once you’ve taken their perspective and this in turn makes you care more about their outcomes. It’s a very powerful process if people engage in it.

You know, there is this myth that people are simply trustworthy or not and all you have to do is watch your colleagues and see how they behave and you can figure out if they’re trustworthy or not. But in reality, trustworthiness is something that’s negotiated. Both sides have expectations for trustworthiness and you have to talk about them to figure out where to meet in the middle.

Wofford: So we know that perspective-taking and managing other people’s emotions and emotional influence are important, but how do we get there? How do we get to a place where we’re doing that regularly?

Williams: I would just say practice, practice, practice. Perspective-taking is critical because perspective-taking decreases when people are under stress, under time pressures or when they’re trying to multitask. And of course, this is exactly when it’s most needed.

On a personal level, get feedback. Solicit feedback from individuals about how well they think you understand their perspective. Ask people, what are the situations in which I’m at my best?
Think about those types of situations so that you can build on those strengths.

And finally, practice generative listening. Generative listening goes beyond active listening. So you are listening – you’re not texting while they’re talking to you – but more than that, you’re also affirming their perspective.

You don’t have to agree with someone to affirm that you’ve heard, what they’re saying, and what assumptions they are moving forward from.

Wofford: What are the takeaways you hope people get from our talk here today?

Williams: Building high-performing, collaborative work relationships requires effort, perspective-taking, emotional work, and threat reduction. It’s an interpersonal process that’s ongoing. You don’t do it once and stop.

In today’s global workplace, effective work relationships are key to promotions, project success, and a company’s profitability. Some of the concepts we’ve talked about today can help you build and maintain the trust you’ll need within your team or organization.

Wofford: Michelle, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining me.

 

Want to hear more? This interview is based on Michele Williams’ live eCornell WebSeries event, Building High-Performing Relationships at Work: What Leaders, Followers and Team Members Need to Know. Subscribe now to gain access to a recording of this event and other Human Resources topics.