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Don’t schedule your strategic planning session until you figure this out.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Time for those leadership sessions we use to plan for the future. But before you clear those calendars and head into days-long meetings, ask yourselves: what question are you trying to answer?

We’ve helped many leadership teams plan for the following year. It’s surprising how many companies schedule an off-site or a series of working sessions without clarity on exactly what problem they’re trying to solve and what objectives they want to hit.

So before you schedule, figure out which questions you’re trying to answer.

1. Who are we and where are we headed?

Every executive team must align around their purpose, vision, and values. But not every team knows how to align. It takes practice. The process builds relationships as team members discuss, work, collaborate, and agree on a singular view of the future.

This work might seem unnecessary; most organizations already have a purpose, vision, and values. But it’s worth asking whether these “truths” require revision. Triggers include acquisitions, changes in leadership, and significant market shifts.

2. Are we organized to achieve our vision?

A good operating model is the blueprint of your organization, It shows all the key  components that contribute to the organization’s value stream, including inputs, outputs, processes, metrics, and technology. It highlights the interdependencies within teams and processes and how they deliver value.

By constructing the model together, the leadership team develops a greater awareness and appreciation of all contributions and understands the importance of acting in unity.

Again, you probably already have an operating model. Or do you? Many of our clients are surprised to discover they don’t have it documented, and certainly not accessible to the company or used as guidance for day-to-day work. Even a strong operating model is worth refreshing every few years.

3. How do we get there?

“There” is wherever you plan to go—the mission, the vision, the operating model… Businesses thrive when the organization knows what it wants to achieve and by when. Every company should have a roadmap.

Executives are responsible for identifying the high-level “what and when.” The session should include representatives of key business functions to determine the “how.”

4. What is our message to the organization?

If an organization must change in any way, it needs a message. As the executive team creates the message frame—the four key words that anchor the message—they clarify and align on the change.

The message frame ensures all leaders and advocates tell the same compelling story, consistently and authentically, without relying on written materials or PowerPoint decks. Each communicator customizes the story with details and data that mean something to that particular audience—this is what gets your entire organization pulling in the same direction.

5. How should we work together?

We all have natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Effective teams understand how these patterns impact the overall team dynamic and how to use the strengths of their members to deliver results and move the organization forward. Smart teams create working agreements that take into account different working styles and reduce conflict. Agreements should be simple and direct, created by the team, and present at all meetings.

One of our favorite tools to craft these agreements: the Clifton Strengthfinder™ Survey. We work with a team to find each member’s unique contributions and leverage them in service of the strategy. Then we define team agreements, taking working styles and culture into consideration.

6. How do we sharpen our performance?

To make improvements in business processes, org structure, and behaviors, leaders need to know what’s working and what’s not. A working session can pinpoint what should change, and determine how.

Some of the tools we use as a first step: 1) SWOT analysis, which identifies strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and 2) the Start, Stop, Continue exercise. Then we take those findings, prioritize, and plan implementation.

Many executive teams blend these types of sessions into something custom that works for them. What’s most important is clarity—understanding your problem, the process you will use, and the outcomes you want—before you start.

How to Get a Job with Us – or Anyone

The first recruiting Emerson ever did took place about 20 years ago, in our first company headquarters – our CEO’s basement. Our recruiter conducted phone interviews surrounded by critters – Trish’s cat, her large poodle, and the overly friendly woodland animals who made their way through the open window.

“Can you tell me a bit about what made you contact us?” Our recruiter asked one candidate. “Well, actually,” he answered enthusiastically, “my dad said great things about your company. He used to work for Emerson!”

Cool story, bro. At that time, we were just a few months old, so we didn’t know your dad.

In those early days, the average person thought “Emerson” was a window company or the electric company, depending on their geography. Candidates often said they knew our work, but that was rare.

Today, candidates seem to be as informed about our company as we are. They have worked alongside our employees at client sites, attended our workshops, read our books, and spent hours on our website. We offer the flexibility today’s workforce wants — to work remotely and make their own hours, while serving our clients well. They know who we are and they know they want to work with us.

That makes our job a little harder. The candidates we talk to love Emerson. They love what we stand for, what we do, how we do it, and who we are. We love them right back. We sometimes wish we could hire all of them, but we can’t. Our recruiters have to make tough decisions.

Want to land a job with Emerson – or any company? Here’s what we recommend:

Impress us with your communications.

If you represent Emerson, you will help clients create business outcomes. There are a lot of documents and deliverables that support those outcomes, and they have to be exemplary. The first deliverable we see is your resume. If we wouldn’t present it to a client, we can’t hire you. Is your resume well written, succinct, good-looking, and honest? Great! We’re already interested.

If we ask you for a writing sample, make sure it’s your best work. It might seem like a perfunctory step in the process, but we take it very seriously. The same with your emails to us. We ask ourselves whether we’d send them straight to a client, under our logo. That’s a high bar.

Be yourself.

If you are smart, polished, funny, or professional, we will love talking to you. But if you are consciously trying to seem smart, polished, funny, or professional…you won’t. You will just sound like you aren’t being yourself. Or, worse yet, you might come off sounding pompous or defensive. We want to get to know the real you. That’s the only person we want to meet.

Do your work.

Sometimes we come across candidates who misunderstand what we do. If you don’t really understand what we do, your examples will just make things worse – they will prove you don’t know the job you’re applying for.

There are also candidates who DO understand what we do, but they’ve never done it. They’ve been around it, next to it, have a friend who does it… Writing an article about a house fire is not the same thing as being a firefighter. Just be clear and distinct about your experience. Not having every skill we need is better than “stretching” your experience to seem like you do.

Answer the question.

The bulk of an interview is made up of questions and answers. Our conversation will go smoothly if you answer the question that was asked. Sometimes it’s simply too much of a good thing – enthusiasm can make you lose track or talk in generalities. Or, maybe you don’t know the answer. That’s ok! It’s always better to be honest. When you are honest, we can have a real and productive conversation and get to the right answer for both of us.

Remember the “I” in team.

For the purposes of our interviews, there is an “I” in team. If you’re a great person to work with, you’re probably used to acknowledging other people’s contributions and seeing every victory as a team effort. And we love that – that fits our culture beautifully. But, just for this conversation, we need to know what you did. We’re not hiring your whole team. What was your role? What did you deliver? What difference did you, personally, make to your company or client?

Mind your manners.

We are grateful for your interest in our company. We appreciate the time you take in getting to know us. We feel lucky you sought us out as a potential employer. We like it when we can tell you feel grateful, appreciative, and lucky too.

We hire experts in behavior change. They are smart, capable, kind, collaborative, down-to-earth people with a great sense of humor. If this describes you, and you take our few bits of advice, we’d love to hire you. Who wouldn’t?

Why do we love the Olympics?

Have you ever thought about it? What if we told you we could break it down and help you make your next change project feel a little bit more fun?

It all starts with behavioral research. In “The Best Vacation Ever,” Drake Bennett looks at the psychology behind the definitive fun activity – a vacation – to explain the four factors that make something enjoyable.

• Anticipation: We enjoy looking forward to an experience more than actually experiencing it.
• Intensity: We remember intense highs, intense lows, and novelty – how our experiences “Peak” and “End.”
• Adaptation: We quickly acclimate to our current experience. If our positive experience is interrupted by reality, we have heightened enjoyment when we return.
• Deadlines: We tend to procrastinate on activities, even fun ones, if they have extended timeframes. We have more fun if it’s on a schedule.

Per Bennett, “….how long we take off probably counts for less than we think, and in the aggregate, taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it. And interrupting a vacation – far from being a nuisance – can make us enjoy it more. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins, who you’re with matters as much as where you go, and if you want to remember a vacation vividly, do something during it that you’ve never done before. And though it may feel unnecessary, it’s important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place – people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable things like vacations as unpleasant ones like paperwork and visits to the dentist.”

It turns out that the Olympics are a great proof of these principles.

• Anticipation? How long does NBC, the US home of the games, spend hyping the Olympics? We get months and months of previews on NBC’s outlets, and disseminated across social media. By the opening ceremonies, we know what new sports will be included, who’s expected to medal, and what the US team uniforms look like.
• Intensity? “The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat.” (Are we dating ourselves?) The games are jam-packed with highs and lows, and the coverage really exploits them. Simone Biles is out, and we all feel it. Lydia Jacoby’s gold has her entire Alaska town jumping up and down. We’re on a rollercoaster for weeks.
• Adaptation? Yes, the Olympics are interrupted by reality, especially for those of us watching from home. We end each normal day living vicariously through the glories and disappointments of the athletes.
• Deadlines? They come with the schedule. If Americans want to watch Tokyo events live, and remain unspoiled, they’d better get up in the wee hours of the morning.

Now, we don’t think an organizational change project can touch the level of enjoyment we get from a vacation or watching the Olympics. But could we at least try?

Could we nudge it in the direction of fun?

What if, as we design a change program, we incorporate these principles? Ask yourself these questions:

• How have we heightened anticipation for this program? What will be enjoyable or satisfying about it? How can we help people look forward to the good parts?
• Can we celebrate milestones and highlight better-than-expected performance? How can we end with a bang?
• Is the program broken into sprints? Can we build in periods of focus, hard work, and celebration, alternating with periods of business as usual?
• Do we incorporate tight timelines for action? Does everyone see the big-picture schedule and understand the urgency and the benefits of reaching the end?

It might feel like a stretch to try to create fun in the midst of an organizational change project. But just look at the impossible feats on your TV right now. You can do it!

And How To Stop Them

Vaccines are here. Hopeful for post-pandemic normalcy, employers across the country are bringing their employees back to the office. But not all of them.

Many people are quitting their jobs. The March 2021 resignation rate was 2.4 percent – the highest rate of quitters recorded in any March of the last 20 years. Some of this is the release of a backlog—would-be leavers who kept their jobs in 2020 to fend off pandemic-driven hardship.

But that backlog is clearing. And, as businesses welcome everyone back to the office, many are saying, “No, thanks.”

Why? There are several reasons. One is increased savings and debt reduction. Another reason: people hated the pandemic, but loved working from home. Faced with a choice between going back to the office and quitting, some people will quit.

And, if they have another job option, why not? During remote work, they saved a lot of money and a lot of time—no commute, no travel costs, no dry cleaning, no costly lunch, no co-worker-you-hate, no drop-ins from the boss, no sharing the bathroom with dozens of strangers… I could go on, or I could sum it up in one word: Control.

Yes, pajamas are comfy and your dog’s head resting on your lap makes a meeting more bearable. But home is greater than the sum of its perks—working from home (or a coffee shop, or a beach) gives humans the autonomy we crave. It’s not the fuzzy slippers; it’s the choice to wear the fuzzy slippers.

So what’s a company to do? Create control.

In our change management work for clients, we use the concept of control to create momentum and improve adoption of a change.

We do this by making people feel in control of a change. That doesn’t mean we’re tricking them, just building in autonomy where we can and focusing their attention on those autonomous feelings.

Here are a few ways you might create feelings of control to entice workers to stay with you.

1. Flexible Hours. Giving people their choice of shifts—earlier, later, or even a four-day week—might soften the return to a commute.
2. Goal-Based Weeks. Don’t make people sit at their desks eight hours a day, regardless of what they’re doing. Set realistic performance milestones and give employees the remainder of the week off after they hit them.
3. Work-at-Home Days. Schedule all-hands-on-deck days, for in-person work, and let them work from home the rest of the time—but only if they want to! Choice is the point here.
4. The Comforts of Home. Think about what workers will be missing when they come back to the office, and give them alternatives. Cheap lunch? Pay for it. Privacy? Create pods for people who want to get away. Kids nearby? Set up a day care. A better view? Think of your office space as a campus. Open up new spaces to work, so people can curl up on a sofa near a window, or feel like they’re at their favorite coffee house as they work.

The keys to making any of this work are genuine choice (not a top tier for some choices and a slower track for others) and communication (clear, consistent messaging on choice before they decide to quit… so get on it).

Some of these ideas sound costly, don’t they? Maybe not more costly than turnover and productivity dips.

A final thought: As they contemplate bringing the work force back to the office, the C-Suite might ask itself why. Why do you need them in the office? Is it because seeing the work and the workers right in front of you makes you feel in control?

You are up to your eyeballs in change. The US pandemic is waning, but markets are still recovering, workforces are shifting, and the imperative of new technology hasn’t let up.

But you’re on top of it. You are clear on the initiatives your organization needs. Now you’re trying to manage a suite of overlapping rollouts, so you need a strong communication plan to get employees on board.

Your senior execs have delivered PowerPoint presentations, participated in talking head videos and sent sponsorship emails. You have a network of people to answer questions and send you feedback. You’ve branded the projects, distributed swag, launched apps…

But you’re not getting the traction you hoped for. People seem unaware of the key points, or just plain unaware. Execs are frustrated; they say, “We told them. Why aren’t they getting it?” Employees are not using the new tools and approaches you’re trying to deploy. Why not?

According to the Radicati Group, 281 billion emails are sent worldwide daily. With 3.8 billion users, that’s 74 emails per person. Every day. Bain Consultants estimated in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article that 15% of company time is spent in meetings. Verizon commissioned a study that found people attend over 60 meetings per month, accounting for 37% of their time. The WSJ found that we are distracted every 3 minutes.

So what’s going on?

Your employees are being assaulted by information and demands on their time.

You are not in the communication business, you are in the ATTENTION business. You have to help people cut through the noise and focus on what’s important. To do that, you have to rise above the fray. Everything you deploy should grab attention. Your messages must be obviously different, relevant and worthy of people’s limited time.

Here’s how to focus attention:

1. Keep it simple.

Distill your point to its essence. It’s your three-word theme for the year, the mantra that gets you to the project end, the political platform statement, or the four words that capture the problem, solution, approach and results.

A childcare company was implementing new technology. Here’s how they distilled it to four words. “Our caregivers are overwhelmed. The solution? Make sure they are connected. They deserve a thoughtful approach to this implementation. What do we want in the end? Energized people.” These words were easy to remember without relying on PowerPoint. Anyone from any department could provide examples for those words, and they did. Simplicity creates clarity.

2. Use visuals.

When he ran Farmhouse Rice Company, Peter Molloy created a “visual vision” to convey company direction.

Researchers have found that people can remember 2,000 pictures with 90% accuracy, likely because visuals engage more of the brain. It doesn’t matter whether a person is trying to memorize the images or is casually exposed to them. There’s an extra, unconscious leap needed to translate an image to a word, which is why words are harder to remember. Line drawings are particularly easy to recall, perhaps because they are more visually complex. Crude hand drawings are more memorable than stock images. Dan Roam has a great book, Draw to Win, which can help you overcome your self-consciousness and create your own powerful visuals.

When he ran Farmhouse Rice Company, Peter Molloy created a “visual vision” to convey company direction. It was so effective, he used the same technique again when he became CEO of La Terra Fina.

3. Use novelty or contrast.

Subconsciously, we are constantly looking for threat. That’s why anything unusual piques our interest. When you create disruption — whether in stories, process, color, structure, volume – makes people notice.

Years ago, an IT department in a Chicago hospital implemented a standard approach to requesting support and custom reports. People were accustomed to paging their favorite IT person to fulfill the request. (Yes, it was that long ago!) When they moved to the new process, they changed all IT pager numbers. A small disruption signaled a new way of working. Look for variety and surprising ways to make your point.

4. Use environmental cues.

Look for elements in the workplace itself that can serve your purpose, like the physical space, processes, screens, codes, reporting relationships, and job titles. The real world encodes the conceptual. And often what people encounter every day contradicts what the company is telling them.

Chevron did it right. Years ago, they decided to create a culture of safety. That meant asking introverted engineers to be a little confrontational if they saw something unsafe. All the communication in the world wouldn’t address that behavior. So they made a point of starting every meeting with a “Safety Moment,” where each person had to identify one thing they saw that day that was unsafe. Over time, they layered it with other activities, such as assessing each person’s work station to ensure it was ergonomic, or confronting one another for driving while talking on their cell phone. These environmental cues reinforced behavior in ways no email campaign could.

Traditional communication plans fail because they don’t use the best thinking on human behavior. Don’t churn out information and hope it sticks. Focus attention on the behaviors you want and you’ll achieve your business outcomes.

Hacking Human Biology to Improve Performance

According to the Harvard Business Review (1), employee productivity in most organizations dropped by at least three to six percent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaders have a particular challenge, balancing employee output with supporting them through today’s very real issues. But there are hacks we can use to help our people be more resilient, all based on our biology.

The Problem

It’s hard for our brains to process stress and think strategically at the same time. (2) When we see or hear something, our brains try to make sense out of it and determine a response. If we perceive a threat, our amygdala gets involved. You might know the amygdala from its biggest hit: Fight or Flight. If the threat seems strong, the amygdala might react quickly at the expense of the frontal lobes, which are trying to make sense of everything and compose a rational response.

Stress impacts our capacity to perform. Stress physically changes our brains. (3) It steeps our brains in hormones that change its physical structure: neuro-processors get shorter and the prefrontal cortex gets smaller.

These physical changes impact everything. Science writer Virginia Hughes elegantly explains this relationship in Nature. In Stress: the roots of resilience, (4) she writes that those with PTSD have an underactive prefrontal cortex and an overactive amygdala, and that resilience depends on the communication between the two.

But we are built to bounce forward.

Researchers took MRI’s of the brains of stressed students, and observed physical damage. Then, they measured those brains after one week of vacation, and found their neuro-processors and damaged dendrites had regrown. But here’s the interesting part: they did not end up just as they were before. The repairs suggest that the brain increases capacity to address future stress.

So our teams are under unusual stress, which diminishes performance, but they have the capacity to be resilient. How can we promote this resilience?

The Leaders’ Role

We can do two things to promote resilience: 1) give the team agency, and 2) give the experience meaning.

Agency matters.

Agency is the sense that person can impact an outcome. People with active control over their experience are resilient—they feel stronger and more resistant to challenges. Here are three ways to create agency.

1. Engineer progress. It is imperative to give people simple tasks that show progress. Focus on a simple, observable activity that produces an outcome—not on the ultimate results themselves. It’s like the doctor pushing us to stand soon after surgery. She doesn’t say, “Heal!” she says, “Stand!” Because standing will get us walking, and walking will return us to full health.

For example, if we know that sales come from relationships, focus the team on contacting one client a day. That’s it. Then celebrate the completion of that step. It’s something they can control—it’s achievable and they can report success. Over time, the constancy of those moments will create results that matter. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “Don’t judge each day by the harvest we reap but by the seeds that we plant.”

2. Play the part. The physical and psychological are intertwined. Alison Wood Brooks, (5) at Harvard, studied reactions to certain types of fear, like stage fright or falling. She found that the sensation of fear and excitement are closely related. When she asked her subjects to say out loud, “I’m excited!” or “Get excited!” before a scary event, they reduced their anxiety.

Actors have known this trick for a long time. If we act happy—if our body language is open and we smile—we can actually produce that emotion. During COVID-19, a good number of us have been acting sad—withdrawing from friends, not dressing, and staying home. Small wonder depression has risen during COVID.

What can we do? We can model a bright mood and dress like we care. It might seem superficial, but the mirror neurons on our colleagues’ brains will encourage them to catch the positive emotion.

3. Create fresh starts. It’s hard to move forward or express positive emotions in the face of daunting obstacles, like a global pandemic and lockdown. One way to clear those hurdles is a reset. Daniel Pink, author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, (6) tells us we have a wellspring of opportunities for resets. Look at the calendar for the start of the next year, quarter, month, week, or even the next new day. Look for holidays, birthdays, new team members, anniversaries of shared success. And we can manufacture resets, too—this is one reason software development sprints work—a long project becomes a series of kick-offs and accomplishments.

As leaders, we can create agency to promote resilience. We can give people active roles in a change, including choices and options. We can also engineer events that promote the expression of positive emotions and the feelings that come with fresh starts.

Meaning matters.

How we interpret stimuli determines our responses. We act based on the stories we tell ourselves. For example:

Is this picture good or bad? It depends.

Is this picture good or bad? If you’re a dog person you might think this dog is playing. If you’re not, you might think the dog is vicious. We filter information through our own lens, and construct stories about the world.

Martin Siegelman is the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who gave us the idea of learned helplessness. He describes this process of interpretation in his 3P model. (7) He says that, when we encounter an experience, we might define it as personal, , and pervasive. For example, let’s say we’re struggling with an assignment in a computer science course. The table below are the alternative interpretations, according to Siegelman’s model.

As we can see, a negative event seen through the three Ps is potentially harmful to a person’s self-image and ability to perform. But reframing the experience to show that it’s impersonal, impermanent and specific is compassionate and can help people bounce back.

As leaders, we provide the context. We don’t need to twist a bad experience into a good one—we can simply acknowledge it. Then, depending on the event, we decide whether to reframe it. Some bad things are so horrible, we should just affirm people’s feelings and be with them. But for your average, everyday failures: reframe it.

Take it out of that personal / permanent / pervasive space.

Retell the story as a bad experience with a finite context that doesn’t confer blame or foretell the future. Give the experience meaning.

Conclusion

In business, we can tend to focus on intellect and will. Old school, Type A winners flourish on vending machine food, florescent light, and four hours of sleep, right? To fix performance issues, we have told our employees (and ourselves) to power through. So it’s inconvenient to acknowledge that we, and our teams, are basically animals with a strong connection between what we experience, how our bodies respond, and how we create organizational results.

Today, we have the knowledge and tools to do something about it—to foster resilience and high performance. It’s a strategy not only for these tough times, but for sustained success.

References:

1. https://hbr.org/2020/12/the-pandemic-is-widening-a-corporate-productivity-gap
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228115061_Stress-induced_changes_in_human_decision-making_are_reversible
3. Recognizing resilience: Learning from the effects of stress on the brain – ScienceDirect
4. Stress: The roots of resilience : Nature News & Comment
5. Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement – Article – Faculty & Research – Harvard Business School (hbs.edu)
6. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
7. Martin Siegelman’s Positive Psychology

Co-authored by Mary Stewart

How the President’s Primetime Address Used Brain Science to Unite the Country

On Thursday, March 11, 2021, much of the country tuned in to President Biden’s first primetime address to the nation. His challenge was clear: unite the country to act according to his plan, and bring on the end of the pandemic. The audience, no doubt, was diverse in its attitudes toward Biden and readiness to follow his lead. How would he persuade resistant Americans to do the right thing?

We are in the business of aligning organizations around a change and creating positive momentum. So we feel you, Joe. And we think you did the right thing. You used the principles of brain science to your advantage, just like we do.

When we help our clients manage a change, we make it feel Familiar, Controlled, and Successful (FCS). Here’s how the President used FCS in his speech.

Familiar

Our brains see new things as dangerous. Any change generates fear, which causes resistance. Creating connections between your change and other experiences makes people feel it is familiar, which turns off fear.

One way to do this is to compare your initiative to something people know and remember as being successful.

“I’m using every power I have as the president of the United States to put us on a war footing to get the job done. Sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it, a war footing. …It’s truly a national effort, just like we saw during World War II.”

”The development, manufacturing, and distribution of vaccines in record time is a true miracle of science. It’s one of the most extraordinary achievements any country has ever accomplished. And we all just saw the Perseverance Rover land on Mars. Stunning images of our dreams that are now reality.”

See what he did there? He didn’t just talk about the Trump administration’s initiative, or even invoke other pandemics, like H1N1 or Ebola. He used winning WWII and landing on Mars. He tapped into familiar, positive feelings and attached those feelings to the current initiative.

Controlled

We don’t like to move forward in the dark. Our brains crave control. Adding choice, structure, and predictability makes the change feel controlled, so people feel less anxious, more engaged, and feel free to take action.

One way to create feelings of control is to give people information, so they aren’t surprised.

“I met a small business owner, a woman. I asked her, I said, ‘What do you need most?’ …and she said, ‘I just want the truth. The truth. Just tell me the truth.’”

Another way to create feelings of control is to talk about milestones. Tell people what is going to happen, and when.

“I said I intended to get 100 million shots in people’s arms in my first 100 days in office. Tonight, I can say … we’re actually on track to reach this goal of 100 million shots in arms on my 60th day in office… All adult Americans will be eligible to get a vaccine no later than May 1.”

A third way is to give people something to do, so they feel like they have a part in the change.

“But I need you, the American people. I need you. I need every American to do their part. And that’s not hyperbole. I need you. I need you to get vaccinated when it’s your turn and when you can find an opportunity.”

Finally people who have clear instructions and tools feel in control because they know exactly what to do.

“…in May, we will launch…new tools to make it easier for you to find…where to get the shot, including a new website… No more searching day and night for an appointment for you and your loved ones.”

He said he’d give accurate information, previewed the road ahead, told people how they can take action, and promised them support to do so. All of those messages grant control to the listener.

Successful

Winning releases dopamine—the feel-good neurotransmitter. Sharing successes releases oxytocin—the connection hormone.

One way to create a feeling of success is to create and highlight small wins.

“You can drive up to a stadium or a large parking lot, get your shot, and never leave your car, and drive home in less than an hour.”

“Millions and millions of grandparents who went months without being able to hug their grandkids can now do so.”

Another way to foster success is to celebrate collective wins.

“When I took office, only 8% of those over the age of 65 had gotten their first vaccination. Today that number is 65%. Just 14% of Americans over the age of 75 …had gotten their first shot. Today, that number is well over 70%.”

“…if we do this together, by July the 4, there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.”

The President talked in vivid terms about success—individual success through quick shots and warm hugs, and collective success through high vaccination numbers, culminating in a national day of celebration.

Mr. President, we’re big fans, both of your pandemic plans and the way you convey them. Brain science to message and epidemiology to protect—that’s a winning team.

Facilitate the hell out of your next executive session

Leave them wanting more. Is that even possible with a meeting? People want fewer meetings, right? Or maybe you’re doing it wrong.

2021 is the perfect opportunity for a reset. Next time you facilitate an executive meeting, make it a satisfying experience: effective, focused, respectful, and even fun.

1. Do your research. Nothing takes the wind out of your sails like the participants realizing you don’t know enough to run the meeting. Don’t make them stop and educate you. Make sure you’re rock-solid on the facts, figures, and history you need.

That starts with the Why. After you think you’re clear on the goals of the session, ask the participants. Send each one a personal invitation and ask them to answer one question:

“Why do you think we need this meeting?”

This will surface misunderstandings so you can resolve them before everyone shows up. It also gives each attendee some buy in – it’s a trick of psychology; you’re getting them on the record saying it’s important.

2. Focus. We all know “Begin with the end in mind,” and that’s right. Start the session by confirming the goal. Here are a few more tips:

Limit attendees. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven Rogelberg says the ideal size is seven participants. AND that decision-making effectiveness decreases 10% with each additional attendee! Balance your need to have all the right decision-makers in the room with the value of your outcomes.

Limit devices. I once sat in an exec meeting next to a new team member who kept his laptop open. I was the only one who could see that he wasn’t taking notes; he was reading the news, checking stock performance, and watching hockey highlights on mute. (I swear.) He didn’t last long in the company. Either the meeting is important or it’s not. If it’s not, then cancel it. If it is, then silence phones and close the laptops. If someone gets a call and has to take it, stop the meeting for a break. This has the double-whammy of respecting the call-taker (because you can’t continue without her) and pressuring her to get off the phone fast.

Use a “parking lot.” When someone goes off topic, stop, reset, and document that point on a flipchart page, whiteboard, or notes window. Promise not to lose that thread and follow up after the meeting.

3. Limit session time. “I don’t need time. I need a deadline.” ~ Edward Kennedy Ellington. Duke was right— time limits work. Rogelberg and others recommend scheduling hour-long meetings for 50 minutes. If you truly need more time, break it into 50-minute sessions with specific milestone goals for each. And chunking up your process lets you use another technique…
4. Delay decisions. Why do we say “I want to sleep on it?” Because it works. Time for reflection and synthesis yields better ideas. We’ve all sent that follow-up email saying, “Hey, I just had another idea” or “We didn’t have time to cover this, but…”

So design that into your session. Up front, explain that you will make no firm decisions at the end of any one meeting. Everyone will go away, let their “back burner” brilliance work, and come back together to confirm. This works well if you have broken your process into multiple short sessions. Assign a milestone goal for Session One, then use the first ten minutes of Session Two to play back tentative decisions, bring in new info, and make a final call.

5. One up, one down. This concept comes from the military, but I know it as a best practice in my kids’ Montessori preschool. Each class had two teachers managing 25 kids working independently or in small groups. Rather than the goat rodeo you might expect, the classroom worked beautifully. “One up, one down” meant that when one teacher was focused on teaching students (in a chair or on the floor) the other should be standing, with a view of the whole group.

In an exec session, there should be at least one person focused on documenting, fixing, or providing support; the other should have eyes on the room, to manage the discussion and progress.

6. Document, document, document. Executives have zero time for your shenanigans. They don’t want to repeat themselves, argue about what was said last time, or struggle to understand what’s going on. So make sure you collect and replay all essential information.

Record faithfully. If it’s ok with participants, record the audio and/or video of your meeting. That’s the only fool-proof way to make sure you know what happened. If you can’t do that, take copious notes. And commit to being the historian, calling up meeting minutes, inputs, and outputs in real time when asked. Use these to produce executive summaries at milestones and at the end of the process.

Dampen the politics. Sometimes it matters who’s talking. Junior participants might not hold the floor as long, or might get a quick rebuttal. But when you record and play back what happened, you can give all good content equal weight, removing any hierarchical barriers to a good idea.

7. All brains matter. People process and retain information differently, so provide as many channels as you can. We default to bullet points and flow charts, with a voice-over from the facilitator. But that’s not the only way. Consider these:

Silent reading. Give the group information to read as an input to your discussion. Some people think better when eyes aren’t on them and people aren’t speaking.

Listening. The growth of podcasts and video books has revealed a segment of people who love to learn with their ears, minus other distractions. Use audio content in the session or as pre-work.

Video. Moving pictures really work for some people, especially with retention. Video has it all: sound, images, and verbal content.

Graphic documentation. This is a powerful way to capture ideas and decisions. Use a graphic artist to illustrate content in real time; you’ll end up with a graphic that conveys more than a list of bullet points ever could. Graphic documentation is a great touchstone to use after the meeting—post your graphic in a space where people can revisit it and use it to communicate to a wider audience.

8. Be tenacious. Even the best outputs can evaporate after you all leave the room. People ignore emails, crises emerge, and enthusiasm fades over time. Don’t let go. Set milestones for feedback, new meetings, and other next steps. Get commitment before you leave the room. If necessary, unblock the logjams with one-on-one conversations over time.
9. Lighten up. Why so serious? We can accomplish real work and have fun at the same time. We recently asked an exec team to come up with their own theme songs. Each member chose their own song, then they composed a song to represent themselves as a team, real-time. We captured and produced their work of art after the session. It was a good time, but it wasn’t just a good time—it surfaced and confirmed their strengths and cohesion. Think about how to brighten up your session. Use stunning graphics, gamify your process, or use a new environment for the meeting. Fun doesn’t have to get in the way—bake it into the work.

Meetings have such a bad reputation, especially among busy executives. But if you do it right, they’ll accept your next invite with a smile.

Looking to move your curriculum online? You’re not an expert in eLearning development and digital delivery? You’re not alone.

Now more than ever, people who have never built an online course are tasked with making the switch, and for good reason—traditional in-person training just isn’t feasible during a pandemic.

There are also significant advantages to blending your curriculum with digital assets. Improved access at point of need, reduced classroom time, and flexible learning mediums are good for the long-term health of any learning program, regardless of what the future holds.

But embarking on this new online adventure can feel intimidating. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be.

Enter Articulate Rise 360.

With this innovative technology in-hand, the barrier of entry for web-based training development is lower than ever. You don’t need a degree, certificate, or background in eLearning to build rich, engaging online content. It’s a simple-to-use platform that is actually as intuitive as other technology claims to be.

Don’t believe me? Let’s explore using the 5 Ws:

• WHAT – Articulate Rise is a web-based eLearning authoring tool. It helps you build responsive online training that automatically adapts to the device your learner is using. With a flexible outline format, you can string together blocks of content (e.g., embedded videos, articles, image hot spots, accordion interactivities, quizzes, etc.) into lessons, and then deploy your training through a single URL in one click (or an LMS if you need reporting data).
• WHEN – Turn to Rise when you need to get content online quickly. It’s the perfect tool for rapid development. The menu of easy-to-use out-of-the-box content blocks lets you add or remove with a single mouse click. Combined the with aforementioned outline format, you can largely fast-forward through the design process. You can jump right into developing your course, on the fly, without learning complex scripting or trigger manipulation.
• WHY – It’s easy to use. You don’t need a background in instructional design, or a certificate in eLearning development to create a course. It’s an industry-leading tool that is compatible with your learning infrastructure. If you don’t have an LMS, you can build out a full curriculum and still publish at the click of a button. It also gives you the flexibility to use the more powerful Articulate Storyline to build complex, custom interactions, if you need them.
• WHERE – Check out their free 30-day trial, learn more about the platform, and join the Articulate Community to find all the help, tools, and resources you need to get started.
• WHO – You! I can’t stress this enough; you can do this. Rise is designed so that anyone can quickly build engaging, visually pleasing online courses.

No, I don’t work for Articulate, I just happen to be a big fan who knows how challenging and rewarding eLearning development can be. I want it to be accessible to everyone; the more who use it, the better humanity’s training resources will be. It’s the kind of cycle I want to be a part of.

If you’re not happy with what you built, keep practicing, or reach out to me (mcassady@emersonhc.com). Emerson Human Capital Consulting has expert instructional designers and eLearning developers who can take your curriculum to the next level. As an added bonus, all it takes is 30 seconds to transfer ownership of the course to you, so you’ll be ready to make changes as needed, with no hassle.

Don’t Let Your Consultants Leave You Hanging

We call them “deck and dash” firms—consultants who dazzle you with strategy, conceptual models, and slick slides…then wish you luck and head for the door. Now what?

Maybe that’s what you want, but at least be prepared. Make sure that they leave you in a place where you can get the benefits of your investment.

Before signing the contract, here are the questions you should ask:

1. What will the business outcomes be? How will your work translate to benefits for us, specifically? It’s important to hear stories about their other clients, but the focus should be on your business. How does the work connect to your strategies and integrate with other initiatives in your organization?
2. What has your team learned from similar implementations? Implementation informs strategy and design. Even if you are paying them to build deliverables and then hand them off to you to implement, you need consultants who regularly roll up their sleeves and help their clients launch. Consultants learn and sharpen from that experience.
3. To what degree will you involve the business leaders impacted by this change? How? Many consultants like to touch base a few times to gather information, then go away and create — leading to a grand reveal of the solution. That’s fun and dramatic, to be sure, but it’s wrong. You need consultants who work with key members of your business, to ensure the solution is right for you, create momentum, and help the business plan for launch.
4. What will the deliverables look like? Will they include implementation plans, timelines, and estimates? Ask to see samples from similar projects. Imagine being left with that deliverable. Could you use it? Would your business know how to get the benefits you expect?
5. What does your last day look like? How will you transition your work to us? What you’re looking for here is their involvement in implementing the solution and your readiness to take it forward.
6. What if we have questions after you finish the engagement? You need consultants who are invested in your success. If your people are sincerely confused or unprepared to use the deliverables the consultants built, then their work isn’t done. Make sure they commit to an ongoing advisory relationship to support what they delivered for you.

Paying for ideas, plans, and strategies might be right for your business. Just make sure you have a clear picture of your life after the consultants are gone.

Here’s how Emerson addresses the six questions:

1. We helped a major university’s IT department focus on the outcomes they needed. Click here to read more.
2. We helped a large U.S. government agency launch their HR strategy. Click here to read more.
3. We worked with the largest hospital system in Missouri on a custom approach. Click here to read more. 
4. We built solid implementation plans for one of the best-known retail brands in the world. Click here to read more.
5. We fully transitioned our work and expertise to a large pharmaceutical company. Click here to read more.
6. We continued to support a business technology corporation with ongoing advice. Click here to read more.