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HOW TO REASSURE YOUR TEAM WHEN THE NEWS IS SCARY

We’ve all had that moment on an airplane where we experience turbulence. Maybe you are rudely awakened by a sudden jolt, or you stand up to use the restroom and have to hold onto the back of someone’s seat. Within a few seconds, the pilot’s voice comes over the intercom. What are you listening for? You are listening for reassurance through the uncertainty of turbulence.

With Covid-19 concerns around the globe, it’s not just the airline industry that is experiencing a sudden lurch on its normal journey. Many business leaders are asking how they can communicate uncertainty both internally to their teams and externally to their clients — whether it’s about participating in an upcoming conference or delivering on a signed proposal. Communicating in the face of uncertainty is a constant leadership challenge.

In addition to working with the airline industry on this topic, my team and I have worked with Fortune 500 companies around the world who need to manage high-stakes communications to multiple audiences simultaneously. Here are five steps we have found to be incredibly effective:

1. Pause and breathe.

Before you start communicating to others, take a minute to pause and breathe. When you are the most senior person in a room, your team takes its cues from you in terms of how to act and how to feel. Taking a minute to center yourself will ensure that you present a calm, rational force to your colleagues and clients. This applies over the phone or through email as well. When you feel anxiety, you transmit that to others. A study of empathetic stress found that observing others experiencing stress could cause observers to themselves to feel more stressed.

2. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes.

In public speaking, knowing your audience in advance is critical. In times of uncertainty, it’s paramount, regardless of the medium. Do a thorough strategic analysis of who you are communicating to. What are their concerns, questions, or interests? What do they need an immediate answer to? You might use language such as, “I know many of you may be thinking…” The quicker you can address what’s on their mind, the quicker you will be able to calm them down. If you are not addressing their most pressing interests, they might not even be listening to you.

3. Do your research.

In times of stress, misinformation can be especially destructive. Seek out credible sources of information, and read the information fully before distilling it into clear, concise language. Share those links with others, so that they too have a credible resource. As a faculty member at Harvard, I appreciate that the university created a separate webpage with credible sources for more information and that it sends frequent emails with updates.

4. Speak clearly and confidently.

You can speak with confidence even without 100% certainty. You can confidently express doubt or uncertainty, while still sounding like you are in control of the situation. You might say, “Reports are still coming in, but what we understand so far is this…” Communicate frequently with your audience, even without news to report, so that they know you are actively following the issue. Fellow communication expert Nancy Duarte wrote an insightful article on this topic several years ago and said, “People will be more willing to forgive your in-progress ideas if they feel like they’re part of the process.”

5. Have specific next steps.

In times of uncertainty, it’s helpful to provide your team with tangible action items. Discussing your own next steps or recommending next steps to your audience gives them a sense of control so they feel like they are contributing to stabilization. Use language such as, “Here are the steps we are taking” or “Here’s what you can do” to demonstrate action.

Communicating through uncertainty is an essential leadership skill, regardless of whether or not you have a formal leadership role. In fact, the ability to communicate through uncertainty is part of what demonstrates to others your leadership readiness. Use the above steps to first find your own sense of focus and then allow yourself to transmit that reassurance to others.

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(This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review, by Alison Shapira, that reserves all the rights. To read the original article please visit here.)

WHY AI WILL SHIFT DECISION MAKING FROM THE C-SUITE TO THE FRONT LINE

Hardly a day goes by without the announcement of an incredible new frontier in Artificial Intelligence (AI). From fintech to edtech, what was once fantastically improbable is now a commercial reality. There is no question that big data and AI will bring about important advances in the realm of management, especially as it relates to being able to make better-informed decisions. But certain types of decisions — particularly those related to strategy, innovation and marketing — will likely continue to require a human being who can take a holistic view and make a qualitative judgment based on a personal consideration of the context and facts. In fact, to date, there is no AI technology that is fully able to factor in the emotional, human, and political context needed to automate decisions.

For example, consider the healthcare industry, where AI is having a huge impact. Even if AI can support a doctor in making a diagnosis and suggesting medical treatments for a cancer patient, only the doctor herself would be able to factor in the overall health condition and emotional context of the patient (and of the patient’s family) in order to decide whether to proceed with, say, surgery vs. chemotherapy. Most of what we do in healthcare is not simply about making a diagnosis, but working with patients to find an appropriate treatment that factors in a more holistic and empathic view of the patient’s circumstances.

AI technologies can provide managers and employees with accurate data and predictions at their fingertips to support and enable the right decisions in a timely way. But even if an AI system gives an employee super-powered intelligence, it won’t be enough to make a timely decision if the company’s internal bureaucracy requires time-consuming pre-authorization from senior managers before acting on the decision. To extract real value from AI, employees at all levels of the organization need to be empowered to make final decisions aided by AI, and act on them. In short, there needs to be a democratization of judgment-based decision-making power.

Much that’s been written about the decision-making impacts of big data and AI has tended to emphasize the importance of having centralized teams staffed with plenty of data scientists. This implies that companies with more data scientists have a better chance of generating business impact. My own experience as a consultant, supported by recent research, indicates a different view: firms that hire an army of data scientists do not always generate better bottom-line value. Rather, it is the democratization of access to AI tools and decision-making power among managers and employees which creates more tangible value.

Consider Internet platform companies such as Airbnb, where data is at the core of their business model. Airbnb believes that every employee should have access to its data platform to make informed decisions. This applies to all parts of the organization from marketing and business development to HR. For example, employees can monitor in real time how many of its hosts use the company’s professional photography services and in which location, with emerging trends, patterns, and predictions.

Data access is key, but it’s not enough. Employees also need to be given the skills to use and interpret data and tools. For Airbnb, it would not be possible to have a data scientist in every room, and the fast internationalization of the company makes the situation even more challenging. Airbnb launched a Data University, which is split into three levels, with a curriculum of more than 30 modules. The goal is to build the knowledge and skillset for all employees to utilize and interpret data and tools. This enables employees to act swiftly on innovation opportunities. For example, product managers are learning to write their own SQL code and interpret their own experiments about whether to launch a new product feature in a certain city. The result: since launching the program in late 2016, more than 2,000 employees were trained, and the weekly active users (WAU) of the internal platform — a proxy of how “data informed” the organization is — rose from 30% to 45%.

Another case is Unilever. Orchestrated by the company’s newly created “Insights Engine”, the company introduced a number of AI-driven systems and tools that are accessible to all of its global marketers. The availability of real-time, frequent, data-driven consumer insights has generated even more need for distributed decision-making by the company’s marketers at all levels within the organization. One tool they use is People World, an AI platform able to mine thousands of consumer research documents and social media data. The platform is able to answer natural language questions that marketers may ask on a specific area. This addresses the classic problem “If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows,” helping to remove silos, increasing trust in “one consolidated source of truth,” and dramatically reducing the time needed to make informed decisions.

Over the last decade, the costs and time associated with organizing data and running analyses has dropped dramatically. But in many companies, AI use is still highly centralized. Corporate AI units often develop dashboards for senior executives which are used by them exclusively. AI democratization remains limited. But, by using AI to increase the effectiveness of the decisions employees are making, the need to control and centralize decisions essentially evaporates. Best practices show how democratization can bring about quicker and better distributed decisions, making companies more agile and responsive to market changes and opportunities.(This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review, by John Coleman, that reserves all the rights. To read the original article please visit here.)

Now, imagine that the snow is the business environment, and the new car is your team. Whenever something happens in a business environment that you can’t control, and your team doesn’t adapt as quickly as you would like them to, you are considering if you have the team you need?